Evan Patterson
Evan Patterson is a GTM operator and fractional CMO who helps founder-led companies turn strong ideas into clear positioning, scalable marketing systems, and sustainable growth.
Overview
Kerry and Evan explain how AI-powered search is shifting visibility away from rankings and toward recommendations, citations, and brand mentions. They discuss the importance of strong positioning, creating content that directly answers audience questions, and building credibility beyond your website. The conversation highlights a simple reality: brands that know exactly who they serve and why they matter will have a significant advantage as search continues to evolve.
Transcript:
Kerry Guard 0:15
Hello, I am Kerry Guard, CEO of MKG Marketing, and a host of Back on Track. Yes, this is not Sarah Nay, although I am sure he could do a fabulous impression. Sarah couldn't make it today, and so Evan and I decided to hop on because the lads blew up. The whole search world is blowing up, and I have a lot to say about it. And so I was like, "Hey, Evan, should I just go on and like talk about it. He was like, "Yes, you should, and I was like, "Cool. He's like, "I'll be right there.
Evan Patterson 0:46
Here we are
Kerry Guard 0:49
Here we are. I've been throwing a lot at you, Evan, as this stuff is happening. News alert: Evan helps me with all my social posts. He is the guy behind the scenes making all of these articles and posts happen because clearly I can't stay on top of it, and I needed someone to help me out, because we talk about consistency all the time, and I gotta practice what I preach, and so I also.
Evan Patterson 1:11
Do you want to hear a secret sauce? We'll hear secret sauce, so half the ghost writers in LinkedIn have their own ghost writers, and I'm one of them
Kerry Guard 1:20
Ghost writers
Evan Patterson 1:21
Because, so here's that, I really enjoy this, and this actually talks a lot. This is all live with what you're talking about, too. I actually like and enjoy doing it for other people way more than for myself. So, yeah, it is. Yeah, I have, I have people that help me too.
Kerry Guard 1:39
Yeah, that is fantastic.
Kerry Guard 1:40
Yeah, fantastic, yeah, yeah. So that's how Evan and I hang out on a regular basis, and why he's joined me. Evan, I've thrown a lot at you in the last 48 hours.
Evan Patterson 1:52
Yeah, but you're one of like the best clients, because I don't have to beg you for collateral and assets, and I honestly like it, and if you're one of my other clients, and you're offended by that statement, take the hit.
Kerry Guard 2:07
Yeah, yeah, there's a.. I mean, I don't know how other.. I don't know other industries you work in, but Kerry, being in marketing, both of us being in marketing, and watching sort of what's unfolding with Google right now. So I called this ages ago, I've been saying this for a while, that Gemini, you know how we work with the AI mode, or Gemini is going to be the ipso de facto way we interact with search. Yes, lo and behold, it has arrived. I don't think any.. I think we knew it was coming, but we weren't actually ready. It's like having a baby come early, and like, the bedroom is, we don't have a crib, like.
Evan Patterson 2:43
Yeah, yeah, yeah, or when I impulsively adopted my first cat, and I'm like, go puff ordering a glitter box right at 3 o'clock in the morning.
Kerry Guard 2:56
Where's the food? I need the thing for them to sit on, and all that, yes, yes, absolutely. Pets are just the same.
Evan Patterson 3:04
Yeah, yeah, obviously, to all the parents out there, I've deduced you to pet ownership. Oh God, I gotta stop with the type five. So, when you sent me this article, it's oh, the anxiety that you give me, not you, but the anxiety-inducing materials that you give me, that's really what it is, because to your point, a lot of companies aren't ready for this, and it's, ooh, I just, it makes people like you and me do more important, so like, there's a selfish bit of, like, oh, yay, you know, thank you, Google, for creating job demand for me, but then also, oh, now I have to explain this to a bunch of people that I, that I know a lot of them won't listen at all, because they'll think it's fluff, and then in one to two years of, as we've written about, they'll go, oh, I should have listened to two years ago, and I'm like, yeah, you said you said we've heard this song and dance before, so take that hint. Listen to this. I'm sure we'll probably share these articles at some point, or I'll be writing some content going out to Kerry.
Kerry Guard 4:12
Yes, I, yes, I am actually glad this, as my, my coach likes to remind me of how this is happening for me and not to me. Um, thank you, Top Hummer. I appreciate you.
Evan Patterson 4:21
So, what is Google doing? You want to summarize it for the folks at home.
Kerry Guard 4:24
So, there are two things that have happened. One is that Google published an article about how to show up in AI for Google, which is half-true, and I'll unpack that in a second. And the second thing is they had their big IO event yesterday, two days ago, yesterday.
Evan Patterson 4:42
Tuesday.
Kerry Guard 4:43
Tuesday, two days ago, I was still jet-lagged. They're fine.
Evan Patterson 4:48
That's why I'm here to help.
Kerry Guard 4:50
exactly. And so, two days ago, they did their big IO event, and they talked about how, basically, the AI mode. Experience is going to be the ipso de facto experience. Blue links are disappearing. You'll no longer rank. You will be recommended, you'll be mentioned, you'll be cited, you will be the answer. And so, while we had, like I said, we had time to figure this out, we don't now. And so, if you're not the answer, or people aren't directly searching for your name, it's going to be significantly harder to be seen, and that struggle is about to get real between these two things. I want to start with Google. I have a lot of qualms with this AI guide that Google put out. I have so many qualms. The first one is that it's about Google specifically, so it doesn't take into account ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Claude, none of which have actually put anything out about how they are doing citations or how you're getting found.
Evan Patterson 5:54
I have a question about that for you later, but I'll ask you later.
Kerry Guard 5:57
Okay, so keep that in mind, as you're reading Google, Google's recommendations, basically, what the all it says is that good, it's all about good content, and if it is, and somebody just wrote this beautiful LinkedIn post, and I was applauding him, because what he said was, if it was just about writing Google, if it was just writing good content, then it would just be a content strategy, and you wouldn't need an entire division of SEO experts dedicated to this stuff, because it is not just about good content.
Evan Patterson 6:30
If it were about that, it would have been about that before AI, or before generative search like this. It would, it, yeah, it would have been that way all along. It would, yeah.
Kerry Guard 6:40
That's their argument, like, if you go to any S, if you're following any of the SEO, or is out there, that's their argument, good SEO is enough, and it's like, hold up, wait a minute, no, it's no, it's not, it's one, it's one pillar and one foundation, that's why we've broken the map between SEO.
Evan Patterson 6:57
If good SEO was what worked, then Sears wouldn't have collapsed.
Kerry Guard 7:04
You've got to say more on that one.
Evan Patterson 7:06
A lot, you can be really good at a lot of things in marketing, but you can't. Good marketing, regardless of whether it's an SEO or in social media or on billboards, I don't care. Can't save a bad company. It can't save bad marketing elsewhere, you know, it needs to be good everywhere, and that doesn't mean just within marketing, means in the whole company. So, you can, you can rank number one all you want, you can show up number one all you want. Back in the traditional search days, still won't fix it if everything else is bad. Congratulations, most people in the world are going to your site more than anybody else's, but your site's bad.
Kerry Guard 7:46
I'm writing a book. It's gonna come out later this year, which will be perfect in perfect timing, because Rin Fishkin and Amanda are also writing a book from Spark Toro, which we're going to be sort of parallel to each other. It's very tactical, like, here are the things to do to make sure that you're showing up for your audience everywhere, not just in search, which is going to be brilliant. They're wonderful.
Evan Patterson 8:10
Well, I have so many thoughts now. Go ahead.
Kerry Guard 8:13
My book is more about the what you need foundationally and the systems and processes that you need to build to ensure that you can be everywhere, because just going to do a podcast, or just going to be on podcasts, or or just creating clips of content, or just writing LinkedIn posts, like those are all tactics, but they need to be part of a bigger system that ensures that your message is consistent, you're saying the same thing about who you are, why you're different, and why you're better, and you're saying it everywhere on a regular basis, and so you need, you need to first go do the hard work of understanding who your customer is and why you, and nail that down, and then you need to build the content and the messaging that then goes and lives not just on your website but everywhere.
Evan Patterson 9:05
You know why I'm about to say this, that might involve starting internally, and maybe perhaps you don't defer those questions to other people internally, maybe when your marketer asks you for either your opinion, you don't just defer to somebody else to somebody else's opinion when I actually need specifically your opinion, I can't have a standing for the bride at her own wedding. Sorry, I've gone through something this morning, and I had to say it, but yeah, listen to your marketers, we're trying to help you, but yes.
Kerry Guard 9:39
Internal. Internal interviews are crucial, as well.
Evan Patterson 9:44
This, to the, to this, to the visibility. Yeah,
Kerry Guard 9:47
Absolutely.
Evan Patterson 9:48
If we don't know how we're talking about it internally, I don't know how we're going to talk about it externally, and if I don't know how we're going to talk about it externally, we are not going to show up on Gemini, we are not going to show up on Chat GPT, we. Not going to show up anywhere.
Kerry Guard 10:01
Correct, correct, you're not going to be mentioned, and this is what's happening. So, here's the second thing that Google dropped, all within a week, which was so kind of them to pour this on us.
Evan Patterson 10:11
Lovely, I love big tech companies, they're my favorite people in the world. Did you know that they are run by some of the most introspective, mindful, therapized individuals on the planet?
Kerry Guard 10:22
Believe me, I have picked that up. So, in terms of the second thing, it's about how search is changing and it's going agentic, it's all about AI, and it is really cool, like some of the things they were, they were showing is going to be like, especially for anybody like me who hates meal planning, like with every bone in my body, you can come right there with these and save them, and actually build like a little app for yourself that has all your favorite recipes, and you can do meal planning, it can put less together, like you can search and build at the same time, which is super cool, so I'm not saying that this isn't going to be game changing for the everyday consumer. It's going to be awesome, but it's going to hurt B-to-B.
Kerry Guard 11:09
It's really hard.
Evan Patterson 11:11
It's gonna hurt them, way harder than anything I could ever say or do to somebody. I can tell you that.
Kerry Guard 11:16
It's gonna be painful. It is, because now, now what's happening is AI is making the decision on what they're going to show the user, not just because you wrote good content, you're going to rank, and that's where this consistency, consistent messaging comes in handy, and is really important, because not only do you need to say it on your website and be very, very unique, they, they glossed over it in the IO, oh yeah, like, oh, throw away comment, but they were like, and look at this content that we've, that we're showing you, that is very unique and niche to exactly what it is that you're searching for, like that does not get more prescriptive than of exactly what kind of content you'd be producing, on top of the fact that it needs to be tailored to who you are and what you do, and then that needs to be further perpetuated, not only from what you're saying, but your customers have to be saying it. Yeah, influencers have to be saying it, like it has to be bigger than just you, PR, right? Yeah, this is what Spark Toro talks about all the time, in terms of the power of PR, and it feels.. I know it feels really big right now. It is big.
Evan Patterson 12:27
I think the thing that is hard for some, potentially like non-marketers, to wrap their brains around is that it's all it's done is throw fuel on the fire of things that are already important, or just made them even more important.
Kerry Guard 12:42
You're broken, and you're going to be more broken.
Evan Patterson 12:44
yeah. And I am in no way, shape, or foreign trying to lessen the importance of what you're talking about when you're talking about consistency, but when you touch on uniqueness, you know, I don't want us to gloss over it the same way that Google did, because it's being relevant, being niche or niche, whatever part of the world you pronounce it as, being having your own POV as a brand, as a business, having something different about whatever the heck it is that you provide is going to be also just like consistency more important than ever before, and, and there's other parts of economics. If you want to, like, really, like, get to, like, macro economics, you can sort of, this, you know, micro marketing view of it all. We're, we've already seen kind of, like, you know, a reversal to, like, the 1940s and 50s, in some ways, of, like, Sephora is building stores and residential neighborhoods now near train stations here in Chicago, like where normally you would have, like, a liquor store or convenience store, you know, but, like, but, like, they know people are doing, like, online pickups, and they want to go pick it up on their way home from work, and on their commutes, and, and they're getting people in the store now, they're adding three things to their online order while they conveniently go wait for somebody to go and pick it up, this, the employees are purposely taking their sweet time, knowing that you're wandering the aisles, you know, they're providing more in-store experiences, right? Where those are all we're reverting back to the 50s, where, like, you went down the street to the corner store to get these things right. So, when people are searching for things like hyper locality, hyper specific to my lifestyle and my needs, we have so many more choices than ever before, and with every type of service offering. Look at grocery stores and the bread aisle; it used to be six options for bread; now it's like every single loaf is completely different on the shelves, you know, there's so much competition. This is just another example of, like, in some ways we're moving forward in new ways that have never been done before, but in other ways we're kind of just doing a version of things that we did pre-internet.
Kerry Guard 14:49
Yep, yep, it is. It's all it is coming back to basics. It's going back to Mad Men days, and the, oh gosh, his name escaped me, but it. Is it is that feeling of making people feel again, and get, and having that emotional buy, because it, it, there are just too many options, and people have to.
Evan Patterson 15:09
It's almost like your marketers need to be emotionally intelligent and mature. It's almost like therapy is good for your career.
Kerry Guard 15:18
Oh, everybody, everybody should have therapy, 100% 100%. We're all gonna need it now to get through whatever.
Evan Patterson 15:24
Yeah, if I ever get a resume again, if ever start working traditional jobs, need a resume, I'm gonna put how many years of therapy under my career experience, yeah. And the names of my psychiatrists under skills, Lexapro, 25 milligrams.
Kerry Guard 15:44
I mean, I'm, yes, I mean, I think we all, the struggle is going to be real for a while as we all figure this out. I mean, if you have strong positioning and messaging, that's like a step.
Evan Patterson 15:54
Then the consistency doesn't matter. Yeah, you can have all the consistency in the world, but if your messaging is bad, it doesn't matter.
Kerry Guard 16:00
Yeah, if it's not all tied together around who you are and why you, what makes you different, and what audience you serve, then it's going to, it's just going to be screaming into the void. There was another LinkedIn post yesterday that I loved, and I wish I were saving these. I should just start doing that, so because I'm referencing them, of somebody.
Evan Patterson 16:18
And send them to me.
Kerry Guard 16:19
Who talked about how we're writing content the wrong way, and I couldn't agree more. We are writing from a place of what we think the audience wants versus knowing what the audience actually wants. We have so much data at our fingertips. I go into Semrush. I just did it today, went to SEMrush, and pulled down all the prompts. We literally can look at straight-up prompts people are writing to know exactly what they're asking for and what questions they have, and then we can write specific content to those prompts, and that's the order of operations. Like, we need to stop guessing and actually work with the data that we have.
Evan Patterson 16:52
I need to get myself a summarized subscription for just me, because I could see that being useful across the board.
Kerry Guard 17:00
Yeah, well, that I mean, the amount of data it has, I'm skeptical about looking at it from a reporting standpoint, because it literally will pick up every.. if you've been writing a lot of top of funnel content for a really long time, actually, this is probably helpful if you've been a lot of writing a lot of top of funnel content for a really long time, and you go into SEMrush, and you're like, "Oh my gosh, I like hardly ever.. I'm like at a 17% AI visibility, but it's telling me I have like all these mentions and all of these citations, like what is happening? It's because it's bucketing you in a very broad category.
Evan Patterson 17:40
Yeah, yeah.
Kerry Guard 17:42
And so it's misleading how you are actually showing up in the market, because you're showing up too big, and you really need to niche down and get your content. I'm not, for some of my clients, I'm not writing content right now, I'm optimizing the existing content to get it as crystal clear for every single page. Every single page has to be unique. Yeah, to solve a problem, and it has to be very, very specific.
Evan Patterson 18:10
That's, that's, that's a nuance.
Kerry Guard 18:12
That I am content right now.
Evan Patterson 18:13
That's a nuance that only, like, a really trained eye can gather, which I think is why it's, you know, back to the analogy, like you can give a hammer to somebody, but it doesn't make him a carpenter, you know. You can hand Sam Rush to somebody, but it doesn't make them an SVO expert. So, there's your pitch. Go work with MKJ RMKG Marketing if you need help with this, because the SEMrush subscription is useful in a lot of ways, but it's not useful in every possible way. The thing that I find, maybe you'll find interesting. You can tell me, because you say a lot more than I have in my career. Its insights seem to be where it's most valuable, not so much when it's reporting, the leading indicators. And as long as you know what to do with that information, and how to read the reports, and what parts the trust more than others, it can be helpful, and this is not an attack on SEMrush. Actually, I think that this is a limitation of the technology, not of the product or the platform itself. This is still new, like we're still, as a global society, trying to figure out how this technology works.
Kerry Guard 19:17
Yeah, yeah, I would say Google Search Console is your friend in terms of understanding how what's actually showing up in your traffic from from organic search, but Semrush is at the very top of the funnel of what are people even searching for, and that's really it's that's that's its value, especially now you have to, you have to reverse engineer to understand what your customers care about, and knowing exactly how they're searching in the language they're using is really helpful. I will say it's really hard to figure out what category you should even be looking for, or what keywords you should be showing up for, or what you know, or what prompts you should be looking at, until you put your positioning and messaging together.
Evan Patterson 20:00
yeah.
Kerry Guard 20:01
Yeah, come back to that. I'm gonna be a broken record.
Evan Patterson 20:05
I was gonna say, like, when someone goes into, you know, Semrush to figure out what people are searching for, the act of using Semrush can give them the wrong answers, because they don't know what they're searching for within Semrush. Yeah, and it's, it's the whole, you don't know what you don't know, and I think it's just why it's just so important to have experts in the drivers, you to these tools, and also, and if you are learning how to get good with tools, like, it takes time and practice, like I'm not an expert in this by any means, I'm not, I wouldn't call myself an SVO marketer, an SEO marketer, I would call myself a marketer that has a mild to moderate understanding and experience level, and I usually defer to folks like you, but I have seen so many people that just look, they, they misguide themselves while being well intended with tools like SEMrush, they think they know their audience, they think they know who their ICP is, if you're in, and that can really kind of only fuel the problem, because we can, we can, it goes back to, you know, the consistency, we can have a ton of consistency, and we can be super clear, and we can do all the right things, but if it's for the wrong audience.
Kerry Guard 21:13
Yeah, I had a client in the wrong category, he, he's a, he's a business, he's an executive coach, but we were going after terms around business coaching, and it was totally not the right. He wasn't showing up at all. I couldn't get him any visibility because the message we had with the category keywords we were going after was not in alignment. Yeah, so the minute I switched him over to executive coaching and restructured the website in terms of the content of how it needs to function now for SVL, in 15 hours, he was showing up, he was being cited, he was being.. we don't need mentions yet, but that's because now we have to see the message beyond website, but it's being in 15 hours, it's sound being cited, and it is ranking, so not that ranking is going to matter much longer, but it is. It is a a like a leading indicator in terms of whether Google is going to prioritize you. If you're ranked 50 versus ranked number two, it's going to, it's going to prioritize, you know, the number two spot.
Evan Patterson 22:18
yeah. Well, well, we know how it matters, at least a little bit with Google. What do you think is going to happen now that Google has kind of put out this semi-honest, semi-transparent, well, like translucent way of looking at how they do things? It's frosted glass, we'll call it that.
Kerry Guard 22:41
Clear at all.
Evan Patterson 22:42
Yeah, do you think
Kerry Guard 22:44
Good SEO is good enough?
Evan Patterson 22:46
It's a frosted glass fun house mirror. How do you think Open AI and all the other, you know, tools out there, the companies that make those, like, do you think that some of them are going to want to go the route of pretending to be open about how it works? Do you think they'll keep their cards close to the chat that they currently are, or do you think one day we're going to see one that is incredibly transparent, kind of like the blue sky of the LLM world?
Kerry Guard 23:16
You know, I think that for Chat GPT in particular, you probably could follow Microsoft's guidelines for Bing, because they're using the same system.
Kerry Guard 23:26
So that's being tested right now. So, I think you could probably do that. Perplexity, I have - I have no idea. It's such a different system in terms of real-time. It's well, you know, is one of the first places from an LLM perspective to go in terms of real time, everyone else was like this is data from 2023 so I think that's totally built differently, and we have no idea how it's built, so again, just coming back to I think following best practices in regards to what we do know in in how all LLMs are working and how they're scraping the internet for understanding your brand beyond your website is, is just where it needs to happen. I think Spark Tour Toro has got some good data around perplexity, and I think that's where, like, all the Reddit and the LinkedIn recommendations really came from, of like, these are the places you need to be, because it's where your audience is, it's where they're talking about you, and it's where it's being scraped. So I think perplexity, at least they were leaning into those platforms. I don't know if they still are, because I know that the algorithms are being updated all the time, and places like Gemini and Claude are putting less emphasis on those channels, but I don't know about perplexity and chat, if they're still leaning into those pretty hard. The problem with and by the time we finish this, the rules will have changed. Absolutely, absolutely. Yeah, but I love your opinion on this, as being a social person, and Reddit is, I find, I know that there are Reddit strategies out there. Can do, like, ask me anything. Yeah, like, man, the minute a brand shows up on these places, you're like, you get hammered. It really is about the audience bringing you to the conversation, not really you showing up as the brand. And I don't even remotely know how to, to even begin to get..
Evan Patterson 25:19
I have my response to Reddit marketing could be a whole episode of its own, because, and it really angers a lot of, I would call, but they wouldn't call themselves traditional business folk, the Red Reddit, Reddit marketing, Reddit's not like you can hire a social media manager or social media marketer to run your LinkedIn, to run your ex, to run your Instagram, to run your YouTube. How you could even hire one to run all of them, you know, with the right team to make the content, or you can AI automate the hell out of it, whatever. Right, there's... we already know how that role works. Okay, like, we are.. We all have a firm understanding of how that role works, how it has worked, and how it will work for the foreseeable future. Reddit marketing is in its own category; it is its own department, its own job, its own thing. When in, and the other industries really seem to others to stay in this outside of b, like the gaming industry, is so, first of all, the gaming industry is a multi-trillion-dollar industry. The gaming industry, somebody fact-checked me on this, but I remember learning that it is bigger than the music and movie industry combined. It is huge, the gaming industry, because we're combining like think about you're combining board games with World of Warcraft, with The Sims, with Skyrim, with mobile Candy Crush. You know, it is that's how big an industry it is. So they have really mastered marketing as an industry because they're so big and there's a lot of competition, especially within all the sub-genres of gaming, right? And the different platforms, so they know how to fight, they know how to fight.
Evan Patterson 27:07
The irony, the irony, right? They're eating their own dog food, and before Reddit really blew up, because Reddit was a slow burn of a platform, and it promises ties to AI gaming companies. First started, like, in the 2000s, they were really big on trying to infiltrate fan-created, user-built gaming communities within tools. If you're a real nerd like me, you'll remember Ventrilo, Team Speak, you'll remember Engine, E N G J I N, or Guild Launch. And then we got to the 2010s, Discord entered the chat room, basically pun intended. And now entire companies have people dedicated to managing their Discord communities, and, and joining the community, the Discord communities of gamers and influencers with followings of the internet, so on and so forth, which is the v of the of the private website communities and the fan site forums that I use, mentioned in the v and the 2000s and the 90s, and now in the 2020s you know, they haven't stopped the Discord play, but what they have started to add on to it now is they have entire people dedicated to that same logic, but on Reddit, because Reddit is such a heavy lift that even if you dare attempt automation, if you dare attempt any of the logic that applies to marketing anywhere else in the world, on like LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc. it will not work on Reddit, not just because of the algorithm, but because of the social norms of the of the platform set by the users, Reddit is definitely a platform by the users for the users, and it's an extreme version of Discord in that sense, right? So you have to play by the rules of the people, which makes leveraging Reddit so much harder when it comes to citing in these AI search results, but at the exact same time, it also means that if you got it done right, then you got it done really right. I often make the joke in the negative of, you know, a lot of you were bad at marketing before AI, now with AI, you can be bad at marketing faster. Now with AI, though, you can also be really good at it faster too, so you can't AI your way through Reddit faster, but what you can do is AI your way through figuring out how to use Reddit faster, and then how to measure the slow part of using Reddit faster, but that slow part of like engaging, talking, having talking like normal people, having your own little evangelists, you know, we're going to bring that job title back, you know, playing around on a Reddit and a Discord in the gaming world is exactly what they've been doing, and if the company doesn't have an in-house team, they go and hire influencers and bring ambassadors through that for them, so, or just make a really good product. That people get excited about and want to talk about. I could go on forever.
Evan Patterson 30:03
Yeah, bb needs to take some hits. Yeah, take some notes.
Kerry Guard 30:07
I feel like the only way you end up on Reddit as a B2B company is if people are complaining about you, so you almost don't end up on Reddit, because if people are complaining about you.
Evan Patterson 30:18
Or you want to be the company.
Kerry Guard 30:20
Ignore you.
Evan Patterson 30:21
My favorite part, though, is that people who are complaining about you in their posts. Somebody's in that comment section saying, yeah, I hate them, that's why I switched to whoever else you want to be. Whoever else.
Kerry Guard 30:31
You want to be the switch, you want to be whoever else.
Evan Patterson 30:33
Because that, because even if that comment doesn't adjust your search engine results, even if that doesn't adjust your LLM results, that's still pipeline, sweetie, that's still pipeline, you know, and also that is also data that you can use to find out what content to make to then show up more on the results, it's an indirect but yet still valuable way of gleaning what content to make and to improve the quality of your consistency. It's that it's this constant balance between quantitative and qualitative that marketers deal with every second of every day.
Kerry Guard 31:08
Oh my god, every second of every day. And you know, we use AI to write content, but it's backed by that positioning and messaging that we did. We did so much work last year on figuring out, like, why do people keep coming back to us? Why do they keep hiring us? Why do they leave and then bring us on to the next thing over and over and over again, and then all of our content is then backed is baked into the questions people are asking, so it's aligning those two things and writing content, even with the help of AI, to really make sure that it's, it's, it's marrying those two things together, and so I, yeah, it really does come back to that. Like, why you? How can you get people excited to talk about you and want to show up on Reddit and say, "stop using them, start using these folks, because they do x, y, and z, and we've experienced it, and it's awesome," right?
Evan Patterson 31:57
yeah,
Kerry Guard 31:58
I think that's the only way to get into Reddit is if your users want to talk about you.
Evan Patterson 32:03
Yeah. And what I find funny, though, is these companies will get the tools to make the content that's like, you know, 15 bucks a month, 200 bucks a month, whatever. And then they'll wonder why it's not working on Reddit on these platforms, because they're once again back to the tool in the carpenter example, right? It's the sure content has never been cheaper to produce. It has never been so low-cost to produce. It is so easy to make it now for a low cost. It's also really easy to make content that's not bad but not great either for a low cost. What, what I envision is the companies that let's say you're spending $5,000 a month on a content initiative, and then now if AI, like, ooh, I can get down to $200 a month for the same thing. I would actually encourage you to keep the $5,000 budget and spend the new found savings on instead of paying for someone's time to execute on the task, you're paying for someone's intelligence, you're paying for someone's taste, you're paying for judgment, you're paying for curiosity and strategy, that's the thing that the tool is not good at, and, and you can, and you can have the tool prompt a strategy and a right one for you all you want, but it's going to take a true talented marketer to know how to use the tool to get the answer you need. It's really, it's a lot of manipulation of the, of the AI. It's by it's done by the human AI. Certainly won't replace the human, but the human that's really good at using AI will replace other humans.
Kerry Guard 33:39
Oh my gosh, I am so.. I just talked to a gal this morning who is looking for her next thing, because her company is squeezing and squeezing and squeezing her to do more, thanks to AI. So she's responsible for seven products in an enterprise, seven..
Evan Patterson 33:57
There is a.. There does come a limit, that's insane, that's insane.
Kerry Guard 34:02
Yeah, somebody's going on maternity leave, so they just tossed all of her work to her from a different geo.
Evan Patterson 34:08
Katie Kerrry lied to Mean Girls. The limit does exist. The limit absolutely does exist.
Kerry Guard 34:13
Wonder why she's looking. You just lost somebody who's been with you forever, and now, yeah, they're out the door.
Evan Patterson 34:24
I shouldn't be given more work.
Kerry Guard 34:25
AI should do two things for you. It should either help you build something better than you could before, because you didn't have the skills or the tools before, so now you can do something even better, or it's taking stuff off of your plate, so you can spend more time thinking, and again making something better than you did before. At the end of the day, our work output should not increase in terms of volume, but increase in terms of quality, and that's really where the AI makes things like taking stuff off your plate. You can then pile on more. It's to get you to be able to do your job even better, because you're not worried about moving data from one place to another. You're actually able to do the analysis on what the data is saying, versus just moving it around to get it in the right place to build the dashboard.
Evan Patterson 35:14
Yeah, well, on the note of quantity and volume, that is more of a symptom and less of a diagnosis, I think people need to remember that too. You ever, I agree with everything you just said, but if we have more volume, or if we have more quantity, if we have more output, that's not the goal, that's the side effect, that's the downstream result and consequence of doing better work. That's not the, that is not the definition of better work; that is just what happens when you have better work, because to your point, I can spend more time thinking and being more time being strategic and more time being creative. I, you know, when I first started being a content marketer full-time at Troops, I was giving you a blog assignment on a Monday and was expected to have a first draft done by Thursday. It was okay if that blog didn't get posted for two to three weeks. You and I both know that timeline is not appropriate in today's world, but you know, six, seven years ago, that would have been completely appropriate. But the point, though, is like now, like, sure, I should, I shouldn't take three weeks, maybe I should take a week, but just because I can get it done in the evening doesn't mean I should. It means that get the draft done in the evening, noodle on it, sit with it, think about it, and ask some other folks about what they think about it. Spend more of that time you would have spent on editing, manually writing, researching, validating, testing, and getting opinions. Have nine drafts instead of two or three drafts, like it's allow more time for editing, you know, that's not.. let's, okay, good, done, ship, you know, next one, like it's this order taking system, the speed, like fast food drive-through factory thing is going to be the death of so many brands and companies, and I am so excited to see who's bad at their job, we're already seeing it, and I love it. Thank you for lowering the bar for people like me.
Kerry Guard 37:09
I mean, that's exactly what this is going to do. When I, you know, I have clients who are building products right now, they're no longer wanting to spend the 12 grand plus a year on CRM building their own, which I had qualms about. It was a huge liability, right? Security standpoint, and then left it one of them beyond love, because rather take the energy to build the thing themselves, they would help in the brands, because ease profits, and more importantly, building it and AI is literally serving up what tool they need.
Kerry Guard 37:45
Yeah.
Kerry Guard 37:45
Oh, you opt to make sure you have signed, you need to make sure that you can take easy payments. Oh, you need this tool. They're not giving them options or saying Here are your options of what tools you could potentially use. It's telling them to go sign up for the thing, so that they can grab the API and plug it in on their end, like it. This, like, this is what we're up against in terms of where AI is headed in how B2B is going. These platforms are going to be recommended. You have to be the answer, and the only way to be the answer is to solve a very specific problem better than anybody else for that audience, for that AI to serve you up, like that's yeah, that's the mountain we get to climb.
Evan Patterson 38:33
That there's the mic drop, that's that's that's a fantastic place to lead people, because the go hire Kerry and her team, you know, that's it's if you're going to, well, it's also it's it's if you're gonna, I just, I just don't understand why when there's a new tool that comes out, why we have to go, oh yay, profit margin increase, it's like, how about reallocating that newfound cost difference on something that really makes that investment more, more worthwhile, versus just going, "Oh, yay, look at how much money I'm saving. Like, sure, that looks impressive short term to investors and stockholders, but long term, you're going to have a lot more sustainability, and this is such an American thing. It's the becomes economics. You and I could talk about the philosophy of that approach for hours and hours, I'm sure. But you know, if you got a 15% profit margin and you're, and you're growing every year 15% profit margin, your goal shouldn't be to get to a 20% profit margin, it should be to maintain the 15% profit margin, because when hard times hit, you're going to be fine with that logic, and I think that AI is just another example of that. It's just another way that companies are going to shoot themselves in the foot if they don't marry everything Google is putting out. Reaching in the article that I'm sure you'll be sharing and talking away a ton on the internet, if you don't marry that with talent, and if you don't marry that with, you know, thoughtfulness and having a strong POV, and everything we discussed in this interview, it's not going to be worth even $10 a month.
Kerry Guard 40:18
Nope, nope. The last thing I'll say in all of this is, if things are good right now, and you think you have time, because things are good, I'm telling you, you don't like the best time to build is when things are good, and I'm speaking, I'm maybe speaking from experience, right? Like, as a marketing agency, of course, you know, the cobbler's children have no shoes, is like exactly what we've been up against for the last five years. Things were good, things were really good until they weren't, and then we were like, no, what do we do? And we started marketing in the worst of times, and we still are working on it. And now things are better, but that's because of referrals in our network, and the same clients bringing us back, which is not sustainable, so we are doing our own marketing now, while things are good, so we could lay that foundation, so when things are not good, it's okay, because we have pipeline and we have other channels we can pull, and we have a strong foundation that we can build on, and like no problem, but man, do I tell my younger self, if I could go back 15 years, start marketing now. What you're doing for clients, do for yourself, and start right now.
Evan Patterson 41:29
Please, everybody, especially if you're in your early 20s, please, please build the brand, even if you don't know what you're selling yet.
Kerry Guard 41:37
Absolutely, absolutely. And if you're out there looking for a job, do your treat yourself like a brand and start marketing yourself.
Evan Patterson 41:46
especially if you are a marketer.
Kerry Guard 41:50
yeah. Oh man. Well, clearly we could talk all day. These two articles just dropped. I'll share the video from the IO yesterday. I'll share the Google article about best practices, take it with a grain of salt. DM me if you have any questions. I'm here for you. Let me know if you want some. I'll jump into some rush and grab some questions if you want anything to help you all out and get ahead, because it's, it's here. Times come.
Evan Patterson 42:14
Well, damn.
Kerry Guard 42:21
Though it ends on that note. We appreciate you all. Thank you for letting us jump in on this Thursday off script, and we will see you next week with a guest.
Evan Patterson 42:33
Oh yeah, because I'm not a guest.
Kerry Guard 42:38
It was awesome. This was just us getting to chit-chat and run, which was awesome.
Evan Patterson 42:42
We gotta do this again sometime. This was a, this was a pleasure.
Kerry Guard 42:46
Always, always. Well, now I know what to do next time a guest cancels.
Evan Patterson 42:50
If I'm free, I'm here.
Kerry Guard 42:52
Let's do it, let's do it. Thank you all so much.
