What’s Up THIS WEEK: #1 December Content Format! (Spotify Wrapped Your Marketing!) AND 🪄Wicked for Good? 🪄 | Ep. 449

0:00Welcome to Do This Not That, the podcast for marketers. We share quick tips, things you can do right now, and then we add a little bit of chaos at the end of every episode. We also keep it short, like this intro. Let's check it out. We are back for what's up this week from the Do This, Not That podcast. This is our short episode. We're breaking down what's going on this week in business and marketing and life, and then we still have our other episodes the rest of the week. So what is going on? So if there was one piece of content that I would be working on right now, whether I was a business marketer, a consumer marketer, a nonprofit, whatever it is, it would be something to piggyback off of Spotify Wrapped.

0:39So Spotify Wrapped is coming out. First of all, what is Spotify Wrapped? Spotify is the platform you listen to music on, podcast, whatever you use Spotify for. It has a zillion users. And every year they come out with something called Spotify Wrapped. And there's never a firm date, but generally it releases the last week of November or in the first few weeks of December. So it's coming out in the next few days. And so Spotify Wrapped is this personalized year-end recap that basically highlights all the stuff you've been listening to, your most played music and whatever from the year. And it gives you all these really cool stats.

1:15And it makes this social media post for you that you could share about what you've been listening to. And it gets shared out of control. I don't work for Spotify. They didn't pay me to talk about this. But it's a marketing tactic that you can do no matter what your brand is, no matter how boring your brand is, that can piggyback off of this thing. And the reason you should is that according to Spotify, last year, for example, there were 435 million shares of wrapped content last year. Now, the key stat, and this one's from World Data Research, which is pretty wild, is that business-to-business and consumer brands who created wrapped-style content related to their own businesses, forget about the music, related to their own businesses last year.

1:59if they launched it within five days of Spotify dropping their wrapped, they saw a 50 % increase in overall engagement levels. So what does that look like? What does that feel like? How can you do that for your business? So let's say you're a B2B, a business to business, like software platform or something, right? You can create a wrapped based on how people, you personalize it, how different companies or people have been using your platform. So it might be something like productivity wrapped. Acme saved 127 hours this year. And you can personalize it down to the company and how they use your platform or Acme wrapped.

2:36Look at what you did. And then you take all the different hours they spend on your platform. Maybe the emails they sent on your platform, maybe the people they hired using your HR platform, whatever it is. And you stick that in this thing that you send to them. And what it really does, it shows that individual in that company the value of what they got out of your company. And then you're of the moment, super shareable, something they share internally, look how cool this is. And if you don't have time to create a personalized version, you can make a generic version that's basically just talking about what your company did and not what the person got out of it.

3:09Because say, you know, this year we helped companies save, you know, 1 ,427 ,000 minutes of time. We helped companies save blah, blah, blah amount of money on wasted, blah, blah, blah. Who cares? You could do a wrap and you could send that out. And it's basically like social proof on how awesome your company was this year. And then beyond that, let's say you're a nonprofit. You get so easy. You know, 2025 wrap, the hope you created or 2025 wrap, small actions, big change. You're sharing with people what their impact was. They donated$45, cool. This$45 resulted in blah, blah, blah. On the consumer side, this is the ultimate no-brainer.

3:45You know, your 2025 favorites are in, your 2025 style highlights, your 2025 feel better journey. getting on board with whatever's going on of the moment. And there's nothing bigger. There's no content play that's bigger to be of the moment than getting involved with the Spotify wrap for your brand. And you have now the next few weeks to figure it out. So that one's kind of fun. So I'll tell you what's not fun that I saw, which is kind of interesting that I didn't know. So you know, there's that site, that service called Angie, A-N-G-I, where they do like all the different home services, repairs and stuff.

4:17Like you can get any kind of like, I don't know, contractor or plumber or whatever, great service, whatever, who cares? But I didn't know that the day after Thanksgiving, okay, we know that to be Black Friday. But did you know that it has another name? I just learned this. This was a news release I learned from this week. It is also named Brown Friday. Ooh, why? Because it happens to be the number one, and this is real, busiest plumbing day of the year, you know, post-turkey day because everyone's disgusting. Everyone eats so much and they break their toilets. What a debacle. So Angie jumped on board this.

4:54I love it. And they created a hotline this year, a regular good old fashioned, you can call up hotline, not talk to AI. You can talk to a person and they create this ask Angie hotline where you can call up and ask one of their experts what you can do to deal with Brown Friday and your toilet being broken. I don't know what we're talking about. What is going on? What else is going on? So something that marketers don't realize out there, and I just want to put in your brain so it's in there. You don't have to worry about it. And people forget about this. This time of year, okay, from November 15th to about January 15th, that 60-day period, it is the highest unsubscribe rate for email databases over any other 60-day period throughout the year.

5:40And this is according to subjectline.com. For business-to - business brands, unsubscribe rates are over 200 % higher during that 60-day period. And for consumer brands, it's over 190 % higher than for any other period. Now, why does that matter? What are we talking about? When you're doing all your marketing this holiday season to your email database, it doesn't matter a business or a consumer brand, you're going to be getting a lot of people unsubscribing, removing themselves. And you're going to say, uh-oh, we're sending out too much email, we're doing bad things. And I'm here to tell you you're not.

6:11The reason unsubscribes people removing themselves from your list are so much higher is because as we head into the end of year, everybody's trying to get their act together for next year, personally, professionally, whatever. They're like, I'm going to get to inbox zero. I'm going to clean up my life. I'm not going to have all this garbage going on. And they take themselves off a load of different lists, consumer and B2B. On the consumer side, a lot of times people just sign up for those temporary deals when they want to buy something and then they unsubscribe. So I'm telling you this because don't change your marketing plans because you see unsubscribe rates go higher this time of year.

6:42it's not related to what you're doing. It's related to the psyche of what people are dealing with right now. All right, let's get into some nonsense. I saw this and I thought this was wild. So I was watching the Today Show and Jenna Bush Hager, who I love, Jenna Bush Hager was on and they were talking about her wedding because they were talking about bridesmaids. And then she talked about how many bridesmaids she had at her wedding. How many bridesmaids do you think Jenna Bush Hager had at her wedding. This is ridiculous. She had 19 bridesmaids, 19. I mean, are you, first of all, I had to look it up.

7:20What do you think the average number of bridesmaids are at a wedding? It's four. It's four. Okay. Like what if you were like one of Jenna Bush Hager's friends and you're, you're like the 20th friend. You're like, sorry, there wasn't room for you. What do you mean there wasn't room for me? You've included every person at this wedding except for me. I mean 19 I don't think I know 19 people let alone 19 people I would include in my wedding party oh my I would say I don't think I'm in real communication with 19 people on earth I don't think I am I don't want to be first of all absolutely do not want to be but I don't think I am that is ridiculous I love Jenna Bush Hager but that we got to work on that we got to reign that in what else is going on so wicked for good basically the wicked part two the movie's coming out this week.

8:09I'm an epic loser for many reasons, but I've not seen Wicked the first one. Oh no. What am I going to do? So here's the game. I feel like I'm going to be pulled in to go see Wicked 2, but do I need to see Wicked 1 before I see Wicked 2? Do I have to commit like a lot of my time and energy over the next week to Wicked stuff? I don't know if I care. I know the music's good. I know all the things are good. I'm going to paint my face green. I don't know. I got to figure this out. I got to figure it out. Anyway, I appreciate you being here. And what you can do for me, you didn't ask, you leave this thing review because you're awesome.

8:48And that would help out. Get this thing circulated. And yeah, we'll catch you later. You did it. You made it to the end. But wait, the party is not over. Listen, I want to keep hanging out. Subscribe to this podcast. And if it wasn't the worst podcast you've ever listened to, give it a five-star review. Why not? But you know what? I want to do even more with you. Go to gurumediahub.com and we can partner there. You could find out about all of our free events, all of our stuff. And if you're epically bored, go to jschwedelson.com and we could stay connected. You could find my newsletter and everything else I got going on.

9:24Thanks for being here and hope you subscribe.