👋 What’s up everyone! Back in your inbox with everything that happened this week in marketing.

This doesn’t fit into a single category, but The Elephant in the room: The myth of exponential hypergrowth is an excellent long form piece dispelling the myth of exponential growth – especially the classic examples of Facebook and Slack. Worth the long read, and worth sharing to your leadership teams too.

Ok, on to the roundup 👇

Social Media & The Creator Economy

• TikTok is expanding the testing and rollout of its Stories feature. Yes, it’s the same stories format we’re all familiar with. No, it won’t get you to use TikTok if you’re not there yet.
• TikTok and Instacart have partnered, so you can instantly order the ingredients from whatever godforsaken 60 second recipes you happen to be watching.
• Here’s a step-by-step guide for businesses that want to experiment with Instagram Live. With so many choices to do a live broadcast these days, it’s good to read a primer before you jump in.
• Oh, Facebook is on TikTok now. Yes, that IS the sound of the pending apocalypse you hear in the distance.
• Pinterest just released a new feature that lets you share idea pins to other platforms.
• Twitter already rolled back last week’s algorithm timeline update after intense user feedback. We like what we like, and we don’t like it to change abruptly.

SEO & Content Marketing

• One of the biggest stories this week was Google’s announcement to retire their legacy product (Universal Analytics) in favor of the much-maligned GA4. This caused an immediate uproar. The good news: the transition is over a year away.
• Looking for a Google Analytics alternative? I’ve been happy with Fathom Analytics. It’s privacy focused, GDPR-compliant by default, and way easier to use than GA (you don’t need a six-hour course to understand how to use it).
• SEO for social media is something we don’t bring up enough. The team at Later put together a quick guide on increasing your presence on Instagram via a smart SEO strategy.
• Running content marketing for an e-commerce brand? Need some inspiration? Here are 9 e-commerce companies that are doing an impressive job at putting out unforgettable content.
• This set of reminders of consumer behavior are great for planning your content strategy. Spoiler alert: humans are lazy, would rather skim, and are impatient.
• The survey results in this article are eye-opening from the perspective of the future of online marketing. One stat that stands out: over the last year, there was a 19% increase in people who made a purchase because of an email they read on mobile.
• Even more email marketing stats: the team at Campaign Monitor put together this list of 2022 Email Marketing Benchmarks which is broken down by industry and day. One interesting thing: average open rates have gone up, but average click-to-open rates have gone down.
• This thread on SEO tips for small business owners is great. Some are good reminders, but there are some new tips I haven’t seen before.

Copywriting, Branding & Advertising

• Spotify inked a deal with FC Barcelona to be the title partner of the football club’s stadium. Also included in the deal: Spotify’s brand on team shirts, and using in-stadium displays to promote music artists.
• FreeWater, a bottled and boxed water company, is letting companies take over their packaging as an experiment at SXSW. The company hopes their clients see a return on investment and that this can become a big moneymaker in the future.
• Old Navy’s latest commercial, “Written by the Internet” was created by reading TikTok comments. Here’s how it all came together.
• One of the big topics this week was Doja Cat x Taco Bell TikToks that at first glance are awkward. To me, they’re a brilliant use of influencer marketing, to the tune of 28M+ views of her two TikToks. It’s all a play to re-launch the Mexican Pizza menu item. Here’s TikTok 1, and here’s TikTok 2.
• Copywriting and sales go hand-in-hand. Cold email requires knowing principles for both. This video from Kevin Dorsey and Dave Gerhardt breaks down how to make cold sales emails affective.

For Fun

• Where to find the best virtual backgrounds for Zoom. Let’s face it, we’re never going to get rid of video meetings. Might as well make them interesting.

Woo! You made it to the end. Thank you so much for being here for another week.

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