How to Win AI Search and Prove it Drives Pipeline (with AirOps, Compt, Muck Rack and more)

Dave [0:00:01]: You're listening to the Exit Five podcast.

Dasha [0:00:12]: Whoo.

Dasha [0:00:12]: Very live.

Dasha [0:00:13]: Are we updated?

Dave [0:00:15]: Through is this through with stuff, Dasha.

Dave [0:00:16]: How are you doing?

Dasha [0:00:18]: I'm doing great.

Dasha [0:00:18]: I'm rocking my Halloween shirt.

Dasha [0:00:21]: Okay.

Dasha [0:00:21]: We're in October.

Dasha [0:00:22]: Yeah.

Dasha [0:00:24]: How are you?

Dave [0:00:25]: I'm good.

Dave [0:00:25]: I'm wearing us.

Dave [0:00:26]: So today I…

Dave [0:00:27]: My my team has out fitted me in the Exit Five staff polo.

Dave [0:00:31]: These will soon be available at exitfive.com/merch.

Dave [0:00:36]: I also have the Exit Five Mike cap, and I have the Exit Five water bottle.

Dave [0:00:41]: I'm full on team brand because I feel like these are the things you can do.

Dave [0:00:46]: It it's all the brand and visibility these days, Dasha, and I feel like more people will search for us in chat and Clogged and Ai search if just the Exit Five brand is everywhere.

Dave [0:00:57]: And so you someone actually back backstage said you should have these…

Dave [0:01:00]: I should have five of these.

Dave [0:01:01]: So I'd like to have five of these sent to my house.

Dave [0:01:03]: They just wear one every day.

Dave [0:01:04]: So…

Dasha [0:01:05]: We call it Exit Five max.

Valerie [0:01:06]: That is also…

Valerie [0:01:07]: Yeah.

Valerie [0:01:07]: I like that.

Linda [0:01:08]: From

Dave [0:01:09]: and I I heard that there's There's a little Halloween.

Dave [0:01:12]: We we're doing this back to back.

Dave [0:01:14]: So next week.

Dave [0:01:14]: So we have right now.

Dave [0:01:15]: We're talking about Ae.

Dave [0:01:16]: Next week is all about events.

Dave [0:01:18]: We're pivoting to do a webinar all about in person events so very different than this one.

Dave [0:01:24]: I think you should come next week?

Dave [0:01:26]: Spoiler alert, there may or may not be some costumes and different attire there.

Dave [0:01:30]: Is that safe to say?

Dasha [0:01:32]: You didn't say there will be.

Dasha [0:01:33]: You said there might there might be.

Dave [0:01:36]: Can you just clarify something.

Dave [0:01:36]: Do they…

Dave [0:01:37]: Is there Halloween in Canada?

Dasha [0:01:39]: Yeah.

Dasha [0:01:39]: Dave, there's Halloween in Canada and people go trick or treating.

Dave [0:01:45]: Alright.

Dasha [0:01:45]: Okay.

Dasha [0:01:45]: But, blah bye what.

Dasha [0:01:46]: One thing.

Dasha [0:01:47]: I I did wanna know.

Dasha [0:01:48]: So when I was a kid, and I trick or treating is…

Dasha [0:01:50]: I don't know if that's the right.

Dasha [0:01:51]: Trigger…

Dasha [0:01:52]: When trick or trading?

Dasha [0:01:53]: Yeah.

Dasha [0:01:53]: We would bring pillow cases?

Dave [0:01:55]: Yeah.

Dasha [0:01:55]: Is that a Canadian thing?

Dasha [0:01:56]: Like, you really want case because it can fit a lot of candy?

Dave [0:01:59]: No, you got it.

Dave [0:02:00]: Americans, we definitely have more loss for sugar and awful things.

Dave [0:02:04]: So we have much bigger pillow cases so we.

Valerie [0:02:06]: Okay.

Dasha [0:02:07]: But the pillow case thing is not a…

Dave [0:02:08]: Maria yell.

Dave [0:02:09]: Maria is literally yelling at a start to partner.

Josh [0:02:11]: You know

Dave [0:02:11]: what We're once I get out here, I'm in charge.

Dave [0:02:13]: You're not in charge.

Dave [0:02:14]: I'm in charge.

Dave [0:02:15]: Well, hey everybody.

Dave [0:02:16]: Thanks for coming We do these on Fridays.

Dave [0:02:18]: This is called Exit Five Live.

Dave [0:02:20]: I'm Dave Gerhardt founder of Exit Five.

Dave [0:02:22]: This is my co-host Dasha.

Dave [0:02:23]: She's VP marketing a company called Proton Ai.

Dave [0:02:25]: Just a good marketer who's good on camera good to hang with us Every two weeks we do these, although we're doing one back to back next week.

Dave [0:02:32]: We go deep on a topic that is really important to you all right now in marketing and no surprise.

Dave [0:02:38]: This was the most…

Dave [0:02:39]: Just real quick shout.

Dave [0:02:40]: This is the most people…

Dave [0:02:40]: By the time we went live here.

Dave [0:02:42]: We probably broke two thousand regis.

Dave [0:02:43]: But this is the most people we've ever had registered for one of these, and we've been doing them for four years, so amazing.

Dave [0:02:48]: And not surprising marketing one zero one, which is, like, the number…

Dave [0:02:53]: It's not because we sent a bunch of emails, not because we had some promo trick up our sleeve.

Dave [0:02:57]: It is because this is the hottest topic in marketing.

Dave [0:02:59]: I was interviewing a Cmo of a seven hundred million dollar cyber cybersecurity company last week in New york City, and he looked at a hundred people in the room, and he said, the number one thing that matters in marketing is winning Ai search.

Dave [0:03:10]: And I think that is why so many people have turned out to this session.

Dave [0:03:14]: So real quick, can you just give people the run rundown.

Dave [0:03:17]: What what are we doing in these?

Dave [0:03:18]: And then and then we'll get into the the the show today, please?

Lauren [0:03:21]: Well, first, I think we

Dasha [0:03:21]: should think AirOps.

Dave [0:03:23]: Oh, do have to do that first.

Dave [0:03:24]: Okay.

Dave [0:03:24]: I'm just having a good time today.

Dave [0:03:26]: I'm I'm on my sixth coffee.

Dasha [0:03:28]: He's off scripting guys.

Dave [0:03:30]: That's okay.

Dave [0:03:30]: I'm better.

Dave [0:03:31]: I'm better off script.

Dave [0:03:31]: Yeah, So fine.

Dave [0:03:32]: We'll we'll do we'll do this now, But I I wanna give you a quick shout out to.

Dave [0:03:35]: The presenting sponsor of for today's session that is our friends at AirOps, Shop speaking of Ae.

Dave [0:03:40]: Ai search is the topic Everyone is being asked to get smarter about right now.

Dave [0:03:43]: I see constantly in the Exit Five community and across our newsletter podcast.

Dave [0:03:46]: Like I said, on stage with a top Cmo last week who made me feel very inadequate about what I know about Ai and SEO.

Dave [0:03:53]: AirOps helps you get there their Air is your partner in turning Ai search into your next growth advantage, to help marketing leaders build the strategy systems and channel presence to win Ai search, powering companies like Carta, Ramp and chime as good logos right there.

Dave [0:04:06]: Rather than choosing between software or agencies AirOps gives you the platform expertise to figure out what works for your brand, execute your strategy across the channels that matter and helps you execute one step ahead of the competition.

Dave [0:04:18]: Go check them out after today's session.

Dave [0:04:20]: It's airops.com.

Dave [0:04:21]: And by the way, even if you're not ready for AirOps yet, they have a ton of free resources, smart marketers on their site, you can check it out about Ai search and creating content with Ai, and they run live sessions like this a couple of times ago.

Dave [0:04:32]: So go check that out.

Dave [0:04:33]: I'm sure there's a bunch of Air customers in the chat.

Dave [0:04:35]: Feel free to to holler that, Dasha back to you.

Dave [0:04:37]: Now you can tell us.

Dave [0:04:38]: What's?

Dasha [0:04:39]: Now I can deliver on your ass.

Dasha [0:04:41]: Okay.

Dasha [0:04:41]: So what the heck are we doing here today?

Dasha [0:04:42]: We are going deep on Ai search.

Dasha [0:04:45]: And Why does this matter?

Dasha [0:04:47]: We surveyed a bunch of you.

Dasha [0:04:49]: We surveyed close to nine hundred people about what's happening with Ai search on their teams and the alarming thing is that only thirty percent of folks can prove the Ai search is driving pipeline.

Dasha [0:05:00]: Which if you listen a day, if this is a number one thing we should be focused on as marketers, we better be able to talk it about why it ties to pipeline and why this is helping our company grow.

Dasha [0:05:11]: So Yeah.

Dasha [0:05:11]: The focus today, Dave, Take it away.

Dasha [0:05:14]: I you have to…

Dave [0:05:15]: Link.

Dave [0:05:15]: I have some questions about this data.

Dave [0:05:17]: I mean, obviously, we we did this poll, so this is on us.

Dave [0:05:20]: But I think to me, this is, like, the same as asking, like, do you know if if SEO is working?

Dave [0:05:25]: And so I think there's, like, speaks to the deeper question inside of marketing teams, which is, like, how do we prove?

Dave [0:05:30]: It's not that…

Dave [0:05:31]: Can we prove that we're showing up an Ai search.

Dave [0:05:33]: I think that problem is solved It's…

Dave [0:05:35]: Can we prove that showing up an Ai search is actually driving leads, meetings, pipeline revenue, and that's kinda always gonna be the the million dollar question.

Dave [0:05:44]: I don't think anyone has ever figured fully attribution out.

Dave [0:05:47]: But this is still telling.

Dave [0:05:48]: I think there's a lot of questions here, and I think that's why we got these eight experts to hopefully dive in and give you something new.

Dave [0:05:54]: I want you to take notes at this session, get a couple of new ideas you can ring back to your team for Monday and start to make some progress here with Ae at your company.

Dasha [0:06:02]: The other thing we surveyed you guys on is what is your biggest Ae challenge and I I love it.

Dasha [0:06:07]: Not sure what actually works.

Dasha [0:06:09]: I insane.

Dasha [0:06:09]: That's why I'm here too.

Dasha [0:06:10]: I'm hosting, but I'm also learning.

Dasha [0:06:12]: I'm digging the transcript from this and sending it back to Claude and dis instill it down for insights for our team.

Dasha [0:06:17]: I also force my team to to show up to this webinar so.

Dasha [0:06:20]: Shelby and Brian, I hope you're in the chat.

Dasha [0:06:23]: Reveal yourselves.

Dasha [0:06:24]: Alright.

Dasha [0:06:25]: We are here to talk about what actually is working for eight marketers.

Dasha [0:06:28]: This is how it's gonna work.

Dasha [0:06:30]: So we've got eight speakers that we're gonna split everyone up into two groups So group one is gonna present.

Dasha [0:06:36]: They're gonna have two minutes to present their play.

Dasha [0:06:38]: They're gonna vote on who you want from group one to make it into the finals.

Dave [0:06:43]: This is important.

Dave [0:06:44]: Lots of people criticize us in the chat, but you don't listen to the instructions at the beginning of this folks it's a two minute teaser.

Dave [0:06:50]: So everyone's gonna come on.

Dave [0:06:52]: They're gonna tell you two minutes for why you should vote them into the next round.

Dave [0:06:55]: Okay?

Dave [0:06:56]: Then they're gonna get longer if they win.

Dave [0:06:59]: There's gonna be three people, two winners from each round and a wild card.

Dave [0:07:01]: We're gonna have three people that will each get four minutes in the back half of this session to go deep and tell you more about that topic.

Dave [0:07:08]: So you're gonna vote for the person who you want to see explain more, not who had the best presentation.

Dave [0:07:13]: Which of these eight people do you wanna see get more time on the clock to explain their their thing.

Dave [0:07:17]: Okay?

Dasha [0:07:18]: Okay?

Dasha [0:07:18]: And then questions as you go, you're gonna have questions because, you know, that's what happens when someone presents only for two minutes.

Dasha [0:07:24]: You're gonna have questions, ask them in the chat.

Dasha [0:07:26]: There's also in q and a function, and our speakers are gonna be hanging out in the chat and answer answering your questions.

Dasha [0:07:30]: Dave, what happens if someone wins?

Dasha [0:07:33]: What's gonna happen to the finalist is?

Dave [0:07:35]: And so if you win, we're adding a new thing where I'm gonna go to your house.

Dave [0:07:38]: I will live your house for seven days, and I will give you access to my Linkedin.

Dave [0:07:42]: No.

Dave [0:07:42]: We send up this handmade.

Dave [0:07:44]: Dan has custom made this trophy.

Dave [0:07:46]: It goes out.

Dave [0:07:47]: This is real Jessica Molly, Logan, spa rule.

Dave [0:07:51]: We actually send this trophy out in a world where we don't do anything in person or physically anymore.

Dave [0:07:56]: We're sending you this trophy.

Dave [0:07:58]: Who's it gonna be?

Dave [0:07:59]: Which one of these eight folks is gonna be the next to post this coveted Exit Five trophy on Linkedin.

Dave [0:08:05]: We will find out in about forty minutes.

Dasha [0:08:08]: Dan's getting so good at en inquiring too.

Dasha [0:08:10]: Okay.

Dasha [0:08:11]: Let's talk about our lineup.

Dasha [0:08:12]: We're gonna bring everyone on the stage and everyone is gonna give you a little spiel of who they are where they work and what they're gonna talk about today.

Dasha [0:08:20]: Alright, John This off.

Josh [0:08:23]: Hey, everybody.

Josh [0:08:23]: I am Josh Sc head of search marketing here at AirOps and I will be talking about our Air answer page and why it is one of our most cited pages.

Josh [0:08:32]: Then?

Vivek [0:08:34]: Everyone.

Vivek [0:08:34]: My name is Ta.

Vivek [0:08:35]: I'm from crossings that's crossings with a k, and I will be shedding an example of why thinking in terms of brand is just as important as thinking in terms of SEO tactics for a SEO visibility.

Dasha [0:08:48]: Love it.

Dasha [0:08:48]: Valerie.

Valerie [0:08:50]: I'm in Valerie Erie.

Valerie [0:08:50]: Up until recently, I was head of marketing at Gi.

Valerie [0:08:53]: Now I I'm living that fractional life.

Valerie [0:08:55]: And today, I will be talking about how to answer your CEO when they ask why you didn't show up when he chat G.

Dave [0:09:04]: Let's go.

Dave [0:09:04]: I love that.

Dasha [0:09:05]: Sean Round us out for group one.

Sean [0:09:08]: My name is michelle Bland from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Sean [0:09:10]: I run a category creation agency called Gate Studios, and I am talking about why most Ae advice is just SEO advice, so you should focus there.

Dasha [0:09:18]: Love it.

Dasha [0:09:18]: Okay.

Dasha [0:09:19]: And then group two Linda,

Linda [0:09:22]: Hey, everybody.

Linda [0:09:23]: I'm Linda, VP of communications at Mu bra, and generative Pulse.

Linda [0:09:27]: And today I'm gonna be talking to you about why most of what the Ai answers say about you is not in your control.

Linda [0:09:35]: And why or media journalism drives your visibility.

Linda [0:09:40]: Spicy.

Linda [0:09:41]: I like it.

Linda [0:09:42]: Pedro?

Pedro [0:09:43]: Hi, everyone.

Pedro [0:09:44]: My name is Per Das Silva, I d a SEO Strategy a bill.

Pedro [0:09:48]: And today I'm gonna be talking about, I'll, a bill we saw an increase of a a thirty percent in marketing and qualified leads quarter over quarter.

Dasha [0:09:56]: Love it.

Dasha [0:09:56]: Ross?

Ross [0:09:57]: Hey, everybody.

Ross [0:09:57]: Ross.

Ross [0:09:58]: CEO of speech media, I just wrote a book on Geo o.

Ross [0:10:02]: Today.

Ross [0:10:02]: I'm gonna be talking about Sci is geo o and some power credibility nuggets.

Dave [0:10:08]: Tell me what the heck is g.

Ross [0:10:11]: You know, I rebranded it.

Ross [0:10:12]: I ran rebranded.

Ross [0:10:13]: I apologies.

Lauren [0:10:15]: Lauren around us group too?

Lauren [0:10:18]: Yeah.

Lauren [0:10:18]: I'm Lauren.

Lauren [0:10:19]: I lead brand communications and product marketing at comp.

Lauren [0:10:22]: Today.

Lauren [0:10:23]: I'm going to tell you that your homepage might be beautiful.

Lauren [0:10:27]: It might even convert.

Lauren [0:10:29]: But it might be still costing you Ai recommendations.

Lauren [0:10:32]: So I'll tell you how to fix that if you vote for me, obviously.

Dasha [0:10:36]: Obviously.

Dasha [0:10:36]: Okay.

Dasha [0:10:37]: That is great.

Dasha [0:10:39]: Let's bring Joss on stage, kick off the timer and take it away.

Josh [0:10:45]: Let's go.

Josh [0:10:46]: So there's lots of stuff I can talk about with AirOps today, but I wanted to focus on one particular play that I did recently, and it is an AirOps answers page, and this is not a blog post.

Josh [0:10:56]: It's not a page, but it's actually our most cited page.

Josh [0:10:59]: So for example, it has over thirty five thousand citations, influencing LLM and Ai answers.

Josh [0:11:06]: This is over the past three months, and it also changed from my prompts here recently.

Josh [0:11:10]: And it was up to like, three hundred prompts, but it covers over two hundred and forty prompts.

Josh [0:11:14]: And then in q three of twenty twenty six, it touched over ten closed one deals worth over seven hundred k, and that is ten x, what a medium, a medium blog post would do.

Josh [0:11:27]: So this is a really great thing that lots of people can put in place this afternoon or even Monday and get going with that.

Josh [0:11:34]: And so if you vote me…

Josh [0:11:35]: Oh, wait.

Josh [0:11:35]: I forgot about this part.

Josh [0:11:36]: But don't even take my word for what you're about to see j h shirt, one of the most critical people in the SEO space.

Josh [0:11:44]: I probably have some people out here who could who could vouch for that.

Josh [0:11:46]: He loved this play.

Josh [0:11:48]: Cassandra at campfire labs.

Josh [0:11:50]: Used to be at animals.

Josh [0:11:51]: She also thought this was really interesting.

Josh [0:11:53]: And then I got lots of other comments about it when when I have shared this in the past.

Josh [0:11:58]: So this is a really great super actionable thing that everyone can literally do this afternoon.

Josh [0:12:04]: And so definitely vote me through, and I will show you how you can get started and exactly what you need.

Josh [0:12:10]: Epic call to action.

Dasha [0:12:13]: With thirty seconds left too, lead the people wanting more.

Dave [0:12:16]: Yeah.

Dave [0:12:16]: Yeah.

Dave [0:12:16]: Exactly.

Dave [0:12:17]: Andrea I also just put you in a body bag…

Dave [0:12:19]: I can't trust anyone who can't remember There's a second slide.

Dave [0:12:21]: So just as we'll see yourself out.

Josh [0:12:24]: Well, there was so much great stuff that I just had so much to say, but that slide speaks for itself.

Josh [0:12:28]: So many great people recommending this play.

Josh [0:12:30]: You have to check it out.

Josh [0:12:32]: So…

Josh [0:12:32]: Wrote me on.

Dasha [0:12:34]: Alrighty.

Dasha [0:12:34]: Kicking off the timer ready set.

Vivek [0:12:38]: Alright.

Vivek [0:12:38]: Hey, everyone.

Vivek [0:12:39]: My name is Vi.

Vivek [0:12:40]: I'm from crossing and I'm actually tuning in from Lisbon.

Vivek [0:12:42]: I feel like I'm the only person here who is shooting in from Europe, But anyway…

Dave [0:12:47]: It's ab…

Dave [0:12:47]: That's complete lander.

Dave [0:12:48]: There's some European Awesome.

Dave [0:12:50]: But if you're in your if you're Going the chat right now.

Dave [0:12:53]: Please

Vivek [0:12:54]: Alright.

Vivek [0:12:54]: And my is, I'm gonna show you how Brand first thinking actually took one of our supply chain industry lines from zero to forty four percent.

Vivek [0:13:02]: Ai visibility in just eight weeks In February, basically, their visibility was zero.

Vivek [0:13:07]: Showing up for absolutely nothing.

Vivek [0:13:09]: And even worse, as you can see from this little screenshot over here, if you zoom in, they were being mistaken for a marketing agency the same name.

Vivek [0:13:18]: Most Ae playbook at this point would have probably gone in, fix the site, make some technical changes.

Vivek [0:13:24]: The page clusters, what have you.

Vivek [0:13:26]: We actually solve this as a brand problem because Ai learns about you from, basically the entire Internet, not just your website.

Vivek [0:13:33]: So this was a brand recognition problem, and you can't optimize your way to brand awareness.

Vivek [0:13:38]: So essentially, what we did is we built one asset.

Vivek [0:13:40]: Just one landing page, and these are the results that we got.

Vivek [0:13:45]: Now, here's something I wanna point out, which would go out against SEO advice organic traffic actually decreased the whole time, but Ict traffic increased.

Vivek [0:13:54]: And in terms of reporting, we didn't just stop at a visibility score.

Vivek [0:13:58]: We actually used a bunch of metrics to tell a story that the Cmo could take to the board.

Vivek [0:14:03]: There were no page clusters, no major campaigns.

Vivek [0:14:06]: We built it from two data sources that most companies already have, but never seem to use.

Vivek [0:14:12]: So my pictures bought me through.

Vivek [0:14:14]: I'll show you what we did where we source the data from, which tools we used and how we measured success and told the story.

Vivek [0:14:22]: So that's it.

Vivek [0:14:24]: I think Honestly a long time.

Dave [0:14:26]: Good job.

Dave [0:14:26]: After you're done, scroll back up in the chat.

Dave [0:14:28]: Look at how many people are from Europe.

Dave [0:14:29]: Good job.

Dave [0:14:30]: There's five hundred and twenty one people here right now Fyi.

Dasha [0:14:36]: Okay.

Dasha [0:14:36]: I kicking off the timer.

Dasha [0:14:38]: Let's go.

Valerie [0:14:41]: Hi.

Valerie [0:14:41]: So kicking this off, raise your hand if you're CEO, head of sales or a board member ever asked you.

Valerie [0:14:46]: I googled it and why didn't me come up.

Valerie [0:14:48]: You're gonna wanna keep your hand up for the second question because now in twenty twenty six, it's…

Valerie [0:14:53]: I asked chad Gp, and we didn't come up.

Valerie [0:14:56]: So I'm gonna be talking about, and we all know as marketers.

Valerie [0:15:00]: That's not how this works.

Valerie [0:15:01]: That's not how any of this works.

Valerie [0:15:02]: And so we are gonna talk about how to collectively disprove that question, and got on top of it.

Valerie [0:15:09]: So well at Gift Deepgram, we really need to build a lot of the foundations, so starting q three last year.

Valerie [0:15:15]: We were doing things like Sc, updates, copy, updates, Faq builds, claims, there was just a lot going on.

Valerie [0:15:22]: And so if you are doing a whole bunch of different things at once and not one specific play, you need to prove that it's making an impact.

Valerie [0:15:29]: Right?

Valerie [0:15:29]: Then meanwhile, alarm making all these foundational changes in the dashboard.

Valerie [0:15:32]: We were seeing that paid inbound leads were going down.

Valerie [0:15:35]: I'm sure we weren't the only ones, and that direct organic traffic were going up, and we didn't know where it was coming from.

Valerie [0:15:41]: Because if someone's researching it in Chat or claw and they're arriving.

Valerie [0:15:45]: That's direct, and then the Crm is logging in as direct organic, your Ai and Influence is invisible.

Valerie [0:15:50]: We have the data the seventy percent, their love of citation on the bottom to back that up.

Valerie [0:15:56]: And so then we had a working hypothesis.

Valerie [0:15:58]: The CEO was, like, so is it Ae and I was, like, probably, but you can't say that you're going off vibes when you're answering a CEO.

Valerie [0:16:06]: But and so we needed to start tracking it for efforts and making impact However, only twenty two percent part of marketers were tracking Ai disability, and we were on the seventy eight percent side of that.

Valerie [0:16:17]: So we needed to start building it out.

Valerie [0:16:18]: And so we put together a three part framework.

Valerie [0:16:21]: This is part one.

Valerie [0:16:22]: We implemented cog.

Valerie [0:16:23]: Big shout out for them, love their tracking, and then we complemented it with Ae Hubspot, which is in beta and track those tools.

Valerie [0:16:32]: So for me to unlock the other two parts we started tracking the framework.

Dasha [0:16:37]: Alright.

Dasha [0:16:37]: We've got our last one in group four group one, our fourth…

Dasha [0:16:41]: Oh my god.

Dasha [0:16:42]: Okay.

Dasha [0:16:42]: Anyways, starting Timer.

Sean [0:16:45]: So guys.

Sean [0:16:45]: So I'm here to tell you is more a mindset shift that A, what works in Aa is SEO.

Sean [0:16:50]: And it really comes down to this, which is there are two stages two surfacing things in Ai chats, whether Ai finds you.

Sean [0:16:58]: And then whether it chooses to output you, we can control whether it finds us, but no one knows how it chooses to output us And do you wanna spend your one precious life on this planet of earth guessing it what the magic machines one from you.

Sean [0:17:09]: I say no focus on what you can control?

Sean [0:17:11]: Even the people who make these things don't know how they work.

Sean [0:17:14]: They don't know why they surface certain results.

Sean [0:17:16]: So how can you possibly guess that?

Sean [0:17:18]: I don't think you can.

Sean [0:17:19]: So let's focus on what we can control.

Sean [0:17:20]: Further, let's talk about some of the Ao advice you may hear today or elsewhere, which essentially boils down to SEO advice from twenty seventeen.

Sean [0:17:28]: In fact, you can replace the words in SEO advice and it holds for Ae.

Sean [0:17:32]: Like this one.

Sean [0:17:33]: You should build backlinks on sites that aren't yours.

Sean [0:17:35]: Great.

Sean [0:17:36]: Hr ahrefs told that in twenty twenty one.

Sean [0:17:37]: How about create thoughtful content that gets to the intent of the user.

Sean [0:17:41]: Awesome.

Sean [0:17:42]: M told us that in twenty seventeen.

Sean [0:17:43]: Create information gain content.

Sean [0:17:45]: Great.

Sean [0:17:46]: Search engine land told us that in twenty twenty thirty.

Sean [0:17:48]: So Later, if you vote for me, I'll share more data and what to do instead, including, I did an analysis of three hundred and seventy five B2B blogs.

Sean [0:17:56]: And the correlation between organic search traffic and Ai citation is point nine three.

Sean [0:18:01]: That's pretty tight.

Sean [0:18:02]: Which means if you get SEO rate, you'll get Ai right.

Sean [0:18:04]: Stop worrying about it.

Sean [0:18:05]: Go take a vacation instead.

Dasha [0:18:07]: I need Sean's voice on my alarm in the morning.

Dave [0:18:10]: Hold on.

Dave [0:18:10]: Hold on.

Dave [0:18:11]: I agree, but everyone's gonna leave the freaking webinar right now.

Dave [0:18:14]: Like, great job and also with the heck.

Dasha [0:18:17]: We love a contra.

Dasha [0:18:18]: Thank you.

Dasha [0:18:19]: Yeah.

Dasha [0:18:20]: Okay.

Dasha [0:18:21]: We're gonna vote?

Dasha [0:18:22]: Who did you love?

Dasha [0:18:23]: Who do you wanna see in the finals?

Dave [0:18:26]: Hell.

Dave [0:18:26]: So this is who was the best…

Dave [0:18:28]: What what who do you need to hear more from?

Dave [0:18:30]: Right?

Dave [0:18:30]: Based on what they just said, who do you need?

Dave [0:18:33]: We got five seconds.

Dave [0:18:34]: We're gonna wrap this vote.

Dave [0:18:35]: Wherever you are in the car on a plane, Star link on on United wherever you are, please pull over the side the road five four three, two, one.

Dave [0:18:45]: Hands up, put your hands up, put your hands up.

Dave [0:18:48]: The voting is complete.

Dave [0:18:50]: Wow.

Dave [0:18:51]: This is a tight one.

Dave [0:18:52]: Is it?

Dasha [0:18:54]: Yeah.

Dasha [0:18:54]: Yeah.

Dave [0:18:55]: Josh.

Dave [0:18:55]: The AirOps guide has juice the numbers and Josh is going next out.

Dave [0:18:59]: This gonna be really interesting because we have Sean and Valerie could be the wildcard.

Dave [0:19:05]: You never know.

Dave [0:19:06]: That's what's amazing about this format.

Dave [0:19:07]: Hashtag innovation.

Dave [0:19:09]: That's what the double m's, Marie Mercer.

Dave [0:19:10]: That's what they'll do you on these webinars.

Dave [0:19:12]: Alright.

Dave [0:19:12]: Let's keep it rolling Dasha.

Dave [0:19:13]: What do we got.

Dasha [0:19:14]: We got a timer.

Dasha [0:19:15]: I can call you that for free.

Dave [0:19:17]: Alright.

Dave [0:19:17]: Great.

Dave [0:19:17]: That's huge.

Dasha [0:19:19]: Let's go.

Dave [0:19:20]: We're back.

Linda [0:19:21]: Okay.

Linda [0:19:21]: So I'm Linda on VP communications at Mu, and I'm going to tell you about why pages you control aren't the way to get into the answer.

Linda [0:19:32]: So for us, one article was cited a hundred and fifty nine times, and it was our sync biggest driver of ai visibility.

Linda [0:19:39]: We didn't write it.

Linda [0:19:40]: We didn't own it, and we can't edit it.

Linda [0:19:41]: And it was published guess.

Linda [0:19:43]: April twenty twenty three.

Linda [0:19:45]: And it is still our number one say citation.

Linda [0:19:47]: So everything you own and everything you buy, at your site, your campaigns only adds up to sixteen percent of what Ai sites.

Linda [0:19:55]: How do we know?

Linda [0:19:56]: We looked at twenty five million links across Bt Claude and Gemini.

Linda [0:19:59]: Three times our fourth report is coming out next week.

Linda [0:20:03]: So journalism malone is nearly a third and paid is less than half a percent.

Linda [0:20:08]: So what I'm talking about for journalism, I'm talking about a reporter writing about you.

Linda [0:20:12]: Not your blog, not a press release not a paid placement, not your digital site.

Linda [0:20:16]: Pure earned media on a journalist list site written by a journalist.

Linda [0:20:20]: So what Ai says about you is all in essentially, pages that you just can't control.

Linda [0:20:27]: So We stopped theo, I we looked at it ourselves on our own earned media.

Linda [0:20:32]: I do comps for a comm tech platform.

Linda [0:20:34]: It is very meta, but we looked at it over nine months, a hundred nine prompts to seventy seven thousand.

Linda [0:20:40]: And we traced every single citation back to the exact piece of content that produced it.

Linda [0:20:45]: So earned content was cited seven times more than a press release.

Linda [0:20:51]: A press release is the paid distribution model.

Linda [0:20:54]: So that is paid, seven times more, and ten articles produced seventy percent of our citations.

Linda [0:21:01]: So the right articles matter here.

Linda [0:21:03]: The citation rate did not decay and that two thousand twenty three article gets cited as often as two thousand twenty six, and

Lauren [0:21:12]: if…

Lauren [0:21:12]: Alright.

Dasha [0:21:15]: She go.

Dasha [0:21:15]: We go in with their next speaker.

Dasha [0:21:17]: Let me timer Go.

Pedro [0:21:24]: Alright.

Pedro [0:21:24]: Everyone.

Pedro [0:21:25]: So talking here about how to increase qualified leads with a high intent Ao strategy.

Pedro [0:21:28]: A bill, we saw a thirty percent increase quarter over quarter coming from organic search with a combining with Ai referral traffic as well, which also got some recognition within a profound index report for the summer as the second largest mover and visibility in Ae within the Fintech and financial operations.

Pedro [0:21:46]: What we did pretty much is we identify high intent prompt strategy by focusing on prompts that actually cite brand names and not just informational.

Pedro [0:21:54]: Also how we mined sales calls with our potential customers to identify some prompts to track.

Pedro [0:22:01]: We also identified the top site side sources with an Ae and to find the third party sites representing eighty percent.

Pedro [0:22:08]: And now we build a tiger team led by the SEO team to execute the strategy, divide and conquer, to actually drive qualified leads to the business.

Pedro [0:22:17]: So if you choose me for the next round, I'll be talking more in detail what those strategies were.

Pedro [0:22:22]: I wouldn't want about it.

Pedro [0:22:24]: I'll be attracted and more metrics and their results as well

Dasha [0:22:28]: Wow.

Dasha [0:22:28]: Was a minute left?

Dave [0:22:30]: Yeah.

Dave [0:22:30]: What should we do?

Dave [0:22:30]: Should we donate it?

Dave [0:22:31]: Should we donate that to charity that remaining thirty…

Dave [0:22:34]: Forty five seconds.

Dave [0:22:35]: That's high Roi right there.

Dave [0:22:36]: Let's go.

Dave [0:22:37]: Let's keep going because then we'll have more hard time for to be some jokes.

Dave [0:22:41]: Yeah.

Dave [0:22:41]: If we keep going then we have more time to banter.

Dave [0:22:43]: So…

Dasha [0:22:44]: Alright.

Dasha [0:22:44]: I'm ready.

Dasha [0:22:45]: You ready?

Dasha [0:22:46]: Go.

Ross [0:22:47]: I'm ready.

Ross [0:22:47]: So we looked at five hundred instances on our peak of different sites we're tracking visibility for, and we saw that the sites that have the most visibility in the mid authority market.

Ross [0:22:56]: Have five plus trust symbols on their homepage compared to those that did not.

Ross [0:23:02]: So it's a linear path were the more trust symbols or credibility nuggets you have on your homepage, the more visibility you had in that mid authority segment, on average.

Ross [0:23:12]: So what do I mean by that?

Ross [0:23:13]: That's the awards that's the reviews, essentially saying, at the core, Cro is A, not geo.

Ross [0:23:19]: However you wanna call it, And the home homepage in particular is most important because that's fifteen x more bot requests than any other page.

Ross [0:23:26]: It's it's valuable.

Ross [0:23:27]: So how you do this fruitful?

Ross [0:23:28]: Ideally, you have text, yeah, that looks nice, A product team will love it.

Ross [0:23:32]: We don't know for sure that LLM everywhere can render this.

Ross [0:23:35]: You can use alt text on those awards the g two call outs for your category that can be helpful.

Ross [0:23:40]: The secondary thing beyond just the overall product reviews is what I would call a stats block.

Ross [0:23:46]: So you can pull out a stats with core first party or third party proof about your company.

Ross [0:23:50]: Here's Zen here's gorgeous for pronouncing you correctly properly.

Ross [0:23:54]: And you could see the details about their product usage that differentiates them, that LLM will pull out and reference and this makes sense why they're used so frequently.

Ross [0:24:02]: So it's not simply just the data points their logo, etcetera.

Ross [0:24:06]: It can be anything about your company.

Ross [0:24:08]: This near shore dev company.

Ross [0:24:09]: It's simply the quality of their clients and logos that is referenced by LLM specifically.

Ross [0:24:14]: You can use these nuggets and repurpose it across all the transactional content on your website.

Ross [0:24:19]: So that overcomes a core objection around first party or content in best x format because you're now pulling in third party data in first party proof that will get you reference and it won't matter if you're calling yourself number one because that's helpful.

Ross [0:24:33]: They hear some examples from that near shore dev, the logos, clutch, client retention stats, how many clients you have.

Ross [0:24:39]: These are all confidence inducing.

Ross [0:24:40]: Ahrefs has a ton of backlinks.

Ross [0:24:42]: That's specific to that landing page that matters, and you see it get pulled into the core thing.

Dasha [0:24:48]: We gotta do it.

Dasha [0:24:49]: We gotta do it for the people.

Dasha [0:24:50]: We gotta do it for the time.

Dasha [0:24:51]: If you wanted to hear more, vote him through.

Dasha [0:24:54]: We've got our final speaker, Lauren, take it away.

Lauren [0:24:59]: Alright.

Lauren [0:24:59]: Two and a half time.

Lauren [0:25:01]: So that is how much our home homepage Ai citation rate increased from April to September, and also our main product page, nearly triple two.

Lauren [0:25:09]: And no, we did not turn our homepage into a giant Faq.

Lauren [0:25:14]: Here is what we started with.

Lauren [0:25:17]: Lifestyle benefits at work that work.

Lauren [0:25:19]: Cute.

Lauren [0:25:20]: Super on brand.

Lauren [0:25:21]: But imagine someone asking Chad, what is the best platform for what we do, managing employee diapers, reimbursement, taxes.

Lauren [0:25:28]: Our was great at selling the dream, happier your employees, better culture and more flexibility, but where were the answers about all the actual software.

Lauren [0:25:37]: So that is the problem that I set out to solve.

Lauren [0:25:40]: Now as a brand and product marketer.

Lauren [0:25:41]: I can just, like, throw a thousand words of product documentation onto the homepage though was super tempting.

Lauren [0:25:47]: But I also couldn't expect Ai to recommend us based on just a great headlines and alone, so we re thought the page around three c's clear what do you sell?

Lauren [0:25:58]: Compelling what should buyers choose us and sight what specific information can Ai reference.

Lauren [0:26:04]: So we need our work category explicit.

Lauren [0:26:07]: On.

Lauren [0:26:08]: We address the administrative work Our buyers want to eliminate.

Lauren [0:26:11]: We got specific about our…

Lauren [0:26:13]: What our software actually does.

Lauren [0:26:14]: Now the hardest part wasn't figuring out what to add, but what not to add because you can give Ai every answer imaginable and end up with a homepage that is ugly and that no human wants to read.

Lauren [0:26:27]: So if you vote for me, I will show you where we drew the line, plus slick a five minute homepage test that you can run on Monday for free with no new tools acquired because the goal isn't to build a homepage that Ai loves and humans hate.

Lauren [0:26:41]: Come on people.

Dasha [0:26:43]: That was epic.

Dasha [0:26:43]: Lauren, someone in the chats that I love your voice, and I agree.

Dasha [0:26:46]: You do the, like, human parenthesis thing.

Dasha [0:26:48]: It's awesome.

Dasha [0:26:49]: Okay.

Dasha [0:26:50]: We're doing a vote.

Dasha [0:26:50]: Who do you wanna see in round the final round?

Dave [0:26:56]: Which Ae idea deserves a deeper dive.

Dave [0:26:58]: Who was it?

Dave [0:26:58]: Who is it gonna be?

Dave [0:26:59]: Is gonna be Linda?

Dave [0:27:00]: Pedro.

Dave [0:27:01]: Ross.

Dave [0:27:01]: Lauren, who do you need to have?

Dave [0:27:04]: Who do you need to have?

Dave [0:27:05]: Who do you need to have backup up here to teach you to see what matters.

Dave [0:27:08]: Holy cow.

Dave [0:27:09]: There's so many people here since staying how quick these votes happen.

Dave [0:27:12]: Look at Lauren, just running laps right now.

Dasha [0:27:16]: Ripping.

Dasha [0:27:16]: Just totally amazing in the…

Dasha [0:27:18]: Yeah.

Dasha [0:27:18]: This is awesome.

Dasha [0:27:19]: More people wanna hear Lauren voice.

Dave [0:27:22]: And you know what There's no offense, no offense not respectfully none taken, but there can only be…

Dave [0:27:27]: There can only be three people that are gonna advance.

Dave [0:27:29]: That's what makes this form.

Dave [0:27:30]: This format, such a smash.

Dave [0:27:32]: Good thing we had Claude to come up with a webinar topic that works so well for us.

Dave [0:27:36]: Right?

Dave [0:27:37]: Wink Wink.

Dave [0:27:37]: Okay.

Dave [0:27:37]: I think we can call it.

Dave [0:27:39]: So we got…

Dave [0:27:39]: Who was our first one?

Dave [0:27:40]: Things have happened so fast.

Dave [0:27:41]: Who's our first winner?

Dave [0:27:41]: Josh.

Dave [0:27:42]: Josh.

Dave [0:27:43]: Shout to Josh.

Dave [0:27:44]: We got Lauren.

Dave [0:27:45]: Who's the wildcard card?

Dave [0:27:47]: Producers behind the scenes.

Dave [0:27:48]: Who's the wildcard card?

Dave [0:27:49]: Hold on.

Dave [0:27:50]: Give us a minute.

Dave [0:27:50]: We gotta tally the votes.

Dave [0:27:51]: We gotta sharpie them up real quick.

Dave [0:27:53]: That's a tight…

Dave [0:27:54]: I don't know who that is.

Dave [0:27:55]: Yeah.

Dave [0:27:56]: Okay.

Dave [0:27:56]: Valerie.

Dave [0:27:56]: Shout to Valerie.

Dave [0:27:57]: Okay.

Dave [0:27:57]: So we got Josh.

Dave [0:27:58]: Lauren and Valerie moving on to the final round.

Dave [0:28:02]: Dasha, let's keep this thing rolling no naps, No naps We're ripping right now.

Dave [0:28:06]: Let's keep this pace going because, you know, no one has a real attention span today.

Dave [0:28:10]: So we have to keep going.

Dave [0:28:11]: So let's keep going.

Dasha [0:28:12]: Do it?

Dasha [0:28:12]: Okay.

Dasha [0:28:12]: Everyone in the final round has four minutes.

Dasha [0:28:14]: And we will continue to be ruthless.

Dasha [0:28:16]: You can yell us in the chat.

Dasha [0:28:18]: Alright.

Dasha [0:28:18]: Let's take it off.

Dasha [0:28:19]: Josh, take it away.

Josh [0:28:21]: I'll be honest here.

Josh [0:28:21]: I don't know how many slides that have coming up, but it'll be great for everyone involved and I promise you you will not have to get your marketing leaders to sign off on a homepage redesign with this page.

Josh [0:28:33]: Because what you're gonna do is you are gonna create one page that for every question that buyers ask about you.

Josh [0:28:40]: So what we did here, was we went live with a very simple what is Air page.

Josh [0:28:45]: It's always there.

Josh [0:28:46]: Always present.

Josh [0:28:47]: The answer comes first in that paragraph.

Josh [0:28:49]: And then we have seven different sections that answer buyer questions directly.

Josh [0:28:54]: Inc inc q and a's, and then our proof is there in each and every answer.

Josh [0:28:59]: So here's an example of what it is.

Josh [0:29:01]: You can go to airops.com/answers to check it out.

Josh [0:29:04]: And how do you set up a page like this?

Josh [0:29:07]: So it has seventy six questions with six types of questions that buyers are asking.

Josh [0:29:12]: So twenty eight of them or how does it work?

Josh [0:29:14]: Eighteen is comparing it against other tools.

Josh [0:29:17]: Nine of those questions are about use cases and fit.

Josh [0:29:20]: And then it's what it is buying an evaluation, like, how does Air pricing actually work with the features and then proof and trust, which companies are using AirOps today?

Josh [0:29:31]: What are some of the values are getting out of it.

Josh [0:29:33]: And so another great thing.

Josh [0:29:34]: I don't even know if I have a slide on this.

Josh [0:29:36]: So I'm gonna say it now.

Josh [0:29:37]: Is this really improves your internal linking to all of your pages across it.

Josh [0:29:41]: So as you can see here where I have use cases and fit.

Josh [0:29:44]: You can link over to your platform pages, link over to your solution pages, proof and trust, link out to those g two pages, link out to your use cases, buying evaluation.

Josh [0:29:52]: Link out to your pricing pages.

Josh [0:29:54]: This becomes a backbone for all of your internal linking across your site, especially for those branded search results.

Josh [0:30:01]: Okay?

Josh [0:30:02]: And so here's a great example.

Josh [0:30:03]: As chad Y teams are picking and the Ai answers page comes up.

Josh [0:30:07]: Here's one example, why do some teams adopt air over traditional Ai tools.

Josh [0:30:11]: You can see that page being cited right there.

Josh [0:30:14]: And, yes, this is the Air interface.

Josh [0:30:16]: I just pulled that the other day.

Josh [0:30:18]: And so why this page matters?

Josh [0:30:20]: Your own content shapes what Ai says about you.

Josh [0:30:24]: Lots of stuff out there from our end and from others about third party sources being an important source for how your brand is mentioned at L.

Josh [0:30:30]: That is all true.

Josh [0:30:32]: But where do they pull from initially?

Josh [0:30:34]: It's coming from your own content.

Josh [0:30:35]: So your own content serves as an important function for LLM and for other parties in other sites to pull from?

Josh [0:30:42]: And then, second reason it answers, questions that lead directly to revenue.

Josh [0:30:46]: And so that includes pricing comparisons use cases.

Josh [0:30:49]: And to be perfectly honest as we all know, we're not exactly sure of which pages are always gonna be cited or pulled in an answer.

Josh [0:30:57]: And so this helps to shape that narrative.

Josh [0:30:59]: And then again, yes, this is the number one that cited URL on airops.com beyond our docs pages beyond our home pages.

Josh [0:31:06]: And again, this is something you can set up right away using all of your sales questions, customer calls, all those types of things.

Josh [0:31:13]: And yes, this page influences revenue.

Josh [0:31:15]: Like I said before, it influenced several closed one deals it contributed to pipeline with over two hundred and fifty In q three.

Josh [0:31:23]: And then maybe this could be the main reason.

Josh [0:31:26]: This is one page.

Josh [0:31:28]: That is easy see to refresh as your product changes.

Josh [0:31:31]: We have lots of workflows and that helps you do that.

Josh [0:31:34]: Lots of playbook and air that help you make those changes, stay up to date as your product, as your positioning changes as you can add new product lines.

Josh [0:31:42]: This page is something easy that you can refresh right away.

Josh [0:31:46]: I do have some more slides here.

Josh [0:31:47]: It looks like.

Josh [0:31:48]: Okay.

Josh [0:31:48]: So what are you gonna do?

Josh [0:31:49]: You're gonna track the questions.

Josh [0:31:50]: You're gonna add answer them in short direct answers with proof.

Josh [0:31:54]: And again, this page index, very quickly.

Josh [0:31:57]: And then we try to do a refresh on this every time our product or positioning changes, but you could also set, like, a monthly or quarterly, scheduled for that as well to refresh it.

Josh [0:32:06]: And then, yes, start your page.

Josh [0:32:08]: I put Monday on here.

Josh [0:32:09]: You could start this afternoon.

Josh [0:32:10]: Here go to AirOps answers, airops.com/answers.

Josh [0:32:14]: Find twenty questions that buyers ask about you.

Josh [0:32:17]: That's step one.

Josh [0:32:18]: The other steps are here.

Josh [0:32:19]: Please sure and vote for me.

Josh [0:32:21]: See you later.

Dave [0:32:23]: Alright, Josh.

Dave [0:32:23]: Go in the chat.

Dave [0:32:24]: Go in the chat.

Dave [0:32:25]: There's a thousand questions for you to go in the chat and answer.

Dave [0:32:27]: I think one of the funny things is when the music comes on, people just start talking louder, like, it's gonna go away.

Dave [0:32:34]: It's so so great.

Dave [0:32:35]: Yeah.

Josh [0:32:36]: True.

Dave [0:32:37]: Yeah.

Dave [0:32:37]: Alright.

Dave [0:32:37]: She's back.

Valerie [0:32:39]: She's back…

Dave [0:32:39]: Be the might be the number one vote at of all time.

Dave [0:32:41]: I don't know.

Dave [0:32:42]: I've never that I don't think anyone has never had that many votes because there's never been that many people here, but she's…

Lauren [0:32:47]: On my grave, Dave.

Dave [0:32:49]: I'll be your grave.

Dave [0:32:49]: You don't have to die freaking Linkedin.

Lauren [0:32:52]: Oh, good.

Lauren [0:32:52]: It's like, okay.

Lauren [0:32:52]: Well, sure.

Lauren [0:32:53]: Alright.

Lauren [0:32:54]: We start the timer?

Lauren [0:32:55]: Great.

Lauren [0:32:56]: I promised you that I would show you what we actually changed.

Lauren [0:32:59]: So here is our homepage at the beginning of the year.

Lauren [0:33:02]: And I can hate on it because I wrote it and designed it.

Lauren [0:33:05]: And here is our home homepage.

Lauren [0:33:08]: Now.

Lauren [0:33:08]: So because our hero section, obviously.

Lauren [0:33:10]: The design is different throughout the page, but what's more important is what the page communicates.

Lauren [0:33:15]: So before we talked a lot about employee happiness, flexible benefits.

Lauren [0:33:19]: Sadly, that is all fluff.

Lauren [0:33:21]: Now within seconds, you know what comp does.

Lauren [0:33:25]: Who it's for?

Lauren [0:33:25]: The problem it solves.

Lauren [0:33:27]: And really interesting decisions happen farther down the page.

Lauren [0:33:30]: I don't have screenshots for those.

Lauren [0:33:31]: That's me plugging our website go to comms.io.

Lauren [0:33:33]: There were three things that I kept coming back to.

Lauren [0:33:37]: Number one, do not make people guess what you sell.

Lauren [0:33:40]: We moved away from leading with a clever headline and made our product category explicit.

Lauren [0:33:46]: That's important for buyers, obviously, But it's also important when Ai tools are trying to decide whether they're going to recommend you or whether you belong within a particular recommendation.

Lauren [0:33:57]: Second is to show the problem and ben explain how you solve it.

Lauren [0:34:02]: Sounds easy.

Lauren [0:34:03]: For comp that meant taking…

Lauren [0:34:05]: Talking about spreadsheets talking about manual reimbursement.

Lauren [0:34:08]: All the administrative work that comes with managing employee.

Lauren [0:34:11]: But we did not stop at saying that we make Hr life easier because That would be too simple.

Lauren [0:34:17]: We added concrete explanations of how the software actually works the nitty gritty.

Lauren [0:34:22]: It's boring, but it gets the job done.

Lauren [0:34:25]: Program rules, tax treatment and payroll, reimbursement.

Lauren [0:34:28]: Those are details that our buyer needs to evaluate us, and they're also specific information that an Ai tool can reference when explaining our capabilities.

Lauren [0:34:38]: Third, and this is probably the most important.

Lauren [0:34:42]: You've gotta know when to stop girl.

Lauren [0:34:44]: You gotta know when to stop because our homepage does not need to answer every possible question about employee benefits.

Lauren [0:34:52]: There's a whole rest of a website for that.

Lauren [0:34:54]: It needs to answer the important questions to help someone quickly understand and evaluate comp.

Lauren [0:35:01]: So we made our products easier to identify.

Lauren [0:35:04]: We separated what is included from optional add ons we brought common buyer questions onto the homepage.

Lauren [0:35:11]: There's an Faq section.

Lauren [0:35:12]: You can see it's right above our photo Cta.

Lauren [0:35:14]: And we linked to deeper pages for more detail.

Lauren [0:35:17]: Now we also, secretly, but not so secretly.

Lauren [0:35:20]: Overhaul our navigation and our footer, so those pages were easier to find.

Lauren [0:35:25]: And then also when we introduced some Ai capabilities, where we were putting some more product features out there, we didn't just slap the words Ai powered on the homepage, we actually showed what that means with some product screenshots.

Lauren [0:35:37]: Now the point is we weren't adding more content for the sake of doing so.

Lauren [0:35:42]: We were giving every single section on this page a specific job results.

Lauren [0:35:47]: I highlighted our citation growth earlier.

Lauren [0:35:50]: We track those page level citations in a tool called Gauge.

Lauren [0:35:53]: But as a product marketer, I also care about what happens when people reach our website.

Lauren [0:35:58]: So we're looking at Ga four in Hubspot too.

Lauren [0:36:00]: So across five priority pages that I'm measuring are tracked conversion rate improved from q one to q three, thirty four percent.

Lauren [0:36:06]: You have slightly less traffic.

Lauren [0:36:08]: We were down, like, six percent, honestly.

Lauren [0:36:10]: Sql grew twelve percent year over year in q three.

Lauren [0:36:13]: Now, obviously, we're doing a lot more work than that.

Lauren [0:36:16]: Right?

Lauren [0:36:16]: We're doing earned media.

Lauren [0:36:17]: We're doing founder or brand.

Lauren [0:36:18]: We're doing content, But that's why we're looking at both…

Lauren [0:36:21]: Are we getting discovered and are we giving buyers a reason to take action.

Lauren [0:36:25]: So here's the part you can steal.

Lauren [0:36:27]: It costs absolutely nothing to get started?

Lauren [0:36:29]: No Ae platform?

Lauren [0:36:30]: No new software?

Lauren [0:36:31]: First.

Lauren [0:36:32]: Name the thing is your product category explicit.

Lauren [0:36:35]: Two.

Lauren [0:36:36]: Have you given Ai concrete reason to recommend you?

Lauren [0:36:39]: Three, link it.

Lauren [0:36:40]: Link it.

Lauren [0:36:41]: If you're missing any of those things, you found your starting point.

Lauren [0:36:44]: So don't make it easy for ai to just understand what you sell, give a reason to recommend you.

Dasha [0:36:49]: That was great.

Dasha [0:36:50]: Go read the chat, and the people love you.

Dasha [0:36:52]: I think I'm obsessed with you.

Dave [0:36:53]: Yeah.

Dave [0:36:53]: Like, literally in the middle of that, she sends a message to Marissa and Maria was like, I need to book her on the podcast.

Dave [0:36:58]: And I'm like, not now.

Dave [0:36:59]: This is, like, asking the shout.

Valerie [0:37:01]: Dave gave me.

Dave [0:37:01]: Is so my…

Dave [0:37:02]: This is she…

Dave [0:37:03]: I was like this is like, going up to the chef in the middle of dinner and being, like, when's the staff meal?

Dasha [0:37:08]: And I.

Dasha [0:37:08]: I deserve that, but Lauren, I think it speaks to how how great your present was.

Dasha [0:37:12]: Yeah.

Dasha [0:37:13]: I almost broke Maria flow for that for you for you.

Dasha [0:37:16]: She Okay.

Dasha [0:37:17]: We've got our wild card, take it away.

Valerie [0:37:22]: You love a wild card.

Valerie [0:37:23]: This is where I left off where I think the music started playing.

Valerie [0:37:27]: So three part attribution model, so this is my four minute park, but I actually prepared it guys, where the Ai influence goes, again, coming back to that seventy percent are coming up as invisible.

Valerie [0:37:40]: So we put together three parts for this framework.

Valerie [0:37:43]: One, Ai visibility tools.

Valerie [0:37:45]: This tracks where Ai sites you.

Valerie [0:37:47]: But it's gonna miss where anyone clicked.

Valerie [0:37:49]: The next is web analytics, it will see visits direct growth, but it's gonna miss let's sent them.

Valerie [0:37:55]: And then three sales conversations who says Ai sent them, and it's gonna miss anyone who never said.

Valerie [0:38:01]: So each of these alone are kind of weak.

Valerie [0:38:03]: Directional, you can kind of see things here you're seeing traffic, here seeing live feedback, but to combined with our powers combined for any other eighties children.

Valerie [0:38:13]: They will do the same direction, we'll give you that signal that you need.

Valerie [0:38:19]: So to combine, they triangulate so that you can make sure that the…

Valerie [0:38:22]: And work that you're doing is driving an impact.

Valerie [0:38:24]: So the first layer of this is the Ai ability.

Valerie [0:38:27]: This is our leading indicator.

Valerie [0:38:28]: This is what's going to move first.

Valerie [0:38:30]: So we implemented Cog, great tool was one of early adopter there and it's grown a lot over the last year, and we were tracking prompts that buyers were actually asking best gift card platform really specific prompts we were tracking over two hundred of them.

Valerie [0:38:44]: We watched the citation right there, share of voice against competitors, whether we're recommended or just listed and what that sentiment analysis is.

Valerie [0:38:52]: And then we also cross check that with Hubspot Ae.

Valerie [0:38:55]: And that is was and still is in beta and had a much less number of prompts that you can do.

Valerie [0:39:01]: So we actually ratio out the prompts based on our Ict, our industries are different topics so that we could kind of cross reference than volume of citations.

Valerie [0:39:10]: In both platforms.

Valerie [0:39:12]: That way we can cross check them because we know that they're running at different time.

Valerie [0:39:16]: Sometimes you would see maybe, like, a little bit of a disconnect.

Valerie [0:39:18]: And so with those two reports, we would combine them, analyze them, If they generally agree or going in the same direction We were trusting the trend when they do birds is when we would start to investigate.

Valerie [0:39:29]: Is there one Ic that's kind of dropping or one, industry that's not being side cited as much was there one prompt that was getting a ton of visibility on Hug, but isn't coming up on Hubspot Ae.

Valerie [0:39:39]: While we felt that Hug was really robust since Hubspot natively lived in our Crm.

Valerie [0:39:44]: We wanted to be able to utilize.

Valerie [0:39:46]: It and since it was in free and in beta, I thought that was a great way to, again, combine them and look for that directional accuracy.

Valerie [0:39:54]: And then the next is traffic signals, I actually saw at the beginning of the webinar, a couple people were talking about Ga four and tracking that in the Ai assistant, natively, in Google.

Valerie [0:40:04]: This was added in May twenty twenty six.

Valerie [0:40:05]: There are some shortcomings with it, which I think is kind of what we were chatting about in the chat.

Valerie [0:40:10]: It's not retroactive.

Valerie [0:40:11]: Sometimes it nice complexity.

Valerie [0:40:12]: It's not great on Gemini.

Valerie [0:40:13]: We created a custom channel group.

Valerie [0:40:15]: To pull in the platforms that we really cared about the most, and that also echoed what we were tracking in Ta because you can pick which platforms and all you wanted to track.

Valerie [0:40:24]: And then in addition to that, we were…

Valerie [0:40:26]: We set that up one time, and then watch monthly brandon search and direct.

Valerie [0:40:30]: Again, citations move first.

Valerie [0:40:32]: That's the the leading and then our lagging indicator was this layer number two.

Valerie [0:40:36]: And then the third, this is something that you can do really quickly and easily, we set up a gong channel that listens to all calls, but flag specifically and listens for any time a prospect says that they found us.

Valerie [0:40:46]: To Ai.

Valerie [0:40:47]: So constantly listening and manually updating a custom field in our Hubspot property that then gets pushed both from the contact level and then falls to the deal, and then we did really deep training for all of our client using and teams with Bd at ease, Am Cs to always ask that questions that we can follow from the contact level all the way down.

Valerie [0:41:07]: And this a new example

Lauren [0:41:08]: of the report.

Lauren [0:41:08]: And I got cut off.

Lauren [0:41:09]: Right.

Dave [0:41:10]: Good job.

Dave [0:41:10]: That's it.

Dave [0:41:11]: So we got them all.

Dave [0:41:12]: So this is it Now now's is the time to pick the winner, Who will be the next owner of the coveted Exit Five live handmade Trophy?

Dave [0:41:22]: Is it gonna be Josh?

Dave [0:41:23]: Is it gonna be Valerie?

Dave [0:41:24]: Is it gonna be Lauren.

Dave [0:41:26]: It's close right now.

Dave [0:41:28]: It's close.

Dave [0:41:29]: Seventy three thirty six ninety two, just set just roasting out numbers.

Dave [0:41:34]: Okay.

Dave [0:41:34]: So, hey, While we pick a winner right here, I I have a question for all of you, if y'all let me take a question.

Dave [0:41:38]: We're trying to just we had some questions a chat, but a higher level question right now.

Dave [0:41:43]: What advice would you give to someone who needs to go and talk about Ae back to the leadership team.

Dave [0:41:49]: Right?

Dave [0:41:49]: Like, today was very tactic focus.

Dave [0:41:51]: Here's how I did this that led to this thing, but If I need to go back and explain where we need to invest, how do we think about this?

Dave [0:41:58]: Any advice from the three of you?

Dave [0:41:59]: Like, where do you start?

Dave [0:42:01]: How do you have this conversation with leadership around the things that you need to be doing for from a Ao standpoint?

Josh [0:42:07]: Yeah.

Josh [0:42:07]: I mean, we…

Josh [0:42:08]: We…

Josh [0:42:08]: We're all thinking about this world of of, like, balancing the performance versus the brand awareness, and I would say it's multiple things like attributing for that.

Josh [0:42:15]: What we're seeing is a lot of increase from our direct and also organic.

Josh [0:42:18]: Search.

Josh [0:42:19]: I mean, branded organic search coming through.

Josh [0:42:21]: But then when we ask people, like, and how did you hear about this type forms, they do mention Ai search or Ai referrals, Ga four has started tracking some more of those Ai assistance and referrals.

Josh [0:42:31]: So the measurement there is still a work in progress, but but a lot's coming along.

Dave [0:42:36]: Yeah.

Dave [0:42:36]: Go ahead longer value you wanna build on that.

Lauren [0:42:39]: Yeah.

Lauren [0:42:39]: Same kind of thing happened for us because we use Hubspot.

Lauren [0:42:41]: We were seeing pretty sharp increase in the number of chat Referrals that were coming in specifically.

Lauren [0:42:47]: And that was before we even got, like, an Ai tool and decided to do that because we wanted a little bit more visibility into what we were doing, and we were able to get the funding in our marketing budget for an Ai tool because we were able to prove, like, there's something happening here.

Lauren [0:43:02]: Like, people are coming in through Chap Gp, they're having conversations with our sales team, and we've had a lot of closed one as a result.

Lauren [0:43:09]: So because we've seen some revenue coming in as a result, then we get more money for it.

Lauren [0:43:15]: But to be fair, like, our CEO is is pretty down with the Ai stuff.

Lauren [0:43:19]: So oh, that helps.

Valerie [0:43:22]: I think it's just a matter of, just streamlining at all.

Valerie [0:43:25]: I think that was really, like, the big conversation, which is why I focused on reporting.

Valerie [0:43:28]: Right?

Valerie [0:43:28]: Like, you're doing the whole bunch of little things.

Valerie [0:43:30]: And because you're all figuring out at the same time, I think just starting to document is really what started to make that shift.

Valerie [0:43:35]: And once you kind of start the documentation, you can build upon it and then to Lawrence point once you can get a couple of documented wins and revenue on the board, then you know, that you can start to to really then invest with both just resources and not just free free efforts.

Dave [0:43:50]: Alright.

Dave [0:43:50]: So we have we the final…

Dave [0:43:51]: We have the final results and in our our winner.

Dave [0:43:53]: The latest trophy holder.

Dasha [0:43:57]: Jerome role.

Dave [0:43:58]: Who was it?

Dave [0:43:58]: Do you know?

Dave [0:43:58]: I forgot.

Dave [0:43:59]: No.

Dave [0:44:00]: Know one's Lauren.

Dave [0:44:02]: Yeah.

Dave [0:44:02]: It's was lauren.

Dave [0:44:02]: Yeah.

Dave [0:44:03]: Yeah Right.

Dave [0:44:05]: Am I right?

Dasha [0:44:06]: Yeah.

Dasha [0:44:06]: Yeah.

Dasha [0:44:06]: You're right.

Dasha [0:44:07]: You're right.

Dasha [0:44:07]: Right.

Dasha [0:44:07]: You're.

Dasha [0:44:08]: Alright.

Dasha [0:44:08]: And you just have came so long but.

Dasha [0:44:10]: I was, like, you you got this…

Valerie [0:44:12]: It was lauren.

Dave [0:44:12]: Time for speech.

Dave [0:44:13]: Thank you for that.

Dave [0:44:14]: We'll hook you up with the trophy.

Dave [0:44:15]: You'll be the next person that hopefully posted on Linkedin way to go.

Dave [0:44:18]: Josh Lauren Valerie, all the other folks behind the scenes right now.

Dave [0:44:23]: Thank you for coming on.

Dave [0:44:24]: The big value prop here is just getting out there learning from other humans who actually have stakes and have something on the line when you just ask Claude a question about marketing.

Dave [0:44:32]: They don't have the same risk and steaks that you do.

Dave [0:44:35]: So thank you.

Dave [0:44:35]: There's also a pull up here.

Dave [0:44:37]: We measure all these sessions.

Dave [0:44:38]: Did you find this session valuable I see a bunch of people voted for that.

Dave [0:44:41]: Thank you for that.

Dave [0:44:42]: And, right, We're back here next week.

Dave [0:44:44]: We're gonna try to get a bunch of our speakers in here to do more stuff like this in our community, the discussion board in there, get a bunch of questions to your Ae questions, Geo questions, whatever you wanna call it, We'll do an Ama in there, and we're back here.

Dave [0:44:57]: Maybe hypothetically, a little Halloween themed episode next week.

Dave [0:45:02]: I would tune in.

Dave [0:45:03]: Absolutely.

Dave [0:45:04]: Dasha and I have a little…

Dave [0:45:05]: You know, we got a little something.

Dave [0:45:06]: The team's got a little someone.

Dave [0:45:07]: Thank you.

Dave [0:45:08]: Marissa Maria, Everyone behind the scenes, Dan, Ben, Anna Allison, Matt.

Dave [0:45:13]: Shout out to you all.

Dave [0:45:14]: What an awesome time.

Dave [0:45:16]: Great job, everybody.

Dave [0:45:17]: We'll see you here next week for another world famous Exit Five live session.

Dave [0:45:21]: Thank you.

Dasha [0:45:22]: Yeah.

Dasha [0:45:22]: Bye.

Dave [0:45:27]: Hey.

Dave [0:45:27]: Real quick before we wrap up, I just wanna give a quick shout out to all the stuff that we're doing at exitfive.com.

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