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The best marketing ideas for 2026 🧰
Over the past year, I’ve shared 50+ marketing ideas with this newsletter.
Some went viral. Some quietly became my readers’ favorite tactics. And a few completely changed how companies approach growth.
Here’s every idea worth saving - organized by what you’re trying to do.
Bookmark this one ⭐️
I want more leads & conversions 💰
🌫️ Put a blurred screenshot behind your signup form: One of my weirdest A/B tests showed a 94% conversion boost from adding a blurry product screenshot behind the signup form. It triggers curiosity (people want to see what’s hidden) and creates a progress illusion (feels like they’re almost inside). Works on trial pages, upgrade prompts, demo request forms, etc.
🛝 Replace “Book a Demo” buttons with “Try it yourself” playgrounds: No one wants to give their email for nothing or wait for a Zoom call. Build a frictionless playground where people can play with a dummy version of your product. No sign-up, no credit card, nothing blocking the Aha moment.
⚡ Use your product FOR potential customers, then gift them the results: Find 8-10 ideal customers on LinkedIn. Use your product to create something valuable for them (a report, video, any output basically). Send it as a surprise gift. Vanta’s co-founder sent the Segment team a SOC-2 compliance spreadsheet before they were even customers. If they don’t respond, share it publicly and tag them.
☎️ Create phone hotlines people can call: Let people experience your product through a 30-second phone call. Bland’s billboard had a number - when you called, their AI salesperson answered (perfect demo of their product). Cloaked’s hotline reads your leaked personal data out loud - which is proof you need their privacy protection. Converts at 5% because the call itself IS the product demo.
💵 When someone clicks “Maybe Later” on your popup → ask for their email: Don’t just close the popup. Show a second screen: “Want us to remind you?” with an email field. Wikipedia does this on their donation popups and raised $169M last year.
🎣 Start video ads by naming WHO should watch: In the first 3 seconds of any video ad, say the viewer’s job title or problem out loud. “Hey Product Managers” works 10x better than “our AI-powered platform”. Deel, Gong, and HubSpot all do this.
I want to generate buzz without paid ads 🎉
🪖 Recruit an army of micro-influencers for almost $0: Create an open ambassador program with no follower requirements and no content approval. Anyone can join, post about you, and get paid based on impressions. tl;dv pays $100 per 20K views (capped at $700). They now get 10M+ impressions monthly.
🧸 Build "the world's first {familiar thing} for {your audience}": I built the first-ever toy store for CISOs (security leaders). It went viral, hit #1 on Reddit, and generated 46K visits in 24 hours. The formula is stupidly simple: Take something everyone recognizes (toy store, dating app, meditation app) and make it absurdly specific to your target audience. The mismatch creates irresistible curiosity.
🌀 Give away free stuff, but add a ridiculous requirement: Domino’s offered free pizza for life to anyone who tattooed their logo. They expected 3-4 people. But 350 did it in 5 days. The weird requirement is what makes people talk about it. HBO did it with blood donations. OnePlus did it by asking people to smash their old phones.
🪶 Make journalists come to YOU with the “Journalist Bait” framework: I got featured in Business Insider, The Guardian, and BuzzFeed without pitching anyone. Journalists don’t care about your news. They only care about spotting the next big trend. Reframe your story from “company update” to “proof of a cultural shift” and post it on social. Let them find you.
⛔️ Dominate every “+reddit” search: People add “reddit” to Google searches to skip marketing garbage. Reddit is now the #3 most visible domain on Google. Start question threads that match what people search, be the first helpful comment when someone posts about problems you solve, host AMAs, and share free resources. One Reddit post got my friend 4K visits monthly for years.
🗽 Put OTHER people on billboards (not yourself): Feature their faces, names, or logos on a Times Square billboard (or an AI mockup of Times Square). Circle featured their customers on Times Square - and every creator they featured shared it on social. Loops did the same with startup logos for just $2K and got warm email threads with hundreds of qualified leads. The people walking past your billboard don’t matter. The shares do.
🔒 Censor your own announcements: Lovable posted a new integration announcement with the partner’s name blurred out. People started guessing in comments. Engagement exploded. A few hours later they revealed it was Shopify. Wayyyyy bigger impact than if they’d just announced it normally.
🎭 Give your whole team fake job titles on LinkedIn on the same day: tl;dv “promoted” all 50+ employees to CEO at once. Everyone updated LinkedIn. That’s 50+ “new job” notifications hitting thousands of feeds. LinkedIn rewards job changes with free reach.
🎬 Share “leaked” internal content: Post Slack screenshots, internal brainstorm docs, or “accidental” drafts. It feels like seeing something you shouldn’t. A fake internal Zoom brainstorm promoting Chalamet’s new film went mega viral.
I want customers to share my stuff 📱
🍌 Give out certificates with the customer’s name as the biggest element: When customers complete a challenge or hit a milestone, give them a certificate. Make THEIR name huge (not your logo). People share things that make them look good. Our social shares jumped 300% at Wiz after we started doing this.
🪙 Send physical items to your power users: OpenAI mails custom coins to top users. YouTube sends Play Buttons. Physical stuff sits on desks and gets posted on social. Virtual badges get ignored and forgotten.
👴🏻 Show users how long they’ve been with you: Display “member since” dates or account age somewhere visible. OpenAI’s browser shows exactly how many days ago you joined ChatGPT. People screenshot these numbers and post them everywhere, flexing who joined first.
🏅 Let customers compete for weird “world records”: Clay tracks who used their product in the strangest places (underwater, on mountains, on jet skis). Winners get featured on their website. Give people a public way to compete, and they’ll create content trying to win.
⚡️ Write one “magic line” that makes people share immediately: Every viral post has one sentence that triggers the thought “my friends need to see this”. Use insider lines (”After analyzing 100K emails, I discovered...”), helper lines (”You’re losing 12 hours every week because of...”), or thinker lines (”Everything you know about [topic] is wrong because...”). Place it in your first 3 paragraphs.
I want to crush my competitors 🥊
🛸 On comparison pages, describe competitors as narrowly as possible: Asana’s comparison page says: “Asana is a work management powerhouse. Trello is a Kanban board.” They’re not saying they’re better. They’re saying Trello plays a smaller game. Find the smallest, most limiting way to describe what competitors do, then create a bigger circle for yourself.
🩸 Create SEO pages targeting “[Competitor] coupon code” searches: When someone searches for a competitor’s discount, they have their credit card in hand. They’ve already decided to buy. Speechify created a fake Veed coupon page. BlueNotary wrote a “DocuSign discounts” article. Each page explains why YOUR product is better (and cheaper). Catch customers at their highest purchase intent.
🧬 Say the exact opposite of what competitors say: Anthropic’s marketing used to be garbage. Then they launched “Keep Thinking” while every other AI company was pushing automation. The positioning was anti-slop, for actual human thinking. They went from cringe to viral in 90 days. Write down what your top 3 competitors say, find the pattern, then say the opposite.
I want customers to stay forever ❤️
📦 When customers mention personal life events in support emails → surprise them: A customer told Chewy her dog died. They refunded her food AND sent flowers with a handwritten note. She tweeted it. 650K likes. LEGO sent a personal letter from “Sensei Wu” to a kid who lost his minifigure. Cost: $20. Marketing value: priceless.
💰 When customers ask for refunds → offer 110% back as store credit: Make store credit instant while bank refunds take 5-7 days. Show exchange options before the refund button. 30-65% of refund requests convert back to sales with this approach.
💌 Send emails showing customers how successful they are with your product: Grammarly emails users “26.7M words analyzed.” ProfitWell shows “$3,016 recovered.” Loom shows “X meetings avoided.” People don’t cancel products that make them feel accomplished.
🔁 Build something free that makes customers use your main product more: Nike Run Club makes people run more, so they buy shoes faster. Nespresso’s recipe app needs 2-3 capsules per drink instead of 1. Find what makes customers stop using your product, then build something that fixes it.
I want to win at events 🎪
🎟️ Make people STAY at your conference booth with challenges: Stop doing wheel-of-fortune giveaways. Your goal isn’t getting people in and out fast. It’s making them stick around. When people see others hanging out at your booth, FOMO kicks in. We hide QR codes around the booth (people hunt for 15+ minutes each), run arcade game tournaments (people line up and chat with sales while waiting), and create themed scavenger hunts. Average stay time went up 900%.
🏴☠️ Hijack conferences you’re not even sponsoring: Map out the “attendee journey” (flights, hotels, meals, nightlife) and insert yourself everywhere. Zendesk flew drones over a Foo Fighters concert during a Salesforce conference. Brex made hotel key cards look like their credit cards. Adidas AirDropped sneaker images to phones at a stadium. You don’t need a booth to own the event.
I want to future-proof my marketing 🤖
🪦 Build distribution channels that don’t need algorithms: AI slop is flooding the internet. Blog posts, LinkedIn posts, generic newsletters could all be AI. The companies winning in 2026 are building things AI physically can’t do: their personal network (one intro > 1,000 cold emails), borrowed audiences from influencers, in-person communities, email lists they own, and human stories worth repeating at dinner.
🥷 Get featured by people who already gathered your audience: Newsletter writers, podcasters, and LinkedIn creators already have your customers’ attention. Pay them, praise them publicly, interview them on your podcast, tell them they inspired you. Borrow their audience instead of building from scratch.
📌 Add something unexpected to your website footer: Most footers are boring legal text. But people actually scroll there when they’re interested but not convinced. One company went viral just for a funny footer line. At Wiz, we spotlight our podcast in the footer. What could you add that would make someone screenshot it?
🔍 Ask website visitors to boost you in Google’s source preferences: This one is a bit technical. Google has a settings page where you can tell it which websites you want to see more often in search results. One website added a popup asking visitors to “boost” them in Google, pre-filling the URL so it takes one click. If you have a valuable blog or resources page, create a popup with this link:
https://www.google.com/preferences/source?q=yourwebsite.com🤖 Add “Ask AI about us” buttons to your website: Link directly to ChatGPT or Claude with a pre-written prompt asking about your company. People trust AI more than marketing copy. And the prompt you write primes the AI to say positive things. Looks brave, works like testimonials.
📱 Put your logo in places users naturally screenshot: X redesigned their interface so when you screenshot any post, the “Ask Grok” button immediately changes to the logo “X.com.” Every screenshot is now branded. Look at what people screenshot from your product and put your logo there. Free distribution forever.
💼 Show how small teams can be with your product: Ramp ran a genius ad featuring one of their customers with the text “$10 BILLION in spend. 3 PEOPLE in finance.” CFOs see that and immediately think “wtf am I doing with 150 people?” If you’re selling B2B software, find your most impressive efficiency story and put a number on it. How many people does it really take to run X when you have the right tools?
The clear pattern we’re seeing 🧠
Every tactic here has one thing in common: AI can’t do any of them.
AI can’t fly drones over a competitor’s conference
AI can’t turn hotel key cards into ads like Brex did
AI can’t send Chewy-style flowers to a grieving customer
AI can’t stand at a booth and make people laugh
AI can’t mail a personalized gift to someone’s desk
AI can’t be the person a journalist picks up the phone for
AI can write a million posts. But it can’t do any of this.
See you next week ✌️