Hi everyone, and welcome to a new week of trending marketing news. This week is a big holiday in the US, Thanksgiving. Which means Black Friday sales aren’t far behind (every b2c marketers favorite holiday!), but this year we’re all lucky if anything is even in stock to buy.

As an Indigenous person, I’ve often felt conflicted about Thanksgiving as a holiday in my adult years. Recently, I’ve tried to shift my perspective from being angry about the holiday to creating my version of it, which is a time to reflect and celebrate the positive things in my life. Hopefully, this week you get a chance to do the same.

Reply and let me know what you’re thankful for!

Ok, on to the news!

Social & the creator economy

• If you do have some extra time this holiday week, check out Hootsuite’s look at social trends for 2022. It includes survey date from 18k respondents, 15+ interviews, and countless data crunching from around the world.
• How many hashtags should you use on an Instagram post for maximum effectiveness? According to Instagram, it should only be 3 to 5. Is this higher, or lower, than you expected it to be? For me, it’s wildly lower.
• You can now shop directly in Facebook Groups. Groups can now have a “shop” tab, plus members can tag specific questions as “product recommendations.”
• A TikTok exec has now landed at LinkedIn to help build out the creator program there. Love it or hate it, LinkedIn is ripe to be the home of the “business influencer.”
• Speaking of LinkedIn, here are 4 ways to use the platform to grow your influence and build your personal brand.
• 'Tis the season not just for being thankful, but also for giving. If you’ve ever wanted to use Instagram to host a fundraiser, the folks at Later put together a great guide to help you out.
• Popular app Cameo lets you buy shoutouts and messages from celebrities. You can now buy a Cameo from an Ai version of Thomas the Tank Engine. Wild.
• Substack reported they now have more than 1 million paid subscriptions to publications on their platform.
• Instagram rolled out live-stream badges to all eligible profiles in the US. This program helps creators earn money by charging viewers to have their comments highlighted during the stream. Viewers can buy packs of the special hearts from Instagram, and when used, the creator gets the money.

Branding & advertising

• Ever wanted to advertise on a podcast? It’s your lucky day. Spotify rolled out self-serve podcast ads this week. You can get started for a minimum of $500.
• The Staples Center, perhaps the most iconic basketball arena in the US, will be renamed the crypto.com arena. Hello? Yes, that’s the future calling. The new naming agreement is for 20 years, at the cost of $700 million. It’s one of the biggest naming deals in sports history. As we discussed in last week’s issue, cryptocurrency advertising isn’t going anywhere.
• This week, Kraft Mac & Cheese rolled out a new campaign which begins a push to market to more than just families with kids.
• Apparently, Millennials and Gen Z are all about monochromatic logo design now, which is leading to a new design trend.
• Snapchat was the most affected company from Apple’s privacy rollout, losing lots of money on ad sales. Now, they’re trying to do something about that by introducing a new delivery format for ad creatives.

Content, SEO, & websites

• Keeping up with the holiday theme, here’s a deep dive from SEMRUSH on the trends and shifts for Black Friday 2021 — with a look at search trends YoY.
• Here’s an excellent guide to writing copy for a landing page that converts, from marketing examples.
• If you create content for YouTube, you might find this YouTube SEO guide handy. That’s right, SEO is just as important as your content. After all, YouTube is the number two search engine (after google, of course).
• Popular social media app Buffer deleted their blog. They ended up increasing their traffic as a result. Here’s a great case study on why they had two blogs, and how they went about the process of consolidating blogs.
• Want your customers to feel like you’ve read their minds? Take a look at this piece about language/market fit. The process of finding this fit starts with customer interviews. Remember, in marketing, whoever gets closest to the customer wins.
• If you use Google Analytics (guessing that’s a lot of you), here are 11 useful reports you may not know about.
• This week was popular website platform Webflow’s NoCode conference, and they made several announcements that make me super bullish about Webflow as the standard choice for websites for the foreseeable future. Webflow is uniquely positioned for becoming a standard because it’s both a design tool AND a development tool. You can do pretty much anything on a website without ever touching code (and more importantly, never messing with out-of-date plugins and themes). Over the last couple of years, I’ve used Webflow every single day, and honestly can’t see a reason anyone would use a legacy tool like WordPress at this point. And this is coming from someone who was hand coding WordPress sites in 2006. Check it out here, if you’re not familiar.

Fun

• This article from The Verge on why Netflix is never down is a great read. Netflix hand-built their CDN (content delivery network) which allows them to do some really cool things — including keeping the service up almost 100% of the time.
• How the US federal government seized $1B in stolen bitcoin from Silk Road. If you don’t remember Silk Road, it was an underground internet site that was often used to sell drugs, among other things. Most users paid via Bitcoin. Shortly before the government put the founder in jail, someone hacked Silk Road and took all the bitcoin. That individual held it for 7 years before it was recovered. What a wild story.

That’s all for this week’s news! To those of you in the US, enjoy some downtime!

See you next week,

Forge