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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.
Tom Rudnai (00:05.709)
Hello everyone, welcome to another episode. think we are somewhere in the 20s now, which I think means it's time for me to stop calling out which episode it is because I can't remember. But another episode of Demand Geniuses. I'm going to get straight into it and introduce my guest for today, which is Andy Crestadina. So first of all, Andy, hello, welcome.
Andy Crestodina (00:24.152)
Glad to be here, Tom. Thanks for having me.
Tom Rudnai (00:26.198)
Thank you for coming on. I know you told me beforehand that I'm the last thing keeping you from an hour of drinking whiskey with good friends. hopefully we can have a good conversation and send you in there in a good mood.
Andy Crestodina (00:38.232)
Nope, this is the glide path and I'm ready for this. This is great.
Tom Rudnai (00:42.134)
Okay sounds good. I guess before we get into it and I always do about about an hour of research before the show and I have a laundry list of things that I want to talk to you about. Do you want to just give us a little bit of an introduction for those who don't know into into you? Who is Andy Crestedina?
Andy Crestodina (00:58.862)
Yeah, people who know me know me as a speaker and writer and author and one of those people who posts and records and writes a lot about AI and content strategy and SEO and analytics and conversion optimization, lead gen. And so I'm, I'm, I'm in a lot of events and I write a lot. And so people know me that way, but I'm actually also the co-founder of a digital agency called orbit media. We started in 2001. So I've done.
24 years of search and analytics and lead generation. We're a team of 55 now. And this is one of those actually many agencies that have relied on a totally like inbound content strategy approach to demand. I've 24 years, I've never bought an ad and revenue is just over eight and a half million a year. this is I'm here to as a proof point show it's possible to
create tons and tons of leads without spending money on paid.
Tom Rudnai (01:57.822)
Nice, which is the name of the game I'm short for a lot of our listeners. I'd love to hear a little bit actually at some point about your experience with the agency more recently as well. But I guess one thing I always like to ask at the top and it might be difficult for you because I you've been with the agency for a long time now. But like, I don't want to go through a complete CV, but is there a step in your career or maybe a moment in your career that you reflect back on and was particularly formative in terms of your development and of your thinking as well?
Andy Crestodina (02:26.402)
Yeah, there's a big one. It's great question. So a lot of startups start with two people, the hacker and the hustler, as in the service provider, the problem solver, the product builder, the resourceful one, and the hustler, that's me, sales marketing, connect to community, get the word out, building connections to the world and creating demand. That works up to a point when you realize that probably neither of those two co-founders are experts at business.
And the day we added a partner, his name's Todd, he's down the hall. He's our CEO. We have a professional full-time equity partner, CEO, and that changed everything because as soon as he built the processes and teams around me, I had like 20 hours a week extra to double down on content. And that's when I wrote a book, started a monthly conference, started a monthly event, launched an annual conference, doubled my publishing frequency. And we grew dramatically right after that. So I think that founders.
I think that it's actually unlikely that a founder is an expert at business and a likely good CEO. Talking to you, Mark Zuckerberg. And taking off that hat and letting the pros do that was a huge inflection point, made a big difference.
Tom Rudnai (03:39.348)
I thought you were going to say I'm talking to you Tom for a second there. was like, God, he's coming for me very early in this conversation.
Andy Crestodina (03:42.583)
No, think it sucks a great example and a weird example of like someone who's like, I'm gonna run the whole thing forever. It's like, I'm sure he's got an excellent board and that company seems to be successful. So no, but that's it. It's a big difference. I think it's a big difference. It's a technology. It's self-awareness and it's acknowledging your strengths and weaknesses. And I was never a pro manager of people. That's not what I do. I don't do it well.
Tom Rudnai (04:09.609)
Yeah, well that was what I was thinking is it takes a lot of self-awareness and a lot of lack of ego to be willing to found a company and let someone else come in in the kind of head roll, right? Which is cool, but it sounds like a decision that you're very happy that you made.
Andy Crestodina (04:16.622)
Mm-hmm.
Andy Crestodina (04:26.028)
Yeah, it wasn't that hard for me. I'm not like a super controlling guy. I wanted everyone to be happy. You could tell morale was low, productivity was low, margins were low, and growth was slow. And so now, and I was exhausted. I was spending all day talking to prospects and all night writing proposals and it was not going well. So life's been better ever since that day.
Tom Rudnai (04:49.193)
Yeah, well, I could talk about starting and building businesses all day long, but I think we've just established that's not what you want and that's not what our audience wants. So let's talk about marketing a little bit. So I guess, well, one thing that strikes out to me, right, it's a very long, very distinguished career that you've had in marketing. I think you said 24 years ago you started, you launched the agency.
My first question was like how much do you think marketing has really changed over that time because there's a lot of noise, right? Personalization, automation, AI. Has all of this created fundamental changes in marketing or is it noise?
Andy Crestodina (05:23.256)
There's one huge fundamental change created by digital in general, the internet in general. And I think that when you talk about change, I think the most useful perspective is the change in the buyer or in the user, because everything else flows from there. People love to talk about changes in technology. Think about the user and your prospect. Back in the day, like pre-internet era, there were very few ways for them to get information. They kind of had to talk to sales reps to get the...
You know, the features and the options and the pros and the cons. And so there was a lot of connections between brands and prospects. 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 (07:40.406)
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 (08:05.862)
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.
Andy Crestodina (10:27.626)
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 (10:44.947)
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 (10:54.926)
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 (11:01.257)
Thank
Tom Rudnai (11:20.605)
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 (11:32.174)
I don't know, it fits, that word fits here.
Tom Rudnai (11:46.816)
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 (12:25.507)
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 (13:09.822)
Mm.
Andy Crestodina (13:25.037)
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 (14:35.349)
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 (15:08.59)
That's right.
Andy Crestodina (15:12.783)
Right, yeah, because that's what they...
Tom Rudnai (15:17.233)
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 (15:29.689)
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.
Tom Rudnai (17:26.933)
Yeah, well, and that was the other, you kind of brought it back to the other question that I had in my mind there, which was you talked about this train the AI to be your sales rep. You've also talked a little bit about the delineation between marketing and sales, right? The marketing funnel has got bigger. The sales funnel has gone shorter.
I guess I would, I would, would dispute that slightly. And I actually think the two have become very much intertwined to the point that that handoff is very, is a benign distinction to make and not, not that helpful. I guess, how do you think about if we zoom out from just marketing to revenue or go to market, how do you think about that handoff? And if I can ask you to look in your crystal ball a little bit, how do you think it's going to evolve as all of this starts to filter through a bit more?
Andy Crestodina (18:07.939)
I love this question. I don't know if I've been asked this before, but I've been thinking about it a lot. So from this direction, from the prospect's direction, the internet in general and AI specifically make it much easier to research your decision prior to landing on a website or talking to a rep. So you're in, so you can go, you're just a much more informed, educated buyer. And then from this direction, AI actually creates opportunities for sales reps to help find those ideal clients through AI.
So there are tools where you can give it a giant list of companies and then it will enhance the data narrowing down by saying, for example, first score them or disqualify the ones that are not in my geography, score them or disqualify the ones that are not in my revenue range. Give these industries, these criteria, people that have had recent investment.
There's tools that people are now using to narrow down prospect lists to really like, wait, these are the 11 I need to talk to right away. So the, we're going to meet in the middle, but there are tools that I'm doing things now where I can take like a big list and be like, wait, these are exactly the ICP clients. and that's an AI, those are AI methods that do that, that do that data enhancement, qualifying and disqualifying. It's exciting.
Tom Rudnai (19:31.326)
Yeah, well, and that's, it's interesting because we, talked about how the content market is becoming more more important. And I, so I come actually from an enterprise sales background. I'm a recovering sales rep myself. and that's really what got me into building demand genius and looking into how content can be used more intelligently further down the funnel in B2B, basically because no one wanted to talk to me anymore. And I don't think it was just me. time will tell.
But so I have the same opinion for different reasons that content marketer is becoming incredibly important skill set because all of that great efficient research that a sales rep can do now is fantastic. But I think the way of engaging with them going forward is going to be very difficult, different because 75 % of buyers don't really want to talk to a sales rep anymore. So that changes again, the content marketer job, but in a way that makes it so much more important and moves it a lot closer to the kind of sharp pointy end of the revenue function as well.
Andy Crestodina (20:18.319)
Great, yeah.
Andy Crestodina (20:29.815)
And I love that. And I think that a lot of content marketers miss that. I mean, so they tend to not hang out that much, the sales team and the content team. When they do, you can find out things like these are the top questions people ask. These are our best answers. These are the topics that would best support our claims in that we discuss in marketing meetings. If you write content that is almost like a
sales script or content that can get sent to your prospect after the sales call addressing relevant topics. If your content is appropriate for including in a nurture sequence that goes out automatically after the proposal is sent, you've got good sales marketing alignment and you don't care at all about traffic. One visitor is great because that's the visitor who's in your pipeline. So it's...
I think the way the internet works we're just so enamored by numbers and there's reports everywhere and followings and traffic and but really if your sales marketing aligned you're just obsessed with quality and I mean you could analyze your pipeline today. There's 12 companies in there. Eight of them have this specific concern and we've never written about that. Pause the whole content program. Write a super detailed piece with influencer quotes and data and links to case studies and
and then send that directly to the prospects in your pipeline, you might get six clicks that make you money instead of 60,000 that didn't care at all. That's.
Tom Rudnai (22:03.305)
No, 100%. There's a couple of ways. There's huge opportunities to do that through just good old communication. Also these days you can be piping gone calls into an LLM that spits out the summary of all the sales calls. means that as a content marketer, you actually understand what are the things that are coming up. And the big advantage is increasingly as search behavior means that the people arriving on your.
Andy Crestodina (22:13.423)
Sure.
Tom Rudnai (22:26.395)
site are typically much further down the funnel later in their journey. That's also how you find out the long tail keywords that you need to be targeting in order to hook those people in. So I think it's a huge opportunity. Then the other element is what we work on, is using the data to find that as well. But you said it, because I think one of the challenges that you have, if I put myself in the mindset of someone listening to this is like, okay, great. So yes, I can get those six people, but I'd better be able to prove that it's the six people who bought like
Andy Crestodina (22:33.871)
Mm-hmm.
Andy Crestodina (22:41.753)
Smart.
Tom Rudnai (22:55.017)
How do you think about measurement as a content marketer? And I guess a little bit, as a, as, but importantly, not as a CMO, because as a content marketer, have to be conscious of it.
Andy Crestodina (23:05.551)
Sure. Well, I'll split the measurements into three big groups. There's the sales, the best marketing metrics are in your CRM. So not just form submissions, but marketing qualified leads. And what percentage of which types of leads from which categories or industries are most likely to close. Those are your most important metrics because the closer you get to the money, the more valuable the metric. So then when you move up,
into the website visitor behavior metrics, Google Analytics. I'm inside analytics every single day of my life. I teach it all the time. There you're basically measuring two main things. It's the conversion rate and the traffic. But neither of those are meaningful on their own, so you need to segment them down. So conversion rates, even better, click through rates on calls to action from which pages. Any improvement to any page focused on trust should improve the click through rate on the call to action.
Very few marketers can tell you the click the rates and their calls to action, but it's in the path exploration in GA4. Traffic, as I said, you need to segment that to exclude the information intent visitors are reading articles. If you want to be close to demand and actually measure like the traffic to the key pages, look at traffic to every one of your key money pages. Most sites have like six of them. They're not that many often. And see if traffic up or down per traffic source. Okay.
We'll move on past that to the third category, which I would just say are brand marketing metrics. These are things that just, you know, that you're, people are becoming aware of you. For me, my LinkedIn newsletter is my best brand play. I've been writing articles there for maybe four years and it's got a quarter million subscribers. That sounds great. I'm not really, I'm not trying to get any sort of attribution from that. That's just making our company visible. And the fact that I don't.
know or care what percentage of people read those and then clicked. There's brand marketing, there's performance marketing, and there's sales marketing alignment. So those those different metrics for each. our focus changes. You should step back and think about what you're working on today and focus on what matters for each of those three separate channels.
Tom Rudnai (25:23.977)
Who do you think should do this? Because I think what you're saying is there needs to be a lot more data literacy and a lot much more deeper, more contextual look into what is good performance and stop trying to boil it all back to one metric, which I think is eminently sensible. We just did a with a community called SuperPath, who you might know. We did an attribution report with them and what I found is 23 % of content marketers feel self-sufficient when it comes to data and measurement and attribution.
Andy Crestodina (25:44.207)
Mm-hmm.
Tom Rudnai (25:53.894)
think that's something that a content marketer at the execution level needs to upskill themselves or do you think it's something that organisationally we need to invest in doing for them better?
Andy Crestodina (26:07.023)
There's a lot of people who disagree with what I'm about to say. if, yeah. The insight you're looking for in Google Analytics, if you know, click the rates on calls to action, search traffic per URL up or down. I could count many of these things you can literally discover in maybe six clicks. You want to hire someone to do that for you?
Tom Rudnai (26:10.805)
Great, it'll play great.
Andy Crestodina (26:36.611)
or just learn which six clicks will get you the insight you need. think it's the, I think drivers need to look at the dashboard to know how much gas they have and how far they, you know, how fast they're going. And I think marketers need access to and the, and the basic skills to know where to look, to just find out the impact of that action. I don't know why I did a one hour mini master class of GA4 yesterday.
I showed exactly where to click to get which insight and if I went back and counted the clicks and there's not that many sort of types of analysis you need to do. Maybe five of those different things you should learn and you'll be more comfortable, you'll be more valuable, you'll be more hireable if you're in transition. If you know where to look up the impact of your actions. It's like, should athletes be able to see the scoreboard?
Or should they have to go to the sidelines and ask a scoreboard expert what the score is? It's a weird idea. I don't know. It's so accessible. It's not mysterious. Invest in your skills. don't know why you wouldn't. It's strange to me.
Tom Rudnai (27:46.389)
Well that was what I think, because I completely agree with you. Why, when you say a lot of people out there won't agree with this, why?
Andy Crestodina (27:56.687)
Uh-huh.
Tom Rudnai (27:59.19)
I can ask them.
Andy Crestodina (27:59.696)
think it's, yeah, well, the objections to that are somewhat valid. Andy, those few things are insufficient. There's more to it than just those few metrics that you're talking about. We could teach everyone on the team to do each of those things, but what about the other things? Okay, I'm not trying to solve every problem. I'm just showing a conversion copywriter where to look up the call to action on click through rates on the page they just rewrote.
So when people, when a common objection in business in general is the conflator who attaches other things to the goal, that makes it much, much harder to solve problems. If you conflate the issue, you're going to have a more difficult time solving. Other objections. that wasn't what I was hired for. I'm bad at math. I got into marketing to be creative. this it's, it's,
They won't give me access?
The percentage of marketers that use GA4 has basically stayed the same for the last 10 years. I do a survey about this. There's a gap there still. And then what's funny is people, they sort of said, oh, I'm going to abdicate that, that's someone else's job. And then a year and a half later, when I see them on LinkedIn and they say, hey, do you know anybody who's hiring? I'm in transition.
If you had a GA4 certification, it would be a lot easier for me to refer you to people. And it takes about an hour to get that.
Tom Rudnai (29:33.813)
Which puts it into perspective. The I'm bad at math one infuriates me. Like I'm not a mathematical genius by any means. I was always more comfortable at school with essay type topics because there's no right answer. Bullshit my way through it. It's fantastic.
Andy Crestodina (29:43.417)
Me neither.
Me too.
That's right, yeah. I'm not an analytical person by nature. I'm certainly not. Yeah.
Tom Rudnai (29:53.12)
But I'm curious, I'm curious and you don't have to be deeply analytical. These tools make it so easy. Like you don't have to be a math genius. You don't even need to use a calculator anymore. Put it into chat.gbt in natural language and you'll get the answer.
Andy Crestodina (30:06.755)
And it's motivating, Tom, think here's another point of view. If you could see the scoreboard, sports are more fun. It's motivating to know the impact of the action. It would be so weird to me to be a marketer and just put something in the market, put something in the market, put something in the market. And then maybe, I don't know, you got to feel for if it worked or not based on a comment or something. Like that's just, this is when you know, the ultimate state is when you are.
Tom Rudnai (30:11.765)
Mm.
Andy Crestodina (30:35.127)
You did analysis, you formed hypotheses, you prioritized those hypotheses, you took an action based on the top prioritized hypotheses. And then with an outcome in mind, so you knew which metric you were trying to impact. And then two weeks go by, you go back and you confirm or reject that as an effective action and then iterate. The marketers who do that get ever better results. They can reliably improve performance.
every iteration over time. How do you do that without, if you're not using data to help form hypotheses, if your hypothesis is not prioritized, if they're not aligned with a metric, and if you don't ever look up the impact, I think you're very high risk of just burning calories with no real, nothing you can point at, that was a win.
Tom Rudnai (31:29.267)
Hmm, yeah, well, because what you described there is the scientific method, right? I think a lot recently, right, which is marketing is part, certainly content is part art and part science.
Andy Crestodina (31:35.375)
That's right.
It's the scientific method in general. It's just, that's how human knowledge happens. This is nothing to do with marketing, Andy. You just described how learning works. I guess, yeah, you know, it's got nothing, this is not necessarily even a marketing topic.
Tom Rudnai (31:59.721)
No, but it's also, if it's part art and part science, so many people I think are almost disparaging of the science, right? And I think you get that a lot more in content than any other area of marketing. You said it yourself, right? That's not why I was hired. I was here to create.
Andy Crestodina (32:03.983)
Mm-hmm.
Andy Crestodina (32:09.901)
Some. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Just for fun, I'll argue against that now and I'll make the other case. Because the optimizer is trying to get ever better results and improve performance incrementally over time consistently. They drive performance. The problem though with your data is that it only includes what you've tried in the past. The brand marketer is...
doesn't mostly start with data and they start with the audience and they are just obsessed about being different and interesting and doing something wildly creative. I think that the problem with the optimizer and there's a time and a place for that and I'm basically one of those types of people is that they miss opportunities to inject chaos into their data. Brand marketers and people with big weird ideas are also super valuable in marketing. I don't know that need that.
know, every week, maybe once or twice a year, where you do something that no one would have suggested based on a report. Mark Schaefer wrote a book called Audacious. I don't have it next to me. He describes this, I don't know, the launch of a show or something at South by Southwest, where this drone swarm in the air flew around and then formed a QR code in the air. Analytics did not suggest that. Yeah, there's no like these are like
Tom Rudnai (33:32.022)
I saw that.
Andy Crestodina (33:35.715)
Big weird ideas are also beautiful and there's certainly a place for that. Just know what kind of marketing you're doing. Today I'm doing performance marketing or let's do some brand marketing. These are different mindsets, different outcomes, different starting points, sometimes personalities.
Tom Rudnai (33:53.975)
Yeah, well, I've got a way of thinking about that, that I thought that I developed recently, which I've actually already talked about in the podcast, but fuck it, we'll go again. Like I've been thinking a lot about how we can build more momentum at Demand Genius, right? And starting to, I think I naturally fall into the creative. I want to do things because I think they're cool, not because some number told me to do it. So how is momentum built? I think there's a very simple formula actually. It's clarity plus consistency multiplied by creativity or by talent. So clarity and consistency.
Andy Crestodina (34:23.183)
I love that.
Tom Rudnai (34:24.158)
The optimizer is fantastic at that. Creativity, know, the multiplier. But you have to have something to multiply. So you can get the same output by being a 3 plus a 3 times by 0. Or I'm not going to do all of the math, we've already covered that. That's not my strength. But you have to have a foot in both camps or you're damn well better sure how to go and outsource that part.
Andy Crestodina (34:26.691)
Yeah, multiplied by.
Andy Crestodina (34:47.887)
Bravo, sir. Well said. I agree completely. You have in one formula encapsulated those key inputs. Creativity is a multiplier. And there are brands that are just too boring. And they're consistent. And they may grow. And they may close deals. And they know what people need. they're focused on their niche. But there is, you know, at least once in a while, do something weird. It's fun.
Tom Rudnai (35:14.676)
Yeah, yeah, well, and that's the other thing when you're doing this in practice, like it should be fun. So you said you're an optimizer. Do you enjoy optimizing without inserting chaos into your data, which is what you said before?
Andy Crestodina (35:20.633)
Yeah.
Andy Crestodina (35:31.716)
Yeah, I did a post about this years ago. said there's two kinds of marketers, the 10 % marketer and the 10X marketer. And the optimizer is the 10 % marketer and the game changer, the branding person is the positioning. That's the 10X marketer. I don't really inject chaos into my data, but I do things that don't rely on data at all. For example, I have...
an annual conference. It doesn't need metrics. It's 100 people. It sells out every year. I've done it for 10 years. It's downtown Chicago. It's lovely. It's called Content Jam. I have a monthly webinar. I don't really know how many people, you know, I don't really care. Like it's, it's not about, it's more about networking and relationships. I host a monthly happy hour.
I meet these people, I told you Tom, I'm there every Friday, you started by, you So a lot of my offline marketing efforts, my networking conference, I present it, I do maybe 100 presentations a year if you count webinars. mean, this time of year I'm in like two cities a week. I'm not looking for attribution. So I do all kinds of things where I don't really look for attribution or measure impact or I'm not counting leads, you know, or.
how many people are in the room or trying to get people to download something from a QR code on a slide. But no, I don't really do that many weird things. Not enough. You point out a deficiency in my program for sure.
Tom Rudnai (37:08.371)
I'm guessing there are other folks in your team maybe that are more indexed towards that and that help inject more of the creativity.
Andy Crestodina (37:17.475)
Well, I'm really, you know, there's only one and a half marketers here. Amanda, who's our marketing director and me, our team's mostly face down on, heads down on projects. They're just trying to drive outcomes for projects. They're obsessed with, we'll do 30 high performing B2B lead gen sites a year. We have 30 retainer based clients where we're getting ever better results through optimizing. But no, it...
I think actually I'm an example of a brand that doesn't really do, we're just differentiated sort of through the consistency and quality and that's sufficient. We grow anyway.
I don't have any big brand plays. I don't think there's anyone else here that does either. We're just the steady player that you've seen a hundred times over many years. And if you ask around, you'll find thousands of people who say, yeah, you're insane not to talk to those guys. That's, that's our go-to-market and it works. It's, but it's more like a train. It doesn't ever take off. just goes, it's, it's, it's steady performance, consistent performance.
I don't have the multiplier you mentioned at the end.
Tom Rudnai (38:26.306)
Yeah, well it's interesting, it makes me think, so there's a difference in the type of business you're building there, right, which is an agency versus, and a lot of people listening to this will be working at SaaS companies and AI companies, I always think of venture capital as corporate steroids, right, we're building business through ridiculous measures that are not sensible at all, but because someone's given us the juice. And I think there's always a tendency in that environment
Andy Crestodina (38:35.639)
Right, yeah.
Andy Crestodina (38:46.05)
Mm-hmm.
Tom Rudnai (38:53.697)
to neglect the optimizer in favor of what did you call the game changer right because that's what everyone's shooting for is the rule but it's don't know if there's a question there i'm just thinking out loud
Andy Crestodina (38:56.97)
Sure. Right.
Andy Crestodina (39:05.538)
Well, SaaS is a crazy weird corner of the internet. And it's insular. And people in that community are very much enamored by things like category creation and launch and big ideas. And I fully appreciate that. But remember, like, 90 % of the economy is other categories.
Tom Rudnai (39:17.174)
Hmm.
Andy Crestodina (39:31.675)
And you can build a huge business by doing 100K marketing programs, digital programs for the manufacturing category. And each of those projects makes them a million dollars. So the SaaS world is very much driven on.
these certain playbooks. there's a lot more to life than that. you reach out more broadly and just talk to more marketers, there's just huge, huge categories that you've never heard of where marketing teams are making enormous difference for their clients. So I think the SaaS thing is people in SaaS need to remember that the things that they prioritize and do are very different from what most marketing looks like.
Tom Rudnai (40:20.054)
I'm going give you a very annoying hypothetical or maybe not a hypothetical but a binary choice. Which do you think is more fun? Do you think marketing is more fun with a small budget or with a large budget?
Andy Crestodina (40:35.634)
Uh, I've never really had large budgets and I think, um, but I'll tell you where I think marketing is fun. If you, if your client has a lifetime value of customer of $10 million because they sell some big fancy machine or as, or, uh, you know, big services and you can build something for them that improves their conversion rate and increases marketing qualified leads. You can literally create hundreds of jobs.
by building a better website for a brand. Marketing is really, really fun when the impact of the marketing, the scoreboard is visible and the scores are big. It's really hard to make millions of dollars for certain brands, right? The thing they sell is too small or they're not well positioned in their niche. But I meet companies all the time where it's like my mouth waters.
We're going to kill it for you. This is huge. Like you're, you have everything in place. Your margins are high. Your prices are good. Your brand is good enough, but your website and digital is crap.
Just let me fix this. Hold my beer. You're gonna have way more leads in three months if you let us fix this for you. That is really, really fun. I could give you tons of examples of like weird niche categories where you've made millions of dollars and you would just watch the companies grow. They literally start, they have to hire. You can grow that corner of the economy.
Tom Rudnai (42:08.086)
But that's really interesting because you just described where marketing is fun for an optimizer, right? Because the conditions that you need to enjoy yourself is you need pre-existing scale because then you can move a percentage point and watch that trickle through and sit back and look at your dashboard and have your whiskey. Someone who is more of a game changer type mindset.
Andy Crestodina (42:15.224)
Yes.
Andy Crestodina (42:29.656)
That's right.
Tom Rudnai (42:30.89)
They can't because suddenly all of that scale is, it's a straight jacket to them, right? Because with the scale comes the rules and the bureaucracy and stuff like that.
Andy Crestodina (42:39.628)
Yeah. Tom, I showed my true stripes. I am an optimizer till the end. Give me any brand, any page, any keyword, any conversion, and I can improve it. I'm 100 % confident that I can make money for anybody almost like I need AI to do it. need a couple of tools. It takes me a couple of hours, but the brand marketer, you know, with a sufficient budget, I'm sure you've had other guests that would be super excited to tell you about the
giant inflatable gorilla they made or I don't know. I'm just trying to think of like, you know, you know, something where, you know, they took over, you know, the flash mob or, I've seen really fun things and I love when brands do them. one time this company said, Hey, like we're including influencers in this book. Give us your favorite recipe. They made a cookbook. They sent me an apron. They made a show.
Tom Rudnai (43:12.726)
I'm sure.
Andy Crestodina (43:37.035)
about food to promote a SaaS product. Okay. the risks are higher up there. That was a very expensive program. It was a beautifully printed book. It was like a real cookbook. but it's not my, I'm probably better for other questions than big brand ideas. Should talk to Mark Schaefer or April Dunford, you know, or, Jay Akunso or Drew Davis. These are people who have.
They're my friends, I love them, and I never miss a chance to get a whiskey or have dinner. But they know me for who I am and I fully appreciate who they are.
Tom Rudnai (44:14.998)
Yeah, I love that. Look, I've had loads of other questions, but we're drawing towards the end of our time. So what I'm going to do, I'd like to move on to a couple of quick fires now that we always do towards the end. So first one that I'm going to give you is what is, what's an AI use case or an AI tool that you just absolutely love that blew your mind a little bit?
Andy Crestodina (44:35.458)
Hmm. this morning I found out that Fathom has a coaching feature that can evaluate calls against any criteria you plug in. So Fathom's like AI note taker. It's in all of our meetings. It has a, you know, a transcription thing and it kind of writes a summary for you.
But now if you're an admin, you can turn on coaching and you can put in little playbooks to say, did this call have these certain criteria and it scores calls. That is something that was possible. I had a custom GPT for doing that before, but you'd have to export the transcript and import it into chat GPT to get this little scorecard. So that just the fact that it's integrated and adoption will be a hundred percent because it's going to do it automatically. It identifies that this type of call and then it, then it applies the scorecard. That's kind of special.
Some of the AI tools have an advantage because they're built in. It's like, know, a co-pilot is inside, you know, Excel, so you can just talk to it about your data. Other tools, you have to kind of export the data and import it into the model, and so the adoption rates will be a little bit lower. I just did a giant workshop in San Diego at Content Marketing World, how to export your charts and upload them into AI. Anyway, this was lightning round. I messed that up, but Fathom's coaching feature, it sounds good.
Tom Rudnai (45:54.863)
No, I have something very similar to you. just switched our CRM a couple of months ago over to Attio, which I absolutely love. It's just much simpler, but they have the same. So they record, joins every call, and then I can create templates within Attio. Everything goes straight in and I can apply the templates retrospectively. So after we had our kind of initial meet before this, I have a template that's then pulled out the most interesting kind of podcast talking point that'll come from that. And the sales call, you can get it to do that and feed into your follow-up. So that's super cool.
Andy Crestodina (46:18.457)
Cool. Nice.
Tom Rudnai (46:24.696)
same kind of thing. Next question is more for you personally, what skill or trait of yours would you say has been the biggest needle mover for you in your career?
Andy Crestodina (46:26.381)
Love it.
Andy Crestodina (46:36.623)
Structured content writing just writing things that are easily digestible and clear and and and Highly visual and easy to scan. I think it's the people say people might say it's like my articles But it's specifically it's the part of the articles that is the formatting the influencer quotes the images the bullet lists the internal links that that's been 15 years of publishing one of these every other week and you know, have
three and a half million readers a year. It's just because of that.
Tom Rudnai (47:11.094)
I had
Now I'm ruining the quote for our format, I had Timmy Olotu on, he's one of my good friends who's a CRO at company called Charlie HR, but he started out as a copywriter. He, I think it's not his quote, but good writing is good thinking and that's why good writing is hard. But it's something that's come out of a lot of these conversations with content folks on this podcast is they're so structured and organized in how they think and it's really, really impressive. And you can tell it comes from the discipline of the fact that they've had to.
Andy Crestodina (47:34.795)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Tom Rudnai (47:41.428)
It's in horrible context to me who just throws stuff out there and sees what sticks.
Andy Crestodina (47:41.956)
Yep.
Andy Crestodina (47:46.071)
It's not just writing. There's a famous quote, Eugene Schwartz, copywriting legend from like pre-internet days. He said, great copies never written. It's assembled.
Tom Rudnai (47:55.191)
Nice. Yeah that's good. Right and then next one, last one before we get into a couple of just recommendations. I always think so you've come across as quite intelligent over the course of this conversation and now I just want to tear that down for everyone. What was the biggest fuck up that you made in your career? Like the heart-stopping moment?
Andy Crestodina (48:08.578)
Thank you. Great. Let's dispel that notion now.
Andy Crestodina (48:17.358)
I bombed on stage once by changing my topic after I got to the event everyone who came into the room had a certain expectation from what was in the program and Because I've been like the top rated speaker the year before the organizers said sure do whatever you want So I changed my topic got on stage and said, yep great, know I'm gonna be shifting focus here a little bit I'm gonna talk about X instead of Y and the energy died and never came back like people just started walking out
It wasn't even a good topic for me. Like I couldn't answer their questions. I have crashed and burned live and publicly and learned a lot from it. You know, the job of the presenter is to meet then exceed expectations. And you can't do that if you do a hard pivot on your way up the stairs. Doesn't work.
Tom Rudnai (49:09.696)
Psychologically, that's so tough. Do you think that you have to, in order to get good at speaking, have to crash and burn a few times?
Andy Crestodina (49:17.91)
No, I hope no one ever does that. but I have a physical, there was almost a physical memory of that. And I remember who was in the room. And when I see them, they're, they give me grace and they forgot that long ago. I've given hundreds of presentations since then. Many of them have been at, but, I know who saw me. I, you know, sin like that's, it was like a lie. Like you actually didn't deliver the thing you were supposed to do.
Tom Rudnai (49:19.189)
Thanks.
Andy Crestodina (49:48.077)
So, but hey, I mean, that's not even the biggest mistake I've made in my life. That was just a speaking mistake. So resilience, key skill, key attribute.
Tom Rudnai (49:59.671)
And then just before I you go, one, is there a recommendation you have for all of the listeners in terms of like a book they should read, a podcast that they should check out, a thought leader, either one of them, what would you recommend?
Andy Crestodina (50:13.196)
Hmm haven't been asked that in a while. I've been thinking more recently about a book. read a long time ago called deep work It's it's about focus and the people who learn the most and who are best suited best prepared for the future of the economy are the ones who can Remain at maximum cognitive intensity for longer if you can stay focused for 90 minutes instead of 20 You're gonna win Because everyone else is distracted
You make your phone super boring, delete Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok. And when you start working, don't get out of your chair until you have really stayed very focused for an hour at least. That's one of my strengths actually, is I can work for long durations without distraction. Pretty deep work, it made a difference for me.
Tom Rudnai (51:02.57)
Yeah, I like that as a person with ADHD, there's both a strength and a weakness. You're really bad at controlling when that happens, but when it happens, it's kick ass and you go for like five hours down some rubbish. Yeah, can't, I don't, I'm not very good at choosing when I get into a flow state, but when it happens, it happens. Yeah, that's awesome. And then just quickly, anything that you would like to plug that you're doing, give you a quick moment.
Andy Crestodina (51:11.896)
That's right. Flow state. Get into the flow state.
Andy Crestodina (51:19.82)
Andy Crestodina (51:28.718)
well, we talked about that article about the, we could maybe share that in the notes. It's the traditional search versus AI search, the way that AI is making recommendations and reaches farther down into the funnel. But anyone here that hears this is welcome to connect with me on LinkedIn. The blue button says follow, but if you find the connect button, click on that and mention this show. You're welcome to connect with me there. can chat and orbitmedia.com. If you look at that blog, even just to see what a blog can look like, or check out what we do.
I write an article every two weeks and that's the first place I publish.
Tom Rudnai (52:00.786)
Awesome and I can confirm to everyone that he does actually look at it and he does respond because that's how we met only a weeks ago as I slid into Andy's DMs. do reach out and take him up on that. Andy, it's been an absolute pleasure actually. I've really enjoyed this hour. So thank you for joining us and thank you to everyone who's been listening.
Andy Crestodina (52:06.606)
Mm-hmm.
Andy Crestodina (52:12.248)
Glad you did.