So What? Aligning Content Marketing With Buyer Intent

So What? Marketing Analytics and Insights Live

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In this episode, Katie Robbert explores methods to match content marketing with buyer intent.

This knowledge will transform your content marketing into a magnet for ready buyers. By closing this communication gap, you will align your message with the true desires of your audience, and the resulting content marketing will guide curious listeners toward a confident purchase decision.

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In this episode you’ll learn:

Why buyer intent and content marketing often drift
What techniques help identify buyer intent gaps
How to use your favorite AI model to identify and fix those gaps

Transcript:

What follows is an AI-generated transcript. The transcript may contain errors and is not a substitute for listening to the episode.

Katie Robbert – 00:33

Well, hey, everyone. Happy Thursday. Welcome to So What?, the marketing analytics and insights live show. I am Katie, joined by Chris and John. Howdy, fellas.

John Wall – 00:41

Hello.

Katie Robbert – 00:45

This week we are talking about aligning content marketing with buyer intent. This was something that I started thinking about last week when Chris and I were at MAICON in Cleveland, which went very well. We were very excited to be at that show last week. One of the nice things about attending shows like that is you get to really hear what’s going on inside your own industry, what your peers are talking about, what your potential customers are talking about.

And something that really struck me was that we at Trust Insights have so many things, and we try to educate and share so much information, but it doesn’t mean that we’re necessarily doing it right. And what I mean by that is we aren’t necessarily reflecting back the words that our audience and our prospects are using.

Katie Robbert – 01:39

And so I was thinking about what our services are called, what we talk about in our various live streams and podcasts and newsletters. And are we really, truly understanding what people are wanting to hear about and reflecting back their language to them? So that’s sort of where this idea of aligning content marketing with buyer intent started to be clear. Not a new concept, but the way in which generative AI and other resources are now available to people.

Things like going through thousands of hours of customer service calls, which was previously something that felt unrealistic because of the time and resource intensiveness and trying to figure out what the patterns are. Generative AI can do that for you very quickly.

Katie Robbert – 02:29

Because if you’re thinking about what generative AI is good at, it’s really good at pattern matching and digging out similarities. So don’t let it make your decisions for you, but let it do that deep analysis of thousands of hours of customer service calls. So that’s where this started. I’ve been doing this for Trust Insights, but Chris went ahead and did this for his own personal website so that we’re not giving away our Trust Insights IP, but the process in general is similar to what I was approaching, and then I shared with Chris what I was trying to accomplish. So all of that to be said before we get into the analysis.

Katie Robbert – 03:03

John, as the person on our team who primarily owns talking with prospects, I want to get your thoughts on how aligned we are at Trust Insights with how we talk about our stuff to what you’re actually hearing on intake calls.

John Wall – 03:22

Yeah, that’s a core competency for us. But we’re in a unique point in that the product is changing regularly. Over the course of a year, we will probably have to pivot twice on a product to make it stay current and meet the customer-specific needs because of changes in tools and how everything works. So, yeah, that’s part of our whole model of why we do live streams every week and why we’re doing the Analytics for Marketers Slack group, where there’s real-time feedback.

So again, core competency for us is staying on top of what’s in demand today. And does what we have match it? The gap that we see with so many clients is they’re not in such a meat grinder.

John Wall – 04:06

They have a product that hasn’t changed maybe that much in the last three years. And so for them it’s a lot more critical. And the big thing with them too, it’s not as much the alignment, but making sure they’ve got it in the right channels or the right places. We see this all the time where they have a content team and they’re doing okay with that, but they’re not going the extra steps of, okay, is it in the right channels where it needs to be for today, for the reality of business now and where things are going.

So, yeah, it always needs work. This is one of the few times where I’m like, yeah, we’ve got this covered. This is something we do well. This is the opposite of the cobbler’s kids for us.

John Wall – 04:44

We are walking the walk on this one.

Katie Robbert – 04:47

I love to hear it because I feel like sometimes I’m too close to it to know if that’s the case or not. And I’m the one who’s like, well, are we doing it right? Are we missing the mark? Those are the questions I should be asking all the time. And I am asking all the time. And so I like hearing your perspective as that gut check, which is always incredibly helpful.

John Wall – 05:10

And is the money there? For us, we’re taking the risk. Yeah, exactly. That’s a key point to make, that’s a different question because we’re so early in the cycle. For an established business, though, it’s not a question at all. They know for a fact that if they can answer the questions, that just translates directly to more money.

Katie Robbert – 05:32

Chris, I know I’ve run this analysis, but I’m curious to see what your approach was and where you started. I had talked with you about this last week, that I was starting this for the company, and you took it and ran with your stuff because you were curious. So how did you start? Where are we with this?

Christopher Penn – 05:57

I had to come up with three things. First was what data have we got? Obviously we have all of our sales calls, and that’s the gold standard. The things that people say to John on sales calls are what’s most important, because we’ve got to use our customers’ words.

The second is methodology, which is what are the ways that you would analyze this kind of language? And there are two different categories. There is lexical and semantic. You’ve heard these terms before. Lexical is what are the exact words that people use that you would search for in the old days, like in SEO. This would be exact-match keywords. The second is semantic, which is topics. What are the topics that people will talk about?

Christopher Penn – 06:39

So one example that you give often, Katie, is we will say AI enablement and other people will say AI ops, or how do we use this AI thing? Those are not exact-match words, but they are semantically very similar. So we need an approach that does both.

And the approach is called reciprocal rank fusion, where you take something like Okapi BM25, which is one algorithm, and you take vectorization, embeddings, cosine similarity and Jaccard similarity, which is a second. And you have basically two sets of approaches, and you weld them together so that a document, a page, a blog post, a YouTube video that scores well on both the real words people use and the topic that we care about will rise to the top. And you need both.

Christopher Penn – 07:30

And then the third is you have to create a way to ingest and process all this data. So what data is there?

For my analysis, I used three different data sources. The sales calls, again, that’s the gold standard. Then my WordPress export. For those people who use the WordPress content management system, if it’s self-hosted, like we use WP Engine, you can go into your WordPress database and say, give me the database, and it’ll drop this huge blob of all of your posts with all the data in them, the words, the metadata, the tags and all that stuff.

And I also dropped in my Google Search Console data, because that’s sort of the middle ground. There is what I write about, which, let’s be honest, sometimes is pretty darn random.

Christopher Penn – 08:19

There’s what the real customers say, and then that middle ground is Google Search Console, to say, Chris, are you talking about anything that people are searching for, or are you just foaming at the mouth like a madman? And welding those three sources together allows us to say, okay, well, here’s the… it almost follows kind of a funnel. And the funnel, at least from an information perspective, is three stages: informational, commercial and transactional.

So informational is, I just want to learn about this thing. No buyer intent. Commercial is, who’s a good keynote speaker on marketing AI? There’s some buyer intent there. Who’s a great consulting firm that can help me with my AI and operations? Who’s an expert in change management? That would be you, Katie. Those are commercial terms.

Christopher Penn – 09:13

And then transactional is, how do I hire Trust Insights for AI enablement? How do I hire Christopher Penn as a keynote speaker? How do I sponsor a season of Marketing Over Coffee? Those are, the credit card is out, I’m ready to buy.

And so we have to take that framework and apply it to all three sets of data. In the sales calls, John and I were just on a call yesterday which was half informational. They were just asking questions that had nothing to do with what they wanted to buy; they just wanted to be educated. What are the words and phrases and concepts that are commercial, and what is transactional?

Christopher Penn – 09:51

And so given all that, it was essentially a nine-page prompt that I gave to Claude Code, along with a long list of the recommended approaches that I thought it should take. But it was free to push back, and it did. And then 11 and a half hours later, it had a piece of working Python software that did all this and produced the analysis.

Katie Robbert – 10:19

So a very different approach from how I did it.

Christopher Penn – 10:23

How did you do it? Tell us about how you did it.

Katie Robbert – 10:25

I started with a hypothesis, and the hypothesis was that the way that Trust Insights talks about their services is not aligned with what our audience is trying to solve for. Basically saying, to your point, we might say AI enablement, they might say AI audit, which is semantically, topically related.

But we know that people are making decisions like this, and they’re like, if I don’t see myself in it immediately, I’m going to move on to someone who has exactly the thing I’m looking for. Don’t maybe think too hard about it. So that was my hypothesis.

Katie Robbert – 11:08

And so what I did, probably similar to you, just not in those technical terms, was I pulled all of our new biz calls, plus some client calls, basically starting from January 1st, compiled those and said, let’s pull out what people are saying about what they’re struggling with, what their pain points are, and then let’s see how well we answer those questions.

I think we’re after the same thing, but we approached it slightly differently. I approached it the way that I feel like a non-technical person approaches it, but at the same time, I feel like I got really good information, because what I got back from that was, you’re right, the terms that we use are ones that we’re making up internally, not things that are necessarily reflective of what our audience is saying. But it’s close.

Katie Robbert – 12:02

It’s close, that we’re like, we could feel good about it if we left it, but it’s far enough away that it might be, not for sure, but it might be a reason why someone’s not raising their hand and saying, how do I buy from you?

Christopher Penn – 12:15

Yep. And it’s interesting, because the other thing that’s funny about the analysis I did is that we’re essentially treating my personal website, my personal newsletter, as a part of the Trust Insights funnel, which it is, the mailing list and stuff like that. We see that in our analytics. We cover that on other episodes. And so the results should be different than what you see.

What ideally you should see, Katie, in your analysis is that it should be very heavy commercial and very heavy transactional, if our content’s working for us. Yes, there should be some educational. But we really want to see, yeah, you are driving people to the finish line with your content, and it is making them say, yes, here’s the credit card, I’m ready to go.

Katie Robbert – 12:59

And I don’t think we’re quite there yet, and I won’t get into specifics, it’s things that I’m working on in the background. But we definitely have some gaps that we need to fill in terms of what that looks like. So we don’t lack for content, we lack for focus and giving people a clean journey to go on with the content, which are fixable things.

Christopher Penn – 13:24

Exactly. So just to show you one part of one of the exports from my stuff. Again, this is something that we’ve covered plenty of times in the last year. I gave it the Trust Insights ideal customer profiles, Strategic Sarah and the usual cast of characters.

And those ideal customer profiles, because we’ve done a good job with them, have needs, pain points, goals, motivations, buying behaviors and all that stuff. And from my content, it said, here’s how your content aligns with the needs, with the pain points, with the goals, the motivations, and whether it’s informational, commercial, transactional. What we see here is, ignoring the last column here…

Christopher Penn – 14:04

My content resonates most with the goals of our ideal customer profiles, followed by the pain points, followed by the information, just trying to explore, like, what is my pain? The old Star Trek V, share your pain. Sorry. John’s like, no one liked that movie.

But you’ll see that even though I’m doing a good job of eliciting and matching my content to that buyer intent, it’s not transactional. My content is not doing a good enough job, compared to our sales calls, of saying, here’s how to buy. It’s like the last line in every Snapchat commercial. Here’s how to buy. And my content does not do that. And so these numbers here are really low. And if…

Christopher Penn – 15:02

If my website was solely my business and not part of Trust Insights, I’d be out of business, because I can’t get people to buy. But I can create that commercial demand. And then people go to Trust Insights, and that’s where we want them to say, all right, I’m ready to buy.

John Wall – 15:18

Let’s…

Christopher Penn – 15:19

Let me buy something.

Katie Robbert – 15:23

So the largest two buckets are no tag. What does that mean?

Christopher Penn – 15:27

That means that there’s content in those that basically says, yeah, we couldn’t find any places for this content. So 82% of my content doesn’t fit in transactional, 16% of my content doesn’t fit in commercial, and 63% doesn’t fit informational.

Basically, there’s a bunch of stuff like, for example, my blog post on whether lighter fluid is in your food when you’re cooking it over charcoal. That does not fit with any of our buyer personas. That does not fit with anything that anyone ever talks to John about. And so that would fall in the category of, yeah, this is not relevant.

Katie Robbert – 16:03

So what I’m hearing is, John, your job is more than safe, and you are highly valuable.

John Wall – 16:10

Well, yeah, if we could replace working with customers with just content on the web, yeah, that would be one thing. Yeah, it’s interesting to see. So what are your thoughts on that? As far as… I don’t know. My gut, though, is that’s what Trust Insights is here for. You don’t change your voice, because your voice is what makes you unique in what you’re doing and where your research is. But what are you thinking about getting rid of some of the posts that don’t touch upon anything that’s even remotely related?

Christopher Penn – 16:43

In the stakeholder version, which is the less technical version, it basically says that a lot of the time my content does not answer the ready-to-hire. It doesn’t do such a hot job of, it’s weighing us up. It’s in there and still learning. There’s a lot of information there, but I’m near the topic.

So if I wanted to make it much more of a direct pipeline to specific Trust Insights businesses, this magenta bar would have to get smaller and the green bars would have to get larger, to say I need to write and speak more about these specific topics and have content on the site that is transactional related. Something in the footer that says, if you’re ready to talk to Trust Insights now, click here.

Christopher Penn – 17:33

Or here’s the way that you can work with Trust Insights, instead of it being a personal blog where it’s just filled with all the random stuff that’s normally there.

So there’s opportunities in my own content. And this is the same analysis. We did this analysis for Trust Insights as well. We’re not going to show that version, but essentially the green bars are much longer in the Trust Insights version, because we’re much more focused on the company website. We’re much more focused on our blog and our content.

Christopher Penn – 18:00

The other thing that was interesting is I looked at how my different content types address the prospects. Because I sync my YouTube channel with my website, the So What? live streams get cross-posted, because we transmit on all these different channels. For my website, in the analysis I did, the methodology I did in terms of what content answers, and this one surprised me, You Ask, I Answer was lower than Mind Readings. Mind Readings is my rambling opinions on things.

My newsletter does the best job of fulfilling more of that commercial and transactional intent, obviously, because there’s a lot of calls to action for things like Trust Insights courses and Trust Insights Academy and so on and so forth.

Christopher Penn – 18:50

And the live streams are not as aligned to what the ICPs for Trust Insights would want to buy, in the language that they’re using.

Katie Robbert – 19:02

And so this is still, you’re using the call transcript data to determine what questions the prospects are asking. And so this is saying that, of the questions or the pain points that our Trust Insights prospects have, the So What? livestream, which is what we’re on right now, is the least effective in terms of answering those questions?

Okay, that’s helpful to know. That’s something that we’ve been thinking about for a couple of months: what does this look like in 2027? No clear answer right now. But the analysis is always helpful. I’m not surprised that Mind Readings is slightly higher than You Ask, I Answer, because I feel like part of the challenge is that people don’t know what to ask.

Katie Robbert – 19:56

And so You Ask, I Answer means that somebody knows what the question is in order to ask it. And a lot of times that’s not the case. They’re waiting for something to resonate with them, which is sort of where we started this conversation.

Whereas Mind Readings, if those are your opinions, a lot of the questions that people don’t know they have are whether or not something is BS, or what do you think of the latest models? Because they’re wondering about those things, but they’re not clear that it’s a question that they should be raising their hand and asking you to directly answer.

Katie Robbert – 20:31

So I can understand why a little bit more of the opinion piece would rate higher, because people don’t know what to ask, but you’re giving them a lot of information that they can then go use and say, oh, okay, now I can apply that, because Chris is a trusted source, and when he says this model is good, this model is bad, I can take that with me and do something with it, versus I don’t even know that the model came out, so I don’t even know to ask about it.

Christopher Penn – 20:59

Exactly. And there’s limitations too. There’s data I didn’t put in this. I did not, for example, grab our internal Slack. I did not, for example, grab the Analytics for Marketers archive itself. I went off just the very bottom of the funnel, and those other communities would have fit in more of the informational and commercial slots, whereas sales calls are really transactional.

So part of the strategy for a V2 of this would be to look at what content we have at each of those three levels: informational, commercial and transactional. And then measuring our content externally against that internal content to say, yeah, we are doing a good job of creating informational content that matches the informational discussions that we have access to, and so on and so forth. Looking at parity across the different levels…

Christopher Penn – 21:51

Of those three buckets.

Katie Robbert – 21:55

Our good buddy Brian. Hey, Brian. He has a question. So great seeing you at MAICON. You as well. “How will you ensure that you look at your content strategy insights before creating content, instead of just creating content based on what interests you?”

Christopher Penn – 22:11

For the company? That’s exactly what this analysis does. The analysis says, here’s what we need to create more of. And Katie’s got that in, I’ve seen Katie’s decks, for our internal team reviews to say, okay, these are the things that we need to do more of to match not only the semantics but also the lexical matches, to say, this is the language that people use. What’s the old, famous Cicero quote?

Katie Robbert – 22:35

Right.

Christopher Penn – 22:35

If you wish to persuade me, you must speak the words that I speak. You must feel the emotions I feel.

And on my personal website, I don’t know that I will do that, because that really is my dumping ground of, hey, here’s the random thing that I was thinking about this week. Like, I was having a conversation this week with a friend about whether machines can have souls or not. The answer is no. That’s something that I would probably create some content around that has zero alignment with any kind of buyer intent from the kinds of people who hire Trust Insights. So I don’t know that for my personal stuff I would do that, but I would definitely not do that for the company, because it has no commercial use.

Katie Robbert – 23:23

Well, so let’s just take the example of your website. Let’s say that was the company website for a sec. Let’s just hypothetically say that. And we found that your content marketing does not align with your buyer intent.

Is there an opportunity to keep the sandboxes, I call it internally, your sandbox, because I want to make sure you have a space to do the R&D, to do the different thinking that doesn’t necessarily align, but there are pieces that align with the company. So is it a matter of just reorganizing your personal website? Again, let’s say that’s the company website. Would we just reorg it?

Katie Robbert – 24:07

So it’s like, here’s all the random stuff, here’s all the stuff if you’re curious about working with us. I don’t know, because I feel like that’s overly simplistic, and people try it and it still doesn’t work, to just say, oh, well, we can just point people to things on the website. I don’t know that’s a really good solution. So I guess I’m curious to hear, so what do you do with that?

Because we know, again, from our own data, and we’ve shared it on the live stream before, your website does have a role in our funnel. And so if you’re saying, no, I’m not going to align my content with the company’s buyer intent, my instinct as the CEO is WTF? What do we do?

Katie Robbert – 24:55

But it has to. Even a small slice of it has to. And so I don’t know what that looks like, because I just don’t have an answer for that.

Christopher Penn – 25:05

Well, part of it is there’s obviously rational self-interest. The rational self-interest is I’m not going to publish or create things that are harmful to the business or to my personal reputation. That’s just stupid.

Katie Robbert – 25:18

Sure.

Christopher Penn – 25:19

And what would make the most sense logically, because one of the things that I have as part of this experiment in the code I have the matches against which pieces did best against that. And what would be a logical thing to do would be to then put that through a mechanized pipeline to create Trust Insights versions of those that are more buyer-intent aligned.

So maybe I wrote a piece, for example, on semantic embeddings. Pretty nerdy, not super helpful, but my playground. But it did well because I talked about the topics that people were interested in. That could go into a workflow or a skill or an agent that would say, okay, here’s the known language that prospects use. Here’s the ideal customer profiles. With those two things, here’s this original raw piece.

Christopher Penn – 26:12

Hey, AI of the day, rewrite this piece that’s more aligned with these two things, and then put it on the Trust Insights website, or maybe queue it up as a podcast topic for Chris and Katie to discuss, so that we get a business-aligned version of the things that work the best.

Katie Robbert – 26:30

Why wouldn’t you, the human, just rewrite it for the company? Why would AI do it? Because this was a hot topic at MAICON last week, AI writing versus human writing.

Christopher Penn – 26:41

Because if you have a known good human source and you are making minimal edits, if you have a human rewrite, you’re basically redoing the same work.

Katie Robbert – 26:56

I don’t want to get too far down the rat hole with that one, so I’ll just park it for now. But that was a big topic we heard at MAICON. Well, in general, we’re hearing a lot of, there’s a big pushback on AI-written content versus human-written content. What belongs where?

I guess my question, and I’ll punt this over to you, John, is what kinds of resources? Because again, you’re the one who’s talking with prospects. Do you feel like you have adequate resources to share with people that answer their questions, or are you finding yourself saying, we just don’t have those topics covered, I don’t have anything that I can share with them?

John Wall – 27:39

No, we’ve got that, because really we have a lot of content. And part of the process that you guys have built is every time there’s a new product built, there’s a deck that’s generated and a PDF that’s put together of, okay, here’s why this thing was made and the selling points and where everything works. Some of the stuff is a 50-page document that’s just all over the place, but there’s always five pages that are the guts of, this is what I’m going to send to a prospect when somebody needs to be educated about the topic.

And the thing for us is, very quickly it gets to a point where we’re talking about their specific situation.

John Wall – 28:13

They’ll come to us with, hey, I have a problem in GEO, or with analytics, or with using more AI-enabled processes, and that kind of stuff we share with them. But by the second call, it’s like, okay, this is the exact thing I’m working on, what have you got for that? And maybe we have a related case study to share, but that’s at the point where we’re already doing consultative sales and explaining what we would build and how we would build it.

And that’s why we’re scope driven, which is also… Yeah, and I hadn’t thought about that, but yeah, we have that content on demand, because you guys have built out the Claude skills, so we take those informational calls.

John Wall – 28:51

And I still get the first cut of the scope automated, and we just have to tweak and align. But the grunt work of putting that together and making that content, that’s actually fully on demand.

Christopher Penn – 29:03

Now, Katie, you just raised a very important point, though, something super important, which is the gap. The flaw in this particular methodology is we do not have the sales calls we never get. So we never get a sales call that says, hey, Trust Insights, we have a $4 billion project we need you to bid on. We don’t get those. And so that language does not exist.

Katie Robbert – 29:31

Come on. Manifesting.

Christopher Penn – 29:33

Yep. So we don’t get that, which is one of the reasons why I use both the real world and the ICPs. Because you have to have both. You may say, I want to work with our friends over at Thermo Fisher, for example. They are not a client. We have not had a call with them in the window of time that we’re looking at. So that data is not there.

And so one of the catches here is what our friend Tom Webster calls the optimization trap, which is if you follow only the data you have, you’re optimizing for what you already have. You are not optimizing for growth, because growth means going beyond what you have now.

Katie Robbert – 30:09

And that’s actually a really good opportunity for me to plug that I will be talking about building a better ideal customer profile at MarketingProfs on November 2nd in downtown Boston. And one of the examples that I give in the talk is, oh, gosh, I don’t remember the exact verbiage, but if you come see me live, then you’ll get it firsthand.

But it’s along the lines of a Navy officer wanting to build the armored vest based on the people who came back with the bullet holes and where they were. And that’s all well and good, except he wasn’t looking at the people who didn’t come back and where those bullet holes were. So you’re only getting a small segment of data.

Katie Robbert – 30:55

Now, it’s a fairly extreme example, but when you think about human protection, it’s very easy to wrap your head around. Oh, yeah, I totally want all of the data because I want to protect all of the potential places where I could get hurt. And again, sort of an extreme example.

But what you’re saying, Chris, is we’re only optimizing for the ideal situation. And this is where we started a couple of years ago with our ideal customer profiles. It was literally, who would we love to work with, and what are they? What do they have to say, what are their profiles? But that was not reflective of who we actually sell to, and then more importantly, who we actually lose to. And all of that data together makes a stronger profile of an ideal customer.

Katie Robbert – 31:44

And up until recently, we were missing that data, but also just not looking at that data. We were looking at our ideal customers as who would we love to work with. Taking that word ideal a little too seriously.

Christopher Penn – 31:58

The other way, and we had this experience very recently, is you can backfill some of that data by looking particularly at what peer companies or aspirational companies are doing on the new business front.

And the easy way to do that is to look at the RFPs that companies are issuing and say, okay, what are the words in these RFPs? We just finished an RFP process ourselves, and we looked at the words and went, wow, there’s some stuff in here we should probably create content on. Because the company that was soliciting bids had very specific language. And I’m like, all right, I need to create something about this specific thing, because it was important enough to put in an RFP with a lot of zeros before the decimal.

Christopher Penn – 32:45

It’s probably something we should have content on.

Katie Robbert – 32:51

So what’s the so what of the analysis that you did? If we’re talking strictly about Trust Insights, I would have a full plan for how we would approach this, the words we would start to use. Instead, I guess I have a two-part question. One is, what’s the so what of your stuff personally? Because you did this analysis, you talked about what you will and probably won’t do, and we’ll have words about that later.

But then the other question is, how often is this useful? And I will take GEO, for example, and the way in which it’s talked about. So GEO, AEO. I just saw OAO, and people saying SEO. How often should you be revisiting this?

Katie Robbert – 33:45

Because I feel like we’re now in this weird space where we’re constantly trying to pivot the messaging, but the services stay the same. But it’s exhausting, because you could just do that every single day based on whatever new set of words someone comes up with to describe the same thing.

Christopher Penn – 34:02

You nailed it before, exactly, when you asked John, what are you hearing? If John said, guys, this is the third time this week I’ve been asked about this and we don’t have anything for it, John is our early warning system to say there’s gaps. There’s gaps. And at this layer of the funnel, we need something for that. For Trust Insights, I think having the robust pipeline, and then having the tools basically say, based on the mathematics of what we’ve done, these are the things you need to do more of.

And it’s actually in the stakeholder report. It says, do more of this, do less of this. For me, there were a couple of things, like I said, like, hey, you know what?

Christopher Penn – 34:45

You still have a lot of really weird random crap on your blog. Maybe stop doing that. And I was like, no, I like doing that. But as a business, that would be like, okay, these posts gotta go, because they’re distractions and they’re attracting the wrong kind of traffic.

So you would remove those, archive those, redirect them, what have you. And then from your topic list, especially if you’ve done a landscape survey, which is a separate topic, you should know where the gaps are, in particular at the transactional and commercial layers. And your traditional SEO tools will do this for you. You don’t need to buy anything special for it. To your point, Katie, we kind of need something. Yes, everyone’s saying AI visibility now. We’ve been saying GEO.

Christopher Penn – 35:34

We probably need to have something that talks about AI visibility specifically, and say also known as GEO. I saw somebody, oh, Ashley Faus was saying that people are using LLM optimization. They’re calling it Elmo. I’m like, why? Why are we doing this?

Katie Robbert – 35:50

Well, so two things. One, John, we clearly need to get you a bullhorn. If you are the early warning system, you need to have your bullhorn, like, hey, guys, hey, heard this thing.

Christopher Penn – 36:00

Hey.

Katie Robbert – 36:01

But second is, so now we’re getting more tactical around what to do about this when you see it. But I’m seeing a lot of things like, you can’t just keyword stuff things anymore. So if we have, what is GEO, or how does Trust Insights approach GEO, we can’t just have the first line of the content be, also known as, and then list all the keywords and just stuff it that way.

Because I feel like that’s what a lot of people are doing, and I don’t think that’s the right approach, but I could be wrong.

Christopher Penn – 36:34

No, you wouldn’t want to just keyword stuff. You’d want to have some legitimately useful content. People do make a distinction between AEO, GEO and SEO. I don’t think those distinctions are meaningful, but that alone would be the content.

If, going back to your question, my personal website was the business by itself, I would have a piece saying AEO and GEO are the same thing. Stop calling it other things, you dummies. And here’s why. Because what you’re talking about is getting recommended by AI, period. End of story. Call it whatever you want. That’s what you’re trying to do. And here’s how Trust Insights will help you do that. We have our PARM framework, which I’m definitely going to make an infographic for.

Christopher Penn – 37:22

And it 100% could have a picture of chicken parm in it.

Katie Robbert – 37:26

But then you’d have to have words for the word chicken. It’s just parm. So you just have to have the piece of cheese.

Christopher Penn – 37:32

That’s true. It could be a multitude of dishes. Eggplant parm and chicken parm. Anyway, no, keep…

Katie Robbert – 37:39

Okay, so keep your eggplant parm off my website. Apparently that’s where I draw the line.

Christopher Penn – 37:47

Clearly everything else was fine.

Katie Robbert – 37:49

Everything else is fine. Just no eggplant. So, so what? So all of this to be said, Chris, what’s your next step? What are you going to do with all of this information?

Christopher Penn – 38:00

For me, looking at the Almost Timely newsletter, because that was the piece of content that says this aligns best, I know for a fact I have not updated a lot of the calls to action in a while. They are pretty rusty. They’re not wrong. They don’t go to dead ends. But they’re not the priorities of the company anymore.

And since the company is basically the headline sponsor of it, they’ll be updating it. Say, instead of one course, go to the Trust Insights Academy now and see all the courses we have to offer. Instead of talking about just one AI service…

Christopher Penn – 38:31

Hey, here’s the AI services page and all the things that we can do. So that will help align, knowing that the newsletter itself is already pretty well aligned for commercial intent. That will fix that transactional layer that we saw in the data, to say, yeah, let’s make the transactional things that are already there more effective. So that’s step number one: fix that easy stuff.

And then the second thing, and this is a much larger conversation that we’re actually gonna have tomorrow, is what is the function of my website? Besides being a hobby ground, what else is it supposed to do? How is it different from Trust Insights? How do we avoid cannibalization and make it complementary? And my…

Christopher Penn – 39:15

My initial feeling is if it was more focused on the speaking part of what I do, and Trust Insights is all about the consulting that we do. Once you’ve heard the dog and pony show and the shock and dazzle, and they’re like, how do I buy more of that? We say, come on over to TrustInsights.ai, and we will help you get more of it.

Katie Robbert – 39:35

What do you think, John, from a buyer’s perspective? Two websites that have two different purposes, or one website that gives you the whole enchilada?

John Wall – 39:47

Yeah, that’s a good question. I think having the speaker thing as a separate and unrelated site does answer some questions, because it’s a totally different buyer. Different ICP, as far as looking for speakers and what they need to get done at events and wanting to see video, as opposed to the Trust Insights site, which is a whole lot more than just speaker stuff. There’s a lot of different content and other places to go. So, yeah, I don’t know. That’s kind of interesting. I hadn’t thought about it too much, but we’ve seen that in the agency world.

There were all these agencies where they had one person that was kind of the public speaker and the voice of it, but they had their whole brand and their own thing going the entire time.

John Wall – 40:32

And it was important to keep that separate, because I think in some ways it can diminish the agency, if people just presume that the entire agency is run by that one person. And you get in those weird situations where clients won’t do a deal if that person’s not involved. And you need to make it clear that there’s a whole lot more going on, way beyond what one single person can do.

And what you really need is the team of experts over here. They’ve been trained by that expert, but we have specialists who cover exactly what you’re looking for. You don’t need to hold out for Gini Dietrich. You can go ahead, and anybody at the firm is going to be able to help you out.

Christopher Penn – 41:13

The two risks, one of which, in a lot of those examples you talked about, John, we don’t have, is a lot of those personalities were not owners of the agency. And therefore, when they left, they took their audience with them.

John Wall – 41:29

Right.

Christopher Penn – 41:29

As a co-owner of Trust Insights, we do not have that problem. But to your other point, this is also something I want to see happen with katierobbert.com. It should be showcasing how great a speaker Katie is, the crazy high ratings Katie gets in her evaluations, the strong feedback, the people who are posting on LinkedIn saying, I was in your workshop, it was the best part of the entire conference. All of that should be on that website, so that it is very clear.

And when people search for Katie by name, they find Katie’s website, and they see that this is a person that they want to have on the big stage. Katie, you and I were talking about, what does it take to get to the big stage?

Christopher Penn – 42:11

It takes building that brand. The same thing is true for Marketing Over Coffee. John, you and I have been the cobbler’s kids running around a bloody stump for 20 years now. If we wanted to take that to the next level, whatever that is, more sponsors, bigger sponsors and stuff like that, we would use these exact tools and this exact methodology.

So the methodology is: gather the real words that people say in your sales process. Gather your words, have your AI tool of choice do semantic and lexical analysis, and then produce the clusters throughout the customer journey to tell you, at a high level, here’s what’s working and here’s what’s not. Here’s where you are weak. So for example, with me, I am weak on the transactional side.

Christopher Penn – 43:03

I am weak on saying, here’s how to buy. And then, to Katie’s point, you go and do the thing.

Katie Robbert – 43:11

All right. So we got our work cut out for us, huh?

Christopher Penn – 43:14

We certainly do. Thank goodness, as usual.

Katie Robbert – 43:17

Yeah, per usual, we just made our list longer, not shorter.

Christopher Penn – 43:22

Mm, exactly. Any final parting thoughts?

Katie Robbert – 43:29

Listen to your customers. Listen to what people are saying. With today’s technology and tools, you really have no excuse for working within your own little bubble of, this is what I think people want. You don’t have to say that anymore.

You can actually go find out what people want, without having to spend months hand coding qualitative data and trying to find the patterns. You can do that almost instantaneously now. So if you are not reflecting back what your customers are asking for, you got to fix it.

John Wall – 44:08

Yeah, we just need less events. That’s what I want. Less events. There’s just too much going on.

Christopher Penn – 44:20

All right, that’s gonna do it for this week, folks. Thanks for tuning in, and we will see you all on the next one. Thanks for watching today. Be sure to subscribe to our show wherever you’re watching it. For more resources and to learn more, check out the Trust Insights podcast at TrustInsights.ai/tipodcast and a weekly email newsletter at TrustInsights.ai/newsletter.

Got questions about what you saw in today’s episode? Join our free Analytics for Marketers Slack group at TrustInsights.ai/analyticsformarketers. See you next time.

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