The Good, the Bad and the Ugly of LinkedIn Ads This week, I was researching LinkedIn ad creatives for one of my upcoming marketing courses. First, I scrolled my feed: only the bad and the ugly. Defeated and bored, I resorted to the LinkedIn Ad Library and checked the high-growth B2B brands. What I found was the day to my LI feed's night. What high-growth B2B brands do differently: Experimentation ➡️ 50+ active ad creatives Proven best practices ➡️ top-performing ad types Irresistible...
16 days ago • 2 min read
Happy Friday, fellow marketing animals. One trend I forgot to include in my list of 55+ marketing predictions for 2025 is this: These days, no top marketers read the articles in vestigial marketing blogs. Instead, they search their LinkedIn feeds for the latest news and discussions. And they open their inboxes to find new deep dives on growth tactics, social media hacks, and strategic GTM by the leading content creators in industry. One thing that amazed me while researching the best...
about 1 month ago • 5 min read
Marketing Things is now Marketing Fix Over the past three weeks, I spent too many hours researching the marketing newsletter landscape. I was surprised to see that most Reddit forums and lists recommend the not-so-great newsletters by the industry's ancients: HubSpot, Moz, Neal Patel (or, as I found out, #stealpatel). That's not what the cool-kid marketers read these days, or is it? I hope not because there are lots of brilliant marketing newsletters out there, most written by individual...
about 1 month ago • 3 min read
TL;DR: Marketing trends will continue to shift A LOT this year... Writing about 2024 marketing trends, I focused on the Big Five of trends, including Gen Z social media, UGC-style content, AI hype going down (I was wrong) and sustainability going up. An important shift form the early 2020s is that marketing strategies, tactics, and channels have become increasingly differentiated among B2B v.s. B2C, virtual v.s. physical products. Also, there’s a whole new space of AI marketing tools, the...
about 2 months ago • 7 min read
Are industry trend reports worth the marketing investment? Last week, I wrote about creating a 30-page industry report for a B2B brand I'm working with. It took me ca 55h to research, write, design, and promote it, plus report on results. Was this enormous undertaking worth it? Many B2B software behemoths (HubSpot, Adobe, Salesforce), by launching and promoting "X Year Trends in X" reports seem to validate the strategy. But what about the small B2B brands just entering the market? Based on my...
3 months ago • 5 min read
Ever downloaded an industry trend report or e-book? As for me, I've downloaded 100+ of those.... Why? The landing page text might say things like "we polled nearly 1,800 designers and developers from four continents..." (Figma) but, of course, I never read the promo text. Because it's the impeccably designed cover that gets me. Like 8 billion other human animals, I'm a visual creature. The design team at Intercom wins the beauty pageant – as well as my email address that I exchange for the...
3 months ago • 7 min read
Remote work: a human right or... A few weeks ago, an interview with Spotify’s HR chief Katarina Berg relaunched a heated discussion on whether companies should allow remote work. In her interview with Raconteur, Berg voiced a PR-worthy statement: “You can’t spend a lot of time hiring grown-ups and then treat them like children.” The words were echoed in click-baity headlines by most business publications, from Fortune to Entrepreneur to Fast Company. Nobody seemed to question the premise of...
5 months ago • 6 min read
Accepting new marketing projects! Just a quick FYI note that I'm back in business after a 4-month writing break and open to 2-3 new marketing consultation projects. (If you're new to this newsletter, read more about my background here.) In September/October 2024, based in NYC: Doing intro calls, one-off auditing and small-scale consulting projects. From November 2024, based in London: All the above + large-scale projects, e.g. part-time CMO and week-on-week growth projects. Book the November...
6 months ago • 2 min read
You asked, I answer. This will be the most transparent newsletter I've ever written. (Yes, we'll also get to the money talks.) Two weeks ago, I wrote about my life as a freelance marketer and part-time writer. Many of you, readers, got back to me to share your own freelancing stories and ask further questions: on pricing, getting started, and more. Thank you! (If you missed the previous newsletter on freelancing, you may want to check it out here before continuing with this one.) Before I get...
11 months ago • 12 min read