Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: All right, we're here for the second session of 10 speed sessions.
Driving home after the last recording, it hit me about halfway that I never even introduced who we are or anything. I was so focused on shifting from the former podcast and this one. So I am Nate Turner, co founder of 10 Speed and Kevin King, also.
[00:00:22] Speaker B: Co founder of 10 Speed.
[00:00:23] Speaker A: Yes. So sorry for skipping that if you happen to catch the first one, but we are excited to be chatting here.
And just a quick background. 10 speed we founded in 2020 so agency focused primarily on B2B marketing clients and covering a lot of different areas of non paid marketing. So SEO. Last week you talked about AEO aspect of that now as well, content marketing, social, you email kind of a lot of those areas. So that's a bit more about us. You can find us at 10 speed IO and also any of the podcast episodes like the last one. Find it there.
So with that, now that I've properly introduced us, we got a lot to talk about today.
Want to talk about some different stuff. You know AI is still certainly on the agenda. Some stuff about BB marketing and where we're going to start is talking about on Search Engine Journal recently was published a 2025 CMS Market Share Report and so just a couple of the highlights. We thought about maybe pulling up some images from that, but the charts weren't necessarily terribly helpful.
The wild thing from it is WordPress still very dominant at 61.2% of the market share.
And a subset of that kind of tailored to the E Commerce portion is WooCommerce which is tied to WordPress and kind of that like Plug in front is actually bigger market share than Shopify, Magento, Prestacart and OpenCart combined, which is something that surprised both of us. And then the last thing that we'll kind of touch on a little bit more is Webflow sort of surprised us at being only 1.2% very soon. That's when we hear a lot. So yeah, I want to kind of jump in and dissect the data and kind of talk about it as it relates to marketing.
[00:02:30] Speaker B: Yeah, I mean it stood out. I know we have talked about it a bit over the past, whatever two weeks since we kind of saw the report. But I think one of the, I mean for me it's satisfying to some extent to see because we're Both a bit OG ish in this space to see WordPress is still dominant. I mean we always knew that to some extent and I know that the 61.2% is slowly dropping I think that's one of the key takeaways but it still is the most dominant force and I, I, I do believe probably the best still to pro to go with in general.
But I think for how it relates to us and what we've seen over the past five years with clients is that like we felt that, we felt that there was more of a shift towards like the web flows and the headless CMS of the world and this report kind of enlightened us to the fact that it's not as dominant. Those are, those cms aren't as dominant as we once maybe felt.
[00:03:27] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:03:29] Speaker B: So yeah, yeah.
[00:03:30] Speaker A: And we've, we work with a lot of SaaS companies and I would, I would assume if you broke down that report by, you know, industry, there probably would be a higher percentage of webflow of framers. Another one that we hear a decent amount. Yep.
Contentful and HubSpot were also not on the list.
[00:03:50] Speaker B: HubSpot was the surprising one.
[00:03:52] Speaker A: Yeah. So obviously when you think about the totality of the Internet like that is so massive that you could understand a bit versus the, the world we play in with SaaS and B2B companies. But regardless, I think there's a lot there that to me stood out as like we should talk about it a bit more because I feel like we did hear a lot of companies saying we're moving off of WordPress.
We could talk about the elementor aspect of WordPress and then also just like the, I think like site speed was such a big thing for a while with sites that were built on WordPress being issue just sort of like legacy, you know, excessive code and some of those things that were really kind of impacting the site speed aspect. So there's a lot to it that I don't think it's like just because it's the big market share that it's perfect.
But I think there's something to be said for the obstacles that we've seen and why people have left.
[00:05:02] Speaker B: Yeah. I think one other thing on that is that we have seen actually since we started 10 speed, we did see that initial shift from WordPress to the webflows of the world. We had a few clients that moved to Contentful as of, I'd say the past 18 months we actually have seen more clients shifting back to WordPress. Yep.
Which again it's very satisfying because I still appreciate WordPress and its ease of use and but to your point, like the Elementor, which is one of the other bigger theme frameworks for WordPress that gets most commonly used. I guess they were called out in this article as well, I guess alongside WooCommerce.
[00:05:48] Speaker A: Right.
[00:05:48] Speaker B: As like one of the other subsets of WordPress that gets heavily used. But yeah, there was, I think, I think the big underlying theme across all of these things, regardless of what you go with, is that it still requires a really dedicated and talented and strong informed person to build the CMS. Right. So I just. WordPress was the first ones there really. So they got a big head start on everybody. Yeah.
[00:06:16] Speaker A: But yeah, and I, I think the other thing to that point on like we heard about a lot of people moving to webflow then we heard a lot about, you know, Framer and some different companies wanting to move there. I think, you know, if you're a marketer and maybe you're joining a company and the company's on WordPress or any CMS, I don't know that it's great to just jump on whatever everyone's excited about at the moment. I think that each and every one gets early adoption and gets some hype and it's something is unique about it. We kind of went through that with Contentful and that didn't stick very well early. Yeah.
Early in our time at 10 speed, Contentful was coming up in a lot of conversations.
Same with like headless CMS and moving into a lot of the react compatible stuff. And so there, I think there's hype and there's going to be hype and I think that as a business decision it's important to understand what it's going to take for support. We have webflow, it's very different. There's a learning curve.
Yeah, it is really good. If you have a designer who is, you know, has some front end chops then I think that tends to be solid because there's a lot that they can do themselves. But if you need support like consider, you know, WordPress has a huge ecosystem, tons of consultants.
You can probably, you know, whatever throw a rock and hit a marketer that knows how to use WordPress versus the latest and greatest they may not know. And so a lot of those things that you need to think through and are decisions beyond just what's the one everyone's talking about right now.
[00:08:16] Speaker B: Yeah, I think the thing too that gets lost in the shuffle when those businesses or teams move from like a WordPress to another new CMS like a webflower, any of these other ones that are listed here is that like one of the driving forces that always came up was I remember hearing this a bunch is that those platforms are really developer friendly.
But the thing that was always missed was like they weren't marketing friendly or marketer friendly and they aren't as, I mean they've come a long way. But I mean even we created a webflow like an SEO guide for webflow because there wasn't even any documentation or like they don't have plugins like WordPress does. Right. So yeah, so it isn't as tailored to the marketer. And that's the thing that always confused me, which also again is validating and why WordPress is still number one is that, you know, the day the website is a marketing tool, it should be leveraged and used by marketers and not all of them are developers. I think we're going to see a shift now with everything that we've talked about when it comes to like understanding how to modify code and things with AI that should shape that. But that's one of the things that I think is so interesting is that I think companies indexed on moving over to those because they were developer friendly. But then I think probably the shift back, I'm probably making some assumptions, but is that it was harder to use for the marketing team and they needed to move quicker.
[00:09:45] Speaker A: Yeah, I'll put you on the spot because we didn't talk about this before and I did not research, but on the front of like the legacy code aspect of it and site performance, we've certainly had some clients with WordPress and Elementor that was sort of a nightmare from technical SEO perspective.
Anything that you've seen on that front that's really changed. That's indicative of WordPress making an effort to address those challenges. Or is it still largely needing a developer to resolve it?
[00:10:26] Speaker B: I think it's still the person who's, you know, behind the wheel that that's the reason things go out of control, go off road to some extent, I guess.
I think the instance where we had some issues with Elementor, it was maybe a developer not being as SEO knowledgeable as they should have been, maybe in making decisions on to modify that theme for maybe a fancy UX that didn't perform as well from a speed perspective or have a good ux.
So yeah, I think it has to be still someone who's, at the end of the day, the people using the tools still need to be knowledgeable. They're not going to just work for you. WordPress is one of the better ones to be out of the gate as friendly as possible. But still you have to know what you're doing to make it work for you.
[00:11:23] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. So pros there are. There is a huge ecosystem, tons of plugins, whereas webflow and some others do not. And then the con being you could pretty easily just start adding plugins without understanding performance impacts and some of the other stuff that happens there.
[00:11:43] Speaker B: Totally. And I mean I've been there and playing around with even getting a plugin that has tons of reviews for WordPress you're just like I'm going to install this and then it breaks the site. Like you know, you never know what's going to happen. Some of them just work, some of them you got to know more.
[00:11:56] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. And I. The other thing I want to mention we didn't really talk about much like Joomla Drupal were on on that list which kind of surprised me.
But then between there were several and we'll have a link to the market share report in the show notes but in between WordPress at the top and where Webflow was Squarespace and Wix were whatever, 2, 3, 4 on the list, something like that.
That isn't terribly surprising. But I think to me I think there's a much heavier orientation towards small business, small website using those. And so I think that's also a factor. Like I said at the beginning, industry. If you were to take an industry slice of this report, it would probably look very different because we see larger companies, B2B companies that are building out large web presence. It's predominantly WordPress or Webflow.
[00:13:09] Speaker B: Right.
[00:13:09] Speaker A: So even though Squarespace and WIX have larger market share, it's not necessarily something we're seeing.
We've had companies be on those and we help them move off as part of the engagement as well and stuff like that.
[00:13:23] Speaker B: Yeah. If you're a local small business, you know, have a few services, need a four page website, four or five page website. Those are great solutions. So it's to your point around just do what's best for the business and make sense but then also just understanding like you know, having some forward thinking and planning around like is this going to grow and how do you want marketing to be perceived and all that.
[00:13:45] Speaker A: So yep. Cool. So don't necessarily jump on the bandwagon and the hype around something and certainly think through support and ecosystem and marketer usability kind of all those things certainly matter.
Switching gears a little bit, case studies.
We've really seen a lot of evidence of just a big rising importance of case studies in a marketing strategy, in a content strategy and even just kind of looking through our team looked through a bunch of data. And there's a. Most B2B marketers will know if you have a pricing page like Homepage to pricing page is a very common path that users will follow but pretty high up. There is also people going from Homepage to any sort of case studies that you have to understand that and kind of look at credibility but authority and just how LLMs are processing and utilizing case studies. We're seeing a lot there. So that's why we wanted to spend some time talking about how that is like where that becomes part of your strategy, kind of all that stuff.
[00:15:11] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, it's super interesting. I mean this is going to be.
We'll probably touch on this throughout a few different of the, a few of the topics here today and in coming weeks. Probably because it's becoming someone so important but its ability to influence LLMs is really big. That's you call it out. But one of the reasons behind that is case studies.
Not only are have they been, you know, kind of a fundamental lower funnel, bottom funnel piece right where you can really communicate the value your product brings to a specific example or business but it is a unique piece of content that only you can create about your business. And you know, no one else is going to replicate that. Like someone's not going to go and do a competitive SERP analysis and go like hey, let's look at these 5K. Like maybe from a structure standpoint they'll be inspired by how something's laid out and creative but at the end of the day the thing you're speaking to is truly unique. So I think one, it's really important because that's going to end up influencing alums and brand sentiment, all that. And if you have good stories to tell a good brands it's going to be really powerful.
But yeah, just classically though they're great decision making pieces of collateral. I don't think that's ever going to change.
[00:16:28] Speaker A: Yeah and it's, it is interesting because it, it seemed like most of my career case studies were like oh yeah, we need some of those or like let's, let's make sure we get four this year or something.
And it was just like purely for getting that into a sales rep's hand to maybe support a sale if they needed it and then on the website for people to kind of jump into that section like I mentioned as a bottom of funnel. Let's validate and confirm some of this stuff. But it is seeming as though there's like it is something that should now be more Strategically part of a marketing strategy, a content strategy, something that we're certainly recommending as we are building those for clients and kind of leading that process end to end on what to ask the customer and potentially doing the interview, writing that distribution, all of it.
Just seeing a lot of opportunities to plug that in and make that part of the strategy so that it's consistent but then can also be leveraged throughout other parts of the content too.
[00:17:51] Speaker B: 100%. Yeah. Like one of the things that's still really powerful is the ability to classically cluster content right around a specific topic, build multiple pieces that speak to different aspects of a topic, connect them right to build authority.
Case study can anchor that in a really powerful way so it can be a part of that cluster. But just clearly the bottom funnel or lower funnel piece. We get asked all the time too around like what should we be promoting in this piece of content like cta? Like where should this point to? Right. Like you have so many different options. Classically it's going to be your primary cta, but maybe you don't want to push into that. A case study is perfect. And if, if the case study speaks to not only the like top, the like feature that is tied to the topic, then like that's a perfect thing to push people to. And yep. It just creates a more natural journey that not everyone's going to go through. Linear like in a linear fashion. But it's just, it's a good piece that doesn't have to just be about the like non brand broad subsets of a topic.
[00:18:57] Speaker A: Yeah. And it can fuel a lot. You know the retargeting ads can be really powerful using that, they're tying that into. We do a lot of like core call them core pages. But whether that's feature page, solution page, any sort of product use case type pages, really good tie ins there, good tie in with blog content.
Good for organic social as well. Like a lot of places that that can, can come through and I think we'll see that more and more. Like we're already seeing that, you know, ramping up and we're doing more of that for clients. And I think we'll continue to be a big authority piece which ties to what I was saying last week that is just positive. You don't get good case studies from your customers if you're not doing good stuff and you don't have good product or good service.
[00:19:51] Speaker B: Good litmus test for you to find out if you're not doing great.
[00:19:54] Speaker A: Yeah. So I think it's again just A positive thing, moving a lot of these things in the right direction, but certainly something that we see growing in importance and we predict will be continuing to be very important.
[00:20:10] Speaker B: Yes. And then pro tips on these? Well one, because first they're not easy to create, which is why we like decided we wanted to help try to create them.
Which is why a lot of companies don't have as many. Because longer to produce, get a client or customer to agree.
Right. Like that's time commitment. You don't want to be sensitive to asking for more time.
[00:20:32] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:20:33] Speaker B: So there's all of that asking the right questions, which is a big part of it. You know, like we have to conduct an interview, do an async interview. All these different things. Right. All adds up. But if you're going to do it, it's probably best to even like that's a great piece for like repurposing.
Get a video testimonial and chop that up and all these different things that you can feed into your content ecosystem.
Promote it throughout other pieces of content as well, not just like have a CTA placement.
[00:20:59] Speaker A: Yeah. Which brings a good point. We clearly were talking about this through the lens of written case studies, but certainly a video component is going to be ingested by an LLM as well and they process what generates the transcript or not. It's going to kind of know what's going on there.
So there's possibilities for citation or a lot of times just unique things that are just being said in the video that don't necessarily get put word for word into the written version. So I think yet another way plus like you said, chop it up, kind of push all the pieces of that out and do more with that as well.
[00:21:43] Speaker B: Oh yeah.
[00:21:44] Speaker A: So yeah, I think that's something we want to wanted to talk about and keep. Keep an eye on because it's I think a bit of changing how marketing teams are orienting and where there's some priority.
Google's new AI mode.
So Google I O happened right after.
[00:22:09] Speaker B: We recorded last time, I think like the day after. Yeah.
[00:22:13] Speaker A: So obviously a lot of stuff that rolled out in that conference overall, but AI mode is certainly a big piece of that. So that's something we want to jump into. And really after having used it a bit and read some different articles on it and whatnot, I think there's quite a bit there.
I think if you haven't tried it yet, it is rolled out I believe to all users now. Maybe not the. I don't think it's the default yet, but it's out of search labs.
[00:22:50] Speaker B: Yes, out of search labs, but rolled out. Yes to all and not on business profiles, I believe. Correct.
[00:22:57] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:22:58] Speaker B: It's only on personal. Yeah, yeah.
[00:23:01] Speaker A: And so the.
So it is there. It is available. The interesting thing, if you haven't checked it out yet, what they call the blue links, like your traditional results in the page, effectively in kind of a right hand rail, diminished position on the right side, but still there just not 10 of them either. It was only three or four when I was working through it quite a bit. And the other interesting thing, I tried some of the classic best whatever software and it listed it out and it felt familiar to a chatgpt type of result.
But then if you actually clicked on the company name, it slid open on the side the Google business page, which was a very, very weird experience for a software company to have it pull up street view picture of a location or whatever. This is not at all what I want or need.
So yeah, there's just a lot to it and I think it's clearly new and developing and they're trying to figure out. A lot of people have talked about the, they have the innovator's dilemma and they're trying to figure out how quickly do they roll it out and disrupt their own world and all that stuff. And so we're in the early stages of it, but I think it's clearly in motion, it's happening.
They're moving pretty quickly on it at this point.
[00:24:47] Speaker B: Yeah, I mean it seems like it's.
I don't feel I'm super convicted on it, but it seems like it's the thing that they would probably try to maybe make the primary search at some point. I mean, I don't know if. I don't think there's been anything deliberately stated to that extent but. But yeah, I mean the experience so far is when you do have to reach for it, like you said, like it's a tab, right. You get an AI, it's a convoluted experience to some extent. You get the AI overview and then you unfurl that if you really want that. And then I think sometimes there's like a button at the bottom that says go to the AI mode or you can click on the tab. And so like you have all these different choices you want to make before you even get there. But yeah, once you there, the experience is. Yeah, is kind of all over the place.
But I think one of the big things that's been controversial is just how much it's probably not sending Traffic to websites. Yeah, it seems like an experience which they're, you know, Google, why wouldn't they say this? But they say that it over times that NAI overviews will send more traffic to websites over time. I think they're claiming that data, it's tied to AI overviews right now. But over time it sends more traffic to websites. Everyone seems to be going that can't possibly be true. Especially when you see like the way they cite sources and the way you click through to websites isn't naturally like it's not a blue link.
[00:26:11] Speaker A: Right, right.
[00:26:12] Speaker B: So AI mode just seems like this experience that's supposed to be like stay here, don't go to a website.
[00:26:18] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. Which especially knowing obviously a big part of that similar to Perplexity and the others is like the conversational aspect of it and additional dialogue that you get from that. And so I think that's interesting. I think like anything, certain queries will shift much faster than others.
Like I'm curious, I didn't see a lot in at least any of this stuff that I tested or read about like the visual aspect of it. So you think about like okay, I want to search for something, click through and see the text context plus images that kind of supports that, whether it's product screenshots or any of that kind of stuff how exactly that comes through. Because obviously, you know, even using ChatGPT asking questions like it's all just text responses. So I think there's certain things that are going to have a more visual element that may shift slower but overall it's clearly happening.
Being sighted by AI mode is really critical and that's sort of going to be a big portion of essentially how you're going to to get some of that click through traffic. And yeah, obviously like the brand recognition and all that stuff, but with super unclear attribution. Yeah, yeah.
But a lot of this was already kind of like the core building blocks were also just kind of already underway. The EAT and that stuff that had been pushed for a while on the, you know, core search algorithms and that still is a big component of this and they're cracking down a bit more on fake. Like they're kind of identifying, faking the EIT stuff.
[00:28:23] Speaker B: Oh yeah.
[00:28:25] Speaker A: So like anything, this is how they rank. I'm going to figure out a way to hack that. And so that happens every time they change the algorithm that people try to figure out how to gain the system. But overall EAT building topic clusters supported by data driven insights, first party data, case studies like we just talked about authoritative citations. All those things are I think again starting to lay the roadmap for how companies shift their marketing and go to market to be part of this.
[00:29:09] Speaker B: Yeah, there was an article or a bigger guide, comprehensive guide released yesterday on Search Engine Land by Mike King that went through all the deep technical components and under workings of AI mode and AI overviews. It's super interesting.
Lot a lot of detail there and it's all good stuff to really understand, especially as a content marketer and SEO and all that as this is evolving.
But some of the key takeaways still from it are like, to your point, like you know, clustering content or I don't want to say the wrong takeaways, but structured, high quality snip like snippet double content is really still like the most powerful thing. So one thing I'd say if you come across that one thing, it's a great read. We should probably put that in the notes too. But it's is that if you're creating content like it's good to have that information but don't think about that stuff when you're creating content to some extent, like create. Think about the audience, think about the structure. You know, make sure that it's not, you know, there's no fluff, there's no weasel words. Right. I know everyone like just make that. Not just make great content. That's not easy. But like that's the thing everyone should still be focused on is like audience targeting, voice positioning.
Are you, are you providing value to that audience and is this matter to them? And as it relates to what you're doing as a business.
[00:30:41] Speaker A: Right.
[00:30:41] Speaker B: That should still all matter as long as it's wrapped up in a, you know, nice strategy that makes sense.
[00:30:48] Speaker A: And yeah, yeah, all that they TBPN Technology Brothers podcast they were talking a little bit about like the example, if I remember correctly, was like wanting to know Tom Cruise's age and showed like pop that into Google like normal Google mode and it was like split second 62 like or whatever it was came up. But then you know, go to ChatGPT and it was like go there potentially have to log in if you're not already logged in, but then like choose the right model. Because if you don't choose the right model, it's going to take two minutes to come back with this far too in depth research. Yeah, but it was like significantly longer to get the same answer.
And so related to this as you talk about like Google's AI mode and what I was saying about certain queries whether it's more visual or you don't want the summary or you want to be absolutely sure that it's not hallucinating in some way or whatever.
I could see it. Not that I'm here to try to predict anything, but I could see it being useful to have some optionality in like a very quick toggle kind of experience in Google where it's like yes, I do just want like a summary and some conversational or I know, just give me a traditional 10 blue links and let me look through some of the authority signals or get to something like that quicker to get to the actual website and like consume some of that. Because I think similar to how on ChatGPT, whatever you need like a quick model to just kind of give you answers or do you need like deep research or reasoning and like different, different use cases. Use cases. I think there's, there's potentially something there on that Google front where you, you end up with this mix and balance and then you know, as marketers start to look at the data and see, okay, well our users behavior shows this. You know, for these types of queries and like solving these problems and then for the others it's here. And then you start to shape kind of your content, strategy and authority and all of that to, to kind of align to those.
[00:33:12] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, I, yeah, I agree. I mean like it's going to, it's going to be interesting how it shakes out. I feel like it's kind of interesting how people use, people are so used to using Google specific way. It'll be interesting to see that if people will. And now people are used to using ChatGPT a specific way and those two things are not necessarily the same. So AI mode tries to like get you to do the thing that you do on ChatGPT in Google. But I don't know if anybody naturally feels like that way. Like when, to your point when you were searching in AI mode, you were still searching. Kind of like you were searching on Google or at least your queer initial query was. Yeah, that's what I was doing too. And that's not to say we're the like benchmark for this, but like it took me a minute to realize, oh, I've got to interact with this like I do with that. But the psychological connection we have to Google is do it this way.
[00:34:02] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:34:03] Speaker B: So I think they do probably have a bigger uphill battle to fight.
[00:34:06] Speaker A: Yeah. And I did just for my own credibility, I did test it with more long form queries. But I was curious just like if someone does it to your point, like out of habit, just search best, whatever, what happens?
Does it pull it up? And so we've seen a ton of iteration on that just in the last 18 months with the different ways they've displayed AIOS and the company cards and different things that they've tried doing there.
I think so much of it is it's just a whole new paradigm of behavior that I think will fragment depending on is this the start of your search and you want to just tell me who's in the field and a one sentence description of each or are you trying to deeply understand some of those nuances and do you want to do that in a conversational way or go to a source and understand who's saying it about all kinds of stuff across financial industries and like that type of content and where are the stakes higher or lower for hallucination? I don't care if Tom Cruise is actually 61, instead he's 62, but I care if a software that I'm considering does actually integrate with another tool that I need it to.
So there's a lot that I think can and will evolve for all that stuff.
I think from my perspective, not that I've been a power user of AI mode on Google yet, but I think they've got some work to do to get traction and break some of those habits and really kind of make that a good experience. But I think regardless, I think that's the direction it's going and just a matter of time to kind of figure.
[00:36:20] Speaker B: It all out and in six months it'll probably feel pretty.
[00:36:23] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, agree.
So building on that, we talked at length about AEO Geo answer engineering, Generative Engine Optimization.
[00:36:38] Speaker B: Yes, it seems like GEO might be, even since we spoke, the more predominant one.
[00:36:46] Speaker A: Yeah, I'm going to keep pushing for the other.
I think the GEO aspect of it as in geography.
We were just talking about creating some confusion and.
[00:37:03] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, I was searching around earlier and it was if you look like best G GEO tools, any variation of that query.
Majority of the time it brings up a geographic technology. Like some sort of geographic technology or like geographic anything.
There were a few instances where you could see. I took some screenshots to share with the team where it was literally the AI overview was like a geography tool and then right below it was a featured snippet that actually had the like what we're talking about Generative Engine optimization. So it was two different, completely different things. So it'll be interesting to see if that changes Anyway, that's not necessarily what we're getting into here.
[00:37:47] Speaker A: I like AEO even just as the acronym, but I, I will concede that at its core, like answer engine versus a generative engine, I think generative engine is more broadly applicable versus answer engine. Like that kind of implies that you're like, you are asking questions. But it's more than that, I think.
[00:38:14] Speaker B: So if the answer was no, frequently I would say, but the answer's always yes and what you want.
[00:38:21] Speaker A: Right, right, right.
[00:38:22] Speaker B: Yeah, just a variation of it.
[00:38:23] Speaker A: Yep.
So like you said, what we want to talk about is there's a lot of tools starting to pop up and a lot of different flavors to what those tools are saying they do or what they do.
Some is around sort of the monitoring of results and performance and positioning and competitive intelligence and all that stuff. And we, we have been building some of our own, like, proprietary tech to do that exact thing for ourselves and for our clients.
But then some of it is also kind of claiming that it has some kind of brute force, automated, like gaming of the system to sort of influence a certain company to become a preferred response.
So we want to just talk about it because I think on the one hand, this is kind of the tools that are being built to solve what a lot of people are asking right now.
How do we know, how do we measure, to me is no different than when people started to want to understand how many people were going to a website way back in the day.
So there's validity there, but on the flip side, they're kind of just ultimately wrappers and it's unclear the validity of the data and how a lot of them really work and yeah, what exactly it's doing and all that. So super early, but has come up a bit and we want to just kind of talk through that as a category that's developing.
[00:40:17] Speaker B: I mean, it reminds me of just the early days of other, other like the initial Martech software space where, you know, social was kind of emerging and, you know, SEO had been around. But like, how do we understand the performance of these things and how these, the things that we're doing to spread our message and content across these different channels. How does that perform and how do we understand it better? And that's what these tools are trying to shore up. Right? Like, how do we analyze it? Like the analytics component of it right now, I feel like is the most, not the most important. It's probably tied with like, how do we get into this? And then how do we understand the most pressing question? Probably, yeah, and there's lots of what seems to be strong players so far.
But yeah, I think there's skeptic skepticism from like, you know, myself, our team to some extent, but like on just the ones that do claim to get you like into those like some sort of automated way. And I will say in our brief preparation of this topic on for this episode and over the past few months, because these have come across our, our desks, a bunch like team member will share one of these tools and every time I'll go look through it.
A lot of them have great websites, great product marketing to some extent. But the thing that's missing is like a very clear understanding or explanation as to what it's actually doing which then just causes it rings some alarm bells or raises some question marks around what it's actually doing.
I don't.
The performance analytics aspect of it seems much more straightforward. Yeah, ahrefs, we, we use ahrefs Shout out.
So they have a beta tool that's out there that's about, you know, brand visibility in all these tools. And we've been playing around with that and we feel good about that because we know AHREFS and they have brand recognition.
So if I were to land the plane on this thought, it's that like there's just a lot of new brands like I don't know, I don't know which ones to.
To trust in terms of their capabilities to do this effectively.
So I think there's a lot to be seen from them and also it's all moving so quickly. So I don't know how they could all keep up with that.
[00:42:39] Speaker A: Yeah, I think there's a lot specifically just to name daydream. Profound scrunch.
I don't know how you say. Cognizo. Cognizo, yeah. Cognizant.
Yeah. So I think there's a number of those there.
I think the long and short of it is I think this will be a real category. Yes, I think it's for sure, like we said, extremely early stages and we're building our own. And so I intimately understand the nuances of what you can and can't do, what we're trying to accomplish with it, the insights we want our team to have, what we want to be able to show clients how we then use it to do that. And so that's like I think the most practical things in terms of implementation. So again, not necessarily the ones claiming to brute force and get you into references and citations, but like the LLMs TXT file generation, some of that stuff from just like a schema standpoint and then also kind of a layer in the content creation process to sort of test for how well the content you're creating is sort of structured and optimized for that.
[00:44:09] Speaker B: Like a clear scope for LLMs to some extent or content optimization tool for LLMs. Yeah, yeah.
[00:44:15] Speaker A: So I think those are really clear use cases beyond the reporting side of it and so have seen some, some kind of good early signals on, on the stuff we've been building and.
[00:44:27] Speaker B: Yep.
[00:44:29] Speaker A: Yeah. So I think there's a lot there.
But yeah, in terms of like would I invest in one of those tools right now that feels like angel investing. It's so early and undefined. It'd be hard to really know how to pick a winner there.
And would I pay for a tool?
I don't know. As a in house marketer I think that there's just not, there's not a lot there. It's a new category and one of hard to say.
[00:45:08] Speaker B: A callback which was one of the notes I made earlier a callback to one of our previous topics was case studies. A lot of these tools that I actually was looking at, there aren't a ton. There aren't little to no case studies yet that they have promoted.
That's an influence and a decision making influential piece of content that would help us understand if these are working better. But I do think it's so early that like I, I not to be so like such a skeptic on it and or overly negative. I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of these tools do work but like how are we going to actually understand that until we get actual proof on it? I think that's one of the things that I'm waiting for to make a decision on like making maybe placing a bet on one of them or at least investing in one because there aren't free trials. A lot of them are contact us or demo request cta. So that's one of the challenges right now. It is early. I'm sure there's some good technology behind a lot of them but I think it's probably best to wait and just do a lot of the fundamentals correctly.
[00:46:10] Speaker A: Yeah.
Yeah.
And I think it's, you know I made the joke the other day that I if we could spend a little more time on it we probably could spin this out and go raise 10 million.
[00:46:21] Speaker B: Yeah, totally.
[00:46:23] Speaker A: Just because there's absurd amount of funding going into AI tools and wrappers. But I do think that's an interesting aspect of this is ultimately These tools are wrappers and it's very different than a lot of the AI first CRM or something like that where that's not just, oh, let me integrate with the LLM APIs and just feed stuff back to you that's legitimately building your own models as your base layer for your product and all that stuff. So I think there's already been a lot of talk around how much funding goes into wrappers versus some of the actual ground up AI first companies and whatnot. So.
[00:47:20] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:47:22] Speaker A: Yeah. So I think it's something to keep an eye out on or keep an eye on, but need a WordPress plugin.
It probably will happen.
[00:47:33] Speaker B: Yeah. Why wouldn't there be? It makes sense.
[00:47:35] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:47:36] Speaker B: Make sure all the content's structured in a way that just feed it right into the index. Yeah, I shouldn't have said that. We should just make ours.
[00:47:43] Speaker A: Yeah, still good.
Yeah, So I think we'll keep an eye on that space. But the last piece on the agenda that we wanted to cover today was unsurprisingly kind of going through all of this and we talked about last week or in the last session and we talked about so far today the.
[00:48:08] Speaker B: Skill.
[00:48:08] Speaker A: Set and well, the skill set for a modern B2B marketer.
And also we kind of have both conversations in parallel.
You know, if, if I were the framing of, if I were joining.
[00:48:23] Speaker B: Right.
[00:48:23] Speaker A: An in house company today as a VP of marketing, you know, where would I prioritize? Where would I spend my time?
I think both of those, we can kind of have that discussion in parallel. But it is, you know, clearly, I mean, just even recent conversations I've had with marketers of like a lot of people are sort of figuring out where, where are they putting dollars, where are they prioritizing?
No one feels like there's a super clear channel or slam dunk or silver bullet or whatever you want to call it. That's, that's the answer. It's sort of a mixed bag and go to market has been fragmented and yeah. AI SDRs and just.
[00:49:05] Speaker B: Oh, right. Yeah.
[00:49:06] Speaker A: We talked a little bit about the, the shift in paid and so. Yeah, like what, what does B2B marketing today look like?
[00:49:14] Speaker B: Oh yeah.
Well, I mean, I think there's a lot of different things.
Obviously the, a deep understanding of all the stuff that we've been talking about is, is going to be critical. Right. So if we back into it from there because that's going to be something that every, if you think about like you get hired, what are the questions you're going to get asked by an a cease like a CEO or co founder, especially if you're being hired as a VP of marketing, you can probably ask a ton of questions around and all that. So which I know we have like had a note on, but like the authority building aspect of things, right, like what type of.
Of material or content are you going to put out there that focuses on that? Not to be so specific on content, but building authority through content and different distribution channels is going to be important.
What else I know you had.
[00:50:12] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, I had like a willingness to adapt and learn. I think is whether you're like super junior or.
Or 15, 20 years of experience and think that everyone's kind of in the same boat on that front. I made a comment on LinkedIn recently about what's happening right now is a big part of what I sort of fell in love with SEO in the beginning, which was I was getting into it and then we had the panda and freshness and caffeine, like a bunch of updates that happened, algorithm updates that happened pretty close together. And I was like all of a sudden I was on the same playing field as people that had been doing it for much longer than me because we were all learning the new paradigm. And so to me this is the exciting part that it's not just this is how like what are being a lawyer or something like this is the law, this is the law, this is what the law's been and it stays that way or whatever.
There's a lot of innovation and change.
So I think in general there's now more than ever just a willingness to adapt and learn. And I think that it's kind of obvious, but AI skills are critical in terms of where because it's just coming at all angles from a B2B marketing standpoint, whether it's optimization or ad creative generation or on the content side and now all the AEO and all that stuff.
A number of ways that that's coming through. So from a skills standpoint, I think that some of those are probably the.
[00:52:10] Speaker B: Biggest also because comparing some notes that were overlapping was like one focusing on things. This is probably the most obvious thing to lead with, but like business impact. So like lower funnel.
We talked about it last time, so I'll draw it, I'll connect it to a broader skill set. But product marketing probably is like something that I don't think a VP of marketing would not necessarily not have, but I'd say it's even more important now.
So like investing in that, especially since now we're Talking if we tie it to LLMs. Right. We talked about how and I know there's been some good studies put out there on this but like the homepages are being serviced more and also just feature pages use case like just the core marketing pages are getting surface more in those. So. Right. Are you going to want to invest in people who know how to like create really strong product marketing? I'm sorry, strong landing pages positioning. Positioning. Also getting reviews and all those things like that entire function.
There's probably. That's an area to probably prioritize and invest in if the company doesn't already have a strong motion for it. And that's not something that you can easily outsource. There are some agencies, but it's a smaller percentage of them.
[00:53:30] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. And like case studies and reviews is something I had written down is like oh yeah, if I were you know, joining marketing today, like that's definitely an area I would focus on. So we didn't talk about that the reviews side of it when we talked about like case. The rising importance of case studies.
[00:53:50] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:53:51] Speaker A: But reviews G2 Trust, Radius, any of that stuff and like a lot of other.
Some niche industry ones as well. But that's I think substantially more critical now because that's again also just kind of all feeding into LLM. So it's not just oh, get reviews so that your potential customers can see reviews about your company and evaluate you that way. It's now feeding into that as yet another authority signal and citation and whatnot.
The review part of it I think is definitely big.
Yeah. I think if anyone's heard us at all in the last year, I don't think mine would be a surprise to anyone by the four main things that I wrote down if I were joining today.
So it's obviously not everything. I will quickly preface by saying I'm always a big fan of if you can get a good a positive ROI on paid ad spend, you should keep putting money into that until you're seeing diminishing returns.
Whether that's paid search or something else. If there's active demand that you can tap into on the paid side as a positive roi, do that.
That's baseline but under the umbrella of authority, really establishing the ability to do first party data. Yep.
Around like organic social building authority there thought leadership. All those are I think critical. And thought leadership can also just be being a guest on other people's podcasts.
[00:55:41] Speaker B: Or you know, personal brand. I'm personal brand which is like probably going to be very appealing.
[00:55:46] Speaker A: Yep.
SEO AEO so like obviously there's a lot of stuff about your core website in addition like technical SEO structure schema, integrating the authority elements into there still a lot of opportunity there across both aspects.
Case studies and reviews was the third.
And then as we continue to do for ourselves and work with clients like podcast, video, newsletter, any of those things that are going to help you build your own audiences and kind of built in distribution is all I think very critical.
And then obviously beyond that is kind of dependent company by company or whether you're exhibiting at events or some of those things. That's not necessarily a widely applicable use case, but those are kind of the four big areas. I thought pretty much no matter what type of B2B company that I would join that, that those would be coming in.
[00:56:53] Speaker B: Yeah, I agree, I had a lot of that. You just had it all categorized much nicer than I did.
[00:56:59] Speaker A: That's rare.
[00:56:59] Speaker B: Yeah, no, that's pretty much how it goes.
And then one thing I also threw in here is more of a like a kind of a shout, a promote, probably a promotional thing, but like working with agencies, understanding how to bring an agency on board strategically and effectively.
[00:57:14] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:57:14] Speaker B: Because I do think depending on the stage you're going to want to leverage them and companies want to run lean to some extent now.
So there's a lot of great areas where you can get value from an agency, obviously.
[00:57:29] Speaker A: Absolutely.
[00:57:30] Speaker B: I mean you're dear to our heart.
[00:57:32] Speaker A: Yeah. And whatever. Whether you work with us or a different agency. Yeah, I think that's a very valid point because that is still very much developing, but certainly have seen and heard many instances where the way a company is staffing in general marketing being a big part of that shifting because of where AI comes in, a lot of the things that would typically have been entry level employees, a lot of that work is and can be done. And therefore if you are running Instead of a 10 person marketing team, it's three people, you are naturally going to have bandwidth.
Even with those people being heavily empowered with AI and AI first tools and all that, there is certainly a bandwidth restraints and expertise restraints that I think agencies can and will continue to augment that. And it's just a matter of what happens with the agency landscape. And I imagine there'll be a lot of thinning out from all that.
[00:58:55] Speaker B: But for sure.
Yeah, I agree with all that.
Yeah, I don't think I have much more to add to that.
[00:59:04] Speaker A: Yeah. So you just, yeah, you just join the company and build your, build your website on WordPress and hire an agency. Write some case studies.
Yeah, there you go. It's also simple.
Yeah, I think we pretty well covered the agenda for today and yeah, excited to keep chatting through some of that stuff. We know there's a lot developing on.
Some folks have really started to uncover at a very, very detailed, nuanced level what LLMs are looking for, how they're deciding a lot of that stuff is starting to come out. So I think that's certainly an area we'll want to discuss in the near term as that plays out a bit more. We have the ability to see some of that for ourselves and test that with clients and whatnot.
But yeah, this has been a great session too.
Yeah, thanks for checking out. If you're still listening, visit 10Speed IO to access any other sessions or past podcast episodes, other content we have there. And with that we'll wrap up.
[01:00:28] Speaker B: Sweet.
[01:00:29] Speaker A: Thanks.
[01:00:29] Speaker B: Yeah, thank you.
