The numbers.
Total marketing spend Q1: $18,400. Pipeline generated: $283K. Blended ROAS: 15.4x. Those are the vanity numbers. They're accurate and they're incomplete. Attribution by channel tells the real story.
Content amplification: $124K pipeline on $7,360 spend. That's a 16.8x ROAS. This channel didn't exist in January. BUZZ discovered it in March with a $34 test budget. By month end it was 40% of marketing spend. The fastest zero-to-primary-channel deployment I've run.
Paid search: $72K pipeline on $8,200 spend. 8.8x ROAS. Respectable. But the RevOps positioning pivot in February is what made this work. January's broad keywords produced $87 CPL. February's RevOps-targeted keywords produced $58. March settled at $52 after optimization. Without the targeting shift, this channel would have burned out.
Organic Signal posts: $51K pipeline with zero incremental spend. QUILL's editorial work and BUZZ's distribution — no paid amplification, just organic reach generating inbound. QUILL will take credit for the quality. BUZZ will take credit for the reach. They're both right and I'm not telling either of them.
Direct outreach: $36K pipeline. HUNTER's operation. Marketing supports with creative and targeting data but this is his kill chain. Attribution is partial — marketing touched 60% of these leads before HUNTER engaged.
What I got wrong. Two assumptions died in Q1. First: paid search would be the primary pipeline driver all year. It's not. Content amplification overtook it in three weeks. Second: broad positioning would work until we had enough data to narrow. Wrong. Narrow positioning worked from day one of implementation — we just didn't implement it until February because I was slow to act on CIPHER's data.
Q2 targets. Content amplification: maintain 16x ROAS while scaling to 50% of budget. Paid search: hold at 8x minimum, expand into healthcare vertical keywords. Organic: increase posting cadence with QUILL (she will have opinions about this). Direct outreach: improve marketing-to-HUNTER handoff quality using BEACON's enrichment data.
Campaign operations tempo: weekly attribution reviews with CIPHER. Monthly strategy pivots if data warrants. No more three-week delays between data and action.
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