Don't Mess Up Your Marketing With These Dirty Tricks (And How to Do Better)
Here’s a list of things you shouldn’t do when advertising to your customers, along with some things I just don’t personally like.
1. Boring Content for the Sake of Content
With the takeover of short form video, standing out is harder than ever. If you have the means to avoid boring, generic posts and ads, stay away.
ChatGPT may be the best tool to make short work of copywriting… It’s only better than typo-filled lukewarm marketing (if that’s where you struggle, dear god use ChatGPT). The game has changed. The internet has been taken over by GPT marketing. Everything sounds the same, looks the same, reads the same.
Good is no longer good enough.
If you don’t have real engagement, don’t post into the void. If it isn’t really working, don’t waste your time.
What to Do Instead
Use AI for inspiration. Use it to answer questions, provide synonyms, list examples… It’s a great tool that may help jumpstart your creative process, not replace it.

I love alliterations.
2. Engagement Baiting
Have you ever watched a video that had an obvious mistake, typo or an error that’s so blatant anybody could catch? This is known as engagement baiting, and it’s often used in video to generate comments, which theoretically promote the creator within the platform due to inflated numbers.
It’s lame. It’s cheap. It’s obvious. If you’re an influencer, sure, I guess? Who cares. But for anyone else, if you’re trying to build a reputable business that people can trust, don’t do this.
What to Do Instead
Ponder your audience. Ask them relevant questions. Get their attention by asking for their experience or have them ask you questions. This has the same effect without being disingenuous. You get engagement, and better yet, create long term brand loyalty. And that’s worth a ton more than angry comments from self-righteous netizens who feel good about correcting a mistake.
Cunningham’s Law states “the best way to get the right answer on the internet is not to ask a question; it’s to post the wrong answer.”
Just because it works doesn't mean it isn't sucky.
3. Trend Chasing
You’re an executive level employee, and you’ve seen a TikTok or Reel of some corporation or business doing something funny and you want in. You have your marketing coordinator whip up a video of whatever the latest TikTok trend is. It goes through 6 revisions and approvals from managers; three weeks later it gets released.
It bombs.
What went wrong? You tried cashing in on the cute and quirky silliness of video trends while not understanding what makes them special in the first place: authenticity.
Don’t be a trend chaser.

I hated this trend so much. These people are probably all really nice and just having fun, but after 94 of the same video... it just doesn't work.
What to Do Instead
Either have trust in your marketing team to catch the waves as they come without corporate interference, or don’t do them at all.
Authenticity is a hard sell when it comes to viral marketing. At best, you successfully deploy content in a trend and fit snugly among the brands who were fast enough to do it, too. At worse, you bomb spectacularly and are the laughingstock of the social media world forever. **cough** Accenture **cough**.
So trust in your team of trendy twenty-ish year olds who take care of this stuff.
When it comes to trend chasing, the bigger you are, the more likely it is you’ll fail.
4. Affiliate/Influencer Marketing
Okay, it may seem like I’m saying “don’t do influencer marketing”, which I’m totally not. Instead, I’m warning you how hard it is to connect to audiences without properly doing your research.
An influencer’s brand is not their follower count. Don’t select people based solely on their popularity.

What to Do Instead
Unless you’re in lifestyle, wellness and home product categories (there are a million lifestyle influencers out there), take the time to find candidates who’s content niche has overlap with yours.
- Find creators with content you actually enjoy.
- Make it exceptionally clear that you’re an advertiser.
- Let the creator create.
If you like the creator’s content, trust them to deliver messaging that works. Don’t try to dictate tone, key value props or self insertions too much. The further you remove the creator for their creative capacity and style, the more the ad content will stick out like a sore thumb. A good ad comes from the creator you’re working with, not from whatever brand mission/value prop/ elevator pitch you came up with them.
If you’re taking this route, it has to be genuine.