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Why Most Content Marketing Reporting Is a Waste of Time · Content, Briefly

• 0:00
  [upbeat music] Hey everyone, Alex here. Let me tell you about Userp. That's U-S-E-R-P dot I-O.
• 0:14
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• 0:22
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• 0:32
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• 0:43
  They helped monday.com go from six hundred thousand to one point two million organic visits leading into their IPO.
• 0:49
  They built hundreds of high-authority links and content assets for Earlybird, a fintech app driving over twenty thousand acquired users before Earlybird was acquired by Acorns.
• 0:58
  And they've helped Onboard rank for thirteen thousand more keywords in their space, tripling their organic pipeline value in a single year.
• 1:04
  What makes Userp different is they don't just publish content and hope for the best. They engineer content assets that rank and convert, backed by links on sites like HubSpot, Gartner, and G2.
• 1:14
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• 1:26
  That's userp.io. Hey everyone, Alex here. Really excited for this conversation today. Talked to Brad Smith, the co-founder of Userp. It's userp.io, our partner for this month.
• 1:38
  Brad recently wrote a piece on LinkedIn called Why Most Reporting Is a Waste of Time that I found really interesting, and our discussion today dives into that.
• 1:47
  Now, I would actually recommend, if you can, read that article, which I'll link in the show notes, before listening to this conversation. If not, I think it's a great read for after.
• 1:58
  It's just a really good companion, and there's some examples and metrics and numbers that kind of ground this conversation that are hard to share in an audio format. So would recommend that piece as well.
• 2:09
  Again, that will be in the show notes. I hope you enjoy this conversation. All right. Brad Smith, welcome to Content Briefly. Awesome to have you here.
• 2:18
  We wanna talk a little bit about an article that you wrote talking about why most reporting for marketers is a waste of time. Let's just jump right into it.
• 2:28
  Would love to hear kind of your thesis, hypothesis here, and kind of how that's shaped how you work with your clients at Userp. Definitely.
• 2:36
  So I think th- my issue with reporting is how it's often done, like most things in life. It's-- The idea isn't bad, obviously. It's often how it's done and/or, like, the decisions being made off of it or around it.
• 2:46
  And so I've been doing SEO now for over 15 years probably, and I've had the same conversation, like, five million times where it's like, "Hey, keyword ranked today five. Yesterday it was three. Why did that happen?"
• 2:59
  And it's these conversations around, like, aggregate metrics based on decisions that were made six or 12 months ago that fluctuate, but we're supposed to, like, sit here and have a straight answer for them when we don't.
• 3:11
  The area and the nature of reporting is getting more challenging and more challenging, especially on the organic side, as we have less actual, useful, reliable information data to work with, which kinda compounds the same problems that are-- have already existed forever and ever.
• 3:24
  And then I think that a lot of times brands then try to do things like over-index on competitive benchmarking, which can be helpful, and is helpful in certain cases, but often also not helpful because it brings up a lot of other, like, flawed assumptions that you don't have about a particular brand that you are trying to compete and/or compare yourself against.
• 3:44
  It's kinda like competing your, you know, vacation routine against, like, your friends on Instagram. It's like, it's-- you're just putting yourself in a no-win position to start with.
• 3:51
  And so I just think there's a lot of challenges with reporting that have existed forever and that will unfortunately just kinda continue to exist [chuckles] in the near future.
• 4:00
  So yeah, when it comes to competitors, like you'd say, like, focusing almost entirely on yourself and, like, benchmarking against your kind of previous metrics, that's the way to go versus, like, trying to, like, assess yourself in this landscape of, like, competitors that are, like, trying different strategies, right?
• 4:16
  Is that fair? Yeah, I think so. Because as an example, it is helpful to have a competitive benchmark to understand, like, where your gaps are and where your weaknesses are. Like, that is helpful.
• 4:25
  It's helpful to benchmark against competitors 'cause you might wanna look at, like, oh, how's their content quality?
• 4:30
  Like, subjective things that are very helpful anecdotally to help us figure out, like, oh, what should we be doing better? What can we do better? The challenges are, like, you don't know what their budget is.
• 4:40
  You don't know what their team size is. You don't know what their internal profit margins are. You don't know what their cost per lead is.
• 4:46
  You don't know, like, all this information that actually dictates, hopefully, the decisions they're making respectively too. You don't know if they started five years ahead of you or a year after you.
• 4:56
  There's just, like, a lot of challenges and flaws with, like, reading too much into it, and I think that's-- especially when we get to stuff like L and visibility, it's like 100% compet- not 100%, [chuckles] but it's like 100% competitor benchmarking based on fake synthetic data in the first place.
• 5:11
  And so it just-- it becomes like a-- You start circling the drain very quickly when it comes to deciphering or differentiating between the signal versus noise. Yeah.
• 5:20
  I think that extends to so much of looking at competitors in marketing. I think about, like, some of my examples of, like, oh, we're going into a brainstorming session.
• 5:28
  Like, let's look at what all the competitors are doing, and all of a sudden you're assuming they're making, like, really, really smart decisions, and you're like, "Well, [chuckles] let's make a decision like them," instead of being like, "Well, maybe we can, you know, think about it in a smarter way for ourselves and focus less on them."
• 5:42
  So I think that translates a lot. Tell me a little bit about your kind of cohort-based analysis approach to metrics and how you work with clients on that. Yeah, for sure.
• 5:52
  So especially when we talk about traditional search, just because the feedback loop times are so longSitting here today looking at, like, keyword rankings from a year, 18 months ago, it's helpful. Again, it's helpful.
• 6:03
  It doesn't help me decide what to publish more or less of next month, if that makes sense. Or should I refresh more content, or should I publish more new content, or should I do more LinkedIn content, or should I...
• 6:12
  Like, it, it doesn't really help me create actionable sort of insight from.
• 6:16
  And so I have found over time that the best way to do it is to start breaking it down into cohorts, and there's a few different ways to do this, and there's a few almost, like, layers to it.
• 6:26
  But the first and most important step is trying to understand or gauge, like, what do you think your potential time to results might look like in the first place?
• 6:34
  We do this in a few different ways, but again, if you just think about it, like simplistically, if I publish something today, how long do I want to see a lagging indicator, like a top three keyword ranking, or a specific amount of search traffic, or whatever traffic again?
• 6:48
  D- it doesn't matter on the channel. Y- you do the same thing on the paid side too.
• 6:52
  So that's the other kinda like funny thing is I feel like a lot of times on the content organic side we don't apply the same ideas or methodologies as much.
• 6:59
  So if we were doing a paid campaign or someone was doing a paid campaign today, same idea. It's like, how much do you have to spend? How many sort of creatives do you have to run?
• 7:07
  When do we think these leads will start showing up? How do we tell whether or not we're doing a good job, like when we're in the moment?
• 7:12
  That's what we're trying to, like, assess with this sort of reporting cohort idea on the search side.
• 7:16
  The problem is on the search side, I can't spend money today and then see traffic tomorrow, and then see leads a week from now, and then see closed deals a month later.
• 7:24
  Like, it takes six months plus, not three weeks, and that's the big challenge on the organic side. Yeah. Absolutely.
• 7:31
  I think one thing, and we talked a little bit about this on the prep here, but one thing we see in the Superpath community, like maybe the top metrics problem that content marketers have faced in the past year and a half is declining web traffic.
• 7:45
  How do you factor that into kind of how you think about metrics with this cohort-based analysis?
• 7:50
  And then I guess my, like, follow-up question there is I think specifically one of the challenges is kind of communicating this to the leadership team, and I think we maybe for a long time, for better or worse, probably for worse, looked at web traffic as like, "Hey, this is the thing that I can drive up," and I can say, "Hey, we're doing a good job because, see, this number went up," and now that number is going down.
• 8:14
  How do you think about...
• 8:15
  So I think, one, looking for ourselves as content marketers, like better indicators of success for ourselves, and then, two, how we communicate that to external stakeholders, like for example, if you're a startup, a CEO that's like, "Wait a second, why are these numbers going down?"
• 8:32
  And, you know, maybe it made sense where it feels really good when the numbers are going up because you're like, "Hey, this is shots on goal for getting leads." Like, that all is great.
• 8:40
  Now you're giving me this like complicated cohort structure. Like, walk me through how you think about it internally, and then how you think about it with these other external stakeholders. Yeah, for sure.
• 8:49
  So I think first and foremost it's adjusting your baseline target. So as an ex- like first and foremost, just take all your CTRs down aggressively.
• 8:58
  As we talked about too, I think, like right before starting this call, we could all sit here and say, like pretty much every brand can sit here and say that they've lost 30% of their traffic plus in the last year.
• 9:07
  It still is or should be the biggest traffic driver for every single company, too. So it's the answer's not throw the baby out with the bathwater either, in my mind. That's also too simplistic and it's too rash.
• 9:17
  Search has the unique ability to provide like compounding results in the future, so the value of something I publish today actually increases over the next 6 or 12 months, which is different and not the same for every other channel everywhere.
• 9:30
  The other challenge is, though, with it is to focus on how are we actually trying to define success, and what I mean by that is other than traffic, [laughs] to your point. Mm-hmm.
• 9:41
  So traffic is a big part of it to a degree, but even in like the bigger B2B scenarios you go into, the more like niche where there's a lot of money, frankly, traffic's always been low. Traffic's always been tiny.
• 9:53
  And so you- Mm-hmm... you, we have always had to look at things like lead value. We've always had to look at things like attribution.
• 10:01
  So did this content play a part in multiple sessions over a long period of time to help people convert or not?
• 10:08
  Like we do, you know, people talk about like sales enablement content today, and that's true, but it's con- content's kinda always been sales enablement, if you see what I mean, or should be. Yeah.
• 10:17
  And so there's other ways or there should be other ways to judge content quality, which is another like funny or flawed concept and idea because people judge the quality of the content whether or not it drove traffic.
• 10:28
  And those two things have- Mm-hmm... nothing to do with one another. They do, they should.
• 10:32
  They often do, but they don't, in that content quality is subjective and it should be your own assessment and/or y- from your company or your customer's perspective.
• 10:41
  Like what do they think is quality content as opposed to like, did this get a lot of clicks last month or more clicks than the last month?
• 10:48
  And so I think this has to be like a disassociation between content performance and content quality and just traffic.
• 10:55
  So maybe if I give you like a s- more explicit answer, maybe traffic now is like 20% out of a balanced scorecard of how well- Mm-hmm... we're judging content performance overall.
• 11:06
  In an ideal world, you should be doing content that can work for organic search, for LLMs, for at least one other channel, like paid or like email, 'cause you're repurposing it.
• 11:17
  Like there should be other benefits or value you're getting out of a piece of content other than...
• 11:21
  I strongly disagree with this idea or notion of like SEO content versus white paper sales enablement content versus LLM listicles. Mm. I very much disagree with that approach too, if that makes sense. Yeah.
• 11:33
  Okay, so you're thinking content serves all of these purposes.
• 11:37
  I guess the like, the pushback that I'm thinking about that I've heard is that, you know, an LLM's gonna read a piece of content very differently than like your average reader.
• 11:47
  How would you think about like that critique of that? Yeah. My first... Yeah, so it's, it's a good question.
• 11:52
  My first response to that is that I'm not, I don't mean this in a flippant way, but it's like does my customer care about how an LLM analyzes that or not?
• 12:01
  Beca- and the reason I say that is because we all in tech-Pay way too much attention to what other tech people do and say. Yeah. [laughs] That's for sure.
• 12:09
  There's a big world out there of people who kinda sorta dabble with LLMs but don't really trust them, and don't really use them seriously, and don't really think that, like, more intrusive tech in their life is a good thing.
• 12:19
  There's a lot of those people in the world too. So if I'm like... If... In B2B especially, if an executive at a company reads this thing,
• 12:29
  that is more important to me and/or his opinion or her opinion is more important to me than an LLM's. Similar as like Google too. Mm-hmm.
• 12:35
  So again, I think we need to actually understand, like, what we're trying to do and why, and that helps us answer reporting, if you see what I'm... see what I'm trying to like- Yeah... slowly tie it back.
• 12:43
  Like, the decisions we're making on the reporting side are to hopefully validate the decisions we're making from a strategy and a tactical perspective, not to just, like, seek graphs and charts go up to the right all the time for everything.
• 12:56
  And I think that LLMs have a lot of good overlap with search, but the other thing I see with brands is that most brands don't show up in LLMs, because most people using LLMs aren't searching for brands specifically.
• 13:11
  And that's- Mm... so again, it's kind of like it'll just tell you. Data, stats, analytics will tell you what you want to hear or what you wanna find.
• 13:18
  And so, like the vast majority of usage on LLMs is about stuff other than brand specific information, which again, [laughs] so it's- Yeah...
• 13:27
  it, it's almost like more exclusively helpful f- to understand LLM, like, behavior and/or content impact.
• 13:34
  If you're like super bottom funnel competitor comparisons, like product categories, like that style of stuff is almost better to understand and analyze.
• 13:43
  There is no, like, top or middle of the funnel for LLM brands, if that makes sense. Yeah. And it's obviously like very gray area that we're all, you know, trying to figure out right now.
• 13:55
  I'd say based on our conversation so far and what you've written here, you're a little bit more skeptical of just, like, focusing on LLM optimization.
• 14:06
  I'm curious, like, like, in your current, like today's state, is there anything that you would recommend clients do for LLM optimization, or are you kind of more leaning towards the vote of like, stick to these fundamentals, they will have residual impacts on LLM?
• 14:21
  I think... Yeah, I think it's a good question. I think my answer to that is the things we should be doing for LLMs today are the things we should've been doing all along. So first party data. Okay, cool.
• 14:30
  Why haven't we been doing this for years, though? Like, a lot of good brands have. A lot of big brands have.
• 14:35
  Pulling in like customer insights or testimonials, pulling in subject matter experts within a company, like these things should have been already happening.
• 14:42
  We could sit here and say like, "Yes, they're good for LLMs too," but to me that's not like an LLM tactic, if you see what I'm saying, or it's LLM- Yeah... specific tactic. Listicles, okay, yeah, fine, sure.
• 14:51
  Uh, there's like, there's some other things that you often see as LLM tactics in air quotes that are- Yeah... like SEO 101 in my view. What are citations? Citations are link building.
• 15:02
  Like, sorry to break it to everybody. Throw social, like Reddit into that too. S- same thing. Like it works of...
• 15:07
  in this, the mechanics of doing it well are often a lot more similar to like good link building as opposed to bad link building. It's the same idea with like, are you doing good content or are you doing bad content?
• 15:18
  Are you... Bad content's like generic SEO, pay a freelancer five bucks, or spit it out like pushing a couple buttons with like AI. You could do AI content well. It takes a lot of work.
• 15:30
  It takes like so much work and thought to go into it to make it come across i- any way that you would be happy with. That to me is a better judge, especially in B2B, 'cause in B2B I don't...
• 15:40
  I do, but I don't care about share voice. Like that doesn't mean anything to me. Like, it, mm, like what does- Mm-hmm... pipeline look like? What are our average order values going up?
• 15:49
  Like those metrics are often a lot more important to understand, and often then it's a lot more subjective,
• 15:54
  intangible aspects about the quality that, of the content, as opposed to today some LLM visibility tool spit out some fake synthetic data and give you a number on a screen that doesn't make any sense. All right.
• 16:08
  I wanna throw something at you, and we didn't prep this in advance, Brad, but would love to just hear about... Let's get... I want you to get in the Superpath shoes here, and so pretend we're one of your clients.
• 16:19
  You know, I'm thinking a lot about our content strategy.
• 16:22
  This is a very meta thing, where I'm thinking a lot about our content strategy right now, and I'm not entirely sure what we're trying to do with that and with the blog at the moment.
• 16:31
  Kind of walk through the basics of Superpath. We are a content marketing community. This is, you know, a little bit more B2C than B2B here. We occasionally target companies and their content teams to join Superpath Pro.
• 16:43
  We've kinda got the top of funnel with the newsletter, and then we have Superpath Pro, which is a $50 a month, $500 a year membership. We're trying to find content marketers. How would you think...
• 16:54
  Like, pretend we're starting from absolute scratch here. We've obviously got this rich, I think 500 blog posts in the past, and we, we do have some nice SEO, but let's pretend like we're starting from scratch.
• 17:07
  How would you suggest... Superpath's one of your clients here. How would you suggest starting to set up our goals and metrics, and how should we measure success in the next year? Yeah, for sure.
• 17:17
  So the first thing I would start with is insight around the ICPs specifically. So what... And we've been...
• 17:23
  I feel like we've been talking about probably a lot of the answer already, but like what are the top trends and issues that content marketers are dealing with today?
• 17:32
  [laughs] As if it's, as if it's not immediately obvious to everyone. [laughs] Yeah.
• 17:36
  I think we all know, but just to reiterate here, I think navigating what's changing with AI, kind of a, a changing template for how content marketing has been done the past 10 to 15 years, and a lot of what we've just talked about here with, you know, how do we communicate what we're doing better?
• 17:52
  Is the role changing? How do I adapt? I think especially in our situation where-... professional development group.
• 17:58
  So I think it's, for us, I mean, the big values we provide are, you know, syncing up with peers, navigating a future that's changing quickly together, and then kind of helping each other move forward.
• 18:10
  And so it's a lot of the, like, what skills do I need for this role for the next 10 years? Do I need to adapt what I'm doing?
• 18:17
  And I'd also say, importantly, kind of our personas, we have agency folks, we have in-house folks, and we have freelancers, and they all kind of have a little bit of a different niche here in where they find value in Superpath.
• 18:28
  Yeah. Cool. Awesome. If I had to take a few assumptions too, I think the other challenges that you probably have...
• 18:33
  I have not looked at your site at all before this, but if I had to make, like, a few broad assumptions- I did not prep, Matt, for this in this way. [laughs] It's okay. I came up with this as we were talking before.
• 18:41
  That's okay. [laughs] But I think it's a good example in that, like, Superpath is big.
• 18:46
  Caveat is the types of most obvious keywords or topics you might want to talk about or write about relative to those ICP challenges are bumping up against indirect competitor sites that are ginormous. Right.
• 19:02
  And for the ones you might also be thinking about where there aren't huge, huge, huge companies you're bumping up against, the other probably big challenge then is going to be around very, very small traffic in the first place, let alone whether or not that traffic decreased in the last year.
• 19:18
  It's the amount of, like, potential volume or interest in those topics is, like, microscopic compared to a big consumer space or brand or something. Mm-hmm. So then your challenges are, like, okay, do I...
• 19:30
  To your point earlier, what do we do with the blog? Do we do anything with the blog? Like, full stop. Do we develop more? Do we go back to the world of gated content? 'Cause at least we could see- Mm-hmm...
• 19:41
  if people converted, and we could start to, like, piece together what I did to drive people into that yes or no. You could look at retargeting on- Mm-hmm...
• 19:52
  if you did not gate the content, you could retarget those people, and you get- Yeah...
• 19:55
  at least get some understanding of, like, what is bringing people to the site and why, or what is bringing people to, like, my brand and why in a way that's...
• 20:05
  You can make ideally more directionally accurate decisions around. For...
• 20:11
  If you have 500 blog posts, I would also be just taking a look at, like, what of this is worth doubling down on versus what of this is worth purposely ignoring? Because we know- Mm-hmm...
• 20:20
  that, like, the cost benefit's not gonna increase. So you see this a lot with traffic changes over the last year. There's often traffic changes because CCR got impacted. There's often- Mm-hmm...
• 20:31
  also traffic changes because the content was actually not that great in the first place, and it hasn't been updated in three years, and used to work really well or used to perform really well, it just kind of fell off because we got busy with other stuff.
• 20:45
  So sometimes you do wanna go in and identify what that is and make updates to it if you think that it... that content is going to be strategic over the long term or in this, like, new future world, if that makes sense.
• 20:56
  So it's kind of just like starting with, okay, what are we actually trying to do? How are we actually trying to help people?
• 21:02
  And then what do we have or don't have currently set up in order to, like, start to close that gap? And we can get into, like, the weeds a little bit more, but that's, like, almost a starting point, if that makes sense.
• 21:10
  Yeah.
• 21:11
  I'm kind of curious as a spinoff there, the types of content you're seeing across clients that are worth doubling d- I mean, obviously it is pretty, you know, dependent on what your goals are, and I imagine the context changes a lot.
• 21:23
  But I know something in the article that you mentioned is you were citing this one particular client example, and you said a lot of the traffic decline was due to glossaries.
• 21:34
  I'm curious just if there's any other buckets that you're seeing, like, oh, like, this was a play that, like, was getting you a lot of web traffic. The way things work these days, it's really not worth it.
• 21:45
  That's probably not driving results.
• 21:46
  Just from, like, a high level, knowing there's a lot of nuance in every client that you work with and their goals, what buckets of content are you seeing clients more likely to double down on and see success, or say, like, "Hey, step away from this.
• 22:00
  This was kind of like a, a past growth hack play," or, like, something that just propped up your web traffic metric that never really had an impact? Yeah, for sure.
• 22:09
  The what is query type, the glossary, the definition content- Yeah... was, like, probably number one for B2B software especially, 'cause it was, like, the most obvious.
• 22:20
  And a symptom of that or a, like, a related issue with that is broad surface level keyword and topic targeting. So what I mean by that- Mm-hmm...
• 22:30
  is you would cover the what is, I don't know, international SEO sort of keyword. Yeah. But you wouldn't talk about anything else related to international SEO.
• 22:39
  And so I always talk about going, like, deep and narrow as opposed to, like, broad and shallow. And what I mean by that is- Yeah...
• 22:45
  if we're talking about a spec- a particular type of topic, like, how would people find Superpath? Do they literally type in, like, content marketing communities or anything like that? Yeah.
• 22:55
  Is it- I mean, we get a lot of that. Like, when I get, you know, self-reported things from leads is, "Hey, I was, like, looking up best content marketing communities."
• 23:03
  I mean, we're also in this spot where it's like a lot of people are like, "Hey, I've got this, like, learning and development stipend that I wanna use. Like, I'd love to join a community."
• 23:12
  Or, you know, freelancers being like, "I need to go meet other content marketing freelancers." So we get a lot of people that come in that way. Okay, cool. Yeah, it could be leaning in to that really aggressively.
• 23:23
  The challenge with content marketing communities- Yeah... I don't need to look, pull up Ahrefs to know content marketing communities as a keyword or topic area is probably, like- Yeah...
• 23:30
  fairly shallow to begin with in that there's just, like- Yeah... not a whole lot to work with. But then I would just, again, I would start...
• 23:34
  So when that happens, I start, I go back and I start, like, broad and top down, meaning like- Yeah... okay, well what are the types of, what are the types of content marketers? So could we look at it- Mm...
• 23:43
  by industry or vertical? Could we look at it by role type? Can we look at it by... Like, how do we actually get, like, a-Take a few steps back and understand better who and what we're trying to target. Yeah.
• 23:55
  Because there might be some topic area that's related to learning development, as you just mentioned a second ago, that I hadn't maybe thought about or considered, like, five minutes ago before you said that, but that people are trying to understand, like...
• 24:07
  And if I had to guess, a good potential segue into this, although this is also, like, a competitive space now is everyone's being forced to use AI. Everyone likes using AI. Nobody knows exactly how to use it best.
• 24:19
  So if you're tying it back to that l- like, learning angle, that could be one of the components of it.
• 24:23
  The other just subtext around that is two years ago, AI topics exploded in a good and bad way if you were, like, timed it right. They're more competitive today. Yeah.
• 24:32
  It's almost, like, more of a mature market today from a search perspective than it was in, in a very short amount of time. Yeah.
• 24:38
  That reminds me of, so my previous company, actually two companies ago, we were, like, early stage startup doing remote onboarding right before the pandemic, and it's like we got in- Yeah. [laughs]...
• 24:48
  at exactly the right time, and then one year later it was like, there are so many... Like, it is so oversaturated. Yeah, I feel like it's the same thing.
• 24:57
  And so it's like this, like, the remote thing and then the AI thing. Yeah, yeah. It's been a whirlwind the last few years. I feel like it's been a decade in the last, like, four years.
• 25:05
  But as an example, you could look at, like, okay, well what- Yeah... what is it about? What are the... I mean, you're, again, we already live in this world, so we could probably start spitballing ideas immediately.
• 25:13
  But it's like, okay cool, what are the issues related to AI content? 'Cause there's a million of them. Or what are the challenges with AI content? 'Cause it's like can be useful, can be terrible. Yeah.
• 25:22
  It can be efficient, it can also blow up in your face. Like, there's a lot of issues around just, like, these... So you start attaching- Yeah...
• 25:29
  market ICP problem and issue with, like, area that we actually sort of sell stuff around, and we can kind of- Yeah... start to bridge the gap a little bit more.
• 25:39
  So the top, middle, bottom of the funnel lens is helpful to a point, but at that lens is different for every company because of we all do different things and sell different things too. Yeah.
• 25:48
  So let's dive in on that one then. Like, I think that's a good example. So like, you know, one of the challenges that people have is like, hey, I've... My company is... So this is for in-house specifically.
• 25:57
  My company or leadership wants everybody using AI, and thinks that, you know, I can do 10X the work all of a sudden, and it can be the same quality.
• 26:07
  Like, how do I navigate communicating around AI when, like, everybody's in a different place on it? How do I keep up my quality of work while, like, meeting the expectations of leadership?
• 26:17
  Like, there's a lot of those sorts of questions. I think that's, like, kind of the deeper dive where I think there's a really good pathway of somebody that's like, "Hey, I'm a content marketer.
• 26:26
  I just heard this thing from my boss. I'm gonna go search, you know, around, like, what are people doing. Like, what are some strategies for dealing with this? Like, how are other people thinking about this?"
• 26:37
  And then they kind of come across our content and be like, oh shoot, there's a bunch of other content marketers here navigating these same challenges.
• 26:46
  I mean, another one here is like, oh, like, all of our leaders now just, like, automatically, like, use AI to write stuff and then throw it at me for an edit. And it's like, oh my gosh.
• 26:55
  [laughs] This is, like, horrible and I could tell you put no thought into this. Right?
• 26:58
  So there's, like, all these, like, very interesting, I think, like, the politics of AI within a company that, like, we can bring somebody into this space being like, yeah, we have conversations about this all the time.
• 27:07
  Like, we have AI show and tell, which is, like, part of our pro member community where we're, like, talking about how we're using it, what's working, what's not, right?
• 27:15
  And let's say that's a, a topic area I wanna build around. We wanna be kind of a trusted brand in that space.
• 27:20
  What's your kind of process for there in terms of setting up how we should think about getting known there, building credibility there, and then measuring success in bringing in leads? Yeah, for sure.
• 27:30
  So I think you brought up a good point in that there's that some of those things touched on, I think it also relates back to the first sort of problem or issue we got into this conversation with was there's a difference between a topic and an angle.
• 27:41
  Yeah. So content people will understand that. Nobody else does.
• 27:43
  So it's like [laughs] so whether or not we think this topic or keyword is good to target is different from how we're gonna cover it, and how we're gonna talk about it, and bring differentiation to it, if that makes sense.
• 27:55
  So that is important to state upfront, because especially in, like, a world of declining search traffic, especially in a world of AI search, especially in a world where we are or should be diversifying content types across multiple different places, what is a good, in air quotes, keyword target, again, can be different than how we're actually going to be, like, approaching it or covering it, and talking about it, and bringing in all this, like, unique insight that you guys have as a community, which is, like, real people, real opinions, people debating things, which you can't do online anymore.
• 28:24
  I dunno if you've noticed. [laughs] You're not allowed, you're not allowed to, like, debate things in public or anywhere seemingly.
• 28:31
  But in a community, in a close-knit community of other experts and peers, you can have those sort of, like, sensitive conversations or discussions that you can amplify and then still bring that back to whatever best...
• 28:45
  I'm trying to think of a [laughs] best AI content creation tools. That's a terrible one. That's a terrible one, but you know what I'm trying to say.
• 28:52
  From a search perspective, that might be a really difficult keyword to rank for. Mm-hmm. And that is a separate conversation from, like, we can actually cover it and do a good job on it.
• 29:00
  So that's where, again, you j- it just takes a more holistic understanding or look at the world. The other thing I probably would take a look at, because I know AI... Marketing topics overall are pretty small.
• 29:11
  AI related marketing topics are also very small and competitive. The other thing then that I would take a look at is, like, how does this affect people's, I don't know, career paths? Or how would I look at- Mm...
• 29:22
  other topic areas that aren't traditionally... Without doing stuff that where the intent is bad, meaning you're gonna get, like, HR people searching for it. But how would I look at...
• 29:30
  I mean, potentially though, like, have you ever talked to an HR manager or sold into a business where you sold, like, 10 memberships or anything like that?
• 29:38
  So that could be an example where, like, traditionally from our lens, we wouldn't do that. We'd be like, "No, we want more content marketing people specifically." Right. Exactly.
• 29:46
  But from a business perspective you might be like, "Hey, actually that's not a terrible idea.
• 29:50
  Let's at least explore it or let's at least analyze whether or not-"The, and again, I apologize because I don't know enough about it, but like the learning and development space around marketing or tech companies specifically or certain types of companies- Mm-hmm...
• 30:04
  whether that's, like, easier and/or better to publish more content in, whether that's search driven content or white paper. Again, it shouldn't be either/or.
• 30:13
  It should be like good, unique, interesting asset that we can promote, paid organically, that we can repurpose and that we can create derivatives off of, that we can also have a landing page that does tie back into search.
• 30:25
  Like the, these, all these factors should be intertwined I hope, I believe, but they often just aren't and/or they're often, like, one team or person owns, like, sort of one of those and the other one owns the other one, and then nobody talks to, like, sales or customer support, so they don't know whether or not these, like, customers are good in the first place.
• 30:42
  It's kind of like all frag...
• 30:43
  It's too fragmented in a world today where it's, we need fluidity and, like, osmosis right now because it's so difficult from any one lens or viewpoint to know whether or not you're doing a good job, in air quotes. Yeah.
• 30:56
  Yeah. Well, I appreciate you letting me walk through this, uh, Superfast example.
• 31:01
  I wanna end here with a question we like to ask everybody, which is, if you are a content marketer right now, what skills would you be developing over the next year or two to help position you better for the future?
• 31:14
  That's a good question. I was gonna make a dumb joke and be like, "Get a new job." No, I'm just joking. [laughs] Uh, I'm speaking to myself more so. No.
• 31:21
  I would say that under s- like, there's almost this meta layer of critical thinking we should be doing more of today. And what I hopefully mean by that is we can now spit out words with a click of a button.
• 31:38
  Doesn't always mean it's good, it doesn't always mean it's bad. What we need to understand or analyze is, how do you actually make these systems work effectively? Mm-hmm.
• 31:48
  And that is difficult because not enough brands have spent enough time on it. So again, all content marketers can tell you or say, like you get a ICP from a company or your own boss and it's like hollow.
• 32:01
  It doesn't give you r- any real insight. If you look at style guidelines across most companies, it's the same problem. If you look at how they judge- Mm-hmm... link quality, it's the same problem.
• 32:11
  [laughs] It's like we don't have enough of our own measures of success, and then it makes it really difficult to apply speed and scale on top of that, which is like what AI does and or can do. Like you can...
• 32:24
  All AI does today is scale inefficiencies if you don't have these things- Yeah... ironed out ahead of time.
• 32:30
  And that's the challenge that we're stuck in right now, is, and everyone's trying to figure out, is I think we've gotten away from, like, the basics and the fundamentals in a positive way in that, or in a negative way, but in a positive way in that, like, we're all being kind of, like, forced to go back to those steps of a- truly understanding, like, who we are, who we're trying to help- Mm-hmm...
• 32:50
  how we help them, how that's unique or different from someone else, other than just, like, reading two landing pages and seeing a couple bullet points.
• 32:57
  That first person insight comes directly from talking to customers, directly reading customer success type stuff. That helps us then define all the tactical things.
• 33:07
  So it helps us figure out what content types to do, where it should go. Helps us understand link quality. Like we have this conversation in links all the time, link relevance especially.
• 33:17
  People think, like, link relevance is like direct competitors or huge brands, and it's like, no [laughs], no, it's not.
• 33:23
  It's like product specific often or it's audience specific, meaning just 'cause, like, if it's a site that is related to something that your audience is already talking about and caring about, it is still relevant.
• 33:34
  Like your, a direct competitor's not gonna link to you.
• 33:36
  And so it's, all the, like, tactical challenges we're having today and we're experiencing today I think often flow back to having a really good understanding of marketing principles, like actual- Mm...
• 33:47
  marketing principles, not like tech marketing principles in the last three years.
• 33:50
  And I would urge caution around, like, just applying scale and speed and efficiency on top of stuff that's already broken 'cause all you're doing is multiplying- Yeah...
• 33:58
  future issues that you're gonna have to, like, deal with later, if that makes sense. So like being good at AI is cool. Like I'm not saying don't be good at AI.
• 34:04
  I'm saying, like, understand how and where you apply it and/or what kind of like a tool it is. Like what... Is it a hammer or a screwdriver?
• 34:10
  Like you have to understand how to actually use it to then know how to, like, get better results from it, if that makes sense. Yeah. Well, thank you so much, Brad, for joining us. This article was on LinkedIn.
• 34:22
  Is that the best place to find you or is there another spot as well? Yeah, that's a good spot. Our company, uSERP, is U-S-E-R-P.I-O. I live in Hawaii, so you probably can't find me hopefully, if I've done this right.
• 34:35
  [laughs] I'm just kidding. [laughs] I'm just kidding. But no, yeah, those are the best spots. Thanks. Awesome. Thanks for joining us. [outro music]