Expert Q & A

4 Tactics That Grew MIT’s Social Audience to 4M+

MIT has a bigger social following than schools 3X its size. How did they accumulate such internet fame? We asked MIT’s director of social strategy, Jenny Fowler.

Mae Rice

The Do’s and Don’ts of Marketing Pet Cloning

How would you market a pet cloning company? That’s the question ViaGen Pets had to answer when it pivoted to the domestic market. Spoiler alert: think influencers, not vets!

Kelsey Donk

3 Non-Garbage Ways To Use NFTs in Marketing

NFTs might feel like the latest scam, but they can help marketers build customer loyalty, find new audiences, and partner with like-minded businesses. Seriously!

Kelsey Donk

Inside Tushy's Super Bowel Monday Success

Not every brand can (or should) post eyebrow-raising poop jokes on social media. But bidet brand Tushy is an exception. We asked them about their recent Super Bowel contest.

Kelsey Donk

The New Mainstream, According to Super Bowl Ads

Super Bowl ads cost so much and reach so many people that they’re usually “basic.” In 2022, turns out cryptocurrencies and electric vehicles are basic!

Mae Rice

4 Reasons Marketing Isn’t Like Dating (Sorry!)

It’s a #MarketingTwitter meme at this point: Marketing is just like dating. But is it really? Not according to B2B marketer Sara Pion. Here's why not.

Mae Rice

3 Perks of Working With Pete Davidson, According to Rowing Blazers

Davidson isn’t just a comedian and honorary Kardashian — he’s a model who can make a fashion campaign pop, says Rowing Blazers art director Georgia Gray.

Kelsey Donk

3 A/B Testing Tips From a Wharton Professor

A marketing professor at University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School dug into data from 2,500+ Optimizely A/B tips for a recent paper — and shared some best practices with us.

Mae Rice

Should You Pay People Crypto To Opt Into Your Marketing?

Permission.io’s CEO Charlie Silver thinks so — and his company has launched a new DSP, Permission Ads, that can do it at scale. Like, Google Ads’ scale.

Mae Rice

3 Things Amanda Natividad Learned From SparkToroing Her Own Twitter

Natividad is VP of Marketing at SparkToro — but this was her first time using her company’s audience research tool on her audience of 58K. Here are her top takeaways.

Mae Rice

3 Key Factors Complicating Cannabis Marketing

Cannabis products might be trendy, but they're surprisingly challenging to market. Marketing a double-edged sword for cannabis brands, with increased competition on one side and a regulatory maze on the other.

Mae Rice

4 New Year’s Resolutions for B2B Marketers

Want to impress a fresh generation of B2B buyers? Pare back the investment in press releases and tap into pop culture references and powerhouses like TikTok.

Mae Rice

How a Deathtech Startup Got 1M+ TikTok Followers

Eterneva makes memorial diamonds from people’s (and pets’) ashes. Not your typical TikTok brand — but they’ve gotten more likes on the platform than Nike.

Mae Rice

How French Social App Yubo Got 20M American Users

Yubo started in France, but the app is now most popular among teens in the United States. We asked Yubo’s head of brand how the company successfully exported itself.

Kelsey Donk

The BFCM Forecast Looks... Sunny?!

Despite talk about #Shipocalypse 2.0 and the end of Black Friday, this coming weekend is looking more lucrative than ever for e-commerce — and sales are still the norm, according to Arka founder Phillip Akhzar

Mae Rice

3 Ways Augmented Reality Can Transform Print Marketing

If you want to launch a print marketing campaign and you also want to make engagement easy, scannable codes are a good solution. But QR codes aren’t for every brand. AR print marketing could be the answer.

Kelsey Donk

5 Pros and Cons of DIYing an Ad Platform, From the Creator of Snapchat Ads

Building an owned ad ecosystem can pay off big-time. But first you have to face challenges, from dumb algorithms to a sales team pivot, says James Borow.

Mae Rice

3 Ways To Get Ready for iOS 15 Effects to 5X

Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection (MPP) launch may have only slightly destabilized open rates so far, but its impact could 5X in the next year. Here’s how to prepare for that now.

Kelsey Donk

How To Market Books on TikTok, According to a #BookTokker

Where do bestseller lists get made? Increasingly, on TikTok, according to a creator who catapulted a 2019 novel onto the 2021 bestseller lists. Here's everything you need to know about #BookTok.

Mae Rice

Are Mobile Apps the Next Big E-Comm Channel?

Apple's privacy updates have shaken up paid social media marketing, and now email marketing. What's an e-commerce business to do? Maybe a mobile app is the answer.

Mae Rice

Can Promoted Tweets Boost Your Personal Brand?

Liron Shapira, co-founder and CEO of Relationship Hero, has been running paid Twitter tests to find out. He let us peek inside his experiment. (Current cost per follower? $50.)

Mae Rice

The New Paid Social Playbook

iOS 14.5 is nearly six months old. Time flies when you… can’t target your ideal customer! Here’s how the pros are adapting to privacy-first paid social.

Mae Rice

Taboola Is Worth $2.6B. Is It Worth Reconsidering?

Is Taboola truly an “eyeballs without conversions” advertising platform? We’ve heard plenty of marketers complain about it, but according to a former power-user, it has its upsides.

Mae Rice

How REI, Allbirds and Bearaby Do Black Friday

Black Friday doesn’t have to be about slashing prices — and this year, supply chain slowdowns mean it kind of can’t be. Luckily, there’s an alternative playbook you can try.

Mae Rice

Does Black Friday Even Make Sense Anymore?

Black Friday 2021 could be our most dysfunctional yet, thanks to clogged ports and limited manufacturing bandwidth. Could this be the end of BFCM? We asked Cart.com’s VP of Logistics, Jay Sauceda.

Mae Rice

How Bearaby Markets Its Cozy Weighted Blankets Year-Round

Bearaby's weighted blankets are most popular in winter — when paid ad prices are at their highest. That's a challenge the company's marketing team tackles with SEO, earned media, CRO, and... hedgehogs?!

Mae Rice

What Makes a Full-Time Marketing Job Sticky?

Believe it or not, full-time marketing roles still exist — but fewer and fewer experienced marketers want one, especially long-term. We asked growth marketer Juda Borrayo what makes a full-time role worth staying in.

Mae Rice

Can Influencers Get Us Vaxxed?

Influencer campaigns have done a lot. But can they make COVID-19 vaccines cool? We walked through the pros and cons of the White House's new "influencer army" with an expert in the field.

Mae Rice

Did GDPR Prepare the EU for iOS14.5?

Marketers in the EU have spent the past three years working on the privacy-first web. GDPR taught them early how to work with opt-in buttons and the like. But iOS 14.5 is a different story.

Mae Rice

Chip and Joanna Gaines' Small-Town Turnaround Playbook

What comes to mind first when we say, "Waco, TX?" If it's Chip and Joanna Gaines, or the HGTV show "Fixer Upper," that's their expert rebrand at work.

Mae Rice

3 Predictions about Facebook’s Thanos-Level Ad Algo

Now that iOS 14.5 has launched, Facebook's ad targeting algorithm has less data to train on. How will that impact its performance? Surge AI founder and data scientist Ferris Jumah gave us his predictions.

Mae Rice

How Magic Spoon Competes with Big Cereal

Cereal has been a sleepy category for years. Enter: Magic Spoon, a DTC brand that disrupted cereal as we know it, and grew 100%+ last year. Here's how they did it.

Mae Rice

So You Had Product-Market Fit in 1995. What Now?

You probably remember Turbie Twist's '90s infomercials. What's the company up to now? Wading into e-commerce — and its storied past is its secret weapon.

Mae Rice

The Case for SEO

Sure, zero-click Google searches are up. But optimizing longform content for search is still absolutely worth it, explains MarketerHire's director of marketing, Tracey Wallace.

Mae Rice

This Is Why You Can’t Find a Head of Growth

Heads of growth are more in-demand than ever, but companies — especially startups — are struggling to fill the role. Delivering Value's Andrew Capland filled us in on why.

Mae Rice

To Find Marketing's Next Big Thing, Look to Hip Hop

Rappers kickstarted mobile marketing as we know it — and they're usually a step ahead of the marketing industry. We talked to Trapital's Dan Runcie about why.

Mae Rice

What If Instagram Like Counts Disappear?

Instagram has been testing hiding like counts on posts. What would this mean for brand accounts — and Instagram ads? We asked Ben-Nun, a digital marketer who's spent $10M+ on Instagram.

Mae Rice

Is Apple's iOS14.5 the End of Paid Social As We Know It?

We asked Nick Shackelford, managing partner at Structured Social, if iOS14.5 has hurt paid social performance data as badly as experts predicted. It's even worse than expected, he said — but the only way out is through.

Mae Rice

The Dark Side of Scalability, According to Nik Sharma

“In order to succeed you need to do things that DON'T scale.” DTC growth marketer Nik Sharma tweeted that back in 2017 — and he says it’s just as true today.

Mae Rice

Should Shopify Merchants Care About the Latest Integrations?

Shopify has been making headlines for recent partnerships. Investors are excited. But what do these updated integrations actually mean for Shopify merchants’ marketing?

Mae Rice

TikTok's Superpower Might Be Marketing Beauty Products

How did The Ordinary achieve its sky-high valuation? Well, it helps that the brand's products have gone viral on TikTok (where it's also verified, natch). We got Doe Lashes founder Jason Wong's take on why TikTok's so powerful in the beauty space.

Mae Rice

How One App Used Lil Nas X to Pop Their TikTok ROI

“The [Venn diagram] of people that are interested in Lil Nas X and… hologram technology is pretty much a circle." Here's how one app discovered that overlap.

Mae Rice

West Elm’s Crisis Marketing Playbook

Furniture retailer West Elm has been having problems. Customers have been railing on their quality and service for years, and the pandemic led to the kind of shipping delays that make DTC brands weep. Why, then, are they doing better than ever?

Mae Rice

How to Rediscover Product-Market Fit Again (and Again) (and Again)

Pre-pandemic, Ministry of Supply was building a modern workwear brand full of crisp-yet-travel-ready clothing — a brand that COVID could’ve crushed. How did they live to tell the tale? It all starts with spotting the four horsemen of a market shift.

Mae Rice

Patio Furniture Is Hot This Winter?!

Most outdoor furniture retailers don’t increase marketing spend in winter months. So why did Outer, a DTC outdoor furniture company, double down on holiday marketing last winter? Founder Jiake Liu explains his strategy that led to millions in sales.

Mae Rice

Inside John Deere's UGC Machine

On Instagram and TikTok, everyone wants to show off their John Deere tractor. Why? And what does that mean for the in-house marketing team? We asked John Deere's director of PR and social, Jen Hartmann.

Mae Rice

Ahrefs CMO Tim Soulo's Code of Ethics for Marketers

We asked Ahrefs CMO Tim Soulo what "ethical marketing" means to him. He answered with a handful of principles he and the Ahrefs team live and work by.

Mae Rice