This Free HubSpot Guide Turns Days of TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube Scrolling Into a 15-Minute Ad Brief
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| This Free HubSpot Guide Turns Days of TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube Scrolling Into a 15-Minute Ad Brief - THELOSTOFFER.COM |
If you run ads for an e-commerce brand or agency, you already know the real bottleneck isn't strategy — it's volume. Meta's algorithm keeps rewarding fresh creative, which means someone on your team is stuck scrolling TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube for hours, trying to catch the next trend before a competitor does. It doesn't scale, and it burns people out.
HubSpot just published a free guide that tackles exactly this problem, and it's worth a read if creative research eats up your week.
Where this guide came from
The guide is built on a conversation between HubSpot's Kipp Bodnar and Mike Futia, an AI automation specialist who works with e-commerce brands and Facebook ad agencies — including some serious nine-figure clients. Bodnar explains he first came across Futia's work on X (Twitter), after Futia posted an Instagram trend-research tool he'd built, right around the time HubSpot was rethinking its own approach to organic and paid social. That connection turned into an episode of Marketing Against the Grain, HubSpot's marketing podcast, and the guide is the practical, prompt-by-prompt writeup of what Futia demoed on the show.
It's called Social Trends Research Stack, and it's free — you just create a HubSpot account to view it.
The origin story: a client's most painful task
According to Futia, the whole system started because a client — an agency trying to keep up with Facebook ad creative demands — needed a faster way to find what was popping on TikTok before building ads around it. Futia's first version was built in n8n, a workflow-automation tool. Later, he rebuilt it as a lighter web app by "vibe coding" it in Claude Code — describing what he wanted in plain language and letting Claude write the implementation. The current tool chains together a scraper (Apify) to pull trending videos, Gemini to watch and analyze them, and Claude to turn the analysis into a usable brief.
Watching the tool work, using AG1 as the example
To demo it, Futia used AG1 — the wellness brand — as a stand-in client, searching TikTok for videos related to "gut health." A 20-video search turned up results ranging into the tens of millions of views, including one clip with tens of thousands of comments. From there, the tool can pull a transcript and send the video to Gemini for analysis.
What comes back isn't just a summary — it's structured around what an ad strategist actually needs to know: the visual hook in the opening seconds, what's being used as proof (a demonstration, a before/after, a product shot), the core theme, and roughly which stage of the marketing funnel the content is aimed at. In the demo, one video's hook was described as opening on an unfiltered close-up meant to grab attention immediately, with the surrounding comments revealing what viewers were actually curious about — recipe questions, plus a recurring belief among commenters that gut health and skin health are connected.
That comment-mining step is arguably as useful as the video analysis itself — it's a shortcut to the objections, questions, and beliefs an ad's messaging needs to address.
From research to a finished creative brief
The last step is where the workflow pays off: combining the video analysis, the comment insights, and a brand's own context — audience description, tone of voice, pain points, past winning ads — into a ready-to-edit creative brief. Futia calls this brand context a "taste profile" or "brand bible," and it's what determines whether the output is generic or actually usable. In the AG1 demo, the generated brief included a campaign objective, an audience description, and a key message built around the idea of replacing confusing DIY wellness routines with a simpler, more credible alternative — the kind of starting point a human strategist can react to and adjust rather than write from scratch.
Bodnar's framing of this is worth repeating: the value isn't that AI replaces the strategist, it's that it gets a team to a rough, 80%-there draft in minutes instead of hours, so the human's time goes into judgment and refinement instead of blank-page research.
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What's actually inside the guide
The published guide turns this demo into 5 workflows and 15 ready-to-use prompts, each rated by complexity (Simple, Moderate, or Advanced) so you can start small and build up. At a high level, the five workflows cover:
- TikTok trend research — automating the discovery-to-analysis process for trending videos in your niche
- Instagram Reels competitive monitoring — tracking what's working for your competitors without manually checking their profiles every day
- YouTube Shorts hook extraction — building a library of proven opening patterns from high-performing Shorts
- Influencer content analysis — evaluating potential partners on data instead of gut feel or follower counts
- Competitor ad creative monitoring — turning Meta Ad Library research into an actual counter-strategy
Each workflow comes with the exact prompts, tool setup instructions, and three tiers of implementation — from "enhance your manual research" up to "fully automated pipeline that runs itself." That part is best read directly in the guide, since it's the actual value on offer and not something worth spoiling here.
The parts I found most useful
A few points from the conversation stood out beyond the workflows themselves:
- He's skeptical of "AI agents" hype. Futia draws a sharp line between autonomous agent tools — which he describes as unreliable and security-risky in their current form, citing examples like an agent taking hours and leaking credentials just to book a dinner reservation — and simpler, predetermined automations that follow a fixed set of steps. For real business use today, he strongly favors the latter.
- Not everything should be automated. Research, competitive analysis, and first-draft writing are excellent candidates for AI. Actual creative production, especially video, isn't — Futia is blunt that automated AI video output is still generally poor and that marketing succeeds by standing out from the average, which is exactly what AI tends to produce.
- You don't need to learn a complex workflow builder first. Futia spent three to four months actively avoiding n8n before eventually learning it out of necessity, and says that if he were starting over, he'd skip it entirely and go straight to "vibe coding" in a tool like Claude Code — describing what you want in plain English and having Claude write and debug the implementation with you.
- Gemini's long-video analysis is the underrated trick. Because Gemini can process video up to an hour long, Futia's suggestion is almost deceptively simple: record yourself doing the repetitive task you hate most, feed the recording to Gemini, and ask it to identify what could be automated.
Who should read it
This is most useful for e-commerce marketers, DTC brands, and agency teams responsible for keeping ad creative fresh who can't justify hours of manual scrolling every week. If you're earlier in the process — still doing all your trend research by hand — even adopting one of the five workflows at its simplest tier could save meaningful time.
FAQ
Is the guide actually free?
Yes. You create a free HubSpot account to view it — there's no separate payment or trial required.
Do I need to know how to code to use these workflows?
No. Futia himself isn't a traditional developer — he describes learning by having ChatGPT and Claude help him build and debug as he went. The guide's "semi-automated" tiers are designed to be run manually, copying outputs between tools, before you touch any automation platform.
What tools do I need?
At minimum, access to Gemini and Claude for the analysis and writing steps. Full automation adds a scraping tool (like Apify) and an orchestration tool (like Zapier or Make), but the guide's simplest tier works without either.
Does this only work for TikTok?
No — the guide's five workflows cover TikTok, Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts, influencer accounts, and competitor ad libraries across Meta platforms.
Is this guide only useful for e-commerce brands?
It's written with e-commerce and DTC ad teams in mind, but the underlying approach — feeding video and comments to AI to extract structured insight, then combining that with brand context to draft a brief — generalizes to most social-first marketing teams.
Will AI just write my ads for me?
No, and the guide doesn't claim that. The workflows automate research and first-draft briefs; actual creative production and final judgment calls are still meant to stay with a human.
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| Cover HubSpot's Social Trends Research Stack guide - thelostoffer.com |
Get the guide
The full guide, with all 15 prompts and the tool setup details, is free here: 👉 Social Trends Research Stack (HubSpot)
If you want the fuller story behind it, including a live demo of the tool, the original conversation between Kipp Bodnar and Mike Futia is on HubSpot's Marketing Against the Grain podcast: watch it on YouTube.
