TLDR Marketing 2026-09-16
Thought leadership trend 💡, LI follower growth tips 📈, paid search for AIO 💰
Gen Z romanticised the library into relevance again (3 minute read)
Gen Z is driving a library revival through viral TikTok and Instagram content. Creators frame libraries as aesthetic, free places to study, work, and socialize. 67% report visiting public libraries, including many who are not active readers. The trend also ties into growing interest in physical books and digital detox. For libraries, social content can turn cultural relevance into real-world visits and stronger evidence for continued public funding.
Companies Are Hiring Editors to Run Thought Leadership and Measuring Them on Pipeline (4 minute read)
Companies are hiring senior editors to run thought leadership and tying the function to revenue. Workato, for example, measures its program on win rates, deal velocity, and average sales price instead of content output. Research shows thought leadership can influence buying decisions and reach “hidden buyers” who rarely interact with sales. Recurring research and publishing can also build category authority over time. Owned media is becoming a permanent function with editorial leadership and a pipeline-focused scorecard.
Don't use questions in your titles (1 minute read)
Use statement-based headlines instead of questions to increase engagement with marketing content. A Stanford study found that question titles generated 71.6% fewer comments and 12.6% fewer clicks across experiments and analyses of more than 22,000 news articles, 3 million academic articles, and 53,000 Reddit posts. Questions may perform worse because they signal uncertainty and provide less immediate information to readers. Test statement formats such as “X compared to Y” against question-based titles, then check that title changes don't hurt SEO.
I audited 4 weeks of my LinkedIn posts. Here's what grew my following (4 minute read)
A 4-week LinkedIn audit found that conversation-starting posts, relatable humor, and provocative takes drove the most follower growth. Shorter copy also performed better than long paragraphs. Memes were fast to produce and often earned strong engagement, but they didn't build followers or trust as effectively as video. The best mix is repeatable, high-engagement formats like memes alongside videos and posts that spark debate or make the audience feel seen.
Stop Trying to Go Viral. You Need the Right 100 People to Know Who You Are First (3 minute read)
Personal branding isn't a numbers game, it's a positioning game. Being known for one specific thing, not several, is what makes a name and a topic become inseparable in someone else's mind. The first time an idea gets posted, it's scrolled past. The fifth time, it starts to register, and by the twentieth repetition a name becomes the person others associate with that topic. That kind of association compounds into leverage long before any follower count does.
GEO Webinar: Your customers are asking AI. Does your brand own the answer? (Sponsor)
Join IDHL's SEO, content and digital PR specialists on the 23rd September as they reveal the factors that influence whether ChatGPT, Claude, Copilot and AI-powered search can find, understand and recommend your brand, and discover how to strengthen your visibility across the surfaces that matter.
Register nowAI Overviews and paid search: When to fight, influence, or generate demand (7 minute read)
AI Overviews make it harder to use one bidding strategy across every search query, so marketers should classify terms by intent and AI visibility before allocating budget. High-intent terms belong in the “Fight” bucket, where paying for absolute top placement can still generate direct sales. Informational terms belong in “Influence”, where SEO and PPC should work together to earn citations and brand mentions in AI answers. Zero-click opportunities belong in “Generate Demand”, where budget should move to YouTube, Demand Gen, and content that builds demand before the eventual commercial search. In one B2B account, 83.3% of queries triggering AI answer blocks were informational, showing why reallocating budget across these buckets can matter more than simply adjusting bids.
Salesforce and Nvidia's new reasoning model is everything the AI labs should fear (3 minute read)
Koa answers a problem Salesforce couldn't solve without Nvidia, a reasoning model trained for sales and support work that never has to touch a customer's actual data. It was post-trained entirely on synthetic conversations, including simulated irate customers and negotiating sales reps, and its architecture is built to reach a token-efficient answer faster than a general-purpose frontier model would. Its own AI gateway can now route reasoning-heavy requests to Koa instead of paying frontier-lab rates for the same work.
The Job Market Has Been Contracting for 31 Months (4 minute read)
White-collar hiring has contracted for 31 months, with professional and technical roles shrinking despite stable overall employment. The bigger change is repeated headcount deferrals, leaving existing teams to absorb work indefinitely. Instead of waiting for hiring to recover, identify what you're actually paid for beyond your job title. Turn those skills into something clients or smaller companies would pay for. Build a small version while still employed, then review your progress in 6 months.
Does TV actually suck now? (4 minute read)
Streaming didn't shrink television's quality - it multiplied its supply, turning a manageable weekly lineup into a catalog large enough to produce real decision fatigue. An audience now half-watching on a second screen while scrolling through that catalog is bound to feel worse about whatever it lands on, regardless of how well made it actually is. The fix is a shift in viewing habits, not a demand on the industry to make better shows.
Curated tactics 💡, trends 📈, and tools 🛠️ for cutting edge marketers
Join 330,000 readers for
one daily email