Semrush Conference: Digital Marketing Trends for 2025

Summary

The Digital Marketing Podcast: Semrush Conference Insights for 2025

Hosted by Daniel Rolls and Louise Crossley

Release Date: December 5, 2024

In this episode of The Digital Marketing Podcast, hosts Daniel Rolls and Louise Crossley delve into the key takeaways from the Semrush Conference held in Amsterdam, exploring the latest digital marketing trends poised to shape 2025. Despite the absence of co-host Kiaran Rogers, Daniel and Louise provide a comprehensive and engaging analysis of the conference's highlights, offering listeners actionable insights and forward-thinking strategies.

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1. Overview of the Semrush Conference

Louise Crossley kicks off the discussion by painting a vivid picture of the Semrush Conference, describing it as Semrush's inaugural in-person event. The venue in Amsterdam was lauded for its "completely Instagrammable" setup, featuring impressive coffee stations, a Matcha station, and an "expert area" replete with various tools. The aesthetic appeal was further enhanced by "old-fashioned TVs stacked on top of each other flashing different marketing memes," creating a visually stimulating environment ideal for marketers (02:33).

Daniel draws parallels to other major conferences like Inbound, emphasizing the importance of creating shareable and visually appealing experiences to maximize attendee engagement and social media presence (02:56).

2. AI Trends in Marketing

One of the standout presentations was by Andrew Warden, the CMO of Semrush, who provided insights into the impact of Artificial Intelligence (AI) on marketing efficiency. Warden highlighted a compelling statistic: "91% of companies reported an increase in marketing efficiency having used AI" (03:37). He addressed two primary anxieties surrounding AI:

1. Job Displacement: Contrary to fears, AI is projected to create 97 million new jobs while displacing 85 million, resulting in a net gain of 12 million jobs.

   “AI is expected to create 97 million new jobs, displacing 85 million,” Warden stated (03:37).

2. Content Visibility: With the surge in AI-generated content, ensuring that one's content stands out amidst the noise is crucial. Warden introduced the "SSS" framework—Simplify, Specify, and Solve customer problems—coupled with a focus on authenticity to capture audience attention efficiently (04:48).

Daniel corroborates these insights, referencing research from Imperial College that suggests AI is augmenting rather than replacing roles in marketing. He notes, “there's a lot of stuff that we could be more efficient at now,” but warns of the ensuing challenge to maintain quality amidst increased content volume (04:05).

3. The Evolving Role of Search Engines and Google's Future

Michael King, founder of iPool Rank, presented on the "messy middle of search," likening Google's current state to the transitional era of mini discs in audio technology. He emphasized that while Google possesses advanced capabilities like personalized experiences and semantic search, users often underutilize these features.

King also discussed OpenAI's dual threat to Google:

1. Polluting the Index: The influx of AI-generated content makes it challenging for Google to effectively index and rank content.

   “OpenAI is attacking Google by polluting the index,” King explained (09:05).

2. Disrupting Information Modalities: Tools like ChatGPT are changing how users seek and consume information, potentially reducing reliance on traditional search engines.

Despite these challenges, King asserted that Google remains dominant, handling vastly more traffic than AI-driven search engines like ChatGPT (09:28). He outlined four advantages Google holds over competitors:

• Multiple Products with Billion Users: Integrated platforms like Chrome and Gmail.
• Invention of Core Technologies: Advanced in-house tech development.
• Extensive Behavioral Data: Superior user data collection.
• Proprietary TPUs: Independent processing capabilities, avoiding reliance on third-party providers like Nvidia.

Daniel echoed these points, adding that regulatory pressures, such as potential EU fines for monopoly practices, could impact Google's data dominance and operational strategies (10:05).

4. Content Strategy Recommendations

King provided six actionable strategies to navigate the evolving search landscape:

a. Publish Short-Form Content with Structured Data

To counteract reduced visibility in organic search results, King advised integrating short-form content into websites and marking it up with structured data. This approach increases the likelihood of content appearing in prominent SERP features.

“Start publishing short-form content on your website and make sure that it's marked up with structured data,” King recommended (13:01).

b. Monitor SERP Features for Target Keywords

Using Semrush, marketers should track SERP features associated with their target keywords to adjust strategies accordingly. This ensures content remains visible despite changes in how search engines display results.

c. Monitor Indexing Through Google Search Console

With Google's "helpful content update," indexing has become more selective. Marketers should regularly check their indexing status via Google Search Console to identify and rectify issues.

“Monitor your indexing in Google Search Console to see what needs work,” King advised (14:55).

d. Optimize Crawl Rates

Google's intelligent scheduling focuses on crawling URLs deemed valuable. Enhancing website speed can positively influence crawl rates, as faster websites are crawled more frequently.

“The faster you make your website, the more Google will crawl it,” Louise noted (16:34).

e. Focus on Content Quality Over Quantity

Emphasizing high-quality, original content that provides unique value is paramount. This includes personal insights, relevant stories, and thought leadership that differentiate from competitors.

“Stop focusing on content volume and focus on quality and information gain,” King emphasized (16:59).

f. Track Brand Visibility

Recognizing search as a branding channel, it's essential to monitor brand visibility in SERP features and AI overviews. Even non-clickable brand mentions can significantly impact brand awareness.

“Your social site can be different from your product. Brands have personalities,” Louise explained (18:02).

5. Social Media Strategy and Disruption: Insights from Duolingo

Zaria, the Global Social Media Manager at Duolingo, concluded the conference with a compelling discussion on disruption in social media strategy. She clarified that disruption doesn't necessitate revolutionary changes but rather requires time and critical thinking.

“Disruption doesn't actually need to be revolutionary, but it requires time and critical thinking,” Zaria stated (21:07).

Key takeaways from her session include:

• Creative Freedom Over Budget: Allowing social teams creative freedom can yield more engaging and authentic content than merely increasing the budget.

• Calculated Risks: Successful disruption involves taking calculated risks that align with clear positive outcomes, ensuring that innovations resonate with the target audience.

• Humanizing the Brand: Showcasing behind-the-scenes content, such as Duolingo's team safety protocols, can enhance engagement by offering a transparent and authentic view of the brand.

“If you can't give your social team's budget, give them creative freedom,” Zaria advised (21:07).

6. Diversity and Inclusion in Marketing

A diversity panel featuring Natalie Duval of March Muses and Bea from Grey London highlighted the importance of genuinely serving diverse communities rather than superficially ticking diversity boxes.

“If you're going to make money from a community, you need to make sure you're actually serving them,” Bea emphasized (28:05).

Examples included practical accessibility improvements, such as correctly implementing braille on signs, rather than perfunctory gestures that fail to meet the community's needs. The discussion underscored the EU Disability Act 2025, mandating that accessibility be integral to all digital experiences.

7. Brand Visibility as a Marketing Channel

Daniel and Louise explored the concept of brand visibility beyond traditional engagement metrics. Leveraging tools like Moz.com's new brand visibility metrics and HubSpot's AI brand visibility tool can help marketers quantify their brand's presence in search and AI summaries.

“If you appear in a snippet, even if people don't click through, you're still providing brand awareness,” Louise noted (18:02).

This shift necessitates a broader perspective on brand metrics, moving beyond clicks and engagements to include impressions and visibility in various search features.

8. Memorable Quotes and Takeaways

Throughout the conference, several quotes resonated with the hosts:

• Tom Fishburne (Marketoonist): “People don't want quarter inch drill, they want a quarter inch hole,” emphasizing the importance of focusing on customer outcomes rather than just product features (29:12).

• John Evans (Uncensored CMO): “Interesting content is content that denies an existing assumption because people don't like to be proven wrong,” highlighting the impact of challenging audience expectations (26:01).

These insights reinforce the necessity of creating meaningful and disruptive content that not only grabs attention but also drives brand differentiation.

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Conclusion

Daniel and Louise wrap up the episode by reflecting on the valuable strategies and insights garnered from the Semrush Conference. They emphasize the importance of adapting to AI advancements, evolving search dynamics, quality-driven content creation, and authentic social media strategies. Additionally, the discussion on diversity and brand visibility underscores the multifaceted approach required for effective digital marketing in 2025.

Listeners are encouraged to implement these actionable strategies to stay ahead in the competitive digital landscape, leveraging tools like Semrush and embracing innovative content and social media practices.

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Note: For further details and resources mentioned in this episode, please refer to the show notes on TargetInternet.com.

Transcript

[Daniel Rolls]

Welcome back to the digital marketing Podcast brought to you by targetinternet.com My name is Daniel Rolls. I'm Louise Crossley and we are going to be talking about the Semrush conference, a roundup of insights and what that means for 2025. Okay. You'll notice that we're not joined by Kieran today because Kieran is in a cool dark room recovering from Black Friday special offers and Cyber Monday and all the e commerce work that he's doing. So we've let him in a couple of days off.

[Louise Crossley]

Oh, bless me.

[Daniel Rolls]

And yeah, we're going to go through and talk about a bit of an experience that Louise has had recently, a conference she attended. Load of insights from that, what that means for 2025 ahead as well. But I am very excited to announce we've been speaking about this for about two months now. We are launching up our first audio course certification for Target Internet members. So you can get on there for a free trial for a month if you wanted to as well. But basically people love the podcast and we decided, well, how about we teach an entire subject with a certification that is CPD accredited And the first one we've done is search engine optimization. So you've got hours of audio in there built as a structured certification and if you remember a Target Internet you will get access to that that will be going live as we record this. It is Thursday 5th December, so this means this will probably be going live later today or tomorrow, Monday at the very latest that that course is going to be live. So go through and take a look at that and we're going to be adding more to that as well. So I'm quite excited about your reaction to that. Anyway, tell us about the conference that you attended, Lou, and we'll get into some of the insights.

[Louise Crossley]

Yes. So the conference was called Spotlight and it was Semrush's first ever in person conference. So a lot of people have heard of Semrush, big SEO marketing tool. They held their conference in Amsterdam and it was amazing. Like when you walked in, the setup of it was amazing. Like it was completely Instagrammable, like as a marketer would love it to be. They had like amazing coffee stations. They had a Matcha station which I actually didn't find and only found about after which I was really annoyed about then Expert area was amazing. They had loads of different tools there. They had like a memorable marketing setup where they had loads of different like old fashioned TVs stacked on top of each other and they were flashing different marketing memes, which was really cool. So, yeah, the setup of it was amazing and it was just a really good event to go to.

[Daniel Rolls]

It's kind of like inbound. They do the same thing. Like, you walk in and there's these huge, big, brightly colored, Instagramable things. So the first thing everyone does, go in and shares it. So, yeah, if you're not doing that for your conference, you're missing a trick now. So. So. So tell us about some of the insights. There were some great speakers. So we had obviously the CMO of Semrush. Semrush that was there. Duolingo, Ipull, Rank, a load of others. So talk us through who we're going to speak about first.

[Louise Crossley]

So Andrew Warden, he did the first introductory speech of the day and he was giving a little bit of an insight into AI. So he was just talking about marketing efficiency and saying how it's something that people are worried about, but actually 91% of companies reported an increase in marketing efficiency having used AI. He was then talking about the two marketing anxieties when it comes to AI. So anxiety one being that AI will take my job because that's what everyone seems to fear when AI started becoming a big thing. And he actually said, well, AI is expected to create 97 million new jobs, displacing 85 million. So it's actually increasing 12 million new jobs.

[Daniel Rolls]

Yeah. This lines up with some of the research that we've done at Imperial College that says, actually it's in. In the area of marketing is the single most impacted area, because we've adopted a lot of this stuff early and we got a lot of the tools early on, but actually it's not replacing, it's changing, augmenting to some extent. And what we're seeing is that there's a lot of stuff that we could be more efficient at now. But what that's led to is loads of people being able to pump out loads of really average stuff, do like they were before, but the volumes have got higher.

[Louise Crossley]

Yeah.

[Daniel Rolls]

So there's that whole piece of actually we need to try and stand out, which I think we're going to get into a little bit later on as well.

[Louise Crossley]

Yeah.

[Daniel Rolls]

And then he kind of moved on to, say, the other kind of anxiety and then what he thinks the solution is. Right.

[Louise Crossley]

Yes. He was talking about a lot of people worried that their content won't get seen. You know, there's 6 to 10,000 people who are exposed to ads daily, so you can imagine the ad fatigue and the content of fatigue when all this content's being pushed out by AI and actually humans have an 8 second attention span but he was saying how Gen Z they actually have the highest attention span for that first eight seconds. So he was just focusing on, he called it sss. So simplify, specify and solve customers problems and just focus on being authentic.

[Daniel Rolls]

Well it's interesting because we say, oh, you know, there's no attention span these kids. So we start throwing all that accusation about as well. Actually I think those younger generations have become more discerning in working out from short form content what's relevant for them and what's not. From that point of view. You as well.

[Louise Crossley]

Yeah, you need to focus on the hook.

[Daniel Rolls]

Yeah, yeah. And I think that's the things like what's going to stop the scroll. We've talked about this before. It's interesting because when Kieran did some testing about two years ago, I'm going to say they were testing what was the optimum length for a video ad and he had come up with eight seconds and everyone thought he was bonkers at the time and saying that's just ridiculous. But yeah, it's absolutely kind of right. So this simplify, specify and solve customer problems. Okay, we'll get into that. The lead with authenticity piece I think comes into something you're going to speak about the next person as well. But I've been in three agency pitches for the last couple of days. So I'm working somewhere, I'm a non executive director and we've been in all these agency pitches and everyone has been talking about they think we should be doing more social advertising, paid social, very much about the middle of the user journey which we're going to talk about in a second as well. And actually saying you can't just create branded assets, brand videos and then chop them up into source making segments and put them out across Instagram and TikTok and places like that. Because it just doesn't have that user generated content feel, it doesn't have that authenticity and it's just not going to work. And particularly for what we're calling for this particular audience are moment makers who are that young kind of demographic that are very interested in the Instagrammableness and the shareableness of a particular experience. Experience as well. So talk to us about the next speaker.

[Louise Crossley]

So the next speaker was called Michael King and he's the founder of a company called iPool Rank and he was brilliant but he was one of those where he's going through his slides so fast because he Just absolutely knows what he's talking about. And every time I got my phone out to take a picture of the slide, it like, already moved on.

[Daniel Rolls]

Yeah, I did a lot of that. I looked at my phone after inbound and I've just got all these pictures of weird, random things and it's where I've missed the slide.

[Louise Crossley]

Yeah.

[Daniel Rolls]

And what I've realized, speaking at conferences, if people are all getting their phones at the same time, it means the stuff on the slide is really interesting to them. So you should give people a second to take the picture. Unless you want to get them to fill in a form and to get the slides afterwards, which maybe it's quite a good tactic as well.

[Louise Crossley]

Well, he actually gave his slides out for free, which was great.

[Daniel Rolls]

Yeah, that's. That's great. And we're seeing that kind of like, it really does push that value when you do that as well. Say, look, if you love my stuff here, here's something for free. And, you know, come and, come and get. Get involved and get engaged later on the. The bit that I was looking at your. We're looking at a coggle on the screen as normal. So we've got our mind map in front of us and it says the messy middle of search. And I've been. Again, I've been in these agency pitches the last few days and this came up again and again and again. So talk to us about this and I'm really interested in your first bullet.

[Louise Crossley]

So he was talking about this messy middle of search as like, this is the era of search that we're in now. And he compared it to a minidisc. So Google's in its mini disc era.

[Daniel Rolls]

Are you even old enough to remember what a mini disc is?

[Louise Crossley]

No.

[Daniel Rolls]

Right.

[Louise Crossley]

But let's not talk about that.

[Daniel Rolls]

So I was just going to say I used to love minidiscs. I had my portable cassette player, old school. And then. And then we moved to portable CDs and they were a bit rubbish because they would skip all the time. And then you had these cool little things called MIDI discs, which were like these like, little. It was a great thing. It never really got massive levels of traction.

[Louise Crossley]

No, see, I grew up with the ipod.

[Daniel Rolls]

Yeah, Right, So are we saying then that, you know, Google is a little bit old school and it's not. It's not quite what it should be.

[Louise Crossley]

It was basically saying that Google's not quite at sort of like MP3 and streaming level, but it's more advanced than like vinyls and cassettes.

[Daniel Rolls]

Yeah, okay, fine.

[Louise Crossley]

Google has the capability now to offer all these more advanced features, so personalized experiences and semantic search. But often users aren't really exploring them fully because users don't really know how to dive into them properly. Which I thought was a really good way of describing the state of Google currently. He was also saying that OpenAI is attacking Google in two different ways. So by polluting the index is one of them, because all of this content is being generated by AI and Google isn't always able to get its head around it because there's so much of it. And the next one is. It's sort of disrupting the modality of how people are getting their information because people would always straightaway go to Google and they'd get it answered. And now everything's sort of changing a little bit with ChatGPT.

[Daniel Rolls]

Yeah, I'm really interested in this because it's not just that. So it's the, It's. We're using ChatGPT to answer things. We've got these generative search engines like Perplexity and Search GPT, but also all the stats I keep talking about from like Neil Patel and people like that that are showing the second biggest search engine is Now Instagram and TikTok's in there and YouTube has always been in there. So it's, it's kind of search everywhere as well, which is interesting.

[Louise Crossley]

And his focus on it was that everyone can talk about ChatGPT, but it's not really a threat to Google. And still king. So people might be using more channels, but Google still gets 100 times the traffic that ChatGPT gets. And still definitely the leader in that area. He was also talking about there's four advantages that Google has over anyone who's looking to challenge it. Okay, they have multiple products with billion users. So if you think Chrome, Gmail and all the different spinoffs that they have, they invented the tech, they have more behavioral data than anywhere else and they have TPUs, which basically means they don't rely on Nvidia like GPT do. So they won't like run out.

[Daniel Rolls]

They've got their own processing power. Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's really interesting because you. It's a really good, good point that they've got multiple users across multiple different tools. But the true threat which is suddenly coming more true is this, you know, the government position of breaking up the monopoly. And there's a lot of discussion at the moment about there's a huge fine across the eu. There's some stuff going in the US about them saying that they've manipulated their monopoly position in order to get you to use the Chrome browser. Now, there's lots of arguments either way with this. They are challenging that we should say as well, but it means they're that kind of. Hold on. All that data may be broken down potentially a little bit as well. I think it's quite healthy, all of this. I think that I love Google and I think that they've done a phenomenal job. I also think having some competitors, some stronger competitors is not necessarily a bad thing as well. But it's quite interesting saying the future will be built on the past user experience, relevance and authority. I'm just sitting there as well. And I think what Google have, which ChatGPT don't have, is all that user experience stuff. What happens when you got to the website? What happens when you got to the news website? Did you read it? Did you actually consume that? And they still have that massive advantage. But what I'd say is if, if you're not actually visiting websites, if you're staying in the stuff you see in social media, if you're just reading what you get within ChatGPT, does it matter that they haven't got that data? So it's certainly a period of pretty radical change. And I think it means that if we are very reliant on Google to send business to us, we need to start exploring. I don't think it's the end of the world yet, but I think it's certainly changing things pretty quickly as well. And then you kind of, then kind of talking about people's needs are changing as well.

[Louise Crossley]

Yeah. So he started talking about how younger audience search behavior is shifting and he just mentioned a tool which I thought would be quite useful to people. So it's called Profound and it basically helps you track how your brands are showing up in the large language models. So ChatGPT, Gemini perplexity and everything like that. So it just gives you a really good idea of how you're showing up. So Google started surfacing more visual content in the SERPs because of how TikTok is starting to threat Google. So it then threatens a position for organic web content because everything gets pushed down. And something that I really liked about Michael's talk was that he split his talk into six different actions so that everyone who was listening knew what they needed to do to take away in order to prepare for the future.

[Daniel Rolls]

Because that was everyone loves an action.

[Louise Crossley]

Everyone loves an action.

[Daniel Rolls]

I could hear Kieran saying that in my mind. It's as if he's here.

[Louise Crossley]

So the action for this one, because he was talking about how your organic position in Google is being threatened because of TikTok and because of all of this stuff that's being introduced at the top of the Google page. So the action was to start publishing short form content on your website and make sure that it's marked up with structured data so that any short content that appears on your website will have the chance to appear in those snippets at the top.

[Daniel Rolls]

Yeah, this is really interesting because I was speaking literally today at a meeting about an hour ago that we're creating all this kind of short form video content and it's going into Reels or TikTok, but not actually repeating that on our websites. And a lot of people coming to our website won't have been on those social channels to see it. But actually if you structured markup, you've got the opportunity then to get that showing up in those different places as well. And it's another reason that you want yourself into YouTube shorts as well. So if you're creating that content, you should be putting it into all of those places as well. So what was the next action?

[Louise Crossley]

So, so the next action and Semrush is a really good tool for doing this, but it was to monitor the SERP features for target keywords to see if you need to sort of pivot your strategy there. Because for example, for a specific keyword there's loads of SERP features that be included at the top and all the organic content's being pushed down. Your content then might be less visible, so you might want to sort of focus on different keywords.

[Daniel Rolls]

I'm just going to jump in if anyone's listening, going, why do they keep saying SERP and what does it mean? It's a search engine results page. It is just the results in Google and I think it is potentially one of the least necessary acronyms in the world. But then since I was talking about GEO Generative Engine Optimization the other week, I'm not going to talk about acronyms and unnecessary ones too much as well. But I think it's a good point that actually looking at those results pages and seeing what else is showing up and I think increasingly the thing that I've noticed is more short form video showing up. But also Reddit is just showing up everywhere lately as well. So if you haven't got a plan or a strategy for Reddit, that's a, that's a big problem as well. Next step.

[Louise Crossley]

So the next step was Michael was talking about how Indexing has gotten a lot harder since the helpful content update by Google as the bar is higher for what Google now deems worth capturing. So his action was to monitor your indexing so you can do that in Google Search Console, monitor your crawled but currently not indexed and monitor your discovered but currently not indexed reports to see what needs work there.

[Daniel Rolls]

Yeah, and I think this is this eat piece. The experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trust comes in here loads. And I've seen even more research that is showing including audio and video and in fact images throughout your content is gonna. Original stuff's gonna have an impact. Adding call out quotes and linking through to whoever did the quote as well. But adding referencing so actually saying where this data and this insight is from is really important and then linking through to the buyer of the author as well. So that, that's what. And I think that takes us onto your kind of your next action as well.

[Louise Crossley]

So his next action was to monitor your crawl rates and this was quite interesting because he shared a LinkedIn post that had been written by an analyst at Google and I'll read out. So the LinkedIn post basically said my mission this year is to figure out how to crawl even less and have fewer bytes on wire. A few days ago there was a post on a Reddit community about how in the OC's perception, Google is crawling less than previous years. In the grand scheme of things, that's just not the case. We're crawling roughly as much as before. However, scheduling got more intelligent and we're focusing more on URLs that are more likely to deserve crawling.

[Daniel Rolls]

Yeah, and they're basically going to less websites and they're probably revisiting websites less often if you're not updating regularly as well. So there seems to be quite a strong connection between the regularity of publishing content that's seen as high value and how often they're coming back and looking at your websites again and again as well. So I think it's a really good point.

[Louise Crossley]

Yeah, so that was his fourth action and basically if you go to settings in Google Search Console and they go to crawl stats, you can find that out. You'll often see an inverse relationship between crawl requests and average response time. Because the faster you make your website, the more Google will crawl it. So it just shows how all of those things sort of tie in together.

[Daniel Rolls]

Excellent. Okay, and where did he go from there?

[Louise Crossley]

So action five was to stop focusing on content volume and focus on quality and information gain, because it's all about what are you talking about? That your competitors aren't. So you're looking at personal insights, relevant stories, original research, thought leadership, and then actually what you're just looking at is your eat. Your eat.

[Daniel Rolls]

Yeah, exactly. And it's interesting because it ties into that final step as well. So the stat that kind of brings me to this one is that when Neil Patel looked at a load of data and they looked at the fact that updating your content probably had a bigger impact than just creating new content all the time as well. And by going through what you've got and adding all this value to the content and trying to improve it is probably a more powerful tactic than adding new stuff. And I mean, an ideal world you'd be doing both, but it's quite interesting. And then the final one again is I've been, every, every pitch I've been into in the last few days has been talking about this. So tell us the last one.

[Louise Crossley]

So Action six was track brand visibility and this one was quite an interesting one because he was talking about realizing the power of search as a branding channel and not always just a performance channel, which people necessarily haven't always thought about searching that way. But even if you appear in a snippet, if people don't click through on that, you're still providing that brand awareness. And so it's really important to track your rankings and impressions and visibility in these SERP features and AI overviews.

[Daniel Rolls]

Yeah, I was going to say AI overviews and then brand mentions, full stop. So even if it's a non clickable brand mention, it's having a big impact. Moz.com another the other big SEO tool they have talked about, they've got their new brand visibility metrics that they're bringing into it. It's a bit of a beta test them at the moment, but they're doing exactly the same thing. And then if you look at things like the AI brand visibility tool that HubSpot created, it's doing the same thing. It's trying to say how visible is your brand as well. And I think the problem is with AI summaries because they only bring in the top couple of brands. When you ask them a question about something, if you're not sitting up at the top of your particular niche, there's a bit of a missed opportun. So it's interesting because it's complete mindset change from going through. It's all about clicks, it's all about engagement, it's all about comments to actually saying people. Just seeing your stuff is important. And the thing is We've always known it was important, but we haven't really measured it because it was a bit of a soft metric. But actually all those things we were talking about as vanity metrics. Yeah, they're vanity metrics, but actually they're having a big impact. So it's a real. I would take a bit of a mindset change on the whole thing as well. And it means there are gaps in our understanding of the user journey as well, to some extent, but it is having an important as well. So how does he say then, if you want to continue your content's going to continue performing, how do you do it?

[Louise Crossley]

So he sort of broke this down into two different stages, topic clustering and content pruning. So on topic clustering, make sure that you've got your core subject and your cluster articles around it and that you're linking between them internally. An example of this was Disney World. So your website in general might be about Disney World, but you've got different content on, you know, the best restaurants, what to take when you pack with you, how to budget, the best times to visit, and all of those pages are linking internally together so that Google gets a really sort of rich idea of what your content's about. The next thing that he spoke about was content pruning, and this was to basically take a step back and look at the content lifecycle and make sure that you're removing content that could be weighing down your website because it's just not performing as well as it should be, or making sure that you're going in and actually updating that content. And by removing that sort of dead weight, you're actually then going to improve your overall website health. And there is a content pruning workbook he had, which I'll leave the link into the show Notes as well.

[Daniel Rolls]

Fantastic. So targetinternet.com forward/podcast and you will. You will find that in the show notes as well. Okay, so some really interesting tips. And they're connecting up content, social media search optimization. Next speaker was Zaria from Duolingo, right?

[Louise Crossley]

Yes. So she is the global social media manager at Duolingo and she was the last one to speak on the day and she was incredible. And obviously everyone knows Duolingo, they've built up their TikTok channel hugely. So she was a great speaker to have and the bulk of her speech was about disruption as this social media strategy. So she was talking about how disruption doesn't actually need to be revolutionary, but it requires time and critical thinking, which are often the two Resources that are the most scarce. And she was saying how truly new things rarely need an abundance of money.

[Daniel Rolls]

Yeah. This is interesting because Sam Parr from my First Million podcast and other various things that he's done, when you looked at how he grew his email list and how he grew his podcast list and things like that, was very much saying, let's look at social media and content more broadly, like journalism, in that if you were just to stick something in a newspaper or a blog that anyone could write in five minutes, it's not going to be interesting. And that's what an awful lot of digital content is to be. Whereas actually if you often you do some research and you speak to people and you come up with a really creative idea, that's. That's gonna. What's gonna resonate. And I love the, the quote here, it says, if you can't give your social team's budget, give them creative freedom. Yeah. Which is a really interesting one as well. And then that thing about to be a successful disruptor, you need to understand that it's a calculated risk and you don't want to upset people where risk is worth reward, I guess it's the balance between this and a traditional brand. So if you're a finance brand, you might not want to be doing this stuff. Right. It's. You've got to decide how you kind of approach it, but there's got to be flexibility within a framework for some of these things as well. And this is here you're ordinary is often someone else's extraordinary. So what's that example?

[Louise Crossley]

Yes. So she was basically saying how things that you might not deem worthy as posting on social media might actually be something that other people find exceptional and really interesting because they don't live in your world. So she gave an example and it was water park and they'd done a video about how their team walk this every single slide every morning to make sure that it's safe.

[Daniel Rolls]

Right. That is interesting. Right. You wouldn't know that.

[Louise Crossley]

Yeah. And no one knew that. And it was really interesting and it's garnered them, you know, loads of attention, loads of engagement.

[Daniel Rolls]

Yeah. That behind the scenes piece as well. So like, for example, when we're doing podcast or video shoots and we just say, this is how we set up. This is the audio baffling we have in the room. These are the mics that we use. This is the camera. We've got three cameras, We've got this. All that kind of people. Okay. I can, you know, because people, everyone approaches it in Slightly different ways as well. But you only have to look at TV and other forms of journalism to understand this. Because if you look at all the TV shows about like how a particular factory works or what it's like behind the scene to work in London Zoo or whatever else it might be, people are fascinated by that stuff. It is really interesting. So I think the human aspect of that is, is really important as well. There you go. And it's a testing things, testing with and without the owl. People don't care about humans at Duolingo, they care about the owl. So what's that one?

[Louise Crossley]

So this sort of follows on to the point after it as well where it says your social site can be different to your product. Because quite often she was saying people look at our social media and they see this big owl twerking and then they look at our product and it's. And it's a language learning app and they weren't really too sure how the two marry up. But at the end of the day, you know, brands also have personalities and your social side can be different to your product. And when you don't also have a lot of budget, like what we were talking with Kiran in a previous episode. If you just remove something and see what happens, you can get a really good idea of what was creating that impact. And when they remove the owl, they realize that people only cared about the owl on social media and it's helped really shape their brand. And this disruption piece, some of that is probably going to annoy people because it might not be what people expect a brand post, but the cost of being a disruptor is risk. But it's calculated risk. And calculated risk is a bold decision that marries up with impact. And risk is worth reward if there's a clear positive goal at the end of it.

[Daniel Rolls]

Yeah, I mean, James Wilson did this and when we interviewed him from the do this not that podcast where he said, we've got all these stickers that we. They gave. They do the swag giveaway kind of thing and they've got loads of things about reality TV and it doesn't have their brand on it. And people say, well, that's crazy. He's saying, no, because what we do is we've created an experience and you're going to remember that experience. The risk is, oh, no one associates with the brand. But actually it's a very calculated risk and it's one that's really, really thought through as well. So, okay, really interesting stuff that probably leads us on to the cost of being dull. So this was. John Evans talks about this.

[Louise Crossley]

Yes, John Evans, he has a podcast called Uncensored cmo and he did the renegade talk and it was one of the most beautifully presented slides I've ever seen, if that's not a really geekish thing to say. But something that I took away from his session, which he spoke about was that interesting content is content that denies an existing assumption because people don't like to be proven wrong. And I thought that stuck in my head. And he gave a great example of this. There was a campaign that was run by France during the World cup and what they'd actually done is they'd showed clips of the women's team playing football, but they actually deep faked it so that it had the men's football players on. And it was generating. I remember this, yeah. And it was generating all of this sort of content, like about how amazing it was. And then people could not believe it when it was actually the women's team playing.

[Daniel Rolls]

Right. Yeah. It was a brilliant campaign. It was really clever. It's interesting because people would rather watch something or listen something they agree with. There's like this cognitive bias that says you're more likely to listen to content and read content you agree with. So actually if you make people think they've agreed with you and then go, well, actually this is the opposite of what you think, that's going to get loads of traction because it's going to really ruffle people up. And it goes back to what we were just saying from Duolingo about, you know, taking the risk of upsetting people. And that that risk of upsetting people is, you know, maybe there's a, there's a risk reward basis for that as well. And then what was, what was the other thing that came from him?

[Louise Crossley]

So he then brought up on screen this anti dole dial and it was measuring your content on this chart of anti dullness. And there's five angles to it. So the first one is, are we meeting them where they care and speaking to them in their language? And obviously if you're not, then why are you posting this content? Are we using the real bar to judge what's interesting or some invented one of our own? Because again, what's interesting to you might not be interesting to others. And the other way around, are we showing real distinctiveness and character? And then are we using emotion, drama and storytelling? And are we denying one of their key assumptions and surprising them? And I just thought that was a really good chart. The anti dole dial.

[Daniel Rolls]

Yeah, nice. And there's that whole piece that, you know, if you, if you're dull, you need to ramp up your spend, right. Then what, you need to throw money at it if you're, if you're going to be dull. So you've got to ramp up that accordingly as well. Okay, so that was, that was some of your main kind of speaker highlights. What about a couple of. A couple of quotes that you pulled out that you thought were interesting?

[Louise Crossley]

So there was a diversity panel that was really great and two of the ladies on that were called Natalie Duval and Bea. Natalie has a company called March Muses and Bea works for a creative agency called Grey London. And they were doing this diversity panel and Bea was saying how if you're going to make money from a community, you know, the blind community or the deaf community, you need to make sure you're actually serving them. And she was giving some really good examples of how people might be trying to tick a box as if they're serving the community. Whereas actually what they're doing isn't actually helpful at all. Like including braille on signs that people can't reach. Different examples like that. But I thought that was a really nice takeaway.

[Daniel Rolls]

I think there's a lot of this going on. Like we talk about greenwashing, right. In terms of, you know, oh, we're very environmentally. And then I think that the same happens. Diversity, diversity washing going on massively as well, where people are doing it to tick a box but they're not actually looking at what. I always try to refer people back to it. This is like when you look at accessibility, for example, and you try and improve the accessibility across your website to serve those audiences that would need an accessible website, you generally improve the website for everyone else and you generally end up making the website a bit faster potentially as well, which will help your search rankings and so on as well. And it's like with design thinking, in design thinking, we tend to look at a very niche group, but actually by improving things to that niche group, we end up improving things for everyone as well. So I think it's a. It's a really good point. And yeah, you shouldn't be kind of making money for a community unless you are actually serving it as well.

[Louise Crossley]

And Also with the EU Disability Act 2025, accessibility has to be at the heart of all of your digital experiences.

[Daniel Rolls]

Yeah. And that was actually baked into British law as well, so that there are standards and those standards are actually increasing next year, which we'll put a link into the show notes about as well. But it's definitely worth being ahead of the game with those even if they don't apply to you because it does improve your website overall anyway.

[Louise Crossley]

And then there was another quote which just really stuck out to me. And this was from Tom Fishburne and he also goes by the Marketoonist and I'll leave the link in the show notes to sign up to his email newsletter. But he basically creates all of these cartoon marketing memes and they're great and his speech was just totally hilarious. But one of the quotes from his session was people don't want quarter inch drill, they want a quarter inch hole. And it's just that refocus on. You're not always selling your product, but you need to be solving your customers solutions and focusing on their problems.

[Daniel Rolls]

We are way guilty of this. You know, we taught 250 modules of e learning, 300 podcasts and live daily sessions and all this kind of stuff. And the reality is people want to improve their career and improve their life and make more money. So it's, you know, it's, it's selling the outcome. I think that's massively important as well. So we got some Spotlight offers I think from Semrush as well, haven't we?

[Louise Crossley]

Yes. So after the conference they kept emailing out some different offers. So there was a couple that reached my inbox a few days ago which I thought would be quite good to share. One of them was Swido. So see what you do online. The reporting dashboard, which you've spoken about quite a few times for new customers. If you email supportwido.com with the code SEMrush Spotlight, you can claim $100 credit on your subscription. And then GetFluence, which are a company who connect brands with media outlets to publish sponsored articles to basically improve your reputation, visibility, SEO. You can get 20% off of a sponsored content piece if you use the code getspotlight online.

[Daniel Rolls]

Yeah, and these aren't, these aren't affiliate links for us or anything like that. This is just some offers we thought would be good for, for you. Okay, thank you for that, Lou. Some really great, really great insights in there. Don't forget we've now got our first audio certification live on targetinternet.com it's available for all the members. Membership starts at £20amonth. We've got the buy get your boss to buy for you letter on there and all that kind of stuff as well. And don't forget now, every month if you are a member. So you're on a six or 12 month membership or you've been a member six months, you get our monthly and at least monthly we've done. I think. I think we've done three already this month, but we're doing these half day masterclasses. So we did half day on GA4. We've got a digital strategy one coming up. We've had the ChatGPT ones and so on as well.

[Louise Crossley]

And there's like nine or ten brand new ones which are now on the website for the first half of 2025.

[Daniel Rolls]

Brilliant. So you can go and have a look at all of those as well. They're really good fun. We have a big group of the audience coming along and interacting and chatting to each other and asking questions and actually answering each other's questions a lot of the time as well. So if you want to join that community and you want to spend half a day with me every month, what more could you want then please do join up. We're having a lot of fun with those and they seem to have got a lot of traction. We'd love to hear what you think about the new audio course as well, which I said will be live by Monday at the latest. And what did you think of an episode without Kieran? Was it a far superior experience or was. Was it sadly missing something? Let us know what you think as well. All answers appreciated, especially those that infuriate Kieran, so please let me know. Thank you for listening to Digital Marketing Podcast and we'll see you next time.