Business Growth and Digital Marketing News & Tips 07-19-26

The tools, tips, news and advice you need to grow your business.

Every major holiday creates a predictable pattern. Businesses spend weeks preparing promotions, scheduling content, updating websites, and planning campaigns. Then the holiday passes, the proverbial fireworks die down, and marketing often goes quiet while everyone shifts their attention to the next event on the calendar.

That pause can be a big missed opportunity.

Customers are still engaging with your brand, talking about their experiences, sharing photos, leaving reviews, and deciding whether they will come back. Some of the most valuable marketing happens after the holiday itself, when you have a chance to extend the momentum instead of starting over from zero.

The holiday may be over, but your marketing does not have to be. The businesses that build lasting relationships are often the ones that keep showing up after everyone else has already moved on.

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Important Alert: Privacy Related Lawsuits

Over the past few months, we’ve seen a number of businesses receive legal notices related to website tracking and privacy laws — specifically the California Invasion of Privacy Act (CIPA). If you’ve gotten one of these letters, the first thing we want you to know is: don’t panic, but don’t ignore it either.

CIPA is being increasingly applied to common website tools — things like chat widgets, session recording software, and third-party tracking pixels — and a small number of plaintiff attorneys have been sending these notices broadly across many industries.

Here’s our honest take: before making any changes to your website, talk to a qualified attorney first. Why? Because any remediation typically means implementing stricter consent requirements around tracking — which creates a real trade-off in the marketing data we use to help guide your business decisions. There’s no reason to limit that data unnecessarily if you’re not required to.

If you do need to move toward compliance, we have solutions to help minimize the impact on your reporting and results. And in the meantime, we’re happy to audit what’s currently running on your site so you have something concrete to bring to your legal team.
Questions? Reach out — we’re happy to talk through it.

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What you need to know:

Bing Deepens AI Visibility Reporting
Microsoft is adding Intents, Topics, Citation Share, and Compare to Bing Webmaster Tools, giving organizations a more concrete way to track how content shows up in AI answers instead of relying on rank alone. Read More

Google Pushes New Demand Gen Upgrades
Google’s latest Demand Gen update adds more video resizing, Gemini-powered creative recommendations, and better web-to-app measurement. Read More

Meta Launches Business Agent
Meta is expanding its Business Agent across WhatsApp, Messenger, and Instagram to help brands answer questions, recommend products, book appointments, and qualify leads. This pushes conversational commerce closer to always-on customer service and sales in one workflow. Read More

Meta Expands Off-Platform Personalization
Meta will use activity shared by other businesses to personalize more than ads, including feed content and AI responses, while updating its controls. Marketers should watch this closely because it affects how personalization, consent, and customer trust will be managed going forward. Read More

YouTube Tightens AI Content Labels
YouTube is making AI disclosure labels more prominent and adding automatic detection for some photorealistic AI-generated content. For brands and creators, that raises the bar on transparency without changing monetization eligibility. Read More

Creators Get Search Profile Control
YouTube says eligible creators can now build official Search profiles that pull together links, bios, and social presence in one verified destination. That gives creators and brands a cleaner way to control discoverability and reduce confusion in Google Search. Read More

LinkedIn Opens a Creator Marketplace
LinkedIn is launching its own Creator Marketplace so brands can find and partner with vetted creators inside Campaign Manager. That gives B2B marketers a more native way to scale executive, expert, and influencer-led content on the platform. Read More

LinkedIn Adds Brand Kit Controls
LinkedIn is testing brand kit tools that let advertisers define colors, fonts, and even brand voice for AI-generated content. That could help teams move faster with platform AI without losing consistency across campaigns. Read More

AI Shoppers Convert Better on Shopify
Shopify’s early data shows AI-referred shoppers convert at higher rates and spend more than organic-search visitors. That gives marketers a strong reason to start treating AI traffic as its own growth channel instead of folding it into general organic. Read More

B2B PR Now Shapes AI Answers
As AI assistants influence vendor discovery, MarTech makes the case that PR now plays a bigger role in whether your brand gets surfaced and trusted. The practical shift is from just earning coverage to building consistent signals AI systems can recognize and cite. Read More

ChatGPT Ads Get Better Measurement
OpenAI’s ChatGPT ads are getting a measurement lift through LiveRamp, helping advertisers connect campaigns to outcomes in a more privacy-conscious way. That makes the channel more credible for performance-minded marketers who need proof beyond clicks. Read More

AI Search Is Shifting Budgets
Digiday reports brands are moving money into content and AI visibility work before traditional media buys, as AI search changes how discovery happens. For marketers, that’s a cue to rethink the order of operations in budget planning. Read More

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ADVERTISING

The Problem with Boosting Posts

The blue boost button on a Facebook post can be tempting. Why not gain some extra reach with just a few clicks? It seems innocent, but for most small businesses, boosting a post can be more expensive than running a traditional ad through Meta Ads Manager. Let’s look at the differences and which one might be better for you in the long run. Read More

ADVERTISING

Using Remarketing as a Nurture Tool

Stop treating Remarketing like a sales pitch and start treating it like a nurture sequence. Your conversion rate—and your customers—will thank you. Read More

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