12 Years of unLOCKEd: What 20+ Years in Marketing Has Taught Me About Growing a Business

unLOCKEd has now been in business for 12 years, but my marketing experience goes back more than 20 years. I’ve worked through major shifts in technology, channels, buyer behaviour, and expectations. What’s interesting is that the tools have changed dramatically, but the core business problems are often the same. Most business owners are not short on ideas. They are short on clarity, coordination, and time. That is still the problem unLOCKEd is built to solve.

12 years ago, I started unLOCKEd because I kept seeing the same problem: a lack of consistency. When businesses have one company handling their signage, another managing their social media, and another designing their website, their messaging is incoherent, their image is unrecognizable, and, most importantly, their strategy is scattered. Business owners are left juggling vendors with no one coordinating them. unLOCKEd provides clients in Waterloo Region with one marketing partner for everything from strategy and creative to execution and reporting. Consistency builds trust, and trust builds your business. After 20+ years of watching businesses make marketing decisions, this blog will reflect on what has changed, what hasn’t, the value of strategy, and the lessons I’ve learned along the way.

What Has Changed in Marketing Over the Past 12 Years 

While the importance of strategic marketing has not changed, the strategies I use have. Over the past 12 years, tools and trends have evolved, and marketers have had no choice but to evolve with them. While there have been more changes than I have time for in this blog, here are my highlights:

• Social media has become more fragmented and much harder to rely on organically. 

• Google has become more complex: local search, paid search, AI-generated results, reputation signals, and website authority now overlap. 

• Businesses need more video and more human content than they did years ago. 

• AI has accelerated content creation, but that also means generic content is easier to produce and easier to ignore. 

• Customers expect consistent experiences across website, social media, Google, email, ads, and offline touchpoints. 

• Measurement is better, but there is also more data than most businesses know what to do with. 

• Marketing is now more connected, more technical and, in many ways, more difficult for an owner to manage alone. 

These changes have made marketing experts more important, not more replaceable. When every industry is oversaturated, it takes far more effort and strategy to stand out. When every touchpoint is increasingly essential and complex, it takes experience and coordination to succeed. It’s not about more marketing; it’s about better marketing.

What Has Not Changed 

Although it seems like so much has changed, some things still have not:

• Businesses still need to understand who they are trying to reach

• Marketing still has to support a business goal

• Trust still matters; clear messaging still matters; consistency still matters

• Good questions still come before good tactics

• Relationships still outperform short-term tricks over time

• A bad strategy cannot be fixed by better execution

These are the principles unLOCKEd was built on 12 years ago, and they hold true today. With every client and project, we focus on building strong foundations, planning clear strategies, creating consistent content, and developing lasting relationships.

Why Strategy Matters More Than Chasing Trends 

I have watched businesses jump from platform to platform and from tactic to tactic because something new became popular, but not every trend deserves your time or budget. That means that it’s less about reacting to every headline and more about deciding what aligns with your brand, audience, and strategy.

The first question should not be “Should we be on TikTok?” or “Should we use AI?” It should be “What are we trying to accomplish?” Strategy helps decide what to ignore, and in turn, reveals what is truly important. One of the most valuable things a marketing partner can do is keep a business focused on what actually moves it forward. Posting more and jumping on every trend creates activity, but activity is not the same thing as progress. 

Why Businesses Need Marketing That Connects Across Channels 

Strategy is also what helps us align every touchpoint of a client’s marketing. A social post should support the same positioning as the website. Google Ads should lead to a page that converts. SEO should reinforce the same services and language sales is using. Branding, signage, email, social, and web should feel like one business, not five different vendors. 

I have seen good work underperform simply because the pieces were disconnected. When marketing is inconsistent across channels, brands become unrecognizable and untrustworthy, leaving their audiences confused. Businesses often think they have a social media or website problem when the real problem is that the entire customer journey is not connected. That’s why our primary focus is building a strong foundational strategy that every aspect of the brand can tie back to.

The Importance of Having One Person Overseeing the Bigger Picture 

Disconnected marketing is often a result of a disconnected process. This is one of the biggest reasons unLOCKEd exists. Specialists are incredibly valuable, but specialists naturally focus on their own discipline. Someone still needs to understand the business goals, priorities, audience, budget, and timing. Without that person, the owner often ends up acting as the project manager for multiple vendors. 

I don’t think business owners should have to become marketing managers just because they need marketing. That’s why I act as your single point of contact and outsourced marketing advisor, managing and coordinating every aspect of your marketing. The value is not only in finding good specialists, but in making sure their work fits together. With over 20 years of experience and a trusted team of specialists, we make sure your brand is consistent, professional, and effective.

Lessons from Working with Businesses at Different Stages 

After 12 years building unLOCKEd and 20 years in the industry, I’ve worked with businesses across a wide range of industries and at many stages. I’ve learned that every client requires a tailored package, and this is how I approach businesses at each stage of growth:

• Startups usually need clarity before they need volume

• Growing businesses often need systems and consistency more than they need more ideas

• Established businesses sometimes need to simplify, reposition or stop doing things that no longer serve them

• Bigger budgets do not automatically create better marketing

The right priorities vary at every stage, and marketing should adapt as the business evolves. A strategy that worked three years ago may not be right today, but sometimes it takes an outside perspective to see that.

What Today’s Businesses Should Prioritize 

As I discussed above, tools and priorities have changed over the past two decades. Here’s what I think today’s businesses should focus on:

• Clear positioning: can people quickly understand what you do and why they should choose you? 

• A website that supports sales, not just looks professional

• Strong Google visibility, especially for local and service-based businesses

• Consistent, useful content rather than constant content

• Reputation and reviews

• Measurement that focuses on leads, inquiries, conversions, and business outcomes, not vanity metrics

• A realistic marketing system the company can actually sustain

• Human expertise and perspective in a world full of AI-generated sameness

While these priorities can’t plan, create, execute, and optimize your marketing activities (that’s what unLOCKEd is for!), they will set your business on the right path toward connected, consistent, and sustainable marketing.

What I’m Looking Forward to in the Next 12 Years 

I’ve discussed where we started and where we are today, so let’s finish with what I’m looking forward to:

• I’m excited by how much more strategic marketing can become with better data and AI tools.

• I’m also convinced that judgment, experience, and human relationships will become more valuable, not less.

• I want unLOCKEd to keep evolving without losing the reason I started it.

• I want to continue making marketing easier for business owners to understand and manage.

• I want us to keep bringing together the right specialists instead of pretending one person should be an expert at everything.

• I want to keep learning. After 20+ years, I still think curiosity is one of the most important skills in marketing. 

The goal is not to become bigger for the sake of being bigger. The goal is to become more useful, more effective, and more valuable to the businesses we work with. I hope after 12 more years, I can look back and see that I’ve done just that, and hopefully so much more!

12 years into unLOCKEd, I am more convinced than ever that good marketing is not about doing everything. It is about knowing what matters, bringing the right people together, and making sure every piece is working toward the same business goal. The tools will keep changing. That part won’t.

Thank you to every client, partner, supporter, and colleague who has been a part of my journey and unLOCKEd’s growth; I couldn’t have done it without you! If your business is looking for an integrated marketing strategy and the local marketing partner that can help you coordinate and execute it, book your strategy call today.