SEO Is Dead… 5 Ways To Save Your Business In 2024

is Google search traffic in Decline that is the topic of today's show we go through posts of businesses shutting down because of Google's latest update we go through what we think are some potential replacements for search traffic if you've been affected and if you're a company relying on Google search today just what should you do we give you the answers that's on today's marketing against the Green I'm Kieran Flanigan here as always with my co-host kit Bodner let's get into Today's Show [Music] on today's show we are breaking down what the hell is happening in SEO are you noticing your traffic from gole starting to go down we're going to tell you why that's happening and what to do about it there have been two updates we we're going to talk about those I'm going to share just like the saddest Reddit page on the internet as part of this discussion and then we're going to talk about how you should think about evolving and what you should think about do doing going forward all right so so Kieran there there are two Google algorithm updates the first one was in February and it was was really to to start fighting AI spam instead of Link spam because Google was concerned that that people are going to go out create a lot of informational content with these large language models build up th hundreds and thousands of pages to try to attract traffic right which by the way is not was not a terrible strategy but what's happened if you are have like blog articles and website pages that are basically basic longtail informational queries which is just like a long like howto advice kind of thing you're getting hit your ranking for those keywords went down in February we have a lot of those pages of HubSpot we saw our rankings go down I've talked to everybody from Big Brands to Media companies and everyone in between they've all seen the same thing it is universal and across the board did you see a slight recovery in that afterwards like February was like a decline and then it didn't come back up to where it was but it did recover a little bit that's what I've heard a bunch of people say is they saw like a star Decline and then a little bit of recovery not a ton of recovery we in the going forward we can talk about the recovery the recovery is more from updating and improving articles that were not hit as hard which we can which we we could talk about but that there it was a pretty hard hit and then we had a second update in March and the March update basically instead of dranking those informational sites more didn't do that but what it did is increased the ranking of community-driven sites like Reddit and quora things that are very very hard to replicate with large language models and artificial intelligence and so while your informational article might have been amazing if there's a really great Reddit thread on that your informational article is moving down the search rankings and subsequently we know every place you move down the search rankings less clicks less traffic coming back to your website so those two updates combined have sent the SEO industry and search as a channel for marketers really into kind of like a death spiral like I have SE I haven't seen this much like sadness and despair in marketing in quite a while before before we get back to Today's Show here's a quick word from HubSpot if you're a marketer one thing I know for sure is you love data and boy we have data for you the 2024 state of marketing Port is chocked full of data and insights around the current trends that are shaping the marketing industry today things like artificial intelligence you know I love AI tools personalization influencer marketing all of the topics that are key to getting a competitive Advantage this year it's going to make sure you're not stuck in Old strategies and old tactics so click that link in the description and go get your free copy of the 2024 state of marketing report today now let's get back to Today's Show Kier and I present to you yeah my nomination for the saddest marketing page on the internet and five days ago in Reddit a redditor started is Google killing the SEO in is Google killing the SEO industry this is in r/ SEO the SEO uh Reddit and I've been in the industry for over a DE decade I've always had long-term high value clients for Content writing recently 80% of my clients have either terminated the contract or revised it down significantly and then you go on to read and it is just like comment after comment about people close having to close their business right it's like oh I have this media site it's it's I I have to close I have this Niche I had to close and you know somebody even called out that the tech Niche has been in Decline since the Panda and Penguin updates which we we just talked about but this is just you have an SEO person saying time to diversify into other niches to be just an SEO guy is perhaps not broad enough agreed the there's another couple of things going on within this in that um so the point that you point the thing that you pointed out was Google are prioritized on large aggregators now it's like community community aggregators but that that those sites are doing much better than these kind of Standalone content businesses I've also seen a lot of people who who whose keywords have remained pretty static like they have not declined in Ranken but they have declined in traffic and that that's just a continuation of what we see Google wanting to do which is if you go all the way back to the featured snippet box right that was really Google's first play on a AI chat like experience where they would explain explain that more explain what the snipper the snippet is and why Google wanted to do it so the feature snippet is you know people will remember when Google first launched this it is the knowledge box on the on the search page and what Google does is basically they try to kick this snippet most relevant to your search from a web page and construct an answer on the on the first page of Google uh within this kind of knowledge box right and I remember way back when we were doing this in HubSpot and we were looking to see how we could get into those feature Snippets and starting to see we could actually get traffic from them and it was like real head or Miss in terms of understanding how to get how to get your content featured in this little box in the first page of Google Now if you actually think about what Google were doing back then they were like well there some queries that a user has that probably can just be answered by the kind of AI engine because Google's search is like an AI engine it's an AI algorithm and they we don't need them to visit the publisher so that was really the first like you know shot thrown by Google against Publishers and that like we will we will take your content we'll take we will determine what we think is the best part of that content and we'll just show it to the user on our site and they they don't need to visit your site and so there's a bunch of information queries that could be answered on the first page of Google and you no longer needed to go to the publisher site even though they were using the Publishers content now that is a better user experience right like and so this is Google's first step towards what we see happening now today across all these AI chat experiences that you and I have talked about for over a year now and that AI chat is a better experience because you can just get your answer there and then without having to thrall through all these different links now there are times when it probably makes sense you're doing like some thorough research you want a bunch of different viewpoints and all of these different things and you might have to go research a bunch of sites but there's a lot of queries that you can just get the answer for and be on your way and so that was the first time we started to see keywords start to decline in traffic the study that we did way back when the hotspot was if you had keywords appear on the first page along with a knowledge box or you know a feature snippet you actually would see a decline in organic traffic and this is a continuation of that which I think Google is stting to see the future is a world where Blue Links are not the you know core way that people retrieve information and they're giving the users what they want UPF front and not needing to go to the publisher s now the the thing that this breaks is this like incredible relationship that has existed in the internet to date which is what which has really helped small businesses mediumsized businesses which is we will create really valuable content I know there's a whole industry that creates very un valuable content and tries and gets ranked in Google but like we will create valuable content in return for you showing us showing the user that content on your on your page right there's a equal exchange of value there and what's really C what's going to be very like interesting to see how it plays out is this kind of breaks that relationship because why does a publisher create content if Google take that content to serve their user but in no way serves the actual publisher I would pause it to you and this might sound hyperbolic but it's not that what is happening in Search and it's not just Google it's the search industry overall but Google just happens to be the far and wide player here is it is a form of modern-day torture for marketers and the reason for that is that it's not this like quick change and you like have to change overnight it's like cool let me just like break your toe today and like next month we'll like we'll break your pinky and like all these little changes and little terrible things like will then add up and the danger of that is if you're a marketer is you're like oh okay well it's just a little bit this month that's okay it's just a little bit this next month that's okay and you wake up in 12 to 24 months and it's all gone right it's the it's the old metaphor of like if you put a frog in a pot of cold water and slowly turn up the heat it'll boil because it won't know it's too hot to need to jump out right and that's what's happening with search it is not Des big Boiling Pot of water it's like slowly getting turned up every month every quarter right and that is the big risk and if you were listening to the show I know that you were a progressive pioneering type of marketer and what I'm going to tell you is you have to take more aggressive changes in the future to diversify from organic search cuz this is going to continue to happen this is going to be like month after month like we could probably do a monthly show on search Kier and the changes in Search and the reason that it's going to happen and the reason behind all this especially with Google is that Google's Core adword Business is $250 billion and they can't just do a hard pivot and completely change organic search so what they're doing is they're slowly changing the search experience in a way to try to not kill the ads AdWords business right the the thing I would say is interesting about this update and this is an example of a long list of things I have seen on X and Twitter people posting their traffic screenshots is that it it's like a steady decline and then that March it up like we just seen whole entire sites burn to the ground right like usually you're right in that the Google updates are Death By A Thousand Cuts and you know there's this update to prioritize this there's this update to Prior and and and smart marketers smart SEO people kind of like navigate around those changes and there sometimes you can't bring back the traffic but you kind of like reach a steady state but this one seems to have just annihilated like that's the sites that's what your threat is people in that call that which is like I'm leaving the SE industry like yeah like I'm literally shutting down my site or I'm leav site shutting down my agency all of our clients are kind of leaving us because their sites have tanked so this one does seem like different in that it's much more liver die like you know the sites that have really been affect fected it's not even they reached a steady state they're kind of just going out of business well first of all don't think I didn't miss that Taylor Swift reference with death by uh thousand is you go I'm actually a secret fan know know all of her music never listen to a single track I should we'll change that for you Karen well what's interesting and one of the Nuance as to why you're seeing some sites kind of completely go out of business and some sites take a smaller hit of traffic and like if if you're watching Today's Show you're probably like well why isn't this just happen to everybody and why what like why is it kind of uneven because one of the things that Google is doing as it's protecting its AdWords business is that it's rolling out all these changes on low monetization keywords so if you're a business and you have all of your product keywords what you'll see is the traffic to those product keywords is likely unchanged maybe it's up maybe it's down just depending on how good your team is and and and where you've been focusing there but those product keywords and what's and those what are often called transactional keywords are not have not been hit in the same way as these informational keywords I think that's a very important distinction to make to everybody right yeah and the other interesting point about what's happening is and maybe you can think of other examples Google is like maybe the last of the open kind of what's the right word but like the open platforms where you can just go use it you can go and click on something and go to another site like all these kind of other platforms like meta X LinkedIn all these other platforms don't want you leav in their website and they actually penalize you for ACT promoting things on there that take people away from that platform whereas Google's entire job has always been to get you off the site like there's all there there there's like metrics in there that actually help content rank which is if you can get someone off the site off Google onto your page and you keep them there you'll actually rank higher right you don't have a high bance rate because there you create a value people have stuck around and consume that knowledge so that must be a good result for that that keyword but Google was like the last kind of hey we we have this kind of relationship with you all you give us things we get people onto your site right very very much one of the last people to do that I think we might be going towards Google much more as a closed entity like those other platforms where they're going to try to get you on the site they're going to try to like give you the information that you need and then like be able to do other things with you and I wonder have they looked at the likes of open Ai and these other websites which have just basically said not not the hell with all this kind of give us your content and we'll give you traffic and exchange we'll take your content and we'll just use it to make ourselves you know enrich ourselves so maybe Google are like maybe that's a better that's a better model right we can just like take all your content and enrich ourselves but again I think the the content that survives like you can imagine a world where there's only two types of web web like there's these kind of large aggregator platforms and then there's closed walled Gardens or there's and basically every individual website needs to be closed off to crawlers because if Google search doesn't exist what is the benefit in actually allowing anyone to crawl your content there there's no benefit in allowing anyone to crawl your content so you might as well just create content for your own Community or your own users or whatever it may be and not allow anyone else to provide and that does completely turn the internet on its head I I don't know I don't know let's let's have a little debate for a second I don't know if that's going to actually happen though like are you going to not are you going to let's let's say you and I were running Acme Inc and we had some business and we were out there would we block our content from all these llms to not show up as recommendations and other things in these llms I don't think we would I think that like symbiosis in the dependence on distribution is so great that even if it changed people are still going to kind of get on board you would do it because you're like kind of like a fomo reason because I want to appear in these LMS if I can but I I don't I think the I guess I think the head like the head and the long tail right there's always there's always a small collection of companies who get most of the traction or most of the visibility across these sites even Google right there's a bunch of large aggregators and sites that dominate all the serps for their Market I think the and that we call that the head and the longtail is like everyone else who gets some amount of traffic the head in llms is going to be much smaller much harder to so the so the the problem is if you're in that longtail I guess you wouldn't block them into llms but I wonder how much benefit you're going to get from the llm in the first place but you are right you but but I I think in the in the Google like there's whole companies that have been successful building for the longtail right building for these kind of very small amount of traffic searches but they actually convert really highly and we create content just for those whereas it's harder to see why you would do those types of things when the llm is going to be so much more different like you're just not going to search that way you're not going to query that way I I feel it does I can imagine a world without Google search and I don't think we're anywhere near that I think we're like declining in traffic we're not saying that Google search billions of searches a day yeah but it does you can see that we're on a slow march to sech not being the most dominant marketing channel at least dominant marketing channel and I think it does change like if you're a Content publisher if you're a company right let's go back to HubSpot right let's say HubSpot we star in today and we we are starting in actually threee time two two to three years time and Google's traffic was the amount of search traffic you could get from Google was a half of what you could get today you would probably have set the content team up differently like a smaller amount of time would have been on the blog and more amount of time would have been on video and audio right so it does change the I think it changes how you decide to build your content engine let's let's let's talk about this for for a little bit because I I imagine if folks have been 15 20 minutes in with us they're probably like all right jerks like what the hell do I actually do why are you stop like making me this a live here because I I actually also am curious about what what what to do thanks I think we should start with this because I've been asked this time and time again by everyone in my network what are you going to do about the Google thing to search like what what what what are you thinking about replacing it with what have you heard other people doing like we should start with there is no replacement as in like a like for like with Google search Google search is the best single best marketing channel we as marketers have had since the birth of the internet because nothing scales like it nothing is as predictable as it and nothing converts like it from organic channel right I know paid can convert really well but you have to you're you're paying for that traffic so you're optimizing it to certain things and I think organic gives you the benefits of paid but without I but by using your brains not wallet right not that paid people paid marketers are incredibly smart incredibly intelligent but you can compete as a small company with a little bit of money but a lot of brains and get a similar type of experience is paid where it's like scalable and predictable now unless you have some something that you're going to like put out there is maybe a replacement I haven't thought of a like for like replacement but I'm not saying that there's not like things that you can do as search traffic potentially declines yeah so let's let's talk about it I think the answer is different depending on the situation of the company and so I want to kind of walk through some different situations and maybe give advice and and and hear your perspective on each of these so let's first start at the start from the bottom and now we're here with our Founders and startups and I think Kieran we are entering an era where if you are considering starting a company you need to be a Creator in that market for 6 to 18 months prior to starting that company this is like a a very controversial take I think but it used to be oh cool I'm going to start this business and kind of in parallel I'm going to build this product I'm going to have myself or my co-founders is going to start getting some friends and family type of customers and I'm going to have one person probably some Freelancers start creating some content and start getting some traffic and traction to my website that is going to be harder and harder every month from here on out the real Advantage is going to be hey I a Creator I have built a following with some type of media stack YouTube newsletters podcasts what have you and I have some real Authority and I have a I have a sight line to grow this audience even more but I have like some critical mass of audience and a critical mass of audience I would say is tens of thousands of people that I can go and promote this new company too I I think if you're a founder and you are not doing that kind of Creator Le Playbook that your pro then your product has to be so highly differentiated that it can almost distribute itself in the early days do you so let's so so give me your feedback for that's kind of the early stage startup small business just getting started what do you think okay so s months ago Kieran Flanigan on LinkedIn where he's uh he's he's hot in LinkedIn he's doing some cool things over there seven months ago you know post I did a post uh you and I have talked about this we talked about it at inbound back in September B2B is going to have its creator moment I think B2B is having its creator moment for that reason right in that when I said that I I had some comments back recently when I when I when I talked about this which is what do you mean like marketing channels favor creators well let's look at the channels that have been the kind of most foundational to most digital strategies which is like Google search and paid right as in if you truly not Fortune 500 doing large Enterprise deals we can talk about that as in the side but I'm talking about companies who really need to scale quantity of customers right they're the two most scalable channels well paid is has become so well optimized by the platforms themselves that it is hard to compete away on anything else and other than budget now there are some incredible paid marketers who you know the top 5% are still the top 5% and can get you a bunch but they're getting you marginal Improvement not exponential Improvement yeah not exp right like that's what I want to set when it comes to the world of paid marketing today now Google search the best people get you exponential returns right and has now those two things are being commod I think being commoditized away the channels that are starting to become much more popular and where people spend much more of their time and I before we bought the hustle we actually did the survey with the hus husb customer base to look to see where people were consuming content it's like podcast like Tik Tok like Instagram like YouTube now all these channels that are growing have two two things that are unique in terms of how we think about Marketing in that they cause for the most part indirect conversions to customers for B2B BTC it's much more conver like much more conversion orientated you can sell things I think Tik tok's Ecom is like catching up to Shopify but for B2B it's much more indirect that you can influence a sale but you can't actually tie that sale all the way back to someone doing something on that platform and the second one is they favor personalities right they don't favor Brands going up there well our brand Lea is this and our product is this they favor actual personalities and if they are the channels that are growing and at the same times the channels that we've grown to from date and digital for B2B are starting to be commoditized then I that is the reason I think that B2B creators become much more a core part of how we do marketing and for the most part it would help a Founder it would help a Founder in two ways right I actually um talked to a Founder when I was doing a bunch of investment calls for cstage companies and one founder really stood out in AI that they were already an influencer they already had a huge audience and they've gone on to do really really well and they were they were a newsletter Creator from from you know from the start and then they kind of pivoted into software and I think that's a pretty good way cuz you actually learn a ton about your customer like what better way to learn about your customer serve them through through content um but I truly believe in this SL actually just made an investment in a company who's going to help B2B companies do this much easier because I believe it's going to be probably like what like 20% of all paid advertising budgets go to creators over the next couple of years and that is a sizeable I I'll take the over I'll take the over yeah like 30 I think that's the right point and the right point for everybody to understand is that in the first era of the internet brands could come out published directly and tell people what to think now we're flooded with Brands doing that so brands have have much lower residence right then we're about to get flooded with AI information AI content that's going to make that even harder to decipher so what people are going to trust is other people and you are going to see creators rise to a level that might seem silly today right like it's it's not going like 1X from where it is today it's going to go 10 to 100x from where it is today and and the point I would impress upon you it's like it's one thing to like consume all this content and listen to what people tell you to do it's a whole different thing to watch how they actually spend their time and Kieran we are recording episode 216 of the podcast right now episode 26 we could have done anything else with that probably thousands of hours that it spent us to record 216 episodes we did this and we did this because we believe it is critical to the next 10 to 15 years of our lives and our career right full stop like that is why we're doing it we're doing it because it's important we do not do things that are not important that do not matter I I think what actually happens is there's a loop that gets created here right and so what happens is if we actually hit my number 20% or hit your number 30% then there's much more money going to people who want to create Niche newsletters Niche podcasts to serve certain markets within B2B that may not may not make sense today because they can't make that money but when there's actually more money to spend on creators in B2B it actually gives them more reasons to create that content which actually pulls more creat what pulls more people into that space I know within my own network I've seen an explo exposion in people who used to have seite roles like exec roles start to create newsletters podcasts like want to get into creating content for their space and I think that's just going to become more and more common as you start to see more of these kind of marketing budgets go from not pivot completely from Paid marketing but actually have a core part of it go to these kind of influencers creators for B2B well let's uh let's walk through a little exercise Kieran to kind of demonstrate that Kieran do you think it's possible in the next call it 24 months that with all the AI disruption the Chang to Google search that Google could see some slight decline in search market market share you think that's possible so I think that it's it's possible I I think it's percentage points it's possible the reason I'm do you know the reason I'm hesitating is because the AI chats don't get Canada as a search engine and so I wonder if overall search the number of searches I think might decline in traditional search engines but Google maintain its market share but actually the thing I'm paying attention to is number of searches done each and every day by humans because they because what I what I expect to see over time is to see those things get cannibalized by the AI chats and so the number of like searches in traditional engines go down but Google probably maintain their market share so you would say if if if both searches potentially might go down and you're saying some of those searches might be done by AI which you can't monetize from a traditional advertising model right you following me here and so do you think it's possible in the realm of possibility that Google could maybe lose like 5% of its advertising business oh yeah oh 100% okay very I think they know that as well so if Google lost 5% of its advertising business that'd be 12 a half billion dollars right that has to be spent on marketing still right like those are still companies out there who have to do marketing I would postit you that the majority of that's going to the Creator oh I like that actually I like that so if you if you want to think about the future scale of that Creator Market it's like oh is it possible between Google and meta and other channels that like 20 billion dollars goes to the Creator Market in the next two to three years very possible very possible tily possible right I'm not I'm not going to the point yet to where I'd say probable but very very possible and so if you are a Creator great if you're a company you're not working with creators that's a real concern if you're a company not employing creators that's a real concern right and so I we need to shift as we close out the show to talk about like what if you're an established company you've got real search traffic you're seeing that decline what what what what do you actually do what you're going to do is friend of the show Cody Sanchez sign up your H news letter and start looking at these offline businesses buy a car wash buy a launderette get off the internet you going be like oh they got to drive by this car wash I'm going to buy it baby no look I still I'm still long the internet I'm I'm here I'm here on the internet and it's related to this is like what what is the life cycle of the marketing strategy right and B2B specifically B2B right so it is oh do unscalable things and most unscalable things are like these kind of tactical outbound things and maybe a little bit of online webinars things like that but they're very tactical outbound things and then for the most part most B2B if you're not a plg company a product L company and you're not doing like touch list if you actually have a real product to sell you kind of start at outbound sales right you start to build your outb sales model and you're like okay we need to improve our un unit economics we need to get turn better all of those things as we move up as we continue to scale and then you start to build on digital and you start to like make digital your primary marketing channel right and I I bound as part of it but digital becomes your primary marketing channel the thing I do wonder about is like are we going to see a boom for the for a period of time and outbound in that you're going to have to do Ian much better and much longer and a bigger percentage of your sales are going to have to come from I B because you don't have this predictability in digital here's my take on that yes you're going to see a boom and outbound that outbound boom is started from all the people I've talked to and the data that I've seen think it's going to continue for the next 3 to five years while the internet kind of gets reborned and new inbound channels get reborn it's going to that outbound is going to kind of be a bridge for the next 3 to five years if you're a company you're established company you get hit on search what do you do one you're going to consider some outbound work if you have a sales team like you're going to consider consider ramping up your outbound prospecting because one of the things we know about AI is it has the potential to make outbound prospecting more efficient Kieran I think You' invested in like a thousand companies working on AI prospecting I have just invested in a one today as well there will be no K is like whatever the AI outbound Market is I will own some portion of it imagine it's like I've invested in every single one and then the one that makes it is like the one that I pass them it be hilarious actually um so that's for sure happening the next thing you're going to do is in the short term you are going to double down on the updating and maximizing the performance of the pages that are ranking and that's going to work for probably one to two years and that's going to be much higher turn cycles of optimizing content on page increasing the conversion rate on page keeping that content Fresh So you hold rankings all of those things you're going to go heavy into video because video is much harder for AI to disrupt YouTube is the second biggest search engine if you just take those same keywords we should do this as a follow-up show actually what if we look at search traffic for like random 100 informational keywords on Google and then on YouTube and compare the trending on them right wouldn't that be cool I do think uh YouTube is the place where a lot of investment goes because it's harder to do far harder to replicate and much more defensible from AI well right what you just said should be everyone's Mantra if I want leverage I have to do the harder thing and what are the harder things the harder things are video because video is harder takes takes more time takes more money video is harder that's why YouTube and short form video are going to continue to be be huge the other thing that's hard working directly with creators so you go and do really custom partnership media sponsorship deals with creators individually versus playing on the big ad networks it takes a lot more time it's a lot more manual work but you know what you'll get you'll get Arbitrage in your costs right your cost per leads will end up being lower and not a little lower most likely a lot lower right because you are doing the hard thing if you are ever through the next couple years going through this transition saying why is the thing I'm doing not working it's because you're doing the easy thing and the easy thing gets commoditized and it's going to get commod Iz faster you're going to have to do the harder more expensive takes longer thing but once you Crest those things and get past them you get a huge amount of success on the other side right we said this at uh in man and I've said it on a separate episode that AI is the Grim Reaper for lazy marketers like if you're a lazy marketer doing the lazy thing you're it it's over for you unfortunately like you you're going to have to start to do the hard thing and really learn learn a skill because the the The Lazy things are being commoditized the other thing I think about if I was a founder and I was building a product and my product was like a starting as a low low ACV product average contract value which means like it's a low cost product and you have to do Mass amounts of customers I don't think I would launch anything that doesn't have some sort of inbu virality whether that's like virality in the sector that I'm going into virality and the features that I create if I was just going in there riing on these like to do a bunch of digital marketing to try to like scale that uh and Google is one of those channels I wouldn't be is confident about its ability to succeed and I think I would probably start with how does this product sustain its own growth and launch a product like that well that's to lead into my last Point like last week uh on Friday I I caught up with uh our friend David senra over from the founders pod Kieran and I was talking to him about a whole whole host of things uh you know I we always got ideas love and one of the things it kind of became a little mini founder spot where we're talking about some of the books and some of the lessons and you know David reiterated to me which is the number one quote that I found have found valuable from his podcast Founders podcast is that every hundred episodes he's going to redo the James Dyson biography because he thinks that is the most impactful book that he's done and the most impactful lesson from that book is different in every way different for the sake of it that is the James Dyson lesson intentionally different yeah so like and and how that how does that show up it's like if you walk into a store and you're going to buy a Dyson it's way more expensive it looks completely different right like it it is like it works completely different everything about that sucker is different and if you line it up against everything else in the category you may not pick it but it's clear that it's going to be different right and if you're a marketer the thing you have to bang on to your CEO to your head of product to everybody else in your company is ever differentiated we are it needs to be 10x more differentiated like we have to take the differentiation up to another level because differentiation is going to be one of the core trademarks of companies over the next 5 to 10 years it's it's it's one of those same as ever things it's always been important it's just going to happen it's just going to become even more important right one thing to end on actually is put on your take take your crystal ball CU I've done a littleit this yeah and what would you bet so we talked about Google search cuz if I if I'm listening the last thing I'm thinking through is okay cool but you know Kieran said this channel is the most scalable predictable and convertible like actually converts into real customers and you can track that what do you have any prediction for if Google just be if Google search just becomes another Channel like 20 like the max you can really do is like 20% of your overall customers come from organic like in really great companies that actually above 50 what do you think could be a potential channel that may not even exist today like do you have any theories on what could be a thing that takes Google search's place like are you a AI chat could be it are you a it's not being invented yet are you are well YouTube could be it because it gets a bunch more traction in B2B and people start gravitating towards that like customers to like do their research I think so what you're what you're basically asking me is like hey if Google became like 70% smaller as a channel like really materially smaller like what is what would fill that Gap in for marketers Plus may even grow above that Gap here are my guesses I don't know I'm I'm I'm just a mere mortal like everybody else my guesses are YouTube becomes incredibly dominant and I Still Believe YouTube has a 10 to 20 year run ahead of it as like the core fixture of culture in our world and I see a world where YouTube maybe becomes Google's Core Business long term um that is uh is something I see I see social media actually exploding if AI explodes the need for person truly personal connections so whether be what I don't know is how is it Niche social networks is it communities what like I don't is it something that hasn't been invented yet likely um but there's something that's happening there and then the the third thing is probably representation in in kind of point of sale what I'll call point of sale llms cuz I don't have a better name for this so uh I have the meta uh Rayband glasses do you have those Kieran no I have to get those actually you told me to get them I'm actually going to set myself a note they're they're they're awesome and Facebook and meta is slowly rolling out AI features to them where uh I don't have them yet but I've seen all the demos and I think I hear they're they're rolling out in the US over the next couple months we're like you can look at something and be like hey what's the name of that mount or like hey what's this so it's like oh hey what do I need to fix this thing in my car or hey what do I you know there will be AI recommendations because of multimodal and like wearables where it will just be in the moment of trans of problem where instead of like hey oh yeah like this thing of my car is broke I got to remember to like go look up and do some research and everything and'll just be like hey yeah I want this what do I need oh I need this thing okay just order it for me and and send it to me and I think that will probably change especially in e-commerce how a lot of things happens but I think there will be some B2B use cases as well I think that I I agree with those I think maybe other things might be freemium like I do think freemium is being a little bit monetized as well so you have to get smart with it but maybe a premium versions of apps and software like really replacing League magnets with user magnets and trying to figure out how to accelerate growth I think those are a good shortterm solution for technology companies I don't think they're a long-term Mass Market solution no no age that's what that's what I believe Community I guess this like this was a little bit of a therapy session would exp would explode as people want more interaction with other people yeah I I think I think that's right um so today's show has been part therapy session part real bummer because we love SEO uh part look into the future uh some real advice around what we think you should go and do if you have questions if you want other advice if you if you think there's anything we miss leave us a comment on YouTube hit like And subscribe please and we'll see you very soon on marketing Instagram this data is wrong every freaking time have you heard of HubSpot HubSpot is a CRM platform where everything is fully integrated W I can see the client's whole history calls support tickets emails and here's a task from 3 days ago I totally missed HubSpot grow better

Channel: Marketing Against the Grain

Views: 13,342

Keywords: marketing against the grain, matg podcast, kipp and kieran, hubspot, hubspot podcast

Id: jBsKToB9vx0

Length: 41min 26sec (2486 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 11 2024