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title: 7 Marketing Horror Stories Just in Time for Halloween
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The Intention.ly Brief | October 2026 ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­    ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­  

| View in browser The weird, the wild, the WTH…every month, we’re sharing the industry observation, marketing mystery, or growth dilemma that gets our team fired up.    We spend a lot of time looking under the hood of marketing operations at financial services companies. In the spirit of Halloween, we thought we’d share some of the things that genuinely scare us.   Not the small stuff - an outdated website, ugly email template, a LinkedIn account that’s become a ghost town - but the expensive, often invisible problems haunting firms that don’t even know they’re living with them.   1. Spending $100,000s on Martech That Nobody Uses   A firm has HubSpot or Salesforce, a marketing automation platform, three analytics tools, a sales engagement platform, an intent data provider, and a handful of AI subscriptions.   They're spending hundreds of thousands of dollars a year on technology. And they're still exporting CSVs to figure out which leads to follow up with. Instead of designing a real system, they bought a collection of capabilities they hoped would somehow become an operating model.   A martech stack is not a growth engine, and owning sophisticated technology doesn't make your marketing sophisticated.   2. The Marketing Dashboard That Makes Everyone Feel Good   Lots of green arrows mean impressions are up, website traffic is growing, email open rates look fantastic, and everyone congratulates the marketing team. Meanwhile, nobody can answer how much revenue marketing influenced, which campaigns created opportunities, or whether the leads generated are qualified.   This is genuinely concerning because it's so common. We've somehow convinced ourselves that reporting activity is the same thing as measuring effectiveness when, in reality, five business-level metrics are far more valuable than 40 beautiful charts that don’t tie back to anything that matters.   3. Lead Collection Campaigns Masquerading as Lead Generation Campaigns   A firm spends $20,000 a month on lead generation. They run ads and receive form completions. Their agency is reporting conversions.   Then what?   The leads go into a CRM. Maybe someone receives a notification. Maybe an automated email gets sent. Maybe sales calls them three days later.   Nobody knows.   There's no immediate scheduling opportunity, no meaningful qualification process, no thoughtful nurture strategy, and no accountability for what happens between someone raising their hand and someone becoming a customer. Six months later, everyone concludes that paid media doesn't work.   Generating a lead without designing the conversion process is just paying to build a list of people you'll disappoint.   4. The AI Strategy That Consists of Giving Everyone ChatGPT   We’re huge believers in AI. But we also think firms need to be more thoughtful about how they’re adopting it.   Companies are celebrating because their employees are writing emails faster, generating more blog posts, and producing social content in a fraction of the time.   To what end?   If your strategy was mediocre before AI, congratulations: you can now execute that mediocre strategy at an unprecedented pace.   The real opportunity isn't to produce ten times as much marketing. It's to rethink the entire operating model: how we understand buyers, identify opportunities, personalize experiences, orchestrate campaigns, qualify demand, and convert interest into revenue.   And that requires more than access to technology. It requires expertise, strategic thinking, and an understanding of how all the pieces fit together.   5. The Firm That Confuses its Marketing Agency for its Sales Team   A firm hires a marketing agency to build awareness, grow the audience, create compelling content, generate engagement, and start putting qualified opportunities in front of the business.   Six months later, the CEO asks, "Why haven't we gotten more clients?"   Well, what happened to all those opportunities?   Did anyone follow up? How quickly? Were prospects invited to have a conversation? Did sales have the tools, processes, and accountability to convert the interest marketing generated?   Or did everyone just assume the agency was going to handle that part, too?   Marketing should absolutely be accountable for growing your audience, generating demand, creating engagement, and putting real opportunities in front of your business. A great agency should also help you build the systems that make those opportunities easier to convert.   But somebody still has to close.   You can't expect your agency to move the ball 95 yards down the field and then blame them when your team can't get it into the end zone.   And yet, we see firms evaluate their marketing investment almost exclusively on how many new clients they acquired, without ever examining what happened after marketing did its job.   If your marketing creates opportunities that don’t convert, you don't necessarily have a marketing problem. You might, however, have a sales problem.   6. The Customer Journey No One Has Taken   Pretend you're a prospective customer. Visit your website. Try to understand what makes your company different. Download something. Fill out a form with your personal email address. Request a meeting. See what happens next.   You might be surprised.   Companies invest enormous amounts of money in brand development, websites, campaigns, and lead generation without ever experiencing what it's like to receive their marketing.   Messaging is inconsistent, CTAs are confusing, follow-up takes days, and the sales conversation doesn't match the promise on the website.   Each team does its job, but no one owns the journey end to end. Your prospects don't experience your business in departments. They experience one company, and every gap in their journey is an opportunity to lose them.   7. The CRM Full of Disconnected Contacts   Thousands of contacts. Years of historical data. Multiple pipelines. Dozens of custom fields.   And nobody can trust any of it because contacts aren't linked to the right companies, lifecycle stages aren’t consistent, and sales and marketing use completely different definitions of a qualified opportunity.   But the company is making major budget and growth decisions based on reports generated from that data.   We tell firms all the time: you cannot automate your way out of a broken data foundation. Adding AI to bad data just makes the bad decisions happen faster.   🎃 These are real scenarios we experience every day. The scariest part is that most firms we talk to have incredible potential - great stories, differentiated solutions, the ability to make a real impact buried deep beneath strategic and operational horrors.   If anything on this list scares you, we’re happy to talk it through with you, over Zoom or around a campfire.  Upcoming Webinar: Beyond the Deal: Questions Every Advisor Should Ask Before Making a Move November 12 at 10:00 ET Join Kelly Waltrich and Josh Tomolak from Diamond Consulting as they explore what advisors should consider before selling their business or joining a new firm—from economics and culture to client experience, control, and long-term growth. Register Now Want to see something you’re working on featured in a future edition of Intention.ly Brief? Drop us a line here to share your news.  Intention.ly, 1018 W. 9th Ave, Suite 120, King of Prussia, PA 19406 Unsubscribe Manage preferences |
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