Vibe Check Part 3: When Vibe Marketing Goes Off the Rails

Marketers: I know a lot of you are jumping on the AI vibe train, just like me. Vibe marketing is making it easier than ever to join in with the newest trends, to unlock new abilities with new tools, and to turn your ideas into reality.

But what if those trends end up being shallow? What if those tools aren’t actually the right ones for the tasks you need done? And what if you’re relying on vibes that don’t ladder up to real results? AI itself is so affirming, it can be hard to spot that there are problems until you’re already off the rails.

That is, unless you know what to look for. Whether you’re just getting started or have already built out your own vibe stack, here are five of the top pitfalls that vibe marketers need to be aware of. By staying vigilant, you’ll be able to keep your vibe train rolling full steam ahead.

Pitfall 1: AI band-aids

Say your sales team needs faster access to customer stories. You could pretty quickly build an AI agent that scans through all your customer stories and serves up the details on request. Problem solved, access is easier!

But a few weeks later, you start hearing complaints. The agent has trouble finding stories for particular industry use cases. It surfaces stories from two-person startups when you know you have better quotes from globally known brands. And some of the stories are even hallucinated, where no customer actually said what the agent outputted.

The AI agent helped with the immediate problem of faster access, but it turns out that speed wasn’t really the core problem you needed to solve—it was a symptom of other issues with your story library. An AI tool might be able to help fix those issues, too, but only if you know to address them with it.

The solution: Make sure you’ve identified the core of your problem before implementing an AI solution. Since AI solutions are pretty easy to put together, it’ll be worth your time to dig into the issue first instead of just applying a quick-fix band-aid you have to fix more later.

Pitfall 2: The wrong tool for the job

AI tools are incredibly powerful and easy to use. But just because you can use a tool for a task doesn’t mean it’s necessarily the right one for what you need.

For example, maybe you want a faster way to analyze your customer feedback and surface new engagement opportunities. You could send batches of feedback data to ChatGPT, and it’d definitely output some results for you. But ChatGPT is a general-purpose LLM. Will the output be as accurate or relevant as if you used a purpose-built tool like Amplitude’s AI Feedback?

The solution: Don’t let tools lead. Define the overall job to be done, figure out what tasks you need to accomplish for it, and establish what good results would look like first. Then you can find the right AI tools to scale your strategy.

Pitfall 3: Trend chasing

Action figures of your customers. Ghibli-style comics about your brand versus a competitor’s. TikTok dances. There are always fun new trends your business might participate in, and AI can definitely help you keep up with them more easily.

Does following those trends serve your marketing needs, though? Viral sensations work if you can use them to speak to your brand values or help attract your target audience. But if you’re just following trends for the sake of the trends themselves, AI’s ability to speed up meme production may also dilute your message.

The solution: Be selective. It’s totally fine to jump in on a trend if it aligns with your brand, but also make sure to balance trend following with trend setting.

Pitfall 4: The dreaded AI voice

AI writing isn’t just a shortcut—it’s a game-changer. But when your content is full of sentences like that one, your audience will start to notice it. Emdashes have become so synonymous with LLM writing that they’re the first thing professors check for when screening papers for AI. And when your audience notices AI voice, it absolutely kills the customer vibe.

More than polished phrasing or perfect grammar, what your audience wants from your marketing material is to know that you value them. That’s how you get them to value your brand in return.

When you cut corners, whether with AI or with any other shortcut, your audience can take that lack of effort as indicating that you didn’t value them enough to put in the work. So if you don’t value your audience, why should they value you back?

The solution: Show them that you care. You can still use AI for writing (and you can still use emdashes), but give your content at least one bonus edit pass to make sure it feels unique, interesting, and valuable. And if you don’t enjoy it on your edit pass, odds are your audience won’t either—it’s totally fine to try a different direction!

Pitfall 5: Measuring the wrong things

This might be the most important vibe marketing pitfall to avoid. If you aren’t tracking the right metrics, all these other pitfalls can stay hidden until it’s too late.

Say you launch a vibe marketing email campaign, using AI to tailor a trendy message to recipients that links them to industry-specific sign-up pages. The open rate is off the charts. Your prospects are loving it! Apparently.

A month later, your team flags that your daily active users count hasn’t budged. What went wrong? It could be any number of issues:

• Did the emails have too much AI voice? If you tracked email click-throughs, you’d see if the message resonated with your readers.
• Was your trendy email too attractive to flighty trend followers? Retention metrics can tell you which users who sign up actually keep coming back.
• Did you use the right AI tool to create your recipient lists? Tracking landing-page behavior could tip you off to low conversion because of an AI personalization mix-up.
• What if your emails are fine, and the problem is actually in your sign-up flow? Other metrics could help you spot a deeper problem that AI-powered engagement won’t fix.

The solution: Measure more! It’s important to establish your KPIs upfront, but some problems (and some opportunities) only appear when you have enough data to explore. Metrics may seem against the spirit of vibing, but data-driven vibes are the most successful.

Vibe on with Amplitude

That brings us to the end of our series! But before we close out, we do need to answer our opening question: can you get the benefits of vibe marketing without killing the vibe for your customers?

We’ve discussed what vibe marketing is, its potential benefits with lowering the technological barrier to entry and increasing your work speed, and its potential risks with customer vibes. We’ve talked about the common pitfalls to watch out for and strategies to avoid them. And we’ve covered how to track the right metrics to measure your impact with Amplitude.

After all that, I think we can safely say: you can do vibe marketing right. You just need to make sure you’re using what we covered in this series to check your vibe. With the right vibe checks in place, your vibe marketing train won’t just stay on the rails—it’ll be full steam ahead.