Garrett Mehrguth shares practical B2B marketing advice and campaign case studies from Directive, covering paid search and social, lead quality, brand investment, and visibility in AI-driven search.
Garrett Mehrguth shares practical B2B marketing advice and Directive campaign examples about paid search, social, lead quality, brand, and AI search.
Best for
A B2B agency or strategy-led campaign focused on qualified pipeline, not maximum lead volume.
Not for
A guaranteed sponsored post with fixed lead numbers and last-click attribution alone.
Key takeaways
More leads is easy; sales-accepted leads are the hard part.
Attribution is too narrow, so brand investment is managed with macro pipeline KPIs.
AI search visibility splits into durable reputation and fragile tactics.
Check first: Confirm whether this is an agency engagement or a personal collaboration, and ask for a measurement plan.
Main ideas
More leads is the easy part; sales-accepted leads are the hard part · Attribution is too narrow, so brand investment is managed with macro pipeline KPIs · AI search visibility splits into durable reputation and fragile tactics
Garrett Mehrguth is known for practical B2B marketing advice drawn from Directive campaign examples.
His posts cover paid search and social, sales-qualified leads, brand investment, and visibility in AI-driven search.
They are useful to readers because they connect a marketing decision to what happened next: for example, he describes shifting a client's budget toward campaigns producing opportunities, and argues that brand spending should be judged against broader measures such as proposals and bookings—not clicks alone.
His distinctive strength is making campaign trade-offs concrete.
In one account, he explains how Directive moved away from optimizing Google Ads for lead volume, refocused LinkedIn on tiered account lists, and tested different ad formats; he reports a 28% quarter-over-quarter drop in paid-social cost per opportunity.
In another, he describes repairing lead-flow and tracking signals before scaling campaigns, alongside a reported increase in sales-accepted leads.
He also applies the same practical lens to AI search: distinguish technical tactics that may change with a model update from reputation built through independent coverage and reviews.
The posts make his work worth following for specific examples and tests, while their reported client results are claims in the posts rather than independently assessed outcomes.
Garrett Mehrguth’s recurring ideas center on making B2B marketing prove out on pipeline and revenue rather than cheap leads or perfect attribution.
Read more
He argues that lead quality and sales acceptance should drive budget, that brand investment needs macro KPIs, that AI search visibility depends on durable reputation as much as technical tactics, and that paid social should be tested by targeting and offer. He makes these points through Directive client case studies, operational checklists, and sales-process advice for agency owners.
More leads is the easy part; sales-accepted leads are the hard part
Garrett argues that lead volume can look healthy while sales rejects the leads or cannot close them.
Read more
He wants budget to follow opportunities and sales acceptance, not the cheapest conversions. A higher cost per conversion can be acceptable when it comes with higher win rates and contract values.
For a technology client, Garrett says leads rose 87% and sales-accepted leads rose 25% in a single month without spending more.
Directive rebuilt LinkedIn’s lower funnel with focused Message Ads, scaled search campaigns already producing bottom-of-funnel value, repaired the Unbounce-to-HubSpot lead flow, and replaced feature messaging with case studies and product tours.
In another account, a top edtech company increased ROI by 45% while lowering total spend after re-ranking campaigns by opportunities created, funding competitor search, and moving LinkedIn spend into tiered account lists.
Attribution is too narrow, so brand investment is managed with macro pipeline KPIs
Garrett describes attribution as one of the biggest problems in B2B marketing and points out that most advertising is never clicked.
Read more
He argues Google search ads mostly capture existing demand rather than create incremental demand, so growth requires brand spend on channels such as Meta, LinkedIn, CTV, and Native. Because individual opportunities often cannot be tied back to impressions, he recommends accountability through proposals held, demos, trials, and bookings won on a 90-day lookback.
Directive paused all gift card advertising and direct response for its performance division and replaced it with brand campaigns: video ads, educational content, and top-of-funnel awareness ads.
Two quarters later, Garrett said the team still could not connect brand advertising impressions to individual opportunities.
The reported result was $5M in new business in Q1 and almost $8M in Q3, during the middle of summer.
AI search visibility splits into durable reputation and fragile tactics
Garrett separates technical AI-search work — schema, formatting, getting quoted, being parsable, publishing markdown versions of support and product content — from the more durable work of brand reputation.
Read more
He argues that earned coverage, PR, and reviews on respected platforms are what sustainably feed the knowledge graph. A tactic that changes when the model changes is a hack, not a channel moat.
Garrett says one client’s Reddit citations dropped hard after a single OpenAI update, with no change on the agency or client side.
In another case, a cybersecurity client restructured content around commonly asked questions, strengthened content already earning citations instead of publishing more, and pursued third-party placements.
The reported results were AI share of voice up from 30% to 50% and AI referral leads up 60% since July.
Review sites are now category infrastructure for LLMs, not just lead sources
Garrett says B2B marketers often think about review sites only as places to spend money and get leads.
Read more
He argues that review sites now teach LLMs and Google which categories a brand belongs to and which industries it serves. That makes review-site presence and third-party listicle inclusion part of AI and search discovery, not just demand generation.
Garrett recommends searching a commercial modifier for a category, such as “Top Kubernetes software” or “Best Kubernetes software companies,” to see whether Gartner Peer Insights ranks. He also recommends searching a company’s primary keyword on Google, ChatGPT, and Claude, seeing which listicles are referenced, and making sure the brand is part of those conversations.
Test targeting and offer before creative, and let account evidence pick the LinkedIn format
Garrett argues that creative affects click-through rate, but targeting and offer determine who shows up to demos.
Read more
Lower-friction asks such as interactive product tours can move cold buyers better than a demo request. His LinkedIn format advice is not universal: one account may expand conversation ads while another moves away from them, so the decision should be based on qualified replies, MQLs, or opportunities rather than form fills alone.
For an edtech client, shifting LinkedIn toward conversation ads, where a reply is the conversion event, helped paid social cost per opportunity fall 28% quarter over quarter.
For a technology client, Conversation Ads were underperforming, so spend moved into more focused Message Ads, the lead-form and scheduling flow was cleaned up, and weak sender and copy variants were paused.
That account went from minimal MQL production to 18 MQLs in the month at a materially lower cost per MQL.
Agency sales needs a structured multi-call close, not a one-call close
Garrett tells agency owners that the one-call close — run an audit, get on one call, send the contract — is how agencies get ghosted.
Read more
He argues for a structured process where each call has a purpose: discovery, methodology and positioning, pitch with price, and statement-of-work review that maps procurement, legal, and finance.
Garrett describes Directive’s four-call process: an intro call run by an account executive, a methodology call led by the CEO or solution seller, a pitch call after gaining access to analytics and ad accounts, and an SOW review. He says this process is used at Directive and taught to agency owners, whether they sell $3K retainers or $50K engagements, and that every pitch has a price.
This is the clearest account of how Garrett turns paid budget toward pipeline quality rather than cheap lead volume.
Read more
In a quarter, Directive says it increased ROI by 45% for a top edtech company while lowering total spend.
The account had two problems: Google Ads rewarded conversions instead of opportunities, and LinkedIn spend was spread evenly across broad campaigns.
Garrett describes rebuilding Google Ads around high-intent and opportunity-producing campaigns, funding competitor targeting more heavily, cutting broad LinkedIn audiences, moving budget to tiered account lists, and shifting LinkedIn format mix toward conversation ads where a reply is the conversion event.
Paid social cost per opportunity fell 28% quarter over quarter.
The post closes with four reusable moves: rank campaigns by opportunities, fund competitor search as a test, review cost per opportunity by account tier, and test targeting and offer before creative.
For brands planning a campaign
For an agency improving lead quality, use cost per opportunity as the reallocation metric and build a test plan around competitor search, tiered account lists, and conversation ads rather than treating broad reach as healthy.
It shows a concrete paid search and paid social turnaround where lead volume was not the only goal.
Read more
For a technology client, Garrett says leads rose 87% and sales-accepted leads rose 25% in a single month without spending more.
Directive rebuilt LinkedIn's lower funnel with more focused Message Ads, cleaned up the lead-form and scheduling flow, and paused weak sender and copy variants.
It scaled search campaigns already proving bottom-of-funnel value, including PMax, AI Max, tier-one non-brand, and competitor conquesting.
It repaired the Unbounce-to-HubSpot lead flow, gave product tours platform-specific URLs, tightened UTM governance, and connected Meta Conversions API.
It also replaced feature messaging with case studies, social proof, outcome-led claims, real product UI, and interactive product tours.
Finally, it put brand and competitor exclusions on AI Max and PMax and reviewed lead quality.
For brands planning a campaign
The practical sequence is to audit CRM handoff and conversion signals before changing bids, then use lower-friction offers such as product tours and test LinkedIn senders alongside copy and creative.
This explains the case for top-of-funnel brand spending when attribution cannot connect impressions to revenue.
Read more
Garrett describes pausing all gift card advertising and direct response for Directive's performance division in Q1 and replacing it with brand campaigns: video ads, educational content, and top-of-funnel awareness ads.
Two quarters later, the post says the team still cannot connect brand advertising impressions to individual opportunities.
The reported result was $5M in new business in Q1 and almost $8M in Q3, during the middle of summer.
Garrett asks whether marketing's job should be increasing total bookings rather than perfectly attributing every MQL.
The post also notes that a six-person marketing team and four-person sales org made the pivot.
For brands planning a campaign
For a brand investment proposal, use bookings, proposals held, demos, and trials as macro KPIs, and pair upper-funnel brand campaigns with bottom-funnel demand capture rather than waiting for perfect attribution.
It gives a useful test for deciding whether an AI-search tactic is a durable channel or a temporary hack.
Read more
Garrett says a new category of agencies has formed around getting brands cited by AI models, and some of that work is real.
But he argues much of it is sold as durable when it is not.
He describes a client's Reddit citations dropping hard after a single OpenAI update, with no change on the agency or client side.
The post separates structural or technical work, such as schema, formatting, getting quoted, and being parsable, from brand reputation work driven by reviews on platforms like G2, Gartner Peer Insights, Clutch, and Capterra.
Garrett offers two questions: if the model changed, would this tactic change, and what percent of the LLM strategy is structural versus reputational.
For brands planning a campaign
An AI visibility plan should balance technical AI-search work with PR and review-site reputation so the program is not dependent on one model's behavior.
This is a specific AI-search case study with named changes and reported results.
Read more
Garrett says a Gartner representative called one of Directive's largest cybersecurity clients one of the most mature AEO setups encountered and had no recommended changes.
The post lists what got them there: restructuring content around commonly asked questions, stopping the attempt to out-publish the problem, going after third-party placements harder than owned content, and making the brand the default reference point in the category.
Garrett says the client became consistently one of the top two most mentioned brands among its competitor set, AI share of voice rose from 30% to 50%, and AI referral leads rose 60% since July.
The takeaways are that volume is not a lever, earned coverage can outperform owned content, and the real KPI is becoming the default answer.
For brands planning a campaign
For AI search visibility, prioritize earned third-party coverage and strengthen content already earning citations before commissioning more owned blog volume.
It turns review sites into a practical discovery and list-building tactic for AI search.
Read more
Garrett argues B2B marketers should think about review sites differently.
Rather than putting money into Capterra, Software Advice, or G2 and expecting direct leads, he says review sites now teach LLMs and Google which categories a brand is in and which industries it serves.
He recommends checking Gartner Peer Insights by searching a commercial modifier for the category, such as top Kubernetes software, and seeing whether it ranks.
He also recommends searching a company's primary keyword on Google, ChatGPT, and Claude, seeing which listicles are referenced in AI Overviews and LLMs, and getting the brand into those conversations.
For brands planning a campaign
Include review-site presence and third-party listicle inclusion in B2B campaign planning because they influence how AI systems describe and categorize a brand.
It gives a simple numerical argument for why click-based attribution misses most marketing effect.
Read more
Garrett lays out a click-through math problem.
A good CTR is 2%, maybe 4%, and 6% is exceptional.
That still means 94% of an audience never clicks.
He argues Google search ads deposit no long-term brand equity because they capture existing in-market intent and cannot create more people searching for commercial queries.
To move the needle in B2B, he says brands have to use Meta, LinkedIn, CTV, Native, and similar channels where most outcomes cannot be tracked through clicks.
Directive tracks proposals held, demos, trials, and bookings won, and asks whether brand ads increased proposals held or bookings on a 90-day lookback.
For brands planning a campaign
Use macro pipeline KPIs with defined lookback windows for upper-funnel brand campaigns, and stop treating clicks as the only evidence that marketing worked.
It explains how Garrett structures agency sales when bigger clients require more than one call.
Read more
Garrett tells agency owners to stop trying to close deals with one call.
He describes Directive's four-call process: an intro call where an account executive explains the agency's difference and runs discovery on goals, budget, timeline, and decision-makers; a methodology call where the CEO or solution seller walks through the methodology deck and deal strategy; a pitch call after getting access to GA4, Google Ads, LinkedIn, Meta, and similar accounts, where the audit, opportunity, and price are presented; and a statement-of-work review where the account executive maps procurement, legal, and finance so the contract does not disappear into silence.
Every pitch has a price.
For brands planning a campaign
Agencies should adapt a multi-call sales process for larger retainers or engagements, with a clear purpose for each call and procurement mapped before the contract stage.
AI search visibility: separate durable reputation from tactical hacks3
Lead quality over lead volume2
Attribution is limited, so brand investment needs macro KPIs2
Paid social formats, offers, and lower-friction asks2
Review sites as a discovery channel for buyers and AI models1
Agency sales process and service positioning1
Personal outside-work content1
Lead quality over lead volume
Garrett's campaign breakdowns repeatedly argue that more leads is the easy part; more leads that sales accepts and closes is the hard part.
Read more
In one account, a technology client's leads rose 87% and sales-accepted leads rose 25% in a month without spending more.
The changes included rebuilding LinkedIn's lower funnel with Message Ads, scaling search campaigns already producing bottom-of-funnel value, fixing the Unbounce-to-HubSpot lead flow, tightening UTM governance, connecting Meta Conversions API, and replacing feature messaging with case studies and product tours.
In another account, a top edtech company increased ROI by 45% while lowering total spend after re-ranking campaigns by opportunities created, funding competitor search, moving LinkedIn spend into tiered account lists, and testing targeting and offer before creative.
Re-rank campaigns by opportunities created, calculate the share of spend sitting in campaigns that have never produced one, and reallocate that budget. Review cost per opportunity by account tier so budget follows win rates and contract values.
Garrett states that a higher cost per conversion is not automatically bad when it is offset by higher win rates and contract values.
For brands planning a campaign
For a brief focused on lead quality and sales-accepted leads, ask Garrett to start with a CRM and handoff audit, then reallocate budget using cost per opportunity rather than cost per lead. A paid search and social plan should include competitor search as a test, LinkedIn formats tied to qualified replies, and a measurement plan that connects campaigns to sales acceptance.
Attribution is limited, so brand investment needs macro KPIs
Garrett describes attribution as one of the biggest problems in B2B marketing and points out that most advertising is never clicked.
Read more
In one post, Garrett calculates that even a strong 6% click-through rate leaves 94% of an audience unclicked, and says Google search ads mostly capture existing demand rather than create incremental demand.
Directive paused gift card advertising and direct response, shifted to brand campaigns including video, educational content, and top-of-funnel awareness, and saw new business rise from $5M in Q1 to almost $8M in Q3.
Garrett says the brand impressions still cannot be tied to individual opportunities, but tracks proposals held, demos, trials, and bookings won on a 90-day lookback.
Track proposals held, demos, trials, and bookings won rather than only clicks or MQLs. Compare brand campaign periods on a 90-day lookback.
The evidence does not prove a causal link between brand impressions and individual opportunities; Garrett explicitly says that connection remains difficult.
For brands planning a campaign
For a brand-investment campaign, set expectations that last-click attribution will miss most of the effect. The plan should define macro KPIs such as proposals held, demos, trials, and bookings, with a 90-day lookback, and treat lower-funnel search as demand capture rather than the whole growth engine.
AI search visibility: separate durable reputation from tactical hacks
Garrett treats AI visibility as a mix of technical work and brand reputation.
Read more
The technical side includes schema, formatting, parsable content, and making support and product material easier for models to digest.
The durable side comes from how an industry describes a brand and what reviews it has earned on sites such as G2, Gartner Peer Insights, Clutch, and Capterra.
One post describes a cybersecurity client that restructured content around commonly asked questions, strengthened content already earning citations instead of publishing more, went after third-party placements, and became a default reference point in its category.
The stated results were AI share of voice up from 30% to 50% and AI referral leads up 60% since July.
Another post warns that Reddit citations dropped hard after a single OpenAI update, showing that some AI visibility tactics can change without any action by the brand or agency.
Search primary category terms on Google, ChatGPT, and Claude; see which listicles and third-party sources are referenced; then pursue placement in those sources and maintain review-site profiles.
Garrett says some AI visibility tactics are hacks that can break with a model update, so they should be balanced with sustainable brand and reputation work.
For brands planning a campaign
An AI visibility campaign should pair technical formatting and schema work with earned coverage, review-site presence, and PR.
Measure AI share of voice and referral leads, not just rankings.
Fund review-site and third-party placement work as a reputation channel, while treating Reddit or listicle tactics as testable and potentially fragile.
Paid social formats, offers, and lower-friction asks
Garrett's posts describe testing LinkedIn formats and offers against qualified pipeline rather than clicks.
Read more
In one edtech account, shifting LinkedIn toward conversation ads, where a reply is the conversion event, helped paid social cost per opportunity fall 28% quarter over quarter.
In a technology account, Conversation Ads were underperforming, so spend moved into focused Message Ads, the lead-form and scheduling flow was cleaned up, and sender and copy variants were paused when they did not pull their weight.
That account went from minimal MQL production to 18 MQLs in the month at a materially lower cost per MQL.
Garrett also argues that a product tour is a smaller ask than a demo request, and that targeting and offer affect who shows up to demos more than creative affects click-through rate.
Isolate targeting and offer in tests, and use qualified replies as the conversion event for conversation-style ads. Review lead quality after changing formats.
The recommended LinkedIn format varies by account: one post expands conversation ads while another moves away from them because they underperformed.
For brands planning a campaign
For a paid social plan, test format and offer before creative.
Use lower-friction offers such as interactive product tours for cold buyers, and test the sender as much as the copy.
Do not assume one LinkedIn format works across accounts; build the plan around qualified replies, MQLs, or opportunities rather than form fills alone.
Review sites as a discovery channel for buyers and AI models
Garrett says B2B marketers need review sites and are often thinking about them only as lead sources.
Read more
In a pre-LLM model, the calculation was simple: put money into Capterra, Software Advice, or G2 and get leads.
Now, review sites also help teach LLMs and Google which categories a brand belongs to and which industries it serves.
Garrett recommends checking whether Gartner Peer Insights appears for commercial terms in a category, because it ranks well, has relatively few reviews, and can be affordable.
The suggested actions are to search a primary keyword on Google, ChatGPT, and Claude, see which listicles are referenced, and make sure the brand is part of those conversations.
Search the primary category term on Google, ChatGPT, and Claude, identify referenced listicles, and pursue inclusion. Check Gartner Peer Insights for the category's commercial modifiers.
For brands planning a campaign
For a B2B brand trying to improve AI and search visibility, review-site presence should be treated as category education, not only lead generation. The campaign should include profile maintenance, review acquisition, and placement in the third-party lists that AI tools and Google already reference.
Garrett also writes for agency owners about selling.
Read more
One post rejects the one-call close and lays out a four-call process: an intro call run by an account executive, a methodology call led by a CEO or solution seller, a pitch call after gaining access to analytics and ad accounts, and a statement-of-work review that maps procurement, legal, and finance. Garrett says this process is used at Directive and taught to agency owners, whether they sell $3K retainers or $50K engagements.
This advice is about selling agency services, not about running client campaigns, so it is a different buyer topic from the paid search and social case studies.
For brands planning a campaign
For an audience of agency owners or B2B service sellers, Garrett is a relevant voice for sales-process content, playbooks, and training material. A sponsorship or co-created asset could focus on multi-call sales process, deal strategy, or procurement navigation rather than generic lead generation.
The recurring format across the posts is a specific client result followed by a numbered breakdown of what changed and a short list of takeaways.
Read more
Examples include an edtech company with 45% ROI improvement while lowering spend, a technology client with lead and sales-accepted lead growth, a cybersecurity client with AI share-of-voice and referral lead gains, and Directive's own shift from direct response to brand.
The posts often use operational details such as campaign structure, budget allocation, CRM handoff, UTM governance, review-site tactics, and tests of senders, formats, and offers.
They also invite readers to test the tactics and report back.
Start with a named business problem, describe what was working against the account, list the changes in order, report the result, and end with portable actions.
For brands planning a campaign
A brand can use this format for co-created case studies or campaign teardowns. The strongest collaboration would pair a real account result with a concrete diagnosis, the exact changes made, and a short checklist a reader can apply.
One retained post is personal: Garrett writes about pre-fishing before a tournament, a schedule that mixes workdays with fishing days, and the effort that goes into tournament season.
Read more
This is not connected to the B2B marketing advice in the other posts.
A single personal post is not enough to establish a recurring personal-content topic.
For brands planning a campaign
Personal content has limited direct commercial use for a B2B marketing brief. It may suit a lifestyle, outdoor, or local sponsorship only if the campaign's audience overlaps with fishing or tournament interests.
Garrett Mehrguth's posts place his work inside Directive, the B2B marketing agency whose campaigns he describes in the first person — its performance division, its cybersecurity, technology, and edtech clients, and the sales process he says the agency runs.
Read more
The posts never state his title or whether he holds an ownership stake, and Directive's clients are described by industry rather than by name, so no client brands can be listed. Other companies in the material — Google Ads, LinkedIn, Meta, HubSpot, Unbounce, and review sites such as G2, Capterra, Software Advice, and Gartner Peer Insights — appear as channels, tools, or recommendations in his advice rather than as disclosed partners.
Directive
Employment
Garrett Mehrguth writes as a member of Directive's team, using "we" and "our" for the agency's campaign work, its performance division, and its clients.
Read more
One post describes pausing gift card advertising and direct response for "our performance division" and moving budget into brand campaigns; another recounts rebuilding Google Ads and LinkedIn campaigns that raised sales-accepted leads for a technology client; a third credits the agency with improving ROI for a top edtech company.
Garrett Mehrguth also cites $275,000 a month spent on LinkedIn ads "for Directive" and describes the four-call sales process "we run at Directive" and teach to agency owners.
The posts show a working relationship with the agency but do not state a title or an ownership stake.
Garrett Mehrguth publishes LinkedIn posts that read like case-study breakdowns: a named business problem, the changes made, the reported result, and a short list of takeaways.
Read more
To explore the work, start with lead-quality posts about sales-accepted leads and cost per opportunity, then move to attribution and brand investment.
A third cluster covers AI search visibility, review sites, and third-party placement.
For agency owners, separate posts cover a four-call sales process.
The through-line is that budget and reporting should follow pipeline and bookings rather than cheap leads or last-click clicks.
The posts are practical and operational, often inviting readers to test a tactic and report back.
Jonas writes for B2B marketers about paid media and attribution, especially the gap between platform reporting and signed revenue.
Read more
The posts cover connecting attribution data to Claude, identifying campaigns that closed revenue, calculating return on Meta Ads from signed deals, tracing deal touchpoints, and spotting ad sets that spend without reaching demos. That overlaps with Garrett's focus on pipeline, sales-accepted leads, and paid search and social measurement.
Jonas leans into prompt-based reporting workflows and plan-versus-reality observations. Garrett tends to present agency client case studies with named problems, campaign changes, and reported results.
Vincent analyzes B2B marketing operations as a set of queues across account intelligence, content creation, distribution, optimization, and sales visibility.
Read more
Vincent also argues that AI should preserve relevance as account lists grow rather than scale the same campaign faster. That connects to Garrett's interest in operational fixes, testing, and using AI in go-to-market without losing relevance.
Vincent centers on account-based marketing workflows and personalized account experiences. Garrett centers on paid search and social, brand investment, attribution, and agency sales.
Dev writes about B2B pipeline foundations, marketing and sales alignment, lead definitions, attribution, and content for complex buying committees.
Read more
Those themes overlap with Garrett's arguments about lead quality, sales acceptance, pipeline measurement, and content that helps a deal move.
Dev writes role-specific playbooks, such as a 100-day plan for new CMOs and stakeholder-by-stakeholder buying content. Garrett writes paid media campaign breakdowns, attribution and brand arguments, and agency sales process advice.
Garrett Mehrguth’s posts may appeal to B2B marketers assessing paid media, lead quality, and brand investment: he discusses shifting campaign budgets toward sales opportunities and pairing brand advertising with demand capture.
Read more
That establishes subject relevance, not who follows him.
The available evidence does not measure audience occupation, seniority, or employer.
For a brief targeting specific professional roles, ask for recent audience survey results or another documented source showing those attributes.
Garrett Mehrguth's posts do not advertise sponsorship packages, paid placements, sponsored posts, or creator-partnership rates.
Read more
Across the supplied LinkedIn posts, the only commercial offers he names are services sold by Directive, the B2B marketing agency he leads: paid media management across Google and LinkedIn, AI search visibility (AEO/GEO) work, and PR and communications support.
Those are agency engagements a client buys through Directive, not influencer formats a brand books with Garrett personally.
Nothing in the available material shows a sponsorship menu, rate card, media kit, exclusivity terms, or disclosure practice, so quoting a rate or deliverable mix would be guesswork.
What is documented is the absence of any stated partnership offer in this material; that is not a claim that he never accepts sponsorships.
If a brand wants to work with him, the realistic route is a commercial conversation with Directive rather than a standard creator booking, and a buyer should confirm sponsorship availability, pricing, and disclosure directly before planning around it.
Good fit for a strategy-led campaign or a case-study collaboration, provided the goal is qualified pipeline rather than maximum lead volume. His posts give concrete examples of reallocating search and LinkedIn budgets around opportunities, repairing lead tracking and CRM handoffs, and judging brand activity with pipeline measures. They also show that the right LinkedIn format can vary by account: one case used conversation ads, while another moved away from underperforming conversation ads. Build in testing rather than prescribing a fixed format.
Read more
Brief
A B2B marketing agency wants to improve a client's lead quality and brand investment, and is considering Garrett for a paid search and social campaign.
Commercial fit
The reviewed material documents Directive's agency services, not a personal sponsorship package or creator rate card. Treat this as a possible agency engagement or a proposed collaboration to confirm directly, not as a standard paid-post booking.
Next step
Ask for a discovery conversation with Directive. Share the client's sales-accepted-lead definition, account tiers, CRM and tracking setup, budget, and current campaign results; request a proposed measurement plan before agreeing to a campaign.
When to choose a specialist
Poor fit on the available evidence. Garrett's posts question both lead volume as a proxy for quality and click-based attribution as a complete measure of marketing impact. They do not document a personal sponsored-post offer, guaranteed deliverables, lead guarantees, or rates. A brand requiring those terms should choose a provider whose documented offer and measurement approach match the brief.
Read more
Brief
A software brand wants a guaranteed sponsored post from Garrett to generate a fixed number of leads, with success measured by last-click attribution alone.
Alternative approach
If the brand's actual goal is durable B2B category awareness, reshape the brief around a campaign proposal with agreed pipeline indicators and a defined evaluation window. Garrett discusses tracking proposals, demos, trials, and bookings on a 90-day lookback, while noting that brand impressions may not be connectable to individual opportunities. Confirm that the brand accepts those limits before proceeding.
A worked campaign example
Angle
From more leads to more sales-accepted pipeline
Hypothetical brief
A B2B software company is spending across paid search and LinkedIn. Lead volume is acceptable, but sales accepts too few leads, and the marketing team is also considering a brand campaign.
Plan
Start by checking the CRM handoff, lead routing, UTMs, and conversion events so campaign systems receive usable quality signals.
Re-rank search campaigns by opportunities and sales acceptance, then review cost per opportunity by account tier. Test competitor search where it fits the company's market and sales capacity.
On LinkedIn, test targeting, offer, sender, and format against qualified replies or sales-accepted leads. Do not assume conversation ads or any other format will work in every account.
Replace a high-friction demo ask for cold audiences with a product tour if the offer suits the product, and use case studies or other proof in campaign messaging.
If the company funds brand activity, pair it with demand capture and agree in advance to track proposals, demos, trials, or bookings over a stated period. Do not promise that impressions will be attributable to individual deals.
Success checks
Sales-accepted leads and opportunities by campaign and account tier.
Cost per opportunity, alongside lead volume and cost per lead.
A documented CRM and tracking audit before optimization.
For brand activity, agreed macro pipeline measures and a defined review window.
Why this angle fits
It combines the operational detail in Garrett's paid search and social case breakdowns with his argument that brand investment should not be judged only by clicks. His posts report specific results, including increases in sales-accepted leads and lower paid-social cost per opportunity, but those are reported client outcomes, not a guarantee for this hypothetical campaign.
Choose Vincent Plassard when the brief is a defined target-account list and the client's problem is relevance at scale rather than broad lead capture.
Read more
The reviewed posts lay out a five-stage account-based motion — intelligence, creation, distribution, optimization, visibility — and argue that the real bottleneck is queues, not people: nobody hand-builds 200 personalized experiences, bids get set at launch and reviewed days later, and engagement sits in a dashboard until the next pipeline review.
That framing suits a client whose campaign needs to reach a known set of accounts with different proof points for different stakeholders, and whose sales team needs engagement signals pushed back into scoring while interest is still warm.
His second reviewed post is the sharper test for a buyer: it warns against using AI to produce more assets that say roughly the same thing, and asks instead that the level of context from a 20-account program be preserved at 200 accounts.
Plassard's posts make a speed argument — account-based marketing is slow in a specific, fixable way — but they do not report client results, cost-per-opportunity figures, or a search and social budget reallocation playbook.
The reviewed material contains no closed-lead or sales-accepted-lead outcomes comparable to the paid search and LinkedIn case breakdowns Garrett Mehrguth describes.
If the brief needs a tested paid search and paid social reallocation plan with reported pipeline movement, Plassard's material addresses the account-based layer around that plan rather than the plan itself.
Two posts from September 2026 is a narrow sample of his work.
Choose Jonas Strambach when the client's bottleneck is measurement rather than campaign structure: the team cannot say which campaigns closed revenue, what a qualified lead cost per channel, or which touchpoints sat behind a deal that closed.
Read more
The reviewed posts work at that layer.
One sets out twelve Claude prompts for connecting attribution data and asking for revenue by campaign, return on Meta ads counted on signed deals, every touchpoint behind a closed deal, where the biggest deals started, which ad sets spend budget without reaching a demo, cost per qualified lead by channel, and what closing journeys have in common.
The other is a plan-versus-reality list about paid media: budget scaled on a competitor sighting, one ad run unchanged for months, audience targeting reduced to a job title, and platform lead counts that sales does not recognise.
Strambach's material is a prompt pack and a light humour list, not campaign execution evidence.
The reviewed posts report no client results and no reallocation decisions, so a client cannot judge from them whether a spend shift produced more sales-accepted leads.
The prompt post also ends by offering a comment-and-DM pack, which means the published text is a preview rather than the full resource.
If the brief needs a documented strategy with reported outcomes rather than a way to see the numbers, Garrett Mehrguth's posts carry case detail Strambach's do not.
Two posts from early October 2026 is a narrow sample.
Choose Dev Basu when the buyer is a newly appointed marketing leader — or a client whose marketing system is visibly broken — and the campaign cannot be planned until the foundation is fixed.
Read more
His 100-day sequence is the clearest reviewed alternative for that situation: audit closed-won deals, map channels against pipeline, check the real MQL-to-SQL rate, audit attribution, and interview the last five sales losses; then align the ICP with sales, agree on what a good lead looks like, and set one North Star pipeline metric; only then launch bottom-of-funnel content and paid search on bottom-of-funnel keywords, reactivate cold CRM leads, and fix the demo page before sending traffic. His second reviewed post explains why complex deals stall: a six-stakeholder buying committee asks about internal sellability, strategic impact, ROI, security and integration, implementation and terms, and most teams build content for only one of them.
Basu's material is diagnostic and organisational sequencing.
It does not contain paid search or LinkedIn format testing, budget reallocation by cost per opportunity, CRM and conversion-tracking repairs at the level of a specific account, or reported lead and sales-accepted-lead results.
A client whose foundation is already sound gets less from the 100-day plan than from a campaign-level reallocation brief.
The reviewed posts point to a newsletter for the full version, so the published text is a summary, and two posts from September and October 2026 is a narrow sample of his work.
This profile is built from nine LinkedIn posts written by Garrett Mehrguth.
The posts cover paid search and social campaign changes, lead quality and sales acceptance, attribution and brand spending, AI search visibility, review sites, and one account of agency sales process, plus a short personal post about a fishing tournament.
The reviewed posts do not carry publication dates, so the page does not describe how Garrett's views changed over time.
No Instagram posts, articles, or transcripts were part of the evidence.
Similar-creator comparisons draw on retained posts by Jonas Strambach, Vincent Plassard, and Dev Basu.
Reported client results are claims made in the posts and are not independently assessed here.
Material gaps include dated post metadata and any longer-form work that would show how these ideas developed.
Recent engagement
Across their last 9 LinkedIn posts, the median post got 41 reactions and 18 comments. Checked 2026-11-02.
