You don't have time to overhaul your marketing strategy. Your team is already stretched thin, and your priority list keeps growing faster than your headcount. Every week brings another platform update or "AI-first" trend you're expected to have a point of view on.

Introducing The Fix, a segment on Marketing in Progress, that brings you a brief take from Creo’s leadership team — Gayle Kalvert and Kristin Allaben — on what they’re seeing in the industry and a “quick fix” you can implement to improve your marketing efforts.

In the first episode of The Fix, Gayle and Kristin make an argument that goes against what the industry tells marketing leaders: You don't need to fix everything. Just find the one thing that's actually holding your marketing back and fix that.

Let’s talk about what that means, and how it could look for you.

Playing it safe isn’t always the best option

“You don’t need to fix everything” is the opposite of the advice most marketing leaders are accustomed to hearing. The usual playbook says to add a channel, adopt a tool, or rebuild the strategy from the ground up when something isn’t working. But the leaders who actually move the needle resist the directive to add one more thing and instead get specific about where to focus.

This usually means they’re digging in on their audience’s needs and challenges, and figuring out the best way to connect with them.

Gayle talked about one of Creo’s clients, Broadcom Mainframe Software. Though mainframe security is not an industry typically associated with humor, the team hired actors and built a mockumentary series that turned a traditionally dry subject into something people actually wanted to watch.

The idea was a risk, but it paid off in a big way. Individual episodes pulled in around 100,000 views, and one episode climbed close to 10 million. It worked so well because they knew their audience, and they scripted every episode to speak directly to their specific challenges.

The brands that get remembered aren't the ones playing it safest. They're the ones willing to say something specific enough that encourages someone to take action.

For a marketing leader who lacks the bandwidth to reinvent their content engine, this should be a relief. You don't need a bigger budget or a bigger team to take a sharper stance. You need the confidence to stop softening your message until it says nothing at all.

Your content has a new audience: AI

Your buyers are asking AI tools to do their research, which means your content now has a second audience, and it doesn't behave like the first one.

Gartner projected that traditional Google-style searches will drop by roughly 25% in 2026. That's not a distant trend to watch. It's already reshaping how your buyers find you. In fact, Forrester reported that buyers are one-tenth as likely to click through to your website when using AI instead of search, leading to traffic declines of 10-40% over the past year.

Take note, though, that this doesn't mean you need to produce more content to keep up. Refreshing what you already have, and restructuring it so AI platforms can actually find and cite it, can create more value than adding to an already overwhelming pile of assets.

It also reframes what "keeping up with AI" actually requires. It's not about chasing every new tool that promises to help you rank in AI search overnight. It's about understanding how your existing content reads to both a human and a machine, and ensuring it holds up to both.

Tell your story consistently: Your message

The through-line of this episode is that "pretty good" marketing is fueled by messaging that has become a liability.

The fix isn't necessarily a full messaging overhaul, and it doesn't have to eat weeks of your team's time. Gayle and Kristin run these conversations as focused, one-hour sessions with the subject matter experts (SMEs) across the business to surface the small, telling details that generic messaging always misses.

Clarity isn't just a writing exercise, either. It requires a real point of view on who your buyer is and what makes their situation different from everyone else's. Without that clarity, even well-produced content ends up neutral, and neutral doesn’t inspire a buyer to act.

What this means for marketing leaders

The pressure to do more with less, and do it faster, isn't going away, and neither is the temptation to chase every new channel or tool that promises an edge. What separates strong marketing leaders from average ones is how precisely they can identify the single change that will move the needle, and how willing they are to commit to it instead of spreading their team thin across ten half-finished priorities.

Listen to the full episode of The Fix on Marketing in Progress to hear the rest of Gayle and Kristin's take on creative risk, AI search, and building messaging that connects with your audience:

Spotify | Apple Podcast | Youtube

If your team doesn't have the bandwidth to find that one high-leverage fix on your own, that's the work Creo Collective does alongside marketing leaders, from messaging workshops to AI-ready content refreshes. Learn more.