The Best SEO Podcast: Unlocking the Unknown Secrets of AI, Search Rankings & Digital Marketing

Marketing in the Age of AI: Why the Funnel is Dead and Content is King with Sara Faatz

• MatthewBertram.com

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The customer journey has transformed from a linear path to a chaotic "choose your own adventure" experience as AI becomes increasingly embedded in search processes and content discovery.

• Zero-click search has fundamentally disrupted traditional marketing as users get answers without visiting websites

• Quality content with unique insights and authentic perspectives remains essential despite AI advancements

• The traditional marketing funnel concept is outdated – customers enter and exit at various points across multiple channels

• Attribution modeling is increasingly challenging with significant "dark social" interactions influencing buying decisions

• B2B purchases involve complex buying committees with different stakeholders at various stages in their journey

• AI propensity scoring helps predict customer behavior and personalize content experiences effectively

• Accessibility principles align closely with AI-friendly content practices – clear, concise, well-structured content wins

• Sales and marketing integration is evolving toward revenue operations with deeper collaboration between teams

• Core SEO tenets remain crucial even as search technology evolves

• Content must ultimately connect with humans, regardless of how it's discovered or delivered

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Guest Contact Information: 

https://www.progress.com/sitefinity-cms

https://www.linkedin.com/in/sara-faatz-b67213/

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The Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing podcast is a podcast hosted by Internet marketing expert Matthew Bertram. The show provides insights and advice on digital marketing, SEO, and online business. 

Topics covered include keyword research, content optimization, link building, local SEO, and more. The show also features interviews with industry leaders and experts who share their experiences and tips. 

Additionally, Matt shares his own experiences and strategies, as well as his own successes and failures, to help listeners learn from his experiences and apply the same principles to their businesses. The show is designed to help entrepreneurs and business owners become successful online and get the most out of their digital marketing efforts.

Find more great episodes here: https://www.internetmarketingsecretspodcast.com/  

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Speaker 1:

This is the Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing, your insider guide to the strategies top marketers use to crush the competition. Ready to unlock your business full potential, let's get started.

Speaker 2:

Wow, look at that. Welcome back to another episode of the Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing. My name is Matt Bertram. I have too much data stored on my studio and so it's glitching out, so I apologize to everybody. Things are moving so fast and everybody wants to know. Or either you're drowning out all the AI progress because it's happening so fast and you're trying to focus on what matters, or you're drinking out of a fire hydrant and just trying to take it all in as quickly as you can, and so you're going to probably fall on that spectrum somewhere, and so I wanted to bring on somebody that's at the forefront of this, of what's going on with AI and content management from Progresscom, sarah Fatz. Welcome to the show.

Speaker 3:

Thank you so much, really excited to be here.

Speaker 2:

Well, you know, I know we were having in the pre-interview and I was like let's just like put this live for everybody, because I find that the conversations I have before we go live and after we go live are the absolute best conversations, and you just got to try to record it all and that's what people want to see. I guess is that real conversation?

Speaker 2:

So you and I were talking about customer journey and how that's absolutely changed and you know I have looked at it for a long time. There was a Google study a while ago about how it looked, kind of like a neuron, where people kept going back to the center right. It wasn't linear. Everybody draws it out linear. So why don't you kind of tee up and set the table for the audience of how you see the customer journey today, and then, of course, we'll naturally progress into what you're doing and AI and all that?

Speaker 3:

Absolutely. Yeah, thank you. Yeah, I think I mean the democratization and proliferation of AI has changed everyone's behavior right Now to your point. I think we used to marketers thought that we had some semblance of control over the journey, and I think it's always been a little chaotic because we're we're messy, you know, humans are messy, but but there was still a path that you could take. You could drive people to your website through SEO and other other strategies. When they got there, you could help them find the path to help them take the action you wanted them to take Right Buy now, register, download them. Take the action you wanted them to take right by now, register, download. But today, with ai, oftentimes the journey ends before it even begins, like, if we're being honest, because people can get the answers to their questions or find the information they need without ever making it to your site. Zero click search, in my opinion, is the biggest catalyst of change we've seen in a really long time when it comes to the customer journey and content journey all up.

Speaker 2:

I absolutely agree. We're seeing, on the SEO side of things, less people are being driven to the website specifically, but it hasn't changed the buying patterns for the brands that own the space, right, like. So if you own the market and you're everywhere and people can see you, right, it doesn't matter what platform you're on. They're going to go buy when they're ready to buy. The biggest thing that is hard for us to track things that I'm seeing digital marketers hard to track is well, because each search is so personalized. Uh, tracking rankings is getting uh very difficult. And then last click attribution right, like everybody wants to. Uh, you know, first or last kick attribution. I'm like, uh, you know there's there's so much going on that you don't even see where it goes online, offline. So, like, map out, like uh, you do a lot of B2B stuff, map out like maybe just a general customer journey as you know it in your head, but you can't prove it through the data.

Speaker 3:

Welcome to my world, right? Yeah, I mean, I think the customer journey really starts with. A customer is looking for something, and we've, for a long time, talked about the fact that you shouldn't be marketing features and functionality. You should be marketing the problem that your product solves. But that's really hard. But the companies that are going to be successful moving forward, particularly in an AI space, are the ones who actually can do that.

Speaker 3:

They stop talking about features and functionality because, let's be honest, nobody really is searching for I shouldn't say nobody, but most people aren't saying hey, I want to know if you have a new button.

Speaker 3:

Do you have a new color, blue on that button, unless you're using the product already?

Speaker 3:

So what they really care about is making sure that they have a website or a product that's accessible, and to solve that problem, they need to make sure that they have high contrast colors and those kinds of things.

Speaker 3:

And so the customer journey then becomes understanding at a very deep level, who the customer is, what problem they have and how you're going to be able to solve that problem. And that changes your content journey in a very, very big way, because it's no longer just everything has to be more, it has to be deeper, it has to be a lot more authentic and it has to be predictive, in the sense that you understand your customers well enough to know what they're going to be needing or asking and why I mean you're creating products with new features and functionality because the customer needs them. You need to be able to communicate at a much better level why that's important, right, and tell a story. It's more about storytelling. Those are buzzwords that we've been using for a long time, but I don't know that people have done it right or well for a long time.

Speaker 2:

So two of the things you said. Can you hear me? I changed my mic out. Hopefully it sounds a little bit better for everyone. So one is people buy based on emotion, right, and they may justify it based on logic. So we're talking about storytelling, we're talking about connecting with the audience, and then I forget who I want to reference, who it is correctly, but they said, like you've got to get in the head of the customer and understand the conversation. They're telling themselves to answer that question for them, right? So you got to answer that question. You got to draw upon the emotion and I am seeing that absolutely in the data.

Speaker 2:

So when you look at how people are using chat functions like LLMs, or even how they're using Google, they're getting a lot more advanced and they're using a lot more prompting to get what they're looking for right and to customize it.

Speaker 2:

Boolean search used to be the big term right in the past, but we're seeing conversions happening a lot of times. Eight plus keywords, okay. So like where the conversions are happening. So you want to rank if we're talking about SEO for that core seed keyword, because then you're going to qualify for all these other searches, but then outside of those searches, understanding and Google's tried to do that right. Like people will ask things to know, they're trying to solve those and there's been a big kind of uproar of the zero click of getting into those spaces. But we've seen, if you can get on the first page now you don't have to be first because also, actually what's interesting is sometimes the first position gets skipped for whatever reason. We've seen that in the ads. Right, it's about catching the attention, drawing them into that, and a lot of times the AI overviews are where people's going and you can show up in there and then, if they see your name later on in the customer journey, right, multiple times, they start to gravitate to you as a trusted source.

Speaker 3:

A hundred percent, yeah, but it's those, it's it, those are the invisible things, right, it's very hard to track hey, I've seen you, you know seven, 20, you know 25 times. Um, because it's so, so much a part of the subconscious right, it's very hard to say, oh yeah, this is working because of X, right? So when you actually have to come and defend your content strategy, it you know, it's very hard to have a data-driven approach to say we appeared these 17 times in this person's search and that's how we, you know that, that's how they, they, they found us. I think that starting to collect and review unstructured data is going to help us maybe find it'll be more of a dotted line, you know, hey, this is what's working. But I think that looking at being able to build leveraging AI, to build profiles based on unstructured data from some of your key customers is going to help you start building that um, that report that says, hey, this is working right. This is why we should be doing X, y or Z.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I mean, that's one of the things that I I talk about. Um, you know, the big brands most of the time understand this.

Speaker 2:

Um, the smaller brands just want transactional right and they just I need leads or whatever it is and you know you got to map out who are you trying to speak to, what kind of bait are you fishing with? Right, and that actually translates when I see with the bigger companies, the marketing qualified leads and the sales qualified leads, they got to be in alignment of what what that looks like. And if the content strategy doesn't start out going after that target persona, right, you're going to get the wrong kind of fish or the wrong kind of bait, or like right and and so it all puts together and what I've had to do, um, and tell me what you're doing and what you're seeing.

Speaker 2:

Like I start with, okay, or is this the kind of lead Like, when, like, what's the final result? Is this the kind of lead that you want? What about it, don't you want? And then I try to, because you can't track everything and I'm working with some non you were, we were talking about nonprofits. I'm working with a nonprofit right now that their funnel goes to three different sites, okay, so if you're doing UTMB tracking, like you lose it, right, and so. So then I'm like, okay, well, can we set up heat mapping on? Like, like, how do we track it? And so I I start at the end and I'm having to work backwards to try to figure it out. But you're like going, okay, here's who we're going after and here's the end, right, and then you're doing all the things in the middle to try to figure out exactly what's happening.

Speaker 2:

There used to be this term. It was totally a buzzword, but I think that there's some truth in it. They were calling it like dark social, okay, and they're like, and I was like what is dark? Do you remember?

Speaker 2:

that.

Speaker 3:

Like I was like what is?

Speaker 2:

dark social Right. But it's like all the stuff that happens that you can't track, and I think that, like Google AdWords gets a lot of credit for the last touch attribution, but in someone's customer journey, when they start out knowing they have a problem, the last thing they do is they're deciding between companies, right?

Speaker 3:

Right, exactly, yeah.

Speaker 2:

Or they even know that their service, whatever you're selling, that they need to be searching for that, and so you know that's when the conversion happens. But it could have been, you know, that Reddit post or that Facebook ad or something else that spurred their attention to say, hey, this is it. And then people, right now, with the economy getting more uncertain, people are tightening up and they're cutting the things that they think are not working. But it's really the collaboration or the, the, the, the amplifier effect of all these different channels that have built this carefully drawn out funnel of you're getting leads.

Speaker 2:

And so if you change too many variables at one time, we had a client just recently change a couple of things, okay, on their own, they just decided that they were, they changed this and their leads dropped by 90%. And then they're like, what happened? And I was like well, what did you do? Right, and you know, like, and so everything's kind of delicately put together and you don't know. You know what, what signals are sending, where and how you're positioning, but you change one thing what, what signals are sending, where and how you're positioning, but you change one thing the whole organization of like where you land, and if you move from position one to position three boy, are you gonna feel it right?

Speaker 3:

you know, right, it's right, yeah, and the amazing thing is, I mean, you're talking about, I mean think about that from a one buyer, um, perspective when you start adding buying groups in there, right, right, you have a far more complex journey. That you know. You, how do you? You may have a you know a champion who is, or you know the person's ultimately going to be the user, but they're not the purchaser and they have, you know, on the content management system, for example, you have, you're going to have your, probably your IT team is going to be involved and marketing ops will be involved. Revenue ops might be involved, marketing might be involved, depending on the size of the organization. Right, that's a lot of, that's a lot of audience that you have to talk to, and in every organization that might be a different purchaser at the end, and so you have to really all of those things that you're talking about in that dark dark side of you, know the dark right, however you want it, but it it definitely is Um.

Speaker 3:

You have to really start understanding and I love the idea of going working from from. You know, here's the sale. Let's work back and figure out um. How we got to that ideal lead to begin with Um.

Speaker 3:

But I think the other thing is that we're all humans. All take their different paths. That's why. That's why saying a funnel a funnel was never linear. To begin with, it was always chaotic and messy. We just had there were fewer paths for people to take, right, so it felt more. It felt like a funnel and now it's more, just like it's a choose your own adventure where people are starting getting off and on at all different points and places.

Speaker 3:

You know, getting off and on at all different points and places, and I think the one thing that ai does to really disrupt that is that it doesn't necessarily, if we can believe that that ai in some cases is the ui, it's that user interface that you. You then have to start thinking about um. If I have this piece of content whether it was, you know, maybe it was a middle of this piece of content. Whether it was, you know, maybe it was a middle of funnel piece of content that if they caught that information on my site, there would be a natural path or progression.

Speaker 3:

Now I have to start thinking about that content and say, if somebody consumes this as part of an LLM output or from an AI agent, how do I help them understand that there is more that they could learn? There's more that they could learn. There's more that they could do. We have more to offer, right. So it really does make you have to rethink the purpose of the content and how you use it as a stepping stone for people or help them use it as a stepping stone. But then again, like I said, you can go back to before you have. If you have multiple buying groups that all of a sudden becomes. That's a crisscross, you know path that kind of eventually hopefully all leads to the bottom.

Speaker 2:

Well, you know, when you, when you talk about the, the, the funnel and the pathway, I think all the way back to when Google uh, no matter what keyword you would rank for, it would always be your homepage. Right, so you always had the.

Speaker 2:

you always had the that you were going in so you know how people could direct. But today every page is like a node in you know the ecosystem of information organization, right, I guess? And and so you know this random page over here that's not even in your navigation structure could be the doorway that people are coming in. And so I think that understanding analytics because I can tell you really understanding how to chop up analytics helps you guess better.

Speaker 3:

I guess Right right, right right.

Speaker 2:

And you can get ideas about stuff, and I think it, you know. I mean, look, gary Vaynerchuk says just do it all, do as much of it as you can, because you're just mapping everything out and you want to be be everywhere, right, you know, that's great, and AI helps speed everything up. I think, like you said, it's like this interface that just speeds everything up, right, and and so you know. But there are general channels, right, there's general channels that people fall into, and I think that that's where people should start right.

Speaker 2:

Start start with the heavier channels and then kind of build up of there. There are people on a, a scatterplot right, that are going to be everywhere, um, but try to kind of cluster those things to hopefully get the uh user traffic flowing in the right direction and then set set those triggers. But, like you said, give the directional point of okay, you can go back and go up. You actually heard that on somebody I was interviewing on the previous podcast. They weren't using it in that context, but it's so applicable because okay. So I'm going to jump to like short form content for a second.

Speaker 2:

I am absolutely seen in social media that, because the algorithm changes from TikTok, uh, just, and, and everybody's adapted right, youtube's adapted, instagram's adapted Like you, facebook is adapted Like this content is going to find somebody that wants it, right, and it's so reflective of whatever you want, right, literally like everybody's producing content at this exponential rate. It's literally choose your own adventure, because your feed, sarah, my feed, anybody's feed is going to be completely different. I've looked at other people's feeds and I've gone like this is not at all what my feed looks, like this, this is not at all maybe what I'm interested in, based on like a percentage of buckets or whatever, but it's absolutely designed for them and so so I don't know the choose your own adventure really resonates with me, yeah.

Speaker 3:

Well, the only thing, the only concern I have with the choose your own adventure, and I think choose your own adventure a hundred percent is the way to go, but then you also have to your point. So much content is being created. I don't want to end up in a digital wasteland. Creating content for content's sake is not the right way to go. Creating content because you can do it quickly is not the right way to go.

Speaker 3:

I think some of the core tenets of solid SEO remain true from an AI discoverability perspective, and that is create quality content right. Create content that has you know unique thought, unique insight, that has you know your perspective on things, as opposed to this general fluffiness and I'm afraid, like I still see people creating, like just you know, garbage with it because it's easy, and I think that that's where you know when we start talking about feeds and having short form content and content that resonates, you know, from an individual perspective and almost hyper personalization, you still absolutely need to be thinking about the fact that you know why am I creating this piece of content?

Speaker 2:

right. Is it actually going to do something, or is it just going to be noise, or digital waste, as we like to refer to it? The exponential rate, they can't even keep up. Or I mean they can keep up, but it's moving so quickly that they're, you know, trying to index, right. Well, not index, but they're trying to collect all the information that's being generated in the world, and then they're trying to organize it right, that's their kind of core tenant.

Speaker 2:

Well, if you're not in the top 100, right, and we already know from all the studies of the data like, look, if you're not on the first page, it almost doesn't matter. So the only things that are going to show up in the first page and also show up in the first 100, is going to be original thought. It's going to be you're adding something to the conversation online that AI can't generate because it hasn't incorporated that yet. Right, and so you know, I think, that a lot of people have gone the route of generating a ton of content and then these core updates happen and they lose a ton of traffic. And it's because, well, you know, that content barely crusted the surface of the top 100.

Speaker 2:

Right, and then, and now it's been optimized in another way and it was able to grab other content that might have been more valuable. And boom, now you're gone and you have no link equity. That's getting pushed from it. And then, boom, like you said, it goes back to the core tenets of SEO, of like is this good quality content? How do we design this for the user? So nothing's had, nothing has really changed, right, right, like, fundamentally, I mean, they added the expertise to eat, right.

Speaker 3:

Right, right, yeah, exactly.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, try to say hey, like this is a real human. So I think that that was helpful. But I mean, what? What are you seeing? Um, I mean, I'm, I'm trying to stay on top of this. Like this is like a weekly thing of like, where everything's going. But like I talked to a client actually this morning who has a neighbor Okay, um, so, so and and the neighbor, um, I think, so smart guy, I haven't, I haven't met him, but he's mentioned the neighbor to me a few times and he's like Google's dead, he goes, he goes and he doesn't even know it yet and I go, man, like I hear. I've heard that SEO is dead so many times and and SEO, I think, has taken on a new form that almost everybody needs to understand SEO as, like you're building stuff, but it's like understanding the algorithms on any platform to understand how that content, whatever it is, is being interpreted. So I just wanted to get your, your take on on where we are at on the time.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, yeah, I mean, google's not dead and Google's not going to die. I think we're evolving just as anything, right? I mean, there was a time when websites were dead because they were only brochure where guess what Websites evolved, and now they are all sorts of things. I think websites are going to evolve again and I think they're going to continue to be a channel. I do think that AI will become the UI in some cases. I think that integration of AI within the search tools, within your Googles and your Bings that only is going to. They're just going to evolve. They're not going away, they're not dying.

Speaker 3:

And I think SEO from I think it was Neil Patel who said it's not search engine optimization, it's search everywhere optimization right, and I think that that is 100% what you're going to see. But I think that, again, the core tenants, if you're saying, hey, drop everything and just make an AI strategy so everything's discoverable on AI, and ranking through with AI agents and LLM outputs, then you're going to be losing sight of the fact that you still need to optimize for SEO. Right, search engines are not. They are in some cases. Well, they're built on a lot of AI engines, right? I mean, they are. I mean, so it's.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, I think that there's a lot of hype. We're obviously at the top of the hype cycle right now. There's a lot of truth in what's going on from an AI perspective and a lot of change. I mean, I think, you know, if we had the same conversation a year from now and looked back, we might be laughing at even some of the words that we're using right now. Right, and how we're even talking about agents, ai agents or LLM outputs. But no, I think that they are a hundred percent. Google and all of the search engines need. They're going to remain. They're just going to grow and evolve and be as relevant and maybe, in some cases, even more relevant as they are today.

Speaker 2:

Awesome. So let's transition to what progresscom is doing and what you're doing with content. Maybe you could share kind of some case studies or something that you're seeing that might be interesting for people to know from a new data standpoint of like hey, this is what we're doing and this is what we're seeing and this is how it's working. I think that would be super helpful for the audience.

Speaker 3:

I mean, I think there are a couple of things I mean from a product perspective. We actually have introduced recently AI propensity scoring within Sitefinity, so we actually have customers who are leveraging that for personalization in ways that they never have we talked about. Personalization is a buzzword. That has been, you know people, how long have we been talking about personalization?

Speaker 3:

I think with AI, one of the things that we're seeing is our customers who are using our platforms are able to truly actually, you know, personalize content now and personalize the content journey in ways that they weren't before and by leveraging the propensity scoring they can actually have, they have some predictive analytics about what, what will be coming next, and so we have some customers who have um leveraged that to modify their content journey, um to build new content, that for for higher results, um, and they're seeing higher conversion rates. So, um, a partner roundtable event last week in Dublin and one of our partners was talking about a client that they have that has done that within Sightfinity and it's really proving itself out, which is amazing to me, because we're, you know again, we've talked about personalization for a long time. I think it's just getting to a point where it's mature enough that we can. Technology is mature enough that we can accurately do that.

Speaker 2:

Can you explain to me maybe at a high level, for people listening as well what is the scoring system doing? How is it working? Just at a high level? I think that would be helpful for people.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, so at a high level, it's looking at the actions that customers and prospects are taking within the content, within the site right, and leveraging predictive analytics to let you know what their next anticipated step will be and if you're seeing the way you can use it. It's really interesting because if you're seeing that there's a massive drop off, at some point in time you understand that there's something broken in that. Choose your own adventure game. You need to add another option for them to say, okay, this is where I need to go, and so it allows you to really start to understand what kind of content is resonating and how that journey is unfolding, so that you can help guide them through that journey. Does that make sense?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, so it's really helping map out the funnel of what people are doing beyond what you're getting with GA4 or something like that. It's at a site level, and so it's a CMS, correct.

Speaker 3:

Correct. Yeah, so it's a CMS and then we have a CDP as well, a customer data platform that looks at unstructured data as well, so not just the data within the site, but it's looking at the broader all of the data that we have for that customer across the board, which is really putting together a pretty powerful picture of the customer journey.

Speaker 2:

Describe that a little bit more of the unstructured data, of what it's capturing or looking at Again, just at a high level, I think yeah, so it can, um and it's all.

Speaker 3:

Whatever we can be collected and looked at legally, right, I should. I should preface it with that um. It is a um, but it's the the known information on that person, whether it's uh, social interactions or um other sites that they visited. Looking at that kind of information and and building that unique profile for that customer.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, moz is doing some of that these days, right, like he's really mapping that out. I think that that is super helpful when you're trying to figure out who you're going after, where they're at, what they're looking at.

Speaker 2:

And then like you said, that customer journey, kind of going back to it is like you need to look up or like, if you're, if you're on a spatial plot, right, like it's, it's what you touch in every direction, because they can, they can choose to go whatever direction you give them. And if they want to go, you know this direction and you don't have a piece of content there they jump from your content to to something else or they go back to the beginning, right, and they, they, whatever, wherever they started their search, which could be YouTube, could be, uh, you know, chat, gbt, it could be Google, it could be anything, um, but they go back to that beginning point and then start over and you might not get them, you might not catch them again.

Speaker 2:

And one of the things I'm seeing. I'm curious this is something I'm seeing in the data A lot of times people are converting in the mode that they're in right. So they're either going to convert that first day like they're going to go all the way to the finish line and close that first day, like they're going to go all the way to the finish line and close, or it's like 30 days plus. It's almost like I'm I'm not seeing any data like in between there. Not a lot right, like just substantially.

Speaker 2:

Like you either get them on the first shot right or they're, you're, they're going to be going through a sifting process and and you're going to, you're going to hopefully capture them, that they're going to find your stuff later, and that does happen a lot, and that's what I see in the reporting. A lot is like we need to look backwards, like 30 days, to say did this work? Because you know I mean with data you are getting real time data. But like, even if you run ads like I'm, like it takes two weeks or something to like for it to just kind of percolate through and for people to take action, not to say that there's not 3% or whatever the number is of someone that buys immediately. But when you're getting them into like that customer journey, unless they're ready to buy immediately, you're kind of dropping. I feel like it's like dropping a Plinko ball and it's going Exactly.

Speaker 3:

A hundred percent, yeah, yeah, yeah. And I think the other thing is every every buyer's, you know, buying life cycle is varies and even within our business, you know, we have, you know, five or six buckets of products and some are very transactional and a hundred percent what you said. If they, if they're not taking an action when they're there, and some are very transactional and 100% what you said. If they're not taking an action when they're there, it's going to be either 30 days, 60 days or they're just not right.

Speaker 3:

We have others that the buying cycle could be 18 months, believe it or not, right? And those are the more complex products that have buying groups as opposed to a single purchaser and all of those kinds of things and all of those kinds of things. But that becomes exponentially more complex. Which is also why having predictive analytics, having propensity scoring, having that kind of information available to you, is super important, because you have to look at the buying group as a whole as opposed to you know if somebody's purchasing the product, what are all the touch points from that domain or from that organization that says, okay, these are, you know, it's similar to intent data, right? You know what are the signals that you're going to get from from all of that, but being able to understand on what point they're, they have pause, um, you know, in that journey it's it's really, really important.

Speaker 2:

So so, if I use like, so we're, we're in Houston, so we do a lot of oil and gas, industrial um, manufacturing, all that kind of stuff, and what I'm seeing is, okay, you're speaking to the executive, okay, and then you're speaking to maybe the field person and then they've they've really drawn a like step back and there are buying groups, right, and you might not even know who everybody is on that committee now, right, so you can't target the like. I mean there's the procurement person or whoever it is. But what I am seeing as like people are like, okay, we need to trim spend or this or that. And we trimmed spend on a couple of campaigns where we weren't targeting the 25 to 35 group. Okay, well, like, what we saw as a result of that is we were getting less people like requesting RPs or whatever it is, because, because there's the, the assistant or the new hire or the junior person that is going to do the, the gophering.

Speaker 2:

I don't know if that's the word, but going to go doing the research, finding the stuff and then passing it back, and then the executives might go do that research after, like, it's been vetted to a few companies or something like that. And so like. You need to have that predictive analytics. You need to understand who you're targeting, who you're speaking to, who are your champions, right, I mean? Who are the?

Speaker 3:

people who are going to champion within the organization, because they might not actually have anything to do with the final purchasing decision, but they could be incredibly influential. And I think that's the audience that a lot of people I don't want to say ignore, because that sounds harsh, but I think they do they kind of push them off to the side because, oh, it's a nice to have when, in actuality, they are as critical as the final purchaser in a lot of cases, because they're the gatekeeper. If your champion or influencer is not, they're the ones who are doing that initial hey, we need this product or a solution. Right, we have this problem, we need to solve it. If that person is not being engaged with the content, that you would need to be the champion, right, you know? Or, and that the kind of.

Speaker 3:

Then I think you're yeah, you're 100% missing out. Sounds to me like you're doing. Yeah, you're a hundred percent missing out. Sounds to me like you're doing a lot of experiments, which is fantastic that you can actually turn around and say, hey, you know, we have data to show. This is why we need to do X, y or Z, and I think that's something with AI we should be able to see more of, because you can move quickly Right.

Speaker 2:

Well, I mean what we're seeing. Yeah, I mean what what we're seeing? Yeah, I mean I get to work with a lot of different overseeing strategy for a lot of different companies, big and small, and so I'm able to see a lot of data and and draw inferences from that and then apply that and and we're seeing a lot, even on the social side of things is like let's put out a trial balloon on social, then if it does well, then let's put some money behind it on the advertising side, versus just like deciding like this is what we're going to go with and run it, because I mean, ultimately, the end result is what people are paying for, not whatever comes in between there. They're really looking at the final result. I mean, what, what are you seeing?

Speaker 2:

Um, like so, so you, you have these different stakeholders, like you said it. Um, you know you got marketing, you got executives. What I'm increasingly seeing is sales and marketing working more and more in hand, the CRO position, all that sort of thing. Um, and and I I'm seeing, or I'm trying to help have the perspective of sales change on how, like critical and how influential marketing can be in that sales process. Right, and I think COVID and you know everything moving online had had had increased that Right and also drawn that attention to it, because you can't, you couldn't, spend your conference budget on on on marketing Right.

Speaker 2:

Like you couldn't. You couldn't go to the conferences, so let's put our money other places. And they're seeing it happen Right, like, what are you seeing in that that customer journey from a sales and marketing standpoint, are, are, are you cause? I think your platform from a sales and marketing standpoint, because I think your platform and I want to talk more about it on how it also can help, because I think it's super critical. So just tell me what you're seeing on the marketing and sales, how you're seeing salespeople look at marketing and how to influence that.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, I mean we're seeing more of the rise of revenue operations, which is that marriage of the two, right, you have marketing ops, you have sales ops coming together from a revenue operations perspective, I mean I think the marketing sales interaction has always I mean, that's a tale as old as time right, but I think, yes, we are seeing more integration with it's not just a handoff and walk away. There is more integration, a deeper integration across both organizations.

Speaker 2:

Because I can see that the platform that you have prove out what's happening right. Because a lot of times marketing will go to sales and say, hey, what is the customer story you're using? What's the testimonial? What's the?

Speaker 2:

what's the homegrown stuff you're not supposed to be using, but we know you're using that in the field, like let's bring that back, let's get it approved through legal and let's let's use that across uh, you know the, the, the uh districts or territories, and and I I'm seeing that the the data that you're being able to give is is more supportive of that to say hey, like this, this is helping, this is working, and and being able to see the like, the real application of what we're not seeing, like we talked about more in the field?

Speaker 3:

Yeah, absolutely. And being able to marry the experience that we're able to pull from the platform and the I don't want to say anecdotal because it's not anecdotal, but the evidence that the sales team is getting, and marry the two? Yeah, absolutely. And we are being able to show that and it is exciting to see that take place because it does allow for more meaningful engagement and higher conversion rates on the backend and it shows that the marketing spend it's funny you talk about events. My team is responsible for our event strategy as well, and that's changed exponentially in the last five years.

Speaker 3:

And the purpose I still believe a thousand percent in events and that you need to be doing them, but you need to know why you're doing them, and I think for a long time, people didn't understand that, and so being able to reallocate that spend to more meaningful engagements that impact sales in a different way is really, you know it, it it's something that we're I ended up having to have conversations a lot about. Well, why aren't we at this place? Or we should be here, why aren't we doing more of this? And like, my first question to them always is well, what is your, what is the goal? Like what do you think we're going to get out of that by doing that?

Speaker 3:

And usually it's something that they want. They want something that you're not going to get from an event, right, they want something. They want exactly what you and I were just talking about that connection. That's a deeper connection with the customer, something that's going to have a higher conversion, something that's going to get them closer to a sale, and most events today are not that. They're about building brand awareness. They're another touch. They're about engagement. They're building trust, delighting existing customers right, there are a lot of different reasons that you go, and there's education that goes along with that, right.

Speaker 2:

And so, anyway, yeah, go ahead, yeah can you give me one example, and I want, after this, for you to really tell us a little bit more? Give me the elevator pitch for progresscom. I want to know. You said events have changed for you a lot. Can you pull something out of there and give a like, a specific, that you've adapted what you were doing before and and and how that would work?

Speaker 3:

Yeah, and so this would be more on the and I'll give an example. On our developer tool side of the business, we would go pre COVID. We were sponsoring anywhere from 30 to 40 events per year. We were out there and COVID hit, and we pivoted very quickly to. We did a lot of live streaming on Twitch and things like that.

Speaker 3:

What that changed, though, was the way that you engage with your customer or prospect right, so the engagement became more personal to a certain extent, because there was even and that might sound ironic from a live stream, but it allowed you to have interactions and engagement with people all around the world, not just the thousand people who were showing up at that event, or 3000 of people and let's be honest, you're not talking to all of them anyway, and you are but a drop of sand in an expo hall.

Speaker 3:

So, as we got away from COVID, the way people engage similar to the fact that customer behavior is changing in the face of AI the way customers or prospects want to engage with a product or a brand is different, and they want more of a even if it's not an in-person touch, they want more of an engagement that is, that's more personalized.

Speaker 3:

So, again, not to say that the events I mean events absolutely are, and I believe, I believe in the human side of software. People buy from people they don't buy from from brands at the end of the day. So it's still important to have that touch. But we found that there are more impactful ways for us to engage with the audience and that's by providing some sort of education in a different way, in a way that they can engage with us, whether it's again like a live stream or a webinar or podcast, but having the live Q&A afterwards or something along those lines. It gives us, at least for that particular audience. From a developer perspective, they wanted the ability to interact with the people and not just and you can't do that at scale from an event perspective.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, no, I think that the get into the know, like and trust, like in person at the events, compresses the time right. So customer nurture, I think is big. I'm seeing like a pre event events like online and post event events online is is huge to to get that engagement.

Speaker 2:

Okay, so we're we're getting kind of close to wrapping up. I wanted to ask you one last question that we're starting to use this as shorts, so it can be you repeating something we've talked about. Just kind of repackaging it into a short clip is what is one unknown secret of internet marketing that might be underutilized today?

Speaker 3:

One unknown secret. That's a good one. I'm trying to think if I would go Give me two, give me whatever.

Speaker 3:

Talk about content, whatever you got, yeah, yeah, yeah, I mean, I think from a content perspective, probably one of the secrets would be that, even though there is this hype around AI, the core tenets of SEO remain the same. I don't know if that's a secret, but I think that it's something that's often forgotten. I think that people also forget that, as you need to create and this is a problem, whether it was early days of SEO or early days of AI optimization at the end of the day, you're still creating content for humans, and so, while you need to optimize for the technology, do not forget that, at the end, the person or the thing that's consuming that is human, and if it's not something that they can engage with, all is going to be lost, right? So it doesn't matter if you have the right keywords or the right keyword clusters or the right groups. You absolutely have to be creating that content that somebody would want to actually engage with, whether it's video, whether it's written content.

Speaker 3:

I think the other thing and I will this is more than one, it's more than two, but I will throw this out there. These are just because I've been thinking about it a lot we talk a lot on our end about making software that's accessible, and accessible software? Obviously there's. There are laws around that, but more than anything, accessibility means that you need to. It means that it's something that most anybody could consume.

Speaker 3:

And, as I'm looking at the best practices from an AI perspective, I think you find it kind of ironic that a lot of the best practices for creating AI friendly content fall on the foundation of accessible content, right? So content that's concise, that's easier to read, that's clear, that's well-structured, all of those things that uses appropriate use of alt text. I think, if you are thinking, coming to the party with an accessibility first mindset, you're going to actually have a very AI friendly strategy and that's going to help you win. When we come down from the bottom of you know, come down to the plateau of this hype cycle. I think that's where you're going to see organizations winning.

Speaker 2:

I love that Okay.

Speaker 3:

So tell me more about progresscom, give us the pitch and then also what's the best you gave me a link that we'll put in the show notes and what software that allows our customers to build, deploy and manage responsible AI-powered applications and experiences. Within the digital experience business unit where I live, we have products like Sitefinity, which is our complex content management system and digital experience platform, and Sitefinity Insight, which is our customer data platform. We also have our developer tools. We have document collaboration tools and file transfer solutions. I just sputtered through all of that. Can I say that one all again for you, and sorry, your question was something about progress. Is that great? Oh, that, that was great.

Speaker 2:

So what's the best way to get in touch with you um to follow you, all that sort of thing yep, um.

Speaker 3:

best way to reach me is um on linkedin um and sarah fats on linkedin uh or x, although I don't use x as much as I used to um and SFATS is my handle on LinkedIn. I do have a podcast as well 10 Minute MarTech for those who are interested, and you can find that on our YouTube channel, the Sitefinity YouTube channel.

Speaker 2:

Awesome. I want to just totally resonate with what Sarah's saying that your website is much more than a brochure today. With what Sarah's saying that your website is much more than a brochure today, uh, and I think a lot of people uh in the B2B space are looking at that to like check the box. I think that 10 years ago, okay, like you have a website, you're legit, um, you know. Now talk to our salespeople, um, but, but the customer experience, more and more people want to have that, get to that sale online, and that that's really what I'm seeing is, uh, the more uh you can drive it online, the more leverage you can get um as a company, uh to to not have to um do so much heavy lifting in person, right, and so it's really a sales tool. It's a supportive tool.

Speaker 2:

I've seen it in the pharma space big time. Um, they were already driving people to uh, you know, uh touch pads and where they were clicking and what was going on and and user engagement was big and and I'm seeing it kind of uh, uh percolate to to all the other industries. So, uh, if, if you haven't already, go check out uhcom. If you're thinking about building a new website, you really should. Every like three years I would say max five years you have to build a new website. I mean, we build a lot of just WordPress sites or Shopify sites or stuff like that, but when someone comes to us, I can almost date when their website was built right and now there's other platforms that you can build sites on as well, and I think, checking out progress and understanding especially if you're an enterprise company and you have the ability to leverage all these analytics and do something with it I would encourage y'all to check it out.

Speaker 2:

And so hopefully, this conversation was helpful. Hopefully we de-stressed you a little bit that we are in the hype cycle of AI, but if you're doing all the foundational things, you're doing it right. And, sarah, I'll give a quick, actual, real testimony. We landed a client and this was I don't know a year ago. I wasn't looking at all the different LLMs and ranking in all the LLMs, like I was. We were dabbling in it, like we were. Definitely it's a moving target.

Speaker 2:

We were looking at it and a client called, or someone called and said the only reason I I I'm talking to you right now like this, is how they started the conversation, and that person actually listens to this podcast, so they'll hear this. But but basically, the only reason I'm talking to you is because you ranked first in perplexity and at the time, okay, and this is where I was a year ago. It's, we've come a long way. My first question was what is perplexity? And my first question was what is perplexity? And and and and. So I, we were just doing good SEO and we were optimizing for SEO and the schema showed up there Right, and and then, and then to your point of the customer journey. As the conversation was going on, he goes wait, like I don't know if he said I recognize your voice, but maybe he did. I don't know.

Speaker 2:

But he was like I listened to your podcast. So so that point plus this point, it was like this is going to happen, right, and so so you know just to to to leave everybody on a on. On a positive note, whatever you're doing right now is good and if you're focused on the strategy, it's great. But you can do more and you can get more leverage with AI, but you still have to have someone driving it that understands the strategy and what you're doing or you're just going to be paddling really hard, right?

Speaker 2:

So, everybody, hopefully you found this conversation helpful. If you're looking to grow your business online with the strongest, most powerful tool on the planet the internet, reach out to EWR digital for more revenue in your business and we can hook you up with the right people like Progress or what have you, based on your needs, and thank you all for listening. Until the next time, my name is Matt Bertram. Bye-bye for now.

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