6 Common Marketing Mistakes (and How to Solve Them)

Every marketer knows the theory. Build awareness, capture demand, drive pipeline.

However, the real world doesn’t always follow the playbook. Campaigns dip. Messaging flops. Budgets shrink.

And when that happens, the difference between good and great marketers isn’t perfection - it’s how fast they diagnose, adapt, and recover.

Across the Marketing Dilemmas podcast series, we’ve spoken to marketing leaders from brands like Hunters, Omni Lab, Reachdesk, Dreamdata, and Croud. Each faced a real-world problem most of us have lived through, and found a way out.

Here are 7 common marketing mistakes (and what to do instead).

1. Over-targeting until your reach disappears

Targeting is a cornerstone of B2B marketing. It’s drilled into us that the tighter our targeting, the better our campaigns perform.

However, better doesn’t always mean narrower.

One of the biggest overcorrections modern marketers make is hyper-targeting to the point of exclusion. In the pursuit of efficiency, they shrink their potential audience so much that they only ever reach a sliver of their market - usually, the people who already know them.

Deivis Rupslaukis, Founder at DERU Digital, sees this mistake all the time in paid media. He calls it “false efficiency.”

On paper, the numbers look great - high CTRs, strong conversion rates, and a hyper-defined audience. But when you look closer, the data tells a very different story.

In a typical LinkedIn campaign, around a third of your account list sees zero impressions, while roughly 10% of your audience absorbs most of the budget.

It feels efficient, but it’s actually limiting. You end up optimising to the same small subset of buyers who already engage with you - while the rest of your market, including your future buyers, never see your brand at all.

Deivis shared a story that perfectly captures the hidden downside of this mindset.

Years before he had budget or buying authority, he kept bumping into Dreamdata’s content - not ads selling features, but insights that helped him solve real problems. Over time, those touchpoints built trust and familiarity long before a sales conversation ever took place.

Fast forward a few years:

Deivis joins a company squarely in Dreamdata’s ICP, faces the exact challenges their content had been addressing - and Dreamdata is instantly on his shortlist. No cold outreach required.

That’s the quiet power of brand reach. When we focus only on today’s ICPs, we forget that people change jobs - and their memories move with them.

The answer isn’t to go broad for the sake of it. It’s about building a system that combines precision in the short term with reach that compounds over time.

At Cognism - and in Deivis’ own demand-gen philosophy - that means structuring paid programs in layers:

Tight, measurable capture campaigns

• Keep these laser-focused: high-intent search terms, defined ICP segments, and clear conversion paths.
• These are your pipeline plays - built to capture demand already in motion.

Broader demand creation layers

• Expand to future buyers, related personas, and adjacent industries.
• Diversify beyond LinkedIn - layer in lower-cost awareness channels like Meta, YouTube, or creator-led content that builds brand recall efficiently.

Measure how reach compounds

• Don’t just measure impressions and clicks. Track branded search growth, direct traffic trends, and self-reported attribution.
• If more inbound leads are saying they “heard about you on social” or “saw your content somewhere,” your reach is doing its job.

As Deivis puts it:

“It’s people who buy - and people change jobs. If they knew you before they could buy, you’re already on the list.”

The brands that win aren’t the ones that reach the fewest people most efficiently.

They’re the ones that reach the right people early enough that, by the time they’re ready to buy, the decision already feels made.

2. Pivoting too late when the market shifts

Markets don’t stay still. Buyer behaviour changes, technology evolves, and what worked last year might quietly start to lose impact.

The danger for many marketing teams is realising that too late, waiting until numbers dip or competitors overtake before reacting.

That’s the dilemma Maura Rivera, CMO at Qualified, wanted to avoid. Qualified’s flagship product was performing well, but she saw the landscape changing fast. 

AI was reshaping how buyers engaged - how they researched, interacted with content, and expected responses from sales. For Maura, the question wasn’t whether to innovate, but how to do it before the market forced their hand and they were inevitably already behind the rapidly changing market.

Rather than waiting for cracks to show, she led a proactive pivot. Behind the scenes, her team quietly began building and testing an AI-powered version of their core product - refining features, trialling messaging, and collecting customer feedback in private beta.

By the time they were ready to go public, they weren’t launching an idea; they were launching something already validated.

The move paid off. It allowed Qualified to control the narrative - positioning themselves not as followers of an AI trend, but as innovators defining what “AI for pipeline generation” should look like.

If you’re looking to make a pivot like Maura and her team made, here are some of her biggest learnings from the process:

Build before you announce

When markets shift, the temptation is to react quickly - to ship a new message, launch a new product, or release a “we’re doing AI now” campaign.

But rushing a pivot before it’s proven can do more damage than standing still.

Start quietly. Treat your first phase like a live experiment.

• Run private pilots with existing customers who already trust you. Ask them how the change fits their workflow, what friction they feel, and what value they actually see.
• Validate your hypothesis: Is this truly solving a new problem, or are you chasing a trend?
• Document learnings early. Capture the language customers use to describe the new value - this will become the backbone of your positioning later.
• Refine before you scale. Don’t launch until you’ve ironed out product friction and can back your claims with early proof (logos, quotes, metrics).

This “quiet build” phase gives you something every good pivot needs: evidence. It turns your story from theory into credibility when you do go public.

Enable sales early

A pivot doesn’t just change what you sell - it changes how you sell it.

Your product, narrative, and proof points are shifting, and if sales finds out the same day the market does, you’ll burn deals fast.

Make sales your co-pilots in the process, not your afterthought.

• Bring your top AEs and SDRs into testing conversations so they can hear how customers react first-hand.
• Co-create the new talk track: What’s the new pain point? What’s the “old way vs new way” story?
• Arm them with a pivot pack before launch:
  • One-sentence positioning statement.
  • Updated pitch deck with new problem framing.
  • Competitive comparison sheet (old vs new).
  • Objection handling doc (especially for existing customers).
  • Proof assets (logos, data points, early adopter quotes).
• Train and role-play before launch. Your frontline sellers need to believe the new story before they can sell it.

If your pivot is bold, expect confusion. The smoother your sales enablement process, the faster that confusion turns into conviction.

Launch loudly, iterate quickly

Once the foundation is in place, don’t tiptoe into the market - own the narrative.

A pivot isn’t just about what you’ve built; it’s about reclaiming relevance.

• Control the story. Frame the “why” before others do - what’s changed in the world, what’s broken with the old approach, and why your pivot solves it better.
• Make the launch a moment. Treat it like a campaign, not a press release. Align product marketing, PR, content, paid, and sales outreach around a single narrative arc.
• Prove it in public. Showcase customer quotes, data outcomes, and product walkthroughs early and often.
• Stay responsive. Monitor reactions across channels - sales calls, social comments, customer support - and update messaging in real time based on what resonates.
• Plan a second wave. Don’t let the announcement be a spike. Build a three-month content and event plan that keeps reinforcing the new belief until it becomes familiar.

The key is to see a pivot as an ongoing motion, not a one-time launch. The first announcement gets attention; the follow-up content, case studies, and sales alignment are what turn it into momentum.

Maura said:

“If you’re not innovating, you’re dead. If you’re not adjusting and pivoting, you’re going to fall behind.”

The best leaders don’t wait for the pain to show up in pipeline reports. They spot the change early, act decisively, and move fast enough that by the time the rest of the market is reacting, they’re already on to the next iteration.

3. Measuring SEO by clicks, not visibility

For years, SEO success was judged by a single number: traffic. More clicks meant more success - simple, right?

But in today’s search landscape, that logic is falling apart. Between AI overviews, featured snippets, and zero-click results, your content might be performing brilliantly - educating buyers, shaping perception, and building brand authority - without ever driving the same volume of visits to your website.

That’s a challenge that Tom Mansell, VP of Organic Performance at Crowd, sees many teams struggling with today.

Search is no longer a click machine; it’s a visibility engine. As Tom said:

“Your content might not always win the click anymore. But it can still win the impression, and that’s where your brand recall starts.”

Marketers who rely solely on clicks as their north star risk underestimating the impact of organic content. The smarter approach is to redefine what success looks like.

Organic performance today is about influence, not just interaction. That means shifting your SEO measurement from the number of people who came to your site to the number of buyers who saw, remembered, and trusted you along their journey.

Here’s how to do that in practice:

Track visibility, not just clicks

Start by expanding what you measure.

• Impressions and share of search tell you how often your brand is being seen, even when users don’t click.
• SERP real estate (owning multiple spots: blog post + YouTube video + review page) increases the odds that buyers encounter your brand repeatedly, even across different platforms.
• Branded search growth is one of the most reliable indicators of organic impact. If more people are typing your company name into Google, your content is working, whether or not they came via a keyword.

Tom explained:

“Visibility is the new north star. Content teams need to start acting like publishers.”

Correlate visibility with pipeline

Visibility alone doesn’t pay the bills, but it does create the conditions that lead to pipeline. Tie your organic metrics back to commercial outcomes:

• Overlay visibility trends with CRM data. If branded impressions and direct traffic spike before demo requests, that’s attribution in motion.
• Ask in your forms. The “How did you hear about us?” field often surfaces organic discovery that analytics may miss.
• Track “dark social” mentions. Use tools like SparkToro, Brand24, or manual LinkedIn monitoring to capture where your content is discussed, even off-site.

The goal is to connect the dots between organic visibility and commercial intent.

Focus on E-E-A-T: Experience, Expertise, Authority, Trust

Google’s direction of travel is clear - content that’s credible, first-hand, and human-led wins.

• Experience: Feature real practitioners or SMEs in your content. “From-the-field” insights outperform SEO filler.
• Expertise: Specialise deeply; don’t chase every trending keyword. Own a few high-value topics with comprehensive, authoritative coverage.
• Authority: Build backlinks and collaborations from trusted industry sources - podcasts, guest articles, or expert quotes.
• Trust: Keep transparency high - cite data, update dates, and avoid clickbait titles that overpromise.

This isn’t just about ranking; it’s about shaping brand perception every time your result appears.

Keep content alive (and diversify formats)

SEO isn’t a “publish and pray” game. Review top-performing pages at least once a year to refresh statistics, update screenshots, and rework introductions to match how buyers now search.

And remember: organic discovery extends beyond Google.

• YouTube, Reddit, and niche forums are becoming major research channels.
• Video content often ranks in both YouTube and Google search, doubling visibility.
• Answer-driven formats (Q&As, frameworks, templates) perform better in AI summaries and snippet results.

If your audience’s journey starts in a Google SERP and continues in a Reddit thread, your content should exist in both places.

The marketers winning organic today aren’t chasing clicks; they’re earning attention everywhere discovery happens. Visibility is the first step toward trust.

And in a world where fewer people click, that first impression might be your only one.

4. Ignoring your internal audience

Most B2B marketing teams are laser-focused on external communication - the campaigns, the content, the brand.

But one of the most damaging (and common) mistakes is forgetting that you also have another audience to win over: your own company.

It’s easy to assume that internal alignment will just “happen.” That if you run good campaigns, hit pipeline goals, and publish impressive reports, everyone will understand what marketing does and why it matters.

But as Florian Frese, Marketing Director at Wire, learned, that’s rarely the case. He told us:

“If you don’t tell your internal story, someone else will and usually, some wrong assumptions will be made.”

Without consistent communication, the narrative about marketing gets written for you, often by people who don’t see the full picture. You become “the campaign team,” or “the people who make nice slides,” instead of a strategic growth driver. 

And once that perception takes hold, it slows everything down: approvals, budgets, collaboration, and trust.

Florian’s lesson is simple but powerful:

You can’t just market to your buyers; you have to market to your colleagues, too.

Share updates regularly, in multiple formats

Don’t leave people guessing what marketing is working on or how it’s performing.

• Run formal updates through OKR reviews, company all-hands, or QBRs. Use visuals, stories, and customer proof points. Don’t just show numbers; show impact.
• Use informal touchpoints like Slack recaps, internal newsletters, or a “Friday marketing round-up.” These keep momentum and visibility high between the big updates.
• Include what’s working and what’s not. Transparency builds trust faster than a highlight reel ever will.

When people know what marketing is doing, and why, they’re far more likely to back it.

Create two-way feedback loops

Alignment isn’t a one-way broadcast; it’s a conversation.

• Ask sales, CS, and product for regular input: what messaging lands with customers, what assets they need, and where friction shows up.
• Treat internal teams like focus groups. Run short polls or surveys to gauge how your positioning is being received inside the company before it goes public.
• Join their meetings. Don’t wait for feedback to come to you; embed yourself in sales stand-ups, product updates, or customer calls to stay close to what matters.

You’ll get sharper insights, and you’ll show you’re invested in shared success, not just marketing metrics.

Post externally for internal impact

It might sound counterintuitive, but LinkedIn is often your most visible internal comms channel.

When employees see leadership or marketing team members sharing smart, transparent content about company wins, campaign insights, or learnings, it shapes how they view marketing from the inside. It gives them language to describe what you do and pride in how you represent the brand.

Encourage your team to post updates, lessons, and campaign highlights externally, not just for reach, but for internal credibility.

Turn internal advocates into amplifiers

The most powerful marketing allies are often right inside your company.

• Enable sales with content they’re proud to share.
• Equip product teams with the story of how customer feedback is shaping new launches.
• Celebrate cross-functional wins publicly - tag collaborators in Slack, shout them out in company meetings, or include them in campaign retros.

When people feel part of the story, they’ll start telling it for you.

5. Confusing attention with resonance

In a world obsessed with reach, views, and engagement metrics, it’s easy for marketers to confuse attention with impact.

A flashy ad might get likes. A meme might go viral. A campaign might dominate feeds for a week, and then vanish without ever shifting perception, pipeline, or preference.

That’s the trap Michael Maximoff, CMO at Belkins, warns against:

“Most campaigns don’t fail because the creative is weak.”

“They fail because they’re irrelevant. They don’t answer the question: ‘Why should my buyer care?’”

It’s not that bold creatives or attention-grabbing tactics are bad; they’re essential to stand out.

But when they lack emotional or contextual relevance, they create momentary noise instead of lasting memory.

The strongest marketing doesn’t just get noticed, it connects. It makes people feel seen, understood, and motivated to act. Here’s how to anchor every campaign in relevance instead of gimmickry:

Start with empathy

Before you write a headline or open Figma, pause and ask:

• What’s my buyer thinking or worrying about this week?
• What pain are they trying to solve, and how does it actually feel?
• What are they under pressure to prove?

Empathy is the difference between “We help sales teams close faster” and “You’ve got a quarter left to hit your number, and your CRM’s a mess.”

Here’s how to find that emotional truth:

• Listen to Gong calls or sales recordings, hear how real buyers describe their frustrations.
• Spend time in Slack communities or LinkedIn comments where your ICP vents in their own words.
• Shadow sales or CS - you’ll learn more from one raw conversation than a week of dashboards.

Test ideas through real conversations

Too often, creative teams brainstorm in a vacuum. They workshop taglines in meeting rooms, only to realise later that buyers don’t talk, or think, that way.

Here’s how to break that pattern:

• Run message sprints: Test 3–5 ad hooks or subject lines directly with existing customers or friendly prospects. Ask, “Which one sounds most like you?”
• Use paid micro-tests, small-budget ad experiments that validate resonance before full rollout.
• Watch customer engagement quality, not quantity: Are the right people saving, sharing, or commenting thoughtfully? That’s resonance.

The goal isn’t perfection, it’s proximity. You want your message to sound like it came from your audience, not at them.

Stop chasing virality

Virality is an ego metric. It feeds the algorithm, not necessarily your pipeline.

Instead of asking, “How do we make this blow up?” ask, “How do we make this stick?”

That means:

• Prioritising recurrence over reach - series, formats, and shows that earn return viewers rather than one-hit wonder campaigns.
• Designing creative loops that build familiarity (same host, tone, or structure) so every touchpoint compounds brand memory.
• Measuring resonance through brand recall, saves, and replies, not just impressions or clicks.

As Michael puts it:

“The real job of marketing is to make people care. If you can’t answer why your buyer should care right now - don’t launch.”

When your message reflects the real emotional landscape of your buyer -what they care about, fear, or hope for - you stop chasing reactions and start building relationships.

That’s what turns campaigns into movements, and buyers into believers.

6. Panicking when performance dips

It’s one of the most common - and costly - mistakes in marketing: performance dips, and panic sets in.

Click-through rates fall. Conversions slow. CPLs climb. Suddenly, the dashboards look red, the Slack threads light up, and everyone’s scrambling for quick fixes.

Budgets are shifted, ads are rewritten, targeting changes overnight - and by the end of the week, the team has made so many adjustments that no one can tell what actually caused the problem.

Jonathan Bland, Co-Founder at Omni Lab, calls this out as a form of “false control.”

It feels productive to tweak everything. But more often than not, you’re just making the data noisier - and erasing the very patterns that could tell you what’s wrong.

He said:

“When results slide, most teams start tweaking campaigns, changing copy, and shifting budget - making causality impossible to track.”

The problem isn’t the dip. It’s the reaction to it. When performance falters, the right move isn’t speed - it’s discipline.

Here’s how to stop reacting emotionally and start thinking like a marketing scientist:

Log every meaningful change

You can’t diagnose what you can’t see. Start by documenting every adjustment you make - what it was, who made it, when, and why.

• Keep a simple change log for all major campaign edits.
• Note the expected outcome and the hypothesis behind each change (“We believe CTR will rise if we switch creative A → B”).
• Track the impact window - how long you’ll wait before evaluating results.

It sounds basic, but this single step transforms your team from reactive to methodical. When performance shifts again, you’ll have a trail of evidence to follow.

Rule out the basics first

Before you rewrite your messaging or overhaul your targeting, make sure the fundamentals aren’t the problem.

Work through issues in order of simplicity:

1. Tracking: Is data being captured correctly? Are conversions firing where they should?
2. Structure: Are campaigns overlapping, competing for budget, or throttled by delivery settings?
3. Search terms: Have irrelevant keywords or placements crept in?
4. Landing experience: Has page speed slowed? Are CTAs still aligned with ad intent?

Most performance drops stem from small, mechanical issues, not creative collapse. Fix those first.

Diagnose calmly

Jonathan’s advice is simple but powerful:

“Less changes are ultimately better. Over-optimisation makes it harder to find the real problem - and harder to explain what actually worked.”

That means resisting the instinct to “do something” just to feel in control. Slow down long enough to look for a signal in the noise:

• Pull a time-based analysis - when did the dip start, and what changed right before it?
• Segment results by audience, device, or region - is the problem everywhere or isolated?
• Compare organic and paid performance - sometimes the slowdown isn’t campaign-related at all, but market-wide.

The best marketers don’t guess - they observe, isolate, and test with intent.

Hold changes long enough to learn

One of the hardest habits to build is patience. Give every change enough time to gather statistically useful data.

• Set minimum learning windows (e.g., 7–14 days per creative or targeting change).
• If you’re testing multiple hypotheses, stagger them. Don’t test the budget, creatives, and landing pages simultaneously.
• Record what you’ll stop testing just as clearly as what you’ll start - pruning tests is part of staying focused.

Rushed iteration creates confusion. Controlled iteration creates clarity.

Build a process that protects you from panic

Over time, you can design your workflow to make these disciplined habits automatic:

• Establish guardrails for optimisation frequency (e.g., “No major changes more than once per week”).
• Include a diagnostic checklist for every dip before taking action.
• Encourage post-mortems when campaigns recover - what actually fixed it, and how can you replicate that insight next time?

When you institutionalise calm, your team can handle turbulence without chaos.

Performance dips aren’t failures - they’re data points.

The difference between a marketing team that flails and one that learns is discipline. The best marketers know that not every problem needs a new campaign - sometimes it just needs a pause, a process, and a clear head.

The last word

Every marketer has made one (or all) of these mistakes.

You’ve over-targeted and limited your reach. Reacted too slowly to a shift. Chased clicks instead of visibility. Focused too much on your external audience and forgot your internal one. Launched campaigns that got attention, not resonance. Or panicked when performance dipped.

The truth is, these aren’t signs of failure. They’re signs of motion.

Marketing isn’t about avoiding mistakes; it’s about how fast you learn from them. The best marketers don’t chase perfection; they chase progress. They build feedback loops, test calmly, communicate clearly, and stay grounded when the market moves.

Because every one of these “mistakes” hides an opportunity:

• Over-targeting teaches you to build for tomorrow, not just today.
• Slow pivots remind you to innovate before you’re forced to.
• Obsessing over clicks shows you the value of visibility and trust.
• Ignoring your internal audience proves that marketing is a team sport.
• Chasing attention teaches you that resonance beats reach.
• Reacting in panic shows you the power of discipline and process.

Marketing will always be messy, but the mess is where the insight lives.

So the next time performance dips, trends shift, or pressure mounts, remember:

Slow down. Diagnose. Learn. Because the marketers who win aren’t the ones who never make mistakes - they’re the ones who turn them into momentum.