9 Best Marketing Newsletters to Follow on Substack in 2026

Substack was supposed to be a blogging platform for journalists who got tired of editors. Instead it became the place marketers actually go to figure out what’s happening, while everyone else is still refreshing LinkedIn for a hot take that’s three weeks stale.

The shift makes sense once you look at the incentive structure behind it. LinkedIn rewards whatever performs in the feed that day, but a Substack has to earn a spot in someone’s inbox week after week, with no algorithm doing the work for it. That’s a much higher bar, and it filters for a different kind of writer. It’s also why the newsletter has quietly become a media business in its own right instead of a side project bolted onto a blog. The best marketing newsletters are building a relationship with a reader who opens every single issue.

This matters more now than it did a few years ago, because the marketer inbox has gotten genuinely crowded. Between daily marketing newsletters, weekly marketing newsletters, and every brand’s own attempt at “thought leadership” content, newsletter discovery in 2026 is its own problem to solve. Most best-marketing-newsletter roundups solve it by listing the same twenty names in a different order. We wanted to do something more useful: pull together the Substacks that are actually shaping how sharp marketers think right now, across brand strategy, growth, social, and culture, and tell you honestly who each one is for.

Below are nine of the best marketing Substack newsletters worth your inbox space, plus a quick-hit list of other top marketing newsletters if you want to build out a fuller rotation.

TL;DR: Top Substack Newsletters for Marketers

#	Newsletter	Best For
1	Silence, Brand!	Social media managers, brand strategists, internet-culture obsessives
2	Scroll Sick	Social media managers, algorithm watchers, content strategists
3	Considered Chaos	Brand strategists, CMOs, marketing educators
4	The Sociology of Business	Brand strategists, CMOs, market researchers
5	Link in Bio	Social media managers, brand marketers, content strategists
6	Lenny’s Newsletter	Product managers, startup founders, career-focused tech professionals
7	*buzzing	Brand marketers, culture strategists, pop-culture obsessives
8	MKT1	B2B marketers, SaaS and startup founders, tech growth marketers
9	NoGood News	Growth marketers, scaleups, and brands

The 9 Best Marketing Newsletters on Substack

1. Silence, Brand!

Author: Anonymous Crab (a collective of brand marketing professionals)

Publishing frequency: Tri-weekly

Best for: Social media managers, brand strategists, internet-culture obsessives

Silence, Brand! is written by a rotating collective of brand marketers and culture strategists who publish under a single shared identity instead of individual bylines. The idea is that no one person can track the internet alone, so a group of insiders pooling notes covers more ground than any single voice could.

Three times a week, the crabs round up the memes, formats, and micro-trends moving through the internet and translate them into something a brand team can actually use, not just observe. As a subscriber, you get the trend before your boss finds it, along with the strategic reasoning for why it’s spreading in the first place.

2. Scroll Sick

Author: Carmen Vicente

Publishing frequency: Fortnightly

Best for: Social media managers, algorithm watchers, content strategists

Carmen leads social and content strategy full-time at Slate, and spends the rest of her time making critical video essays about algorithms and digital culture on TikTok and Instagram. That dual vantage point, inside the platforms and skeptical of them, is what shapes Scroll Sick.

Every other week, Carmen hands subscribers a curated set of what’s worth their attention, filtered through someone who studies the mechanics of the feed for a living. Her running argument is that discernment is a skill most people have quietly outsourced to the algorithm, and the newsletter is a standing invitation to take it back.

3. Considered Chaos

Author: Eugene Healey

Publishing frequency: Weekly

Best for: Brand strategists, CMOs, marketing educators

Eugene is a Melbourne-based brand strategist and educator who treats branding less like a discipline and more like applied sociology. He’s spent his career arguing that brands themselves are inherently boring; what’s actually worth studying is the unmet, universal desire a brand happens to be standing in front of.

Each week, Considered Chaos works that argument out in public, breaking down why an aesthetic, a rebrand, or a cultural flashpoint landed the way it did. Subscribers get a framework for thinking about brand strategy that goes past “be authentic” and into why an audience wants what it wants in the first place.

4. The Sociology of Business

Author: Ana Andjelic

Publishing frequency: Weekly

Best for: Brand strategists, CMOs, market researchers

Ana Andjelic is a former global brand executive and the author of Hitmakers: How Brands Influence Culture. She started The Sociology of Business in 2020 to give herself the structure to finish that book, and the newsletter outlasted the deadline that inspired it, growing into one of the most cited marketing publications online.

Each week, Ana uses her background in brand leadership to explain how shifting forms of social, cultural, and status capital reshape business strategy. Subscribers learn how top brands turn cultural relevance into an actual growth lever, not just a talking point in a pitch deck.

5. Link in Bio

Author: Rachel Karten

Publishing frequency: Weekly

Best for: Social media managers, brand marketers, content strategists

Rachel spent over a decade in social media, including leading the team at Bon Appétit and Epicurious, before going independent to consult for brands like CAVA and west elm. Link in Bio is where that operator experience gets put to work every week.

Subscribers get case-study breakdowns of what specific brand social teams are actually doing, along with the reasoning behind it, rather than repackaged best practices. The newsletter has grown into one of Substack’s top business publications, and it’s easy to see why: it’s written by someone who is still doing the job, not someone narrating it from a distance.

6. Lenny’s Newsletter

Author: Lenny Rachitsky

Publishing frequency: Weekly

Best for: Product managers, startup founders, tech professionals looking to advance their careers

Lenny spent seven years as a product lead at Airbnb before leaving to write about everything he’d learned. What started as a single retrospective post turned into the largest newsletter on Substack, now read by well over a million subscribers.

Each week, Lenny interviews product and growth leaders across the industry and turns those conversations into usable frameworks rather than anecdotes, including a running “Ask Lenny” advice column for reader questions. Marketers read it less for marketing advice specifically and more for the adjacent muscle: how growth actually compounds inside a product before a go-to-market motion ever touches it.

Here’s what Substack cofounder Hamish McKenzie has said about Lenny’s Newsletter:

“It’s both specific enough to be immediately put into action and also universal enough to matter to anyone thinking about their careers or hiring or pricing or generally how to do better in their professional lives.”

7. *buzzing

Author: Lara Muhn

Publishing frequency: Weekly

Best for: Brand marketers, culture strategists, pop-culture obsessives

Lara is an independent pop-culture creative and strategy director who curates *buzzing as a running log of what brands are doing at the intersection of music, fashion, gaming, and sports.

Each week, subscribers get a breakdown of the campaigns, collaborations, and cultural moments worth knowing, with the strategic “why” attached instead of just a recap. If your job involves knowing what a fashion house or a streaming platform did last week before a client asks about it, this is the newsletter doing that homework for you.

8. MKT1

Author: Emily Kramer

Publishing frequency: Twice a month

Best for: B2B marketers, SaaS and startup founders, tech growth marketers

Emily Kramer has over 15 years of experience leading B2B marketing teams at some of the fastest-growing startups, including Asana, Carta, Astro, and Ticketfly. She’s since become an advisor and investor to growth-stage B2B marketing leaders and startups, and MKT1 is where that operator experience gets distilled.

Twice a month, Emily shares B2B marketing frameworks (which subscribers have nicknamed “Krameworks”), content and branding tactics, and templates built to help you scale a marketing function from scratch. The newsletter is deliberately slower and denser than most on this list, and it shows: each post reads like something you’d hand a new hire on day one.

Here’s what Lenny Rachitsky has said about MKT1:

“My number one favorite marketing newsletter.”

9. NoGood News

Author: NoGood Squad

Publishing frequency: Bi-weekly

Best for: Growth marketers, scaleups, and brands

NoGood is the growth squad behind some of the world’s most successful brands, from Fortune 500 companies to venture-backed startups. Our team draws on growth marketing expertise across Organic Social Media Marketing, Paid Search, AEO, SEO, CRO, Paid Social, Content Marketing, Creative, AI, Performance Branding, and Marketing Analytics.

In our bi-weekly newsletter, NoGood News, we share our take on industry news, brand analysis, and growth tactics, plus a Q&A with a NoGood growth expert to keep you current on what’s actually moving the needle. It’s a free marketing newsletter built for people who want the tactics, not just the theory.

More Top Marketing Newsletters by Use Case

Nine newsletters won’t cover every beat, so here’s a quick-hit list organized by what you’re actually trying to get out of your inbox. None of these needed a full writeup to earn a mention, but they’re worth knowing about.

For daily marketing news: Marketing Brew, part of the Morning Brew network, is the closest thing to a daily marketing newsletter for general audiences, covering brand strategy, social platforms, and ad tech in a five-minute read. Stacked Marketer covers similar ground for a more hands-on, channel-level audience, with a faster, more tactical format built around paid social, SEO, and e-commerce updates.

For growth marketing: Demand Curve’s growth newsletter is built directly from the agency’s client work, breaking down a specific growth lever, CRO, paid acquisition, retention, positioning, in every issue.

For copywriting and content marketing: Marketing Examples by Harry Dry distills copywriting and design decisions into short, visual case studies, making it one of the more efficient content marketing newsletters to skim on a lunch break.

For marketing psychology: Katelyn Bourgoin’s Why We Buy focuses squarely on the psychology behind purchasing decisions, which pairs well with the more cultural, sociological lens of Considered Chaos and The Sociology of Business.

For the creator economy: Jay Clouse’s Creator Science and Lia Haberman’s ICYMI both track how creators build and monetize audiences, which is increasingly inseparable from brand marketing strategy.

For SEO and email: Moz’s long-running bi-monthly roundup is still a reliable SEO newsletter for algorithm updates and insights, while Litmus and Really Good Emails cover the email marketing side of the craft in more visual detail.

For newsletter operators themselves: Matt McGarry’s Newsletter Operator is the meta-layer, a newsletter about how newsletters like the ones on this list actually grow and monetize.

FAQs About Marketing Newsletters