← The Best SEO Podcast: Defining the Future of Search with LLM Visibility™
The Best SEO Podcast: Defining the Future of Search with LLM Visibility™
Why Traffic Is Down but Leads Are Up, and How to Read the Signals With Charlie Grinnell
00:50:24
Loading summary
Transcript65 lines
- [00:03]
A
I'll clip the beginning here. So 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. Howdy. Welcome to another episode of the Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing. I'm your host, Matt Bertram. As you know, I've been trying to get that changed our intro and the name of the podcast. I've been doing it for 12 years, roughly, like so it's, it's very ingrained in how we do it. But, you know, we are focused on LLM, visibility and the changing world and how AI is impacting search. And one of the biggest use cases that I've found for search is, well, data analysis and pattern recognition and really taking all the different data sets that we have, whether it be similar web or now there's like sparkturo and Google Analytics and pulling them all together and figuring out a lot more about that customer journey, that target Persona, and the things that get people to buy. I think data driven digital marketing or SEO is just so powerful and there's been a shift of people getting more comfortable with analytics. And I'm on a couple large teams for companies where I bring the data set and the traditional marketers all want to see the data and understand it. It's a great time to be alive. I wanted to bring on Charlie Grinnell from Right Metric. He's taken a bunch of different data and brought it all together and does data research and has got some really interesting insights and trends for us today. So, Charlie, welcome to the show.
- [01:50]
B
Hey, thank you very much for having me. It's great to be here.
- [01:52]
A
Yeah, I'm excited to just you get to see big swaths of data. I love when I get to talk to people that have access to QLIK metrics and the data stream and they get to do all kinds of fun stuff with the data. I think the name of the game is data is oil, Data is the new oil. And I feel like prior to LLMs, the excitement got slowed down a lot because you were talking about data hygiene so much. It was taking a long time to clean up the data. So a lot of the excitement from marketers maybe wasn't there when you were setting up data lakes and stuff like that. I think now it's just fast and furious and there's so many cool things happening from a consulting standpoint, from a data analytics standpoint. And I'd love to just let you set the table of where you see the market going and some of the interesting insights you're finding.
- [02:48]
B
Yeah. So I think what you just said there around. There's this excitement again around data, I think is absolutely true. And I think I'll use an analogy, right. For the last 10 or 15 years in marketing, we've been told to like, use our data. Right, Use your data. Use your data. Right. And people go, yeah, yeah, totally, that sounds good. And then they kind of like go away and be like, okay, but now what? Oh, wow, this is really complicated or time consuming or expensive, et cetera. And so when I think about, and I think where we're going is we've been kind of sold this dream of like going to the moon, so to speak, with data. But then that kind of gap that we've run into is like, okay, but like, do we have a launch platform? Do we have spacesuits, do we have like engines, do we have boosters? Like all of that sort of stuff. And I think now what's super exciting with what we're seeing on the AI side of things is a lot of that underlying infrastructure that was expensive, time consuming and not really sexy. The cost and resource needed to actually make a lot of that stuff happen is getting compressed, which is awesome. So, you know, what you and I, I think, have been talking about before we started recording was this idea of being able to count things now that we previously haven't been able to count because they've been cost prohibitive or time prohibitive. So I think that's really, really exciting. Like, yeah, of course AI can create video for us and do all these different things. But I think what's really interesting is like, there have been all these underlying things that we're about to learn about society as a whole. And then specifically in marketing that we're about to learn about our customers because we can now count and pull meaning from all of these different signals that previously have been around us and just kind of hiding in plain sight.
- [04:26]
A
Yeah, I mean, I think that that's the biggest thing and my biggest kind of like, I guess, pet peeve. I don't know if that's the right word, but essentially how many different platforms did I typically have to log into? Right. To. To try to get meaning. And then if you're running multiple campaigns, you know, you're buying like an ad roll or something like that to, to easily roll them all together because. And then run it into a dashboard and like, figure out like, okay, where's my attribution really? Which that's a still a huge issue. Right. Of like, like what converted what? And AdWords always got the last attribute. So people dump more money into AdWords. But it's like, man, the discovery probably happened on Facebook or social. And I feel like that's what's kind of happened in the data recently is it's just kind of left Google and Facebook and it's gone everywhere. And so now it's starting over to figure out what does that customer journey look like? Even the data set of like, okay, someone had to see your ad 11 times before they converted. I recently saw data on the B2B side that it's 30. Okay, so there's like there's 30 touch points that happen before somebody buys. It's not that simple. Of, I'm just going to run some AdWords and I'm going to get business. Right? And here's the crazy thing I saw. This is a little bit one off to what I'm talking about. But I've been seeing in my social media feeds, you know, people post like these affiliate numbers, right? And I'm not in the affiliate space, but they post these affiliate numbers of how much money they're making. I saw a video of a buddy that I know was showing how to write the prompts to create that where it's all fictitious. So all this data of like, so we're in a world today to kind of bring it back where you can't trust anything. You gotta verify it, right? Yeah. And so it's like, okay, what are the data sources? What are you using? Like, even for me, I, I would tend to lean towards search console data over GA4. Data one is, okay, I gotta get recertified in GA4. Okay, that was like one. They keep moving stuff around. They got some good stuff in there. But okay, but what I was finding is we were running like ad data to a couple clients that I was trying to get them to upgrade their servers. Okay. I was like, hey, your, your data, like your servers are slow, core web vitals, whatever. And I could show them the data of like how many people were getting driven to the website and then how many times the pixel fired and there was a huge delta. And I was like, people are coming to the website and they're bouncing before the pixel can even load and fire. Like understanding how all these things work and connect is, is, you know, 2/3 of the game. I almost feel like, because once you figure out where the data is, is and what you need to do. So you get, you could get, you could take the data, you could get the analysis and now the execution is the easiest part. And a lot of people spend so much money on the execution, and they spend almost no money on the strategy. So they're like, you know, they're little mouse trying to make. To try to climb out of. What is that analogy? They're trying to climb out of the bucket. They're trying to turn the milk into cheese. Right. And they're, like, spending so much money and effort. I'm finding that a lot on the AI visibility side. People don't know what to do, so they're doing like a bunch of every everything. And then I come in and I'm like, okay, there's a lot of noise here. Like, you're. You're just trying to survive. Like, let's slow down, figure out what the plan is, and then move in that direction. I don't know. And I just feel like what you do is the engine on that train. Right. Like, you got to have the data figured out. Yeah.
- [08:16]
B
Well, there's a few things you said there that I want to touch on. So the first one being the example that you just gave where you showed a client where the pixel wasn't firing and all of that. I think what's really interesting, and I'd be curious, your take on this is we've kind of had this pendulum, right. So as soon as kind of performance marketing started to come into style, so to say it was like, oh, we can track everything, Therefore x equals 10. And I think we as marketers, like, the pendulum swung over there to be like, what's our roas, what's our roi? We're only doing things if we can attribute them, right?
- [08:47]
A
Yep.
- [08:47]
B
And then we look at, like, okay, the Cambridge Analytica thing happened, you know, so there was like some weird feeling around that, you know, some of the social APIs kind of cut back on what they were showing, all for good reason. Then you have all the whole, like, GDPR data privacy compliance stuff.
- [09:04]
A
Yeah.
- [09:05]
B
And then.
- [09:05]
A
And then you and California. I want to call out California, because no one talks about California. And people just say, in the US you're able to operate no problem, and they don't mention California. So. So.
- [09:20]
B
So totally. So there's so. So what we've seen is kind of this, like, pendulum of, like, let's track everything to now. It's actually kind of swung back the other way because it's like, well, we actually can't see everything anymore. And even the stuff we can see, to your point, it's biased because Google's gonna say it came from Google Meta's gonna say it came from meta. You know, everyone's trying to get that piece of the attribution pie to be like, I was the one that actually did that. And so the kind of the narrator's voice is like, everybody's lying. You know, like, that's kind of the thing. And the answer is it's. It depends. And so then you get into your own data. Oh, well, people coming to our site. The way a visit or a session is calculated on every single website is different. Plus there's bot traffic, plus there's. Et cetera, et cetera. Right. So, like, to your point, it's complicated.
- [10:07]
A
Yeah.
- [10:08]
B
So.
- [10:08]
A
So just to add, like, bot traffic is something that a lot of clients don't rule out when they're setting up their analytics. Right. Or their own. Their own IP address. Right. So you got people at the. It really creates a lot of noise in the data. And I would even say. What was I going to say? I was going to say something that was pretty thoughtful, but I can't remember what it was, so keep going.
- [10:39]
B
Yeah, so what I would say is, from that data perspective, that has just been a really interesting thing to navigate within organizations. Right. Like how we as marketers approach data. What is our level of trust there? So that's kind of like bucket number one, bucket number two. I think that is really interesting is for the last up until kind of like, you know, the advent of all these AI tools in the last 24 months, call it, we as marketers have basically let the tools drive what we count. And I actually think that's wrong. I actually think what we need to do is we need to figure out what is the right thing to count and then have tooling go after that. And I think what's happened is with AI now, you can create tooling in a fairly lightweight way based on the value of the accountability of something. And that is really, really interesting.
- [11:32]
A
Yeah, I think you're dead on. And as a broader concept, that's what I've seen lack in most of the tools is there's things you can measure. So AI on the organic side of things has completely been flipped upside down. Right. Like they've flipped over the cart. There's no attribution. Like, you know, you have to rethink what you're doing. And people are like, oh, it's just good SEO, and that is a portion of it. And it's going to get you, let's say, 70% or whatever the way there. But there's still differences and there's still things that need to happen. But when you think about, okay, what do I need to do? It's not about traffic anymore. Okay? That's. That's the thing that's the biggest thing is, like, there's an inverse correlation now is like, traffic's going down, leads are going up, right? And so people are using this traffic measurement. And, like, I mean, there was some kind of update recently, and traffic just dropped again, right? And then, like, everybody freaks out. And it's like, okay, well, well, what is happening? How are things evolving? Where are things moving to? And we're not tracking the right things. Like, we're tracking what we know how to track. But even keyword ranking. Okay, because now you're talking about customization. Like, it's very hard to figure out attribution. But I do think it's easier to understand who your target audience is and how they search and go, what should we be doing to be in the way of this? And I think what I was gonna say earlier was how people are searching. What I'm finding is when you were saying, oh, it could be Facebook, it could be Google, it could be both, and it could be simultaneously, because maybe there's, like, something streaming, okay. And then they're on their phone. Like, I mean, so a lot of the. A lot of these, like, clear customer journey path is not what it looks like at all. I mean, they came out with a study a couple years. It was like 2003 or something like that, where it was. It looked like, like an atom or something like that. It was like, you. You go out, you would come back, you would. You know, it was very messy. And. And I. And I think as marketers, I guess, or storytelling, you want to explain it for the client really easily. And it's just like, here's the funnels and here's the steps, and we just gate them and move them along. And, you know, this is what it is. But. But all this getting flipped upside down is forcing us to rethink. And also how people are searching is. Is. Is evolving as well, right? Because I'm finding what one of the things you. We were talking about, you know, some of the competitors of the. The tool that you have one. I. I do use one of those tools. And essentially what I was seeing in the data is where were people, where was the referral traffic going from some of these sites? The referral traffic was going to chat gbt. The referral traffic was going to grow because they. They find you somehow, like, maybe it's a Facebook. Whatever they find you or Reddit or whatever. They go to the website, they check it out. What do they do now? Now they verify. So they're going to Google you. They're going to, you know, chat gbtu. They're going to figure out what is the AI saying. And we've landed some clients recently that are like, we don't like what the AI says about us. Can you help us fix that? And I was like, yeah, we can definitely do that. But, like, reputation management in that category was never request, because there was never AIs that were doing it. And then, like, people are starting to tell me too, hey, I usually went to Google, but now I'm starting to go to ChatGPT, and I'm like, oh, you're coming across the river, right? And I'm like, that number keeps going up. So it's, I think it's just a fun world to be in. I mean, what are some of the things that you're seeing in the data that were kind of like a standout to you or kind of shocking to you that you wouldn't expect?
- [15:35]
B
Yeah. So, I mean, that diversification that you're talking about. Yes, that's absolutely in the data across every industry, whether it's financial services, whether it's B2B, whether it's retail, like, you name it. I think what one of the big things that we're starting to see is these niche communities rise up and punch disproportionately above their weight. So I'll give an example. Let's say in the mountain biking space, there might be a big Reddit thread about mountain biking. Cool. Now, that means our advice to a customer that's a mountain biking brand isn't, hey, go get on Reddit. It's watch what's happening here, watch what's being talked about here. And then can you use this stuff in your content, in your activations, and how you put yourself out into the world. But I think what's really interesting is like, these smaller communities are having a disproportionate impact on the behaviors of the larger community with a delay. So, you know the way that when Reddit describes itself as like the front page of the Internet, the way we also describe it to customers is like, you know that thing you're seeing now on Instagram that happened three months ago on Reddit. And I think what we're saying. Yeah, 4chan, like, whatever.
- [16:47]
A
Yeah, same concept, like, for. For everyone that's listening, it's like how culture gets developed from Europe to New York to California to maybe the rest of the world. And then also what you're saying, like what you saw on Instagram, I've seen this on the international side more than anything else. Like, I love when clients are like, multinational and I'm like, oh, oh, we gotta run ads in South America. I'm like, all right. Like, I already know exactly what's going to work because it's what worked in the last two years here that's no longer working now is working there. It's just kind of like a waterfall effect of where it flows from and too. Yeah, totally.
- [17:27]
B
So I think that, that diversification is really actually driven by people's behavior. Right. And so I think that's the thing is, like, what we're seeing is that diversification of behavior. Yes. People are still going to the big platforms. Absolutely. But when we look at where else are they spending time, it's much more broad and diverse and a lot of organizations aren't necessarily set up to, to monitor or even understand that. Right. Like, it's one thing. And again, when I say monitor and understand that, notice that I didn't say show up there and be active. Like, that's the other thing is like, you know, when, when someone hears me say Reddit, you know, I'm not saying go start, spin up a Reddit, like, presence as a brand. I'm just saying understand the people's attention that you're trying to earn. That is where they're spending time. So you, as a brand, the, the, the activity on Reddit might be an intelligence gathering thing that you build into your workflow. Not necessarily. We're going to show up there. And so I think that's like where the nuance is.
- [18:22]
A
That's a big shift because I have had clients go, oh, the LLMs, we need to be on core and Reddit. And they go, jump in out there. They don't understand the culture. Like, right. They've been, they get banned, you know, or whatever. And it's clear self promotion and that's not what these communities want. But you should go and what is it called? Lurk. Like go lurk around and, and understand what's going on. And from an intelligence gathering, you now know what's going to hit your broader market sooner. It's kind of the, you know, the wellspring of whatever you're going to do. I think that that's a great, great takeaway and a great kind of mind shift for people. What else?
- [19:09]
B
When we think about marketing, right, there's the activation output, but then there's also Operationally, what are we setting up for? And so I think that's why I always call that thing out, because it's like, oh, there's this big diversification of channels. And most people go, oh, yeah, we need to go be on that channel. And it's like, no, no, no, you just need to be aware of that channel and you need to set up the infrastructure to understand what's happening there so that you can be better prepared to plan whatever's next. So I think, yeah, that's how I would summarize that the next one. This is, I don't know if this is, I'm curious, your take on this. I think most brands have organic social completely backwards. And what I mean by that is the rise of performance marketing and, you know, paid Facebook, Google, et cetera, has changed the hierarchy internally, where that's where a lot of the resource and focus and attention and like political capital behind the scenes within marketing organizations have gone, right? So when I sat on the social team at Red Bull, at Aritzia and when I worked in marketing, like, all of a sudden we're pouring tons and tons of money into ads internally. I might say, hey, this is an idea, but the person running, you know, 10 million bucks in ads, their opinion's going to trump me because, like, oh, well, that's where the majority of our investment is going. And so we've seen this play out with, hey, we've made these campaigns, we, we've run these ads, and like, off we go. And then usually what happens is like that creative just gets shoveled over to the social team and it's like, hey, yeah, post this. That is completely backwards for sure.
- [20:37]
A
I mean, Gary, yeah, go ahead, go ahead.
- [20:40]
B
Probably the same thing that Gary talks about. Organic social needs to be your petri dish, where what you actually need to do is publish as much content as possible on organic social, establish what a baseline performance is. And anything that pops from that, that's what you double down on and throw ad dollars on and get after 100%.
- [20:58]
A
I think what you're saying has been like the conversation for SEOs for so long. Right? Like, it fits into social as well is, is just like you got the attribution on the ads, so, you know, you see that clear line, so you throw more money at ads. And so it's been disproportional how much money people spend on ads. And you know, and we're, we're. I'm seeing it in all kinds of models on the pay per click just get bit up to where the model breaks. And it's like, this doesn't even work anymore from a customer acquisition standpoint. Now we have to think about new channels and new strategies and workflows and, you know, all these sort of things. And, and so, yeah, I mean, that's, that, that's what I keep hearing Gary say. And I, I, we were doing that for a long time before he even started saying that. Because, like, you could put it out there on Twitter, you could put it out there on Instagram. And like, here's the thing, like, I posted a post on LinkedIn recently and I knew based on how it responded and I posted on Facebook as well. I knew based on how it wouldn't give me access to the analytics. And they're like, we're still trying to figure it out. I was like, oh yeah, this one's going viral, right? Like, and so, so, so it's, you know, it's like, boom. And it's like 30,000 views, like in the first, like three days. And so I think that these kind of wins as well. Showing those to management, saying, hey, how much would it cost to get this kind of impression, you know, reach. And also these are the right type of customers and we're getting the right kind of engagement. And it's like, let's spend our time on what is the narrative that we want to communicate and get involved in that. And um, you're, you're actually not going to have to spend as much on ads on the back end to convert. I mean, there's so much data out there that said if people know your brand, they like your brand, they're going to buy from you and you just got to use the ads to remind them. But if you're trying to use the ads to like, full life cycle, get them from awareness to purchasing, it's very expensive. And not to say that brands can't do it, but, you know, I just, I think that all this turnover with, with AI is forcing people to rethink and start over from the ground up. And I just think it's such a good thing now I'm finding that a lot of brands aren't making that change fast enough and are just getting smashed. Are getting smashed. Like, and, and you know, now everybody's like, oh, we're digitally transformed. We understand that we need to be posted on social. And then it's like, well, now you got to figure out AI, so good luck, you know, and yeah, and so I, I, I don, I'm a constant learner and I love talking to People and hearing what they're doing. And I mean, it's, you know, you have to, if you're running a business, understand the impact and how technology and social media and all this stuff fits into it, or you're really running blind. I mean, the world has changed so much. I would tell you, I won't speak the name, but I sat down with the head of AI and, and a director at like a large, like Fortune 500 yesterday and we were talking about prospecting. Okay. We were talking about sales. We were talking about prospecting. They're not allowed to use AI, okay. They're, they're not allowed to use Legion. They're not allowed to. They're not able to have any homegrown assets. They're not able to build landing pages. And I said, like, what are y' all doing? And they're like, well, we're calling. And I go, can you use LinkedIn Navigator? Nope. I was like, so what are you doing? Well, the old school way, we're calling people we know, we're setting up meetings, we're going to meet them and, you know, we're, you know, closing deals and, and they only eat what they kill. And I'm like, y' all are scaring me. Like, I was like, I was like, I couldn't, I couldn't handle that environment anymore. To know that there's people competing with you that have AI and everything else leveraged up to, to challenge you. And these big brands that are sitting on their logos and, and, and the brand that they've developed for whatever years, like what there, I forget the name of the tool. It was like a vibe coding tool. WIX just bought them. I think they sold for 40 million. It was a one person, Israel, Israeli guy that created the same thing in Wix bond. $40 million. Just one person.
- [25:33]
B
What's Lovable? Lovables, I think they're under 50 people and they're a hundred million ARR. And they've done it in the fastest time in the history of business. Under 50 people, 100 million ARR. So you want to talk about evaluation on top of that?
- [25:46]
A
Like, yeah, well, think about the businesses that are trying to go head to head with these guys. Like, like there's, I mean, it sounds.
- [25:53]
B
Like the company that you were talking to yesterday, based on that behavior based.
- [25:58]
A
Base 22, the Wix 22. Yeah. They go right head to head with Lovable.
- [26:04]
B
But I think about the Fortune 500 that you just mentioned that you will, you don't have to. Oh yeah, but I'm like that to me sounds like, sounds like Blockbuster right before it went away. Like that's crazy because there is that story about Blockbuster where it was like, people love coming into our stores. They love the serendipity of running into their neighbor in the aisle while they're browsing for a movie. And then Netflix was like, you know what people actually like being naked in their bed, watching their show, binging it. Like that's actually what people want, right? So it's so interesting to see like that behavior is still being incentivized at these huge organizations to your point. And then we're having the rise of these little giants. And I think that's actually going to be the future. We are going to see this little giant thing where we are going to have, you know, a ten person billion dollar company. I think we're going to get to the point where it's a one person billion dollar company or like a three person billion dollar company with all this technology.
- [26:56]
A
Oh, I, I think that that's coming and a lot of people have kind of predicted that. I mean I think that like right, Metric gives you those superpowers, right? Like it gives you that data set to figure out. Like I'm not just gonna what, whatever that ad. The, the saying is like I, you know, I, I spend 100 of my budget and I, you know, I know where 50. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Or something. Which 50 worked or whatever it is. But I mean like if you know, laser focused, you know where your customers at, what they like, how to communicate with them and how to position yourself as a brand and then get in front of them. Like these are superpowers. These are legit superpowers. Like people I even like, I'm talking about AI. I'm like, you have like a PhD in every single like whatever sitting next to you as your copilot, right? As Microsoft did a good job of like at everything you do. Like that changes the game. Like it changes the clarity, right? And so now, so now it's like, okay, well I'm working in like N8N right now. And I'm like, okay, what tools, what access to data, what APIs can I plug in this thing to get it even more data to just absolutely crush it, right? And I mean we're, we're, we're living in a, in interesting time. So tell me a little bit more about your tool. So, so the audience can understand kind of what the problem was that you saw with what was out there and then what was, what was the spot that you were trying to fix.
- [28:30]
B
Yeah, so before I co founded this company eight years ago, I worked on the brand side. So I worked in house at Aritzia, which is a women's fashion company, before that, which is hilarious for those of you watching because I'm a bald bearded guy. Before that I worked in marketing at Red Bull on the global social team. And then before that I was actually in video production at Arteryx on the brand team. And so I worked in house of these big brands. And I was the turning point for Right Metric was when I was working at Aritzia, actually. So we had these monthly meetings with the CEO and where we were come in and talk about what happened last month, what was going well. And so we had just had a kick ass month on the social side. And so I come into this meeting and you know, thinking I'm hot shit. And you know, all of our numbers are up and to the right. And I'm like, this is, today's gonna be a great day. And I get in there, we start explaining, you know, kind of our results and like what we've done and whatever. And CEO Brian Hill says to me, okay, how much did the category grow though? You're saying you grew this like 20%. How much did the category grow? And I was like, well, I don't know, I don't know, I don't have that data. And he's like, well, if the category grew 5%, I should give you a raise, but if the category grew 80%, I should fire you right now. And I was like, that's not how I thought this was going to go. But you know what? He was right. And so here I was and my dashboards were telling me a story because this is what we set up to count. But there was no external reference point of if we were winning or not, because at the end of the day, we are trying to build our own brand, but we are also competing against Zara, Club, Monaco, J. Crew, Lululemon, et cetera. And so like we needed to have that point of view to get an understanding is are we actually doing good or not? And are we, can we actually not just mark our own homework?
- [30:18]
A
Benchmark?
- [30:19]
B
That's kind of the genesis.
- [30:20]
A
Yeah, no, I, I, I think that most people are not benchmarking, like they're not keeping track of the market and they're not looking at seasonal stuff. Right. Like I have one client that, you know, I'm providing the LLM visibility for them. Okay. So I'm not running the paid ads, but they're Doing weekly standups, and they're doing sprints, and it's awesome. Okay. They're doing great. They're. They're very productive. They're creating a lot of stuff. The reporting on the paid ad side is week over week. And I'm like. I was like, this data is not helpful at all. Like, it went up by this much this week. It went. I dissed me again. I'm like, this doesn't matter. Like, this doesn't matter at all.
- [31:04]
B
Like, that's nice that you just. You're, like, patting yourself on the back. Look at how great we are. Right.
- [31:08]
A
Like, I'm like, I don't know what this means in reference to everything else. Right.
- [31:13]
B
So totally. But I think that goes back to the point that I made earlier where it's like, we just count things because we've always counted them that way because of how easy they were to count. Right? So it actually goes to like, is this thing actually relevant for us to count? And if not, let's jettison it and let's figure out what is the right. No pun intended, right metric to count. And then, cool, we can use AI to build tooling to start to count that thing. That's great. But I think about this, you know, this benchmarking conversation. I actually wonder. I'd be curious. Your take. I feel like a lot of marketers don't do it. One, because they're stretched thin. We get it. Like, marketers are stretched thin. Two, I actually think there's a huge ego part there where they don't want a benchmark. I've dealt with some people who the last thing they wanted to do was benchmark, and ultimately their business suffers because of it. And I think that's a whole other topic of conversation, is like, oh, I don't know. I'm over here kind of doing this. And maybe if we benchmark, that would actually go against the narrative that I've been pedaling for five years in this organization. Right. And so I think about this, like, idea meritocracy, like the Ray Dalio type thing. How are we actually thinking about that in marketing? Because now it's just too competitive. We have to get to that point because it is too competitive. It is too hard. Budgets are going under the microscope. And so, I don't know, that's maybe a spiky point of view that some people might not like, but, you know.
- [32:31]
A
Well, I'll have to have you back on Charlie. And we can. We can go down that rabbit hole, because I feel like if we Open that up. Like, that's going to be a soapbox and we're going to go like, way off.
- [32:42]
B
Different talk show.
- [32:43]
A
Exactly. I can, I can tell you just a quick response to that is I think that resources are stretched really thin. Okay. I think that people under quote stuff all the time. The expectation of, or. Or the alignment of, of what it takes to get to xyz and, and what I'm even seeing compression happening with from clients thinking, okay, you're leveraging AI So I want it just as good or better for cheaper and faster. Okay? And it's like, okay, well, if we benchmarked where, where the resources were prior to this, like, it was just getting it back into balance. And now you're talking about more compression. And I'm even seeing the whole model for agencies kind of shift. And so again, we're opening up kind of a whole ball of wax or, I don't know, a can of worms. A can of worms, Not a ball of wax. Can of worms. We got all. But I, I think that we could, we could save that for later to talk about how we're dealing with that. A lot of coaching that I do, it's, it's really interesting. So I'm not like, officially coaching. I keep saying I will, and I, and I do have a certification coming out that I, I am working on. But all the people that have like, like, forced in and said, hey, we want to hire you, and they want me to coach them. I'm excited because I'm like, oh, I'm going to help you, like, do better in your SEO or whatever. It always goes back to, like, operationally, how are you running the business? Here are all the, Here are the things that I'm dealing with. And so, like, again, the more you can see on how other people are operating to bring it back to benchmarking, to know, well, this is what's working and these guys are making money and how you're doing it might not be the right way. That helps you, gives you insight into what's going on. And, and also, I think that, you know, don't follow the lemmings off the cliff, right? So, like, if someone's running an ad and you look at it and you're like, okay, they've been running this ad for a long time and this ad must be working, so we're gonna, like, copy it, like, use that as a starting point. But like, sometimes, like, I mean, I've seen ad campaigns where, like, they're advertising all across the country and it's Just running wild. Like some people don't even know that they don't even have access to ad spend that's on some credit card that's like running wild. Like what we started, what we started doing is setting up virtual cards for every client. Okay. And then like putting caps on it. So, so if we're running ads for them, like, I know where the ad spend is, we're shutting down. That's an operational thing. But man, people are just moving so fast to get to the next thing. They don't have time to really look at it and to really do the research. And so tools that help you do that or tools really, I think the biggest need in the space, in my opinion, is taking all these different inputs and bringing them together, like bringing that data together where you can actually analyze and do something with it. Like, you know, and there's inherent concerns with NPC servers, like if you don't know what black box you're getting attached to, what people are doing with your data. And you know, I would just tell you, like, Chad, gbt, like, I mean, I like if you will listen to podcasts, like they're doing something with your data. Okay. And then Facebook, what did they announce on the 16th? So this is probably coming out after the 16th. Did you know that Facebook and I think LinkedIn already did this? They are now saying, we're going to do AI everything with your data. All, all the stuff that's on any of our platforms, we're loading it to the AI. We're going to build like a model about you and around you. Unless you uncheck that box. Like, yes, that's bad. And like, there's a certain degree of like, it's inevitable. If you're using these platforms, you are the product. But I don't think they've ever been able to leverage the data like they were collecting all the data, knowing this day would come. That's what I think. Right. They've been, they've been collecting all this data, but now the insights that you can get are, are just incredible. But you got to have all that data together and you have to have it cleaned up in a way that like the LLMs can, can understand and analyze it. And so tools like yours help bring all that data into one house and then you can you put a gentic wrapper inside your tool. And you know, there's just going to be a lot of things that are coming that I don't think people are prepared for, but are going to be really, really powerful and are going to create that disproportionate leverage to the people that invest in this. And I think that digital marketers, again, I'm on a soapbox a little bit, are well positioned because things continue to change for them. So they're normal with this kind of like modus operandi. And so I think it's a huge advantage for anybody that's listening that's a marketing agency to go, okay, it's changing again, like, don't get burnt out by that, get excited about that. Because if you start competing in adjacent businesses to this, you're going to be unmatched because not everybody wants to keep reinventing the wheel. And once they figured out how to do something, what I've seen in a lot of these legacy businesses or you know, Fortune 500 companies, like not all of them, but a lot of them have like a culture that's stuck in its ways and they're, they just think that they can operate the same way that they've always been operating and they can just outspend and they can out brand which like TV ads are like non existent, like even terrestrial radio. I had a client that was spending a million dollars a month on terrestrial radio and like, what was it, $20,000 or something or $30,000 on paid ads and then even less on that on SEO. And I was like, I understand that this is what you've always done, but I'm telling you this is not the right way to go. And you know, they wouldn't listen. And then I got the filings that they're, they, you know, they're getting dissolved, you know, or. Yeah, yeah, shocker, exactly. But anyways, so I would love, we're kind of getting close to time, but I would love for you to like rapid fire maybe share some interesting insights or things that you found in the data that people might not know. We could cliche say it's like the unknown secrets of Internet marketing or what are some Internet marketing secrets that you can share of things that people might not know. But you know, because you see the data, I would love to hear kind of rapid fire some of those things. And then if you could share how people can find out more about what you're talking about and check out the product because I know it's dot co, not dot com, which, which is is. And dot co is what, what country is it? You know what, what country is it actually?
- [39:40]
B
I actually don't know.
- [39:41]
A
Oh, it's actually a country. It's actually a country link.
- [39:44]
B
Yeah, I'm like, what? Well yeah. What is, I'm like, is it, isn't it Colorado?
- [39:49]
A
Yeah, there you go. Exactly. We're so like us centric here. Like we have no concept.
- [39:55]
B
Totally.
- [39:56]
A
Yeah.
- [39:56]
B
I'm like, I don't know what.co is.
- [39:57]
A
I think so.
- [39:58]
B
So one thing I would say just more broadly around people and behaviors. We work with a lot of big brands and a lot of people on the brand side tend to think about Personas. And when they think about Personas, they think about them demographically and we think that's a massive mistake. You need to think about them behaviorally. And I'll give an example. This is a quick story about my mom and I. So my mom. Love you, Mom. She's 67, just said her name out loud or her age out loud. She'd be pissed if she was sitting here. Okay, so I'm over at my mom's house and we're talking in her kitchen and on her kitchen counter she has an iPad. Okay. So we're talking and she goes, she's forgetting something. She's like, ah, that's going to bug me if I don't look this up. I'm going to Google that. So she walks over to the iPad and me being the like digital behavior nerd, I'm kind of kicking back like this, being like, okay, she walks over, she opens the YouTube app and I'm going like, I'm like, there's no way my 67 year old mother who's an accountant knows that Google owns YouTube. There's no way she knows that. And she goes, just let me Google that. So she types in her query, hits search, and right before she's about to touch a video, I go, mom, stop, stop. What are you doing? And she goes, what? I'm Googling. And I'm like, you're on YouTube. And she goes, oh, Charlie, I don't want to read, I want to watch. Yeah. And that behavior, what I just described would typically be associated with ADHD 20 year olds. My mom is 67, she's scrolling like a 21 year old. And that actually, that, that story is so important because what we're actually seeing in all the data is these, these behaviors don't just attach to demographics, they attach to much broader groups of people.
- [41:48]
A
So Charlie, I got interesting story for you like that. I'll be brief. My business partner's wife wanted to become a influencer online and wanted some attention online, I guess. And you know, to grow her business, of course she has a spa. You know, she had to grow. She wanted to grow her business. So we started using, like, data analytics and we started doing research. And what I came up with was like, this was six years ago. Okay, like five, six years ago. And I said, we need to get on TikTok. And that was when everybody was like, TikTok's for, you know, all these, you know, tweens and all this kind of stuff. I said, I said the search. And. And so basically I also had to identify like, what do we want to talk about? Menopause. So menopause on TikTok years ago, over a million followers now, like 300,000 on Facebook. Like, we basically, like, we said, okay, like, here's demand that's not being serviced here. There's like low quality. There's not a lot of, a lot of videos to serve. Let's start creating videos for this. We followed the data and then from there we got all this visibility and then we started to fan out on what we were doing. And oh, by the way, co is Columbia, so Columbia. Okay.
- [43:09]
B
Yeah, there we go.
- [43:10]
A
Yeah. And people use it as, I guess corporation or company. But I, I looked it up. CO is originally, was originally representing for Columbia, but has been relaunched as a global domain for companies, startups, individuals, blah, blah, blah, blah. Like how you're using it.
- [43:25]
B
There we go.
- [43:25]
A
Right, right. But random, random facts, very random.
- [43:28]
B
That story, though, is crazy. Like what you just said about like the finding, finding the attention and then supplying that demand with something that's valuable. Like, yes, you know, but I wouldn't.
- [43:42]
A
No one would have guessed that. No one would have guessed, like, this is how we're going to build. Like, unless you have the data. Like, the data helped inform the decision. I was actually in a client's office yesterday and they have a couple different service areas they wanted to go after. And basically we were going through search data, cost per click, how difficult it is to rank. We were thinking about some demographics. I was asking some questions because I didn't know enough of what it was. We were using another tool as well. And basically I was like, okay, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. This is a decent amount of volume. The cost per click is similar to what you want to go after, but it better aligns with your brand. So, you know, this is probably what we should go after. And it's actually what they originally wanted to go after. But we went through that whole life cycle process to determine this is the right fit, this is the right brand, and this is what we need to do. So it gave it a lot more confidence to like, okay, let's kick it into full gear. But you know, there was a lot of like, I think that a lot of people get paralyzed today because there's too many options or they want optionality. I feel like everybody wants optionality and so they don't lean into what they need. And the data plus the analysis gets you to that point to, to know that, okay, I'm on the right track, I can, I can focus on that. I can lean into it without too much debate. I don't know totally well.
- [45:12]
B
And I think to the point that I made earlier, I think we actually need to loosen our grip a little bit. And what I mean by that is this whole attribution, performance, Marketing x equals 10 what's my ROAS? We need to loosen that grip and just directionally. So to your point about like TikTok or menopause or whatever it is, finding the thing, the right thing to talk about doesn't have to be, oh, I need 17 different data points to back this up. It's like, hey, this one quantifies attention, maybe video views, it might be engagements, it might be whatever. The thing is, all of those three things, if we zoom out a little bit, those three things are saying that like, hey, there's some attention here. Cool, let's go after that. Yeah, right. Like, I think that's also the thing is like we, as to your point about like analysis, paralysis is like we get out and we're like, oh, it has to be exact. And I actually don't think it has to be exact. It just has to be directionally correct. Because even if it is exact, that that's what you should do. There's still going to be different nuances and variables in the creative, in the targeting, in the spend, in all of those different things that it's never going to be perfect. And so I actually think we need to loosen our grip a little bit and still use this stuff as signal for what it is and use it to guide us, but also not be so like, oh, and now I'm not saying don't be rigorous with it. There's a balance, right? And so I think it's that fine balance of loosening up the grip, listening to the right signals and then being a marketer and being creative to then try and problem solve to create something that drives the outcome that we want.
- [46:45]
A
Charlie, great point. I think it's a great point to end on. I think I've really enjoyed our discussion and I think you're a great educator. I would love appreciate you saying that. Yeah, I would love to hear kind of maybe any speaking talks you have coming up where you're on social. How do people find out more, follow you? Because I think you have some really great insights to share.
- [47:08]
B
Well, I appreciate you having me on.
- [47:09]
A
Yeah.
- [47:09]
B
The best place to follow me is on LinkedIn. I'm very active there. I publish it. I think I publish right now a new video every single day. So if you want to continue to hear my awful voice, you can go there. And I don't know if this is a good thing or a bad thing, but I put my email on LinkedIn, so if people have questions, they can shoot me an email there. That's a. That's a very. I don't know if I. It was a good idea at the time.
- [47:30]
A
I wish. I'm setting up a workflow to help me sort emails because I would love to have the time. Time to respond to everyone. I just need help doing it because I think this time right now is so difficult and I just get flooded with all kinds of stuff and sometimes I miss it with all the kind of noise that's out there. And so hats off to you for being able to do that. If they want to check out your platform rightmetric code, tell us a little bit about the platform. Give me the elevator pitch real quick before we go. Yeah.
- [48:08]
B
So basically what we've done is focus on three types of research, audience research, competitive benchmarking, and content insight. And so what we've done is we basically bought access to over 30 different data tools. We pull all that stuff into one place, and then we have a team of analysts and strategists that actually work with you to scope out what your research questions are and turn things around quite quickly. Because we've also built our own proposals, proprietary tooling behind the scenes to be able to enrich some of that data that we already have access to. And it's funny, some of the things that you said, like having, what is it? A problem half well stated is a problem half solved. We spend a lot of our time working with customers actually getting clear on what are the underlying business questions, because that's going to actually dictate the types of research that you need. And oftentimes when people come at us, they have, oh, I need to look at this. And we're like, yeah, we can totally answer that for you. But what is this actually laddering up to? And then they go, oh, my gosh, I actually need this and this and this and this and this. And that's not. Because we want to sell them more. It's just more. So, like, answer the question. Like actually just get the question answered so that you can go on with your day and move forward as a business. So, yeah, we've been doing it for, gosh, eight years now. We primarily work in the consumer space. We are doing more B2B now because there are some better data sets coming online for that sort of thing. But our main focus is like, how can we harness all of these external data sources? You know, most brands have their internal house in order. They can know what's going on in their ecosystem, but we're able to give them that holistic picture into what's happening outside of their ecosystem in an aggregated way.
- [49:41]
A
Awesome. Well, Charlie, thanks so much for coming on. It was a pleasure having you everyone. If you want to grow your business with the largest, most powerful planet tool on the planet, the Internet. But now I feel like LLMs maybe like are outshining it to a certain degree. Right. Like, I think there's a AI revolution coming. Reach out to EWR for more revenue in your business. Check out Right Metric for more insights into your business. Until the next time, my name is Matt Bertram. Bye bye for now. Sam.