Vigilante Marketing

10/09/2026

Most businesses set next year's marketing budget in November. That's about six weeks too late.

Here's why. Q4 is the only point in the year where you have a full twelve months of your own data sitting there, complete, before the calendar forces a decision. It is also the one time everybody is too busy to look at it.

So the budget gets set the way it always gets set, last year's number, plus a bit, minus whatever got cut.

What we'd do instead, this week, first week of October:

1. Pull cost per lead by channel for the last 12 months. Not cost per click. Cost per actual lead.

2. Find the month where everything worked, and ask what was different. It's usually one thing.

3. Kill the channel you keep funding out of habit. There's always one.

4. Decide what Q1 is for, capturing demand or creating it. Those need different money and different creative.

None of that requires an agency. It requires two hours and somebody willing to look at the number honestly.

If you'd rather not do it alone, that's what the strategy call is for. Thirty minutes, free, no deck.



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Stay vigilant. Stay ahead.

10/08/2026

68% of U.S. Google searches ended without a click in early 2026. When AI answers the question, the business that gets recommended wins.

Here are 3 things to fix before the holidays in the video.

Full Q4 Playbook: https://vigilante.marketing/blog/q4-marketing-playbook-2026/

10/04/2026

10/03/2026

A w**ery doesn't sell w**e. It sells a reason to drive 40 minutes out of town.

That shift is where brand work actually starts.

When we pick up a tourism or hospitality brand, the question is never "does the logo look good." It's:

- What does somebody see in the 10 seconds before they decide to get in the car?
- Does the site load before they lose interest?
- Is the thing that makes this place unrepeatable visible anywhere at all?

Most businesses know the answer to the third one. It's just buried three scrolls down the About page, written by committee, in the passive voice.

Brand development is mostly excavation. You're not inventing a story. You're finding the one that's already true and dragging it up to where people can see it.

We do this across Kelowna, Vancouver, Calgary, Edmonton and Toronto. The geography changes. The excavation doesn't.

So, what's the true thing about your business that nobody outside the building knows?

vigilante.marketing

09/30/2026

Three signs your marketing agency is hiding hours from you:

1. Your monthly report is a pile of screenshots and no timesheet. Impressions are not hours. Nobody ever paid a bill in impressions.

2. You ask what did you actually do this month, and you get a vibe instead of a list.

3. The invoice is identical every month, but the work clearly isn't.

We bill at a hundred an hour and we show you every single one of them. If that sounds unusual to you, that's the problem, so it isn't yours.

Stay vigilant. Stay ahead.
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vigilante.marketing

09/26/2026

5 things your agency should hand you on day one and not on exit day.

1. Admin access to your own ad accounts. Google Ads, Meta Business Manager, all of it, under your email. Not theirs.

2. Domain + hosting logins. If you can't point your own domain, you don't own your website.

3. Source files. Not the JPG. The .AI, the .PSD, the editable brand kit, the fonts you're licensed for.

4. GA4 under your account. So the data survives the relationship.

5. A written scope with hours on it. If you can't see where the money went, that's usually the point.

Missing more than two of these? Screenshot this and send it to whoever runs your marketing. Day one. Not exit day. Swipe for the five things you should already have access to. We hand all of it over before the first invoice, because the alternative is leverage, and leverage is not a service.

Missing more than two? That's a conversation worth having. Free 30-minute strategy call, link in bio.



vigilante.marketing

09/23/2026

If your agency owns your Google Ads account, you don't have a marketing partner. You have a hostage situation.

Here's what we see almost every time a business comes to us after leaving another agency:

- The ad account sits under the agency's MCC. Years of conversion data, gone on day one.

- The website is on a host the client can't log into. The logo exists as a JPG someone screenshotted out of an email.

- Nobody can say what was spent on what. None of that is an accident. It's leverage.

Our rule is simple: you own everything. Accounts, assets, logins, source files. If you left tomorrow you'd walk out with all of it, and we'd help you pack.

That isn't generosity. It's the only version of this arrangement that isn't a trap. So ask your current agency one question this week: "If I left, what do I keep?" Their answer tells you everything.



vigilante.marketing
Stay vigilant. Stay ahead.

09/11/2026

Your Instagram profile is a search result now.

People search businesses inside Instagram and TikTok, not just Google. That means your profile is doing search work whether you set it up for that or not.

Five fixes, ten minutes each:

1. Put searchable words in your name field - "Vigilante Marketing - Kelowna", not just the brand name
2. Write the bio for a stranger, not a fan: what you do, who for, where
3. Treat the first line of every caption like a headline
4. Put real words in your on-screen text and captions, platforms read them
5. Keep the grid current. A six-month gap reads as closed

None of it is glamorous. All of it compounds.

Full write-up on our blog: https://vigilante.marketing/blog/social-media-seo-vs-traditional-seo/

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