MarketingFOMO's Digital Marketing News 🔭 [July 6, 2025]

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

👍 Social

YouTube Provides More Tools To Help Grow Channel Audiences
Andrew Hutchinson
YouTube is giving channel managers more insights into audience engagement, including expanded data on “New” and “Returning” viewers.

X is piloting a program that lets AI chatbots generate Community Notes
Amanda Silberling
X will pilot a feature that allows AI chatbots to generate Community Notes, a Twitter-era feature that Elon Musk has expanded under his ownership of the service now called X.

YouTube Targets Mass-Produced Content in Monetization Update
Matt G. Southern
YouTube is updating its monetization policies to target mass-produced and repetitive content. Here's what you need to know.

Social media intelligence (SOCMINT): A 2025 guide for marketers
Christina Newberry
Christina goes through how SOCMINT uses public social media data to power smarter marketing, policy, and public safety decisions — without crossing privacy lines. 

📣 Ads

Google to enforce phone number verification for Message Assets in ads
Anu Adegbola
Google Ads will require phone number verification for message assets starting August 1st, or those assets will be disapproved and won't serve.

Video Analytics Available in Google Ads
PPC News Feed
A new video analysis feature is rolling out in Google Ads, giving advertisers deeper insights into video performance across campaign types, including Performance Max, Demand Gen, and video-only campaigns, all within the Google Ads interface.

Microsoft Advertising Target CPA and Target ROAS Going Away On August 4th
Barry Schwartz 
Microsoft Advertising will soon retire Target CPA and Target ROAS as standalone bidding strategies. Instead, those bidding strategies will be merged with Max Conversions and Max Conversion Value. This will happen on August 4, 2025.

“Performance Marketing” is just advertising (with a dashboard)
Jono Alderson
'Performance marketing’ is a con. We’ve mistaken trackability for value, and it’s costing us the future of marketing. Jono goes through it. 

📝 Content Marketing

Brand Refresh vs. Rebrand: How to decide what’s right for you.
Chris Bliss
Not sure if your business needs a brand refresh or a full rebrand? Chris breaks down the differences, what to consider, and how to choose the right path.

Blending SEO & UX to Build Content for Real People
Sanja Markovic
The synergy between SEO and UX offers a powerful framework for understanding not just what users search for, but what drives their online behavior and needs. Sanja goes through it. 

The 5 Top AI Challenges in Marketing (and How to Solve Them)
Semrush
Learn the top 5 AI challenges in marketing and learn how to solve them with a better strategy, stronger tools, and aligned team execution.

How To Write Headlines That Hook: 8 Questions To Ask
Olesia Filipenko
It’s the make-or-break moment. Is your headline written well enough to attract and motivate the target audience? Whether created by AI or humans, review it using this checklist (with examples) before publishing.

[Sponsor]​
​⚡ SE Ranking’s AI Search Toolkit: Monitor and improve your visibility in Google’s AIOs and ChatGPT

SE Ranking’s AI Search Toolkit helps you track how your brand and competitors appear in Google’s AI Overviews and ChatGPT-generated answers.

• Track brand mentions: See when AI mentions your brand in response to user prompts—with or without links to your website.

• Monitor your competitors: Analyze competitor mentions and compare their visibility with yours.

• Grow your visibility with data: Analyze link presence dynamics, traffic from AI answers, average positions, and historical trends.

• Automate AI search tracking: Streamline your workflows and get precise analytics to improve your visibility in AI search.

Automate AI search optimization with one complete, intuitive toolkit. It covers Google’s AI Overviews and ChatGPT insights in a single tool!

😎 Creators & Influencers

AI virtual personality YouTubers, or ‘VTubers,’ are earning millions
Zach Vallese
As AI-generated content becomes more common online, concerns about its impact are growing, especially as it becomes easier to generate convincing but entirely AI-fabricated videos.

Substack Isn’t Just for Creators: Tips and Considerations for B2B and B2C Brands
Ann Gynn
Substack, initially a newsletter platform for creators, now attracts over 5 million paid subscriptions. Ann goes through what marketers should know about getting their brands into the mix, including lessons from the CMO of American Eagle.

When it comes to brand trips, is all press good press?
Sara Spruch-Feiner
Sara goes through what went wrong on the Waterboy trip, what makes brand trips worthwhile (and here to stay), and how brands can do them right.

Micro-Influencer Pods: Scaling UGC Volume on a Startup Budget
Kalin Anastasov
Scale UGC efficiently with micro-influencer pods. Kalin explains a structured, budget-friendly system that delivers 30+ assets weekly, without compromising quality or performance.

🤖 AI in Marketing

ChatGPT 4o System Prompt Leak: SEO Impact
Hanns Kronenberg​
​When Is ChatGPT 4o Web Search Activated? When Search Is Prohibited? How Does ChatGPT Search When Allowed? Learn about this and more from ChatGPT 4o system prompt leak.

Top Brands and Sources from AI Chatbots in English, Spanish and German [Via Sistrix, July 2025]​
​SEOFOMO, Aleyda Solis​
​Learn about the main brands and sources from ChatGPT and Gemini in English, Spanish and German. What are the differences and overlaps? Aleyda goes through them.

99% of AI + SEO Tools & Prompts are useless. Context still reigns supreme
Jan-Willem Bobbink
“Until LLMs can see, crawl, and understand your site like Google does and until tools account for content, links, citations and technical structure in context, most AI-powered SEO tools are just fancy autocomplete machines”.

Referral Patterns in Google AI Mode: Understanding the Early Data
Garrett Sussman
Garrett goes through early referral insights from Google's AI Mode, highlighting user behavior trends and SEO implications.