Marketing is getting noisier by the minute.
AI. New search behaviours. Rising ad costs. More platforms. More dashboards. More things telling you what you should be doing.
But here’s what we’re interested in:
Is any of it actually making your business more money?
We’ve been looking closely at what’s happening across our clients, and three shifts are becoming impossible to ignore.
Google is answering the question before you get the click.
Yep. Your search traffic is under pressure.
Google’s AI Overviews are changing how people search, with more answers being delivered directly in the search results.
Pew Research found that when an AI summary appeared in Google, just 8% of searches resulted in a click on a traditional search result, compared with 15% when no AI summary appeared.
Source: Pew Research Center, 2025.
Bear’s Take
SEO isn’t dead. The old SEO playbook is.
Stop churning out generic content just to tick an SEO box. Create genuinely useful, original content that answers the questions your customers actually care about.
And when people do land on your site? Give them a reason to stick around and give you their details.
The Takeaway
Don’t just try to rank. Become the source worth finding, trusting and citing.
Your marketing team might be celebrating the wrong numbers.
More traffic. More clicks. More leads. So why isn’t the sales team happy?
Because a lead isn’t a customer.
HubSpot’s 2026 State of Marketing research found that measuring ROI is the biggest challenge for marketers, while lead quality and lead-to-customer conversion are among the metrics marketers consider most important.
Source: HubSpot, 2026 State of Marketing.
Bear’s Take
Stop celebrating cheap leads. Start measuring valuable ones.
Marketing and sales need to be looking at the same journey:
Lead → Opportunity → Customer → Revenue
If your marketing report says “500 leads” but your sales team says “none of them were any good”, you’ve got a measurement problem.
The Takeaway
Optimise for the quality and commercial value of leads, not just the cost of generating them.
You probably don’t need more traffic.
You might just need to stop leaking the traffic you’ve already paid for.
We see it all the time.
Businesses spend thousands driving people to their website, then make it unnecessarily difficult to enquire, buy or take the next step.
Confusing messaging. Weak CTAs. Too many clicks. Poor landing pages. Friction everywhere.
Bear’s Take
Fix the leaks before you increase the ad spend.
Take a website converting at 2%.
Get that to 4%, and you’ve effectively doubled the number of conversions from the same traffic.
No extra media spend required.
That’s why CRO matters. Sometimes the fastest path to more revenue isn’t buying more traffic. It’s getting more value from the traffic you already have.
The Takeaway
Before you scale the budget, make sure your website is ready to convert it.
So, what should you actually do?
Stop chasing marketing activity.
Start chasing commercial outcomes.
The landscape will constantly shift with new platforms and shiny tactics, but you don’t need to chase them all. You just need to know what is working, what is leaking, and where your next dollar will make the biggest difference. That is where Bear comes in. We are a 100% in-house Brisbane team that works alongside your business to connect strategy, media, creative, websites and data to make your marketing work harder.