About the Author

Corey Morris

Corey Morris

President and CEO

Corey is the owner and President/CEO of VOLTAGE. He is also founder and author of The Digital Marketing Success Plan® and the START Planning Process. Corey has spent 20+ years working in strategic and leadership roles focused on growing national and local client brands with award-winning, ROI-generating digital strategies. He's the recipient of the KCDMA 2019 Marketer of the Year award and his team at VOLTAGE has won nearly 100 local, national, and global awards for ROI-focused client work in the past decade.

Every year brings its own set of challenges, surprises, and lessons for marketing leaders. But 2025 felt different. The conversations around digital strategy, planning, and performance were amplified.

I could point to a number of reasons, but that’s getting into speculative territory and/or talking about economics, politics, sentiment, and other things that important, but are distractions and ultimately are outside of my control of what is central to marketing and ROI.

In hindsight I have observed directly, as well as heard across the industry, that marketing leaders were more direct about frustrations with underperforming plans. Teams increasingly felt pressure to deliver results in environments that were louder, more automated, and more complex.

Across the Digital Marketing Success Plan® newsletter this year, one message stood out: marketing breaks when strategy gets replaced with assumptions, activity, or momentum (without purpose).

Looking back at the full body of articles I published in 2025, several themes consistently rose to the surface. These weren’t isolated observations. They appeared across planning, SEO, ROI, execution, and organizational structure.

Here are the biggest lessons from the year, and the ideas worth carrying forward into 2026.

Planning Fails When It’s Built on Assumptions

One of the strongest themes throughout the year was the danger of planning based on unchallenged assumptions. And, I’m not talking about opinions or POVs…these are often trusted common “knowledge” things taken for granted. Too many teams move quickly into annual or quarterly plans without stepping back to examine what has changed in their business, market, or internal capacity.

This showed up clearly in Why Your 2026 Marketing Plan Should Start by Challenging Assumptions. It was reinforced again in Marketing by Memory: Why “What Worked Last Year” Might Be Holding You Back.

Across what I unpacked in these articles, the point was consistent. Past success can inform decisions, but it should not replace analysis. Markets shift. Buyer behavior changes. Teams evolve. Planning that ignores those realities almost always underperforms.

Better strategy starts with better awareness.

Agility Is a Requirement, Not a Nice-to-Have

Even well-built plans struggle when teams treat them as fixed documents instead of working frameworks.

In Why Your 2026 Marketing Plan Needs Built-In Agility, I explored the Transformation step of the START Planning Process (the second “T” and last step) and why intentional review points matter.

That idea carried through multiple articles:

Teams that built in regular review, reflection, and adjustment perform better than teams that try to execute their way out of strategic misalignment.

Agility shows up not as reaction, but as discipline.

Focus Consistently Outperformed Activity

Another theme that emerged across the year was the cost of trying to do too much at once.

Many organizations are stretched thin. Teams are managing more channels, more tools, and more expectations than ever. The instinct is often to add more activity, not remove it.

I explored and unpacked that tension in:

These ideas connected directly to performance challenges discussed in:

The takeaway repeated itself throughout the year. Clarity and prioritization drive results. Activity alone does not. I can validate this so many times in conversations with prospects and contacts (some of whom became our clients and shared very transparently).

Strategy Always Precedes Tactics

A consistent thread across nearly every article was the importance of putting strategy before execution.

This was especially prominent in the multi-week digital strategy series I published earlier in the year connected to the the “Strategy” phase of the START Planning Process:

And it carried into execution-focused guidance:

Across all of these pieces, the message remained consistent. Tactics work best when they are selected, sequenced, and measured through the lens of strategy.

SEO Isn’t the Problem, Execution Is

SEO appeared frequently throughout the year (as it always does with me), but rarely as a standalone tactic. Instead, it was framed as a discipline that suffers when it’s disconnected from business goals, content strategy, or organizational alignment.

This showed up in:

The pattern was clear. SEO performance improves when teams focus on intent, prioritization, integration, and outcomes rather than volume or checklists.

What 2025 Ultimately Reinforced

Across planning, execution, SEO, and performance, 2025 reinforced a familiar truth. Marketing works best when teams slow down enough to think clearly, prioritize intentionally, and review honestly.

Strong strategy still wins. Focused teams still outperform busy ones. Clear plans still beat complicated ones.

These ideas shaped the DMSP newsletter throughout the year and set a clear foundation for what matters next.

The first newsletter of January will build on these lessons and look ahead to what marketing leaders should prioritize as they shape their 2026 strategies.

For now, the takeaway from 2025 is straightforward. Better decisions come from clarity, not chaos.