Getting found online is no easy task in 2025. AI has both increased the competition for attention and reduced the opportunities to get it (hello, AI Overviews!).
That’s why it’s worth reviewing unexpected wins. What can we learn from the silly blog post or new marketing channel that struck a vein of virality and audience attention, generating 100x the traffic and awareness of anything else you’ve created?
I asked six marketing pros to share a surprising way they used (or have seen others use) to get found online and offer an analysis of why it worked. With a little luck and creativity, we can all learn from their experience and replicate the magic.
Contents
- Let your fun flag fly on LinkedIn
- Create your own industry awards
- Agitate a fear and provide a real solution
- Turn Reddit into a reliable source of referral traffic
- Post podcast snippets on YouTube Shorts
- Use TikTok in unexpected ways
6 surprising ways the pros use to get found online
These marketers found ways to beat the tsunami of content flooding our feeds and gave some tips so you can do the same.
1. Let your fun flag fly on LinkedIn
LinkedIn has always been the stuffy cousin of the social media family. The rule of thumb is to keep it professional there and hold the fun for other platforms. Amanda Nielsen, B2B creator and founder of Thot Leader Labs has found a surprising amount of success by doing, well, the opposite.
“One of my most viral LinkedIn posts used the smiley badge graphic people always post for promotions or major milestones,” she told me. “But I paired it with the caption ‘tried my best’ and listed everyday wins like ‘took constructive criticism without crying’ and ‘didn’t accidentally say love you bye at the end of the Zoom.’”
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Amanda said the post was meant to “poke fun at how overused that graphic had become and how people were using it for everything.”
It’s a little bit of a gamble to make fun of something so many people do, but the wager paid off. “The post ended up with 9 million impressions, 106K reactions, 3K comments, and 2.4K reposts,” Amanda said. “It got way more traction than my typical audience, helped me grow my following significantly, and sparked conversations with tons of new people I wouldn’t have otherwise met. It even inspired me to turn it into a sticker on thotleaderlabs.com.”
Handclap emoji.
The tone in this example isn’t a one-off. Scrolling Amanda’s feed is like flipping through a stand-up comedian’s set notes—if the comedian only played to an audience of B2B professionals.
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The lesson here is that getting found online is about standing out, not blending in. If everything around you is boring B2B content, a little sass in the SaaS will snap people out of scrolling—and make your brand a heck of a lot more memorable. As Amanda put it, “It was a good reminder that sometimes the simplest ideas—especially the ones that play with familiar formats—are what resonate most.”
Stepping out of our comfort zones can feel a little sketchy. Here are a few ways I’ve seen marketers do it:
- Create non-traditional content: Would anyone expect you to publish a comic strip about cybersecurity? Probably not, so it’ll definitely stand out.
- Have fun with your own foibles: We all have missteps in our professional lives. Share yours, especially the ones everyone experiences, and you’ll be a lot more relatable and memorable.
- Mismatch the medium and the message: Most of us don’t want LinkedIn to become Facebook, but one of my most successful LinkedIn posts was a photo from my vacation. An occasional personal post can shake things up in the best way.
2. Create your own industry awards
Winning an industry award is a great way to get some attention for your brand. But what would happen if you created an entire awards program that recognized businesses in your field of excellence?
Deesha Laxsav, senior brand marketing manager at Clutch, knows the answer to that question.
“One tactic that significantly increased engagement and traffic for Clutch was our Clutch Global Awards program,” she told me. The program led to “a more than 100% week-over-week increase in organic social engagement and an over 55% increase in referral traffic.”
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Clutch is an online directory of B2B service providers from “advertising agencies in Amsterdam to mobile app developers in Mumbai.” The Clutch Global Awards program recognizes the highest-performing providers in various categories.
Deesha said the program’s success is bolstered by the “strong focus on the promotional support we offered to the winners.” Specifically, Clutch provides award winners with a promotional toolkit featuring social media graphics, badges, press release templates, messaging, and more “to help them easily share their recognition across their channels.”
Here’s where this strategy gets really cool. Much of the traffic and engagement comes from the award recipients linking back to their Clutch profiles. It’s like they’ve created a whole bunch of partners drumming up referral traffic.
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Deesha said they’ve invested in scaling that benefit. “For the first time this year, we were able to announce winners directly within their respective categories on our directories,” she explained. “This gave providers even more incentive to share their recognition and link to a specific, relevant page, enhancing both our visibility and SEO performance.”
“We’re always thinking about how to evolve and strengthen this campaign to not only recognize top-performing providers but also to drive greater awareness, engagement, and authority for the Clutch brand,” Deesha added.
It wouldn’t be too difficult to replicate aspects of Clutch’s awards program for any business. Here are a few ideas:
- Create a landing page: Use it to highlight customers who use your product creatively.
- Host an awards event on social media: create several categories, and share the winners daily for a week. In any case, do as Clutch does and make it easy for winners to celebrate their awards publicly, linking back to your website in the process.
- Design a rating system: Sort of like Michelin stars for restaurants, give your customers a rating for things like sustainability, creative use, etc.
3. Agitate a fear and provide a real solution
When you publish a lot of content and one particular asset bests everything else you create for almost every important metric, you take a beat to figure out why it worked so well. That’s exactly what Einav Mor, content leader at InfiniGrow, said happened when she published a guide titled “You don’t know what you don’t know—The true cost of data inaccuracies” while still with her former employer.
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“This was a pretty extensive guide I’ve prepared back at AppsFlyer,” Einave explained. It was “one of the most successful guides we’ve put out. It outperformed anything else we published during that quarter for unique views, time on page, and organic traffic.”
The guide was underpinned by a common fear among marketers: How can you drive growth when you can’t trust your data? But Einav said that was just one piece of the puzzle. “The goal was to create a sense of FOMO that was backed up by hard numbers and practical steps to avoid costly data discrepancies.”
The result was a guide that made the problem feel real by highlighting the cold, hard costs of inaccurate marketing data. And Appsflyer promoted those facts to drive people to the content.
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“It effectively touched a nerve for any marketer out there and clearly explained the implications of relying on dodgy data for predictions and measurement,” Einav said. “But it wasn’t just about sowing fear, which would’ve been a cheap trick. It was about giving tools for marketers to deal with daily uncertainty. And I believe our readers appreciated that.”
While the success of the guide may have been a little surprising, the formula isn’t hard to replicate:
- Find a fear that your customers face: Take a survey and ask what vexes them most.
- Make it real with facts and data: Calculate the results of the survey or figure out the cost of the problem.
- Ease the tension with accessible solutions: Publish a guide that solves the problem with your product at its center.
4. Turn Reddit into a reliable source of referral traffic
Sometimes, the surprisingly successful way to get found online isn’t a single ad or asset; it’s an entire marketing channel. That was the case for Megan Janan, a marketing associate at Whalesync, who told me that Reddit is their top referral source, driving lots of traffic to their website.
Now, marketing on Reddit isn’t new; we’ve researched and written about it several times. But it is notoriously hard to get a foothold on the platform. Redditors are quick to call out any overt marketing tactics. So when Megan told me about their success, I wanted to know how they achieved it.
“Reddit works because it’s quite BOFU [bottom of the funnel],” Megan said.”Users are either searching for a solution or are frustrated and venting. That’s when you can come in with your comment and solve their problem.”
Here’s an example Megan shared. A Redditor asked about entering custom formulas in a Notion document—a challenge that Whalesync can solve.
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The reply came from a Whalesync employee. It added more context to other Redditors’ suggestions and then provided a link to a post that dug in further.
It’s a tough balance, but when done correctly, the benefits will compound. “Reddit works due to just the sheer amount of views you can get on a comment or thread, especially if you post in the right sub,” Megan said. “But I personally view Reddit as quite ‘evergreen,’ so even though these posts are quite old, if people are searching for something similar, chances are they’ll stumble on this Reddit thread and see our comment, and this can lead to referral traffic.”
Megan said they look for questions that directly relate to their product, like connecting two apps together. But they also have to get creative and find tangential challenges that their product may be able to solve. In the example above, for instance, the user just wanted to add custom formulas in Notion, and connecting to Sheets was a possible solution. In any case, Megan said the goal is to find ways to “unblock users.”
How can you make Whalesync’s Reddit success your own?
- Find relevant subreddits: Start broad and narrow to niche topics. If you’re marketing a physical therapy practice, find healthcare subreddits, but also look for specific running or exercise threads.
- Link to your content organically: Look for opportunities to link out to your educational content, but make sure it tightly aligns with the question being asked. And if you don’t yet have a post that answers the question, there’s your next content idea!
- Think creatively when answering: If you have a popular product, Redditors are probably already discussing it, so you can simply join in. If your product isn’t a hot topic yet, you’ll need to help people see how your product solves problems in ways they hadn’t considered.
5. Post podcast snippets on YouTube Shorts
Some of the most popular YouTube Shorts ever feature speed cleaning a house, a transforming “Cinderella” dress, and a tutorial to make your very own squishy ladybug toy. It’s not the first platform most marketers head to when they need to boost the performance of their B2B podcast.
To be fair, Sneh Choudhary, Chief Repurposer at Scaling Rad Content, was a little skeptical of it, too. “I help repurpose the podcast The Frictionless Experience,” Sneh said. “It was barely getting any views on YouTube, which is understandable because YouTube may not be the right platform for a B2B podcast. Isn’t LinkedIn a better platform for this?”
But then they ran an experiment, chopping up full-length podcast episodes and running them as Shorts. “And well, this worked better than I expected,” Sneh said.
The Shorts racked up over 30K views and lifted full-episode views by 48%. “And the best part,” Sneh said, “was the full-length episodes that weren’t getting enough views started getting noticed.”
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To run the experiment, the team commissioned their video editors to create three or four clips. “But that wasn’t going to be enough of a sample size to test our hypothesis,” Sneh said. “Will more short-form content shipped consistently help with the podcast’s visibility?” Sneh used OpusClip—an AI video clipping and editing tool—to scale that production, and so far, it’s working like a charm.
“It’s still early days, but this is exciting. I’m now running a second experiment where we chop up the podcast into 10 to 15-minute clips, the ideal length for YouTube videos. We’ll see how that goes.”
The lesson here is not to overlook marketing channels, even if they don’t seem to be the right fit at first. You don’t want to waste too much time on non-performing channels, though. Here are a few ideas to make the process more efficient:
- Use repurposed content: Don’t start from scratch. If you have blog posts, video yourself explaining the same content and try it on YouTube Shorts, TikTok, etc.
- Run intentional tests: Set specific goals for things like traffic or leads, and set a timeline to assess the results.
- Use AI: AI tools are great for things like summarizing content or quickly editing video.
6. Use TikTok in unexpected ways
Small family-owned businesses can sometimes struggle to get found online. They usually don’t have deep pockets or a team of marketing pros planning out months’ worth of social content.
But Reggie Powell, a freelance tech and HR writer, has unearthed a superpower these mom-and-pop shops have that’s hard for big businesses to replicate.
“Considering all the noise and unedited AI slop on the internet, the authenticity a local business can deliver is the new driver of the conversation on social media,” Reggie said.
By way of example, he pointed to Amici’s Pizza, a local restaurant in Mesa, Arizona. “A small business like Amici’s Pizza can’t compete on budget,” he noted. “What they did, which was really smart, was to use their TikTok account to pull back the curtain on what it’s like to run a small business.
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In the videos, “We get to meet the crew, see the good and bad of a long day making pies, and get to know what it takes to run a mom-and-pop pizza restaurant,” Reggie said. “That’s how a small pizza shop in Mesa, Arizona, got over 300K followers.”
Amici’s TikTok triumphs are astounding. The most popular video has over 10 million views. People travel from thousands of miles and line up out the door for a buffalo chicken pizza or a plate of rigatoni. Even the local press is sharing the shop’s social success.
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Reggie said the strategy, if you can call simply showing up as yourself a strategy, has real staying power. “They’ve become so successful because people feel like they know them,” he explained. “They can identify with their struggles, and they can see what it actually takes to run a small business. This kind of real-life presentation will beat viral trends every time because authenticity doesn’t go away after a week.”
If you run a small business, you can leverage the power of personal connection to grow a following on social media in the same way. For example:
- Share a day in the life: Capture the challenges, wins, and even the mundane parts of running your business.
- Share the inside jokes: Every industry has funny phrases and recurring themes specific to it. Create some videos highlighting them.
- Share your greatest creations: Whether it’s a mega-pepporoni pizza, a perfectly poured concrete patio, or a dazzling smile you helped create, let people see your best work and the process it took to get there.
How do you get found online in 2025? Be weird
Great marketing has always been about getting attention. Some marketers will attempt to do that with pure scale, using AI to flood the feeds of potential customers.
But the examples we’ve seen here go a different direction. They’re publishing unexpected content in new places. They’re breaking patterns, stopping scrollers, and building sticky brands that people remember and want to return to.
In 2025 and beyond, it’ll be a lot harder to get found online by being the same, so try to be a bit weird and see what happens.
