Demand Decoded: Demand Generation & Digital Marketing Podcast

hi everyone welcome back to demand ko dan here as usual but it's not phil it's that opposite me today they might look fairly similar but i've got josh ba with me today like incredibly incredibly excited to have josh here he is blends new us ceo and if you follow blend on social or anything like that you'd have seen the announcement and what that means to us and everybody else involved with blend in some way shape or form i'll let josh introduce himself shortly but today's episode is one that i'm really excited to have josh in for actually because what he's gonna be able to bring to this podcast not just this one but also future episodes as well is a fresh perspective on marketing generally and i won't kind of you know spoil the intro to your background but it's a really really interesting one that has already taught me lots actually just in the short time we've actually spent together and this episode is all about how to survive your first board meeting as cmo so for marketing leaders out there that may be entering this scenario the boardroom the lion's den so to speak you know how do you get through that how do you prepare for it what to expect and how to come out of their successfully and also to aspiring marketing leaders who wanna know what happens in the boardroom and what to expect in the future when they might enter the boardroom as a cmo or whatever role they play at that time so it's a probably like a different topic for this podcast more kind of executive level but a really interesting one that i think any marketer actually at any level will find insightful because it's just that fresh perspective on what truly happens behind the scenes and those conversations we don't always have access to so yeah josh welcome to demand decode i'm thrilled to be here it's i've been a fan of the pod for a bit and it's it's just it's really exciting to be here and and as we announced yesterday the us the opening of our us office and the the expansion we're we're conducting in the us i couldn't be more more excited about leading that charge and so yeah thanks for having me on and i'm looking forward to our conversation yeah incredibly exciting times at blend so josh as i mentioned it probably be good for you to introduce yourself i don't wanna sure miss any points out but i've i've thinking in as and where i can i've learned a bit about you over over the last few weeks been talking my kids yeah alright so let's see so i've been in tech all my life all my professional life came out of school in with a comp sci and math degree and immediately went into writing code was not terribly good at it discovered that that i had a a pension for human problems and business problems and and gravitate towards those and so very quickly got into tech company and service company operations and and that led me into growth eventually and for the last seventeen years i've been an executive leader for growth functions sales marketing m and a strategic services for a variety of both private equity held and publicly traded companies primarily or i guess all headquartered in the us but many of them global in nature one interesting thing for this podcast in particular i find is that you haven't come up through the marketing ranks necessarily like i i would say although you've ran marketing teams in the past they've also been sales team and you've you know had the cro and president role in previous companies but also are more of an investor as well like some people might call you so bringing that perspective to a marketing conversation has its benefits as well yeah benefits i'm sure it benefits and drawbacks as your as your audience would suggest but yeah i'm not gonna tell you the best way to do to to design a campaign that we have great team members to do that but i think i do bring perspective of having been in growth oriented companies and leading that charge for quite a quite a quite a while now so happy to get into the conversation yeah said about it yeah and this one in particular actually you've got seventeen ish years of boardroom experience as well being in the boardroom on in multiple roles actually and you've had a lot of experience in terms of what happens in the boardroom and how you've seen cmos come in deliver well cmos come in and deliver poorly and not get their point across well and crumble and i've been one of those there we yeah so yeah so i've held roles that i have included chief revenue officer and when i've been the cro i have always required that marketing and sales both report up and be a combined function and for reasons that we'll talk about i'm sure either in this podcast or in the future because i'm fairly passionate about it but i've also held the role of president i've held the the i've been on the other side of the table i've been an investor at board meetings and and you know it's it it's it's not the lines them but there are definitely best practices and better ways to engage with the board and and maybe worse yeah yeah and we only had this conversation earlier and i think our audience will also benefit from this and it's the like financial acumen side of marketing that many marketers lack understanding in and even you know myself trying to improve in that area can be difficult and i think having you on this podcast yeah we'll just take our listeners as well to the next level to understand what truly matters inside the business i hope so yeah alright well let's dive in and i think where we typically like to start and i think is an important place for this podcast is why this conversation matters so much in particular for cmos because it you know the the boardroom can be a tricky place to get your point of view across and cmos can make big mistakes in terms of the kind of things that they present and bring to the table so yeah let's just chat a little bit about you know why why were we're even discussing this today okay so it's not only cmos that have this challenge but those of us who are operators in a business whether you're a cmo a cro a coo or cfo for that matter we spend all of our time in the business we spend all of our days in the business we know the business inside and out hopefully and and we manage teams inside the business we live and breathe our markets our customers all of that depth is what makes us successful at our day jobs but when we're talking to a board the average board member is coming in and has spent the last twelve hours studying your deck mh maybe reading compliance reports and the last company that i was with before before this we were a publicly traded bank our board members had to read four to nine hundred pages of content prior to a board meeting wow k so if you're if you're ingesting that kind of information and that level of information and you're responsible as a board member you have fiduciary responsibility to to your investor base for the the financial and risk profiles of that company you're spending most of your energy not thinking about the detailed operations of that company you then get a couple of hours maybe tops on on a single day of that board meeting with the leadership team and if i as a cmo come in and go deep into the weeds of of operational metrics i mean i've done it so the you know you just see people i actually had one board member fall asleep on me no yeah yeah to true story yeah it was a about a i don't know there were maybe seventeen or eighteen people in the boardroom and and yeah i looked over i'm standing in front of everybody giant screen behind me and i looked over and there was a guy that's a asleep and you know that that's not his fault that's you know that's that's my fault for not keeping him engaged and and involved in the conversation so yes i think that i think this is an important conversation for specifically for first time board you know board presenting cmos to really think through what is the what are priorities what is the outcome that they really want this podcast forecast 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 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 you spoke about the translation you know issues in terms of understanding what really matters to the board and you spoke about marketers and cmos digging into the operational metrics of that function is that like a recurring challenge that you've seen in the past where actually they just need to read the room understand the audience and present the right things well it's i mean there's reading the room but there's also just in the moment certainly you have to read the room but there's also a a set of things that that let's use private equity exam investors as an example so if you're a cmo or a head of marketing that you know is reporting to a ceo or a cro but you're getting invited into a board and the board is made up of institutional investors those institutional investors have invested with a specific thesis and they care about how well that thesis is tracking and they use very specific metrics to track that if you come in and you start using non you know disconnected marketing metrics and showing what a great job you're not there to show what a great job your team's doing driving website traffic as an example right especially today but but going in understanding what they care about in in a fair you know in some degree of detail and we'll get to that yeah it is is critical to you so yeah i guess it's still knowing your audience but it's it's a whole lot more preparation ahead of time yeah there's also a big challenge i find in marketing with you know people in your position like in the past where everybody thinks they understand marketing everybody's marketing everybody's a marketer yeah everybody in that room will have an opinion on marketing and think that their opinion is right and the right way to go about market i think in itself that presents a a challenge yeah i had a a of a friend ham who who's been a ceo he was my ceo at one of my last companies and hemp always said the cto of the business is the most dangerous guy in the business because nobody in the room can question them right yeah they they don't have the technical expertise the flip side is also true every single person in the room thinks they know how to market yep and some of them have more experience or less but you are you you just you have to know that walking in that there are a whole bunch of pre conceived notions and you may have to be able to defend yourself and explain why you've come to certain conclusions and what data you've used to to do that and i think i think that we'll we'll get into that more as we go yeah alright cool let's frame the boardroom that sure because most people listen to this won't have actually been part of a boardroom environment before and even understand what goes on and who's in there okay so can we outline that and sure let's start with the participants yeah so the board if it's you know midsize pe owned or vc invested company the board's pretty much gonna be your ceo possibly your cfo or or a or in a venture backed tech company maybe that maybe even the cto or or you know technical founder but then it's gonna be the the representatives of the investor groups that you're working with mh if you're working with one you you're owned by a one particular private equity firm then you're you'll have probably a ceo on the board and two to four private equity board members if if it's on the excuse me if it's on the larger side very often that'll consist of a couple of folks from the pe firm mh a partner and a junior partner maybe or an associate and then a couple independent board members that they go and they bring in who have particular expertise in your domain and are you know friends of the firm or in some way engaged with the with the firm or the fund in addition to that you may have your attorney there you may have an outside accountant accounting firm there and then there may just be consultants that the board decides to bring in who are board they call them board observers and and in the my experience is in the marketing and the sales side that's actually quite common where you'll have go to market consultants of some form sitting in on on summer or all board meetings and and so i think you know when you're going into that as a first time cmo a no who's gonna be there ask your ceo right who's gonna who who are the all the attendees do your research if it's the consultant so i'll give you an example it tracks my first or second board meeting we had kimberly casper who was a marketing consultant and ray villa who was a who had run huge sales teams and they had been they had been involved in my hiring process but they were also brought in as as friends of the pe firm to contribute during the board meeting they were amazing they were fantastic they were because they were great marketers and and sales leaders in in their own right they were able to validate the growth strategies that we were presenting and and you know the directions we were heading and they gave and i was meeting with them outside the board boardroom too so i we were able to you know to align things and to to trade ideas i don't know that the boardroom where you wanna have most often where you wanna have you know challenging conversations at least not in your first one there are times for that but but so i think preparation with anyone who's not an actual board member of preparation with those people ahead of time to help them under what you're gonna present and if they have opinions or ideas you know get getting those on the table first is really helpful is there something in creating those allies within the border as well well so more broadly speaking i i have always approached boards and i don't know that i have the science here but i have always approached presenting to the boards as knowing who the chairman is mh or chair person that might be your ceo or it might be a member of the of an investor group or in a public company it may be an elected position and and knowing what they care about and and direct it and making sure i'm directing out of respect if nothing else conversation their way there are also gonna be board members who actually do know more about marketing and growth science then than others and if you can figure that out ahead of time and you can direct more detailed comments to them yeah you can oftentimes get them nodding their heads yeah and and feeling engaged and and you want them to be engaged that conversation right you you want them to ask questions because they'll sound like intelligent questions and you'll be able to ask and tell or give intelligent answers so i i think those are the two groups that i but i'm not i'm specifically not reporting to my ceo or my peer group i'm there to talk to the board members i can talk to my ceo and right i can talk to to my peers in the executive team anytime and i should have we should have done lots of prep ahead of time but in this in these situations i'm gonna have very limited amount of time you should expect even if you're running sales and marketing together you should expect your time window for a an average boardroom bat board meeting is gonna be between ten and thirty minutes tops yeah and if it's just marketing if you get ten minutes your aces that's about as because it gets so really constructing what you wanna present and prepare for is i think critical what segue what's a segue into into our next part because as i suppose as let's you know frame it cmo been invited to their first board meeting they understand who's there they've done their research they understand the chair person and like you say there might be a couple of members in there but they're closer with have a better relationship and understanding of yep now they need to prepare now they need to actually put together the information that the board need to understand for whatever reason it may be which we can get onto to some of the reasons that cmos even you know go to the boardroom because it might be for different reasons right right how do you prepare okay so it starts with sitting down with your ceo and the rest of your executive team well ahead of the board meeting reviewing past decks reviewing what's ben said review understanding what the perspective of the board is asking lots of questions if you haven't been in those conversations you i mean you have a right to know who are the participants and what do they care about and what you know related to the business and and then what has been their expectation and what's going on in the business is the business in a and an uptick is it in a down tick is the market constrained is pricing getting pressured is like where what are the macro trends happening in the business and and what do they know and what what maybe don't they know yet that they're gonna be surprised with not by you but by other members of the team what is the c what are the what's the ceo gonna talk to them about maybe without you even in the room right there's executive session where the ceo may have a conversation with the board before you ever get in there what are the things that are gonna be consuming their mind space can i ask before you walk in what those things are like what what will those ceo be talking to the board about and what it could be a wide range of things it could be lawsuits that the companies involved in either on on on one side of the other it could be real estate transactions it could be i mean it can be just a huge wide range of things that don't involve the operational team may involve the it could be operational or executive hiring mh right it could be personnel matters that the that only the ceo is gonna be in there or the ceo and the cfo maybe and so and then there's you know there's equity planning and and and fundraising and all kinds of different things that are that most operational leaders won't be in the room for all the time anyway and so it's helpful to at least know the topics and know if you the ceo may not wanna give you all the details yeah but it's at least helpful to understand what's filling that board members mind if if if my marketing message is coming right after they have a really hard conversation about a sexual harassment lawsuit yeah like that's not when i wanna walk in the room and try to tell them all about what we're doing good marketing yet so working with your ceo to to plan that and plan the agenda and understand where you fit in the agenda is yeah helpful typically speaking them what is the cmo role within the board meeting why are they even there yeah i mean i i think generally boards especially private equity boards like to hear from all of the leadership team they you they own the company right so if they own the company i own the company i'd wanna know the people who i'm trusting to run the company right to deliver the results and so yes i obviously have to know my ceo but i wanna know all of the executive team a a ceo's maybe most important job bar anything is building the team that's gonna run the business the ceo doesn't do it right it's the ceo's team that actually runs and leads the business and so having some exposure to the to that team and judging whether the ceo is doing a good job recruiting a team that i that i've have trust and can complete identifying where the ceo may have had some conversations with the board about performance of his team or her team and and understanding where there may be and maybe wants some some help gauging whether there's room for improvement so i mean that that's i think i think that's the the the the environment you're walking into now i think it's also important to talk about what are the business metrics that the investors in the board actually care about because when you walk into that room you're thinking all about leads and conversion rates and this and the operational thing but yeah but that's not actually what an investment thesis is going to be focused on when that private equity company wants to go sell the business eventually any buyer or further investor may get down in the weeds in into the those types of weeds but they're gonna be primarily focused on arr growth on eb gross margin gross retention rate net retention rate these things that that are used to create company valuation and free cash flow like these kinds of things right and so so if if that's the case and you walk in and you just immediately start plowing into all of your cool marketing metrics they had they don't have a context yeah right like it would be like me going to buy a car and i'm thinking about how how fast this goes zero to sixty and and and the the guy selling to me gives me all kinds of metrics about the internal rate of combustion on of the of the engine and like like what are you talking about like it's so i i think understanding understanding those metrics i mean arr growth pretty easy right you hopefully you're talking about that already eb as is earnings before interest taxes depreciation and amortization that's that's a very common one and you can google that if you've you've never heard please do if you've have ever heard about it gross margin is is pretty well understood gross retention rate net retention rate are two things that i think board particularly private equity boards and vcs care about a lot and sometimes it's misunderstood so gross retention rate is all of your your revenue that you're retaining year over year or period over period minus anything that you've lost net retention rate is the same thing as your gross retention rate but now you get to add in anything you've ups sold the the dynamic there is important especially for a marketer or somebody who's leading growth right because gross retention rate typically is how well is the business holding on to your customers mh but nat means i can also upsell and if you're in marketing you better be involved in the customer funnel right the customer up upsell funnel cross sell so that we can measure the outcomes but that that metric right in great companies net nr net retention rate is usually a hundred and fifteen to a hundred and twenty percent that means you're adding you're holding on to your existing customer base and customer revenue and then you're adding gross retention rate you know is gonna be a bit smaller than that because you know don't get that add upside but but so anyway so i think having a good feel for those metrics and knowing which ones are most important and then taking what you care about and tying it to them yeah is allows you to create context for that investor to show you to show what your work does and your team's work does to support their thesis yeah i suppose there could be a a tricky scenario where you don't have access to that level of data right yeah maybe in this scenario that you're describing in these board meetings and i think it depends on the majority of company that you're in as well whether you have access to them or not but like do you have any advice or word of wisdom for those people that are struggling to get access to those metrics in the first place well yeah you've mentioned this to me off camera too and i thought it's a big issue marketing really so so i mean i'm an american so i'm gonna be a little bit brute force but you gotta go get it stop lining like it you know your ceo it this isn't true for someone who's three levels down in the marketing stack but if you're being asked to prepare for a board meeting and you and and your ceo is gonna walk you in there this is my marketing person you have every right to demand access to data that's gonna help you tell the story properly and you're see it's not that the business doesn't have it even if they don't think they have it they certainly do have it we just have to collect build it but this the cfo has all the the data that you would need to be able to do that if they're not doing it already and they should be the cro should have sales data and cost of sales here so i'll give you i'll give you an example c hate c mh okay and i hate lt tv and i'll tell you why in a traditional i don't know if there's tradition anymore with ai but in a traditional saas company where you are selling widget kind of software like small ticket software in it lots and lots of times c lt tv makes tons of sense yeah but people have taken that and said oh it applies to every business yeah well i was running a company at tracks that very rarely lost a customer like we had customers for thirty years literally if i had a customer for that long my lt tv is so high it would justify a c of four million dollars a year or for per customer acquisition yeah it's not feasible right but but do you think i got asked what's your c lt tv i sure did mh and i had to explain to them why it didn't matter yeah helping them helping folks understand what metrics really drive shareholder value and enterprise value is really important and and that's why i think conversations in prep with your ceo and your cfo well ahead of time well ahead of the board so that you can get a to a friend of mine in prep i'm thinking about prep and a good friend of mine talks about his name's is jp he's he he talks about if you ask me to present for an hour or an hour and a half i can be ready in ten minutes i've got top it ready i'll go i know what i know if you asked me to dial it back to same topic but condense it to thirty minutes i'm gonna need a week to prepare if you ask me to get that same topic down to ten minutes i need two months to prepare because i have to be salient i have to hit the i have to really practice exactly what yeah yeah you're gonna have ten minutes so you better be preparing well ahead of time and and really practicing with your team exactly what what you wanna share with with those board members yeah the point around c and lt tv is really interesting and also something you know we were chatting about off camera because it can have so many definitions as well right that are right relevant or not relevant to different businesses like you say it tracks there was no point even right know trying to look at c to improve it or you know however you wanna measure it no no there are other metrics that do make sense right yeah like pipeline efficiency pipe you know speed speed to conversion all all kinds of things that will tell me how well we're operating the business and what channels make more sense or less sense and those kinds of things right but but yeah that one in particular nope doesn't belong here yeah in that particular scenario or yeah but because i would say probably in almost any tech enabled service business yeah for the same reasons right tech enabled service businesses b to b enterprise they don't switch all that often because enterprise switching costs are just too high yeah and so if you're if you're gonna have customers for lots of years lt tv is and c they're just not very useful yeah for sure okay cool so you are the now you've kind of understood the metrics that you need to take to this board me and you understand how you might need to structure your point that you're trying to well you understand the metrics and where you are in the agenda and the kind of things that might crop up how do you actually structure the message that you're trying to get across in the border so start with the end of mind that's what i mean that's what i try to tell myself anyway what what my first time my first board meeting what do i want my listeners to come away with if it's the first time they don't know me well they may have heard about me in the hiring process or they or maybe i'm coming i'm being raised up from you know in a promotion situation so the ceo's talked about that but but this is my first access point to the board i want them coming away with three things that they feel that i have demonstrated command of my market command of my business in that i understand what how our business works and what's and what levers and drivers make a difference in that business specifically and then command of our metrics those three things will if i leave the room and they feel that way then i know that i have earned their trust to then when i come back the next time three months later what whenever that is they will be open to critical feedback i may present them that suggest hey we need i'm observing this we need to change this or we have changed this here's the results but the first time i wanna i wanna come away with those three things yep both maxed okay so so how do i do that i i think about personally i think about i i've got two slides maybe one but i think two no more ten minutes i got i'm gonna assume ten minutes that's two slides yeah it's not more than that because you gotta save two to three minutes for questions yeah so seven minutes tops in presenting and i've gotta be able to stitch together some salient points about what about how they view the world what they care about connected to what i control mh and so i a very limited time and it has to be while we get there so so i'd like to i like to be prepared with metrics of my like stitching together that story of what metrics i manage yep and and care about and the performance of those examples might be at this at this stage pipeline velocity and conversion that that connects directly to arr and to net revenue retention channel performance like what's what what's converting faster slower per channel what's my cost per channel that's that's connected to c it's connected the eb it's interesting you said because i i would think just on the service that that might be too pacific actually channels yeah that's i'm surprised you've brought that one up it depends on the business yeah if the business is primarily a channel sales business then you wanna be able to i'm not i don't mean channels like website versus social verse i'm not talking about least yes i'm talking about without getting too deep into attribution that's a whole another yeah conversation that we can have someday but and phil should probably be here for that but but the the idea of channels in this case is more channels business growth channels yeah in that case yeah i think that that boards should absolutely care about throughput invest and investment per channel because that will help them better understand the market that they're participating in the key partners things like that yeah i was so do you mean channels more broadly like partnerships for example could be partnerships yes yeah it could be you might be a reseller you you may be at an oem and you're you're resell to a bunch people or you may be a reseller and you've got a bunch of products that oem products that you're combine together into a solution all of that is meaningful in a channel discussion marketing roi is important but we have to be really careful with marketing roi you as you mentioned you may not have full control over cost of sales and just marketing marketing roi doesn't tell me enough about what that what that campaign might have cost to actually deliver revenue it might tell me how much it cost to create pipeline but if for example that pipeline now has to be closed by a direct salesforce verse a channel salesforce that didn't have that campaign what i pay to those direct versus channel salesforce has to be weighed in on before i can answer the question do i wanna do more of those campaigns do i do i care about that particular marketing strategy well it seemed good to create pipeline but then it converted way less in sales and and so it turns out that it's actually not terribly effective right the whole efficiency of the go to market engine right that needs you consider obviously that that that measurement process connects to eb connects to cost c and arr growth and and so i think continuously and i can even envision some of the charts i've used but continuously drawing your your listener back to here's how this contributes to the things you care about is really help can be really helpful and then and i'd i always talk about the devil on your shoulder the the little guy on your shoulder that's constantly whispering in your ear while you're presenting well what about this and what about this and what about this what about this you know more about your business than your than your listener based does so don't answer questions before they ask them mh that for me that that was one of the hardest things about getting in the boardroom i would start going off because i felt like i'm reading your face and it looks like i'm not connecting so i better go deeper here really make sure i drive on my point when you just might be tired you've yeah you've just gotten out of a that's just conversation or yeah or you're just trying to be polite yeah and so so yeah so sticking to the high level keeping it punchy keeping it friendly and not trying to cram too much into that ten minutes finally and this is a lesson i learned from the cmo at triumph michelle michelle holmes came in and one of her first board meetings that she presented at she finished her little segment like she didn't have a big long segment she had a little segment just like the rest of but she had a little segment and it and it finished with a visual i'm not gonna tell you exactly what visual was a private board meeting but but it was awesome and it made me realize the one thing marketers do have is they have the ability to excite mh and it's not just data it's not just it it's not even storytelling and anecdotes having something visual a video a customer testimonial something exciting happening and at an event finding a way to bring the board into that especially in private companies i think nah that's not sure even public companies this is true getting them to to live the brand and feel like this is the ram they own the company oh now i can see it yeah it was awesome and so i'll do that absolutely every single time going forward whenever i'm in a boardroom boardroom leaving them wanting more because they're they're you know they're excited about like the now it sucks for the guy behind you right if if it's the op the coo that's presenting next great thanks that's but but yeah i mean i think that's it's a helpful thing that they that folks can do yeah and i think you know we should reiterate the point again that we've that you've mentioned around marketing jargon just within boardroom spaces because i can imagine you've seen it and being guilty of it time and time again just using jargon that people don't understand yeah yeah even i mean like internal names for products and stuff like that like you might have you might wanna tell them this product is doing better than this product like they may not even recognize your the names of those products and now they're completely lost yeah so really putting your your your you know grandma goggles on that's what i call them but if if my grandma can't listen to my message and generally understand like she's a bright woman she she should be able to understand what i'm telling her and and why it matters if i'm losing her i should probably rethink my approach so yeah i think the other thing is or the other tenancy of folks that aren't maybe experienced in this environment they'll come in and they wanna do such a good job they wanna set they wanna you know get people excited they wanna motivate they wanna impress and they result the result as they set expectations that they'll never live up to in the next meeting right we're gonna sell you know this might so it's really important that in your first meeting but then in every meeting you do tell them what what you're gonna be doing over the neck you know in the next period say it's quarter in the next quarter and what they can expect but in those cases i would be very conservative and you again whenever ever it you know review all of that with your ceo your cfo ahead of time make sure that that those plans are aligned no surprises in the management team ever and the definitely no surprises for the ceo that's a best that's a bad career move but for but if you're the marketer you know you re yeah you wanna be able to talk about the key decisions you plan to make any any major personnel moves it doesn't matter if you're gonna hire a new copywriter ford doesn't care yeah so leave that alone but but you know any major things you know you're expanding your team to europe that's that's something or to america in this case something that you might wanna mention to your board and then as you're setting expectations and what the key outcomes are for next quarter though that's that's an important thing to to both make sure you present because you will have one or more board members who go back to the previous quarter deck and review that interesting i could and then go to the new quarter deck mh and and i have been called out on yeah i wonder so josh yeah last quarter you said on this page here and if you don't know your own stuff thankfully i was able to say yeah well you you i won't call navigate it but but here's yeah here's why we've made this shift and yeah and what we learned and so on but yeah anyway you don't wanna be cut flat footage yeah that's a that's a good point that's a definitely good point i suppose does that round it out in terms of how to prepare what to expect inside the border yeah i think so okay cool i would love to hear firsthand experience some of the biggest mistakes that you've seen inside of the border from cmos and maybe or mistake mistakes that you've made inside there as well that people can avoid yep so we've we've touched on a couple of those already the the the the the tendency to over explain to over present that's for so like i that's definitely number one so many marketers who love what they do and and are proud about what they've achieved they goes head long into the details and i mean you you're trying to give them the no fly zone and like kicking them under the table and it's just you know pull it back up really understand really understanding your audience and the degree to which they're ready and able to to receive the information that you're presenting to them is you know is important getting lost in vanity metrics mh so talking about metrics that have you know we grew x by sixty percent this quarter but it has no business connection yeah is bad move and and again you'll lose your audience or you'll just you know we you'll you won't demonstrate that you understand how the business works do you think you lose a bit of credibility yes with that's exactly people as an executive not as a not as a marketing person sure but at like oh your marketing person great they don't need to come back to the next board meeting yeah i've seen that multiple times and you know and it's just something to be to be cautious of i think there are times when executive teams don't prepare enough together none of us like to role play yeah but role playing for a for a team and having your entire executive team together and going through those operational slides super important super important and having one member of the team sitting out who who maybe isn't gonna have an active board presentation rule but kin has has some senior and and can listen for what board number's gonna care about yeah or maybe it's one of those consultants or advisers that yeah that they may be bring in having them in that session to to shoot at you it's way better to get shot at practice than it is in the real game right so i think that's oftentimes we we see some of that and so it's good to to plan for that i wanna be sensitive here we all want to be seen as doing a good job in my very first board meeting remember i was a company called be mark and i was very interested in self preservation i was much younger in my career and i really wanted to make sure that the board felt like i was doing the right things and and i was and so my metrics were or my presentation was far more me focused mh and not business focused like fight the temptation these these people they're just people but they wanna know that you're doing that the business is doing well that this asset that they own is is in good hands they don't they're not walking into the room doubtful of you so so just kick that impostor syndrome out the door and instead focus on how you can make their lives better by giving them information that they can use what if the business isn't doing well well that i mean that i've been in those situations we all have that to me investors don't want leaders that hide from that yeah you have to confront that head on like right in the face and say look we know this isn't what we want here's what we've observed here's where we're having trouble these are things that we either can change or things that we can't change about the market at the world our competitors sometimes that that does need board help sometimes there's a legal solution to certain challenges that are in yeah that are facing like acknowledging the real problems the the major risk problems for any company is is absolutely part of presenting to the board and that and you know again you just you can't do it just on the fly like you've you've got make sure you prepped for that with your leadership team and i i think you'd agree with this but no matter what role you're in or what level you're at i think that's something you should always take forward like don't get hide from absolutely negative results like set the the plan in place to combat those negatives one of our core values at blend exactly so yes we wanna hit hit things hit challenges head on yeah and and sort them out face to face without trying to sweep anything under of the rug yeah because you get found out as well yeah in the end yeah it comes it comes to roost yeah yeah absolutely it's never never a good idea to hide behind the negative results because if you're just trying to impose positivity on a negative business situation like the people at the top are seeing business metrics declining mh and if you're just presenting positive impacts there's not aligning and yeah you you're gonna get found out yep absolutely cool what if you're not in the boardroom yet and that might be people that are either aspiring to be in the boardroom or are i just actually interested to know you know how you might go about preparing for that or what really happens how even earn earn a spot really yeah right like so when you're talking to your cmo if you're reporting to the cmo when you're working with your if you don't have a cmo but yeah the cro is handling all of that and you want so you wanna have access to that first of all ask right like you have to make your desires no not all of us can just assume that like i know a lot of people that would never wanna be in the board room they run for the hills yeah i'm sick that day so you yeah make make your your desires known but then work for it mh be able to like everything we've talked about if if you're not the one presenting the person you're talking to is the one that's gonna have to do that job help them be successful yeah show them that you can get you know you understand the world that they're walking into you want them to be successful and so you're willing to go and do some of the grunt work that might be necessary digging through data putting together stories and and framing them in ways that that help them prepare so that they have a reason to think that you might actually do a great job yeah coming along and being have you know having a seat yeah be the side kick like the robin hood that's gonna that's often where it starts yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah love that anything else for for that more junior i don't wanna say junior but the marketing person the marketing team member who's not yet being invited to the board i think the only other thing that i would really stress and this is me as an ex cro is really understand your cro like mh understand how they're driving the revenue strategy and connect always think about the revenue strategy don't think about the marketing strategy as much right think when you when you're not only when you're prepping for the board but as you think about your job think all the way through it don't think your job ends with creating pipeline or creating leads or creating conversions or whatever you're or creating images would depending on what your job is right you think about how all of that connects to driving revenue driving nr driving eb arr growth all of the the things that investors care about and that your executive cares about because if if you can't do that and you get and you're stuck really just like all i can think about is my piece without that broader view of the business you you're just not gonna get to that spot yeah cool alright i think that probably you know wraps this up i was just looking at the time there and thought yeah we're probably like almost always been going an hour hour which is kind of like flown bike right that has flown back is there anything you kind of wanna like wrap up with leave some like rapid tips or takeaways of people from this i mean i don't have anything new properly but i give you three three summary points know your audience walk in their shoes speak in business outcomes not tactics and rehearse your message or rehearse until your message is super clear two slides there you have it remember your out the outcomes that you're trying to drive are real demonstrated command of your market of your individual business in that market and and of the metrics that drive that business and if you can do those three things you can set the right prop the right expectation the right impression with that board the first time you get in there and then from there then you can start to pull them into more substantive conversations and plans and strategies and so on love that alright well let's wrap it up there i am just so excited to do more of this stuff right these kind of topics on the podcast because even though some marketers might hear topics like this and think oh well you know that's not about conversion rate optimization or that's not about how do i get more leads from linkedin and we will still cover those things on this podcast for sure because our audience isn't an all cmos actually the minority is cmos and a lot of the people that we speak to from this podcast are yeah not cmos and do you still want that tactical thinking but i think as a marketer if you can understand what happens in the boardroom what happens in the c suite what happens when they're talking about financial metrics and exits in the business and like all of these kind of things that like truly matter to the bottom line you can just level up your marketing you know tenfold and yeah really become an even bigger asset to the business and like i i am super excited to learn more from you and do more of a of these podcasts and listen back to them and vice versa yeah like this is gonna be awesome and i hope that everybody listened to this podcast enjoys diving into some more of this stuff alongside you know our usual more tactical things as well because yeah i think it's kind of just really helping marketers to to become the best they can be in their role so yeah awesome really looking forward to what we do next i think our next episode on demand decode will also be us again so say stay tuned for that and yeah apart from that we will catch you next time it's been amazing thank you everyone and see you next time

hi everyone welcome back to demand decode dan here with phil as usual and today we're talking about conversion rate optimization it's not a new thing in bt marketing it's not sexy thing in beats marketing it's something that actually a lot of people don't care about and don't think about it's not the new kid on the block that everybody's racing to understand and racing to implement in their business but as ahrefs report showed ai overview in search are reducing clicks by thirty four point five percent so now it's more important than ever to have a good strategy for conversion rate optimization on your website and really make it work harder than ever i know it's something you know phil we've championed for a long time lap blend and believe i mean i agree with everything you say in terms of how cro is perceived by marketers but you know ultimately for me it's one of it's been one of the sexiest things going for a long long time because it's so important it's so it's so impactful it's such an opportunity for many businesses and given how much of the rest of our efforts are aimed at getting people to our website in the first place it's really key that marketers take responsibility for their website's conversion rate and you know optimize it and maximize it so many of the clients that we work with have seen significant results through applying their attention our on our effort here it's a huge lever that can be pulled and a lot of marketers don't pull it because they don't fully understand it like you say it doesn't necessarily you know get talked about in quite the same way as some other tactics channels methods they think it's not for them because they're not in commerce or they don't have the kind of volume that others have but yeah cro is important and can be a huge lever yeah well i think you said at our event last week you know if you implement it in the right way you take the right approach to conversion rate optimization and implement implement that in your b2b design we're talking like over a hundred yeah i mean isn't i i said well there are two things that i think one is very few b b websites have been optimized for pipeline generation efforts may have been made to optimized conversions but very few have been thoroughly overhaul and optimized in terms of the user experience by a journey to create pipeline when we apply our house approach to that it's not unusual to see a hundred to four hundred percent increases in the high intent conversion rates on those websites which is basically pipeline huge impact yep and it means that everything that you then do to drive more of your ic to your website whether that's advertising whether that's organic whether that's ai whether however you get people there you're able to turn more of that attention and their interest into pipeline and it's wrong to believe that buyers will convert no matter what yeah you know you can significantly positively impact the number of buyers who arrive on your site that reach out to you if you take steps to optimize their experience and and give them what they need and want from the journey and you know optimize the way that you get them into the pipeline and into the conversation with sales all these things have an impact and they can transform your results without a doubt and it is just amazing how much budget is spent on ultimately getting buyers to your website because whatever you do in go to market whether it be outbound events paid media organic search like generative engine optimization now whatever it is if people are seeing your brand name or have a direct link to your website or want to convert and speak to you or get a demo from your a free trial in some way they will be visiting your website the buying committed the buying committee for that deal will be visiting your website like everyone is coming there but the actual proportion of budget that's allocated to conversion rate optimization and making that website work so much harder to then you know double down on the rest of the marks thing budget the investment like is so negligible yeah it's ridiculous completely agree i i think a lot of businesses would do well to actually real budget and split it you know more evenly or at least more favorably over channels that drive attention and and and traffic and interested in and website conversion optimization whereas in a lot of businesses i reckon zero percent at the budget is attributed to website improvement over time yeah i understand that a new website is always an extraordinary capital spence right you cannot fit those typically into your operational costs for marketing but maintaining and improving your website should be something you're always doing you know and and it's not hard actually if you if you have time and budget allocated to it what's even more sort of interesting and i think foundation is like quite a lot of marketers don't even collect the data that's needed to make those improvements like you know so many don't have heat maps you know running on their website not necessarily all the time but at any point throughout the year to find out what buyers are doing don't even necessarily look at website analytics in a way that leads to conclusions about how to drive more pipeline so there's a shift there needed as well and then you can start to implement certain changes without replacing the website but b is different to b and different to e commerce where some of the changes that you need to make to see the big gains are you know fundamental you know they do exist at the at the lowest level of the website and they can only really easily or efficiently be implemented when you are doing a big update a big replacement but there's always things that you can do in between those to adjust an and incrementally improve the conversion rate for sure yeah for sure and i think we'll talk about a few of those today i think for me when it comes to conversion rate optimization and where you start it's essentially aligning your website in the experience of your website to your buyers like needs and wants from that experience itself yes absolutely in addition what they their behavior what they will and will not do on a website whilst trying to service those needs and once it's a it's a combination of those two things i think there's an interesting risk developing at the moment where we've often said in conversations before that your website is not a place to be innovative per s as in buyers are not really there to figure out how to interact with your website how to navigate it so in two innovative approaches to navigation to layout out of content can be counterproductive mh and i've seen actually with the in with the sort of dawn of ai in the buying journey there's some innovation going on at the moment in website user experiences and i fear that smes might be moving too soon before buyer behavior caught up because the best results in terms of pipeline come from aligning the experience to the information requirements and needs and the behaviors that they really demonstrate on your website today and that intersection is where you get conversion rate optimization yeah yeah absolutely one really good example that i actually saw from us for the customer was that they they'd already done some really great persona research so they'd clearly outlined who their audience is who their buyers is and what information they need before they eventually convert and then how they like to convert right when you have a look at the persona information and compare it to the the website the information that's on there the conversion points are on there they were totally miss a misaligned okay so you know the well the homepage hero messaging to start with didn't tell them exactly you know what they were looking at on that website the product information available wasn't the kind of product information they needed to consume before making a decision and the conversion offer was just a simple you know contact us as opposed to aligning to exactly how it they like to buy which is either talk in sales or getting a quote yeah like even just that language get a quote even if it is still contacting somebody and the process is very similar using that exact language which essentially aligns to the task they need complete whilst on that website will improve conversion rate and we saw it first and that yeah that for me that's about creating mutual benefit in terms of giving the buyer what they need and want from the process but also you what you need and want from the process it means every conversion that comes through that is like q is high quality and likely it's so yeah that's one of one of several key strategies that we employ which is a align your conversion offers to the needs of the buyer that's on your website today you know yes you can aspire to change the profile of the buyer that's coming into your website but whilst you do that you wanna maximize what you've got in front of you at this point in time so that's a that's a key track g for sure 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 so if we rewind a little bit i suppose phil because yeah good example there but speaking more generally what are some of the core things people should be looking at when it comes to b to b conversion rate optimization specifically yeah so i think the things that have the like largest individual impact are probably the the contents of the homepage header section the hero section are either the first thing that via see when they're on your website and they're giving you that eight second blink test to decide whether it's the right place for them or the wrong place for them and they go off the approach you take to navigation and how people get through your site and in what order to discover content is another key thing that you know can have a pronounced impact on its own all things have an impact and then what you offer in terms of conversion what the experience is and what happens after it are the big ticket items you've also got to look at every page and its contents you know things that are things that apply everywhere across the whole site as opposed to specific areas are stuff like your typo geography you know is your site easy to read is it legible is the font size big enough is the font way high enough is it easy for a visitor to consume the content that's there is your copy scan you know is are your paragraph short in length and is it concise and are there headlines everywhere that show people which bit of content focus on because we know b b readers are skimming they're not reading word for word so those sorts of things apply universally they've got to be on every page every site and sometimes that'll will require you know going back to the brand point to update that but if you can move it in the right direction you should but then when i look at b websites i typically see three core mistakes made that if changed if corrected can produce some of the impacts that we see which is homepage homepage content messaging navigation hand yeah let's version offer let's dig into those though because homepage messaging is a fundamental issue that we see again and again and again and again when it comes to websites what is it that is so wrong about messaging like a lot of the time really it's yeah it's not even a minority of website it's it's really interesting because i i i suppose there are simply many more mistakes than right ways to do it right which is you gotta visit your website you know they they may know something about you but typically they will behave in a very fresh way right they they don't they they come with a sort of blank canvas opinion of your brand your website and you've got a few seconds to make a first impression and you only get one chance to make a first impression the contents of your homepage hero need to communicate your your value proposition you're positioning why you're the right solution for them at that point in time you know in that moment and why they should stay businesses trip up here because they struggle to come to terms with or find ways that are both clear and and concise but also creative and often you find that they reach for overly creative solutions to their homepage hero statement which unfortunately ob escape the actual meaning they don't communicate what the product is who it's for and why it's unique or important or or or powerful positioning is a broad topic right and you know it's a business strategy and your positioning is the product of your you know products unique features and and benefits your buyers challenges the market you're in the category buyers think you're in is all these things affect your positioning and you don't want your positioning to be relayed word for word on your website you actually wanna be able to test different ways of communicating your positioning but your positioning has gotta come through the words on your website cannot be vague fluffy words that tell people nothing about your your product solution for all your problems doesn't actually get people to stay in dig deeper and and the other big mistake that we see often is people using their lap line as their headline on their home homepage twenty website and strap lines typically create these big images around you know grand impact and you know exciting things but contain no meaning yeah so there's an art and a science to homepage messaging and it is a it's about getting across your positioning your value proposition in a unique creative way that doesn't lose the meaning ultimately yeah and sometimes that means coming to terms with the plane way of speaking the we often think is necessary yep but actually some of the best results i've ever seen have come from the most plain and the most boring way of communicating value proposition we do x for y differently because of that you know and that will actually get people to stay on your website navigate and potentially convert at a higher rate than something that's incredibly lofty vague and lacks meaning yeah yeah it is just so true that that strap line issue is such a big one and it it does come a lot of the time from like branding agencies then like doing the website and having such a big influence on that as well because it might look great it might be sold into the business as this great idea and like everyone can get behind the concept and it's fine as a strap line but it just doesn't work as homepage messaging absolutely i i was thinking about this recently and i realized that there's probably a dilemma in businesses which is where they come at this problem what to put in the home homepage here with the idea that it's got to be perfect it's got to be the one and only version and therefore it's got to contain the the highest most important message you've got and that might be your strap line what i encourage businesses to do actually is d this home homepage section from their brand from their positioning to create the freedom to test different messages there create the freedom to to test different ways of saying what you do and what's different about it and see what impact that has on you know conversations you have with people what people tell you during the sales process and obviously results because you need the freedom to be able to iterate and to be able to change it the the message there without it changing your brand and without it changing your purpose for doing things and that's a really important step to take if you d those and i think that will remove the problem for a lot of people because it mean we're no longer trying to create the one perfect message that sums up our business we're creating the message for now you know for for this month for this quarter because of this trend because of this buyer a behavior we're seeing and we and we are free to change it over time and that's a powerful place yeah the the really easy test here is when you look at your homepage or when somebody else looks at your page i don't know ask your wife ask your mom ask your dad ask your friend whoever it may be say when you look at this can you tell me exactly what this business does and who they do it for yeah if not you probably need to make that message a bit more clear absolutely every buyer trying to put you in a category right so if you leave that to chance or you you you end up in the wrong category your competitive position is gonna be really affected right so it's important to be clear and concise i've also said previously that ultimately if your homepage hero state value proposition statement is you know not clear not concise you know if the the result might be that the wrong visitor the the wrong visitor to your website can't tell that they're wrong and if they can't tell that they're wrong then the right one can't tell that they're right either so you're gonna get a lot of poor quality conversions wasting some of your time if you're not helping people self identify so there's lots of benefits to having clear concise sensible content in your homepage in the hero section and your imagery needs to support it if possible so you know it's been found over and over again that if you're selling software show your software yeah peep it creates that trust it creates that removes that obstacle that barrier to exploring further now not everyone has software to show and sell but your choice of imagery and your choice of whether it's static or moving are all elements of the user experience in that critical part of the site you can optimize this is why like i love this framing of conversion rate optimization because we're not just talking about the conversion point here we're not talking about changing a button color from green to blue which you might wanna test and it might work but like most people don't have the data to like me test and improve that anyway but this thinking around conversion rate optimization is all about you have somebody on your website the goal is to convert them but first you have to keep them there like exactly first you have to you know ensure they can understand what you do and move through your website like that is the first hurdle to go but that's the first part of conversion rate optimization completely and you make an important point the rare the reality is that most businesses won't have the volume of data to tell them exactly to do in these critical places you have to use aggregate data and external expertise to do it well and do it right and that's what you know we offer and you've got to use information that's been gathered across lots of different sites and research that's available on the topic cross reference it with your unique requirements to create real impact and success and have confidence what you're doing is gonna work because it doesn't come from like you say micro changes on button colors or individual words or or minor details because even if they have the desired impact the data won't necessarily be there to reveal it to you yeah not unless your apple or some sort of b to you know commerce or with masses of traffic and it takes huge volume huge volume not just on the site on that part of the experience yeah and a lot of us just don't have that yeah okay so we kind of covered off the homepage messaging in there the other two places you called out as you know having regular conversion rate issues were the navigation yep well let's cover navigating yeah i mean navigation is all about again a aligning experience to what buyers really do and really want from your site so that is fundamentally optimizing the the navigation for the device they're on you know presenting it in their format that is suitable for the device are on so that is you know on mobiles you're gonna have collapsed menus in bergen navigation and so on but on desktop you're gonna present it horizontally logically intuitively visibly not hidden away and you're gonna pick and choose an order the content on that navigation in such a way that it aligns to their informational priorities and you're also going to try to create an experience where it's intuitive and so that means it's a the term the term that i don't like particularly is informational sense but you want the headings that are in your navigation to give good clues as to what's behind them and what's there so you wanna structure navigation to flow good information to the top in a logical order and not take a necessary steps to like group things in in broad or vague buckets if you can now some of us have to have product services solutions that's the only way to get our content onto the site but if you can give more away at the top level you're gonna get more click through to your core pages and your core sites but also ordering things there's no point i don't think in the majority of cases yeah well it's always interesting me when i go to our website and the first thing in the navigation is home i'm like it's twenty twenty five we don't need to put home in the navigation you're already at home and everyone knows that the logo will take you home so you can get rid of home quite often the next option which will now be the first option is about us and like yeah okay that's good content to have on your website so it's always good to tell a story and reveal more about who you are but that is not why buyers are coming into to your website for the vast majority of the time so it's your product and it's pricing that they're gonna wanna see first so move that into first position structure it logically give away as much informational centers as possible reduce the cognitive load the burden that you put on the visitor to find the right information and content by making good choices on their behalf and you'll just get a lot more people going from that first page they land on whichever page it is and exploring the site and successfully achieving their aims for being on the site in the first place finding the information they need satisfying their questions their concerns and being inclined to go somewhere to convert yep yep love it great advice therefore phil and i think again this does stem from having that deep understanding of your buyer and your audience and what information they want to consume the behavior they take on you know particular journeys and aligning the navigation not just the content but the navigation to the information that they need to consume before they convert yeah navigation is one area where on a b website you might have enough density of like activity for for your data to be useful to you yeah which is why heat mapping software like clarity and hot jar and others is so is is useful particularly around navigation what are people clicking on like most and what are the positive and negative con like consequences of that where are they getting lost and what are they g rotating towards which content do i need to prioritize and optimize and update and which can i you leave until i've got time or budget left over so heat map data there is very valuable and of course research like there is so much good documentation on this topic out there you just have to read it and consume it and understand it and apply it to your data and you can make great strides in that area in particular yeah it's having that like proven industry research with a suite of data available to you yeah combine the combine the two of them and you you know you will have the proven practices that ensure you have a good amount navigation like you are able to optimize your website for conversion absolutely yeah the right research the right data and the right partners you can do great things yeah okay offer was the third one i think you mentioned yeah usually that's the sort of glaring opportunity yeah you know you might go to a website and you scan along the navigation everything's in the same font in the same format and then down at the end you've got this sort of tired old contact us link which doesn't stand out yeah the name button like no color there's no there's no yeah there's no contrast there it doesn't stand out and let's ask us i i i say to businesses and people that told me like ask yourself the question is contact us what we what we really want people to do on our website the answer is no we want people to act on their interest in what we offer in a way that turns into pipeline that's never contact us so that's never the best language for a key like conversion offer better language is always more aligned to the real exchange of information that you want to take place now that could be taught sales talk to an expert book of consultation get a quote could be take take demo book a demo tech trial there's always something better than contact us for your home homepage now for your hero even your website header navigation to create quality and quantity of conversions into your pipeline and we've seen the positive impact of that multiple times over you know we we changed our own website many years ago to essentially not have a contact us page and have a consultation page instead significant improvement in both quality and quantity customers recently have seen the same impact i was literally just looking for the case study with a robin radar we changed their conversion offer pretty quickly from contact us to talk to sales because ultimately like that is what the buyer is there to do yeah that's mark we don't hide don't need to hide the fact that buyers don't like aren't there to talk to sales if they want the products or the service they understand they have to talk to sales in order to do it's gonna have to have like it's like this taboo subject isn't it it's like oh sales like let's not put that word sales on there i do get it because when you're in more of a like consultative selling space as well you don't want to actually say that you're selling because it is more of like an expert led conversation i get it i do get it for sure but give it a go because they saw like an instant ten percent improvement yeah in conversion rate so i think it's rooted in a general sort of thing that marketers for val of which is this idea that if we sort of that we can maybe trick a few more people into buying from us if we don't say it clearly but that's not true you know people know what they need and what they're about it and so if you optimize for the high quality visitors to your website the ones that know that they're interested in your product and they're gonna have to talk to sales to get the final information that that's necessary that will produce like i said you can always increase quality that forgive me you can always increase quantity but it's harder to do so without it being at the expense quality yeah so if you lie about what your conversion offer is and you make it more attractive than it really is you might increase the quantity yeah but they won't go anywhere you won't have quality you know as well so clear specific honest mute beneficial course action are the strongest move on a website like that yeah that gets them to the page and then you've got the conversion page itself which has a lot of room for improvement in a lot of cases like does the text tell you exactly what's going to happen after you submit the form yeah like you wanna der risk that conversion basically so a buyer knows if i submit this form here's exactly what's gonna happen okay i feel more comfortable given away my information in order to receive that thing back think you said mutually initial mutually beneficial start right you know getting that across in the information before they actually convert adding social proof we added quite a cool section which was what was it who we're not the right fit for right yeah yeah because actually we we want to deter some people of course it's not because it's wasting their time to to us it's not beneficial for anyone so yeah there are things you can do you make an interesting point i reckon it it becomes easier to think about how you can improve the page when it's no longer a contact us page mh that changes the mindset and and the frame of reference a little bit and like you say a commercial bottle of the funnel high intent conversion page needs to have you know good content that articulate what will happen and what won't happen and der risk it you know supporting information like social proof and you know positioning like that like who should do this and who shouldn't do this and then of course you wanna make sure that what happens afterwards both on the website and in the handoff process is both reflective of everything that you've said and and promised up front but also a continuation of the seamless user experience that you've hopefully created on the website which is this is really honest this is really easy and this is really aligned to my needs and interests as a buyer so you can obviously you know route them to the right calendar page you can follow it by email quickly you can do a number of things to ensure that the good work you've put into your website continues yeah yeah and you know one of the things that i've seen us stu i don't know how long you know we've done this phil but is move that contact us form that businesses is still want and need ultimately for those generic contact us queries into the footer yeah i mean that was a move we made a long time ago now because the hypothesis was the leads that i get through this contact us page are shit you know they are really terrible leads you know when i look at the quality the quantity on balance it's meaningless i've got more people offering me their services through that page than inquiring about our product or offering so i was like i don't want that so i don't want that page yep now somewhere we came along with the idea of well let's have that form available on every page in the footer which to some degree you know might feel counterintuitive right why i have more contact us forms if they generate poor quality leads but the reality is that having them in the footer within the context of the pages that contain useful information about our services in particular produces well more conversions on that form and better quality quite a lot of our good fit leads still come through the footer contact form as opposed to the hero book consultation form right it's had a really really good effect and and it has worked out has had a similar effect cross number of sites so it's a strategy that i think is quite counterintuitive not well you you know not common not frequently adopted but really could be quite powerful yeah it's yeah it's one that i now see on every single website that we've right absolutely absolutely there must be some good data telling us to do that well i was on reddit the other day and put an individual posted that they'd they'd had somebody advised them to do the very same thing do do away with their contact us page i and put it in the footer and that they seen strong results from it and that person wasn't me so it's it's obviously spreading which is probably our customer i i asked the great i said was that person me because not a lot of people say that but regardless it's a great move it's a sound strategy and you lose nothing ultimately yeah by not having a contact us page let's face it if we look at data across all the businesses we work with you won't see a high that being a high quality source of opportunities it just doesn't it that way yeah for sure okay so we've covered some core areas there like homepage messaging navigation offer is there anything else to cover in terms of like obvious blind spots when it comes to b2b cro i'm sure there are i mean ultimately every page needs to be ordered and structured in a logical order so for example on your home homepage you might wanna have social proof pretty early on pretty high up yeah quickly get across that signal but on your product pages you don't want that to come before products information for example so each page needs to be structured in a way that aligns to the priority with which the information you know best relevance to the visitor so you can usually you know review each page for the the order in which you present information and also the way in which you present that information scan text lots of headings and supporting imagery that's actually supporting yeah opposed to just nonsense and not gating crucial product information which i still see yeah i mean that's a that's a very good i mean we've obviously talked about un gating content and that's a that's a ship that sailed which is great well is it well i not i would like your things like conversations week it should be yeah a good point they're yeah there are lag ards yeah but yeah like i think there's a lot more confusion around gating case studies product data sheets and brochures and the like and i mean i think you've always just gotta look at if you've gated that information what have you been able to do those leads afterwards yeah are your buyers the people who actually buy from you seeing it first or are they actually just not because it's behind a gate your data will tell you and yeah for the most part i think it's gonna be clear that you should un gate product information un gate case studies so that buyers can consume it freely anonymously on the side the the thing you have to ask as well that won't be visible in the data though is how many buyers are we losing by gating how many are just not looking at this information going elsewhere where this information is free to consume rather than actually filling out yeah i mean you know when i think back to when we first un unblock content you know full stop it was because i could see clearly that the people that bought from us we're not seeing the gated content you know and it was so stark and so off obvious so i was able to form a pretty strong conclusion which is the buyers that buy from us and the buyers that don't are not seeing the content if i believe the content will have a positive impact on our reputation or you know our the buyers his opinion universe of us then they need to be able to see it and so it was pretty clear to me that it needs to be un so i think people can review their like their their stock of content in the same lens which say well if the people who buy from you are not first downloading that content then it's a clear sign that the people who who don't buy from you are also not downloading that content yeah and the people are are downloading that content i'll probably just leads that you've just can't convert you struggled to convert yeah they or tell you that as yeah sure exactly i mean you know ultimately there's loads of little things that you can do and it is all about just reviewing everything with a critical eye and with data and with research to say can this be made more suitable for a buyer who's on our website researching and what we offer and there's lots of things that you can do across your site but we've we've certainly touched on what i think are the the the biggest individual factors that have the biggest impact and are most often wrong those are the ones that people should look at yeah like quick smart yeah and i mean like we can be confident in saying this as well right because we over and over implement it god knows how many times i get blend right oh completely yeah i mean absolutely it's it's not unusual to see between as i said a hundred and four hundred percent increase in high intent conversion rate when you apply our best practices for conversion rate most of which are out there for people to read it about and and and apply themselves if they look around it's a huge lever that has a multiplying magnifying effect on everything else that you do successfully before and after but i should you you you shouldn't leave it to lang because you know at least i don't know what fifty percent to a hundred percent of everything else we spend in marketing it has a aim of bringing someone to our website yeah and so if your website is converting poorly and rates differ dramatically across issues right rate is the hard thing to talk about everybody wants a benchmark but rates are hard can we give a benchmark well i was gonna say that it's it's not unusual to see a website because so few have been optimized around this kpi to see websites that convert at zero point zero zero something you know that that is not new so is that visitor to high intent exactly yeah visitor to high intent conversion bottom of the funnel conversion you know commercial conversion offer you know a really small number often very lower sometimes a whole decimal point lower like so small almost nonexistent existent but by optimizing your website for your buyer's experience you can skyrocket that you can move that to zero point zero two or zero four or zero point one yeah you can make huge strides and they're so close to pipeline the impact is massive and then everything you do will produce more pipeline from the same investment it's it's a no brainer yeah i'll tell you what i think this episode just made conversion rate optimization a bit more sexy you'd hope so wouldn't you when you think about the like the the gains the gains and the opportunities that are available yeah it it does require that marketers think in terms of revenue contribution right really it does it does require that mindset that we're here to generate pipeline and you have to navigate the situations where your kpis leads and the sales team won't expect the leads and any drop in leads will be you know a problem for you this is all about optimizing for high end conversions so hopefully if you can look at it with that viewpoint that mindset you can have an incredible impact on your business yeah for sure alright let's wrap it up there shall we conversion rate optimization i enjoy the great episode yeah i feel like you would really getting into the flow that well we'll go into more detail on a lot of those topics on websites decode we've we're talking about them more specifically but that's a nice overview of things that people can look at today look at our portfolio see what we've done kind given a lot of it of away there yeah for sure well do exactly as phil says otherwise he'll be knocking in and yeah hopefully you enjoyed this episode i did it's a good one and we catch you all next time to you next time bye everyone

hi everyone welcome back to demand coded just a quick episode today from myself and phil because you might have noticed that on our podcast podcast artwork there is a small banner at the bottom now which says hubspot media and we're so excited to now be part of the hubspot podcast network and hubspot media network more generally it's like an amazing exciting time and opportunity for us to join the hubspot media network it means you know we're part of thirty forty other shows and even broader content creators more holistically across other channels and in terms of what it means for the podcast well it won't change a huge amount you know fill and i and other guests are still gonna sit around this table you know online wherever it may be and bring the best insights we possibly can with our own knowledge of you know clients work and successes and knowledge of other people communities that we're part of and you know bring them and share them on this podcast but it also means it will enable us to do more podcast podcasts better podcast podcasts and have access to some fantastic and awesome guests as well so yeah it's only gonna mean fantastic amazing things and yeah it's just like such an exciting thing to happen for this and our other podcast as well which yeah i should mention at the end yeah it's an incredible group of creators the hubspot podcast network that we're incredibly proud to be part of with demand coded and websites decode and and although it's not a requirement in order to be in the podcast network we we've of course been a hubspot partner as an agency for many years now since twenty thirteen twenty fourteen and i forget when we exactly formalized the relationship you know but we've believed in hubspot you know for a long long time and we're constantly checking you know what hubspot offers against the requirements of our clients of our business and it constantly consistently exceeds everything we need and all our expectations so we've been a partner of for a long time we believe in and we you know we really really utilize that that that platform to a great results great extent so becoming part of their podcast network is just an incredible honor you know it's a fantastic real feeling to be you know included amongst those greats but also you know another reflection of the quality of the partnership that we believe in hubspot so yeah no change to what our mission is here with this podcast what we're trying to do but certainly a signal you know that says that we're gonna keep doing it we're gonna try and make it better and better and better and you know they are a a i trusted partner to us in more ways than one absolutely and you know you may notice a few ads for hubspot now pop up aside from just the way we talk about them anyway like hubspot always pop up on this podcast because it's a suite of products that we fully believe in to meet so many requirements for marketers and for businesses but to be honest like we're super proud to be doing that as well because like it is a product we are you know always happy to promote to people because it fits so many needs and helps out so many businesses yeah it's a cornerstone of our offering as a hospital website agency and demand generation agency and you know it's been a key you know pillar of our growth over the last decade so really really pleased to be partnering with them and not having to russell up sponsors every week you know to promote because we don't want to do that whereas this is a real yeah a real match made you know in not heaven that's thoroughly but it's a good match close it's a good match place enough and yeah their support will help us to do a lot more with the message and with the podcast you know without having to change our approach to it which is really great yeah for sure and as i mentioned and phil mentioned earlier we also have another podcast which i'm not sure like what the crossover is between demand code and websites decode but they're both now part of the hubspot media network and the hubspot podcast network more specifically and i would absolutely say like now is a great time to go and check out websites decode if you're listening to tom demands coded because it is such a great podcast that fill host with really short actionable episodes that you can listen to every single week to implement advice straight away into your website as we know the website is such a cornerstone piece of every single marketing strategy and only becoming more important so you know it's a podcast worth checking out and i think a lot of people will get instant value from listings to that yeah it's a website decode is an excellent companion to a demand decode yes ultimately a lot of what we do is trying to create traffic to our website that we can then convert and it gives me great pleasure on websites decode to share all the ways that we've learned to optimize your website conversion rate the user experience around the generation of pipeline which is the ultimate goal of a demand generation approach to marketing so they go hand in hand really well and we'll be doing a lot more with that one as well as a result of this fantastic partnership yeah for sure cool yeah i mean the last thing i would say is go and check out obviously all of the other podcast podcasts that are part of hubspot podcast network it's full of all kind of business topics really yeah and great podcast podcasts when i think of some of the ones in that you know mars against the grain my first million like the nudge like some of my favorite podcast podcasts are part of the hubspot podcast network the best names out there which is awesome go and check them out you know a a huge range from marketing to sales customer success like business podcast and some of the best ones there so do check them out but yeah just wanted to update everyone really because there's gonna be some exciting things coming on this podcast and yeah we're really look like looking forward to the next phase i think yep here's to the future of our podcasts with hubspot cool alright we will catch you all in the next episode see you

hi everyone welcome back to demand coded dan here with phil nice to sit down after a a few weeks not in the studio which is yeah it's always nice to get back in on today's episode we are covering what to include in your marketing dashboard and i feel like this has always been an issue for marketers but with ai coming along and really like raising the stakes and the importance of marketing the importance of understanding what's working understanding what we actually need to measure in order to keep an eye on things make sure we understand where things are moving and where we need to jump in and like what we actually need to analyze understanding what's in your marketing dashboard and who needs to see what information and when is just so important and it is just what like we do talk about measurement a lot because it is still a just fundamental issue across entire marketing team so yeah that's what we're gonna cover off today yep good to be back it is an interesting topic it's not a new topic but it's changing and evolving because there are changes affecting us every day what i think is key is the fact that you know marketers for a long time have had challenges getting by and getting support getting trust from senior management yeah getting the budget they want getting permission to use the budget the way they want and largely it's been well at least a factor is the disservice they've done themselves in terms of what they've presented and reported back on there's a lot of useful data within marketing but the data that you need different audiences to see differs and marketers have not always been good at identifying that difference we've seen that over and over again and we've fortunately helped some change that but it's a p pervasive issue that i think everybody would benefit from getting clear on if they wanna be given the support and trust internally that they need in order to do their job like you said marketing is very very data driven as a discipline you need good instincts but you need data to support your message and to and to get the trust that you need from others yeah yeah like you you've really hit the nail on the head there like marketing has become in some situations perceived as a cost center because they've presented themselves as a cluster center yeah in their data u they have only shown the cost that they're spending and not really showing what they're getting back from you cost yeah yeah well there you go you are a cost center the metrics that you report back don't carry value you're you're only you're only talking about what the expense was associated to them it does start paint you in a very cost center type picture yeah yeah good alright cool well let's help marketers out and really say what needs to be on this board yeah okay so phil i really like your onion analogy which you've used in a few different examples maybe you really like onions i don't know but i like the analogy anyway which is almost you know putting something at the center and peeling back the layers to potentially the less important or less crucial things yeah yeah so we we kind of chat before this and agreed on on our onion model right so where when it comes to marketing measurements and the data you have available to you at the very core of every business is the commercial metric the executive level metrics that everybody understands everybody can appreciate and everybody needs to know ultimately so the crucial things that should be that close one revenue marketing roi customer acquisition costs lt tv to some extent those kind of core things that are directly tied to business critical outcomes yep yeah absolutely well many things in life are onion like you know the analogy doesn't apply solely here at all there's layers right and when you sc something you often realize that you can peel back a layer and get something even more valuable beneath or even more important and that's true in marketing measurement too something that has been discussed for a long long time although it does still happen very frequently is that marketers don't peel back the layers when it comes to presenting to the management to the people the budget holders and they don't talk in terms of business outcomes they don't identify and show how the the effect of their work is contributing to things that you know are either measured in terms of financials or very very cor to those financials and so like you say a good is a management level marketing dashboard does not really focus on the cost of a channel to that business or where budgets being spent or what the you know kpis around optimizing for a platform or you know performance of a component are at all they don't talk about that they talk about things that make sense when we talk about business valuations revenue pipeline forecasts and and those sorts things so so to your point closed one revenue is probably the the number one thing to get clear on you said something fantastic on linkedin the other week which was you know marketers are expected to measure roi without any visibility into the r you know and and that's just that that's crazy right and this is where that that starts by talking about how much pipeline that the business one that you're able to demonstrate a role in the creation of is is the key to it and then you can layer around that additional useful data such as what is our cost per customer you know what is our return on marketing investment what are the you know average if we take into account some fixed variables lifetime value of customers you know or you know the likely sort of you know churn rates or whatever you wanna do you some of those things are not all perfect measurements of past performance but if you fix some of the variables they become useful storytelling around business impact of marketing investments and move you from that cost center perspective to this value creation profit center perspective which is where you start to win trust and support yeah and i do think there is maybe this is peeling back a layer here where you've got your core closed one revenue figure there but there there will always be questions around like where is that source who how can we attribute that back to an investment ultimately and i hear i hear some people saying oh well we can't do that we just need you know one figure or rally around something but i don't think many businesses jive with that because when you're investing in sales outbound motion event marketing like performance marketing linkedin ads brand campaigns you need to be able to attribute that investment to something so even if it's not at a channel level but it's at a kind of like signal and source level so for example from your close one revenue pipeline was that source a high intent lead on the website yeah was it outbound you know where did that person actually originate from into the database ultimately yes was it an import from an event you know like i think i think it's unhealthy for organizations to sort of argue the toss over each and every deal from a attribution from a credit point of view that's not healthy that doesn't create the right outcomes or behaviors but when you're analyzing the data i think you can draw some lines that say this segment of our pipeline was originated through the efforts of marketing and the budget that we spend not the team not the people but the budget that was allocated to marketing and this portion of pipeline was was originated through our sales effort you know and like there's always gonna be some gray area right there's always gonna be some crossover but it's about saying we put this amount of money in we get a result that we understand and we value and that's true in sales and in marketing of course we still need sales to close every marketing and put deal that's originated but far better to measure marketing in terms of how much it puts into the sales team that they can have a chance of closing than to you know fuel the fire but of the fight between the two you know and make and make it you know incentivized marketing to do the wrong things so that sales get recognition for everything yeah you see mark my point there's nothing worse on a dashboard than having marketing source and then sales source next to it because it just creates competition where neither really wants to support the other when in reality like you say every single deal that comes in needs sales to close it every single opportunity that comes through sales will have touched marketing at some point like whether it's the deck that you shared with them that marketing created but they will go to your website most likely at some point they will touch like each team in like every single scenario yeah 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've spoken to a few marketers recently and customers of ours and they've asked similar questions around our board wanna know if we put this amount in we get what will we get out of it ultimately that is what you know the board cares about the people injecting money into the business and care about ultimately if we put x in what do we get out of and like you need to be able to demonstrate that in some way that is really for me the most important metric in marketing you've got a budget to spend how effectively are you deploying that budget to get a return yeah yeah and in fact this sort of approach to reporting and and measurement and your dashboards is a two way street because it's not only what you know business leaders need to hear and see it also requires you to gain visibility and understand it right a marketing team's job is to make good sound investments of its marketing budget and if you're if you're looking at the wrong set of data reporting the wrong set of data you're not in a position to make good sound investments you may create metrics kpis that go up you may have high impressions high engagement high clicks high leads but if that's never measured through to business impact how can you say that's a good investment of that budget yeah so this so this this drives positive change in both directions and marketers need to be the need to be the first to make that change actually if they wanna change the opinion of the function if they wanna change the representation they have at the top table they have to start by measuring and assessing themselves in terms of these business kpis yeah for sure aligning a few of these things together is really important it's worth saying because customer acquisition costs for example is a funny one we were chatting before and customer acquisition cost is essentially just total cost of marketing divided by number of new customers and that's that's count of customers whether that customer is worth ten million or ten thousand doesn't matter like it is just the cost of acquiring however many customers yet got and obviously we always try to improve marketing metrics so customer acquisition cost we'd always wanna try and bring that back down but in reality it might not actually matter if customer acquisition cost is going up for you to acquire certain accounts like certain customers that you need to acquire in order to grow so that's where pairing customer acquisition cost with marketing roi yeah for example is super super important yeah because essentially what you're factoring in there is the average deal size that you're creating which if it's going up you can tolerate you can accept a higher customer acquisition cost so yeah it it is it is necessary to look at these things side by side and also over a variety of time periods right because nothing in b2b marketing happens you know starts in the morning ends in the afternoon is reported on in the evening right unfortunately we operate in sales cycles that are days weeks months years sometimes and a lot of these measurements are in the month so tracking the trend month over month but also quarter over quarter and in some cases year over year is really important to get the full picture like i say they might go up they certainly will go up with you know specific investments that you might make your new website for example your attendance at a key event these things will likely mean that you spend more in a certain month meaning your customer acquisition cost during that month will go up but your roi will be affected later on yeah so yeah really important to take a big view a broader picture and see them side by side and you know different timelines of customer acquisition cost because if you look month on month it might look like a a shark mouth you know with customer acquisition cost aligning with big expenses for example if you look over a longer time horizon and you might actually see like ka start to reduce slowly yeah and i mean there's probably some sophisticated ways to report on that even while it's going up and down as well but usually if you look at this over a you know the the length of your sales cycle then you start to get a really good impression of whether you're trending in the right direction or trending in the the wrong reaction and to be honest i would try not to over complicate it because as soon as you start over complicate something you've then got some serious explanation and reasoning to add with everything that you present it loses interest from people like you just need it easy to understand no measurement in marketing probably apart from closed one revenue is perfect well yeah i mean and even that you know again during what time frame based on what investment so you're a hundred percent right there is no mark measurement in marketing that's a hundred percent reliable trustworthy everyday no matter what you have to apply your intelligence to it as well but these are some good ways to make you know meaningful data available to your team and your you know business leaders yeah cool alright so that's that's the core i think of yeah the marketing dashboard they are the measurements that need to be on there and should be presented to the executive level that's what they'll all want know yeah yeah and then you can step back from there and say well what you know you're you're now sort of thinking about the marketing function specifically you know no longer looking at the sort of net result of marketing and sales working together on opportunities so there's a next layer of data which is reflective of as a function with a budget spend what what are we looking to optimize around what's our what are our major kpis for our own efforts right is that where you put the attention next yeah yeah so i've got it kind of down as the leading indicators and revenue drivers like what are the things that we can generate predictably that correlate heavily with revenue yeah and what are the levers that if we pull them will mean positive results on those business dashboard yeah so i've got things in here like pipeline generated some would argue that goes in layer one for me that's cut layer one is really the truth like you know the bread and butter that can't be argued yeah i think that'll business may differ on that way yeah but it's a valuable metric it's a lead indicator of revenue though that's the that's the difference for me it's an indicator it's not the like cornerstone definitive data point yeah so pipeline high intent leads sales velocity you could throw in there and then you can break things down like pipeline and high intent leads by self point attribution you've then got you know conversion rates lead or high intent leads to opportunity conversion rate for example these are all things that if you measure side by side if you you know correlate them with revenue as you increase one like revenue should also go up up ultimately and if not then you know you can identify the problem from that yeah exactly you know there aren't so many of them right it's it's interesting you know ultimately when you analyze everything marketing is trying to do it it boils downs some pretty fundamental stuff and i think you know high intent leads through our variety of channels probably the number one thing that marketing teams need to you know think about how they optimize their create creations for their assets for the result being pipeline you know again the conversion rate from high intent lead to pipeline might fall under marketing or sales depending on how an organization works but it's two really important metrics sales velocity that's a bit of a that's a bit of a challenging one i might be i might suggest people replace that with time to close or average time to close or at least have that data available to them there are people out there that would point out very quickly that sales velocity as a predictor a not a a a measure of past performance you know but your conversion rates from different sources into those things those like that's key data right i mean again we've spoken about marketers does not only need to understand like business metrics business impact but usually that's just simply a gateway to seeing the stark differences that exist from tactic to tactic channel to channel in terms of what really creates high intent inquiries pipeline opportunities enclosed one revenue yeah exactly exactly that and this is this is really where i love like talking to customers and really like putting this dashboard together when you start to show them you know what pipeline are we generate in from which self reported attributed sources you know where are our high intent leads coming from terms self employed attribution we probably haven't spoken and i was just about say yeah to put that on the list because i think it it needs to be there well yeah i mean i i put it in kind of like underneath things because you'd have the core metric like pipeline like high intent leads and then break it down by self report attribution but i still just love it like i still can't believe businesses just don't have this like i still speak to so many marketers that are just like what self employed attribution is mental have you seen any change in the nature of the self reward attribution responses we it's not so fresh a concept anymore and i've heard some discussions around you know businesses starting to think about how they capture it and you know what they put on their forms if you seen anything change or are people still giving us phenomenal insight it does depend on industry it does i'm in a lot of hubspot portals yeah for our clients and like i see a lot of data around this and it really does vary industry industry manufacturers for example will get online okay a lot you know very helpful online search you know sometimes just nothing or like web you know like set things that you can actually struggle to then attribute back to a channel itself yeah if somebody says online wow you know online is really anything now was it on social did you google me like a was it a you know it could be a whole host of things when you get into our industry for example where you're selling to marketers they're a lot more willing to give you a lot more information aren't you know our answers are still fantastic yeah insight for self support attribution like absolutely fantastic most people will tell you if they came from google search they'll tell you what they searched yeah amazing like it is it is that great but yeah it it does vary based on industry quite a lot but no reason not to have it right still there's no reason to not because you wouldn't have that data otherwise and occasionally you know you will get more in debt answers you know i'm i'm kind of general industries there because it does vary and that's what i've seen but it's absolutely still worth having yeah and i mean again you know self reported attribution has its proponents and its opponents it's never gonna be a hundred percent crystal clear reliable but it's better insight than you can get from a lot of other sources and better insight than a lot of statistical data ever will be yeah we would never never never reject it every time that i've recommended it that we've built it to report in dashboards the response has been like overwhelmingly positive that they can finally see some data that tells them a bit more than organic search or direct traffic you know this is truly telling them more about their overall marketing investments and which which ones are having an impact ultimately on these leading indicators of revenue love that love that yeah we're gonna talk next about the the the next layer which i think correct me if i'm wrong is gonna be more more in the channels more in the you know data points where ai is gonna a topic u is a topic here i don't think so necessarily because it's a channel ultimately yeah self reported attribution as we're seeing already as a lot of customers are seeing shows you where always is showing you you know we're hearing about you from chat from gemini from complexity they're still just using other forms of navigational search to find your website i don't think it fits in here though i i think when you're starting to look at what we'll get into it right share of voice and how you're being in ai for me that's channel performance yeah yep but you want to understand via self support attribution how how you're generating high intent leads through those channels yeah actually your thought comes to mind which is that you know as a marketer you always want to have you wanna be prepared with this data because although you know ai as a channel doesn't belong here per s or necessarily and therefore probably doesn't belong on that mark that management level dashboard you're gonna get questions about it yeah you need to be ready to refer to you know information and data that shows you've got a grip on it and you've got a handle on it without it becoming a top line measurement report i feel like it is one thing you said to me before actually which is maybe somebody you worked with back in your sony days but they always had the answer to data like whenever there was a question like that i think that's such a skill for marketers to just either have the data immediately know it or nowhere where to find it because it does paint a bit of a bad picture if the question is asked and you don't know the answer to it yeah i've met a few people like that over the years and i you know i've admire them greatly so yeah like you say these these layers are reporting you know not only required but they're beneficial because they mean that you can respond to questions when they go beyond what's being discussed and given the the height of the discussion on the topic of ai ar you're bound to get asked about it right yeah well should we just go into that straight well well listen outline the channel metrics first because we've got let's just you know recap right layer one was our commercial metrics executive level the metrics directly tied to business outcomes yep layer two we've got the leading indicators which basically forecast the future commercial outcomes but they're they're very relevant to like strategic planning as a business then you've got your channel level metrics so these are like the tactical performance indicators which would be used to optimize those individual channels yeah so yeah like you say i think ai is a channel linkedin is a channel youtube is a channel search is still a channel events is a channel events is a channel all of these things require their own individual analysis yeah there layer three though because they aren't as easy to correlate with those direct business outcomes you can't quite easily correlate linkedin ad impressions with revenue the two things don't correlate so as that correlation starts to disappear and grow greater you peel another layer off yep absolutely yeah i mean and within each of those channels there's you know potentially a dozen metrics that are important to your team important to you in terms of how you you know create and distribute content to those places how you measure them what impacts you're looking for so this is where we start to get into really granular data that's valuable and useful but it doesn't bubble up to the top because it just creates the wrong mess it drives it's focused on how you make the investment in that channel work hardest for you not what impact you're creating necessarily yeah one interesting thing well we should get onto the ai point actually sure we cover that on first so what's what to measure in terms of ai ai analysis right now ai visibility you know basically visibility within large language models people ask question people see your brand that's like that's what people wanna know that's what people wanna see is that worth including in the marketing dashboard now and how to get that data is the question i suppose well i think this is a rapidly evolving area where solutions are new and it will take some time to shake out what the real you know reliable methods are doing it but if you think about it ai is a place people can go to ask questions and that generates some data now as far as i'm aware at the time of recording this you know these these systems chat claw gemini i don't believe they're providing like a host pipe of analytical data to vendors but there is a growing category of solutions around ai analytics which i think are essentially using information that you provide to query a large language model and get a sense of which brands are present in this response and i think there's a few ways to be present you know to be mentioned to be cited to be linked to for example and you know it's probably time for businesses that you know well for businesses that for which seo was an important channel yeah it's probably time for these businesses to start thinking about how they can use these tools to understand their place in ai there might be rapid change down the road be ready to change your approach change your tool change your metrics because it's a it's an evolving area but it's encouraging to start seeing some platforms come through that will give you a you know a benchmark at a data point that you can track over time yeah and that's what we're looking into right now right like we wanna understand how the the channels vary between organic search and our visibility there compared to our visibility in ai in large language models and it is gonna become a a key driver for marketers going forward and i think everyone should well be thinking about this at least but be looking into the tools available that are out there i mean it's made clear for us right because we started to see self reported attribution yeah results come back saying fan and chat gp fan via ai and because increasingly google searches are being proceeded particularly when people are researching and using informational queries being proceeded with our overview ai mode is coming that may get in front of a lot more informational searches and frankly commercial searches as well how buyers it interact with those tools and engage with them remains to be seen what i think is really interesting in terms of ai sort of analytics and understanding is you know that there was a stat about google searches which is a huge proportion of them on any given day you had never been seen before a massive number like it was only the minority of searches that were repeated even though they aggregate that data to the keyword level i can only imagine that's like way higher in ai yeah because the the conversations are so much more natural and you know the query is so so much longer and more in detail and also con so the data that we get back about these is gonna be really interesting because imagine this right an ai analytics platform takes a keyword that you wanna be found for puts it into chat gp it gets a response how likely how often are we as users going to follow that pattern no never it's so it's gonna be a approximation as opposed to a rock solid definitive data point interesting things to think about and it's a conversational experience where no you will not have individual keywords and individual phrases it it's a conversation the the most interesting part for me is like how this all changes based on memory like if you enable chat memory function then you'll get wildly different responses between people for the same queries based on it's memory of you and your search history and it's conversations with you in the past yeah so yeah it'll be i i we don't really have a a tool to recommend like for yeah a yeah a kind of like fail safe way to measure of this i don't think anybody does no like isn't really experimental right now there's lots out there that are using the same techniques like you say they are basically querying ai models to then understand how many times you're referenced a lot of those are doing the same things based off of the same kind of processes but yeah i mean i don't know how it's gonna imitate memory and different personas no no i think we we've just gotta keep reading on the subject you know hopefully a ll you know vendors will continue to publish information and and content on how their models work you know this like the model itself in fact quite a few of them have said we don't really know how this is working you know which just kind of fascinating and terrifying to hear but ultimately they've got a a transformer in there which is you know taking in an input and producing an output but what's happening now is increasingly those tools those platforms are doing some sort of fan out web search right where they're going taking your query turning that somehow into a set of searches choosing results not necessarily the top results that's the question mark in the tulsa if they were just choosing the top three results this would be easy this we all know exactly what to do but because there appears to be as sem rush found low correlation between top search results and ai citations how are they selecting that content what signals are they using to choose what to return this is all stuff we don't know yet or we don't understand well yet and if we do understand it everything becomes a lot clearer yeah it's all it's really exciting this is such you know we've gone down a rabbit hole here but i think it yeah it's really it is really exciting i like everyone here is really exciting like we are in the weeds of figuring this stuff out absolutely figuring out you know which places do we need to have our brand mentions on most yeah like is wikipedia like pages necessary for every single business now potentially like how do we get in reddit in core like these places these third party websites that are being referenced sell off yeah exactly quite trusted yeah you know by the l and and by their users how do you get your name in there yeah it's kinda like digital p r to an extent as well so maybe need to think about you know whether we start to factor in strategies like that on top of you know owned owned content creation yeah or not yeah it is really interesting and i mean ultimately all these other channels that we've mentioned they're pretty well understood right when it comes to measuring linkedin measuring youtube and there's is some nuance there that some people might need to hear but you know you've got your engagement you've got your impressions you've got your clicks you've got you follow through conversions you've got your dwell time you've got your you know we know what the stuff there we do one thing i would say on any ad platform linkedin being the main culprit here is because we work with a lot of businesses who are leaning on linkedin to be their main ad platform and i think every single one that we've gone into to start with has no conversion tracking set up there's no excuse for me to not have conversion tracking set up to be investing in a channel and not understanding the impact that is having on conversions on your website yep which is the main place buyers convert yep for me there's just no excuse right that's good and good advice to everybody then which is get that place kinda like the revenue like challenge from markets like you're doing it blind if you don't have that data available to you yeah fascinating so in in platform conversions view through conversions for linkedin especially like need to be measured because many people will just be scrolling through the feed they will see your ad and might have you know some sort of brand recall aided recall to remember your brand and then go back to it later yep via search via some other navigational method you still want to be credited on linkedin yes like to have influenced that yes some way to know that that channel is working that buyers is seeing your ad and then converting at some point absolutely absolutely you know few things happen instantaneously right do it like people don't click on an add and buy in b that's not how it works and if you optimize around that you're optimizing for the wrong viewer the wrong outcome the wrong kpis but you gotta be able to like track back and see what impact you had with these platforms on your conversions and how that goes through to pipeline as well yeah that's good advice for everybody yeah the other thing i wanted to ask you phil is should website traffic beyond a marketing dashboard these days well i mean i think from a marketing team level there's no reason to remove it why you know why make yourself blind to something which you spend so long understanding and still contributes to some degree to your overall results but is it the report that goes in the top left of the dashboard anymore no certainly not the changing the role of search in pipeline generation is changing the importance of pipeline in the big picture of things the the website traffic rather in the pic in the big picture of things you shifted and so i'm i i'm still fond of search right i still get i still think we've spent so long mastering it and it will remain and it will still drive visitors to our website particularly commercially so why not know how many businesses are come to your website what's your thoughts on the subject yeah i think just because something is decreasing like it is for most businesses organic traffic is going down ultimately and i can only see it continuing to go down like it will ultimately continue to go down just because it's going down doesn't mean you should remove it from the dashboard because you need to see that as going down like that is that's just much of understanding okay our website traffic is going down what do we do about it like that's the purpose of a dashboard to understand the the movement of data and react yeah to it you might no longer take action to try and push it up right you might not try and drive website traffic up although you you would probably benefit to think of website tech traffic in terms of commercial versus informational and want commercial website traffic to go up but of course website traffic doesn't necessarily break down neatly like that so on its own it's not terribly useful in achieving that aim but yeah i mean i think the you only take something off a dashboard when it's completely not aligned to the goal you're trying to achieve yeah and it may be removed at some point as the correlation starts to you know get wider and wider between website traffic and the rest of your metrics it's like high intent website conversions yes and most businesses are already seeing that website traffic is dropping off because of informational queries but but informational traffic being swallowed up yes elsewhere but high intent leads pipeline like remains consistent like the gap is growing between those because informational search which didn't provide businesses with all of those opportunities is going elsewhere yep but the commercial queries like still remain in some sense yes it it was historically a leading indicator if you grew website traffic you typically grew yeah your high and intake versions as well no longer quite the same but not completely detached so i think for the time being it stays yeah then i've seen some weird weird things on marketing dashboards like that are reported to you know really senior people in businesses like domain authority score website bounce number of seo errors and stuff back number of backlinks all of this stuff by the way is becoming is a gonna become less important i think like these large language models and i know we'd get on to ai it seems like in with every sentence now but like domain authority is a google search thing it's not a chat thing it's not a flawed thing yeah claude and chat don't care about make that they're not measuring trust signals to your website and authority on on deciding whether to include you yeah they might at some point well it's interesting but it's gonna look different yeah absolutely you know it for for something to appear on your dashboard even even you know at the team level you've really gotta be able to draw a link between it and the business kpis that you're trying to improve which is which is if i spend a significant amount of effort improving this metric like am i going see the results i wanna achieve you know ultimately over the years you tend to develop a sense for this which is like bounce rate is not something that if you improve it you'll see you know you'll see a business impact you know etcetera etcetera so most of those things don't belong on a dashboard i mean again they're they're important data points so you use the skin of the onion pro yeah good because like it's not even the layer it's the skin yeah trusty bit i love that actually i think that's very well put which is say you definitely need it in your arsenal but it's not it's not dashboard material you wanna refer to it if you need to yeah i mean something else that i've seen quite frequently that is you know these funnel based reports these like conversion rate based reports and you know they they're quite they're quite pleasant to look at so i think people get quite excited about putting them in place but i've i've i've seen quite often that they look on their own they lack they lack insight they lack they don't give you a lot to go on my general preference when it comes to reporting at all levels is show a time series so that you can see directional travel these funnel reports only show you a snapshot whenever i've used the final report myself i've always put a previous period right alongside it so that i've at least got some comp yeah but stats snapshots moments in time they don't mean a lot so i think all of these metrics are best reported you know over time so that you can see the direction of travel are we going in the right direction you know it the days when we could exactly attribute you know the value of every pound to every outcome in in a performance marketing well they're over right so it's gotta be direction of travel that you optimize for are our investments driving you know increasing in increasingly better outcomes or worse outcome and what do we do to address that it's it's all correlation ultimately ultimately i are we what are we investing in and when and are we seeing a result in this time period yeah absolutely and yeah direction of travel ultimately brand is an interesting one because you know i'm a podcast addict and all i keep hearing in every marketing podcast that i listen to is the importance of building brand now i think you know we've said a few times on this podcast that actually this notion of brand marketing is actually just good marketing that isn't performance marketing yeah ultimately like it's just creating demand like it always has been but people like to dress things up and i get it to kind of differentiate it as a thing you know i see the value in doing that to be fair yes i think there are some ways to measure brand marketing and they can be useful on marketing dashboards understanding things in search console like how many people are actually searching for your brand name for example mh mh share a voice is a useful thing to understand branded traffic from seo so how many like people are actually clicking through on your brand like these are all important things to understand but i do think in the kind of like brand marketing era right now just investing and understand the correlation with those leading indicators is more important than these super specific metrics yes you know at which are you know again subject to the correlation challenge which is they don't necessarily one hundred percent line up and and tell you what the future is gonna be yeah so there's not a lot of point in you know his spending heaps of time and money to try and establish hyper granular data in the area now if you're a ginormous fm g giant it's a different story but if you're you know an sm or a scale up trying to drive pipeline then these directional or sort of sentiment indicators are are good enough for you and like you said i think i think whenever anyone myself included here's the term brand marketing i think about big lavish brand exercises and that's a form of brand marketing but it's not the only form most marketing can be brand marketing probably should be brand marketing when the outcome you're optimizing for is a better place in the buyer's mind yeah resulting in pipeline you know down the road that that brand marketing create it's i think inspires an image of big expensive of like costs but it can be small and and and you can do brand marketing every day in every way if you optimize for those outcomes yeah for sure okay cool anything else before we kind of wrap things up here should we just recap the layers that we've got gone so at the core of our onion we've got the commercial metrics executive level metrics directly tied to business outcomes yeah then we peel bach a layer we've got the leading indicators for that the revenue drivers so these metrics forecast the future commercial outcomes in layer one then we've got layer three the channel level metrics the tactical performance indicators of specific platforms and channels that buyers use then you've maybe got a bit skin on left hand onion where you you might you know just have some metrics in the arsenal like domain authority like bounce rate like some of these brand metrics perhaps in terms of branded search impressions branded search clicks those kind of things that could be useful to pull in when you're diving deep into particular channels yep yep and not a mention of revenue attribution in there all not a mention of revenue attribution but you good think absolutely given how hamish misleading it is yeah maybe we need to do an episode on that actually yeah i think i think i'll probably just about cuts that i think the big takeaway here is when to present that information and in what what format yeah like they know your audience and realize that that they have different requirements and needs and yeah and like change the record right if you're one of those marketers that's been frustrated by the lack of support the lack of trust lack of buy in first question to ask yourself is well is what i'm reporting consistent with getting that back from the audience this is the solution to that yeah for sure you know yeah if you want more buy in for marketing be perceived as a like serious function not just cost center like this is the approach to take absolutely yeah okay cool let's wrap it up there we'll have to do a little mini episode i think next time because people listening may have seen you know some small logo at the bottom of our artwork for this podcast now which is really exciting but yeah we'll talk about that and how exciting that is and well that means probably next time alright so yeah good that's where there yeah let's leave it let's wrap up cool thank you everyone for listening yeah if you drop a like on youtube drop us a subscribe and a follow on any podcast network that you listen to this too that be fantastic and see you next time thanks all

hi everyone welcome back to demand coded in this episode we're going behind the scenes of a real product launch with a brand we all know and admire for their marketing cog and it's really interesting because i got an inside look at this product launch with liam and some of a of the gang at cog out of meet up a couple of weeks ago a few weeks ago now i suppose and yeah it was awesome we got some amazing insights interested learnings that i didn't expect too and here liam is bringing you know the insights to us that demand decode which is great so yeah awesome to have liam here who is vp of brand and customer marketing at cog at cog and we're gonna break down you know the the details within this product launch so you know how they refine the ideal from a profile built the product that actually solves a real problem that they identified and most interesting probably to this audience is how they launched a demand gen campaign that actually delivered results so yeah awesome to have you here liam and it was great to actually be you know see you put the thought process behind this in person yeah i know great to be here and yeah i'm a excited to kinda like dip into it and share some of our learnings and yeah and our process to what we did and yeah i mean if anyone ever has any feedback of ideas as well i'm always open to hearing them so yeah yeah awesome i suppose i should maybe like fan boy out for a minute maybe because i i remember like it must have been a few years ago now where alice was pretty active on linkedin talking about your shift from lead gender demand then you actually you already you guys already had a podcast but it was more sales related then you like put in this mini series which was then the loop but it was in this other podcast and like i first started i listened to that then so then i was in like i heard about like you and fran and you fran and alice were all doing this at the time and now the loop is still going right which you're sometimes hosting but other team members are so like i just think what you guys do and what you've done for a lot of marketers like building in public sharing your learnings your mistakes like being really honest with people publicly is just like so amazing and i think we should thank you for those lessons because i've learned a lot that's so good like so good here we actually just changed the podcast again so yeah i think we started with revenue champions and that was like half well first test of a podcast alice was like to me just go away and create a podcast because everyone was like right even a about way then so yeah we are trying to yeah we wanted to create something didn't really want and we didn't know and we've got like three very distinct personas really the purchase cognizant being rev marketing and sales so we're like oh try and merge it all into one i think the issue we found was we like speaking to everyone and no one and then the lead gen demand gen was such a big topic at the time that it was an and we were going through the midst of it of was such an easy thing to sort of talk about so we then ended up creating the loop and and working on and like building that out i think as that topic started to like wan and like the loop maybe became again a bit of like everything and nothing in like sort of marketing like yeah conversations it's always like trying to find that next thing that like okay what you wanna be known for where you can really provide value so now we've actually just changed the podcast to like you're subscribed to leave still subscribe to it but we've changed it to marketing dilemma which is supposed to like focus a bit more on the on the guest and enable them to like come over a dilemma and then we can discuss it together and aim being there that i just sort of took inspiration from some of the best podcasts out there like any old and they often now like have like a formulaic format like at like off menu or like desert island discs it's the same every time natural guest matters less because then it have to come with some sort of insight they just they answer the questions that are there and i thought one thing that mark all get out of is just learned knowing that everyone's kind of one there's like a little bit of like a yeah like a little bit of like a sick pleasure and kind of knowing that everyone's struggling with the same stuff so like someone come people for like if you get big names that come forward and they're saying that they're struggling the same things it's actually really helpful and and good to hear and like the other half of it was also that then maybe we'd une earth different like different things that we could actually learn from at the same time and if we're learning from it then the audience stephanie is so yeah i think it think it's like a a cool format at the moment and sell yeah to start playing around with it and i and also it works for us in that again you don't have to be some big thought media to come on the podcast we can get customers are we can get opportunity like opportunities on our own coming in and talking about their own challenges and then we can sort of like build that connection with them at the same time so but yeah there's bit of an evolution with the with the podcast so then now i'm might fully hosting that one so funny they've got this one today and then i've i think i'm recording another webinar and then three other podcast podcasts this week so i'm like fully content out i you you are literally becoming the face of cog right yeah i look whenever i look at somebody's profile from cognizant you're in the banner you know whenever whenever i look on cognizant like company page on linkedin your you know at least five posts down i'll see a video of liam and you're hosting the podcast like you are mister cognizant yeah i think i maybe took the brand a bit to you personally you're trying to know yeah look your lead in the charge which is great 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 i suppose we should probably get into what we're actually chatting about today which is sales companion because at the demand gen meet up you gave us all some behind the scenes insight i would say of how you launched sales companion and i think we probably don't need to get into all the details today but there are certain things that i'd like to get into but i think if you could first just kind of outline what sales companion is like how you guys found this product in the end and why it came about and then we'll actually get into the launch of the product which i think is the meat yeah it's kind of in its name and the sales companion is supposed to be like a cells like an sdr or an ae best like tool a tool that like pops up straight away as soon as they log in and start their day in the same way the traders kind of have this i fact i used to work for thomson reuters they're like an i icon or something like that where they are like pivotal to their rowan where they get all their news and stuff to actually like crack on and within the cognizant products obviously like data and data quality like a core it's like core value core part of our brand and and what we do and what we're focused on especially like our strength in european data but what we can also do is surface insights but some of the insights i suppose and the traditional way that cog the traditional commas product is i presented like you have to go out digging for them and actually as a sales rep you want those insights to deliver to you exactly when you need them with guidance to actually where you should be prospecting next so that's what sales is is and like and more advanced and a more advanced chrome extension that they can actually help guide a rep to their next best opportunity but then provide them with the quality contact data that means they can actually go out and speaks to the people that they need to speak to as well and they can rely on that so yeah i and there's other parts as well that i think then appeal to the other sides of like the personas and that as like you know as we move that market that companies want to be able to control who their reps are reaching out to and that it's not random acts of prospecting it's prospecting with purpose and and intelligence behind it and and the ops team can set those parameters set territories enable people to take ownership of accounts and actually like then does camp companion can use that to actually make the best recommendations for who they should next reach out to you to be able to prospect account of an account efficiently so that all came from like a lot the learnings that we had when we did our sort of ic search as well and then like enabled us to actually work out the product that we needed to build today to meet the market that we wanted to get and i also like deliver a product that was a value to them that they could that they would yeah get the most value out of and then hopefully increase our our greatest retention rates as well yeah it was quite like an intentional play right to meet that up market demand because i remember you guys were saying that the cognizant product itself lends itself almost perfectly to kind of mid market almost sm style businesses that just want some contact there you know like there might even just be a one off campaign or they wanted is some contact data but actually where they could get the most value from the product is by lowering on top all of these other products and services that you offer to and that's where sales companion comes in with that information then you mentioned doing customer research done upfront before the idea of sales companion even came around yes exactly so they actually informed the idea of sales so actually at the beginning of last year was when we started ic project and then that was gonna inform the product that we that we we created and in that like research you know it wasn't only like less than ten years ago that everyone was buying data from lists right so you would go out and get a data broker i remember using data brokers and you get given a like an excel spreadsheet and then you you'd use that for your marketing campaigns and it would plug the gaps that you have and like reps would use it for phone numbers as twelve so like a lot of those times says this were like out date by the time you got them records were like yeah well like rubbish and so when we launched problem cognizant begin with it was like kind of in the era of like zoom info and discover org merge it was like this idea that you could now get a platform and get access to data at time but then it's changed since then because now there's multiple providers doing exactly the same thing and actually access the data isn't the issue anymore in fact if anything we've all got too much of it it's like knowing what data to use so and and when and yeah there's i think there's boys gonna be a demand just for b to b data but how do we differ differentiate ourselves as a provider they're saying oh we don't just provide data we provide actually intelligence as well alongside that data and data that's actually gonna get you in contact with the people that you care about not just like volume of counts which i think is is easy to do as well like we could you could say you've a huge volume of counts there or like decision makers then you're not gonna no they're not all decision makers and they're not of like a media user lot of people like we found that even in our own data set in the in that research it's like that it was made it was one percent of our data was access most of the time and that's everyone is looking at the same people and everyone wants they get the same people and that's not to say that the rest of the data is useless just to say that that data is the most important data and that's why you where we need to really focus so if we're serving data and inherit it that contact intelligently to people then that that data needs to always be correct because that's the data that people want and that's why we're gonna spend our time as well yeah that's insane but almost not surprising because you know when you think about who businesses ideally wanna target it's the decision makers it's the c suite it's the v vps it's the directors and i can imagine you know that that is the data that everyone's going after alright cool i suppose the next step once you identify that the product had a fit in the market already where i suppose it was the other way around you identified the problem created the solution right can we just unpack what was next after that like the actual go to market strategy i kind of wanna get into the messaging that was created how you kind of got to that how you were testing and iterating it because i thought i found that really interesting yeah so yeah so we built that we built we started by by building a brand story first to suppose around what cognizant was and why it was and like what like what we were what we were trying to achieve so that was in the intelligence quality personalization compliant and then we start then we wanted to like work like forward from there to some like get that into like messaging what that means sales companion can do for you and i suppose actually there was a little bit of it that was like you can paint it now that it was like done in like a perfect creative process but i think it was actually just a suggestion we kind of accent went probably the wrong way straight to the go to market and we're like looking at ads and we were like building out all of our product messaging around it and we were struggling i suppose with the product messaging i feel like we we did we weren't happy with it looks a bit stale with those brand teams we couldn't quite get yeah across the value that we wanted to and then one of the demand general just mentioned this idea of being sales companion being a plus one like your plus one i suppose that always turns up for you and like support you brings in and like delete and like saves you at the time when you need them so then we've they he side building out there's a different messaging around like sort like the plus one that never lets you down the plus one that's always there the plus one that always shows up and then we realized that this was gonna be like a great theme then that we could actually run through that product messaging and like really backs up what sales companion is as that plus one and so then we started to thread that throughout all of the product messaging and that was like came like the key part of the the creative campaign that we ran and the original like images that we came out with around that and the and the and everything was like based on sort stock images and then we thought we'd go out and like actually personalize them that's when nike we decided that like we'd have me and some becky and the team to feature and then we can we could by that way we're like human it for it with people from cog as well and we also separately come up with like i run these like quarterly the create creative days where we come up with some of our new creative concepts i think they're getting more organized now but at the time we're just sort of trying to come up with fun ways that we could demonstrate sales companion and we came out with a separate idea at that time we i think we've done we'd released alice diary cmo and there was a launch video with that where like fran just pops up in the background in one moment of it which and offers budget to jamie who works there and we we all found it so funny but at that point before oh it'd be kind funny if we could we we recreate some of those videos where someone pops up and they are sales companion obviously them but as we just before we went to shoot those we then came across this the plus one theme and then we were like okay so then we can solidify becky as as as sales companion and that's kind of how it all came together so it was actually a bit pig in the end i think now when i like by accident right you stumbled across this just random idea which ended up being the best idea you probably could have heard yeah and i think actually from it we've kind of realized that we like trying to now create that make this crazy today a little bit more formulaic a little bit more led by data but like to land on those ideas but in the time of the orders that we're not going back changing work that we've already done quickly changing scripts and things like that which was kind of where we were at but yeah it all landed in the end and and kind of self together the trouble is with those creative ideas and when you try and force a creative ideas somebody but if we said oh okay let's book a half an hour call this thursday to discuss ideas for this like all the ideas would be bad probably and like most people wouldn't have any because like the idea just comes at a random moment it could be walking the dog it could be in the shower so like the idea of plus one probably came you know on the toilet like it could've have been like any strange moment so like what are you planning on doing next time or whenever you need that new creative idea to to not kind of rely on a random moment to try and make it a bit more formulaic but allow for that creativity as well yeah so the way we've run the creative date at the moment so we've we've got we've got one at the end of june and previously what i would do is come in and i get the whiteboard out i've split it into three with yes it's complicated and no betty anything ends up and no because we're all british and we don't really wanna insult anyone but there's a lot that ends up getting it's it's complicated and everyone like just the simple thing of like writing we'll come up with their like we're looking for like content themes for their some messaging teams but whatever we're running the creative for and everyone writes on post notes me go through them and then eventually we always we land on something between you got the whole team nearly the whole team there so it's like i think in any of those creative processes it's best to have as many heads as possible because something then clicks and then someone add something else it that then finalize the idea it always comes out something a little bit random but the change now that we're doing is we've got like almost like i suppose it's like a pre read ahead of that now where we actually run through all of the data first and then that gives like two weeks so the data is supposed to then inform what we're gonna do so i think before some of the issues we're taking big swings so there were things that didn't go exactly to plan with sales companion because it was a big swing it was big swing creative idea that was great for creativity but maybe missed on performance so looking at the performance data means that we sort of like control for some of that swing and then by the time we've had two weeks people come and the agendas of it and people then can have those moments beforehand when they just saw like sometimes as i do just sit up bolt up right as soon as waking up going oh my god i've got the idea yeah and then you can like come at the later of those yeah exactly great and i have those ideas when when they've gone for they're walking the dog in the shower or something like that and bring them to the to the meeting and then we expand them so it's like there is no dumb idea it's like all ideas on the table because there might be one that starts off a little bit ridiculous and then we actually work out this the right one so well i'm interested to know what sort of data you bring to the start of those meetings because you must have so much data on all of the content and assets you create it'd be interested to know what you whittle it down to to the most important things that you share yeah so each team like is responsible for like bringing flatbed bets so there's obviously and because the problem is there's competing priorities between them so what might be great content doesn't perform from a performance point of view mh so the our paid media team come with the best performing assets on paid media where we like where that works so then we've also because i think sometimes we actually create too many assets sometimes like i actually you think as a team we never struggled with content production sometimes it's that's what we struggled with is like where it best fits and and its execution then sometimes it's actually a blessing to have too much content but that's actually a bit more of where we've suffered with so the the paid income forward with what's actually resonating on paid what works linkedin ten what how and what works a matter like where we're seeing that performance so it could be something is and that's measured in intuitive different ways of different sort buckets on linkedin depending where where they're aiming for reach or conversions so looking at converting topics looking at topics of high engagement and then get us reach so that we can be like we're gonna focus on those areas messaging that's landing the demand gen team link the dots there as well but also would the pm team think about looking at what messaging is actually working for specifically for mid market so they'll they'll come with like and then there's a lot of like cra testing on that so where we're seeing benefits what uplift on the website of like mh made a difference where we need to where we wanna focus our messaging sometimes the big creative idea is a great creative idea but it doesn't actually say what we're doing which is the that we need that we've you've got blend the fun and the boring and then the content team are coming or come forward with what's flying organically what's working organically what's driving traffic to the website at the moment where we're seeing that work what podcast episodes are working like like the topics i suppose that are actually leading the conversation the where we wanna be like known for and then hopefully between that we'll be able to then figure out kind of some of that accept because some of this stuff as well it's about redoing things rather than starting getting great a lot of good content so it's like work working out what's worked from that so that's the plan and then we'll see if it like if it helps like guide yeah like that that creative process time well i'll be interested to know how that goes and hopefully you posted our on linkedin because yeah i'm i imagine bringing that data up front would be useful for everybody to then bounce their ideas off of what they've just learned so yeah it's it's interesting getting back on topic that was a great you know segment though on sales companion so you have this amazing idea which was the plus one the message testing and getting that message like composed in a way that would resonate with buyers was an interesting process i think you guys went through using tools like winter testing out know you know different variations etcetera to land on the things that worked could you talk us through the process you went on there to land on the things that would actually work yeah so i mean it goes back to the the ic project that we did which we worked with a company called cas to do and they sort like paint this picture of that you need to like identify your head pin in the market head pin being like if you pinch pictures of temp bowling yeah pin everything else falls down and goes and and and you and you land the rest of the market because that head pin like talks about you say positively that he starts to bring in people from outside a it so we started i suppose with on that project with like we had to identify our crown jewels like what are our key strengths in the in the space being and for us was like data quality european data and being like an expert in european data and having like really strong data quality in the market market especially for for europe then we went now and did what they and we then called the target market initiative which was we interviewed key prospects key customers former customers as well to find out exactly where they see how we help solve problems and where they where we see the best fit from identifying our crown jewels that gave us the parameters at that that i those people that we interviewed so that means to start find like a what they'd we called straw man which is like not just like sorry these names are brilliant yeah yeah that's so good that's and makes it sounds so much more technical is but the the straw man being like not just like looking at your industries and your company size segment but like looking at what else make someone a good a customer what ours actually drives high retention rates and that like for us would be that they have european operations and that they have like an advanced tech stack maybe like salesforce hubspot which we integrate into and that they have an advanced rev ops function they're it's that and and i actually have like an sdr team as well so sales head became like an important part of for that mh and then that enabled us to then go when we spoke them to actually build an idea of what that product would look like to fit the needs that they that they had so then we had to one go take that to to actually validate some of further what we we'd find found out so we used tool call use tool called user evidence to to then survey our customers and i validate and that through that we were able to validate some of those findings that you know i think it was like seventy percent of our customers believe that the right people it's the it's the biggest benefit of having a sales intelligence provider like finding those right people they continue to struggle of accuracy crm around dates data i think that's was about eighty percent and of our customer base seventy percent of them europe was their most important region which then validated some of the that idea of what our crown jewels were and and and who our straw was as well and then we took the same sort of like process of testing it to to to like the wider market using winter and winter enables you to you sort of survey do market research of your your ic so you can select the types of job titles and companies that you wanna go after and company size and send them a survey and they're like rewarded for it to give us ideas on on who to talk like to give us their feedback on on on our questioning and like and and that and the the what we we'd wanted to validate and we found that seventy two percent of respondents cited again that data quality was their biggest challenge and that eighty percent agreed that the most important benefit of a sales ton by abilities connect with the right people so then we had both customers and prospects really backing what we were saying we use winter again further when we were building out like then later with the messaging as you say like and looking at the the website so we like built website of all the messaging that we had ready to go for sales companion with the plus one idea and we you can just give them screenshots of the fig files that you're going over and and ask for their feedback and we sent that to then that core ic that we'd defined on the cas project and then they give quite brief feedback some of the time as so whether your messaging is landing and whether they really understand what you're selling whether it aligns with what we believe it is as well so then we use access of them edit further that messaging to that actually meet the expectations of the of the market mh yeah i mean the upfront cost there that you spent on the market research that you spent on you know landing page messaging test probably saved you a hell of a lot in the long run if you kind of went down the approach of testing ad variance to see you know which had the higher click through rate or dwell times to you know resonate best like you knew immediately which pain points were gonna resonate most with the market which like you know is it's common sense when you think about it but not many businesses actually go about product launches that way yeah yeah yeah definitely i mean we could go further and i think i would would like us to i think going forward is actually do a smaller test of some of the creative to begin with as well unpaid because again that that alignment of like the messaging that lands on your website and then aligning it with messaging that delivers in an ad that actually encourages someone to click through and then also that it maps back to your website and like two different things and i think that's something we found with some of the sales companion creative that maybe those two things didn't really like and they enjoyed the creative that they didn't still didn't from that ad understand exactly what the problem was we were solving yeah because you showed some of the eighties arcade themes which have like you know the pac man chasing the prospects or you know i can't remember what exactly it was gobbling up but gobbling up something and like i thought on a visual creative level immediately like they looked fantastic but i suppose when you actually dig into what the prospect is seeing however many seconds maybe like one second you have to actually tell them exactly what you do in the feed and how it will help them maybe it took a bit too much time to figure out what that ad was trying to say and i think you guys compared it to the ads that you ran afterwards which was really you know just telling exactly kind of what the product did yes exactly yeah that was on the so we created cheat code series alongside the launch so yeah and that was it's supposed to be kind of like our go to market series of how you can actually use cognizant to then solve very specific challenges i think we lean too heavily in on the creative idea of it being of the cheat codes that we missed some of like the selling point of yeah of what we how we were trying to solve it and not being clear enough interestingly enough like at the time i saw the greatest and i was like i really like them i think i said that like i i i like have some doubts whether that land have paid based on previous experience but the only way you can test these things is actually by taking them to market unfortunately but like i think some of these things can be done in more controlled limited tests but as you know from that presentation i think we got like seven hundred and fifty ads live and it was sort of like pushed through quickly so we had to do our learnings on the fly as well yeah well i think we should talk a bit more about you know the content that went along with this campaign and kind of like the go to market strategy around the launch too because you know if you haven't seen it yet liam is the next up and c hollywood star like you know the the legendary video acts within this launch are just great i just i love the fact that you spent so much budget on distribution rather than creating the content because that so you see so many brands polishing up video and polishing up assets for launching a particular campaign and maybe spending a fraction of the cost on distribution so nobody ever sees these like amazing new things right and you managed to kind of create this halfway house where the video still like looks professional but it's like very authentic let's face it you know i'm not discredit your but like you know you know tom cruise right but yeah i mean talk us through what like what you took that particular approach to create in some of these assets and yeah yeah okay i think we've always had this of culture and and we we have like an in house video resource and we had the culture of self like creating some of those videos internally there i'd also a voice that have conversations with linkedin there's a lot of like like insights from linkedin themselves that self of authentic videos yeah less polished videos often do better on platform like as you see shared on other social media platforms so we have like the means and the ability to do it so then we focus the budget that we have on distribution instead and create that content internally i also resent the idea which you see so many companies do probably spending like i've god knows tens of thousands of pounds on some really polished video with a production agency then it gets sort of posted on the company linkedin account it's not actually really optimized in any way the paid and they can't optimize it in the same way because that's not how it was built and recorded so it gets like used once gets a number of likes and then it it disappears so the idea of like taking it internally is we have a bit of control over there we human it by using people from cog as well so that you create like hopefully a recognizable element between it so the like your our content strategy is based around having key internal people focus for different pieces of content so that the tires between cognizant and that person as well and then if they're like featured in the creative as well then we can like really start to like double down on that because also insights from linkedin is that obviously people buy from people they wanna see the same they you know they like to associate a person of the company as well and all of that allows us to save money on the production side and then push that back into the distribution side which is where we can then obviously really like get that reach get it out there get the message out and i don't yeah i personally don't think from the engagement we get from it that people are like super fast whether it's a super polished video or not obviously there's times and moments when you wanna have that high production video but like if you really wanna scale video which i think is becoming the predominant content format on linkedin then you have to do a mixture of both and that's like real user generated content bits more scrappy content like video content on top of them some of the the more body stuff that you can do as well yeah it's a hard balance act isn't it because you want people to take you seriously as a business and especially i i imagine it's a tricky one for you going up market because typically you'd think maybe they want something a bit more corporate like they want we want them to take us seriously so we don't wanna be too silly but at the same time like people on linkedin now enjoy humor like they enjoy the authentic nature or something they don't wanna be solved to especially so the add almost and the video content needs to not feel like an ad but like it's okay if it is at the same time if it's a bit joke it's a weird dynamic right now i i think when it comes to content but yeah especially with the up market shift as an interesting one yeah i think that's one i'm still getting my head around because i like to get the idea that as you move that market people won't needs to be more serious more stiff because i like to believe that people like and i behind the company there's always a person buying and therefore and you know they might be on like at work and then when they go home they're on reels and tiktok watching all manner of content and do they really what they gonna and engage with do they really look at it at night see differently between their business life and their and they're like personal life that bit i'm unsure of i do think there's obviously the part of being like being taken seriously and like as a company that you're able to deliver on what you promised and maybe that part is relevant so i think what we try and do is like if we're now releasing something a product launch or a content launch and we have like an engagement element to it which might be more fun content that it's backed with all of the serious content that's needed to say yeah that's a obviously a bit of fun but like here's what you can expect and what we'll deliver and why we're up to job and all the customers that kind of support us with that so i think it's a balancing act i think you you have to in my mind you have to have both because if you get it on the pure series for you then you just don't get the engagement again with and you don't get you message out yeah you don't get the attention and like marketing is a game of attention and it feels like that's even more through now than it ever has been because it's hard to get that attention and people are fighting for it probably more than they have done before yeah i suppose my just my initial thought did go to the serious route like once you have that attention a fortune five hundred company like an enterprise company will need to you know der risk that purchase and understand that you know you they can be you can trust you know your supplier ultimately yeah yeah so i think you have to have all of that side to to back it when people are on linkedin there they're on for a purpose like either with like reps for doing they're actually prospecting on there using it from work masters might be coming on that marketers is ar sometimes like senior saudi leaders might will be coming on there to to learn and i think to capture that attention and that in that feed you need to either a be providing real value real or like entertainment but then after that point you need to be able to deliver the actual message and the trust in the brand that you're actually yeah that they like they can der it and they can and they can see that it's not just all joke content there's actually a serious product behind it as well so yeah that is that is definitely the balancing act for sure yeah okay i'd love to get into the distribution side of things now because you spoke at the demand gen event around some like influencer marketing campaigns that you had going like the huge internal launch that you were doing as well like the ability to rally everyone around and yeah just some like more interesting place you don't hear a lot of people talk about influencer marketing in reality there's a lot of chatter i would say around how it can be used and all influencer marketing you know it's the next thing in b2b after it's been in b like you know there's murmur around it but i feel like you don't really hear of many brands executing it quite well but do you think it went well during the launch yeah i mean we always try back now or any launch we do ever as a contact in our product launch using influences as well at using internal influences we've created plus an external influence for net network for sales companion itself we used a company called furniture to actually help us select some of those influencers and then also work with them and actually manage the relationship to get them to post and some of those like post then like got like insane engagement and actually able to like reach i suppose more of ic in like a different personal way and the influences go away and they take your brief of what your actually launching and then write and do those post themselves we've always we've we started to make use of inferences like probably two years ago we we worked start off by having like what we call like a brand advocate at the time and like an ongoing contracts we we did we worked with ryan raise it to begin with who did like our sales like content and worked with him as like a subject matter expert and then also promoting for his channel and then we worked after ryan with morgan ingram and we've still done a lot of work with morgan so this was like and then when we launched the d of cmo we did the same in night sending people mh books i think and getting there and gave them to post about the boat themselves and that was like hugely successful like in the end i think steven bart that commented on alice post and that's really like blew up there you go but back then actually you've got more of external influences a lot of people were willing to post free of charge there was less of this monetization of it like as it's grown so now you we like find that you have to put budget behind it but like for us it's always like being a great way to completely take over linkedin if you want to do it and actually drive some of that that organic traffic but and get yourself backed by like people that they respect and like content they enjoy so one of the influence we used was like tom boston and he's got like very particular style lots of people follow him for his style and like he creates very specific video for it so yeah like it's always part of our strategy now and when we're thinking about launch we always think about what we're gonna do with influencers both internally and externally as well yeah it's it is so cool to see it in action and just to break it down a little bit so you obviously have this idea for the launch you basically provide a brief to you know a com a third party company who might manage those relationships for you or to the influence influence of themselves they then record their own or produce their own content around that brief like with some unique creativity in there of course we can't be too scripted and then what that's just one time or there's like multiple pieces rolled out across the period yeah so and then and then we would i could prove it sign it off and then we have like the launch date for them and then we we just keep then you just keep those people kind of like on like a retainer so not like not that like like a retainer that as in you sort of like you just keep them on record and then we can go back to them for other launches and you have like an agreed if you're doing it once one you have a agreed price for posting or like and for those launches and then if you're working with the third party then they can manage that for you as well and then you can put your budget to it so kinda starts to work similar to like how you'd manage a paid campaign but just with like a little bit more planning an organization in it as well and i think the second part of your question was around our internal launch structure which should probably sure that answers up well yeah we can get onto that i suppose you just mentioned paid and i haven't got this question written out but here's a dilemma for you if you could only choose one to either launch the product again but only have influences and internal influencers or only have paid ad budget which one would you use totally hypothetical i know well if it was between the difference between our paid ad budget and and the influence budget i'd take the paid budget however if i was in a small company and i didn't have much budget then i would go down the organic group let's say it's the same budget right so i imagine your paid ad budget was like ridiculously more expensive than influencer a budget but you can take that entire budget but you can only use it on either influencers or pays i think we're probably struggle to spend it then i think for delivery you're gonna get always get further paid and in fact a lot part of the paid part as well is then the posts that then the influencers create we then pay promote afterwards right like where which is what linkedin is pushing people to do like i i either think about it as you go on instagram and you have your four use section the organic reach in linkedin is really limited they have monetized the four use section basically by saying that you can have it randomly pop up and feed but you have to pay for that that post to be promoted so they that's basically what they've done so the two end up going like hand in hand so i probably would still stick with the the paid media side because just that's where you're gonna get your reach but the best performing ads are always come from what we call that thought leadership bucket when they're actually they promoted actual brought leader ads on linkedin item yeah yeah exactly yeah that kind of mar up with what a lot people are seeing and i think from you the results from thought leader adds because the nature of them how authentic they look i think is kind of the leading format right now on linkedin yeah and exactly back to there some people buy from people ideas so yeah for sure the internal launch then yeah is an interesting one because you managed to rally the entire business almost round for launch day maybe even for a period after to do like an all might you take of linkedin so did that take quite a lot of planning what went on behind the scenes to to do that yeah i think that was actually the most successful internal launch we've done and in terms of posting and definitely something we wanna replicate so we just planned a a launch party internally it it really didn't cost much we just got some balloons got some like cupcakes with like back in myself on them we'll just built up some hype around it showed the launch video the marketing asset really i think with sales it's always like and our cro always says that he got a lead with the watson in it for us message we had so he he led the charge on that we had our chief product officer talking through and vp of pm talking through the vision why we're doing it so really like drum up solve that excitement for it and obviously then a few drinks as well and then we with that we then launched like this media pack with it and encouraged the posting and really like drove it then saying so they gave them all the assets that we had plus banners for their linkedin and things that day and it i yeah it just really drove it so like i think when we got our first few like the marketing team really led with it we made sure the whole team was in the office so if anyone had any questions about posting they could and it were like it just had a huge success because then everyone was posting those videos and i think it's just because we were able to build that assignment and we did that like across the international offices we did almost like euro vision style where each of the offices were like introducing themselves because we had it on a big screen in the in the main like yeah did the uk get any votes no no biggest region we were right at the bottom again but yeah so yeah i think it was just about trying to like actually it stand at extend that hype and get everyone involved i think some of the mistakes you make for like you launched something you do something completely virtually or don't have that and don't or don't build enough high it you drop all the assets in a slack or or on an email and just everyone ignores it and they don't get to see the value of the the hype that they can create as well so yeah yeah was the coffee van on launch day as well because that was interesting that was for pass buying anyone in the shard as well right yeah yeah so then we yeah we did the the coffee around with that i think the plus one to feel your day and that was like another way of getting people in the office heights in our own like in cognizant coming in get your free coffee make them feel like it was a special day but also like as sort of like little greater move of like getting some of the other companies in the the the like the shard where we are to like get nurse in the round london bridge so like a as a branding effort alongside it which was actually yeah just kind of like a fun exciting play that we could do and actually those things are always surprisingly not as expensive you as you think yeah and there was some bikes maybe with branding and like just some cool elements that you wouldn't usually expect yeah so we rolled that into we we were into forest to wave so we then branded some pet cab as well around forest wave as well and that was like about two weeks after the launch so then we're i was trying to of layer in each of the launches then across the different things that we've got going on and try and make use of the events in the same way so yeah yeah really cool alright i'm just conscious of time and i wanna to get onto some other things but if i missed any like core things there in terms of the launch and distribution that were like really noticed of like noticeable at the time i don't think so actually i think that are they're probably the big ones yeah alright cool in terms of learnings you shared a few of us at the meet up like seven hundred and fifty ads for example a lot to launch in one day you're gonna have mistakes and things crop up but were there any big surprises like you know big mistakes and things that happened on launch day and beyond yeah i think there were all the like small ones i think which we showed on the day is like we had like video ads that maybe didn't have the a thumbnail to begin with so that like hampered their engagement which you would immediately expect there's other small things like some of the stuff that we created videos for organically don't start with the cognizant brand and when you would have them on page you need the actually an organic you can damage organic reach if you have your brand flash up too quickly because people don't see it it's authentic but like when it comes to page you need to have the immediate brand recognition so we sort of changed the process there so like paid ads have the brand logo flash up in the corner and then disappear again so that they had that instant recognition we actually did like a we worked with system one alongside linkedin to actually find that out that sometimes we get record at the end when i logo ago was showed if we didn't have it at the beginning then sometimes that would affect recall at the end that was something that we kind of missed in this campaign and then also i think the sales come that there was obviously the cheat codes messaging there wasn't specific enough about what that cheat code was gonna solve so that's sort of like that that didn't perform as well as we wanted it we had to redo those creative to do so and we also found with the sales companion messaging that it didn't always land exactly with what we like they always got high engagement rates because i think the creative idea was good but then actually the drop off we were seeing on the landing pages was huge and it's because people weren't like clear on what they were clicking through to the two messaging didn't align heavily enough i don't think those ads said what sales companion dirt they highlighted a fund creative of concept but not exactly what we did so then we've got needs to go been going back trying to rework those so that we can actually demonstrate alongside the plus one they're doing like what we do at the same time like obviously i think some of the other parts of it works like probably the back of night that that people start to be back recognizable the ads themselves of fun but like in hindsight if i to read that messaging myself and my ten feed i wouldn't be like oh that's a sales intelligence tool and this is what i'm the through to yeah the the different the thing is though there's the balance again to be found because it can't just be messaged from click through rate on that and and like then conversions from those ads because when i when we look at like disco calls and yeah come through like people all aware of the campaign and they want to find out about it we had huge spike in traffic after all of the organic play so there's an element that's like sales companion as an idea was out there whether it was well said enough that people were turning up to demo requests knowing what sales companion was i think is was the the bit that was potentially missed so it's not against the creative content again it's more about how we think about how we message it unpaid and we found like for example the videos did well because they have the products explained on the on the end of them so you get the sales marketing process and then you get like quiet next client an explanation on the product but the specific image ads that we had maybe like missed the mark there and they were the ones that them didn't perform as well as we wrong to so i think getting trying to get that in to i'll add it's like it was was a key learning yeah yeah really interesting just two quick fire things then before we wrap up if you could do one thing differently next time like you're cl everything but you can only do one thing differently what would you do differently i think we would i i i think we need we'd need to start more methodically like so i think we sometimes we we bake in the speed that we rolled it out we just had we like jumped back and forth from different items which means that we like there was a lot of repeat work so i think really we started methodically with the ic and then and the brand story and then kind of like lost our way of it and i think really we'd wanna start then go back to what we're doing now looking at the data deciding on the distribution part before we decided on the messaging so it's almost like we know what we wanna distribute and then we create the messaging to match to me that would be the way that we'd go about it where maybe we got carried away with the creative concept first and then just try to distribute yeah i think that that switch would be is would be the key thing that would definitely change yeah makes perfect sense and what worked really well that you would definitely do again i think creating all of our own content around it and human icing it with people that that works really well and i think that be like a a rinse and repeat and i also think having some element of like emotional connection in that so i think the humor part pays like i'm a huge part on that whether whether like time and we'll learn whether like humor is like like is this effective in moving that market like i i really feel like that questions aren't answered to me but like there needs to be some emotional elements still to it that actually captures people attention because we saw that that bit worked for engagement say yeah yeah buyers like are human and buy with right i think we forget that buyers don't live and breathe this funnel and they buy on logic because they want this feature like that feature is solving a problem which is a pain to them which is emotional like it's all to do with notion and like how we act as human nature ultimately exactly yeah yeah hundred percent so i think that's when we get all the bright best brand recall that's when we get with the best engagement when we like make someone feel or something of anything for sure alright cool well let's wrap it up there we've got one minute to go but yeah liam it it's was great to have you on i've been meaning to ask somebody cog to come on this podcast for ages because i am a bit of a fat boy off the lie and yeah like it's been awesome to have you on and yeah hopefully so you're at the next demand journey up but yeah been awesome avenue thank you thanks having me dan yeah great chat cool and yeah we'll see everyone next time on demand decode

hi everyone welcome back to demand decode and today's episode is just a really short but important one and an update that i wanna bring everyone and some insights really i suppose we should start with a little story about when we started demand decode which was you know just phil and i kind of recording on linkedin sharing some insights and learnings that we've had from customers from our own experience from our strategist like everything we were kind of learning along the way and in terms of where we were distributing this content it was audio first and also via our linkedin lives but we also had our blend youtube channel hosting all of our content really it was a mismatch of everything we have automatically coded episodes on there any blend related content so like our hubspot content our hubspot website content just other videos that we would make to our websites decode podcast eventually going on there too and there was a lot of clutter in this one youtube channel and as i've kind of spoken about on this podcast numerous times now on different episodes youtube is a place where we're doubling down and like i really believe that youtube first content is a huge play for b b businesses right now and like with the rise of ai overview ai mode like just large language models in general taking up a lot of informational traffic from websites youtube is still a space where you can distribute that content and still get a lot of attention from it so that's one place where we're pivoting a lot of our focus and attention and even if you just look at our videos kind of in the last like two months or so you can really see how we've actually started to make that change and really put some focused effort behind it but one issue that our channel was having quite significantly was that nobody and youtube and the algorithm in particular could actually understand what our channel was about because we have you know blend which is primarily a hubspot website agency but demand gen agency too so like there's quite a lot of overlap in those two areas but also some big differences too like hubspot tutorials and content is very different to like sit down talking head style demand gen strategic video and then we've got our podcast too and like the channel was just really hard to navigate and it was really hard to actually understand what that channel was all about and what the purpose of the videos we were creating were so we've decided to split out our youtube channels which is kind of you know a hard pill to swallow in some ways because we've essentially shifted our demand coded and websites are coded podcast out of the main channel and given them their own youtube channels now so we've had to unleash the videos from the old blend channel for like demand code and websites located which you know some of them have like hundreds thousands of views and they've been listed now and are now on the new channel with zero views but you know this is a long term kind of play and what we believe will have the biggest impact long term in terms of youtube which is a dedicated focus channel where the algorithm understands what that channel is about the users and our listeners and watchers viewers understand what that channel is about so that's kind of where we're at in the journey of youtube i do think that and wish that when we started this podcast there was more focus on youtube first and i think i've spoken about that before but you know youtube is the biggest play for discover ability when it comes to video content and podcast content so if you are thinking about start a podcast or thinking about video going youtube versus absolutely the play to take now and i mean simply you know in the last month or two since we've actually started trying on youtube we're now even seeing inquiries from this channel via self report attribution which is great you know like we were initially seeing early signs of success with like great comments which were you know telling us our content was valuable having conversations and discussions down there and i was kind of saying you know like these are really great early signs of success i wouldn't be surprised if within the next few months we start seeing consistent inquiries come from youtube and we're seeing early signs of that now which is great and i think that'll will keep growing as we start to put more emphasis behind this channel so yeah that's the kind of update on where we're at with our youtube strategy and the thinking behind it so we've essentially got three channels now which is our main blend channel which is all to do with like blend work hubspot websites and hubspot itself really kind of best practices on that tutorials strategic insights from that platform from that software i suppose then we've got our demand coded youtube channel which is this podcast but on youtube is worth noting that we might even start doing like youtube only stuff in the future too and the same websites code so that's the same channel as well now where again we might have youtube specific content that's going out like website tear down clips things like that so for anybody who is on this podcast right now and listening if you could please head over to the demand decode youtube channel or websites decode youtube channel if you haven't checked that out yet you can either get there by the link in the description on the show notes in this episode or just by going on to youtube and searching for demand decode podcast it would be great to see that subscribe account go up so if you could subscribe and just know that that's where we're putting a lot of content now and that's where like the primary distribution for this podcast and the focused effort will be on youtube obviously we'll still be you know distributing this for audio content because you know we appreciate that a lot of people like to listen to podcast on audio but i think the biggest value from these episodes will come via our youtube content so it's definitely worth going checking out the channel or subscribing whilst you're there would be absolutely awesome and yeah like any feedback that you have on any of the videos or anything like that would be really awesome to see and i'm hoping to kind of bring some more insights over the next few months when it comes to like youtube for b b marketing because yeah like i've mentioned quite a lot i just think there's a huge opportunity there and we're learning quite a lot at the moment rapidly when it comes to like testing thumbnails like thinking about audience retention and how like views don't actually match up with inquiries necessarily and the kind of content that should be started with and you know how you actually think about the type of content you should be creating for youtube for like the highest chance of high intent leads as quickly as possible so all of this stuff we're kind of thinking about and it's kind of all led to split out these youtube channels and yeah if you do enjoy this content and would be awesome if you could head over youtube and share us some support there too so yeah that's all from me really and hopefully yeah we'll see you on youtube but we'll keep bringing you content here too so yeah thanks for listening to this episode of demand go

hi everyone welcome back to demand be coded and we're lana on linkedin again which is actually great to be live on linkedin it feels like this is where everything started when we first you know started monthly coded and we're back on linkedin again which is great and i'm joined today by samantha north who is an ai workflow architect and founder of emi gray systems and what's really interesting about having amanda on the podcast is because if you've kind of watched the ai com conversation unfold recently you've probably seen a lot of chat about what's possible and the you know the perhaps maybe things that you could do with ai in the future but not many people are actually showing you exactly how to connect your content workflows up and how you can integrate these tools together to have better faster output and that's exactly what we're gonna go into today with samantha we're gonna be talking about the opportunity right now for ai content workflows how to actually get started and samantha is gonna share some really cool things she's been working on and show you live demos basically of how to connect all this stuff up great to have do you here samantha i think you've got some really really interesting thoughts and practical insights around all of this cool yeah thanks dan thanks for inviting team me on i've been looking forward to this for a couple of weeks now since we first chatted and yeah i've been you know fascinated by these workflows for you know the last six months or so building them every day transforming my other business with them and i just think there's so much that so let's there's so much power in there and and so much that they can open up for for businesses so yeah i'm excited to jump in and share some of those today yeah amazing yeah we had a really good chat actually like because i initially saw you on linkedin actually i saw some of your posts on linkedin you know your make dot com screenshots basic of the content workflows themselves and i was wow like you'd be such a cool person to have on to actually show how to do a lot of this stuff because your linkedin post your content was telling and you know showing some aspects of it i was like i was thinking you know a live demo of this would be useful for a lot of people because there's yeah there's just a lot of talk right now around what is possible with ai and you know the things that you could potentially use it for and i think your one of the few people that are actually showing people how it's been done how did you actually come to like how did you actually come around to all of this ai you know workflow implementation work you've been doing yeah great question it it was a bit of a a winding journey really so you know in in twenty seventeen i started a phd in social data science and that was like a a a very you know not not exactly workflows or anything like that but it's still of opened up this world of working with data and working with machine learning and you know talk of ai and all of this stuff and i finally finished that in twenty twenty three it took me a long long time because i kept doing other stuff alongside it kind and i knew at that point that i i didn't wanna stay in academia it was not for me i wanted to get it more into entrepreneurship and i also heard this this other company called digital which was helping people relocate to europe particularly portugal other eu countries and when i first started that in twenty twenty you know it was so messy and there were so many manual tasks and i i struggled through this you know for several years not knowing anything really about the world of automation and it was only really in twenty twenty four that i i stumbled across some things on youtube there's this guy liam ot who has a really awesome youtube channel also so nick arrived so shout out to those two guys because they've they really helped me a lot and it they just opened up this whole new world of being able to stick all these moving pieces together put some ai intelligence in there and you know transform your business and it was just really addictive to me i came from an seo background as well so alongside my phd was also you know helping businesses with seo and that was you know fun and exciting at first but with all the changes with google and all of that it became you know like like t through a swamp to try and keep selling seo because it's just so unpredictable and you know that there are too many moving pieces in there and the results are very slow in in many cases so i was getting a bit disillusioned with that and i was looking really for some angle to jump into the ai world kind of wholeheartedly and this seemed like the perfect thing to do and i really love it it's just it's just so addictive and so satisfying amazing yeah really interesting i should have said right at the start by the way if anybody watching the live does have any questions for samantha at any point in this if you actually just comment on linkedin on this linkedin live then we can bring the questions up live and ask samantha would you say anything relating to ai specifically content workflows i suppose yeah i mean try anything and i'll do my best once yeah cool 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 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 a good place to start before we do get into the live demos and stuff is actually just outlining the opportunity that exists for marketers right now when it comes to the these content workflows it feels like a unique moment right now in time where like we really as marketers need to start evolving into a lot of this workflow generated repurposed content kind of thing if we actually wanna make the most of what we're doing and keep up with the cadence around us yeah i think so i mean the days when you know you could start a content website or affiliate marketing and all of that and make money that way you know i think that's really fading out because of how google's evolving and and how ai is coming into search you know coming at it from an seo standpoint i i feel that in in twenty twenty five and beyond it's gonna be more about building that kind of brand universe for for your business which means being present on on multiple different channels you know not just not just fc seo maybe not just social but covering all of that and you know when i say this you might be thinking well how do i my team small team perhaps find time to create all those different pieces of content but this is where ai can really like come into its own and and and step in and and fix that for you and by saying that you know i don't just mean churning out the really basic stuff with with basic crappy prompts i mean a a system that really takes the time and effort to like tailor those prompts for for the business for the target audience for the pain points there's so much that needs to go into into a to an effective prompt content and and i feel that a lot of the stuff we see online we don't like that we say you know ai is rubbish is coming from from bad prompting and from like a lack of enough human in the loop and having that there is so important so so yeah i think we're moving towards this like a brand universe type of thing and ai is gonna be really essential in making it possible for small teams and for solo vendors even to to keep up that that pace of content yeah yeah for sure like if you could just summarize you know the big opportunity that content teams have right now when it comes to all of this stuff what what would you say it is how would i summarize it yeah the big opportunity that's there right now i think content repurposing you know start with your start with your long form stuff so like your your youtube your blog or let's say white papers reports if your company if your company has those and use those at the starting point within with an ai system to to chop up and and get ideas for for your social media posts yeah yeah i think that's where we're seeing the value as well to be honest like we're not at the stage yet where we've got workflows in the sense you know that you're gonna show us today but when you just see the power of prompting correctly uploading knowledge like instructions that are revolved around your brand and everything like that like you really start to see the power that ai you know can have in just increasing the cadence and quality of output for like almost every single business is is incredible right now it's so important and now you know the models are improving vastly i i first started using them in early twenty twenty three with chat gp and and claude i think it was claude two point one at that point and they were you know they were reasonable then i always always favored claude for a long time for maybe than most of the last two years for writing task because i i always felt that it's default mode was more natural and less like ai style then chat gp but you know that they're getting really really advanced now and there's so much reasoning power in there as well so you know that there's not really an excuse now for churning out the crappy stuff it's like you know learn learn how to prompt get your knowledge base set up make sure humans put expertise at the beginning and review at the end and then you know the quality is gonna go up so much yeah yeah so like for for teams who have content workflows in place right now but when i say workflows i'm talking like the the old school handcrafted content that they're creating where is the right place to start when it comes to mapping out what you can do with ai because i think a lot of teams are overwhelmed right now by the amount of tools available that's there you've got you know your yeah like layer one ai tools like your chat gp claude gemini whatever maybe then you've got all of these other specialist tools these workflows like n a ten mate dot com zapier that can connect all of this thing all of these things up it's just like overwhelm with tools right now and possibilities as well where do you often advise start when it comes to connecting things workflows up those kind of things yeah well a a lot of these the things you just mentioned are doing similar tasks right so when it comes to zapier here a ten and make they're all doing similar things my my preference at the moment is make because i i find the interface is really user friendly you can you can master it quite quickly a ten seems a lot quite a lot more complex it's something i'm gonna i'm gradually learning but i i think for people who are beginners to this as i was not long ago make is probably quicker to get up and running with sap i can i never really got into i've known about it for years and never really clicked with me so so mate dot com is my kind of go to at the moment but that that ass aside you're gonna need one of those two that these are the glue that sticks all the different things together right so one of those is essential but other than that i i would say you know like sit down and sort of think about how the team puts together what what a piece of content like what are the steps in this process that you that you normally have you know with with humans and and draw those out even with a with a pencil and paper you know and then see how a tool like meg dot com can pull together several bits of software and and make that more automated it's it takes a bit of practice to get the hang off but once you do you you realize that you know these things can be done in minutes you can you can literally like go into your wordpress site grab the latest published posts and have it in six different pieces of social content in like a minute with the right workflows so so yeah i think you know like don't get overwhelmed by by the different kinds of tools a lot of them just do the same thing i i would say start with make dot com i think it makes the most sense and in terms of ai models it really depends what you want to achieve if if you're if you're like business all about written content then my pick would still probably be claude because i've always found it better from an ex journalist perspective it used to be one long time ago but for chat gp you know if that's what you're used to again it it can it can work some of the more advanced models now are getting better and better at at producing written content yeah i i can't remember where i heard this but i think it's true so i'm gonna say it anyway i think claude was trained on like publications and journalist content for its large language model whereas chat gp content was trained on more generalist content which is why the writing style for claude is often a lot more natural and what we would consider more like marketing friendly copy compared to check gp which is very you know yeah general like robotic style which yeah just doesn't really flow quite well well got to you it maybe maybe you told me a call it might have been you who told me actually but yeah yeah you know i'm out distinction yeah i'm just dishing out this false information so if anyone could like verify that claim sounds good so yeah it sounds doesn't it it sounds bad right it's it makes sense to me i mean that would be how i would describe it you know like that's they trained it on something different like claude trained or something different it's way more academic and more journalist like i've done examples of content in both of those categories with it and i've been really happy with the results so so yeah could that be there go one thing that we're actually looking at internally is like an ai matrix so we're taking different tasks across the business and almost mapping them out in terms of like effort and reward ultimately that's kind of the way that we're thinking about how we prioritize what to do with ai because you know like we say the opportunity there is just ridiculous and it is so overwhelming when you immerse yourself in ai tools and ai capability you'd get lost in it and you don't really know where to start so mapping this out somehow like you say with a pen and paper to map out a process if you absolutely have to or you know do some more complex matrix style thing where you can actually map out yeah the reward and the effort of something i think is a good shout i think so yeah in in in my previous business you know what what what helps me find the the the first the lowest hanging fruit was really like in terms of things that generate revenue and blockers that are stopping the revenue from being generated so for example i had i got most of the leads from that business from seo and things were ranking on the front page of google and a lot of inquiries were were coming in for people who wanted relocation information and there were valuable leads in there but because everything was manual it was difficult for me and my business partner to reply to them all in time you know just the two of us and we were missing out on on really like significant revenue from that so that was really that the obvious low hanging fruit that that had to be fixed and we had to set up some very simple automation just to filter these leads and reply to them you know quickly in minutes rather than twenty four to forty eight hours because we were were slow we were slow and that helped lot yeah so that was yeah that was an obvious one but i guess not every business is gonna have maybe not no brainer you know opportunities like that but yeah i think it's a good way to look at it what what takes the most time and and what costs you the most money go for those first yeah and i think what you've just said there is quite an interesting approach because you started with one thing that was directly and clearly impacting revenue right and we speak about that a lot on this podcast in terms of starting with the things closest to revenue first and working your way back and if you can do that with ai too then you'll be in a really good place to actually have more direct roi as soon as possible on those implementations yeah absolutely and i know that you know content isn't always necessarily directly tied to revenue but but for example like if a business had bottom of the funnel content right then i suppose one one thing to automate might be like how good is it at converting the customers right is like is it is is this blog post optimized for conversions properly and you know you can build an automation that would create content with the right conversion points already built in for example yeah which would then boost your conversion rate just off the top of my head that's one that could work well for b2b yeah love that love that okay cool i have noticed a couple of comments come in but i think if we say those to the end because i really wanna get into the juicy part of this which is showing people the what you've been working on that's what i'm calling it anyway so good i'll i'll share the i'll share the screen now and kind of yeah hand over to you some samantha to show us how it's done by an expert yeah yeah i'm good please go ahead and share i think it's still my youtube so yeah nothing weird on there there you go cool okay so i mentioned like i think just before that you know starting with long form content is a really good way to use ai to get your your social media posts as well because the long form obviously it's easier and it makes more sense because there's so much content packed into that rather than doing it the other way around which would still be doable but it'll be it would be less of a logical move so i built this automation that takes a youtube video from my very small youtube channel i've only got like a hundred and something subscribers now but but now for now i haven't worked on this for a long time and it's not even it's not even updated for ai automation yet but you know it's coming but this automation basically whenever a new youtube video is published i think the last one was like six months ago it takes that video and it it pulls it into the flow it grabs a transcript of it and it pumps that transcript into a bunch of different claw prompts that are set up to optimize that for posts that perform well on different kinds of social media so i've got linkedin facebook twitter stroke thread stroke blue sky you can use i think similar formats pretty much for all three of those and finally an email newsletter and so these are all slightly different formats because you know you can't just use the same generic thing on all of those platforms because the algorithms are demanding different things from from the content and then it puts all of these posts into an air table database ready for me to review and to decide whether i want to you know copy paste them directly as they are or or make tweaks and there's also an option to auto post them but i don't like doing that for a couple of reasons and and one is i like to have control over the output because you know you you should never be totally sure that it's gonna be perfect first time there's usually always a couple of tweaks that i wanna make so i like to have that human the loop step at the end and also some platforms linkedin in particular can get quite sensitive about automations being run on their platform so i i really value my linkedin account i've put a lot of effort into it over the last couple of years as i would hate to be banned for for automating for auto posting or something like that so that's basically the gist a bit so i'm gonna switch over to make dot com now and dan tell me if this can this be seen yep we can see that perfect okay that's so this is mate dot com and as you can see it's a substitute for a ten or or zapier but i i like it because the interface is so friendly and it's just something something so nice about looking at these different colored bubbles perhaps that's all it boils down too for me just love the way it looks but but it's it's quite user friendly as well so this is the why i call the content reactor it it basically it reacts to a piece of long form content and it turns it into these different posts so i'm gonna just run you through how this works so mh in yeah in like the in the wild i would have this set up here this youtube module at the beginning i i would have it set up to run on you know when whenever a new post is published which you can do what it basically does is it watches the videos in a channel which you can see here watch videos in a channel and i've got it set up on my channel and then if i were to publish a new one and this was running it's not on at the moment but if this was running it would then automatically grab that in the background and it would run it through all of these steps and it would pop out into this air table here which has different tabs for linkedin facebook email twitter and the youtube we're we're not doing youtube at the moment so yeah so i'm gonna grab just an old youtube video from my channel and show you how this works so gives you the option to choose where to start and this is gonna let me manually pick a video from my channel so this is really well i've got mh i'm gonna go for is seo finally dead this is a video i did a while ago and i'm sure you've seen this question being asked a lot all the time on linkedin yeah so let's grab that one so then all we need to do is click run and this will go through all of the steps pop up at the end so i'm just gonna run it before before explaining the steps in more detail and you'll see what happens so when these little ones pop up it means that that has successfully completed it's basically coming from the youtube channel it's going into this thing called dumpling ai which grabs the transcript and the ai models need to have that transcript text to work with so it's really important to have a step that grabs that then the first one is for linkedin so so this claude module basically operates on the transcript from a linkedin perspective and structures it for linkedin and i'll well when it's finished i'll dive in and show you what prompt actually looks like but that one's completed and that one has been spat out into into the air table ready to be reviewed it's just finished the email newsletter version here and that's now and it's now working on the facebook post which is just finished and the final one is twitter and you can see that twitter set up a little bit different from the others the reason for that is because there are two main different kinds of posts on twitter full compression i don't actually use twitter anymore for reasons but i think it's still important to include because people do and you know you can also adapt this for threads and for blue sky as well so there are two kinds of tweets right a basic a basic tweet which is just one one tweet and a thread which is like a whole bunch of linked tweets so what this chat gp module does is analyzes the the youtube the original idea from the youtube and it decides whether it's a better fit for a single tweet or a twitter thread and then it routes it accordingly through here or through here and most of the time because because the youtube videos are long form and they they're usually like how to do something ninety eight percent of the time in this one in mind it's suitable for a thread and that's what it creates and that gets popped into our table and finally just a little ping on slack to let me know that these posts are ready to review and that's just an optional step i could also have it email me or telegram or whatever made the most sense for my workflow so let's take a look at at what it's output just for reference this is a video so this is me talking about it's actually even a year out of date is seo finally dead but it's basically five ways that i'm adapting in in the case seo might finally be there so let's take a look at what it gave us so linkedin here is the first one so if we go into post text this this is a new one you can see it's today's date open up this and we can see it's got a hook with the brackets that's quite you know something that's quite well used on linkedin and you can see that you know it's quite well structured for linkedin right like this is a common form that i would use and lots of people use and it ends with a nice question to to trigger engagement so you know i think that's quite a decent post i would probably you know not change it too much i i like that might put in british english maybe i don't know why it's in the us i i assume you can add that to the prompts as well you know yeah i can i just probably bother do so okay yeah yeah yeah you can i went i went through a weird phase of writing everything in us english for a while so it's probably just left over from that you know global audience and all yeah so that's the linkedin one so and and it's also got a tag here for the source because i've also got two other versions of this workflow that start with a blog post or start with an idea that's being dictated you know just from a a voice note so they all go into the same bunch of prompts so let's take a look at the facebook one and here you can see a different style for facebook you know it's a bit more click bait google trying to kill your traffic and the seo apocalypse you know all this stuff that is probably better suited for facebook rather than linkedin emojis a few emojis thrown in there yeah i don't really use facebook that much for this myself but i think you know this will be nice because again it you know it gets people to start commenting and i think you for for a brand's facebook page this could be quite a nice thing to post so yep think it's decent and again tag it for its source if you jump into email newsletter now you can imagine this is gonna be quite different from shorter to social posts so let's take a look it gives you a subject line here right here i will probably set it to not do title case because i i find there's something like like cheesy about title case and the subject line of an email do you find that too dan yeah i absolutely what is it about that yeah i think it just looks marketing it it looks marketing it looks like marketing that's it isn't it that's it so yeah can easily tell it not to do that and normally i would i would fix that yeah sure but you know you can do all of that within the prompt right which i'm sure you'll show us but totally i will i will indeed so this one is more like a story right you know so there i was yesterday staring my analytics with this what the heck just happened expression on my face so again it's like you know slightly em ind things here but i think this is kinda of cool it's maybe a little bit cheesy i don't know it depends but you can easily fix these prompts to you know by giving them examples of newsletters that you like or your own previously manually written newsletters there's lots of way to do it but but i think it's you know i think it's a decent start and you can see it's quite extended as a as an email newsletter would be and you see it's got like thing here about strategy call slots and a call to action here so you know and another another ps here so so it's very much geared towards generating leads you know rather rather than just an an email use newsletter for the sake of it and then the final one here is the twitter post and you can see it's chosen it a thread for this one because it's clearly quite a long form topic with lots of different moving pieces so let's see how that looks so what i would do is i would take out the word topic and put this as the first tweet haven't haven't it's been so long since i've used twitter but i believe it starts with a hook like that right that will be the first tweet with a little thread thing here and then it you chain it all together into a thread like this so you know i think that's kind of cool it's given me i'm quite sure where this came from actually how to wake up about five at am without hating your life that's a bit odd maybe you need to get back to that one but yeah i'm not sure about that that one came from typical to twitter you know i mean yeah for b anyway like it's primarily gonna be linkedin yeah newsletter like that is probably about it seeing just time with youtube i think so yeah i just like put it in for for completeness sake you know yeah and i i used to do this thing of turning a blog post into a youtube script but i i figured out after a while that this content reactor works better when the long form thing whatever it is is the starting point so i decided just to you know use youtube or blog as a interchangeable type of starting point so there any questions on that i i'm i'm gonna dive back in and show you the some of the prompts that we use i think just carry on keep keep going mh alright cool so what does the prompt look like let's let's jump into the linkedin one and see you know these are these are bits and pieces i've gathered over time you know some of them have come from other examples and that they've been patched together but so it always are an improving i think that i'm working on improving but anyway so context is you know this was this is set up for me so it's service business owners with their goal their challenge all things to do with ai automation here so it so it knows me and if i were to set this up for a for a client of course this will be tailored to exactly you know their context here and then the task is to take this transcript and transform it into you know an engaging linkedin post and it gives that then you can slot in the transcript right here and what i love so much about make is that it lets you take this modular approach where you can just go to the previous modules here that we've already been through and you can take this this part here which is the transcript and it's captured in this transcript variable and you just plop it into the into the prompt here so it has that to work with yeah it's just really cool yeah on that point because i suppose i'm trying wanna dumb this down a little bit as well for audio listeners to who might not be looking at this i'm just you know try and explain it so dumpling ai here is the next step along from the the trigger which is new youtube video and i suppose you so dumpling i ai is basically taking perfect a video and transcribing it exactly the this just to explain what this purple one is this is this isolate the url yep so basically dumpling needs to have the the url of the youtube video and only the url in order to function so what i've done is i've just like kind of captured that url from the first module which is the youtube one and stored it in a variable that can then be pumped into dumpling so a dumpling is just a tool that does a bunch of different it has a bunch of different functions but one of them is to get the youtube transcript so i think it is possible to do this in chat gp you might be able to get a transcript in chat gp as well but i know that dumpling just just works really well so that's why i chose to use it here cool and then dumpling is basically sending this to mh call but with this extended prompt where you're basically saying you know claude have a look at this transcript here's the task to you know complete the back of it exactly so if you were using claude the the normal way you know through the front end you would get the transcript in a pdf and you'd upload the pdf to claude or to chat gp right that's how most people would do it this is like the equivalent of that but in a in a in a workflow got yeah okay alright cool so i've also given it some writing style examples three of my previous linkedin posts that performed well and i ask you to analyze them to match my writing style and you know post one the whole text of the post and two and three so i think that's it okay now give it some to some things about structure so yeah so i i i picked a few hooks hook frameworks you know that's i i picked up on linkedin i think maybe matt matt barker might be responsible for these and i tell it to choose which hook is the most appropriate for the topic and some tips on the body content and stuff here to to try and get it to stop using jargon and and you know all this tacky ai type stuff and then again you can put anything you want in here of course an format just provide the linkedin post and don't give like a waffle filled explanation at the beginning like it like it tends to do so that keeps the air table nice and clean so yeah that's basically that's the linkedin prompt and any questions on so you're you're basically bringing the claude chat window or at least the initial prompt mh just inter meg dot com here yeah i i i could use but said that the thing is when you're when you're using claw through the front end you've got a lot more flexibility to go back and forth with it it's more like a conversation right but this it needs to be complete at the from the from the get go to make the workflow because the workflow you you can't chat with the workflow okay you can edit the prompt but you have to run the whole thing again yeah yeah so i would be a big prompt would it be beneficial to almost you know take this prompts into the normal chat window and finesse it until you can bring it back into the workflow and then you know you've got a more finalized thing there yeah you could you could do that i probably do have prompt in workflows that an ai has helped me to create in the first place mh it yeah mean sometimes i get the ai to generate the whole prompt it just depends on i was quite precise about this one because it it was you know i i wanted to get the linkedin posts really as close to complete as i as i could you know and try and get them really high quality from the beginning and and i wasn't sure if i sort of trusted the ai to bring in all the many things that i wanted to have in there but i getting better and better so you you could do that as well yeah cool okay yeah sorry yeah sorry on no worries no worries so the others are similar i believe let's just have a quick look at what alright in this one with the email newsletter yeah at this time i gave it a role i don't know if that makes a huge difference the linkedin one didn't have a role but it it still seem to work pretty but anyway it's nice to it's nice to include that it does help again it's the same thing so the transcript is coming from dumpling and i've told it some things about my current offer the call to action you know and instructing it that every email should mention the offer in a subtle way and i think it does that quite nicely because claude is very good at this more subtle and and nuanced kind of responses which i which i think is great so i think are these came from louisa joe is a a creator who's who i follow follow her emails and i thought that i like to style a lot so i plug these in and use them as examples for my own so you can do that if if you have a creator whose emails that you think are great you can just plug two or three examples into here and ask floor to to follow that kind of style and it and sort of merge it with your own style and your own goals and context and it works really well i think so thanks louisa this is all just text text from her emails blah blah let's see what's at the end is there a limit to that because that is a really long prompt i know it is well i i can set them out of tokens here the max tokens right because because tokens it's right like like your it is charging you for tokens it's not it's not that expensive it's just a a few cents but i deploy is one of the more expensive models so yeah and maybe i don't need four examples actually you know two two is two could be enough or is it over time just to pull that back at it so what is a token in in the workflow you know sense what we're looking at here what is it token i believe it's either either a white space or or a letter or a symbol you know at anything here like you know i feel light it's gonna be i know i then the space is a token right word feel is tokens so you know there's there's gonna be a lot in there and that's why this is all quite crammed together to on a an attempt to save tokens but also i don't like it when it's so crammed because you know it's hard to actually yeah do this thing but also the token use is like the transcript whatever the video transcript is i i believe that that also counts as tokens as well because claude has to read all of that transcript as well so yeah you would need like if you put a thousand tokens in here as a limit before stopping that would probably not be enough to to give you a complete output yeah so that's the question of mh is running this workflow you have to paper per spoken basically like claude will charge you for every kind of like api hit yeah so i i have got yeah yeah so so i've got through the un philanthropic console i i've got like i don't know ten dollars in tokens or something and it it lasts for quite a long time actually so it's not it's not hugely expensive just for you know one person or a small team or something like that it's not really it's a negligible amount but there are cheaper models i think google gemini is a lot cheaper and people say it's people say it's almost as good as claude if not better so i'm quite keen to to give that a try but again haven't haven't got around to it yet okay but yeah probably too many examples there but like i said at least two is probably good to give it something to work with so that's that one facebook i think i might have generated this one from chat gp because i don't use facebook that much for business and i wanted it to give me yeah to give me the prompts so i didn't have to create it and i think it does okay you know it focuses on emotion and storytelling and you know grabs attention with a a question or a bold statement and you know that's i guess quite suited to facebook and here i gave it some examples again yeah just one example this time yeah and the twitter one again it was the same stuff with an example and same thing for the other one think i think i also got chat to generate these too so yeah so if you don't if you're not really an expert on a platform it's still okay just to ask ask an ai to help you generate the the prompt itself i think it i think it works quite decently well yeah cool and that's that yeah so just to a quick word on how i could adapt these so it's it's very easy like basically all of this lot from this this routing point all the way through to here to slack would all stay the same pretty much right and what i would do is i would just swap up these three here and i would put for example a wordpress module in here which would then instead of grabbing a new youtube video it would grab a new blog post from that just been published on wordpress and it would run it through the same flow and perform these things on on the blog post instead of the transcript and i've actually got that one but it's it's so similar just imagine that dumpling in the purple where i'm gone and the wordpress there instead yeah yeah i think one thing as well that mh is really good with this workflow so like obviously we're starting with the youtube video we're flowing through getting the transcript and then pushing that into different repurposed formats but i think the air table step is a really clever one to just make like to just kind of make sure that the human you know touch is still going over the top of all of this content that's being created because whilst the output is good and you know you're using prompts there with thousands of characters but we still need to make sure that you know in terms of what our brands look like and how we are perceived is consistent and that we're happy with that output so storing all of the content in an air table i think it's quite clever and i'm assuming that the air table can be replaced with anything else like even as simple as a a google sheet oh yeah so i i was actually using google sheets for the first version of this and it's you know it's just a question of well i just what it would look like in make you just go in and you find google sheets and yes you you know add a row here and link it up to i've got a connection going already and then i would just delete the air table and use that instead button i've i've burned to like ai table more and more because it had it has some really powerful features it's also easier to use with clients because with google you know you get into that whole two factor authentication stuff and it it's really quite hard to access somebody else's google account because they always force you to have to pin numbers to their phone and and all that and especially if you are on a different time zone it can be an absolute nightmare yep so ai air table is just more user friendly and yeah it has some great features like these interfaces which i've been building trying to start building out for for this particular workflow i'm a finish it but it's a really nice way of kind of presenting that to your client so that they so they don't have to really use the back end they can just use this nice looking front end type of setup and i really love that it's just look it just looks so much more professional than a google sheet but but sure yeah that's an easy way to do it yeah we're so obviously you spent quite a lot of time using mate dot com figuring out these workflows were there any things that you stumbled across that were really tricky or just like simple mistakes that you figured out along the way that would have made your life a whole lot easier if you knew them now that you could share you're in specific to mate dot com or not necessarily i mean that's you know just what we were looking at now i suppose when it comes to the whole workflow and content repurposing nature of that mh yeah i think what took me a while to get used to was the whole different way of interacting with the ai tools right so you know i'd spent the last couple of years like all of us do chatting back and forth with them in their with in their window yeah and they're very forgiving because if you don't like the output you just tell it what you don't like and and you know and it fixes it for you right and you can just keep going on on and on and on and on with this as long as you like but here yeah like i like i already said you know you you you need to get this prompt right first time really because you have to you know every every time you run the workflow you can't just keep chatting back and forth with it so so that that was probably one of the biggest adjustments having to really like learn prompt engineering much better than i had done before and bringing in stuff like the role the context the task the instructions the examples and actually you know defining those things in the prompt which which i never really did before when i was just talking with with my ai tools like like what we all do so that was yeah i think the biggest the biggest adjustment in other sense is you know things like getting used to how api keys work and you know if you if you have access to the api key you can basically loop in any kind of software onto into these workflows and i'm not really a code i've tried learning to code in the past many years ago and it never really stuck with me but it was never something i enjoyed but when you start playing with with apis from different things you do have to know a little bit of code sometimes like at least j at least know what json objects look like and how to interact with those maybe a little bit of python scripting once in a while but you know it's nothing too terrifying and with with mate dot com you can mostly stay away from that so you know i think yeah for anyone who is doing this learning how apis work and learning how to properly structure prompts this these are two skills that will really help you a lot well that's actually probably a good time to jump into a couple of these questions because gemma smith asked do you have any resources for learning better prompt engineering it's a good question i would love to know that as well actually yeah that was a good question oh god i i done it sort of like by osmosis from many many youtube channels any good ones you call out yeah that there there are three for learning this so so the first one i ever learned from was this guy liam ot he's a new zealand lender and he's got a big youtube channel one on ai automation and then my other favorite is nick nick arrive i think his name is bit of a tricky name i'll type it in the chat nick arrived he has an amazing youtube channel and anna a community that i'm in which is all about teaching teaching automation and how to actually start an ai automation business so you know this is something i'd love to do myself later down the line but he's way ahead of me so i would still recommend that people check that out and there's another channel by this dutch entrepreneur called ben and it's called ben ai and i i believe he has a video on prompt on prompt engineering so between these three channels you can definitely find stuff on how to do that gemma so hopefully yeah that's i so i'm a big fan of marketing and against the grain with kit bo and karen flanagan panel so you know it's a it's a hubspot podcast network podcast so kip and kieran both hubspot as kip cmo hubspot kieran is vp of oh i think we follow kieran kieran flanagan right yeah that that's the guy okay that's a i follow him on linkedin yeah there you go like they share loads and loads now about ai and how to prompt and the power of using like knowledge storing that and and things like that so i definitely check marketing gets the grain out it's not specific engineering but there's a lot of good cabins in that you can take away yeah yeah because i i i don't think i looked at one specific resource on prompt engineering it was more like there were some videos that covered it as part of a wider how to make a workflow thing and i just sort of picked it up from there but yeah i'm sure there are dedicated resources out there as well probably from you know perhaps from open ai themselves i'm sure they have a yeah how to engineer a prompt guide or ant philanthropic or similar but yeah these are these are all good resources on youtube yeah for sure if you were brand new to this where is this the workflow you would start with like that you'd recommend most b2b marketers to to start with this one i've just showed you yeah so there's content repurposing yeah of awesome cool the content reactor i love fun content actor i think it came from an ai tool i even named my dog from an ai tool but anyway that's another story i just asked it for a list of names and i picked one that was that was really nice is riley if anyone's curious so back to the question got would i would recommend the content reactor as that the first workflow do you mean like the first workflow for a team to build from scratch or to like just to implement it in their in their in their business just to implement in their business i don't think necessarily it should be the first that like i said going back to that whole thing about mapping out you know the stuff that matters to your business i think it's important to at least give some thought to that first and you might find that you know maybe content isn't the thing that needs the most attention in in your business but if if you believe that content is the biggest bottleneck port sure then this will this will help a lot it will definitely allow you to build a brand on multiple channels with minimal effort just from your long form content and it will certainly increase the mileage that you can get from your long form content yeah so if long form content and building a brand universe are important to your business then yeah for sure this this will be a good place to start yeah awesome and i think that is in a lot of cases or at least it probably should be for a lot of businesses where to start because i think the content playbook is changing now and like has been changing for the last kind of three or four years in terms of this flow and where to start so start in with that long form piece of video is so powerful because it enables everything else like okay you do have content you know like video agents and audio agents coming out that might be able to replace you maybe someday on a podcast or on a video but for now i think you do need that human personality because that's what people are craving in that medium but it then just allows you to recreate that you having a a unique point of view having you know that perspective on the market that you can then repurpose across everything else yeah no absolutely and if i can just mention there's there's one other input method for this this same workflow that i think touches that what you just said directly dan so you know it can be true it can be a blog post but another one that i really like is just a voice note so let you know let's say you're a founder or you're a content leader and you have a a great idea for something in your industry that has inspired you right you could just voice dictate it or voice note it into i think i use slack in these workflows to capture it but there can be other things as well and even like a a messy garbled idea can be smoothed out by claude and converted into a good post and actually for the last few months most of my linkedin posts have come from that starting point just me out for a walk somewhere in mode by the sea front and you know being hit by an idea and just voice it dictating it into my phone into slack and then it comes out the other end as a as a linkedin post store or a maybe an email use letter but but usually a linkedin post so i think that's really nice because it it really is a a way to keep that human element in the mix from the beginning but without being too much of a drain on people's time they can just do it pretty easily on the go and it's very user friendly just to voice dictate or record your thoughts and have the ai bring the structure to to the whole thing yeah i love that because how many times do the best thoughts come to you when you're away from everything you know you're away from the desk so you don't have your lap in front of me you yeah that's when the best ideas come and the best thoughts come right like always yeah yeah and of course you know you dropped in there that you go for you know walks along the beach and stuff i go for walks in the rainy forest with the dog again absolutely stoked but yeah know i still get the ideas in those moments at least so yeah voice yeah is a good is a good trigger and input for sure yeah i i like it a lot and i've i've also used it recently in in a workflow i'm building for you know b to b blog content more of like bottom of the funnel stuff and this is this is seo content but it's also very important to me to have an expert like subject matter experts adding their their take on the subject so you know in an in a small nutshell the the the workflow first of all pulls takes a keyword and it it pulls you know competitor stuff from the search engine results and it builds an outline based on that but it doesn't stop there because you know that's very twenty twenty three really to to just build an outline based on what your competitors are doing you also have to inject that expertise in there so the way the workflow does it is by prompting the the user by slack to actually record their their thoughts on this topic into slack so it just like i bought like a prompt set up in slack with different questions that they can answer and this captures their voice as a as a recording and then it pulls it into the workflow and it uses that to enrich this outline with the experts thoughts and opinions and i know ways that they would approach the problem so that's something i'm still sort of fine tuning but but i think it's powerful and it yeah it could be very useful for for b to b content especially bottom of the funnel where that subject matter expertise is so important yeah amazing cool alright well we're kind of coming to the end of this and i think just before we wrap up it would be great to hear from you like where you think the next evolution of these tools is coming or you know is going to go because even when i look at that now i know most marketers are not doing anything like that when it comes to actually having a intelligent workflow and automated flow like that with all of their content tools hooked up together but what's even after that like what what's coming because yeah yeah that is so cool but so overwhelming yeah what's coming probably more overwhelming stuff well i think video is gonna be big right so we we we talked before about video avatars and all of that and it's something i'm you know on the brink of experimenting well i just need to get yet yet another tool subscription but i'm thinking that it would be quite interesting to have a workflow where let's say it started with an idea and then you know cut that all up into your different social post but maybe you could also do some linkedin some short form video content but actually have it scripted by the ai and have your avatar that you've already created in hay j or s read that script deliver that script for you i i don't know if i would use this for you know fully fledged youtube videos like you know long longer ones but maybe for shorts or or for linkedin content or something it could be quite interesting because i feel that they're becoming quite realistic now so so yeah that that's something i'm venturing into i don't know if it's in really a new frontier i feel like quite a lot of others are doing it but for me it feels it feels like a like a new frontier because know when you're making video content it can be quite painful to get your script and to sit in front of the the screen in the camera and deliver that script and get it wrong and have to do it again all of this stuff that makes the the video process quite painful for at least for some people i i find it quite cumbersome and quite painful so anything to get past that would be very valuable i think also you know in a a further away frontier you we might find that ai tools can just build these workflows themselves i mean yeah yeah you're trying money it built out yeah there's things like that already so i i use a software called relevant ai which builds ai agents and you can actually just like describe the kind of ai agent that you want and it it builds it and it's not it's not really perfect yet there's a lot of stuff you need to tweak but you know it's going in that direction i think so yeah who knows how long this this area of work will be viable for these things are changing so quickly yes crazy i mean i'm i'm really skeptical about the the video capabilities of ai like ai avatars because you know i could be totally wrong but for me when i'm watching you know youtube videos and video content i'm almost there for the personality and like the connection with that person as well and if it's an avatar i'd like to think i could probably identify it's an avatar maybe not with like the new kind of capabilities there but yeah i don't know there's there's a disconnection there for me between what i'm seeking out of that medium and what i'm getting from an ai avatar mh and i don't know how the market like the different market would respond to that i don't know yeah it it depends a lot i think right on on the realistic ness of the avatar right like i said i would be reluctant to use it for anything long form but for like a one minute video maybe that would be more appealing to me but again yeah like it all depends on what the what the final output looks like and and that's something i haven't tested yet but i i feel like i'm gonna test it pretty soon based on this conversation because i i wanna see you know is it possible to train it to be realistic so don't know about you but on youtube there's a lot of ai generated voices now and mh stuff right and i don't like it i i do find it putting so it it would depend a lot on how human and how much like me that that that thing that it was possible to make it be yeah for sure okay well if anybody you know wants to follow you check out your stuff see some of the some more of these workflows because i feel like we only just scratched the surface today right where should they go it's a lot more well i should be starting tutorials on my youtube channel so that will happen at some point and that's just samantha north you can also follow on me on linkedin samantha north again and i i do post a lot of these on there and you can also check out my personal website samantha north dot com or my consultancy which is at emma gray dot a if you want to talk about getting some help implementing any of these yeah and yeah for sure like even just follow some samantha on linkedin like because yeah that's how i kinda stumbled across your profile and saw some of this really cool stuff actually being don't don't wait for my youtube to get started again i it's on the list but it's taking ages i need an avatar i need to avatar first maybe maybe yeah but yeah obviously this was quite a visual episode so if anybody is listening on the podcast after this goes live it might be worth hopping over to youtube to actually see the live demo of this because it is really cool and just like i'm so glad we could bring a practical example of one of these ai workflows because we hear a lot about it but don't see a lot of it you know truly being used and yeah it was really cool so it was so so so good to have you samantha to like really appreciate you coming on yeah thanks for having me here dan it's been it's been fun i really enjoyed demonstrating that and yeah i hope it was inspiring for some people and come follow me on linkedin amazing cool alright let's wrap it up there hopefully you enjoyed this episode of demand decode and we will catch you next time bye everyone

as you may have seen in the past week or so google has announced ai mode and it is a huge bombshell for all seo and b marketers really it's huge news that's gonna impact the way that people discover your website and how they actually search and find information online for those who want an end to an ai search experience we are introducing an all new ai mode and i'm excited to share that ai mode is coming to everyone in the us starting today today you'll see how you can ask anything and a more intelligent agent and personalized search will take on your toughest questions so as we just heard google have announced ai mode at their google io conference and you know what it's it really has sent shockwave waves through the entire especially seo community but also b marketing as well and if you haven't seen anything around ai mode yet then i'll definitely you know listen to this podcast for sure to give you a bit of insight into it and how it's gonna impact you but go away do some research set it up yourself and have a play around because it really is a completely new transformation to search and as google themselves said in a io conference it's the future of search and this is gonna impact us all so we need to get our heads around it and how that's gonna impact us as soon as possible really so let's actually just call out what i'm gonna cover in this episode so firstly i'll actually just take you through what ai mode is if you haven't seen it yet and give you a bit of an overview i'll also demo some examples of what ai mode looks like in google and how the actual ui works and what it looks like after the demo i wanna talk a little about a little bit about the future of search and where i think things are heading obviously we've got nothing concrete yet to actually give us evidence of the impact of this but we can kind of base it on what we're seeing around ai overview and how you know this bigger conversational shift with ai mode is gonna impact that even further yeah the impact that i think this could be having on b2b businesses the impact on advertising as well i think is quite interested in dig into what we're potentially gonna see around google ads although nothing is exactly come out yet to announce this but i think you know we can make some initial indications of what we might expect there and really i think you know what do we do next is is one thing that's probably on everyone's mind you know we've got these huge changes happening what on earth do we do about it let's get into the first section which is all about what ai mode is so as you probably heard from google's announcement at the start of this episode and if you've actually watched the io conference or any parts of it google have announced ai mode which is essentially a new feature almost a new product within search which is a conversational search experience very much like gemini or chat gb or claude and it it it essentially works directly within google search itself and has a conversational interface ai mode is powered by gemini two point five pro which is google's most advanced ai model so it essentially takes one question usually a longer query that you would typically ask as a question in ai and breaks it out into fifteen plus related searches so it dives deep basically in the question that you ask and it integrates anything from google really from knowledge graph shopping data live web content it basically scrape the web for that information and serves it in ai mode and it's all within that conversational or interface like we just discussed so you know it is similar to interfaces you would have experienced with other large language models but when you compare the differences between things like chat gp see claude essentially google has access real time access to its data integration so google has a key advantage there to serve you up to date information rather than rely on outdated large language models and well i mean we can talk about the impact and the difference between traditional search a bit deeper but i think you know when i just demo this and show you the the core difference between ai mode and traditional search is the conversational element of it versus versus link based result 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 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 b dot com we've all heard of zero click searches and this is really just doubling tripling quad down on zero click itself google want to be able to answer your question and serve you information directly in their platform itself so you know is this the end of the blue links as we know it potentially kind of we'll get into that a little bit more later in this episode but for now i actually just wanna show you google ai mode if you haven't had a chance to look at it yet it's worth saying as well that ai mode it's been in beta a few months now is being rolled out to the us as we speak in the next you know weeks and months and will then be rolled out internationally so if you wanted to test it out anywhere outside of the us you'll need a vpn to do that but once you have a vpn you know you can jump into ai mode and check it out i think if if you don't have access to it straight away then you'll need to go into google labs and just enable ai mode but i would definitely do it and test it out because it kinda gives you a feel for what's coming and you know give you a bit of early access to the the changes being made too so you can prepare in the best way possible okay so let's open up this ai mode window in in my browser here and if you're listening on audio by the way i'll try and talk you through this the best as possible but it's probably worth heading over to youtube to actually have a look at how ai mode looks and functions and responds but i'll kind of walk you through it so within google search itself once you've enabled ai mode you can jump straight to it and basically have ai mode here if not if you don't see that straight away you'll see if i search for something here like best crm for manufacturing companies so let's go of that then we've got our standard all tab here all of our information that will dynamically pull in any relevant boxes and knowledge panels and things like that and then you can see on the left hand side here of all of our functions so all videos images we've got ai mode right on the left now when we click that it's gonna do the same search there but i can ask it something new if i want to we then get our new ai mode answer so here i've asked for best crm for manufacturing companies and what i've got as the response is a you know what a really good breakdown of some different crm options here the kind of different tiers that they think is good so we've got top tier mid tier specialized crm focused you know particularly on manufacturing needs you know very specific answers to my query around manufacturing companies it's really honed in on that industry that i've put in here and given me the answers to it you know i'd probably like to see hubspot featured more especially in top tier but there we go and what we can see now is if i scroll down we've got no blue links here we've actually only got three links initially served on the on the right hand side here so we can hit show and then i can scroll down and see all of the links that are being referenced from here and that i'll just you know gonna support this information essentially not reference links because you can now see them throughout when i click on this piece of information it's gonna show me the links that are be in reference to pull that there most of the time it's reference links though so every time we click on that we'll see the reference and that's how these eighteen sites are now being brought in on the right hand side here so the most important thing and change happening here is that google were trying to answer your question in a deep way right within this chat window itself and we're only seeing three websites here on the right hand side of the panel so if you're not in these three websites here it's even more unlikely now that people are gonna go show all and then actually find your website itself so you know this is taking the importance of being cited here to the next level because if you're having no visibility here then there is a really strong chance that you're not gonna get traffic from content that's being you know related to this query the other interesting thing to consider is how you can carry on the conversation here so i've initially asked best crm for manufacturing companies i then might want to ask what about crm that have good integrations with erp because that is important to manufacturers and it carries on that conversation essentially now so it's now you know taking the initial context that i that it gave to me about crm for manufacturers and it's now drilling down on the ones that have strong integration between crm and erp systems so we've got so we've got similar answers here but it does tell you a little bit more about how they specifically are tailored to integrate with erp systems so you know it's answering my question even more so in this window again now when you think about the difference between this and how we would traditionally find this information we would probably make that initial search look for best crm for manufacturing companies would probably dive around a bit maybe on you know the vendor website maybe doing more additional searches to say does salesforce integrate with erp we might do a separate search together for what crm have good integrations with erp and then look at all of these websites but google is now just pulling all of this information directly into the chat window that we don't necessarily need to actually look at any other content other than what we're seeing here because it's actually doing a good job at consolidating that information and presenting it to us directly within the ui here so this is a really really huge fundamental change to search and you know there's no denying the impact that this will have now if we try something a little bit more complex and what i'm keen to do here by the way is actually show a lot of b2b examples because if you look for anything ai mode related everyone's kind of asking you know what best what are the best trainers for this what's the best family car and suv and those kind of things but it's like actually for our audience especially and for a lot of marketers that i speak to the impact on b2b can vary because of complex buying decisions they need to evaluate you know tens hundreds of thousand millions of dollars worth of you know product or service sometimes and though those buyer journeys are different to an e commerce product like trainers or even cars for example so it's important to see how this is gonna impact b2b as well so if i put in a more complex query here which is our roi analysis tools for saas companies under fifty employees with integration requirements for crm data why not that doesn't even make full sense but i'm gonna just plug it in anyway and see what ai mode comes backwards with so typically there wouldn't be any content let's face it related to this particular keyword we'd have to do a lot of digging to find the right kind of software in place that is an roi analysis tool it's suitable four companies under fifty employees and you know within that range it's a really sweet spot and it integrates to our crm now what we what we have is google scraping the web scraping data that it has to actually find the answer to this and what we've got here is you know the answer split out so all in one crm and r roi analysis tools like hub hubspot crm z pipe drive and it gives you reasons why these are great then we've got special specialized roi analysis tools that have crm integration capabilities and then general analytics platforms which do require more configuration for roi how to choose the right tool so you know we've got such a great suite of options there do we want something all in one do we want something more specialized do we want you know just a more general analytics platform that we can then configure for roi all of these options here are just fantastic and then i can you know potentially follow up with which is the most cost effect option but will give me the best insight overall that's a pretty you know interesting question to get some more in information here and then we've got strong contenders which that it's kind of now just delving deeper on my initial answers that it gave me but it's still giving me the content that i want here because now it's telling me you why it's cost effective you know why hubspot is the most cost effective option in this space why z is good chart mo was actually a new one that's come up there then other options as well like all of this content is being served directly in this chat window i don't think i can emphasize that enough like the difference in search experience here is just so great we don't have to click through any links to find this information to find you know how much any of these things you know what is the most cost effective option we don't have to click into each of these you know links to find that and you know see the analysis on whatever website it may be or even the own vendor website we essentially get that information here and then we can go to the vendors website with that information as well so it kind of just pushes all the informational gathering and evaluation process into this chat window itself into google ai mode and then leaves the you know the more in stuff at the end of the process for the website itself where okay after i've gathered some of this in initial information i'll then go and check out hubspot website z website and compare them more closely but i can do in a lot of the initial research and evaluation just through google ai mode right here you know what i find really interesting as well is that within google's io conference they stated this as the future of search and let's just go back to the all tab here because this is obviously what we're all used to right we've got our nice blue links in here there's no example okay we've got some knowledge knowledge boxes being pulled in here for people also search for but you know we might have some knowledge pulled in some video aspects here that are all dynamically pulled in depending on our search so if i go in actually and changes this to roi analysis roi analysis tools we'll probably get some more interesting things so we've got a featured snippet here i thought we might oh yeah we've got some videos down here so this is all being dynamically pulled depending on what we search here the same for the positioning of all of these elements here like images video shopping short videos news all of these tabs here are dynamically positioned based on what we searched for i find it really interesting that google have positioned ai mode on the left hand side before all and you know it doesn't worry me slightly because i think we need to be alive to any changes that are made but to me it signals that google have called this the future of search right and it's being positioned in google before all is it just a matter of time before ai mode is the default browsing experience i think it could be i think they will make some big adapt adaptations to the way that ai mode presents information because you know this was just recently out of beta and we've already seen with so many changes that happened in google like they are just iterating over time so what we see today will not will absolutely not be what we have in a year or two years time like it will change drastically based on the feedback they're receiving but i do think ai mode is in a very strong position now to be the default browsing experience especially with what google have said around it being the future of search okay so let's just talk a little bit more now about where this is heading in the future of search like i've just mentioned you know i do think that this is the future of search potentially maybe there's no potentially about it and it actually is i think google have positioned it in that way for sure so we need to kind of prepare ourselves for that reality and i think google have this vision of an end to end ai search experience which i do think is plan to replace our traditional beloved blue link search experience and it's all about the conversational or multi step research that you get from an ai experience and it keeps people on google's platform ultimately and google are there to serve information to people and become that source of info and research and you know part of that process to gather information and if they can do that in the best way possible to serve their users in the best way possible then i think they'll do that too there's obviously you know a huge kind of debate right now in the seo communities which is like well we'll just stop producing content then which will basically bring google to be out of day and it won't have that information to pull on to actually get the most up to date information so there is a catch twenty two here for google which is if they strip out all of you know the blue links and the traffic that they will send to websites then why would people carry on producing content that then renders google's model for serving information completely out of date because where did they get it from so there is you know this dilemma happening right now and you know do we continue to produce content or not which i'll move on to at the end but yeah i think the conversational multi step research is really where google are trying to take this and i think they just need to figure out the way right now to still have these blue links integrated to actually get websites to have traffic and also a key one for them will be how on earth they integrate google ads into this experience because they will they will absolutely have to for their revenue stream but how is the big question and you know there's no indication right now of how they're gonna position ads in ai mode there are no ads in a in ai mode right now at all but i think you know we will see them rolled out and you know we'll keep a close eye on that based on google's io announcements as well we already know there are some amazing upcoming features to support ai mode like deep research where ai can conduct comprehensive research reports within that window a shopping integration that's probably where we'll start to see ads come in as well multi modal search so you can use voice image and text all combined to then get your response personal context so that google will essentially integrate it with your user's data so your google google profile will basically train google to give you a different response based on you know your watch history your browsing history all of these kind of things you'll get a more personal response and real time visual search as well so your camera based interactive search experience so whatever you're seeing on your camera will then search in google so yeah some quite cool interesting updates come which is only gonna kinda of buff up google ai modes capabilities and probably increase the likelihood of them trying to serve it to more people what implications does this have on the market well i think you know there's a few key ones just in terms of of like the search experience itself so i think there'll be some key behavior evolution within search itself right now we we know that people are searching for longer queries i can't remember there was some data on this but people are already searching for longer search queries and ai mode only prompts people to have longer more conversational queries as well because if you're searching for something really particular you no longer just need to search for a couple of words to then try and dig your way through results to actually get the information you need you can ask it all straight directly in the window to actually get that response and ask follow ups questions as well to get more of your answers directly within that window itself and i think the user expectation and behavioral shift will change to get to want more immediate comprehensive answers there'll be a growing frustration to at actually have to do a lot of effort and manual research process to get answers much like now where we see ai you know replicate tasks it takes transcripts transcription meetings and it's likely while on earth would we ever have a meeting note taker in the business now so actually come in and type that up like those kind of things it will be like we go into search why earth will be click through those blue links to get all of that information when i can just get it from ai mode you know there's some synergies there that i think will become and basically you know there's just a kind of expectation shift from users which i think will come from this everyone is gonna see some impact from this whether it be good or bad probably more so bad in terms of traffic for most businesses i think there was a start i saw from hr which was we're already seeing about thirty five percent less clicks from queries with ai overview in google now if we compare the ai overview experience to the ai mode experience it's it's quite different because ai mode still is just part of the native traditional search experience where we've just got you know the box that answers the question but all of our links still remain in there it's still very familiar it's intuitive we understand to get information elsewhere if we need it ai mode is really containing your search experience to be more conversational it's kind of supplementing it with the links but that's not the core experience the core experience is the conversational answer you'll getting them back so a thirty five percent decrease in clicks from queries with in with ai overview is what we're seeing right now i expect that to be a lot larger with ai mode but also the queries won't be as comparable because i think the conversational nature of it will end up in such unique long queries you know the two won't actually be comparable but there's no doubt it's gonna take some some traffic what do we what does that actually you know mean for us well i think whilst traffic drops it does mean that the traffic we do get to our website will be more qualified because users are getting pre educated through that ai experience very much like how i showed you when i was looking for roi analysis tools and kind of figuring out crm and things like that i was getting a lot of the information the pre res search and pre evaluation information from ai mode you know a lot like how people are getting it from chat eb and claude and complexity and gemini itself right now but at the end of the day when it comes to b b we still need to go to that website make sure it's a you know true business and we can actually identify the things that are being said in ai mode for ourselves on the website and actually you know trust our own intellectual experiences and what we actually need from that product or solution and if they will match our expect expectations from looking at the website itself and kind of understanding how it suits our needs so similar to how we're seeing ai overview take a lot of informational search traffic i think ai mode is gonna do exactly the same thing we're gonna see an even bigger drop in informational search traffic and it might start to creep in to some of the more kind of middle of the funnel you know research and evaluation type content to but i still think for now like the commercial intent queries will be quite safe from ai mode especially when it comes to b2b purchases because businesses well and the purchaser the buyer will still need to evaluate your products on their own like when we're talking about tens of thousands hundreds of thousand millions of dollars worth of purchases here ai mode still probably isn't gonna be trusted to make that final decision you'll need to navigate to that website you'll need to back up you know what ai mode is saying for yourself like by reading it by understanding the nuances of your own situation and you know your complex needs that you still won't be able to get from ai mode you know that is internal within you ai mode won't help you do that so you need to basically take what you know and apply it to what you're reading an ai mode won't always have that you'll need to actually direct yourself to the website where you ultimately convert so whilst i do think that informational traffic will be you know gobble up even more there's almost no doubting that when it comes to our commercial traffic and then the commercial high intent inquiries we get off the back of that we might not see that drop off quite as much as soon you know it might be inevitable that that happens slowly in the long run but i think for the short term and just the way that b buying happens it's likely that will still see commercial intent search directing people more to websites and high intent leads from search remain fairly stable potentially a bit of drop off the evolution of content is something we've spoken about on this podcast already but i think that's becoming more important and we might even see ai mode eventually i think we will start to see it include more like video content from youtube for example to help answer those questions because it's conversational it'll be interesting to see how that works and how they then direct people to video because it's you know chat window but i think we could see it for sure but i think the way that buyers are consuming information and consuming content is you know video first anyway channels are prioritizing video first buyers are wanting to consume video content in lots of different ways so businesses need to adapt to that shift in buy preferences that's already happened by the way and you know we're trying to get to the point with some of our clients as well where we're prioritizing that long form piece of content at the start that we can then repurpose in lots of different ways and we're seeing some great benefits from that too and that's only helping us produce content faster in more mediums in a much better way because we've got that initial point of view that we can then serve throughout all of our content and you know it actually gives you something interesting to say too and what that enables ai mode to do if we're producing more content on the right things that we're linking you know internally that's great for our commercial keyword ranking and exposure on whatever that night look like in the future but it also gives us more chance of actually being mentioned in ai mode which i think is gonna gonna become more important and we we will talk more about that on the podcast too because it's thing that is something where looking at quite a lot at blend right now which is essentially geo which you've probably heard of generative engine optimization how do you actually get found in ai and i think that's gonna become quite important for ai mode figuring out how your brand gets mentioned there becoming kind of more brand orientated figuring out yeah how you get mentioned will almost become like the new ranking signal it's kind of like how many times you mentioned compared to position one to ten for example i briefly touched on the impact of ads which i yeah i do think this is an interesting one because i'm not too sure how google gonna get around this because right now even with ai overview we don't always see ads integrated into the ai overview window itself they're either above or below and i think google came out and said that themselves that that's typically how they're served but i have seen them in the ai overview box themselves yeah i think you know is without a doubt google will be figuring out a way to implement ads into ai mode because they have to for their own revenue they're not just gonna completely lose that stream my best guess will be that they'll still appear on the right hand side so within the cited websites it might like that might retain its own box but you'll have ad placements above or below that in terms of how you then target keywords and things with the conversational nature i think that will you know evolve in itself and you might have to go down a more phrase match type route to actually capture all those long tail queries because a you know direct match probably isn't going to be the best fit for the way that conversational search is in itself so yeah some big changes to come i think in the way that ads are gonna be served in google and particularly how they are served in ai mode for me i think as soon as that gets rolled out ai mode ads in particular like i'm gonna be putting directing a lot of our budget elsewhere into that because i think if you can be an early mover in that and have ad showing in ai mode it's a kind of big lever you might be able to pull quite early on to kind of get that exposure that people aren't yet set up to get so yeah if that does come and we can get some ads out there we'll obviously share any results on this podcast that we're seeing just quickly wrapping up like what to do next which i think we've kind of covered throughout this podcast but obviously the immediate steps are to try and get seen as much as possible in google ai mode and as far as you know we've researched and can tell that geo which is essentially what this is the best way to get ranked in there is still kind of our traditional seo methods by producing unique valuable content that google can then cite in its answers and so can other large language models so there's that aspect you know kind of continuing to do that but also adapting your content strategy in such a way that enables you to get your brand seen in the areas where attention is shifting which is largely you know in social and for video too so things like youtube and linkedin how do you actually get seen there that could be in a paid for way to actually reach the right people or how do you kind of establish that organic process that enables you to get a unique point of view into the market and have engagement and attention ultimately from the market marketing is a game of attention you need to go where that attention is and ensure that the market is resonating with your message and your brand is being seen and creating memorable experiences that they keep coming back to but yeah the world of seo is changing like massively and quickly at the moment yeah it's a it's a tricky one to see exactly where we're going and i'm interested to probably get fill on an episode in the next few weeks to get his thoughts as well and you know give myself a bit more time to do some more research into this and have a bit of more play around with ai mode and try and you know bring some more consolidated thoughts on exactly how we get mentioned in ai mode and kind of what that means for our traditional content plays like blogging like pillar pages should we still do it i think for now the answer is probably yes because the commercial value of google and seo is still there we still see high intent leads from google across multiple businesses and we know that in order to be seen for commercial queries we need high value content you know inter linking to those with exact match keywords etcetera but you know is that changing i think it's probably too early to tell yet but we definitely need to be on the pulse and we'll bring you any insights that we get to that but i just wanted to kind of bring this i'm calling it an emergency episode to you because you know this is a huge change that i think all marketers need to really kind of just do a bit of research on and figure out what's next and we'll do the same and bring you any insights that we have along the way for sure as always but yeah it's really interesting and i think you know a lot of seo and marketers are probably like scared about this but if you think about the marketers that are now just joining the workforce you know they're fresh out of you or whatever it may be and they're getting into their first marketing job this is all new this is all this isn't new to them this is just the norm like this is what it is now and they will figure out the ways work with what it is now and get results in the current landscape you know and i think we all need to do the same we can't think about what if that was this way or what if that didn't change like we just need to actually figure out what is working next and you know we're doing that blend i think in a good way figuring out how to get attention from these other places but there's definitely more work to do for everyone to understand the impact of ai mode in particular and the search landscape shape itself which is just yeah changing quickly but i think it's exciting you know it's a new era of marketing almost that we can all be excited about and you know take on the next challenge i suppose so yeah an interesting episode for the podcast there it's worth saying as well we'll have an episode coming out at some point to announce outside kind of like new youtube setup up but we do have a new youtube channel called demand decode itself we split it out from the ben channel for multiple reasons which i'll call out in another podcast but if you are listening to this right now and wanna head over to youtube to subscribe to us there and watch you know the content which is you know visual at times when i'm diving through demos that would be hugely hugely appreciated in the meantime jobs have follow jobs are like anything is appreciated and i'll catch you next time bye everyone

right now ai is everywhere and it's being pitched as the answer to every single problem can write faster strategize better scale easier than ever but just because ai can do something doesn't mean that it should and just because somebody tells you that ai can do something doesn't mean that you can do it just as well and effectively and sc for your business so in this episode phil and i are gonna actually sit down and discuss where to draw the line when it comes to ai phil ai really is just the kind of perceived answer to everything right now and there are there's a lot of noise around ai and how effective it is i think we should also start by saying like we are obviously huge fans of ai and have found a lot of amazing use cases for it but i think it is really really important for marketers to know where to draw that line yeah exactly i mean it's booming and it's exciting as you say we've got lots of time for ai we're using it in lots of different ways but we are most definitely in a some sort of hype cycle around it and there are claims that it can and we'll do all sorts of lofty things but the proof just often isn't there and probably if we come away from this conversation with like one piece of advice for listeners it's establish that proof for yourselves right but we'll get there but by talking about where you can and can't use it and how you can get value out of it without falling foul of its limits it's flaws and where actually could weaken your you know weaken your work against you if you use it in the wrong area so yeah it's an area where cautions needed but there's a lot of potential too hundred percent yeah it's just knowing yeah where to be cautious and where to really accelerate everything yeah so in this episode we've got some like kind of core themes that we're gonna run through and where we just think take caution with ai you know it might be used in the process but it definitely shouldn't be the kind of end output or the driving force behind it so we'll we'll go through those and or replace the you know the human element yeah completely there are places where you can just totally trust men task to ai but there are places where the human mind brain invention is all still the most valuable thing you can use yeah for sure okay well the first one that we've got here which rolled on nicely from that is strategy and differentiation and the reason why i feel so strongly about this is because when you think about the way that ai works and it's predictive nature i mean it is literally a predictive machine it predicts what's gonna be next in the series of words or outputs basically based on its input and its training data so it basically excels at what it already knows and what is already gonna predict is gonna be you know the next thing based on what you've said it doesn't forge new ideas or new plans so when when i think about strategy it's quite a messy thing you know it you've got lived experiences you've got kind of market intuition conversations timing like what you might have just heard in the market from other sources like that ai doesn't have access to and relying on ai for strategy direction or to differentiate your business or your go to market is just gonna give you something that has already been done and isn't unique to you and will guide you in the best way yeah ai isn't good at sparks of inspiration you know or cross referencing you know unrelated ideas to come up with new approaches ai can't go for a walk down the high street and suddenly think of a great way to stand out from your crowd competitors and so on and you've talked about it being a predictive machine and that is true you know a an l a large language model type of ai essentially outputs words based on a probabilities spectrum and based on the tokens that reflect the words that go into it i've spoken about this before but essentially you know in nearly all use cases ai on their own the knowledge of the world that's stored in their weights and them and the model itself is not the value they offer you're gonna get the better results usually if you input extra information against which that model of weights applies we'll talk about context and instructions and projects at some point i'm sure but in this area of strategy and differentiation i think even that approach has limited ability to get you you know above the above the competition yeah into blue sky thinking or in into original ideas because like you said ai is very good at taking what is put in and condensing it down based on probability that doesn't lead you to new places it's that's why marketers are still critical to creating you know unique memorable strategies that are gonna produce outs outside results and you know help them to step out of the you know failing strategies that you know commonplace but no longer working and and things like that exactly that and iso is quite hard right because we see influencers and other businesses sharing the output of ai and it looks like this amazing well structured strategy and it is it looks good it's well structured the output is good but what it actually is and what it means and what it represents is not unique like it's just well polished and it looks quite structured but it it's so if you're a saas business and you ask ai generically for a go to market strategy the output might look good but it's going to be the same as every other single business yeah there'll be a lot of a lot of parallels would what everyone else is getting out of that system for similar questions like you say it looks good it's produced quickly that's very very gratifying to see but you know if you take the time and you should to read every word of it you'll realize that it is a reduction it yeah for the most part it's very good at taking the information that's available on subject and and averaging it summarizing it you're not gonna get a strategy that's unique to you or you unique to your business when you're watching the videos of influencers who are demonstrating these approaches i think it's important to separate what they're saying from what they're doing many times i've seen people post a video where the headline is a huge claim about the result of an ai exercise being the best ever world leading you know category beating and they do a very good job of describing it as such but if you look at what's created at at the end of that process and ask yourself well is it i think the answer answer's often no and so there is a disconnect here between what people wanna hear and see therefore what's being provided in terms of content and what's really possible to get as an output from these methods and that's really important to stay critical as you as you view these because i get caught up in it i did every day yeah every day i'm watching a video that you know claims to be able to revolutionize something in this area yeah and every day i'm reminded that just because someone says it's so doesn't mean it's so 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 yeah it's it's overwhelming isn't it it is overwhelming because you know every time i literally open up the linkedin app on my phone or every single podcast i listen to you right now is talking about a brand use case for ai and you think oh wow yeah i could use it in that way i could use it in that way and i think this comes back to your point around like safety around ai as well which is something marketers need to bear in mind when they explore all these new tools yeah i mean you know every ai tool comes with a warning about not putting sense information and then most marketers do it anyway right let's be honest but the risks are even greater if you start to cross post information if you start to try to integrate systems automate them give ai your apis your secrets you know in terms of you know connecting your platforms and so on there are huge risks around hooking a up i ai up to your business but in the context of creating a business strategy i think the risk is simply that you're going to get something that is already been done to death by competitors yes and doesn't stand out from the crowd because almost no amount of audience insights no amount of direction is gonna get that predictive language model to come up with something that's never been seen of or seen or heard of before in terms of how to go to market what message to use how to position yourself that that will be very mediocre yeah we've seen it many times and that's why you're better off retaining your very central role in that process yes you can use ai as a tool it's particularly as a productivity tool yep around that and to gather some you know baseline of information yeah sure fine but get it to write that strategy and you might be onto a losing yeah and you know you can get it to kind of consolidate your ideas and structure them in a in a manner that works for you you know let it take the kind of competitor analysis the context within your business what you did last year the results where you wanna be all those kind of things but the actual input and the idea ideological and like where you wanna go and how your business is different should be coming from you because ai does not have the kind of internal nuance of everything that we have as humans and i think it's really important to remember that and not try to just outsource everything because you can yeah absolutely for sure i think it's interesting to note how the biggest success i've had with with ai is a sort of writing assistant is usually in quite narrow scoped exercises a lot of input lot of context very clear instructions step by step you know so i get to review every output and validate it and decide whether it's workable or yeah but when i fire off ai on a research project yes i'll get back a lot of information sometimes that information is useful but it's always average information that doesn't stand out so yeah warning for sure alright so that was strategy the next thing that i've got here is the final creative output and that goes for anything i was mainly thinking ads when i put this down but you know we chatted before and actually maybe this extends to all creative actually but i think when it comes to thinking about ai role in creativity for me it's still very much a kind of production a productive tool to use within the the idea deviation process and the kind of conceptual commercialization of something and absolutely not their end product yeah yeah i think that might come down to there's two there's two factors at play there one of which is like scale of organization and therefore what's at risk you know and you typically a larger more mature business will have more risk and therefore want want and need stronger control and output and ai output therefore is gonna be less useful but there's also like cost you know to your point if you're if you're spending money distributing ads to your audience using ai created output right now isn't a safe strategy for ensuring roi on spend the ability to craft you know we we know that ai generated creative has a telltale signs yep the mistakes and see if you don't like what you first get it can be quite hard to maneuver it into your right position because again you know it's it's a different kind of model but it's still a generative model yeah which doesn't respond to feedback the same way a designer response to feedback a designer who can take a layered design file and move things exactly where you want them yep not an option in the majority of ai tools that available today so yeah there's definitely a variety of reasons and risks that mean that businesses wouldn't or shouldn't allow ai to be their creative you know they're final creative output yeah the they're kind of like a creative assistant and creative collaborator along the way but not like the creative director yeah that's gonna yep you give you the the input on what to have and like get the output that you need you make a great point which is i mean you know i think we're pretty close to ai having an application or replace within creating certain types of stock photography as long as you're prepared to accept the some the flaws that are probably present right yeah yeah like there are there are sectors there are fields there are applications where getting a stock photograph is nigh on impossible right and actually ai i can really help you out there and it can also help in certain you know more illustrative image creations on the abstract side you i don't think you can ask ai to create a an illustration of your software as ui better than you can create your software as ui but again turning like you know photographic material into something more illustrative is possible but it probably isn't going to be your art director creator director or your are ux sir anytime soon yeah and actually there's a big overlap there with the strategy discussion because you need intuition innovation and the ability to sort of cut across subjects and themes and have ideas there that isn't possible in generative models yeah like again it comes back to originality and the way that ai even you know output which is based on predictability yep and you're not gonna get something totally unique based on ai idea i think the idea deviation process can kinda be fleshed out through ai as well but the actual original thinking in the first place like when you first start the creative process for whatever you're doing needs to come from you yes and then you kinda got this middle bit which is where you can use ai as a collaborator and then the final output for me does need to come through a human the the point you make around like the back and forth that you sometimes have with these ai image generators is like i felt that pain yeah when we've kind of being enhanced in our youtube thumbnails right now i used i can't remember what the tool was but it was a like youtube thumbnail generator which would give you the classic youtube thumbnail look but i must have wasted half a day like on on this trying to come up with like the right prompts so i thought if i can nail it if i can nail the right prompt that's it you know we're golden but honestly the back and forth was just constant and so so frustrating to try and get it right yeah it's interesting isn't it it's like again like if you listen to the voices this stuff is easy now it's there's a tool for everything and what you gotta do is buy that tool but the truth is the reality is and and most of us will have experienced it it is not that that easy yeah and therefore i think like you say caution has to be applied and you have to realize where you as a human have value to add and and retain that value and i think approach is to adopting ai maybe need to get turned like inverted a little bit inside small businesses talk about that in a but yeah i think the other thing within creativity as well is that authenticity is so valuable today that allowing ai to get in the way of you making that authentic connection with your audience is a really bad idea so for example would it would it be better to create videos using an ai avatar or to sit down in front of a camera and create whatever kind of video you can and we gotta how rough with your personal characteristics and opinions of points you know it's yes there you go get like that it's another case of just because you can do it just because the software and the capability is there to do it doesn't mean that you should do it yeah and what about turning written content into ai generated podcast episode again not for me like maybe there's i don't what the appeal is so i heard an interesting use case for this though at the demand journey me up couple of weeks ago which was in sales conversations mh so they basically took i can't remember maybe it was a back and forth trans you know email chain or messages and proposal and basically turned it into a podcast which would be a conversation between the two rather than just like a video talking through it it was more of a conversation i don't know you know how that actually went i think it was quite rep well received but you know would everyone really listened to like a ten minute podcast episode maybe but it was an interesting different use case for us it's good to try these things right and an experiment but even that feels like it fits in the sort of like identify an opportunity a problem test and ai but don't go out don't come out this thing thinking well i can replace myself yeah and my team and my function and do it with ai ar and not have to do it myself in yeah and you know what you know what's funny with these things right these like ai podcasts and ai video generators the people actually marketing these are still themselves mh again yeah like separate what people say from what they do right it's always been a bit of a watch word of mine and you can you can learn a lot by observing that sort of thing which is okay if this is so good why am i still watching a human yeah record this video or are they're hearing their voice yeah yeah good one last point on the creative output i think it does come back to roi again because i suppose are we are we calling blogs creative output i think and i think written that you share with your audience is probably a form of creative mh when you think of the roi of a blog it's typically going to be lower investment and lower return on a single piece of content then potentially you know a big ad campaign on linkedin where you're spending tens of thousands hundreds of thousands so the level of input and output you get from ai is different a blog which we know firsthand can be crafted pretty well with ai mh you know almost to ninety percent done through the use of you know projects uploading knowledge strict instructions on exactly what to do yep you can trust ai to do that because like the roi expected and the the level of input needed is less if i'm running an ad campaign spending tens of thousands hundreds of thousands are you going to trust that creative idea which is but the creative output i mean which is you know eighty percent of the importance of a campaign is the actual creative people see yeah are you trusting that to ai yet to get you maximum roi on that investment exactly i don't so i mean even in the case of blogs right you you still need to the marketing the the marketer the human still needs to remain in the loop right you you'd you'd be un otherwise to simply let an ai generate content and publish it unchecked if we all did that well one would probably drowning content tomorrow yeah and it wouldn't have an effect so even though ai there is performing a larger more valuable task for you and it's better suited to it it still can't do the whole thing right so there is still that balance of human and ai involvement but like you say where where visual and textual meets cost yeah that's where you've got real concerns that you need to monitor and an ai is less of a solution to that type of need in your business yeah interesting point cool alright number three on my list which i know for a fact some people will disagree with but it's ai mass outreach basically because for me ai doesn't make it easier to connect with people doesn't make it easier to engage with them no easier than it is right now so you know craft that outreach is still possible ai just makes it easier to spam them like spam on a mass level and i feel like i'm seeing it firsthand you know just getting waves of ai spam i know when i say i because i can recognize you know the the type and the language it uses and i'm literally ignoring one hundred percent of and i think everyone i know it is as well yeah and even when it isn't an ai the response rates were always low right so adding in heaps of ai generated content no matter how good it is you know is hard to see a scenario where that doesn't create a negative impact on results from that type of activity because of the volume of noise that's going on and to your point about engaging and connecting with people there's that need for authenticity again right it's like yeah you need to be a real authentic human really to get a response from someone in any channel these days whether it's on social with video content or in their inbox if you are a seasoned experience successful you know rep performing outreach yep hard to imagine a world where ai outreach doesn't simply drive up the volume massively and the results down yeah because people can no longer sift out anything that's even remotely interesting yeah i mean you know we've not been big fans of of outreach full stop in terms of we'd rather see businesses get inbound operational know and to support that effort if not do without it to some degree but when you do do it it it it hinges on the ability to create that why you say that authentic yeah connection in their inbox or on the phone and stand out yeah the thing that will happen right is we'll basically replace personalization tokens contact first name company name industry job title with these more kind of crafted things by ai but you will be able to identify by them as soon as they're used well they already are like you can easily identify when ai has pulled a piece of information about you and pop it into an email like you can literally identify it so whilst there are claims that ai tools can buy you know amplify and improve the personalization of your emails you can still identify it and that's the point like you can still tell when it's it's not crafted to be authentic it's not crafted to actually build trust with me and you know if you're if you're relying on ai to build trust then i i think that's a dangerous games play and they are just claims until they're until they are proven the evidence right and in a lot of marketing trends marketing and sales have some overlapping this area but in a lot of marketing and sales trends the proof is often quite slow to come if it ever does and so i think if you're considering you know adopting tools and strategies like this then you've got to be really you've got to really sc the roi you know yeah to your point earlier you know and for example like like outreach has always been low response right yep and so even if an ai outreach mechanism can promise you know a certain amount of leads or a certain amount of meetings booked until you look at the pipeline created and the revenue created from that type of go to market you cannot determine its roi in its value and so it you can't look at part of what you do in a go to market context in terms of pipeline generated and then part of it in terms of leads booked go yeah leads leads generated meeting booked because you're not comparing apples to apples then and yeah i think ai outreach reach while well it's more complicated than it seems to do first of all i've i've worked with a few people who trying to set it up and it's actually really quite complicated and i think the results will be disappointing yeah yeah and until i see the you know proven case study for we implemented this tool we did this with it we had you know this amount of outreach and this is what we got in return in terms of revenue you know i remain to be that way you know yeah i'll that it the other thing that happens in like marketing trends is that the businesses with the best results and what are usually the ones selling that product yeah or tool and it's not until you get results from other industries that are not related to that particular type of solution that you can really just determine whether there's because of course people who are looking for a certain thing are gonna be more responsive to that thing you know in the sales process yeah i remember for example you know video emails yeah vid when yeah they were the craze that that spiked pretty quickly pretty hard but i think same conversational marketing same with ab same with certain you know direct mail platform like lots of things are easiest to sell when you're the ones selling it yeah and it's only when other businesses adopt it apply it and and succeed with it that they sustain their interest over the long term right so give it some time in this area yeah i do maybe think there's a there's a case to say if you're currently doing outreach mass outreach and it is dire it is the crap of crap outreach that you've ever seen ai can make it mediocre u but i think if you're already doing really great outreach and getting results from it like you'll still be doing that ai might be able to take you to the next level to improve productivity yep but it's not going to literally take you from zero to hero no without any effort in there without any strategy behind it without already doing it effectively and just enhancing what you're doing yeah yeah and and and if you do try it whatever you do try gotta be measuring it in the same way because lots of things get added to the go to market like budget but the result is still generated by the same activity in the same amount and convert close that roughly the same quantity but you've got this other thing that just doesn't really do anything alongside it and that's quite sort of interesting to see when you see it but this could be a case where you spend that money and you don't actually improve your results and what you do get is still the products how you were doing it before yeah interesting yeah for sure okay the next point i've got here which i think is a quick one we can touch on is brand voice and your identity basically i think we're huge fans of things like cloud projects and custom gp because of the ability to upload knowledge and your voice and you know essentially train a project on what you sound like if you're gonna rely on ai to do the talking for you then you're gonna sound like everybody else you're gonna sound generic you're not gonna sound unique you're gonna have no differentiation at all and yeah it'll often you know hit the mark when it not hit the mark when it comes to resonating yeah you know if you sound if you ask a generative model like an l to produce an output based on nothing but it's you know weighted knowledge of the world as it were then you're going to get very mediocre not unique sub par results if you can remove its need to rely on anything that it knows by giving it copious amounts of context then in the case of the written word in particular l m's are quite good at generating outputs that are aligned to your needs based on your inputs so once your brand voice is defined if you can prompt an ai tool well enough then you can probably get copy out that is in an editable condition and you and utilize it but wouldn't recommend people use it to develop their brand voice you know back to that strategy point you know in terms of what your brand is and stands for and who you are and how you communicate it all those things that's where humans have the edge absolutely but once you've got to the point where it's defined you can through projects through custom gp with the right approach prompting you can remove the need for the l to really use its weighting or its knowledge of a subject at all and just base its output on what you give it to to reference and that can result in good things yeah for sure so yeah i think the caution there is basically just using ai without any knowledge of your brand voice or relying on ai to produce that brand voice for you yeah not gonna work you've got to give it those instructions you've got to give it that context that style guide as well you know and the more you can give it the better because the more you sort of drown out the average noise that comes from the model and you can have the output based on your unique content and context so yeah that is that is an area where there's some value yeah for sure okay did you have a point around like business size or scale to touch on well we talk talked about the fact that businesses of different scales will have different like risk appetite smaller businesses nothing to lose you might wanna you might get away or using images and the audio day are i generated ad and blog post but you know if you've got any kind of success under your about you're gonna be less tolerant of the floors and drawbacks that are in those you know outputs i think another challenge that needs to be treated with caution is the again there's a lot of hyper and not only what can connect what ai can do but how easy it is to code with it to integrate to connect you know there's lots of developments happening in enabling you to connect different systems to ai but again mature businesses will need to take the security risks and safety risks and privacy risks associated with those types of initiatives very carefully right i don't think it's wise in a business that's either mature or iso certified for just anybody to buy an integration platform connect their crm with an ai language model with a with their ad platform that can spend all their money you know and let it run off and do its own things that's just not wise right so you need to work with your it department you need to work with the right resources internally if you're gonna go beyond using ai and l m's in these sort of like you know spot areas within your function and try to go horizontally across the organization i think there's lots of exciting potential for ai to go horizontally across the organization but it needs to be done with care and again you've made the point that there's lot of claims out there that are as yet un subs and in fact when you go and try and replicate what's been claimed it can't be achieved right but marketers life story i think but it's you know happening again a lot with ai my recommendation for people that when it comes to ai adoption in the business is to you know set aside these lofty ambitions that are that are put there by influencers shortly leaders there's and vendors and and start with specific use cases i encourage businesses to divide their business up into all sort of different functions they've got divide those functions into all the steps that they take to deliver their output their value and one by one find out prove if an ai tool in the first place just an l like yeah like chat your claude can reliably do that task if you can't reliably do that task you've got nothing to integrate you've got nothing to propagate or build upon but if you can prove ai application in that task you've suddenly got real two really interesting options available to you one is to look at tools that are more specialized more dedicated to that function and whether they give you additional benefit right most of these tools are api into these language models so if you can't do it yourself with that model i'm not confident that any tool will do it better for you right but if you've proven it you can go up to those tools and maybe get more speed or roi or you know better results maybe or you can look at well i've now got this output where can i send it yeah who can i give it to and again i do that manually in the first place pass it to yeah your teammate your colleague your other department so here you go put that into your yeah process and you can extrapolate ai across the business taking that use case application approach and sooner later you'll find that you might have quite sophisticated you know set of tools working together yeah but you've covered it from a ground up approach and from a from an evidence based approach as opposed to this kind like crazy lay off dozens of people do everything with ai today yeah which just isn't working yeah yeah i really really like that point you made around the kind of horizontal and then vertical shifts you can make with ai because so much so many of these ai tools especially when we're talking about language models and you know if they specialize in headline copy or add copy whatever it may be they are actually just using the language model of like you know claude chat totally google you know one of the call language models out there and they're basically just plugging in a fancy ui making it look good and and selling it which you know might work for them but actually if you can prove out first with the core language model in a lot of case that be well to then decide if you wanna scale up to that new tool yeah exactly i briefly tested a a a platform that claimed to create you know marketing strategies you know using ai and yeah know it was quickly obvious that it it wasn't doing anything but prompting chat gp to get utterly mediocre information back and was like well that that experiment you know it was quick quick to conclude because it it wasn't doing anything that was of any use whatsoever but it proved the point that yeah for the most part if you could do it yourself on a i don't know whether they called like tier one or like layer one ai but if you could do it in chat claude then you can maybe do it even better yeah in a dedicated tool or platform but not if you can't yeah prove out first yeah cool okay well that's all i've got on my list then about you no that's me i'm good okay cool well hopefully that was interesting i think we yeah just to say again you know like we are huge fans of ai here we're definitely not dinosaur marketers thinking ai you know has no place in this world and you know humans are everything there are so many use cases for ai we've seen the benefits firsthand we've got amazing use cases right now that we're implementing and using it for but we just recognize the hype as well and like i think we try and be honest on here yep and just cut through the hype and basically yeah just try to give honest feedback about what we're seeing what we've tried and ultimately where to draw the line with this hype practical information that people listening can can apply repeatedly and successfully my my entire marketing career i've always looked for things that can be executed repeatedly and with the same results and it it's always been a it's always been a case that there's far more that you can't apply and get the the promise results out of than the than you can and i've always sought out and tried to share the things that if you take them home and do them you'll get more or less the same thing out that i got and and i i think that's the value we bring when we when we share our ideas yeah cool alright well that's let's wrap it up there hopefully you enjoyed this episode if you did drop us a like follow whatever it is on whatever player you're listening to that would be great and until then we will catch next time bye thanks all

starting and scaling a b podcast is really really hard and if i could go back in time and give myself five brutally honest truce before launching this podcast these would be them okay so lesson number one that i feel like i've learned the hardware is that getting started is really the hardest part of all of this process when i think about when we launched this podcast and even websites dakota our other podcast there was no fancy studio like i'm saying and now we had no great marks we had no great cameras we literally just started the the podcast with our laptops with our webcam our built in webcam our built in mics we streamed on linkedin live to grow a bit of an initial audience to nail down ourselves for that actual date and time and it really wasn't polished and you know what it was really nerve wracking as well i recently just went to watch back episode one of demand coded and my god i think i made it to that the ten minute mark i was cri so much i just couldn't finish it so please don't go back and listen to episode one it was yeah a a horrible thing to look back at but you grow as you do podcasting and you learn kind of what works your kind of conversational style what you enjoy to talk about how you bounce off of other people how to ask questions meaningfully how to add to a conversation how to know when not to talk to be honest but i think the message to get across here in that you know getting started is the hardest part is that you don't need all of the fancy equipment you don't need highly polished production in order to have a podcast that resonates with your audience what you actually need is a good unique point of view you need to understand your buyers and you need to be able to educate them in a way that's compelling enough that they that learn they want to come back and they enjoy consuming your content that's ultimately the goal of a podcast to educate and have return listeners that trust you and may or may not want to buy from you in the future but that is the overall goal that you're going for when it comes to getting started so i think one thing and this probably goes throughout all of b2b marketing is that actually launching fast and learning fast is the best way to be especially right now as everything is accelerated through ai having thoughts and technological excuses hold you back is a really like dangerous place to be in because you end up never doing anything whilst everybody else who's accelerating all of their activity especially through ai are just learning and iterating fast and time and time again so yes getting started is hard you know being kind of vulnerable to people calling you out and disagreeing with you and even just listening to yourself back is you know a hard thing to do at first and it's uncomfortable but actually you just begin to normalize the discomfort and almost everybody that starts a podcast if you just scroll all the way back to episode one you will just see such a drastic difference from then to where they are now and you know when i think about the most successful podcast they've done hundreds of episodes you know most of them are two hundred plus many are four five hundred plus actually and the amount of learnings in that time are unbelievable so yeah getting started is definitely the hardest part but obviously you know we don't get to episode sixty eight like we are here you don't get to episode two hundred three hundred without starting episode one so that is the important thing to remember 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 one thing that really helped me sell in the idea of a podcast and has helped a lot of people sell in the idea of a podcast is not framing it as the podcast itself yes you know the podcast itself will give you a great source of long form content but it's about everything else that the podcast brings we spoke maybe on the last episode the episode before even with kyle about this new b2b content marketing playbook which is all about starting with a long form piece of content that has a unique point of view that shares your opinion with the market educate them in this long form way which is the seed to all the other content that you can then create and it's not a huge lift to then repurpose that into a podcast but where you'll get the most value where you'll get the most engagement the most impressions the most clicks is actually the repurposed content that you get out the back of that so even if you sell in the podcast first as a way to purely produce content at scale and across multimedia a multi channel then that will get you started and that will kind of sell it into the business and just give you a jumping off point to then expand the podcast from and see the value directly from the podcast itself another really hard challenge with a lot of podcast podcasts and b2b podcast podcasts in particular especially with smaller marketing teams and lean budgets is that you'll typically have the one person whether that be a marketing manager content marketing manager one person that might do absolutely everything and that's where i was all of the idea isolation the scheduling recording editing public clipping writing producing behind the scenes set up all of this is a lot for one person to handle and what you kind of miss out on here is the fun of podcasting which is actually getting behind the mic and you know bouncing off of somebody throwing ideas around having discussion having a laugh at some points and it it removes the element of it feeling like work and like a job whereas as soon as you start to layer in everything else you need to think about the fund starts to be stripped out that's before we even get into the actual like production quality advantages of not doing it yourself that you get because you know you don't have to control the audio levels you don't have to control the focus on the cameras you don't have to do white balancing on editing and remove certain sounds and distractions that happened during the podcast you know you don't need to do all of that and one thing that's really helped us in this podcast and our and our other podcast as well is having somebody internally who can help maximize the output that we're able to deliver you know when i can dedicate my time to simply producing well sitting behind the mic and talking about things that i've learned in the market from marketers i've spoken to from our customers from our strategy team and other teams we can absolutely double triple quadruple the output in some cases and it enables me to have a clearer vision on where i want the podcast to go what i want us to talk about and yeah just be able to absolutely nail the output and have more consistent output too because you know i'm not being pulled in too many directions on that point as well just being creative and having the energy for ida and discussion actually on a podcast is a finite resource and you really need to protect that in whatever way you can so that's why i think being able to outsource some of your production is extremely valuable of course you need to get to a position in order to do that which i'll speak about in a sec but just being able to protect that resource is a yeah is a really important thing to do and you know i haven't even spoken about just the different actual skills required in content creation as i'm doing now just talking and the actual production of content they are different skills and required different skills sets the more i sit behind a mic and learn how to you know explain my thoughts and come across the right way have meaningful discussions understand you know how to listen deeply to like that is a skill to craft and hone in on itself the same way that learning how to edit a podcast trailer how to you know stitch certain things together and transition from one thing to another are all very important skills but are very different skills and being able to outsource one part of that enables me to actually deliver my thoughts and the kind of educational content we want to in a much better way it's really really important to understand when to get to this scale though and when to outsource your production because like i spoke about at the start really the best way to get started is just on your own you know fire up whatever equipment you have edit it yourself if you absolutely have to start with episode one so you can get to episode a hundred that's the most important thing but it's also really important to know when you actually need to scale and get a producer in house or outsource that and there are a few things to think about here so the first thing that i saw was that i was becoming the bottleneck and creating our content you know i was ending up delaying releases causing us to skip episodes altogether you know going a few weeks even up to a month before actually posting another episode just because there was so much friction in my day to day job and i didn't have the time to actually sit down record and edit and do all of the post production required in a podcast so that was a huge warning sign like if we wanna actually continue this podcast and scale it and we were already seeing the value which i'll spoke about which i'll speak about in a moment but if we want to continue on this and actually scale it up we're gonna we're gonna need to remove the bottleneck which is me the next thing to consider is the actual quality of the output obviously like i spoke about having a content creator and a content producer i require different skill sets and if you feel like your your output doesn't match the input so your creative content advice is really really great and you've got a good message that resonates with the market but your post production doesn't match up with that a producer can obviously elevate that show and polish it up for you so you know that that kind of leans into caring more so about the output and having it matched up with you and i think the important point to remember and to know here is really when when to start doing all of this even if you know you feel quite burn out you feel like you you are the bottleneck the content quality isn't necessarily that good and you're considering outsourcing the production or getting somebody in house to do it i think it's still important to have seen value from the podcast and be able to prove value because ultimately you're gonna need to justify this decision to outsource it or take budget from some somewhere else and use it to outsource the production so you need to be able to prove value from the podcast first of all and that comes from a few different ways so you've got things like several port attribution which if you're doing podcasting rights and you're driving demand through podcasting your educate in the market in the right way and building affinity of your brand soon enough your self supported attribution will eventually show people finding you and hearing about you through your podcast the other thing to consider are the qualitative things that you're hearing in the business and these might come from sales you know like sales conversations that you might be able to use at tool like gong to actually analyze and track are people mentioning the podcast have they listen to your content did they find you on linkedin where your podcast content came from another thing to consider is like retention rates through customers that listen to your podcast customers that are fully aligned with the content that you create and the the ethos and approach that you take to whatever market that you're in you know they're fully aligned with you will typically be retained better but your data might show that you know can you pinpoint the customers that interact with your content that turn up on your live shows that you that you'd turn into podcast afterwards and do they retain better do they expand better all of these things will be signals to tell you when you're ready to scale up and you know you want a few of those signals in place you wanna be seeing positive signs of success those even early indicators you know like customers interacting and just knowing that your content is resonating with the with the right people and that if you just put a bit more effort into it and remove potentially the bottleneck from that outsource production you might be able to scale growth even faster the third point i've got is being youtube first podcast second and i think i was quite naive actually when we started demand decode to think that podcast listeners would just find us through spotify or apple but that really didn't happen to be honest and it's taken all of this time we're probably pushing eighteen months maybe even like two years i think more eighteen months of doing this podcast and i've learned the hard way that people just won't find us through spotify or apple no matter how much people tell you that you need to do you know podcast title or seo which can help a little bit but the majority of your audience aren't gonna find you through that they're gonna be finding you through things like social maybe even like your email newsletter but the realization for me was when we've recently started trying on youtube i know that sounds you know funny like why would you be even uploading on youtube without trying but that was just another channel to place our content content on which could be linked to and embedded from other places but actually when you start trying on youtube and you upload your first few shorts you you know upload that that first thumbnail that you've really kind of crafted quite carefully you've lent into youtube seo and you know you've got something like vid iq to find keyword volumes on youtube and all of a sudden you know you're starting to see more comments more engagement more views on your videos and really like this has been such an eye opener to me that youtube is absolutely the place to start a podcast it's not just a distribution platform it's a a search and discovery engine that will drive most of your new visitor your new listeners to your podcast it's yeah i mean now i now i think about it is it's actually quite obvious because in b2b people will often search for things to learn you know they will search for topics that they don't quite understand they need to educate themselves on further and they will do that in channels like search and like youtube they won't search for that in a podcast typically so getting those new listeners i is much much easier through a channel like youtube then if you weren't actually trying to do like trying to actually focus on youtube itself so yeah now we are totally shifting our thinking to be youtube first and this aligns with kind of what we're doing with the channels what we're trying out in terms of like visual framing transitions where we're actually placing content in the video trying to ramp up retention rate like being a huge one for the google our algorithm title formatting descriptions like chapters all of these considerations we're now putting into youtube because i absolutely see it as the biggest growth lever we have for the podcast and i think you know if i could go back eighteen months and start the podcast again i wouldn't even care like i would reverse my thinking from thinking more about the audio consumption which is still important thank you to everybody who listens to this of course but actually the video consumption is more important for initial discovery like audio is still probably the place or a key place to retain listeners and get repeat listeners back to the podcast coming you know every single week getting that notification on their phone but youtube is equally important for that and also has the added benefit of that discover ability which is just absolutely unmatched when it comes to other podcast players so yeah i would say that was a a mistake but you know sixty eight episodes in now shifting our thinking but yeah if you're thinking about starting the podcast i think youtube first lesson four is that podcast roi is definitely real but it's just not a media there is a myth out there i would say that you can't measure the impact of a podcast and you can't to some degree you can't measure the impact in comparison to a performance marketing campaign when you're running google ads and you're measuring immediate conversions on your landing page it doesn't work like that it's a brand activity it's a you know non track dark place where you distribute content and if somebody sees your podcast a hundred times you might never know that unless they convert on your website and tell you or they tell you another way you know you just won't know but to say that you just blanket statement can't measure the impact of a podcast is just absolutely not true you just need to know where to look and i've already mentioned these places but self reported attribution will be a key way to know if your podcast for your business is actually driving conversions on your website and like building demand for actually what you offer and convert in that in that way on your website ultimately and even this won't be media it will take time to even grow your audience and actually build trust build affinity and have people trust you enough and understand that you are the go to place for this advice and for this service or this product and then go to your website and tell them tell you that they heard about you through your podcast you know that will still take time as you grow up your listeners partnership but it will come if you're doing b2b podcasting effectively and the other thing like i spoke about before was those qualitative insights so through sales conversations maybe you have a call recording software can you measure how many times people are referencing your content it might be the content that's created from your podcast it might not be the podcast itself it might be that somebody just says they found hurt like listen to you on youtube it might not appear in any attribution but it might come out in a sales conversation for example or a customer success conversation from existing customers then can you link all of those things together to understand that actually the people who reference that they consumed our content either convert at a much higher rate or they're retained and expanded at a much higher rate and then you soon start to build up this picture of the impact of your content and your podcast of the content that's created from your podcast you know the people that consume it are a better fit for the business and they are you know they offer more lifetime value essentially which is the commercial metrics that the people who you're kind of trying to justify the the time investment for this podcast to actually matter lesson than five which i'm even guilty of as i say it for this episode which is quite funny is that preparation equals quality and there is this correlation for me at least which i found between prep time and the quality of an episode and funnily enough we recorded a podcast earlier which i i prepared for quite deeply i i had half an hour of focused prep which really really helps me just get in the zone before a podcast and i will try and do it immediately before that episode sometimes the night before so i can sleep on it but i'll always give myself some focused time before that episode if i can and i find that if i do have that focused prep time the quality of the episode and my ability to like string thoughts together and get ideas across you know like verbally is much much stronger so you'll be able to tell probably because i haven't prepared as much for this episode that if you go back to the last episode you know am i able to convey thoughts as well as i am in this episode i don't know i don't feel as prepared perhaps for this one because i maybe had fifteen minutes of prep rather than you know half an hour even more than that perhaps and i just think that everybody who podcasts i know some people are really really great at just wing it and just being able to add l and go with the flow but i think for most podcast simple preparation will always outperform simply just wing it and this is where ai can massively help you because now all i do is just think about the topic that we're gonna cover which is usually prepared weeks in advance you know within a spreadsheet and it's put in the calendar yeah probably a month if not three weeks in advance and i understand that topic and i understand the points that i wanna get across so all i do is just bullet point some notes run that into ai to have it kind of translate all of those ideas into a better structure to then run through and then all of a sudden you know i have a more structured approach to actually recording the podcast itself and it just enables me to kind of convey my thoughts a bit better come up with some sort of structure to the podcast and stay organized as i'm talking and throughout the entire episode i think there's still definitely room to be you know there's still room to be spontaneous but you need that structure to to make sure you're conveying the thoughts that you initially wanted to in that episode anyway and i think it kind of depends on your style of podcast podcasts as well so like if i was interviewing somebody the prep would be very different to a solo episode so this solo episode for example i already had these five things determined in a linkedin post that i already posted i just needed to kind of expand on these thoughts a little bit within the episode itself but i kind of already had that in my mind if i was interviewing an external guest the prep would be very different i'd wanna look more into their profile understand what they do i might have a call with some guests before they come on and enable that prep as well and maybe feed the transcript from our prep call into ai to get our discussion points out and probably think and structure it in a in a more refined way than a solo episode which some in some ways is more template because you can't have spontaneous thoughts just appear on your own very often you know sometimes mine does wonder but it will never give me a whole new talking in point perhaps like you know if you were just interviewing somebody completely new the conversation does flow and goes wherever it needs to and it can spark new ideas so yeah it's important to kind of find the the right rhythm for you depending on your podcast but i definitely find that preparation does decide the outcome and the quality that you get from your podcast okay i'm gonna wrap it up there this was a bit of a different episode but one that i've been meaning to do a while because you know we have done sixty eight episode of this podcast now i think we're on similar for websites coded and when i started these podcasts i had absolutely no idea what even went integrating in a podcast i didn't know that you needed you know software to distribute it how to even think about podcast seo and audio and intros and transitions and you know advertisements within the podcast i didn't know any of that and it's kind of been a journey along the way and if i can share some of those insights with you now hopefully that's helpful you know maybe when we get to a hundred episodes that i'll just tell you that everything i told you in this episode is a complete lie and that nothing is true but hopefully you know these learnings will see us through into the next kind of phase of this podcast growth i think there's definitely some learnings in there like the youtube first strategy which you know if you're thinking about podcasting now is definitely one that i would recommend taken into so yeah well hopefully you enjoy this bit of a different podcast episode if you did enjoy it then a follow or a like on any podcast platform that you listen to would be great or on youtube would be even better and yeah apart from that i will catch you next time bye everyone