Six Feet Under: Marketing Tactics to Bury for Good
The fog is rolling in, the porch lights are flickering, and somewhere I swear I just heard a steel gate creak. That's right; it's spooky season. And that makes this the perfect time to take a walk through a different kind of graveyard—one full of marketing tactics in desperate need of a final resting place.
Every tactic I'm about to walk you through did real work in its day, often for years and sometimes spectacularly. They were sent to the graveyard for reasons beyond anyone’s control. Buyer behavior shifted, platforms rewrote rules, and new privacy expectations moved the ground under all of us. Nevertheless, these zombified tactics are still walking among us, and they really do need to die.
So grab a flashlight and consider this your candlelit tour of the marketing tactic graveyard. For each stop, I will explain what the tactic is, what made it popular, why it's being sent six feet under, and what I recommend you run in its place.
R.I.P. Exit-Intent Pop-ups
Exit-intent pop-ups do exactly what the name promises. They track cursor movement toward the browser's back button or tab bar, then throw up an offer in that last second before a visitor leaves. For years, this was a smart, low-cost way to convert someone who was otherwise walking away by giving them a small nudge at exactly the right moment.
What changed is where that moment happens now. Today, the majority of B2B research happens on mobile devices. There is no cursor to track on a touchscreen, so the entire mechanic just does not fire. And on desktop browsers, where the pop-up still fires, visitors have simply seen the trick too many times. Closing the pop-up has become a reflex; people dismiss it before the offer even registers. And nowadays, asking for an email address right as someone is trying to leave feels less like a helpful nudge and more like a toll booth.
What I recommend now is building triggers around signals of genuine interest rather than signals of departure. And whenever possible, use signals that work across device types. Scroll depth, page count within a session, and return visits all tell you someone is engaged. Use those moments to surface a relevant next step like downloading a case study, pricing something out with a calculator, or finding a real person to talk to. Basically, look for ways to engage them more deeply while they’re leaning in rather than walking away.
R.I.P. Spray-and-Pray Cold Outbound
With the “spray and pray” method, you send the same generic email or LinkedIn message to a wide list and count on volume to make up for a lack of targeting. For a long time, that trade made sense. Building a personalized sequence took a ton of research time per contact. A broad list with a decent template converted decently enough that it justified skipping the effort a more personalized approach would require.
Thankfully, technology has changed. Intent data, firmographic enrichment, and AI-assisted personalization make it almost as fast to send a personally relevant message as to send a generic one. That shift flips the economics. Most outbound tools charge by contact or by send, so a broad list runs up costs before a single reply comes in. Plus, a bad send also risks your domain's deliverability, which is expensive to repair. Add those two costs to a list of contacts that were never going to convert, and spray-and-pray method was already the pricier option, even before you factor in results.
What I recommend instead is using that great new tech to build smaller, more targeted lists around real triggers, like funding news, leadership changes, or product usage patterns. Let the trigger shape the message. You’ll have fewer sends with higher relevance, and outbound messages that read like they were written for one person, because increasingly, they were.
R.I.P. 10-Field Gated Forms
Gating a whitepaper or webinar behind a form that asks for the downloader's name, email, job title, company size, and phone number used to be standard practice. And it used to work. Filling out a long form in exchange for genuinely useful content was a fair trade. And teams actually needed all that firmographic detail to route and qualify leads.
Two things changed at once. Firstly, the patience we have for online tasks that feel like chores has drastically dwindled. A 10-field form is perceived now as 10 reasons to just click out of the page altogether. Secondly, we’ve all gotten used to getting more for less everywhere else on the internet. Free trials, freemium tools, and expert advice are plentiful. So, a long form in front of a mid-funnel content asset feels… out of place.
What I recommend instead is progressive profiling. Ask for very little up front (even just an email address) and let enrichment tools fill in the rest behind the scenes. Save the longer forms for moments that really warrant them, like a demo request, where a prospect already expects to give more because they are further along.
R.I.P. Last-Click Attribution
Last-click attribution gives all the credit for a conversion to whatever channel touched the buyer right before they filled out the form. We all used it because it was simple to explain, simple to report on, and, back when buyer journeys were shorter and more linear, it was a reasonably fair way to measure campaign success.
What changed is the journey itself. B2B buyers now move through blog posts, social content, peer reviews, and sales conversations across weeks and months before they ever convert. Last-click attribution ends up crediting whatever channel just happened to be there at the finish line while starving the channels that did the real work of building interest earlier on.
What I recommend instead is moving toward multi-touch attribution, or at minimum tracking assisted conversions alongside last-click. It takes more setup, but it stops your team from defunding the channels doing the real work without ever noticing.
R.I.P. Vanity-Metric Reporting
Impressions, follower growth, and page views are not meaningless numbers. They tell you real things, like whether awareness is building, whether content is resonating, and whether a campaign is getting seen at all. The problem is that too many organizations report those numbers without ever connecting them to the outcomes the business cares about.
For a long time, that gap didn’t matter much. The vanity metrics were easy to pull and leadership rarely pushed back on them. Plus, we didn’t have anything better. Now, budgets are tighter and finance teams are hungry for numbers that tie more directly to revenue. A rising follower count next to a flat pipeline doesn’t hold up in a budget conversation the way it once did. And thankfully, we have more metrics available for tracking.
What I recommend now is keeping the existing metrics but pairing them with what they lead to. Tag campaigns and content consistently in your CRM so impressions and page views can sit alongside pipeline influenced or opportunities created. Same numbers, more context, and a far easier conversation with your CFO.
R.I.P. Unedited, Bulk AI-Generated Content
This one is a newer addition to the graveyard than the rest. In the early days of generative AI, publishing AI-drafted content with a light editing pass could often be a truly useful way to move faster. The masses weren’t doing it yet, the quality bar was still novel enough to clear, and it filled content calendars that would otherwise have sat empty.
The problem is, everyone does it now. The thing that made bulk AI content work—the fact that it stood out simply by existing—is gone. AI content is everywhere and readers have gotten remarkably good at spotting the same flat rhythm and generic phrasing across every brand's blog. Even good products end up sounding indistinguishable from their competitors, and audiences are tired of reading it.
What I recommend instead is using AI for what it does well: early research, structuring, and first drafts. Plan on generating a real point of view, including real expertise in your prompt, and doing a very meaningful editing pass before anything goes live. The brands that stand out from here on will be the ones whose content still sounds like a person wrote it.
Every tactic on this list earned its keep for years. But buyer behavior, platforms, and privacy standards have all moved. We have to build for today’s marketing, not what used to work.
If your team is holding onto tactics past their expiration date and wants a second opinion on what to bury and what to revive, we’d be happy to help you sort it all out. Reach out and let's spend spooky season building a marketing plan that’ll work well for you all year.
