“You’re doing marketing all wrong,” my first client told me after I presented my carefully crafted traditional marketing plan.
I was crushed.
Fresh out of business school with textbook strategies in my arsenal, I thought I knew it all.
But that harsh feedback became my turning point.
Fast forward five years, and I’ve helped dozens of startups scale their growth through weird, unconventional marketing strategies that you won’t find in any textbook.
Here are the strange habits that actually work:
- Start Your Day Reading Complaints: Every morning, I spend 30 minutes reading negative reviews — not of my products, but of my competitors’. It sounds masochistic, but there’s gold in those angry rants. Customer complaints are unfiltered market research. They tell you exactly what’s missing in your industry and what problems need solving.
- Talk to the Wrong Audience: Once a week, I pitch my products to people who would never buy them. Sounds crazy? Here’s why it works: When you explain your value proposition to someone completely outside your target market, you’re forced to simplify your message to its core. If a 70-year-old retiree can understand your SaaS product’s value, anyone can.
- Create Content for an Audience of One: Stop trying to reach everyone. I write every piece of content imagining I’m writing to my friend Sarah (who’s terrible at marketing but brilliant at understanding people). This weird habit makes my content more personal, engaging, and paradoxically, more relatable to a larger audience.
- Break Your Analytics: Every month, I deliberately ignore my usual metrics for a week. No checking Google Analytics, no social media stats, nothing. Instead, I focus on having real conversations with customers. This digital detox helps me spot patterns that numbers can’t show.
- Copy Your Competitors’ Mistakes: This sounds counterintuitive, but hear me out. When I see a competitor making what looks like a mistake, I sometimes intentionally copy it — but only once. Why? Because what looks like a mistake might be a brilliant strategy you don’t understand yet. Testing it yourself is the only way to know for sure.
- Schedule “Stupid Idea Time”: Every Friday afternoon, I spend one hour coming up with the dumbest marketing ideas possible. The worse, the better. This habit removes the pressure of being “professional” and often leads to breakthrough ideas. My most successful campaign came from combining two “stupid” ideas during one of these sessions.
- Become a Professional Stalker (Legally): Pick three random customers each week and dive deep into their digital footprint — their LinkedIn, Twitter(X), blog posts, anything public. Don’t interact, just observe. Understanding their whole life, not just their buying habits, gives you incredible insights into your true customer persona.
- Write Your Marketing Plan in Reverse: Start with the end result you want, then work backward through each step, all the way to where you are now. It’s like writing a mystery novel — you need to know the ending before you can plant the right clues at the beginning.
These habits might seem weird, even uncomfortable at first. But that’s exactly why they work. While your competitors are following the same old marketing playbook, these unconventional approaches will help you stand out and connect with your audience in meaningful ways.
Remember, the best marketing doesn’t feel like marketing at all. It feels like a friend helping you solve a problem you didn’t even know you had.
