Topical authority works best when brands build deep expertise in a core area before expanding. ChatGPT cited brands in 74% of closely related categories compared to 50% of distant ones, but overall brand mentions declined from 44% to 25%. Consistent coverage within a category drove stronger visibility than spreading content across unrelated topics. Brands should expand into adjacent areas gradually, as the impact of broader coverage varies by industry.
Social has become a core part of the holiday shopping journey, moving shoppers from discovery to purchase. 37% of shoppers use social for gift inspiration, close to search at 41%. Social also drives transactions, with 78% purchasing in-app. Creators play a central role, with 94% of social shoppers turning to them for guidance. AI is already used by 23% of shoppers, while messaging remains a key touchpoint throughout the buying process.
Online communities often underperform because teams launch them without a clear strategy for long-term engagement. The biggest issues come from unclear goals, weak internal support, and community operations that don't match member needs. Teams should define what the community is meant to achieve and invest in the right infrastructure. Members need to be given room to create valuable discussions instead of relying on heavy moderation.
Instagram uses Reel audio as a distribution signal, so brands should monitor rising sounds and publish during the early adoption window before trends peak. Similar videos can see very different reach depending on the audio choice, making real-time trend tracking more effective than planning content too far in advance. Teams should leave room in their calendars to adapt as new sounds gain momentum.
What's holding you back from delivering standout digital experiences? This 15-question benchmark [8] from Contentful covers your workflows, content structure, governance, and AI usage to pinpoint your bottlenecks. Discover where your biggest opportunities are, understand where to invest next, and get a practical action plan based on your
Spotify now rewards active fan engagement over automated growth tactics. User Notes lets artists and playlist curators add context to songs, which creates new opportunities for storytelling and music discovery inside playlists. Campaign Lift provides a clearer way to measure the impact of Discovery Mode by estimating results beyond organic streams, which helps validate ROI and choose the right tracks for promotion. Spotify also now requires fans to reconnect third-party app permissions every 6 months, so artists need to build email and SMS lists and keep a steady release schedule to maintain fan connections.
The App Store is seeing a resurgence of niche apps. Rather than replacing apps, AI is helping independent developers build focused tools that solve everyday problems. Apps like Albo organize saved content from across social platforms, PI.FYI brings back friend-driven recommendations, and ThingsBook offers a personal space for tracking interests and memories. Simple, human-centered experiences can still stand out in the AI era.
Pie named creator Nadya Okamoto as co-founder and CMO as brands lean more on individuals over traditional marketing. Okamoto built a large audience while scaling her previous company and now uses her platform to introduce Pie, gather feedback, and influence product decisions in real time. The role focuses on testing ideas publicly and iterating quickly, reflecting how marketing is becoming more creator-led and experimental.
The agency vs. in-house debate is outdated as budgets stall and AI turns execution into a commodity. Agencies still provide speed and cross-industry exposure, but their reliance on utilization and margins often leads to diluted ownership and limited visibility into real business outcomes. Freelancers offer cost-efficient execution, but are constrained by capacity and tend to diagnose problems through a narrow lens. In-house teams align deeply with product and strategy, yet can lose external perspective and default to safer decisions due to higher personal stakes.
Subvertising uses parody and imitation to critique brand messaging, often gaining traction when it feels more honest or aligned with public sentiment than the original ads. From billboard hacking in the 1970s to coordinated campaigns today, these efforts have influenced perception, exposed ethical gaps, and even contributed to policy change. With AI making imitation easier, brands face greater risk of losing control of their narratives, especially when messaging lacks credibility or contradicts real practices.
Reddit's stock fell more than 20% after an earnings report that beat expectations on nearly every metric except search referral traffic. Google's AI Overviews cut website referral clicks by almost half compared to traditional search results, and Reddit's now weighing whether to end its $60M Google licensing deal over it. Google disputes the decline, saying organic click volume to websites has stayed relatively stable year over year. The Economist and Reuters are reportedly weighing similar exits, since the same referral squeeze hits any publisher still dependent on Google search traffic.
Use customer interview recordings as a source for keyword research by extracting pain point questions with AI. Search those questions, analyze top-ranking pages in Semrush, and identify the keywords they rank for. Expand the list with related URLs and create content targeting low-volume, low-competition terms that closely match customer needs.
Employee personal brands should be treated as an investment, not a retention risk. Companies that help employees build audiences create stronger advocacy and visibility, even if those employees eventually move on. Instead of relying on one executive voice, encourage teams to develop their own presence through personal content, employee-led podcasts, and shared expertise. The goal is to make employees so valuable that they never have to rely on a resume alone.
Open rates can be misleading, with revenue serving as the stronger measure of email performance. Segment audiences by engagement, purchase frequency, and customer value to send more relevant campaigns. Increase frequency when subscribers are engaged, test different opt-in offers beyond discounts, and review automations for missed revenue. Instead of removing inactive subscribers, use reactivation campaigns to bring back customers who may still convert.
Everyone's using AI, but are organizations benefiting? According to an Atlassian survey [10] of 12k knowledge workers and 173 Fortune 1000 executives, that's unclear. When AI tools overlook collaboration, individual productivity gains come at the cost of alignment: the fragmentation tax. To learn how leading marketing teams actually get
This webinar, on August 5, will show how to stop pursuing prospects who won't convert by recognizing early signs of misalignment. It will explain how to separate curiosity from real intent and why the right audience requires less effort to close. The session will focus on using buyer behavior and timing to improve targeting and drive more consistent sales.
Google released its first standalone help page explaining how to create YouTube audio ads. It's an official reference for the format's specifications and setup.
Cheaper tokens didn't shrink AI bills - they multiplied how many calls get made. Token prices fell more than 95% in three years, yet enterprise LLM spend more than doubled in 6 months to $8.4 billion. The volume surge lands directly on margin, since AI-native gross margins run 50-60% against 80-90% for traditional per-seat SaaS, and a flat seat price can't absorb a cost that scales with usage. That's forcing a shift toward per-action and per-outcome pricing, the model Salesforce, Intercom, and GitHub Copilot have already adopted.
Marketing emails now carry legal risk. Courts have ruled that misleading subject lines alone can trigger damages even if unopened. This applies to any company emailing consumers, since lists can't exclude specific states and federal anti-spam laws offer no protection. Nearly 200 lawsuits have targeted retailers, airlines, and colleges over extended “deadline” claims, with damages up to $500 per email, now reduced to $100 under a 2026 law.
88% of Reddit users made a purchase last year based on something they found on the platform. Joining that conversation pays off, big time... if you have a strategy. (Buying upvotes isn't going to cut it.)
Discover the inside story of how Sonos built one of Reddit's most trusted brand voices without ever launching a branded account - straight from Sonos's Head of Global Communities Keith Nieves (u/KeithFromSonos), and Rob Fawkes of Standing on Giants. They'll get into why pseudonymity and upvotes make trust nearly impossible to fake, and why showing up early beats showing up in a crisis.
→ JOIN LIVE ON AUGUST 5TH [5]at 3pm GMT / 11am ET / 8am PT (or RSVP to watch on-demand)
AI search visibility depends heavily on whether a model already remembers a brand before it searches the web. A new report found that remembered brands were searched 3.2 times more often than brands outside the model's memory, with search rates of 55.7% versus 17.4% across nearly 4,000 AI responses. Category authority built through press coverage, analyst mentions, partnerships, and consistent brand association appears to increase the odds that AI models will search for and recommend a brand. Strong live content still helps newer brands appear in AI searches, but building long-term brand recognition gives a more reliable path to visibility across future AI answers.
Self-improving marketing is already live, with AI systems running continuous loops that execute and refine their own work. In one case, an SEO loop ran every 2 hours for 9 weeks, while another saw organic sessions jump 85% alongside more efficient paid performance. Each cycle builds on the last, compounding gains over time. As execution becomes automated, the role of marketing shifts toward setting direction and judging outcomes, while the system handles ongoing optimization.
Growing an email list starts with creating discovery content on a consistent schedule and using lead magnets to capture subscribers. Instead of lengthy ebooks or courses, businesses should create quick, actionable resources like templates, swipe files, and checklists that solve a specific problem. These can be repurposed from existing newsletters, social posts, videos, or client materials. Testing new lead magnets monthly and promoting them through social channels, websites, and email flows helps find what drives conversions.
A research-led website redesign can grow conversions without risking revenue when every change is validated through testing before launch. Churnet Valley Railway used user research to find specific friction points, then rolled out A/B tested updates one page at a time. The homepage redesign increased conversions by 5%, and reusing proven design patterns helped lift Breakfast Train bookings by 10%, Midweek Lunch Train bookings by 48%, and dining page conversions by 13%. The program also showed that practical information, customer FAQs, and richer visuals such as video can increase bookings, which helped the railway sell out its Christmas event after a 7% booking increase.
Tinder is trying to get its users out of the swipe screen and into cooking classes and mahjong nights instead. The feature grew out of research into Gen Z's post-pandemic social atrophy, letting users see who's attending an event beforehand and swipe on them afterward rather than in the moment to reduce the pressure of in-person rejection. Nearly 70% of eligible users engaged during a 60-plus event LA pilot, and it's now expanding to 26 cities across the US and Europe by September, one of Tinder's largest financial and engineering bets in a decade.
Most brands optimize for Google while AI answers quietly reroute buyers elsewhere. On August 5, Josh Grant, founder of StackedGTM and former VP of Growth at Webflow, joins AirOps to break down the playbooks turning AEO into revenue this quarter, comparison pages, pricing pages, and third-party proof.
Alertmouse is a lightweight brand monitoring tool that finds and tracks mentions across the web, including sources Google Alerts often misses. Users set up alerts in minutes, then receive filtered, prioritized results via email or API. It's built for marketers, founders, and creators who want signal without noise or enterprise bloat. Pricing is freemium, and your first alert is free forever. Paid plans are available for additional alerts and usage.
AI search is changing what gets surfaced and cited, making traditional SEO metrics like rankings and traffic less reliable indicators of performance. Growth Advisor Kevin Indig will join AirOps Head of Search Marketing Josh Spilker on August 13 to explain how to measure visibility through citations and share of voice. They'll also cover why methods like last click attribution and prompt tracking can mislead.
Katie Passarello, Co-Founder of PitchWell, explains how AI is changing public relations by making storytelling and media outreach more accessible. The discussion explores how businesses can improve visibility while maintaining the human experiences that make stories compelling. It also highlights why third-party credibility remains important as brands compete with the growing volume of AI-generated content.
Developers distrust campaigns but trust each other, so Cursor built its growth strategy around peer proof rather than paid promotion. It removed setup friction to create an immediate "wow" moment, shipped rough features in public instead of waiting for polish, and used a free tier to drive word of mouth while paid tiers converted engineers at companies like Shopify and OpenAI who started expensing it themselves. Cursor also turned community into its marketing department, paying 300 city-based ambassadors to run hackathons that double as tutorials, content, and recruiting all at once.
A newly released report based on five years of influencer deal data shows that influencer marketing has matured into a more structured and efficient channel. Average creator contract values grew from $3,065 in 2019 to $7,400 in 2025 while average deal timelines fell 36% as contracts and campaign processes became more standardized. Brands get better results from long-term creator relationships because 24% of partnerships now include repeat engagements, and repeated campaigns build audience trust over time. Micro-creators often generate stronger revenue per follower while larger creators still deliver greater overall reach.
ClickUp is hiring a $500K - $1M solo CMO to run its marketing function using AI agents, as companies rethink org structures. While Fortune 500 firms are eliminating the CMO role, ClickUp is consolidating it into one high-leverage operator focused on systems and judgment. The role shows how AI compresses execution and raises the value of taste and decision-making. It also introduces risks around scale and reliance on a single individual.
Find a competitor profile on G2 or Capterra, open it in Ahrefs Page Inspect, and compare the current version to one from 6 to 12 months earlier to see every content change. Use those edits to spot new product descriptions, structured feature sections, and outcome-focused messaging that can improve AI search visibility. Apply the strongest ideas to your own third-party profiles instead of guessing what works.
Being featured on Product Hunt now depends less on total upvotes and more on consistency and credibility. Schedule your launch early to get featured, secure an experienced hunter, and activate supporters in advance with real engagement. Avoid asking for upvotes directly, since coordinated behavior gets penalized. Focus on generating thoughtful comments and replying quickly. Stagger promotion across time zones to maintain steady momentum. Skip paid upvotes, as detection systems can remove votes or derail your entire launch.
Automatable marketing tasks repeat in a predictable pattern and stay easy to review before anything public goes out. Meeting recaps, search term sorting, pulling campaign summaries, and customer feedback clustering are all automatable tasks that can consume a lot of time but require little original thinking. An estimated 10 to 15% of a marketer's time can already be automated with current technology.