I'm Cody Jensen, and I own a SEM agency called Searchbloom. One of the oldest practices that needs to die is the focus on chasing viral content. Businesses still think one big viral hit will change everything, but in reality, it's like winning the lottery: fun if it happens, but not a strategy you can build a future on. Momentum is the answer, like developing useful, search-friendly, or AI-friendly blogs tied directly to your consumers. I tell clients all the time, I'd rather see you rank on page one for 50 buyer-intent keywords than blow up once on TikTok. The former pays the bills, the latter just feeds your ego. https://searchbloom.com
Hey there! I'm David Einstein, Co-Founder of Orange Line, an independent digital marketing agency based in Sydney. An outdated "best practice" that isn't serving business best interests anymore is the idea to "post as much content as possible to stay top of mind." The reality is that spray-and-pray content clutters feeds and dilutes brand value. With AI and algorithms filtering what people see even more than SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) has been doing up to now, more content doesn't equal more visibility at all and it can actually be the opposite, and it condemns you to invisibility. If your content is usually not valuable, they won't surface it, and you risk your quality pieces being buried in the noise too. Quality and strategic context win. What brands should do in 2025 is create fewer, but higher-impact pieces of content designed to answer real customer questions, show up in AI-driven search results, and spark genuine engagement. The new best practice is precision, not volume. Your content needs to be discoverable, credible, engaging and aligned with how AI tools and humans alike decide what's worth amplifying. Orange Line website: https://orangelinedigital.com/ Thanks, David
One outdated "best practice" I still hear is: "The more channels you use, the better your marketing." Being present across every channel you can think of can result in weak messaging, scattered resources, and, ultimately, tuned-out audiences. At Textmagic (https://www.textmagic.com), I've seen firsthand that success, unlike popular opinion, doesn't come from being everywhere. As long as you're effective on the channels that are most relevant for your audience, success will follow. So, go after those channels where your target audience is most engaged. Narrow down your efforts, as well as your messaging. In our case, email was ideal. We recently launched the email campaign feature and we used it to both connect with our audience and drive action like trial signups for the newly released product feature. The emails we sent out were direct, personal, and pretty hard to ignore. Of course, you can combine email with SMS or a chat widget to pretty much cover every part of the conversion funnel and approach clients at exactly the right time for their next decisive move. This can turn loyal customers into real brand ambassadors, a shift that doesn't happen very often. To sum it all up, in my work with businesses of all sizes, I've seen companies boost retention and conversions by simplifying their customer communication stack. Chasing every platform might get you noticed, but delivering on the ones that count will ultimately seal the deal.
One big myth we see brands cling to is the idea that performance marketing is more effective than long-term brand building. Brand is the most significant competitive advantage you have, so at Column Five, we encourage clients to infuse brand storytelling into every performance campaign—and leverage AI tools to help you do it at scale. AI can power highly personalized content that engages audiences in direct, relevant ways, improving short-term performance results. At the same time, it enables you to produce content consistently and at volume, creating a steady stream of brand-valuable touchpoints that compound brand equity over time. This approach ensures every dollar you spend works twice as hard, driving immediate results while steadily strengthening the brand that will fuel your future growth.
Hello! I saw your query about outdated Marketing best practices on Featured and thought I'd share my experience! I'm an in-house Marketing Specialist with 15+ years experience working with an IT company called Resolute Technology Solutions. Here's my thoughts! One old marketing adage is: all coverage is good coverage. Meaning, as long as people are talking about your brand, it will likely lead to getting the exposure you need to gain new customers, drive sales, and continue to grow as a business. In today's market, this is not always true. Many buyers do a lot of research before making a decision and with multiple review sites, AI summaries, and a complex digital ecosystem - what people say about your brand online can have a huge impact on buyer decision-making. What businesses should be doing, is carefully crafting communications to resonate with their target audience as well as setting up alerts to notify them of any brand mentions online. That way, you can respond to them and manage your brand reputation to prevent bad actors from turning away potential customers. Consider setting up keywords to watch for in Google Alerts, take an active role in managing reviews on Google MyBusiness, Bing, TrustPilot, etc. and actively maintain profile listings on other sites where visitors are coming into contact with your brand (Glassdoor, Indeed, etc.). Let me know if you have any follow up questions! Happy to contribute. If you do use some part of the quote above, please attribute a link back to 'Colton De Vos, Marketing Specialist, Resolute Technology Solutions (https://www.resolutets.com/)' and let me know if we are featured and I'll amplify your social posts or share the article from our company social media accounts.
Chief Growth Officer (CGO) | Marketing, Technology & Strategy | AI Systems Architect at femmeprenista
Answered 5 months ago
The Myth: The idea that "Content is King." For decades, a single mantra has echoed through marketing departments worldwide: "Content is King." This proclamation, famously articulated by Bill Gates, once held undeniable truth. However, the kingdom has become overpopulated, and the king's decree has been distorted into a frantic, counterproductive battle cry. This long-reigning myth needs to be dethroned, because it's entirely false. For years, businesses have been counselled to churn out content like a factory on overdrive. The prevailing wisdom has been to be omnipresent—to blog, tweet, post, stream, and pin on every conceivable platform. This strategy isn't just unsustainable; it's a direct path to strategic chaos. We are collectively throwing spaghetti at a dozen digital walls, desperately hoping a single noodle sticks. This relentless focus on quantity has created a deafening noise, and it has made us blind to the one element that truly matters. - The Customer... This brings us to the new rule for the modern age: Context is King, and AI is the Kingmaker. The obsession with volume has stripped marketing of context. We've become so focused on what we are saying and how often we are saying it that we've forgotten to ask who we are speaking to, where they are in their journey, and why this specific message is relevant to them. However, the days of this digital cacophony are numbered. The true game-changer, the force that will shatter the old paradigm, is the rapid evolution of AI from a simple tool into a personal guardian for our attention. We are already witnessing the early stages of this revolution in the sophisticated ways our email inboxes filter promotions from primary communications and how social media feeds attempt to curate relevance. Soon, this will be supercharged. Our personal AI assistants, integrated into our operating systems, will create an almost impenetrable shield, deflecting the vast majority of context-blind messaging. The shotgun blast approach, will simply no longer work. In this new reality, the only messages that will penetrate the AI shield are those deemed hyper-relevant and valuable. This technological shift forces us back to the most timeless principle of understanding your customer. The great filtering is here, and only the truly relevant will be heard. Bear McBlack, Chief Growth Officer (CGO) | Femmeprenista at https://www.femmeprenista.com.
One practice that I think is particularly outdated and actually could work against you is that the more content (specifically blogs) the better. Let's be honest a lot of companies are writing blogs (and using AI) just to just to hit their keyword quota and would do better to focus their efforts on almost any other marketing channel. If we think about this logically, Google have huge server costs. This means they are incentivised to not index content that provides little to no value. If you see that a lot of your content and pages aren't indexed on Google, then this is a clear signal to a large part of your website is of little value and will highly likely effect your search rankings. A solution is to reverse engineer queries, see what the results are and only create content where there is an opportunity for you to add value and can actually rank.
I often hear people say print marketing is dead and that everything has to be digital. But at BMM, our clients' results tell a very different story. Channels like direct mail and door drops are still highly effective when used strategically. Print isn't outdated, and it can deliver stronger impact, wider reach, and a clear return on investment when part of the right campaign.
Content is King. If I don't hear that again for as long as I live, I'll be happy. Everyone's making content. The internet is full of content but being everywhere doesn't mean you're being seen. Instead, prioritise quality, not quantity. Focus on standout, meaningful pieces that actually provide value or entertainment (ideally both!) We've found that a single strong, data-driven post or a well-produced video can generate more leads and backlinks than a flurry of bland, bandwagon posts. www.lambdafilms.co.uk
A lot of businesses fall for the idea that more content always means better results. It's an old marketing "best practice" to think that posting more blogs, social media updates, or emails will get you more traffic and sales. In reality, audiences are overwhelmed, and content that doesn't really add value can hurt your brand. Making content that really connects with your audience - content that tells a story, solves a problem, or gives useful advice - works much better. Putting quality over quantity not only makes sense to people, but it also works better with search engines and social media algorithms.
Cold email outreach. The marketing industry is littered with brands that take the shortcut of buying an email list and then blasting people with unsolicited, sleezy sales pitches. This is the opposite of adding value or adhering to permission-based marketing, as popularized by Seth Godin. Cold email is barely effective, but it is intrusive, annoying, and unethical. Instead, allow people to subscribe (or unsubscribe) to your email list. Give them a reason to join your list and stay on it. Reach out to them with interesting and insightful information—not just sales pitches. This latter method is more difficult, but it's far better for everyone involved.
One of the most common myths in marketing today is the idea that "bigger is better"-that businesses need to reach as many people as possible in order to succeed. It's a myth that's sent many brands down the wrong path, spending resources to chase a mass audience instead of build any actual connections. The result? Wasting time, money and effort on people who simply don't care Instead, businesses need to punch through this outdated thinking. It's not a matter of how many you get; it's how deep you get with the right people. In today's world, a personalized experience is everything. The answer is to focus on quality engagement above reach. Improve retention, trust, and conversions exponentially through establishing a community of individuals who gravitate towards your brand and engage with your content consistently. At Davincified, we do not want to be exposed to the masses. We're all about creating AI-driven experiences - whether it's custom-printed paint-by-numbers kits - that tap directly into our customers' passions. This type of marketing has been far more effective than any blanket marketing.
Scaling the paid marketing campaign with the help of ad spend only. Performance marketing has become one million times more granular over the last decade. At the same time, the competition has also increased proportionally. Now, you cannot simply set a higher daily ad spend and expect more revenue. With this approach, you will turn your profitable campaign into a loss-making one. Instead of simply putting more money on the table, always work on improving the effectiveness of your campaigns. First of all, run A/B tests to see what variations of ad creatives, ad copies, and landing pages deliver the best engagement and conversion rate. Second, keep working with negative words, locations, and demographics: the more you invest, the higher the chances that a platform will burn your budget on an irrelevant audience. Remember a rule of thumb: making a paid campaign profitable is easy; scale is the challenge. This rule will help you save thousands to millions on your marketing ad spend.
The excessive use of keywords is not only an outdated industry 'best practice,' but it's also one of the most disastrous content marketing tactics you can deploy when it comes to customer acquisition. Misconceptions over keyword stuffing stems from the misguided idea that marketing is all about engaging your audience at all costs, but modern customers crave something deeper than superfluous copy in 2025, and your keywords simply need to lead somewhere to get results. Excessive keywords are a terrible addition to your marketing strategy because they'll disrupt the flow of your reader, making it harder for them to engage fully with your content and build their brand awareness. Most modern search engine crawlers have wised up to keyword stuffing too and generally prioritize context when ranking web pages.
I hear a lot of agencies tell brand owners that "you don't need to optimize your site before starting paid media". While that is objectively true, it's a huge farce because without a conversion optimized website, every additional visitor you send to your site is a waste of money, especially in the land of CPC advertising. For instance, if you're spending $1 per click and you get 100 qualified visitors coming to your site (let's forget the fact that you'll never get 100% qualified people clicking your ads), but your website sucks (think slow, un-optimized, and sloppy looking) you may get around a 1% conversion rate. Meaning your cost per acquisition is now $100. Now the media team can pull all sorts of levers to make that CPC go do a bit, but not nearly as much as simply just raising your conversion rate. Just going from 1% to 2% conversion rate halves your cost per acquisition and makes it go from negative ROAS to positive in seconds.
Treating your feed like a 24/7 sales pitch, constant promotions don't inspire trust, they burn it. People don't follow your brand to get spammed, they follow because they want value, maybe even a little entertainment. Today's market leaders aren't just posting product shots; they're sharing useful tips, updates on the brand even asking for the community's opinion. Basically, they give, give, give before they ask.
Post as frequently as possible on social media to stay visible. I find this advice so misleading. Posting constantly for the sake of it only creates noise and dilutes your brand value. Your target audience on social media expects value from you, not volumes of random posts. Brands that focus on sharing context-driven content record far better results than those who have the "always be posting" mindset. You can still drive massive engagement by publishing fewer but highly relevant posts tied to pain points that your target audience cares about. Visibility alone doesn't drive trust. You can only build trust when every touch-point adds real utility.
I think one of the worst pieces of advice is: 'You need to be on every social media platform.' We tried this, and it turned out to be a waste of time and money. The truth is, you don't need to be everywhere, you need to be where your clients actually are, and then focus on doing a better job than your competition on those channels. Website: https://revupdental.com
Founder & Growth Marketing Consultant at Jose Angelo Studios
Answered 5 months ago
An outdated marketing tip says that creating more content always leads to better results. But many businesses keep pushing out lots of content without a clear plan. This can overwhelm people and result in low-quality content that doesn't connect or provide value. Instead, businesses should focus on quality over quantity by creating content that is meaningful, targeted, and aligned with their audience's needs and interests. This involves understanding your customers deeply, conducting research to identify pain points, and delivering solutions through thoughtful and engaging storytelling. Also, businesses should use analytics to track performance and refine their strategies continuously, ensuring that every piece of content serves a specific purpose. Focusing on a clear strategy, rather than creating content just to create it, helps build trust, strengthen your brand, and deliver real results. Great content isn't about quantity—it's about the connections it makes and the impact it has. Check out my company website: https://joseangelostudios.com/
A steep advertising budget isn't needed to win at marketing. Believe it or not, you really don't need to mirror the big spenders with flashy ads to find success. That's a common trap many fall into, which is overestimating the shine of expensive campaigns and underappreciating the strength of marketing. When it comes to effective marketing, the goal is strategy, not just spending. As a small business, talking about tools like local SEO, content that resonates, Google Business Profiles, and PPC with long-tail keywords can target your perfect customers without draining your wallet. These tools are not only budget-friendly, but they actually improve your return on investment by focusing exactly on those who most need what you offer. While many still cling to old-school advertising like TV, radio, and print, thinking it's needed to spend big, the real game-changer is strategic thinking. Top marketing experts agree that a smart plan trumps a big budget every time. Something I would do instead is to dedicate a small daily budget, say $10-$50, on platforms like Facebook, which could bring you surprising results. Set clear goals and continually change your methods to see what really works. It's smart to start small with your investments, check the results, and then scale up what works best. Add in some SEO, encourage customer reviews, and keep your content fresh and exciting. These organic strategies improve your visibility more than throwing money at various channels. It's not about how much you spend, but how wisely you use your resources. Changing your technique to focus more on smart, targeted strategies is important to staying ahead. URL: https://www.hellodent.com/site/home