Latest / Content, Briefly / Content Marketing Isn’t Just for Robots, with Ryan Sargent

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Content Marketing Isn’t Just for Robots, with Ryan Sargent · Content, Briefly

• 0:00
  [upbeat music] Hey everyone, Alex here. Let me tell you about uSERP. That's U-S-E-R-P.io.
• 0:13
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• 1:27
  [upbeat music] Ryan Sargent is here with us today, and he thinks that B2B content needs to be for more than just robots, and he argues that influencing or delighting the human reading is actually the key work for human marketers right now.
• 1:42
  He is here on the podcast with us today to talk about his latest piece for the Collective Content blog, The Art of Content, titled Content Marketing Isn't Just for Robots.
• 1:52
  Ryan, I am so stoked to have you on the podcast today. I think this is gonna be an awesome conversation, and I've been looking forward to it all weekend, which probably sounds kind of nerdy, but it's true.
• 2:03
  So thanks so much for being here, and I want to start with some rapid fire questions about who you are. Are you in-house, agency, freelance? What are you up to right now? Well, thanks so much for having me.
• 2:15
  I likewise was excited about this all weekend. I work at an agency. I lead the content team, the digital PR team, the design team, a whole bunch of stuff at Ten Speed.
• 2:25
  We're like a search visibility, organic growth agency, all of the, all the right buzzwords there. [laughs] Awesome. What is your favorite part of your job? This is tricky, 'cause picking just one is always the hard part.
• 2:35
  Fair. I think one of the parts of my job that I like the most, and that is specific to it being an agency job, is that I get to see how the sausage gets made for- Yeah...
• 2:43
  a lot of folks, a lot of industries, a lot of team structures, a lot of ICPs. Everything from very much like PLG, traditional SaaS, that kind of motion, and through enterprise sales, that stuff.
• 2:58
  And so getting to see how especially B2B content works across so many different use cases is always exciting and, like, keeps me on my toes. Yeah, I love that about working freelance too.
• 3:09
  I feel like I get to see under the hood at so many different cool companies. Yeah, totally with you. What would you be doing if you weren't in content? Uh, I think I'd be a music history professor. Oh, wow.
• 3:19
  'Cause that's what I was doing before I got a job in marketing. [laughs] Oh, no way. [laughs] That's awesome.
• 3:25
  Yeah, it turns out that the health benefits that come with B2B marketing far exceed the health benefits that come with being an adjunct professor, and that has kept me going for a long time. Very fair. That's awesome.
• 3:37
  I was not expecting that. Well, I'm so excited to jump into this. Your piece is called Content Marketing Isn't Just for Robots.
• 3:44
  I thought it was so smart and such a sharp response to some of the conversation about this topic floating around the content world right now.
• 3:53
  So just for anybody who hasn't read your piece, or maybe it's been a little bit since they have, describe the thesis of your article for us in just a sentence or two. Yeah, I think the, the thesis of the piece is that
• 4:05
  we... the content is, like, bifurcating. Mm-hmm. And search in general, AEO and SEO, are becoming more and more about robots finding your brand, your website. Mm-hmm.
• 4:17
  And so we should let the robots build the content for that, while humans build the content to do the work of influencing humans. It's not to say that SEO and AEO don't have value.
• 4:29
  It's not to say that, you know, that, well, we should abandon those entirely, but that more and more that work is to convince the robots to surface your brand, as opposed to convince a human to make a purchase decision.
• 4:40
  Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah. I love this.
• 4:44
  You know, you're kind of just breaking it down into these two avenues of types of content that are getting created, and I think this is going to become increasingly important, but it still does kind of feel like a hot take to say something like, "Oh, robots are good enough to do SEO now."
• 5:04
  But I think you're agreeing with this, and there's been other people, Ryan Law and others, that are kind of saying this online.
• 5:11
  Can you flesh out a little bit, like, why you think that's true and what potential pitfalls maybe there are in how we think about this? Sure.
• 5:22
  I do think robots, meaning a- AI writers, are good enough to build content for SEO and AEO, and that's hard to say as someone who has spent the past decade building SEO content. Yeah. Like, that's hard.
• 5:38
  I do think that the models that came out in December represented a big step forward there.
• 5:42
  Like, I can actually go back and look at our attempts to have AI write articles a year ago, and they're not as good as the articles we're producing with AI today. Mm-hmm. And, and so that's one change.
• 5:51
  I also think that some of this is based on what I say in the piece, that content marketing is more than just AEO or SEO. Yeah.
• 5:59
  And that we've been kind of lumped in with the SEOs for a long time, and-SEO was wildly successful for a long time, and that was part of it.
• 6:07
  It was an easy way to be hitched to the right horse, [laughs] as it, as it were.
• 6:12
  And the business attribution, right, the revenue results, the pipeline, all of that, on top of the fact that it was something that our writing skills could be quickly systematized for.
• 6:21
  And that's now much harder to do with a human and much easier to do with AI. Mm-hmm. And so that's the only piece of content marketing... Well, maybe I probably shouldn't say that.
• 6:34
  [laughs] But, but perhaps the most significant piece of content marketing that I think AI is capable of doing today. Does that mostly answer the question?
• 6:42
  I think so, and I think, like, you had really smartly put in your article, you had written something like, 'I think that AI is good enough for that work because that kind of content isn't necessarily trying to do the hard work of influencing a human,' right?
• 6:58
  Like, it's trying to influence an algorithm, which those two things are actually two different types of influence.
• 7:06
  And I like, you know, I think it's smart to say what you were just saying about SEO being such a small piece of the content marketing pie, and I do see this online all the time, where there's this idea that content marketing equals SEO and vice versa.
• 7:24
  I'm curious your thoughts on, like, why do we do that? Is it just because SEO was easy, like y- like you're saying?
• 7:31
  Is it because it's easier to optimize, or there's, like, a really neat workflow, or why do we kind of conflate these two things so strongly? I think it's 'cause SEO was the one bringing in the money, and
• 7:46
  that meant that content got attached to the thing that, where the results were easiest to prove. We've always been building content for social, for email, for- Mm-hmm... right, like, for print. Yeah.
• 7:57
  And that's all always been content. But SEO had this, like, beautiful graph for free in Google Analytics- Mm-hmm... that said, well, the content person is more than paying for themselves.
• 8:09
  We should absolutely keep hiring them. And that was, I think, where we got kind of bound up. We also were in a space there in the, especially in the late 2010s where SEO could be your whole marketing strategy. Mm-hmm.
• 8:19
  It, like, that was just all you had to do. And as that has maybe peaked and come back down to earth- Yeah, I think so... for me it's that everything is content. Like- Mm, mm-hmm...
• 8:29
  in my mind, the follow-up email from your sales outbound motion and your renewal email that your customer service team sends and your banner at an event booth, like, that's all content marketing still. Totally.
• 8:42
  And but those things are much harder to prove attribution for. Yeah.
• 8:46
  I do feel like so much of so many discussions in content come back to attribution and ROI and how can we tie this back to what's making money, which absolutely makes sense because content is an arm of your business, and also
• 9:06
  is, like, one of the hardest things to do, especially with...
• 9:10
  You know, I think there's kind of this inverse graph where, like, the better your content is and the more, you know, it gets noticed and liked by your audience, the harder it is to prove numerically that it's actually doing something.
• 9:25
  I agree, and that's where SEO still has a lot of value to me.
• 9:30
  Like, because of the attribution piece and because of the, like, ubiquitousness of, or ubiquity of Google's, Google's algorithm and Google Search, SEO is still valuable.
• 9:41
  It's that the content you- we need to move the needle for that can be produced mostly with AI now. Yeah. And so it's not that that work doesn't have, like, pipeline implications or revenue implications.
• 9:54
  It's that I still don't know anybody who's made a massive, like, I'm talking, like, six-figure B2B enterprise purchasing decision because the brand was mentioned in ChatGPT. Like- Yeah...
• 10:05
  that was the start of the journey, not the end of the journey, and the end of the journey still required human content. Mm-hmm.
• 10:11
  Yeah, and I really like how you pull out these two lanes in your piece, and I think that you're right. Like, nobody is making, like, one-shot decisions where...
• 10:24
  And I don't think people were even in the heyday of SEO either, where you Google, like, what's the best, you know,
• 10:33
  SaaS tool for whatever, and Google says, like, "Oh, the best one is ClickUp," and then you're like, "Okay, great. Let's do a six-figure enterprise purchase." You know? That was never really how it worked.
• 10:46
  So you're really smartly calling out, like, robots should focus on the robot side of things, and humans should focus on the human side of things.
• 10:54
  And what's interesting to me about this is it feels like everyone would agree. Like, I don't know anybody that would disagree with this on the surface, and yet it kind of feels like nobody's...
• 11:07
  Not nobody, but there's still a lot of distance between what we intellectually agree with and what we are practically doing. So where does that... You know what I mean?
• 11:19
  Like, what's happening in between that, those two poles? I've thought about this a lot since, actually since you published the article. Okay.
• 11:28
  And the analogy I've been, like, playing with in my head is this idea that we were making hot dogs. Okay. And we were making hot dogs one at a time, and they were pretty good hot dogs.
• 11:38
  And someone has come along and said, "I have a machine that'll make 50 hot dogs at a time." And that has thrown everyone into a panic, for good reason.
• 11:47
  If I'm, have spent the last 10 years making hot dogs one at a time and now a machine is here to make hot dogs 50 at a time, my job is at risk.
• 11:54
  But for some reason the reactions have seemed to have both missed the mark for me. Mm. Some people are saying, "I have to k- keep making hot dogs one at a time. I just have to make these $50 hot dogs.
• 12:06
  I gotta put caviar and saffron and solid gold on these hot dogs because that's the only way I'm gonna show my value."And it's like, I'm never buying a $50 hot dog. Like, I'm just never doing it.
• 12:17
  I don't care how much caviar you load on top. Mm-hmm. Other people have said, "We can make hot dogs 50 at a time, so I'm gonna eat 1,000 hot dogs."
• 12:25
  And that also doesn't, doesn't work for me 'cause the only person getting rich if you eat 1,000 hot dogs is your cardiologist. [laughs] And like, [laughs]
• 12:33
  so what I'm advocating here is we now have a machine to make hot dogs 50 at a time, so let's make 50 hot dogs, and then spend all the rest of our time making Michelin Star dessert, Michelin Star vegetables, right?
• 12:46
  Like- Nobody wants microwaved broccoli. Exactly. Yeah. Exactly. So a bit of a roundabout analogy. No, I love it. Yes, this did occur to me in a Costco- [laughs]...
• 12:56
  which maybe is the reason that it's so related to hot dogs. But like, they're both understandable reactions, and the middle path, I think, is gonna be a lot more productive for content marketers. Mm-hmm. Yeah.
• 13:08
  I'm also curious, like, you know, especially since you're in an agency setting and ostensibly seen this reaction across a number of different brands, have you seen, like, a movement toward more of this middle ground, or especially from within companies?
• 13:27
  Or do you still see, like, a big divide on these? And how do you think we can move more toward the middle, especially for folks who are in-house?
• 13:34
  I think being in an agency is actually how I arrived at the middle path 'cause this is a conversation we have a lot with folks. I bet.
• 13:41
  We have people coming in the door saying, "But these four people on LinkedIn said I should eat 1,000 hot dogs." And we're like, one, that's more expensive than you think. You know, the tokens. But then also,
• 13:52
  if you're just publishing that much, you're, you're gonna crater. Mm-hmm.
• 13:55
  And we should invest that resource that you wanna spend with us on building a research report, buil- doing digital PR to make sure the right party mentioned support the content, right?
• 14:02
  At the same time, we have clients come to us who only want to build traditional, very detailed content. Mm-hmm. And the conversation usually starts with, "This is why we should hit publish today."
• 14:14
  'Cause at some point, you just gotta hit publish. Right. Mm. And so I think having seen out in the real world the way that both of these two reactions play out has led me to the middle path.
• 14:23
  It's something that we talk about a lot.
• 14:25
  Yeah, that makes a lot of sense, and I think it is so easy to just get caught in kind of like this one or the other way, where you say like, "Oh, we're gonna do everything with AI, and we're gonna supercharge, and we're gonna do, we're gonna eat 1,000 hot dogs every day."
• 14:41
  Or to be like, "We're gonna do everything manually 'cause we're humans here, so, like, we don't need to touch any machines."
• 14:47
  And I do think when you're looking at these responses happening across a variety of brands, it's easier to kind of take a step back and be like, "Oh, let's find a balance in the middle that is actually productive and efficient and effective," versus when you're just seeing your own perspective in this one little lane.
• 15:09
  Of course it feels like that's the only option.
• 15:12
  But I also wanna pivot and talk a little bit about the human side of things because I think, like, there is an argument, a little bit of like a devil's advocate argument maybe, to say like, well, if the robots and the algorithms are picking up our content and showing it to people and talking about us in ChatGPT and we're showing up in search, then it's getting to humans.
• 15:36
  Why is that not good enough to take it all the way? Like, SEO used to be the only thing we did, so why can't we just do AEO now and that's enough? There will be the exceptions that prove the rule.
• 15:48
  Like, like I- Yeah, that's true... I, I suspect that for some clients and for s- for some companies, some brands, that, that will actually work, that good AEO will represent incoming pipeline in a really meaningful way.
• 16:00
  What often happens, we, to what we already discussed a little bit, was, is that it's the first touch in a longer journey. Mm-hmm.
• 16:07
  And so to ignore the rest of that journey, whether we think of it as a funnel, a playground, a loop, i- is just like not taking a holistic view of content strategy.
• 16:15
  For me, that's why it's like it's not enough to just do SEO or AEO. We also are outsourcing our content strategy onto someone else's platform pretty, pretty wholeheartedly there.
• 16:27
  We're at the whims of the people controlling the algorithm, and that is a necessary evil in content marketing, but we don't have to only do that. Yep.
• 16:35
  Particularly since we don't get nearly as much information about the AI algorithms as we did and have about Google. Yeah. That's a great point.
• 16:43
  Yeah, I feel like, not to totally sidetrack us, but I do feel like the AI visibility space is still so new, and there's not...
• 16:53
  I mean, there's a lot of great tools out there, and I mean, I have folks reaching out to me, like, every other day being like, "We have a great AI visibility tool. Like, please give us a try."
• 17:03
  And I do try many of them, and it's not that people making the tools aren't doing a good job.
• 17:09
  It's that there's just not a lot of data coming out, and there's not a lot of consistency coming from these AI search platforms. But that's a side tangent.
• 17:20
  But I do think your point too, like, we just have less visibility and insight into what's actually happening, so it's dangerous to make that your entire strategy. Yeah.
• 17:33
  The tools, I mean, are improving fast, which is- Definitely... I'm, I'm very, I'm very relieved to see that. I think if the tools had stayed stagnant where they were six months ago, we would be in a bit of a pickle.
• 17:43
  One of the key things for me with all of the AI visibility tools is that the quality of the prompts you choose to track often determines their relevance for your marketing efforts.
• 17:52
  And so that is a place to invest time, human time and effort. Like, have we uploaded the right prompts- Mm-hmm... such that this is saying something meaningful about our business?
• 18:01
  If the tool is suggesting prompts, interrogate those. [laughs] Yeah. I'm also curious to hear your perspective, going back to the content for humans piece.
• 18:11
  So, like, once you get through the SEO, AEO piece, and once someone has heard about your brand or had this first touch and they're kind of interested or they're just gonna hear about you some more, like, what does that content for humans look like?
• 18:28
  What should it look like? Is it about format? Is it about-That it's made by a human? Is it about what channel it lives on? Like, what distinguishes that, or what should distinguish that, in your opinion?
• 18:41
  There's my opinion, and then there's the opinion of the people you are trying to reach, which I think is key. Yeah. That's a great point.
• 18:48
  This is the place to- to leverage and highlight all of your knowledge and research about your audience. Like, pour it in right here. I do think format matters.
• 18:58
  It is very difficult to do great tofu content for humans- Mm-hmm... given the way that content arbitrage has, and, like, AI, has- has made... There's no cost to producing a mediocre piece of top-of-funnel content.
• 19:12
  There's just no cost. So I'd probably stay away from that. I'd probably look middle of funnel. Mm-hmm. I'd look at channels that aren't necessarily search.
• 19:21
  I saw a thing that suggested that giveaways of important Claude techniques are one of the best performing things on LinkedIn right now, or over the last 60 days. Okay.
• 19:30
  There's an example of, like, when I see somebody with a bunch of Claude how-tos in my LinkedIn feed that looks like it's AI generated, I keep going.
• 19:38
  And when it's somebody I trust who clearly put a lot of time and effort into, "This is how I've been using Claude successfully"- Yeah... I pay attention. And so, like, again, that's hyper-relevant to me in my job.
• 19:49
  That's a platform where I spend a lot of time. So that's the right channel and format for that content when it's generated by humans.
• 19:56
  The other way to think about this, like, with an audience thing, is to use, like, a music analogy. You can't play heavy metal in the wine bar. [laughs] So- Yeah...
• 20:04
  like, the best content for humans understands setting and place and, like, yeah, and makes really clear motions and, like, s- sends signals, right, to- to the other humans that, like, "I get this." Yeah.
• 20:20
  And that's very broad, right? And, like, bound up in that is all the stuff around taste and judgment and- Yeah... storytelling and all of that. So it's easy to start using weasel words. I can be more specific there.
• 20:31
  No, I mean, I think you're calling out... I- I'm hearing you call out really important things, and I think where it gets tricky is that these are things that, you know, most of us know, right?
• 20:44
  Like, this isn't a surprise to most of us, and it's really hard to do these things well, and that, I think, is actually where it gets tricky, is not that we don't know what the right things are to do, but that the right things to do are actually really challenging.
• 21:02
  And, like, some of the things I'm noticing you're talking about are, like, trust. I really trust that person. How did you gain trust, right?
• 21:10
  [laughs] Like, that is a long, complicated process that takes time and effort, which is another thing you mentioned. Like, when somebody's saying, "This is what I'm doing. I've put time and effort into this.
• 21:23
  I've tested it. I've tried all these different things." Like, you can't shortcut that process, which is what makes it valuable and what makes it hard to do, you know?
• 21:32
  So I think there's kind of these both/ands on all of these pieces. Yeah. The specifics for me often look like when, with data, I'm much more swayed by data that only you could have.
• 21:45
  So for B2B companies, that often looks like product data. So let's say your product serves accounting firms, right? Mm-hmm. And so, like, now because of that, you can anonymize, right?
• 21:54
  But say 80% of the accounting firms that use our software found this kind of success when they performed operation Y, right? Like, and now I'm saying, like, "Oh, wow. Well, no one else has access to that." Yep.
• 22:07
  And as somebody who owns an accounting firm, this is highly relevant to me and is, like, maybe it doesn't pass the sniff test, and I need to investigate more, but at least, like, I'm engaging with that in a meaningful way.
• 22:16
  Judgment-wise, I think that often looks like the ability to, in a world full of noise, noisier than ever, some of the judgment is about choosing which things we should have a point of view on. Yeah.
• 22:30
  Where is our strong opinion gonna make the most difference with our target buyer? I get that a lot of B2B brands are scared to have an opinion, and that's- Scared...
• 22:38
  you know, senior content marketing manager number three, you can't just storm into the CEO's office and say, "We need to have more hot takes." [laughs] Right. Like, that's right. That's- that's not...
• 22:48
  But what you can do is say, "Here is the trend. Here is the data that supports that this trend is being spoken about with the people who matter most to us. This is the trend we need to have an opinion on.
• 22:58
  Hey, CMO, can you help me?"
• 23:01
  Like, build the internal support for having the opinion on the right, at the right place and time on the right topic, and you'll get to insert yourself into that conversation in a meaningful way.
• 23:10
  That's a judgment call, right? Yeah. All the way up at the top of the chain there, that's a judgment call, like an editorial judgment call. And I think that's the foundation of taste as well. Yeah.
• 23:19
  And I like that you call out, like, not just knowing what to say, but knowing what to have something to say about, because I think it's easy, at least with, you know, many of the brands that I have worked with, the temptation is like, "Well, we need to say something about everything.
• 23:35
  You know, the Oscars happened." Yes. "We need to talk about the Oscars. The Super Bowl happened. We need to talk about the Super Bowl. Apple just did blah, blah, blah. We need to talk about that."
• 23:44
  And meanwhile, their buyers are, like, in the finance world and not- Yeah... watching the Oscars and don't care about the Super... You know?
• 23:53
  Like, so I do think, like, this is a big piece of judgment that it's actually, I think it's a very similar problem to the 1,000 hot dogs problem.
• 24:03
  It's this idea that instead of making a decision, we're just gonna do everything so that we don't have to make a decision, and it's hard to do everything well. Absolutely.
• 24:16
  The example that immediately came to mind, we are merely four weeks away from a lot of rainbow logos. Yeah. [laughs] Yes. [laughs] For companies that
• 24:24
  could contribute in much more meaningful ways than changing their logo. Right. So
• 24:30
  that judgment you were talking about, how, like, let's just do everything so we don't have to make a decision, I think the way to do everything as a content marketer there is to become more involved with other things that touch revenue.
• 24:39
  As a content person, how can you be more involved with product marketing, with life cycle marketing in an important way that, like-It leverages your content skills, but also creates something with more attribution than this kind of increasingly difficult to attribute content work.
• 24:54
  Yeah.
• 24:54
  And so that's another way to apply taste and judgment to content that's mostly still being produced by humans, and bring yourself closer to the business decisions, because ultimately, that's the stuff you've gotta have a- an opinion about.
• 25:05
  Right. If you use your judgment to say, "Here's the thing that's gonna make the difference for the business."
• 25:09
  I'm so curious to hear, I know that we're kind of starting to wrap up, but I'm so curious to hear, like, how would you think through the kind of balance between robot content or, like, algorithm driven content, AI created content, and more, like, brand marketing, human made content?
• 25:31
  Like, it's so individual based on a company's goals and audience and so on, but what is kind of your framework for thinking through how someone should balance those, or when they should lean more one way or the other?
• 25:44
  That is the magic question, right? That's like, that's hard. It is. It's so hard. I- I do absolutely believe that everyone should be doing both.
• 25:51
  To- to see a brand that truly is all in on only one or the other would be very surprising to me. Mm-hmm.
• 25:57
  And for what it's worth, I think there's a way to have a brand that for whom SEO was not correct, but maybe we need to be operating on the fringes of AEO, for example, with digital PR. Mm-hmm.
• 26:08
  I also think that another place where the AEO content is, like, not necessarily optional anymore comes with some sort of comparison or alternatives content.
• 26:17
  This does not have to be a listicle, but to allow the AI to only source your competitor's views on that critical piece of brand narrative is just leaving money on the table. Yeah.
• 26:29
  So there are places where the robot content is important, even if that's not a primary channel for you. And that's one place where maybe it's like table stakes, like you need to build that stuff.
• 26:40
  The flip side of that coin is even if you're building almost all robot content, what's getting you the last mile? Is it sales enablement? Is it great life cycle emails for your PLG strategy? Yep.
• 26:49
  What other piece of content away from search is going to most close business? And that piece of it, I think, is worth your time and attention. Don't... Carve out some piece of time.
• 27:00
  Don't spend all your time on robot content to the exclusion of input- of- of using human effort and resource on that last mile stuff. Yeah, that's so good.
• 27:08
  All right, I wanna go into some rapid fire questions as we wrap up. So just kick off with a huge one. What is the main job of content for humans? To prove that your company is worth paying attention to. I like it.
• 27:23
  Is AEO really different from SEO, or is it just an expansion of the same thing? This is tough as a rapid fire. I- I do think it's a Venn diagram. Okay. There's a lot of overlap.
• 27:33
  I think the amount of overlap in that Venn diagram depends on your level of expertise with SEO and AEO. So if you're fairly new to these specialties, the Venn diagram starts to look like a circle. Yep.
• 27:46
  And if you have decades of experience as a technical SEO, the tactics start to break apart a little bit. Mm-hmm. There's more to do that looks like just AEO. Yep, that makes sense.
• 27:56
  What's the last thing that inspired you in making B2B content? Honestly, the Art of Content blog. Oh, thank you. [laughs] That's lovely.
• 28:04
  So many of the art- well, all of the articles are just like, I feel like I'm with my people. And then- That's awesome...
• 28:10
  there's, y- you have done an amazing job of curating and sourcing folks who have, like, actual takeaways, which is great. Like- I've been proud of that too.
• 28:18
  [laughs] Raced to share Ronnie's framework with- Oh, Ronnie's was so good. So good. What's your favorite kind of content to make? I think the honest answer is, like, New Orleans funk albums. Okay, I love that.
• 28:31
  I love that. I've love a Galactic cover, but the more B2B focused version is actually those life cycle emails. Okay. I got to do a lot of that early in my career, and the juice was always worth the squeeze.
• 28:43
  That's awesome. Like agonizing over every subject line, A/B testing everything. It's such, it's so satisfying, so satisfying to do a good A/B test. Yeah.
• 28:52
  And with those emails in particular, like, it- this would happen to be like a, like how many free trial users can we convert to paid kind of a thing. Okay. Mm-hmm.
• 29:00
  And in that world, it was like, this is the amount of money we made. Like, we spent all this time and effort, and then, like- This is the payoff... the money is here. Yeah. Yeah. And it was, like, so cool to do that.
• 29:10
  Also, in a world of ever increasing noise, like the human touch at that moment- Yeah... like the CX of that, I think is a big moment. Yeah, that's true. What is your personal favorite thing to use AI for?
• 29:25
  I could have several answers here. The easy answer is internal linking. This was something that I've spent hundreds of hours on in the past. Yep. I felt like I was carrying around whole site maps in my head.
• 29:37
  [laughs] I genuinely have. And now AI just does that. And like- That's awesome...
• 29:44
  at Ten Speed, the AIOps workflow we use for this, we actually have it analyze the site map for up funnel and down funnel links, as opposed to just semantically matching the URL slugs. So
• 29:56
  we're actually trying to have, in a given article, like something that links to a top of funnel article on the same topic, and then something that links to a case study- Okay... on the same topic so that there's like...
• 30:05
  'Cause one of the things that internal linking tools have struggled with in the past is, like, actually, you know, assessing the buyer journey and, like, including relevant information about, like, the customer. Yep.
• 30:16
  And we've managed to get it to do that in AIOps, so. That always feels good. Um, and last question, what is one skill content marketers should be building right now?
• 30:24
  This has been a theme, I suppose, over the last 30 minutes, but I think that business impact piece, the ability to contribute to the business as opposed to build content.
• 30:34
  Not to say we didn't care about the business before. Mm-hmm. But really being able to tie the work back to the business impact, it feels even more important.
• 30:42
  And it's a tough skill for content marketers because so many of us come from either creative backgrounds or journalist backgrounds- Yep... where the content is the product. Right.
• 30:52
  So even in, at its most commercial, both art and journalism fundamentally are you're building to build. You're creating to create, and now it needs to be we are creating to accomplish this business thing.
• 31:04
  And speaking articulately to that, speaking consistently to that- Mm-hmm... b- has become a huge part of managing up as I lose my earbud. And so I think that skill will be only more important as we move forward. So good.
• 31:17
  Well, thank you so much again for coming on today.
• 31:20
  This was such a great episode, and I know that it was kind of silly, but I'm definitely gonna be thinking about that hot dog analogy, uh, as it relates to all these things. Yeah, thank you so much.
• 31:33
  It was so awesome chatting with you. Thanks so much for having me. This was a blast. [upbeat music]