 | | Issue No. 1 • Wednesday, 30th September | Hey marketing people,
Meanwhile, in Marketing started as a place to share what's caught our eye in marketing lately, what we're learning as we go, what's working for us, and a bit of what we're building at 5day.io along the way.
Follow along, and if something in here is worth a reaction, good or bad, write to us at marketing@5day.io - we'd genuinely love to hear your thoughts! | | FEATURED
How to Market in a Boring Industry
Dan Holt (CMO, Mary) has spent 15 years marketing the categories everyone marks "boring" - industrial services, insurance, anything with "commercial" in the name. His take: those markets are easier to win, because every competitor in them is fighting at the bottom of the funnel and none of them bothered to be memorable.
Two things worth watching for: his six-month pitch for getting brand work funded, and why humor beats a bigger budget.
| STEAL THIS
Headline formulas that earn the click
My initial articles flopped because of poor headlines. If yours aren't pulling the numbers you want either, maybe you'd want to check your headlines too.
You're competing for people's most valuable asset: their time. Your headline has to convince them your piece is worth their next 5-10 minutes.
Writing a great headline is part science, part art. Steal these formulas for your next article headline!
1. How to [Do Something] in [Time Frame]
→ How to Build a Content Engine in 90 Days |
2. How to [Painful Task] Without [the Typical Painful Method]
→ How to Grow a B2B Email List Without Paid Ads |
3. How to [Achieve Something]: [Number/Adjective] Steps / Guide
→ How to Write a Cold Email That Gets Replies: A 5-Step Guide |
4. [Number] Lessons I Learned From [Somewhere Uncommon]
→ 7 Lessons I Learned from Unedited Podcasts |
| MARKETING TO BOOKMARK
How Zapier Turned a Creator Retreat Into a Marketing Lab
Zapier brought 20 creators and builders working in AI, automation, and content to Zion National Park for a three-day retreat called Zapier Outpost.
Instead of making it a typical influencer trip, they built the experience around real collaboration. Before the trip, they asked their community what was frustrating them at work, and attendees swapped workflows, ran live demos, and competed in a hackathon to build solutions together. One winning team built an AI-powered workflow that turned voice notes into researched, ready-to-record video scripts.
The result was content that came from the experience itself rather than simply posting sponsored product content.
500K+
VIEWS | 374K
REACH | 1.9K
COMMENTS | 190
SHARES |
Across LinkedIn, YouTube, and TikTok.
| | Why it worked: Zapier didn't treat creators as a distribution channel. It put them inside the product, gave them something interesting to do, and let the content emerge from the work. That made the campaign feel more like a community of people building together and left them with things they could continue talking about after the retreat. |
| | MORE RESOURCES WORTH BOOKMARKING
TEMPLATE
The Marketing Calendar Template
A free spreadsheet that logs every campaign in one place and turns it into an auto-updating dashboard and 26-week calendar view, so you don't have to dig through five different calendars to find out what's live.
Get the template →
PLAYBOOK
Restructuring Your Marketing Ops Around AI Agents
A framework for fixing scattered AI use on a marketing team: give agents actual jobs, brief them properly, and route anything risky through a named approver before it ships.
Read the playbook → |
ARTICLE
4 Hard Questions About Brand Building for Startups by Sairam Krishnan
The operational questions most brand frameworks skip: how to hold your ground on brand when leadership wants short-term pipeline, which content bets are worth doubling down on, and why long, high-trust sales cycles need more brand investment, not less.
Read the article →
ALSO WORTH A MENTION
The author, Sairam Krishnan's debut book, Super Cool Startup, is now up for pre-order - an early-stage marketing playbook for founders, built around five fundamentals: storytelling, content, community, PR, and social.
Pre-order the book → |
| FROM THE 5DAY.IO PRODUCT
Meet Ace
Ace is the AI agent we're building into 5day.io. Give it a goal and it drafts the first version of your campaign plan, grounded in your brand and past campaigns.
| That's issue #1. If something here was worth your time, forward it to a marketer who'd like it, and if something wasn't, tell us that too.
See you in two weeks! Write to us at marketing@5day.io.
- The 5day.io team | | 5day.io | Built to Run Your Marketing Operations
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