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hi everyone welcome back to demand coded dan here as usual and phil here kind of as usual and i suppose been with us for a few episodes now before we you know get some other people on the podcast and we are talking about something that everyone i think is thinking about right now at least you know ninety five percent of marketers have this at the top of their mind which is a and in particular what content you should be creating for ae in order to be cited and be found and in this episode we really wanna break down the the feasibility nature of creating all of these different kinds of content the kinds of content you should be focusing on what you should prioritize etcetera etcetera and really give you a kind of overview of what you should be looking to create in order to be fired before we get into the podcast today here's a quick word from our sponsor hubspot think about listening to this podcast right now you're probably multitasking and catching seventy maybe eighty percent of it now flip that and imagine only catching twenty percent that'd be pretty crazy right yet most businesses only use twenty percent of their data all the important details in cool logs emails and chats just left floating in digital space hubspot gives you access to those insights to help your business grow because when you know more you grow more visit hubspot dot com to get the full picture today ai has detonated like both information creation and consumption at the same time you know marketers have always moved in hoods which i've enjoyed you know we've gone after new interesting topics together but the speed of this one is unprecedented you know so you know a few weeks ago we were all thinking about seo in you know some pretty traditional ways and now it's all about ae so we've got to get grips with it and we've got to figure out what we can do you know to positively impact our results in our business in this new paradigm yeah yeah everyone is thinking about it like if you mention seo now as a term like people just look at you funny because they just think like you know old get by the times there absolutely i mean it's still there isn't it but it just doesn't it just doesn't carry the the the the the the value the the the worth that it did a while ago this is the new this is new frontier that we've got get and the thing is even if it does carry some worth still which i think it doesn't you know i see from the day of for sales and customers like they're still getting a good amount of high intent leads from google but it's just the thinking is how long is that gonna lock gonna taper it down because isn't it there's no real other way to look at it it's gonna diminish it's gonna whittle away yeah and so you gotta be building up something new yeah okay so let's talk about a and the types of content you need to be creating in order to be found and served in large language models and i think firstly let's talk about that the areas of content to focus on i think the consensus is that you should be focusing on commercially orientated content yeah absolutely and to to some that might sound like a fairly obvious statement but you know it's critical in ae in an seo era we needed informational content to get in front of people early in the buying process to build like mental availability brand authority and relevance with but also to create that commercial authority for our content so that we could rank highly for those terms in this ae o era the informational content doesn't carry the value of the worth that it did evolved because there's no brand there's no brand presence amongst that content you know people are just con converting with ar getting the information they need getting any the answers they need and really collapsing the the the the value of that type of content for for your business meanwhile we've been listening we've been testing we've been learning and we've been observing and there is a consensus so amongst people that i do trust that commercial content is where you can have a tangible in the first place hopefully measurable impact on results within ae o tools yeah that also critically confer positive benefits to your business because there's lots of things you could do in marketing that don't benefit you at all but this could be the way to optimize for ao that also confer benefit to you to your pipeline to your business yeah yeah and when we talk about commercial com versus informational or wit we're saying basically ditch the you know complete guide to this ditch the what is this the how do you do this and focus on you know product and vendor orientated content so actually we can run through that list that we've got in a in a little bit maybe but yeah i suppose that is what makes commercially focused content it's it's not trying to give somebody the initial knowledge of a topic it's actually you know when they get into the buying process they've done a bit of research and now they're ready to go to almost vendor selection that's the kind of content that you wanna be creating to be appeared for yeah it's aimed at the part of the spectrum where they're trying to understand their options you know trying to identify compare evaluate and ultimately prefer solutions vendors providers you know so it's it's consistent with commercial intent to some degree from the seo era and it's that it's down that end of the buying process where the research the general information gathering the research is done and now we wanna take action we wanna implement it and they they they enter a different type of query once they get to that point which will typically result in an ae engine and an answer engine returning brands vendors and recommendations mh that's where you wanna aim your efforts yeah actually before we get into that table of content to create let's let's segue a little bit into how to identify which queries you should be targeting because this is this is where seo and ae differ quite massively right because when it comes to seo and keyword research it was always fairly easy to get the data you know get some kind of gauge on what your audience was searching for and in a world and then you know what keywords to target and what content to create in order to fit those in a is a completely different ballgame game altogether yeah number one you don't have the data available to you in order to actually understand what prompts users are using in order to actually get answers like that's that's a big gap that we have right now and just the level of context and the length that i covered in one of the episodes that i did it was a solo episode evaluating you know eighteen hundred chat prompts i can't remember what the length there's a stat in that about the difference in length between prompting chat gp versus a keyword search in google and it was ridiculous long life i mean outrageous longer the level of context that you're giving makes finding queries and keywords different yeah absolutely so the the great way that i've heard it said is that within ai search within ao the the volume on any query is is simply one you know queries are so long queries are so nuanced so full of context so unique that the volume on any query is essentially one yeah within seo we had huge amounts of correlation around keywords because users the technology and and google and bing you know provided search engines all sort of understood that that was the most effective way to get good results out of it but that's no longer a case yeah and now we've got this scenario where users can and will and are typing long questions series of questions with loads of memory about them in personal context that totally transform the landscape so there's no data you know hard data on which queries are being used most frequently which themes and topics within them occur most frequently either so that's not a route now to understanding you've gotta find new ways to establish what's being asked in your vertical in your center that you can aim your content yes yeah the best way that i've figured out to do this so far well the good thing is everything in marketing start with a deep understanding of your audience and if you're already doing a really fantastic job at understanding your audience you should have you know your buyer journey mapped out your personas maps out your ic maps out you know you'll have all of that documented if you don't you can create it pretty easily now with the help of ai as well right and you know maybe we can overlay this on the youtube video but the way that i've gone about understanding the kind of prompts that buyers might use is by creating a persona simulation project claude which essentially takes a load of knowledge documentation on our personas so you know who they are what companies they might work for the challenges they might have the solutions they're looking for how they search how they think how they communicate all of these different kind of inputs and then basically provided instructions to use that knowledge in order to extract questions and prompts they would likely ask a large language model based on a particular topic or category yep and i've seen you know really great outputs from this like questions and prompts that you could realistically say yeah my buyers would would be asking that and it just helps you to you know illustrate the kind of ways that your buyers might be using ai without like we don't have the data available to us so for me this is the next best thing in order to simulate that process yeah and it's really important but as a way of increasing your confidence in what content you're going to create right there there does need to be some targeting and tailoring around sensible worthwhile queries and these projects where you s your buyers you know point of view a really powerful ways to do it and as you say that's a great tool that can be used sort of continuously iterate on from a knowledge from a from an an audience insight perspective but it's available to you all the time whereas your your ideal customer might not be on the phone when you need them every day but a tool like this you can work with like in real time and come up with great content ideas it's also gonna be critical and i mean we're we're jumping around a little bit in this video already but i think that's good you know if you do go on to select a tool to try to understand yeah your impact you're going to need that knowledge as well you're going to need those audience queries because they are what will be monitored yeah you know if you measure it so we'll get back onto that later i'm sure yeah yeah i mean till tools are important tools are important but before you know before you can measure anything you've gotta take action and so like developing your understanding of your audience critical building out a method of generating the types of queries they would use that's a really key because you know what exactly then you can start to produce the kind of content that's tailored to that audience yeah with those queries in mind and around their commercial needs and questions what will get you the results we think yeah so let's actually talk about some of that content now the different types you can create and there was a webinar with winter and omni omniscient yep really good which guys i missed but you caught and so did cr so you know i've i've watched bits of it back and kind of get the context from it and they they were thrown around some amazing you know suggestions and ideas in terms of the kinds of content that is right to create yeah for ae and i think we really just wanted to throw their list out there and you know bring some context around it and think about how we prioritize that kind of stuff so within a and commercial intent content you have quite a lot of formats that you can choose to create content in that i'll typically serve within ai answers so you've got things like list of calls that would be you know the best best x for this the top tools for that large language models are serving content like that all the time k really are you've got reviews and comparisons between you know different tools or different services documentation or knowledge based type technical formatted stuff you've got product pages you've got persona and use case pages so that could be content directly mapped to a specific ic or you know context of use yep you've got industry pages which i'd probably almost bundle in with that one above perhaps case studies which well we can talk about these but yeah i'm not sure i'd call that out sale i think within the other fund together right yeah yeah that's where it's got value yet and then original data and research as yeah yeah absolutely and mean you know immediately i think people will see you know what first of all props to omniscient and winter for putting that together people are think immediately see and feel the fit between that kind of information and the responses that ai engines are giving you know because they're they're picking passages you know not not whole pages not whole results picking passages that are really closely aligned to the requirements of the question and so list of calls where solutions are covered individually one by one fit that model right and they're being used extensively i think comparisons could be really powerful because so many times they will be comparing one solution to another all to several so again it's a really good fit and content that's aligned to specific not just ic because of course a company might have one or a small handful of ic but the sub segments within the ic the specific niches and different types of organization that make up the ic that's got really useful that's got real interest as well and i think to your point you know case studies are a form of data yeah that can really differentiate one of those from another make them specific and unique to that audience which is really powerful way to you know build out this content at some sort of scale really powerful yeah great list yeah right now the easy one to get started with it are these list calls right i do question the longevity of these and you know how long we've got before i think i've mentioned this in the last episode you know like chat other large language models introduce some sort of trust based signaling but for now list calls seem like a really great short term way to get citations in in a yeah yeah but that they they indicate that they have the ability to produce a tangible you know perhaps measurable beneficial impact at critically relatively low volume yeah as and you can start to see this impact almost as soon as you start to create this content yeah that's not say that a large volume is not desirable it is one of the challenges with you know answer engine optimization and the fact that queries have a volume of one is that content scale is kinda critical but with this approach you can nevertheless start to get some confidence back that you are impacting things yeah and it it's pretty easy to create ultimately scale and that that's one of the considerations to make here which is how much of each of this content do you need in order to have an impact and like you just mentioned that with a a handful you know a dozen of good list calls you can actually start to appear for most of those queries within ai answers if they're specific enough whereas when we get into like persona and use case pages well that really depends on the query that the user is asking and how specific the passages of content need to be in order to answer that yeah absolutely there's a graph i think that all businesses ought to sort of have somewhere in their mind wish it was two axes but it probably needs to be three which means it's hard to visualize but we'll try on one you've got you know the impact what impact can this type of content have you know how how desirable is it how large is it how feasible is it for you to produce it at any kind of scale and then on the third axis what kind of scale is needed to produce the business benefit that you wanna see and all of these content types exist somewhere in that three d space and i think list calls as you've said sit in a very attractive part of that space because relatively relatively feasible relatively you know low challenge to create it quick results potentially and and a good result and then i think the next one to look at is you know those niche industry pages or another good example to look at is it's a niche industry page approach which is yeah you might need more scale with more nuance and more differentiation to make an impact yeah but could that impact be bigger greater this is what we all need to sort of observe and monitor and see what happens yeah yeah people you know sometimes wanna like what we're doing so we can share that so right now list of calls has kind of been the number one priority because it's where we saw some early early gains i would say in like positioning position increases in ai answers and also traffic from ai engine engines thank you for that yeah like i was surprised to see like five percent of our traffic now comes from yeah ai sources that surprised me yeah that's probably thanks to new original source metric that we can see that quite clearly yeah yeah seems quite surprised yeah so list of calls you know for us that that includes like the best agency for x the best agency for y the best you know service for this etcetera etcetera here's a quick story from us at blend and our customer detail will launch in a completely new product in a brand new market with a different type of buyer to do this effectively they knew they needed to re overhaul their website and rethink their go to market strategy we partnered with them to achieve this transforming their brand rebuilding the site with their new identity and working with them long term to shift from lead generation to demand generation the impact thirty five percent more revenue sixty three percent more profit and eight hundred percent roi from marketing and to top it off a hubspot impact award to recognize the success that we have together this is what happens when you have a partner who has strategic creative and technical expertise all working together if you're in a similar place and want to discuss how we can help your business grow just head over to blend b dot com if you're enjoying this show let me recommend another one from the hubspot podcast network that i personally never miss nudge hosted by phil ag what i love about nudge is that it's all about the psychology in science behind human behavior what makes us take action form habits or say yes and then it shows how those same principles shape great marketing and sales in one episode phil looks at how just three words in the text message boosted vaccination rates and may have saved hundreds of lives that's the endowment effect at work a tiny psychological nudge creating a huge outcome every episode of nudge is about twenty minutes fast paced no fluff and packs with ideas you can actually use check it out nudge is available wherever you get your podcast and i think it's interesting so i mean that's the approach we're taking right blend as a a company of the size we are in the feel we are contrast that a little with what hubspot talking about doing you know we've met with age us we've we've had conversations with kip in the past you know we've watched their podcast episodes and loop presentations they talk quite openly about creating these niche industry pages at scale yep where their content is optimized for use cases personas within ic and that's their approach which as a business with a content engine the size of theirs with you know at the scale they are they think is a a sound approach for them but i do think that the right approach does vary depending on your scale and the capacity you have do these things hence the feasibility concern i have yeah i like the way he broke this down the other day actually which is when you're a large enough scale you can think about these persona and use case pages almost like so you've got your category plus sector so it might be crm for manufacturers and then you go down to the location you've got crm for manufacturers in the us mh and then you've got crm for manufacturers in you could go state level yeah and then you've got crm for manufacturers and you could go city level and you know you've got all like this huge kind of diagram that's splitting out and getting larger and larger at the bottom and then you can layer in things like size you can layer in things like funding you can layer in think you know yeah like technology all of these different nuances and yeah i mean from what i've heard from like hubspot and and other larger companies with the scale ultimately to be able to produce this level of content is that they are getting very granular with these persona pages yeah we gotta keep an eye on it and see what it looks like in the wild but it's definitely a a an approach that some are taking yeah so i think those are two things worth considering yeah i mean like we we've dabble with these persona pages i do think about the scale and you know that's ultimately why we diversify our content as well because like we all of this could change tomorrow yeah yep we don't know what algorithm or is it in our rhythm i don't even know model model change what model change open ai are gonna make tomorrow we don't know so all of this is kind of you know guess work in in some ways we have the data and let's actually talk about tools next but yeah we've kind of dabble with persona pages and are able to track it to a certain degree and saw some success and i think what helped in that was putting in case studies like actually having data within that page was good being very specific saying who you do something for like calling out the personas is that are likely to be used within a prompt if you can imagine somebody saying like to a to a prompt to a to a large language model you know i am a a vp of marketing in this industry like you need to think about covering those things so cover the persona cover the typical profile that you might work with who you work with why specifically people come to you and then cover off the challenges they might use in those prompts like if you can include all of that on a page there's probably a good chance of being served for those answers yeah i think that aligns really well to what people are gonna start using ai to do which is like really prompting it to think about their unique challenges like tools they you like complementary tools they might be using or competitive competing tools they're considering yep you know case studies actual data these all aligned really nicely to that context rich prompt query that you know sirius ai users are gonna use in their space yeah yeah let's talk about tools in tracking yeah for a moment which interesting because this is yeah this is really interesting and very different to how we typically track seo which was a lot easier yeah yeah so yeah we've been trying out a few different tools which i think you know happy to name auto being one of them scrunch we're demoing at the moment try to get demos for x funnel and profoundly but haven't seen those yet but you know we're getting a good range of kind of data and understanding of what these tools can offer now and for me the the big difference is that data point as well there's obviously differences in how you actually track all of these in tracking two thousand prompts is different to tracking five keywords very much so but yeah just the level of data available in order to actually see volumes and things like that is is different i my understanding of it and i'll interested to see if i'm right based on what you've seen is that these tools are all gonna take the prompts that we provide is being prompts of interest or maybe help us generate them but it's gonna develop a set prompts that we wanna understand our visibility within it's going to ask the ai engines that we want to track that exact question or perhaps some iterations of it but they're it's gonna pose that question to the ai engine not just once multiple times mh to develop a statistical you know probability that you will be mentioned or cited you know and then dare say there's gonna be the ability to sort of q like classify those citations those mentions and the degree of visibility but it's interesting how closely these tools are mimicking our own behavior mh as in you know seo tools have access to data that didn't really wasn't part of the user experience those tools but these tools are all relying on the very same thing we are which is prompt the engine assess the result back now what they can all do differently is build on different layers of analytics activation around it so be interesting to see what tools you know become popular and what tools meet business different requirements but it has been really interesting getting under the hood them starting to see what's possible yeah so what scrunch do is they basically take your full prompts which could you know be twenty words long and they condensed it down into a slightly broader prompt in order to try and capture more of like the re the relevant things that might be going on there okay rather than just one highly specific thing so they almost condense your really long prompt into something that might be more reusable across multiple users mh and yeah that's an interesting way do what i really like about the tracking is like how they split out different large language models and see how you track on a daily basis against those and basically gives you like a green score or a red score if you're mentioned or if you're not mentioned mh and looking at the trend to see like okay we created this piece of content here for this prompt we're green green green green green yeah all of them we're red like what's happened there or like we're green and red we're green like we're mentioning we're not mentioned like what's going on with that flip flop there and yeah it really allows you to dive into basically track what we're talking about here yeah it's conference well and that's you know that's what's so exciting it's exciting i'm really pleased that we're getting close to you know having a tool that allows us to report back here about what impact we're having with these different types of things because our objective is always to a you know find a sound strategy that benefits us and then share that information with everybody so yeah really pleased that we're gonna have some ability to measure and report on that it's gonna be critical it's just a very new area yeah takes a lot of yeah fresh thinking about how you approach and tackle it yeah i would say when it comes to tools a lot of these tools do the same things i mean they pretty much all do the same thing actually in terms of they just query the prompt that you have asked yourself like they they go away and be the user yeah using the api the difference will be and how they present they've information back how they make actionable and what they charge you for it it's exactly well that's the big thing as well you know i do think a lot of b2b won't be able to afford these tools and might have to work with agencies to get the answers to get the data perhaps yeah or most of these platforms are significantly more expensive equivalent aren't yeah that's a challenge for people yeah makes it kinda hard to it's not quite so democrat if it costs quite a big chunk of budget to get access to something to monitor your performance thankfully you know hubspot of released mh some tools to help businesses get an understanding of their visibility within a engine at aes and you can run that tool over and over and over again it's not incredibly practical but it is there yeah is accessible so there are some methods to get some insights and some data but yeah hopefully plenty of businesses can embrace a tool at some point and hopefully there'll be some improvement in price position for these tools you know at the moment again my understanding and i i could be proven wrong any day now is that you know as you said they're they're doing what we do when we use the tools ourselves there there's no api feed of this data that they can get on to but that might change as well like you said i open ai could change things any day yeah and make things a lot easier or a lot harder yeah for us we'll have to wait and see yeah you just stay an idea yeah one kind of closing off point that i'd like to end on is when we were kind of prepping for this episode you made a really nice parallel to the adoption of inbound marketing back in like twenty ten twenty fifteen which was like you'd have a lot of conversations with people and say the best time to start doing this mh was you know yesterday and i think the same is true for this as well right now yeah well i mean i i can remember actually that you know when when we first started sort of you know helping businesses understand by marketing they that they often came to us with the insight that they wish they'd started two years ago or you know because in fact the best time the best time was in for inbound was years before yeah because it took time to build up a body of content it took time to create the sort of gravitational mass that resulted in measurable traffic increases and pipeline growth as on so so the best time was anytime in the past and the second best time was now now and i do think we're in the similar boat now which is yeah it's gonna take time to create content that has an impact but if you da if you wait if you delay now you're going to miss out on the opportunity to be building that body and to be having that impact so yeah do get started because you'll regret that potentially quite significantly in two years time when everybody's on board and everybody's optimizing and you're just one of the masses this is this is the moment in time to be still an early adopter yeah first mover particularly within some segments other than marketing and to potentially have outs outsourced results from it as a as a result so yeah get on with it yeah and whilst this episode is focused on ae that you know this podcast isn't focused on just ae it's just one component of demand generation ultimately so you know i would just say think about diversifying content massively like because we're just so unsure about what's gonna happen with a and like there's just not that level of consistency that we have with google and the updates and how it works and how algorithm changes you know might have had some impact but they weren't like catastrophic well we just don't know right now and i just think now more than ever is a good time to think about diversifying that content absolutely absolutely if you've got a budget you know it take a fresh look at it and split it between this and building a brand online in other channels in other formats in other mediums because we know that the businesses the brands that are you know top of the shortlist list when when ai research starts to take place have an outs sized potential to win that deal regardless of what gets asked or served or learned within ai so being that brand is incredibly valuable that's worthwhile investing some of your budget in whilst this might be worthwhile a part of your budget as well and i mean this is written content for for l m's right this this doesn't have to be a huge cost ai can help you create this at scale so this doesn't have to consume all of your budget i i don't think and therefore that does mean that you can be looking at other channels and other formats yeah alright nice one phil i think we should wrap it up there that was quite you know think there's a lot of information condensed in there and yeah a lot to think about when it comes to a hopefully that gives you a starting point at least because a lot of people are asking the question like what content do we create now in order to be found and hopefully that gives you some answers somewhere to start from yeah yeah start tracking see how it performs and go from there basically absolutely alright awesome let's wrap it up and we will catch you in the next episode bye everyone thanks everyone this episode of demand decode was brought to you by blend we help b2b technology companies growth through strategic creative and technical expertise bringing you the capabilities you need to drive demand and turn it into real revenue impact for your business if you enjoyed this episode followed demand coded on your favorite podcast platform leave us a quick review and we'll see you next time with more insight to help you grow

hi everyone welcome back to demand coded dan here as usual phil on the other side of the desk over there and we are back for a new episode today and we're kind of covering something that's hypothetical but kind of realistic and not hypothetical as well which is what happens if google abandon traditional search as we know it you know what happens if the blue links go tomorrow what would we do what would change what would happen what would marketing look like all of those things that's what we're gonna cover today and yeah i think it's a really interesting way just to frame our thinking about marketing now even even though we know that's not gonna happen tomorrow right but we need to actually start thinking in this way so yeah yeah this a it's a useful thought exercise to put yourself ahead of others that are relying on the fact that so far so nothing so it hasn't gone away you know people might be aware are aware that change is happening and you know results are moving to different locations but like this is a really good way to think okay in an extreme situation how would we react how would we respond and while it is hypothetical i don't think it's un feasible i don't think it's an impossibility at all we gotta be ready for anything before we get into the podcast today here's a quick word from our sponsor hubspot think about listening to this podcast right now you're probably multitasking and catching seventy maybe eighty percent of it now flip that and imagine only catching twenty percent that'd be pretty crazy right yet most businesses only use twenty percent of their data all the important details in cool logs emails and chats just left floating in digital space hubspot gives you access to those insights to help your business grow because when you know more you grow more visit hubspot dot com to get the full picture today i think what's really interesting here is that businesses that have i've already started to recognize that the traditional search landscape and you know search marketing has been starting to decline for some years now and businesses that have recognized that and pivoted into other channels in other areas are actually starting to see the compounding effect of that yep already so absolutely all ai up like the rise of ai yeah the trend of by attention drifting away from search at the earliest stages of the buying process are have been around for quite some time meaning the value of search has become increasingly commercial over time now the way to tap into that value has actually remained largely the same from a search content seo perspective but nonetheless the impact and the role of it and go to market and and demand creation is has changed already yeah so this would be an extreme acceleration of that but not a net new shift yeah yeah and like as we said as i said at the start this is hypothetical of course but ai mode is in google already phil you said you gotta a pop up literally yesterday saying go ahead and use ai mode yeah encouraging me to like just ditch my search query and search results and and go favor ai mode yeah so i'm pretty confident i don't know when it's gonna happen but in the nearest future search is gonna look very different yeah ai mode will be the default browsing experience it's it's really interesting because it because goo google is the only company that can usher in that new era right we've got chat claw complexity people are using them like in their numbers it's phenomenal but google if they replace search with ai mode which appears to be a trajectory they're on it's kind of the final nail in that coffin almost which is predominantly users buyers are buyers the people would care about are gonna be using one of those tools to perform their information gathering and you know figuring out what they wanna do and what they wanna buy and how they wanna buy it and search is gone yeah so interesting to think about it yeah so how do you think that's that's gonna be changing the way that ultimately we think about marketing we think about channels because that really removes the need for traditional seo absolutely as we've thought about yeah i mean if you take it back to investments whatever part of your budget was being spent focused on creating an impact within traditional search results and search traffic has to be reevaluate yeah you have to reevaluate it in terms of what are you hoping to get when you do what you do and is that still a sensible you know worthwhile endeavor not is the it's not that's the answer but you've gotta a you should always consider and review these and in that case what can you do instead that is a sensible investment of that budget or where can you put that money yeah instead to offset the you know the loss that you're gonna experience in terms of traffic yeah it's it requires a fundamental rethink of that part of your go to market and potentially that part of your budget yeah and content creation really which is what most people would have been doing with that money right you know you've got configuration and i suppose some search engine marketing right some some google ppc ads in a traditional sense but when we think about seo when we think about search results the play that most people were doing performing to get results there was written content creation yeah and that is significantly undermined by any kind of shift further in this direction so yeah content creation has to change yeah and it already is changing for a lot of businesses but like just the way that we used to create informational content there was there was a reason for blogging like not only to educate people about a particular topic but also to combine with the other pages on your website particularly product pages those commercial pages your homepage to help that entire kind of cluster of things yes when we think about ai not only you know taking most of the traffic away from those informational queries because it's serving that information upfront we also haven't seen yet the requirement to build topical authority yeah that google needs and you know it's in your own advantage to create that in order to build up that holistic kind of authority and evidence to really rank better for a cluster of pages yeah i mean not everybody saw the connection between informational content creation and commercial position improvement but many benefited from it you know even if it wasn't the thing they were going after and and truly that's what created results for b2b companies being found high amongst commercial queries as a result of the work that you're doing to create domain authority high relevance high authority we've seen the ai cares very little for that top three position that you had or striving for in search results and it will go significantly deeper to get the most closely aligned results yeah so you haven't got to influence your position in the same way meaning you haven't got to create the same type of content on the same quantity of content to achieve that outcome furthermore every piece of informational content that was created in the search era had the opportunity had the potential to create some brand recognition brand it's visits to your website and the ai experience totally strips out of the way yeah you know informational queries are answered comprehensively with information from many sources and and in the majority of cases brands get very little visibility or traffic from it so there's not much benefit to being part of that mechanism right let others do that yeah let let let other content other brands inform people in a way that benefits don't want other than the user and focus your energy somewhere else yeah yeah in unless large language models like chat start to roll out trust signals or use google's api in order to feed those into it which is entirely possible there really is not much point in creating informational content to be served in ai yeah because yeah like i think that such a good point about the disconnect between the information and the brand yes like even if you're sighted as a source for that informational content it's such a like tiny citation that most users are not paying attention to that like the large language model models have gotten to a point now where they're so trustworthy without the citation in most cases there will be use cases where you you know need to know what's citing that information but yep most of the time now you don't need to see that so yeah and i think this is sort of like omitted a little bit from the advice even from the like the the experts that i trust this point isn't always made clear but if you look closely at the recommendations and the examples there is a general correlation around commercial yeah commercial content you know you create content to be found in the commercial type of query in an ai engine where the citations are greater the like the mentions and the brand visibility is greater because ai is talking about companies and solutions specifically and the likelihood that you can convert that into a visit somehow mh now you know hope hubspot of helpful include introduced l or ai as a original source channel you know because some people will click links and that probably will increase inside their chat experience but right now the majority of people are still going to a to search i think to perform branded search yeah to get to the brands and the vendors that the ai up tool recommends as a result of that comp commercial query and the content within it yeah the thing about commercial seo and commercial intent though is that that's always been where the value it's in seo and the difference i think is that when it comes to seo commercial content you only have to have you know three five pages on your website which covered that topic because right the engine was clever enough to serve that content for you know shorter tail keywords that didn't include the level of context that you now have with ai prompts the difference is now you need all of that time all of that resource that you were putting into informational content to actually compete at the same level with ai prompts because there's so much more variety and context being given if you want your brand to be served and cited in that time you need to be creating content commercial level content and at scale in order to meet that that is definitely where the thinking and the advice and the evidence is headed somebody i heard or sore can't recall now said you the other day that the volume on an ai query is one you know i meaning yeah but whereas i google obviously had you know a yeah a long tail it was still we were still able to group together themes and topics and be visible in multiple but there's so much scope for context and threading and memory and nuance within conversations as per the data that you talked about on the recent episode of demand coded and that the search volume on a on an ai query is truly one so in order to be featured you know significantly within the results you've gotta be highly specific yeah which calls for scale yeah it absolutely does so if google was to turn off organic search tomorrow i kinda wanna get into like the nitty gritty of this now mh because we're not saying it's gonna happen tomorrow but it's it's likely to happen at some point that searches we know it is gonna change and be ai mode as a default yep what on earth do we do as marketers where do we go okay alright well i have my thoughts i have my thoughts i think we have good thoughts together so let's see if we're aligned one you've got you've got a number of options one double down on reinvest in perfect and you know become brilliant at creating brand awareness is too weak word it's mental availability preference and trust amongst your ic for your brand before search slash ai takes place by creating content in the formats that's necessary and required to be seen and discovered and consumed in channels other than ai and search i e social i e video and youtube i e events communities etcetera informed and influenced by your audience and what you know about them but be the brand that they know before they move in market for the category so that your top of the shortlist because we know that the brand that's top of the shortlist list when the need when the desired to purchase arises has an outs sized probability of winning that deal you know so that is a key play for brands now already was but it's becoming even more powerful i think given the change in search most businesses don't realize just how much their website is holding them back v would generate in strong demand but their site just wasn't converting it we rebuilt their site with their buyers in mind sharpen the user experience and aligned it to their goals and within ninety days after launch high intent conversions increased by a hundred percent and demo requests rose by fourteen percent that's what happens when your website finally works as hard as your marketing if you think your website might be holding you back let's start the conversation at blend b dot com if you're enjoying this show let me recommend another one from the hubspot podcast network that i personally never miss nudge hosted by phil ag what i love about nudge is that it's all about the psychology in science behind human behavior what makes us take action form habits or say yes and then it shows how those same principles shape great marketing and sales in one episode phil looks at how just three words in a text message boosted vaccination rates and may have saved hundreds of lives that's the endowment effect at work a tiny psychological nudge create a huge outcome every episode of nudge is about twenty minutes fast paced no fluff and packed with ideas you can actually use check it out nudge is available wherever you get your podcast brand is obviously has always been important but i think now there is so much more emphasis on being shortlist listed in that initial vendor selection process because it gives you such an advantage that's always been true but it's never been harder to be part of that list because of the way that you know search evolving and buyers are ultimately using different channels in order to actually get that vendor list one thing i always think about when diversifying channels and ultimately going in new areas because what we're talking about here really is anything outside of seo mh because if we're saying google was gonna turn organic search off tomorrow it's like what what do we do then the way that i've always thought about this is starting with the fundamental fundamental understanding of your audience where where do they go to consume information yep like who do they trust in the market what messages resonate with them what events do they go to all of these kind of things like building up that comprehensive profile of your audience of of your customer of your buyers understanding them deeply and just go into the places that work for them for most b2b businesses now that's gonna be linkedin like as the number one place to start followed closely i would say by youtube yep the thing i love about like video content and i'm i'm bullish youtube have been since maybe mid last year when i've really started to you know notice this shift in and the disconnect between brand and informational content youtube gives you the connection between the information you're delivering and your brand and your people in ways that written content never could anyway like the power of it is is truly incredible and it still enables you to educate your audience like if we're saying that ai is ultimately taking you know most of the blog content or informational blog content well youtube is still there like foul millions of people are still using youtube we we get thousands of views on like hubspot related videos yeah which is you know it shows i mean that's a niche like that's a really tight niche and like people are still really enjoying the content their comment and saying that it's you know fantastic content and you're becoming a trusted source of information for them yep and that's a great way to work your way at the ladder on that vendor selection list when the buying tri occurs absolutely and you know like linkedin like seo was youtube is a to some degree of performance channel you can understand it yeah you can iterate on your approach you can optimize your results and you can measure so it's important to treat it as such and there's a big opportunity there not you know even before you get to the to the concept and the realization that creating content in video format first gives you maximum on it so no matter what your audience requires and desires creating content in video format first gives you the ability to transform it into other assets other content types so much easier than beginning with the written word it's really really really really the way to go yeah yeah i mean like three five years ago when video first when this kind of like content playbook of video first has really taken off was great then now it's essential yeah like it's never been more important to go with that approach first because of the channels it allows you to unlock yep and different mediums if you and also you know as lots of businesses will be wanting to do if you want to use ai effectively and efficiently within your organization then that type of content is the app absolute best content format you can produce in order to drive your ai workflows nothing else comes close yeah nothing else cuts it it's it's the way to optimize for ai within your business as well as within the buying process so that's really worthwhile considering isn't it yeah absolutely so phil do you have anything you can you know give as a kind of playbook as a as a thought process the way to think about actually aligning content creation now to you know that more commercial side of things that will help visibility yeah i think i think we can so having observed what buyers are doing what how people are using ai some of the the experiments we've performed here that you've run and also the work of hubspot right with a new loop growth playbook we're starting to see some strategies that are getting some consensus and and sharing some results which is to ultimately create the content that ai ar users to describe your service category solution for the buyer that's using the tool which means producing content that is easily by ai recall that ai retrieves passages of content not whole pages so really well structured content that has complete thoughts communicated in one passage as opposed to a sort of fragmented narrative approach which for me was good blog strategy but you know a variety of approaches worked now more than ever it's important to really structure your content for this passage based retrieval system you know and think about the content that ai needs in order to answer the user's query so one of the early plays that we're seeing have some you know some merit is users ask ai to tell them who are the best software companies for this part of their business they're their problem their challenge you know their their enterprise or who are the best vendors service vendors within a category or who are the best you know providers of x y z and they're enriching that content with information about their company so content that's aligned so that could be a list of the best types of provider including yourself for a need you know can be very effective at becoming the source that ai use so thinking about the queries that your buyers are likely to use in an ai engine and then creating the content publishing that content on your website so that it could be crawled and pooled and served to them appears to be a way to move the needle now on how often you're sighted how clearly and how how sort of put how prominently you know if your piece of content is the source for one of these queries you can position yourself very well very highly in that set of results now ai is prob right nearly every result is different in some degree you can't guarantee that by creating an article saying who are the ten best project management systems for you know construction businesses working in civil engineering in north america or in a particular state you can't guarantee that by creating one article for that you'll always be in first position but you can positively impact the likelihood that you'll be there and do that over and over and over again and you can increase and change the number of mentions number of citations that you're getting for those commercial queries which can produce brand awareness mental availability and traffic to your website that you can then convert and will probably convert at a higher rate given the level of education the level of qualification that that visitor represents yeah having seen that information big challenge for people is monitoring that measuring that you know there's a whole new category of tools coming out and you know at best i think these tools can give you directional data only because of the massive quantity of unique searches that are gonna take place when unique queries are gonna take place in ai but most businesses are gonna wanna start to think about an ai ai monitoring tool of some sort to see whether this is impacting them you know the way they want yeah there's was a lot time packing that which is awesome the thing i would say just whilst it's fresh is the tool the tool thing right a lot of these tools are great demoed a few now tried a few and they they do the job they are very very expensive yeah yeah i don't think that's fundamentally down to the costs of operating them actually that they're basically doing what you do yeah which is querying an ai engine over and over and over again to produce a sort of statistical you know data point on how often your brand appears that's not very efficient yeah so for most like mid market b to companies i think you'll struggle to get the cost of one of these tools signed off yeah like for your use because if you think if you have sem rush right now or ahrefs for example which a lot of b2b companies do like themselves i mean you're talking like ten x the cost yeah yeah it's it's insane really maybe less for you know just one brand but it will be significantly more no doubt mh i do i do question like the long term effectiveness of some of these like ai content plays because and you know we were chatting about this before right i i just think the the job of a search engine is to provide the user with the best experience possible and that's why google have rolled out so many algorithm changes over the years and change the ui of their interface and things like that because ultimately they wanna serve their users with the best information possible give a lot of ads of course to make revenue yeah chat gp and other large language models right now if they can be easily gained and manipulated to you know serve vendors at the top of a list even when they might not be trusted to actually be the best vendor for that purpose then i think at some point in time they're gonna have to iterate their model to be more trust based mh mh i mean who knows right but we just don't know yeah it will be interesting to see what happens i think i take confidence from the fact that businesses one businesses have to do what works now i agree with you know we can't pull on nobody do now well while we wait for something else to happen an event run by winter earlier this week the updates and announcements we heard from hubspot about loop and speaking to asia he'll be on the podcast soon mh you know give me confidence that there's a general expectation that this will last for some length time most things in b to b marketing last now the rate of change is accelerating so i think you are right to not nobody should count on this and bank on this exclusively yeah and forever because that the road could get pulled like it did with you know backlink yeah and an authority back in the day google yeah so be diversified be ready but this is showing promise right now i think it's the opportunity people can can capitalize on if they're able to do it effectively efficiently yeah if you take forever to get to get to it then the window of opportunity might close yeah sure there are always short term opportunities that could you know push into long term is that you should pull on i yeah as regardless you know again if you come at this from the sort of idea that you're gonna you've got through you've got a number of objectives right create brand mental availability preference produce content that is found and cited in a seo a and also convert visitors and you know you got this broad array of requirements as a business to create pipeline you know if you come at content creation from the you know top down video first you can you can create these types of content for these different channels relatively efficiently yeah and you can be working in multiple channels simultaneously at that level of efficiency so even if there's change here in what works and to what degree it works you can sort of be hedging you know you can be you can be taking care of other parts you go to market at the same time yeah and hopefully you know offset any risk yeah the reason you know why i kind of bring that up is because i think there's always a risk in marketing of hedging all of your bets in one particular channel one particular area people that have built a business based on effectiveness of seo are gonna start to feel the pain of that yeah and there is always of risk in putting too much value in a channel that you don't own because you're at risk of algorithm changes that buyer behavior changes that but linked even linkedin for example if you've built up a profile of two hundred thousand followers and it's bringing you you know amazing business consistently if google just changed their algorithm that negatively affects your visibility like well you're screwed yeah yeah and people have you know had shocks in that regard in the past absolutely so it's always worth diversifying this no matter what like of course google like if google turn off organic search tomorrow the the marketers the businesses that win are the ones that i've already diversified to that point it's a it's a good like we're we're doing a mental exercise now around google search yeah what if google search goes away it's it's quite useful to do that on anything that's kinda of critical to your go to market right if this just whole lapses is completely yeah what would we rely on what would we do that combined with up to date audience insights you know and self reflection to some degree can keep you you know ahead of some of the potential yeah like disruptions but yeah think that's useful like say and if you've can't if you've and an seo is one of the s seo is one of those businesses have counted on it for so long and to such degree that for some it will represent the totality of their you know t of their generate demand acquisition yeah know that's really risky yeah and others will have done the same with email marketing and with social to some degree or google shopping ads or there's a whole range of channels that if it's the only meaningful contributor to your results that's a risky position to be in yeah and it's time to reevaluate absolutely one thing that i do wanna touch on because i'm i wanna try and touch on this as much as can now on this podcast is cro yeah and actually i love that it's a fundamental part of the loop now how they've how hubspot of really frames conversion rate optimization as such a key part of their new playbook yep because sure traffic is going down on most websites not all but most websites we get like google is generating less clicks to websites yep there's a i'm sure it it's around like fifty eight percent of google searches aren't being zero click zero search yeah absolutely that i'm marketing at grain yeah and that one of the best things you can do right now is optimize your website to convert that traffic in the best way possible yep and the traffic that you do get now will be more qualified like better informed buyers who can make decisions yeah i mean right now we're like businesses are getting traffic to their website that that represents a whole mix of people right many of whom are not interested not in market and not really that attractive to us yeah and we're kind of optimizing or should be optimizing for the portion of that traffic that is our buyer yeah in the future that's gonna be the only portion of traffic that you receive which is a huge positive in some respects because it means that you know you know who you're talking to and you know what you're what what you're trying to do and you're not sift out data from all sorts of other you know visitors but the number's gonna go go be significantly lower meaning the relative value the relative potential of each one is much higher mh they're gonna be more educated they're gonna be more qualified so it's critical that you are doing everything you can everything within your power to help them you know act on their interest take the next step want to talk to you and become an opportunity the way the way i think about this is the fact that inbound is still incredibly important inbound still works the act of doing things so that buyers find you come to you engage with you and buy from you is still you know very very very important effective and powerful yeah but the way that you bring people inbound is changing and has changed significantly since inbound was created you know twenty ten i suppose by hubspot you know we've been devi away from that original playbook ever since so loop marketing the ai era is usher in a big rethink of how inbound programs need to be structured but they are still an incredibly effective way to create pipeline as long as you move with the times you move with your buyer you move with the technology and you don't either over rely on a single channel or acting in a way that's oblivious to the data that's showing you how this behavior is changing move the times move the data and you can continue to grow through inbound very very effectively yeah i i just think there might be some tactical things in this episode that you you could take the the real thing is like this is just a great thought exercise to be doing right now because if you start acting like google has stopped providing organic search yep altogether it forces you to think about different things and like there is a extremely strong chance that this is gonna be a reality at some point in our future and if you can start thinking about how to build your brand how to drive demand in other ways outside of search it's just a really good bike yeah reflection thing and a good strategic exercise to actually do right now yeah put puts you you know a ahead of competitors puts you in a position to win and and protects you yeah from anything sudden that does change yeah alright awesome i think we're gonna talk a little bit more about the role of content in a couple of episodes time because there's a lot of questions right now around yeah if we're not creating this blog content what kind of content do we create and we've touched on that in different things but i really wanna unpack that playbook for people yeah that'd be good yeah okay alright awesome well let's wrap it up there yep and yeah hopefully you've enjoyed this episode that was a that was an interesting one like i love talking about you know different hypothesis and you know what the future could look like and in some ways it's a scare you scary reality but yeah all good nonetheless well that has to be embraced absolutely yeah cool let's wrap it out there hopefully you enjoyed this episode and we will catch you next time bad thanks all this episode of demand decode was brought to you by blend we help b2b technology companies grow through strategic creative and technical expertise bringing you the capabilities you need to drive demand and turn it into real revenue impact for your business if you enjoyed this episode followed demand coded on your favorite podcast platform leave us a quick review and we'll see you next time with more insight to help you grow

hi everyone welcome back to demand coded dan here as usual and i have amanda mcgrath sat on the opposite side of the desk from me which is amazing we'll get into you know amanda in a little while i might be a little bit cro today compared to the last episode and you'll probably know wirelessly we were inbound last week we were live from inbound which is incredibly exciting it was an amazing event already looking forward to next year but a lot of talking the vocal cords have being damaged and stretched so i'm really glad to have amanda here today to talk a lot about this because you know she's a fantastic expert to bring in on this topic and the topic is building a powerhouse marketing team and avoiding those fires and hires that none of us wanna make and you know i spoke to a lot of marketers last week amanda is talking to a ton of marketers every week as well and you know we hear a lot about the changes happening in marketing the types of teams that are being hired the types of teams that and marketers are unfortunately being mis misused and ultimately fired and there's just a lot of change in the way that marketing teams are being made up and ultimately should be made up and how businesses should think about hiring the right marketers and potentially you know scaling down some of their teams scaling up other areas and in this episode we're really gonna unpack all of that and understand and bring you kind of insights on how you should think about hiring for your marketing team in the future and really how we think marketing teams are gonna look in the future ultimately before we get into the podcast today here's a quick word from our sponsor hubspot think about listening to this podcast right now you're probably multitasking and catching seventy maybe eighty percent of it now flip that and imagine only catching twenty percent that'd be pretty crazy right yet most businesses only use twenty percent of their data all the important details in cool logs emails and chats just left floating in digital space hubspot gives you access to those insights to help your business grow because when you know more you grow more visit hubspot dot com to get the full picture today amanda it's been what over a year since we last had you on mon code yes yeah we were just chatting about the fact that the last time i was on i was actually also struggling to talk because i was about eight months pregnant and couldn't breathe properly so that was exciting for me and it is really exciting to be back on this topic partly because in the last few months since i've been back from maternity leave i've for the first time ever switched sides i'm no longer just a marketer i am now doing sales here for blend and i'm talking to new opportunities every single week for us and the people that i speak to i say it a lot internally nine times out ten the person i speak to you who picks up the phone to start a conversation with us about a project has been with their business less than three months yeah in some cases it's one of the first conversations they've had outside of talking to their actual business leaders i've spoken to people on day five or six even so why why is that i suppose it's because the way that we position ourselves and we talk about things as blend is that we talk about websites when people come into a new marketing role that is often very very high on the agenda of problems that need solving our website isn't working for us but what does it mean i'm talking to market very early in their relationship with a new business and it means that i see a lot of the issues that have gone on sometimes that person who's been hired is not the right person to fix marketing in that organization sometimes they've made the wrong choice of role that they've put out there and that you know that has actually led to some really unfortunate situations where people that we were talking to and working on a potential project with have ultimately ended up leaving in pretty quick succession because they've actually not been the right person to solve that problem for that organization and there is a big difference between the organizations to hire the right people and put the responsibility in the right places and the ones that actually have you know have made those kind of mistakes and and and i think that's something that we renewed to talk about especially now when the way marketing is delivered in businesses by agencies it's been shaken up so much if you are building a team right now for marketing you are not constrained by the rules that were in place a few years ago to get to scale you don't necessarily need all the same kinds of role and i think it's an important thing to think about where do you start even if you are refreshing a team that isn't working for you where do you actually need to start with that to avoid getting yourself into a situation where you've a mismatch a real mis alignment between the person that's coming in and what you're trying to do as a business yeah yeah one of the main things i really wanted to cover in this episode is how marketing teams are already getting smaller leaner but also a lot mean mh than they were before because of the capabilities they now have access to it's it's never ever been quicker and easier to go from idea ideological to execution on something very and there's a lot that goes into that and you need to have the strategic brain and now in order to have the idea that's effective in the first place and i'm sure you know we'll touch on that later in the episode but marketing teams will be smaller and i think they will be a lot more effective being smaller as well and businesses will see a lot more roi and efficiency coming out of their marketing teams because they're just able to do so much more so like so more effectively as well yeah and it really does make the case for changing the way that people look to achieve roi through their marketing it really helps to say you can spend the same amount of money but you don't necessarily need as many different resources as you previously needed so concentrate your investment and actually get the people who are gonna change the game for your business so i think that is such a big and important message to any kind of organization actually is invest really heavily in that strategic oversight of your marketing have them deeply embedded in your business and see the success that comes from that don't be afraid to spend all of your budget on one person if that person is going to rewrite the rules and take you to market in a completely new way that is going to grow your business yeah yeah like they should be able to come in and you know shake things up massively they they should make you feel uncomfortable and if they're not asking the questions and pushing back that are different and that required change then that signals probably it's not the right person they're not you know doing that level of thinking required in order to really change the businesses goes to market yeah i i think that's exactly right i think so we've all those of us who have been in the industry for a while we'll know what a business that is under investing and marketing looks like it is the business that has taken on an intern with no oversight an intern that reports directly into sales let's say where they are just creating collateral maybe they're doing some social media maybe they're a friend of the owner like their child like it's it's not a strategic investment in marketing ultimately it's actually just what we feel like we need some resource and then we get something that is underscored underdeveloped and then we say marketing isn't defective i've always had a bit of a grip of this thing right where people will hire the most junior team member they can possibly find and put them in charge of social media i know we get a bit specific here but that's always kind bugged me because it really under underpins the value of social media yeah and actually social has never been more effective especially in b2b marketing and to hire the most junior member you can find and just put them on social media because they're in gen z or whatever like is really under playing the value that you can build between your brand and your buyers on those platforms and it creates like dis disappointed delivery something that i've been saying for the longest time here is you know you shouldn't invest in three things when you can invest in one really well and and that's true if you think about your entire marketing output as one grand campaign right you have one campaign that's always on and what it's doing is telling the right people about what you offer them and that's every touch point should be on that campaign there might be other campaigns that are going on around that you shouldn't have too many of them you don't wanna divide your efforts but if you think about your channels individually you are always gonna create mis in the way your messaging is being delivered you are not going to be strategic in your use of those channels we see it all the time like faux pas come up where someone has overs stepped the the mark in something that they've delivered on social and sometimes it goes viral and it's really funny and everyone really likes it but more often than not it is not doing something as big or is detrimental as that or having such a big impact it is small little things where what you're saying on social doesn't quite tell the people who might see it exactly what you do it's just ever a slightly off message it's not as coherent and a strong story as you could be telling and you can't really do that by having someone very junior on that area because they don't have enough experience of the business that you're in the way that people who buy speak to each other all of those things it's actually a really serious business and and i think that particularly there's this self fulfilling prophecy element about it right where historically people have looked serious social media drink it's not a serious channel we'll put it in the hands of a junior resource it stays not a serious channel yeah and then you can say that it's not a serious channel so why would you pay for it why would you invest more in it so yeah you're setting up and these cycles of stuff not being as good as they could be yeah we have a risk here as well that with the enable of ai businesses may think oh well we can just empower a load of junior team members with these ai tools and get great output the trouble is with like obviously you know we can talk about ai on every single episode and we pretty much do now but you still need to know what good looks like yes absolutely you your marketing roles need to be people who are truly guardians of your brand champions of your voice understand your customers inside and out you don't get those people by start by with ai you need to start with knowledge that goes into them you you absolutely need someone who has a voice to put in who knows what assets you've got and has the assessment to say this is what we should build this from and then vet the output an editor a champion someone who is really deeply ingrained and that's why you know if if there were one takeaway from this and we were saying to any business who's your first marketing hire please stop hiring even marketing managers hiring marketing manager unless you have existing marketing capabilities within your organization is doomed to fail you need a marketing director you need a cmo even if it's fractional you need at worst a ahead of marketing someone who is expecting to have some clout you need a strong brief for them about where your business is going but you need someone who is ready to receive that brief and a junior resource simply isn't they don't know enough about business they don't know enough about your industry to be able to do that and you do you are not bringing them the marketing capabilities around them that will help them step up so you need someone who's self sufficient ultimately who brings stuff to the table that challenges you and maybe find you a little bit alright let's try and kind of visualize this for our audience in terms of what a typical marketing team setup looks like now and before and where you think that how you think that's gonna look twenty twenty five and beyond so if we think about not necessarily the roles but the capabilities that you need in your team you're always going to need we've talked about the person who plans and strategize we need someone who owns and coordinates the efforts we need someone who does any visual work and usually separately to that someone who can do any video based work we've got someone who owns content and the voice typically now you might say all of these can be one person in your organization you've got someone who's got all of those round capabilities but many organizations will and then you know beyond that you've got specialist areas haven't you you've got things like who owns your paid media spend who owns some of your specific kinds of channel if you do any kind of partner marketing you've got product marketers you've got a whole range of different things that might need to be covered depending on what you do what you offer to the market now many organizations therefore have teams even in mid sized businesses teams of five ten fifteen people across all of those disciplines many organizations have a full time graphic designer a full time video editor multiple content writers and produces someone who coordinates all of those efforts they have all of these people in different seats the future may look quite different in that many businesses i suspect will not need full time res resource in all of those areas to generate the amount of output that they need to to have impact so the decision making can be around strategically choosing what seats do need to be full time seats what capabilities can be drawn together what can be outsourced i you know say this to someone who works an agency but i genuinely think that when you reach a point where you've got three or four disciplines that you do not need full time in your organization actually getting an agency in place to run those areas for you because they've got that same person working on three or four accounts will be a cost saving to you a much more effective use of your budget and you get the benefit that that person is being exposed to other brands and doing other work and is usually more advanced for yeah their stage of career then you would get from someone who's only worked on one brand so there's lots of benefits to be had there but i think it really starts with it starts with that strategic thought what are the things that we need to create what are the things and channels that we need to cover and delivery then you start to break it down and group it some of it will be yes actually it will make the most sense even in a situation where we've got some full time resource and some agency resource or only agency resource we will still probably need someone to coordinate the efforts internally because there's someone who we need someone in our business who will draw on our resources from the rest of the business our sales team our senior team our product experts to bring assets into marketing that can be used to drive our efforts there are things that if you have a real high expertise in your discipline and you need to create content you may well find that you need a content role that is specialist within your organization and that person might have a mixed responsibility in the future of not just doing collateral for marketing but also doing sales collateral you might but you you probably will at some point in your development need that sort of role there are other areas that i think a any industry need to think about more events are having a big impact right now and changing and bridging that gap that's created in content by the rise of ai where written content is less trusted it is less directly digested you skip that and get directly to humans heat own connection it's incredibly impactful so what do you do about events now you probably won't do enough events in a year even if you have a very busy schedule to justify a full time resource in that area but you might if you already have an events calendar that you have to work you know we work with with teams in the life sciences where some of them attend thirty fifty conferences a year you probably will need events in in in house at that point but for most businesses where you're thinking about getting started with half a dozen even a dozen events that you are running from scratch do you actually need someone full time or when you think about all of the things that an event requires or any of those elements of full time role probably not yeah yeah the thing is you know when it comes to events as well it's so like operational i wanna say in terms of managing events that there's often things that you can distribute to other people in order to you know loosen the burden of managing those events they're very time consuming but not very strategic mh thinking you know it's a lot of project management getting things yeah and again when you've got if you're saying as you build your team of hive if i really think about core of any businesses marketing team now i do think the main partnership that needs to be forged is between your strategic leader who should at the very least be a marketing director and a coordinator who is gonna make sure that things get done if you've got any specific expertise beyond that that are required your first that would probably be to outsource those rather than to create full roles but your coordinator can soak up a lot of that kind of admin that you're talking about so yeah maybe you get an agency to market your event and to help you decide on yeah the the venue to help you pull in speakers even all of that your coordinator is there to make sure there is much to order this that and the other to coordinate taxis and travel and actually make it happen yeah and be part of it because that person can be earlier stages in their career and learning and soaking up for this environment knows to everything exactly and adding a huge amount of value yeah where do you stand on like because i have maybe a hot take on this specialists within the marketing team you mentioned like paid media before yeah even content writers to a certain perspective certain you know degree mh what do you think's happening with those so we've talked for a long time about the t shaped marketer you really want anyone in a senior marketing seat to have a broad overview and some areas they're deeper in but maybe one that they've spent a lot of time in i think that that is still it's still the case and more so that in the world of ai that senior marketer can oversee all of those efforts i am less less and less convinced that we will need deep expertise in any one of those areas particularly within businesses i think when you get to an agency where you've got enough room to specialize because you have a whole team of people that are shared across multiple like businesses essentially then it's very different having the special and being able to say i know best what good looks like in this area i am the one that's really listening to what's going on here and the day the most up to date methods into the way that we practice this that's important but i i don't think that many businesses will actually need full time resource in any of those areas think as well that they'd probably be surprised even now at how inefficient that resource for them is yeah how many businesses really have enough budgets going on in paid media to justify a full time person i i think it would be a lot fewer than you think even even now a couple of years on from sort of the advent of ai tools yeah i totally agree i think ai has enabled us t shaped marketers putting myself in that yep group to get to eighty percent capability in most channels tactics areas yeah because you have you know this knowledge tool in order to you know do you pretty much anything you need to do on a day to day basis it's only when you then get into that top twenty percent echelon of area where you need the deep platform expertise and knowledge and years of experience in order to truly extract the most value from that but most businesses aren't at that scale to need that in house and if you have that t shaped market at the more you know generalist side of things then they can be a like good enough they don't need to be at that expert level in the top twenty percent even the top ten percent of people who are doing that exact thing they will be agencies mh ultimately yes because that's where they are gonna be needed and pulled into lots of different accounts in order to manage that but for most mid market businesses i really think those specialists will not be needed as much anymore because more generalist can actually pick up a lot of the work mine i think that's where these hybrid approaches will have huge impact right and we have a number of relationships here where we work in parallel with the t shaped marketers and we extend their capabilities and we've vet the work that they're doing for them and we say this could be better if you employ these tactics and then they go away and do it we've done hybrid hybrid marketing plans for years now where we've said this is the outcome and we've agreed these are the things that we need to create here's how we'll divide them up if you do this we'll do that there's a mixture of everyone tackling different projects but everyone knows they're working to a shared plan i think that kind of collaboration greatly enhances the impact of these leaner mean teams as you say and actually allows them to achieve very very high levels of success and impact for their businesses when glenn first started as a b2b marketing agency we kept seeing the same problem great marketing was failing because the website couldn't convert and one client even challenger us saying of course we'd say that our marketing efforts aren't working because their website wasn't converting effectively you know of course we'd say that so we built them a new site for free and overnight their websites is completely transformed and that's when we realized websites aren't just a part of marketing they're the foundation of predictable growth fifteen years later we built over a hundred and fifty websites on hubspot worked with hundreds of b2b teams to turn them into revenue engines because when you get the website right every other marketing effort works harder if that sounds familiar and you'd like to explore what we could do together head over to blend b dot com if you're enjoying this show let me recommend another one from the hubspot podcast network that i personally never miss nudge hosted by phil ag what i love about nudge is that it's all about the psychology in science behind human behavior what makes us take action form habits or say yes and then it shows how those same principles shape great marketing and sales in one episode phil looks at how just three words in the text message boosted vaccination rates and may have saved hundreds of lives that's the endowment effect at work a tiny psychological nudge creating a huge outcome every episode of nudge is about twenty minutes fast paced no fluff and packs with ideas you can actually use check it out nudge is available wherever you get your podcast you've spoken a a bit about the senior marketer that's gonna be so important to businesses and our audience on demand coded is largely you know we've got some cmos marketing directors a lot of marketing managers mh and but like it it really scales the entire kind of marketing spectrum and i think it would be interesting to position this actually as if you are you know one of those marketers what are business looking for yeah from that senior marketer in order for you to you know go and get that position and be the best marketing leader you could possibly be i mean yeah if we're talking to a lot of if there are a lot of marketing managers out there thinking well i want to have that clout and be that senior marketer what do i need to do about it well we've talked about a lot of these things on recent episodes we've talked about what matters to the board yeah and what matters to the board is what matters to the business fundamentally what are the business objectives if what you're talking about every day isn't heavily tied into what the business is really trying to achieve financially then you are missing the mark if you are not if you are in a tu between yourself and sales in your current role how do you use that shared metric that you're going for to create better alignment being really aligned with sales is key so if you're the marketer think about how do i get really strongly aligned with the bottom line like ultimately where am i making the most impact it is on revenue it is actually how am i contributing to the financial metrics of this business so have a look at that and think how do i therefore use that to better conversations with sales and to work on things together not to be at their back and call which i know can be an issue for a lot of marketers but actually to have a strong relationship where we agree on the quality of leads that are required we vet them together we make sure we do the right tactics that bring more of those in i think as well probably having a really strong sense of the future vision for your markets bringing conversations to the table about ways that business is like yours are doing business and growing bringing insight from the industry is a really powerful way to show that you are learning exposing yourself to the industry that you're in and learning more about it from networking i think that is something that not everyone is really comfortable with and maybe is something of a of a an issue for post pandemic rising stars is that a lack confidence when it comes to networking but it is critical people buy from humans people work with humans if you go out and make friends you will learn things about your industry that will make you more valuable to your leaders and then what else i suppose being really rigorous if someone asks you for the figures you've just got them you don't have to dig yeah like really make sure that you have honed if you if you have that that understanding what the business is looking to understand from you and it's not how many followers you that's let's you know if we have to name check the fact we do we're not talking about vanity metrics here we are talking about the sanity metrics it's at best how many marketing qualified leads are coming through the site and knowing what proportion of those are becoming sales qualified leads are actually good that's really important and having that to hand at all times being ready talk about it at all times and not devi into your granular world we've definitely talked about on the podcast a long time ago the importance of clarity of communication as a marketer to move up you've got to elevate your communication and you've got to think about what the people you're talking to will understand so your senior executives your sales team members they are not gonna care about the change that you're doing in your google analytics they're not gonna change care about how you massage the figures they want the core they want you to be speaking their language you are more capable of learning their language than they are of yours that that efforts on you so yeah think about who you're talking to you think about what matters to them make sure you're speaking that language those are pretty much i think those are kind universal trees to some extent in anyone who wants to advance is is to make that journey and to make you carve out the future version of yourself to some extent but i also think it's not solely on the market i think a lot of it is about the attitude of the business if the business isn't ready for the kind of challenge that comes from a true senior your marketer you know are they really ready to spend any money on marketing is that why they've been throwing money down the drain on these interns yeah yeah i think you know from personal experience trust is one of the biggest things you absolutely need to have in marketing but you need to earn it in marketing and those two things kind of fight against each other because in order to get trust you need to execute a few things that are probably a little bit different they tackle some really big problems but you need to trust in order to do those as well so one thing that you know i've heard and seen from speaking to a lot of marketers is within that first ninety day plan have a few big ticket items in there that are really gonna like showcase exactly what you can do mh have some immediate success within there so you're starting to build that initial trust and within that communication style then start to actually speak the same language what does what are those successful things that you've just gone and done it might be a big event it might be a website project it might be some step change in conversion rate that you've been able to change how does that actually then influence the business metrics because then you're kind of sharing both sides of the story yeah i i think so you talk about trust and what you need to do to gain trust trust is also about respect and the respect you show for the people around you doing things that you don't do i've worked with many marketers over the years who see themselves in opposition to sales but actually and maybe this is like my current experience talking putting them down or putting them into a pigeon hole and saying that this is all they're capable of understanding is also part of the problem diminishing them they are working one of the hardest jobs in the business which is making sure that the business habit has enough money to grow so really understanding what it's like to be them what kind of skills they have to bring to the table and learning what their pain points are like they are a really important stakeholder for you not just in the sense that you have to react when they say please do this but if you understand where their pain is coming from and you understand what they are doing yeah then you are going to be better able to advise and guide and support them not just some clicks their fingers and you've gotta to get this sudden powerpoint out for them in like ten minutes or whatever like yeah empathize respects them like i i genuinely have talked to a lot of marketers who are just oh well they get paid so much more you know they don't understand marketing they don't really know what people want they're just there to change opinions and force people to buy things that aren't i'm right for them like maybe some of those things can be true in some situations but actually take a walk in their shoes understand how difficult they to do their job like you really need to be empathetic to the salespeople people you work with because if you try and read between the lines when they say like when they're not doing something that you've asked them to do follow up with a bunch of leads or whatever there's a reason why they're not doing that mh there's a reason why they're trying why they're actively ignoring the things that you've asked them to do and they're going to do something else it might be because those leads are crap and they're not closing it might be because you know they've got to fantastic deals that they're working on right now and they're like eighty percent proper probability of closing well go and see how you can help with those things like go and you know work with them closer to understand what truly matters to them mh at the end of the day like they have a target to hit at the end of the month if they don't hit that they might might not get their commission in order to you know even pay their bills like mh you really need to yeah be empathetic and i said this on an episode of josh how yeah i was chatting to one of our sales leaders at a previous company about that and he he like really here at home for me basically about the fact that commission is so important in in that structure anyway that there's a reason why they only do certain things and they ignore request marketing because ultimately like they they have a target and they they really need to hit that mh yeah that's lately it's not easy and i think that's true of everyone in business like being empathetic also builds rapport and rapport is so important for marketing we talked when we were kind of thinking about this earlier about what are the big issues that a business and the big mistakes that a business can make in the hiring that miss higher a bit mh and sometimes it is pure and simple you've not invested enough money in getting someone of the right senior so when they come to you and say i believe it's going to cost this amount to fix the problem that you've given me to solve you go that's crazy because your expectations of what you need to spend in that area or wrong and you've also hired someone who you don't give enough credit to and you don't trust enough yeah really to make those kind of decisions i've i've certainly have conversations with people this year where they've gone in and said i need we need a new crm in place we need hubspot in place and the business has gone we are not ready to spend that kind of money you are on the wrong track yeah and that relationship has all certainly not worked out for the people and involved which is a terrible thing actually like when it's hard for you as a business imagine how hard it is for that person that you've hired if it doesn't work out for them they may have left another job yeah you don't make those decisions lightly an awful thing to do so go in ready for someone who bring in to expect you to do things very differently to expect you to spend some money on fixing the problems that you've asked them to solve but probably do that by hiring someone who's opinion you respect yeah absolutely not someone who you think he's gonna do a nice job in the coloring in department ultimately so there's there's a there's a big attitude thing there where i think it is important the businesses that are hiring are ready to take marketing seriously even if it's your first role so yeah you've grown to this size through word math and your network and your founders and you've done all of this without marketing when you start marketing don't under invest yeah if you if you're thinking we've tapped out our networks now you've got a whole new pipeline to develop from scratch don't under invest not just in terms of the money that you put into the person but be ready to invest in them as a human and make sure that they can build rapport with your entire organization because you're all aren't gonna have to go on a journey to do things that you've never done before you're gonna need to be challenged you don't really get that challenge and you don't get it landing effectively with someone who's like off in a lab mh they can't be off just doing their own thing it i don't know if you think of a business as being like a planet a moon doesn't really change your planet enough you've really got to be on on the service you've got to be part of you can't you can't be a satellite ultimately you need to be part of the fabric you needs to be in the business and really a key part of the team so you've got to get them deeply ingrained you've got to be ready for the challenge that they're gonna bring and to invest in making the changes that they recommend and if you're not ready to do those things maybe don't bother for a bit longer and see how that keeps going for you but don't go i'm gonna solve this by hiring someone for thirty k it's pretty much the worst thing you can do because it will just burn you you will have a terrible experience in that person will too yeah absolutely one thing that we didn't get to earlier but i think is important to which is you know i'd be interested to know how you feel about this because it's definitely my thoughts but i'm also a person that probably does over work is like hiring and expanding that marketing team because for me now every hiring decision you make before you make that decision you should be thinking can i do this with ai mh or can i do eighty percent of it with ai and do twenty percent myself or do twenty percent with the rest of our team i don't think there should be immediate need to hire that new marketing person unless you have exploited your options in terms of ai because it's gonna make you a lot more efficient and a lot more cost effective to the business in order to run that entire marketing motion mh yes i think that's true i think the other thing is that businesses have been cautious about engaging with fractional resources mh right and that's where as i've been saying if you don't need a full person you need someone to do that last twenty percent that you can't do yourself or take that eighty percent that you're doing make it a hundred and twenty of effectiveness then fractional through an agency is almost certainly the way to go about it because you will bring in people who have the capability to look at what you're doing to get under the skin of it and really help you further it so either i i i certainly agree that anything that you're looking to implement you should probably test the case for with existing resources and and be cautious around that i think gone are the days when you go well we won't start doing ppc until we've hired a a ppc specialist special if that's an extreme example right happened it hasn't happened and and then it's not worked because completely new resource so you need the business case of we believe this can be effective we've shown it can be effective over here we want to invest more effort into it we think it's worth its own role or we we think it's worth an agency supporting and boosting in that area because we think we can achieve x and y yeah so more structured business cases more consideration and readiness to try a smaller scale russian a pilot it's a great thing to be able to do now i guess what i think one thing i still think about is is one person really gonna have time to to spin all of those plates and how do you help them how what happens when they have too many plates but that is ultimately where strategy comes in yeah we talk about this a lot rights trash about what you say no to yeah an idea comes up and you go yes but we have to get rid of that yeah i can't spend more than six plates yeah or i need to get rid of it by outsourcing it now that's going well so i should move it on and say you go and do that for me if we're testing something i'll take that on because i'm the experiment the the cool thing about experience bodies handling ai is they have an ability to experiment and to show earlier results and to rule things out and say this isn't for us and i've tried it and i now know it if you get that coming from a junior resource a more junior resource you're always running the risk that that experiment was flawed in a way that you couldn't really analyze but if it's someone that you really deeply trust and they say this doesn't work for us in why then at least you know you've properly ruled that out and you've done your due diligence around it and you've moved onto to other tactics and there will be and and also if you've got truly strategic mind they'll say yes later they'll be able to prioritize alright i think that was probably quite a nice closing point there just kind of wrapping everything up and that's probably about it on the agenda today and unless you got anything else no i think so i think you know his pretty simple summary invest in the right people really embed them into your business give them the freedom to experiment and to say no kinda covers it right teams will be smaller but you'll have stronger people leading them win win love that alright let's wrap it up there well it's been amazing to have you back it's i know we've got some more episodes scheduled in over the next few weeks so you're gonna be hearing more from amanda which i think is you know great for everyone we've got quite a lot of you know different voices on demand coded now and i think we've got a just a great bunch of minds to bring different insights and experiences ultimately to our listeners which absolutely love and also we met a couple of like demand coded listeners inbound which was like so cool like i just you don't expect that right on a like b2b podcast to have people come up and say oh hey i listen to demand coded which is you know really cool it's pretty amazing so anyway yeah love doing the podcast and great to have you back and looking forward to doing some more it's been great to be back thanks so much alright catching the next episode and see you later this episode of demand decode was brought to you by blend we help b2b technology companies growth through strategic creative and technical expertise bringing you the capabilities you need to drive demand and turn it into real revenue impact for your business if you enjoyed this episode followed demand decode on your favorite podcast platform leave us a quick review and we'll see you next time with more insight to help you grow

hi everyone dan here as usual and joined by phil and we're live from inbound we are in the hubspot creator a lounge here we've got a nice backdrop behind us couple of stalls and we're here to you know check in and basically bringing you what we've learned from the that's so far totally awesome we thought we saw an opportunity yeah to report back from the event live in person so we thought why not before we get into the podcast today here's a quick word from our sponsor hubspot think about listening to this podcast right now you're probably multitasking and catching seventy maybe eighty percent of it now flip that and imagine only catching twenty percent that'd be pretty crazy right yet most businesses only use twenty percent of their data all the important details in cool logs emails and chats just left floating in digital space hubspot gives you access to those insights to help your business grow because when you know more you grow more visit hubspot dot com to get the full picture today now there's a couple of things that we wanna chat about today some of the things are you know what we've heard being on the ground speaking to people but also about events in general blender here sponsoring again as we were last year and i think right now is an important time for event marketing it's a really like crucial pivotal moment where there's a lot of kind of dis unwanted fragmented marketing and events are a really great way to bring the community together bring your buyers to you and as a marketer i was saying last night that there is no better way to learn about your buyers then to be on the ground talking to them here and their challenges hearing the kind of things that really resonate with them right it's very rare you get those opportunities on a day to day basis yeah to have those conversations a good event can conserve so many purposes and your go to market you know cut through has always been something we desire and what it means to cut through changes depending on how buyers find and consume information and like right now at ai is accelerating their ability to compress information you know into a single quick conversation and so meeting face to face at an event like this provides a really really valuable way to cut through you know get your brand recognized get your point of view and your people recognized by your buyer you know in addition to the information they're learning about you about your category through ai through social through youtube with podcast podcasts it's a great way to get buyer insights yeah and it's a great way to stand out you know from competitors that might be on their shortlist if they're having real face to face one to one conversations which are authentic and human and we all crave it no matter how the marketing world changes and how information changes yes yeah you have to absolutely speak you do and you know for us inbound is kind of a no brainer right we identify our audiences here and they're coming you in numbers our ic peers here like it's no brainer for us to go where our audience and it's kind of one of the things i've always said right like when it comes to channels tactics strategies ultimately you need to go where your audience are there's no you know a perfect play playbook but for everybody understand your audience deeply and do the things that align with how they you know operate where they go how they consume information and how they wanna talk like that i think events have always been a challenging sort of medium for businesses particularly smb yeah and mid markets because no they have cost profiles that are very different to creating content or creating a media you know they require travel they require a accommodation people time that they're really challenging thing think about but i think it's interesting how for a long time what sort of like digitization of go to market meant people spend less and less time talking to one another it's kind of refreshing that the introduction of ai into our buying processes has actually push down on that and in in a way that has created a desire buyers and sellers to meet face to face with their vendors again and so it's becoming really really important to consider or reconsider how you include events in your strategy but it is still challenging because i think you know you can't spend a significant amount of budget on a on on an event like this if you cannot justify it to your c your coo or identify what you'll gain out of it is so yeah we're here at in man our audience sitting in band and we have really strong sense that we can create meaningful connections and relationships with them but we've also gotta try to measure that impact through our business to see whether it's something that we continue to do or whether we iterate on that model and take our brands to different places yeah absolutely i mean outside of the like the event i think inbound in general like as a conference i know many of our listeners would have been to inbound and you know heard about it before like you connect with some great people you know i know you've had a lot of conversations this week with hubspot as we spoke to asia yesterday you hopefully we'll get on the podcast pretty soon as well yeah talk about luke the loop marketing thing yeah i mean we could touch on that quickly thing now right hubspot new marketing playbook right inbound marketing has evolved rapidly and that's something that you know we've both seen for you know seven years upside years absolutely a long long long in martin a methodology of going to market has been changing for some time yeah has been becoming less and less effective ultimately absolutely change been continuous ai accelerated it and create a moment when everybody suddenly you know know so they need to look and think about how they do things there's always a conversation in the halls within in that right know there's always a topic that's going around and it's less crystal this year than in previous years but it is all really around how how buyers behavior is changing yeah with ai at their disposal and how we adapt hubs hubspot haven't wasted a moment to research the topic tests ida and come out with a growth playbook loop which we're gonna talk more about in the very near future days yet and that's perfectly fine because as i said people here are really really facing that challenge head on now and ask one another how are you doing it what are you changing what are you introducing what are you stopping in doing in your marketing mix to continue to grow when traffic is disappearing yeah vanishing and in google search results are you know so so less frequently used yeah buy your buyer yeah one thing that gets me because obviously you know you never usually speak to this many marketers on a day to day basis slice it it's quite consuming you know the amount of people that you do towards it and what gets me is how whilst things are evolving so rapidly similar challenges still pop up every every time you know we have conversations with marketers obviously we're here to serve our core go to market offering which is being the number one hud hubspot website agency yes and the same challenges around the website around you know fire user experiences how they user how they consume content right they are the same challenges that were existing ten years ago yeah they are still prevalent they are still holding back some companies growth and yeah we are always acquiring new challenges but very few challenges actually get totally eradicated yeah we just get the largest set of challenges yeah but yeah you know we're still having very very impactful conversations around things that we've been practicing for some you as well as the new cutting edge thinking around how it's all changing yep businesses websites are still perhaps even more than ever now a critical lever in their go to market machine machine that needs pulling you like i just every business should be pulling hard on yeah the opportunity that is their website's ability to convert highly qualified highly educated you know high intent visitors into that pipeline but what i love about the loop actually is its focus on conversion and conversion rate optimization yes we've done you know podcast podcasts even recently that talk about conversion rate optimization but you know have that outlined as a crucial step in this new playbook i think is amazing because we're gonna be a we're having less and less influence on our on the ability to you know educate buyers during their research process because that's being informed by ai yep and they're not connecting that with our brand but when they do come to our website like they're gonna be more qualified and there's gonna be fewer visits and we need to make the website work really really hard oh yeah yeah the stakes are higher than ever the website conversion and just more and more of the research process selection process comparison process is gonna be done in the dark you know and that's not a new trajectory but it's being accelerated by the advances of an and so yeah the stakes are high for website rate optimization and good marketing the aligns to how buyers research share ideas chill out sometimes you know it's like it's a whole person's like role i think to understand your buyer and align what you do to how they really buy today and that's why keeping an eye on how ae o is evolving yeah having your content creation strategy being updated to reflect the channels to use and taking very very serious steps to optimize your website or all worthwhile things do one thing that i would say is that we're all gonna be and a lot of people are speaking to an inbound are gonna be taking away the fact that they really to understand how ai search experiences actually augment information how they train data you know how they learn how your brand gets served cited within that actually think about your time and effort we're putting into understanding that and put some of that time and effort into understanding user experience conversion rate best practices because how that will truly help you move the needle faster for pipeline and revenue for your business i think that's very good advice stan i think that's that should be heated by all it's it's it's a critical part of the marketing mix for this often neglected for a variety of reasons but yeah if you're trying to understand how buyers research how buyers discover you then yeah do yourself a favor a big favor and understand how they behave on your website and what improves their tendency their likelihood to take action on any interest they have had convert and apply it and test it and iterate on it you know it's it's entirely possible to make significant gains in your website conversion rate if you apply you know learnings from other experts research that's been done by a variety of parties hubspot included nielsen some norman others people are perfect really good stuff from him too and blend you know we we share everything that we find out about how to make let's work harder or minute yeah absolutely and when we think about you know that step before and how things are changing there you know we spoke to asia about informational or content how that's changing the types of content that hubspot are now looking to do and i would say you know we need to take a a deep hard look at the content that we're now creating and the mediums we're creating it in because informational content i have this amazing conversation with somebody yesterday who's a big market share about okay yeah so we were talking about they ask you answer yeah his you know that was famous seminal book yeah i was kinda like well you know what now it's almost like they ask ai answers that is very very yeah very quote you after and it's literally if they're if they are asking yep ai man where they're asking well most places if it's you know a search engine ai is aren't answering right yeah and you know we may see that experience start coming into more and more websites where there are agents on those websites that can be asked questions and them in the context of your business which is very favorable because you control that information but users may start to desire to interact with us via that medium yeah we've heard talk of completely parallel web starting to take shape which is completely optimized for ll consumption an ai you know processing and from s of we may see websites to be replaced entirely in the future with you know simple chat boxes i think that's a way off if happens at all yeah but you know we have to be able to we have to be an alive to these changes in case they affect us in a material way but yeah they ask ai answers so you have to think about as with all things in marketing why do you do what you're doing what is the outcome you hope to gain and is it realistic for expected i think that's a baseline for marketing activity and upon that sort of foundational understanding you can build how will we measure it what will tesla look like you know how do we optimize it for our buyer and and so on and so on and so on but yeah understanding why you're doing things you do and not simply taking every bit of third party advice you know as it comes to you but critically thinking about how it fits in your new business i think is really essentially in modern marketing yeah most businesses don't realize just how much their website is holding them back v would generate in strong demand but their site just wasn't converting it that we rebuilt their site with their buyers in mind sharpen the user experience and aligned it to their goals and within ninety days after launch high intent conversions increased by a hundred percent and demo requests rose by fourteen percent that's what happens when your website finally works as hard as your marketing if you think your website might be holding you back let's start the conversation at blend b dot com if you're enjoying this show let me recommend another one from the hubspot podcast network that i personally never miss nudge hosted by phil ag what i love about nudge is that it's all about the psychology in science behind human behavior what makes us take action form habits or say yes and then it shows how those same principles shape great marketing and sales in one episode phil looks at how just three words in the text message boosted vaccination rates and may have saved hundreds of lives that's the endowment effect at work a tiny psychological nudge creating a huge outcome every episode of nudge is about twenty minutes fast paced no fluff and packs with ideas you can actually use check it out nudge is available wherever you get your podcast the other thing about you know being it inbound and speaking to a lot of hubs hubspot is you start to understand kind of where they're going with their go to market strategy and the things that they're really leaning to one of the things that i've said multiple times is that hub hubspot always first to everything is it's actually annoying how brilliant they are at being first of things and i think we all see that as marketers and they're they are really such a fantastic example of how to you know change at scale ultimately yep and whilst we were trying to asia and other hubspot you know we've really got the sense that their b media angle like we're that here right we're we're in the hubspot create allowing right now which awesome yeah we've got these cool lights behind there's sound boards there's like hot pass booths over there there's other hub creative lounging and around like yeah we're having a good time but yeah like asia was saying as well that hubspot are leaning more into the kind of create a program influencers mediums in terms of like video podcasting because that is one of the best ways now that you have to educate your buyers and connect them with your brand as written as the written word as written information is consumed by ai and disconnected from brands best way to to connect now is in those different media yeah absolutely we agreed yesterday that loop marketing is still in inbound but i think it's really it's it's really got an opportunity to help people move away from inbound of old right research is taking place in the dark as it already was on social you know and a lot of marketing efforts been focused on bringing buyers out of the dark into the life but that doesn't actually improve your odds of selling to them and had them turning them into apple customer loop updates inbound for an era when ai plays a huge role yeah buyers are increasingly anonymous unknown to us private but we can still grow we can still improve upon our own results and we can still have fantastic fantastic relationship minds and as long as we update our playbook in ways that align to what they want from us as we sell to them so luke is great because it's gonna it's an it's an update to the inbound philosophy but it's still inbound yeah yeah inbound will still play a role forever i think ultimately because it's how buyers have wanted to buy for you know a long long time now and i think people are wanting to go more inbound all ai is doing is basically you know giving buyers more empowerment to do more themselves yeah like yeah ultimately we are empowering inbound inbound is not going yeah inbound does not equal lead generation no inbound does not equal landing pages inbound does not equal email does not equal anything it equals if it equals anything bringing buyers into you yeah right by whatever means work now yeah and that's what loop will help people hopefully get a real better grasp on and implement the next execute quickly yeah for sure alright can we wrap it up there let's wrap that i think you know this is a small little inbound check but i think we're both tired our feet in her and it's been a hard week it's been been a very hard yeah i'm i'm sure like marx will sympathize with us being sit on a booth for a few days side legs tired feet tired legs good vocal cords but the mind and the cogs are worrying like you know more than ever before they are yeah that's sounds absolutely fantastic conversations but yeah small checking from that's there great do on dakota right and in the great lot yeah i mean it is just awesome so yeah i mean who knows we might do this next year for yeah so yeah awesome we will catch you all in the next episode see you next week yep this episode of demanding decode was brought to you by blend we help b2b technology companies grow through strategic creative and technical expertise bringing you the capabilities you need to drive demand and turn it into real revenue impact for your business if you enjoyed this episode followed demand coded on your favorite podcast platform leave us a quick review and we'll see you next time with more insight to help you grow

hi everyone welcome back to demand cody dan here as usual and we've got josh back on the podcast today and we're discussing the challenge that affects almost every ceo which is how to build a productive partnership with your cfo and ultimately secure budget approval and have a great relationship going forward it's really great to have josh here to bring his perspective onto this show and this particular topic because josh has led you know multiple marketing teams he's led cfo he's really bridged the gap between finance and marketing at that board and at that executive level so he'll really be able to bring a perspective on what marketing leaders get wrong and what they get right in terms of building that relationship with the c the cfo and we're just really gonna dive into like why it's so important and fundamental to build that partnership with the cfo there's often you know a lack of financial acumen poor communication between within cmos which affects their relationship with cfo and yeah on today's episode we're gonna unpack all of that and give you some advice on how to build up those partnership for stronger better results going forward before we get into the podcast today here's a quick word from our sponsor hubspot think about listening to this podcast right now you're probably multitasking and catching seventy maybe eighty percent of it now flip that and imagine only catching twenty percent that'd be pretty crazy right yet most businesses only use twenty percent of their data all the important details in call logs emails and chats just left floating in digital space hubspot gives you access to those insights to help your business grow because when you know more you grow more visit hubspot dot com to get the full picture today josh great to have you here always a pleasure dan awesome alright well let's get into our first section which is really around like the three financial fundamentals that every cmo must understand and maybe you know before we get into that or around the same time we can kind of unpack like why cmos often getting the bad books when it comes to their relationship with cfo and where they're miscommunication and understanding falls down mh yeah yeah i mean i i think maybe the most the best way to start is to really think about the customer the cfo in this case and and what their goals are and what they're trying to do and so i think of cfo as focused on three very important parts of running any business they they care first and foremost about return on investment and financial accountability so they when it comes to marketing they wanna see and understand the clear measurable and returns that marketing spend is going to generate they're looking for concrete metrics they're looking for ties to revenue generation and and and to understand the timing of that connection they're also looking second category really should be risk assessment budget predictability what are the things that could cause negative outcomes and so trying to understand their financial risk trying to prevent or at least predict potential downside scenarios so that if those start to occur like we don't have full control in any business of of what's happening when those things occur the cfo wants to be prepared to say okay we anticipated this this is how we're going to modify our plan and then the third area is strategic alignment with business objectives so the ceo sets the business objectives with the board the cfo is very often one of the gate you one of the image bearer or that's not quite the right word but the the flag i think is the word i was there more that yeah that would that will carry that forward to the organization and so they wanna understand when it comes to marketing how does the marketing spend in the budget drive the key priorities set by the business whether that's it's market expansion customer retention new product launches competitive positioning what whatever the the goals of that business are the cfo is going to want to see when the budget comes from marketing how that connects and and directly drives or or supports those strategic goals so in those three categories the cfo has also works within a set of financial reports that we're all probably fairly familiar with right and and those thing and those three categories come to come to life in those financial reports so you've got your income statement you've got your balance sheet and you've got your statement of cash flows and you know the the goal for the cmo should be to be able to talk to the cfo in the language of financial reporting that that can that meets the cfo objectives in those three categories and shows how that budget is going to be is going to be deployed to achieve those goals but timing makes a big difference right so in the income statement in the annual income statement you might have annual goals but month by month you've got cash flow that i mean the cfo more than anything is there to make sure that there's cash to support the business and if if we aren't careful about when cash flow gets impacted especially like we're not i don't think our podcast is targeting fortune five hundred companies right we're we're really focused on mid market tech companies and in that case cash is very often king and so i think understanding timing for and being able to create a a transparency to timing when expenses are gonna hit when cash is going to have to be paid to vendors to you know to wherever is is also super important for the cmo yeah like if a marked a mark of the cmo and the marketing team is going out there and requesting you know a hundred and fifty k for this trade show coming up but has no details on the timing of that when the cash is actually expected to leave and go to the vendors the cf is gonna naturally have a a problem of that yeah i mean that's a great example actually because when we go to trade shows very often the trade show wants you had to book next year in advance yeah you sign a contract maybe at that point the expense there's a difference between expense and cash flow right the expenses incurred typically organizations will incur that expense at the time of the next show right so if if it's a fifty thousand dollar trade show but booth and then that fifty thousand is gonna hit your income statement a year from then yeah and so the cmo may be thinking oh we'll just put it in the budget but the but the invoice for it might come a month later and there may be a cash you know payment that's due in the same year and that would be a complete surprise to the cfo right they weren't planning on sending fifty grand out another another example of that or something we see very frequently is in either software contracts or analyst contracts like ga where you may have a very significant expense quarter million dollars or more that dick that will because it's a subscription it will get amortized in the income statement it'll get amortized month over month right so you'll have one twelfth of that two fifty every month but the but very often the trend is we're gonna bill you the for the full year up upfront and and we're gonna you know and maybe they'll give you discount or maybe they'll just say nope it's just due that's how we do business and and now you've got two hundred and fifty grand going out the door you know at the beginning of that relationship and that that again is a major impact to to the cfo who's planning cash flows and it if let's say it is a an expense that's tied to revenue generation or a pipeline build well the offsetting revenues that you're saying hey this this investment gonna get us x amount of added pipeline added revenue you're gonna tie you know you're doing a good job you're tying it to revenue creation but if you're willing to pay that two fifty up upfront you've got a you've got a long tail particularly if your sales cycles is long to to recoup that expense in the you know from a cash standpoint and so like for the cmo to understand that and then to be able to carry that into vendor negotiations and say no i'm not gonna pay you two fifty upfront we are going to need to space this out i need to be able to to create a better cash flow structure for for our business is probably a conversation you know that vendor management piece of a conversation that the cfo is certainly going to be feel a whole lot more comfortable with cmo if they're having that and and pushing that agenda rather than just rolling over and giving away cash upfront yeah it sounds like it's it's a twofold fold situation right because the cmo job is to communicate both to the cfo and also the like sponsor and the vendor about the situation they're in so it's not just a case of oh okay we've just done that trade show we wanna book it again for next year let's book that in like how do you approach the the requirements the cfo needs to see and meet and agree on before you book that like what should you be presenting in order to get that signed off and get agreement well i mean you know it's coming right so before you even go to the trade show the cmo should be sitting down with the cfo saying hey we're going to this trade show they're going to tell us that they would you know that we need to book it and to get the best booth position we want to be able to book it there's reasons for that that you know that are valid but having that meeting ahead of time and getting alignment on here's where here's when we can pay and you know that creates productivity and communication always is is the best you know the best answer but but if you get ahead of it then then yeah now now you're equipped you can engage the vendor you don't have to go back to say hey i need to go get approval you've already you already know what what's gonna work and yeah i think i mean i think just getting ahead of it and sitting down and and being transparent with the see with the cfo in those cases is is just part of the job yeah part of like the regular communications you're gonna have with the cfo right like here's what's coming up here's what we're expecting diving into the metrics that you spoke about at the start and yeah talking through i suppose alright so josh obviously you've had some great oversight in the past in previous roles looking over cfo cmos and seeing the relationship and the transparency how reliable they are throughout you know years and years of experience well i'm not bad hold well you keep telling people that in in your time like what are some of the things that you team worked really well what are some of the things you've seem work not so well in terms of building that relationship and and building that transparency and reliability between the two functions yeah one of the best things i've seen for an organization that's let's say you know they're mid midsize pretty pretty solid sized organization let's assume you're somewhere between you know fifty and and two hundred and fifty million in revenue the cfo you know in one such case the cfo my cfo us took a resource and it was a sort of a financial analyst resource and assign them as a business partner to the marketing team mh and they served the marketing team and and one other group within the organization and and that was amazing because now you you were embedding a financial analyst into a group that that probably you know lack some financial acumen themselves but now they had a partner who would help them pull the data that was necessary understand why different things were necessary and so it it became a very proactive model for enabling the conversation i don't see a lot of cmos saying i need to go hire a financial analyst i think depending on on where budgets sits sometimes you know that would also be a good investment is for that cmo to say i i wanna have a proactive relationship with finance and i wanna make sure that we are structuring the business the best way possible one of the things that that that analyst was able to do then they were able to create transparency between connection and transparency to from marketing investments to impact on the business not just in a hey this is going to create more pipeline but when is this gonna create more pipeline how long from pipeline creation to deal signature how long from deal signature to revenue and cash flow and so you could see for the cfo could then see okay we're gonna make this investment back here and it's gonna be eighteen months before i have a a right to even expect that we're going to have an roi on that but i can plant but that that's fine mike that that's the architecture of the business you can't always get an roi on you know day two so but but having that financial analyst it embedded in the team so that as they're making plans that person was able to to go and breathe you know take those marketing plans and bake them into the overall plan for the business and that you know that led to inputs into the future year's budget both on the expense side but more importantly on the top line right so we made the investments in year one we now should see pipeline creation in year two that allows me to have confidence that i can increase my sales targets and be able to you know be able to hit a higher close rate higher revenue rate whatever you know whatever the metrics are we're using to to to have a logical budget that holds together and and again lacks or or has predictability removes risk and so like to me that was that was the best implementation of that proactive communication process and i would just love to see like if you're a cmo you're listening to this if you think about that from a from your budget like don't just ask the cfo necessarily to to foot the bill but if you can figure out how to put that into your budget and proactively come to them and say this is what i wanna do that creates a a unique and well i think i think it will be very well regarded position for you as a business partner not just a cost center yeah and you know what that that is marketing in a nutshell and like marketing leadership by identifying the gaps and the weaknesses that you have within the function and naturally financial acumen is probably gonna be one of those you'll never gonna be able to and you shouldn't be able to understand finance in the way that the cfo and the finance team understand it and equally right they will never understand marketing in the way like you you should be the expert on marketing and not the expert on finance there's a reason why you're the cmo and not the cfo but i think like employing that financial analyst within the team that has a deeper understanding of what the finance team are looking to see and can work like cross collaboratively is a really really smart move yeah and i mean i agree with you you never want your cmo but to have the they probably if they can switch chairs and be the cfo they probably aren't the right cmo right in most cases if there it would be a very rare individual the but on the other hand i would expect any cmo to be able to pick up financial statements monthly quarterly and annual financial statements and be able to read them like any other executive in the on the leadership team right and then be able to translate them for their team be able to help their team understand them and understand why they're important you know what's important about them and what they're seeing and why other you know why the sales leader the cro or why the whether the head of hr whether the you know cfo in in particular is questioning something they need to be able to understand their the financial impact of what they're what they're doing day to day that that is that's yeah that that's the job of the cmo definitely yeah and let you say i i assume you know that is the job for any c level executive to be able to right those statements and understand and it's no exception for marketing just because we're a more creative function perhaps it's no excuse to then not have that acumen to be able to you know speak to the cmo and the the cfo and the language they understand and be able to work together in the best way possible well if you wanna be a marketing organization that isn't just thought of as a bunch of creative folks over and you know on that side of the of the floor you do need to be able to connect what you'd that creativity to actual business outcomes because you wanna be you like that's how you are in a seat at the table right so i i yeah i just wanna if you if you're a cmo that isn't comfortable with financial reports there's a ton of information online you don't need to hear us lecture about it but it's it is your job to go and and and get trained up on that and your cfo will probably help you if you ask them most businesses don't realize just how much their website is holding them back v dot would generate in strong demand but their site just wasn't converting it we rebuilt their site with their buyers in mind sharpen the user experience and aligned it to their goals and within ninety days after launch high intent conversions increased by a hundred percent and demo requests rose by fourteen percent that's what happens when your website finally works as hard as your marketing if you think your website might be holding you back let's start the conversation at blend b dot com if you're enjoying this show let me recommend another one from the hubspot podcast network that i personally never miss nudge hosted by phil ag what i love about nudge is that it's all about the psychology in science behind human behavior what makes us take action form habits or say yes and then it shows how those same principles shape great marketing and sales in one episode phil looks at how just three words in the text message boosted vaccination rates and may have saved hundreds of lives that's the endowment effect at work a tiny psychological nudge creating a huge outcome every episode of nudge is about twenty minutes fast paced no fluff and packed with ideas you can actually use check it out nudge is available wherever you get your podcast would you say outside of speaking the same language in the numbers there's a big relationship builder in there which is ultimately just transparency between you know uncertainty and marketing activity and roi and spend and you know just being honest on a relationship level with the cfo yeah i mean i i think when i think about when i think about cfo and cmos and the relationship between them i think there are probably well let's count them we'll go through them there's a few things that that the that often result in challenged relationships that can be managed proactively like you say first is really understanding the cfo language avoiding the the metrics disconnect mh there are a lot of cmos still today who will talk in terms of marketing terms impressions engagement rates brand awareness if we and those things are all important right we know they're important but if you're talking to this to the cfo and you're and you're not translating those into financial outcomes that's going to be a problem in the relationship and it's not the cfo job to turn those into financial outcomes you need to do that with this with your cro and so that you can come forward and you can say yeah these these are the marketing metrics but these translate into these financial outcomes here's when you know here's when we're gonna have expense here's when we're gonna have offsetting revenue here's you know here's the impact on customer retention that that will allow the cfo to to create a plan you know budgetary plan going forward the second area that i think is important is like short term versus long term thinking when you're a cmo you you are simultaneously trying to drive pipe for next quarter this quarter right but you're also thinking about how is my brand being recognized and you know more broadly and how do i what portion of my my budget do i put into brand development in b b tech that's you know that's super important especially with all the changes that we see happening in you know with seo and ai and and whatnot not having it used to be there was an argument a long time ago that brand didn't matter if you were in b to b tech that it was all just about demand gen and pipe but because buyer buyer journeys have changed and buyer the buying process for a lot of enterprise b b tech has radically changed brand is very important for companies that wanna have high growth over the next three to five years and so being able to communicate how your budget is structured based on both short term needs and long term value creation and showing how investments in long in in that brand for example in long you know longer term thinking will actually reduce the net the need for budget in the future to to be able to do the same amount of demand gen or to to meet a higher amount of of pipeline creation i'm really annoyed that you said that because it was my question for you next like so much so much marketing is not measurable not directly attributable anyway to a revenue outcome like you say that building brand and being known ultimately by your market is a huge lever you can pull and it amplifies then everything else you do like it will bring down your cost it will bring down your your customer acquisition costs and if all of those other metrics that you're tracking and get reduce your sales cycle right like exactly which which is a huge driver for the sip for the for the cfo if they can reduce their sale the sales cycle by let's call it you know six weeks that has a a a dramatic impact on both cash flow revenue recognition and and can materially impact the the find financial performance of the company in you know pretty quick order so yeah i i think being able to so we we shot a podcast a couple weeks ago about attribution mh and the opportunity to to not just rely on one touch attribution or you rep form you contribution shelby be you or what like yeah all all the different ways but to actually get to a place where you can download all of your touch point data all of the ways that the customer does engage you and that can include all the places your brand is pushed out to before they ever you know self identify that they're a buyer and be able to analyze that with with ai more more effectively i think we won't res shoot that podcast now but i think that taking the lessons from that and and thinking about because measurement gaps are a big problem for the cfo right and so being able to use those kind of methods to be able to teach the cfo what the buyer journey looks like and why you're making investments in the beginning of the buyer journey that may be invisible immediately but we have all this data that shows us that this is how these ultimately you know these buyers ultimately engages us i think is is really worthwhile to do and and so yeah i would i would go back to that and and look at how do i tell the story to the cfo using all of the data that i have not just well this campaign had a you know had an attribution score of x and so we're gonna put more money into that that's a single tactic you really wanna understand the entire buyer journey yeah for sure and yeah like i sorry go no please i was gonna say i don't wanna you know res shoot that episode so definitely go back and listen to it but you mentioned something on another episode as well i can't remember which one of was but it was a it was a really great point around the cmo role to educate the board and it sounds like you're in a similar situation here as the cmo in that you need to educate the cfo about what truly happens on the buyer journey and when we invest in brand when we invest in these areas that don't have direct attribution what's actually happening in that journey in in my opinion is just my opinion i think the cmo job number one job is not to create pipeline the number one job is to understand the buyer journey and be able to collect the data necessary to to truly get to the bottom of here's how our world operates and then be able to teach the business about that so that resources can be applied to the most effective way to optimize the the top line outcomes and i guess bottom line outcomes too so like if i'm a cmo i'm a i'm a sherlock holmes right i'm i'm really trying to i'm trying to get to the bottom of and collect data everywhere i can to figure out you know what that looks like and then and then be able to attribute my spend into that that buyer journey and be able to then because that'll create that should create more predictable outcomes and that gets back to where we started which is trying you know the cf cfo is trying to you know understand you know and predict cash flow and in revenue and they're trying to reduce risk and and and downside you know protection right i think i think that that's the job right and if you can do that and you can do it with open communication and you can be transparent and you can acknowledge where you don't know things that creates an environment where your cfo and your cmo can be open together to each other and can say hey we need to now go figure this out together the cfo may actually be able to contribute to some of that right because they're very data focused and very typically very oriented towards going and and comb through large amounts of data to be able to create you know single view of the truth so but just that transparency i think creates an authenticity to the relationship and it it breeds true partnership which is ultimately what every executive wants across the across the c suite yeah there's a lot of awesome like positives there to take away i'd be interested to know maybe this is more of a quick fire thing but things that you've seen or heard or experienced yourself what that really diminish the relationship between a cmo and cfo like what are some really bad things you've seen in the past that should definitely be avoided for anybody listening to this i wanna i wanna be careful here i don't wanna you don't need to name that you get myself into trouble there are a couple of cases where i've seen marketing leaders spend with you know spend without asking lose lose track of their budget or make significant investments that maybe were in the budget but you know they were doing it so that they could spend the budget and and yet sales was low that year and so you know we were in a conversation about a if sales is low if revenue low right now what do we need to adjust and we've got the cmo going and protecting their budget by spending a bunch of money and and like that's just not being a team player right like you if you if you're genuine i think this the the entire executive suite whether you're in sales whether you're in marketing whether you're in operations you you are ultimately partners and peers trying to get a single business single set of business outcomes second you have to worry about your individual contribution to that but if you allow your individual contribution and your your own personal goals to overtake what the business goals are and what's best for the business that's where you know you're i mean i guess that's where politics start and whatnot but that's the that's the problem right like that's a that's a serious problem and you know i've seen see i've seen marketing leaders get fired over that kind of behavior where they're just you know they're they're just say hey i i'm gonna go do my thing and and it's not it's not in alignment with what the business what wise decisions for the business really are yeah ultimately i suppose they might be trying to protect themselves in spending that budget it might enable them to hit their target but ultimately that's not helping the actual metrics the business are trying to achieve like that's then it just it should be an open conversation yeah right so it's not that anybody that not this like the cfo or the ceo or sitting there saying hey i don't want my marketing leader to hit their number but if everybody's come to the table able to say hey my my sales team you know revenues low i need to i need to protect my current outflow what are the levers that we can pull and what's the impact and so the cmo should come to that and say well i can reduce this or i cannot spend this now it will have this impact in our next year right the the i i will back the cmo a hundred percent if if they come and say that and then they say well then the the answer is well we're gonna take that money but we still want you to hit those numbers next year like that's not that's not intellectually honesty either so i advocate for intellectual honesty with all parties and to build plans that are that have connective tissue across you know all the way across the board but but yeah i mean the cmo or any budget holder needs to come to in those cases where unfortunate the business is going through a down cycle you've gotta be able to be a team player there or you're probably not gonna stay josh obviously we have a lot of marketers listen to this podcast we have some cmos we have marketing directors we might have marketing managers listening to this so they're not all the cmo partnering with the cfo but they still have an important role to play in this right and understanding that relationship and a lot of the things we've touched on today yeah totally i mean whether you're whether you us aspire to be a cmo or whether you just aspire to do a good a great job for your cmo if you're in on the marketing team i i would encourage you one build up your financial acumen be really be able to read financial statements because if you can you will have a better context for the decisions that you make and the the initiatives that your or your responsibility you will have a better appreciation for you know it's one thing to say hey my my web my site visitors doubled this month okay it's an it's another thing to say hey i helped our sales team sell three x more revenue this this month than last year at this time right and be able to to actually connect what you did over the past year to to drive that and understanding financial reporting is is part of that it will also help you when the cmo comes and says hey we've got you know we've got pressure on the budget what are our options you'll be able to have a seat at that table contributing with thoughtful understanding of of how do i go about achieving the best goals the best results i can while reducing my budget and you'll understand how that you know or or even i can reduce my budget here i can push expense out let me call that vendor that we expect to have to make a big payment to next month let me see if i can get them to accept you know a plan that gets me gets them paid in three to six months those kinds of i mean if you're if you're working for a cmo and you can tell them hey i'm gonna go do that proactively wow like that's a that's a huge benefit to that person and she's able to then go to this to the cfo and say hey we've we've been able to manage our vendor contracts so that we've pushed out these these cash flows that are coming you may still have the expense but you'd end up with you know with better cash management it's i i mean i just think it's those kinds of things and then i think beyond that really pushing yourself to tie marketing metrics to financial metrics and and figuring out even if it's not a a direct correlation it's an indirect correlation and you can you you know you can say these three initiatives we're undertaking with this type of expense and it's meant and and we're doing that for these reasons in our buyer journey to be able to to generate this kind of return if you can support the you know that conversation with data you know i think you're you're becoming a serious asset to the organization amazing yeah i just i love these podcast podcasts josh because like there is just so much value here for all markets i think we can talk tactics channels even strategy to a certain extent but understanding what truly fundamentally matters to a business from a financial perspective which you know ultimately is the most important thing are any business right that's that's why the business exists that it's it's it's just great unless you're an up for profit you you are there to make money yes yeah and you know whilst at blend like i've kind of been on the journey coming in and tying our marketing activity to financial outcomes actually you know learning from you and hearing you speak about some of the terminology and like financial tools and things that cfo is using is like super valuable to me so i imagine it's really valuable to our audience as well so yeah it's it's really great to just have a download apparently some benefits to getting old yeah any kind of closing thoughts on this topic like key takeaways i you know to be honest i would love to hear from the audience if you have things that have worked tactics strategies that have worked in connecting or building relationship between your cfo and your cmo those are the that's the kind of dialogue we wanna be in the middle of and we would love to hear directly from the audience and from our listeners what are the what are the best ways you've you've you've been able to do that or where are the challenges that you you'd like us to be able to address in a future episode but i i think there's there's few relationships that are more important because like the cro and rev rev gen is much more transparent and direct it's easy right but marketing the danger of being the marketing lead is always that it's it's kinda it can be a black box and not understood and you know that's not where you wanna be when when people are starting to ask hard questions you wanna be able to create trades so so i think surfacing the best ways to do that is is really you know it's part of what we you know growth engineering is what we call you know what the business we're in it's really part of growth engineering is building that connection connective tissue between finance and marketing yeah amazing alright well let's wrap it up that by the way like demand you coded is on an absolute run at the moment last month we had our highest ever downloads by over a hundred percent which is yeah wow incredible so we've had a lot a lot of new listeners to the podcast i think like being part of the hubspot podcast network is obviously great we have some good cross promotion between the podcast obviously having you join josh and you know promoting in the podcast and probably good anybody away well i don't think so maybe some of our old listeners have gone but we've got some new ones along the way anyway but honestly it's just so great to see and like we all blend love doing the podcast being part of it listening to it as well part of our own routine so yeah i just wanna say you know thank you at the end of this episode ultimately to all the listeners and if you can keep sharing and keep liking keep following doing all those great things like we will be bringing more and more content and more and more insights and more learnings ultimately as we start to work with more businesses and yeah hopefully everyone's gonna benefit from listen to this absolutely thank you to our our partners at hubspot and dan thank you your fantastic host alright just wrap up catch you next time this episode of demand decode was brought to you by blend we help b2b technology companies growth through strategic creative and technical expertise bringing you the capabilities you need to drive demand and turn it into real revenue impact for your business if you enjoyed this episode follow demanding coded on your favorite podcast platform leave us a quick review and we'll see you next time with more insight to help you grow

hi everyone welcome back to demanding ko dan here as usual and i'm on my own today for a solo episode and it's a really exciting one because whilst we've all been talking about the search transformation how ai and large language models are transforming the way that buyers use search research and they evaluate differently and it's entirely true but up until now we haven't had much research which proves the way that people are actually using ai and how they search and the changes from our traditional beloved blue links and keyword based approaches to long contextual prompts that give very specific answers and on today's episode i'm gonna bring some research which by the way hasn't had a ton of engagement so i think most people listening probably haven't heard this research yet so we'll obviously link it in the show notes in the description here but it's it's research from a guy called messi and he's an seo professional he's been writing on his own blog for over a decade and he essentially found that like many people chat gp chat were actually being indexed by search the temporary chats would be an index and these were accessible for a short period of time by doing a site search so site colon chat gp dot com temporary chat and then it would bring up you know thousands of temporary chats that have been created on chat ep and were accessible to the public and that is what he was able to dig into in order to create this research report which really digs into how people are using chat to search what are the kind of prompts they're using how detailed do they be what kind of context are they using what kind of language and approach they actually using to get the answer out and that's exactly what i'm gonna run through in this episode and give you an overview of what's in this report and what we can kind of find and take into our ai seo and marketing strategy as a whole as we move into this new era of search and you know as we try and get more brand mentions and really lean into the way that people are researching searching and discovering information right now before we get into the episode today here's a quick word from our sponsors hubspot you don't become the world's most valuable women's sports franchise accident angel city's football club did it with a little help from hubspot when they started data was housed across multiple systems hubspot unified their website email marketing and fan experience all in one platform this allowed their small team of just three to build an entire website in just three days the result nearly three hundred and fifty new sign ups a week and three hundred percent database growth in just two years visit hubspot dot com to hear how hubspot can help you grow better as i mentioned before this research was done independently by an seo x but it wasn't conducted by open ai themselves or a you know really well known seo publication or anything like that but i still think the methodology has a lot of grounds to be useful for everybody listening to this and most marketers out there to be honest so as i mentioned for a short period of time you're able to access temporary chats on chat gb and that's exactly what met anne did in this research so he was able to essentially collect thousands the exact amount but then this researcher was one thousand eight hundred and twenty seven chat ep prompts was able to extract the question parameter essentially the exact user prompt and analyze what they looks like and similarities and differences throughout them and what we could find in this are some like really interesting shifts in what's happening so firstly the thing to look at is the actual length of the prompt so the average prompt prompt length found within this research was forty two words and the medium was eleven when we compare that to the average query of a google search which is typically two to four words so what we're saying here is that chat queries are five to twenty times longer than traditional google searches and i'm not surprised by that in the slightest i don't know about everybody listening here but i'm now a huge fan of dictation to chat eb and other ai tools as well so the amount of context i'm given these tools is absolutely incredible i'm probably prompting over a hundred words most times giving it as much context as possible to give me the best answer possible when we compare that to a typical google search which is going to be you know something like best crm software for manufacturers even that's quite long it could just be best crm software compare that to the chat gb style prompt which should be give me the top five crm software for a manufacturer we are a you know five hundred person company operating in out of florida we've just raised series c funding we're moving into the next stage of growth we currently have an erp system on this we currently have this marked in automation tool give me a crm that fits their needs for all of that the amount of context and extra information you're able to give chat ep and that people are giving chat ep because it's proven in this research is absolutely off the charts and users are now trusting ai more to s multiple steps into this single interaction not just point to resources where you need to go and then get that information for yourself as you would in google they're trusting ai to give the answer the full answer itself aside from the length of the prompt the other shift that's come out of this research is the shift in intent instead of asking questions more and more people are asking command so actually seventy five percent of the prompts found within this research were commands and not questions so when we think of how we might prompt well ask google in the past how do i fix a four zero four error codes people using chat and other large language models are uploading that error prompt and that information to chap chat jb and saying fix this you know fix this prompt right here which is a really interesting shift away from the question based approach that has always you know stood the test of time within google within the research itself and i'm not gonna embarrass myself by trying to explain a lot of these examples because they're kind of debugging command for code a lot of them are so like fix class solution fix this bullying that contains this that is airing like these kind of prompts are being surfaced within this research and it's a really interesting well to be fair there's some persona based ones as well so acts as a recruiter and write me a job post for a senior react developer i want you to act access as a food critic i would decide describe a restaurant and you'll review it so again these are actionable based prompts rather than questions in there and the the difference here might seem subtle at first in the way that we're asking we're we're commanding instead of asking questions but actually the outcome here in response is huge instead of asking for instructions in chat bb they're asking for execution it's not how do i go about doing this thing it's look at this thing here's the context do it for me it's a complete shift in user psychology away from searching for something and searching for the answer that i can execute myself and outsourcing the actual doing and the execution of something the the kind of mindset shift and yet the psychological behavior is completely different between searching in google and researching and getting the answer yourself to expecting chat eb and a large language model to do it for you i won't spend too long on this point because it's less relevant to this audience but chat within this research was used heavily by developers and technical experts so forty percent of the task orientated prompts were around development tasks and i think it's clear to see why chat is the stack overflow expert it contains all of that information it's the mentor it's the code converter it's the configuration guide all in one place and if we think about how developers would have want search and found solutions to problem it would have been multiple searches on google scanning stack overflow answers trying something seeing if you get an error trying something else but on chat paste the problem in paste the error code that's in there and your code along with it get the solution right there and then it's really interesting to see how developers are leading the way in this kind of shift and they're showing us how i think other industries will start to follow along and collapse multi step search and research into one simple ai interaction and execution at the back of it this podcast is brought to you by blend we're a b2b website and demand generation agency we work with ambitious businesses just like yours to create and execute effective demand generation strategies that drive pipeline for your business we also recognize that your website is the most important asset you have in marketing so we specialize in building scalable websites on hubspot that convert the demand that you've created if you want to find out more about our services and see real results that we've generated for businesses visit b b b dot com the next really interest in insight which i think is more relevant to this audience too is the changing in commercial queries and and in particular how hyper localized and high intent they're getting too so one example within this was somebody looking for a shanghai filter supplier and they used language when the prompt that said shanghai high temperature resistant high efficiency filter and what's interested in there is how local it is and how specific it is too it's not just a simple search for you know a filter supplier in general it's got the location and the particular use case that they're trying to solve with that filter and the difference in the expectation of output here is what's really interesting too because not only are buyers using more specific language getting more localized and hyper specific about the actual challenge they're trying to solve the expectation of response is not that it's going to trigger a load of resources and websites that you then go and explore and look at the outputs yourself that actually user users are expecting ai itself to filter out these suppliers compare the prices and present the best solutions back to them with all of that reasoning in place itself and right now most businesses are not optimized for this kind of search they're optimized for generic based searches where the context of the actual application the context of the industry is not being applied to the search because typically that's not how google search has been set up it's not how people have searched in the past but as more people turn to ai as they are now and get more localized and get more hyper specific the actual opportunity to create more specific content around that is going to present it itself and i still think this content has to be done so in a high value way we can't afford to just be publishing crap content with low value at a scale that is gonna become unsustainable and i predict in the future will be seen as you know un trust information in the eyes of ai and other search engines that are using this approach i think there will still need to be a level of trustworthiness given to a piece of information so it's important that you followed the same practices that you've always created with content and have it be you know high authority with a unique perspective on it but it does need to be for ads you know taken the approach that somebody is now using ai to search and they're becoming more localized and more specific with their prompts and giving it extra context and this needs to be taken into account with content that you're creating now if you wanna be being mentioned if you want your brand to be mentioned within the answers to those prompts the other interesting find within this is how people are getting the ai to role play as a particular persona so within this we had examples of food critic recruiter stack overflow poster time travel guide there were some weird ones that this threw up but what people are trying to do is essentially program the ai behavior at the query level and if we think about you know google google never did this you couldn't tell google to be a food critic you can tell google to be a recruiter to act as a recruiter you could find food critic reviews you could find recruiters and see what they were doing but you couldn't make the engine role play as one and it's really interesting to see how people are using ai in order for it to act as them or act as somebody who they perhaps report into or you know act as anybody else in their life that they then might need to get a specific response back and i think we can take this into marketing to see how users are acting potentially as you know the board acting as particular people who need to sign off budget to act as their customer and all of this can be used by us to establish actually this is the kind of content we need to create in order to serve our entire buying group the buying committee because not only are we just targeting perhaps one specific persona even then themselves are trying to s being other people in the business and you know we need to play into that too there are some suggestions within this research to basically tell you you know what you should be doing from a content perspective now in order to be seen by these ai tools and chat jb and be referenced in there i would say go and check out the article for yourself there are some things in there that i don't think are proven yet to work but some things that high i have seen work for you know clients of ours and in tests that we've had ourselves that i can speak to are things like sc information so sc has always been around in search has always existed but it's never really been used to a certain you know extent by b2b in particular a lot of e commerce stores employ sc data for products but a lot of b2b don't use sc on their website at all and large language models when they're looking at information on our website are using sc in order to identify the type of content that they're extracting and it makes it easier for them to pass the content and bring out passages and specific information into answers that they're then serving other things are i mean this is just a standard seo practice which is you know a good heading structure so making sure that you have h1 h two's h threes and also a summary of a particular article at the start that can be easily again like what we're thinking here is passage retrieval how easy would it be for an ai to quickly look at this snippet of information and pull that as a summary and pull out maybe your brand within that summary too and a particular you know sure concise executive summary and in addition to that bullet points to to explain any features and benefits and options can then extract even more information from that if needed but the summary is really a place to you know be cited as a particular source again another thing that i just find really interesting about this research is i initially thought that people would be using ai more in a question based approach so you know who is the best x for this i have this problem how do i solve it but actually what this research has found and let's take this research with a pinch of salt as well you know let's bear that in mind that there are only one thousand eight hundred and twenty seven prompts being analyzed within this research and there are over a billion prompts actually being used every day in chat e so it's a fraction of the actual data but it does give us insight into how people are using it and yeah i you know was under the impression that more and more people were using chat gp to have more question based approaches and bring out more answers but the fact is that more and more people are using it to actually execute something to you know do it for them instead of getting a response like you might in google to a particular question where you know in chat you can add some more context but you're still just getting an answer for you actually getting it to execute on that thing is being seen more and more so yeah there might be less room for question based prompting and the things that you're tracking and the things that you're trying to influence and actually more command based things go away execute this thing do this research bring it back to me you know instead of just answering your questions and then you having to do more of the execution after that too i think overall if we combine everything we already know about the way that large language models retrieve information the way that buyers and everyone really are is using chat in order to service information we already understand that prompts are gonna be much longer as this research services we understand that prompts are gonna be much more contained extra they're gonna include things like their persona information their industry information their company details a lot more context that gives a more specific answer and we'll execute a specific task more effectively we need to now be thinking about how do we bring that level of thinking into the content that we create so instead of just having you know generic blogs answering a particular you know high level topic or idea even a pillar page doing that even a you know sector page doing that how do we now bring in this persona information this industry information into the content that we're creating and that does mean doing more that does mean being more personalized and in order to be visible in ai and be found within ai we're gonna be needing to use ai in order to you know feed the engine with information like as we've spoken about many times on this podcast using things like claw projects in order to extract that persona information and the way that they might go about prompting again maybe even based on this research then creating very specific content based on those prompts in order to be found be visible within the answers that are generating out of that like that is where content creation is going again i wish there was more proven research out there on the approach to take right now but everyone is assessing everyone is iterate iterating we're getting kind of closer and closer as we go along as this kind of research develops as well the first thing we have to do is understand how people are using the the actual search engine itself in order to see okay how do we provide information that then gets served and answered that also requires understanding the engine all of these pieces are coming together though really nicely and allows you to do more testing more iteration to actually come up with a fundamental solution a repeatable solution that you can do time and time again and there are things that we're testing at blend even if you just go to our blog you know you'll see some of the things just naturally that are coming out in the tests that we're doing there to be found for more specific queries and high intent queries to commercial queries but yeah i think everybody after this episode should absolutely go and have a look at this research for yourself and start to think about your content strategy and shifting it to this more you know persona location driven approach that is being used by you know a lot more people now within their search experience thanks for tuning into this episode of demand coded as always if you did like it we'd appreciate a follow a subscriber on whatever channel you're listening to it really helps us out and to see that you're enjoying this content just makes us wanna do more too if you wanted to comment on what you think you know we're seeing in ai what your thoughts were on the report how you see things going you know i'd love to read those and be part of the conversation too so yeah thanks for listening and i'll catch you next time on

hi everyone welcome back to demand coded dan here as usual and we have josh back on the podcast which is amazing after a couple of fantastic episodes he's joining us again and this time we're talking all of we're talking about attribution and how we go about attribution without the politics in marketing and attribution wars between marketing and sales it's kind of been an issue forever in marketing and in sales how do you attribute how do you compensate how do you actually align these two core functions of the business and give them the credit they deserve and also serve the business in the best way at the at the same time and yeah hopefully in this episode we're gonna share some insights on how to align those two teams and how to attribute in the best way possible so josh great to have you back here and yes it's an interesting topic i'm thrilled to be back this is our first time doing this when we're not in the same room so or see how it goes but yep back here in atlanta and this is this is a topic that's been you know since the dawn of marketing right people have been struggling to get to have their met marketing and sales teams on the same page singing from the same play him book or whatever you know analogy you wanna use yeah i i'm excited to talk about it let's sneak in before we get into the episode today here's a quick word from our sponsors hubspot you don't become the world's most valuable women's sports franchise by accident angel city's football club did it with a little help from hubspot when they started data was housed across multiple systems hubspot unified their website email marketing and fan experience all in one platform this allowed their small team of just three to build an entire website in just three days the result nearly three hundred and fifty new sign ups a week and three hundred percent database growth in just two years visit hubspot dot com to hear how hubspot can help you grow better well i think to frame us off like we should just cover why this is such a big issue why has always been such a big issue but why still an issue you'd think with all the technology available all of the systems we now have in place for marketing and sales surely the attribution problem like should be put to bed but actually it's probably more prevalent than ever it's a bigger issue than ever and yeah really just companies are struggling to solve this challenge and i think we've both had experience and witness issues firsthand right yeah i mean i you know i think of it as maybe three different key drivers of this dilemma what one is human beings generally want to be measured for their contributions based on what they can control it doesn't feel real good to be able to to to be told we're gonna measure you this way and that way you know you don't have complete control over over what happens right and so that that's part of it and for marketers you know that that often not always but often ends at the hand off to sales and so it's very easy very intuitive to say well i show only be measured on that part yeah sales you know from a sales perspective though if you put your your shoes on your salesperson shoes on for a minute and walk walk in their shoes they never have complete control over there outcomes right they have competitors they have internal politics at their customer they have all these other they have they have to rely on product effectiveness product market fit they have to like all these things that impact their ability to be successful and they have to be and they still get measured on that success one one way or the other right there's no excuses in sales and so i think those dilemma are those the nature of those you know those functions when not proactively managed and designed can all can it just it's it's sort of natural that these things come up i think the second reason they come up and it's something you brought up while we were prepping for this is that very often they end up in different systems mark been working in one system and sales is working in another i mean and and i think you've seen that with some of our customers right absolutely yeah it's it's such a big issue that you just wouldn't expect right sales are operating out of the core crm that might be attached to service as well like serving a customer afterwards marketing have absolutely no visibility into the pipeline into closed one revenue and this just in itself causes measurement gaps marketing then have to measure something to prove their worth in the business but this can't physically be pipeline or revenue because they don't even have visibility of it that and that blows my mind i mean especially when platforms like hubspot do exist that do a great job of of being able to bring them to bring people together and bring those those two sides of the house together i know you know the other guys would say that they can do that too it can but but it's a whole lot harder to manage in their environment and so like within hubspot like as a hubspot agency we you know that's i just expect that sales and marketing are are are seeing from you know working in the same environment but you're right i mean we run into customers all the time that that are still using hubspot for marketing and and salesforce for sales and while they can be integrated it's never as smooth as if everybody's working from the same platform yeah and then and then i think the other thing that happens dan is over the last twenty five years of b to b growth that that i've been leading the buyer journey and the degree to which we get to play a role in the buyer journey at different places has changed dramatically right and and the frequency of that change and the pace of change i think also contributes to this because there are companies lots of companies that just don't stay up to date on that and so they're using old models and so that when they're as a result their their growth volumes which might have been great for a while start to decline or plateau and they don't know why and and as soon as they don't know why but the but the people above them are pouring down at everybody then point you know finger pointing across can easily happen and and so i think it it again is incumbent upon executive leader leadership senior leadership to really push their teams to you know to to have shared goals shared compensation shared and and a shared ownership of the the state of the art how how b2b b growth continues to evolve and and how it how they need to be behaving now compared to even three or four years ago yeah do you think there is some sort of historical cultural us versus them mindset which causes this disconnect between marketing and sales i mean in certainly in some places like yes i i i would tell professionals in both sides that it's in their best interest to spend a year working on the other side like if you've if you've never carried a bag if you're a marketer and you've never carried a bag you're not going to understand the the pressure that an individual salesperson goes through in their day to day they it's sorry you're not yeah you can pay it well you haven't you just haven't lived it yeah the and and the same is true on the other side if if the average salesperson understood the complexity of marketing and the complexity of the the the demands the volume of demands would generally the the lack of budget to meet all those demands that most organizations have to deal with and the lack of information that marketers have in oftentimes gaps from you know sometimes marketing is the this isn't the certainly the best best practice but but sometimes marketing is the last one in in the door right like last one invited into the meeting and that's a that's crazy but sometimes that that's the case and so like i i do think yeah that that it would be amazing for so you know for people to shit to switch seats for it for a year as ways to build stronger growth teams yeah you know what there's there's a lack of empathy on both sides and right i worked with a really great marketer who was a salesperson before and he kind of like drilled into me the thought process of a salesperson when it gets to the end of the month when it gets to the end of the quarter like okay we might be sending them these a hundred leads we captured at an event or from a webinar they don't care they care about hitting their target to get the their compensation so they can pay their bills like go on holiday like do the things they need to do and have security in their job whereas i like marketing to be fair you know and i say this as a marketer right who doesn't have that target on my back at the end of every month at the end of every quarter like we don't come under that same level of scrutiny that we need to succeed in in order to you know have a livelihood right yeah you're no you're it's a great example of you know when you let's say the companies managed by quarter because most of our b clients aren't month to month their they're quarter to quarter in that environment the last week and a half of that quarter that's that sales team is full on focused on closing right and and so if marketing plans a webinar and in that period and then generates a bunch of leads and we know right we know that leads need to be followed up on in minutes right not yeah not days weeks or or months and the the value of those leads d rapidly over to over you know very short windows well we're not doing ourselves any favor if we plan that in the middle of crunch time for the sales team and so yeah be brings but that's you know again that's where sales and marketing leadership need to be working together to plan their calendars and plan you know plan where they're gonna invest what resources and what their shared outcomes are trying to be right if if we i i mean the other like how many times have you heard a sales or a marketing team say well we generated sql and the sales team say we haven't seen any sql and and and there be this you know giant river of of gap between what marketing things should be good enough and what sales is saying hey no i want the table set better before i engage because it's not worth my time and you know that's that again that is executive leadership but anyway that's a whole another conversation we could do that at another another podcast like how do you how do you define those things in a way to to drive fish effectiveness of both teams but yeah but let's so let's get back to attribution so so you know so yes so we have these dilemma and everybody wants to use money well marketing doesn't wanna lose their budget they wanna be able to assess what is what is effectively turning you know what is most cost effectively creating the most pipeline in the in the best of worlds that's what mark marketing goal is right it's they don't have any other agendas they're just trying to do what's best for the business which is grow as much pipeline as possible qualified pipeline ic pipeline in you know through through means that we can i'd identify understand and replicate right yeah that's what that's what attribution for so you know people go through and there's been all kinds of models right there's there's there was first touch which claimed you know top of funnel success whoo and it didn't matter what happened at the at the bottom there's last touch which which completely ignores everything that happened above you know above that which sometimes sales lu because they may be the last touch but but and then there's there's hybrid models you u shaped models w shaped models like all these different models that pete that we've tried to and but the truth of it is not a single one of them truly emulate the buyer's journey yeah right and why is that i mean technology can only do so much right our ability to view a buyer's journey at every single stage is inhibited by the technology that's available to us buyers are complex creatures and there's this ga guide and we can put it on screen now and it's like the b buyer journey and it's a few years old now but i absolutely love it because it has it has lines all over the place it's just an absolute mess and spaghetti mess but somehow our attribution models our technology is meant to identify all of those sources all of those signals of information and it's just totally impossible some of the most crucial things that happen in a buyer journey might be a conversation around the coffee machine in the office about your product it might be a conversation down the pub with you know an x colleague who is using your products it might be in a slack community that you have no access to it might be in a whatsapp group but there are so many actions that take place outside of any technology visibility whatsoever so in terms of whether you use first touch last touch multi touch i don't really care like they all have their own issues and the the truth thing that matters is the goal at the end and not the attribution that is assigning credit along the way like i do have ideas that we can get into that we apply and how to try and attribute in the best way possible but technology just has fundamental issues and if you think you're gonna implement you know an attribution model you know let's introduce multi touch and it will solve all of your problems and tell you where to invest in the best way possible i'm sorry it's not gonna happen right no you're i'm i'm a hundred percent with you i think it's fun to to talk about what we do here at blend too so what do we use a blend yeah so we are big advocates of several attribution in our attribution modeling taken a hybrid approach so several broad attribution i've i've spoken about loads on this podcast right so it's basically asking the buyer how did you hear about us and the great thing about that there's there's downsides as well which i'll will talk about absolutely are but the great thing about using several attribution is highlighting the dark places where buyers are having conversations they're hearing about your brand for the first time probably the most significant you know recall of your brand and telling you what that is if you look at your software attribution compared to your self reported attribution there will often be a huge disconnects there right if if hub hubspot or another software is telling you that the buyer came to you from organic search or a referral they might actually say in self court attribution oh i heard about you from gary in you know in this company and he just told me to get in touch with you basically so actually your marketing there did nothing right it might the other and it's it self reported attribution is what gives us the roi for this podcast because does we otherwise any other attribution model prohibits us from being able to use this be being able to prove there's a a value to this podcast other than just in in the inherent value of us being out there chatting right like for the you know six people that listen i'm it's skin the the the only one i'm on so the the so but when when when we do that we start to see that people say regularly oh i i heard about you on your podcast and i'm coming to you now because i wanna talk to you about my challenges i've heard a number of different marketers out there tell tell customers oh you shouldn't do podcasts because you know now there are a lot of work and you have to stay you have to stay up on it you have to you know we we spend a lot of effort on it but i think it's one of our best performing go to market strategies and and pipeline generation strategies and yet we would it's a it's a the reason people are saying it that they shouldn't do it is is because they have no way to measure it well self self reported attribution is one one way to measure it it's not the only way but it's one way i think there's also as we approach the world of ai and you know we're we're spending more time in l m's and and getting comfortable with use you know letting the l consume massive amounts of data if we have access to you know if we're collecting every touch point from marketing for a customer or a prospect and every touch point from sales and every page view that they come and visit and we're collecting all this information in our systems ideally in hubspot but you know lot people do lots of different things if we do all of that we can take all of that data unstructured and push it into l and let the l detect you know over the course of let's call it a thousand one in lost deals right a thousand contacts ten ten thousand contacts whatever whatever the right number is to get for it to be able to do have statistical relevance it will go and it will find patterns that we would never find and now to the extent that anything you know that any buyer's journey is well understood that's going to give us a much better sense of what's happening when deals go go to the finish line and what's happening when they don't and and i'm i'm super excited about being able to do that for some of our customers in the near future because to me we've just been like all these attribution models have have been trying but failing to really understand the buyer journey this podcast forecast is brought to you by blend we're a b2b website and demand generation agency we work with ambitious businesses just like yours to create and execute effective demand generation strategies that drive pipeline for your business we also recognize that your website is the most important asset you have in martin so we specialize in building scalable websites on hubspot that convert the demand that you've created if you want to find out more about our services and see real results that we've generated for businesses visit b b dot com so yeah funnily enough josh i actually connected claude with hubspot the other day i was doing like a few tests because obviously hubspot now has an integration with chat and claude kept it on read only mode for now because you know i didn't feel comfortable pushing lots of data back into hubspot based on response i got and claude is read only on the way chat gp can work directional but claude is just read only and yeah i mean even the level of analysis i was able to do just on some of our like self reported attribution modeling was but really interesting it's kind of early stages in the testing but it's already given me a really great understanding of what's possible from these large language models with that amount of data being able to structure it in a way that is easily digestible and the amount of context you can get to the prompts to receive something back is absolutely incredible one other the thing that i was thinking of as you were talking then was the ability to measure signals in action and when when we talk about attribution a lot of the time we're thinking channel first so we're thinking out well how do we measure you know our roi from linkedin how do we measure the roi from the podcast but actually we forget how do we measure the roi from intent data how do we measure the roi from outbound signals that occur and there's really interesting ways to go about this as well pulling all of that data into your crm and like you say using ai to detect when this signal occurred we took an action like sales took an action off that and the conversion rate into pipeline and close one based off of that action was this it could be website inquiry comes in it could be zoom info detects a new account has received funding in your ic so you go outbound to them it could be that you met somebody at an event there's all of these other signals that are almost like a layer a layer up of the kind of buyer journey that you then also need to track and understand which ones are most effective for you that that covers your entire go to market model not just marketing yeah that that's exactly right that that's really my vision is that we we have an ability to aggregate all that data without feeling the need to to structure it or define it in any way because we won't do as near near as good of a job as ai will in in doing that and you know i i mean as long as you have enough data enough touch points you're you know you've got like i'm not sure this works for the five to ten million dollar company but if you're in if you're in a company that's doing twenty five million in revenue and above you absolutely have a nut you should mean you better have enough touch points enough data elements across everything that you do that you can you know and this works this should work on both sides of the house too right like we should be able to also turn this to existing account growth and be able to analyze everything that happens with that account and there are frankly the the systems that are in place today do a better job of that inherently in detecting patterns because it's it is a bit more structured but you know if you if you build intent if you if you have intense signals and you bring those intense signals in you can even do that against your existing customer base and start to detect hey my existing customers are start somebody in my existing customer starting to search for what i do and that might be concerning to me right even though even though my service team says oh they're they're happy as a clam all of a sudden you start getting intense signals that are suggesting that maybe they're starting to look other other places or maybe it's a different part of the company that's looking for something and that's that's you know you can identify opportunities for same account growth by expanding your footprint all of that's possible now with with the you know with the use of ai and and so yeah so i i think i think in the next i don't know six to twelve months we will have a set of tools that are you know fully capable of being deployed like that and i think there's probably a lot of other people who are who are working on the same sorts of things for their businesses it's an exciting time it doesn't however like if we re if we think about all that as that reporting let's say it does do it first of all to your point earlier it it doesn't completely model the buyer journey there's a big chunk of the buyer journey that's still going to be invisible because they won't have touched us right and and so we still have to figure out brand matters being out in the in the marketplace generative engine optimization is still a thing still is going to be a thing is gonna be an increasing thing all because we want to be able to influence ahead of when we fight first recognize the prospect but but the other thing that that doesn't solve even if we get to a complete view of or as complete as possible view of that buyer journey and where we're where we're seeing success and where things are falling off it doesn't change the fact that marketing and sales may have different measurement criteria and comp structures and i think that that if there's anything that executive management needs to do while their teams are sorting out all this and trying to build these systems and create better visibility what executive management should be doing is sitting down the head of marketing the head of sales and bring them together if they aren't already reporting to the to the same person anyway and creating shared success of of view of you know a measurement rubric and compensation scheme that's based on shared success if we don't do that we're gonna continue to to even if we have more data we're gonna be continuing to to foster these com you know these challenges yeah and just to be clear you know and ask the question do you see that and have you seen that in the past basically a shared revenue goal between both teams yes depending on depending on the type of business so like for example in a b to b software or tech enabled services business that's got an average ac of half a million dollars yes absolutely i have in fact i've led teams where we've created a revenue component or a win rate component or a you know some some degree of of success sales success as part of what marketing is measured by it did i i got lots of flack on a regular basis because they didn't have complete control but my my point was look that's kind of the point is you know we all succeed together yeah and we can't have a part of our organization claiming success if another part is is is failing and if the business is failing i can't you know you can't just sit over in the corner and say well we did our job like you you didn't because one one way or the other our growth organization which is sales marketing channels everything to get everything put together didn't deliver to the business the revenue that it that was needed or the growth that was needed yeah and executive you are absolutely responsible for the outcome of that and that's the conversation i would have and then we would go about discussing what those shared goals we're gonna be and then how they could influence them i mean what it did do is it it forced my marketing leader to be sitting daily with my sales leader to discuss what they're seeing and how you know how this is going and and it wasn't just hey we're throwing things over the over the wall we ended that led to bd go getting re reassigned from sales leadership to marketing leadership we realized that bd you know the at that time the speed of follow up and the type of follow up that we wanted in in the leads that we were creating meant that the bd r's really didn't shouldn't be serving the outside sales team they should be working hand in hand really very closely together with the marketing team and so it made sense to move them under under marketing and the sales leader was great with that because that meant that what they were getting was a when when the handoff would happen it would be a much more thorough qualified pipeline than than was happening previously and they could focus on just crushing pipeline and so yes i mean that that did that has worked that's just an example it probably doesn't there are probably cases where it doesn't always work but yeah i'm i'm for it generally yeah absolutely it's aligning them around one particular goal right i've i've got another question for you because in our last couple of episodes we were talking bit around you know cmos in their first board meeting alignment with you know ceo the board around metrics and understanding how much do does do the business leaders do the board do you know private equity investors care about attribution i don't think they do they might they might claim that they do or they might have read an article and therefore they think their experts but what they really wanna know is what's what volume of of legitimate pipeline was created based on my marketing spend and if i increase it do i get a linear or better return you know growth of that marketing spend and how and how much more than linear and and then they wanna understand sales efficiency right so it's a it it still shocks me when companies higher sales before they build pipeline and then they expect in this world like i i'm talking specifically b to b software b b hardware b to b like tech tech and tech enabled services i'm not talking about like there are businesses the brokerage business trucking brokerage in the states for example is example where you do you do hire tremendous numbers of outbound like cold calling cold emailing just it's a there there are other ways to do it too but but that tends to be still be an effective growth strategy but in but in most worlds like complex solution selling type environments the the idea that you would hire sales team before you have demand before you have pipeline created is like it doesn't make any sense to me but people still do it so like to me as an executive as an investor i want to know what's your what's your how much pipeline are is each salesperson managing how much can they manage before they're just over overwhelmed right and what's that what's the ideal close you know number of accounts that they should that each salesperson should be managing or a number of opportunities and then when does demand when will demand overtake yeah the volume of sales teams you have so that we can then be hiring ahead of that and training so that we can catch those opportunities and continue to convert without causing our sales team to run out the door because we're just brow beating them but there's no question in my mind that the if that if i really wanna build a go to market efficiently i don't just hire your salespeople and tell them to cold call i i or you know use their network which is another one of those you know nineteen eighty five thought processes the the you know what i wanna know is is okay i'm gonna give demand i think we by the way i think we should start calling chief marketing officers chief demand officers i think that would change change the world in terms of like how they think about themselves and what their what their objective is but k so doesn't doesn't help or it doesn't hurt that we're called demand decode in this podcast right like i like don't hand part but so our our chief demand officer then is is ultimately responsible for generating as much pipeline with as few resources as possible and so they wanna know all of that and they wanna be as sophisticated as possible but what their invest when they report to the board they want one metric right an efficiency score with and may and maybe two metrics an efficiency score and a close rate score right here's the quality of the pipeline just demonstrated by our close rates and if we can increase efficiency and increase close rates in our and and see total demand increasing every investor in the world gonna be thrilled and gonna be wanting to give them more money right let's okay then let's let's keep going let's do more yeah so did i get your yeah and there's a reason why i asked you that question because i knew you'd give me that answer you know i the board don't care about your channel attribution they don't even care about your signal attribution like you say they want it one number we put money in how much money do we get out like basically what is the roi of your marketing and go to market investments overall and in marketing yes of course you need to break that down and understand where are you most efficient are generating in that revenue which channel is it which signal is generating in the best returns but at the end of the day you're only reporting to you know the people who are ultimately investing in the business that one figure so if you need to invest in areas where you don't have the clear the clearest sight of channel roi if your multi touch attribution can't detect that thing well that doesn't matter to the board okay it might matter to where you can deploy that budget but if you can then start using things like increment incremental lift tests and things like that we invest here we did this activity we saw a lift in pipeline and revenue and you can tie it that way you don't actually need to do the granular channel level attribution that you know people rave about needing may mainly technology vendors rave about you needing it's not actually necessary in order to get the result at the end there are other ways to think about it and as long as you can report on that main number at the end which is you know like you say roi efficiency then you're okay yeah i think that you know the other person in the room that outside the board that that you may have to go into more detail on with is the cfo in the but in the annual budget cycle or or you know the quarterly budget cycle depending on what kind of company you're asking for you know when you wanna go ask for money you're gonna have to to demonstrate that you understand how to be a good steward of that money that's that's legitimate but i think that's where you can educate the cfo too like he's historically that cfo might have been gotten used to people using first touch attribution to justify and then and then cognitive realize wait a minute they're telling me that this is all great but i'm not seeing revenue increases over here yeah so whatever they're telling me doesn't doesn't like i i become skeptical so when they ask for money i'm like that maybe i'll just re you know reduce that if i some to make my my numbers work on the other side the that's why i i i mean i'll come back to getting everything into one system getting and then using ai to analyze the details of that's of every touch and every sales engagement and be able to really try to to create a a more transparent view of that buyer a more thorough and transparent view of that buyer may may help us to to connect the dots with the cfo the ceo and and it's no longer a political thing because you've got sales and marketing data together and you can show like in and you can show like that's what like if you oh gosh really the guys the the first guys that we're doing call recording and and and like deep analysis of call recording maybe gong yeah yeah so gong has been doing this for a long time but the the last couple years they've gotten really really deep in the psychological analysis of of what they're hearing the tonality the engagement level the eye contact the all this stuff that that and they're they're coat using that to coach reps that level of analysis and data but across every single touch point of of the the where the buyer connects to you in any in any way listens to a podcast download white paper whatever i think is the in is where this gets really interesting to me yeah yeah i think you're right like there will be a point in time in not not too distant future where you are feeding in all of your channel data all of your go to market data your you know marketing attribution sales attribution signal data into one large language model and that's kinda aggregate the data it's going to pull out the things that truly matter to you in a in a view that makes sense to you know the board to the people that need to see it and that's what we're gonna be aggregated view in in one single place and it's terrifying to think about but absolutely amazing to think about what's what is gonna happen there yeah so i didn't prep you for this and it because it just crossed my mind but if we have people listening to this who wanna go down that journey with us reach out to us we will give you the deal of a lifetime to to be able to get access if you have enough data to be able to do this in in the real world outside of just our own data and be able to work partner with you to to to build this analysis to help you really get visibility into what you how your how your company grows or how your buyers bought we're your where your buddy we come come and reach out and and we will we will bring the resources we will work with you to get the data and and yeah i this is this is such an exciting place for me personally to because like we use the term growth engineering and blend wants to be the premier growth engineering firm in the world mh this is how you engineer growth in the in the world of ai and in the world of you know the the the modern buyer journey you really have to get your hands on all the data and be able to analyze it in depths and detect these these patterns and and anomalies and and let that drive your behavior and and so yeah so for any customer that's interested in going down that journey i i i would love to talk with them about how do how we can do that and partner with them yeah good josh because you know sometimes just being able to work with an external consultant in order to you know aggregate that data in ways that you might not have thought before would be really interesting and i think for us being able to like you say have that volume of data to look at to understand to kind of shape what that looks like with another business will be valuable to everybody and of course you know we'll share those learnings along the way on the particular right try and help more people how we kind of enter this next phase of of you know business and and growth engineering let's get back onto attribution and sorry because i mean what a tangent but a good one i think because yeah i mean ai literally creeps into every single podcast now there's no escaping in it and that's just the way of the world right but i think we can probably start to wrap this episode up now from an attribution standpoint but just circle back to that point i think from my perspective we've mentioned this a few times the attribution war between marketing and sales can be largely ended by ref framing the single goal by re framing the compensation that they get out the back of those goals and by aligning the systems which is still a humongous gap for so many businesses if you're a marketing team if you're a marketing leader listening to this and you have no visibility of pipeline and revenue you need to be taking that to the ceo to whoever right now after this episode because there is no way that you can efficiently spend your budget efficiently deploy your team and your resource in the best way possible to get the best result it's just simply not possible but when it comes to attribution we've kind of mentioned a few things on this self reported attribution will be a really great easy way to identify some of the channels that you might not be able to see in traditional software attribution that are working hard for you aside from that looking at signal based attribution will be another good way to evaluate the entire go to market engine you can supplement this with some technology attribution to but aside from that those are the things that are probably gonna help you out most yeah i i agree with that a hundred percent dan i mean that the i think the other the last thing i wanna say is there's there's there's no silver bullet to growth but particularly in b to b tech right there you can't if you're using attribution to say this is the thing this is the the the marketing channel that's gonna you know enable our growth and it's it's the one i'm gonna pour all my money into that's gonna be that's gonna fail because there is not or it's not gonna at least it's not gonna be as optimized as it could be because buyers connect to us in so many different ways and they want to connect to us in so many different ways and and so just be careful how much you're you're paying attention to individual attribution points and trying to create roi cases for one thing as opposed to really building a portfolio approach to to how you're to to your go to market overall and looking at the connect the connective tissue between those portfolio items i think being able to that's the whole point of this ai discussion is really to understand the connective tissue and what happened you know what succeeds most often when this touch point goes to this touch point goes to this touch point and in what timing right to be able to to understand where you can now you know spend more optimize what what have you so yeah i'm i would not get into a conversation any anymore with with anyone trying to to have a religious view of first touch or last touch they're all they're all just you know up there yeah yeah they're all just noise and they all have their issues right which is why we we advocate for like a hybrid approach that takes into account multiple things alright cool well let's wrap it up there unless there's anything else from you josh i don't think so may maybe just pay the one thing you can do if your hubspot customers pay attention to the attribution reporting in hubspot it it it will automate some things for you if if that's all the appetite you have then you know that's better than nothing but but let's let's use those to start and then let's get your data and let's let's really build something out help you understand your grow yeah and i would just say self report attribution again on top of that because a really important thing to supplement that data with alright let's leave it there that was a really interesting episode we went down a few rabbit holes hopefully you're going to you know boring for everyone with those things but yeah i i liked the fact we did that on the last episode as well they've gone down pretty well so i think you know when that thought comes sometimes you just need to lean into it right and you just need to kind of go down a rabbit hole it it entertain us if nobody else right so yeah exactly well thank you for listening to that waffle of a monte coded so it's really fun and yeah we'll catch you next time if you could drop us a light rate in drop us a follow on whatever platform you listen to that be totally awesome but until then yeah we'll catch you next time thanks for listening

hi everyone welcome back to demand decode dan here as usual with phil on the other side of the desk over there and on today's episode we're gonna be talking about the biggest b2b website mistakes that are costing you leads and revenue through your website no it's not the sexiest topic of the latest greatest ai tool that's come out but this is genuinely something that can change your business lead volume and pipeline volume overnight if you actually get it right and there's a few reasons why we're discussing this today right phil the rise of ai and zero click searches yep being a big one of those and just some other historic things that have always existed with poor websites yeah now i think about it b to b website cro i think is a relatively underserved sort of topic a bit and a bit misunderstood because of course when we think of cro we think of changing the bottom color on an e commerce website but that's not what cro conversion rate optimization is in majority of b cases and for a variety of reasons it's not a topic that marketers spend a lot of time talking about it's a it's a discipline that is very different to ab b testing in any ecommerce situation and it's as you say becoming more and more critical as zero clicks search increases as ai search and research increases changing the landscape for us in terms of what what what i'll beat what our website is doing the landscape it's operating in but it's an area where actually mark ought spend a lot more time and effort and focus conversion rate optimizing their website to get the most out of the traffic they are getting whatever traffic they continue to get and the effort of their the the the output and the outcome of their other efforts further up the funnel yeah before we get into the episode today here's a quick word from our sponsor hubspot you don't become the world's most valuable women's sports franchise by accident angel city's football club did it with a little help from hubspot when they started data was housed across multiple systems hubspot unified their website email marketing and fan experience all in one platform this allowed their small team of just three to build an entire website in just three days the result nearly three hundred fifty new sign ups a week and three hundred percent database growth in just two years visit hubspot dot com to hear how hubspot can help you grow better there's two big things in there because zero click searches ai seo and just l m's in general are causing traffic to decline on websites and marketers might be thinking oh well actually maybe we'll just neglect the website a little bit more and try to appear in these l m's and do other things to combat that but actually that is you know completely the wrong thing to do the traffic that you do get now will be more qualified better informed and you need your website to work harder yeah you yeah that to the neglect intellectual website now would be a real a real costly mistake and an issue you're gonna get much less traffic to your website overall in the future meaning relatively speaking every visit is more and more important to you and your ability to turn that attention that brief opportunity into an engaged visitor to build on their understanding of your brand their trust level with it and to turn some of those into high leads and pipeline is ever more critical i think zero click search and ai search is such an interesting topic because of course historically google's algorithm would reward websites that provided it with content with visits in their states right potentially loads but only if you got to the top few positions for any particular attractive keyword searches you know ai search on the one hand is interesting because it it's been shown it's been proven that it can delve a lot deeper into the rankings but what you get as a publisher of that content is so diminished compared to the visibility in a link yeah the the click that you would have got the visit you would have got that's all just staying within these ai tools so by the time people buyers ideally ic coming to your website all that's taken place all that's happened without them visiting and they're there now it's super important that you focus on providing an experience that's to aligned to what they need and what they want if you want your business to benefit from what is in most cases an incredibly attractive source of pipeline self nominated self qualified opted in high intent leads we've seen it over the years right the conversion rate on that is high you've gotta be optimizing for it and you should have been doing so all along but when we look at the way b b budgets get distributed d up and spend website optimization often isn't there's not even a limelight yeah it doesn't feature yeah and businesses go through these like lu like multi year from one facebook and i get it you know these websites are big complex projects when you're doing them you know to a fresh but when you're doing a new website applying a conversion rate a b to b conversion rate optimization mindset critical and even in between those projects improving your website's ability to convert is a very very worthwhile you know use of budget and time as a marketer in a b2b companies need today yeah yeah i mean i just wanna go a bit deeper on that again because one marketer that i speak to you regularly always uses like the the ten k mark as a kind of neat starting in point for any investment if they're doing an event no matter how big no matter how more minimum ten k okay doesn't matter campaign ten k another thing ten k anything is ten k how much do they spend on their website cro zero and it blows my mind because all of these investments add up you know their marketing budget is well over a million and not a single penny of that is being spent on improving the website yeah and you're driving huge amounts of traffic just naturally not even if they're not attempting to drive direct traffic through links yeah it's a product of everything you do yeah if they're sponsoring events it's just a byproduct and no matter who you speak to then the buying committee from that deal might end up on your website too like all of these buyers these people these factors like contribute to them coming to your website and if your website isn't communicating your value proposition like communicating what your product offers effectively then really you're just diminishing the returns of everything else you've spent up upfront it's interesting like we all know this right all marketers know this and yet there's a blind spot for it when it comes to you know where to put time and attention and and there's probably something in that that's rooted in you know fear the unknown uncertainty we most of us want to do things that we think we know will pay off or not and maybe this is an area where people don't feel saving because yeah as i've said b b website cro is not a very well discussed topic but it is so it it it is a blind spot where there is yeah just this you'll obsession with looking away from it instead of looking to it i increasingly think of our website as a part of our what i consider to be our performance marketing investments mh so the part of our marketing which is focused on producing an outcome whatever that outcome is not necessarily a not a leads outcome or an attributed outcome but a business outcome and our websites are not brochures they're not creative exploration of our brand they are performance tools in our go to market which need to be optimized to perform in the way they do i think marketers need to shift the website from wherever it sits in their mind into this is something that has to perform and therefore i need to learn about why it does or doesn't perform and how i can make it perform better yeah there's a lot of shiny objects right now in marketing more than ever before and everyone's chasing the answers to how do we show up in ai answers how do we get more from ai basically any question related around ai but that's not proven yet that's not a slam dunk if i invest in that area and trying figure it out that i'm gonna get measurable results your website conversion rate is a proven tactic and strategy to get more high intent leads which result in more pipeline and more revenue for your business it's a safe bet to put budget to put effort and focus yeah it's an it's interesting actually you you're i completely agree couldn't agree more although i'm well aware that a lot of people are in a position today where their website currently generates no pipeline whatsoever no high intent leads whatsoever because it hasn't been built around that objective mh and so the first thing for some businesses is to actually realize and learn that their website should be a reliable trustworthy real source of pipeline and to make that first transition before you optimize its conversion rate you actually build it with conversion in mind and and the goal that you have because we can say with absolute confidence that websites can ensure generate lots of high intent good quality leads and can be and is in most cases a source of very high converting close rate i mean opportunities yeah so you you you've got to put your you gotta put effort into creating it but doing so is very very reliable and valuable yeah absolutely okay well is that the rant over rant over out we're passionate about this stuff but yeah in the next part of this episode we're gonna dive into some of the core things to look at when it comes to your website and really the biggest mistakes that we see that are costing your website's ability to actually work hard for you to convert ultimately so yeah yeah absolutely yeah i'm i'm just thinking that yeah b2b website cro is such an interesting topic that we can we can do more to help people understand and help them aggregate the resources that already exist because that's the interesting thing right there's a load of research done on this topic you have to have a you have to have your common sense switched on to be able to distinguish between what would work in a beat to t setting versus a b to b setting not all research on website user behavior ux is distinguished between the two but there's a load of resources out there the people can and should use to learn this subject and we can perhaps do more to aggregate some of those but yeah there are mistakes that we see over and over again that either prevent people from getting this result this outcome or the you know limit the the success and the impact they have with their website yeah for sure alright well should we dive into point one and i think this is something i hear you talk about regularly consistently all the time something you're passionate about i think which is positioning position are i wonder where you were going because there's a few passions but positioning i mean this is a this is a relatively speaking a a detailed point because of course since before you can get to your the point where your thinking really carefully about the the the key message on your website you've got to have built an entire website you've got to have your whole website project you know moving and we'll talk about that in a moment but of all the things on your b website there is none with higher impact more importance than the few words and the supporting images that a biases sees on the homepage when they first arrived which will in most cases be the hero message which should be a extrapolation from your business positioning your positioning should inform you where your product or your offering exists versus competing solutions in the landscape of buyer challenges why they should care about it why they should spend money to solve the problem you solve all these things makeup positioning it's quite a it it's not a simple part of the go to market strategy it's it's a it's more complicated than a single sort of sentence and what we do and your website then has to communicate that effectively and clearly i've been reading and loving the work of fl who are specialists on product positioning and the work that they do can really help businesses get their positioning right in a way that informs their messaging on their website and helps you to communicate value to your ic clearly quickly so that the first five to eight seconds on the website the blink test result in a high level of affinity for the message and a desire to stay you know a comp propulsion to continue the journey as opposed to bounce away and it might seem sort of trivial to some but the cost of saying nothing there or saying something that doesn't mean anything to your ic is enormous because it means every visit you do get is more likely to bounce away and less likely statistically to continue the journey to take a call to action to enter the pipeline yeah and of all the things on your website that's the one with the greatest connection to your results what you say in the homepage hero what your messaging is and how it relates to your positioning yeah it's the first thing that people see when they land on your website and no matter how they've heard of you elsewhere or how they've come to get to your website that needs to resonate with them instantly yes to know that they are in the right place or the wrong place and if they should go elsewhere for their solution or to learn more or if they should stay and explore further yeah absolutely most businesses you know need to convert right they need to convert because they don't most businesses are not in the position where customers flood to them yeah right you can get there you know salesforce forces is arguably there but in your earlier years you need to convince people that you've got a compelling solution to their problem and they should work with you and when it comes to your website this is where you do it so falling into the traps of for example using your brand strap line mh as your homepage message instead of a clear concise statement of your value is a classic mistake most strap lines are very nice sounding are very clever when you understand them they make a lot of sense yeah but to a first time visitor or to your website they rarely communicate what you do in a clear way so it's a massive fail to either run with your strap line or to start off well but then end with your strap line which i've seen happen quite a lot you know another mistake is to think that you will be able to make up for a overly sort of clever or cryptic headline with a good sub headline mh i often see sub headings on websites that are significantly better than the main headline at communicating yeah the proposition problem is significantly fewer people will read the sub headline yeah compared to the headline so you're just wasting the good work you've done there by not putting it in prime position lots of websites would do well to basically swap those two things around right lead with your sub headline clear statement of what you do and what you offer and then follow it up with a nice witty you know thought provoking line on why that matters or what that that can help you achieve yeah that putting the good work in the sub headline unfortunately wastes that work given how how many people won't see that content yeah like the eye drawn to the large heading on the page totally know which is typically gonna be your h one unless you style it otherwise for an seo purpose but yeah absolutely i just wrote down an example of i'd i haven't seen this as exact line before but it's just like classic like driving growth with next generation solutions i mean like that kind of thing isn't it it's that kind of like ambiguity around a message exactly and people end up there for lots of reasons multiple stakeholders in indecision unprepared or inability to select a core market and what that tends to do is drive people up the benefit change right so fl anthony there calls it multi order benefits and i think you've nailed it with that which is if the benefit your software your product delivers is you know faster turnaround time on a on a project or you know something specific if you take that up and up and up and up the food chain as it were yeah eventually you'll get to save time make money yeah yeah it's all about but that's what everything does moving away from the benefit you offer to a higher order benefit so that you end up saying something that could apply to truly any product means you're saying nothing mh and it's a common problem that people end up in for a lot of reasons but you gotta fight it you gotta resist it and i get it i have to admit that the best homepage messages are not always super exciting but i think there is excitement in communicating clearly in a compelling way in getting people excited to stay on your website and that's what i want people to pursue yeah and our role as marketers is to get a result at true it's to drive pipeline and drive revenue for the business it's not to excite ourselves or the business internally with a sharp snappy like homepage hero that means nothing to the buyer yep you know yeah absolutely and you know and ultimately bear in mind as well that messaging website messaging doesn't make up for poor positioning mh it doesn't change your positioning it's an expression of positioning and if businesses are worried about their positioning or feel that they could be clearer on it they should look at the work of april dun yeah her book obviously awesome and the she's it what she writes on the subject of positioning particularly for businesses that have got multiple products yeah multiple personas or multiple markets i think is critical reading to get home homepage messaging website messaging that's that creates pipeline and to do that effectively so absolutely definitely look definitely look that up cool alright homepage messaging checked off do we think tick that is the first place to look though like absolutely after this episode you know listen to the end of course but just go and have a look at the homepage message does it communicate communicate clearly what you do and who you do it for yeah completely this podcast is brought to you by blend we're a b website and demand generation agency we work with ambitious businesses just like yours to create and execute effective demand generation strategies that drive pipeline for your business we also recognize that your website is the most important asset you have in marketing so we specialize in building scalable websites on hubspot that convert the demand that you've created if you want to find out more about our services and see real results that we've generated for businesses visit b b b dot com what are some of the other core mistakes we see on your website i think the ones to talk about next is that a commercial call to action if you think about the way buyers buy you know the website plays a a vital role in it but also some of the people that buy from you and in some situations that people that buy the fastest and the best as it were they've come to you because you were top of their mental shortlist already for work you've done in the demand generation phase they may have researched the topic in ai or google but that won't have necessarily disrupted your place on that shortlist and they've come to your website with an intention to talk to you really homepage messaging needs to confirm that any pages they visit obviously should build their trust in you but providing them with a call to action that is mutually beneficial and aligned to what they need and one at this next stage is probably the next best thing to do because some of those visitors will just instantly click after visiting one page only on your top right navigational call to action yep and that's an area where you can create an impact if you align it to what a buyer wants from your website as opposed to what is conventional wisdom or what you want where am headed with this if the button at the top right your website says contact us change it nobody coming to your website to contact you that's pointless and truthfully we don't want people to contact us we want people to buy from us so a call to action that meets their requirements and your requirements will much more likely talk about or speak to that process the purchase process and whatever the purchase process looks like in your category so yep in some verticals the right call to action is talk to sales talk to an expert yeah speak to somebody specific about something specific not contact us not open ended va meaningless contact us in other verticals categories it will be book a demo it will be see the software live experience it with someone who knows it inside out yeah and ask your questions in others it'll be take a trial you know i think each of those is relatively speaking more attractive to website visitors than the preceding one because it's lower investment but that doesn't mean it drives the result you're looking for as a business so you need to dial this in around what works for you and your customer to get the best results doesn't make sense to drive a load of trials if it isn't trials that get people to buy but take a trial demo talk to sales has improved performance significantly in lots of the cases we've seen it used and when you think about it makes sense because it says what you want buyers to do and what they're there to do yeah yeah you know we've got case studies of some of these things as well i think the wrong radar one i'd have to go back and double check but i'm sure is between ten and twenty percent conversion rate improvement from changing contact tests to talk to sales and that's you know completion of the form yep in terms of conversion rate there you know ultimately what we're trying to do here is provide a mutually beneficial offer to the business and the user right like it's it's rooted in being bios centric again which is actually something that people forget a lot of the time when they're building their website they forget what the buyers they to do you know the right call to action for lot sites could be get a quote yeah and you know we've seen that when put in the right place for the right customer have a very positive impact because not every buyer is there to talk about a a a a broad solution problem now if you have a taught sales cta alongside it that can give them a route to do so yeah but if your buyers today tend to ask you to quote for your product tour offering make that easy yeah something that actually caught my attention recently was a a a a a discussion about conversion rate optimization on the conversion rate expert website and they were talking about a test run that had been successful and i thought it was interesting because the rationale for the success was not in you know increasing click through rate by making it more attractive or or more you know aligning the color to the buyer preference or whatever those sort of typical av test that we it was about remove removing friction you know thoughtfully removing friction making the conversion process easier for people that wanted to yeah and that's a lot of what b cro is actually making it easier for the people who can and do wanna buy from you to do it yeah as opposed to thinking that you're gonna create loads of new customers if you make this change or that change to your website yeah totally agree and you've set up you know at the start of this episode that b to b conversion rate optimization is totally misunderstood or not well documented because if you look up anything around conversion rate optimization it will be telling you to test an orange button instead of a green one and you know tests an increased font size or font way or tiny micro changes that most b2b companies don't have enough data to measure the impact of anyway yep and you know changing those tiny things they're not gonna have the biggest impact when it comes to b2b it's aligning your website and its journey to the journey that your buyer wants to take yeah absolutely absolutely okay can i go on my rant now rant bike so one of my big issues with b2b websites is the hand off process between the website and the sales team or the experts or the account manager whoever it may be i submit a form on a website and all of a sudden i need to wait twenty four hours forty eight hours to hear back that just does no longer align with buyer expectations the expectation now because it's being used so well on many you know products websites and service websites now i submit a form i get to book a me in straight away mh and so many businesses are losing out on great buyers because their hand off process is absolutely appalling they've got buyers falling through the cracks who never hear back from sales because not only are they not booking meetings ins instantly they're just not following up together there's no process in the back end to enable that because to be fair some buying processes don't need a medium boat right you know they might just need a quote instantly but that needs to be formalized and have a fast automated processes to enable it to happen as quickly as possible but most b2b companies especially those with products or services like will have a conversation like of sales in order to sell the product on service and it just like blows my mind that businesses aren't investing in relatively like cheap cost effective software to solve this issue like i just invite lots of them have it but don't don't use it use it solve this issue this should be table stakes yeah this should be as foundational as security reliability edit you have your website you know the work that you've put into generating traffic and into converting it into opportunities to have these sales conversations needs to be met matched with the a seamless streamlined hand process that's aligned to the way your customer buys completely agree and it is you know a real waste when it's not taken care of and it's a puzzle because like we said a a lot of people have the tools to do it yeah you know and if you're in any doubt how to do it give us a call drop us a line because we'll help you with that because it it it isn't shouldn't be difficult you you need to be able to provide a website experience that gives the buyer what they need whether that's a form to fill in a diary you know route rooting them to the correct person diary or following up by a email quickly or sending them with a documentation that you need to send them and then internally assigning that lead to the right person making that person aware getting that person booked in with that contact that prospect or you know in new newer systems you know creating a lead object for example yeah track the process this challenge should be automated absolutely and i was just looking up a study that i put together from it's a couple of years old now from blend ourselves so we had an existing process that used automated emails after somebody submitted still a a better process than just leaving it you know it's to chance for a salesperson to follow up with the lead yeah but essentially somebody would submit a high intent form on our website and they would get a series of automated emails to that had calendar links within them so you know not a not a bad process not the optimal one but interestingly our sql so that's a high intent lead on our website to meeting conversion right so how many of our m q hours was generated through the website ended up booking a meet during that period h one twenty twenty three with the automated email follow up was forty two percent mh in h one twenty twenty four would updated this process to have the meeting scheduling capability directly after the form fill yep and the q to meeting conversion rate was seventy seven percent yeah amazing impact and it's so significant some a little change relatively simple to do but so effective in terms of improving our ability to connect with those prospects and yeah yeah identify fit and we say you know the software yeah it is available for most people but even if you needed to spend an extra ten k twenty k to get almost a you know hundred percent increase on that conversion rate like the downstream impact of that on pipeline and revenue like cannot be underestimated and yeah it just bog my mind again that you'd spend you know that ten k twenty k on some linkedin ad to drive some more traffic to your website that then still isn't converting into meetings for sales yep it's part of the optimization process of the website as a pipeline generator and you're investing you know ten k hundreds of k's in some situations in driving people there and then sq that opportunity it's it's it's it's it's something that has to be addressed yeah yep so the best thing you can do here is still have the form the high intent form on your website because we've seen that still adding that little bit of friction in will result in more qualified buyers and opening up your calendar to anybody and people who are probably gonna sell to you rather than you're trying to sell to them yeah that's a bridge too far yeah having the friction in place that actually somebody has to go through the motion or filling out your form and then seeing the the calendar is just the way to go yeah i mean we've talked about sort of the the three points of the conversion rate triangle on on the website which is the homepage message the call to action and the handover process i think those are truly some of the highest impact things that you can focus on the whole website matters of course but changes you make to it don't have the same ability to influence your outcome you just have to build a website that's optimized for website users so you know broadly speaking don't underestimate the importance of headlines everybody's skimming the page looking for interesting relevant snippets they're not reading it verbatim so your headlines are critical short snack content that's consumable quickly or by skin readers as opposed to walls of text is it's broadly the way to go imagery that supports the message supports the content and in particular product imagery if you can show it are the ways to create you know effective website pages that if bounded by this very strong conversion rate framework can produce a really good website that buyers you know use to form an opinion to educate themselves and then convert into really really high fit good quality leads that you can close with these yeah one thing i'd add onto that is can we just all agree now to not gate content like i feel like you know we've our first episode of mandy coded was on this topic wasn't it i think it was a big feature there and and we're still talking about it eight the odd episodes later yeah reckon you know we've probably seen a movement in more people have un gated their promotional content than had back then but it's not uncommon to see gated case studies yep gated pricing yep gated decision level content around products and solutions and there's very little points and you can usually analyze that right by saying well how many of the people that download that that go through that gate give us that information become our customers and just like the influential content of old i reckon it's very very low but one thing you you can't measure is the impact of not having that and the impact of people who don't choose to download your gay piece of content because it's gated yeah and they go elsewhere oh absolutely i mean you're completely right and it sort of you're having you have you have as b2b marketers you have to use the measurements you have available and your insight into the buyer to form conclusions and by measuring the poor performance of lead generation content we're able to build a a perspective that was actually given the way these two cohorts of buyers behave there's a there's a huge cost negative cost to this approach we're not seeing can't measure it because it doesn't happen yeah but that's the issue it doesn't happen so if you look at your case study downloads and your pricing guide downloads and you compare that to people who buy from you and there's a really big distinction you could probably you could potentially get a lot more people to buy from you if you gave that information away to them freely during the research process and you know it was true in the algorithm seo era and it's probably just as true in the ai seo era which is gated content can't help you get found in those platforms yeah so by gating that case study content you're potentially cutting off a nose despite a face when people could be discovering the stats the success the impact in conversations with ai as they move towards the more com commercial end of their queries which is where we think there's actually more opportunity to impact ai results through content yeah yeah just insane to me you know case especially but why wouldn't you get your most crucial valuable pieces of content that show buyers on your website the results that you could get for them yeah yeah yeah it just it just shocks me you know how many businesses still get content like when we did our breakthrough event a few months ago you know there are some industries that are lagging i think in these areas and yeah it's truly surprising that how many businesses are are doing this and sometimes it feels like we're in an echo chamber of people who are moving on to the next thing and the next thing but actually there's a lot of people who are still trying to figure this stuff out yeah like marketing always evolving new things were always disappearing but they tend to they either they either disappear you know like become obsolete and lose their relevance or they add to the foundation that you've actually got to keep your eye on and keep maintaining and this is one of those things and this is why we do the podcast right so to hopefully help you know one or more people like move out of a fog you know from by by hearing our perspective our our discoveries you know because that's the like you said like the a lot of a lot of the world we live in is echo chambers where yeah where the ideas is we already have a forced by s ais and you know the people we choose to follow and so on exactly and it's really useful to have that sort of challenged and broken down every now and then by outside opinions and thoughts that you can then process and apply yeah for sure i think one thing to to touch on air phil would be the technology you use for your website because that can have a huge impact on a number of things right well indeed so as we've said when we were talking about the handoff off process we said it was it was a table stake and it was like reliability speed availability security privacy stability all of which are not things that you design no they are they're part of what you buy to host your website we use hubspot for the websites we build because as a product it incorporates all of the things that we believe are critical to an effective b website project on which we deliver the creative strategic expertise to build outside and we code you know in in in lean performance ways but we don't have to worry about infrastructure you know defenses against the malicious stuff that goes on out there a tool set for editing yeah etcetera etcetera etcetera that's all taken care of my advice to all businesses is before you go and procure a website platform as part of a project or on its own that you that you don't make that decision based on what you think you know yeah you form a comprehensive list of your requirements and you check which software platform vendors meet those requirements and you get demonstrations from the people that will build on it so that you can be be shown and you can see firsthand what the eligibility position you're gonna end up in truly is yeah because a lot of promises get made in this world done are not born out either buy the product itself when you buy it or by the solution that's built on top of it yeah and that's a critical point and you know i i don't i hate nothing more than hearing people who've tried to make good decisions but then end up in uncomfortable situations because they didn't do that part of the due diligence so you know test and pro what's gonna get built for you when it comes to your website to ensure that you ability is gonna be useful edit eligibility not just crippling overly complicated edit eligibility yeah or no edit eligibility at all like edit eligibility is is a massive one right because all of the things we mentioned today require you to go in and edit your website in on in one way or another and if you can't do that you need to you know email developers to do it or you just can't do it full stop for whatever reason that's gonna limit your ability to improve the conversion rate of your website and have an impact through it and it's gonna stag really quick yep i'd i'd love to show people you know our new websites edison experience because like you know that went live last month and we're already thinking about okay right we're gonna change that we're planning to do this like the changes are already gonna be happening because a website iterate it evolves over time and like you need to be empowered to do that as a marketer you shouldn't now need to spend an extra fifty k over the next year to get developers to make tiny tweaks on your website like you need to have the ability to be able to do that and iterate time yeah absolutely i think we've really nailed our approach to that and it basically puts you know our customers users of that platform form in the right place on the like edit eligibility spectrum which is i i have a saying which is when when while everything while while a website should live up to this the the phrase you know everything should be editable that doesn't mean anything should be possible there's still lying beyond which you are going to need the support of others to achieve a goal but that's a good thing if you wanna maintain the consistency of your brand the standardization of your style yeah the security reliability and performance of your website so we get people to the right point on that spectrum with our approach to it and that's what you should ask to be shown when you're engaging vendors around project that alright phil well i think that should probably do it for today's episode i think we've outlined you know why this is still such an important thing to get right yep in amongst all of the shiny objects happening right now like your website is just a fundamental business set that needs to work as hard as possible for you and yeah hopefully some things in there like tactical advice that you can go away and look at today improve and have better results tomorrow yeah alright cool well let's wrap it up there hopefully you enjoyed this episode of demand coded as always a review a like on whatever platform you listen to is always appreciated and yeah until then we will catch you next time thanks all bye

hi everyone welcome back to demand decode dan here as usual and phil making a surprise appearance on the podcast it's been a few weeks i'll weeks you've back been on been on holiday so yeah nice to have you back today we are covering the state of seo really and the state of ai seo it's a topic that keeps coming up in almost every conversation can't ignore it we're everywhere yeah with marketers in communities that i'm part of it takes the the hot seat in terms of every single discussion it's on everyone's mind you know like what is happening with seo should we still care about it anymore how do we influence ai seo yeah should we even be looking at that what is it so on today's episode we're gonna try and cover all of that for you and give you some insight into what's happening now and what could be happening in the future before we get into the episode today here's a quick word from our sponsors hubspot you don't become the world's most valuable women's sports franchise by accident angel city's football club did it with a little help from hubspot when they started data was housed across multiple systems hubspot unified their website email marketing and fan experience all in one platform this allowed their small team of just three to build an entire website in just three days the result nearly three hundred and fifty new sign ups a week and three hundred percent database growth in just two years visit hubspot dot com to hear how hubspot can help you grow better so phil seo i think let's just touch on that for a moment like where are we at right now do we even care about it anymore and what do we do it's a crazy time for sure right the rules of b marketing amongst other things are being rewritten by ai so we've got to look again at what we're doing and why and so seo for a long time has played a very central very predictable very core role in smart b growth strategies right and we've all reap fantastic rewards but technology drives by behavior and bio behavior drives technology and currently that cycle is moving very fast in new directions and we're seeing ai really really fundamentally shift the way buyers use seo and therefore we have to shift the way we think about it so seo the way we used to think about it the way we did it is no longer i don't i think that's fair to say i think i think ai will for the vast majority of people listening for the vast majority of businesses with a few exceptions and a few you know lag ards for and early adopters most of us are in the core where ai is replacing the meaning of of seo in our go to market strategies and therefore how we think about it what do we know we know that buyers are quickly adopting chat based interfaces for the ease and for the speed with which they get them information there was an an initial sort of concern that accuracy would be an issue would be a factor and and buyers would resist or doubt it but actually that's been q right yep one most chat most ai based l based chat tools have quickly figured out that in order to provide the service or the experience buyers want they've got to enable web search fan out queries as part of their offering so it's no longer relying on the knowledge that the weights within the ai model you know have what they're actually doing the prompt engineering for you they're going out and finding the most relevant the most accurate content within search predominantly so you don't have to making that the new prompt so people are experiencing up to date accurate information meaning they no longer have to look at blue links at all they no longer have to go to search results they no longer have to sift through them they no longer have to choose which ones to read compare and contrast multiple ai is doing it and it's doing it on a scale that we could never do ourselves often you're seeing hundreds of pages referenced within a single query in an ai engine whereas most people would look at two or three you know and usually two or three on the first page ai doesn't care about the first page ai is going down to the tenth page to get the most specific results so going to google searching something and picking which page is to visit it doesn't make sense anymore for most buyers so yeah i think there's gotta be a drastic rethink about what to do and where and why with the budget and the resources you have available one critique i have of the way the industry is talking about ai is it's not factoring in scale affordability and like feasibility for businesses most of us operate on constrained budgets resources so we have to pick and choose where we bet where we place our money we can't do it all at once if we could do it all it would be easy right we would we'd implement every single recommendation that was given about how to influence ai search how to update your seo strategy etcetera etcetera etcetera but most of us aren't in position to do that so i hope that we can share some things that have got like sensible like sound advice for people who've got constrained limited budgets with which to do their marketing to grow that business yeah love that i think seo as we want to knew it is dead like it is is over i and i say that more from an informational gathering perspective yeah you can probably say seo can be divided down into a number of intense yes informational being them the big one the massive one where we all spent tons of time in effort creating content and getting some reward if we did it smartly and we did it well and then there's the more commercial and navigational side and if you draw a line the informational side of seo yeah gone gone yeah gone for most intents and purposes because ai has so dramatically changed the way information is yeah found provided and accessed yeah and we've just seen now that ai mode is now active in europe yeah yeah so an exciting day seen that offer to us for the first time with without vpn yeah but there we go right and we were kind of saying it's in the us it's in india like it's a matter of time before it comes to europe and now it's just a matter of time before that becomes the default browsing experience yeah people will already be trying out and using it now and using that conversational ui to gather information but that will become the default and that will be used and that is you know if you're not aware what ai mode is it is basically gemini a gemini based search experience within google's default browser that we've we've all used forever yeah and as a side no note i think it'd be really interesting to see what this what the introduction of ai mode does to market share up until now chat gp was kind d facto leader in the space but google's at everyone's fingertips and i reckon they're gonna take a big chunk out of that user base just because of ease of access so it'd be very interesting to see what it does to that and it will usher in like you say further usher in and advance and accelerate the shift from traditional information discovery and consumption on the information side and the ai version of that yeah i i would say like four marketers content people out there who are thinking about what create now who are doing their content planning if you're still planning in content around the the what is the how do i do this type content i i honestly wouldn't bother but most industries yeah and it's not because it doesn't have an in an effect or an impact right you know these ai tools are still using fan out queries yeah to search for content that closely matches the the the quick answers the question they've been asked but even if you like produce the content that the ai engines find and used to sen s their answers what benefit do get from it it's so small now compared to what a visit to your website exposure to your brand you know would have created in the past ai has exploded the variety of queries that users can can use meaning it's like just atom optimized the need for content and it's also atom optimized the visibility of any brand that influences the answers yeah so while seo content created to to be found by those ai engines might still be found by them the purpose no longer exists because it isn't generating what you need as a business out of being part of that answer it's really interesting to see how that's shifted but when we see these responses because we're testing all the time we're you know we're we're looking we're we're using ai every day ourselves to see what query responses look like we we're testing tools that you know aggregate that data analytical tools you know one thing that's consistent is brand mentions brand visibility is almost none yeah you know you get little snippets of urls you get little lo yeah for any informational content you get the odd link but not much yeah so there's no point yeah it's not gonna drive your pipeline yeah when we talk about the other end the other types of searches is like commercial being a main one well we'll talk about ai sc seo i think in a bit but if that that's where you can have value on your brand being mentioned not a cited source of information necessarily although that could help too but your brand being mentioned in a list of vendors for a particular pain yeah yeah yeah exactly it's informational search the way ai ai basically if it takes the view that most things are common knowledge right most of us weren't creating cutting edge original content that was you know completely unseen before and we've talked today about whether they're still like a space for that and like you know academic journals publishing content to to share what they're doing not for seo reasons but because they have to like might still fulfill that need but most of us in business in categories where there's some competition not creating net new knowledge every time we publish a blog post yeah ai the way buyers sort of think about ai i think or or or treat ai is that most of that stuff is out there somewhere already you gain nothing by being one more business yeah to describe that topic to a buyer that's not gonna see your brand your value prop your website when when when they search this podcast is brought to you by blend we're a b website and demand generation agency we work with ambitious businesses just like yours to create and execute effective demand generation strategies that drive pipeline for your business we also recognize that your website is the most important asset you have in marketing so we specialize in building scalable websites on hubspot that convert the demand that you've created if you want to find out more about our services and see real results that we've generated for businesses visit b b b dot com i think there is still an opportunity for informational content but just not in the same mediums so video audio public speaking things like that way you can still create a real connection between the audience and you and your brand still has a lot of you know a lot of runway i think to connect with people on that level if we think about what the purpose of informational content that was surfaced through google was it it was about getting people onto your website to see your brand have a click ultimately and then have you know potential retargeting opportunities potential lead capture opportunities things like that but the main thing was they knew your brand from that and people still well are using video more than ever to consume information yeah and right now that is a big opportunity i i think for brands to still serve some unique informational content with a you know unique point of view within that and connects with the audience on that level yeah and i think if your content informational content contains a unique point of view then it to some degree becomes commercial because it creates a a perception of you that is unique to you and can stand apart from the the mountain of informational content that just describes topics you know in in a fundamental way and also those types of content have more applicability outside of search anyway where buyer attention is drifting to other places and other channels and seeking other kinds of content because although buyers love ai for what it can offer them you know there is still a growing desire for the authenticity side of companies to show through so when you're active on linkedin when you're posting videos to youtube when you're in other channels that your buyers using outside of search yeah ai you know those mediums have real cut through potential because they reveal your authenticity and they reveal your point of view and that can make you stand out from your competitors in that in that discourse on that topic yeah yeah so i think if you're thinking about informational content and you want to produce content like that to share your unique point of view that's probably the mediums and how to do that in for commercial related content and queries i think seo still has a place right now so commercial commercially people still need to get to your website and there's still a process that they go through in terms of like making a evaluated decision yeah right you know they they they id things you know on social platforms and communities in real life with peers they will probably use a variety of channels and tools to research that mh ai will play a pro of a very dominant predominant role in that but it won't necessarily drive new brands into their consciousness but they still need to find the best competitors to whoever their their sort of top of mind brands are which might produce commercial focused queries within ai tools and they still need to navigate your website yeah so there is still definitely content to be created and work to be done to get people to you when they're in that later stage of the research process i think that's what you're referencing there yeah it is because people are still i'm still seeing people using traditional search for that type of query as well so this is before branded search yes before they go to a website that they know they wanna visit and after information information search is done they're still looking for the best providers for certain problems in certain categories yeah and things are a lot of that nature yeah you know when you think of like the commercial suffix is on the end of a topic like project management software or solution or best of this thing i'm still seeing people go to search traditional blue link search to answer those questions yep i think that will be swallowed up by ai as well eventually now that ai mode is first and what will become first and foremost definitely absolutely like for now it still plays a place still has a role within that but i think more and more people will be turning to ai because of the amount of context you can give it because of the experience you get from it like people's expectations are changing from the research process buying process having to go to google search for you know project management software and then having to do all of that vendor research yourself clicking into ten different websites analyzing the features the product the pricing like that is just that's no longer long no longer a thing yeah when it comes to ai search like you can go to chat ep ask for the best project management software but give it all of the context of your exact situation ask for the pricing there like everything is done for you yeah what what the ai experience allows people to do is take a take a commercial keyword that would have historically been really valuable and very attractive you know best project management software for you know saas or yeah agencies or aviation or whatever and then like continue to refine it with you know specific information to you your scale your vertical your role your challenge and and get answers to are that much more specific to your query which is a real change to the way commercial keywords yeah operate and again it's that explosion of variety the opportunity there though is that there's far more content on those queries in existence because people haven't historically been creating that really niche focused like refined content that's to some degree might be perceived as duplicated to and to an extent yeah yeah but but differentiated how it addresses specific concerns for specific types of buyers and that appears to be an opportunity that we're exploring for content creation that is both seo and ai seo focused yeah yeah well let's dive into that a little bit then because yep we've spoken yeah about the importance of being mentioned like your brand your vendor information being mentioned in these types of commercial queries now which i think is the the big play here for ai seo it's basic if somebody searches for who is the best to do this what should i be looking for in vendors to do why like you need to be servicing in those conversations in the in the chat interface and yeah we've been playing with a few different things and there's some good information out there from the marketing gets the grain podcast also part of the hubspot podcast network which most people would be aware of and they had a episode where they were talking about what hubspot are doing from a content creation perspective and how they're kind of going down like the industry page route i think they were referencing where they're looking at the signals that ai is looking to reference things like stats data information specific ic granular detail about what the user might be searching and they're crafting these unique pages say unique there's definitely like you say some duplication some crossover there perhaps but in order to be cited for very specific prompts and yeah we've been trying some of those things but also some other like information and type content streams as well yeah you know it's really interesting because i think ai has got every everyone excited quite right but it's worth remembering that artificial intelligence is still a long long way from actual intelligence right l m's are super impressive but they're nowhere near the human brain what the human brain does is almost magical you the our ability to create to invent to you know because we're we're both we're both logical and chemical biological yeah right so so ai isn't at the level of the human yet meaning even though what it does is incredibly impressive even though what it does is prob rather than deter and even though what it does is really really massive compared to what seo and and google's algorithm based search could do it's still a system mh and it still behaves in some predictable ways because it's still a machine behind the scenes running a set of rules and so there is a way to say that we can influence the results within that commercial part of the spectrum in a way that means that we're sighted more regularly if we align some of the content we create to the query and the needs of the query i e the l and put content out that is that has far less competition yeah so as you said if you if you draw together the key information for a very specific niche very specific user very specific set of challenges and queries and you put the relevant information together even though there'll be some similarity with other content on your website we've seen already that you can become cited in that commercial type of query very quickly yeah under the current circumstances impossible to say how long that will continue to be a needle you can move so easily but at the moment at this moment in time based on what azure frost said to marketing edge grain in terms of what they were seeing being the opportunity of content which was lots and lots of quite high volume of content yeah focused on these commercial queries i think is a reflection of the fact that they're not as competitive ai always got less to choose from and therefore for now there's an opportunity to get a visible result quite quickly yeah this is content not for search it may still have some benefit for search i don't think there's any drawback in creating very specific industry focused service pages with all of this content that ai is looking to reference there's no drawback on search quite i don't see yeah i don't think so but i think it's important to note that this is content created for a machine right right do you agree with that yeah i think so i think like ultimately we're not trying to get somebody to visit this page no and consume it in its entirety we're trying to be featured in the most valuable types of queries yeah in an l and they're not even pages that are part of our user experience once once people are on a website so yeah i think you're right i think these are pages predominantly created for the machines yeah one other thing that i've been playing around with and i think i don't wanna give away everything here because i think well one we're not totally sure on a proven method we got more work to do before we're it i wanna make sure that we're getting pipeline and revenue from these things before we actually start saying okay this is a playbook that works right now and also like we're spending a lot of time money and effort on figuring these things out and like i would say some of it is like intellectual property right now when it comes to the workflows we've put in place and the structured way we're forming this content so like if you did wanna dig into any of this deeper i'm happy to share it on a one to one basis but yeah some of the flows and thinking behind it are it quite novel i think but one thing i will throw out there that everyone can look into and use is try to become your own source of information try to be the source what you'll find if you go to chat eb and put in your category and common searches that might be made to find a solution so the best project management software available for manufacturing companies if you put that in and you see what's being cited as the source material you'll see a lot of list a lot of blog content from vendors themselves yeah yeah which is a which is something you can i hesitate say emulate it's something you can implement right and yeah you can you can suppress plant them as the source of information about your brand yeah and improve the quality and the frequency of the citations in those critical commercial ai queries yeah and we've seen we've seen that impact as well and it can happen overnight yeah and you make a really important point which is the we we have to keep asking ourselves why yeah know why i do this you've got you've got a finite amount of budget spend there's a few places that i you would say most businesses wanna to consider and some are more predictable more measurable in terms of their pipeline generation we think this will be important and and impactful but we aren't there yet to be able to say that is absolutely where you should take a chunk of your budget and and and investing yeah yeah not yet i don't think i i i'd like to think we will be able to say that with confidence fairly soon but yeah i i do think there's a big opportunity to become your own like to be the source of those vendor curated lists within within a chat interface and all you have to do really is go into like i say like do a few test cases within the the chat interface for your category and i'm pretty confident in most scenarios you will find list calls of vendors being shared from vendors themselves and they're putting themselves at the top of the list yeah yeah yeah yeah and then they're being cited as the best for that but they're their own source so there might be a sound strategy that we come that we recommend or develop which is to say that two types content sort of like the the the the category list yeah and the niche specific commercial pages together in tandem could really enhance your results in those commercial searches it's quite logical again really when you think about it user types in a query ai goes and searches for the most relevant content of which there will be less by definition yeah and and therefore if you put something out there that has a degree of likelihood to be again when when we were creating content for seo something i always reminded people was if if somebody if nobody ever types that into google there's no point creating that piece of content or at least no point using that title like it's gotta connect with users doing something for you to get a benefit yeah you can publish all the blog posts you like and get zero pipeline from it if it's not connected to user behavior on that platform yeah we're talking here about you know after informational queries have been done where there's like i mean we used to talk about long tail search the tale is so long now it's impossible to manage yeah but we're getting back here into ultimately there are only so many categories there are only you know so many types of business that we'll use a particular company's products and offerings you know so there's a bit more concentration on these types of queries meaning it makes more sense to try to influence those results and you can i think be more likely to have a predictable impact yeah and it's it's easier it reminds me of like the whole backlink versus internal link conversation where it's like oh well we're trying to get backlinks but it's really really hard so okay we'll just do internal linking which we can control which we can manage and we can have our own impact on that it's like people are talking about well how do we get site as these sources how do we get into these places how do we get into medium how do we get into the g two list do it yourself yeah agreed absolutely our stance on internal linking versus backlink was always this is so much easier and and has an impact almost straight away but most people overlooked it i think because i don't know there's an to being referenced by someone else and there's and there's a lot of a or to you know the the really high valued backlink that the algorithms you know placed on those backlinks yeah but they were so hard to get whereas you could create dozens maybe even hundreds of internal links and have the same impact yeah the this is it again right most of the advice that i've seen about how to influence the ai engines is all about reddit medium subs forbes like okay that's fine but again you've gotta do a lot of this stuff to move the needle in a measurable way to your point if you can become your own source for commercial queries in your category i think the impact could be realized a lot faster yeah potentially we've gotta do our due diligence on that but it's exciting to think yeah we're we're kind of early stage and we're we're sharing the journey with everyone here right and everyone's trying to figure this stuff out and we're trying to figure it out and we're just kind of sharing that journey yeah but absolutely like the amount of work you'd need to do to reference yourself in reddit and in these other places like quo would be really hard to also be genuine whilst doing that yeah and feasibility again at at scale right if you're a medium sized sm i i think this is a probably got this within a a a mix of a few other activities probably got more you know sense than and you just can't afford to do all of those things you can't afford to have a a a full going p strategy that means you're getting you know you're getting featured or guest content into those publications on a weekly basis you can be generating this material weekly yeah so yeah it's got real attraction for me for sm yeah i do worry about the longevity of it and we kinda spoke about this yesterday right i'm i'm worried that chat eb other ai models will have to start thinking about trust signals more very much like google did back in the day we don't know that though no it's an interesting it's an interesting point and i think it will be interesting to see how the mission of these companies determines their behavior it's really interesting that you know chat gp now and probably ai mode doesn't really seem to care about domain authority yeah the way the yeah searched it it'll go as deep as it needs to go to get the more accurate the the result and right now that's resulting in really really useful information for people that's a that's a big departure from google's mission which was to provide the most you know trustworthy content to the to the user's first it will be really interesting to see how that evolves and you are right to warn people because the pace of change is so incredible there are no guarantees in this world which is why i think we have to sort of put this strategy this channel you know on the board with the other things that we could do with our budget yeah and determine where we feel we're gonna make the biggest gains and i think that like we're trying to work this out and people should probably let us do that you know before necessarily going all in on that if it comes at the expense of other things that we would say have got a high degree of predictability or relevance in today's b2b b buying journey yeah and longevity as well like building your brand being known as the go to vendor for a particular thing is always gonna be the number one priority for any marketing intent yeah yeah the lion's share of purchases go to the brand that was top of mind when the knee year arose and buyers had long moved away from search yeah for that moment in their journey that was happening on social that was happening at events that happening in communities that was happening in webinars and in videos that wasn't in search anymore and i don't think ai will bring that back no so if you are in the mind of your ic as a credible provider of a solution in a category that is dutch worth a lot of yeah time and attention ai is replacing search but all of these things the vendor selection process was is still happening outside of search for a large majority of buyers anyway like their vendor list is curated in their mind over times over touch points of brands over years sometimes yeah yeah absolutely so being within that list that's predetermined in somebody's memory is you know the number one strategy for any marketing team and for most of us fortunately it doesn't take a lot of work a lot of content a lot of effort to to win in branded search right if someone searching for our brand google the the ai tools are usually pretty decent yeah about giving them us yeah now there are situations where companies have the same name right so you do have to have some degree of you know visibility is good or some sort of nuance that people can you you know to to get to you but but google's pretty good if you've created a brand and and you can get people searching for you while they research other people you're in a strong position you're in a really strong position because you're top of their supplier shortlist your out of their mind and there is a statistical likelihood that you will have a very good shot of that deal you don't need to be part of the research process the search process for that to to work and i think again if if one of those came at the expense of the other you've gotta be really cautious because if you can't brand because you're doing this yeah that might that might not pay off over the long term yeah exactly there's one thing that i actually have that i wanted to cover which is a comment that i've heard thrown around a few times you know since the rise of ai seo which is if you just do good seo and you rank well using traditional seo tactics like it will pay off for ai seo and i think that is fundamentally not true and you can prove this out quite easily as we did yesterday i think went into google search and search for the best b web design agencies mh if you compare what you get in the all tab in the first ten blue links with hopping over into ai mode and seeing who is referenced in there you will not see the same vendors quite yeah so like good seo doesn't do you any harm no it's not negative absolutely but it's also not gonna produce the result you're looking for and again it it comes back to what are we trying to achieve like we're trying to drive pipeline and good seo isn't going to deliver that result good seo may impact ai search results but that might still not impact you yeah your business and i think we've gotta be really clear about that and look at what is happening in the buyer again it's about being bio centric not company centric right it's like you can rank for all the things you want to but if buyers aren't using that information informed decisions it's it's for phenomenal and if the ai models aren't using those ranking signals to inform the content that they're to inform the answer there giving which they're not the correlation between ranking yeah yeah yeah and content retrieval like is really poor i can't remember the exact stat there's an hr report yeah i mean i think it's brilliant i think it's brilliant for users the ai is able to pull from results that are so low down the traditional rankings because ultimately that levels the playing field again right the playing field was leveled when search became a thing and then it got increasingly un level and if you weren't in the top three results you you didn't really have a hope yeah this is fantastic but at the same time although ai can pull from those deep deep down results it doesn't generate brand awareness and it's brand visibility traffic to your website when it does yep so it's kind of moot in many cases and not really worth your time or effort to be in those twenty deep informational results commercial side that's got some legs that's got some that's got some worthwhile you know it's worth exploring as we're doing and then building that brand before search winning before search as as pep says i think it's really really where this exciting opportunity for business is still even while ai disrupts everything yeah and let's not forget a lot of the things we we do for seo for technical seo reasons for seo in general making you know headlines more clear with target keywords in there like these things are actually all still great for user experience incredible yeah you know like you shouldn't forget about these things just because people are using ai to search i was thinking about this recently and i was thinking how like ai is sort of swallowing up right this whole part of the buying journey the the buyer experience and i think that increases the stakes on our brand creation work or activity the importance of being a known brand in your category and the importance of your website user experience being good right mh we've always said you well the saying is you only get one chance to make a first impression and so how you structure your website particularly your homepage particularly your hero particularly your navigation has always been critical to your conversion rate because of the degree to which ai is robbing us of traffic you know informational traffic particularly but also just traffic overall we're gonna get far fewer opportunities to make that first impression yeah but every one of those opportunities is gonna be vitally important because it's probably gonna be a more qualified better fit visitor to our website so getting your website user experience right becomes even more yep valuable and being a known brand in your category becomes even more valuable and so i think it's really interesting to think about the effect that this change in search is gonna have on the other parts of our go to market alright well i think that probably about rounds off this episode we'll have to come back to it for sure i think you can come back every single week on this topic you will and you know like have something unique to say that's how fast things are moving i would say like there's probably no more exciting time to be a marketer than right now people are freaking out right but people are also like so much more engaged so much more in about like what to do what's next how do i figure this out than ever before yeah i mean we've we've had a period of time where it was just rinse repeat right we we knew what we were doing we knew how it worked and we knew how to do it so we were just doing but but those moments where we've had an opportunity to figure something out to be the first or be one of the first that's that's incredibly exciting this you can look at this time this change with you know with fear or with excitement and and i understand both but yeah it is really an exciting time because there's so much opportunity to to change the way we do things yeah and somebody will figure this out right if we think back to brian figuring out the the skyscraper technique somebody will figure out the ai seo content technique maybe it's maybe it'll be us yeah maybe it'll be somebody else but if you're part of that initial fold of businesses that can do that it'll benefit you yeah lot you'll you'll have the the the lead on people you'll have a window of opportunity arbitrage will exist and it might not last forever but your reaper rewards cool alright well let's leave it there good to have you back phil thank you and yeah if you would love to follow us like the episode on whatever channel you listen to watch on youtube spotify apple podcasts any engagement is helpful to us we'd love to see it so yeah we'll leave it there but thank you very much for tuning in and we'll see you next time thanks all

hi everyone welcome back to demand coded dan here as usual and it's a solo episode today and we're talking about linkedin ads and in particular we're gonna cover well i'm gonna cover why your linkedin ads aren't working and how to fix that it's actually funny how many times i hear the question have been asked the question why aren't my linkedin ads working and it's a generic question but it is rooted in not seeing any measurable improvement in you know data leads pipeline revenue from linkedin ads themselves so if you've tried linkedin ads and you've walked away because you've thought maybe they're too expensive maybe they didn't generate any qualified leads for you maybe they didn't move the in terms of pipeline and revenue this episode will hopefully unpack some of the common reasons why linkedin ad simply just fail for so many businesses they are extremely expensive in a lot of cases depending on who you're targeting but most of the time it will be you know high level professionals who will be highly like in highly concentrated markets where a lot of businesses are trying to target those with ads which does make them a really expensive channel a lot of the time to serve ads on and you need to make sure that these ads are performing in the best way possible to build your brand to drive demand for exactly what you do capture qualified leads who are in market to buy and ultimately you know drive pipeline and revenue and growth for your business every investment that you have in marketing should aim to do that and linkedin is absolutely no different it's just a channel that people for some reason struggle to get right despite all of the right things existing on the platform itself so yeah in this episode will impact all of that and hopefully give you the best advice possible to fix those linkedin out of that just aren't working for you before we get into the episode today here's a quick word from our sponsors hubspot you don't become the world's most valuable women's sports franchise by accident angel city's football club did it with a little help from hubspot when they started data was housed across multiple systems hubspot unified their website email marketing and fan experience all in one platform this allowed their small team of just three to build an entire website in just three days the result nearly three hundred and fifty new sign ups a week and three hundred percent database growth in just two years visit hubspot dot com to hear how hubspot can help you grow better let's start with the main core issue when it comes to actually linkedin as a channel more broadly not just that ads themselves and the main issue is that your audience your buyers just aren't on linkedin let's face it not all industries not all professionals will be on linkedin every single day if we think about industries like you know selling to hospitals and medical professionals where they might not be able to access linkedin in all the time and they don't like to consume linkedin content in their personal time there's a good chance they're gonna be really hard to reach on that platform and other channels will actually give you a better opportunity to reach those it may be conferences that that they go to it may be communities that they're part of how do you get your content how do you get your ads into those places how do you get your brand seen in those places where they actually are so yeah linkedin of course starts with understanding your audience understanding that they're there understanding the kind of content mediums that they enjoy consuming to and all of that starts with audience research it's something that we spoken about time and time again on demand decode ultimately doing their upfront audience and customer research will allow you to understand where your audience goes to consume information which channels they actually operate on in terms of social and other you know information consumption needs and and things like that and if linkedin isn't actually coming up in that research you know you don't have to use it as a channel just because it's kind of become the default advertising channel for a lot of b2b companies does it mean it has to be for yours ultimately you should be putting your budget in the best place possible to reach your buyer so that you can you know build up brand awareness brand affinity with them drive demand for exactly what you do and ultimately convert them whenever that buying trigger occurs later down the line for most b2b your audience will be on links in it's just a matter of fact it is the biggest professional network the biggest professional social channel your linkedin your audience will most likely be on linkedin you know there will be those exceptions that i just spoke about but for the most part they will be on linkedin but what i've seen time and time again is targeting that is just way way way too broad and when it comes to linkedin as i mentioned at start they are expensive ads and they get more and more expensive as you start to target more senior professionals who are gonna be targeted by more and more companies than the competition heats up but one of the biggest mistakes i see is just burning budget on an audience that simply cannot and will not ever be able to buy from you or influence a a purchasing decision for your brand so for example if you're going after cfo for mid market saas companies you're targeting should reflect that or at least branch out just into the kind of buying committee and influencers or maybe champion for a product that you're trying to sell but you shouldn't be you know targeting any more than the financial responsibilities within a business and you know that financial kind of vertical within that if you end up seeing that your demographics are all of a sudden branch now into it procurement sales then you have a huge problem on your hand when it just comes to those demographics alone but actually what you often see more so is people loosening the reins on kind of like industries company sizes the kind of things that allow you to have a broader audience but probably aren't your actual ic themselves the the way that i've always done linkedin targeting is to target our best customers already if you're not yet ready to serve your exact future ic then trying to build a brand with them is a good thing but trying to actually make them buy from you when you're actually not in a position to serve them is probably not a good thing so one thing that i've always done with some success is basically enable our linkedin audience to be our highest fit ic that we're already selling to that are already a fantastic fit for our business because it enables us to get the best roi back from our budget because we know that we're targeting an audience who are already a fantastic fit for us we can serve them perfectly and we probably already have the case studies and the trust and those kind of signals to actually back up what we're saying within that there's other best practices that we've talked about before on this podcast like don't use audience expansion only target the actual linkedin platform form itself not the audience network because you know you need to be thinking here audience expansion is just gonna be expanding your audience into other people on the platform who actually aren't in your perfect fit persona or ic you know why would you wanna be spending budget on people who you haven't defined that you want to target and not enabling the linkedin audience the network expansion is just a really quick way to waste budget on showing your ads in inefficient places where your buyers probably aren't and where they're not at least consuming that kind of information there's a reason why you've probably come to linkedin as a platform to use and show ads because you know that's where your buyers are you know they consume content there and you know that's where they operate so that is a huge huge issue that i see time and time again targeting just being way too broad rein in as much as you can and you've maybe we'll get onto metrics a little bit later in this but your targeting should be narrow enough to give you a frequency if we're talking cold audience you probably want between three and five so if your audience is absolutely ginormous and your budget really low your frequency probably gonna be below one which means a particular person within your audience is only seeing your ad one time well we know you know scientific studies have proven that just seeing your brand one time is not enough to make you mem remember it you actually need to see it multiple times in order to get aided recall signals back to the brain to stimulate it to remember what they've just what they've seen time and time again so then that eventually when the buying trigger occurs they will associate your brand and that memory with the the pain that they have and the thing that they actually wanna go ahead and buy so yeah we wanna be refining that audience having a a smaller audience is pretty much always best to get frequency high whilst saving on budget use using it as efficiently as possible number three is a quick point about objective because for the most part linkedin objectives are pretty good you can't go wrong with website visits or brand awareness or video views or conversions if you have the data most people don't so i'd avoid those they're all good i i tend to default to brand awareness because it gives me the biggest reach with the audience for usually the most reasonable cost i would say website clicks website visits are also fairly reasonable as well you can get a good amount of reach there but cp can sometimes be quite a lot higher one thing i just wanted to say on objective here is that i still see a lot of businesses using lead gen ads with a completely cold audience and a completely kind of low quality offer that is just gonna generate leads who will never ever buy from you linkedin lead gen adds are the fastest way to burn any marketing budget for low quality lead who will ultimately not be interested in buying from you later down the line it bog my mind that businesses and marketing team still spend you know fifty to a hundred dollars on a lead from a linkedin lead gen campaign that will ultimately never buy from you they they've built up no connection with your brand just from that tiny piece of content that they've consumed it might not even be relevant to them they might not even enjoy it and you've spent that much money on collecting an email address which most of the time is gonna be a personal email address too yeah you can you know go to a platform like apollo zoom info cog get the same lead information for you know literally ten cents whatever it may be an absolute fraction of the price and you've got that professional email that ready to use and the arguments i've heard is that well they've consumed our content they've seen our brands so they'll be more like to engage with us but that's actually not true because the offer that you've given to them isn't building a deep connection with your brand because they could have consumed that content elsewhere without exchanging that level of information and nobody wants to be nurtured and spanned after filling out a form you know we're not in twenty twelve anymore where that's kind of a new and acceptable thing to be doing nobody wants to be submitting a form for what's probably a bog standard piece of content with no real original content or original original content probably wrong original data anyway no like first party information within that content itself nothing totally unique that it would warrant an exchange of information and then just be spam by emails and spanned by salespeople on the phones to try and sell something that ultimately they're not ready to buy and probably don't want to buy actually so yeah when it comes to objectives absolutely avoid legion ads as much as you can i would even say when it comes to retargeting there is maybe be more of a case for it because there's more trust there's more affinity with your brand they may be more likely to sign up for your newsletter or exchange information for something of value within that stage but for the most part you can just leave that all un gated and your audience will consume it freely within their own time and come back to you when that buying charter occurs because you've built up the brand affinity the brand awareness and you're gonna be top of mind when that does happen this podcast is brought to you by blend we're a b2b website and demand generation agency we work with ambitious businesses just like yours to create and execute effective demand generation strategies that drive pipeline for your business we also recognize that your website is the most important asset you have in marketing so we specialize in building scalable websites on hubspot that convert the demand that you've created if you want to find out more about our services and see real results that we've generated for businesses visit b b dot com okay number four the biggest mistake that i see when it comes to linkedin ads in particular is creative saying a lot without actually saying anything at all and this one gets me so much because teams just don't see the problem that's wrong with it it's it's not as clear as an audience or a particular budget or objective that's being set you can't say that's categorically not the right thing to be doing or implementing in that scenario because creative is up to a matter of opinions right it's down to preference and what somebody has come up with creatively but this one is just absolutely everywhere it's where ads look sleek they look good the headline sounds professional it you know it all joins up in terms of a creative eye sense but you read it and you have absolutely no idea what the company does or what they sell or who they do it for stuff like we empower revenue teams to unlock potential that could be a saas company it could be consulting it could be coaching ai literally anybody can say they do that and it has some sort of impact if you're creative when it comes to linkedin ads is to abstract vague or trying to be too clever it's just not gonna perform people who are scrolling linkedin are poor on time they wanna be scrolling things and seeing immediate resonance within the feed with that piece of content and if your ad isn't doing that they're just gonna scroll straight past it if you think averaged dwell times on our ads are around five to ten seconds but an add of that isn't relevant isn't even gonna get five seconds worth of screen time for that particular user they're gonna be looking at your ad for a couple of seconds and if they don't understand it within that exact you know couple of seconds that they're dedicate into it they are just gonna keep scrolling so adds to that are trying to be too clever are usually you know the enemy of their own success whilst they're witty they sound great they're actually just not saying anything to the audience at all and it might sound really boring just to say well just say exactly what you do and who you do it for and how you help them yeah that that might be more boring than coming up with a a witty headline that you might see from coca cola or sony or apple but let's remember we're in b2b it doesn't mean we need to be boring but it does mean we need to be direct and we often don't have the brand equity behind us in order to be really fancy really creative because we're actually trying to craft a market for us we're trying to build brand from zero in some cases and by being too witty you're just making sure that people don't understand what you do rather than actually speaking to people directly and ensuring that they know exactly what you do and what you offer you know just when it comes to things like powering next gen growth enable that's actually one that i saw when the product could have probably said something more along the lines of automate sales follow ups but thirty percent more more demos no extra head count like it's benefit driven and it's not there's no fluff i've actually got a few examples here because let's face it we're not all perfect right even though our ads i'm really happy to say all have over a naught point four percent click through right of course we have some that perform better than others so let's now just show you a few different examples of ads and some that perform better than the others because i think there are some clear reasons behind it and this you know times that we've tried to get too clever too so this ad here we've got twenty five examples of bespoke tailored websites that are built on hubspot and i do like this ad from a creative standpoint and we're still running it because the click through rate is reasonable enough in order to you know have a varied creative ad set but it doesn't perform as well as a more simplistic version of this ad and what we're trying to do here is be a bit too clever and mimic air drop ultimately by saying we'd like to share twenty five examples of you twenty five examples of creative hubspot websites with you but you know it looks a bit misleading perhaps with the acceptable decline looks like we're trying to bait people out in order to click that and it's maybe just not as clear as what we're actually trying to offer here in terms of the ad which is basically a link to a blog with some of these examples on the click through rate on this was around zero point four percent whereas if we compare it to this which is going to exactly the same place has similar messaging as well twenty five examples of hubspot websites but it just shows them more visually laid out it doesn't have the kind of clickbait bait button options and the headline is actually a lot bolder here this actually performs at around naught point six percent so we've got a big improvement there on click through rate and i just think the clarity here is really helping helping us in this scenario i've got another example here and it's a similar concept that you might see around linkedin on ads every now and again and it says conversational style so we're trying to put ourselves in the shoes of our customer here being the marketer and we say marked sick of seeing and poor results from your website and we've got message bubbles here the ceo saying how's the new website before mark said not great actually our traffic down thirty percent and we're not seeing the leads we hoped for ceo says maybe we should have gone with blend after all i hear the get great results and actually on the surface this ad looks really sleek it's really cool it's quite a kind of unique format to use on linkedin too but again it doesn't perform as well as our ad actually showing an example of our work it's saying a hundred and thirty two percent increase in demo request with new website like this is an actual true case study that we have from a website that we've got a hundred to a hundred and thirty two percent increases in demo request is amazing right and we're not just trying to let the audience read all of these chat bubbles in order to get that we're saying it right up upfront here and i think that's the difference in there when we have a look at this you would have to stop on this ad for you know five to ten seconds in order to get what we're trying to say here whereas if you just scroll past this you see wow a hundred and thirty two percent and it immediately captures your eye and guides it then to the text below increasing demo requests with new website so a couple of examples of there of a couple of examples there of when linkedin ads can be over engineered over designed in order to try and say a message in a you know clever witty way when actually just saying the thing that you really wanna say is easier because it's easier to understand it's easier for everybody to consume and recognize b buyers don't just click and buy they don't look and buy they look and consume and learn and that's what your linkedin ads need to be doing too and you can't expect that somebody sees an ad for your brand at once and will immediately go and buy it there are cases where that does happen right if you happen to reach an audience who are in market to buy which you will most likely do if you're targeting your complete ic you have no idea where they are in their journey if they're about to pull the trigger and buy something then if they're totally new to this pain that they're experiencing and need educating and you don't know where they are so the chances are actually you will hit somebody buyers who are in markets to buy and you might get lucky or you might just be in the right time at the right the right place at the right time that's not luck it's just being there and that's a great thing but for most of your audience ninety five percent of them are not in market to buy and that means you need to be building up trust you need to build be building brand affinity brand recognition throughout the entire duration that they are not in market to buy until that buying trigger happens and they actually now need a solution that your product or service falls into the category of you then wanna be as high at that vendor option list as possible when it comes to actually you know deciding who to go with ultimately and in order to do that showing your ad once it's gonna be forgotten in thirty days i can't remember the exact stat around that you'll have to go and check out a guy called dale harrison who is a absolute mastermind when it comes to brand recognition brand memory kind of cognitive information of brands and brands are forgotten i believe this within thirty days or maybe even less from you know seeing it the first time i think it's less and what our job is is to enable people to remember our brand time and time again and to have aided recall so that when they see a portion of our brand our message our logo our colors whatever it may be that they remember us that they remember to associate us with that particular benefit with that particular pain point so when the buying trigger occurs you know we are there and simply running one single layer might get you you know a decent frequency but as soon as you layer on retargeting you take the engaged people who might have clicked on your ad viewed seventy five percent of your video you know they're actually engaged with you you can then double down on the budget to reach those harder and faster with more and more ads creating more and more recall more and more affinity with your brand so in the long run it's gonna benefit you because more people are gonna remember you when that buying trigger occurs one big issue in all of this is actually the measurement itself people saying our linkedin ads aren't working are usually measuring the wrong thing they don't actually understand if it's working or not the trouble is when it comes to linkedin ads and brand ads in general starting them in most cases won't have an immediate impact on you know high intent leads pipeline or revenue based on your sales cycle you might again you know end up being in the right place at the right time with those ads and have some success there but for the most part it's gonna be a longer term play and you need to give yourself enough time in order to measure the success of these ads so the best way to measure linkedin ads and to understand this effectiveness on the conversion throughout your entire buyer journey and your funnel is to measure using self report attribution which we've spoken about time and time again on this podcast so asking people on your high intent forms how they heard about you if you're running good linkedin ads people will likely you know reference those linkedin out of being how they first heard about you or maybe even the most memorable part of that you've then got your actual linkedin conversion tracking itself which can easily identify any just view through conversions themselves let's not forget that if you do have some software attribution in place like hubspot for example which is fantastic at measuring clicks from your ads and how they've then progressed into your website converted etcetera it misses the people that i've just seen your app in linkedin gone to google search for your brand name and then convert it later view through conversions will give you that data so it's really important and hopefully that's where self report attribution can capture some of that as well because self reported attribution then enables you to tie that attribution type linkedin add social wherever you may bucket it as and then track that progression all the way through to pipeline and revenue so now you can truly split out your channels linkedin be in one of them how much are we investing in it how many high leads have we got what is their value in terms of pipeline how many are converted into closed one there you've got your channel roi the final point is marketing teams who aren't iterating and just ultimately guessing linkedin is a channel where i found shipping fast iterating fast is the way to go because you're running a lot of ads there's a lot of volume out there when it comes to you know high budgets high impressions high clicks and you learn a lot from being able to run a high volume of ads in a short space of time the best campaigns that i've seen that i've ran as well are a result of iteration and not luck and when it comes to like ab b testing and testing granular things on linkedin it can work you need a lot of budget a lot of volume there to say oh okay let's just tweak this button color or let's just tweak this headline you can do that and i have done that in the past and you know we might have seen a winner by naught point zero five percent click through rate and okay we might have a few extra clicks then onto our website but actually i find when it comes to iterate and what we're trying to do here is find the concept the type of ad that's actually outperforming all the others is it a screenshot style review ad is it a clear you know one line message exactly what we do is it a couple of product benefits is it a case study with stats what's the actual format and what's the wording being used in that format that's resonating most that will allow you to then lean into more of that format and do more of those you know you can get into the kind of micro ab b test but i actually prefer to lean into the kind of broader concepts that i working and double down on those because i found that you know in the past they can have improvements or differences of naught point one zero point two zero point three percent click through rate instead of the smaller iterations that you get from just changing micro things on an ad so just because one campaign has flopped in the past and you haven't seen the results that you've bought you were gonna see from linkedin ads absolutely doesn't mean that it's not a channel that's gonna work going into the future so i would say always be able to come back iterate and not go off of guess work but use the data you're inside the platform in order to iterate test and improve over time hopefully that's giving you some insight on where to look if you're asking the question you know why aren't my linkedin out to work in you've got some places to look there to hopefully improve those ads for you and just remember you know linkedin ads aren't magic you can't turn them off and immediately generate ten x more pipeline and double your revenue overnight but they're absolutely not broken they may be more expensive than a platform like meta of course they're gonna be because the targeting is just so much more advanced for a b2b b company but you can just have so much huge success there and brilliant roi really when you get everything right from the audience the targeting objective creative measurement when you have that all in place all working correctly you can really start to build an engine which is gonna build your brand generate demand for you and ultimately drive revenue for your business so fix all those things and hopefully linkedin will be a channel that's really gonna work for you going forwards but you know if you did wanna chat to me about linkedin campaigns or you know know just wanted to shoot me an ad get my thoughts whatever it may be dm me on linkedin always open to that happy to connect and you know share ad examples whatever it may be so yeah feel free to hit me up on there if you haven't liked or subscribed on whatever channel it is that you listen to this to it might be youtube or one of the audio players then please do so demand coded is growing rapidly at the moment which is amazing to see i'm sure the hubs podcast network as it's something to do with that we've had josh on for a couple of episodes and the last two which were a lot more detail orientated we're not detailed they actually weren't detail orientated in terms of you know tactical analysis but they were further up the change should we say when it comes to strategic marketing thinking approaches to take and kind of c level executive board thinking which you know is still fantastic and we'll get josh on in the future for some more episodes a bit more tactical today which is hopefully still valuable so yeah that's my ramble over for this anyway and hopefully you enjoy this episode just love where demand code is going at the moment and really really looking forward to the next episode see you nice time