Rand Fishkin on Building Brand Influence in a Zero-Click World

Welcome to Content Disrupted. Bold takes on brand marketing. I'm your host Dan Baptiste and together we'll explore what it takes to excel in brand marketing at one of the most exciting and disruptive times in industry history. Welcome to Content Disrupted. Today we are blessed with the one and only Rand Fishkin. Rand is a co founder and CEO of SparkToro, makers of fine audience research software. Rand was previously the co founder of moz and inbound.org fundamentally shaping how we all think about search inbound and connecting with people. He co authored the Art of SEO. He's keynoted over a hundred events around the world on marketing, technology and startup topics. He's dedicated his professional life to helping people do better marketing, which is why he's here today. You can find him on multiple platforms. He's the one with the huge followings in his personal life. Ran's a chef, he's always a sharp dresser. I gotta, I'm gonna need some tips at the end of this and all around. Great guy, Ran. Welcome to the show. Oh my gosh, Dan, it was a very kind intro. Thank you. Is that a hot start or what? Hot start, Hot start, yeah. Awesome. I gotta tell you, man, this was a tricky one to prep for. So with all the changes that are happening in marketing today, we could sit here for a week, but neither of us have that time and we only have an hour. So either we talk fast or we focus. But how are you feeling about marketing in. In marketing right now? Well, I think it's either an exciting time if you are someone who loves change and is prepared to have lots of hard conversations with your boss, or it's a really frustrating and infuriating time where you're being told to keep hammering on the same things that people expected from digital marketers for the last quarter century that are dying and won't work anymore. I think that it hasn't been true to this degree any other time in my career. If I think back to 2003, when I first entered marketing, the sort of roadmap kept growing in terms of options of channels and tactics. And you could evolve and learn. Starting with search marketing, which was exploding in 03, and then content marketing, which had its heyday, social media marketing, obviously email marketing continued to be hot through all of that. And it's not like any of these channels have died. But none of them work the way they used to and none of them should be invested in the way they used to be. And that probably started to be true about five years ago. But I don't Think for whatever reason, it wasn't until the AI hype cycle got infected into everyone's brains that marketers and CMOs and some smart CEOs and CFOs started to pick up on it. Yeah, I think it's interesting as we were looking and starting to question things like we're in the content marketing space, we had the same thought process, right. Like I think about five or six years ago, we were looking at just the process of creating content and I think at the time we were helping create content for Pfizer around the period of the vaccine, which you can imagine what that looked like. And it was just in all of our clients, right? It's you find an expert author and you do the research and then it goes through 75 rounds of revision and kicks back and forth and you get like one thing. And separately we were looking at a lot of clients planning in really disparate ways like either at the team or channel level or this bottom up approach where you're just like really chasing these tactics. And it was exhausting. So we started to think differently and thinking about like a market position. What's our. How do we create points of views and connected ways across channels? So as the AI sort of hype cycle, as you called out, came into market, while it's. There's some stuff that's really frustrating, a lot of it forced conversations like you're saying that probably needed to happen anyway, right? Like how do we get better and stronger and smarter about this? Yeah, well, and what's a good example? Podcasts in general, podcasts and YouTube channels and webinars and all that kind of stuff. My understanding of the current space is that, and this is, this could be maybe not true for this particular podcast for you, Dan? I don't know. But my understanding is that we're going to record an hour of a show here and almost no one is going to listen to that or watch it. But thousands or perhaps tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of people will watch and see 30 or 60 second clips from this episode. And so essentially we're doing what a lot of television shows and broadcast television and movies do, which is to essentially record 10 times as much content as we need, cut it down to the bare essentials, and then promote that through channels where people are already paying attention. Whatever Instagram Reels or YouTube Shorts or LinkedIn has a surprisingly effective video service. Now Reddit people consume a lot of business like SaaS and marketing content on subreddits that is deeply weird to a content marketer of 10 years ago. Right. That's just not, that's not how you think about building audiences. If you go and show yourself boss or your client from 10 years ago a dashboard that says, hey, we have 111 subscribers to our YouTube channel. They're going to go cancel this project. This is dumb. Throw it in the bin. And then if you go to them and say, but look, Every episode produces six 30 second clips that get a hundred thousand views each and build our brand reputation and make us familiar and trusted to our audience, they're going to go, oh yeah, prove it. And you can't prove it the same way you couldn't prove any of the marketing or advertising investments of the 20th century. We know they work, but we can't prove it. We can't prove it through attribution the way digital marketing was expected to prove attribution for the last 25 years. And I think we have to throw out the attribution modeling and embrace the new reality of how people both consume content and are influenced through platforms that will provide no data to us about how effective they are. At the bottom of the funnel. Yeah, definitely a lot to unpack there. Ran. What you don't know is for the early 2000s, I spent about 10 years in radio. So talk about no attribution, but it worked, right? You start seeing loads and loads of people. I moved into the digital space in this concept of measuring everything in last touch attribution and what led to what? Yeah, terrible, terrible. You know what's embarrassing, Dan? Here's what's embarrassing. I spent two decades on stages you mentioned right in the intro keynoted hundreds of events around the world. A bunch of those keynotes were all about taking a big crap on radio, television, billboard advertising, marketing that wasn't attributable and reinvesting those dollars into attributable channels like at the time SEO and content things where I showed how you could measure it all the way through the funnel, build these fancy dashboards that would capture every single sale and it was all baloney. I am so embarrassed about that now. I look back at that time and you could squint and see your way to about 60 or 70% of full funnel attribution. Back when Google gave you refer data on every keyword, back when every website perfectly sent their cookie and their referral string and, and back when you could hold cookies for two years, right. Third party cookies could sit around for two years no problem. No one ever cleared their browser history. There was no personal information protection no gdpr, no California privacy law, no Canada's privacy law. When those things didn't exist, you could squint and see your way to full cycle attribution. And now you're just kidding yourself. I don't know. I feel a lot of shame about this. Well, I'm going to go ahead and say the problem was you, then I am to blame. If you want to know why your CEO and your CFO are being like, no, we're not investing in social media. That only shows me impressions every time. I would be like, Rand, yeah, keep that curse in the back of your pocket. Exactly. So really, as we hop in, I think for the past 15 years, we're talking a lot about SEO and content. There was largely this almost like breadcrumb approach, right? Where you're like, hey, if we can sprinkle our message and really shallow ways across the Internet, people will find themselves to our website where we can engage and convert in this user journey mindset of moving people to you. Does that work anymore? Yes, absolutely. That has not fundamentally changed. It's just that you can't prove it and what that journey looks like has changed. So for a huge number of businesses, that journey was extremely similar for the first, like maybe 97 to 2017, let's say, right? So like those 20 years, it was almost always start with a search, right? Because there wasn't a whole lot of other ways to consume content on the Internet until like maybe 2010 and Facebook and Twitter started getting big. So you would perform a search in almost always Google, and then you would find your way to some content, almost always on somebody or several somebody's websites. And then you might subscribe to that content via their blog or email or whatever. And then you would consume that content. You'd learn to know them, like them, trust them. You might follow them on their social channels and then eventually convert to a sale or subscription or whatever it is. That cycle was really familiar and similar across industries and networks. And then over the last eight to 10 years, it has diversified massively. It's changed so, so much. And unfortunately, the stickiness of that early model is still in a lot of people's brains. Not necessarily exclusively search focused, but very much a. There's a top of the funnel, there's a middle of the funnel, there's a bottom of the funnel, there's channels at each one of those. There's tactics that we should use, there's a playbook that everybody should follow. And that's. That's not the case. I saw a great LinkedIn post with a visual of a pinball machine. And the pinball machine had all of these different bumpers and flippers and little alleyways that the ball would go through. And the analogy was perfect for the marketing funnel. It's no longer a funnel, it's no longer top, middle, bottom. Now you bounce around from, oh yeah, I'm consuming content on Instagram, I pop over to Reddit, I see something in my email, I see something in the real world, I catch a radio ad, I hear a podcast, I see something on YouTube, a friend of mine mentions it to me. And before that conversion at the bottom, it is not mappable. And just exactly to your point, your goal is essentially to spread your brand and your message in all these places that the pinball might hit and be present in those places, even though you will not be able to measure, or at least imperfectly measure, which ones are part of any given sale. Yeah. In sort of compounding that, a lot of the thought leadership that you and Amanda put in market around this concept of zero click. So even just moving people from those platforms, like they're going to move naturally on their own or stay within those platforms, but God forbid you try to pull them out of the platform into you. Right? Yeah, because. Well, so two reasons for that. When we talk about zero click, one thing that's happening is the platforms themselves. Limiting, prohibiting, or making algorithms that biased against links. Instagram, for example, the only place you can put a link is in a story. Right. And even then those Instagram sends out like 01% of its traffic. ChatGPT answers. You will almost never see a link in there. Google's AI overviews. Google is restricting the traffic that's coming out of there. I don't know if you saw this, I just saw it yesterday. But their new AI mode, yeah, AI mode does not pass a referrer string when it sends a click to your website. So if there's a link, you will not know that it came from Google's AI mode. How flipping crazy is that? By the way, they're not the only ones doing this. Slack, when Slack sends you any referral traffic, no refer string. TikTok no refer string. The only place you can put A link in TikTok is in the profile. Right. So if I click on Dan Baptiste on, on TikTok, I can see a link in your profile. If I click that, TikTok won't tell your website that TikTok sent that visit. And there's tons of these. Facebook messenger doesn't send it Reddit sends a limited amount. LinkedIn restricts about 15%. I don't know why exactly, but all of these platforms limiting. The second reason is not a platform reason. It's a human reason. People are trained. Like, we are socially conditioned on our phones to go like this, but not like this. Yeah. For those of you who can't see me, I am scrolling, right? Scrolling. We do a lot of scrolling. We do some swiping. We don't do tapping. Click and go to another platform. I hate it. I should never need to use this button on my mouse, Right? The. I only want to use this one. Yeah. Make it easy. I gotta swim around the bowl. So that inherently creates an issue. Right. We've spent a ton of time, both of us, investigating and looking at how to influence search. And as a brand, like, what's your strategy? And how do you influence the information discovery environment and earn trust and bring people back? Now, I've seen your frustration with the LLM AI search conversation of, like, how do I break into those? But there's a couple of narratives that I want to look at. One is Google is dying because all these elements are popping up. So I'll let you trash that one. And then I think there's maybe an explanation to why people are saying that. Because really, the traffic from Google to us is dying, which is scary because we have new behaviors. But I'd love to unpack that first part and then we can go a couple of clicks deeper. Yeah. So my company, SparkToro, we rely on clickstream data as one of our primary data sources. And what clickstream is for anybody who's not familiar. It's essentially all the URLs that a device visits kind of in order with timestamps, and then it's aggregated and anonymized by. We buy our data from DAOs, but essentially what they have is tens of millions of real people in their phones or laptops or desktops, every URL that their browser visits in order. And so essentially we can see that people who visit X also visit. Yeah, Right. Really, really simple. The research that we did was essentially I went to DA DOS and I said, hey, guys, can we, like, look at how many people are performing a prompt session on chatgpt and Perplexity and Gemini and Copilot and Claude versus how many people are searching on Google and Bing and Yahoo and DuckDuckGout? And that research came out in March. And essentially what it showed is that in 2024, for every one time ChatGPT was searched, 373 searches were performed on Google. And that's not all. So. So ChatGPT is growing faster as a percent than Google, like 190% or something last year. But Google, because the denominator is so big, Google grew by 5 chatgpts last year, like accidentally. I mean, pretty intentionally so. Last year was Google's fastest year of slow search growth in five or six years. And I think that's why they published their number around like, hey, we're now serving 3 trillion searches a year, whatever it is. And that suggests that unless ChatGPT grows much faster than it has grown in the last couple of years, they're just not going to catch up. Right. Like Google is just going to be 90% plus of the market. ChatGPT isn't as big as Bing. Right. And like, people are not investing any marketing in Bing. So look, I'm not saying don't get into AI, like, don't get into LLMs. You need to as a brand, you absolutely should. But mostly you need to because Google is using LLMs to answer such a high percent of the searches now. Yeah. And I think the thing for me that it calls in question is not Google or Perplexity or GPT or fill in the blank. It's more, we used to, to your point, query, click, explore, Right. And now it's, we open up a session in. We were talking about AI mode. You're having a full conversation inside of that platform and not leaving. Right. So as a marketer, if you have a spreadsheet of keywords that you're targeting one by one with informational content, like, oh my God, right, There's a reckoning coming for that type of behavior. So maybe you can dig in there because it's important to understand so we can figure out where to go from here. I want to be clear. I left the search SEO world eight years ago, but I still maintain friendly contact with lots of people in that field and still go to some of those events and stuff. And one of the people who I really admire and like in that world is Ross Hudgens from Siege Media. He and his team just published some great research. They've got an agency that. So they have access to like hundreds of their clients, like analytics software and all that kind of stuff. He published a great study, just published a video about it yesterday that looked at traffic to websites overall and traffic to homepages. And what's fascinating, Dan, is that if you imagine in your mind what you think would be happening in an LLM centric World, which is I go to Google, I go to ChatGPT, I go to Claude and I have this session where I ask all sorts of questions. I have a back and forth, I'm staying in the platform the whole time and I get all my answers about a product, a market, a space, a problem I'm having. And then at the end of that, or somewhere in there, there's some reference to some brands. So like, oh hey, you should check out these three brands. And what happens? Well, people search for those brands and go to their homepage. That's exactly what Ross's study showed. The Siege Media study showed that clicks and traffic are down 5 to 15% and homepage traffic just to the brand's homepage of their website is up 10 to 15%. So what's happening is the conversation and the content consumption and the exploration that used to happen on your website is now happening inside the platforms. And then once the platform conversation has happened and once the recommendation occurs, people still go to your site. They're just not reading your blog post and subscribing to your email newsletter and checking out all the clever articles and case studies and examples that you've got. They're consuming that content inside their search tool. Yeah. I mean even beyond. Right. Like, so not only search, but you mentioned LinkedIn as everybody is hungry to learn. One of the things I really like that you do within LinkedIn specifically is open up the product and start talking about thought leadership, but then show real data inside of the product, which for many years was like, oh, should we like hide the product? Should we even have a video? And you're out there with thought leadership with the product, showing how it works, showing what's real and kind of taking on some of these topics head on with real data inside of your environment. Which I think is awesome. And I've shown that example to many brands to be like where it makes sense. Not every time, not everybody can be ran whiteboard, but it works. Right. Like, and it, it's not something we need to hide in the appropriate lens. It doesn't have to be this like segmented universe where this thought leadership belongs here. Yeah, I mean I think LinkedIn is a really interesting platform in a bunch of ways because it benefited a tremendous amount from the death of Twitter. Right. Like Elon self sabotaging that company and then the demand and desire for a place where professional and interest based topic discussion could happen that was relatively free from other issues. I don't think this is totally a good thing. Like I don't think we should be inoculated and free from discussions of cultural or social or political issues. But such is the world and such is the way. And so LinkedIn has really prospered from that. We can see in our data that essentially activity on Twitter, non bot activity on Twitter kind of died post 202223 right after the acquisition and then the rise of LinkedIn from that, you had a few hundred million people who essentially switched their behavior to that platform. And that has made it insanely powerful for reach and engagement if you can find your audience and produce things that they actually care about. I'm a unique weird animal here. I've found, I think, Dan, ways to cross pollinate conversations. People care about things that they want to learn about. My particular weirdness, which is being able to take something that other people feel is complex and they don't really get it and like explain it in layman's terms and make it accessible. That's something I've had 25 years of practice doing. But the weird thing for me is that oftentimes SparkToro comes up in that conversation, right? So like, whatever. I'm talking about how content marketing is changing and one of the things that sort of naturally comes about is, well, where is my audience? Which networks are they on, what search tools are they using, what websites they visit, what YouTube channels they subscribe to? And of course, that's what SparkToro does, right? It answers those kinds of questions, which is really useful. And then what really helps is because I'm spreading that message, talking about that thing over and over in lots of places, in lots of different ways, with lots of different examples. It gets picked up, right? It gets picked up in two ways. One, by language models that Google and all the search tools and AI tools are using. And so if you ask ChatGPT for audience research tools or audience research software like SparkToro's right there, it's great. And it gets picked up in the minds of people who might be likely to be our customers. So when people think of, hey, where can I do audience research? Or where can I find which YouTube channels my audience subscribe to? They're like, oh yeah, SparkToro for that. And they don't have to have subscribed to our email list or read our blog or even visited our website. All that activity happens in their feed, right? In this thing that they're paying attention to. Outside of any interest in SparkToro itself, I think that's where a bunch of brands get stumped. They get stuck in this mindset of we're supposed to publish our content on our website. That's supposed to be the home. Don't build your house on rented land. That advice is now terrible. I know. Build your house on rented land. Friends. I don't care if you think LinkedIn might die tomorrow. It doesn't matter. You have to build where your audience is and then follow them wherever they go. And if that happens to be Blue sky or Mastodon or threads or TikTok or Reddit or wherever they're going, you gotta build in those places. There's no choice. Your competitors are going to win if you don't. Yeah. As we're looking at this space, really starting to think about the story that you have to tell. We last week had our friend Brendan Hufford on talking about content ip. Right. And having a point of view that you can bring out in all of these different ways and start to be known for that. And then to your point where you, where it comes to have a company and an association every time, whether it's your bio or when you're speaking or things like that, and the influence of your point of view, plus showing up in all of these places start to sort of stick in people's mind as well as in the algorithms. Right. So you're starting to get known in all of these places in really important ways. Yeah. And what's weird is how marketing has changed so much. And also I suspect that someone who was doing great marketing 75 years ago would be really good at it today because the principle remains the same, which is essentially find a story that resonates with your audience and a message that you can quickly and easily tell them via a single image, like a highway billboard or a 30 second radio spot or a 30 second television commercial, and then repeat that message over and over in the places that they pay attention, in the ways that resonate with them and in a way that builds your brand association in their mind. And what's wild is all the technology that these, you know, AI tools and search tools and social media tools have built is actually intentionally or unintentionally designed to essentially funnel people toward you're interested in X. So here are brands, Y, Z that are connected to that, you know, space that's like how all of this stuff works. If anybody ever looks into how an AI tool works, generative AI is words that frequently come after other words. So if your brand comes after those words, you win. What's kind of funny is this focus on what we talked about, this like bottoms up approach to Trust in influence, right? We were historically publishing a high volume of individual assets, chasing almost like one off topics under a large umbrella. And it didn't afford you the space to do that work anymore, right? So you're like, oh, the supply demand was way off. Like all of a sudden people are like tapping you on the shoulder, like, I need more content, I need more content. You're like, yeah, but I got like these 57 other things I'm doing right? And then because of that, then in swoops, AI. And it feels like an easy button to that problem. But that wasn't the right solution anyway. So you have AI creating crappy AI generated content in an almost antiquated behavior. Instead of taking a step back and saying, what is our market position and how do we think about it and create engagement? Why does it matter to our audiences? And why are we valued in the world? Not can AI create something that maybe would create a rank position that's not going to get a link anyway? Like, so starting to reimagine this inflection point of where we are. And to your point, the principles are the same, which as a marketer is encouraging, right? Like, you're like, oh, thank God, like, I can get back to what feels important instead of like five reasons why I need an audience. You know, like, it's a different thing. But honestly, I think it's a better thing. Look, I agree that it's very nice to go back to these principles of marketing, right? Be present in the places your audience pays attention with a message that resonates. But I do fundamentally agree with a lot of the critics of like the AI era that there's a few things definitively frustrating and wrong with it. I think the ethics of how it's made is awful, right? And like, if any thoughtful, empathetic person were sort of in charge of AI regulation, it would be, hey, you are not allowed to steal content and use it to train your models without paying the original copyright holder and creator of that content, which would bankrupt every AI tool and no one would be able to build it, except maybe Google could afford to, maybe Microsoft. I think the other reality of it is that it's always derivative. And so even if you are someone who thinks, hey, I think AI content might solve this problem, just be aware that it's a stereotype machine that is at the core what it is. And so if what you need is a brainstorm of common ideas that are already associated with a topic, AI is perfect. It's really wonderful for that. And if you need Novelty, humor, creativity. If you need to build new associations, if you need cleverness, you cannot turn to AI. And you can see right now like look, we've had AI for in common use maybe four years, right, since kind of the early launch of ChatGPT. Was that 3.2.5? I can't remember. But I browse a lot of content on the web and I have yet to share one time a piece of content, an image, a video created by AI. Other than to say this is pretty sketchy AI stuff. It just doesn't. It does not appear at the top of Reddit, it is not at the top of Google News, it does not show up in your LinkedIn feed, it might show up a little bit in your LinkedIn feed, it doesn't show up in your threads, Facebook, TikTok. Like, because it's not novel, it solves a production problem, but it doesn't solve the whole reason that content marketing or brand marketing existed in the first place, which is how do we create value in the market? Yeah, I think there's a bunch of people who probably listen to what I just said and strongly disagree and they're like, no, you just haven't seen the great examples. Or I bet you're already sharing stuff and you just don't know it. And I don't know, take a hard look at yourself, man. Like I don't think if you look at consumer or B2B behavior overall, you're going to see a lot of purely AI generated stuff making that pinball machine work. Yeah. I think for us our calculus on where a ad fits was part of can it automate tasks? Great. Yes. Can it help pull information and then from our standpoint, use the word derivative. We will create longer form human created insight driven pieces and then create derivatives of that piece into formats, channels and et cetera, which allows you to scale a position and spend your time on the thought provoking material that you want to create in the first place and then reformat it into other areas so you can actually bring it out into the world and what you described. Yeah, yeah. I mean I think one of the uses of AI that I've seen that I really like is transcribing audio content. I also find that it's great for, hey, give me 10 ideas for X. Right? Fill in the blank. What X is 10 new ideas for headlines on my homepage that I want to test. 10 new ideas for ad copy, 10 new ideas for blog posts. I would strongly recommend you don't use any of those directly, but it's a way to fast forward the brainstorm process. And you know how. I don't know, Dan, if you've been in a bunch of rooms where you, like, brainstorm ideas with a team, but there's a lot of what I call social and human work that you have to do to not insult someone's ideas. Yeah, yeah. You don't have to do that with AI. Yeah. You can tell it to give you 100 ideas, tell them that 99 of them are terrible and they should feel bad about themselves. And, like, the AI will still give you just as good ideas tomorrow. Yeah. The one I like is you just don't write it down. And they're like, no, I think this person said that. And I was like, we already captured it somewhere else. You don't have to do that. Right. And I think it does give the freedom to have bad derivative ideas in just. Okay, well, none of these were useful, but this one made me think of something that is creative and clever, and so now we're going to use that. So clearly the marker here of success that we've kind of anchored on for years was largely like traffic and then having some sort of loose correlation to revenue. Right. The attribution model is broken. Traffic is not the thing. Traffic is a vanity metric. Yeah. So if not that, then what I guess, like, is marketers that are trying to figure out cool, but still have to, like, report my activity up to some level of impact. Because you told me two years ago, Rand. So, yeah, help me out. Yeah. And I want to be. I want to be really clear that I have empathy for and recognize the need for reporting and measurement. I don't think those things are dead. I am criticizing and urging you to throw out attribution, but not measurement. So attribution would be. Just to clarify the difference between these two things. Attribution would be. Dan came to SparkToro's website initially because he listened to this podcast. And then he came back again after a Google search. And then he came back again after following us on bluesky and seeing a blog post. And then from that blog post, he went and signed up for a free account. And then two weeks later, he got this nurture email. And that nurture email led him to pay for an account. And so these things get this percentage of credit in the attribution model. That's dead. I am urging you to admit that's dead because you cannot measure all of them. The most measurable ones are going to be the paid channels, and you will always over index on paying, usually Google and Facebook for the privilege of thinking where a transaction came from, when in fact what they're doing is just charging you money for sales. That would have happened anyway. And you can see this in all the examples where people turn down their ad spend and 90% of the sales remain. I love the Airbnb example from a few years ago, right, where they were like, oh, we shut off all our performance advertising and saw 95% of all those transactions still came through. And I would just urge you to be cautious. That's attribution measurement is saying, we made 10 videos for LinkedIn. They collectively had this amount of reach. Here's the people that they reach, right? The sort of job titles, because LinkedIn will show you the job titles of people who saw your. And then our homepage traffic over the six weeks following the success of these six videos was X percent higher than what we would have expected based on seasonality and organic growth. Well, boy, it sure looks like that is what's going on. And this is the frustration because you can't prove that any one video view led to that person definitively going to your website. A lot of C suite folks are throwing out that data and saying, that doesn't prove anything. No, it doesn't prove anything. But it is how you have to measure. It's the same way you measure television advertising or radio advertising or billboards. Right? You know, it's 1955, Dan, and we throw up a billboard for Coca Cola in Detroit and same store sales in Detroit over the next quarter lift 5%. So we throw up the same billboard in Chicago and they get a 5% lift as well. So then we try it in Milwaukee and then it works there too. And so we roll it out nationwide. That is measurement based investing versus attribution based investing. We can't prove that like any particular motorist driving by the Coke billboard stopped at the convenience store and bought an extra six pack. But we see the lift, so we keep investing. So the measurement obviously is important to see where you're getting traction and see what's working and what's not. But not the sort of credit based approach that attribution forces. And then everything becomes some sort of direct response, last mile optimization versus like how do we actually influence the market and grow our brand? And how do you build a brand? You can't build a brand through direct response and bottom of funnel only. You can't build a brand through conversion. You have to build a brand top and middle of funnel. You have to build a brand in every part of the pinball machine. So let's go there. If we're talking about building a brand and creating influence, which is the job to be done in an environment that looks like it does, if you're a CMO listening to this and you're like, gosh, I'm doing a lot of the things you're like, got your hand on your forehead, you're like, I'm doing a lot of the things they're telling me not to do right now. And I don't know how to sort of move forward. Right? So if you were in that seat and you had the next six, seven months of this year to step by step, shift from maybe a little bit of a antiquated approach into moving into this modern approach, could you talk to me about, like, step by step, how you would think about moving some stuff out and some stuff in? So the first thing that is your obligation, and this is our job as marketers, is to have the hard conversation with the people who hold the purse strings. So you got to sit down with your board, your executive team, your leadership. If you're an agency, you got to sit down with your clients and say, this is the way the world is going. We can keep doing the things that we've been doing. They will have a declining amount of value. We will lose return on investment over time. You can almost certainly already see it slipping, right? Five years ago, we produced this much content, it produced this many visits. This year we produced this much content, it produced this much smaller amount of visits. You can almost certainly see in your traffic that the sources that sent you traffic five or ten years ago are either not reporting that they're sending you traffic anymore or they've declined. And so that conversation is the first thing, because the first thing that has to change is cultural belief inside the organization. There has to be an acceptance at the highest level that, yes, we are going to make hard to measure and impossible to attribute investments into the places where our audience pays attention. The second thing you have to do is know who your audience is and where they pay attention. So who are they demographically and psychographically? What's their consideration, set of options? What sort of problems are they experiencing? What do they use your product or service to solve? Who are they and what else do they care about? All those kinds of things. You need that information so that you can craft resonant messages in the places that you know they pay attention, right? And then you have to do the audience research to figure out, okay, what social networks are they on, which search and AI tools are they using? Which one's more or less than average sort of web browsers? And where can we be present with our message and our type of marketing and content that will really speak to them? That's going to be different for every different company. But channel selection and tactic selection, that's like classic CMO VP marketing job. That should be pretty familiar to you. The only thing I'd really urge is if you're not already getting data from someone, you don't have to use SparkToro, but like get data from one of these audience research platforms to tell you not only where is your audience across specific networks and search and AI tools websites, but which ones you should know. Hey, my audience is subscribing to these 10 YouTube channels and they're listening to these podcasts and they visit these subreddits and you should be present in those places at least a little bit. Listen to a couple of those podcasts, visit a few of those subreddits once a month or more, right? So that you are inside, embedded in the culture and content consumption that your audience is. Otherwise you won't know them, right? You won't have like a real sense for them. And then last step, now go do your tactics right now go craft your messaging, see which ones work, do some conversion rate optimization testing, some AB testing, buy some ads, do some organic content, do some video, do some social media posting whatever it is in the right places. And what's the role of the website in this world? Because I think obviously there's some areas where you'd say like, wow, it's actually probably more important because whether I'm pulling thoughts and ideas into a repository or blog that then could potentially get indexed up into lots of different places, but then I'm taking that message and traveling. So, like, how do we think about the web, the home web experience in its role in the process? Yeah, you nailed it. The website is the repository for the content and the ideas that you're going to take and spread across all the other channels. So as an example, if you want your brand to be associated with this particular problem and the solutions to it in a certain way, like for customer X, who is experiencing problem Y, we are solution Z. And you're going to say that in a million different ways and you want that to spread all over the web. But the home base of that content, where people could find the original source, read the whole thing, large language models in Google can refer to it, that should be hosted on your site, right? That should be a place that you capture. What's going to be weird for people is they'll look and go, yeah, but I'm not getting value from that anymore. I used to get ten times, a hundred times as many visits to that type of content on my site. And as we talked about in the beginning of our conversation, that whole experience is happening off your website. You're just powering it with the message and the content that you're putting on your site. You're maybe getting one tenth of the same traffic to that blog post, article, video, whatever it is that you're hosting, but then you're spreading it to all these platforms where you can get way more reach than you ever did before. And it's just the home base. There's tactical things we could talk about. Like, oh, if you're going to post on LinkedIn, Amanda and I are doing a bunch of testing around this. Like, take that video, that same video that you put on your website, that's like, whatever, your weekly video about content and research that's happening in your field. Go embed the full version of the video. I would keep it to five minutes. That tends to do the best on LinkedIn. And then have a link that somebody else posts in the comments that points to, hey, if you need to share this with anyone, like, here's the original. You know, it's great. LinkedIn gets indexed by Google, but LinkedIn search sucks. Yeah, it's terrible. No one can find anything on LinkedIn. And so they go to Google and they search for, hey, where's that video that Rand Fishkin did about this blah, blah, blah, blah thing? Oh, look, it points to his website rather than LinkedIn. Great. Perfect. Wonderful. But because it's on LinkedIn and Reddit and threads and Bluesky and Twitter and YouTube, guess what? All those transcripts get indexed and they all feed into the language model. And right now the magic's happening and you're coming up at the top of the AI overviews, or you're coming up in the ChatGPT conversations, all that kind of stuff in Reddit. You brought that up. Reddit's kind of like, in my mind, like this snarky black box. And if they find out you're a brand, they just light you on fire. But it's also kind of important, especially Google licenses their data, obviously to power Gemini and others. So have you seen strategies work to have brands have an engaged presence on Reddit? Okay, I'm going to tell you the weird secret of Reddit, which is it doesn't matter how much you get downvoted. Okay. The language model does not give a shit about the votes. Right. The language model just sees the content or it doesn't. Yeah, you can get banned, you can get buried, you can have your comment removed. But I would urge you not to be afraid of leaving comments that get one upvote and nothing else. I would urge you to not be afraid of submitting a piece of your content that doesn't do well. You're playing a game where you're learning the platform, you're learning what works and doesn't. But also you're having influence. Even if you're getting no traction with the actual Reddit community, just treat it a little bit more like republishing on Medium or something. Fascinating. You're planting seeds around the web. It's almost like a free place to just stick your stuff. Right? It doesn't hurt anything. Don't leave a link. Right. You don't need the link. And be transparent if you want. It doesn't hurt you. It's fine to be totally transparent about this stuff and be like, hey, I'm Rand fishkin, I represent SparkToro. I did this research, I'm submitting it to Data is Beautiful. You know what's crazy? I did this a few months ago, that Google versus ChatGPT research that I was mentioning. I put it up on Data is Beautiful, which has like hundreds of thousands or maybe millions of subscribers on Reddit. I thought I made some nice charts. The community took a big crap on it, like they hated it. I don't think it even got. I think it has less than 50 upvotes. Does not matter. You know what comes up when you search for ChatGPT versus Google in Google image search number one, baby. My man. My man. Because of that Reddit post. And I'm like, well, I don't really care that you didn't vote for me. Yeah. When you look at channels, do you program channels like LinkedIn deliberately, or do you kind of just find ways to cross post content as a distribution channel? Does that make sense? Like, do you go in and deliberately say, this is my LinkedIn strategy, or is this just a place to extend videos that I already created? Both. So I have like a, I would say, informal strategy for LinkedIn, for Blue sky, for YouTube, for Reddit. These are the channels that my audience pays attention to. And then I kind of have like almost the primary ones. So for me, that's LinkedIn and Blue Sky. Everything else is a little bit secondary. YouTube is a place where I essentially cross Post. The same is true for threads. The same is true for Twitter. The same is true for to the extent that I use them, Facebook and Medium, which I occasionally will cross post to. You know, I essentially think of those as like three minute tasks that happen when I post something that I think I want to cross post to those communities. Not as a, hey, I actually need to get traffic and value from this and engagement here and I care about how many likes and impressions I get. I don't. I'm using them the same way I just described Reddit to you, which is this is a place for distribution, an additional place where automated systems might pick up my content and then reward me for it. And I would urge people to do this too. Look, we're a tiny little company of three people, right Dan, like sparktor, we don't have the bandwidth for like, oh yeah, let's build this formal strategy. If we're a big company and my marketing team were 10 people, I would have strategies for probably more of those networks. The ones that our audience pays attention to most, which I can see in the SparkToro data, right, that it's like for us it's LinkedIn is, would be our number one, I think YouTube would probably be our number two and then probably some combination of like Reddit threads, blue sky, etc. But I would have my team have strategies for all of those important networks and then specific tactics for cross posting and probably start a substack, all that kind of stuff. I think the value that you all bring with the perspective on where people are hiding is really important to say like, okay, these are my top X channels, I need to have strategies. But to your point earlier or to the conversation earlier, it all should ladder up to a position you're trying to create in the market. And I think what's different is all of these teams and organizations and it's starting to change now. It's really that C has started to change in the last three to four years where you'd have like a social team that doesn't even communicate with a content team who has a different demand gen team. And they are all we talked about attribution. They're all measured on different things, they're all doing different things. So there's no momentum that you're building because everybody's just off on their own. You mentioned a 10 person team. I was at a bank talking about this stuff in a room with 300 marketers. That's the world, right? And there hasn't been collaboration. But in this world, you need to. Right. Like you need to start thinking about how do we get a common core important message. Even things like we're commissioning original research studies. You mentioned some data studies, like having original research around the problem you're solving. Oh my God. Great. For a hundred reasons. Starting to think about elevating SMEs like yourself, like can people bring this to market versus just the brand? Starting to take that message into multiple places and having teams work together on a common mission versus their attribution goals and once they hand the baton, they don't care what happens after that. Yeah, exactly. Right. So like I think about this in consumer a lot where many of the most successful consumer brands essentially have a very consistent message that they turn into a million kinds of content for tons of different platforms. Right. They have like a, hey, here's our event strategy. We're going to associate our mascot with this event in this way. Hey, here's our social media strategy, which is we're going to take these current events and make them memeable with our brand and we're going to look for opportunities to do that. And then our website content strategy is to take the messages that resonate and have a whole bunch of essentially text content around those that is quite explanatory and that not a lot of people will care about. Doesn't matter because that's the thing that's going to help us in LLMs and search and all that kind of stuff. Fine. Great email strategy too. Like what's our email strategy? Well, we're mostly centered around promotions, but also we should do positioning around that so that our new launches all get positioned in the way with the words, with the associations that we want. And you know what, Dan? I think the most infuriating and frustrating part of all this is that marketing is not allowed into the room with product. That's where when I see brands B2C or B2B, when I see brands that get like magical marketing, it's because the product and the marketing are almost one thing. Sales too. Yeah. I mean, right. If sales is selling it the way marketing talks about it and the way the product has been designed to create the demand, but also create the incentive for amplification, that's when you win. My favorite example of this is the American candy bar Snickers. They nailed this. I want to say it was like 12, 15 years ago. They identified that people were buying Snickers, almost like they were buying energy bars rather than candy bars. So they started switching their positioning from Snickers being delicious or it's packed with peanuts or whatever it is to you're not you when you're hungry. And then essentially creating this almost new category that they own in the market of candy bar plus hungry equals Snickers as opposed to every other candy type treat that you might buy. And it dominated for them. And it works because the product does the marketing too. And seemingly that behavior sort of existed that they then capitalized. There was a similar. I guess you're talking about candy bars. I'm going to shed a little light on my life. There was one with Pedialyte and hangovers and they had a huge spot of people who just like struggled to get up in the morning after a long night. And voila, here you come. Instead of babies, right? Completely. Completely. I mean, I think that like Gatorade kind of had a little bit of that positioning too. But think about this in B2B, right? If you're selling like a software product and you talk about your software product solving a problem for a market on your homepage that is not actually the problem that your audience is experiencing and not actually the market that is using you the most, things get really awkward. It's like this. You're trying to fit the square block in the round hole and like it's just not singing. And then when you find that match and the product does exactly what your marketing and messaging says it does for exactly who it says it does it for in the places those people pay attention. Magic. Magic. Yeah. And that's where you get communities, people taking our ambassadors of your vision versus some marketing message that isn't true and isn't brought in the market. Well, one last question, and this is a little bit of a non sequitur, but it does come up in a world in. You mentioned the AI mode demo that we both watch, which is interesting, but in that world and others, I think one of the leaders of Google came out and was talking about buying baseball tickets and he said, I tasked Google or an AI agent to find me the best tickets. And it went and filled out all the forms, multiple websites and stack ranked the seats and the price. Two questions. One, is that something that brands need to pay attention to if they're not e commerce of agents? Almost like researching without you. And then two, I would argue, I think that the brand becomes really important because if you all of a sudden get a bunch of responses, guess what's going to win? Either price or brand affinity or trust. And typically brand affinity and trust, you're going to pay more the thing you like so Any thoughts on like this AI agent quirky world that's starting to pop up and how brands need to think about it? Did you hear how Amazon shut down Alexa? No. They basically threw in the towel. They were like, this didn't work. We thought that people were going to be in their homes and they were going to say, hey Alexa, go find me the best baseball tickets for blah, blah, blah. And then I found you these baseball tickets for whatever, Padres versus Mariners. There was that assumption that would be a huge market in it, just with something like less than 1% of consumers ever use that thing. I don't know, I don't want to prognosticate too much, but I think big tech is obsessed with this idea of technology doing these tasks for you. And I. I'm skeptical. I do think it will exist. I think there will be 1% of people who hardcore use it this way. I think they will never be able to shut up about it. And so it's like doing CrossFit or being into podcasts or astrology or whatever. Like, yeah, you're like, oh God, I get stuck with the AI agent conversation for an hour. Yeah, Yep. Which is fine. Like get obsessed and excited about whatever you want, man. Like, I don't want to rain on your parade. I'm not here to yuff people's yum. But just be aware that your behavior is different from other humans. Would I put a ton of effort into that? Only if you think that those hardcore early adopter, techie type, agentic AI obsessed people are going to be big users of your service. I would not tell the average MLB team that this should be on their radar as something to worry about. I would say win more games, make your mascot more popular in your town, do more stuff for your community, make your players more charismatic to like the people that they interact with. Like give people reasons to cheer for the team that might not just be win and loss record. Like those are all things that I would invest in. And here's a great example of this. There's a local airline in Seattle based in Seattle, Washington called Alaska Airlines. They have become one of the six largest airlines in the United States almost exclusively through a phenomenal loyalty and rewards program. Essentially what they realized in the like early 1990s was if we try and compete on price and routes exclusively, we're going to lose. It's going to be really hard. But if we don't have to compete on those things and people just prefer us because we give them so many benefits when they consistently stick with us, and they book every flight through us, we're going to win. And that realization, to some extent, almost as much or more than like Southwest's innovations around airlines, was a winning formula for them and continues to be. They have, I think, I can't remember if it's the most loyal or second most loyal customer base where people who fly them over and over again because the credit card is great and the rewards point is great and the experience is like, consistent. And they don't like flying other airlines because they don't like the seats and the service and like what's available on the flight. So, like, if you can create that addiction to your product and your brand rather than trying to compete on the list of things ChatGPT would spit out, I think that's the winning formula. Yeah. Well, that's a great place to wrap. I think. As we start to look at creating influence, not traffic, how do we really become something that people love? Right. Like we've been saying that in the content space forever, and then now you look at the world and to your point, you don't love generic content. You don't love AI generated content. You love, like really rich stuff that shows that a brand understands you and brings a unique perspective to the market. Whether it's B2B or B2C. The same rules apply in taking care of those customer relationships wherever people are and not expecting to just build it and they'll come to your website. So starting to think about how this world is starting to rearchitect in really interesting ways. Your software is a key part of that. Becoming audience obsessed. Right? Like, how do we just really understand people and where they are, how to make connections. And typically, if you do that in an authentic way over and over again with a big picture vision on why you matter to them, I think you're going to be okay. I agree. It's weird to be like, oh, brand and product wins. What did I just have to listen to Dan and Rand for an hour? Like, damn it, where's the summary? Yeah, yeah. But all the little details, all the little tactics, all the platform strategies, those are all changing. And so, look, rearchitecting is right. You're going back to the base. And if you've been doing digital marketing in a performance attribution style way, you got to throw it out, my friend. Amazing. Well, thank you not only for today, but all the thought, work and energy you put into the marketing community every day. So we appreciate you, my friend. Thank you. Right back at you, Dan. Thanks for having me. Thank you. For listening to content disrupted Brought to you by Skyward to stay up to date on the latest ideas and insights in brand building and content marketing, visit our website@skyward.com that's s k y w o r d.com join us for our next episode, where we'll continue to challenge marketing norms and inspire you with fresh strategies for growing business through brand storytelling.