Last week, Meta stock nosedived and Mark Zuckerberg lost $31B. One factor? Metaverse-related losses.

Rebrands are expensive!

On the bright side, we had a good week by comparison. 💅

In this issue:

• Why marketing ISN’T like dating
• 3 marketing operations red flags
• January 2022 hiring, by the numbers

Today’s loaf of Raisin Bread is sponsored by… #paid.

Roses are red
Violets are blue
Work with creators
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Once you connect with creators, collaborate on beautiful branded content — while #paid handles unsexy stuff like rates, legal and admin.

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EXPERT Q&A

4 reasons marketing isn’t like dating (sorry!)

Check social media this week, and you’ll probably see a post proclaiming the good news: Marketing is like dating.

It’s a #MarketingTwitter meme at this point, an endlessly-recycled analogy proven to drive engagement. 

But is it… accurate? 

Not really, according to Sara Pion, a B2B marketing manager at Voiceflow. Here’s why. 

You only date a handful of people at a time — but you market to millions. 

In marketing, you’re trying to reach an audience of many. But “generally dating is [with] one-ish people,” Pion said.

Even if you’re polyamorous, or the lead on The Bachelor, you’re not using performance data and automations to build relationships at scale — which is what marketing’s all about. 

If you’re dating like a marketer, you’re overanalyzing.

Marketers are often “trying to study human behavior,” Pion said. “Marketers love to talk about psychology.”

Some marketers even look at data on prospective customers’ neural signals, thanks to an emerging field called neuromarketing. 

Approaching dating that way, though, means you’re “overthinking every single thing,” Pion said — and you’re treating your dates more like lab rats than love interests. 

Marketing takes hard skills.

Sure, marketing, dating and all other human interactions go more smoothly when you have soft skills.

But marketing also takes hard skills, Pion noted: data literacy, familiarity with testing frameworks and analytics tools — not to mention an encyclopedic knowledge of marketing acronyms. 

Tweets that minimize this technical element can lead people to pursue marketing careers they regret, or DIY (and tank) their marketing.

Love isn’t a conversion.

If dating is like marketing, then its goal is a conversion. Would that be… intimacy? Love? Marriage? 

Whatever it is, if Pion had a partner who thought of their relationships as sales funnels, “I’d be rethinking the relationship,” she said. “It’s dehumanizing.”

We don’t think she’s alone there. 

Our takeaway? 

Like dating, marketing involves empathy and soft skills — but the similarities basically stop there.

So this Valentine’s Day, our tip is this: Don’t compare your relationship to a nurture stream!  Even though “nurture stream” is marketing’s most romantic term. By far.

TWEET TREAT

Is a faceless resume a faux pas?

That’s what we wondered when we saw this tweet from Appcues director of content and the author of Product-Led Onboarding, Ramli John.

The tweet got 135+ replies, and most of them said no. But why? 

The problems with photo-resumes

There three main downsides people saw:

1. Adding photos to marketing resumes is a gateway to hiring discrimination.

2. There’s no sense in wasting precious resume real estate on a photo when employers can learn so much about a candidate’s personal brand on LinkedIn or Twitter. 

3. Applicant tracking systems (ATS) used by many employers can’t read photos, so they could reject your resume outright!

What’s your take?

We want to know what you think: Should marketing job applicants put their photos on their resumes? (Or … just send a photo, no resume? 😬) 

a) More resume pics, please!
b) Save the headshots for LinkedIn.
c) Why are we even doing resumes these days?

SMALL BITES

The Roblox demo, the Stabilizers and more

Alert! 17- to 24-year-olds are the fastest growing audience on Roblox.

Reciprocal linking is fine for SEO, Google said — as long as it’s natural. 

TikTok’s creator marketplace won’t replace influencer marketers yet. 

Is celebrity cryptocurrency spon … ethical? 

Future and Hailey Beiber starred in the Hugo Boss rebrand.

Facebook lost daily active users in Q4 2021. 

Meet the Stabilizers — Millennials and Gen Xers prioritizing stability in 2022. 

Expect QR codes and influencer curation in Amazon’s clothing stores.

Need TikTok ad inspo? This thread is for you.

Brands are “less engaged” with the Olympics after Tokyo 2021.

FROM OUR BLOG

3 signs your startup needs to rethink marketing operations

Marketing operations (or MOps) can be an afterthought at startups, since it’s not usually in anyone’s job title.

But startup marketing teams still need to operate efficiently. Here are some signs your operations could use an upgrade. 

1. You’re not sure what “marketing operations” means at a startup.

• What it means, big-picture: MOps describes the logistics work that makes a marketing team run efficiently.
• What it means at a startup: Depending on stage, it can mean hiring marketers, allocating marketing budget, collecting and storing marketing data, and more. 

2. Your marketing data is dirty, and getting dirtier.

Dirty data might mean duplicate data, or data some marketing systems can’t read.

“If you keep adding junk into your system, and [you’re not]... continuously auditing and cleaning and de-duping, it's hard to find the gems,” said Daniel Murray, a marketing operations solutions consultant at Clearbit. 

3. You don’t know which channels perform best.

When the omnichannel funnel looks good, marketers often don’t dig into channel-by-channel performance. 

That makes it hard to double down on what’s working — and pull pack on inefficient campaigns. 

Want to learn more about MOps? Head over to our blog.

DATA SNACK

The most hired marketing roles in January 2022

How did marketing leaders ring in the new year? 

In the first month of 2022, they ramped up content headcount and reduced paid social media hiring, according to MarketerHire’s internal hiring data.

Content marketers got hired more often … 

Content marketing hires made up 14% of all MarketerHire hires in January — up 38% from December.

Some of that bump may be seasonal. “It’s Q1,” MarketerHire’s VP of Creative Operations, Ellen Kim, said. “[Marketing] budgets got approved.” 

Another factor: six of our top 15 marketing trends for 2022 involve content. It’s hot this year!

… but not paid social media marketers

In January, paid social media marketers’ share of total MarketerHire hires shrank 12% MoM.

That downturn may be linked to ebbing Facebook spend. Over a third of marketers have cut FB spend, according to MarketerHire’s Facebook Ads spend survey. 

Some moved budget to Google Ads or Taboola, while 6.5% were pivoting to content marketing.

Our takeaway?

The marketing roles businesses hired for most in January 2022 lined up with our marketing trends forecast: Demand for content hires soared and paid social media marketers shrank. 

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