← MarTech Podcast ™ // Marketing + Technology = Business Growth
MarTech Podcast ™ // Marketing + Technology = Business Growth
Navigating the AI boom with resilient marketing
00:33:09
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A
The Martech Podcast is a proud member of the I Hear Everything Podcast Network. Looking to launch or scale your podcast, I Hear Everything delivers podcast production, growth and monetization solutions that transform your words into profit. Ready to give your brand a voice? Then visit iheareverything.com.
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From advertising to software as a service to data across all of our programs and clients, we've seen a 55 to 65% open rate. Getting brands authentically integrated into content performs better than TV advertising.
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Typical lifespan of an article is about 24 to 36 hours.
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We're reaching out to the right person with the right message and a clear call to action. Then it's just a matter of timing.
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Welcome to the Martech Podcast, a member of the I Hear Everything Podcast Network. In this podcast, you'll hear the stories of world class marketers that used technology to drive business results and achieve career success. Here's a host of the Martech podcast. Benjamin Shapiro.
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20% Only 20% of marketers said they will use AI agents to automate their marketing in 2025, 8 out of 10 marketers are still sitting on the sidelines. AI isn't just another Martech tool. It's causing a universal change in how customers expand. Expect to interact with brands, but most marketers see AI as an assistant, not a tool to improve their personalization at scale. So how do you move past AI assistance to improve your customer experiences? I'm Benjamin Shapiro and joining me today is Dave Steerer, the CMO of webflow, which is a platform helping marketing teams build and optimize websites with enterprise grade performance and AI driven personalization. And today Dave is going to show us how to navigate the AI boom and and deliver digital experiences that move the needle. Dave, welcome to the Martech Podcast.
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B
Thanks for having me, Ben. I'm excited to be here, excited to have you here.
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C
Excited to talk about, you know, the topic of the year, probably the topic of the decade, navigating the AI boom. And we're probably gonna get into some Boston sports metaphors here as well. Instead of starting off by talking about Mo Vaughn and his mvp, which is always forgotten, I want to ask you, why are marketing teams treating AI like a copywriting tool instead of thinking about it as something that is an experience shift for their consumers?
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B
Well, first of all, anytime you bring the Red Sox up in the beginning part of a conversation, I have an elevated heart rate because I grew up in Boston watching the Red Sox and I'm of an age where I grew up watching them lose more than win. And so I always have this elevated heart rate anytime anybody starts a conversation with the Red Sox. But, you know, look, I think we're speaking of baseball. We're in early innings as it relates to AI adoption across the board, both in the business and consumer landscape. The word that I see, the word on the street, is of all the teams within a company, within an organization, marketing teams are actually on the front end of AI adoption. And I think one of the reasons why is as marketers we love to experiment. And you know, through the dawn of the age of marketing, there's always been new technologies coming our way. And AI is the latest of new technologies. It just so happens to be a game changing one, not to bring baseball back up again. And so I see, I see our profession really at the front edge of testing out these tools and seeing how does it really fit into the marketing mix and what can we do with it.
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C
I'll preface this with I'm a San Francisco Giants fan and I have some knowledge of Boston sports because I went to college there. And I'm sure this metaphor is going to go over almost everyone's head who listens to this. There's a difference between Doug Mankiewicz and David Ortiz, right? Doug Mankiewicz won a World Series, David Ortiz won a World Series. But one was a journeyman first baseman who like barely played and nobody can remember his name and definitely can't spell it. And the other one is big poppy, like kind of a big deal hall of Famer. And so when we talk about technology shifts in marketing, cool. Somebody launched a new app and. Or there's a new social channel. And now we're shifting our media span from Facebook to Instagram or to TikTok. That's a Doug Mankiewicz, right? It's like you just kind of playing a shell game and zero win over replacement. Then you get to something that is like a monumental, groundbreaking, the tip of the spear that is moving the Red Sox from lovable losers for 86 years to three time world champions in a decade. And it's kind of a big effing deal. It's big poppy. This is big poppy. Like, okay, yeah, there's, there's AI change. That's as deep as I can go on Boston Sports. But I, I feel like I did a good job there.
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B
You landed this one. You landed this one, Ben.
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C
Yeah, it's a big deal, right? This is an iPhone moment. It's gonna take 20 years to see this technology change roll out as opposed to, eh, this is a six months trend and going back to like how marketers are adopting AI. There seems to be kind of a race to say we're doing this, but it doesn't seem like marketers have necessarily mastered the experiences. And most people are just being like, yeah, I use GPT to write my emails. It's cool. It's so much deeper than what the average marketer is actually using. Like, you can't compare Doug Mankiewicz to Big Papi. So why are people treating AI, most of us like it's Doug Mankiewicz?
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B
Yeah, I just think that you landed this one. AI is, is the big poppy of the martech stack. I mean, it's. I mean, and it's even more elevated than that. It's not just marketing. Technology in the martech stack is really. It's a. It's the game changer for how people get their work done, how people consume and interact with a knowledge base that far exceeds their imagination. Just a few years ago, I think this is bigger than the iPhone moment.
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I.
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The closest that I can get to it is this is how it felt like when the commercial Internet came. And that was a tectonic shift in how we thought about content, how we thought about media, how we thought about connecting. I mean, that was really this first wave. And, you know, when I think back then, I was a. I was a young, you know, sort of cub just entering in the professional world at that point.
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C
A poss, if you will.
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That was a poss coming up from the minor leagues. And I was surrounded by people who were like, we know that this is going to change the way that we do our work. We don't necessarily know exactly how just yet, but we're going to have to experiment our way into doing it. And back then, coming on the Internet, one of the biggest things was like privacy and security. And are people going to be able to trust the fact this nameless, faceless website with their personally identifiable information and their credit card information. And it took a while for society and for marketers specifically to get over that hump and to really figure out how does the website and how does the World Wide Web fit into the role of a marketer? I think we're at that age right now with AI, not necessarily from a privacy and security perspective, but for sure from a trust perspective. And like, I think about a lot of these things with tech, especially in the B2B world, is that a lot of it has to do with change. And when you think about change, it's really not just technology, it's people and process at the same time. And Technology can shift really fast. But the people and process part of that change, or that transformation, if you will, that takes time. And I think that's the age that we're in right now.
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We are in the.
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Phase.
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Right. Thank you. I'm glad you got it. The dial up Internet, like AI writes my copy, is the most elementary way to think of the usage of this technology. And look, the people that are forward thinking that are listening to this podcast are probably being like, please don't make that sound again. And we know this. And so great, the other people are sitting on the sidelines. And if you're not thinking about how to interject artificial intelligence to automate your processes, you're a laggard. And I'm more curious to talk to the people that are actually implementing solutions to understand the sort of context filtering and, you know, agent building. To me, that's really some of the ways that we're starting to just get into the way that artificial intelligence is actually going to facilitate communication and engagement and interaction, just like the World Wide Web did. So tell me a little bit about how you're seeing webflow. Customers use AI personalization to improve experiences. What are people actually doing? How are they building to start to implement this technology outside of like, I need to write an email. Okay, here's my draft.
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B
Yeah, yeah, great. You know, I promise not to make that sound again if for no other reason than the transcription service will have no idea how to insert that sound.
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I feel like we're finally speaking its language, but go on.
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B
Actually, maybe we're speaking directly to the model right now when we say that. Well, look, I, I'll, I'll start by saying, and this is not a pitch for the product, but just to provide context. Webflow is what we call a website experience platform. It's a platform that enables anyone involved in marketing, and I think of marketing as a verb, not a noun. So it's really anybody involved in the marketing mix. Designers, developers, growth marketers, product marketers, everybody involved to be on the same platform, working together to deliver an experience on a website that is deeply immersive on brand and drives growth. And so the practitioners that I see among our customer base and also the people who I meet who are very interested in what to do, they're thinking about how do I go from, let's say, wave one, which is content, which I think is a super important entryway into the use of AI in marketing, to wave two. And the wave two that I think about is like, how to use AI and automation broadly to, to create personalization on the website, to enable testing and optimization at scale so that you're not just doing one a B test, but you're running a hundred a B tests at the same time on your site and you're using AI to inform and help you figure out what are the things I want to test. Like, for example, one of the primary blockers for a growth marketer who's into experimentation and optimization is where do I start? Well, with platforms like ours, you can actually engage with the AI to come up with ideas for the things to test based on the interactions people have had on the website or the website experience up until that point. And so it's a long winded way of answering your question. I think that people are looking to go beyond content and into other areas of the marketing mix to leverage AI to basically do at speed, scale and at a quicker time what used to take, you know, kind of a long time to do.
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C
What I'm hearing is it's essentially automating the multivariant testing. Right? And that's the beauty of AI, is it can take unstructured data and make some sense out of it. And when you're looking at a website, you could say, hey, here's this website. What are the things that are possibly breaking and how do I test whether it's working? Not specifically talking to webflow, but to website optimization in general. One of the problems that, you know, one of the reasons why I haven't like tried to create different versions of our website is we just don't have that much traffic, right? And we've got a production business that, you know, maybe some people that are interested in podcasters, like my mom, a couple of producers are coming to the website, gets little traffic. And so I'm kind of like, what's the point, right? One experience is probably fine, but I'm now also feeling, I'm like, well, there's GEO or AEO or are we still calling it SEO or whatever EO we're working on these days where what content is on your own properties gets fed into an LLM and that's actually what matters. And then they never come to your end property, they just interact with an LLM. So how much of the changing of your website and making that dynamic actually is for your website? How much traffic do you need to be able to do that? And then how do you think about the impact of having this sort of like dynamic being of a property and its effect on where people are doing most of their research, which is now LLMs? Yeah.
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If there's one, you know, kind of message that I want to impress on anyone listening to this podcast, it's that, is that your website, no matter how big or small, how big your audience is, or small your audience is, or I would say tailored is your audience. You're now speaking to two audiences. You know, you're still speaking to humans. So you need a website experience that is, that is going to delight and maybe enable people to fall in love with you and your brand. But you're also speaking to robots. And the way that you structure your content has to really inform the AI and the LLMs that are crawling on your website and creating answers. It's called Answer Engine optimization, or aeo. And so we work with a lot of companies right now. We've actually just created this AEO maturity model to help marketers understand how to structure their websites, you know, from a stage one to a stage five, the expert stage, so that they can really compete in this age where essentially the brand is disintermediated by, by LLMs. And so in a world like that, the type of content that you create for your website really matters because people's first impression they have with your brand is actually happening before they even step in digital foot on your website. And so we've been really focused on that.
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C
Yeah, it's funny how the thought process for marketers has changed or hopefully is changing. Where I think the tip of the spear for most people was here's my own property, here is my website, and when you come, you'll get information about who we are and what we are, and maybe there's an ad, some sort of a hook that's driving to that. But the bulk of the research was done on my owned property. And now, and this is even before LLMs, that has really shifted to where the buyer journey is. Research used to be in Google, then it was with influencers and creators, hopefully podcasts and YouTube videos. But now we definitely have a different entity, which is LLMs, where the research phase is all happening off site and it seems like the conversions are happening on site. If the on site experience is going to be dynamic, how do you make sure that you're giving a steady, reputable signal to the LLMs if that's where your consumers are going to do the research?
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Yeah, I mean, it's a great question and it fits in on a, on a trend line and the trend line is what we are seeing. And again, we're in early innings, so we'll see how this plays out over Time overall, traffic to websites will go down, but the type of traffic that gets to your website will be much further down the funnel and so it will be much more qualified traffic. And so finding out that right tuning so that you have enough consistency in place with the content on your website, that you're sending the right signal to the LLM, which will end up becoming one of the first experiences that people have with the brand and yet have a highly conversion oriented site for the high traffic, for the high quality traffic that will end up there. That will be, that will be the secret ingredient, number one. And then number two, I'll say something spicy. I think in, in. Or you judge whether it's spicy? I think in, in. In this age, the, and I call it, you know, looking over at a sea of sameness. Because I think one of the unintended consequences of AI is is that we're going to end up seeing a lot of content out there and experiences out there that just look the same. I think in this environment, your ability to be creative will be your competitive advantage and that will bring marketing back to its roots. That will bring us back to our storytelling roots, that VINX's qualitative and qualitative quantitative data into a place where we tell stories that break through and enable our teams to be extraordinarily creative, to compete both on the answer engine optimization side. And then when people come into the.
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Website experience, that's like the medium red salsa of spiciness. I think that the idea that the experiences will be relatively the same, I think is logic. I think what really matters is your ability to context filter. Right. It's one of the things that we've really worked on a lot here with our interview prep is not just like how do we figure out what the questions are and what the topics are for our podcast, how do we do our research? It's how do we give an LLM the context of why we are different, what we are about, how do we give it information about who you are, how do we tell it what is important to the audience in real time, then give us suggestions. And so there's that notion as if you're able to give clear guidelines to an LLM about what makes you unique, you'll have a unique experience, right? It's just the same thing as if you gave that information to a human and said this is what makes us different. Go create something in line with what makes us different. You'll be novel. Now to me, what is interesting is what are those experiences and how that shift is changing. You already said. All right, well, people are doing the buyer research upfront and that the buyer purpose of your website is dramatically changing. It is now a down funnel tool. Talk to me a little bit about the capabilities, like what is actually driving impact as opposed to what everybody is just talking about. Because we all still have a website, we all still have content. We know people are in LLM. What is actually driving business results?
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Yeah, well, I mean, I think about it in the context of, of, of attention first, first and foremost, like I'm a subscriber to the belief that we're in an attentional economy right now and the people that win are the people that not only, you know, grab attention, but they can hold attention for long periods of time. And so again, this is where I bring up the importance of a deeply immersive brand forward, but also growth. Growth first. Website experience becomes really important because once you've grabbed people's attention either through, you know, answer engines, but, but mostly other channels, we live in a fragmented media landscape right now and it continues to get more and more fragmented. Once you capture people's attention there, they, they've got to go to a place to actually learn more about what it, who, who you are and why you matter. And that's where the, that's where the, the website experience tool to the marketer becomes extraordinarily important. So back to capabilities. One of the primary capabilities that I see, and I think AI is an accelerant here, one of the primary capabilities I see is having platforms that bring all of the various stakeholders in the marketing mix onto the same platform, collaborating together with the right guardrails in place so that they can move really fast, but they're actually working on it together. And so I'll give you an example. I was talking to a customer last week at Inbound and she's got a great website, but she's got designers, I believe in Israel, who like to go off brand every now and then. And she really wants to enable them to move really quickly, but they're also doing it in a way that's kind of off brand. And so we were talking to her about like the importance of having what we call over here a brand operating system in place. And that's just fancy for all of your design standards and variables are all in the right place. And you've got guardrails in place so that people can move quickly, but they're all doing it within the brand context that the marketing leader has set. So that's just an example of a Capability that will become even more important as marketing moves faster and faster.
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C
Earlier you talked about the idea of being able to iterate quickly. And one of the things that webflow is great for is, and AI specifically is great for, is accelerating experimentation. How do you structure AI initiatives to avoid all of the experimentation you're doing end up in the experimentation graveyard?
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I think the graveyard is a feature, not a bug. I mean, I think the sign of healthy experimentation is that you're going to fail. And failure is fine as long as you're failing fast and you're learning from it. And so I've interacted with marketing teams that don't have the psychological safety to fail, and the telltale sign is they don't have a graveyard in place. And so I'm a huge proponent of that graveyard. In fact, I think that, again, like I said earlier, it's a feature, not a bug. I think marketing teams should be celebrating every experiment that goes out the door and should be. What we do over here is we try to market in the open as much as possible. And so our team over here is experimenting all the time with new uses of AI and new uses of AI within our product. And we like to blog about it, we like to say, what's working well, we tried this thing, it didn't really work well, and we're learning from it. And I think that becomes really important because, again, if you subscribe to the fact that we're in early innings, one of the primary barriers to adoption right now of AI in marketing is people just don't know where to start. And so I think the winners out there will be the ones who are experimenting in the open, have a bias towards experimentation, and become magnets to other marketers and marketing practitioners to follow their lead. And so that's really what I'm watching for. Who's experimenting out in the open?
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C
One great answer. Experimentation graveyard is a feature. You should be experimenting. And when an experiment doesn't work, actually, that means it works. That means you have the learning of what not to do moving forward. Let me reframe the question a little bit. It's not about how to avoid your experiments going into the experimentation graveyard. How do you avoid wasting resources with experimentation? How do you not spend all of your time trying to build something and then say, oh, actually, nope, this doesn't work. Shoot, now, we wasted three cycles.
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B
I think of my dad sometimes. So my dad was a doctor and a scientist, and I think I learned about experimentation through him. I obviously did not go down, down his profession route. There was something about hospitals and blood that didn't really work for me. But this idea of experimentation being a really important part of what we do. And one of the things he impressed upon me is, is how to design smart, well, run tests that everything has a hypothesis, everything has a control, and I'm exposed. Everything has a really smartly defined experiment design. And then everything has an opportunity to do a retrospective on what did we learn in the process, and then how are we applying it back to the work that we're doing? I've carried that with me from a marketer marketing perspective. And a lot of the work that I've done via go to market strategies where you put together positioning, you put it in market, and the teams that win are the teams that quickly learn whether or not that positioning is landing in the way that you want it to. And if it's not, you have got this fast feedback loop back to the business to kind of take those insights and retry it. So to me, it's all about the experimental design and the culture of experimentation.
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I interviewed the CMO of Meta and he preached the value of incrementality and one of the reasons why we worked together at eBay 20 years ago. And I was like, how did you go from where we were together to being the CMO of Meta? And he was like, it was incremental gains all the time, whether it was my team or whether it was my career, it was one small step to one small step to one small step. And I really thought that that notion of incrementality is perfect because it takes the pressure off from having to go from, you know, almost nothing to I've got everything. On the flip side, when you're experimenting constantly and taking little incremental gains, it doesn't necessarily give you the same control, totally unrelated to Alex's career, but it doesn't necessarily give you the control of which direction you're going. Well, the experiment says, go little left and the next one says, go a little left. And then we get one right and two left and left and left and left. And now all of a sudden we're leaning. How do you maintain control when you're constantly experimenting? And the reason why I think this is important is we're not necessarily in control of the experiments as much anymore. And so if we keep optimizing towards incremental gains, how do we make sure that we're still just pointed at the North Star?
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Yeah, well, so first of all, this I learned. I knew that you looked familiar, so I think you And I and Alex were both at ebay right around the same time and probably learned a lot from Gary Briggs who taught us a lot about this balance between brand building and experimentation has to.
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C
Small world.
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Yeah, yeah. I mean, so Alex has, has really applied those learnings back from ebay days in a really effective way both for experimentation and brand building at Facebook or Meta. At this point, I think that there's a, there's a role for experimentation and, but there's also a role for taking big swings that are based on, you know, more qualitative information and, and, and let's just say brand positioning and brand attributes or understanding of where the brand needs to head. And so I think really successful marketing strategists today have this balanced portfolio of incrementality based experimentation and an understanding of go to market strategies, changes that are happening in the market, changes that are happening in categories and where and how to position your brand in a way that is taking advantage of those shifts. And so all of it needs to work together.
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C
There's a traffic metaphor and I'll go back to Boston here where all of the streets in Boston are originally created by cow paths. So there is nothing linear, right? There is no go straight for a mile. It's. You stay on this street and it curves around based on where all the cows went. So if you want to go 100 miles north, because your goal is to get out of the city, you have to go all sorts of left and right and turn and twist. And to me, there's a metaphor here between experimentation with artificial intelligence, which is you're constantly sort of volleying back and forth and optimizing, but you still do have to understand what the end goal is, otherwise you'll just end up going in circles. So what's the right way that marketers specifically, you know, CMOs or your customers can maintain their focus on the general direction they want ahead without just, you know, getting stuck in traffic going left and right and back and forth.
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B
I'm sure there's an inappropriate big dig metaphor that gets you through all of the cow paths and all of that. I think this is a hard, this is a hard. It is probably the hardest thing for the marketing leader to do right now, which is again, how to have that balanced portfolio of all of the experimentation and the direction forward. And I think this is one of those things where, where, you know, using, using the marketer superpower of being extraordinarily customer focused, extraordinarily market oriented, such that we have a clear eyed view of what's going on in the world around us and the categories around us so that we can say this is what the next three years of this market looks like now, and this is the overall directionality that it's going in now. Exactly how to get to that end goal is unclear at this point, and we're going to experiment our way into it. But this is the shift that is happening, and I think this is one of the, you know, it's one of the biggest challenges and the fun part of the job, to be honest.
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C
There's always an art and science to marketing. There's always a balance between the data and the creative, the science, the technology, the artistry. And I think that as much as we're in our big poppy, our universal change moment with artificial intelligence, striking that fundamental balance of this is where we're going, as opposed to this is what our next turn needs to be, is always a challenge. It's always a balance. And it really does take true talent to be able to navigate the creative, the scientific, the technology, the direction, the strategy all at once. It's really hard to find a great marketer. And artificial intelligence can help us with the experimentation, but it can't help us figure out that balance between the scientific and the creative as well.
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B
I think that's why I like this job so much, you know, and, and again, I, I'm so glad that you brought up the ebay days, because the. Well, first of all, I can't think of a. There are a few brands as special as ebay and the pathway that we were building back then. But, but second of all, I think that's where I really learned the importance of stories and, and narratives. And I believe that stories and narrative, I mean, since the dawn of age, stories have been the thing that motivates people to take action, to do things, to be better than they are at that point. And it's also one of those things that AI is going to be an assistant in, it's going to be a co pilot in. But ultimately, and this is where we come back to creativity, ultimately, the human is going to be at the center of that because of everything that we're bringing up.
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C
Yes, stories and a reverse timer that wraps up this episode of the Martech podcast. Thanks for listening to my conversation with Dave Steere, the CMO of webflow. If you'd like to get in touch with Dave, you can find a link to his LinkedIn profile in our show notes or on martechpod.com or you could visit his company's website, which is webflow.com and if you haven't subscribed yet and you want a daily stream of marketing and technology knowledge in your podcast feed, hit the subscribe button in your podcast app. Or Visit us on YouTube, where we'll be back in your feed next week. All right, that's it for today, but until next time, my advice is to just focus on keeping your customers happy. Foreign.
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A
Thanks for listening to the Martech podcast, and I hear everything. Production Looking to launch or scale a podcast like this one for your brand? Then visit iheareverything.com.