When you’re looking for a product to solve a problem, where do you turn to research your options? Personally, I head straight to Reddit for honest, in-depth reviews and conversations about products I’m on the fence about.

For marketers, the platform can be intimidating. Reddit users have little patience for brands that try to hijack conversations for promotional purposes, and when a product falls short, they’re rarely shy about saying so.

As a leader, there are a million things that need your attention. You have your team to care for, important decisions to make, challenges to navigate and a mission to execute. It’s easy to ruminate on what your organization needs next and what you’re going to do to make it happen.

My encouragement to you is: stop and pray.

There are so many ministries out there with a unified team, a clear vision and an obvious need for the work they do, but there simply aren’t enough hours in the day to do it all.

As a leader, you carry a lot. There are people to serve, stories to tell, technology to manage, staff to take care of and communications to plan and execute. As your ministry grows, it can seem like your capacity starts to shrink.

There’s a strange thing that can happen when you work with a brand long enough: you start to get tired of it. You’ve used the same colours, fonts and visual elements in your graphic design for years. You’ve said the same things and posted variations of the same ideas, over and over.

So you start thinking that maybe you should change things up. Before you do, consider how your audience feels. They’re seeing far less of your brand than you are.

One of the hardest things about social media is accepting that people probably aren’t paying as much attention to your brand as you think they are.

You can spend hours creating a post and writing the perfect caption. Then you publish it… and move on.

Your audience does too.

I recently walked into a sandwich shop and saw a six-foot-tall poster of a sandwich on the wall. Something about it was deeply wrong. The bread did not look like bread; the fillings looked unnatural — to the point where I felt uneasy looking at the image. The image was clearly generated by AI, and I learned that day that I don’t want artificial intelligence anywhere near my food.

Walk into almost any Costco and you’ll see the same thing: packed aisles, long checkout lines and people leaving with carts full of products they probably didn’t plan on buying. On paper, this scenario sounds like a personal nightmare. Yet I, along with millions of people, happily pay for a Costco membership every year.

Why? 

A lot of ads sound the same. Have you noticed?

Messaging like this is everywhere:

"Our product helps teams boost productivity.""Quality you can trust.""A dining experience you'll never forget."

While these things might be true, they don't tell people what makes them different.

I came across an Instagram ad recently that completely stopped me mid-scroll. I watched it a few times over and realized something interesting: while I could see myself being interested in the product, I was even more drawn in by the entertainment of the ad itself. It felt engaging, authentic and full of personality while still showcasing the product perfectly.

It was completely different from the ads I normally scroll past.