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Monday’s Marketing Minute: Pinterest on Fire, Employees Love Remote Work, Hubspot Acquires The Hustle

Happy Monday, y’all! Ok guys I have an announcement to make, and I could NOT be more excited! This Friday, I am relaunching the Think Like a Rock Star newsletter as the Backstage Pass newsletter. If you are already subbed to TLAR, you’re in!

So why the relaunch?

For years, since at least 2015, I have had peers who are smarter than I, all industry names that you know, telling me the same thing. “Mack, you gotta get on email. Newsletters are where it’s at!’

So I launched the Think Like a Rock Star newsletter. But I couldn’t figure out the format, the audience I wanted to appeal to, or the content that should be included. And the schedule was non-existent. I honestly did everything wrong with the newsletter, and yet it still had over 3,000 subscribers. That told me that the subscribers enjoyed the content I was creating, I just needed to get the strategy dialed in.

At the same time, I am watching how my dear friend Ann Handley is killing it with her newsletter Total Annarchy. The branding is on-point, the schedule is consistent, and the content is spectacular. And recently, I’ve discovered The Hustle (more on them later) and Morning Brew newsletters. Both are insanely popular right now, and I love the format.  Then last week I was in a Clubhouse room where I heard Ann say that in 3 years of writing her newsletter, she had grown it to 45,000 subscribers.

That was the final push I needed to go all-in on newsletters. And that’s what I am doing with Backstage Pass.

What will it feature? Click here to get more information, and to subscribe. In short, I want every issue to replicate the content and material I would cover if I could spend a full day with your company, training and working with your marketing, digital and content teams. Each issue will be massive, it will require hours to consume, which is why I am delivering it on Friday so you have all weekend to enjoy it and can implement the ideas it contains starting on the following Monday. I spend approximately 20 hours on every issue, and it will hit inboxes every Friday at around 8am Central.

Please do subscribe to Backstage Pass. My best content will be here, and in Backstage Pass. Thank you!

 

Now…on to today’s Marketing Minute:

 

Not surprisingly, workers are loving the freedom of working remotely from home, as we see from this eMarketer chart. However, remote work is creating a lot of problems for companies that were forced into the move due to covid. Such companies are struggling to effectively manage suddenly remote workers, and the workers themselves are being affected by a loss of office life and in-person interactions with their teams and co-workers. Managing remote workers is actually one of the biggest concerns CEOs have right now, and I’ll be doing a deep dive into this topic and how to manage remote work in next week’s issue of Backstage Pass.

 

Pinterest is closing in on half a billion active users. What’s interesting is that Pinterest’s growth is mostly fueled by international users, growth in the US has pretty much stalled. Pinterest’s monthly usage grew 11% in the US, and a whopping 46% internationally. Additionally, most of Pinterest’s revenue comes from US users. So if the platform can figure out how to more effectively monetize it’s non-US users, it could be see massive growth in overall revenue in the coming years.

 

Finally, Hubspot acquired The Hustle last week. I’ll have more on this in Friday’s issue of Backstage Pass, but I did have to chuckle at how another popular newsletter Morning Brew, reported this news. The majority of their blurb on the news focused on how this signals that there is an acquisition market for select newsletters that have built a massive following. In sum: Morning Brew is thinking this news means they could be acquired as well, and they are probably right.

 

That’s all for now, please do subscribe to Backstage Pass, as the first issue will go out this Friday morning. And tomorrow night at #ContentCircus on Twitter, we will be discussing Winning Strategies For Creating Content on Twitter. And we’ll be discussing it on Twitter! How amazing is that???

And see you here in 24 hours for a case study on customer acquisition that I think you’ll find fascinating. See you then!

About Mack Collier

My name is Mack Collier and I am a digital marketing and content strategist located in Alabama. Since 2006 I've helped companies of all sizes from startups to global brands such as Adobe, Dell and Ingersoll-Rand, create customer-centric programs, content and experiences. A long-time internet geek, I've been online since 1988 and began using social networking sites in 1991 when I joined Prodigy. Today, I help companies understand how new technologies like web3, crypto and artificial intelligence can integrate with existing marketing strategies to lead to exceptional customer experiences.