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The Best SEO Podcast: Defining the Future of Search with LLM Visibility™
Marketing in the Age of AI: Why the Funnel is Dead and Content is King with Sara Faatz
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- [00:03]
Matt Bertram
This is the Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing, your insider guide to the strategies top marketers use to crush the competition. Ready to unlock your business full potential? Let's get started. Wow, look at that. Welcome back to another episode of the Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing. My name is Matt Bertram. I have two much data stored on my studio and so it's glitching out. So I apologize to everybody. Things are moving so fast and, you know, everybody wants to know, or either you're like drowning out all the AI progress because it's happening so fast and you're trying to focus on what matters, or you're drinking out of a fire heighten fire hydrant and just trying to take it all in as quickly as you can. And so you're going to probably fall on that, that, that spectrum somewhere. And so wanted to bring on somebody that's at the forefront of this, of what's going on with AI and content management. From progress.com Sarah Fats, welcome to the show.
- [01:12]
Sarah Fats
Thank you so much. Really excited to be here.
- [01:14]
Matt Bertram
Well, you know, I know we were having in the pre interview and I was like, let's just like put this live for everybody because I find that the conversations I have before we go live and after we go live are the absolute best conversations. And you just got to try to record it all. And that's what people want to see, I guess, is that real conversation. So you and I were talking about customer journey and how that's absolutely changed. You know, I, I have looked at it for a long time. There was a Google study a while ago about how it looked kind of like a neuron where people kept going back to the center. Right. It wasn't linear. Everybody draws it out linear. So why don't you kind of tee up and set the table for the audience of how you see customer, the customer journey today. And then of course, we'll naturally progress into what you're doing and, and AI and all that. So.
- [02:13]
Sarah Fats
Absolutely. Yeah. Thank you. Yeah, I think, I mean, the democratization and proliferation of AI has changed everyone's behavior right now. To your point. I think we used to, marketers thought that we had some semblance of control over the journey. And I think it's always been a little chaotic because we're, we're messy. You know, humans are messy. But, but there was still a path that you could take. You could drive people to your website through SEO and other, you know, other strategies. When they got there, you could help them find the path to help them take the action you wanted them to take, right, Buy now, read, register, download. But today with AI, oftentimes the journey ends before it even begins. Like if we're being honest because people can get the answers to their questions or find the information they need without ever making it to your site. 0 click search, in my opinion, is the biggest catalyst of change we've seen in a really long time when it comes to the customer journey and content journey all up.
- [03:09]
Matt Bertram
I absolutely agree. We're seeing on the SEO side of things, less people are being driven to the website specifically, but it hasn't changed the buying patterns for the brands that own the space. Right. Like, so if you own the market and you're everywhere and people keep seeing you, right, it doesn't matter what platform you're on, they're gonna go buy when they're ready to buy. And the biggest thing that is hard for us to track, things that I'm seeing digital marketers hard to track is, well, because each search is so personalized, tracking rankings is getting very difficult. And then last click attribution, right? Like everybody wants to, you know, first or last attribution. I'm like, you know, there's, there's so much going on that you don't even see when it goes online offline. So yeah, like map out like you do a lot of B2B stuff. Map out like maybe just a general customer journey as you know it in your head, but you can't prove it through the data.
- [04:16]
Sarah Fats
Welcome to my world, right? Yeah. I mean, I think the customer journey really starts with a customer is looking for something, right? And we've for a long time talked about the fact that you shouldn't be marketing features and functionality. You should be marketing the problem that you're, your product solves. But that's really hard, right? But the companies that are going to be successful moving forward, particularly in an AI space are the ones who actually can do that. They stop talking about features and functionality because let's be honest, nobody really is searching for. I shouldn't say nobody. That's, that's a. But most people aren't saying, hey, I want to know if you have a new button, right? Do you have a new color blue on that button? Unless you're using the product already, right? So what they really care about is making sure that they have a website or a product that's, that's accessible. And to solve that problem, they need to make sure that they have high contrast colors and those kinds of things. And so the customer journey then becomes understanding at a, at a very Deep level, who the customer is, what they. What problem they have, and how you're going to be able to solve that problem. And that changes your content journey in a very, very big way. Because it's no longer just. Everything has to be more. It has to be deeper, it has to be a lot more authentic. And it has to be predictive in the sense that you understand your customers well enough to know what they're going to be needing or asking and why. I mean, you're creating products with new features and functionality because the customer needs them. You need to be able to communicate at a much better level why that's important. Right. And tell a story. It's more about storytelling. Those are buzzwords that we've been using for a long time, but I don't know that people have done it right or well for a long time.
- [06:05]
Matt Bertram
So two of the things you said. Can you hear me? I changed my mic out. Hopefully it sounds a little bit better for everyone. So one is people buy based on emotion. Right. And they may justify it based on logic. So we're talking about storytelling, we're talking about connecting with the audience. And then I forget who I want to reference who it is correctly. But they said, like, you got to get in the head of the customer and understand the conversation. They're telling themselves to answer that question for them. Right. So you got to answer that question. You got to draw upon the emotion. And I am seeing that absolutely in the data. So when you look at how people are using chat functions of a, like LLMs or even how they're using Google, they're getting a lot more advanced and they're. They're using a lot more prompting to get what they're looking for. Right. And to customize it. Boolean search used to be the big term.
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Sarah Fats
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
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Matt Bertram
Right. In. In the past. But we're seeing conversions happening a lot of times. Eight plus keywords. Okay. So, like, where the conversions are happening. So you, you want to rank if. If we're talking about SEO for that core seed keyword. Because then you're gonna qualify for all these other searches. But then outside of those searches, understanding. And Google's tried to do that. Right. Like, people ask things to know. They're trying to solve those. And there's been a big kind of uproar of the zero click of getting into those spaces. But we've seen if you can get on the first page now, you don't have to be first because also actually what's interesting is sometimes the first position gets Skipped for whatever reason. We've seen that in the ads, right? It's about catching the attention, drawing them into that. And a lot of times the AI overviews are where people's going and you can show up in there. And then if they, if they see your name later on in the customer journey, right, Multiple times, they start to gravitate to you as a trusted source.
- [08:07]
Sarah Fats
100. Yeah, but it's those, it's, those are the invisible things, right? It's very hard to track. Hey, I've seen you, you know, seven, 20, you know, 25 times because it's so, so much a part of the subconscious, right? It's very hard to say, oh yeah, this is working because of X. Right. So when you actually have to come and defend your content strategy, it, you know, it's very hard to have a data driven approach to say we appeared these 17 times in this person's search. And that's how we, you know, that that's how they, they, they found us. I think that starting to collect and review unstructured data is going to help us maybe find, it'll be more of a dotted line, you know, hey, this is what's working. But I think that looking at being able to build, leveraging AI to build profiles based on unstructured data from some of your key customers is going to help you start building that, that report that says, hey, this is working, right? This is why we should be doing.
- [09:12]
Matt Bertram
X, Y or Z. Yeah, I mean that's one of the things that I, I talk about, you know, the big brands most of the time understand this. The smaller brands just want transactional, right. And they're, they just, I need leads or whatever it is and you know, you gotta map out who are you trying to speak to, what kind of bait are you fishing with?
- [09:36]
Sarah Fats
Right?
- [09:37]
Matt Bertram
And that actually translates when I see the bigger companies, the marketing qualified leads and the sales qualified leads, they gotta be in alignment of what, what that looks like. And if the content strategy doesn't start out going after that target Persona, right. You're gonna get the wrong kind of fish or the wrong kind of bait. Right. And, and so it all puts together and what I've had to do and tell me what you're doing and what you're seeing. Like I start with, okay, or is this the kind of lead like when, like what's the final result? Is this the kind of lead that you want? What about it? Don't you want? And then I try to, because you can't track everything. And I'm Working with some non, you were talking about non profits. Working with a non profit. Right now that their funnel goes to three different sites. Okay, so if you're doing UTMB tracking, like, you lose it, right?
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Sarah Fats
Yeah, yeah.
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Matt Bertram
And so, so then I'm like, okay, well can we set up heat mapping on like, like, how do we track it? And so I, I start at the end and I'm having to work backwards to try to figure it out. But you're like going, okay, here's who we're going after and here's the end.
- [10:49]
Sarah Fats
Right?
- [10:50]
Matt Bertram
And then, and then you're doing all the things in the middle to try to figure out exactly what's happening. There used to be this term. I, it was totally a buzzword, but, but I think that there's some truth in it. They were calling it like dark social. Okay. And they're like. And I was like, what is dark? Do you remember that? Like, I was like, what is dark social?
- [11:08]
Sarah Fats
Right.
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Matt Bertram
But it's like all the stuff that happens that you can't track. And I think that like, Google AdWords gets a lot of credit for the last touch attribution. But in someone's customer journey, when they start out knowing they have a problem, the last thing they do is they're deciding between companies. Right?
- [11:29]
Sarah Fats
Exactly. Yeah.
- [11:30]
Matt Bertram
Or they even know that their service, whatever you're selling, that they need to be searching for that. And so, you know, that's when the conversion happens.
- [11:39]
Sarah Fats
Right?
- [11:40]
Matt Bertram
But it could have been, you know, that, that Reddit post or that Facebook ad or something else that like spurred their attention to say, hey, this is it. And then, then people, right now with the economy getting more uncertain, people are tightening up and they're cutting the things that they think are not working. But it's, it's really the collaboration or the, the, the, the amplifier effect of all these different channels that have built this carefully drawn out funnel of you're getting leads. And so if you change too many variables at one time, we had a client just recently change a couple things. Okay. On their own, they just decided that they were, they changed this, right? And their leads dropped by 90%. And then they're like, what happened? And I was like, well, what did you do? Right? And you know, like. And so everything's kind of delicately put together and you don't know, you know, what, what signals are sending, where and how you're positioning, but you change one thing, the whole organization of like, where you land. And if you move from position one to position three, boy, are you going to feel It. Right. You know. Right, it's.
- [12:55]
Sarah Fats
Right, yeah. And the amazing thing is, I mean you're talking about, I mean, think about that from a one buyer perspective when you start adding buying groups in there, right. You have a far more complex journey that, you know, you, how do you, you may have a, you know, a champion who is, or you know, the person's ultimately going to be the user, but they're not the purchaser. And they have, you know, on, on the content management system, for example, you have, you're going to have your probably your IT team is going to be involved and marketing ops will be involved. Revenue mops might be involved, marketing might be involved, depending on the size of the organization. Right. That's a lot of, that's a lot of audience that you have to talk to. And, and in every organization that might be a different purchaser at the end. And so you have to really, all of those things that you're talking about in that dark, the dark side of, you know, the dark side. Right. However you want to. But it, it definitely is, you have to really start understanding. And I love the idea of going, working from, from, you know, here's the sale, let's work back and figure out how we got to that ideal lead to begin with. But I think the other thing is that we're all humans, all take their different path. That's why, that's why saying a funnel was never linear to begin with. It was always chaotic and messy. We just had, there were fewer paths for people to take. Right. So it felt more, it felt like a funnel and now it's more just like it's a choose your own adventure where people are starting getting off and on at all different points and places. And I think the one thing that AI does to really disrupt that is that it doesn't necessarily, if we can believe that that AI in some cases is the ui, it's that user interface that you, you then have to start thinking about if I have this piece of content, whether it was, you know, maybe it was a middle of funnel piece of content that if they caught that information on my site, there would be a natural path or progression. Now I have to start thinking about that content and say if somebody consumes this as part of an LLM output or from an AI agent, how do I help them understand that there is more that they could learn, there's more that they could do. We have more to offer. Right. So it really does make, you have to rethink the purpose of the content and how you use it. As a stepping stone for people or help them use it as a stepping stone. But then again, like I said, you can go back to before if you have multiple buying groups that all of a sudden becomes, that's a crisscrossed, you know, path that kind of eventually hopefully all leads to the bottom.
- [15:35]
Matt Bertram
Well, you know, when you, when you talk about the funnel and the pathway, I think all the way back to when Google, no matter what keyword you would rank for, it would always be your homepage. Right. So you always had the, you always had the door that you were going in, so you know how people could direct.
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Sarah Fats
Right.
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Matt Bertram
But today every page is like a node in, you know, the ecosystem of information organization. Right. I guess. And, and so, you know, this random page over here that's not even in your navigation structure could be the doorway that people are coming in. And so I think that like, understanding analytics, because I, I can tell you, like really understanding how to chop up analytics helps you guess better, I guess. Right, right, right, right, right. And, and, and you can get ideas about stuff and I think it, it, you know, I mean, look, Gary Vanderchuck says just do it all. Do as much of it as you can because you're just mapping everything out and you want to be, be everywhere.
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Sarah Fats
Right.
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Matt Bertram
You know, that's great. And AI helps speed everything up. I think, like you said, it's like this interface that just speeds everything up.
- [16:44]
Sarah Fats
Right.
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Matt Bertram
And, and so, you know, but there are general channels, right? There's general channels that people fall into and I think that that's where people should start, right? Start, start with the heavier channels and then kind of build up of there. There are people on a scatter plot, right. That are going to be everywhere, but try to kind of cluster those things to hopefully get the user traffic flowing right in the right direction and then set, set those triggers. But like you said, give the directional point of.
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Sarah Fats
Right.
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Matt Bertram
Okay. You can go back and go up, you can go sideways. I love that. Choose your own adventure. I actually heard that on somebody I was interviewing on the, a previous podcast. They weren't using it in that context. Yeah, but it's so applicable because. Okay, so I'm going to jump to like short form content for a second.
- [17:40]
Sarah Fats
Yeah, yeah.
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Matt Bertram
APPLAUSE I am absolutely seen in social media that because the algorithm changes from TikTok just. And everybody's adapted, right? YouTube's adapted, Instagram's adapted, like you. Facebook is adapted. Like this content's going to find somebody that wants it, right. And it's so reflective of whatever you Want, right? Literally, like everybody's producing content at this exponential rate. So it's literally choose your own adventure because your feed, Sarah, my feed, anybody's feed, is going to be completely different. Like I've looked at other people's feeds and I've gone like, this is not at all what my feed looks like and this is not at all maybe what I'm interested in based on like a percentage of buckets or whatever.
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Sarah Fats
Right.
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Matt Bertram
That's absolutely designed for them.
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Sarah Fats
Right.
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Matt Bertram
And so, so I don't know, the choose your own adventure really resonates with.
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Sarah Fats
Yeah, well, the only thing, the only concern I have with the choose your own adventure and I think choose your venture 100% is the way to go. But then you also have to your point, you know, so much content is being created. I don't want to end up in a digital wasteland, right. I think that there's, you know, there is. Creating content for content's sake is not the right way to go. Creating content because you can do it quickly is not the right way to go. Right. I mean, I think the, some of the core tenants of solid SEO remain true from an AI discoverability perspective and that is create quality content, right? Create content that has, you know, unique thought, unique insight, that has, know your perspective on things as opposed to this general fluffiness. And I'm, I'm afraid like I, I still see people creating like just, you know, garbage with it because it's easy. And I think that that's where, you know, when we start talking about feeds and having short form content and content that, that resonates, you know, from an individual perspective and, and almost hyper personalization. You still absolutely need to be thinking about the fact that, you know, why am I creating this piece of content, right? Is do something or is it just, is it just going to be noise or digital waste as you know, as we like to refer to it.
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Matt Bertram
Well, so yeah, if you look through the SEO perspective Google has, and this was probably at least 18 months ago, started unindexing content, right? Because the exponential rate, they can't even keep up. Or I mean they can keep up, but it's, it's moving so quickly that they're, you know, trying to index, right? Well, not index, but they're trying to collect all the information that's being generated in the world and then they're trying to organize it, right? That's their kind of core tenant. Well, if you're not in the top 100, right? And we already know from all the studies of the data, like, look, if you're not on the first page, it almost doesn't matter. So the only things that are going to show up in the first page and also show up in the first 100 is going to be original thought.
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Sarah Fats
Right, okay.
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Matt Bertram
It's going to be. You're adding something to the conversation online that I can't generate because it hasn't incorporated that yet. Right, yeah.
- [20:48]
Sarah Fats
And, yeah.
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Matt Bertram
And so, you know, I think that a lot of people have gone the route of generating a ton of content, and then these core updates happen and they lose a ton of traffic. And it's because, well, you know, that content barely crusted the surface of the top 100.
- [21:08]
Sarah Fats
Right.
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Matt Bertram
And then. And now it's been optimized in another way and it was able to grab other content that might been more valuable, and boom, now you're gone and you have no link equity that's getting pushed from it.
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Sarah Fats
Right.
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Matt Bertram
And then, boom. Like you said, it goes back to the core tenets of SEO of like, is this good quality content?
- [21:29]
Sarah Fats
Right.
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Matt Bertram
How do we design this for the user? So nothing's had. Nothing has really changed. Changed.
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Sarah Fats
Right, right.
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Matt Bertram
Like, fundamentally. I mean, they added the expertise to eat. Right, right, right.
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Sarah Fats
Yeah, exactly. Yeah.
- [21:42]
Matt Bertram
Try to say, hey, like, this is a real human. So.
- [21:45]
Sarah Fats
Right.
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Matt Bertram
I, I think that that was helpful, but I, I mean, what, what are you seeing? I mean, I'm, I'm trying to stay on top of this. Like, this is like a weekly thing of, like, where, where everything's going. But, like, I talked to a client actually this morning who has a neighbor. Okay, so, so, and the neighbor, I think, is a smart guy. I haven't, I haven't met him, but he's mentioned the neighbor to me a few times and he's like, google's dead. He goes, he goes. And he doesn't even know it yet. And I go, man, like, I hear, I've heard that SEO is dead.
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Sarah Fats
Right.
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Matt Bertram
So many times. And SEO, I think, has taken on a new form that almost everybody needs to understand SEO as, like, you're building stuff, but it's like understanding the algorithms on any platform to understand how that content, whatever it is, is being interpreted.
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Sarah Fats
Right.
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Matt Bertram
So I just wanted to get your, your take on. On where we are at, on the time.
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Sarah Fats
Yeah, yeah, yeah, right. I mean, Google's not dead. And Google's not going to die. I think it's. We're evolving as, just as anything. Right? I mean, there, there was a time when, you know, websites were dead because they were only brochure where work is what websites evolved and now they are all sorts of things. I think websites are going to evolve again and I think they're going to continue to be a channel. I do think that AI will become the UI in some cases. I think that integration of AI within the search tools, within, you know, your Googles and your Bings and you know, that only is going to, they're just going to evolve. They're not going away, they're not dying. And I think SEO from, you know, you have, I think it was Neil Patel who said it's not search engine optimization, it's search everywhere optimization. Optimization. Right. And I think that, that, that is 100% what you're going to see. But I think that again, the core tenants, if, if you're saying, hey, drop everything and just make a, an AI strategy so everything's discoverable on AI and ranking through, you know, with AI agents and LLM outputs, then you're going to be losing sight of the fact that you still need to optimize for SEO. Right. Search engines are not. They are, in some cases. Well, they're built on a lot of AI engines. Right? I mean, they are, yeah. I mean, so it's, I, yeah, I think that there's a lot of hype. We're obviously at the top of the hype cycle right now. There's a lot of truth in what's going on from an AI perspective and a lot of change. I mean, I think, you know, if we had the same conversation a year from now and looked back, we might be laughing at even some of the words that we're using right now. Right. And how we're even talking about LL or agents, AI agents or LLM outputs. But no, I think that they are 100% Google and all of the search engines need, they're going to remain, they're just going to grow and evolve and be as relevant and maybe in some cases even more relevant as they, they are today.
- [24:41]
Matt Bertram
Awesome. So let's transition to what progress.com is doing and what you're doing with content. Maybe you could share kind of some case studies or something that you're seeing that might be interesting for people to know from a new data standpoint of like, hey, this is what we're doing and this is what we're seeing and this is how it's working. I think that would be super helpful for the audience.
- [25:04]
Sarah Fats
I mean, I think there are a couple of things, I mean, from a, a product perspective, we actually have introduced recently AI propensity scoring within within sitefinity. So we actually have customers who are leveraging that for personalization in ways that they never have. Right. We talked about. Personalization is a buzzword that has been, you know, people. How long have we been talking about personalization? I think with AI, one of the things that we're seeing is our, our customers who are using our platforms are able to truly, you know, personalize content now and personalize the content journey in ways that they, they weren't before. And by leveraging the propensity scoring, they can actually have, they have some predictive analytics about what, what will be coming next. And so we have some customers who have leveraged that to modify their content journey to build new content for higher results, and they're seeing higher conversion rates. We just had a partner roundtable event last week in Dublin and one of our partners was talking about a client that they have that has done that within sitefinity. And it's really proving, it's proving itself out, which is amazing to me because we're, again, we've talked about personalization for a long time. I think it's just getting to a point where it's mature enough that we can, the technology is mature enough that we can act accurately, do that. Right.
- [26:35]
Matt Bertram
Can you explain to me maybe at a high level, for people listening as well, what is the scoring system doing? Kind of like, how is it working? Just kind of at a high level, I think that would be helpful for people.
- [26:46]
Sarah Fats
Yeah. So at a high level, it's looking at the actions that customers and prospects are taking within the content within the site. Right. And leveraging predictive analytics to let you know what their next anticipated step will be. And if you're seeing the way you can use it, it's really interesting because if you're seeing that there's a, a massive drop off, you know, at some point in time, you understand that there's, there's something broken in that. Choose your own adventure game. Right. There's, you need to add another, another option for them to say, okay, this is where I need to go. And so it allows you to really start to understand what kind of content is resonating and how that journey is unfolding so that you can help guide them through that, that journey. Does that make sense?
- [27:31]
Matt Bertram
Yeah. So it's, it's really helping map out the funnel of what people are doing beyond what you're getting with GA4 or something like that. It's at a site level and so it's a cms. Correct.
- [27:43]
Sarah Fats
Correct. Yeah. So it's A cms. And then we have a. We have a CDP on as well, a customer data platform that looks at unstructured data as well. So not just the data within the site, but it's looking at the broader. All of the data that we have, that we have for that customer across the board, which is really putting together a pretty powerful picture of the customer journey.
- [28:03]
Matt Bertram
Describe that A little bit more of the unstructured data of what it's capturing or looking at. Again, just at a high level, I think.
- [28:09]
Sarah Fats
Yeah. So it can. And it's all. Whatever we can be collected and looked at legally. Right. I should. I should preface it with that. It is a. But it's the, the known information on that person, whether it's social interactions or other sites that they've visited, looking at that kind of information and building that unique profile for that customer.
- [28:30]
Matt Bertram
Yeah, Moz is doing some of that these days. Right. Like, he's really mapping that out. I think that that is super helpful when you're trying to figure out who you're going after, where they're at, what they're looking at. And then like you said, that customer journey kind of going back to. It is like you need to look up or like if you're. If you're on a spatial plot. Right. Like it's. It's what you touch in every direction.
- [28:57]
Sarah Fats
Exactly.
- [28:57]
Matt Bertram
Because they can. They can choose to go whatever direction you give them. And if they want to go, you know, this direction and you don't have a piece of content there, they jump from your content.
- [29:08]
Sarah Fats
Exactly.
- [29:09]
Matt Bertram
To. To something else. Or they go back to the beginning. Right. And they, they whatever, wherever they started their search, which could be YouTube, could be ChatGPT, it could be Google, it could be anything. But they go back to that beginning point and then start over and you might not catch them again. One of the things I'm seeing, I'm curious. This is something I'm seeing in the data. A lot of times people are converting in the mode that they're in. Right. So they're either going to convert that first day, like they're going to go all the way to the finish line and close. Or it's like 30 days plus. It's almost like I'm. I'm not seeing any data like in between there. Not a lot. Right. Like just. Yeah, substantially. Like you either get them on the first shot. Right. Or they're. You're. They're going to be going through a sifting process and, and you're gonna. You're gonna hopefully capture them that they're going to find your stuff later. And that does happen a lot. And that's what I see in the reporting a lot is like we need to look backwards, like 30 days to say, did this work? Because, you know, I mean, with data you are getting real time data. But like, even if you run ads, like I'm saying, like it takes two weeks or something to like for it to just kind of percolate through and for people to take action. Not to say that there's not 3% or whatever the number is of someone that buys immediately, but when you're getting them into like that customer journey, unless they're ready to buy immediately, you're kind of dropping, I feel like analogy is like dropping a Plinko ball and it's going exactly 100.
- [30:52]
Sarah Fats
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I think the other thing is every, every buyer's, you know, buying life cycle is varies and even within our business, you know, we have, you know, five or six buckets of products and some are very transactional and 100%. What you said, if they, if they're not taking an action when they're there, it's going to be either 30 days, 60 days, or they're just not. Right. We have others that the buying cycle could be 18 months, believe it or not. Right. And those are the more complex products that have buying groups as opposed to a single purchaser and all of those kinds of things. But that becomes exponentially more complex, which is also why having predictive analytics, having propensity scoring, having that kind of information available to you is super important. Because you have to look at the buying group as a whole as opposed to, you know, if somebody's purchasing the product, what are all the touch points from that domain or from that organization that says, okay, these are, you know, it's similar to intent data. Right. You know, what are the signals that you're going to get from, from all of that. But being able to understand on what point they're, they have pause, you know, in that journey is really, really important.
- [32:05]
Matt Bertram
So, so if I use like, so we're, we're in Houston, so we do a lot of oil and gas, industrial manufacturing, all that kind of stuff. And what I'm seeing is, okay, you're speaking to the executive, okay. And then you're speaking to maybe the field person. And then they've, they've really drawn a like, step back. And there are buying groups, right. And you might not even know who everybody is on that committee now. Right. So you can't target the Like, I mean, there's the procurement person or whoever it is. But what, what I am seeing as like, people are like, okay, we need to trim spend or this or that. And we trim spend on a couple campaigns where we weren't targeting the 25 to 35 group. Okay, right. Well, like what we saw as a result of that is we were getting less people like requesting RPs or whatever it is that. Because, because there's the, the assistant or the new hire or the junior person that is going to do the, the go for. I don't know if that's the right word, but the research, doing the research, finding the stuff and then passing it back and then the executives might go do that research after, like it's been vetted to a few companies or, or something like that. And so like, you need to have that predictive analytics. You need to understand who you're targeting, who you're speaking to, who are your champions.
- [33:34]
Sarah Fats
Right? I mean, yeah, people who are going to champion within the organization because they, they might not actually have anything to do with the final purchasing decision, but they could be incredibly influential. And I think those are the, that's the audience that a lot of people, I don't want to say ignore because that sounds harsh, but I think they do, right. They kind of push them off to the side because, oh, it's a nice to have. When in actuality they are as critical as the final purchaser in a lot of cases. Because they're the gatekeeper. Right. If your champion or influencer is not, you know, they're the ones who are doing that initial, hey, we need this product or a solution. Right. We have this problem, we need to solve it. If, if that person is not being engaged with the content that you would need to be the champion. Right. You know, or, and that the kind of. Then I think you're. Yeah. You're 100% missing out. It sounds to me like you're doing a lot of experiments, which is fantastic, that you can actually turn around and say, hey, you know, we have data to show. This is why we need to do X, Y or Z. And I think that's something with AI we should be able to see more of because you can move quickly. Right.
- [34:40]
Matt Bertram
Well, I mean, what we're seeing, Yeah, I mean, I get to work with a lot of different overseeing strategy for a lot of different companies, big and small. And so I'm able to see a lot of data and draw inferences from that and then apply that. And we're seeing a lot Even on the social side of things is like, let's put out a trial balloon on social, then if it does well, then let's put some money behind it on the advertising side versus just like deciding like this is what we're going to go with and run it. Because I mean ultimately the end result is what people are paying for, not right what, whatever, whatever comes in between there. They're really looking at the, the final result. I mean, what, what are you seeing? Like so, so you, you have these different stakeholders. Like you said it, you know, you got marketing, you got executives. What I'm increasingly seeing is sales and marketing working more and more in hand, the CRO position, all that sort of thing. And, and I, I'm seeing, or I'm trying to help have the perspective of sales change on how like critical and how influential marketing can be in that sales process. Right. And I think Covid and you know, everything moving online had, had, had increased that. Right. And also drawn that attention to it because you can't, you couldn't spend your conference budget on, on, on marketing. Right? Like, you couldn't, you couldn't go to the conferences. So let's put our money other places and they're seeing it happen. Like what are you seeing in that, that customer journey from a sales and marketing standpoint? Because I think your platform, and I want to talk more about it, on how, how it also can help because I think it's super critical. So just tell me what you're seeing on the marketing and sales. How, how you're seeing salespeople look at marketing and how to influence that.
- [36:37]
Sarah Fats
Yeah, I mean, we're seeing more of the, kind of the rise of revenue operations, which is that, that marriage of the two. Right. You have marketing ops, you have sales ops coming together from a revenue operations perspective. I mean, I think the marketing sales interaction has always, I mean that's an a tale as old as time, right? You know, I think. But I think yes, we are seeing more integration with. It's not just a handoff and walk away. There is more integration, a deeper integration with, across both, both organizations.
- [37:14]
Matt Bertram
Because I can see, I can see that the, the platform that you have prove out what's happening. Right? Because. Yeah, because you know, a lot of times marketing will go to sales and say, hey, what is the customer story you're using? What's the testimonial? What's the, what's the homegrown stuff you're not supposed to be using, but we know you're using it in the field like let's bring that back. Let's get it approved through legal and let's, let's use that across, you know, the, the, the districts or 100 territories. And, and I'm seeing that the, the data that you're being able to give is the, is more supportive of that.
- [37:54]
Sarah Fats
Yes.
- [37:54]
Matt Bertram
To, to say, hey, like this, this is helping, this is working.
- [37:59]
Sarah Fats
Right.
- [37:59]
Matt Bertram
And, and being able to see the, like the real application of what we're not seeing, like we talked about more in the field.
- [38:07]
Sarah Fats
Yeah, absolutely. And being able to marry the, the experience that, that we're able to pull from the platform and the, I don't want to say anecdotal, because it's not anecdotal, but the evidence that the sales team is getting and marry the two. Yeah, absolutely. And we are being able to show that and it is exciting to see that that take place because it does allow for more meaningful, meaningful engagement and, and higher conversion rates on the, on the back end. And it shows that the marketing spend. You know, it's funny you talk about events. My team is responsible for our event strategy as well. And that's changed exponentially in the last, in the last five years. And, and the purpose, I still believe a thousand percent in events and that you need to be doing them, but you need to know why you're doing them. And I think for a long time people didn't understand that. Right. And so being able to reallocate that spend to more meaningful engagements that impact sales in a different way is really, you know, it's something that we're, I end up having to have conversations a lot about, well, why aren't we at this place? Or we should be here? Why aren't we doing more of this? And my first question to them always is, well, what is your, what is the goal? Like, what do you, what do you think we're going to get out of that by doing that? And usually it's something that they want. They want something that you're not going to get from an event. Right. They want something. They want exactly what you and I were just talking about. That, that connection. That's a deeper connection with the customer, something that's going to have a higher conversion, something that's going to get them closer to a sale. And most events today are not that they are. They're about building brand awareness. They're that another touch. They're about engagement. They're building trust, delighting existing customers. Right. There are a lot of different ways, reasons that you go and, and there is a, there's been a. There's education that goes along with that. Right. And so anyway. Yeah, yeah, go ahead. Yeah.
- [40:07]
Matt Bertram
Can you give me one example? And I want, I want after this for you to, to really tell us a little bit more. Give me the elevator pitch for progress.com. i want to know, you said events have changed for you a lot. Can you pull something out of there and give like a specific that you've adapted what you were doing before and how that would work?
- [40:30]
Sarah Fats
Yeah. And so this would be more on the. And I'll give an example. On our developer tool side of the business, we would go pre Covid. We were sponsoring anywhere from 30 to 40 events per year. We were out there and Covid hit and. And we, we pivoted very quickly to. We did a lot of live streaming, you know, on Twitch and things like that. What that changed though was the way that you engage with your customer or prospect. Right. So the, the, the engagement became more personal to a certain extent because there was even on. And that might sound ironic from a live stream, but it allowed you to have interactions and engagement with people all around the world, not just the thousand people who were showing up at that event or 3,000 of people, you know, and let's be honest, you're not talking to all of them anyway and you are a but a drop of sand in a, you know, in an expo hall. So as we got away from COVID the way people engage, similar to the fact that customer behavior is changing in the face of AI the way customers or prospects want to engage with a product or a brand is different and they want more of a. Even if it's not an in person touch, they want more of an engagement that is, that's more personalized. So again, not to say that the events, I mean events absolutely are. And I believe in the human side of software. People buy from people, they don't buy from brands at the end of the day. So it's still important to have that, that touch. But we found that there are more impactful ways for us to engage with the audience and that's by being, you know, providing some sort of education in a different way and a way that they can engage with us, whether it's, you know, again like a live stream or a webinar or podcast, but having that, the live Q A afterwards or something along those lines. Right. It gives us at least for that particular audience from a developer perspective, they wanted the ability to, to interact with, with the people and not just. And, and you can't do that at scale from an event perspective?
- [42:37]
Matt Bertram
Yeah, no, I, I think that the, the get into the, you know, know, like, and trust like in person at the events compresses the time. Right. So customer nurture I think is big. I'm seeing like pre event events, like online and post event events online. It is huge to get that engagement. Okay, so we're getting kind of close to wrapping up. I wanted to ask you one last question that we're starting to use this as shorts, so it can be you repeating something we've talked about, just kind of repackaging it into a short clip is what is one unknown secret of Internet marketing that might be underutilized today?
- [43:22]
Sarah Fats
One unknown secret. That's a good one. I'm trying to think if I would.
- [43:31]
Matt Bertram
Go, give me two, give me whatever, talk about content, whatever you got.
- [43:36]
Sarah Fats
Yeah, I mean, I think from a content perspective, probably one of the secrets would be that even though there is this hype around AI, the core tenets of SEO remain the same. I don't know if that's a secret, but I think that it's something that's often forgotten. I think that people also forget that as you need to create, and this is a problem, whether it was early days of SEO or early days of AI optimization, at the end of the day, you're still creating content for humans. And so while you need to optimize for the technology, do not forget that at the end, the person or the thing that's consuming that is human. And if, if it's not something that they can engage with, all is going to be lost. Right. So it doesn't matter if you have the right keywords or the right keyword clusters or the right groups. You absolutely have to be creating that content. That is, that's somebody would want to actually engage with, whether it's video, whether it's, you know, written content. I think the other thing, and I want this as more than one is more than two, but I will throw this out there, these just because I've been thinking about it a lot. We talk a lot on our end about making software that's accessible and accessible software. Obviously there are laws around that, but more than anything, accessibility means that you need to. It means that it's something that most anybody could consume. And as I'm looking at the best practices from an AI perspective, I think find it kind of ironic that a lot of the best practices for creating, creating AI friendly content fall on the foundation of accessible content. Right. So content that is, that's concise, that's Easy to read, that's clear, that's well structured, all of those things that uses appropriate use of alt text. I think if you are thinking coming to the party with an accessibility first mindset, you're going to actually have a very AI friendly strategy and that's going to help you win. When we come down from the bottom of the, you know, come down to the plateau of this hype cycle, I think that's where you're going to see organizations winning.
- [45:38]
Matt Bertram
I love that. Okay, so tell me more about progress.com. give, give us the pitch and then like also what's the best. You gave me a link that we'll put in the show notes and what's the best way to get in touch with you and follow like your content?
- [45:55]
Sarah Fats
Okay, so Progress Progress is a software company that's been around for 40 years. We create software that allows our customers to build, deploy and manage responsible AI powered applications and experiences. Within the digital experience business unit where I live, we have products like sitefinity, which is our complex content management system and digital experience platform, and sitefinity Insight, which is our customer data platform. We also have our developer tools, we have document collaboration tools and file transfer solutions. I just sputtered through all of that. I will. Can I say that one all again for you? And sorry, your question was something about progress. Is that great?
- [46:44]
Matt Bertram
Oh, that was great. So what's the best way to get in touch with you, to follow you, all that sort of of thing?
- [46:50]
Sarah Fats
Yep, best way to reach me is on LinkedIn and Sarah Fats on LinkedIn or X, although I don't use X as much as I used to and SFATS is my handle on, on LinkedIn. I do have a podcast as well, 10 minute martech for those who are interested and you can find that on our YouTube channel, the Sitefinity YouTube channel.
- [47:13]
Matt Bertram
Awesome. I want to just totally resonate with what Sarah's saying that your website is much more than a brochure today. And I think a lot of people in the B2B space are looking at that to like check the box. I think that 10 years ago, okay, like you have a website, you're legit, you know, now talk to our salespeople. But, but the customer experience, more and more people want to have that get to that sale online and that that's really what I'm seeing is the more you can drive it online, the more leverage you can get as a company to not have to do so much heavy lifting in person. Right. And so it's really a sales tool It's a supportive tool. I've seen it in the pharma space big time. They were already driving people to, you know, touch pads and where they were clicking and what was going on. And user engagement was big. And. And I'm seeing it kind of percolate to. To all the other industries. So if. If you haven't already, go check out progress.com. if you're thinking about building a new website, you really should. Every. Every. Every, like, three years, I would say max, five years. Like, you have to build a new website. I mean, we. We build a lot of, like, just WordPress sites or Shopify sites or stuff like that, but you can. When someone comes to us, I can almost date when their website was built. Right. And now there's other platforms that you can build sites on as well. And I think checking out progress and understanding, especially if you're an enterprise company and you have the ability to leverage all these analytics and do something with it, I would encourage y' all to check it out. And so hopefully this conversation was helpful. Hopefully. We de. Stressed you a little bit that we are in the hype cycle of AI, but if you're doing all the foundational things, you're doing it right. And, Sarah, I'll give a quick, actual, real testimonial. We landed a client, and this was, I don't know, a year ago. I wasn't looking at all the different LLMs and ranking in all the LLMs. Like, I was. We were dabbling in it. Like, we were definitely. It's a moving target. We were looking at it. And a client called or someone called and said, the only reason I'm talking to you right now, like, this is how they started the conversation. And that person actually listens to this podcast, so they'll hear this. But. But basically, the only reason I'm talking to you is because you ranked first in perplexity. And at the time, okay, and this is where I was a year ago. We've come a long way. My first question was, what is perplexity? And so we were just doing good SEO and we were optimizing for SEO and the schema showed up there, right? And then to your point of the customer journey, as the conversation was going on, he goes, wait. Like, I don't know if he said, I recognize your voice, but maybe he did. I don't know. But he was like, I listened to your podcast. So, yeah, so that point plus this point, it was like, this is gonna happen, right? And so. So, you know, just to. To leave everybody on a, on, on a positive note.
- [50:42]
Sarah Fats
Yeah.
- [50:43]
Matt Bertram
Whatever you're doing right now is good. And if you're focused on the strategy, it's great. But you can do more, and you can get, you can get more leverage with AI but you still have to have someone driving it that understands the strategy and what you're doing, or you're just going to be paddling really hard. Right?
- [51:02]
Sarah Fats
Right.
- [51:02]
Matt Bertram
So, everybody, hopefully you found this conversation helpful. If you're looking to grow your business online with the strongest, most powerful tool on the planet, the Internet, reach out to EWR Digital for more revenue in your business, and we can hook you up with the right people, like progress or what have you based on your needs. And thank you all for listening. Until the next time, my name is Matt Bertram. Bye bye for now.
- [51:41]
Sarah Fats
Sam.