6 Marketing ‘Best Practices’ That Are Now Obsolete
The world of digital marketing is a landscape of constant, often contradictory, change. Best practices emerge, become gospel, and are then swiftly rendered obsolete by the next platform update or shift in consumer behavior. For strategists and business leaders, cutting through the noise to find what actually works is a perpetual challenge.
This article challenges several pieces of conventional marketing wisdom that have become outdated or were misguided from the start. We will explore six surprising, data-backed realities that are reshaping how the most effective brands approach advertising, audience engagement, and conversion. Prepare to question your playbook as we dive into the strategies that are delivering results right now.
1. Your Ad Creative Is the New Targeting
For years, the gold standard of Meta advertising was granular audience targeting. Marketers meticulously layered interests, behaviors, and demographics to pinpoint their ideal customer. Today, that model has been turned on its head. The reason is that the platform’s machine learning is now so advanced it can find converters better than manual inputs, making creative the primary way to guide its powerful optimization engine.
As industry expert Jon Loomer notes, the primary lever for reaching the right audience is no longer your targeting inputs, but the diversity of your ad creative. The new mandate for advertisers is to feed the system a rich portfolio of distinct ads that speak to different buyer personas, pain points, and motivations. This empowers the AI to find the right person for the right message.
Creative diversification replaced micromanaged targeting as the lever advertisers can actually control.
This represents a fundamental, and for many, a counter-intuitive shift. It moves the focus from micromanaging audience settings to a more strategic development of creative that resonates with every potential segment of your market. Your immediate action item is to shift budget from audience testing to a robust creative testing framework that explores multiple value propositions.
2. ‘Ugly’ and Unpolished Ads Can Annihilate Slick Creative
In a feed saturated with high-production, slickly designed advertisements, sometimes the most effective creative is the one that looks like it doesn’t belong. A case study from The Loan Exchange demonstrates the disruptive power of intentionally unpolished design.
The company ran an “unconventional static ad” designed to look raw and organic, featuring a simple, handwritten listicle format. It broke every conventional rule of clean design, yet its performance was staggering. This single ad generated 7 leads compared to just 2 from all other ads combined—a 3.5x performance lift—and achieved an 87% lower cost per lead (CPL).
Why did it work? Authenticity and pattern interruption. The ad looked more like a note from a friend than a corporate promotion, breaking through the noise of professionally produced content. The strategic directive is to test intentionally raw, low-fidelity creative against polished assets to discover untapped authenticity gains.
3. The Unfair Advantage of Motion
The debate between static images and video in advertising is over, and the results are not just conclusive—they are monumental. Data from multiple A/B tests shows that even simple motion, like a GIF, can dramatically outperform its static counterpart.
Consider these head-to-head comparisons where the only variable changed was the format:
• Dennis Carpenter (e-commerce): A GIF version of an ad achieved a 39x higher Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) compared to its static equivalent.
• King Sailfish Mount (e-commerce): A GIF ad generated a 6x higher ROAS, 5x more clicks, and a 33% higher click-through rate than the identical static ad.
This isn’t a minor optimization. The performance gap is often so vast that choosing not to incorporate motion is a significant strategic disadvantage. The strategic imperative is clear: allocate resources to convert high-performing static ads into simple motion formats like GIFs and videos.
4. The 95:5 Rule and the Vast Market You’re Ignoring
Most marketing efforts are laser-focused on capturing existing demand. However, a critical strategic framework known as the “95:5 Rule” reveals the limitation of this approach. At any given time, only about 5% of your potential buyers are actively in-market and ready to purchase. The other 95% are out-market; they may be future buyers, but they are not looking for a solution today.
Focusing all resources on competing for that tiny 5% sliver of the market is a recipe for rising acquisition costs and growth plateaus. Sustainable growth is not built by capturing the 5%, but by influencing the 95%. This is about building brand salience and “mental availability” so that when a buyer does enter the 5% in-market group, your brand is already the default choice. Therefore, your long-term strategy must involve allocating a significant portion of your marketing efforts to brand-building activities that influence future buyers.
5. The Surprising Power of Deletion on Your Landing Page
When it comes to landing page optimization, conventional wisdom often focuses on what to add. Yet, one of the most powerful conversion levers is subtraction: removing all navigation links from your landing page. This strategy is based on the principle of the “1:1 attention ratio”—for every campaign, there should be only one desired action. Navigation links are exit opportunities that distract a visitor from the single conversion goal.
The impact can be dramatic. A test by Hubspot found that removing navigation links increased landing page conversions by up to 100%. By reducing cognitive load and eliminating decision paralysis, you make it far more likely that a visitor will complete the one action you want them to take. Your task is to audit your key landing pages, remove all non-essential exit links, and enforce a strict 1:1 attention ratio to maximize conversion.
6. The New Goal of SEO Isn’t Clicks, It’s Citations
For decades, the goal of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) was simple: rank high and get the click. But as users increasingly turn to AI tools like ChatGPT and Perplexity for direct answers, that goal is fundamentally changing. The new discipline, known as Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) or LLM Seeding, isn’t about driving traffic—it’s about becoming the source.
When a user asks an AI a question, the value lies in being the authority cited in the generated response. The click becomes secondary to the brand mention and the implicit endorsement. As a strategy, GEO is also the ultimate tool for influencing the 95% of out-market buyers, building authority in the very tools they use for initial research.
LLM seeding asks, “How do I become the answer, even if there’s no click?”
This changes the purpose of content creation, shifting the focus to publishing unique data, building undeniable authority, and structuring content so it can be easily parsed and referenced by AI models. The forward-looking directive is to reorient your content strategy around publishing unique, citable data and structuring it for easy parsing by AI.
The strategies that define marketing success are not static. They are in constant evolution, driven by interconnected shifts like the rise of AI-driven optimization, the market’s demand for authenticity, and the strategic imperative to build long-term brand equity over short-term clicks. Clinging to outdated playbooks is a direct path to diminishing returns and market irrelevance. The most impactful breakthroughs often come from challenging the status quo and embracing counter-intuitive, data-driven realities.
Which ‘best practice’ in your own marketing playbook is overdue for a challenge?