Leading B2B marketing technology podcast with host Greg Kihlström. Each episode is filled with ideas and insights of how B2B marketers can use technology and data to achieve greater success.
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Today we’re going to talk about using speech analytics data to enable better B2B marketing and a better customer experience.
To help me discuss this topic, I’d like to welcome Eric Williamson, Chief Marketing Officer at CallMiner.
About Eric Williamson
As CallMiner’s Chief Marketing Officer, Eric oversees all global marketing functions from brand and events to demand generation. Eric’s marketing team works very closely with channel and sales to drive pipeline and CallMiner’s explosive growth. Eric has over 20 years of experience in both technology and consumer products marketing from both the vendor and agency side. Before joining CallMiner, Eric was VP Brand & Digital Marketing at Acquia — an open DXP platform built around Drupal — where he led brand, creative services, webops, editorial, and demand generation. Prior to Acquia, Eric was on the agency side of marketing working as SVP Digital & Social at MullenLowe, and before that as VP Digital Strategy at The Martin Agency. During his career Eric has worked with a variety of B2C and B2B brands including Google, Microsoft, Intel, GEICO, Walmart, P&G, Pizza Hut, Acura, Royal Caribbean, and Hyatt. He earned his undergraduate degree from Texas A&M University and an MBA from The University of Texas at Dallas.
Check out The Agile Brand Guide website with articles, insights, and Martechipedia, the wiki for marketing technology: https://www.agilebrandguide.com
B2B Agility with Greg Kihlström is produced by Missing Link—a Latina-owned strategy-driven, creatively fueled production co-op. From ideation to creation, they craft human connections through intelligent, engaging and informative content. https://www.missinglink.company
Transcript
Note: This was AI-generated and only lightly edited
Greg Kihlstrom: Today, we’re going to talk about using conversation intelligence data to enable better B2B marketing and a better customer experience. To help me discuss this topic, I’d like to welcome Eric Williamson, Chief Marketing Officer at CallMiner. Eric, welcome to the show. Hi, Greg. Hey, thanks for having me on. Yeah, looking forward to talking about this with you. Why don’t we get started with you giving a little background on yourself and your role at CallMiner.
Eric Williamson: Sure thing. So as you said in the intro, my name is Eric Williamson, and I’m the Chief Marketing Officer at a company called CallMiner. CallMiner is the leader in conversation intelligence, which I think we’re going to spend some time talking about today. In terms of my role there as Chief Marketing Officer, I oversee our global marketing team. And that spans everything from brand to demand gen to events, as well as product marketing, and the BDR team.
Greg Kihlstrom: Great, great. So yeah, let’s dive in here. And we’re going to start by talking about what marketers can learn from conversation intelligence data. So first, just to define terms and make sure everybody’s on the same page here. What exactly is conversation intelligence? And what kind of data is collected from this?
Eric Williamson: Certainly. So I think a lot of your audiences is enterprise level organizations. So most of these companies have a variety of different ways that they’re interacting with their customers, or if you’re in health care, your patients. So everything from, you know, voice people calling into large customer service centers or contact centers to text and chats, whether it be the website or some sort of support chat, but hundreds of different ways that they’re interacting, even surveys that they do in post call, things like that. So all of that data is out there and available. But what typically happens is an organization, you know, marketers especially are generally just relying on surveys quite a bit for a lot of their insights and the things that help them measure customer experience. Whereas you’re missing a vast majority of unsolicited data from all those interactions. So conversation intelligence, like our platform, ingests and then uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to analyze 100% of all those interactions, all those different forms that I talked about. And it analyzes all that to provide real-time guidance to a customer service agent. And then the bigger proposition is if you think about all those interactions and the data and the valuable insights that are there, it’s able to find those root causes and those insights and level those up to, let’s say, a CMO or a chief product officer or somebody in operations. And these insights help them improve their business.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, and to build on that, could you give us an example or two maybe of some of the insights that that can be gained? You know, what are these? What is this data kind of leveling up to those those leaders?
Eric Williamson: Sure. So thinking above the customer service agent, because I think we’re going to talk about that a little bit. But if you think about the insights that might be valuable to a chief product officer, so several of our customers, if you think about this, you know, what’s the what’s one of the main reasons you’re calling into customer service? It’s because the product or service something’s wrong with it. They need support. And so if you’re able to analyze 100% of all those interactions at scale, you’re going to get a much better trove of insights that will be valuable to the product team to optimize their product or service. You’re going to get a lot of valuable information based on those interactions that could lead to product development. So that’s just an example from a product experience standpoint, that a lot of our enterprise level customers are using those insights to improve their business.
Greg Kihlstrom: And then what about those those customer service agents, you know, what kind of insights are they able to do that that might improve their work and the results from their work?
Eric Williamson: Sure. So yeah, in a in a large contact center, or a customer service center, there’s a couple different layers there, the the agents themselves, who, you know, in this case, if you’ve got a platform, like ours, that is analyzing in real time all of the, let’s say it’s a call, all the conversations, and it’s, you know, giving guidance back in real time, it’s allowing that agent to do a better job because it’s tapping into, let’s say, the knowledge base. So as these questions are coming up, or the conversation is going on, It’s spitting back out the appropriate product information, answers, guidance on how to solve the problem, which is key for the customer service agent. A level above that in the customer service centers, you’ve got business analysts or analysts in general that are analyzing some percentage of the calls, and they’re able to, I guess, better assess at a larger scale some of the agent performance. give them guidance. So part of our platform is a product called Coach, and it’s literally what it sounds like. It provides the ability by analyzing all those interactions, it provides the ability for those analysts and the contact center leaders to provide coaching back to the agents so that they can do their jobs better. Beyond that, some of the fundamentals of contact center is compliance. So you’ve got a lot of heavily regulated industries like banking or health care, where compliance is really, really critical. And so it helps to track a lot of that compliance as well.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah. And so taking a step back then to marketing strategy and, you know, those CMOs out there know, knowing that they have access to this conversation intelligence and, and the insights available, you know, what, what does this enable marketers to do that they might not have previously been able to do, you know, knowing they have these data and insights capabilities? Sure.
Eric Williamson: Uh, well, I think the first one would be. And knowing that that’s available, a lot of enterprise level organizations, in fact, we do an annual survey of CX professionals and customer service professionals across the globe, and only 50% of enterprise level organizations are actually tapping into this unsolicited data. A lot of it is just mostly still survey-based. So first and foremost, knowing that exists. If you’ve got multiple large contact centers, that data is there and you may not be tapping into it. Once you have begun to tap into it, then it’s just organizational. Let’s make sure you have those connections with the CXO or the contact center leaders who can give you access to this information. Once you’ve got that project going, then I think there’s a variety of different things. Just thinking right off the bat, a lot of large, you know, a lot of large marketing organizations for like an enterprise level company, they’re largely using survey based efforts in order to find the insights that are going to drive future product development, future marketing campaigns. You’ve got a treasure trove of information just coming from a lot of the interactions that are already happening. So you could be tapping into that just to inform what sort of marketing and messaging you should be doing. Beyond that, once you’ve launched these campaigns, there’s a ton of insight you can gain from hearing the interactions that are happening or analyzing those and seeing the insights. For example, a lot of enterprise-level organizations might have direct-to-consumer or direct-response type campaigns out there. These are perfect for the types of one and done, you know, was this a successful transaction or not, that can be analyzed at scale using conversation intelligence. Beyond that, you look at things like brand sentiment, which, you know, generally a large marketing organization for enterprise is going to be using some sort of semi-annual brand survey, or they’re going to be using NPS or CSAT or something like that. That is great, but that’s survey-based. So you’re missing out on a ton of additional data that can give you true insight into what your true brand sentiment or the emotion and sentiment of your customer base is. And then I think lastly, when you think about just campaign effectiveness. We talked about the direct response, but you can also look through all the interactions and analyze through to find out if your message is resonating, if people are saying some of the same phrases and terms back. And it gives you a better, deeper understanding of whether the message that you’ve been putting out into the market, whether it’s TV ads and some of the things that are harder to track, are actually starting to make an impact with your consumer.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah. And I want to follow up on One thing that you brought up early on after I asked that last question, because I think for those that maybe are not as familiar working with, let’s say, Fortune 100, Fortune 500, it might seem like, okay, well, these CMOs, they have access to all these tools and this data. But I want to follow up on what you were saying about a lot of times the stuff is there, but not known. And again, it’s, I’ve been there, and experience that, that very thing of, you know, there’s a wealth of information. It’s just, you know, it’s, it’s inaccessible, for one reason or the other, you know, sometimes it’s technical issues. But you know, just, I guess the question for you would be, you know, a CMO sitting out there, you know, what would your advice be to them? You know, they’re, they’re, they might not have everything that they want, everything that you mentioned, perhaps, but there’s probably some of this stuff sitting out there, you know, what would your advice be to them to, you know, what’s a question that they should ask? And should it be to their customer service team, or, you know, to get a little more of these insights, even if they’re not all the way there? Sure.
Eric Williamson: Well, uh, and as I mentioned earlier, you know, at least half of the organizations that are in our annual report, a lot of it is what we found from, from that, uh, research. A lot of it is organizational silos that is causing the problem. Um, another factor in this is, Many times, CX spans multiple departments. So you may be lucky enough to have a CXO, but a lot of times, CX lives a little bit in marketing, a little bit in customer support. So it spans it, which makes it organizationally difficult. But let’s just step back and say, all right, you never even knew this data was available, but you know you have five customer service centers, and then you work with two different BPOs for handling all of your customer interactions. How can you start tapping into this? I think the first thing to do would be to make a connection with some of those department leaders. Or if you’re looking for your peer levels, you know, customer service centers may roll up underneath customer support or sometimes operations. So make a connection with your peer. And instead of trying to boil the ocean, focus on a couple easier, smaller projects to start some of the things, some of the solutions we’ve talked about today, and start with that and get a couple of few quick wins where you’re tapping into that data as opposed to just survey-based data. And I think then you can grow from that as opposed to trying to do all of the things we’ve been talking about.
Greg Kihlstrom: This show is sponsored by BetterHelp. I can’t believe we’re already well into the summer months. Things move so fast. It’s important to take a moment to pause and check in. Is there something you’d like to celebrate so far from the year? And what are some adjustments you might want to make for the rest of the year? Therapy can help you take stock of your progress and set achievable goals for the next six months. You might want to think about your family, your friendships, your personal goals. Where do you feel like you’re making progress, and where do you feel like you might be able to use some help? If you’re thinking of starting therapy, give BetterHelp a try. It’s entirely online, and it’s designed to be convenient, flexible, and suited to your schedule. You just fill out a brief questionnaire to get matched with a licensed therapist, and you can switch therapists at any time for no additional charge. This summer, take a moment to do this. Stop comparing and start focusing. Visit betterhelp.com slash agility to get 10% off your first month. That’s betterhelp.com slash agility. So now I want to you know, we touched we touched a bit on the end customer experience, but I want to talk a little bit more about that. And So kind of talk about the inverse of what we’ve been talking about and talk through the customer lens. So as far as from the customer experience standpoint, you had mentioned, you know, the coach tool, for instance, and some other things as well, you know, what can be done in either in real time, you know, during a call, or maybe even immediately after when conversation intelligence is used to improve that customer experience, you know, how, what does this look like from the customer side?
Eric Williamson: Sure. And I think you sort of mentioned it, but both to be clear, both post, but Santa of a call, both post interaction, or both post call analysis, and then, you know, conversation intelligence, analyzing this is important, but also the real time aspect of it. I think where the real time aspect of it ultimately improves customer experience is because it’s improving the agents, customer service agents ability to do their job and solve problems. So you know, we talked a little bit about it, but When when a company is using our platform or another platform that has real time agent guidance, it’s giving it’s it’s listening to transcribing and analyzing all that at those interactions in real time and being able to provide back the tools needed for an agent to actually solve problems and do their job and which is going to benefit the customer and their happiness with the outcome of that call. For example, beyond that, from a coaching standpoint, What happens in most big customer service centers is the analysts are really only sort of spot checking in a manual way two to three or 4% of the interactions that are happening and looking for compliance, quality assurance type situations. when they could be tapping into 100% of that pool and being able to analyze that at scale. So just the sheer volume of interactions you’re able to access and use as insights that then make the agent’s job better and their experience better improves customer experience.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah. And so, you had touched on the idea of, or the challenge of data silos and everything, but obviously the opportunity to connect not only the data channels, but the marketing and communication and CX channels is tremendous here. So, how can conversation intelligence be combined with other, you know, multi-channel analytics to create that, you know, that North Star of the omni-channel customer experience?
Eric Williamson: Sure. So, depending on which customers, we have customers that have a variety of different ways that they are combining all this data together. First and foremost, when we think about conversation intelligence and, you know, our platform, et cetera, it is omni-channel. So, it’s able to ingest pretty much any type of interaction a large enterprise organization, typically, they’re probably already well into some sort of digital transformation effort, which means they either have a large data lake where they’re pulling all this stuff in together, or they have a daily CDP, that’s helping provide a rounded view of the customer. So integrating a platform like ours, that’s doing a lot of that analytics, The ideal scenario is that by pooling all this information together and all this data together, you’re able to map out this beautiful customer journey. But what’s missing a lot of times from that is the actual context and emotion, the sentiment that happened in each one of those interactions. You may have had a really amazing chat with the chat bot, but then when you talk to the agent, they didn’t know any information. things went downhill. So a platform like ours helps provide more of that meeting and context to each of those touch points, which can then be ported into whatever, you know, massive data lake or a CDP, your main CRM, whether that be Salesforce or whatever, that can help be the central point, but you have to have something that’s providing that meeting.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah. So last topic I wanted to talk about is based on a trend in B2B marketing, I’ve been seeing for years, and I’m sure you and those listening are seeing it too. And that’s a move towards co-opting more approaches in B2B from the B2C marketing world. And after all, B2B marketers and B2B buyers are consumers, at least when they get off work. And so there can be and is a lot of crossover in the thinking and approaches. So I wanna talk a little bit about what B2B brands can learn from B2C marketers. So, you know, what are the top one or two trends that you’re seeing in B2B marketing that maybe originated in B2C, but are becoming more popular in the B2B world as well?
Eric Williamson: Sure. I mean, I spent, you know, good half of my career on the B2C side, actually. So it’s a good observation. And I do think that B2B marketing can learn quite a bit from B2C. First and foremost, I do think that on the consumer side, large marketing organizations, whether they are client side or on the ad agencies, they generally, they build their career learning a lot of the fundamentals of brand in a much better way than I think most B2B, especially B2B tech does. And that could just be the nature of how marketing evolves as the company grows. But I think one of the biggest things would be the increasing importance that I’m seeing in brand and not just, not talking about, you know, the visual identity, although I do think that B2B tech in particular is, is starting to get better at this part of the overall brand identity, but more, more specifically being very, very clear about what your, what your unique point of view and positioning is, and being able to articulate that using a lot of the same brand fundamentals that I think B2C brands are much better at. So what I’ve seen in B2B is that it becomes a lot more formulaic. They think of it, the marketing, it’s an engine that’s delivering pipeline for sales, for example. And the value of brand in the past has, I think, been forgotten or missed quite a bit from some of the CEO or some of the CFO who’s delivering the budget availability for marketers. I do see that improving quite a bit in B2B, but I think there’s a lot more work to do. And I think you’re missing a huge opportunity. It’s very hard to… connect that to ROI sometimes. But I think it’s a huge opportunity missed if you’re not building a strong brand.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, yeah. And is there anything I know that’s something that that a lot of B2B brands still need to, to adopt more of? Is there anything maybe a little further out that it might not even be on on many B2B marketers radars, but still that they should start paying attention to?
Eric Williamson: Obviously, from a tactical standpoint, I think any B2C or B2B marketing marketer should be, if you’re not already, you should be figuring out how to integrate gen AI into your work and process with your teams. For example, from a B2B standpoint, the marketing team, one big part of our remit is that we are enabling sales and customer success with all the materials and information and taking complicated technology type situations and providing the right positioning and messaging around that. And it’s a constant battle to try and enable the field. Essentially, you’ve got tons and tons of inventory of existing materials, but inevitably the Slack channel is like, hey, do we have one of these? And you’re like, yes, we have 5,000 of those. So one of the things is leveraging Gen AI to create some sort of help bot that’s able to, they can prompt it, ask questions, and it’s not able to just go retrieve it, but it provides them a summary using your own inventory of all the assets your team has worked so hard to create to provide summaries. And then there’s the link. So tapping into things like that, or even at a much, much smaller scale, our content team, for example, The hardest part of writing a great blog post or white paper is the blank page. So it’s a pretty great way to get the ball rolling in terms of the writing process. Have it write a V1 and then you can take it and it either inspired you and you can build on that or at the very least it got things going and you can go through and massively edit it, which you absolutely should. Don’t ever just use chat GPT alone, please. But so those are some of the tactical things that I would recommend. The only other thing I would say is your team and your marketing tech stack, you’ve probably been around using AI through a lot of the software you already use anyway. So talk to those vendors and ask them how Gen AI is integrated in with the solution that you’re already using and ask them for some advice too, as opposed to taking it all upon yourself.
Greg Kihlstrom: That’s great. Well, Eric, thanks so much for joining the show. One last question before we wrap up. You’ve given a lot of great insights and advice already. What’s the next best action you recommend for B2B brands to stay agile?
Eric Williamson: Um, I think don’t forget about, we talked about the importance of brand and, uh, I think, you know, a key part of that, that gets missed in B2B. I think we, we, whether it’s you’re a tech company or whatever, you tend to get sort of feature function and a lot of your messaging. And I think that misses a really vital part of, of don’t forget about emotion. Uh, whether you’re a B2B brand or a B2C brand, there’s still a human that’s, that’s looking at your ads, that is engaging with your salespeople that are using your messaging. So look to in your headlines and some of the key differentiating points, look to evoke emotion, whether that is tapping into a known pain point, or you know that there’s a particular need. So those are the types of things that solve problems and those evoke emotions. So I think don’t ignore that part.
Check out The Agile Brand Guide website with articles, insights, and Martechipedia, the wiki for marketing technology: https://www.agilebrandguide.com
B2B Agility with Greg Kihlström is produced by Missing Link—a Latina-owned strategy-driven, creatively fueled production co-op. From ideation to creation, they craft human connections through intelligent, engaging and informative content. https://www.missinglink.company
Transcript
Note: This was AI-generated and only lightly edited
Greg Kihlstrom: Today we’re going to talk about the ins and outs of B2B SEO, why it’s so important to do right, and the role of AI in the future of search. To help me discuss this topic, I’d like to welcome Sam Dunning, founder at Breaking B2B. Sam, welcome to the show.
Sam Dunning: Hey, Greg, thanks for having me on, man. Looking forward to getting stuck in.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, yeah, definitely. And yeah, thank you for I know I was on your show a little bit ago. And so now reciprocating here. So looking forward to talking about this. For those that haven’t caught your show yet. Why don’t you start by giving a little background on yourself and what you’re currently doing?
Sam Dunning: Yeah, sure. So Sam Dunning, I’m founder over at Breaking B2B. We tend to help B2B tech, SaaS or service companies that are usually a little bit frustrated that maybe when they go on Google search and prospects are searching for what they do or how they help, competitors are constantly outranking them, kind of stealing traffic or inbound leads or sales calls or demos. So we fixed that with a bit of an unusual approach to organic search and website design and dev and content marketing. and also run a podcast just like yourself called Breaking B2B, B2B marketing focused. So we do a mix of interviews with B2B practitioners, and they share tips on what’s working to grow their business and marketing side of things. And we also do solo episodes on SEO, website tips and unusual B2B strategies.
Greg Kihlstrom: Great. Well, wonderful. Yeah, and definitely, definitely recommend everybody listening to check out that show. Definitely a lot of a lot of great insights there. So let’s just get started by a pretty fundamental question. But you know, you’ve you’ve put a lot of focus on on b2b SEO, you know, why, why focus there? And you know, what, what kind of got you into that?
Sam Dunning: Yeah, yeah. So I’ll save you the too heavy background story. But it’s mainly as most B2B organizations, I mean, the lifeblood of most B2B companies, be them service based, technology based or software based is sales. And to get there, their sales team, be it very tiny with just perhaps the founder selling, or be it large with a whole team of outbound, inbound, AEs, SDRs, and all kinds of sellers. But they’re going to need a steady stream of leads. And from my background, really, from the frustration of when I used to work in other agencies, be the marketing based or web based or otherwise, never really getting a steady stream of inbound leads from marketing. And then eventually discovering this crazy thing called Google Organic Search, SEO, where you could essentially capture folks that were directly searching for your offer or comparing you to alternatives or searching for problems you fix. And if your content did a good job, if your SEO strategy worked well, and if your website was good at building trust and showing people what they wanted to see and converting them, SEO was, I found SEO a great way to drive a steady stream of kind of organic, fairly qualified sales calls or demos for some of the companies I worked at and then eventually span off and after messing around with many experiments and some of which did work, some of which didn’t work, ranking my own stuff, kind of fired up my own team after basically feeling the frustrations myself as a founder that sells. and kind of most most smaller businesses and as they grow and get bigger sales teams struggle to get a steady stream of inbound leads. So that’s the kind of problem that we we look to tap and we find a lot of b2b companies in the same boat.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, yeah. And so you know, you’ve touched a little bit on a few of these these points, but you know, what what makes I mean, SEO is challenging in and of itself, but what makes B2B SEO so challenging? And for those maybe a little more familiar, I know there’s a lot of B2B folks listening to the show, but how is B2B different from B2C when it comes to SEO?
Sam Dunning: So it’s going back to fundamentals, really. It’s the fact that B2B, especially when you go into higher ticket deal size, So not so much talking, I don’t know, $20, $30, simple contracts where someone might just flick on your website for the first time and sign up or purchase. But when we get into higher average contract values, be it $50K a year, $100K a year, $200K a year, whatever, and higher, that’s when it gets trickier because there’s multiple folks involved in the decision process. So therefore, SEO becomes a part of that marketing ecosystem. As an example, sometimes when we get inbound leads at breaking B2B, they might put on the book a call form. that they found me our company through organic search. But when I actually speak to them, they might say something like, well, yeah, we did see you on Google. In fact, that was one of my colleagues on the marketing team. But also we heard you before on a podcast, then we followed just some of your stuff on LinkedIn. And we saw some of your ads. And what you come to realize is that b2b buying is quite complex. SEO is can work really well to capture some of that demand and drive some leads and demos. but it can also partner up with the other B2B channels and marketing channels that you’re running, be it ads, be it content marketing, be it podcast, email, LinkedIn, kind of feeds into that ecosystem and kind of helps you keep mind share. So as I touched on the B2B buying cycle is often involves several decision makers. So if they are searching on Google and you’re not showing up, you’re almost giving your competitors a free slice of the pie.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, yeah, and so you know, I think a lot of people to kind of talk about what people get wrong about SEO, you know, I think a lot of people do have unrealistic expectations of well, I’m, you know, I do XYZ. And we’re a pretty big company. So why don’t we automatically rank, you know, top 123. But like, you know, as far as other things as well, like what do most people get wrong about b2b se like what what are you hearing from people when they first walk in the door, so to speak, as far as you know, unrealistic expectations are just kind of, you know, get getting it wrong.
Sam Dunning: loads of things. Some of the some of the primary targets for kind of getting SEO wrong, I suppose. It’s when One of the common situations for B2B companies is they perhaps neglect SEO because SEO often gets put right to the bottom of the barrel when it comes to marketing spend. Like you’ll have, I don’t know, paid ads, maybe Google paid search, maybe events marketing, maybe influencer marketing, maybe you’re doing outbound sales, maybe you’re investing in paid review sites, maybe LinkedIn ads, maybe you’re doing some media, some PR. and right at the bottom, if any, SEO gets the very last crunch of the budget. Now, what that often means is that it just gets forgotten about. until eventually maybe the founder or the exec team are like, Oh, I keep seeing competitors above us when folks are searching for what we do or how we help or stacking us up us against competitors. So I really think we need to do some SEO. So they’ll go to the marketing leader, be it a one person marketing team or bigger. This marketing person probably have 97 other jobs on their task list for the month. And then they’ll say, can we do some SEO? And the marketer will be like, sure, I’m a bit busy, but I’ll try and do some SEO for you. And then they’ll go ahead, they’ll fire up a tool like hrefs or SEMrush. And they’ll look for an industry based keyword. won’t be too much thought behind it. They’ll probably just look for a keyword that drives a lot of traffic has a good few monthly searches, but it’s quite easy, like low keyword difficulty, it’s quite easy to rank for. They’ll find an article that hits that criteria, chuck it into chat GPT, blast out an article, publish it on the website a few days later, and then get back to their 97 other marketing tasks for the month. A few months ago by and the leader that tasks them with it was so how’s SEO going? And the marketers will say, well, yeah, I did some SEO, publish the page. It’s getting a bit of search traffic. Here you go. And the leadership folk might say, well, how many leads did it drive? To which they’ll say, well, none. He didn’t ask me to drive any leads. He just said, quote, unquote, do some SEO. I did some SEO. And I think that’s just where it goes, goes far wrong, because it’s not done at a strategic level. So it’s kind of looked at as this kind of bottom of the barrel marketing activity and therefore given very limited time or limited resource or limited budget. And therefore, as a result, it’s not done strategically. So folks end up going for kind of high traffic search terms, but they’re like long tail search queries, like how to do something or best way to do something or informational based search queries. The problem with those, Greg, is at best, that person might flick onto your blog article, pull the information they need. At the very best, they’ll skim it and maybe sign up to your lead magnet or your email list or check out your podcast. At worst, they’ll skim it, get the information they need, and bounce off and get on with their day. And the mistake they’re doing is they’re not going for what’s called bottom of the funnel search queries, i.e., what is a company or a prospect most likely to search when they need our offer now? So what are they searching when they have a high intent to speak to a salesperson around a roffer? And those queries, those bottom of the funnel searches often have way less volume, especially the more specific, the more niche you get to the industries you’re targeting, and all that good stuff, which we’re happy to chat about. Yeah, that’s, yeah, basically, they get it wrong around.
Greg Kihlstrom: And I think another, you know, another thing that you touch on, too, is like this idea of, SEO is something you do. It’s like the the infomercial, like set it and forget it, you know, kind of thing of like, OK, well, I did it. You know, it’s not really something that you do once. And then it’s not like you plant a seed and the tree grows over time with very little effort or whatever. Right. I mean, it’s this is a this is a continuous effort. Right.
Sam Dunning: Exactly, man, exactly. And it’s, like you say, it’s basically seen as a, often seen, not always, some companies do it right, but often seen as a checkbox activity. So it’s like, do a social media post, check, do a blog post, check, SEO’s done. Whereas, like you said, it’s more of a evergreen thing. I often compare it to when you search on YouTube and you search a topic and you might see videos that are a month, two months, even three years old. But that’s the same with SEO. It’s got that value that you can drive traffic and leads for weeks, months, and even years to come through that evergreen content and that asset that is the pages and content of your website being found on Google.
Greg Kihlstrom: This show is sponsored by BetterHelp. I can’t believe we’re already well into the summer months. Things move so fast. It’s important to take a moment to pause and check in. Is there something you’d like to celebrate so far from the year? And what are some adjustments you might want to make for the rest of the year? Therapy can help you take stock of your progress and set achievable goals for the next six months. You might want to think about your family, your friendships, your personal goals. Where do you feel like you’re making progress and where do you feel like you might be able to use some help? If you’re thinking of starting therapy, give BetterHelp a try. It’s entirely online, and it’s designed to be convenient, flexible, and suited to your schedule. You just fill out a brief questionnaire to get matched with a licensed therapist, and you can switch therapists at any time for no additional charge. This summer, take a moment to do this. Stop comparing and start focusing. Visit betterhelp.com slash agility to get 10% off your first month. That’s betterhelp.com slash agility. What’s the state of your website? If you’re looking for a new digital experience platform, or DXP, to run your digital experiences, I have the book for you. The Agile Brand Guide to Digital Experience Platforms is part of my best-selling series of MarTech books. In this book, I explore and demystify DXPs and look at the roles a digital experience platform should play, the different types on the market, as well as how to initially evaluate platforms, then how to best implement a DXP once you’ve selected it. The book also features a forward from Rupali Jain, Chief Product Officer at leading DXP provider Optimizely, as well as several other thought leaders in the industry. Learn more and get a copy in print or digital now by going to the Agile Brand Guide website at www.agilebrandguide.com. You know, I think you kind of touched on this a little bit, but I want to, you recently wrote something about the dangers of vanity driven SEO. Could you talk a little bit more, you know, what do you mean by that term? And you know, what are some of the drivers for that?
Sam Dunning: Yeah, I could probably go off on this whole episode, but that that’s kind of the motivation behind my company. Yeah. So breaking B2B, our headline on our homepage is literally B2B SEO and websites for revenue, not vanity. And I think it was because there was a stage on LinkedIn, Greg, where marketers were just, especially when chat gbt was like at its peak, and AI was at its peak, like a year or so ago, folks were basically posting, like marketers were posting these crazy upward trend organic search traffic graphs. And they were like, we took our website from zero to 50k visits in three months. And then I’d comment on their post saying, Wow, great work. How many leads that drive on the back end, and then that would just be crickets. And it would turn out like these articles would be just really low intent, high search volume. So high traffic queries that were just informational base, like how to do something, or a hot topic at the time that, like I said, will drive a ton of traffic. But at the same time, it risks wasting time, because they’re probably not going to actually drive leads, because the person that’s searching is just looking for information. Also, because they’re written by AI, fairly recently, Google put out a spam update, which if you’re just relying on AI for your copy, and you’re not using direct expertise or authority and kind of getting the content written by someone with some level of subject expertise, you could get penalized. So it’s that kind of thing really where marketers or even agencies just focus on metrics like rankings, organic traffic, aren’t really looking into what are our dream clients, our target clients, the people that actually we want to buy our stuff, what are they searching when they want to speak to a salesperson? Well, they’re searching for our offer. It’s directly related to our industry or to fix a juicy, expensive problem we fix, or maybe they’re stacking us up, comparing us to common alternatives. Like those are the money keywords you should be thinking about rather than just trying to kind of get traffic or people onto your site when they don’t really have any levels of intent and Google search.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, yeah. And so I want to I want to get to AI in a second here. But I think, you know, maybe an example, I know, you talked about the, you know, top of the funnel versus bottom, bottom of the funnel. But do you mind giving? I mean, it can be hypothetical. But do you mind giving an example of, like, what exactly? What would a company do the right way versus the wrong way?
Sam Dunning: Yeah, yeah. And it’s, it’s not to say this is deadly wrong. It’s just to say when you’re starting SEO, and most companies in general are going to have limited resource and budget if they just get dipping their toe in SEO, you want to do stuff that’s going to move the needle fast, drive qualified traffic and leads as quickly as you possibly can. So let’s pretend we were in, let’s pretend, I often use this example, let’s pretend we were a B2B proposal software company. So we basically put out software that helps kind of B2B teams write proposals. So it could be a company like Proposify is a common one, or there’s a bunch of others, right? So an example of a top of funnel query might be how to write sales proposals that close. or how to write better sales proposals that convert or something like that, or even how to write sales proposals. So that that’s what we call kind of top of funnel. It’s an informational based search. If I’m typing how to do something, it’s unlikely I’m looking to speak to a salesperson around the offer. I’m probably expecting to land on an article that explains the process. Right.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah.
Sam Dunning: And yeah, maybe I’ll scroll through, maybe I’ll then check out the YouTube channel, maybe I’ll sign up to their email list, or maybe I’ll grab a lead magnet like, I don’t know, 10 ways to improve your sales proposals, writing skills, whatever. And then I’ll go into their ecosystem, or maybe they’ll retarget me ads, fine. But in my opinion, you’d be better off going for kind of towards the bottom of the funnel keywords or search terms, which might be best proposal writing software, Or niche-specific, i.e. proposal software for HR teams, or proposal software for recruitment companies, or best proposal software for accountancies. So that way someone actually already has already identified they have the problem, they’re already aware they need to get a solution, and at this stage they’re actually searching to find a vendor that can fit that solution. So if you show up for that kind of keyword, you’re much more likely to drive a lead.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, well, and I mean, it seems like, which I think is common with a lot of b2b marketing in general is, you know, you might get lower volume responses, but you’re going to get higher quality responses, right? And I know you’re saying it’s, it’s not 100%, you know, only do it one way or whatever. But the I think the temptation, right, is to, okay, let’s get as much traffic as we can, because, you know, we, we must, we must be able to get a lead if we get a bunch of traffic, but versus thinking, okay, yeah, actually thinking through the thought process of someone that’s further along the funnel, and and stuff. Is that is that kind of the thought process there?
Sam Dunning: Yeah, that’s it. That’s it. And then another common play for I mean, this is more b2b SAS b2b software, another common play as you go for keywords like you, as we touched on earlier, in the b2b space, you because there’s multiple decision makers, usually when b2b folks are looking to invest in a solution, be it service, be it tech, be it software, they normally compare three to four vendors. So another like bottom of the funnel play you can look at is versus or alternative keywords where companies are already researching three or four vendors, but they’re on the, on the fence about who they should choose. So they search keywords like competitor alternative, but in the proposal software space, that might be propose a fire, propose a fire alternative or. They might search for pricing, like Proposify pricing. And then those searches usually bring up what we call listicles, where they compare like the top 10 options and usually position your own offers as section one within that. But yeah, there’s a whole bunch of strategies and tactics you can play at the bottom of the funnel. But ultimately, it’s about understanding what your target clients actually search for when they have a decent level of intent to speak to a salesperson, and they’re using Google search as the method to find that.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, yeah. So I want to get back to the topic of AI. And, you know, so you already, you touched on this. And, you know, one of the common themes just in general is, you know, I’m, I’m a huge fan of AI in inappropriate use cases, let’s say, but there’s a lot of potential use cases, some of them better than others. And so, you know, it makes, it makes creating content just really easy to do, right? It reduces a lot of barriers there, but… to that point, and what you were saying earlier, it also means we’re just kind of flooded with a bunch of mediocre content, right? You know, there’s some great content out there, of course, but like, there’s a lot of crap, for lack of a better term. So like, what’s, what’s, what’s a b2b marketer to do, you know, in other words, like, on the one hand, their job is made so much easier. And there’s some tools out there that, you know, can you can work your keywords in and even with like a chat GPT or Gemini or something, you can tell it what keywords to use. So you know, there’s, there’s all these like benefits out there. And yet, now we’re talking, you know, get potentially getting penalized if it’s as you know, it’s if contents AI generated, you know, what, what should B2B marketers kind of be focused on right now?
Sam Dunning: I would say if you wanna use AI in your workflow, when it comes to SEO, there’s nothing wrong with that. And like you say, there are ways that you can use it as a keyword research tool. You can use it to help you draft outlines for blog articles or landing pages, like it might help you write up ideas for your meta title and your meta description, maybe your H1 tag and the rest of your heading tags. It might even give you kind of a guideline or format for pages. But the thing to be careful with is if you think of it from your own perspective, and let’s say we were going down the route of looking for a proposal software vendor, and let’s say we ran a sales team and we searched, like, best proposal software for sales team, but we land on this landing page, and it’s just using words like, are you ready to 25X and turbocharge your sales process today? Use our all-in-one wizardry. You’ll become a sales proposal wizard with our magnifying 20X solution. And you land on this page, and you’re like, what the heck, this doesn’t even make sense. And then you see all these rocket emojis and like sparklers and stuff. And you’re like, this was written by a robot. So it’s not even the fact that you can use AI like to completely write a copy. And yes, some of those pages might even rank for kind of some more easier to rank terms. But look at it from a prospect potential client perspective. If they’re landing on that page and it’s got that kind of jargon, are they really going to stay on it for longer than a couple of seconds or are they just going to bounce and go to a competitor that actually understands their world, their pain points, their frustrations, someone that actually understands their jobs to be done, their goals, their motivations, that’s kind of building trust with social proof, like testimonials, reviews, outcomes, sharing the product and giving clear call to action to take the next step. For myself, I’d much rather go with someone that’s kind of written a page, be it an article, be it a solution page, be it a landing page, but knows my world, i.e. knows the problems I’m facing and the impact of the problems and the end route that I want to get to, as opposed to someone that’s using all these crazy words I’d probably never say in a normal conversation.
Greg Kihlstrom: Right, right. Well, and I mean, it kind of goes back to the, you know, I would say the recurring theme here is, you know, as a As a customer, I think you already nailed it as far as they have a problem to solve and they just want real information. As a B2B marketer, what is the problem that you’re trying to solve? Are you just trying to get traffic to a page? In which case, yeah, sure. If you’re able to fool the search engines, because they’re going to get way smarter pretty soon, if not already. about all this AI-generated stuff. If you’re just trying to get impressions and clicks, then cool, keep doing what you’re doing. But that can’t really be the goal, right? If you’re a cohesive sales and marketing organization, people are going to see conversion rates are just abysmal. You might get a ton of traffic, but conversion rates are terrible. So B2B marketers are not going to win at this at this game, unless they actually are creating valuable content. I know I’m, you know, preaching to the choir here, but like, that’s, you know, that it just, I think it just kind of comes, comes back to, you know, it may be easier to do, but it really just comes down to good content, right? I mean, isn’t that the just fundamental thing?
Sam Dunning: Yeah, I suppose I’m one of those weird SEO guys, because I’ve got, because I’m a founder and also because I’ve got a sales background, like before I got into B2B marketing a few years ago, I’ve had various sales roles. So I really know the frustration of running a sales team and kind of starving them of leads or when the website just isn’t producing kind of sales calls for days, weeks, let alone months on end. So, I always think like, if we’re going to work with an organization, that’s probably the top of their mind, and that’s probably on the top of their exec team’s mind, and likewise, probably on their board’s mind, or their investors, depending on how they’re set up. And to your point, yeah, I mean, customer research is so often neglected, not just in SEO, it’s neglected in SEO all the time, in content writing, content creation, but also across the board in B2B marketing. So, so many folks are just guessing what they think their dream clients care about, what their problems are, their frustrations. their goals, their jobs to be done and, and the, the kind of gap from where they are and where they want to get to, but. Customer research is so often undervalued. And if you can really get those main top three problems, folks care about impact and not, not solving them where they want to get to their common questions, their common objections on sales calls. And if you can weave that into your content in general, not just on your website, on your articles, your landing pages and such, but also throughout your ads and your other media, then. you’re likely to be so much more ahead of your competitors just because prospects will see that you understand their world. And that is often neglected in B2B in general.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, yeah. So, you know, thinking out a couple of years here, you know, how is SEO impacted by AI? You know, I think in the short term, we’ve kind of touched on this. And, you know, I do think Google’s getting smarter and, you know, so on and so forth. But it’s like, you know, what, what is the role of, of a, you know, chat GPT, or whatever interface versus a browser search? And you know, where do you see things headed over the next couple years?
Sam Dunning: Yeah, it’s hard to say. It’s hard to say. I mean, the interesting thing that we’ve seen recently is that Google rolled out AI overviews. Yeah. And For anyone that’s not familiar with it is basically you can do a search on Google. And usually it’s for things like if you’re searching for restaurants or cuisine or gyms near you or that kind of stuff or holiday plans. And they’ll basically give an instant overview. So instead of doing the search, clicking enter, and then having to troll through some search results. completely above the fold, you get a generative explanation and it’ll give a full explanation above the fold so you don’t have to scroll without having to click a link or go through to a website. And sometimes it has a couple of supporting links of articles that back up the information, but they rolled it back because it was giving so much false information. Like, you can type in stuff like how to make a pizza, then it will tell you to like, get some PVA glue and like glue it to the base of the pizza and stuff like that. And people are like going crazy on Reddit and all these forums. And I think Google have rolled it back to only 7% of search results now show the instant AI overviews answers. Yeah. But obviously, AI is going to come on and come on in the weeks and months and years to come. So there will be more of instant results. And what’s to say that Google might lose some some market share to some of the AI search tools that probably is fairly likely. But I think it comes down to a lot of it’s going to be that if you’re putting out a lot of top of funnels, when I say that, more informational, easily searchable content that an AI tool or computer could generate, then the chances are your website traffic and leads in general could be penalized because of that. Because basically the content you’re putting out is easily answerable by a robot. But when you get to more specific, more niche relevant, um, more customer relevant content, that’s kind of directly tied into what your customers care about, their problems, their objections, their goals, along with your niche and your offer. And you make it specific to that and it’s backed by customers. So that’s probably where you’re going to win more in SEO with the commercial value in mind. Basically stuff that can’t just be spat out in a few seconds by a robot or a tool.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, yeah, makes sense. Well, Sam, thanks so much for joining today. One last question before we wrap up here, given a lot of great advice and insights already, but for those out there listening that want to improve their SEO, what’s one next best action that you’d recommend?
Sam Dunning: SEO in general, probably the best thing you can do is experiment yourself. So, I mean, there’s tons of resources. There’s endless resources to learn, but the best thing, like, my SEO probably improved the most when I tried to do stuff myself, be it, I know if you’re a marketer in a business, you might be limited, but perhaps you could do your own website, try and rank that, or your own blog site, or something similar, or maybe you have got free reign on your own site, and maybe you just look, you do a bit of research, or maybe you think, I’m gonna go after this commercial value keyword, I understand this is probably something that prospects are going to search for when they have some level of intent to speak to a salesperson. Why not spend some time evaluating what’s ranking well for that keyword in the search engines already? Look to create content that’s way better, more helpful, informative, useful than that current page that’s ranking organic top. publish it, see how you go, learn from your mistakes, see what works, see what doesn’t, keep improving it, keep messing around with us. That’s the best way you can learn SEO. The same for link building and stuff like that. Like, there’s no better way to do that. I mean, we’ve we’ve got plenty of resources on breaking b2b.com on the newsletter tab, but there’s no better way than kind of experimenting yourself to see what works and what doesn’t.
In today’s digital ecosystem, data compliance and privacy are more than just legal requirements; they’re critical components of customer trust and brand reputation, especially for B2B marketers. To navigate these waters and understand the intersection of compliance, technology, and customer experience, we’re joined by Jordan Sher, Vice President of Brand and Communications at Drata.
