February 5, 2025 • 35 mins
In Episode 19 of The Drake Insights Podcast, host Natasha Drake of Drake Strategic sits down with Andrew Miller, co-founder of Workshop Digital, to unravel the latest digital trends reshaping the senior living marketing landscape. Tune in as we explore how artificial intelligence (AI), personalization and voice search are transforming SEO, paid search, and content marketing strategies. Join Natasha and Andrew as they delve into these critical trends and provide actionable insights to help senior living communities thrive in the evolving digital world.
To learn more, visit Drake Strategic at https://www.drakestrategic.com/ or Workshop Digital at https://www.workshopdigital.com/
This is the Drake Insights Podcast, your weekly dose of cutting-edge senior living marketing insights. Your host, Natasha Drake from Drake Strategic, will bring you bold ideas, proven strategies, and inspiring stories – straight from the experts – to help you dominate in today’s competitive market. Tune in each episode for actionable tips and insider secrets to outsmart the competition and future-proof your success. So tune in and let's conquer the senior living marketing landscape together! @DrakeStrategic https://www.drakestrategic.com/
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Episode Transcript
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Natasha (00:00):
This is the Drake insights podcast, your weekly dose of cutting
edge senior living marketing insights.
Join me, your host, Natasha Drake for boldideas, proven strategies and inspiring
stories straight from the experts.
Tune in and let's conquer the seniorliving marketing landscape together.
Hey guys, welcome back to anotherepisode of The Drake Insights Podcast.
(00:22):
I am your host NatashaDrake from Drake Strategic.
Let's get started.
So on today's episode we're gonna divea little bit into 2025 digital trends.
And not really trends because you've heardof most of these, but really what's most
important of all the things you've heard,changes, innovations in the digital world.
What is most important to take a lookat for you to know as you're working
(00:46):
with digital agencies and othermarketing agencies and changes that are
happening with things going on with AI,generative experience, chat GPT, all the
things that we'll explain more later.
But what is it you have to hone inon really understand and how that
can change your search results, yourpaid search on Google and the results
and the conversions you can expect.
(01:07):
So I don't know if you saw it,but Workshop Digital has released
their Top Trends of 2025.
If you haven't seen it,check it out on LinkedIn.
And I was really interested to see allthe things that they had to talk about.
And we're not going to have time togo through all of those trends today.
We're going to talk a little bitabout them, but really dig into
the top SEO and paid search trendsand changes that we're seeing like
(01:31):
I just mentioned with innovation.
And so I brought on our expert fromWorkshop Digital, a co-founder,
Andrew Miller, welcome to the podcast.
If you wouldn't mind introducing yourself.
Andrew (01:44):
Yes.
Hello.
Thank you, Natasha, for the awesome intro.
Happy to be here.
I'm Andrew, one of theco-founders at Workshop Digital.
We're a digital marketing agencybased in Richmond, Virginia, but
obviously hybrid, gone remote, andnow spread out all over the country.
We've been around formally since2015 for about eight years prior
to that as separate companies.
(02:06):
origin story, but today most peopleknow us as a B2B and lead gen focus
agency with really, really smart peopledoing kick ass work in SEO, paid media.
We do a lot of work across a varietyof industries have a long history
with senior living and have workedwith Natasha and your teams in
different instances along the journey.
(02:28):
It was great to reconnect.
Thanks for having me.
Natasha (02:29):
Yeah.
I should have mentioned that before.
Yeah.
We worked together like a littleover 10 years ago with some of my
biggest clients back in the day.
So we've had some greatsuccess with Workshop, some
great innovative strategies.
So I'm really excited to hear what youall are doing and some feedback you have.
So thank you again for being on.
If you wouldn't mind, can you just kindof delve into some of these top trends,
(02:50):
kind of give highlights for the listenerstoday of what you all mentioned and
then we'll dig in further after that.
Andrew (02:57):
Sure.
Well, I'm glad we're calling themtrends and not predictions, right?
Prediction posts are runningrampant this time of year.
The last thing we needis more predictions.
What we like to pay attention to is,is things that are a little bit more
established that we can measure.
We can, we can actually put some strategicthinking into and take advantage of rather
than just crystal ball prognostication.
So, for us, the trends that we'repaying most attention to are going
(03:21):
to be pretty familiar to industryveterans, but if you're not as tuned
into the day to day digital marketingenvironment that we're working in now,
these, these might be useful for you.
There's always a tradeoff.
Right now we're really paying closeattention to the tradeoff between
personalization and data privacy, right?
This is evolving very, very quickly.
There's a sweet spot, we believe,between being helpful and being creepy.
(03:45):
Technology is advancing a lot fasterthan consumer adoption and regulation.
So, you know, watching where yourdata privacy practices are falling
on that spectrum is going to be superimportant for brands going forward.
Another one that's really interestingnow, especially in the evolving world
of AI, is voice search optimization.
(04:05):
We've been voice search hasbeen around for years, right?
We all have devices wearablesthat we can speak to and little
AI agents in our pockets that wecan we can chat with sometimes.
But it's growing, and it's especiallygrowing on a generational basis.
So there are there are younger consumersor budding consumers out there that
are have grown up with voice search.
My kids are examples.
(04:26):
They speak to their phones more thanthey type to their phones these days
when they're trying to find information.
I think that's a signal of wherethings are going and really, what
does that mean for us as, as SEOsor digital marketers that's paying
attention to the, the way that searchbehaviors and patterns are changing.
Right.
So there's there's more naturallanguage based queries being being
(04:47):
served or processed now becausethat's how people are talking.
They're personifying their devicesand speaking to it almost as a as
a copilot rather than a search box.
So something to watch out for there.
I think maybe the last one I'll touchon is the quick change of pace in
analytics, specifically marketinganalytics and the integration of AI tools.
(05:09):
We can't go a week without hearing updateson new technologies, new platforms, new
bots, new agents that are coming along andpromising a whole lot of a lot of sizzle.
You know, the stake is still the data.
There still needs to be a human inthe loop in analyzing, interpreting,
drawing insights, and informing strategy.
But AI is quickly carving out its, youknow, its its own value proposition as
(05:33):
that copilot for our human analysts.
So we still really believe inthe, the power of AI plus humans.
I don't think we're anywhere nearthe the replacement phase where
they're going to take our jobs.
So that's what we're looking at in 2025.
These trends are goingto continue to evolve.
But I think we'll probably be talkingabout some of them going in next year as
Natasha (05:54):
Yeah, awesome.
Thank you for going through that.
And I think a lot of theseterms are buzzwords that
people are hearing a lot about.
And I think a lot of the peoplethat I've met with and spoken to
maybe don't really understand thefull implications of what they mean.
And so I wanted to clarify that.
It's another reason why what we'regoing to talk about today is, you know,
you hear a lot about AI, Chat GPT.
(06:15):
Okay.
But how, how is this actuallychanging the way our SEO works, the
search engine works, our paid ads.
I think there's just a lot ofbuzz about, yeah, it's cool.
It types in, it comesup with things for you.
Right.
But not really understanding how on thebackend, that's really going to change
the way you're doing, and you'll go intothis more, but the way you're going,
doing your content and the way you'redoing search and just like you mentioned,
(06:38):
the way that users are searching.
When I know what I talk into myphone, is not what I would be
typing into a search query, right?
So I'm assuming that that's thengoing to change how the, it pulls
content, where it pulls it from.
So if you wouldn't mind digging in firsta little bit to the, the SEO changes
we've talked about in terms of how thesetechnologies are going to affect that.
Andrew (06:58):
Sure.
Yeah.
And I'll, I'll start with kind of acontext that we're all familiar with.
Right?
If you've, if you've been usingGoogle for a number of years,
you've seen the evolution ofhow they present search results.
So what happens after you typethat query into a search box?
And I'm talking about, of course,Google.com, the web, the web interface
that we're most familiar with.
So we'll, we'll kind of stick inthat frame of reference for now.
(07:20):
You know, it used to be 10 blue links andthen those 10 blue links and a few ads.
And now it's a whole mishmash ofdifferent types of search results that
have evolved over the years to include,you know, questions that are commonly
asked suggested search queries, ofcourse, shopping results and maps and
all sorts of, like, rich search resultsor search features as we call them.
AI overviews, which is Google's takeon, you know, the AI generated search
(07:45):
results that we see at the top of thesearch results pages now are just really
a natural evolution of those thosesearch features that are that Google is
betting on answering questions betterand faster for their users, right?
That's what it comes down to for Google.
Google wants to create happy users andideally keep them on their platform.
Keep them searching, making money,generating clicks and revenue, of course,
(08:06):
there's always a, you know, a followthe money angle here, but in Google's
quest to make an answer engine, theyare synthesizing these AI overviews or,
or AI generated results that now try toanswer questions sometimes hilariously
but try to answer questions the same wayyou might get from a chat GPT chatbot.
(08:26):
It's, it's similar technologies.
So what does that mean forus as marketers, right?
That's the landscapethat we use as consumers.
As marketers, that means that a lotof the SEO strategies and content
strategies that worked for the last5 to 10 years need to evolve, right?
A lot of that top of funnel traffic,the awareness based traffic or
(08:47):
search volume that we are used toseeing is now being addressed or
answered by those AI overviews tosomething informational, for example.
You know, all you have to do is go toGoogle and type in, you know, what's
the best travel destination and youhave to scroll pretty far before
you see an actual website, right?
You're going to see ads, of course,but above that, you're even going to
see their AI overview of, you know,here's, here's our best guess as to
(09:12):
what people on the web want to see.
So that means for marketers, we'reseeing less top of funnel traffic to our
websites, less informational traffic.
So we have to do a betterjob creating content that
answers more buying questions.
You know, Natasha, when we workedtogether before, we were talking about
creating really engaging, useful contentfor for brands that we partnered on
(09:36):
and speaking, you know, to their maybethe history of their organizations,
the history of their areas, kind ofjust trying to localize the content,
associate the brand with the community.
And that type of content now islargely answered by AI pulling
from a variety of sources.
So that's an example of typesof content that may not be
as effective going forward.
An example, it's breaking this week.
(09:57):
I don't know if you've seen, but allyou have to do is go look at HubSpot's
search visibility recently is plummeting.
HubSpot's great contentmarketing and has been for years.
They define content marketing for alot of us over the past decade, but
Google's new algorithm updates and searchfeatures are really hammering HubSpot's
(10:17):
visibility and it's declining at anextremely high rate because a lot of
their content is overly broad, right?
It's, it's keyword based.
It's, It's, not nearly as link baity orclick baity as BuzzFeeds, for example.
But it's it's it's not coreto their product and the
solution that they're providing.
It's it's very generalknowledge type stuff.
(10:38):
They're very good at producing for alot of years, drove a lot of traffic.
Now that traffic is plummetingbecause Google is going either to
different sources or generatingtheir own results, you know, HubSpot
still ranks well for CRM relatedsearches and product related searches.
But that's another example of acontent producer that's that's
suffering right now in a way, but.
(10:58):
Where do we go from here?
And I'm not going to speak to HubSpotstrategy, but where I would go from here,
where we're going from here with ourclients is leaning into the expertise,
the authority that you have, the brandas a subject matter expert, and really
focusing in on what your consumers wantwhen they're ready to research and buy
you know, there's, that's not unique orproprietary to us, but that's what we're
(11:19):
seeing working well now is the middle,the bottom of funnel type content that
helps people make a final decision andencourages them to, of course, choose
your, your brand or your product orservice over a competitor, but it all
has to be based on something unique thatyou're bringing to the party, right?
You're experts, your point of view,your perspective you know, your, your
(11:41):
trust factors that, that elevatesyour brand above your competition.
It's, it's a very long winded way ofsaying, you know, quality content still
matters and it matters more than ever.
And how Google is defining thatquality component is evolving to favor
more more, more human driven expertlevel content, not the AI generated
(12:05):
mishmash that any of us can createwith a few prompts in the chatGPT.
Natasha (12:08):
And you may be talking about this shortly, but what is the biggest change?
The biggest change here is we used towrite content specifically for keywords.
So we would know, okay, you know, insenior living for independent living,
whatever, we wanna make sure we plugin these words right into our content.
Right.
And obviously we know we've talkedabout a few the past few years
that has changed into phrases andthen it's answering questions.
(12:31):
And so is the, is that something that's,I want to make sure that that's clear.
That's a big change of the wayyou're writing your content.
I think it's what you're saying is firstof all, knowing your target audience,
who, who is searching for you, whodo you want to be searching for you?
Right.
And what are the specific thingsthat they, what are questions
they want answered in terms ofwhat your community provides.
(12:54):
Am I saying that correctly?
And so I'm just trying to think of howthis is exactly is, is so different.
So for example, if we wanted to attractsomeone who's looking at a life plan
community, we might write a blog orsomething about specifically about life
plan communities, the care they offer.
But is that, is, is that still thesame or is the way you're writing
that content different than maybe youwould have written that blog before?
(13:16):
I want to make sure I'm clarifying that.
Andrew (13:18):
Sure.
Is it still the same?
I'll give the traditional SEO answer,kind of yes and no, or it depends.
Keywords still matter, right?
Searches are still largely keyword based.
There's intent there.
So we can't ignore keywords, of course.
We have to match search intentto the content we're providing.
But to your point, the format,the presentation of that
content matters more now.
Natasha (13:39):
Okay.
Andrew (13:39):
And not the visuals.
I think the harder concept for, for a lotof marketers to understand is it doesn't
really matter how you present the content.
It's the, it's the depth, the quality ofthe content that Google is looking for.
Natasha (13:53):
mm, mm,
Andrew (13:55):
I mean think of it this way, if you're Google you can discover thousands
of articles about any one particulartopic and they're all reasonably,
subject matter, you know, they'refocused on the right subject matter.
They have the right keywords.
They have the right content.
Rule of thumb is if you can go to ChatGPTand prompt it to write a blog post.
Then anybody else can, andthey already have, right?
There's nothing uniqueor proprietary in there.
(14:17):
So where we're seeing the best resultswith our clients, and then your example
is leaning into the things that areunique and proprietary to your, you
know, your community or your brand.
That can be your experts, you know,it could be your, your, staff,
your, your health care providers.
It could be your residents.
It could be the community members, right?
(14:37):
Each of them has a story to tell.
Each of them brings a uniqueperspective and diverse experience.
All of that boosts the, the, one,the uniqueness, the, credibility
and a little bit a little bitof the authority component that
Google is looking for as well.
And I'm throwing around these terms.
I'll back up.
Google employs thousands of humansaround the world to rate their search
(15:02):
results as part of this feedback loopto generate better search results.
And these human raters are givenguidelines to help them clarify, you
know, what's, what's a good website.
This should be in our searchresults and or what are good search
results that reflect the trueintent of the query and what's not.
These aren't ranking signals.
This isn't the algorithm, but theseare guidelines given to humans and
(15:24):
the acronym that's in there in blackand white that any of us can access.
It's on the web.
It's not secret.
The acronym is EEAT or expertise,experience, authoritativeness
and trustworthiness.
So that that model iswhat Google's looking for.
And the humans are thereevaluating as best they can.
You know, who's the expert?
Who's the authority?
Who has who, who's trustworthy.
(15:46):
And there's a variety of suggestionsunder that under each of those
criteria that that I would encouragefolks to go find and read through.
Some quick examples that we see workingwell, proprietary research, right?
Yes, we can cite public sources,but if you can go do your own
qualitative or quantitativeresearch and publish those results.
Again, that's unique.
(16:06):
That's something you're bringingthat Google hasn't seen before.
You know that that couldplay in your favor.
You may have been around for50 years or a hundred years, or
maybe you win every industry awardor certification under the sun.
Or you have raving fans and, andresidents or or customers that love to
tell their story and share their story.
Lean into that, right?
Build that that credibility, thattrustworthiness using those signals.
(16:27):
So every every brand has somedifferentiation they can they can bring
to this equation and that's that's ourjob is to help tease that out and figure
out which of those to emphasize and whichones we need to strengthen a little bit.
Natasha (16:37):
And that's important specifically to for the listeners in the senior
living industry specifically becausebefore it was very broad, everyone
was writing kind of the same types oftopics with those keywords, but you
know, put in there to make sure thatthey're ranking for a specific keyword.
But what you're saying and what Iwant to make sure everyone's hearing
is it needs to be very customized.
(16:58):
It needs to be unique in depth.
Right.
Real information that's, that'sdifferent maybe specific to that
specific area people are searchingto not just a broad example.
Unique content.
And also, if I'm correct me withthis is updated often, right?
Like it needs to be relevant.
It can't be like you're citing statsand data from another article that
was written 10, 15 years ago, right?
(17:20):
So Google can tell that,that's not a relevant article.
That's not the most recent.
We want to be updatingwhatever we're doing content.
We have to be constantly updatingit because I think that that back
five, 10 years ago, we didn'thave to do that as much, right?
Little changes.
And now it's like, no, you have toactually up, you have to actually
change and update your content too.
So I want to make sure that that'sclear for everyone because I think
a lot of times what I have heardwith some clients is, well, we just
(17:42):
got to keep working on our content.
Yes, that's true, but it's alittle bit different in terms of
the way the AI is pulling that.
And I wanted to make sure I clarifyif I'm saying that all correctly.
Andrew (17:51):
Absolutely.
Yep.
Freshness matters as well.
Right?
It's not one of those EEATacronyms, of course, but it does.
It does matter because we all again put.
We're all Google users as well.
We want the most relevantfresh results, right?
And we quickly identify whensomething's a few years out of date.
Natasha (18:10):
I mean, I can't stand that when I, and this actually happened not too long
ago and you're searching for somethingand you find an article and then you're
like, this was written five years ago.
Like, well, this is not helping me.
Right.
I read the article and all of a sudden Isaw the date and I'm like, this is, you
know, in our industry, that's a, that'sa huge change in those amount of years.
So.
And then in terms of, I don't know ifyou have any more to add here, but I'm
just going to ask in terms of voicesearch specifically, and I think you
(18:33):
mentioned it, touched upon it, but Iwant to clarify how that's changing the
search query because the way people aretalking into it and how they're asking,
or maybe like the in depth specificquestion they're asking is different
than like, senior living near me.
It might be like, Hey, I don't wantto say her name because she's in
the room, you know, who in terms oftechnology, you know, I'm talking
(18:54):
about you know, find what's the closestassisted living in Washington Crossing
Pennsylvania that offers high leveldining, whatever, something like that.
Right.
Where someone most likelywouldn't type that in.
But as I'm thinking and talking, I mightsay a query more specific like that.
Is that correct?
Andrew (19:12):
It is.
Yeah.
You know, that's a good exampleof like lower funnel, high intent,
transactional search query, right.
You would expect a differenttype of search result.
For that, whether it's their voiceor web search, then you would, if
you were just saying, you know, tellme about my parents are getting old.
How do I help an aging parent who'shaving certain types of issues or,
(19:35):
like, you know, give me some adviceto to help navigate some of these
challenges that that, you know,children and adult children are facing.
Natasha (19:43):
Oh, that's a good one.
Yeah.
Andrew (19:45):
Like that, that's the kind of conversational that
people are starting to use.
You know, it's technically groupedunder voice search, but where this all
ties together to your point, there'sa lot more of these responses now
that are that are generated for voicesearch commands are actually those AI
generated amalgamations of content.
So it's trying to actually answera question for you without having
(20:07):
to click through to a communitywebsite for specifics, right?
That's the challenge we face asmarketers is a lot of these different
types of search features now, notjust voice search and not just AI
overviews, but they're they're groupedunder what we call 0 click searches.
Natasha (20:23):
Hmm.
Mm
Andrew (20:23):
Where Google or the search engine that you're using.
We're using Google, but it'sinterchangeable with others of course.
The search engine presents you theinformation you're looking for, and
you no longer have to click throughto a website to get that content
or get that information that'sdangerous for us risk challenging
for us as marketers, I should say.
And that's that that's that top of funnelinformational type query that we're
(20:45):
seeing less volume from these days.
Natasha (20:46):
Right.
And correct me if I'm wrong.
Sometimes though, and maybe this is nottrue, but in those generative search on
the top, sometimes it does cite, right?
Some like it'll cite if there'sspecific facts or things that are in
that it'll cite where it came from.
And that's great.
Right.
If you're, if your site shows upspecifically as cited by Google, that
(21:09):
is, am I saying that correctly too?
Andrew (21:11):
Yeah, you'll get the citation and you'll get the link.
There'll be a little, you know,currently, this could all change,
but Right now there's like, a littlehoverable tool tip link icon in most
of these platforms that would link
Natasha (21:23):
So that would
Andrew (21:23):
you through to the one of the underlying sources.
And that's where youwant to be as a brand.
Natasha (21:27):
That would be ideal.
Yeah.
So no, that's helpful.
And before we go on to the next question,I do want to make sure I point out that
all of this just goes to show how muchcontent you have to have on your site.
I talked about this a littlebit in my website episode.
One of the big hot buttons insenior living is how much to give,
how much information to give.
Do we list pricing?
Do we not list pricing?
(21:48):
We're afraid to list that we don'twant to give everything away.
We want them to come and tour.
And it's just something thatI'm very passionate about.
We have to just get on board with,we have to have the information
relevant and on our site becausepeople are searching for it.
As you can see, theywant all the information.
It's more about selfselecting and self sales now.
So just wanted to throw that in that it'sreally important to make sure we have
(22:11):
as much of that content cause they'regoing to quickly go somewhere else.
If you don't have it listed on yoursite and if you don't write, what are
the averages of prices in your area?
And ours is here and they can getthat information somewhere else.
So make sure they're staying, you know,top of funnel and on your website.
Andrew (22:26):
But maybe it's worth pointing out, too, what complicates this, because
everything you said is 100 percent true.
We're talking about a funnelor a customer journey, like
it's some linear path, right?
There's only one line from pointA to point B. We all know that's
true, so I think we're working onthe assumption that the content
should surround the customer journey.
It's not necessarily that linearpath that we all would love it to
Natasha (22:48):
Yeah.
Right.
Correct.
Yeah.
I mean, some, and we, and we talkedabout this in the last episode where
someone will could contact a communitysix times from six different ways
at different times of their path.
You know, so a lot of times I'llhear, Oh, well, you know, the social
media lead wasn't a good lead.
Well, that could be their sixth time.
They've already been on your website.
They already searched you.
They already saw your ad. Theyalready saw your direct mail, right?
(23:09):
So you don't know wherethey are on that journey.
So let's make sure we have the contentfor them and what they're looking
for, depending on which touch it isthey finally landed on your website.
Okay.
So my next question I'm goingto ask is more about paid.
So you talked a little bit about that andpaid search and this interested me because
I wasn't really aware of a lot of this.
So, you know, the changes withAI specifically on paid search
and how that's changing forlisteners to hear about today.
Andrew (23:33):
Yeah, so paid search, Google ads, Microsoft advertising, even even
Meta, Facebook and Instagram ads.
And every platform now has been usingAI behind the scenes for years, right?
It's something we've we've co-evolvedwith on the paid media side.
You know, whether whether werealize it or not, AI is taking
over more of the mundane day to daytasks, like bidding optimization.
(23:57):
In a lot of cases, audiencecreation or audience selection,
creative rotation and testing.
Now they're getting into creativegeneration, ad copywriting, image
generation, that type of thing.
So it's been a, it's been a longer alonger period that we've had time to
get used to this on the paid media side.
And it's not withoutits, you know, pitfalls.
There were years where Google wastrying to automate more of this
(24:19):
stuff, but the, the machine learning,the models weren't there yet.
Humans could still dramaticallyoutperform some of these AI driven
advancements, if you know what you aredoing . Now that's in the last couple
of years that tide has shifted back.
The machines have have started towin again where, you know, they're,
they have so much more data.
They can process it so much faster.
They can, they cantarget audiences better.
(24:41):
They can build better bidding models,ultimately optimizing for better ROI
or return on ad spend than a human can.
So where does that leave us?
You know, that's, that's alwaysthe interesting part of it.
What does that mean for us as humans?
And I think we're, you know, wherethis conversation always goes for
us is like, okay, well, humansare still better at strategy.
Still better at drawing insightsand informing strategy and defining,
(25:05):
you know, what do we want to test?
How do we want to test where, how dowe connect all of our different data
sources on the back end to feed moreinformation back into the algorithms?
To give them the best quality data.
And then, of course, QA, QA, QA.
You know, AI is not perfect.
It's not gonna win 100% of the time,even if its success rate is over a human
(25:27):
is 85% of the time, there's 15% of thetime where it's gonna go off the rails.
And if you don't spot it and stop itand course correct, all of a sudden, you
know, we, we look bad because we've takenour eye off off the off the machines.
So that's our general philosophy.
It's not surprising that a lotof people aren't aware of that
or aren't aren't adapting to it.
Natasha (25:48):
Well, and I think there's a lot of, there's a lot that, especially
in this industry, people aren'taware of how paid search works.
I mean, right.
You hire digital agency.
Here's the spend.
Here's where we're targeting.
You kind of see it back.
So I think it's important to understandthat this is being used a lot on the
back end that, you know, we're, we're.
That you're now saying that actuallyAI kind of leading and having a
(26:10):
little bit of dependence on it.
We kind of need because of how muchdata they have that we may not have,
or you're using their data and ourdata, but that in terms of the bigger
picture, the overall strategy andkind of partnering with AI somewhat.
Is that the right way to say it?
Like, we're, we're monitoringAI, but we're still using it.
And I think we have to kindof get behind that otherwise.
(26:30):
And I think what you're saying isbecause the results that they're able
to get with the data they have andthe way that AI you know, knows how
to target specifically figure out.
You have to use that, but wehave to be careful and monitor
and and be strategic about it.
Andrew (26:44):
That's right.
Yeah.
You wouldn't let.
You, you wouldn't let Alexababysit your kids, right?
You'd want to check in every nowand then put, put eyes on it.
Here's a tell right for the, forthe marketers out there, you know,
if you're not in tune with, withpaid media and the changes in
that over the past several years.
If your paid media partner is asking, youknow, still talking in terms of keywords
(27:07):
and, you know, static ads and that typeof thing, you know, chances are that
they're still using some outdated tactics,doesn't mean they can't work, right.
There's, there's a lot of use casesfor that like like we talked about.
Where we're finding the most fruitfulconversations with our clients and what
I, what I would encourage people tolook for, you know, is, is partners
(27:29):
that are that are digging moreinto the business side of things.
What happens to those conversionsonce they happen on your site?
Where do those leads go?
What's what walk me throughhow the, you know, a sales team
might engage with that prospect.
What does the journey look like?
How many times are they calling you?
Where does that information stored?
What does the CRM structure look like?
Oh, and by the way, can we, likecapture and store some ad click
(27:50):
information in there and then, youknow, close the loop so to speak.
Natasha (27:53):
Yeah.
Andrew (27:54):
That's the section of the customer journey.
That's the most important right nowis what happens after the click.
And so we need to be focusing on andoptimizing for those touch points.
And a lot of them happen offlinestill, but there are better and
better ways to feed that offlineinformation back into these algorithms.
So that's where I push our team andwould encourage people to really dig
in to see how much of that offlineinformation are we feeding back in.
(28:17):
That's your competitivedifferentiation these days.
Natasha (28:19):
Yeah, and I did talk about that a little bit on the
prior paid episode with Matt.
You know, we talked a little bitabout that Google, you know, match
back and using your CRM data.
And I, I want to say it again,cause it's, it's really important.
Yes.
Google has all of their data that youdon't have, but they don't have your data.
Right.
So making sure that we are sharing thatinformation with Google to tell Google,
(28:41):
great, everything you've done on the dataend that you've brought me this lead, that
was a bad lead, or that was a good lead.
And telling Google so it knows, okay,those are the types of people, this
is the journey that person went on.
This is what they clicked on.
This is the entirejourney they got to you.
And now I know what's a, what's in yourterms, you know, a good toured or moved
in, whatever that, whatever you saythat that is, the definition of that.
(29:03):
We need to be giving that to Googleand AI so that we're working together.
It really is like a partnership, whichis kind of crazy and scary to say,
but that's, that's kind of now how I'mseeing it is it's not them versus us.
It's a partnership.
And how do we work together on the datathey have and the data we have to have
higher quality leads, less, not, youdon't need to have so many, it's more
(29:24):
about quality than a huge quantity, right.
For your sales teams to work with.
So, yeah that's, that'sreally interesting to me.
So I do want to ask, you know, what isyour / Workshop Digital's, you know, point
of view, opinion on all of this, likewith AI and the growth and how you all, I
mean, you've had to make changes, I'm surein the past five years of how probably
(29:44):
every year, every six months, right withsome of these Google algorithm changes,
like you're constantly having to adaptand change and help educate your clients.
And so what is your, what's youropinion or take on all this?
Andrew (29:58):
Wow.
Well, I wish we could go six months
Natasha (30:01):
Yeah, I was going to
Andrew (30:02):
major updates.
That's a, that's a breath of fresh air.
I think we're talking like sixdays between, you know, little
course corrections that we'reall making in this industry.
Natasha (30:12):
Right.
Andrew (30:13):
Our, our philosophy is, is born out and has worked for us over
the past couple of years as we'vebeen leaning into this is that humans
plus technology, humans plus AI aregenerating better outcomes, of course.
We have to equip our humansto think differently with
the new tools that we have.
Otherwise, we will be obsolete, right?
A digital marketing agency thatdoesn't evolve quickly will be
(30:37):
replaced by either other agencies oror platforms that are using more AI.
Or we'll just, we'll quickly becomeso inefficient and ineffective that
we lose all of our clients, right,that’s how from an agency perspective
if you’re an in-house paid mediapractitioner same rules apply.
Natasha (30:55):
Right.
Andrew (30:56):
So our, our POV is, of course, like you said, you know,
it's, it's a co-pilot for us, right?
It's a, sometimes it's a sounding board.
It's a way to quicklyaggregate and analyze data.
But our philosophy is test andlearn quickly on different AI tools.
Not just chat GPT or not just the onesthat are integrated into Google ads
(31:16):
these days or Meta ads, but, you know,when we, when we hear about something
that's evolving, that might be a goodfit we're, we're quickly jumping in
and giving it giving it a solid a solidbusiness case and seeing if these AI
tools can bring something unique orproprietary to the, to the conversation.
And sometimes we have to test and retestbecause their capabilities change quickly.
(31:38):
So lots of testing, lots of validationto make sure they can actually
do what they say they can do.
And most of them can't.
Spoiler alert.
You know, there's a lot of AItools that make big claims,
but they can't back it up.
And then retraining, reframing ourconversations internally with our
clients about you, like, updating,modifying workflows and processes now
(32:00):
to incorporate more AI, just to speedthings up and make it more efficient.
The end result of that is we havehumans with more time for strategy and
strategic conversations and businesslevel conversations and consultation.
Less time needed to analyze data, buildcharts, crunch numbers, and go bid
(32:20):
on individual keywords, for example.
So
Natasha (32:23):
Yeah.
Andrew (32:23):
It's more fun, it's more engaging for the brain.
Natasha (32:25):
Right.
Yeah.
I mean, this is and this is one ofthe reasons why I always recommend
and I love partnering with with peoplelike you and always recommend to
clients and communities I work with.
It's really important that youare working with an expert in this
because it's changing, like you said,like maybe I get updates less often
than you do, but it, it is, it'schanging so frequently and evolving.
(32:46):
I shouldn't say changing, evolving andgrowing and adapting that you need to be
partnering with someone who's an expertwho can really walk you through these
changes and make adjustments and tacticsas you go, but partner with you on it.
So so grateful for people like youand agencies like you that I get
to partner with because it makesmy life a lot easier as well.
And then before we leave today,thank you so much for being on
and, you know, giving us all thisvaluable digital innovation insight.
(33:08):
What are some actionable, you know,key takeaways you want to make sure
we talked about a lot of things here.
You know, what are some key tipsyou want to make sure we the
listeners remember from today?
Andrew (33:18):
Yeah.
Well, number one, stay curious, right?
There's, if there's one innate humancharacteristic that will that will get
us through any evolution in technologyand AI it's our curiosity, right?
We have to know what questionsto ask each other and what
questions to ask of the data.
So staying curious, asking good questions.
(33:41):
And then, you know, we,we have to understand.
We have an obligation to understand howthese technologies actually work, what
their capabilities and limitations are.
I think point number 2 is, youknow, not all AI is created equal.
Not all AI is actually AI.
So don't take things on face value, right.
Spend a little bit of time learning, youknow, the great YouTube videos on there,
(34:02):
out there, but like, spend a little bitof time learning what AI actually is, and
just as importantly, what it isn't andwhat the inputs and outputs are, right?
We all, I think we all intuitivelyknow by now, AI is only as good
as the data it's trained on.
Natasha (34:16):
Right.
Andrew (34:16):
Right?
You can't ask a language modelto do complex math, for example.
So just making sure you're usingthe right tool for the right
problem is a big part of it.
But that's the, that's one of the biggestthings I see people getting wrong.
So
Natasha (34:28):
Interesting.
Andrew (34:29):
Level of familiarity is, is key.
Natasha (34:32):
Well, awesome.
Thank you so much, Andrew, forbeing on today and Workshop Digital.
If anyone wants further insight intothis, please reach out to me or to
Andrew Miller at Workshop Digital, happyto help you and walk you through this.
And I know it helps meto walk me through it.
So thank you again somuch for being on today.
Thank you everyone forlistening to another episode
of The Drake Insights Podcast.
(34:53):
I look forward to seeing you next time.
Bye.
This is the Drake insights podcast, your weekly dose of cutting
edge senior living marketing insights.
Join me, your host, Natasha Drake for boldideas, proven strategies and inspiring
stories straight from the experts.
Tune in and let's conquer the seniorliving marketing landscape together.
Hey guys, welcome back to anotherepisode of The Drake Insights Podcast.
(00:22):
I am your host NatashaDrake from Drake Strategic.
Let's get started.
So on today's episode we're gonna divea little bit into 2025 digital trends.
And not really trends because you've heardof most of these, but really what's most
important of all the things you've heard,changes, innovations in the digital world.
What is most important to take a lookat for you to know as you're working
(00:46):
with digital agencies and othermarketing agencies and changes that are
happening with things going on with AI,generative experience, chat GPT, all the
things that we'll explain more later.
But what is it you have to hone inon really understand and how that
can change your search results, yourpaid search on Google and the results
and the conversions you can expect.
(01:07):
So I don't know if you saw it,but Workshop Digital has released
their Top Trends of 2025.
If you haven't seen it,check it out on LinkedIn.
And I was really interested to see allthe things that they had to talk about.
And we're not going to have time togo through all of those trends today.
We're going to talk a little bitabout them, but really dig into
the top SEO and paid search trendsand changes that we're seeing like
(01:31):
I just mentioned with innovation.
And so I brought on our expert fromWorkshop Digital, a co-founder,
Andrew Miller, welcome to the podcast.
If you wouldn't mind introducing yourself.
Andrew (01:44):
Yes.
Hello.
Thank you, Natasha, for the awesome intro.
Happy to be here.
I'm Andrew, one of theco-founders at Workshop Digital.
We're a digital marketing agencybased in Richmond, Virginia, but
obviously hybrid, gone remote, andnow spread out all over the country.
We've been around formally since2015 for about eight years prior
to that as separate companies.
(02:06):
origin story, but today most peopleknow us as a B2B and lead gen focus
agency with really, really smart peopledoing kick ass work in SEO, paid media.
We do a lot of work across a varietyof industries have a long history
with senior living and have workedwith Natasha and your teams in
different instances along the journey.
(02:28):
It was great to reconnect.
Thanks for having me.
Natasha (02:29):
Yeah.
I should have mentioned that before.
Yeah.
We worked together like a littleover 10 years ago with some of my
biggest clients back in the day.
So we've had some greatsuccess with Workshop, some
great innovative strategies.
So I'm really excited to hear what youall are doing and some feedback you have.
So thank you again for being on.
If you wouldn't mind, can you just kindof delve into some of these top trends,
(02:50):
kind of give highlights for the listenerstoday of what you all mentioned and
then we'll dig in further after that.
Andrew (02:57):
Sure.
Well, I'm glad we're calling themtrends and not predictions, right?
Prediction posts are runningrampant this time of year.
The last thing we needis more predictions.
What we like to pay attention to is,is things that are a little bit more
established that we can measure.
We can, we can actually put some strategicthinking into and take advantage of rather
than just crystal ball prognostication.
So, for us, the trends that we'repaying most attention to are going
(03:21):
to be pretty familiar to industryveterans, but if you're not as tuned
into the day to day digital marketingenvironment that we're working in now,
these, these might be useful for you.
There's always a tradeoff.
Right now we're really paying closeattention to the tradeoff between
personalization and data privacy, right?
This is evolving very, very quickly.
There's a sweet spot, we believe,between being helpful and being creepy.
(03:45):
Technology is advancing a lot fasterthan consumer adoption and regulation.
So, you know, watching where yourdata privacy practices are falling
on that spectrum is going to be superimportant for brands going forward.
Another one that's really interestingnow, especially in the evolving world
of AI, is voice search optimization.
(04:05):
We've been voice search hasbeen around for years, right?
We all have devices wearablesthat we can speak to and little
AI agents in our pockets that wecan we can chat with sometimes.
But it's growing, and it's especiallygrowing on a generational basis.
So there are there are younger consumersor budding consumers out there that
are have grown up with voice search.
My kids are examples.
(04:26):
They speak to their phones more thanthey type to their phones these days
when they're trying to find information.
I think that's a signal of wherethings are going and really, what
does that mean for us as, as SEOsor digital marketers that's paying
attention to the, the way that searchbehaviors and patterns are changing.
Right.
So there's there's more naturallanguage based queries being being
(04:47):
served or processed now becausethat's how people are talking.
They're personifying their devicesand speaking to it almost as a as
a copilot rather than a search box.
So something to watch out for there.
I think maybe the last one I'll touchon is the quick change of pace in
analytics, specifically marketinganalytics and the integration of AI tools.
(05:09):
We can't go a week without hearing updateson new technologies, new platforms, new
bots, new agents that are coming along andpromising a whole lot of a lot of sizzle.
You know, the stake is still the data.
There still needs to be a human inthe loop in analyzing, interpreting,
drawing insights, and informing strategy.
But AI is quickly carving out its, youknow, its its own value proposition as
(05:33):
that copilot for our human analysts.
So we still really believe inthe, the power of AI plus humans.
I don't think we're anywhere nearthe the replacement phase where
they're going to take our jobs.
So that's what we're looking at in 2025.
These trends are goingto continue to evolve.
But I think we'll probably be talkingabout some of them going in next year as
Natasha (05:54):
Yeah, awesome.
Thank you for going through that.
And I think a lot of theseterms are buzzwords that
people are hearing a lot about.
And I think a lot of the peoplethat I've met with and spoken to
maybe don't really understand thefull implications of what they mean.
And so I wanted to clarify that.
It's another reason why what we'regoing to talk about today is, you know,
you hear a lot about AI, Chat GPT.
(06:15):
Okay.
But how, how is this actuallychanging the way our SEO works, the
search engine works, our paid ads.
I think there's just a lot ofbuzz about, yeah, it's cool.
It types in, it comesup with things for you.
Right.
But not really understanding how on thebackend, that's really going to change
the way you're doing, and you'll go intothis more, but the way you're going,
doing your content and the way you'redoing search and just like you mentioned,
(06:38):
the way that users are searching.
When I know what I talk into myphone, is not what I would be
typing into a search query, right?
So I'm assuming that that's thengoing to change how the, it pulls
content, where it pulls it from.
So if you wouldn't mind digging in firsta little bit to the, the SEO changes
we've talked about in terms of how thesetechnologies are going to affect that.
Andrew (06:58):
Sure.
Yeah.
And I'll, I'll start with kind of acontext that we're all familiar with.
Right?
If you've, if you've been usingGoogle for a number of years,
you've seen the evolution ofhow they present search results.
So what happens after you typethat query into a search box?
And I'm talking about, of course,Google.com, the web, the web interface
that we're most familiar with.
So we'll, we'll kind of stick inthat frame of reference for now.
(07:20):
You know, it used to be 10 blue links andthen those 10 blue links and a few ads.
And now it's a whole mishmash ofdifferent types of search results that
have evolved over the years to include,you know, questions that are commonly
asked suggested search queries, ofcourse, shopping results and maps and
all sorts of, like, rich search resultsor search features as we call them.
AI overviews, which is Google's takeon, you know, the AI generated search
(07:45):
results that we see at the top of thesearch results pages now are just really
a natural evolution of those thosesearch features that are that Google is
betting on answering questions betterand faster for their users, right?
That's what it comes down to for Google.
Google wants to create happy users andideally keep them on their platform.
Keep them searching, making money,generating clicks and revenue, of course,
(08:06):
there's always a, you know, a followthe money angle here, but in Google's
quest to make an answer engine, theyare synthesizing these AI overviews or,
or AI generated results that now try toanswer questions sometimes hilariously
but try to answer questions the same wayyou might get from a chat GPT chatbot.
(08:26):
It's, it's similar technologies.
So what does that mean forus as marketers, right?
That's the landscapethat we use as consumers.
As marketers, that means that a lotof the SEO strategies and content
strategies that worked for the last5 to 10 years need to evolve, right?
A lot of that top of funnel traffic,the awareness based traffic or
(08:47):
search volume that we are used toseeing is now being addressed or
answered by those AI overviews tosomething informational, for example.
You know, all you have to do is go toGoogle and type in, you know, what's
the best travel destination and youhave to scroll pretty far before
you see an actual website, right?
You're going to see ads, of course,but above that, you're even going to
see their AI overview of, you know,here's, here's our best guess as to
(09:12):
what people on the web want to see.
So that means for marketers, we'reseeing less top of funnel traffic to our
websites, less informational traffic.
So we have to do a betterjob creating content that
answers more buying questions.
You know, Natasha, when we workedtogether before, we were talking about
creating really engaging, useful contentfor for brands that we partnered on
(09:36):
and speaking, you know, to their maybethe history of their organizations,
the history of their areas, kind ofjust trying to localize the content,
associate the brand with the community.
And that type of content now islargely answered by AI pulling
from a variety of sources.
So that's an example of typesof content that may not be
as effective going forward.
An example, it's breaking this week.
(09:57):
I don't know if you've seen, but allyou have to do is go look at HubSpot's
search visibility recently is plummeting.
HubSpot's great contentmarketing and has been for years.
They define content marketing for alot of us over the past decade, but
Google's new algorithm updates and searchfeatures are really hammering HubSpot's
(10:17):
visibility and it's declining at anextremely high rate because a lot of
their content is overly broad, right?
It's, it's keyword based.
It's, It's, not nearly as link baity orclick baity as BuzzFeeds, for example.
But it's it's it's not coreto their product and the
solution that they're providing.
It's it's very generalknowledge type stuff.
(10:38):
They're very good at producing for alot of years, drove a lot of traffic.
Now that traffic is plummetingbecause Google is going either to
different sources or generatingtheir own results, you know, HubSpot
still ranks well for CRM relatedsearches and product related searches.
But that's another example of acontent producer that's that's
suffering right now in a way, but.
(10:58):
Where do we go from here?
And I'm not going to speak to HubSpotstrategy, but where I would go from here,
where we're going from here with ourclients is leaning into the expertise,
the authority that you have, the brandas a subject matter expert, and really
focusing in on what your consumers wantwhen they're ready to research and buy
you know, there's, that's not unique orproprietary to us, but that's what we're
(11:19):
seeing working well now is the middle,the bottom of funnel type content that
helps people make a final decision andencourages them to, of course, choose
your, your brand or your product orservice over a competitor, but it all
has to be based on something unique thatyou're bringing to the party, right?
You're experts, your point of view,your perspective you know, your, your
(11:41):
trust factors that, that elevatesyour brand above your competition.
It's, it's a very long winded way ofsaying, you know, quality content still
matters and it matters more than ever.
And how Google is defining thatquality component is evolving to favor
more more, more human driven expertlevel content, not the AI generated
(12:05):
mishmash that any of us can createwith a few prompts in the chatGPT.
Natasha (12:08):
And you may be talking about this shortly, but what is the biggest change?
The biggest change here is we used towrite content specifically for keywords.
So we would know, okay, you know, insenior living for independent living,
whatever, we wanna make sure we plugin these words right into our content.
Right.
And obviously we know we've talkedabout a few the past few years
that has changed into phrases andthen it's answering questions.
(12:31):
And so is the, is that something that's,I want to make sure that that's clear.
That's a big change of the wayyou're writing your content.
I think it's what you're saying is firstof all, knowing your target audience,
who, who is searching for you, whodo you want to be searching for you?
Right.
And what are the specific thingsthat they, what are questions
they want answered in terms ofwhat your community provides.
(12:54):
Am I saying that correctly?
And so I'm just trying to think of howthis is exactly is, is so different.
So for example, if we wanted to attractsomeone who's looking at a life plan
community, we might write a blog orsomething about specifically about life
plan communities, the care they offer.
But is that, is, is that still thesame or is the way you're writing
that content different than maybe youwould have written that blog before?
(13:16):
I want to make sure I'm clarifying that.
Andrew (13:18):
Sure.
Is it still the same?
I'll give the traditional SEO answer,kind of yes and no, or it depends.
Keywords still matter, right?
Searches are still largely keyword based.
There's intent there.
So we can't ignore keywords, of course.
We have to match search intentto the content we're providing.
But to your point, the format,the presentation of that
content matters more now.
Natasha (13:39):
Okay.
Andrew (13:39):
And not the visuals.
I think the harder concept for, for a lotof marketers to understand is it doesn't
really matter how you present the content.
It's the, it's the depth, the quality ofthe content that Google is looking for.
Natasha (13:53):
mm, mm,
Andrew (13:55):
I mean think of it this way, if you're Google you can discover thousands
of articles about any one particulartopic and they're all reasonably,
subject matter, you know, they'refocused on the right subject matter.
They have the right keywords.
They have the right content.
Rule of thumb is if you can go to ChatGPTand prompt it to write a blog post.
Then anybody else can, andthey already have, right?
There's nothing uniqueor proprietary in there.
(14:17):
So where we're seeing the best resultswith our clients, and then your example
is leaning into the things that areunique and proprietary to your, you
know, your community or your brand.
That can be your experts, you know,it could be your, your, staff,
your, your health care providers.
It could be your residents.
It could be the community members, right?
(14:37):
Each of them has a story to tell.
Each of them brings a uniqueperspective and diverse experience.
All of that boosts the, the, one,the uniqueness, the, credibility
and a little bit a little bitof the authority component that
Google is looking for as well.
And I'm throwing around these terms.
I'll back up.
Google employs thousands of humansaround the world to rate their search
(15:02):
results as part of this feedback loopto generate better search results.
And these human raters are givenguidelines to help them clarify, you
know, what's, what's a good website.
This should be in our searchresults and or what are good search
results that reflect the trueintent of the query and what's not.
These aren't ranking signals.
This isn't the algorithm, but theseare guidelines given to humans and
(15:24):
the acronym that's in there in blackand white that any of us can access.
It's on the web.
It's not secret.
The acronym is EEAT or expertise,experience, authoritativeness
and trustworthiness.
So that that model iswhat Google's looking for.
And the humans are thereevaluating as best they can.
You know, who's the expert?
Who's the authority?
Who has who, who's trustworthy.
(15:46):
And there's a variety of suggestionsunder that under each of those
criteria that that I would encouragefolks to go find and read through.
Some quick examples that we see workingwell, proprietary research, right?
Yes, we can cite public sources,but if you can go do your own
qualitative or quantitativeresearch and publish those results.
Again, that's unique.
(16:06):
That's something you're bringingthat Google hasn't seen before.
You know that that couldplay in your favor.
You may have been around for50 years or a hundred years, or
maybe you win every industry awardor certification under the sun.
Or you have raving fans and, andresidents or or customers that love to
tell their story and share their story.
Lean into that, right?
Build that that credibility, thattrustworthiness using those signals.
(16:27):
So every every brand has somedifferentiation they can they can bring
to this equation and that's that's ourjob is to help tease that out and figure
out which of those to emphasize and whichones we need to strengthen a little bit.
Natasha (16:37):
And that's important specifically to for the listeners in the senior
living industry specifically becausebefore it was very broad, everyone
was writing kind of the same types oftopics with those keywords, but you
know, put in there to make sure thatthey're ranking for a specific keyword.
But what you're saying and what Iwant to make sure everyone's hearing
is it needs to be very customized.
(16:58):
It needs to be unique in depth.
Right.
Real information that's, that'sdifferent maybe specific to that
specific area people are searchingto not just a broad example.
Unique content.
And also, if I'm correct me withthis is updated often, right?
Like it needs to be relevant.
It can't be like you're citing statsand data from another article that
was written 10, 15 years ago, right?
(17:20):
So Google can tell that,that's not a relevant article.
That's not the most recent.
We want to be updatingwhatever we're doing content.
We have to be constantly updatingit because I think that that back
five, 10 years ago, we didn'thave to do that as much, right?
Little changes.
And now it's like, no, you have toactually up, you have to actually
change and update your content too.
So I want to make sure that that'sclear for everyone because I think
a lot of times what I have heardwith some clients is, well, we just
(17:42):
got to keep working on our content.
Yes, that's true, but it's alittle bit different in terms of
the way the AI is pulling that.
And I wanted to make sure I clarifyif I'm saying that all correctly.
Andrew (17:51):
Absolutely.
Yep.
Freshness matters as well.
Right?
It's not one of those EEATacronyms, of course, but it does.
It does matter because we all again put.
We're all Google users as well.
We want the most relevantfresh results, right?
And we quickly identify whensomething's a few years out of date.
Natasha (18:10):
I mean, I can't stand that when I, and this actually happened not too long
ago and you're searching for somethingand you find an article and then you're
like, this was written five years ago.
Like, well, this is not helping me.
Right.
I read the article and all of a sudden Isaw the date and I'm like, this is, you
know, in our industry, that's a, that'sa huge change in those amount of years.
So.
And then in terms of, I don't know ifyou have any more to add here, but I'm
just going to ask in terms of voicesearch specifically, and I think you
(18:33):
mentioned it, touched upon it, but Iwant to clarify how that's changing the
search query because the way people aretalking into it and how they're asking,
or maybe like the in depth specificquestion they're asking is different
than like, senior living near me.
It might be like, Hey, I don't wantto say her name because she's in
the room, you know, who in terms oftechnology, you know, I'm talking
(18:54):
about you know, find what's the closestassisted living in Washington Crossing
Pennsylvania that offers high leveldining, whatever, something like that.
Right.
Where someone most likelywouldn't type that in.
But as I'm thinking and talking, I mightsay a query more specific like that.
Is that correct?
Andrew (19:12):
It is.
Yeah.
You know, that's a good exampleof like lower funnel, high intent,
transactional search query, right.
You would expect a differenttype of search result.
For that, whether it's their voiceor web search, then you would, if
you were just saying, you know, tellme about my parents are getting old.
How do I help an aging parent who'shaving certain types of issues or,
(19:35):
like, you know, give me some adviceto to help navigate some of these
challenges that that, you know,children and adult children are facing.
Natasha (19:43):
Oh, that's a good one.
Yeah.
Andrew (19:45):
Like that, that's the kind of conversational that
people are starting to use.
You know, it's technically groupedunder voice search, but where this all
ties together to your point, there'sa lot more of these responses now
that are that are generated for voicesearch commands are actually those AI
generated amalgamations of content.
So it's trying to actually answera question for you without having
(20:07):
to click through to a communitywebsite for specifics, right?
That's the challenge we face asmarketers is a lot of these different
types of search features now, notjust voice search and not just AI
overviews, but they're they're groupedunder what we call 0 click searches.
Natasha (20:23):
Hmm.
Mm
Andrew (20:23):
Where Google or the search engine that you're using.
We're using Google, but it'sinterchangeable with others of course.
The search engine presents you theinformation you're looking for, and
you no longer have to click throughto a website to get that content
or get that information that'sdangerous for us risk challenging
for us as marketers, I should say.
And that's that that's that top of funnelinformational type query that we're
(20:45):
seeing less volume from these days.
Natasha (20:46):
Right.
And correct me if I'm wrong.
Sometimes though, and maybe this is nottrue, but in those generative search on
the top, sometimes it does cite, right?
Some like it'll cite if there'sspecific facts or things that are in
that it'll cite where it came from.
And that's great.
Right.
If you're, if your site shows upspecifically as cited by Google, that
(21:09):
is, am I saying that correctly too?
Andrew (21:11):
Yeah, you'll get the citation and you'll get the link.
There'll be a little, you know,currently, this could all change,
but Right now there's like, a littlehoverable tool tip link icon in most
of these platforms that would link
Natasha (21:23):
So that would
Andrew (21:23):
you through to the one of the underlying sources.
And that's where youwant to be as a brand.
Natasha (21:27):
That would be ideal.
Yeah.
So no, that's helpful.
And before we go on to the next question,I do want to make sure I point out that
all of this just goes to show how muchcontent you have to have on your site.
I talked about this a littlebit in my website episode.
One of the big hot buttons insenior living is how much to give,
how much information to give.
Do we list pricing?
Do we not list pricing?
(21:48):
We're afraid to list that we don'twant to give everything away.
We want them to come and tour.
And it's just something thatI'm very passionate about.
We have to just get on board with,we have to have the information
relevant and on our site becausepeople are searching for it.
As you can see, theywant all the information.
It's more about selfselecting and self sales now.
So just wanted to throw that in that it'sreally important to make sure we have
(22:11):
as much of that content cause they'regoing to quickly go somewhere else.
If you don't have it listed on yoursite and if you don't write, what are
the averages of prices in your area?
And ours is here and they can getthat information somewhere else.
So make sure they're staying, you know,top of funnel and on your website.
Andrew (22:26):
But maybe it's worth pointing out, too, what complicates this, because
everything you said is 100 percent true.
We're talking about a funnelor a customer journey, like
it's some linear path, right?
There's only one line from pointA to point B. We all know that's
true, so I think we're working onthe assumption that the content
should surround the customer journey.
It's not necessarily that linearpath that we all would love it to
Natasha (22:48):
Yeah.
Right.
Correct.
Yeah.
I mean, some, and we, and we talkedabout this in the last episode where
someone will could contact a communitysix times from six different ways
at different times of their path.
You know, so a lot of times I'llhear, Oh, well, you know, the social
media lead wasn't a good lead.
Well, that could be their sixth time.
They've already been on your website.
They already searched you.
They already saw your ad. Theyalready saw your direct mail, right?
(23:09):
So you don't know wherethey are on that journey.
So let's make sure we have the contentfor them and what they're looking
for, depending on which touch it isthey finally landed on your website.
Okay.
So my next question I'm goingto ask is more about paid.
So you talked a little bit about that andpaid search and this interested me because
I wasn't really aware of a lot of this.
So, you know, the changes withAI specifically on paid search
and how that's changing forlisteners to hear about today.
Andrew (23:33):
Yeah, so paid search, Google ads, Microsoft advertising, even even
Meta, Facebook and Instagram ads.
And every platform now has been usingAI behind the scenes for years, right?
It's something we've we've co-evolvedwith on the paid media side.
You know, whether whether werealize it or not, AI is taking
over more of the mundane day to daytasks, like bidding optimization.
(23:57):
In a lot of cases, audiencecreation or audience selection,
creative rotation and testing.
Now they're getting into creativegeneration, ad copywriting, image
generation, that type of thing.
So it's been a, it's been a longer alonger period that we've had time to
get used to this on the paid media side.
And it's not withoutits, you know, pitfalls.
There were years where Google wastrying to automate more of this
(24:19):
stuff, but the, the machine learning,the models weren't there yet.
Humans could still dramaticallyoutperform some of these AI driven
advancements, if you know what you aredoing . Now that's in the last couple
of years that tide has shifted back.
The machines have have started towin again where, you know, they're,
they have so much more data.
They can process it so much faster.
They can, they cantarget audiences better.
(24:41):
They can build better bidding models,ultimately optimizing for better ROI
or return on ad spend than a human can.
So where does that leave us?
You know, that's, that's alwaysthe interesting part of it.
What does that mean for us as humans?
And I think we're, you know, wherethis conversation always goes for
us is like, okay, well, humansare still better at strategy.
Still better at drawing insightsand informing strategy and defining,
(25:05):
you know, what do we want to test?
How do we want to test where, how dowe connect all of our different data
sources on the back end to feed moreinformation back into the algorithms?
To give them the best quality data.
And then, of course, QA, QA, QA.
You know, AI is not perfect.
It's not gonna win 100% of the time,even if its success rate is over a human
(25:27):
is 85% of the time, there's 15% of thetime where it's gonna go off the rails.
And if you don't spot it and stop itand course correct, all of a sudden, you
know, we, we look bad because we've takenour eye off off the off the machines.
So that's our general philosophy.
It's not surprising that a lotof people aren't aware of that
or aren't aren't adapting to it.
Natasha (25:48):
Well, and I think there's a lot of, there's a lot that, especially
in this industry, people aren'taware of how paid search works.
I mean, right.
You hire digital agency.
Here's the spend.
Here's where we're targeting.
You kind of see it back.
So I think it's important to understandthat this is being used a lot on the
back end that, you know, we're, we're.
That you're now saying that actuallyAI kind of leading and having a
(26:10):
little bit of dependence on it.
We kind of need because of how muchdata they have that we may not have,
or you're using their data and ourdata, but that in terms of the bigger
picture, the overall strategy andkind of partnering with AI somewhat.
Is that the right way to say it?
Like, we're, we're monitoringAI, but we're still using it.
And I think we have to kindof get behind that otherwise.
(26:30):
And I think what you're saying isbecause the results that they're able
to get with the data they have andthe way that AI you know, knows how
to target specifically figure out.
You have to use that, but wehave to be careful and monitor
and and be strategic about it.
Andrew (26:44):
That's right.
Yeah.
You wouldn't let.
You, you wouldn't let Alexababysit your kids, right?
You'd want to check in every nowand then put, put eyes on it.
Here's a tell right for the, forthe marketers out there, you know,
if you're not in tune with, withpaid media and the changes in
that over the past several years.
If your paid media partner is asking, youknow, still talking in terms of keywords
(27:07):
and, you know, static ads and that typeof thing, you know, chances are that
they're still using some outdated tactics,doesn't mean they can't work, right.
There's, there's a lot of use casesfor that like like we talked about.
Where we're finding the most fruitfulconversations with our clients and what
I, what I would encourage people tolook for, you know, is, is partners
(27:29):
that are that are digging moreinto the business side of things.
What happens to those conversionsonce they happen on your site?
Where do those leads go?
What's what walk me throughhow the, you know, a sales team
might engage with that prospect.
What does the journey look like?
How many times are they calling you?
Where does that information stored?
What does the CRM structure look like?
Oh, and by the way, can we, likecapture and store some ad click
(27:50):
information in there and then, youknow, close the loop so to speak.
Natasha (27:53):
Yeah.
Andrew (27:54):
That's the section of the customer journey.
That's the most important right nowis what happens after the click.
And so we need to be focusing on andoptimizing for those touch points.
And a lot of them happen offlinestill, but there are better and
better ways to feed that offlineinformation back into these algorithms.
So that's where I push our team andwould encourage people to really dig
in to see how much of that offlineinformation are we feeding back in.
(28:17):
That's your competitivedifferentiation these days.
Natasha (28:19):
Yeah, and I did talk about that a little bit on the
prior paid episode with Matt.
You know, we talked a little bitabout that Google, you know, match
back and using your CRM data.
And I, I want to say it again,cause it's, it's really important.
Yes.
Google has all of their data that youdon't have, but they don't have your data.
Right.
So making sure that we are sharing thatinformation with Google to tell Google,
(28:41):
great, everything you've done on the dataend that you've brought me this lead, that
was a bad lead, or that was a good lead.
And telling Google so it knows, okay,those are the types of people, this
is the journey that person went on.
This is what they clicked on.
This is the entirejourney they got to you.
And now I know what's a, what's in yourterms, you know, a good toured or moved
in, whatever that, whatever you saythat that is, the definition of that.
(29:03):
We need to be giving that to Googleand AI so that we're working together.
It really is like a partnership, whichis kind of crazy and scary to say,
but that's, that's kind of now how I'mseeing it is it's not them versus us.
It's a partnership.
And how do we work together on the datathey have and the data we have to have
higher quality leads, less, not, youdon't need to have so many, it's more
(29:24):
about quality than a huge quantity, right.
For your sales teams to work with.
So, yeah that's, that'sreally interesting to me.
So I do want to ask, you know, what isyour / Workshop Digital's, you know, point
of view, opinion on all of this, likewith AI and the growth and how you all, I
mean, you've had to make changes, I'm surein the past five years of how probably
(29:44):
every year, every six months, right withsome of these Google algorithm changes,
like you're constantly having to adaptand change and help educate your clients.
And so what is your, what's youropinion or take on all this?
Andrew (29:58):
Wow.
Well, I wish we could go six months
Natasha (30:01):
Yeah, I was going to
Andrew (30:02):
major updates.
That's a, that's a breath of fresh air.
I think we're talking like sixdays between, you know, little
course corrections that we'reall making in this industry.
Natasha (30:12):
Right.
Andrew (30:13):
Our, our philosophy is, is born out and has worked for us over
the past couple of years as we'vebeen leaning into this is that humans
plus technology, humans plus AI aregenerating better outcomes, of course.
We have to equip our humansto think differently with
the new tools that we have.
Otherwise, we will be obsolete, right?
A digital marketing agency thatdoesn't evolve quickly will be
(30:37):
replaced by either other agencies oror platforms that are using more AI.
Or we'll just, we'll quickly becomeso inefficient and ineffective that
we lose all of our clients, right,that’s how from an agency perspective
if you’re an in-house paid mediapractitioner same rules apply.
Natasha (30:55):
Right.
Andrew (30:56):
So our, our POV is, of course, like you said, you know,
it's, it's a co-pilot for us, right?
It's a, sometimes it's a sounding board.
It's a way to quicklyaggregate and analyze data.
But our philosophy is test andlearn quickly on different AI tools.
Not just chat GPT or not just the onesthat are integrated into Google ads
(31:16):
these days or Meta ads, but, you know,when we, when we hear about something
that's evolving, that might be a goodfit we're, we're quickly jumping in
and giving it giving it a solid a solidbusiness case and seeing if these AI
tools can bring something unique orproprietary to the, to the conversation.
And sometimes we have to test and retestbecause their capabilities change quickly.
(31:38):
So lots of testing, lots of validationto make sure they can actually
do what they say they can do.
And most of them can't.
Spoiler alert.
You know, there's a lot of AItools that make big claims,
but they can't back it up.
And then retraining, reframing ourconversations internally with our
clients about you, like, updating,modifying workflows and processes now
(32:00):
to incorporate more AI, just to speedthings up and make it more efficient.
The end result of that is we havehumans with more time for strategy and
strategic conversations and businesslevel conversations and consultation.
Less time needed to analyze data, buildcharts, crunch numbers, and go bid
(32:20):
on individual keywords, for example.
So
Natasha (32:23):
Yeah.
Andrew (32:23):
It's more fun, it's more engaging for the brain.
Natasha (32:25):
Right.
Yeah.
I mean, this is and this is one ofthe reasons why I always recommend
and I love partnering with with peoplelike you and always recommend to
clients and communities I work with.
It's really important that youare working with an expert in this
because it's changing, like you said,like maybe I get updates less often
than you do, but it, it is, it'schanging so frequently and evolving.
(32:46):
I shouldn't say changing, evolving andgrowing and adapting that you need to be
partnering with someone who's an expertwho can really walk you through these
changes and make adjustments and tacticsas you go, but partner with you on it.
So so grateful for people like youand agencies like you that I get
to partner with because it makesmy life a lot easier as well.
And then before we leave today,thank you so much for being on
and, you know, giving us all thisvaluable digital innovation insight.
(33:08):
What are some actionable, you know,key takeaways you want to make sure
we talked about a lot of things here.
You know, what are some key tipsyou want to make sure we the
listeners remember from today?
Andrew (33:18):
Yeah.
Well, number one, stay curious, right?
There's, if there's one innate humancharacteristic that will that will get
us through any evolution in technologyand AI it's our curiosity, right?
We have to know what questionsto ask each other and what
questions to ask of the data.
So staying curious, asking good questions.
(33:41):
And then, you know, we,we have to understand.
We have an obligation to understand howthese technologies actually work, what
their capabilities and limitations are.
I think point number 2 is, youknow, not all AI is created equal.
Not all AI is actually AI.
So don't take things on face value, right.
Spend a little bit of time learning, youknow, the great YouTube videos on there,
(34:02):
out there, but like, spend a little bitof time learning what AI actually is, and
just as importantly, what it isn't andwhat the inputs and outputs are, right?
We all, I think we all intuitivelyknow by now, AI is only as good
as the data it's trained on.
Natasha (34:16):
Right.
Andrew (34:16):
Right?
You can't ask a language modelto do complex math, for example.
So just making sure you're usingthe right tool for the right
problem is a big part of it.
But that's the, that's one of the biggestthings I see people getting wrong.
So
Natasha (34:28):
Interesting.
Andrew (34:29):
Level of familiarity is, is key.
Natasha (34:32):
Well, awesome.
Thank you so much, Andrew, forbeing on today and Workshop Digital.
If anyone wants further insight intothis, please reach out to me or to
Andrew Miller at Workshop Digital, happyto help you and walk you through this.
And I know it helps meto walk me through it.
So thank you again somuch for being on today.
Thank you everyone forlistening to another episode
of The Drake Insights Podcast.
(34:53):
I look forward to seeing you next time.
Bye.
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