Marketing Tips - How to Get More Customers

1. The two words that get big accounts to promote you

Here's a tactic that costs nothing: when you build something, publicly credit the person who inspired it.

Post your launch with "inspired by @[the big account whose idea sparked yours]." You're not asking them for anything — you're paying them a public compliment. And people share compliments. Ego plus reciprocity is a powerful combination.

The same launch that gets crickets on its own can go viral the moment the person you credited reposts it to their audience.

You don't need reach. You need to genuinely admire someone who has it — and say so out loud.

2. Celebrate people and they'll do your marketing for you

Nobody shares your "we're the best" post. Everybody shares a post that says they're the best.

Publish a "Top 10 [people in your industry]" list, an annual award, a spotlight series. The people you feature will share it with their audiences — because you've handed them social proof they didn't have to write themselves.

When privacy company Mine built a "Top 10 DPOs" page, all ten agreed to interviews and site traffic jumped 4,000%.

Praise is the only marketing channel where the distribution is built into the content.

3. Put their name on your thing

A twist on the last tip: instead of featuring people after you build something, involve them in the building.

Security company Wiz asked 20 security experts one fun question — "what's your favorite song to hack to?" — and turned the answers into a credited "Hacking Playlist." Most of the experts shared it, because it was partly theirs.

The formula: small ask, public credit, something fun enough to share. Twenty micro-contributions equals twenty people with audiences promoting your brand.

4. Make the thing influencers are starving for

Influencers have a problem you can solve: they need to post every single day, and coming up with material is exhausting.

So build the asset they wish existed. A database. An industry report. A stat that makes them look smart when they cite it.

Wiz built its Cloud Threat Database specifically because security influencers love sharing data. The influencers got endless content; Wiz got endless attribution.

Don't pitch influencers. Feed them.

5. You're sitting on a headline and don't know it

Your product data contains patterns nobody else in your industry can see. That's not just analytics — that's marketing raw material.

Gong analyzed millions of sales calls and found that "How have you been?" outperforms "How are you?" on cold calls. One surprising insight, packaged well, became Gong Labs — which became the brand.

Find the one counterintuitive pattern in your data, publish it as a report or ranking, and refresh it annually. The people and companies you feature will share it every year like clockwork.

6. Tell people not to click

Reverse psychology is embarrassingly effective, even on people who know exactly what you're doing.

Wiz ran an ad that said "Please don't book a demo." Microsoft got a 5x engagement spike from "Please don't read this."

Why does it work? Because every other ad is begging for attention, and the one that isn't stands out. Curiosity does the rest.

You don't need to be clever. You need to be the only one in the feed saying the opposite thing.

7. Blur the announcement

Announcing something? Don't announce it. Censor it.

Post the news with the key detail blurred out — the partner name, the feature, the number — and drop it where active commenters gather. Then let the comments fight over what's behind the blur.

Lovable posted a new integration with the partner's name fully blurred and the guessing game exploded before the reveal ever happened.

A clean announcement gets one wave of attention. A censored one gets two: the speculation and the reveal.

8. Plant something weird and never explain it

Drop a recurring character, an easter egg, an inside joke into your marketing — and refuse to explain it.

Security company Torq did this with a "Sock Goblin" and a falcon named Robert Girdle. Fans made "Torq Theory" YouTube videos trying to decode it, and Torq's LinkedIn grew from 4K to 29K+.

Unexplained details turn your audience into theorists, and theorists create content about you for free. Marvel has known this forever. It works for B2B software too.

9. Claim a "world's first" (you only have to change one thing)

Take a familiar category. Change exactly one element. Claim the title.

Wiz built CISOtopia — "the world's first toy store for cybersecurity professionals," stocked with fake toys like blindfolds for your legal team during a breach. Absurd, memorable, and it became a permanent lead-gen engine.

"World's first" is a headline generator hiding in plain sight. Nobody fact-checks it, journalists love it, and the bar is one creative substitution: expected thing + unexpected audience.

10. Reframe your data as a trend and journalists will find you

Journalists don't cover your milestones. They cover trends.

So don't post "We analyzed 100,000 LinkedIn posts." Post the finding as a cultural observation: "The more narcissistic a post, the more engagement it gets."

Same data, different frame. The first is a company update; the second is a story a reporter can pitch to their editor. Post the trend version publicly and let the journalists — who monitor social for exactly this — come to you.

You don't need a PR agency. You need a better headline on data you already have.

11. Run ads on your competitor's error messages

Here's the highest-intent, lowest-competition ad inventory on the internet: the exact error messages your competitor's product throws.

When someone Googles "why is [competitor] not working" or pastes an error code, they are maximally frustrated and actively shopping for a way out. Almost nobody bids on those queries.

Anthropic does this on developer error messages — Claude shows up right at the moment of pain saying, essentially, "I can fix this right now."

Be the answer at the moment of the problem. That beats being the billboard on the highway.

12. The fake-story tactic I won't use

One tactic making the rounds: post a fabricated first-person story on r/AmITheAsshole or r/TIFU where your product happens to be the unnamed hero. The drama spreads to TikTok, traffic spikes, nobody knows it was an ad.

Even the people teaching this tactic admit it's sneaky. I'll go further: it's astroturfing, and it has a shelf life.

Reddit's whole value as a channel comes from being one of the last places people trust strangers' stories. Every orchestrated post spends down that trust — and when you get caught (receipts always surface), the exposé travels further than the plant ever did.

Show up on Reddit as yourself. It's slower. It's also the only version that still works in year two.