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- [00:04]
A
Okay, everyone, look, we're all using AI right now. Point blank, that's. That part's done. ChatGPT, like my dad's talking to me about ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini. It's all gone mainstream and everyone's using it for copy help, idea generation, the baseline stuff. As Jess on our team head of marketing likes to remind me, I'm. I'm only scratching the surface and there's clearly a gap. Most marketing teams are using AI tools to think, but not actually do. And that's where things are heading next. Our sponsor, optimizely, built this platform called Opal that lets you use autonomous AI agents to go and do the stuff you shouldn't be doing manually versus just being another chatbot. This is stuff like creating and optimizing on brand web pages, emails, SEO content and campaigns by audience segment. It catches brand, legal and accessibility issues before anything else goes live. It pulls data from your other systems like Google Analytics or your CRM and sales tools to auto build reports, summaries and recommendations. And guess what? It's completely no code. So marketers like you and me can build and leverage agents for any use case that we dream up without needing to rely on developers. Heck yeah.
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B
So get this.
- [01:12]
A
Optimizely has this awesome offer for Exit 5 listeners. They're offering a free personalized 45 minute AI workshop to help you identify the best AI use cases for your marketing team and map out which agents can save you time with a practical plan you can actually go and use right away. So if you need help demystifying all of this AI agent stuff and you want to figure out where you can put AI agents to work inside of your marketing team, go and check this out. Go to optimizely.com exit5 and check it out. That's optimizely.com exit5. You're listening to the Dave Gerhard show.
- [01:57]
B
1, 2, 3, 4.
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A
Exit. Okay, all right, here we go.
- [02:03]
B
Are we live? Check, check, check 1, 2. Mike, Mike, check 1, 2. I got my whole webinar. Matt's in the building, so I got this whole situation dialed now. I'm in the webinar studio today. Damn it. I already called it a webinar right off the bat. I need to be able to talk to the team internally as things are happening right here. So I have that, I have my notes. I have you all right here. I did see one person, one time was like, he's not even looking at the camera. Well, like, I'm trying to do a lot. I'm your host I'm not the talent today. My name is Dave Gerhart. I am the founder of Exit 5. Exit 5 is the top community for B2B marketers. And twice a month we do these Exit 5 live sessions. I usually say, don't you dare call them a webinar, but I've already broken that rule. And they're a lot of fun. People like them because we bring on subject matter experts to go deep in a particular topic. This topic is probably the hottest topic in marketing. I'll say the newer thing that seems even hotter, which I cannot. Does anybody feel this way? I go anywhere online and all I can see is Claude Code. Right now that's just my answer to any problem in life is just Claude Code. But separate from that, it's AI AI and SEO aeo. And we pulled together a panel of marketing leaders from three different companies, three different industries, three different stages to talk about what they've learned over the last year. Because we want to take you beyond the hype. We want to go and help you separate the signal from the noise, from all the stuff you see on LinkedIn that makes me feel so completely inadequate and dumb and I'm not doing enough with AI to let's actually bring some actual marketing leaders and hear about what they're doing inside of their company. So we're going to get to that in a minute. I'm going to bring up the panel. If you could just go in the chat right now, I want to know why did you where you are and I also want to know why did you take the time out of this day to come to this session? So like, I'm Dave in Vermont. I came here because I still don't really know what I should be doing with aeo. Those are really helpful for us and it's just good to see some names in here also during this session today. The chat is honestly one of the best parts. So you're all marketers. Be in there, ask questions, help each other, push back, give us ideas of questions you want to do, you want to hear us dig into. And then real quick, before we get started, I just want to give a shout out to webflow. They are our sponsor for this session. And a lot of us marketers right now we're dealing with the same reality, which is smaller teams, tighter budget, but the same pressure to grow pipeline. Amen to that.
- [04:18]
A
Right.
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B
And the website is still expected to carry a lot of the load. The bar has changed too. It's not enough just for your site to look good. It Actually has to perform for not only humans, but now these LLMs. Is there going to be a world, by the way, where, like we have these agents that do B2B buying for us? That. That is a possible theory and that's where webflow comes in. It's a website platform that lets you build, manage and optimize your site in one place without having to wait on developers or duct taping together a bunch of tools. I can even log in and do stuff, which is amazing. Their platform makes it easy for you to test and personalize pages, optimize for SEO and AEO and move faster while staying on brand. Speaking from experience, we are constantly tweaking the Exit 5 site, which, by the way, runs on Webflow, which is really cool and it's made it really easy. Gives us a flexibility across our whole team. So go and check it out. Thank you to webflow for sponsoring this session. Good taste in being in front of the right marketers and I'm excited to be here today talking about this topic. So without further ado, Aaron, Producer Aaron, behind the scenes, can you roll out our three marketing leaders that have been hanging out eating green? They all have very strict green room, what do they call it? Requirements. Dave Steer only wanted green M&M's. I don't know why green? Because Webflow is kind of like blue. Claire was just like, whatever's back there. And Marcy requested rotisserie chicken, which I thought was a strange request, but otherwise.
- [05:32]
C
All about the antibiotics.
- [05:34]
B
I like it.
- [05:35]
D
Yeah.
- [05:35]
B
Anyway, all right, so enough of my small talk. Let's get into. Let's go around the room. Quick intro and then I got my first question lined up for you. So who are you? Explain what does your company do so we can get a sense of the stage and size and your mission. And let's go. Marcie, Claire, Dave, Great.
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C
Thanks for having me. Long time listener, first time caller.
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E
Dave.
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B
I was hoping you were going to say something like that. Thank you.
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C
So my name is Marcie Comer. I'm CMO at Eagle View. I've been with Eagle View now five years, which I think is a milestone in and of itself for any marketer. What we sell is aerial imagery and data extracted from that imagery. And we sell it to lots of different industries, namely roofing, insurance carriers, government agencies, and so forth. And so my job as a marketer is extremely complicated to understand all of those industries, especially when previous industries were like hot dogs. So had to really dig deep to understand these industries. But thanks for having me.
- [06:28]
E
And I am Claire Schmidt, I'm head of marketing and communications at Piedmont Global. And we are a strategic globalization organization. And Dave told me that I had to intro this simply, so I'm going to take a stab at that. But we have a very complex buyer journey from language access and education all the way to helping organizations expand into new markets, helping them incorporate AI into their cross cultural workflows. I like to explain it to healthcare staffing. I missed that one. That's a new offering for us this year. I like to say anywhere there's a component of cross cultural operations for our clients, we make it easier for them. So whether that's across the globe or across the street in a healthcare system setting where they have multilingual customers, or if they're expanding into a new market like Nairobi.
- [07:16]
B
Can you share the anecdote that you shared behind the scenes about your daughter texting you, please?
- [07:20]
E
Just so this is the first time that I've been on a totally not a webinar. And my daughter, who is a sophomore in college studying engineering, texted me like five minutes beforehand to be like, good luck and I hope you're not nervous. So she nervousness.
- [07:35]
D
Dave Steer well, I mean that story warmed up my heart. I'll tell you the version that I said, you know, in the green room as well. I have a daughter who's in college in Tulane and I shared our latest advertising campaign with her yesterday and her text back to me was, hey, looks good, cool, but can I start in the next one that you create? And I thought, well, that's a dream job when you can have your kid. Kind of lobby to be your creative talent Next.
- [07:59]
B
I heard a story actually. Ben Affleck was talking about watching a movie with his kids and it was like one of the best movies of all time. And he's like, yeah, it's pretty good. I think you should really hire like some of the TikTok directors though, to like help make the cuts for this. And he's like, oh my God. All right, Dave, who are you, man? CMO at Webflow.
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D
CMO at Webflow. I've been a marketer for about 20 years or so. I've been in seat over here for about seven months. You did a great job, Dave Gearhart, and sort of the table read of what we do.
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B
Thank you.
- [08:28]
D
I'll just sort of expound on that. Which is, you know, we're classically known as a platform that helps companies build amazing brand forward and growth forward websites. But as channels fragment, especially on the web, we're increasingly being used to think about us as a central part of the web marketing stack. So AI, answer engine optimization, all these topics are salient to the audience over here and we talk to customers about it all the time. So thanks for having me.
- [08:57]
B
Yeah, I'm happy to do this. I think that one of the lines that we had is like, and this is the thing that's been coming up a lot is you're writing for two audiences now, which is humans and LLMs. My question, I'm not an expert in this area at all and I hope we can get into this today is like how much of that is different than writing for say Google? But I want to start off here. We pitch this as like getting into the weeds, sharing what real marketing leaders are really doing. So tell me over the past year, let's rewind 12 months ago, maybe 14 months ago, Thanksgiving of last year, you're heading into 2025. It's obvious that things are shifting with search. I noticed it within the last year or so. You know my default is not even a Google search anymore. It's talking to Gemini on my phone, I'm talking to ChatGPT. And so I'm curious about each of you inside of your companies. What have you learned about AEO over the last year? What's changed? And then maybe how is this different than how you're thinking about ranking for for Google, especially at webflow being a website company, I'm sure you, you've had to have some hard questions about having strong opinions here. So I'm just curious what your marketing team is thinking about.
- [10:02]
D
Yeah, well I'm very fortunate to work what I consider really an all star marketing team. And yet I think many marketing teams kind of suffer from the same thing which is increasingly siloed activity inside the team. Lots of specialties, but not a lot of sort of like how do we integrate our work together? And it really comes to the head when you think about things like AI and answer engine optimization. There's the stuff that you can do to optimize your website and your web experience such that both humans and agents can do a great job at reading and understanding your brand and your offering. And yet there's also the how you do the work. And today I think the thing that has changed for me and my outlook is the need to be integrated in approach is now paramount. Like we have to be integrated. I tell my team everything integrated all the time, which is to think about the entire channel strategy and the website as a component of your web marketing channel approach.
- [11:02]
B
When you Say, like, everything integrated. Can you give me a specific example? So, like, I understand from, like, a messaging standpoint, we got this brand campaign. We want this message to be true across all of our channels. But what does that mean for the team?
- [11:14]
D
Yeah, what I mean is sort of integrated thinking. And I'll paraphrase Alex Schultz. He's the CMO at Facebook or Meta right now. He recently came out with a book, and one of the central premises of the book that really landed with me is the technology is changing. Like, the tools are changing, but the principles of marketing are the same. And, you know, some people say, like, the funnel is dead. I actually think the funnel is a really great framework for us to think about. And as simple as it sounds, how, as a marketing team, because it is a team sport, how you move your audience from awareness to consideration to conversion, et cetera, et cetera, becomes important. So when I think about everything integrated all the time, I mean, actually taking that full funnel view of everything that.
- [11:58]
C
We do, are you measuring the full funnel view?
- [12:01]
D
Great question. Yes. I think the challenge that I think a lot of teams, particularly in marketing, face is there's so much data in front of us. The question isn't, are you measuring it? But what signals should you look at and how deeply should you look at all of them? And so one of the things that I talk to our team a lot about and then when I talk to customers is the importance of really establishing what your North Star goal is for any integrated campaign and really assigning a metric or two based on that goal and then using all other data points as telemetry to understand whether you're making progress towards that goal.
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B
Marcy, want to talk about what you've learned in the last year?
- [12:40]
C
Okay, so when I think about what happened in the last year, it's kind of bananas because so much has happened. So my role is twofold. So I have to deliver revenue for Eagle View. I also have to manage our relationship with the board. So there's sort of twofold things that I'm trying to manage at the same time, at the beginning of the year, I sat down with our SEO agency, and I'm like, I need a plan, a literal plan for how we're going to address aeo. And at the time, I didn't know.
- [13:10]
D
What to call it.
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C
AI stuff. Aio, I don't know, Geo, agentic. What are we calling it? If we can align at this webinar live session on what we're calling it, I think that's a great outcome for us. So we sat down and we started figuring out together with our SEO agency who maybe didn't have this expertise at that moment, like how we were going to address this for the year. And the first thing was to get a handle on our traffic. And so we looked at all of our traffic, figured out what was coming from LLMs that we could measure, and then maybe what wasn't attributable. And what we discovered is that the traffic isn't even a top five channel for us. So that we didn't necessarily have to worry about everything, wasn't completely falling for us. But that said, we did want to make sure that we are taking advantage of Greenfield.
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B
So.
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C
So I felt very strongly in the beginning of the year that there was an opportunity for us to grab Greenfield from our competitors, because if we just focused on it and thought about what the opportunity was. And so the way that we did that was simply lay out what the top prompts were for us that mattered to our buyers, and then track the position over time. And we had to go find software to help us do that. We had to figure out dashboards for what that might look like. And what we realized is that much of the same work that we were doing for SEO applied for aeo and that what we should focus on was not just driving traffic, but making sure that we were represented appropriately.
- [14:36]
B
So was it less about like, hey, we want to book an incremental. I don't know how your revenue function works, but let's just call it like, sales meetings. We, we want 10 more sales meetings this quarter. Was it less about that and more of, like, because you talked about Greenfield? It kind of seems like in my mind it was like, you're taking a bet on, like, this is where this is going. I don't need to tie this directly back to sales right now, but it does seem like we should start to plant a flag here because we want to influence how these, you know, LLMs think. It's like being early on in search. You were the only company that had a blog about a certain topic in 2006. Like, you probably ranked for those keywords, is it?
- [15:10]
C
Exactly. Okay, well, so it was like, what are some of the tactics that we can do to take all of the positions? And it ranged right from like, what could potentially be black hat methodologies to standard methodologies. And so we decided we're not going to do any black hat.
- [15:25]
D
Can you.
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B
Can you actually dive into that? So, like, what are some of the standard plays to run? And then what would be some of the Black hat stuff.
- [15:31]
C
Standard play would be writing a blog addressing a topic and many topics around a topic. Standard SEO stuff.
- [15:38]
B
And did they say like writing that blog? Does that change because you want to rank in LLMs versus Google, or is it just write the same blog? The same timeless principles like Dave mentioned apply of what a good article.
- [15:48]
C
I think the same timeless principles apply that could be debated for different things and you could look at different LLMs too. Right? So like ChatGPT for us is the highest traffic LLM versus like a cloud or perplexity. I don't know if that's true for all businesses, but that's what we looked at. A black hat tactic could be you can pay agencies to go and pay off the sources for Reddit, for example. You can change your responses so everyone's.
- [16:15]
B
Like, really writing this down.
- [16:17]
C
It's possible. There's truth in advertising problems though. So you need to think, consider that we do not do that, just for the record.
- [16:25]
B
No, no, I'm just, I'm just giving you shit. It's good.
- [16:28]
C
But you could also sponsor Listicle, which is a heavily source for LLMs as well. So anything that you can do to change sort of the sources that result in the prompt that you're tracking to favor your brand is something you can do.
- [16:42]
B
Sorry, are we back to like writing listicles again? Like if I own a.
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C
No, no, but someone else writes a listicle, you can pay them to put you on top.
- [16:51]
B
Got it. Okay, I want to get Claire in here and then I want to come back to some of the specific, because people love the specifics. So you mentioned like, hey, we worked with this agency. Like, what did you talk to them about? How did you set goals around this? What are the actual tactics? You mentioned software and tools. I want to come back to that in a second. But Claire, I know you have some opinions on this and what have you learned over last year?
- [17:08]
E
Yeah, and I was going to say, yes, we are back to writing Listicles.
- [17:13]
B
Well, like, everything's back. PR is back. I started my career in PR and I wrote this thing about LinkedIn and PR this morning and someone's like, so should we start putting, you know, our press releases out on like PR Newswire again? Like, is that a tactic?
- [17:25]
E
I mean, you know, it's all bets are off. But I still think, though, I'm going to go back to something Dave Sears said, is that the principles haven't changed as much as the surface has. Like, that's the way I think about it. That's the way I Instruct the team is terms of what I've learned over the last year. And I said yesterday, I think in our call, like our prep call, that, you know, I feel behind the eight ball a little because of we didn't really start paying attention to this as much until Q4, because we had the rebrand that we launched September 30th and Dave was like, I think we're all new to the game wherever we are. So some of this stuff that, you know, Marcy talked about, we aren't as far along on that. But I still think I've held these principles sort of all this year as I've been watching all of the fads and the trends and people saying, oh, AI is going to destroy marketing and we're all going to be out of jobs and all that stuff. But so instead of sort of chasing every new thing, and I'm lucky I don't have the same thing that a lot of people have as far as bored. I answer directly to the CEO. We're a single owned company and I have a very good relationship with him. We kind of hash everything out. So. But to get to your point of what I learned over the last year is we've kind of gone back to the basics. So making sure that content is king, it's useful, it's structured, and of course it's a challenge. It's easy for both humans and AI to understand. But I think that if you're using things which I think are useful to humans too, like the TLDRs, this is really tactical. You said I could get tactical FAQs, you know, comparison content on each of our like high traffic pages. Great content still wins. I think there's just like a little bit of a maybe higher or some would argue lower bar for sort of the clarity and structure now. So we're seeing things like that once we started implementing that and of course you can check our website and tell me which ones we're missing. But having Those accordion style FAQs, like some of it does feel like I'm going, wait, I feel like I did this back in like 2010. But it's some of those same things. Going back to the basics, making sure our content is useful, making sure that we're answering those questions that our ICP are asking in the way that they're asking and being just sort of expanding that surface area. So whatever GPT or Perplexity or AI tool you're using, making sure that we're answering those questions that they may be used to take to Google and then also to your point, Marcy, making sure that the narrative, that that actually is accurate, that whatever chatgpt or, I mean, that's. I use that the most is actually answering the question correctly in the way that we want, that matches our positioning and narrative.
- [19:46]
B
Dave, let's bring you in. But I also wanted this point is landing in the chat, which is great. Jessica said, love this reiteration. Kind of tired of all the new marketing tactics and definitions when basic marketing still works. Always good to hear that, but felt like you wanted to say something there.
- [19:59]
D
Yeah. Well, it's interesting to hear Claire's story and Marcy's story. Right. Because it all comes back to, I think, like a fundamental principle. So it's easy to have this top line. Technology is changing, but the principles stay the same. But what are the principles that actually stay the same? From what I'm hearing from sort of the two of you and from our experience over here, now is the time to be very generous with your content. Now is the time to think about content marketing from the perspective of like, am I providing value to the people who I'm putting the content in front of? And so as an example over here, late last year, we really, understanding that our customers and the prospects that we talk to have lots of questions around aeo. We put together this free AEO assessment tool that anybody could come to our website, they put in their URL, and then we would feed back to them based on our understanding of the technology and their website. And we've got like a special, you know, kind of sneak peek into things. Here's where you score and sort of your evolution in aeo, and here are the things that you can fundamentally do to fix it. And so I bring that up, A, to invite anybody in the audience to take that kind of free assessment. But B, it stands for a principle of making sure that you're helping the audience with whatever problem they're going through. And content marketing and content development is a great way to do that in a very kind of authentic way.
- [21:22]
B
So you mentioned this grader that you built. Tools are great. People love hearing about tools. I want to circle back to Marcy. You mentioned tools like, let's dive into your tech stack for this. Once you start deciding you want to go after aeo, what do you bring in? You got your SEO agency.
- [21:38]
A
Okay, cool.
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B
What else?
- [21:39]
C
Yeah, so we use tools through our SEO agency. Our agency is Vario, which I think I got from y' all as a recommendation in the Exit 5 group. And the tools that we use are Peak AI which you can go to their website. It's hard to. It's a tough brand name but it's P E C A I and they have lots of validation from brands they represent. There's another tool at a company called Scrunch as well and that's a startup. But Kevin White, he's a marketing guy, he went there as well and they have a really good report as well and they can give you sort of competitive intelligence along with your own company intelligence. So here's the thing though. These tools are very nascent and very much so evolving with this because we all started like at the beginning of the year trying to figure this out. So what I know for sure is we're missing a lot of attribution which is the age old problem and so we cannot fixate on the numbers that are coming out of it. We have to know that everyone we know is looking at them and to make sure our brand is showing up as we want it to show up. And so yes, track the numbers, report to the board exactly what you're seeing, but do your due diligence as a marketer and make sure that we're providing accurate answers and positioning your brand for success.
- [22:53]
B
What would be the like holy grail that you're trying to get to is. I mean it's probably attribution. Is it knowing exactly how often you're, you're showing up in LLMs? What would be the closed loop thing here?
- [23:05]
C
Well, we hear it from the salespeople. So your prospects or customers that are going to LLMs are very high intent, they're looking for answers and then they show up in sales calls later on. It takes longer, they convert at a much higher rate than any other channel. Like for us, um, it's, I think I mentioned it's 0.1% traffic but it's like 5% conversion rate on that traffic. So it's pretty high. They're very informed, they're researching who they're going to go with and then they show up to the demo later talking about it.
- [23:34]
B
Marcy, anything else in the stack? The reason I'm asking is I want to give people. I think we can go back to the content and the structure in a second. I have some questions on that but I, I think there is a lot of noise around tools and what should you be using? I don't even care so much as to like the name. Obviously people in the chat want to know like, oh, she said this tool, like I'm going to go try it out. Like I need shovels to shovel my driveway. I need a snowblower if it gets really heavy. Like what are the jobs to be done that marketers need to attack? This problem I guess is kind of where I'm coming from.
- [24:00]
E
I think one of the things I'll say and I also got a recommendation from CMO counsel so shout out to Dave is not paying me to say.
- [24:07]
B
This by the way, but I will now. I'm going to send you back whistlers.
- [24:12]
E
After this but Jess Joyce, I think it's just Jess Joyce.com she has been a really great hands on and she's actually mentored some of my team who are kind of new to SEO and AEO or the combination. I'm treating them as one thing internally but she helps us so and we have access to some of her tools plus we have our own. So she's been great. She's kind of like the guide that helps says hey yes, this is a fad. She kind of can be a gut check for me, helps prioritize and lead the team on some of the more technical mechanic stuff. So I think she's a great partner. We also use so she uses Peak EC and then we use Ahrefs and Semrush. They track different things and get different answers. I kind of would recommend just picking one and sticking to it because then if everybody has access then you're going to get one person going. Well why did our AI visibility this month? It didn't rise at all? Oh well, we were acting in AHREFS and we rose six points. You get those kinds of things. So I think it's best to kind of unless you're just having an agency manage it and use their tools stack. I think it's best to pick one of those. I don't really have a strong opinion on which one's better. They track different things. There's different things to like pros and cons. It's just test them both, do a free trial and pick which one works for you. But we use those to sort of track the AI visibility, the prompt rankings, things like that send us a monthly view. We just got the AI versions kind of to test them for a quarter. We just got the sort of AI upgrade for both of those. I think we got them in November so still testing. Haven't really made a final decision on that. I do think this is a little off topic Dave, so stop me if you want if I'm going too far. But it seems to me like the volume from AEO is still Tiny.
- [25:47]
B
Oh, yeah. I, I, I have a sample size of 1. But just like for our business, I will go and look at some of those tools. Sometimes, like, we use hrefs, and I'll go in there and I think part of me is just like, everyone's talking about it, and so it's like, cool to be like, check this out. And then it's, oh, we got two leads last month from this source, and that's compared to hundreds on other channels or whatever.
- [26:07]
D
I'll jump in on that front. I, I think as marketers, we have a long history of catastrophizing the impact of new technology. Again, I go back to the same principles, different tools, but we're guilty, I'm guilty of, hey, there is new technology that's going to upend everything that we do when the reality is to the point that y' all are bringing up. There are, of course, early adopters, but the rest of the market takes a little while to sort of catch on. If you live in San Francisco. I live in San Francisco. You'd think based on Highway 101 and 280 and all the billboards that are around, that the entire world is AI native. Every company out there is AI powered in AI native. And the reality is things feel like they're moving faster than they probably are. I also think that not all traffic is the same. Claire, to the point that you brought up, the type of traffic that comes to our website from an answer engine is just a different type. They're actually lower in the funnel. And so the job to be done of a website at that point is much more about, like, conversion rate optimization and making sure that you've got the right experience set in front of people than almost kind of anything else. And then in terms of tools, I think there is a massive proliferation of tools out there. And so my guidance to everybody here now is choose the right one that fits you. We're giving best practices. We use graphite, by the way. Great agency. And I'd say the principle that I would adopt over here is like, trust your SEO. Your SEO expert is also going to likely be on the front end of changes that are happening with aeo, and they're going to be the right ones to understand which shovel should we buy.
- [27:45]
B
Yeah, when we, when we were talking about some of that stuff earlier, I forget who said it in chat, I wouldn't given the credit, but the real name for this AEO, AEE AIO stuff should really just be like, this is search marketing.
- [27:55]
D
Right.
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B
It's just the New wave of like figuring out, yeah, okay.
- [28:00]
D
All right.
- [28:00]
B
AI generated slop. I think it's the best thing to.
- [28:03]
A
Ever happen in marketing actually, because it raises the bar, right? AI slop is going to kill deals, kill brand and kill trust. Today, marketers like, we're also customers too, right? And so we have to actually put ourselves in the position of our customers and think about all the AI slop they're seeing. And it's on us to create things that actually matter, things that have meaning and impact, things that are educational, entertaining, funny, useful, specific and relevant. And that's everything that our sponsor Air Ops stands for. They're helping reshape how people discover and connect with brands. Because AI slop is not going to win. Air Ops is built for marketers who want to create content that sounds like their best subject matter expert, not another chatbot. This is content grounded in real sources, real insights and real information gain. Their content engineering platform helps you surface your highest value opportunities. And AI search then shows you how to actually take action on them. Not just see dashboards, not just get another recommendation or SEO report, but actually go out and execute. And this is the topic that everyone is being asked to get smarter about right now, AI search and SEO. If you care about this topic, then you want to go and check out Air Ops. They're built for you. It's airops.com exit5. You can learn more about Air Ops and what they're doing in the AI and SEO space. That's Air. Air ops.com exit 5.
- [29:22]
B
There's a comment that I want to address and we can push on it. This is all great, but this is all too high level. Use an agency, use a tool, make great content. So like, let's up our game and like prove that we're not just calling the shots from the, the ivory tower over here. One thing I wanted to get back to in the, in the content was I want to hear what does that mean? What content are you creating? What is the content strategy? There's so many approaches from over the years. It used to be just be like volume wins. We need blog posts, you know, every day. Then it was like this other pivot to like we're going to focus on. I used to call it like pillar content 10x content. We're not going to do a lot of content, but when we do it, we're going to write meaty research reports. But now today you look at it, it's like you got to be on LinkedIn, you got to be on YouTube, you got to have Instagram, TikTok all. You can't possibly do that. And then what happens to some of our stuff sometimes is like, I'll think I have this great idea and I'll put a video on YouTube and it gets 17 views. You need a real strategy here. I'm curious to hear about the actual approach to content strategy and what needs to be created. And I want to make that person feel like, all right, yeah, they heard.
- [30:21]
C
Me, I can give it a go. I am not my direct content person, but I do approve the plan and read every single thing that we put out. So I can give it a go. But ask me more deeper questions and then I can also follow up with you. So what we look at is we start with just like regular SEO, what are the keywords that we want to own? And so once you have that keywords, like for example, for us, it's Property intelligence would be one of those keywords. And then once we have that keyword for AEO specifically, we figure out all of the prompts that would relate to that keyword. So give me the top property intelligence providers. How do people get Property Intelligence? Does Property Intelligence integrate with X workflow?
- [31:03]
B
And are you, are you doing this just like riffing, like coming up with these ideas yourself, or is there a way to research this?
- [31:09]
C
Yeah, I mean, part of it is you can look up and see Google Trends, what people are searching for. You can also see inside of some of these tools, adjacencies that your competitors are ranking for. And that gives you some idea of where you should go. You're already doing this in paid. You already know what keywords you want to own and paid. And so a lot of this applies that you can sort of pick up and go from. So it shouldn't be.
- [31:30]
B
This is a good add on to this, by the way, which Aaron put in the chat. Like, comes down to knowing your customer, Google Trends, sales call data, Semrush, those types of tools. But I, my head went right to like, the tool side of this and it's like, actually, no, if you have a deep understanding of your customer, all the sales calls today are recorded. We all have access to AI tools to be able to analyze this at scale. Right. You could probably use AI to actually come up with the prompts here. It's like, hey, here's the makeup of our 50 best customers. Here's some transcripts, some objections, whatever. Let's come up with a list of the 10 prompts for these people.
- [32:01]
E
Yeah, I mean, everything is recorded now. So that is what you just said, David, in terms of people wanting tactics, I think that's a great way. And we have actually generated some of our highest performing content from that of sometimes it sales individuals if we don't have a call recording, but if we do have call recordings, leveraging. Okay, like you said, these are the 50 calls. What are some common themes across these? Obviously it's dependent, like I said, we're very complex by our journey and it's dependent on vertical, etc. But you can really drill down and get those content pieces and then from a tactical perspective, having somebody ask, I know like who do different content for each and I'm like, I'm a fan of one content strategy and just thinking of it as the human versus the, versus the content and the AI formats. The content is sort of how I think about it. That's how I think about it.
- [32:45]
D
I think there's one, one other part over here and super clearly like this isn't high level in the ivory tower and just thinking about kind of what the content strategy is. But on the ground we tend to think a lot about how do you build in the open and how do you provide value that way. It really goes back to that principle that I said earlier. If you think about how you can create content that provides value, I think about it from almost a community development perspective and sometimes people think about that and it doesn't feel as like marketing specific as it needs to be. But the reality is that from practitioner to champion to economic buyer, there is a whole change that's happening right now and people want to see people building in the open. And so the way that we think about our content strategy in part is I've got a team of about 70 people in the marketing team and one of the things that we encourage is hit LinkedIn, hit X, hit Reddit and talk about what you're learning and share the best practices, where you failed and what you've learned, where you've succeeded and all of that. So anyways, long winded way of saying that that type of building in the open I think is a way for you to keep the noise in the market, which I think is super important today. But also make sure that it's not just AI slop, but you're actually authentically sharing what you're learning.
- [34:03]
B
I like that. We used to talk a lot about air cover and that's why I'm a huge advocate of PR and social. Marcy, you're about to get on a heater and I love it. My ego got in the way. And you know, I'm thinking this is my show and it's not. So.
- [34:16]
C
All right, so I also want to reiterate. Blogs are one tranche of your content for aeo. So there's multiple ways that you can do it, right? So you can write blogs, but you can also get cited. And third party citing is maybe one of the most important things because it signals to the algorithm that what you say is true. It's like a third party source of truth. Have you heard that phrase? It validates what you're saying. And so if you get multiple sources saying the same thing, this goes back to like describing your brand and product accurately. If multiple sources are saying this in the same way, it must be true. The LLM is going to push this to the top of the recommendation. Okay, but back to blogs. So once you have sort of your keywords, then you have to kind of have to like sit and think for a little bit, put it in your brain and put your shoes, put on the shoes of your buyer. For us, it's like many different buyers, we do this in many different ways. But you think about the buyer like how are, what are all the topics at the top of the funnel that they're going to be researching as it relates to their profession? So let's go back to like aerial imagery for example, another one of our top keywords. So if they're looking at aerial imagery, they might want to know as an adjacent topic what I can see with satellite versus aerial imagery or what can I get with drones. And you need to then write content for all of those things, even if it's not directly related to your product. Because what you're trying to do is build up awareness and consideration with your prospect so that when they come time to buy, because 80% of people looking at this stuff are not ready to buy, they'll know Eagle View and then have it in your consideration set. So it's really counterintuitive and frankly, one of the challenging parts of this is that you've got to go to your subject matter experts inside of your company to get them to review some of this because it can be highly technical and as a marketer you do not need to know all the technicalities of every product. So then they'll object be like, we don't even sell satellite imagery. And you have to like explain to this that you are trying to circle the buyer with information so that they know your brand. So, so we literally have a doc if you want to get tactical. We have a Word document that has all the keywords we want to rank for. And then we have a plan. We write out in the plan like a six month basis all of the blogs that we're going to write for that six month basis to focus on one or two keywords that we want to rank for. And then we smash those out and it's not our number one priority, but we make sure we're consistently doing that. And then on top of that for the blogs, for blogs that are already ranking for us and LLMs and search and other ways, we have to update that at least once every year because recency is another trigger for the algorithm that you need to be on top of. So slight adjustments, making sure it's fresh content, that's sort of the second effort.
- [37:06]
B
I love this line about circling the buyer because I think if we separate the like AEO whatever, like, oh, that's the strategy is like circle a buyer surround sound for wherever that Anyone want to build on that? Before I take us in a different direction, this question came up and I made a note, talk about it. Mariella in the chat says, are you all investing more in PR now that it's back? And I made a note here earlier just to myself, which is like, I wonder, like, do you all see the PR and brand become like even more important again? Because here's an example, I'm researching this product. A lot of the enterprise types of products don't always have publicly available pricing, right? And so I might want to buy something. Pricing is not available. Well, there's a good chance that someone somewhere has shared that pricing on Reddit. Right? And so if I go to the LLMs and I'm asking to do the research, it's like, oh yeah, this actually costs this. And so the marketer's dilemma though is like, well, I didn't write that comment on Reddit. And so we all go to like, oh, we should be on Reddit. And it's like, well no, because it's not like you paid someone to write that comment. Someone actually like used the product, liked it, wrote about it. Is there some element of like, let's reinvest in PR and brand because of this whole circle the buyer thing and it's not as easy to tie back to sales. Anybody kind of like pick up the direction I'm going in there for sure.
- [38:19]
C
I don't want to take up all the air. But yes, we went back to long form PR just for the sake of PR this year.
- [38:26]
B
What is long form pr?
- [38:28]
C
Yeah, just one year ago it was like, oh, shorter PR is better, you know, one page press releases. And now we're doing like multi page press releases, cramming it with more information just for the purpose of this. And again, inside the organization people are like, why are we releasing a press release on blah blah blah. And if you're my competitor, please put on your earmuffs. But yeah, it works. It's just more recency, more citing. And then like with pr you put out a press release and immediately everyone sort of repost it now because journalists are all fired so there's no one actually writing any articles anymore. And so the publishers will just repost your exact press release. And it's super.
- [39:05]
B
Just like that, you got a link from another domain. It's like the whole Google thing all over again, right?
- [39:10]
E
For 2024, granted I was a little new to the company and learning the industry and everything, but in 2024 I think we might have done one press release. And in 2025 we did like I want to say 8 to 10. So I kind of drilled down on that and I, I don't have any exact speaking to the person who was like, oh, can we get like the real marketers in next time? I am both. I'm up here at 30,000 Foot View, but also the actually writing the press release that gets sent out and researching. So we did really sort of double down on the press release. We also had a lot of news to share, but I think that I don't have the exact numbers on. Well, did that move the needle? There's some opinions versus data conversations happening internally, but it is also going to be a big part of our strategy for 2026. So I'm with you Marcy. Just to reiterate what you said on the. And even our priority person, the press release wire that we use, they're really helpful. Like we don't pay them extra for that, but they're helpful with telling you like, hey, what works? And they have all said every time I do a press release and I have that live call, they're like, yeah, long form, long form is in. So that's from the big guys at.
- [40:13]
C
Cision.
- [40:16]
D
To kind of double click on what you said. It's fun to both be the leader of the team and the operator at the same time. And I think as things change, all of us are rolling up our sleeves. I started my career in PR and I think having that as a foundation, the ability to kind of tell stories to extraordinarily cynical audience in like 30 seconds or less, it's just an important success criteria for any, like, marketer today. And so to whoever asked the question, should you invest more in PR or not? I 100% think invest more in PR right now. And I also believe that the nature of PR has changed and that the press release is a tactic. Like we're talking about a tactic. Should you do press releases or not? Yes, you should. But press releases are only a part of how you should be investing in pr. And so what we've been doing is we've really realigned our teams so that PR actually oversees not only like media relations and corporate reputation, but social media marketing and influencer marketing and external and yeah, that's just confirmation bias.
- [41:23]
B
I've been writing my ass off about this on LinkedIn and someone finally said what I think.
- [41:28]
D
Yeah, well, I mean, and I completely agree with that. The external and internal part of PR is also really important because the people who work for your company are your best brand ambassadors. So what you need to do is make sure that you're arming them to spread the gospel. And so we've seen great results in terms of that approach. And I think the last thing I was going to say, I want to go back to this, circle the buyer, because I think that can't be emphasized enough. The data out there shows that. And I think it came from LinkedIn or from somewhere before that. 95% of your buyer audience isn't in market right now. They're just not. You're really only speaking to 5% that in the market. So as marketers, our job is to take that 95% and actually push them in market and find their category entry points. And so when we're developing our content strategy roadmap, we're really thinking also about what is that category entry trigger and how do we create content for each of those trigger points.
- [42:26]
B
I like that. I love the combining those roles because social is the new PR today. This word of mouth. And then also, okay, you started your career in pr. That's where I started. I think about this. The challenge is back then there were lots of trade publications, right? I, I worked with one company that was like a legal IT company. And just in the legal sector alone, there were like 20 blogs and magazines and publications that covered legal tech. That's all gone away now. And those people are, they have their own substack, right? Or they have a lot of followers on, on a particular platform. And so that is, you need to influence them, which I really liked. And then also on this, the topic of a press Release beyond the benefits of like you writing something that the LLMs are going to crawl or whatever they call it in this world. I love it as a forcing function for you as the company to have. To have something to say and have some news. And so it's like, I just like the exercise of writing the press release. And I obsessed over like Steve Jobs writing and they used to write the headline first or for any product launch, they'd be like, I'm going to write the headline that I want the journalist to write. And it's like, exactly that exercise of like, let's write this. And then where it's like, okay, yeah, what have we done over the last three quarters? What do our customers care about? Like, what stuff have we shipped? Or it can be like, oh my gosh, like, we have no innovation, we've done nothing. And now this is a forcing function for. I think that like product marketing cadence and tying that stuff up into news is also really important. And how we talked about air cover a little bit, I think that's how you can kind of like manufacture your, your own news internally also.
- [43:56]
E
Yeah.
- [43:57]
C
You know what's painful as a marketer is I write a lot of press releases to help our company understand what our product is and the value when it's so backwards.
- [44:07]
E
Right.
- [44:07]
C
Like, we should not be creating products not knowing what the value is. But yeah. So we use press releases a lot of time as a clarification methodology for our company and we work out sort of the positioning as we write it. And it's unfortunate that's the way that happens, but it's actually a really good tool for it because of course, we want everyone to, in the C suite, your GC or the CFO to your CEO, certainly to approve your press release. And it acts as a mechanism to solidify what we're actually offering and who we're going after. I saw someone in the comment asking this and I think it's really important. You have to push the press release to the wire. That's what gives it the momentum. So it would be helpful, I guess, to put it on your website, but it's not going to have nearly the same impact as if you put it on the wire.
- [44:52]
B
I got a bunch of questions in the Q and A and I want to get to some of them and then we'll wrap up. So I'm going to rapid fire these. Whoever feels the strongest inclination to pop in and answer it, it's. It's up for grabs. This question is for a startup with limited expertise and budget. This seems like a tough start. Do you think it's manageable? So let's reframe this and if you were running marketing at a startup with basically no budget right now, what would you be thinking about from a content and AI standpoint?
- [45:17]
C
I would not be worrying about AI in terms of aeo. I'd be worrying about understanding my positioning and messaging and the AEO will follow if I had limited time and budget.
- [45:29]
D
Marcy, I was going to say the same thing. You and I share a brain. I think the smaller the place, think about your positioning strategy, your messaging, what's the differentiated value that you offer? Who cares a lot about that value? And then lean really into that. Wow. And I definitely share.
- [45:45]
E
Yeah, I agree. I was going to say something similar, maybe a little more technical of just that. Yeah. Once you nail that, then just starting with a very small manageable content strategy. If you do have information on, hopefully you have information on who your buyers are and what they're looking for. But creating content start small. Maybe a weekly or bi weekly publishing cadence. But I think, yeah, I agree with what Marcy said in the beginning. Like I wouldn't be starting about aeo. I would be thinking like what content do we need to create that will be useful to our buyer and then from there you can work your way up. But I do think it's manageable to do it without an agency. I mean it takes time and you have to have leadership aligned. But I do think content strategy and SEO and AEO and what you guys know my thoughts by now on that. I think of it as like one thing.
- [46:30]
D
Right.
- [46:30]
E
But I do think it's very doable.
- [46:32]
B
No better way to learn it than to be forced to do it. Because you can't hire an agency like these big fancy CMOs. No, I'm just kidding. This one is more about on page web stuff. I don't know if any of you have any learnings here. If the blog and resource hub content plays such a big role in search engine, how does that methodology apply to core web pages like product or service pages? What do we need to do content wise on product pages to rank well for aeo? Any lessons there on like actual just structuring of the web content?
- [47:00]
E
I think that for me that goes back to the three things that adding the TLDR key takeaways section on those pages, even the product pages. Even if it feels like maybe this is too short for a TLDR key takeaway, I still think it's important. We've seen that work. I also think adding FAQs to those product and solution pages, ideally they mirror real buyer questions if you can. But again if you don't have an agency or you don't know what those are, you don't have the feedback loop established yet with your sales team. Get that feedback loop established if you can. But I think having those. They're little three or four or as many as eight or ten. I can share some in the chat. I really love shared links. I can share a few. Bankrate does a really good one on the E A T which I had to Google what that stood for because I forgot because that felt like a Marketing 101 class 20 years ago. But I'll share that one and then Credit Team I think is the other one. I'll share them. But they both do a really good job. The sort of the comparison pages. So we are still working on building out that content, but sort of like the us versus them, hey, here's what we do. Here's our differentiation and using legal. If you're big enough to have a legal team, they may give you grief about doing like for us, I'll say one of our competitors is Language Line for the language services pillar of our business and that is like something we're working on is actually Piedmont Global versus LanguageLine and actually doing a comparison. It seems like the algorithm, the LLMs like that kind of content. But I'll send you. I'll put in the chat those examples of some actual. Hopefully it's helpful tactical to kind of how to structure this.
- [48:34]
B
I think we hit on this one. How are y' all tracking AI search? What people are asking. You've mentioned a bunch of tools. Just recap on the tracking because I feel like in order to start we need some progress on this is it. Semrush was one Ahrefs has their brand radar tool. Anything else that we missed there?
- [48:49]
E
Peak.
- [48:50]
B
Peak. Yeah, a lot of. A lot of peak comments.
- [48:53]
D
Yeah, Peak. We use Profound as a tool as well. Again there. There are a lot of individual tools out there, each with their own, I guess kind of added value proposition. I just go back to the basics either if you're using the peak or Profound or. Or whatever but we look at all of that. We are also looking at the fundamentals of, you know, traffic to page conversion rate on page. Making sure that we're setting up sort of experiments on page in the right way so that we get, you know, sort of the greatest amount of learnings from them.
- [49:22]
B
My lesson and I'm going to Apply this to our business from today is like just making sure I have a strong opinion or you know, let's talk to you, making sure you have a strong opinion on how people find you and how people buy from you. And let's work backwards from there. And now it's like, oh, maybe like some of the best plays in here are not necessarily just the cool AI tools to create the content and help you rank for these terms, but it's like a world where like we have all of the customer data, we have all the sales calls, we have all the churn notes, we have all the best fit people. We can analyze all that. I was watching a guy demoing Claude code today and basically there's like a tool in there where you just, it asks you the questions all the way through. And it's like I could just be using an AI tool to basically tell me what I should be working backwards from to come up with the prompts. And I think that's a really helpful lesson. Okay, producer Aaron, let's roll the poll. We believe in measurement. Speaking of measurement, we are a data driven company here at exit 5 and we this is a product for us. We really care about these. So we measure all them. Rate this session right now. Five if you loved it, one if it wasn't great. We've never had a one. So don't you dare press that button today. I see a lot of fours and fives, which is where we want to be. And there'll be a bunch of follow up on this. I feel like we can't hit on this enough. There's going to be an endless appetite for like, hey, teach me how to do AI SEO. Teach me what to learn. We hear you. We're going to continue pushing on this topic. I thought this was great. The mark of a good session for me is often how much I'm scribbling down during this. And I got a bunch of stuff. So just a quick virtual, you know, round of a thank you for Marcie Claire. Dave, thank you to webflow for being a partner and sponsoring this. Go and check out everything we do. Exit5.com all of this will be up on our website and our podcast. You can check them all out on YouTube if you want to go and listen and get smarter on B2B marketing. I'm Dave Gerhardt. I'm the founder of Exit 5. I'm the host and I'm out of here. This was an awesome session and we'll see you again in a couple weeks.
- [51:12]
A
Hey, thanks for listening to this podcast.
- [51:14]
B
If you like this episode.
- [51:15]
A
You know what? I'm not even going to ask you to subscribe.
- [51:18]
B
Subscribe and leave a review, because I.
- [51:20]
A
Don'T really care about that.
- [51:20]
B
I have something better for you.
- [51:22]
A
So we've built the number one private community for B2B marketers at exit 5. And you can go and check that out. Instead of leaving a rating or review, go check it out right now on our website, exit5.com our mission at Exit 5 is to help you grow your career in B2B marketing. And there's no better place to do that than with us at exit 5. There's nearly 5,000 members now in our community.
- [51:43]
B
Community.
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A
People are in there posting every day, asking questions about things like marketing, planning ideas, inspiration, asking questions and getting feedback from your peers. Building your own network of marketers who are doing the same thing you are.
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B
So you can have a peer group.
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A
Or maybe just venting about your boss when you need to get in there and get something off your chest. It's 100% free to join for seven.
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B
Days, so you can go and check it out risk free.
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A
And then there's a small annual fee to pay if you want to become.
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B
A member for the year. Go check it out.
- [52:11]
A
Learn more exit5.com and I will see you over there in the community.
- [52:24]
F
Hey, by the way, we're doing a new event at Exit 5. On the heels of our very wildly successful and super fun drive, we're doing an event designed for marketing leaders. It's called the Exit 5 Marketing Leadership Retreat. It's a two day in person working session for CMOs and video VPs in Arizona in March. Not a conference, not a marathon of content. It's a room of a hundred. Only 100 marketing execs from companies like Zoom, Snowflake, ManyChat, Bitly, G2HP and more. You'll spend two days pressure testing real decisions with your peers who are doing the same job you are. What to hire next, what to cut, what's actually working, what's not. Small, intimate, exactly what you have needed in a marketing event designed for leaders and CMOs and VPs like you and me. It's on March 18th through 20th, 2026 at Mountain Shadows Resort in Scottsdale, Arizona. We have a hundred spots and they're filling up fast. I think as of do as of recording this, we had 42 tickets sold. So if you're a CMO or VP of marketing and you want to think better, move faster and lead with more clarity. This year, this event is made for you. We do awesome events. I'm su super excited to have this one out there. You should go check it out. Exit5.com retreat that's exit5.com ret.