TLDR Marketing 2025-11-03

📨 What if direct mail was as easy and predictable as digital? (Sponsor)

Direct mail campaigns require more than slick software. To design, print, and mail letters at predictable times (and costs!), you need a national print delivery network with routing, printing, and delivery infrastructure. And that's why you need Lob.

Lob is trusted by 12,000+ companies for everything from campaign building to logistics to analytics. Lob's Postal IQ chooses the most efficient USPS path before printing even begins, optimizing every execution step from campaign to mailbox.

"We can have a mail piece printed and in the mail stream within two or three days – that's a massive differentiator." - Abby Warner, 120Water

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News & Trends

The Lengths Americans Are Willing to Go to Make Every Penny Count (4 minute read)

Americans are finding creative ways to stretch their budgets and get more from every purchase. They're diluting cleaners, using smaller portions of products, shopping at discount stores, buying in bulk, and growing their own food. These habits are hitting consumer companies. Procter & Gamble reported a 2% drop in home and fabric-care volume, while private-label sales stayed flat. One household cut its grocery bill from $1,696 to $1,265 by portioning carefully.

The 2025 Social Media Salary Report (7 minute read)

Social media compensation is rising most for veterans. Salaries jumped 12% for pros with 12+ years experience, while entry-level pay only matched inflation. B2B specialists earn 10% more than their B2C peers, and those in tech or working in-house at large companies see the highest pay. Titles now matter more - splitting Social Media Manager and Senior Social Media Manager yields a $5K difference in medians.

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Strategies & Tactics

Say who your product is NOT for (3 minute read)

People are more likely to choose a product when it highlights who it's not for. Across eight experiments, ads using negative framing such as "Not for light coffee drinkers" or "If you don't like spice, skip this sauce" increased product choice and engagement by up to 48%. This works because it makes products seem more specialized and better aligned with personal preferences. The effect has been strongest for food and drink items tested on US audiences, so results may vary across categories or cultures.

Traffic is no longer a reliable growth metric (7 minute read)

Webflow drives AI discovery through 3 automated tactics. It refreshes website content at 5X the normal rate, boosting traffic on updated pages by 40%. Webinars are repurposed into 5-10 content assets each, reducing post-production time by 80% and increasing AI visibility. It also automates FAQs with schema markup, which led to a 24% rise in SEO impressions and 331 new AI citations. This helps its content get cited by models like ChatGPT and drives higher-quality conversions.

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Resources & Tools

Reach millions of tech professionals at scale (Sponsor)

Over 6 million tech professionals read TLDR including developers, product managers, marketers, designers and executives. Get in front of your target audience with an ad placement just like this one! Learn more about running a test campaign.

Amplitude's AI Visibility Tracker (Tool)

Input your brand name, and this tool will provide data on how it performs across different platforms. It produces insights on competitor comparisons, top cited domains and URLs per prompt, visibility by topic area, and more. It's free to use.

How to 'hack' YouTube's 'Ask' feature (1 minute read)

YouTube's Gemini-powered "Ask" feature is now baked into the analytics backend and provides insight into content engagement. Since it's in beta, it only provides 3 preset prompts at the top of your analytics dashboard. You can click the 'stop' button in the chat window to pause the tool and then input your own custom prompt.

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Miscellaneous

How Reddit built the internet's best comment section (3 minute read)

Reddit turned its comment section into the platform's main feature. Its design combined upvotes, karma, and nested threads to make discussions scalable, helping it reach over 100K active communities and 2.7B comments a year. The upvote system prioritizes quality over timing, keeping conversations dynamic and rewarding meaningful contributions. Karma and threaded conversations further motivate users to create and explore content in depth.

Which marketing channel provides the best return on investment for small game publishers? (5 minute read)

Small game publishers get the best return when paid ads support, not replace, community-driven marketing. TikTok and Reddit increase awareness, but conversions and platform fees can hurt ROI. Publishers like No More Robots spend around $50k pre-launch to maintain visibility, while live events, digital showcases, and streamer collaborations sustain authenticity and word-of-mouth.

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