Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: All right, welcome to session three of ten Speed Sessions. I'm Nate Turner. With me today is Kevin King, co founders of 10 Speed. And today we just have two main things on the agenda. One is just allowing ourselves to kind of go into a lot of this topic that's very prevalent right now, which is how to kind of be shifting measurement of activities per all non paid activities, how to be thinking about organic search in terms of measurement.
So that's a really big topic. And then there also was a post in Search Engine Journal About 10 hurdles CMOs today are facing, which a lot of that kind of resonated and ties with a lot of what we're talking about today.
That's the bulk of it.
And so I think just to kind of kick it off, we obviously talk to a lot of marketers. We talk to not always as many CMOs necessarily, but certainly marketing, different types of roles, but manager, director, vps and so, you know, are certainly having a lot of these conversations right now. A lot of people are having them on, on LinkedIn elsewhere, but it is a big shift in how people are thinking about the metrics and just kind of how to work from that. So that's kind of where we want to start.
[00:01:32] Speaker B: Yeah, I think kind of provide more context to. It's particularly important. And the conversation has really risen to the top around how you measure organic success over the past, I'd say like even three months, but like three to six months you probably say. But it's really become even more so as the whole geo, you know, llmo, whatever you want to call it. But GEO seems to be winning out now.
Aeo, as we talked about before, that, that seems to be a big part of the shift is just like really how people are finding things online now. And I think just if you want to make it super binary or black and white, that it was a lot of times from an organic perspective just search, organic search.
[00:02:19] Speaker A: Right.
[00:02:19] Speaker B: So now it's evolved but that's why it's come up.
But I think the thing I would probably set as like the tease into this conversation is that we've already been in that world for a while and there is what I believe a lot of catch up that we're doing in regards to how we measure organic success.
If you were only measuring it on search, that was a very, very narrow focus and you were missing the forest through the trees.
[00:02:46] Speaker A: Yep, yep. Yeah. And I think if you go back to your typical, you know, source medium type of categories in Google Analytics from a long time ago, you had Paid channels and specifically you know, paid search. You had organic search, just traffic directly coming from search engines, referral direct and then social started to become a bigger piece.
Initially that was heavily lumped into referral, kind of got its own bucket, kind of didn't.
But there's a lot that has shifted within that landscape. So GDPR certainly was a big.
We could go way back to say yeah, you used to be able to get organic keywords in Google Analytics. But more recent than that GDPR started to shift how analytics and tracking was happening.
And then the launch of GA4 became another big kind of milestone shifting point into how people were looking at that just dealing with. We had 10 speed was running, we had clients who like we went through that shift with all of them.
And there was a noticeable shift in having less clear attribution when the GA4 rollout happened. Like a lot of things you can do and I think companies have figured out but I think there's like some, some steps of degradation there. And then to your point like for months we've had, I mean even if you go back to featured snippets initially rolling out and being some zero click searches, then more recently AI overviews and that type of behavior. So it really has been sort of this stair stepping down and away from this world where you could know exactly where people came in from exactly what they're converting on. And then to your point, the, the rewiring that's necessary to how you think about organic and is that just what comes from a search engine or is organic non paid more broadly and that type of stuff.
[00:05:04] Speaker B: Right. And I think the reality is that content or however you're marketing your product through non paid channels and know we'll do this a lot probably throughout this conversation but is you're enabling, you're just, you're creating things that you're distributing into a lot of places that will naturally find themselves into places that maybe you didn't even intend but you were, you are optimizing for specific places. Search has been a big one.
But even the past few years we've seen the rise of like you, you kind of alluded to dark sources or the. Yeah I'd say dark sources but like it's like Slack communities or things like that. Like there's places where people are sharing and talking about products and in ways that like are the result of your marketing efforts.
And it's like historically been more considered like earned media I guess. And that's kind of like it seems like where it's going back at least that or organic is maybe evolving more into that kind of space, which is a good thing that everyone is broadening their understanding of that. But like, I guess to put a point on it is just, it's, it's. There are so many channels that are built with organic intent, and I don't think everybody really considers all of those when, when actually even creating a strategy.
[00:06:27] Speaker A: Right.
[00:06:28] Speaker B: For how to market your product.
[00:06:31] Speaker A: Yeah, and I, I mean, to me, I think they're like I was alluding to before. I think there's just a really, really big shift necessary.
Just an entire generation of people who experience digital marketing in that very clean, crisp attribution standpoint. And the reality is that a lot of those people are now executives, they're now board members.
And so you also. I think that that's going to be a very, very critical shift is how. How is the board judging the executive team? How is the executive team judging the marketing team? And if they're still trying to hold on to this, like, I don't want to spend on that because I don't know exactly what I'm going to get from it, or more specific conversations around organic search. In particular, because of the rise of generative AI or whatever it might be, there's so many things that it's just going to require a shift to having a better blended view and understanding of the multiple ways that it can impact from that. And then I think the other part is that the marketing team, we've said it for forever, like organic search is just one distribution channel.
[00:08:03] Speaker B: Correct.
[00:08:03] Speaker A: You've spent time and money to create a good piece of content.
Ideally you are creating good content, but you've spent the time and money to make it, use it, distribute it multiple ways, multiple channels, get the most out of that content.
And if you're not doing that, then, yeah, you are kind of like just leaving yourself to have maybe a smaller piece of the total pie versus, yeah, we created this and we're putting it in all these places. We're getting awareness, we're getting reach, we're getting engagement, we're getting all these different things.
[00:08:42] Speaker B: Right. And I think that that is really what you should be looking at as a whole across a lot of things, which I know we'll touch on a few things. And I don't want to get there just yet when it comes to how to like, actually look at that. But I think one of the things that has been interesting because we are kind of going back to a time in which attribution wasn't as Clear where we had this like golden age of like everyone having a really strong understanding of hey, my conversions come from these channels. You can get some of that but at the end of the day like you have to have some self awareness or acknowledgement that like it's not all actually 100% accurate.
And there is actually going to be a case for correlation across a bunch of different things that if you're doing all these things especially for producing content and distributing content, and you're getting more eyeballs across a set of maybe predetermined and aligned agreed upon sources that are within a specific bucket, maybe organic than that what you're doing is working especially with those bottom funnel, lower funnel metrics are going up into the right, which we've touched on I think a bit in one of the previous episodes and other episodes and we talk about a lot with clients is that focus on the high or lower funnel conversion business impact metrics and then you can establish what your organic APIs are in this new world across a bunch of these new sources.
[00:10:06] Speaker A: Yeah. Yep. So I guess to be more specific, you're saying like instead of like companies look at organic search impressions in search Console, you're saying that now requires just looking at that different, maybe bundling or blending impressions or you know, overall reach in a different way across more channels.
And then obviously we can get into more of the generative AI metrics and we'll talk about that shortly as well, around how that introduces new types of KPIs that are not necessarily replacing but being added to those other ones. Is that kind of effectively what you're saying?
[00:10:52] Speaker B: Yeah, and I think labeling those kind of groupings accordingly, where I don't want to sit here and say impressions are the end all, be all KPI, but if you put that in an awareness bucket, then that's good, that's what it is.
Especially if you're going after the right things or trying to get into the right places. Now I know we're going to talk a bit about referral sources, but that's actually one of the other new groupings is referral sources specific to LLMs being considered organic.
[00:11:25] Speaker A: But.
[00:11:25] Speaker B: But that's where we're having conversations a lot these days around making sure that we are defining that appropriately because referral sources are from those platforms are organic.
You're not paying to be in those places outside of the effort that goes into the work.
[00:11:43] Speaker A: Right? Yes. So you're saying analytics is categorizing it as referral from ChatGPT or perplexity or Whatever.
But in reality the original concept of referral was there's a website that's linking to you.
[00:12:04] Speaker B: It was more of the.
[00:12:05] Speaker A: Referring traffic to you.
I could understand the case to be made for it to be referral, but at the end of the day that's what we're saying, it all starts to blend. Because at the end of the day, if that's replacing a query in organic search and is now in the LLM, then that does have much more of an organic and earned aspect. But it is also referring traffic and therefore you're kind of just splitting hairs and absolutely need to look at it in one direction.
[00:12:41] Speaker B: We're not practically or tactically saying we're forcing the labeling of referral traffic and platforms and systems. Maybe that happens to somebody or certain sources can end up becoming categorized in different ways officially, but it's more that like if you can have a reporting system set up in which you do actually strategically organize those things, your understanding of your organic impact becomes not, yeah, probably a lot broader in terms of what your understanding is today, but just even more effective because you actually understand what sources to optimize for and then segment and do all the things that we are used to doing.
[00:13:28] Speaker A: Which is at the end of the day, that is one of probably the top three things analytics and data should be doing for you is telling you what's working, what's not, where to do more, where to do less.
Yeah. So before we jump into a bit more around the generative engine metrics and then also some other measurement model stuff kind of put you on the spot. Do you have two or three of the most common things you're hearing through client conversations and whatnot around the questions like just how companies are trying to figure this out right now. What are the questions? They're either being asked of them or being asked of us. And just to kind of commiserate or not commiserate, but just help anyone who is listening to kind of understand what others are going through and whether it's similar or not.
[00:14:32] Speaker B: Yeah, I think the biggest one, which we are discussing a lot and seeing a lot of even online discourse around is, is just, is it worth investing in organic. That broad question.
And it's, it's interesting because it's really closely correlated to what, which is a big reason was why we're talking about this. The, the declining click through rates in organic search. That's like what is driving that? And of course the rise in LLMs. But, but like if you look at your data, it's almost like I think that a lot of people are wondering if like their entire organic footprint is just going to all of a sudden be completely dried up. When the reality is we're seeing like click through rates drop from like the organic search, but it's still their organic in general if you look at everything is still their number one source and the metrics from a business perspective are still either sustaining themselves or going up.
It's just this kind of broad reactive kind of panic around just the visibility component and not a deeper dive and understanding of even where that decline in visibility is actually happening. Because a lot of the times what we're seeing is it is old legacy stuff that isn't as important to the client.
So yeah, I'd say that's at least the number one.
[00:16:00] Speaker A: You're saying the biggest concern is around losing that, but ultimately a layer deeper.
It's heavily into click through rate, probably lower impressions overall to some extent. But when you look all the way through the funnel there's far less impact on core conversions, revenue, that kind of stuff.
[00:16:23] Speaker B: Yeah, we're seeing other secondary or however you're labeling them KPIs like engaged sessions like going up from those new sources too. So like even if they're losing click through rates or clicks on like the organic search side, but gaining more on the LLM side, the traffic they're gaining, even though it's not as much necessarily is far more engaged than it used to be.
It's a really interesting shift because all of the metrics or the, the benchmarks that we have are being completely like reset or the expectations that we have for how this, these, these things should perform. Things being content, being organic search. And now these new sources are just changing.
[00:17:05] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:17:06] Speaker B: And there's a like collective industry like tornado of like trying to figure out exactly what to do.
And the other thing about that is, is that everyone's trying to figure out where they should get these loss, how are they going to reclaim these lost clicks and this lost traffic and all that. And it's just, it's almost like a fool's errand, like you're not going to be getting them back in the same way that you, you had them had before. It's not a one to one, although if you layer over which we've done a little bit with some clients you can see that like a decline in some of their visibility when it comes to like top of funnel or this that you can see overlay it with a increase in LLM traffic. So it's not necessarily one to one. There, but you can see that it's shifting, but probably becoming more engaged and that's a good thing. And I just think that everyone just doesn't understand how to validate it, I guess because our previous expectations are up and to the right. More, more, more, year over year, month over month, quarter over quarter. And we're just in this like time of. It's not going to be that way for a little bit.
[00:18:16] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
Yeah. Which is why I think the first session that we did, we talked about that importance of focusing on those lower funnel core conversion revenue metrics and not panic and like you said, sort of fool's errand and chase to try to reclaim stuff that wasn't valuable. Like if you're still converting, still driving revenue, obviously if your revenue is going way down, totally justified, that is a very different story. But I do worry and ultimately expect that there will be companies that just kind of shoot themselves in the foot or take a huge step back by trying to chase these things more, trying to kind of hold on to whatever was or refuse to change the way they're measuring and looking at success and therefore just kind of falling behind the folks who recognize where it's headed, how to reorient, how to set the new baseline and then go forward from there.
[00:19:29] Speaker B: Yeah, one really timely thing I saw was from some keynote I saw this morning was like Sam Altman from OpenAI talking about how ChatGPT isn't actually be. They're not actually a Google or search competitor and they're basically doing their own thing at this point. It's really clear because of the experience people are having there. And then if you look at like a lot of the data that people are now like updating like monthly around like market share and all that, it's very clear that that's not the case. And I think when you tie it back to what marketers should be doing in businesses and how they should be thinking about things, which is how they should have been thinking about them in less of a panicky way, is just making sure that you understand where your audience is at and optimizing for that. Now, yes, there's new sources, but it doesn't mean that your audience has left Google or Bing or. We never always talk about Google, we don't talk about any of these other search engines, but they're still there. It's just the way people are interacting with them is just different.
So. And I don't think that that's easily communicated upwards when people are just looking at the numbers on the spreadsheet or the deck?
[00:20:39] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. And I think there's a couple other pieces to that. Like there's been discussions around does the pie just get bigger?
Like is there still a lot of searches on a search engine? Plus a lot of the volume that moves to LLMs is net new additive because it's sort of a new outlet and new behavior and things that you could ask that you just wouldn't have googled and things like that.
So yeah, I think there's some dynamics there too that are yet to be seen and play out.
[00:21:23] Speaker B: Another interesting note too which I'll find the source and we can because I can't cite it off the top of my head but there is really good data out there too around how LLMs are despite like they're also sending referral traffic and linking out to websites or sending outbound traffic from their platforms like 2-3x more often than even like a Google or search.
When you compare the data it's different, it's much lower in terms of like the volume that people are searching for things on there. But it's a really. The point is, is that it's a really productive source for traffic. But there's another misconception out there that that's people are just staying on there and they're keeping you there and no, they're citing things, they're linking out and they are sending traffic and that's the thing that people just don't understand.
[00:22:10] Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And I think the last thing there about is we've talked before as well that like there's a decent amount of like fear mongering I guess around the business application of it. And I think that it's not uncommon especially on LinkedIn for people to cite very consumer oriented stats and position it as business lens. And so I think there's a lot there that will just continue to be a difference for sure in how many consumer queries move to some of these other tools and very personal things, travel things whatever it might be versus business query and some of that. So that's a lot to be determined. Any, any other. You had the one good one. Any other questions that you've kind of heard people are said that they're getting asked.
[00:23:16] Speaker B: I mean it's, it is top three all revolve around that around organic, organic roi, LLM, just understanding LLM and LLMs behavior and you know how do we get cited in those. That's the biggest one. Like how do we get cited more and more. That's probably number two or three in that list.
And like sub question like is it worth it? And it's such an interesting and complicated question. Actually it's not I guess that complicated.
Yeah. You should strive to get cited in those things if you're building a product that's site worthy and citable.
But yeah, I'd say that that's probably one of the biggest ones is like what are we seeing from a trend standpoint which we've talked a bit about. And, and how do you get into those new sources?
[00:24:06] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:24:07] Speaker B: And then you know, we've talked, we've talked on it. It's. It's very similar to how you would approach content for the other organic sources that we've talked about.
[00:24:17] Speaker A: Yep.
Which I think is a good segue. The Duane Forester has a substack and has been publishing quite a bit around all things, you know, generative engine optimization I guess.
And he in this post, we'll link it in the show notes we're not going to go through it in great detail. It's quite technical.
But he sort of makes the case for I think it was 12 new.
[00:24:47] Speaker B: Yeah, new KPIs.
[00:24:48] Speaker A: 12 new KPIs in this new era. So kind of like it's positioned as like the old SEO dashboard is out. This is kind of the new.
I think it's far too technical for a dashboard you would show to an executive team.
I think any operator or someone who's doing a lot of the work to optimize should understand these at a more practical level. But I think that to your point, a lot of the discussion so far has been around citation and your presence in the search and that's a lot of what we've built already in our internal tools like citation rates, where your position is, how often you're showing up in the search, share a voice against competitors, all that stuff. And the interesting thing is that the way he lays it out is like there's this stack like a.
And search stack. Yeah, I think he does call it a search stack still.
The interesting thing is that those are all like the last layer right. In his visual it's the bottom layer. But it's like there are a lot of things before that in terms of like how you're actually preparing your content.
Like the crawlability, indexation, retrieval, reasoning, that's all precursor, that's tied to the schema, crawlability, technical SEO, all the stuff we've talked about that actually does fit there. We've seen other studies coming out.
Again we'll make sure we have all the links in there that are definitely showing strong correlation to some of the best ways to do that are basically your traditional, what people have been doing in technical and on site SEO for a long time, which is making sure it's clean, it's easy to index, there's not bloat, it's clear, there's good schema, all of that stuff throughout there. And so I think that's really fascinating and there is some really cool stuff that he's broken down in that issue of his substack.
But it's a big topic and I think it's going to launch into a lot of new things for SEOs.
Do they keep getting called SEOs?
[00:27:34] Speaker B: Yeah, I think it'd probably be a lot easier if we just skipped to whatever we want to call all of this, which, I mean, again, it's Geo or just, I don't know, let's just leave it at organic marketing or organic marketers. You know, that's like probably a bigger chunk of everybody's time is just like trying to figure that out or just decide on what that is, when it's going to change. But yeah, I think it's interesting. I don't know if I, I found that article really, really a good thing because it actually does give people a new way to new new things to orient themselves around from an like LLM perspective.
And you can kind of draw the parallels which you're talking about to like search metrics of old, which he calls out early on. He's like, the old ways, this is the new way. I don't think he wants to call them like one to one. But you know, I read that and you can see a bunch of those things in the layers that he has in that sack are akin to impressions.
A lot of them aren't actually like metrics that equate to traffic or clicks or anything. They're actually just like, hey, here's an understanding of where you just appear and there's no activity beyond that. Which I think is also really interesting that no one's like talking about that. They're just like, let's get a heartbeat on where we're at and making sure that, you know, I feel like we're going to have this little period of time where we're going to start throwing metrics at executives that are like, see month over month, your frequency of appearance in alarms is great and let's grow up and they're going to see all these charts and then at some point they're just going ask the question of like, all right, well what's that doing for us from traffic perspective? And it's going to be even harder to tell because maybe they're not getting as much clicks and that correlation of visibility isn't as high as the clicks, which is similar to impressions and clicks.
[00:29:23] Speaker A: Yep.
[00:29:24] Speaker B: So yeah, I mean, it's interesting he gives you all the tools in that article to build a dashboard and, and yeah, it's super fascinating.
I'm excited to see how it plays out and I know we'll probably incorporate some of them to some extent.
[00:29:42] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, that's where I've been fairly deep into that in what we've been building internally and just better understanding that. And I think the piece that's being focused on less, or maybe just talked about less is how he makes a good point that if the bots for LLMs don't even get to your content or ingest your content in any way, then you're done from the start.
That's game over. It's the equivalent of having your, your site set to no index and then expecting to have results in a search engine.
If you don't get into that model at all, then everything else in that stack doesn't matter.
There's no citation, there's no traffic, there's no anything else.
I do think that's a really big piece that isn't being talked about as much as an area where I've been focusing. But yeah, yeah, I think that there's some good stuff there. So like I said, we'll link that post in the show notes definitely recommend that. And then there's a couple other, some good internal links within that post to some other stuff he's written that I think is all really solid.
You want to talk about clear?
[00:31:13] Speaker B: Oh yeah.
[00:31:16] Speaker A: We use a measurement framework called CLEAR acronym and it is something we started to build out.
How was it a year ago? Probably it's been through a couple iterations, but the idea was we just felt like through a lot of client engagements there was far too much dependence on just like looking at organic search metrics.
And we're talking through repurposing and we're talking through other stuff. We're doing work on other parts of the website which affect other metrics that aren't necessarily impressions. Click, click through rate and then just knowing kind of where we were headed with expanding our services to do more non paid channels and kind of support our recommendations for a lot of clients.
That definitely wasn't going to cut it in terms of understanding that. So we built this so go through it. Yeah. Conversion, loyalty, engagement, awareness and reputation with the idea that we could build, you know, tracking and metrics and things around some of these core questions.
So if you want to go through kind of what the. What each of those, like a theoretical question that a business is asking of itself for that. Each category.
[00:32:50] Speaker B: Yeah. I mean it's strategic and I like that it starts with conversion or C, because it's what we were talking about earlier, which is just generally what business impact is coming directly from our organic efforts. Which is the number one question essentially we're getting from clients these days.
Framed a little differently or phrased a little differently, but that should be number one and that should be like the thing that informs, you know, so much and everything else that we're going to run through in here. But that's the first broad question.
[00:33:21] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. And it's, I mean we tend to use the word organic to mean non paid.
[00:33:30] Speaker B: Right.
[00:33:31] Speaker A: Even that we probably should just reword for clarity because we are trying to understand the business impact directly and indirectly from all non paid, not just organic. So we meant non paid when we said organic in this case.
[00:33:45] Speaker B: Right.
[00:33:46] Speaker A: But even then everyone's working on it. Yeah. And like loyalty, are we building brand loyalty and retaining customers through our content, through our marketing efforts? Like that is definitely a big one for companies.
How and where are people interacting with our company and our brand? So that's engagement. That's definitely a big one. And like probably the most familiar and most carryover of like traditional quote unquote digital marketing metrics. I think yes would largely fit into that engagement bucket awareness. How is our overall visibility and brand awareness increasing? So again, that starts to become a big thing, like your brand mentions, citations, generative engines, search impressions, social impressions, all that kind of stuff. And then lastly the reputation. Are we establishing ourselves as an authority in our space?
We've said before, every, every company you ever talk to, it's like we want to be the authority in our space.
[00:34:53] Speaker B: And on specific topics like non brand, quote unquote topics.
[00:34:57] Speaker A: Yes. And more and more I think we've seen that shift. I think there used to be a heavy dependence on doing Gartner and those types of things or having a, a CEO who loves to be on camera and a PR company can go get them on interviews and all that stuff. But like we've seen a huge shift in, you know, CEOs being able to do that with written text posts on LinkedIn. And you know, I think the first party data like gong, I think was super early in that like just. Oh yeah, they weren't necessarily following that traditional playbook, but they just had access to a ton of data and became the authority in the space because of using that. And so I think we've seen that shift. And so therefore again, it requires a new kind of way to think about it and measure all of that impact. And so that's kind of where that clear framework has come for us and be able to have a much better picture across multiple channels, different tactics, all that stuff that kind of paints in there.
[00:36:09] Speaker B: Yeah. I think the reason I love the this model or framework is there are, as you've already touched on a bunch, There are existing KPIs that matter that can easily be mapped to each of these, which we've talked about. Some even like in the conversions, you know, MQL's and all that type of stuff, or just conversions, pipeline revenue, all that type of stuff. But is that whatever you align for those KPIs internally, when you actually you look at it all together, it is driving your strategy towards actually becoming more influencing the possibility of you making sure you're getting into the LLMs, maintaining your visibility in search, whatever it is. All these different things, but these check like all really critical boxes on all the things that at a high level that the new world of organic is like the quote unquote, new world of organic is looking at.
[00:37:10] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. And I think it'll be, it'll be interesting to see, you know, how this even evolves. And I think there will be some additional areas that probably start to come.
You know, if for example, we mentioned Duane Forrester, he sort of said here's 12 new KPIs. I think that a lot of those we said these are not all KPIs you present to an executive team, but of those, some of them probably fit within this model. But over time I don't think we're at a point in LLM and just general AI landscape that what he put there. That's the only 12 metrics. No, it's going to continue to grow and we get into agentic stuff, you're going to start to probably have metrics tracking around agentic usage versus actual human usage and different things. There totally no doubt that this is not 100% future proof. But it is far better in what we can see than just trying to rely on traditional attribution tool or GA4 type of metrics and reporting.
[00:38:35] Speaker B: Yeah.
One maybe final thing to emphasize on it is I think if you look at it as a checklist in terms of do we have coverage or are we tracking all the things in this.
Two things that really stand back or stand out and tie back to the stuff we talked about on previous episodes.
Reputation loyalty.
Those two in particular because they are tied to strong products that mean like you're building good products, you're marketing the. The product marketing is good and all those things which we have said are big influencers in this new world that like I think for a long time, products that, you know, they have funding or maybe just like have put it all in the marketing and the product's not there yet.
[00:39:25] Speaker A: Right.
[00:39:25] Speaker B: Like I want to just get there and then the product can catch up. I don't know if that's going to be the case anymore. Like it has to be like a nice balanced organization that is leading with value and all these things. I mean it's a nice sentiment. I know it's not necessarily always going to be the case, but I think that's good because I think in the past, like those two, those two sections would like likely be unchecked for a lot of teams prior to this.
[00:39:49] Speaker A: Absolutely. Yeah. Engagement, awareness and conversion would be the other remaining three. To your point. Yes, yes. I think that those have been tracked for much longer than the others. And so yeah. Or if anything it was like, oh sure, we have this PR firm and they give us some sort of report and that's kind of like stint of what they would look at from there.
Yeah. So this is certainly a conversation will continue as it evolves.
But the goal of this podcast is not to have breaking news and the latest and greatest, but obviously things that are very relevant that people are encountering right now and working through as companies, as marketers, all that. So with that we'll shift. As I mentioned at the beginning, there's a piece in Search Engine Journal that was kind of outlined 10 hurdles that CMOs are facing today.
So we probably won't go into depth on all of them or leaving comment because I think some will be pretty obvious. But you know, we'll link that article as well in the show notes and then we can.
We'll kind of run through these. So.
[00:41:14] Speaker B: Oh, number one is very familiar to the conversation we've had so far.
[00:41:17] Speaker A: Exactly. Perfect segue. Demonstrating return on marketing investment amidst economic uncertainty.
So obviously we've been talking about in particular the.
The rise of GEO and how some of that's shifting and that's a big part of conversation we've been having. Obviously There are many CMOs who are also facing other Aspects around all kinds of uncertainty with pricing, raw materials, all kinds of different things that may impact their business.
Yeah, I think demonstrating return on marketing investment.
I think there was a little bit of an unnecessary drilling down and differentiation between ROI and Romi in the article. But ultimately I would agree. I mean we don't probably need to go on much more with that one because we've already talked about it so much.
[00:42:19] Speaker B: No, I mean it's just we've talked a lot about all the things that you can at least start to put the pieces together to either demonstrate to your CMO what ROI looks like at a high level. Because there's a lot we've talked here that can require some more digging or more specificity. But, but yeah, like we know that that's a challenge and I agree that that's the number one thing because it's the number one question we're getting asked.
[00:42:43] Speaker A: And I, I remember when I was consulting at the time when beginning of 2020, like when the pandemic started and one of the things that I was talking, talking with multiple companies and was writing about was just like, like look, your, your planning roadmap just has to shrink way down. Like yeah, you're, you're not building 12 month plans. You're not saying like we do this Q1, this Q2, like and building all around that. You just gotta operate on a shorter cycle and be a little more flexible. And so I think that's probably the only other thing I would add there is just if you're going to test stuff, test it smaller. You can't just get into analysis paralysis and be afraid to make a move because you're going to feel penalized because you're, you're now being measured on a shorter scale potentially. But yeah, moving quicker, testing faster, trying things in a more lightweight like get early signals, double down where you're getting traction, like all that stuff.
[00:43:52] Speaker B: Yep.
[00:43:53] Speaker A: Second one we probably don't need to go into unless you want to adapting to Google's AI overviews and other SERP features. No, I think we've talked about that a good amount.
[00:44:01] Speaker B: I mean it's just similar to the LL. It's the broad conversation around LLMs in general. It's just like anything that is an AI summary. How do you get into it?
We touched on it earlier and other cert features are still there, but I think it's going to evolve too. I'd say that like from A, for 2025. Yeah, that's a big one. But I bet you it'll Drop down the list in 2026.
[00:44:24] Speaker A: Agree.
Number three was meeting evolving customer expectations across their omnichannel journeys.
It's a bit of a mouthful, I think.
Like, I don't. This is not new, I guess, is my. No, my takeaway. Like, we already talked about whatever you want to call dark social, like referrals and people talking in Slack and a lot have already been navigating that and like, where and how to stand out in customer views. Like G2 trust radius. Like, there's a lot. Yeah, it's been getting more and more fragmented over the years.
To me, that's not a new one, but it's definitely still relevant.
[00:45:16] Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, a lot of these things are going to tie to AI and LLMs, but I think the one thing that stands out there, because to your point, like, it should have been something we always, we've always been doing, but it's like within those channels or even the dark ones, like, just understanding that audience and like, what is the thing that's going to, like, really stand out in that audience and that tool or wherever a conversation's happening.
And that's like, where you talk about different content types and stuff. Right. Like, it's just not like, hey, let's create blog content and distribute it and all that. Like, no, like, how do you get. How do you end up, like, further down in the generative conversation?
[00:45:55] Speaker A: Right.
[00:45:55] Speaker B: Because someone's trying to accomplish something. But anyway, there's a long lot to go into in that potentially. But yeah, I agree. It's something we should have been doing.
[00:46:04] Speaker A: Yeah. Number four, balancing artificial intelligence with human or. And human creativity, which I thought was a really interesting point because it is something that I think, particularly in writing and design, I think are the two primary things. And talking with prospects, talking with clients, we're seeing a lot of different permutations of how people are using them. So they're different points in the process. Some are using it entirely, some are using it not at all.
And to me, that is a really interesting one because as a cmo, that means you're. You're trying to figure out what's the right mix of speed, cost and quality of output.
And so there are certainly some people who are, I want speed and I don't care as much about quality output and therefore I'm going to make decisions accordingly or whatever. But it is definitely a big new variable in how, you know, they're probably getting told you you have less headcount available to you this year or your budget is smaller or both.
And Therefore, that sort of puts a lot more pressure on how do I figure out the best way to utilize both and kind of get the best end result.
[00:47:36] Speaker B: Yeah. And just the abundance of tools that are out there for the teams or the resources you have to use. Like, it'll be interesting to see what happens in a few years because I think internal machines will have been built and machines, I mean, in quotes, a system has been built with those tools in mind to balance creativity and scale and all that. Where it'll just be not figuring this out anymore. It's just there and we're optimizing for it. But yeah, I think that that's actually one of the other questions. We get a lot from clients. It's just like, where should we use AI and. Or should we not? And.
[00:48:11] Speaker A: Yep, yep.
Aligning marketing strategies with overall business objectives, that shouldn't be a hurdle and me is table stakes.
[00:48:22] Speaker B: But I agree, I think it also just. Yeah, I agree. It's what we've already talked about too. Like.
[00:48:30] Speaker A: I, I guess I'll take that back. I think there are. I know for a fact there are a lot of CMOs that actually have a good understanding of how to tie marketing strategies to business objectives because they've had very fluffy accountability for a lot of their career and just pieces that didn't matter and maybe weren't as performance marketing, acquisition, marketing focused and therefore struggle with that. So I will, I will I guess acknowledge that that probably is a hurdle for some. It shouldn't be. And it, to me, again, it should be priority number one. Like, don't do anything that's not tying to business objectives.
[00:49:18] Speaker B: But I think that's reality. I think the one thing I caveat I put on it is like something I was alluding to earlier around, like, correlation is just like, I feel like it shouldn't.
It's how we approach that. It shouldn't be this. Like, I have to figure out how to attribute every single dollar to every single action type of thing, which it was. It's gonna have to be. Now how do I tell. How do I actually show and tell a story around the work we're doing? Obviously the investment put in and the out and the outcomes of that in a way that, like, makes logical sense versus, like, com, like totally. I can see it right here, one to one.
Right.
And then just making sure that you're not over your skis on investment.
[00:50:06] Speaker A: Yeah.
Number six, effective content creation, scaling and differentiation.
[00:50:15] Speaker B: I mean, that's kind of similar to the number four to some extent.
[00:50:19] Speaker A: Yeah. The AI and human creativity.
Yeah, I think differentiation is probably the biggest part of that one and ever more critical.
Again, it's all very, very good. There was just so much I remember saying at one point, probably said it multiple times.
We've reached this point where every marketer, content marketer, it just has like a Semrush license and a Clear Scope license and they're just like pumping out content for SEO and at kind of nauseating levels at times. And so I think this is all very, very healthy direction. And even again, tying into the GEO stuff really pulls it back and makes it cross critical to get it in the right place, differentiate, have meaning, create stuff for a reason, not just for a keyword and all that. So I would agree. And then I think like you said, the rest of it is that same kind of AI, human creativity balance. Yeah.
[00:51:37] Speaker B: I'm just glad content creation's on there because it feels like within that larger conversation we're having, it seems like sometimes they're questioning, should we even create content? You're like, yeah.
[00:51:45] Speaker A: Oh my gosh.
[00:51:46] Speaker B: Yeah. Isn't that what marketing is right at.
[00:51:49] Speaker A: The end of the day? Yeah, yeah.
Building and maintaining brand trust and authenticity.
[00:51:59] Speaker B: I think that that's actually a pretty big challenge to some extent.
[00:52:02] Speaker A: Yeah.
Because.
[00:52:06] Speaker B: All the things that again, we've alluded to, I think one product marketing is core to that.
I think customer success and customer success teams are core to that. Like it's a. I guess it's difficult because it's a cross functional thing more than just a marketing initiative. And you have to make sure all those things are aligned and working together.
And because it's not, we're past the days of like marketing being able to mask, you know, bad product. So like, how do you build trust if the product doesn't work right? Marketing can't just do that. So the product has to be good. So it's just like it's, it's a multi, it's a cross functional effort. So I agree it's a hurdle for a cmo, but I don't, I think like many things that a C suite member would own, they don't fully own it.
[00:53:00] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. And I think it's all the authenticity.
A lot of that's probably again very tied to the differentiation and whatnot.
Number eight, navigating data privacy and governance in a post cookie world.
I would argue that that is not a hurdle. That is a weight around a CMO's ankle as they have to try to go over every other hurdle.
[00:53:32] Speaker B: Elaborate.
[00:53:33] Speaker A: Oh, it's Just it's in my opinion an annoying I the Klarna CEO recently talked about gdpr.
[00:53:44] Speaker B: Oh yeah.
[00:53:46] Speaker A: And I think put it really well which is like the intentions were good, the whatever like legislation, policy around it was very poorly written and it's just evolved into such a tax on everything on the user, the end user, the company, everything. It's just like it's such a challenge that just finds its way into a lot of the different marketing challenges and tactics and everything you're trying to do.
[00:54:20] Speaker B: So yeah, no, I think that's well good point.
[00:54:25] Speaker A: But yes, very, very. I mean it's fine. I'll call it a hurdle. It is very much a hurdle, a challenge attracting, retaining and upskilling marketing talent. I think that's to me that's potentially top three. Agreed.
It's just a very fast moving time right now.
Say you have a marketing team of 10 people, you probably actually have already a pretty big distribution of their self learning, how much self learning they've done around AI tools, understanding LLMs, a lot of things.
Some people are going to self learn and evolve the times and the others are just going to want to keep doing the way they've done it. And so you're going to have this spectrum of people already there and then you have some younger folks coming right out of college or whatever that are going to be just so much more AI native already and that's only going to continue to be the case.
[00:55:36] Speaker B: They don't have all the baggage.
[00:55:38] Speaker A: Correct.
[00:55:38] Speaker B: They only know what they know is the reality now. So I heard this, I'm stealing it from someone. But that's like actually a refreshing thought that like they will just operate with the tools and the knowledge that they have and not like going like man I miss rankings. Like I miss you know, miss the days of keep like all these different things which is a good thing. So yeah, I think that that's actually hopefully there's some eager marketers out there but that's still like you gotta, yeah.
[00:56:03] Speaker A: Sift through it which is you know, kind of my second time around the track on all that because it was the same thing with the Internet in general, like.
[00:56:12] Speaker B: Yep.
[00:56:14] Speaker A: And so it was effectively an Internet native, you know, type of generation, you know, coming out of college and like we'd had it for a long time and emails familiar and whatever, all that stuff. So.
[00:56:30] Speaker B: Yep.
[00:56:31] Speaker A: But yeah, I think even just knowing like it says attracting, retaining and upskilling and I think that those are all valid hurdles in their own way like identifying what skill sets matter to you and what are going to matter in the next 12 months, 24 months, and attracting people with those, or getting your team up to speed, you're kind of running as the ground's being paved in front of you.
Yeah.
There's not a lot of vision out ahead because everything's changing so quickly.
[00:57:12] Speaker B: I think also, and this is kind of a downer of a note, but I've seen, I've read a bunch of Reddit threads that have been people talking about this, but the, the fear mongering we've alluded to as well around like the rapid evolution of the space, especially with LLMs, I think it's making really good marketers want to not be marketers.
So I think within that it's a challenge to find because you're like your, I think your pool is shrinking because of that to some extent. I don't know how to quantify that. Of course it's all qualitative and anecdotal, but you know, like, there's things that are being said to like, make people feel like SEO is obsolete. And that doesn't make people who've been working hard to like build this thing that is still relevant to the thing that is actually happening feel good because all these other, you know, other competing agendas. Yeah, that's my hot take for the first time, I think on this particular format.
[00:58:06] Speaker A: Yeah. I mean, I think there's always people, you know, there's plenty of people, marketers we've worked with that have pivoted into other areas and I think that's a normal thing. But I, I would agree that there's probably a bit of a watershed moment and you know, folks just saying, I'm just gonna go to nursing school or like I just want to do something completely different.
[00:58:31] Speaker B: You'll be bartender.
[00:58:32] Speaker A: Yeah. Or like I, you know, study to be a teacher. I want to go back.
[00:58:35] Speaker B: Those are better things.
Those are, those are better things.
[00:58:39] Speaker A: Nurse, teacher, bartender. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So anyway, yeah, I think that's a, that's a good point. And it, it probably will be a decent size shift. Yeah. For the industry.
And then lastly, number 10 was fostering cross functional collaboration, which I think hits on your point earlier that.
[00:59:02] Speaker B: It was the trusting authority. Yeah.
[00:59:04] Speaker A: Brand trust, authority, authenticity. Yeah.
That you have to work across the organization that much more.
I mean, even just thinking about like if you have a, whatever company of 500 people and you have people starting to use AI tools in different ways, signing up for free things like even just trying to manage brand guidelines alone across an organization is that much harder when people are leveraging all these tools, let alone everything else that comes under a CMO's purview.
So I do think that that's sort of like maybe not as much of a collaboration thing, but it is still very much a cross functional aspect. And then on top of that, yeah, the collaboration, how are we working together? What does this mean for the brand? What does this mean for our product or service?
There's a lot to it.
[01:00:07] Speaker B: I think all the best being successful products probably have like really strong cross functional collaboration. I think where we see it now especially being more important is in those we work with a lot of technical clients, technical pro, like clients that have technical products.
And you know, marketers aren't all AI experts. So you know, you got to work with your engineering team to understand concepts and make sure you're writing out the right things. And in. And that's not to say that like the answer to that too is like get the engineers to write that. Like there's a balance here.
[01:00:39] Speaker A: Right.
[01:00:40] Speaker B: Teams contribute in different ways and I think that that's a really good example of where that collaboration is super important. And then we're really big proponents of making sure you're enabling, you know, CS and sales and all that. So like all these teams should be talking closing loops and making sure that they're using marketing collateral effectively. So I think it is important. I actually feel like it shouldn't be 10.
[01:01:06] Speaker A: Yeah, good point.
[01:01:07] Speaker B: I don't know where, but it's further up the list.
[01:01:08] Speaker A: Yeah.
All right, we'll go ahead and wrap it up. Make sure to like and subscribe.
Catch any of the future sessions that we release. Visit TedSpeed IE to check out our company a lot of our content. You can also visit newsletter 10 Speed IO.
Subscribe to our free substack where we publish once a month. But then also drop these episodes there first so you can get those before they hit any other channels and yeah, well with that we'll wrap up and continue on from here. Sweet, thanks.
[01:01:42] Speaker B: Yep. Thank you.
