June 12, 2025 • 51 mins
The customer journey has transformed from a linear path to a chaotic "choose your own adventure" experience as AI becomes increasingly embedded in search processes and content discovery.
• Zero-click search has fundamentally disrupted traditional marketing as users get answers without visiting websites
• Quality content with unique insights and authentic perspectives remains essential despite AI advancements
• The traditional marketing funnel concept is outdated – customers enter and exit at various points across multiple channels
• Attribution modeling is increasingly challenging with significant "dark social" interactions influencing buying decisions
• B2B purchases involve complex buying committees with different stakeholders at various stages in their journey
• AI propensity scoring helps predict customer behavior and personalize content experiences effectively
• Accessibility principles align closely with AI-friendly content practices – clear, concise, well-structured content wins
• Sales and marketing integration is evolving toward revenue operations with deeper collaboration between teams
• Core SEO tenets remain crucial even as search technology evolves
• Content must ultimately connect with humans, regardless of how it's discovered or delivered
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Guest Contact Information:
https://www.progress.com/sitefinity-cms
https://www.linkedin.com/in/sara-faatz-b67213/
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The Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing podcast is a podcast hosted by Internet marketing expert Matthew Bertram. The show provides insights and advice on digital marketing, SEO, and online business.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:02):
This is the Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing,
your insider guide to thestrategies top marketers use to
crush the competition.
Ready to unlock your businessfull potential, let's get
started.
Speaker 2 (00:19):
Wow, look at that.
Welcome back to another episodeof the Unknown Secrets of
Internet Marketing.
My name is Matt Bertram.
I have too much data stored onmy studio and so it's glitching
out, so I apologize to everybody.
Things are moving so fast andeverybody wants to know.
Or either you're drowning outall the AI progress because it's
(00:43):
happening so fast and you'retrying to focus on what matters,
or you're drinking out of afire hydrant and just trying to
take it all in as quickly as youcan, and so you're going to
probably fall on that spectrumsomewhere, and so I wanted to
bring on somebody that's at theforefront of this, of what's
(01:04):
going on with AI and contentmanagement from Progresscom,
sarah Fatz.
Welcome to the show.
Speaker 3 (01:11):
Thank you so much, really excited to be here.
Speaker 2 (01:14):
Well, you know, I know we were having in the
pre-interview and I was likelet's just like put this live
for everybody, because I findthat the conversations I have
before we go live and after wego live are the absolute best
conversations, and you just gotto try to record it all and
that's what people want to see.
I guess is that realconversation?
(01:36):
So you and I were talking aboutcustomer journey and how that's
absolutely changed and you knowI have looked at it for a long
time.
There was a Google study awhile ago about how it looked,
kind of like a neuron, wherepeople kept going back to the
center right.
It wasn't linear.
Everybody draws it out linear.
(01:58):
So why don't you kind of tee upand set the table for the
audience of how you see thecustomer journey today, and then
, of course, we'll naturallyprogress into what you're doing
and AI and all that?
Speaker 3 (02:13):
Absolutely.
Yeah, thank you.
Yeah, I think I mean thedemocratization and
proliferation of AI has changedeveryone's behavior right Now to
your point.
I think we used to marketersthought that we had some
semblance of control over thejourney, and I think it's always
been a little chaotic becausewe're we're messy, you know,
humans are messy, but but therewas still a path that you could
take.
You could drive people to yourwebsite through SEO and other
(02:36):
other strategies.
When they got there, you couldhelp them find the path to help
them take the action you wantedthem to take Right Buy now,
register, download them.
Take the action you wanted themto take right by now, register,
download.
But today, with ai, oftentimesthe journey ends before it even
begins, like, if we're beinghonest, because people can get
the answers to their questionsor find the information they
need without ever making it toyour site.
(02:57):
Zero click search, in myopinion, is the biggest catalyst
of change we've seen in areally long time when it comes
to the customer journey andcontent journey all up.
Speaker 2 (03:08):
I absolutely agree.
We're seeing, on the SEO sideof things, less people are being
driven to the websitespecifically, but it hasn't
changed the buying patterns forthe brands that own the space,
right, like.
So if you own the market andyou're everywhere and people can
(03:29):
see you, right, it doesn'tmatter what platform you're on.
They're going to go buy whenthey're ready to buy.
The biggest thing that is hardfor us to track things that I'm
seeing digital marketers hard totrack is well, because each
search is so personalized.
Uh, tracking rankings isgetting uh very difficult.
And then last click attributionright, like everybody wants to.
(03:53):
Uh, you know, first or lastkick attribution.
I'm like, uh, you know there'sthere's so much going on that
you don't even see where it goesonline, offline.
So, like, map out, like uh, youdo a lot of B2B stuff, map out
like maybe just a generalcustomer journey as you know it
in your head, but you can'tprove it through the data.
Speaker 3 (04:16):
Welcome to my world, right?
Yeah, I mean, I think thecustomer journey really starts
with.
A customer is looking forsomething, and we've, for a long
time, talked about the factthat you shouldn't be marketing
features and functionality.
You should be marketing theproblem that your product solves
.
But that's really hard.
(04:37):
But the companies that aregoing to be successful moving
forward, particularly in an AIspace, are the ones who actually
can do that.
They stop talking about featuresand functionality because,
let's be honest, nobody reallyis searching for I shouldn't say
nobody, but most people aren'tsaying hey, I want to know if
you have a new button.
Do you have a new color, blue onthat button, unless you're
(04:58):
using the product already?
So what they really care aboutis making sure that they have a
website or a product that'saccessible, and to solve that
problem, they need to make surethat they have high contrast
colors and those kinds of things.
And so the customer journey thenbecomes understanding at a very
deep level, who the customer is, what problem they have and how
(05:22):
you're going to be able tosolve that problem.
And that changes your contentjourney in a very, very big way,
because it's no longer justeverything has to be more, it
has to be deeper, it has to be alot more authentic and it has
to be predictive, in the sensethat you understand your
customers well enough to knowwhat they're going to be needing
(05:42):
or asking and why I mean you'recreating products with new
features and functionalitybecause the customer needs them.
You need to be able tocommunicate at a much better
level why that's important,right, and tell a story.
It's more about storytelling.
Those are buzzwords that we'vebeen using for a long time, but
I don't know that people havedone it right or well for a long
(06:04):
time.
Speaker 2 (06:05):
So two of the things you said.
Can you hear me?
I changed my mic out.
Hopefully it sounds a littlebit better for everyone.
So one is people buy based onemotion, right, and they may
justify it based on logic.
So we're talking aboutstorytelling, we're talking
about connecting with theaudience, and then I forget who
I want to reference, who it iscorrectly, but they said, like
(06:28):
you've got to get in the head ofthe customer and understand the
conversation.
They're telling themselves toanswer that question for them,
right?
So you got to answer thatquestion.
You got to draw upon theemotion and I am seeing that
absolutely in the data.
So when you look at how peopleare using chat functions like
LLMs, or even how they're usingGoogle, they're getting a lot
(06:50):
more advanced and they're usinga lot more prompting to get what
they're looking for right andto customize it.
Boolean search used to be thebig term right in the past, but
we're seeing conversionshappening a lot of times.
Eight plus keywords, okay.
So like where the conversionsare happening.
(07:10):
So you want to rank if we'retalking about SEO for that core
seed keyword, because thenyou're going to qualify for all
these other searches, but thenoutside of those searches,
understanding and Google's triedto do that right.
Like people will ask things toknow, they're trying to solve
those and there's been a bigkind of uproar of the zero click
(07:31):
of getting into those spaces.
But we've seen, if you can geton the first page now you don't
have to be first because also,actually what's interesting is
sometimes the first positiongets skipped for whatever reason
.
We've seen that in the ads.
Right, it's about catching theattention, drawing them into
(07:53):
that, and a lot of times the AIoverviews are where people's
going and you can show up inthere and then, if they see your
name later on in the customerjourney, right, multiple times,
they start to gravitate to youas a trusted source.
Speaker 3 (08:06):
A hundred percent, yeah, but it's those, it's it,
those are the invisible things,right, it's very hard to track
hey, I've seen you, you knowseven, 20, you know 25 times.
Um, because it's so, so much apart of the subconscious right,
it's very hard to say, oh yeah,this is working because of X,
right?
So when you actually have tocome and defend your content
(08:28):
strategy, it you know, it's veryhard to have a data-driven
approach to say we appearedthese 17 times in this person's
search and that's how we, youknow that, that's how they, they
, they found us.
I think that starting tocollect and review unstructured
data is going to help us maybefind it'll be more of a dotted
(08:52):
line, you know, hey, this iswhat's working.
But I think that looking atbeing able to build leveraging
AI, to build profiles based onunstructured data from some of
your key customers is going tohelp you start building that um,
that report that says, hey,this is working right.
This is why we should be doingX, y or Z.
Speaker 2 (09:13):
Yeah, I mean, that's one of the things that I I talk
about.
Um, you know, the big brandsmost of the time understand this
.
Um, the smaller brands just wanttransactional right and they
just I need leads or whatever itis and you know you got to map
out who are you trying to speakto, what kind of bait are you
(09:35):
fishing with?
Right, and that actuallytranslates when I see with the
bigger companies, the marketingqualified leads and the sales
qualified leads, they got to bein alignment of what what that
looks like.
And if the content strategydoesn't start out going after
that target persona, right,you're going to get the wrong
(09:55):
kind of fish or the wrong kindof bait, or like right and and
so it all puts together and whatI've had to do, um, and tell me
what you're doing and whatyou're seeing.
Like I start with, okay, or isthis the kind of lead Like, when
, like, what's the final result?
Is this the kind of lead thatyou want?
What about it, don't you want?
And then I try to, because youcan't track everything and I'm
(10:19):
working with some non you were,we were talking about nonprofits
.
I'm working with a nonprofitright now that their funnel goes
to three different sites, okay,so if you're doing UTMB
tracking, like you lose it,right, and so.
(10:39):
So then I'm like, okay, well,can we set up heat mapping on?
Like, like, how do we track it?
And so I I start at the end andI'm having to work backwards to
try to figure it out.
But you're like going, okay,here's who we're going after and
here's the end, right, and thenyou're doing all the things in
the middle to try to figure outexactly what's happening.
There used to be this term.
It was totally a buzzword, butI think that there's some truth
(11:00):
in it.
They were calling it like darksocial, okay, and they're like,
and I was like what is dark?
Do you remember?
that.
Speaker 3 (11:06):
Like I was like what is?
Speaker 2 (11:07):
dark social Right.
But it's like all the stuffthat happens that you can't
track, and I think that, likeGoogle AdWords gets a lot of
credit for the last touchattribution, but in someone's
customer journey, when theystart out knowing they have a
problem, the last thing they dois they're deciding between
(11:27):
companies, right?
Speaker 3 (11:29):
Right, exactly, yeah.
Speaker 2 (11:30):
Or they even know that their service, whatever
you're selling, that they needto be searching for that, and so
you know that's when theconversion happens.
But it could have been, youknow, that Reddit post or that
Facebook ad or something elsethat spurred their attention to
say, hey, this is it.
And then people, right now,with the economy getting more
(11:53):
uncertain, people are tighteningup and they're cutting the
things that they think are notworking.
But it's really thecollaboration or the, the, the,
the amplifier effect of allthese different channels that
have built this carefully drawnout funnel of you're getting
leads.
And so if you change too manyvariables at one time, we had a
(12:15):
client just recently change acouple of things, okay, on their
own, they just decided thatthey were, they changed this and
their leads dropped by 90%.
And then they're like, whathappened?
And I was like well, what didyou do?
Right, and you know, like, andso everything's kind of
(12:36):
delicately put together and youdon't know.
You know what, what signals aresending, where and how you're
positioning, but you change onething what, what signals are
sending, where and how you'repositioning, but you change one
thing the whole organization oflike where you land, and if you
move from position one toposition three boy, are you
(12:57):
gonna feel it right?
Speaker 3 (12:57):
you know, right, it's right, yeah, and the amazing
thing is, I mean, you're talkingabout, I mean think about that
from a one buyer, um,perspective when you start
adding buying groups in there,right, right, you have a far
more complex journey.
That you know.
You, how do you?
You may have a you know achampion who is, or you know the
person's ultimately going to bethe user, but they're not the
purchaser and they have, youknow, on the content management
(13:18):
system, for example, you have,you're going to have your,
probably your IT team is goingto be involved and marketing ops
will be involved.
Revenue ops might be involved,marketing might be involved,
depending on the size of theorganization.
Right, that's a lot of, that'sa lot of audience that you have
to talk to, and in everyorganization that might be a
different purchaser at the end,and so you have to really all of
(13:41):
those things that you'retalking about in that dark dark
side of you, know the dark right, however you want it, but it it
definitely is Um.
You have to really startunderstanding and I love the
idea of going working from from.
You know, here's the sale.
Let's work back and figure outum.
How we got to that ideal leadto begin with Um.
(14:03):
But I think the other thing isthat we're all humans.
All take their different paths.
That's why.
That's why saying a funnel afunnel was never linear.
To begin with, it was alwayschaotic and messy.
We just had there were fewerpaths for people to take, right,
so it felt more.
It felt like a funnel and nowit's more, just like it's a
choose your own adventure wherepeople are starting getting off
(14:24):
and on at all different pointsand places.
You know, getting off and on atall different points and places,
and I think the one thing thatai does to really disrupt that
is that it doesn't necessarily,if we can believe that that ai
in some cases is the ui, it'sthat user interface that you.
You then have to start thinkingabout um.
If I have this piece of contentwhether it was, you know, maybe
(14:46):
it was a middle of this pieceof content.
Whether it was, you know, maybeit was a middle of funnel piece
of content that if they caughtthat information on my site,
there would be a natural path orprogression.
Now I have to start thinkingabout that content and say, if
somebody consumes this as partof an LLM output or from an AI
agent, how do I help themunderstand that there is more
that they could learn?
(15:06):
There's more that they couldlearn.
There's more that they could do.
We have more to offer, right.
So it really does make you haveto rethink the purpose of the
content and how you use it as astepping stone for people or
help them use it as a steppingstone.
But then again, like I said,you can go back to before you
have.
If you have multiple buyinggroups that all of a sudden
(15:27):
becomes.
That's a crisscross, you knowpath that kind of eventually
hopefully all leads to thebottom.
Speaker 2 (15:35):
Well, you know, when you, when you talk about the,
the, the funnel and the pathway,I think all the way back to
when Google uh, no matter whatkeyword you would rank for, it
would always be your homepage.
Right, so you always had the.
you always had the that you weregoing in so you know how people
could direct.
But today every page is like anode in you know the ecosystem
(15:57):
of information organization,right, I guess?
And and so you know this randompage over here that's not even
in your navigation structurecould be the doorway that people
are coming in.
And so I think thatunderstanding analytics because
I can tell you reallyunderstanding how to chop up
analytics helps you guess better.
Speaker 3 (16:19):
I guess Right right, right right.
Speaker 2 (16:22):
And you can get ideas about stuff, and I think it,
you know.
I mean, look, gary Vaynerchuksays just do it all, do as much
of it as you can, because you'rejust mapping everything out and
you want to be be everywhere,right, you know, that's great,
and AI helps speed everything up.
I think, like you said, it'slike this interface that just
(16:42):
speeds everything up, right, andand so you know.
But there are general channels,right, there's general channels
that people fall into, and Ithink that that's where people
should start right.
Start start with the heavierchannels and then kind of build
up of there.
There are people on a, ascatterplot right, that are
(17:04):
going to be everywhere, um, buttry to kind of cluster those
things to hopefully get the uhuser traffic flowing in the
right direction and then set setthose triggers.
But, like you said, give thedirectional point of okay, you
can go back and go up.
You actually heard that onsomebody I was interviewing on
(17:29):
the previous podcast.
They weren't using it in thatcontext, but it's so applicable
because okay.
So I'm going to jump to likeshort form content for a second.
I am absolutely seen in socialmedia that, because the
algorithm changes from TikTok,uh, just, and, and everybody's
(17:50):
adapted right, youtube's adapted, instagram's adapted Like you,
facebook is adapted Like thiscontent is going to find
somebody that wants it, right,and it's so reflective of
whatever you want, right,literally like everybody's
producing content at thisexponential rate.
It's literally choose your ownadventure, because your feed,
(18:13):
sarah, my feed, anybody's feedis going to be completely
different.
I've looked at other people'sfeeds and I've gone like this is
not at all what my feed looks,like this, this is not at all
maybe what I'm interested in,based on like a percentage of
buckets or whatever, but it'sabsolutely designed for them and
(18:34):
so so I don't know the chooseyour own adventure really
resonates with me, yeah.
Speaker 3 (18:39):
Well, the only thing, the only concern I have with
the choose your own adventure,and I think choose your own
adventure a hundred percent isthe way to go, but then you also
have to your point.
So much content is beingcreated.
I don't want to end up in adigital wasteland.
Creating content for content'ssake is not the right way to go.
Creating content because youcan do it quickly is not the
right way to go.
I think some of the core tenetsof solid SEO remain true from an
(19:04):
AI discoverability perspective,and that is create quality
content right.
Create content that has youknow unique thought, unique
insight, that has you know yourperspective on things, as
opposed to this generalfluffiness and I'm afraid, like
I still see people creating,like just you know, garbage with
(19:24):
it because it's easy, and Ithink that that's where you know
when we start talking aboutfeeds and having short form
content and content thatresonates, you know, from an
individual perspective andalmost hyper personalization,
you still absolutely need to bethinking about the fact that you
know why am I creating thispiece of content?
Speaker 2 (19:57):
right.
Is it actually going to dosomething, or is it just going
to be noise, or digital waste,as we like to refer to it?
The exponential rate, theycan't even keep up.
Or I mean they can keep up, butit's moving so quickly that
they're, you know, trying toindex, right.
Well, not index, but they'retrying to collect all the
information that's beinggenerated in the world, and then
they're trying to organize itright, that's their kind of core
(20:18):
tenant.
Well, if you're not in the top100, right, and we already know
from all the studies of the datalike, look, if you're not on
the first page, it almostdoesn't matter.
So the only things that aregoing to show up in the first
page and also show up in thefirst 100, is going to be
(20:39):
original thought.
It's going to be you're addingsomething to the conversation
online that AI can't generatebecause it hasn't incorporated
that yet.
Right, and so you know, I think, that a lot of people have gone
the route of generating a tonof content and then these core
updates happen and they lose aton of traffic.
(20:59):
And it's because, well, youknow, that content barely
crusted the surface of the top100.
Right, and then, and now it'sbeen optimized in another way
and it was able to grab othercontent that might have been
more valuable.
And boom, now you're gone andyou have no link equity.
That's getting pushed from it.
(21:19):
And then, boom, like you said,it goes back to the core tenets
of SEO, of like is this goodquality content?
How do we design this for theuser?
So nothing's had, nothing hasreally changed, right, right,
like, fundamentally, I mean,they added the expertise to eat,
(21:40):
right.
Speaker 3 (21:40):
Right, right, yeah, exactly.
Speaker 2 (21:42):
Yeah, try to say hey, like this is a real human.
So I think that that washelpful.
But I mean, what?
What are you seeing?
Um, I mean, I'm, I'm trying tostay on top of this.
Like this is like a weeklything of like, where
everything's going.
But like I talked to a clientactually this morning who has a
(22:02):
neighbor Okay, um, so, so andand the neighbor, um, I think,
so smart guy, I haven't, Ihaven't met him, but he's
mentioned the neighbor to me afew times and he's like Google's
dead, he goes, he goes and hedoesn't even know it yet and I
go, man, like I hear.
I've heard that SEO is dead somany times and and SEO, I think,
(22:25):
has taken on a new form thatalmost everybody needs to
understand SEO as, like you'rebuilding stuff, but it's like
understanding the algorithms onany platform to understand how
that content, whatever it is, isbeing interpreted.
So I just wanted to get your,your take on on where we are at
(22:46):
on the time.
Speaker 3 (22:47):
Yeah, yeah, I mean, google's not dead and Google's
not going to die.
I think we're evolving just asanything, right?
I mean, there was a time whenwebsites were dead because they
were only brochure where guesswhat Websites evolved, and now
they are all sorts of things.
I think websites are going toevolve again and I think they're
going to continue to be achannel.
(23:08):
I do think that AI will becomethe UI in some cases.
I think that integration of AIwithin the search tools, within
your Googles and your Bings thatonly is going to.
They're just going to evolve.
They're not going away, they'renot dying.
And I think SEO from I think itwas Neil Patel who said it's not
(23:30):
search engine optimization,it's search everywhere
optimization right, and I thinkthat that is 100% what you're
going to see.
But I think that, again, thecore tenants, if you're saying,
hey, drop everything and justmake an AI strategy so
everything's discoverable on AI,and ranking through with AI
agents and LLM outputs, thenyou're going to be losing sight
(23:51):
of the fact that you still needto optimize for SEO.
Right, search engines are not.
They are in some cases.
Well, they're built on a lot ofAI engines, right?
I mean, they are.
I mean, so it's.
Yeah, I think that there's a lotof hype.
We're obviously at the top ofthe hype cycle right now.
There's a lot of truth inwhat's going on from an AI
(24:11):
perspective and a lot of change.
I mean, I think, you know, ifwe had the same conversation a
year from now and looked back,we might be laughing at even
some of the words that we'reusing right now.
Right, and how we're eventalking about agents, ai agents
or LLM outputs.
But no, I think that they are ahundred percent.
Google and all of the searchengines need.
(24:33):
They're going to remain.
They're just going to grow andevolve and be as relevant and
maybe, in some cases, even morerelevant as they are today.
Speaker 2 (24:41):
Awesome.
So let's transition to whatprogresscom is doing and what
you're doing with content.
Maybe you could share kind ofsome case studies or something
that you're seeing that might beinteresting for people to know
from a new data standpoint oflike hey, this is what we're
doing and this is what we'reseeing and this is how it's
working.
I think that would be superhelpful for the audience.
Speaker 3 (25:04):
I mean, I think there are a couple of things I mean
from a product perspective.
We actually have introducedrecently AI propensity scoring
within Sitefinity, so weactually have customers who are
leveraging that forpersonalization in ways that
they never have we talked about.
Personalization is a buzzword.
(25:25):
That has been, you know people,how long have we been talking
about personalization?
I think with AI, one of thethings that we're seeing is our
customers who are using ourplatforms are able to truly
actually, you know, personalizecontent now and personalize the
content journey in ways thatthey weren't before and by
leveraging the propensityscoring they can actually have,
(25:47):
they have some predictiveanalytics about what, what will
be coming next, and so we havesome customers who have um
leveraged that to modify theircontent journey, um to build new
content, that for for higherresults, um, and they're seeing
higher conversion rates.
So, um, a partner roundtableevent last week in Dublin and
(26:11):
one of our partners was talkingabout a client that they have
that has done that withinSightfinity and it's really
proving itself out, which isamazing to me, because we're,
you know again, we've talkedabout personalization for a long
time.
I think it's just getting to apoint where it's mature enough
that we can.
Technology is mature enoughthat we can accurately do that.
Speaker 2 (26:34):
Can you explain to me maybe at a high level, for
people listening as well what isthe scoring system doing?
How is it working?
Just at a high level?
I think that would be helpfulfor people.
Speaker 3 (26:46):
Yeah, so at a high level, it's looking at the
actions that customers andprospects are taking within the
content, within the site right,and leveraging predictive
analytics to let you know whattheir next anticipated step will
be and if you're seeing the wayyou can use it.
It's really interesting becauseif you're seeing that there's a
massive drop off, at some pointin time you understand that
(27:10):
there's something broken in that.
Choose your own adventure game.
You need to add another optionfor them to say, okay, this is
where I need to go, and so itallows you to really start to
understand what kind of contentis resonating and how that
journey is unfolding, so thatyou can help guide them through
that journey.
Does that make sense?
Speaker 2 (27:31):
Yeah, so it's really helping map out the funnel of
what people are doing beyondwhat you're getting with GA4 or
something like that.
It's at a site level, and soit's a CMS, correct.
Speaker 3 (27:42):
Correct.
Yeah, so it's a CMS and then wehave a CDP as well, a customer
data platform that looks atunstructured data as well, so
not just the data within thesite, but it's looking at the
broader all of the data that wehave for that customer across
the board, which is reallyputting together a pretty
powerful picture of the customerjourney.
Speaker 2 (28:02):
Describe that a little bit more of the
unstructured data, of what it'scapturing or looking at Again,
just at a high level, I thinkyeah, so it can, um and it's all
.
Speaker 3 (28:11):
Whatever we can be collected and looked at legally,
right, I should.
I should preface it with thatum.
It is a um, but it's the theknown information on that person
, whether it's uh, socialinteractions or um other sites
that they visited.
Looking at that kind ofinformation and and building
that unique profile for thatcustomer.
Speaker 2 (28:30):
Yeah, moz is doing some of that these days, right,
like he's really mapping thatout.
I think that that is superhelpful when you're trying to
figure out who you're goingafter, where they're at, what
they're looking at.
And then like you said, thatcustomer journey, kind of going
back to it is like you need tolook up or like, if you're, if
(28:50):
you're on a spatial plot, right,like it's, it's what you touch
in every direction, because theycan, they can choose to go
whatever direction you give them.
And if they want to go, youknow this direction and you
don't have a piece of contentthere they jump from your
content to to something else orthey go back to the beginning,
(29:11):
right, and they, they, whatever,wherever they started their
search, which could be YouTube,could be, uh, you know, chat,
gbt, it could be Google, itcould be anything, um, but they
go back to that beginning pointand then start over and you
might not get them, you mightnot catch them again.
And one of the things I'm seeing.
I'm curious this is somethingI'm seeing in the data A lot of
(29:36):
times people are converting inthe mode that they're in right.
So they're either going toconvert that first day like
they're going to go all the wayto the finish line and close
that first day, like they'regoing to go all the way to the
finish line and close, or it'slike 30 days plus.
It's almost like I'm I'm notseeing any data like in between
there.
Not a lot right, like justsubstantially.
(29:57):
Like you either get them on thefirst shot right or they're,
you're, they're going to begoing through a sifting process
and and you're going to, you'regoing to hopefully capture them,
that they're going to find yourstuff later, and that does
happen a lot, and that's what Isee in the reporting.
A lot is like we need to lookbackwards, like 30 days, to say
(30:18):
did this work?
Because you know I mean withdata you are getting real time
data.
But like, even if you run adslike I'm, like it takes two
weeks or something to like forit to just kind of percolate
through and for people to takeaction, not to say that there's
not 3% or whatever the number isof someone that buys
immediately.
But when you're getting theminto like that customer journey,
(30:42):
unless they're ready to buyimmediately, you're kind of
dropping.
I feel like it's like droppinga Plinko ball and it's going
Exactly.
Speaker 3 (30:51):
A hundred percent, yeah, yeah, yeah.
And I think the other thing isevery every buyer's, you know,
buying life cycle is varies andeven within our business, you
know, we have, you know, five orsix buckets of products and
some are very transactional anda hundred percent what you said.
If they, if they're not takingan action when they're there,
and some are very transactionaland 100% what you said.
If they're not taking an actionwhen they're there, it's going
(31:13):
to be either 30 days, 60 days orthey're just not right.
We have others that the buyingcycle could be 18 months,
believe it or not, right?
And those are the more complexproducts that have buying groups
as opposed to a singlepurchaser and all of those kinds
of things and all of thosekinds of things.
But that becomes exponentiallymore complex.
Which is also why havingpredictive analytics, having
propensity scoring, having thatkind of information available to
(31:34):
you, is super important,because you have to look at the
buying group as a whole asopposed to you know if
somebody's purchasing theproduct, what are all the touch
points from that domain or fromthat organization that says,
okay, these are, you know, it'ssimilar to intent data, right?
You know what are the signalsthat you're going to get from
from all of that, but being ableto understand on what point
(31:59):
they're, they have pause, um,you know, in that journey it's
it's really, really important.
Speaker 2 (32:05):
So so, if I use like, so we're, we're in Houston, so
we do a lot of oil and gas,industrial um, manufacturing,
all that kind of stuff, and whatI'm seeing is, okay, you're
speaking to the executive, okay,and then you're speaking to
maybe the field person and thenthey've they've really drawn a
like step back and there arebuying groups, right, and you
might not even know whoeverybody is on that committee
(32:27):
now, right, so you can't targetthe like.
I mean there's the procurementperson or whoever it is.
But what I am seeing as likepeople are like, okay, we need
to trim spend or this or that.
And we trimmed spend on acouple of campaigns where we
weren't targeting the 25 to 35group.
Okay, well, like, what we sawas a result of that is we were
(32:54):
getting less people likerequesting RPs or whatever it is
, because, because there's the,the assistant or the new hire or
the junior person that is goingto do the, the gophering.
I don't know if that's the word,but going to go doing the
research, finding the stuff andthen passing it back, and then
(33:17):
the executives might go do thatresearch after, like, it's been
vetted to a few companies orsomething like that.
And so like.
You need to have thatpredictive analytics.
You need to understand whoyou're targeting, who you're
speaking to, who are yourchampions, right, I mean?
Who are the?
Speaker 3 (33:34):
people who are going to champion within the
organization, because they mightnot actually have anything to
do with the final purchasingdecision, but they could be
incredibly influential.
And I think that's the audiencethat a lot of people I don't
want to say ignore, because thatsounds harsh, but I think they
do they kind of push them off tothe side because, oh, it's a
nice to have when, in actuality,they are as critical as the
(33:56):
final purchaser in a lot ofcases, because they're the
gatekeeper.
If your champion or influenceris not, they're the ones who are
doing that initial hey, we needthis product or a solution.
Right, we have this problem, weneed to solve it.
If that person is not beingengaged with the content, that
you would need to be thechampion, right, you know?
(34:17):
Or, and that the kind of.
Then I think you're yeah, you're100% missing out.
Sounds to me like you're doing.
Yeah, you're a hundred percentmissing out.
Sounds to me like you're doinga lot of experiments, which is
fantastic that you can actuallyturn around and say, hey, you
know, we have data to show.
This is why we need to do X, yor Z, and I think that's
something with AI we should beable to see more of, because you
(34:38):
can move quickly Right.
Speaker 2 (34:40):
Well, I mean what we're seeing.
Yeah, I mean what what we'reseeing?
Yeah, I mean I get to work witha lot of different overseeing
strategy for a lot of differentcompanies, big and small, and so
I'm able to see a lot of dataand and draw inferences from
that and then apply that and andwe're seeing a lot, even on the
social side of things is likelet's put out a trial balloon on
social, then if it does well,then let's put some money behind
(35:02):
it on the advertising side,versus just like deciding like
this is what we're going to gowith and run it, because I mean,
ultimately, the end result iswhat people are paying for, not
whatever comes in between there.
They're really looking at thefinal result.
I mean, what, what are youseeing?
(35:23):
Um, like so, so you, you havethese different stakeholders,
like you said it.
Um, you know you got marketing,you got executives.
What I'm increasingly seeing issales and marketing working
more and more in hand, the CROposition, all that sort of thing
.
Um, and and I I'm seeing, orI'm trying to help have the
(35:45):
perspective of sales change onhow, like critical and how
influential marketing can be inthat sales process.
Right, and I think COVID andyou know everything moving
online had had had increasedthat Right and also drawn that
attention to it, because youcan't, you couldn't, spend your
(36:05):
conference budget on on onmarketing Right.
Like you couldn't.
You couldn't go to theconferences, so let's put our
money other places.
And they're seeing it happenRight, like, what are you seeing
in that that customer journeyfrom a sales and marketing
standpoint, are, are, are youcause?
I think your platform from asales and marketing standpoint,
because I think your platformand I want to talk more about it
(36:27):
on how it also can help,because I think it's super
critical.
So just tell me what you'reseeing on the marketing and
sales, how you're seeingsalespeople look at marketing
and how to influence that.
Speaker 3 (36:37):
Yeah, I mean we're seeing more of the rise of
revenue operations, which isthat marriage of the two, right,
you have marketing ops, youhave sales ops coming together
from a revenue operationsperspective, I mean I think the
marketing sales interaction hasalways I mean, that's a tale as
old as time right, but I think,yes, we are seeing more
(37:00):
integration with it's not just ahandoff and walk away.
There is more integration, adeeper integration across both
organizations.
Speaker 2 (37:14):
Because I can see that the platform that you have
prove out what's happening right.
Because a lot of timesmarketing will go to sales and
say, hey, what is the customerstory you're using?
What's the testimonial?
What's the?
what's the homegrown stuffyou're not supposed to be using,
but we know you're using thatin the field, like let's bring
(37:36):
that back, let's get it approvedthrough legal and let's let's
use that across uh, you know the, the, the uh districts or
territories, and and I I'mseeing that the the data that
you're being able to give is ismore supportive of that to say
hey, like this, this is helping,this is working, and and being
(38:00):
able to see the like, the realapplication of what we're not
seeing, like we talked aboutmore in the field?
Speaker 3 (38:06):
Yeah, absolutely.
And being able to marry theexperience that we're able to
pull from the platform and the Idon't want to say anecdotal
because it's not anecdotal, butthe evidence that the sales team
is getting, and marry the two?
Yeah, absolutely.
And we are being able to showthat and it is exciting to see
(38:31):
that take place because it doesallow for more meaningful
engagement and higher conversionrates on the backend and it
shows that the marketing spendit's funny you talk about events
.
My team is responsible for ourevent strategy as well, and
that's changed exponentially inthe last five years.
And the purpose I still believea thousand percent in events and
(38:51):
that you need to be doing them,but you need to know why you're
doing them, and I think for along time, people didn't
understand that, and so beingable to reallocate that spend to
more meaningful engagementsthat impact sales in a different
way is really, you know it, itit's something that we're I
ended up having to haveconversations a lot about.
(39:12):
Well, why aren't we at thisplace?
Or we should be here, whyaren't we doing more of this?
And like, my first question tothem always is well, what is
your, what is the goal?
Like what do you think we'regoing to get out of that by
doing that?
And usually it's something thatthey want.
They want something that you'renot going to get from an event,
right, they want something.
(39:33):
They want exactly what you andI were just talking about that
connection.
That's a deeper connection withthe customer, something that's
going to have a higherconversion, something that's
going to get them closer to asale, and most events today are
not that.
They're about building brandawareness.
They're another touch.
They're about engagement.
They're building trust,delighting existing customers
(39:54):
right, there are a lot ofdifferent reasons that you go,
and there's education that goesalong with that, right.
Speaker 2 (40:05):
And so, anyway, yeah, go ahead, yeah can you give me
one example, and I want, afterthis, for you to really tell us
a little bit more?
Give me the elevator pitch forprogresscom.
I want to know.
You said events have changedfor you a lot.
Can you pull something out ofthere and give a like, a
specific, that you've adaptedwhat you were doing before and
(40:28):
and and how that would work?
Speaker 3 (40:30):
Yeah, and so this would be more on the and I'll
give an example.
On our developer tool side ofthe business, we would go pre
COVID.
We were sponsoring anywherefrom 30 to 40 events per year.
We were out there and COVID hit, and we pivoted very quickly to
.
We did a lot of live streamingon Twitch and things like that.
(40:52):
What that changed, though, wasthe way that you engage with
your customer or prospect right,so the engagement became more
personal to a certain extent,because there was even and that
might sound ironic from a livestream, but it allowed you to
have interactions and engagementwith people all around the
world, not just the thousandpeople who were showing up at
(41:15):
that event, or 3000 of peopleand let's be honest, you're not
talking to all of them anyway,and you are but a drop of sand
in an expo hall.
So, as we got away from COVID,the way people engage similar to
the fact that customer behavioris changing in the face of AI
(41:35):
the way customers or prospectswant to engage with a product or
a brand is different, and theywant more of a even if it's not
an in-person touch, they wantmore of an engagement that is,
that's more personalized.
So, again, not to say that theevents I mean events absolutely
are, and I believe, I believe inthe human side of software.
(41:56):
People buy from people theydon't buy from from brands at
the end of the day.
So it's still important to havethat touch.
But we found that there aremore impactful ways for us to
engage with the audience andthat's by providing some sort of
education in a different way,in a way that they can engage
with us, whether it's again likea live stream or a webinar or
(42:17):
podcast, but having the live Q&Aafterwards or something along
those lines.
It gives us, at least for thatparticular audience.
From a developer perspective,they wanted the ability to
interact with the people and notjust and you can't do that at
scale from an event perspective.
Speaker 2 (42:36):
Yeah, no, I think that the get into the know, like
and trust, like in person atthe events, compresses the time
right.
So customer nurture, I think isbig.
I'm seeing like a pre eventevents like online and post
event events online is is hugeto to get that engagement.
(42:58):
Okay, so we're we're gettingkind of close to wrapping up.
I wanted to ask you one lastquestion that we're starting to
use this as shorts, so it can beyou repeating something we've
talked about.
Just kind of repackaging itinto a short clip is what is one
unknown secret of internetmarketing that might be
(43:20):
underutilized today?
Speaker 3 (43:22):
One unknown secret.
That's a good one.
I'm trying to think if I wouldgo Give me two, give me whatever
.
Talk about content, whatever yougot, yeah, yeah, yeah, I mean,
I think from a contentperspective, probably one of the
(43:42):
secrets would be that, eventhough there is this hype around
AI, the core tenets of SEOremain the same.
I don't know if that's a secret, but I think that it's
something that's often forgotten.
I think that people also forgetthat, as you need to create and
this is a problem, whether itwas early days of SEO or early
days of AI optimization at theend of the day, you're still
(44:03):
creating content for humans, andso, while you need to optimize
for the technology, do notforget that, at the end, the
person or the thing that'sconsuming that is human, and if
it's not something that they canengage with, all is going to be
lost, right?
So it doesn't matter if youhave the right keywords or the
right keyword clusters or theright groups.
(44:23):
You absolutely have to becreating that content that
somebody would want to actuallyengage with, whether it's video,
whether it's written content.
I think the other thing and Iwill this is more than one, it's
more than two, but I will throwthis out there.
These are just because I'vebeen thinking about it a lot we
talk a lot on our end aboutmaking software that's
(44:44):
accessible, and accessiblesoftware?
Obviously there's.
There are laws around that, butmore than anything,
accessibility means that youneed to.
It means that it's somethingthat most anybody could consume.
And, as I'm looking at the bestpractices from an AI perspective
, I think you find it kind ofironic that a lot of the best
practices for creating AIfriendly content fall on the
(45:10):
foundation of accessible content, right?
So content that's concise,that's easier to read, that's
clear, that's well-structured,all of those things that uses
appropriate use of alt text.
I think, if you are thinking,coming to the party with an
accessibility first mindset,you're going to actually have a
very AI friendly strategy andthat's going to help you win.
When we come down from thebottom of you know, come down to
(45:32):
the plateau of this hype cycle.
I think that's where you'regoing to see organizations
winning.
Speaker 2 (45:54):
I love that Okay.
Speaker 3 (45:55):
So tell me more about progresscom, give us the pitch
and then also what's the bestyou gave me a link that we'll
put in the show notes and whatsoftware that allows our
customers to build, deploy andmanage responsible AI-powered
applications and experiences.
Within the digital experiencebusiness unit where I live, we
have products like Sitefinity,which is our complex content
(46:18):
management system and digitalexperience platform, and
Sitefinity Insight, which is ourcustomer data platform.
We also have our developertools.
We have document collaborationtools and file transfer
solutions.
I just sputtered through all ofthat.
Can I say that one all againfor you, and sorry, your
(46:41):
question was something aboutprogress.
Is that great?
Oh, that, that was great.
Speaker 2 (46:45):
So what's the best way to get in touch with you um
to follow you, all that sort ofthing yep, um.
Speaker 3 (46:50):
best way to reach me is um on linkedin um and sarah
fats on linkedin uh or x,although I don't use x as much
as I used to um and SFATS is myhandle on LinkedIn.
I do have a podcast as well 10Minute MarTech for those who are
interested, and you can findthat on our YouTube channel, the
(47:11):
Sitefinity YouTube channel.
Speaker 2 (47:13):
Awesome.
I want to just totally resonatewith what Sarah's saying that
your website is much more than abrochure today.
With what Sarah's saying thatyour website is much more than a
brochure today, uh, and I thinka lot of people uh in the B2B
space are looking at that tolike check the box.
I think that 10 years ago, okay, like you have a website,
you're legit, um, you know.
(47:34):
Now talk to our salespeople, um, but, but the customer
experience, more and more peoplewant to have that, get to that
sale online, and that that'sreally what I'm seeing is, uh,
the more uh you can drive itonline, the more leverage you
can get um as a company, uh toto not have to um do so much
(47:57):
heavy lifting in person, right,and so it's really a sales tool.
It's a supportive tool.
I've seen it in the pharma spacebig time.
Um, they were already drivingpeople to uh, you know, uh touch
pads and where they wereclicking and what was going on
and and user engagement was bigand and I'm seeing it kind of uh
, uh percolate to to all theother industries.
So, uh, if, if you haven'talready, go check out uhcom.
(48:21):
If you're thinking aboutbuilding a new website, you
really should.
Every like three years I wouldsay max five years you have to
build a new website.
I mean, we build a lot of justWordPress sites or Shopify sites
or stuff like that, but whensomeone comes to us, I can
almost date when their websitewas built right and now there's
(48:45):
other platforms that you canbuild sites on as well, and I
think, checking out progress andunderstanding especially if
you're an enterprise company andyou have the ability to
leverage all these analytics anddo something with it I would
encourage y'all to check it out.
And so hopefully, thisconversation was helpful.
Hopefully we de-stressed you alittle bit that we are in the
(49:10):
hype cycle of AI, but if you'redoing all the foundational
things, you're doing it right.
And, sarah, I'll give a quick,actual, real testimony.
We landed a client and this wasI don't know a year ago.
I wasn't looking at all thedifferent LLMs and ranking in
all the LLMs, like I was.
We were dabbling in it, like wewere.
Definitely it's a moving target.
(49:31):
We were looking at it and aclient called, or someone called
and said the only reason I II'm talking to you right now
like this, is how they startedthe conversation, and that
person actually listens to thispodcast, so they'll hear this.
But but basically, the onlyreason I'm talking to you is
because you ranked first inperplexity and at the time, okay
(49:55):
, and this is where I was a yearago.
It's, we've come a long way.
My first question was what isperplexity?
And my first question was whatis perplexity?
And and and and.
So I, we were just doing goodSEO and we were optimizing for
SEO and the schema showed upthere Right, and and then, and
then to your point of thecustomer journey.
As the conversation was goingon, he goes wait, like I don't
(50:21):
know if he said I recognize yourvoice, but maybe he did.
I don't know.
But he was like I listened toyour podcast.
So so that point plus thispoint, it was like this is going
to happen, right, and so so youknow just to to to leave
everybody on a on.
On a positive note, whateveryou're doing right now is good
(50:46):
and if you're focused on thestrategy, it's great.
But you can do more and you canget more leverage with AI, but
you still have to have someonedriving it that understands the
strategy and what you're doingor you're just going to be
paddling really hard, right?
So, everybody, hopefully youfound this conversation helpful.
(51:07):
If you're looking to grow yourbusiness online with the
strongest, most powerful tool onthe planet the internet, reach
out to EWR digital for morerevenue in your business and we
can hook you up with the rightpeople like Progress or what
have you, based on your needs,and thank you all for listening.
(51:29):
Until the next time, my name isMatt Bertram.
Bye-bye for now.
This is the Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing,
your insider guide to thestrategies top marketers use to
crush the competition.
Ready to unlock your businessfull potential, let's get
started.
Speaker 2 (00:19):
Wow, look at that.
Welcome back to another episodeof the Unknown Secrets of
Internet Marketing.
My name is Matt Bertram.
I have too much data stored onmy studio and so it's glitching
out, so I apologize to everybody.
Things are moving so fast andeverybody wants to know.
Or either you're drowning outall the AI progress because it's
(00:43):
happening so fast and you'retrying to focus on what matters,
or you're drinking out of afire hydrant and just trying to
take it all in as quickly as youcan, and so you're going to
probably fall on that spectrumsomewhere, and so I wanted to
bring on somebody that's at theforefront of this, of what's
(01:04):
going on with AI and contentmanagement from Progresscom,
sarah Fatz.
Welcome to the show.
Speaker 3 (01:11):
Thank you so much, really excited to be here.
Speaker 2 (01:14):
Well, you know, I know we were having in the
pre-interview and I was likelet's just like put this live
for everybody, because I findthat the conversations I have
before we go live and after wego live are the absolute best
conversations, and you just gotto try to record it all and
that's what people want to see.
I guess is that realconversation?
(01:36):
So you and I were talking aboutcustomer journey and how that's
absolutely changed and you knowI have looked at it for a long
time.
There was a Google study awhile ago about how it looked,
kind of like a neuron, wherepeople kept going back to the
center right.
It wasn't linear.
Everybody draws it out linear.
(01:58):
So why don't you kind of tee upand set the table for the
audience of how you see thecustomer journey today, and then
, of course, we'll naturallyprogress into what you're doing
and AI and all that?
Speaker 3 (02:13):
Absolutely.
Yeah, thank you.
Yeah, I think I mean thedemocratization and
proliferation of AI has changedeveryone's behavior right Now to
your point.
I think we used to marketersthought that we had some
semblance of control over thejourney, and I think it's always
been a little chaotic becausewe're we're messy, you know,
humans are messy, but but therewas still a path that you could
take.
You could drive people to yourwebsite through SEO and other
(02:36):
other strategies.
When they got there, you couldhelp them find the path to help
them take the action you wantedthem to take Right Buy now,
register, download them.
Take the action you wanted themto take right by now, register,
download.
But today, with ai, oftentimesthe journey ends before it even
begins, like, if we're beinghonest, because people can get
the answers to their questionsor find the information they
need without ever making it toyour site.
(02:57):
Zero click search, in myopinion, is the biggest catalyst
of change we've seen in areally long time when it comes
to the customer journey andcontent journey all up.
Speaker 2 (03:08):
I absolutely agree.
We're seeing, on the SEO sideof things, less people are being
driven to the websitespecifically, but it hasn't
changed the buying patterns forthe brands that own the space,
right, like.
So if you own the market andyou're everywhere and people can
(03:29):
see you, right, it doesn'tmatter what platform you're on.
They're going to go buy whenthey're ready to buy.
The biggest thing that is hardfor us to track things that I'm
seeing digital marketers hard totrack is well, because each
search is so personalized.
Uh, tracking rankings isgetting uh very difficult.
And then last click attributionright, like everybody wants to.
(03:53):
Uh, you know, first or lastkick attribution.
I'm like, uh, you know there'sthere's so much going on that
you don't even see where it goesonline, offline.
So, like, map out, like uh, youdo a lot of B2B stuff, map out
like maybe just a generalcustomer journey as you know it
in your head, but you can'tprove it through the data.
Speaker 3 (04:16):
Welcome to my world, right?
Yeah, I mean, I think thecustomer journey really starts
with.
A customer is looking forsomething, and we've, for a long
time, talked about the factthat you shouldn't be marketing
features and functionality.
You should be marketing theproblem that your product solves
.
But that's really hard.
(04:37):
But the companies that aregoing to be successful moving
forward, particularly in an AIspace, are the ones who actually
can do that.
They stop talking about featuresand functionality because,
let's be honest, nobody reallyis searching for I shouldn't say
nobody, but most people aren'tsaying hey, I want to know if
you have a new button.
Do you have a new color, blue onthat button, unless you're
(04:58):
using the product already?
So what they really care aboutis making sure that they have a
website or a product that'saccessible, and to solve that
problem, they need to make surethat they have high contrast
colors and those kinds of things.
And so the customer journey thenbecomes understanding at a very
deep level, who the customer is, what problem they have and how
(05:22):
you're going to be able tosolve that problem.
And that changes your contentjourney in a very, very big way,
because it's no longer justeverything has to be more, it
has to be deeper, it has to be alot more authentic and it has
to be predictive, in the sensethat you understand your
customers well enough to knowwhat they're going to be needing
(05:42):
or asking and why I mean you'recreating products with new
features and functionalitybecause the customer needs them.
You need to be able tocommunicate at a much better
level why that's important,right, and tell a story.
It's more about storytelling.
Those are buzzwords that we'vebeen using for a long time, but
I don't know that people havedone it right or well for a long
(06:04):
time.
Speaker 2 (06:05):
So two of the things you said.
Can you hear me?
I changed my mic out.
Hopefully it sounds a littlebit better for everyone.
So one is people buy based onemotion, right, and they may
justify it based on logic.
So we're talking aboutstorytelling, we're talking
about connecting with theaudience, and then I forget who
I want to reference, who it iscorrectly, but they said, like
(06:28):
you've got to get in the head ofthe customer and understand the
conversation.
They're telling themselves toanswer that question for them,
right?
So you got to answer thatquestion.
You got to draw upon theemotion and I am seeing that
absolutely in the data.
So when you look at how peopleare using chat functions like
LLMs, or even how they're usingGoogle, they're getting a lot
(06:50):
more advanced and they're usinga lot more prompting to get what
they're looking for right andto customize it.
Boolean search used to be thebig term right in the past, but
we're seeing conversionshappening a lot of times.
Eight plus keywords, okay.
So like where the conversionsare happening.
(07:10):
So you want to rank if we'retalking about SEO for that core
seed keyword, because thenyou're going to qualify for all
these other searches, but thenoutside of those searches,
understanding and Google's triedto do that right.
Like people will ask things toknow, they're trying to solve
those and there's been a bigkind of uproar of the zero click
(07:31):
of getting into those spaces.
But we've seen, if you can geton the first page now you don't
have to be first because also,actually what's interesting is
sometimes the first positiongets skipped for whatever reason
.
We've seen that in the ads.
Right, it's about catching theattention, drawing them into
(07:53):
that, and a lot of times the AIoverviews are where people's
going and you can show up inthere and then, if they see your
name later on in the customerjourney, right, multiple times,
they start to gravitate to youas a trusted source.
Speaker 3 (08:06):
A hundred percent, yeah, but it's those, it's it,
those are the invisible things,right, it's very hard to track
hey, I've seen you, you knowseven, 20, you know 25 times.
Um, because it's so, so much apart of the subconscious right,
it's very hard to say, oh yeah,this is working because of X,
right?
So when you actually have tocome and defend your content
(08:28):
strategy, it you know, it's veryhard to have a data-driven
approach to say we appearedthese 17 times in this person's
search and that's how we, youknow that, that's how they, they
, they found us.
I think that starting tocollect and review unstructured
data is going to help us maybefind it'll be more of a dotted
(08:52):
line, you know, hey, this iswhat's working.
But I think that looking atbeing able to build leveraging
AI, to build profiles based onunstructured data from some of
your key customers is going tohelp you start building that um,
that report that says, hey,this is working right.
This is why we should be doingX, y or Z.
Speaker 2 (09:13):
Yeah, I mean, that's one of the things that I I talk
about.
Um, you know, the big brandsmost of the time understand this
.
Um, the smaller brands just wanttransactional right and they
just I need leads or whatever itis and you know you got to map
out who are you trying to speakto, what kind of bait are you
(09:35):
fishing with?
Right, and that actuallytranslates when I see with the
bigger companies, the marketingqualified leads and the sales
qualified leads, they got to bein alignment of what what that
looks like.
And if the content strategydoesn't start out going after
that target persona, right,you're going to get the wrong
(09:55):
kind of fish or the wrong kindof bait, or like right and and
so it all puts together and whatI've had to do, um, and tell me
what you're doing and whatyou're seeing.
Like I start with, okay, or isthis the kind of lead Like, when
, like, what's the final result?
Is this the kind of lead thatyou want?
What about it, don't you want?
And then I try to, because youcan't track everything and I'm
(10:19):
working with some non you were,we were talking about nonprofits
.
I'm working with a nonprofitright now that their funnel goes
to three different sites, okay,so if you're doing UTMB
tracking, like you lose it,right, and so.
(10:39):
So then I'm like, okay, well,can we set up heat mapping on?
Like, like, how do we track it?
And so I I start at the end andI'm having to work backwards to
try to figure it out.
But you're like going, okay,here's who we're going after and
here's the end, right, and thenyou're doing all the things in
the middle to try to figure outexactly what's happening.
There used to be this term.
It was totally a buzzword, butI think that there's some truth
(11:00):
in it.
They were calling it like darksocial, okay, and they're like,
and I was like what is dark?
Do you remember?
that.
Speaker 3 (11:06):
Like I was like what is?
Speaker 2 (11:07):
dark social Right.
But it's like all the stuffthat happens that you can't
track, and I think that, likeGoogle AdWords gets a lot of
credit for the last touchattribution, but in someone's
customer journey, when theystart out knowing they have a
problem, the last thing they dois they're deciding between
(11:27):
companies, right?
Speaker 3 (11:29):
Right, exactly, yeah.
Speaker 2 (11:30):
Or they even know that their service, whatever
you're selling, that they needto be searching for that, and so
you know that's when theconversion happens.
But it could have been, youknow, that Reddit post or that
Facebook ad or something elsethat spurred their attention to
say, hey, this is it.
And then people, right now,with the economy getting more
(11:53):
uncertain, people are tighteningup and they're cutting the
things that they think are notworking.
But it's really thecollaboration or the, the, the,
the amplifier effect of allthese different channels that
have built this carefully drawnout funnel of you're getting
leads.
And so if you change too manyvariables at one time, we had a
(12:15):
client just recently change acouple of things, okay, on their
own, they just decided thatthey were, they changed this and
their leads dropped by 90%.
And then they're like, whathappened?
And I was like well, what didyou do?
Right, and you know, like, andso everything's kind of
(12:36):
delicately put together and youdon't know.
You know what, what signals aresending, where and how you're
positioning, but you change onething what, what signals are
sending, where and how you'repositioning, but you change one
thing the whole organization oflike where you land, and if you
move from position one toposition three boy, are you
(12:57):
gonna feel it right?
Speaker 3 (12:57):
you know, right, it's right, yeah, and the amazing
thing is, I mean, you're talkingabout, I mean think about that
from a one buyer, um,perspective when you start
adding buying groups in there,right, right, you have a far
more complex journey.
That you know.
You, how do you?
You may have a you know achampion who is, or you know the
person's ultimately going to bethe user, but they're not the
purchaser and they have, youknow, on the content management
(13:18):
system, for example, you have,you're going to have your,
probably your IT team is goingto be involved and marketing ops
will be involved.
Revenue ops might be involved,marketing might be involved,
depending on the size of theorganization.
Right, that's a lot of, that'sa lot of audience that you have
to talk to, and in everyorganization that might be a
different purchaser at the end,and so you have to really all of
(13:41):
those things that you'retalking about in that dark dark
side of you, know the dark right, however you want it, but it it
definitely is Um.
You have to really startunderstanding and I love the
idea of going working from from.
You know, here's the sale.
Let's work back and figure outum.
How we got to that ideal leadto begin with Um.
(14:03):
But I think the other thing isthat we're all humans.
All take their different paths.
That's why.
That's why saying a funnel afunnel was never linear.
To begin with, it was alwayschaotic and messy.
We just had there were fewerpaths for people to take, right,
so it felt more.
It felt like a funnel and nowit's more, just like it's a
choose your own adventure wherepeople are starting getting off
(14:24):
and on at all different pointsand places.
You know, getting off and on atall different points and places,
and I think the one thing thatai does to really disrupt that
is that it doesn't necessarily,if we can believe that that ai
in some cases is the ui, it'sthat user interface that you.
You then have to start thinkingabout um.
If I have this piece of contentwhether it was, you know, maybe
(14:46):
it was a middle of this pieceof content.
Whether it was, you know, maybeit was a middle of funnel piece
of content that if they caughtthat information on my site,
there would be a natural path orprogression.
Now I have to start thinkingabout that content and say, if
somebody consumes this as partof an LLM output or from an AI
agent, how do I help themunderstand that there is more
that they could learn?
(15:06):
There's more that they couldlearn.
There's more that they could do.
We have more to offer, right.
So it really does make you haveto rethink the purpose of the
content and how you use it as astepping stone for people or
help them use it as a steppingstone.
But then again, like I said,you can go back to before you
have.
If you have multiple buyinggroups that all of a sudden
(15:27):
becomes.
That's a crisscross, you knowpath that kind of eventually
hopefully all leads to thebottom.
Speaker 2 (15:35):
Well, you know, when you, when you talk about the,
the, the funnel and the pathway,I think all the way back to
when Google uh, no matter whatkeyword you would rank for, it
would always be your homepage.
Right, so you always had the.
you always had the that you weregoing in so you know how people
could direct.
But today every page is like anode in you know the ecosystem
(15:57):
of information organization,right, I guess?
And and so you know this randompage over here that's not even
in your navigation structurecould be the doorway that people
are coming in.
And so I think thatunderstanding analytics because
I can tell you reallyunderstanding how to chop up
analytics helps you guess better.
Speaker 3 (16:19):
I guess Right right, right right.
Speaker 2 (16:22):
And you can get ideas about stuff, and I think it,
you know.
I mean, look, gary Vaynerchuksays just do it all, do as much
of it as you can, because you'rejust mapping everything out and
you want to be be everywhere,right, you know, that's great,
and AI helps speed everything up.
I think, like you said, it'slike this interface that just
(16:42):
speeds everything up, right, andand so you know.
But there are general channels,right, there's general channels
that people fall into, and Ithink that that's where people
should start right.
Start start with the heavierchannels and then kind of build
up of there.
There are people on a, ascatterplot right, that are
(17:04):
going to be everywhere, um, buttry to kind of cluster those
things to hopefully get the uhuser traffic flowing in the
right direction and then set setthose triggers.
But, like you said, give thedirectional point of okay, you
can go back and go up.
You actually heard that onsomebody I was interviewing on
(17:29):
the previous podcast.
They weren't using it in thatcontext, but it's so applicable
because okay.
So I'm going to jump to likeshort form content for a second.
I am absolutely seen in socialmedia that, because the
algorithm changes from TikTok,uh, just, and, and everybody's
(17:50):
adapted right, youtube's adapted, instagram's adapted Like you,
facebook is adapted Like thiscontent is going to find
somebody that wants it, right,and it's so reflective of
whatever you want, right,literally like everybody's
producing content at thisexponential rate.
It's literally choose your ownadventure, because your feed,
(18:13):
sarah, my feed, anybody's feedis going to be completely
different.
I've looked at other people'sfeeds and I've gone like this is
not at all what my feed looks,like this, this is not at all
maybe what I'm interested in,based on like a percentage of
buckets or whatever, but it'sabsolutely designed for them and
(18:34):
so so I don't know the chooseyour own adventure really
resonates with me, yeah.
Speaker 3 (18:39):
Well, the only thing, the only concern I have with
the choose your own adventure,and I think choose your own
adventure a hundred percent isthe way to go, but then you also
have to your point.
So much content is beingcreated.
I don't want to end up in adigital wasteland.
Creating content for content'ssake is not the right way to go.
Creating content because youcan do it quickly is not the
right way to go.
I think some of the core tenetsof solid SEO remain true from an
(19:04):
AI discoverability perspective,and that is create quality
content right.
Create content that has youknow unique thought, unique
insight, that has you know yourperspective on things, as
opposed to this generalfluffiness and I'm afraid, like
I still see people creating,like just you know, garbage with
(19:24):
it because it's easy, and Ithink that that's where you know
when we start talking aboutfeeds and having short form
content and content thatresonates, you know, from an
individual perspective andalmost hyper personalization,
you still absolutely need to bethinking about the fact that you
know why am I creating thispiece of content?
Speaker 2 (19:57):
right.
Is it actually going to dosomething, or is it just going
to be noise, or digital waste,as we like to refer to it?
The exponential rate, theycan't even keep up.
Or I mean they can keep up, butit's moving so quickly that
they're, you know, trying toindex, right.
Well, not index, but they'retrying to collect all the
information that's beinggenerated in the world, and then
they're trying to organize itright, that's their kind of core
(20:18):
tenant.
Well, if you're not in the top100, right, and we already know
from all the studies of the datalike, look, if you're not on
the first page, it almostdoesn't matter.
So the only things that aregoing to show up in the first
page and also show up in thefirst 100, is going to be
(20:39):
original thought.
It's going to be you're addingsomething to the conversation
online that AI can't generatebecause it hasn't incorporated
that yet.
Right, and so you know, I think, that a lot of people have gone
the route of generating a tonof content and then these core
updates happen and they lose aton of traffic.
(20:59):
And it's because, well, youknow, that content barely
crusted the surface of the top100.
Right, and then, and now it'sbeen optimized in another way
and it was able to grab othercontent that might have been
more valuable.
And boom, now you're gone andyou have no link equity.
That's getting pushed from it.
(21:19):
And then, boom, like you said,it goes back to the core tenets
of SEO, of like is this goodquality content?
How do we design this for theuser?
So nothing's had, nothing hasreally changed, right, right,
like, fundamentally, I mean,they added the expertise to eat,
(21:40):
right.
Speaker 3 (21:40):
Right, right, yeah, exactly.
Speaker 2 (21:42):
Yeah, try to say hey, like this is a real human.
So I think that that washelpful.
But I mean, what?
What are you seeing?
Um, I mean, I'm, I'm trying tostay on top of this.
Like this is like a weeklything of like, where
everything's going.
But like I talked to a clientactually this morning who has a
(22:02):
neighbor Okay, um, so, so andand the neighbor, um, I think,
so smart guy, I haven't, Ihaven't met him, but he's
mentioned the neighbor to me afew times and he's like Google's
dead, he goes, he goes and hedoesn't even know it yet and I
go, man, like I hear.
I've heard that SEO is dead somany times and and SEO, I think,
(22:25):
has taken on a new form thatalmost everybody needs to
understand SEO as, like you'rebuilding stuff, but it's like
understanding the algorithms onany platform to understand how
that content, whatever it is, isbeing interpreted.
So I just wanted to get your,your take on on where we are at
(22:46):
on the time.
Speaker 3 (22:47):
Yeah, yeah, I mean, google's not dead and Google's
not going to die.
I think we're evolving just asanything, right?
I mean, there was a time whenwebsites were dead because they
were only brochure where guesswhat Websites evolved, and now
they are all sorts of things.
I think websites are going toevolve again and I think they're
going to continue to be achannel.
(23:08):
I do think that AI will becomethe UI in some cases.
I think that integration of AIwithin the search tools, within
your Googles and your Bings thatonly is going to.
They're just going to evolve.
They're not going away, they'renot dying.
And I think SEO from I think itwas Neil Patel who said it's not
(23:30):
search engine optimization,it's search everywhere
optimization right, and I thinkthat that is 100% what you're
going to see.
But I think that, again, thecore tenants, if you're saying,
hey, drop everything and justmake an AI strategy so
everything's discoverable on AI,and ranking through with AI
agents and LLM outputs, thenyou're going to be losing sight
(23:51):
of the fact that you still needto optimize for SEO.
Right, search engines are not.
They are in some cases.
Well, they're built on a lot ofAI engines, right?
I mean, they are.
I mean, so it's.
Yeah, I think that there's a lotof hype.
We're obviously at the top ofthe hype cycle right now.
There's a lot of truth inwhat's going on from an AI
(24:11):
perspective and a lot of change.
I mean, I think, you know, ifwe had the same conversation a
year from now and looked back,we might be laughing at even
some of the words that we'reusing right now.
Right, and how we're eventalking about agents, ai agents
or LLM outputs.
But no, I think that they are ahundred percent.
Google and all of the searchengines need.
(24:33):
They're going to remain.
They're just going to grow andevolve and be as relevant and
maybe, in some cases, even morerelevant as they are today.
Speaker 2 (24:41):
Awesome.
So let's transition to whatprogresscom is doing and what
you're doing with content.
Maybe you could share kind ofsome case studies or something
that you're seeing that might beinteresting for people to know
from a new data standpoint oflike hey, this is what we're
doing and this is what we'reseeing and this is how it's
working.
I think that would be superhelpful for the audience.
Speaker 3 (25:04):
I mean, I think there are a couple of things I mean
from a product perspective.
We actually have introducedrecently AI propensity scoring
within Sitefinity, so weactually have customers who are
leveraging that forpersonalization in ways that
they never have we talked about.
Personalization is a buzzword.
(25:25):
That has been, you know people,how long have we been talking
about personalization?
I think with AI, one of thethings that we're seeing is our
customers who are using ourplatforms are able to truly
actually, you know, personalizecontent now and personalize the
content journey in ways thatthey weren't before and by
leveraging the propensityscoring they can actually have,
(25:47):
they have some predictiveanalytics about what, what will
be coming next, and so we havesome customers who have um
leveraged that to modify theircontent journey, um to build new
content, that for for higherresults, um, and they're seeing
higher conversion rates.
So, um, a partner roundtableevent last week in Dublin and
(26:11):
one of our partners was talkingabout a client that they have
that has done that withinSightfinity and it's really
proving itself out, which isamazing to me, because we're,
you know again, we've talkedabout personalization for a long
time.
I think it's just getting to apoint where it's mature enough
that we can.
Technology is mature enoughthat we can accurately do that.
Speaker 2 (26:34):
Can you explain to me maybe at a high level, for
people listening as well what isthe scoring system doing?
How is it working?
Just at a high level?
I think that would be helpfulfor people.
Speaker 3 (26:46):
Yeah, so at a high level, it's looking at the
actions that customers andprospects are taking within the
content, within the site right,and leveraging predictive
analytics to let you know whattheir next anticipated step will
be and if you're seeing the wayyou can use it.
It's really interesting becauseif you're seeing that there's a
massive drop off, at some pointin time you understand that
(27:10):
there's something broken in that.
Choose your own adventure game.
You need to add another optionfor them to say, okay, this is
where I need to go, and so itallows you to really start to
understand what kind of contentis resonating and how that
journey is unfolding, so thatyou can help guide them through
that journey.
Does that make sense?
Speaker 2 (27:31):
Yeah, so it's really helping map out the funnel of
what people are doing beyondwhat you're getting with GA4 or
something like that.
It's at a site level, and soit's a CMS, correct.
Speaker 3 (27:42):
Correct.
Yeah, so it's a CMS and then wehave a CDP as well, a customer
data platform that looks atunstructured data as well, so
not just the data within thesite, but it's looking at the
broader all of the data that wehave for that customer across
the board, which is reallyputting together a pretty
powerful picture of the customerjourney.
Speaker 2 (28:02):
Describe that a little bit more of the
unstructured data, of what it'scapturing or looking at Again,
just at a high level, I thinkyeah, so it can, um and it's all
.
Speaker 3 (28:11):
Whatever we can be collected and looked at legally,
right, I should.
I should preface it with thatum.
It is a um, but it's the theknown information on that person
, whether it's uh, socialinteractions or um other sites
that they visited.
Looking at that kind ofinformation and and building
that unique profile for thatcustomer.
Speaker 2 (28:30):
Yeah, moz is doing some of that these days, right,
like he's really mapping thatout.
I think that that is superhelpful when you're trying to
figure out who you're goingafter, where they're at, what
they're looking at.
And then like you said, thatcustomer journey, kind of going
back to it is like you need tolook up or like, if you're, if
(28:50):
you're on a spatial plot, right,like it's, it's what you touch
in every direction, because theycan, they can choose to go
whatever direction you give them.
And if they want to go, youknow this direction and you
don't have a piece of contentthere they jump from your
content to to something else orthey go back to the beginning,
(29:11):
right, and they, they, whatever,wherever they started their
search, which could be YouTube,could be, uh, you know, chat,
gbt, it could be Google, itcould be anything, um, but they
go back to that beginning pointand then start over and you
might not get them, you mightnot catch them again.
And one of the things I'm seeing.
I'm curious this is somethingI'm seeing in the data A lot of
(29:36):
times people are converting inthe mode that they're in right.
So they're either going toconvert that first day like
they're going to go all the wayto the finish line and close
that first day, like they'regoing to go all the way to the
finish line and close, or it'slike 30 days plus.
It's almost like I'm I'm notseeing any data like in between
there.
Not a lot right, like justsubstantially.
(29:57):
Like you either get them on thefirst shot right or they're,
you're, they're going to begoing through a sifting process
and and you're going to, you'regoing to hopefully capture them,
that they're going to find yourstuff later, and that does
happen a lot, and that's what Isee in the reporting.
A lot is like we need to lookbackwards, like 30 days, to say
(30:18):
did this work?
Because you know I mean withdata you are getting real time
data.
But like, even if you run adslike I'm, like it takes two
weeks or something to like forit to just kind of percolate
through and for people to takeaction, not to say that there's
not 3% or whatever the number isof someone that buys
immediately.
But when you're getting theminto like that customer journey,
(30:42):
unless they're ready to buyimmediately, you're kind of
dropping.
I feel like it's like droppinga Plinko ball and it's going
Exactly.
Speaker 3 (30:51):
A hundred percent, yeah, yeah, yeah.
And I think the other thing isevery every buyer's, you know,
buying life cycle is varies andeven within our business, you
know, we have, you know, five orsix buckets of products and
some are very transactional anda hundred percent what you said.
If they, if they're not takingan action when they're there,
and some are very transactionaland 100% what you said.
If they're not taking an actionwhen they're there, it's going
(31:13):
to be either 30 days, 60 days orthey're just not right.
We have others that the buyingcycle could be 18 months,
believe it or not, right?
And those are the more complexproducts that have buying groups
as opposed to a singlepurchaser and all of those kinds
of things and all of thosekinds of things.
But that becomes exponentiallymore complex.
Which is also why havingpredictive analytics, having
propensity scoring, having thatkind of information available to
(31:34):
you, is super important,because you have to look at the
buying group as a whole asopposed to you know if
somebody's purchasing theproduct, what are all the touch
points from that domain or fromthat organization that says,
okay, these are, you know, it'ssimilar to intent data, right?
You know what are the signalsthat you're going to get from
from all of that, but being ableto understand on what point
(31:59):
they're, they have pause, um,you know, in that journey it's
it's really, really important.
Speaker 2 (32:05):
So so, if I use like, so we're, we're in Houston, so
we do a lot of oil and gas,industrial um, manufacturing,
all that kind of stuff, and whatI'm seeing is, okay, you're
speaking to the executive, okay,and then you're speaking to
maybe the field person and thenthey've they've really drawn a
like step back and there arebuying groups, right, and you
might not even know whoeverybody is on that committee
(32:27):
now, right, so you can't targetthe like.
I mean there's the procurementperson or whoever it is.
But what I am seeing as likepeople are like, okay, we need
to trim spend or this or that.
And we trimmed spend on acouple of campaigns where we
weren't targeting the 25 to 35group.
Okay, well, like, what we sawas a result of that is we were
(32:54):
getting less people likerequesting RPs or whatever it is
, because, because there's the,the assistant or the new hire or
the junior person that is goingto do the, the gophering.
I don't know if that's the word,but going to go doing the
research, finding the stuff andthen passing it back, and then
(33:17):
the executives might go do thatresearch after, like, it's been
vetted to a few companies orsomething like that.
And so like.
You need to have thatpredictive analytics.
You need to understand whoyou're targeting, who you're
speaking to, who are yourchampions, right, I mean?
Who are the?
Speaker 3 (33:34):
people who are going to champion within the
organization, because they mightnot actually have anything to
do with the final purchasingdecision, but they could be
incredibly influential.
And I think that's the audiencethat a lot of people I don't
want to say ignore, because thatsounds harsh, but I think they
do they kind of push them off tothe side because, oh, it's a
nice to have when, in actuality,they are as critical as the
(33:56):
final purchaser in a lot ofcases, because they're the
gatekeeper.
If your champion or influenceris not, they're the ones who are
doing that initial hey, we needthis product or a solution.
Right, we have this problem, weneed to solve it.
If that person is not beingengaged with the content, that
you would need to be thechampion, right, you know?
(34:17):
Or, and that the kind of.
Then I think you're yeah, you're100% missing out.
Sounds to me like you're doing.
Yeah, you're a hundred percentmissing out.
Sounds to me like you're doinga lot of experiments, which is
fantastic that you can actuallyturn around and say, hey, you
know, we have data to show.
This is why we need to do X, yor Z, and I think that's
something with AI we should beable to see more of, because you
(34:38):
can move quickly Right.
Speaker 2 (34:40):
Well, I mean what we're seeing.
Yeah, I mean what what we'reseeing?
Yeah, I mean I get to work witha lot of different overseeing
strategy for a lot of differentcompanies, big and small, and so
I'm able to see a lot of dataand and draw inferences from
that and then apply that and andwe're seeing a lot, even on the
social side of things is likelet's put out a trial balloon on
social, then if it does well,then let's put some money behind
(35:02):
it on the advertising side,versus just like deciding like
this is what we're going to gowith and run it, because I mean,
ultimately, the end result iswhat people are paying for, not
whatever comes in between there.
They're really looking at thefinal result.
I mean, what, what are youseeing?
(35:23):
Um, like so, so you, you havethese different stakeholders,
like you said it.
Um, you know you got marketing,you got executives.
What I'm increasingly seeing issales and marketing working
more and more in hand, the CROposition, all that sort of thing
.
Um, and and I I'm seeing, orI'm trying to help have the
(35:45):
perspective of sales change onhow, like critical and how
influential marketing can be inthat sales process.
Right, and I think COVID andyou know everything moving
online had had had increasedthat Right and also drawn that
attention to it, because youcan't, you couldn't, spend your
(36:05):
conference budget on on onmarketing Right.
Like you couldn't.
You couldn't go to theconferences, so let's put our
money other places.
And they're seeing it happenRight, like, what are you seeing
in that that customer journeyfrom a sales and marketing
standpoint, are, are, are youcause?
I think your platform from asales and marketing standpoint,
because I think your platformand I want to talk more about it
(36:27):
on how it also can help,because I think it's super
critical.
So just tell me what you'reseeing on the marketing and
sales, how you're seeingsalespeople look at marketing
and how to influence that.
Speaker 3 (36:37):
Yeah, I mean we're seeing more of the rise of
revenue operations, which isthat marriage of the two, right,
you have marketing ops, youhave sales ops coming together
from a revenue operationsperspective, I mean I think the
marketing sales interaction hasalways I mean, that's a tale as
old as time right, but I think,yes, we are seeing more
(37:00):
integration with it's not just ahandoff and walk away.
There is more integration, adeeper integration across both
organizations.
Speaker 2 (37:14):
Because I can see that the platform that you have
prove out what's happening right.
Because a lot of timesmarketing will go to sales and
say, hey, what is the customerstory you're using?
What's the testimonial?
What's the?
what's the homegrown stuffyou're not supposed to be using,
but we know you're using thatin the field, like let's bring
(37:36):
that back, let's get it approvedthrough legal and let's let's
use that across uh, you know the, the, the uh districts or
territories, and and I I'mseeing that the the data that
you're being able to give is ismore supportive of that to say
hey, like this, this is helping,this is working, and and being
(38:00):
able to see the like, the realapplication of what we're not
seeing, like we talked aboutmore in the field?
Speaker 3 (38:06):
Yeah, absolutely.
And being able to marry theexperience that we're able to
pull from the platform and the Idon't want to say anecdotal
because it's not anecdotal, butthe evidence that the sales team
is getting, and marry the two?
Yeah, absolutely.
And we are being able to showthat and it is exciting to see
(38:31):
that take place because it doesallow for more meaningful
engagement and higher conversionrates on the backend and it
shows that the marketing spendit's funny you talk about events
.
My team is responsible for ourevent strategy as well, and
that's changed exponentially inthe last five years.
And the purpose I still believea thousand percent in events and
(38:51):
that you need to be doing them,but you need to know why you're
doing them, and I think for along time, people didn't
understand that, and so beingable to reallocate that spend to
more meaningful engagementsthat impact sales in a different
way is really, you know it, itit's something that we're I
ended up having to haveconversations a lot about.
(39:12):
Well, why aren't we at thisplace?
Or we should be here, whyaren't we doing more of this?
And like, my first question tothem always is well, what is
your, what is the goal?
Like what do you think we'regoing to get out of that by
doing that?
And usually it's something thatthey want.
They want something that you'renot going to get from an event,
right, they want something.
(39:33):
They want exactly what you andI were just talking about that
connection.
That's a deeper connection withthe customer, something that's
going to have a higherconversion, something that's
going to get them closer to asale, and most events today are
not that.
They're about building brandawareness.
They're another touch.
They're about engagement.
They're building trust,delighting existing customers
(39:54):
right, there are a lot ofdifferent reasons that you go,
and there's education that goesalong with that, right.
Speaker 2 (40:05):
And so, anyway, yeah, go ahead, yeah can you give me
one example, and I want, afterthis, for you to really tell us
a little bit more?
Give me the elevator pitch forprogresscom.
I want to know.
You said events have changedfor you a lot.
Can you pull something out ofthere and give a like, a
specific, that you've adaptedwhat you were doing before and
(40:28):
and and how that would work?
Speaker 3 (40:30):
Yeah, and so this would be more on the and I'll
give an example.
On our developer tool side ofthe business, we would go pre
COVID.
We were sponsoring anywherefrom 30 to 40 events per year.
We were out there and COVID hit, and we pivoted very quickly to
.
We did a lot of live streamingon Twitch and things like that.
(40:52):
What that changed, though, wasthe way that you engage with
your customer or prospect right,so the engagement became more
personal to a certain extent,because there was even and that
might sound ironic from a livestream, but it allowed you to
have interactions and engagementwith people all around the
world, not just the thousandpeople who were showing up at
(41:15):
that event, or 3000 of peopleand let's be honest, you're not
talking to all of them anyway,and you are but a drop of sand
in an expo hall.
So, as we got away from COVID,the way people engage similar to
the fact that customer behavioris changing in the face of AI
(41:35):
the way customers or prospectswant to engage with a product or
a brand is different, and theywant more of a even if it's not
an in-person touch, they wantmore of an engagement that is,
that's more personalized.
So, again, not to say that theevents I mean events absolutely
are, and I believe, I believe inthe human side of software.
(41:56):
People buy from people theydon't buy from from brands at
the end of the day.
So it's still important to havethat touch.
But we found that there aremore impactful ways for us to
engage with the audience andthat's by providing some sort of
education in a different way,in a way that they can engage
with us, whether it's again likea live stream or a webinar or
(42:17):
podcast, but having the live Q&Aafterwards or something along
those lines.
It gives us, at least for thatparticular audience.
From a developer perspective,they wanted the ability to
interact with the people and notjust and you can't do that at
scale from an event perspective.
Speaker 2 (42:36):
Yeah, no, I think that the get into the know, like
and trust, like in person atthe events, compresses the time
right.
So customer nurture, I think isbig.
I'm seeing like a pre eventevents like online and post
event events online is is hugeto to get that engagement.
(42:58):
Okay, so we're we're gettingkind of close to wrapping up.
I wanted to ask you one lastquestion that we're starting to
use this as shorts, so it can beyou repeating something we've
talked about.
Just kind of repackaging itinto a short clip is what is one
unknown secret of internetmarketing that might be
(43:20):
underutilized today?
Speaker 3 (43:22):
One unknown secret.
That's a good one.
I'm trying to think if I wouldgo Give me two, give me whatever
.
Talk about content, whatever yougot, yeah, yeah, yeah, I mean,
I think from a contentperspective, probably one of the
(43:42):
secrets would be that, eventhough there is this hype around
AI, the core tenets of SEOremain the same.
I don't know if that's a secret, but I think that it's
something that's often forgotten.
I think that people also forgetthat, as you need to create and
this is a problem, whether itwas early days of SEO or early
days of AI optimization at theend of the day, you're still
(44:03):
creating content for humans, andso, while you need to optimize
for the technology, do notforget that, at the end, the
person or the thing that'sconsuming that is human, and if
it's not something that they canengage with, all is going to be
lost, right?
So it doesn't matter if youhave the right keywords or the
right keyword clusters or theright groups.
(44:23):
You absolutely have to becreating that content that
somebody would want to actuallyengage with, whether it's video,
whether it's written content.
I think the other thing and Iwill this is more than one, it's
more than two, but I will throwthis out there.
These are just because I'vebeen thinking about it a lot we
talk a lot on our end aboutmaking software that's
(44:44):
accessible, and accessiblesoftware?
Obviously there's.
There are laws around that, butmore than anything,
accessibility means that youneed to.
It means that it's somethingthat most anybody could consume.
And, as I'm looking at the bestpractices from an AI perspective
, I think you find it kind ofironic that a lot of the best
practices for creating AIfriendly content fall on the
(45:10):
foundation of accessible content, right?
So content that's concise,that's easier to read, that's
clear, that's well-structured,all of those things that uses
appropriate use of alt text.
I think, if you are thinking,coming to the party with an
accessibility first mindset,you're going to actually have a
very AI friendly strategy andthat's going to help you win.
When we come down from thebottom of you know, come down to
(45:32):
the plateau of this hype cycle.
I think that's where you'regoing to see organizations
winning.
Speaker 2 (45:54):
I love that Okay.
Speaker 3 (45:55):
So tell me more about progresscom, give us the pitch
and then also what's the bestyou gave me a link that we'll
put in the show notes and whatsoftware that allows our
customers to build, deploy andmanage responsible AI-powered
applications and experiences.
Within the digital experiencebusiness unit where I live, we
have products like Sitefinity,which is our complex content
(46:18):
management system and digitalexperience platform, and
Sitefinity Insight, which is ourcustomer data platform.
We also have our developertools.
We have document collaborationtools and file transfer
solutions.
I just sputtered through all ofthat.
Can I say that one all againfor you, and sorry, your
(46:41):
question was something aboutprogress.
Is that great?
Oh, that, that was great.
Speaker 2 (46:45):
So what's the best way to get in touch with you um
to follow you, all that sort ofthing yep, um.
Speaker 3 (46:50):
best way to reach me is um on linkedin um and sarah
fats on linkedin uh or x,although I don't use x as much
as I used to um and SFATS is myhandle on LinkedIn.
I do have a podcast as well 10Minute MarTech for those who are
interested, and you can findthat on our YouTube channel, the
(47:11):
Sitefinity YouTube channel.
Speaker 2 (47:13):
Awesome.
I want to just totally resonatewith what Sarah's saying that
your website is much more than abrochure today.
With what Sarah's saying thatyour website is much more than a
brochure today, uh, and I thinka lot of people uh in the B2B
space are looking at that tolike check the box.
I think that 10 years ago, okay, like you have a website,
you're legit, um, you know.
(47:34):
Now talk to our salespeople, um, but, but the customer
experience, more and more peoplewant to have that, get to that
sale online, and that that'sreally what I'm seeing is, uh,
the more uh you can drive itonline, the more leverage you
can get um as a company, uh toto not have to um do so much
(47:57):
heavy lifting in person, right,and so it's really a sales tool.
It's a supportive tool.
I've seen it in the pharma spacebig time.
Um, they were already drivingpeople to uh, you know, uh touch
pads and where they wereclicking and what was going on
and and user engagement was bigand and I'm seeing it kind of uh
, uh percolate to to all theother industries.
So, uh, if, if you haven'talready, go check out uhcom.
(48:21):
If you're thinking aboutbuilding a new website, you
really should.
Every like three years I wouldsay max five years you have to
build a new website.
I mean, we build a lot of justWordPress sites or Shopify sites
or stuff like that, but whensomeone comes to us, I can
almost date when their websitewas built right and now there's
(48:45):
other platforms that you canbuild sites on as well, and I
think, checking out progress andunderstanding especially if
you're an enterprise company andyou have the ability to
leverage all these analytics anddo something with it I would
encourage y'all to check it out.
And so hopefully, thisconversation was helpful.
Hopefully we de-stressed you alittle bit that we are in the
(49:10):
hype cycle of AI, but if you'redoing all the foundational
things, you're doing it right.
And, sarah, I'll give a quick,actual, real testimony.
We landed a client and this wasI don't know a year ago.
I wasn't looking at all thedifferent LLMs and ranking in
all the LLMs, like I was.
We were dabbling in it, like wewere.
Definitely it's a moving target.
(49:31):
We were looking at it and aclient called, or someone called
and said the only reason I II'm talking to you right now
like this, is how they startedthe conversation, and that
person actually listens to thispodcast, so they'll hear this.
But but basically, the onlyreason I'm talking to you is
because you ranked first inperplexity and at the time, okay
(49:55):
, and this is where I was a yearago.
It's, we've come a long way.
My first question was what isperplexity?
And my first question was whatis perplexity?
And and and and.
So I, we were just doing goodSEO and we were optimizing for
SEO and the schema showed upthere Right, and and then, and
then to your point of thecustomer journey.
As the conversation was goingon, he goes wait, like I don't
(50:21):
know if he said I recognize yourvoice, but maybe he did.
I don't know.
But he was like I listened toyour podcast.
So so that point plus thispoint, it was like this is going
to happen, right, and so so youknow just to to to leave
everybody on a on.
On a positive note, whateveryou're doing right now is good
(50:46):
and if you're focused on thestrategy, it's great.
But you can do more and you canget more leverage with AI, but
you still have to have someonedriving it that understands the
strategy and what you're doingor you're just going to be
paddling really hard, right?
So, everybody, hopefully youfound this conversation helpful.
(51:07):
If you're looking to grow yourbusiness online with the
strongest, most powerful tool onthe planet the internet, reach
out to EWR digital for morerevenue in your business and we
can hook you up with the rightpeople like Progress or what
have you, based on your needs,and thank you all for listening.
(51:29):
Until the next time, my name isMatt Bertram.
Bye-bye for now.
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