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Demand-Geniuses is the podcast for revenue-focused B2B Marketers. We bring you the latest insights and expert tips, interviewing geniuses of the B2B Marketing world to bring you actionable advice that you can implement to accelerate growth and progress you career. The role of Marketing in B2B go-to-market strategy has changed drastically. It's more important to revenue generation than ever as buyer engagement becomes more digital. We equip you with the information you need to thrive in this new, revenue-critical role.
Andy Crestodina (00:00)
What the internet did was it made it possible for people to do deep, deep research on their options prior to contacting a company. People don't want to talk to a sales rep. People want to do all their research online. You watch anyone do it, make any B2C decision for a product and they're just doing, they're going deep into reviews and research and the B2B buyer, absolutely true as well.
So if the sales funnel got a little shorter and the marketing funnel got much bigger, people are, so that I think is the number one change. And that change is still growing because these days the person who is using AI to evaluate options, which is totally unlike Google, Google gives you options, AI can make recommendations. They're having a conversation with the AI about who the best option is for them.
Not only can they see all of your case studies and your competitors on websites, all the reviews and all the directories, they can see all the evidence and social proof across the web, but now they can actually talk to the internet about their specific needs and problems, what the options are, the pros and cons of your company versus the others. It changes a lot. It's a big change. But it's part of that same change where people can do deep research prior to contacting a company.
It's for this reason, Tom, I mentioned earlier that people, that the leads, the visitors that come from AI tend to convert into leads at much higher rates than visitors who come from Google. So AI is of course very new, but it's actually part of that same thing where we can all go deep into consideration phases prior to converting and clicking calls to action.
Tom Rudnai (01:42)
And how do you think that that impacts the way that content market or let's say more broadly a B2B market think about search as a channel? Because presumably, I've been saying this for a while, you have to kind of lean into the fact you are going to get less traffic from that channel, but that's it's not really the right measurement anyway. It still can be a perfectly good way to drive actual results. Would you agree with that or would you have anything to add?
Andy Crestodina (02:08)
That's the main narrative. But I have two, I have two points of commentary on this. Traffic from search has been declining since 2019. This is an old conversation. Google search engine results page features, SERP features, have been reducing click through rates to websites forever. I have a weird hobby. I collect screenshots of Google search results pages. I have like 10 years of screenshots of Google search results pages and I can show you side by side what it looks like then and now.
That's why traffic is down. The AA overview is just one more SERP feature. The other thing is, I'm annoyed that everyone is reporting on top line traffic without segmenting that traffic into information intent visitors, they land on articles, and commercial intent visitors, they land on home pages and service pages. So please, everyone, stop posting your top line traffic reports in LinkedIn. My stream is filled with it. Segment that traffic first and then report on it because it's a lot more meaningful.
You're probably showing a decline in traffic to some silly blog post you wrote that ranked super high for eight years and now it's down that no one cares. You shouldn't care that visitor did not want to go to a website anyway. Okay. I've ran over Tom. Here's the real answer to your question. How do we adapt? If SEOs are actually not super well positioned to adapt to this change because SEOs have always just focused on visibility and you'll hear it every day. What about AI visibility? That is too narrow of perspective.
your job is to train the AI to be a sales rep for your brand. That means proof points, case studies, evidence, trust, testimonials, awards, all those things that are conversion focused that the SEO is always sort of abdicated to UX and copywriters, conversion copywriters, are now part of the job. If all those happy...
the stories and proof points are not scannable to the AI and ingestible to the AI as text, then the AI may include you in the mix, but it will recommend someone else. So SEOs need to understand that it's not about AI visibility, it's about getting AI to recommend you. AI goes deeper into the funnel, it's part of the consideration phase. And if your only goal is getting clicks, you're missing it because it's not the click that's important, it's when, pretend to be your prospect.
ask AI for five options, ask AI for the pros and cons of each of those options, and you'll see where your brand is deficient. It's partly brand marketing, it's partly conversion, it's partly sales marketing alignment, and none of these things are things that SEO has ever thought about.
Tom Rudnai (04:47)
I love that phrase, train the AI to be yourself. I think that is a very, very good way to look at it that creates a much more kind of, desperately am trying to avoid using the word AI. Yeah, I hate it.
Andy Crestodina (04:57)
Holistic? I just
said that. Well, that's kind of it, right? I mean, it's not, yeah, it's deeper into the funnel. I don't know if it's holistic because the conversion still happens on your site. No one's letting AI decide which podcast production company to, you know, but they're going deeper that right with by the time they click, they're more ready. So it is more holistic, but it's not complete. That's pretty funny. You thought of that word too.
Tom Rudnai (05:03)
Thank
It is, there's two words in the English language that when I say I want to kind of punch myself in the face and it's holistic and synergy. So whenever I can feel it about to come out of my mouth, I kind of recoil a little bit and scramble for a synonym. But yeah, I think it's a much better way to look at things. I guess there's two ways that I kind of want to take this, because one, I think a lot of people are saying, well,
Andy Crestodina (05:35)
I don't know, it fits, that word fits here.
Tom Rudnai (05:49)
how do I do that? And that's probably the most interesting place for people to go first. So we had someone called Oren Greenberg on here, who's done a lot of research into that a couple of months ago. Like a couple of things that came out of that were there are basically a lot of things that go into GEO, AIEO, or whatever you want to call it. Information density is an important thing. How easy it is to cite the content.
the strength of authority signals that you're giving out. there, like in your experience, are there other things beyond those that you would say are controllable for a content marketer, right? Because some goes beyond your immediate control.
Andy Crestodina (06:27)
So let's say I aced every one of those structural technical considerations. I've got exquisite schema and markup and structure. And I have whitelisted my domain on every CDN. I've got these new robots.txt tags all tuned up and whatever, all those things. Great job. But what does AI think of your brand?
You see, it's, I'm sorry, I'm going to be blunt. It is totally deficient to believe that you've done the job if you've made your site AI friendly without focusing on the message. Trust me, it's reading your, it's reading everything about your brand right now. Just extracting language. It doesn't really need fancy tagging. It's reading everything about your competitors brands right now. Why would it recommend your brand over another?
Tom Rudnai (07:12)
Mm.
Andy Crestodina (07:27)
Have you injected the proof points, the reasons to believe? the, it's conversion copywriting? It's offline investigation, which AI can't do? You found every nugget that would give anybody any reason. It's detailed case studies, it's publishing all the use cases, it's listing out the job titles of the people who buy from you and get the most value from you. When did an SEO ever do these things?
So I get it, yes, structural, technical, fine, good, check, check, check. But really, if you ask AI, just try this. What do you think of my brand? What do you think of my competitors' brands? Make a table showing those strengths and weaknesses of all these companies. And then look and see where you're weak. I don't care what your schema and markup and whitelist domain is if AI doesn't think that you're a great option when someone asks. It's content.
It's learning through language by reading the internet. And tech SEO is just not really, I think, the biggest opportunity for most marketers.
Tom Rudnai (08:38)
I love that, because what you're describing is it's a much more intelligent system, for want of a better word now, that is deciding who to surface your brand for than ever before. But what it means is it should be very liberating for anyone in content.
because it means that you could be much more intelligent in how you write your content and how you communicate your message, right? We get away from the kind of, I think we joked the first time that we spoke about the old SEO thing of like those god awful recipes where before you get your baked beans on toast recipe, you go through a history of the baked bean and what kind of beans play best in baked beans and all that kind of stuff, right?
Andy Crestodina (09:10)
That's right.
Right,
yeah, because that's what they...
Tom Rudnai (09:19)
It was the
lowest common denominator content that won out for a bit there and I know the SEO algorithms have gotten more intelligent since but it should be a very good time to be a content marketer because your skills can shine through more.
Andy Crestodina (09:31)
Yeah, think content marketers publish a lot of insights and best practices and how-tos, and I'm one of them. And I love that, and I will always do that. But if your job now is to train the AI to be a sales rep for your brand, then it's partly a twist on content marketing. I think we all still need to make conversion-focused pages.
and put those on the web that have detailed examples of options and outcomes and specific applications and who got what value from your company. And if you have 50 of those and your competitor has one of those, you probably have an advantage in AI because you've simply told more stories about what you do for who and what happened. That's, that's not classic content marketing. The content marketers should skew toward like case studies and evidence and, and
internal linking to service pages and case studies. I think that the content marketer has a natural advantage though in a slightly higher up the funnel because good content marketers have networks that open access to other publications and AI is training on more than just your website. So the best content marketer is right for other websites. If you inject
good vibes about your brand onto that trade association site or that directory site or Content marketers are listening. They know content marketers have access to sort of like influencer or influencer marketing's product content That's going to become more important in the future that circumvents AI. You can get word of mouth. You know, you just become People just think of you because you have a better reputation. So content marketing actually I think grows in importance influencer marketing PR grow in importance, but
the conversion optimizers and the SEOs need to get together and make a baby and start building out pages that train the AI to be a better sales rep.