About the Author

Corey Morris

Corey Morris

President and CEO

Corey Morris is the President and CEO of VOLTAGE, a search marketing and website agency for expertise-driven organizations. He has spent more than two decades in digital marketing and SEO, and he wrote the book on the Digital Marketing Success Plan® (DMSP), the planning process VOLTAGE uses with clients. Corey has published more than 150 articles and expert contributions across Search Engine Journal, Search Engine Land, and Forbes over nearly a decade, and he still writes regularly for the first two. His Search Engine Journal articles alone have been read nearly 1.7 million times. He has spoken at SMX, Digital Summit, and SMPS. He's also a sought-after podcast and media guest, with more than 75 speaking, podcast, and media appearances. He served as an officer on the board of the global search marketing trade association, founded a Kansas City search marketing conference, and was named the 2019 KCDMA Marketer of the Year.

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 gets into speculative territory and into economics, politics, sentiment and other things that are important but are distractions, and that ultimately sit outside my control and outside what is central to marketing and return on investment (ROI).

In hindsight, I have observed directly, and 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® (DMSP) 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 top. They appeared across planning, search engine optimization (SEO), ROI, execution and organizational structure, well beyond a few isolated observations. 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. I’m talking less about opinions or points of view and more about trusted, common “knowledge” that gets 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, and 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 and teams evolve, and planning that ignores those realities almost always underperforms. Better strategy starts with better awareness.

Agility is a requirement for every plan.

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 as discipline, and much less as reaction.

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, and teams are managing more channels, more tools and more expectations than ever. The instinct is often to add more activity instead of removing 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, and activity alone does not. I’ve seen this validated many times in conversations with prospects and contacts (some of whom became our clients and shared very transparently).

Strategy always comes before 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 “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 struggles when execution is disconnected from the business.

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.

2025 reinforced that clear thinking and honest review still win.

Across planning, execution, SEO and performance, 2025 reinforced a familiar lesson. 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 and clear plans still beat complicated ones.

These ideas shaped the DMSP newsletter throughout the year and set a clear foundation for what matters next. We built on these lessons in what marketing leaders need to prioritize in 2026.

For now, the takeaway from 2025 is straightforward. Better decisions come from clarity, and chaos rarely produces them.