MarketingFOMO's Digital Marketing News 🔭 [January 5, 2026]

Let’s go through the latest in digital marketing news, resources, tools, and jobs…

👍 Social

Instagram Stories: The Complete Guide to Using Stories to Boost Engagement + Reach
Shivani Shah
Shivani goes through the ins and outs of Instagram Stories, from getting started to advanced strategies that will make your stories stand out on Instagram.

How to Build a Brand Subreddit: Full Setup Guide (+ Examples)
Yongi Barnard
Yongi goes through when a brand subreddit is worth it, when to skip it, and how to build a trusted community that won’t turn into a ghost town.

YouTube Tests Still Image Carousels Within Shorts Feed
Andrew Hutchinson
YouTube is experimenting with showing image posts in the Shorts feed to help creators reach their audience with posts in a new place. Creators can include up to 10 images in their posts, making them a great way to tell a story.

The Next Social Wave: The Top 6 Predictions That Will Shape Social Media Strategies In 2026
Susan Ganeshan
From the rise of virtual influencers to the convergence of short-form video and UGC, Susan goes through six predictions that will shape the future of social media in 2026 and beyond.

📣 Ads

Custom Columns Available in Microsoft Advertising
Hana Kobzová
Microsoft Advertising has introduced custom columns in its user interface, giving advertisers more flexibility in how they view performance data.

Instagram ads: Everything you need to know in 2026
Chloe West
Chloe goes through how to create successful Instagram ads by addressing an audience that’s ready to shop on the platform.

How To Get The Perfect Budget Mix For SEO And PPC
Brooke Osmundson
A practical guide to choosing the right SEO and PPC budget mix based on timelines, goals, and realistic performance expectations for marketing leaders.

Google Ads Search Terms Report Adds Quick Filters Without Options Enabled
Barry Schwartz
The Search terms report within Google Ads has this quick dropdown filter that lets you filter by search terms, search terms and landing pages from AI Max, search terms from Dynamic Search Ads, and search terms and landing pages from Dynamic Search Ads.

📝 Content Marketing

Entity-based SEO: An explainer for SEOs and content marketers
Jennifer Clark
Jennifer explains what entities are in SEO, how they differ from keywords, where to find the ones that matter, how to structure content around entity relationships, and how to measure whether the strategy works.

Email and Marketing Predictions for 2026
Joe Pulizzi
Joe shares four non-obvious predictions for 2026, especially for creators, marketers, and media companies trying to build something durable.

Content Freshness - LLMS Favor Recent Info
Jeannie Hill
The era of static content is over. Driven by AI-assisted generation, the pace of production has accelerated. Recency and citations have replaced static authority as the primary currencies of visibility.

The Evolution of B2B Content: Stephanie Losee on Thought Leadership, Trust, and Experience
Lee Odden, Stephanie Losee
Stephanie shares about why distribution isn’t just about marketing channels, but also about activating content internally with sales and customer success in this episode with Lee. 

😎 Creators & Influencers

Instagram chief: AI is so ubiquitous 'it will be more practical to fingerprint real media than fake media'
Karissa Bell
"Everything that made creators matter—the ability to be real, to connect, to have a voice that couldn’t be faked—is now suddenly accessible to anyone with the right tools," he wrote. "The feeds are starting to fill up with synthetic everything.

How travel influencers are transforming the UK tourism industry
Will Haigen
Will goes through how to identify travel influencers who align with your brand values and build lasting, mutually beneficial relationships with them.

Social media follower counts have never mattered less, creator economy execs say
Amanda Silberling
“Creators are finding new ways to harness and cultivate their relationships with their followers, some acting as a salve to AI slop, while others are flooding the zone with a new form of slop themselves.

Instagram Influencer Rates: A Complete Guide for Brands in 2026
Nadica Naceva
How much should brands really expect to pay for Instagram influencers in 2026, and why do rates vary so widely between creators who look similar on the surface? Nadica goes through it.

🤖 AI in Marketing

2025 State of AI Discovery Report: What 1.96 Million LLM Sessions Tell Us About the Future of Search
David Bell
David analyzed 1,963,544 LLM-driven sessions during 12 months from sites across SaaS, e-commerce, finance, and more revealing clear patterns: AI traffic is small in aggregate (0.13% of total sessions) but concentrated on high-intent pages, growing fastest in complex categories, and behaving fundamentally different from traditional referral sources.

Understanding & Explaining Query Fan-Out
Dan Taylor
Query Fan-Out is how AI takes a single question and expands it into a network of related sub-questions. Some LLMs give you greater access to this information than others. Learn all what you need to know in this guide from Dan.

AI Marketing Examples: 13 Times AI Actually Delivered
Mateusz Makosiewicz
Fake influencers, robotic copy, obvious AI disasters, most brands get it wrong. Mateusz goes through how 13 brands have used AI successfully for marketing without the cringe.​