This week's Talking Growth is a late one, but don't worry, it's still packing a punch. We dive into David Dorbik's genius marketing play, highlight the shift of brands utilizing influencers outside of branded shoutouts, and show you how to market without marketing.

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‍📰Talking Creators

David Dorbik 100k Puzzle
YouTube star, David Dorbik, just released one of the most innovative marketing and product campaigns I've seen. Unlike his free Chipotle for year campaign, Dorbik is releasing the 100k Puzzle and giving every person that purchases a puzzle a chance to win 100k. This crushes it in terms of revenue for Dorbik. With around 14M+ subscribers across social, if 1% of his audience buys a puzzle, he makes $4M. That $100k award is well worth the 139000% ROI.

Ratatoulie on TikTok
Ratatoulie is coming to TikTok. I have to admit, I was not following this production as thoroughly as I could but nonetheless, it's impressive that a crowdsourced rendition of the movie was made possible through TikTok. This campaign grew so large that a fund for broadway actors was created to help support during the pandemic.  

Real Estate Agents leveraging Influencers
Where in the early stages of it, but large brands will start leveraging influencers on everything from driving local sales, to helping recruit better talent. The days of influencers being used exclusively for sponsored shoutouts are over. This rings true when real estate agents tapped influencers to help promote rental units.

🤳Talking Social & Platforms

IG Shopping Reels
The social platforms that prioritize creators will win. Instagram understands this hence the reason they copied TikTok. Their goal is to move quickly and develop more solutions for brands and creators to monetize. The ability to monetize is one of the big two when it comes to creators biggest pain points. The other is discoverability. The next step for both Reels and TikTok is shoppable live streams.

Facebook Instagram Calendar
More Facebook and more proof on Facebook's effort to prioritize creators. This time, it comes in the form of the Instagram calendar in Facebook Creator Studio. The new Instagram calendar will allow users to plan, track, and schedule posts for Instagram Feed posts and IGTV up to six months early.

Twitter x Snapchat Partnership
Most social platforms copy each other, not partner. That changes with the announcement of Twitter and Snapchat's partnership to allow Tweets to be featured in Snapchat videos.

☂️Talking Drops From Creators

Newsletter Spy
Founded by Jakob Greenfield, Newsletter Spy is the much-needed database compiling the data points of 20,000+ Substack newsletters. The database includes the number of subscribers, creator names and bios, newsletter name, and the average number of comments and likes. It's a great resource for finding niche newsletters to advertise.

🌱Talking Growth Updates

Client Growth + Wins of the week

• TikTok following grew from 621,700 followers to 690,600 followers
• Instagram went from 24,800 followers to 30,200 followers
• Newsletter subscribers grew from 6,671 to 7,355
• Course signups from 1731 to 1890 enrollments
• Private community from 200 - 211 members

What's working: TikTok sends a newsletter out which gives clues regarding to what content they'll push. With it being the holidays, they're leaning heavily into holiday-themed content. One client's video gained 3M views in 48 hours. Don't forget, once you figure out what's working on TikTok it's time to repost it to IG Reels which is why growth has occurred so quickly.

Tactic of the week:

How to market while providing value: Providing value is and will always be the best way to market without marketing. Danny Postma proves this with the release of his product Headlime, by offering free copywriting advice on Indie Hackers. As more people come for copywriting help, he's able to drive that traffic to his product page.

Source:IndieHackers

Not included are 6 more marketing strategies and tactics from
myself and others.

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🏄Things you want to know

• You can finally check out the first few minutes of Tenet regardless of what Chris Nolan says.
• Kid Cudi drops his long-awaited Man on The Moon III: The Chosen and it's definitely worth the listen.
• According to Apple, it's time for everyone to wear a bra.
• There's more Kid Cudi. This time with his sneaker collaboration with Adidas.

Until Next Time

I hope you enjoyed this week's newsletter. If you enjoyed what you read, forward this email to a friend. Just tell them to subscribe. Lastly, I tend to post more short-form content across social, so if you don't already, follow me and say hi.