Your Marketing Might Be Working. You Just Haven’t Defined “Working.”

Every year, Andy Crestodina and the team at Orbit Media Studios survey content marketers about how they create content, what they’re doing differently and what actually produces results. Campe + Co. has participated in the survey for several years, and this year’s findings raised a question that goes well beyond blogging: Do we actually know what we mean when we say marketing is “working”?

Orbit’s latest research surveyed 1,042 content marketers. One of the more interesting findings is that many of the practices most closely associated with strong performance are declining. Marketers are collaborating with influencers less often, promoting content less, using analytics and keyword research less consistently, publishing less original research and moving away from formal editing processes.

At the same time, some practices associated with weaker results are becoming more common. Marketers are publishing less frequently, creating less visual content, skipping keyword research and increasingly replacing human editing with AI.

There are plenty of possible explanations. Content teams are stretched. Organizations are moving faster. AI has made it possible to create more in less time, and marketers are understandably looking for efficiency wherever they can find it.

But there may be another problem hiding underneath the data. Before asking why marketing isn't working, we should probably ask whether we've clearly defined what "working" is supposed to mean.

“Working” is Not a Strategy

Across years of providing fractional CMO and marketing strategy support to organizations of all sizes, one problem persists: marketing teams, sales leaders and executives often aren't specific enough about what they expect marketing to accomplish.

A campaign launches to build awareness. Everyone agrees that awareness matters. The strategy is designed to reach the right audiences, establish credibility and make the organization better known in the market. A few months later, someone asks how many leads it generated.

Suddenly, an awareness strategy is being evaluated as a lead generation strategy. When it doesn't produce enough immediate, attributable conversions, the conclusion is that it "didn't work." That may not be a marketing performance problem at all. It may be an expectations problem.

Marketing works when it accomplishes the specific business objective it was designed to support. That might be lead generation, but it could also be brand awareness, credibility, customer retention, market education, sales enablement or positioning. The measurement has to match the objective.

Sometimes Awareness Really is the Goal

Consider a company investing in original market research, collaborating with industry partners and developing a strong point of view around an issue that matters to its customers. The ideal outcome might be national media coverage, perhaps even an exclusive story with a major business publication.

That would be a significant marketing win. But the expectation probably shouldn't be that someone reads the article, immediately visits the company's website, fills out a form and becomes a customer. It would be great if that happened, but it isn't necessarily the job the work was created to do.

The goal may be to make the right people aware that the organization exists, help them understand an important issue differently, demonstrate expertise and create credibility around the company's solution. In other words, the goal is to build the brand.

That matters because the lead generation machine everyone wants to optimize eventually depends on people knowing who a company is, understanding what it does and having some reason to trust it. Lead generation can only do so much when it's sitting on top of a weak or invisible brand.

The Things that Work Often Require Work

That's part of what makes Orbit's findings so interesting.

The research shows that many of the practices correlated with stronger content performance require more thought, more time or more human involvement. Marketers who consistently collaborate with influencers are substantially more likely to report strong results. Consistent use of analytics and keyword research also correlates with stronger performance, as do original research, active promotion, longer-form content and more visual content.

There's an uncomfortable lesson in there. Technology is making content production easier, but that doesn't necessarily mean the work itself is supposed to become easy.

AI can absolutely make marketers better and more efficient. But if its primary purpose becomes helping us produce more stuff with less thought, we shouldn't be surprised when the world fills up with more marketing that is technically competent and completely ignorable. In a world where everyone already seems to be moving a million miles an hour, maybe efficiency isn't the only thing worth optimizing.

Are we Measuring What's Easy Instead of What Matters?

Marketing has always had an attribution problem. Digital marketing was supposed to help solve it, and today there are dashboards for nearly everything: impressions, clicks, engagement, sessions, conversions, cost per lead and increasingly sophisticated attribution models.

All of those things are useful. But measurement can create its own trap when organizations begin valuing what can easily be measured more than what is actually valuable.

What is the value of a prospective customer seeing a company quoted in a respected publication six months before entering the market for its services? Or reading three articles on its website before agreeing to a sales conversation? What is the value of a buyer recognizing the company name when a salesperson reaches out, or encountering a strong point of view that makes an executive think, "These people understand our problem"?

And what is the value of simply showing up consistently enough that an organization feels established, credible and relevant? Those things matter. They're also maddeningly difficult to put neatly into a spreadsheet.

That doesn't mean brand building, public relations or thought leadership should get a free pass from measurement. Quite the opposite. Marketing needs to get better at connecting activity to business objectives while also being intellectually honest about what can and cannot be directly attributed.

This Blog is a Good Example

The Campe + Co. blog isn't updated nearly as often as it could be. That's not because there is a shortage of things to say. Most days, the team is busy producing strategy and content for clients. But when something gets published here, the expectations are pretty clear. This article isn't expected to generate a pile of inbound leads. It isn't being written with the expectation that it will land Campe + Co. on the front page of Google or result in a new client tomorrow.

Its job is quieter than that.

When someone hears about Campe + Co., gets referred to us, meets someone from the team, sees something we post or otherwise becomes curious about the company, the website should give them somewhere to go deeper. The content should help them understand how we think, how we approach fractional marketing leadership and strategy, and what it might be like to work with us.

If it does that, the blog works.

Could it also help search engines better understand what Campe + Co. is about? Absolutely. Could it give AI platforms more context about the company's expertise and point of view? Hopefully. Could someone discover the company organically through an article? Of course.

Those would all be welcome outcomes. They just aren't the only definition of success.

Start with the Question We Should Have Been Asking All Along

The rapid evolution of AI, search and digital media means marketers need to rethink plenty about strategy, planning and measurement. But moving forward may require going back to something incredibly basic: What are we actually trying to accomplish? A strong marketing strategy starts by answering that question before deciding what to create, which channels to use or which metrics will appear on the dashboard.

What does the organization need to accomplish? What role should marketing play in getting it there? What should this particular investment accomplish? How will we know if it's contributing, even when that contribution isn't a clean line between a click and a sale?

Then document it and make sure everyone understands it. Marketing should know. Sales should know. Leadership should know. And yes, the CFO should know.

When everyone agrees on the job marketing is being asked to do, there's a much better chance of evaluating whether it actually did it. That clarity may also keep organizations from eliminating the quiet workhorses of marketing simply because their contribution doesn't fit neatly into an attribution report. Brand building. Thought leadership. Public relations. Original research. Community engagement. Great content. None of these deserve a free pass from accountability. But they do deserve to be evaluated against the job they were hired to do. Perhaps that's the bigger takeaway from the Orbit research. Before marketers worry about producing more content, using more AI or chasing the newest channel, organizations need to get much better at defining what success actually looks like.

Because sometimes the marketing isn't failing. The definition of “working” is.

The blogging trends and data referenced in this article come from Orbit Media Studios' annual blogger research led by Andy Crestodina. Read Orbit Media Studios' full analysis of the 2026 survey.