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Ep 36 - Adapting to Change: Digital Marketing's Rapid Evolution and Crappy CTAs Podcast and Video Transcript

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Ep 36 - Changes and Crappy CTAs - 4K

Dave Dougherty: All right, welcome to the latest episode of enterprise minds, Dave and Alex here today. We have been talking amongst ourselves a little bit and talking about just the sheer amount of change that's been happening upon reflection over the last few years across the digital marketing spectrum. Not just AI, but just all of the things that you thought you knew, like analytics, Now being, you know, blown up and done a different way.

And, you know, coming off of the the search algorithm document leaks you know, there's a lot of reflecting going on and in certain digital communities for sure. And then stay to the end. When we talk about crappy CTAs that really should change, but somehow stay alive. A relatable topic to anybody who's been in the game for a while.

So you know, we can, yeah, we'll, we'll do that. So thanks for joining us. Like, and subscribe, share, review, all that stuff. Get that, get that out of the way in the beginning. That really does help us get More people's eyes on this. And we greatly appreciate everybody who's done that already. And is sharing the content across the web.

So, you know, do that, let us know topic ideas. You'd love to hear us discuss. We'd love that kind of feedback and anything that's working for you. So definitely do that.

Reflecting on Digital Marketing Changes

Dave Dougherty: So, all right, without further ado, I was recently watching a video on the social media examiner. YouTube channel. I don't normally interact with that channel like I used to when I was first starting out my career because it was a great sort of repository of best practices for social within North America.

And There was a great interview about like, okay, well, what is actually working with social algorithms in 2024? And one of the things that got me thinking was actually just as they went through all the things that have changed in terms of like the social algorithms, ownership changes on social Google analytics, going to GA4 and all the kerfuffles with that cookies, no cookies.

Then you throw AI on top of that. There's just been a lot of, a lot of change. And I know change management is the topic we've, we've brought in on other episodes more in terms of the organization and how that impacts, you know, colleagues and workers and structures, but even just being in a community or a profession that is constantly changing, I mean, sometimes it's exhausting, you don't even realize all that you've been through until you're, you know, Well, on the other side of it, but, you know, Alex is how much of this is, is ringing true for you?

Or am I just in a reflexive mood lately?

Alex Pokorny: Okay. Comment on your mood. Maybe that is true. A different podcast. The emotional state of Dave. Right. You know,

The Evolution of Social Media and Advertising

Alex Pokorny: yeah, the number of changes has been increasing rapidly. There's no doubt about that. I mean, we, we've seen that always through different software platforms and different periods of time when, you know, the next, the next thing develops, like you mentioned about social media, but to be honest, the rise of paid social media, organic social media kind of kicked off and then, you know, Eventually paid kind of picked up and saying that here's a huge advertising market as those platforms matured enough to have decent advertising platforms that were user friendly.

I mean, there's, there's always some lag time, right? Between these different events and then it goes, they start becoming, you know, more money hungry and then user hungry and they basically kill your organic reach unless you're paying money. And so then you go really heavy on the advertising side. So, I mean, that's a very, very small example, but really that happened over the course of just, I don't know.

Five years, maybe that, that kind of shifted from one to the next. I mean, corporations were still trying to figure out what to do with any social media channel. And then pretty quickly after that, it got to the advertising side of it and things kind of shifted that direction. Overall, I always talk about like the, the game of marketing that hasn't changed.

People want to sell stuff, people make stuff, they want to find their markets. They want to find their buyers. That kind of hasn't changed, but. We shouldn't say that, you know, we're looking at things in a 50 year span. No, I'm talking about just like two years span.

Google's AI and Search Algorithm Shifts

Alex Pokorny: I mean, think about like, this is an upcoming change and actually just kind of an interesting little area of the future is look at.

The way that Google search has just recently changed. So they had a beta product, which is basically giving you this AI produced overview. If you have a question, you know, how much do I need a water in my grass? And it will give you an answer. Or what's the average rent in my area? It'll give you an answer.

I mean, it'll kind of give you that data. You don't necessarily have to scroll down and click a website. Well, let's say it's more of a product query best electric bike, or, you know, something query kind of like very product kind of focus kind of thing. It's going to give you a little bit of a short synopsis of here's some different qualities to look for.

And then it pipes in Google shopping, which is a sponsored spreadsheet upload sort of thing. It's not Google scraping products off the internet because they're great. It's people putting their products on Google shopping so that it can be sold through that. And it's a form of advertising. So. How do you stick out now in that area?

Well, you look at basically which one had the top reviews or is basically being highlighted in those maybe three or four slots and now you're getting traffic. How is this different than before? It's bottom funnel traffic before you used to be able to make the argument on your website because I wanted to say best electric bike.

They scroll down, they find your article you go through. Here's all the different things. Also, this is why you should trust us. This is some, you know, free thing that we're giving you for information. Here's a quick short video to see, you know, what the height is and the right bike for you or a quiz. And then we get you to our products.

And then now you're buying one of our products, not doing so much price comparison, brand comparison, review comparison. Instead, you're just saying, I trust this brand. Now I'm not going to continue down that purchase path. And that is very, very different. Then what's being presented by Google with this AI kind of snippet, and then trying to just drop you straight into what might be Walmart, Amazon, I mean, name your marketplace, it might actually not be your website anymore.

It's probably a 3rd party website. That's that's a big shift in a very small period of time. I mean, the best product you have best reviews, but let's say you launch a brand new product that doesn't have any reviews left. Like, how do you break into that market? How do you become 1 of those 3? So, yeah, I mean, things are shifting rapidly right now.

The Future of AI and Big Tech

Alex Pokorny: And I still have an overall opinion that I think Google is lost right now. They don't know what they're doing. They're very confused about how, to be honest, the one and only product that they've ever had has been since the beginning of the company, which is a very engineered search engine, how it is relevant in an AI world.

I don't think they still figured that out, especially with the advertising side of it. Like, how do you make money on. This AI snippet. Mm hmm.

Dave Dougherty: Yeah, it's easy to look at, you know, the incumbent's dilemma. You're doing well, you don't want to kill your cash cow, you don't want to innovate, so then you just Milk it for what it's worth and then you get that disruptor and then you don't have the capacity to Change quickly enough and I definitely think that describes, you know, Google the way it is

I They're getting there at least with what I've seen. I think they are I agree. Well, they're positioned. Well, I mean, especially, I mean, just the sheer amount of data that people already trust them with, you know, same with apple. If apple announces something big with AI, then that's just going to be crazy amount of data for them to, Leverage into their, their other products.

Alex Pokorny: I wonder just one tension on that one. I wonder if we're going to go back to a more gated world where it used to be Android versus iPhone. Oh, you use this app. It's not available on my system. Oh, you use this thing. It's not available with my system. And now we've kind of come to a merging of things where they basically copy each other, like.

To a ridiculous degree and trying to make sure that the integration is there across the board. So it's almost one system now that we're all basically using, not Mac versus PC, not Apple versus Android. Maybe soon it will be Amazon versus Microsoft slash chat GPT versus Google versus I guess Facebook's been doing some open source stuff or Apple has their own world as well.

Dave Dougherty: Yeah. I think we've, you know, we've talked about this a little bit with the AI piece, but I do with the AI services piece and the B2B world, I do think we're starting to see that where it's the, what tools do we already have vetted and approved for our organization? What's going to be easier to get approvals for things that are already vetted.

And so, okay, great. We're going to go with the AWS system. We're going to go with the Google cloud workspace system because we already have it. Okay. You know, and they slot into different, you know, different spots. But yeah, I mean, it's, it's just easier to do that. And that makes, you know, these startup ones a little bit more rough because you're going to the consumer side just to get some notice and whatever else.

Alex Pokorny: That's like just a weird one. There's been some layoffs recently from Amazon and Google off of their data center side, but their big data side to try to reposition the money into AI, which of course is very data center heavy. It's a funny world right now. A little odd change.

Dave Dougherty: Yeah. Capital is more expensive. That's hard to borrow, man. Video cards, man. Just get rid of the servers. God. Anyway, that's, that's a totally different show. I, when, as you were running through that though, I do, I thought of streaming and the streaming wars and how everybody hated cable because cable was expensive and had you locked in and you're like, you know what, I only want these couple of things.

And then you get those couple of things and you're like, you know what, I hate paying seven different things. Yeah. Yeah, like, okay, I forget who said it, but it's like, the only way to make money is to bundle or to unbundle, you know what, that's kind of, that does describe a lot of the different industries that, you know, affect our day to day.

Alex Pokorny: For sure. Reliance in house out, out in the agency world. Oh, no, we're going back in house heavy now. Hire your own people. We need the specialists. It's too hard to find.

Dave Dougherty: Well, and so, I mean, with all the changes, I mean, just as a digital marketer, right? What's interesting was we've talked with, you know, the AI changes, is specialization going to stick around?

Maybe, maybe not. But it, the algorithm changes are definitely about engagement. It's about keeping you on their platform so they can make more of the ad dollars. And then, okay, but what, how does that benefit you as the creator, the producer, the, the business, right? In thinking of the different funnels, it's like, yeah, content was always really good at being at every different stage because you could target different stages with different types of content on different platforms.

But now I think all of it is just slamming into it, into each other where your awareness, your findability is all on these previously social channels that are now just, you know, media channels at this point. And then your own media sites really are just that mid to late stage funnel idea. And that's a bigger change where, you know, 10 years ago, it'd be like, yeah, have the blog target the long tail, really rank for all of these things to create the ecosystem that brings people in.

It's like, well, now we're at a point where it's so noisy and so hard to get any kind of traction that even to get people in, Into your ecosystem, into your funnel, you have to show them 7, 10, 15 different, you know, experiences with you to get trusted to then go through what was the process of just typing in, you know, typing in the search.

Alex Pokorny: That's actually a funny thing. It's basically. AI is killing the moat that is content. And if you wanted to be a small business and send out an email campaign, well, now you got to write a bunch of emails, you know, a bunch of this, a bunch of that, a bunch of this. Oh, you want to do be a small business owner and write a blog that you're going to publish on a daily basis or three times a week basis.

Well, you got to sit down and write a bunch of copy for that and write a bunch of content. Now you're going to get on social media. Well, who's going to be the one posting, tweeting, You know, doing all the rest of that stuff. And while you gotta be creating all this content and thinking of ideas and witty things to post and all the rest of that kind of stuff, it was all a content mode.

That was the barrier across the board to get into email, to get into the honestly, even advertising as a content mode. I mean, all this stuff was, and AI killed it. And now we don't know what the next mode is that you can become the specialist of, you know, because we became, Content strategist, specialist, social media strategist, you know, specialists and advertising specialists and SEO specialists and all the rest of these kinds of specialties, which really was, you know, different platforms plus content and your specialty being, you know, how to basically blend those two correctly, you know, recommend them correctly, create them correctly, all the rest of that kind of stuff.

Dave Dougherty: Right. But

Alex Pokorny: we're

Dave Dougherty: killing

Alex Pokorny: that

Dave Dougherty: mode. Well, and that's why I've always had a problem with the job title, integrated marketing. Because integrated marketing is that's marketing. That's just what you do. It's an outcome. Yeah. As part of your content plan, like it's not, yeah, like find where your audience is and go get after it.

Like that's, that's the job. That's marketing. Yeah. Yeah.

Alex Pokorny: That literally is the job. That's how, that's how this works. Yeah. Oh, this is a B2B audience. Well, you should be on LinkedIn. You probably shouldn't be on Twitter as much. You know, I don't think anybody should be on Twitter, but yeah, it's, you know, actually funny, sorry, funny tangent.

This blows my mind because Twitter is such a big brand, right? Huge, massive brand. It's all over the place. Try to go to a website. They're going to have a share button that probably includes it. And the funniest thing to me is that it still says X and then in parentheses. Twitter is the worst brand launch that has ever happened in history, like bar none, it's the worst because it is such a broadly used, broadly known, commonly visited, yet the new brand still doesn't play.

It still doesn't work. You still have to always refer to it by the old name. And it's like, wow, that is a terrible brand change. Like Elon Musk, man, you have no idea how to deal with brands and single letter X for something that's so known as synonyms is like Twitter and tweeting and you know, all the rest of that, that basically is connected to basically that cultural element that is Twitter.

And then you're like, Oh, we're just going to call it X except no one will ever accept the X.

Dave Dougherty: Is it? Yeah, it's not just that, but he doesn't even, he doesn't know marketing. He doesn't appreciate marketing. And you can see that with begrudgingly hiring marketers, a team of marketers for Tesla. And then six months after they launched their first campaign, he fires them because it didn't meet standards as a.

You didn't even let him do the job. Like

Alex Pokorny: also you didn't prior campaign and you didn't have a prior marketing team. So what benchmark were you possibly using?

Dave Dougherty: Just placating people saying that he did it. That's essentially all it was like, I, I don't have anything nice to say about the man. But. I've also thought about writing an ode to the letter X because I think what he's doing to the letter X is unfair and it does that letter doesn't deserve it.

Alex Pokorny: Allowing explicit photos. Now they're continuing to degrade the X.

Dave Dougherty: Exactly, man. Like, we're making Elmo sad, like Sesame Street can't use X anymore.

Because of you on letter,

Alex Pokorny: man.

Dave Dougherty: God. All right. Moving on. How to transition out of this one.

In-House Marketing vs. Agency Debate

Alex Pokorny: But some of the changes, if you want to talk quick about like in house versus agency as well, we kind of just briefly mentioned it, but that's been a change. I mean, throughout Let's say just our career timeline that's gone back and forth a number of times where it was bring it all in house because then you have, you know, both have their benefits, both have their, you know, detractors.

I mean, pros and con lists on each one. Easy. I mean, same thing, centralized, decentralized, you know, it's too bottled act, push it out, open to disorganize it, too inefficient, pull it in. You go back and forth again with agencies. It was, we can't have the brain power. That's so specialized. We don't have access to that talent, nor do we need that talent in full time role.

So we're going to basically supplement our workforce with an agency and our people are traditional marketers. They don't know this digital marketing thing. We need an agency that knows it. We need to basically bring in a team of experts, not just one random intern at low level, even though their boss has no idea what they're doing on a daily basis, because they don't understand that, you know, type of.

Marketing or type of work, but now we've gotten to this in house push. I mean, agencies have been struggling for now a couple, a couple of quite a few years now it's been going on for quite a few years now that people are pulling in house pretty heavily. With the shift with AI, do you think that's timed well, or is actually problematic because you've got that costly headcount internally?

Or

Dave Dougherty: I think it's a double whammy, to be honest, like, especially with the big incumbents you have the agencies are the only places that have the leverage to do the types of research, to have the sandboxes, to play with the new tools, to become those specialists, right? So to then leverage that knowledge to go to the big companies to say, Hey, we can sell you these consulting thing. So even if you attract the top talent from the agency side who were doing all these experiments, who were, you know, up to date on all these things, now you put them in an environment that is so locked down with I. T. approvals and legal requirements that you can't play with the new A. I. stuff. Unless it's in a very strict piloting kind of environment.

Right. Because there is that question of, I need to be able to copyright a lot of things. That's part of the agency agreements, right? The work for hire, I own whatever you produce on my behalf. And if that's not in your contracts, go talk to your lawyer, get it in your contracts right now. Um, and.

Yeah, it's, you see it with like Accenture and Forrester and Deloitte and all these guys who are now like penning agreements with the various AI organizations to be like resalers and specialists in that particular thing so that they can build instances for groups with their environments. And that's it. But I think the mom and pop agency where like you and I cut our teeth. That's going to be really hard now because like you were saying, you know, AI cuts out the moat. Well, what does that do? That just, if you are constantly in defensive position, you're going to go back to whatever's the strong, the strongest thing.

And those strongest things right now happen to be the giant tech companies or the giant, you know, fortune ones that have been around for years and years and years. So, And AI isn't necessarily good at telling you what's about to come. It can only tell you what has worked averagely with the data set that it's done, I mean, it gets you to, okay.

Really quickly,

Alex Pokorny: which

Dave Dougherty: I

Alex Pokorny: still call it a blank page killer. I mean, yeah. And it kills the blank page, but it's not a publishable final anything.

Dave Dougherty: No. And that's where, for the activities that you would consider throwaway activities, it's really great because now all of a sudden it's not as heavy of a lift and you don't have to devote as much time to it.

But I do think that, you know, in looking back on, on some of the most productive situations that I've had in my working career, where, you know, if you're able to get a really smart team into a room and have them generate ideas and then prioritize those ideas and put in the work. Yeah, you're not going to use 80 percent of the ideas.

That's part of the process, right? But now the pressures on productivity and being asked to do more with less constantly. And, you know, basically in perpetuity, I feel like the quality control. Just because we're human beings it's gonna go out the door, you know when you've got 36 things to do.

Alex Pokorny: Yeah

Dave Dougherty: Why wouldn't you use AI for that?

Alex Pokorny: There's a limit there too. I don't know I was just thinking about The constant change overall from a career standpoint, thinking about the traditional digital marketer shifts, all the different systems, all the different issues and stuff that has come up. I mean, GDPR, pickup, you know, an issue. There's new stuff all the time that's complex, and you may have not even been even close to it now.

You have to become, you know, some sort of pseudo expert at least. And your application of it, there's got to be a phrase for like general marketer, like malaise and burnout of just like, I'm tired of learning the next thing and tired of the constant change or. I just want to do what I was doing last week because there was okay, just like to do that for another week.

If I can't, I don't know.

Current State of AI in Marketing

Alex Pokorny: We got, we got quite a phrase for that because that's, that's kind of where we're getting there. But I mean, given the current state of AI. It isn't at that state where it's, you know, I'm going to replace my marketer with this AI tool. You don't have the complete solution yet from Salesforce that says, you know, put in the URL of your website and we'll build out every campaign you can possibly need.

And you know, set up the API connections and get your login set up. And now you're just publishing like crazy with a single button. It's not even close to being there yet. I mean, it's not.

The Long Runway for AI Adoption

Alex Pokorny: So we, The runway here is, I think, a lot longer than we think, too. There's always going to be the small business who is not even close and not even played around with AI.

And they're still going to be looking for the agency that can do stuff. And if their agency happens to be using AI in the background,

Early Adopters vs. General Public

Dave Dougherty: The tech industry is very good at talking to the early adopters, the dreamers, and getting them to buy in. So that it appears that everybody's doing it when really it's the early adopters and the headlines are blowing it up because it's tech, but then, you know, 50 percent of people.

Aren't using it in that way, right? Like, I mean, we could look up some stats, but I'm sure even if we did, we would find out that, you know, a vast majority of people aren't even using AI or even paying for the AI versions that are the best versions, right? So Then like any new technology, there's going to be a backlash of it.

I mean, we're still in such a wild west.

The Wild West of AI and Job Displacement

Dave Dougherty: I was thinking about this the other day where you have such the early adopters right now, and there are so many conversations of like, it's coming for jobs or we can replace a lot of sort of menial tasks with this. Even if we don't replace people, we can reallocate them to other places.

Right. Like the Klorna CEO said the quiet part out loud. You know, with his customer service stats that he posted and the AI pilot there you're gonna have some kind of a backlash or there will be something to say, these are the appropriate use cases for this, but the wild, crazy generation, we're not behind and I'm using that as an example, I'm not saying that's going to be the, the actual thing, but We haven't gotten there yet, but I can definitely see, you know, people doing that.

And that's not something that's unfamiliar with that. Right.

Voice Assistants and Privacy Concerns

Dave Dougherty: The, I think of like Amazon echoes or the, the Google home things where it's like, this is going to be great. Everybody's going to be doing voice searches and everybody's going to be. And then you're like, yeah, but do I want a company listening to me in my house all the time?

No. So, you know, do I want to be creating content all the time? No.

The Challenge of Creating Quality Content

Dave Dougherty: You know, I mean, because there's still that mental load of I need, you know, this isn't up to my standards. Like, let me play with the idea before I, you know, put it out. But, you know so I guess if you're more of an anarchist, yeah, you'll just.

But if you care about branding, then, you know, you might actually take some time with it, but I don't know. These are, these are interesting ideas. They're fun to play around with. Clearly we have to do some more thinking on it and, and get there on ourself, but we did promise people crappy CTAs.

Crappy CTAs and Marketing Strategies

Dave Dougherty: So let's let's go to that.

Platform-Specific Marketing Insights

Dave Dougherty: Like, I do think In our conversation of the integrating all the various things into the different platforms and, and various stages of the funnel you know, professor Galloway, Scott Galloway, Prof G podcast in one of his books, he he had it written where, you know, Facebook suggests the, what Google suggests the, how Amazon suggests the, when And I thought that was a really good summary for those platforms and what you basically do on those.

Now, this book is from a while back and it's changed a little bit since then. But, you know, when we talk about We're the first two.

Yeah. Well, with the Amazon piece, it's, you know, you get the delivery, you get the, I need this particular thing right now, or in two days, or, you know, um, it's easier to find the products that way than, than any other, you know, platform. But I like that as a, as a quick synopsis, because then also, if you are reducing your headcount, if you are bringing more intelligent people, In house with the idea that they can produce more with the new tools and whatever else.

Do the CTAs get any better or do we fall back on call our sales guy? Right? Learn more. Learn more. Exactly. I don't want to learn. Learning is work. Discover sounds fun. Let's do discover.

Alex Pokorny: No, I think it's, you know, It gets down to people get stuck with the constraints of how much text can you throw on a button and the variety of CTAs, I mean, that any of us have seen is not great.

And there's generic ones that fit a lot of situations, but it's not necessarily enticing either.

The Importance of Understanding Your Audience

Alex Pokorny: I think we also like, let's say you're having like a sit down and it's a kind of sales conversation at the end when you're wrapping up. Yeah. You're kind of you've set that hook and you're kind of gearing it up towards like completion.

So there's a process there beforehand before you get to that button to of saying we're gearing up to the completion point. Now let's make the final decision where you say yes and we continue on this completion point. You know it's a lot of landing pages I think miss that too where it's Here's some generic, you know, PDF reports that you've now unlocked by throwing in your email address.

Yeah, click here so that you can be contacted by sales. Like we're going top to bottom funnel. Like what, where are we going with this? And the other one with the e commerce side, honestly, this one always bugs me because I see the purpose of it, but I also see the annoyance of it, which is a pop up that shows that says, Hey, throw in your email address.

We'll give you 10 percent off.

Which every time I close it, because it's like, I haven't even viewed the page yet. So I'm not even sure what the product is. And also I'm not sure if price is really the big concern. You could put that selection right next to the price saying, here's a box, put in your email address and we'll knock 10 percent off of it.

And if you show that reduced price right there on the same page, now you've reduced it. And I've put it in the work because I care. Maybe the price is good enough, or maybe I'm just trying to get a quick look at whatever the product is before I hit the back button and look at the next one to like

Dave Dougherty: those five second interstitials are really annoying for that reason.

Yeah, I think it's the same thing. If you if you're good enough to code the countdown timer on the interstitial, why not? Why not choose a longer linger time? She's like, Hey, I see you're considering this, you know,

Alex Pokorny: Yeah, whenever you do those linger ones or the before you hit the back button kind of interruption, it still always makes me think, okay, I waited here.

20 seconds while I was actually, you know, doing something else on my phone and I'm back to doing this app and I'm looking at it again and you get this pop up and it's like, wait, so if I wait 20 minutes, do I get a better offer? Like, where does this end? Like you've opened up a can of worms here by actually by offering like, Hey, you're about to leave.

Let's throw some, you know, extra offer at you. It's like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Like final offer. Well,

Dave Dougherty: that's like those, remember, The the guilt trip CTAs, you know, the, why are you leaving our website? Are you sure you don't want to learn? Are you sure you don't, you want to be one of the 10 marketers that doesn't know this topic or, you know, like, shut up, like

Alex Pokorny: it's frustrating as heck.

If you don't leave now, we'll donate some money and save a kitten. You got me. I don't particularly like cats. Man, we found the cat haters in the group. How long do I have to stay on this page? I want the cat.

Yeah, there's so many problems with that. And it gets down to bad CTAs are lazy marketing. That's what it is. It's, it's not understanding that you are having a conversation with someone and you actually are trying to be helpful to them and solve the problem that they have. Part of this is a continued conversation, which might include, you know, the final credit card input process, which is after you hit the buy button, you know, it's after the add to cart button is the next one is the shipping.

You know, are you going to do the expedited shipping or the free shipping? I mean, there's always like these little decision points along the road as well. So it's not like a lot of these lining pages have this appearance of one and done. They're not, it's a part of a stream of con, you know, conversation that's going on.

And the more that you can basically allude to something that's more natural and normal of you're interested in this particular product let's say it's a B2B. Industrial product, you could say contact type in your question below and we'll send it to 1 of our engineers who can talk to you about basically what's a good solution for you and give you some free consulting.

And you're like, yeah, you throw me a bone. That's actually that's actually helpful for me right now, because I'm in an unusual situation. I'm looking at this very industrial product. Let's be honest. We don't all. Get born and suddenly be around industrial products. Now we actually have limited contact with them.

It's a difficult purchase. It's a complex purchase that probably has a lot of different elements. I'm not even thinking about, and yeah, it'd be, it'd be nice to get some help. Do I want to say contact sales? No, I don't want some, some idiot calling me because they don't know anything about me. I don't know anything about them, but it's a waste of time.

Not there yet.

Dave Dougherty: Along those lines, I get so frustrated with the meetings where it's, you know, okay, what's the purpose of this page? We want that, you know, we want the user to do X, Y, Z action. Why would they do that? Exactly. Nobody asked that or they go, okay, but what about this? What if you have like the 20 users that do this thing?

Can we have this section to do? Okay. Now you're talking instead of one purpose for the page, you're throwing the kitchen sink at it. And then you wonder why it doesn't work. Because you're not thinking of the other strategies that could go into that to address those 10, 20, 30 people that, you know, might care about a really niche question on it, right?

But that can be a different page. That could be a different experience because you know what? That's going to hit them at a different time.

Alex Pokorny: That's a good point too, because there's an element there of understanding your audience. There's an element there of understanding the type of content that you're providing and, you know, who would want that and when would they want that?

Like in what situation would they be in where this is actually useful to them. But there's also an element there of understanding good website design. And I think that last one, we often see missing with marketers because they've got the copy part down to some degree. They've got the audience understanding down to.

Maybe a generic degree where they're just going to throw the standard approach against it versus actually really truly understanding that audience. Because I think that's what makes a great marketer.

The Role of Creativity and Empathy in Marketing

Alex Pokorny: Someone who really is, you know, empathetic to the point where they understand the problems, concerns, fears of this audience.

And they're actually seeking to basically make this person feel better. Like not just, you know, Here's a solution one of 10, but I'm trying to really help you sort of empathy. But that last one of good website design, I think that one gets really tricky. I mean, given site design has changed a lot too, like affiliates used to use the super long sales page, which had like, 20 of the same CTA, but it was just interspaced between more paragraphs and more videos and more images.

And you keep on scrolling, scrolling, scrolling, same thing over and over again. It worked. It worked great. That's why they were popular. But we don't commonly see that in sites now. So things have changed and things have shifted. Well, it's a mobile audience. And a ridiculously long scrolling page isn't really friendly for a mobile audience.

But

Dave Dougherty: you know, it, it occurs to me as we've talked about this, like

a, one of the frustrating things with AI is that it, and this is the reason I got outta copywriting too, because as someone with a writing degree who cares about writing and understands the importance of good writing, one of the more frustrating things that you constantly see in talking to potential clients or you know employers Colleagues is that everybody thinks they can write.

Yeah. Yeah, but they can't and now with AI That fallacy has only gotten worse. Like, cool. I was kind of a crappy writer, but now I can be better because AI can do it for me. And, you know, that's better than what I could do. So I'm just going to use that because it's better than what I could do. Still not better than, you know, what the best can do.

You know, and in, in, in building that, that ecosystem, one of the tried and true tricks of marketing, helping sales. You know, like what's one of the most common complaints? Marketing doesn't give us hot leads. Or they give us the wrong kind of leads. Well, okay, well, let's look at what the titles of your content are.

If you are providing an ebook, that's five things to consider for this industrial chemical, they're not ready to buy. Look at that title. That

Alex Pokorny: is,

Dave Dougherty: yeah, that is pure research. Don't call on that one, right? Sure. Logging into the system. They gave you their email address for this particular piece of content.

What other stuff can they interact with that will show you that they are moving down the path to actually needing feedback or whatever else. You're not going to get that. You're just not going to get that with AI or people who haven't taken the time to experience that. You know, firsthand,

Alex Pokorny: So I, I had my question that I posed about, you know, content was the old moat.

What's the new moat that's going to really kind of break the barrier between bad marketers and good marketers. I think we hit two of them just right there. One was creativity because that's something that AI is terrible at. And I think back to the Mad Men days of, you know, You know, impassioned creative designs and stuff like that, making the thing that breaks through the mold, you know, breaks them all.

And, you know, it gets through the, the slog of all the content that's out there that worked because you had really creative ideas, really interesting hooks. And it was something that you were working on. You'd be willing to pay attention to because it was something creative, artistic, or fun, or something to it that kind of pulls you to it.

And then the other one is that audience understanding, like that empathy there of, you know, what you're talking about was like, that's a bare education sort of level of content. You need to warm that lead. You got to work them down the, you know, down the journey a little bit before you get to the point of like, yeah, this is somebody who really actually wants to be called and talk to somebody and is ready to talk to somebody and have an intelligent conversation about like, these are my problems.

These are my needs. This is what I know. From reading online, but I still don't know these things and I'm not quite confident yet in my answer. Like, can you, can you help me here? Like that? Mm-Hmm, . That's the time where you actually want that call and you, you actually want to have that exchange of maybe email or whatever it is, right?

So that, those are two things that AI doesn't have is one is the creativity and the correct application of that creativity for your particular audience brand, you know, segment, all the rest of that kind of stuff. Platform where replacing it matters, of course. And then. That piece of understanding that our audience.

That's so crucial. And it hasn't really changed. I mean, that's still something AI really won't get.

Dave Dougherty: And the video that I referenced previously, Andy Chrestodina was the main guy. And one of the quotes that caught my attention was. AI doesn't have any friends. AI doesn't have any opinions. So what's your content strategy?

Take a stand, have an opinion. Yeah. Have a network. Have some friends. Have a discussion with friends. Do what we're doing, like, right now, where it's the, Hey, we're having a talk. You can see us. You can do this.

Building Trust in Marketing and Sales

Dave Dougherty: The one thing that I don't think was talked about, and I think we're gonna see marketing sales strategies go towards this Is trust.

We have moved away from building trust with our marketing and with our sales, we've been moving more just towards get that productivity going, get that productivity going, don't, you know, but that relationship with the audience, knowing them, building trust with them, so that when they see you as that SERP result, or they see your content referenced in the AI overview, there's already recognition there, there's already trust there, they'll go with that result Versus what's being sort of summarized

Alex Pokorny: for them, right?

That makes a big difference when you talk about the massive amount of content that AI can create and the slog that that creates too. Because do you want to be the friend to your customer who just shouts random stuff at them? No. Do you want to be the random friend to your customer who is giving them expert advice that's applicable to them?

Yes. So then now you can't have 10 reasons to buy whatever the heck on your listicle sort of article on your site, because that's tarnishing your reputation with these people who don't trust you. You know, they don't want to see that kind of content and it's frankly insulting when you just shove it at them too.

So

Dave Dougherty: either that or you put it on social because it's something that's easily digested and scrolled through in an instant. Right. Yeah. An Instagram type post. Right, right audience, right time, right time. Right, but yeah, that blog version of it may not resonate enough. Or you have to come

Alex Pokorny: up with a better usability kind of aspect to your site of kind of dividing up that traffic as well and making sure you funnel them appropriately.

Dave Dougherty: Now I will caveat what I just said by an example that haven't is a long time ago. Gary Vee was talking to a group of home mortgage people. Now say what you will about Gary Vee, he can be a bit much. But there's one idea. And I love the fact that he had the chutzpah to say this to auditorium filled with mortgage people where they said, you know, people want that personal touch.

They want, they trust the person to, you know, write the mortgage, give them the mortgage. Okay.

The Future of Automated Services

Dave Dougherty: Well, what happens when the technology is good enough that I can be sitting at my kitchen table and I can go, Hey, Google, Hey, Alexa, Hey, whatever. What are the current mortgage rates? What could I qualify for? Okay.

Send me the documents. Now you don't need that home hold that whole home loan group of people that was filling that auditorium because all of that is automated. And the only thing that you need is somebody to verify it. So it matches, you know, the legal requirements of whatever. So build that trust. to try to develop it, but also understand where you can be disrupted in that model as well. And this goes back to, you know, do you understand the craft of marketing? Do you know the competitive analysis? Do you know how to run a SWOT? Do you know how to, you know are you able to look at disruptive factors in the, in the industry? If not,

Alex Pokorny: uh, Yeah. That's a good

Dave Dougherty: training online.

Alex Pokorny: Yeah. One of the ones that I was pushed pretty hard is also audience sizing, very realistic, not just saying, Hey, it's a 10 billion market.

That's fantastic. You'll never going to get all of it. So let's be realistic about it. Cut it down to actually who might actually want this particular product, what our volume of it is and what it kind of looks like, because that's the other thing is like, man, if that, if there's mortgage companies had that understanding at that point of.

Yeah, we're in a massive multi billion dollar industry. Fantastic. That doesn't mean that's where your customers want to be or how they want to be sold or how they want to be contacted. I mean, there's like a whole lot of additional elements there that gets to your point about, you know, understanding that audience and also understanding those, you know, those weaknesses that are going to pop up.

Dave Dougherty: Well, this ended up being a fun one for me. I hope it translated to, you know, you, the listener like we said before, like scribe, subscribe, share let us know what you're working on, what you found useful, any of the followup things that you might want to hear us talk about, like audience sizing might actually be a good topic for us to look at and, and doing that.

Yeah, those skills where you're like, I think I know how to do that, but I'm not really confident in it are always really good ones to explore and remind yourself you do know more than you think you do. Um, again thanks for joining us. We will see you in the next episode and take care.