Social media and the internet have been part of everyday life for years, but the way people use these platforms continues to change. As social platforms have added more features, integrations, search capabilities, and shopping tools, they have also changed how businesses reach customers, and how customers move through the marketing funnel. The traditional marketing funnel is usually viewed as a fairly straightforward journey: someone becomes aware of a business, develops interest, considers their options, and eventually converts. Today, that journey is much less linear.
Every brand with a comment section will eventually get a bad one. What separates a one-off complaint from a lasting reputation hit isn’t the criticism itself. It’s what your brand does next. A single unhappy comment rarely sinks a brand. A slow, defensive, or tone-deaf reply is what turns it into a story. The good news? Handling criticism well is a skill, not a personality trait. It comes down to a few repeatable habits.
Learn why short headlines, minimal copy, and clear visual hierarchy can improve display ad and landing page performance and help drive more clicks.
A practical look at where AI helps marketers and where human judgement still matters.
There's an instinct among certain business owners to keep up with the latest marketing trends, and right now, the trend is AI flyers. They're scattered across social media and aside from sales and promotions, can communicate a lot about what or who a brand is. The instinct is understandable, and for many business owners, a quick solution that can potentially elevate their brand is exactly what they need. The low barrier to entry seems attractive to someone who's already strapped for time and may not be able to afford a professional designer on a weekly basis, but here are a few things to consider and ask yourself before putting one of these flyers together.
There’s a sentence I hear more and more often in digital marketing conversations: “Well, can’t I just use AI to make that?” And the answer is… probably. You can use AI to write a blog, create social posts, generate an image, draft an email, come up with Google Ads headlines or build a content calendar in seconds. I’m not going to tell you that’s a bad thing. We use AI, too. It has made parts of our jobs faster, helped us work through ideas and given marketers access to tools we couldn’t have imagined a few years ago. But being able to make something and knowing what you should make are two very different things.
