Content that Resonates in the Era of AI Slop, with David J Ebner | Sponsored by SearchMaster

Speaker A: Hello and welcome to the Marketing Times analytics podcast. I'm your host, Alex Sofranis, and today we're on with David J. Ebner. David, would you like to introduce yourself?

Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for first and foremost. Thanks for having me, Alex. I'm, um, the aforementioned David J. Ebner. I'm the president and founder of Content Workshop, a brand storytelling agency based in the U.S. i started the company 13 plus years ago. My gosh. Yeah, 13 plus years ago when I was in graduate school studying to get my Master in Fine Arts degree in creative writing and started to learn that the skills I was learning on the fine arts side was applicable on the commercial side. So I started a brand storytelling agency then using those that transfer of skills. And 13 years later, here we are. Good product market fit before we knew what we were doing. And then everything evolved from there.

Speaker A: Can you tell us a little bit more about that transfer of skills?

Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. What's called artistic writing, Right? In artistic writing, there's a lot of talk about character development, right? There's a lot of talk about dialogue. There's narrative flow and thread. There's actions versus narration. There's quite a few elements of storytelling that are taught. Almost all of them are transferable to brand storytelling.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker B: You've got. Character development is very similar to brand development. The idea of dialogue is very similar to the brand. Literally interacting with other people in the audience that they're trying to impart emotion, elicit some sort of interaction. So almost a narrative thread for. I shouldn't leave that one out. I think that's the one thing that's probably missing the most from commercial content that we could learn from our artistic brothers and sisters is this idea that there's a beginning and a middle and end to every piece of content. We're not just, uh, a list of bullets. There's some sort of overarching thing we're trying to solve for that we should prove and then circle back to multiple times throughout a piece of content. That's probably the biggest one, I think, that transfers, actually.

Speaker A: That's really interesting. Uh, so what kind of content lends itself to this narrative structure with the

Speaker B: beginning, middle and end?

Speaker A: Is it more upper funnel? How would you place that in the realm of the different types of content that you can write?

Speaker B: Yeah, for sure. I think most of it does live pretty top of the funnel. Certainly it can live closer to the bottom. When you start to talk about, like testimonials and start to get content around specific client stories, then it can really come in deep, for sure. But for the most part, it is viable for longer form storytelling concepts. So usually there is a lot of written still to, even to this day, certainly in video, it could be applied as well too. And I'll even add, even if the form is short, if you're really trying to get a point across and add value, this beginning, middle, end concept can happen in a matter of seconds. It doesn't have to be. It doesn't have to take 10 minutes to read something for that to come through. We probably should focus on, on shorter mediums as well too. It's just a little bit more difficult. There's a saying that we had in graduate school that I would have made it shorter if I only had the time. Because doing something short, more concise, takes a lot more time and effort usually than doing something that's long, which, um, is not how you would assume it is, but it's always the case.

Speaker A: Yeah, that makes sense. So I'm curious about how content marketing has changed over the last couple of decades.

Speaker B: That's a great question. I'll say that a lot of the foundations of why content works, and really marketing in general, if we go that deep, none of those have really changed because they're the same reasons people have told stories since the beginning of time. They're the same reasons people have bought things since the beginning of time. There's some sort of emotional connection, some sort of problem solution algorithm that is, uh, present. Right. And when you put that as the forefront of the content you're developing, that's the foundation, then it really doesn't matter what time period we're in. Then we're talking about tactics usually, right, Alex? We're talking about what are all the different ways to deliver content to people. How are they changing their behaviors from an attention point of view and where they're applying their attention and not what they're willing to give away for free versus expecting a return on those have changed quite a bit. Back when we started this, uh, 13, 14 years ago, you could write a very long form piece of copy and you would get a lot of response. You would get if it was well written, if it was optimized for search, you'd have traffic immediately. Right? You'd have. It was actually pretty. It was much easier to get in front of people. Now there's just so much, so many tactics, so many things flying at them, so much content out there. Especially with the dawn of AI, there's like this sea of sameness out there. So it kind of looks the same, doesn't really provide a whole lot of value, but you still have to sift through it. So now it's a little bit harder to stand out, but it's also easier to stand out at the same time. As long as you're like, zigging while others are zagging, you're going to stand out even more if there's so many people zigging.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker B: There's just a lot of zig going on out there. So you can differentiate yourself a little bit easier now because so many people are doing the same kind of thing. So anyway, tactics have changed the foundation of why content is viable or marketing from a value point of view. It has been the same, though.

Speaker A: Yeah. And why has content converged into the same style? What do you think is causing that? Is it AI?

Speaker B: Yeah, I think volume. I think there's a lot of people out there, I don't think. I know I've talked to a lot of them, that they're worried about their jobs. I think there's a lot of marketers out there that are leaning on volume and quantity to show worth for their brand and for their job, honestly. And I think there's metrics out there that they're being held accountable to that are more about production and less about actual performance and building relationships and with an audience and all that kind of stuff. And I think people are just trying to survive, honestly in this landscape. The number of layoffs for marketers in this landscape is pretty, I would say, unprecedented. Maybe Covid had more, maybe not, but it was. It's pretty tough right now. So people are leaning into it. People are assuming that they can produce more content with AI, which they can. The question is the quality and how do you differentiate yourself when the main data set is the same for everybody? So if we're relying on AI to be the SME, which obviously is a terrible idea, nobody should do that. But if you're relying on it to be the subject matter expert and be the creative source and intelligence for the piece, everybody's working with the same brain, essentially. So it really comes down to editing and curating at that point in time. And if people aren't doing that part of the process, this is where we're getting the sea of sameness, I think.

Speaker A: Gotcha. Uh, so it's almost backfiring. This process push for volume is actually making them less effective and making them less competitive because they're basically lowering the quality of the output and just using AI, which of course makes it much easier to replace or at least downsize creative teams.

Speaker B: With AI, no question. That's exactly what's happening. There's a way to do it and get high quality. Certainly. I keep thinking about AI. We're marketers, so we understand a funnel, right? Like a funnel kind of looks like this visually. Sorry if you're just listening, but I'm making a funnel with my arms, right? The idea of a funnel is the more you put in the top, the more potential of what can come out of the bottom. Everything doesn't have to come out of the bottom. It's a funnel, not a hallway. Right. Just because you can produce a hundred pieces doesn't mean you should publish 100 pieces. Right. It does allow you, though, to use quality control metrics, use editing, use creativity, add elements that are unique differentiators for your brand to the piece, the hundred pieces, and you can produce probably more of high quality. But you have to choose, right? You have to negate the pieces that aren't going to get across the quality finish, uh, line, as it were, and get rid of those and not produce those ones. So it's like a. I don't know. Words are really cheap right now is the way I think about it. Words are super cheap. Storytelling is just as expensive as it ever has been. So are you publishing words or are you telling the story? I think is the real question.

Speaker A: Yeah. And would you say that especially over the last maybe decade, that other forms have become equally, if not more effective in terms of sharing that story? Like video or podcasts?

Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. Alex. The, uh, mediums in which we can get those stories out have exploded, right? Certainly video has become more prevalent, mostly because of the delivery mechanism. It's not that, actually. I think that video can tell the story better. It does tell it a little bit differently, but you have access to people's attention all day with social media. So video is a lot easier to get in front of your target audience. Right? For the written word, for the most part, unless you're advertising with it, you have. People have to find you. So you have to present so much value that the different mechanisms that produce and index and show results to people finds, uh, you and thinks you're valuable. Right? That's SEO, geo, all that kind of stuff. Right. Whereas on social, you can force yourself into their, into their mind, into their awareness window just by putting something in their feed. So I think people have leaned on that tactic and that medium a little bit more because they have more access to people. So that's definitely in podcasts the same way podcasts are actually audio, um, is a Great medium for storytelling. Fantastic. Even better than video in my mind from like getting an actual story to be implanted in somebody's mind. Right. If you want to leave an emotional connection with somebody, you're going to have more effectiveness probably with, with a podcast, with audio than you are with video, simply because of the authenticity that it, that bears down on. This conversation that you and I are having right now is real. We're two people very far apart, probably. But like, we're, we're having a real conversation, we can share our opinions in real time and people resonate with that kind of empathy and that human element. So I think it's a super powerful storytelling medium.

Speaker A: Yeah. And you mentioned geo. This is something that a lot of people are trying to figure out. And I'm curious what you've learned about it or how you recommend people or businesses optimize for better GEO performance.

Speaker B: Yeah, honestly, it's a lot of I, I recommend the same things that, that work well for SEO for the most part. There's certainly some differences, no question. But both of them are viable because they present value. Right. Like the fundamental is whatever you produce has to be valuable. It has to answer a question and solve a problem for somebody. And you have to do that out of the goodness of your heart and not ask for anything specific in return. If you want to be sourced, if you want to be referenced and indexed and brought into all of these mechanisms, which has always been true about SEO since the beginning of time. Right. So you got to do that first and foremost. Then we can start talking about all the technical elements that make it more susceptible to be referenced. When we talk about indexing, one thing that we have found for some reason, I don't know what the reason is, maybe it's the relationship between Microsoft and OpenAI. But ensuring your site is indexed by being Webmaster Tools seems to have a huge upside. Again, I don't have an answer as to why that is, but we've just tested it and when we do that for our clients, they get indexed more when there's the, when the playing field is same or they get referenced more in LLMs and AI search. So that matters, obviously. Syntax, writing, as people speak, it seems like the, uh, data sets like to have that because they have to process less information. So if you write in very flowery language, it's more difficult for the LLMs and data sets to reprocess that into like conversational language. So why would they choose you over somebody else that has it more conversational? It's actually Like a, an efficiency point of view. I'll add a caveat to that. Don't. My opinion is don't dumb down your content. You can have elements of your content that are designed to be susceptible more to the AI bots that are crawling the sites and not specifically have to like sacrifice your human content and somehow not provide whatever level of dialogue you want with your audience, with a person, just so a bot can read it more effectively. So there's a little bit, there's tactics on that front. I know a lot of. There's so many new elements coming out every day. One thing is, I've noticed Ahrefs did a fantastic analysis of 75,000 websites and they built a correlation matrix between those that would get referenced in AI overviews and those that don't, which is actually really cool. And most of it just falls back on are other people talking about you on other parts of the Internet. That's really what it comes back to. So we're finding, we've always been big proponents of backlinks for SEO purposes. We're finding that for GEO and for LLM and AI overviews, having more backlinks to your website actually does matter quite a bit from reputable sources. If your brand name, brand mentions matter a lot too. For some reason, getting anchor text that is the name of your company on another somebody else's website and it links to your website seems to be like quite valuable right now. So that's what we found. Oh, the last thing, uh, it's new to me, but this concept of essentially generating a different website, essentially you have a secondary website that's generated just for bots, that is from a file point of view, is attached to your current website. So when a bot comes onto your site, an AI bot, it's directed towards these files opposed to the HTML that the humans are seeing. So that you can essentially rewrite your website in a way that's more susceptible for bots and only they see it so that your, your human content doesn't have to be changed if it works well for you. So that's like new. I've only heard about that for the first time recently, but it seems like that might be a direction a lot of people would want to go so they don't have to sacrifice the other content. So anyway, that's everything I know about it in a nutshell as of right now.

Speaker A: Yeah, thank you. That is really interesting. A lot of new stuff that I've, uh, I'm just learning and I'm sure the audience is learning and if there's one thing I'll add, I was talking to Tom Schwab who runs a podcast booking agency, and he gave a couple of tips for geo optimization I thought were interesting. One was podcasting and specifically transcribing podcasts. To your point about conversational language, it's like really easy for the LLMs to traverse and learn from podcast transcripts, so publishing transcripts. Another thing was, interestingly enough, he said that there's one point where traditional SEO and geo actually diverge and that is in the diversity of language. This kind of goes to your point, but it's actually more, more focused around the value proposition for your business. And granted I don't have sources for this, but this is. So take this with a grain of salt, maybe test it. But he said that having the so traditional SEO benefits from very diverse language. Talking about your business versus JIO benefits from essentially sameness or like repeating the same core claims. So in that sense they're a little bit opposed benefit that kind of, uh, dovetails with your idea of creating a secondary site just for bots where it can be totally optimized for LLMs. And then you can keep the traditional SEO optimizations on the main site. But yeah, that's, that's what I've, that's what I can add to the conversation. I love learning about this stuff. Thank you.

Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. I just learned something from you too. This is extremely helpful. And we're all just, we're all just figuring out as we go, right? Nobody actually tells you there's no first party information that's going to share and say, hey, this is exactly how you do it. Because they want us to. We're like writing it as we go too. We're telling them at the same time. So it's a, uh, communal effort for sure.

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. So shifting over a little bit to analytics, how do you determine the effectiveness of your content?

Speaker B: Yeah, that's been hard. For all these years that we've been doing this, we've relied very heavily on organic traffic and organic KPIs and SEO as a main benchmark because what we're trying to do is build sentiment. And there's certainly some tools to measure m sentiment as well too. But like, we're trying to build a relationship with an audience. So we look at things that indicate that none of them directly measure it until you get on the phone with them and say, hey, how'd you hear about us? That that obviously happens. Forms can be filled, yada, yada yada. All that was Pretty easy to measure for the most part. Attribution models can be attribution models. First touch, last touch, somewhere in the middle. And content is essentially everything. So is it, is it an email, is it a blog from SEO purposes, is it a webinar? Whatever it is, it's all still content. But so there's different attribution models. You can go down, but in the end we're looking for things that indicate trust to a degree. So we measure heavily time on page specifically as a KPI of measurement of trust. Certainly like bounce rate and stuff is important to us. Uh, pages per session. Right. Matter to us quite a bit from a traffic point of view to measure that trust. So we'll lean into those quite a bit more to try to measure that effectively for our clients. We still measure today organic traffic. We still measure today rankings. A lot of our clients, some of them have certainly saw, have seen a loss in organic traffic over the last few years, but most of them have not seen anything near what the broader universe is seeing. And I think a lot of that falls down to the fundamentals of the content itself. Is it valuable? Doesn't answer a question. Is it? Who is it? Who is it for? Is it very precise? If you can get to those elements and you build emotion with people, you don't really lose the traffic as much. They just switch to a different mechanism. So we're starting to see AI sources pop up. They're not making up the difference of the loss from organic. Not even close. The last stat I saw was that it's about 1%. 1% of references are, uh, 1% of queries are sent out of AI tools to sites, which Google still trumps that quite a bit. So anyway, that those are the. We're still doing some of the core metrics that we always have. We're doing some new ones. We are, we're actually measuring. There's a lot of different tools out there to measure your AI AI traffic sources. Certainly we can actually narrow those down into, in uh, Google Analytics. But you know how often you're referenced, how often you're mentioned on these AI tools. There's no first party data yet, so a lot of them are just like literally running queries. Right. Just let's. Right, let's ask the question, let's ask the prompt and see if they show up or not. They don't. Let's do that every day. Let's do that once a week. Let's do that, whatever it is. Right. But it's still viable information. So we still Measure a little bit of everything. Certainly shifting, adding to our SEO metrics, some AI and going deeper down into the page analytics quite a bit.

Speaker A: I love that. Yeah. And that's actually something that I'm working on. It's a tool called Search Master and it does just that. So it's looking at business mention prevalence in AI, Ah, search queries in addition to traditional SEO metrics. So just wanted to mention that.

Speaker B: That's Alex, that's fantastic. And they really are one in the. If you think about it, they're one in the same. Uh, like obviously they're measured differently and these are different tactics and tools that are. We're measuring it them with. But man, it just still comes down to producing value. It just fundamentally comes down to that, doesn't it?

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. Talking about producing value, what are some of the common mistakes that businesses make when they're producing content?

Speaker B: I think the most common mistake actually happens much earlier in the process, and it's a flaw that usually sustains throughout. It's really understanding what your brand story is. I think a lot of brands fall into the trap and it's not really their fault. It's natural to think this way, that your brand story is about the founder of the company, it's their story, why they do this, what their history was, or it's about the brand itself, our features, what we do, how we do it, why we do it. And I think that's a fault because then you start to produce content that's all about you if that's the case. Right. It's all about you. Whereas the content that resonates the best are grounded in brand stories that are about the audience, not about you. They're about the Personas, they're about the past clients, they're about the problems that they have in their unique space and how you could help them solve those problems. And if you focus more on that, then usually the content is more altruistic and more about them than it is about you. And I, uh, think that's the fault that many brands take. But when you're just starting out in your smaller company, you don't really understand that. You just know that you as an individual or you as a group of people help certain people because you have this knowledge and this ability. But truly what you're doing is just solving their problems, helping them reach aspirational goals, saving them money, saving them time. There's really the only reasons people buy anything are those metrics, unless it's like a basic need of life. So that's where they probably fall short the most. And that's a strategic issue, not a tactical issue. People focus way too heavily on tactics and not enough time on like the core strategy as to who we help, how we help them, how their lives are better, how they benefit from working with us. So I'd say that's it.

Speaker A: Yeah. And when you're working with clients, are you posing the question to them to figure that out or are you talking to clients? How does a business actually gain that information? Or how do you specifically gain that information?

Speaker B: We actually have a great process in which to do that, that we do with every one of our clients when we start working with them. Sometimes they'll have some of the foundational documents we need. Maybe they have well drafted Personas. Maybe they have some sort of brand voice identity work done, brand visual identity done. Maybe they don't have all that stuff figured out. Very few brands actually spend much time figuring out their messaging from a core level. So we usually start there. We have to have some sort of discovery or understanding of the brand and what they do, all that kind of stuff. They're unique differentiators. But once that's all said and done, we focus on who they help and how they help them. And that usually leads to a deliverable, uh, document we call a message map, which is pretty common for a lot of people to build. We do it in a somewhat unique way. I guess a lot of them are actually built this way. But we look at every Persona we add. Now we have Persona A, pain point B. You apply solution C equals what? It's a mathematical equation, but what are the outcomes and benefits for the person? How's their life better? And we do that for every solution and every Persona. So you get this grid, this matrix, right, this large grid, and then you can start looking at how you make those people's lives better. And then you can start to write messaging around those elements. Right? And that's really the core, the core of all of your content at that point in time. Produce content that helps make people's lives better the same way. Right. Helps demonstrate your expertise at doing that. Right. And there's over and over again. So it's really hard to be good at developing content without understanding that core element. A lot of people guess at it and do just fine. But I would say that message mapping element of the strategy building is really the most valuable.

Speaker A: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. So, uh, really returning to the fundamentals, learning about who you're talking to, figuring out how to best reach them what resonates the most?

Speaker B: Exactly. And we usually, we do that with our clients. We don't hand over a worksheet and give them homework. It'd be nice if they filled it out and brought it, but it's a lot easier to have that as a conversation. We'll interview clients if need be, to understand some of that information better, will review testimonial documentation, things like that, to understand it. Yeah. So it's kind of like a collaborative effort, for sure.

Speaker A: Yeah, that makes sense. I'm curious how you see this whole area of content evolving over the next decade, both from understanding your customers and your prospects. Sorry. Both from understanding your customers and your prospects to actually writing content and getting it out.

Speaker B: Yeah, I think it's. I do believe the fundamentals of things we just talked about will always be true till the end of time. Produce value, ask for nothing in return. Fundamentally, people will come to you once you've built enough trust and they'll buy from you. That's not going to change now. Delivery and tactics are going to change. Right. Obviously, AI is being adopted more and more from a, uh, delivery mechanism. We're actually helping some of our clients develop their own AI content ecosystem internally for their company. Right. And it's good for both the company because there's efficiencies earned there and it's good for the individuals because now they know how to do that. So in this climate where it's hard to hold on to a marketing job, if you know how to build a content ecosystem using AI, you're much more employable after the fact if you do for some reason get Rift or whatever it may be. So I think that's beneficial for people and understanding where the quality metrics need to come in. So building those systems is, I think, something that, uh, every brand is eventually going to do, whether it be a small capacity or a large capacity. Those AI content ecosystems and workflows, the content itself, like all of these tactics, still need words and graphics, like for them to be delivered, they still need the content. I think content might evolve more into interactive elements. We're going to have to provide even more value because the economy right now is an economy of attention, which means you have to give things away for free to get their attention in hopes of either displaying an advert ad to them or having them spend more time with your brand and building trust. So I think it's probably going to shift even more down that, that line into interactive content. So page, there's really going to be like no reason to publish Something on your website that doesn't have some sort of like, calculator built into it or some, some sort of metric for them to a, ah, way for them to engage in that content and provide some deeper level of value. I think that's probably the pathway forward. People say that attention spans are shrinking. I don't, I, uh, actually don't believe that to be true. I think our, for lack of a better word, our BS meters are just more attuned. So like, when we see something that we think is a waste of our time, we immediately throw it out. And that includes like any content that we perceive. So. And the reason I say that is, I don't know about you, but I've got children, I've got a family, and we watch Netflix and we'll consume content for seven hours straight if it's good enough and provides enough value. So this idea of binging is so prevalent in our society for good content that we love. How could our attention spans be smaller? If anything, they're getting larger. They're. We're just not accepting stuff that doesn't present us value. We're throwing them out. So it's going to be important to, to be more valuable. It's gonna be important to give away more secret sauce, more of our, our expertise to people, and then we're gonna have to engage them, I think, on a deeper level to attract them to our content. So that's what I think.

Speaker A: That is such a fascinating take. And I totally agree. I'm trying to think who even came up with that. Most of it, people like in a lab who are saying, like, all right, focus on the. Read this paragraph and we're going to read your brainwaves or something. It's like, what if they don't want to read it? Like, maybe we, like you said, have this luxury of choice in what we spend our attention on. And we, uh, didn't always have that. And so that's what's being measured rather than like, the ground is shifting. So you can't measure attention span compared to how it was before, because in the actual ecosystem of what you can spend your attention on, it's totally changed.

Speaker B: Absolutely. They probably did measure it that way, Alex. They probably had people. And more people are visual learners today than they are are. They learn through reading. It's just a different mechanism of human evolution to a degree. But it doesn't mean, like, we don't have attention spans.

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, I definitely can focus on stuff for long periods of time, so I don't feel personally affected by this drop in attention span.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: All right, thank you. This has been such a fantastic conversation and I really appreciate your time. David, thanks for coming.

Speaker B: Absolutely. Thanks for having me, Alex.

Speaker A: Awesome. And thanks, everyone, for listening. We'll talk to you soon.