Hey everyone and welcome to another week of marketing news and jobs! To those of you in the US, like myself, I hope you get to enjoy some time off this weekend. As soon as I hit publish on this newsletter, I’m heading to the pool. ☀️

I’m working on a holographic sticker for all of y’all that subscribed early, and once they’re made you can get it for free! Next week I’ll drop a link to submit your mailing address if you want one, so stay tuned. Thanks to my friend and fellow subscriber Lee Budkey for coming up with a great design.

Ok, on to this week’s news!

Social & The Creator Economy

• You might think being a creator has an age limit, but Iris Apfel is here to prove you wrong. At 100, she’s doing more than the rest of us with glasses, makeup, and modeling collabs. Plus a TikTok series with Lil Yachty. What a legend.
• TikTok banned the milk crate challenge over safety concerns.
• LinkedIn retired their stories feature. This is another instance of trying to copy popular features instead of knowing your users. Who was even using this?
• Amazon is building out a live audio feature. The long-term vision is for users to access live concerts through Amazon Music. Meh.
• Facebook is reducing political content in the newsfeed. Finally. Still not sure if I want to use it regularly even with this change 😆
• Jake Paul keeps breaking boxing records. He’s undefeated, and boxing needed the kind of hype he’s bringing. He also invested in a sports betting company this week, so it will be interesting to see how this all comes together.
• Twitter released their long-rumored Super Follows subscription feature, which allows users to subscribe to accounts they like for a fee.
• While we’re on the topic of Twitter, the network is planning to roll out new privacy tools for users. The feature set includes the option to auto-delete older tweets. Sign me up!
• Here’s how to build your audience on Pinterest, which is an often overlooked place to get new customers.
• Tell me you’re from the year 2021 without telling me you’re from the year 2021: A seven-year-old YouTube star is partnering with Gary Vee for an NFT project.
• And finally, Here are 4 quick ideas for Reels content.

Search & Content

• Here’s an interesting look at how Apple’s App Store algorithm ranks apps based on keywords. One interesting takeaway: if you optimize for a single keyword, it gives newer apps a chance of ranking with more established ones. I actually didn’t know you could optimize for keywords, and thought search results are based on downloads and reviews only.
• If you write or create for a technical audience, and you wonder why your traffic isn’t growing, it could be because 58% of technical audiences block Google Analytics. Good for them. Not so much for you. An even bigger stat: 88% of Firefox users block Google Analytics. I’m considering alternatives myself, so if you’ve used Fathom or Plausible or something of that nature, let me know how you like it!
• Last week, we wrote about Google randomly rewriting page titles in the SERP (search engine results page). Here’s a free tool that will let you check if your website’s pages have been being rewritten.
• Organic search isn’t like advertising in the sense that you spend money, get conversions/sales, and can easily do the math on the return on your investment. Here’s how to do that with organic search.
• Here are some tips to help you make infographics more appealing. Many people forget that infographics should actually tell a story, and shouldn’t just be numbers in graphic form.

Advertising & Branding

• Your business needs an enemy. Why? It does amazing things for your marketing when you have an enemy to include in your copywriting and advertising. If you’re following this train of thought all the way through, your customer is the hero, and you are a guide that helps them avoid the enemy.
• Starting next year, responsive search ads will be the only ad type you can add to Google Ads, effectively replacing expanded text ads. Responsive ads use machine learning to generate dynamic ads for you, based on the content of your website. I’ve had great success with these, but trusting Google to always write the correct copy is quite a leap.
• Facebook is also getting into the automated ad game. The goal is to help advertisers maximize campaign performance. In theory, you can create a whole customer pipeline in one session, instead of spending hours on creative, audience building, and multiple ad sets.
• One of the best companies at maximizing social proof to acquire new customers? Shipbob. If you’ve never heard of them, take a look at this case study for ideas to use social proof on your website and marketing channels.
• We don’t talk about Twitter ads enough on the newsletter. Personally, I think it’s an often overlooked ad channel and can be really effective with the right creative. Here are some tips, directly from Twitter, on how to maximize your campaigns.
• Speaking of ads, here are the keys to a successful TikTok advertising campaign, in infographic form.
• Reddit launched a new ad type this week called “Conversation Placement” which allows advertisers to place an ad directly under the original post and before the first comment. When done right, this can be powerful given the context and placement of the ads (reaching users when they are in research mode).

Jobs

It’s crazy that the job board just started last week because at the time of this writing there are almost 100 jobs on the board. They range from internships to executive positions. Here are a couple of interesting ones. Want to see them all? Just hit the jobs link on the main website.

• Director of Digital Marketing @ Glossier. One of the OG direct to consumer success stories is searching for someone to build out performance marketing.
• Marketing Specialist @ Carta. Carta helps startup employees make sense of their equity grants.
• Creative Specialist @ Kynship. Be on the frontlines of influencer-generated content and use that content for advertising.

Fun

• Perhaps you’ve heard the story of Bishop Sycamore, a high school that ended up playing on ESPN via shady marketing. If not, this deep dive is worth a weekend read.
• The stuff we’re buying on Amazon could be stolen. Several crime rings steal from stores in bulk and then resell online.
• Why every snack has a spicy version now. There’s even a Flamin’ Hot flavor of Mountain Dew now.
• Watch The real reason McDonald’s ice cream machines are always broken if you have 30 mins to spare this week.

That’s it for this week, thank you for reading! Stay tuned to next week’s newsletter for the link to get your free stickers for being an early member! Until then, here’s how you can help me keep growing:

• Share this newsletter, either by forwarding to someone or sharing the website to your network.
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