The New Frontier: AI, Paid Media, and Organic

You know, for me, if I'm building a marketing plan, and we do frequently, I'm not saying that we would never do search, but the sequence for me is going to be let's figure out paid first, because it's going to deliver the fastest results. And that's what I'm interested in. I want to know if something is working, and I want to know if it's working quickly. And I want to be able to put. If there's a return, I want to be able to put it out there fairly fast.

Hey, everybody. Roland Frazier and Ryan Deiss here with a new episode of Business Lunch. And I don't even know what it's going to be about today because Ryan and I were kicking around three ideas and he is going to tell us what it's going to be today.

All the pressure is on me. No, I was. I think this one's fun. I was having a conversation, actually. I was having lunch with someone, A. A business friend, a business acquaintance, actually. I don't know if you get this. Does. Does your wife ever say, hey, I've got a friend who has a business and I would really appreciate it if you would have coffee with them and help them out?

You know, I was thinking about that.

The last time that you told me that that happened. And I can. I mean, not really. Not really. But it's more because we're together so much. I feel like it happens kind of live because, like, it'll be. We'll be talking to the person and they'll have an issue. And of course, you know, any chance to talk business, I'm all in. So. But no, I don't really get that because I think maybe our friends are much more the same people.

Well, the best way to get free business advice from me is to be friends with my wife. That is just. That's just kind of how this works. And so, yeah, so in this case, yeah, it works. Works like a charm. Yeah. So this is one of those, like, friend of my wife, friend of mine as well. But, you know, they've got a really cool business and they were asking for. Asking for help, and so I was happy to go and grab coffee and you know, just kind of riff on, riff on some ideas, help them out, some ways they grow. But one of the questions they asked is, you know, they were saying that people have been telling them that they should invest in. In search marketing, they should invest in organic. That that was a thing that they haven't been doing and they really should be doing. And this they're not a local business. Right. And because they're not doing local marketing. Because I believe if you're doing local investing in local search absolutely makes a lot of sense. So I want to kind of set that aside. But they're not, they're. They're a nationwide business. Okay, what we said. Sorry, what was that?

What industry?

They have an online school. So they've got basically an online private school.

Okay, well they came to the right guy, right?

Yeah. So that's how their business online private school, they serve people all over the nation and they were saying like should they invest in search? And my answer, and I'm just curious if you agree. But my answer was no, that I did not feel like of all the different channels that are out there, if they haven't started yet, that search marketing was the channel that I would necessarily start with today before figuring out the different paid channels. I'm just curious, do you agree disagree with that?

If it's a startup and the option is paid versus search, it's going to be paid every time for me. So it would be more context I would need as to, you know, how long they've been around, what they were doing, that kind of stuff. But, but I like, it's funny because I kind of came up in search and then watching all the things that happen moved dramatically away from it. Although still love content marketing. And then when we hired the last CMO that we hired in one of our major businesses about a year or so ago, I watched what he was doing with search and I was like oh, that's actually kind of interesting because he's been able to get traction from it where there was none before. I also like search through acquisition of other supporting referring sites that have ranking around lower level search terms that then can kind of leapfrog authority up to you. But it's definitely to me like if, if you were like we're starting a business and we don't really have much marketing in any area and we got to do something, I would pick paid every time. And if it was we have paid that's working right now, I would continue to flesh that out and double down on it until I max it out and got in my other paid channels before I would really go to search. Except for search paid search for my name which is not really organic search. It's paid search.

Yeah. And that's kind of where I was too. If you're going to, if you're starting from, from scratch with a market, it's not the first channel I would go after because not, not only does it take a long time, which is nothing new, you know, it's going to take a little bit longer, but it's just gotten a lot more inconsistent. And this was a belief that I've had. But I felt somewhat vindicated because just today I stumbled across this article and it's, it's from this website, growth memo. So growth-memo.com and the articles filter bubble if somebody wants to go back and look it up. But really good article. This person clearly knows their stuff, did a fair bit of research. But what they kind of honed in on is that there, there are three main things that they're saying are why search is not as effective as it once was. And then they kind of suggest a new model that I'll, that I'll get to. So I'll mention the three things, kind of get your take on it. So thing number one, they said that Google updates have become unpredictable instead of enforcing a straight line which makes SEO less predictable as a channel. So I kind of saw this and laughed because I don't ever recall a time when Google updates were hyper predictable. But apparently they were saying that like it's gotten even worse.

Panda and Penguin, you know, it's, it's.

Been, oh, I remember Florida update. Yeah, I mean I remember the Florida update back in like you know, 2004, 2005. Like yeah, I mean it's. But, but there, but apparently it's gotten even worse and I don't know, even more arbitrary. So they're saying like even if you think you kind of have it figured out, the updates now, they don't seem to be kind of enforcing or encouraging the same types of behavior. At least in the past it seemed like the updates were encouraging or enforcing, reinforcing the same type of good behavior. And now it just sort of seems random. So I can kind of buy that. Thing number two, they're saying that attention is shifting from the open web to social content platforms like YouTube and LinkedIn. I know we've seen this as well. And they kind of quoted this, that 40% of Gen Z use TikTok for search instead of Google. And they said this is a, this is not just kind of a minor, you know, issue. This is a generational shift that has taken place. So the youngins out there, even if you manage to crack the Google code, the reality is that the up and coming generation, they're simply not using Google in the same way that old farts like us did. They're actually using TikTok as their search engine. And then the third thing is that content platforms really are more about engagement and that the way that people are using search and the way that search happens is that it's people are, when they do use search, they're getting their answer right there on the search platform. So it's less about the click out. It used to be that you would go to the search engine, you would find what you wanted by actually clicking on a link and going to the website. Now not only do people not care about the original source, they're definitely not visiting the original source. And, and AI is only making this worse, right? We don't care about the original source.

What's that? I say it's AI for me. And now that AI is citing sources, I do find myself going to the sources that are cited by AI because AI gives me what I want, the search. They just ruined search with ads and manipulation of the results and things like that to where it became very inefficient. You search for what you want and then you get, you've got to go through clicking on 10, 20 different sites to find what you want and then when you get there, you've got to find it. And also a fair number of those are gated and I think Google does, just does a terrible disservice by sending you to gated content where you've got the first three lines of what you want and the rest is grayed out. And it says do a slide, you know, do a subscription. How they haven't gotten all of that out is beyond me, but I agree it's efficient.

Yeah. So with all this said, like, you know, for me, if I'm, if I'm building a marketing plan and we do frequently, I'm not saying that we would never do search, but the sequence for me is going to be let's figure out paid first because it's going to deliver the fastest results. And that's what I'm interested in. I want to know if something is working and I want to know if it's working quickly. And I want to be able to put, if there's a return, I want to be able to put it out there fairly fast. Then, you know, now let's get into organic, but let's go organic social first. And so this might come in the form of depending on where our audience is. You know, maybe it is TikTok, maybe it's YouTube, maybe it is LinkedIn. I want to go wherever they are. And then as a very, very, very distant third from digital marketing channels, it's going to be Google organic search. Organic is where I am. So do you agree with that? Is there anything, how would you change the sequence on that?

So say it one more time.

Basically paid, any type of paid. And that could, and I would, I might throw paid search in with that, but some type of paid, paid social, paid search. Second would be organic social. And I would actually say third, I would say develop owned and operated. So let's, let's try to develop a podcast, something, you know, something internally that we can actually own. So a podcast and a newsletter. So I'd say third for me would be owned media channels and then fourth would actually be organic search, a content marketing strategy with the purposes of organic search. I would probably put that 1/4 in terms of a awareness traffic, top of funnel traffic strategy.

Yeah, probably after other paid media like radio and television even, you know, it's, it's just so hard. And, and if you do all those other things, you're going to get search anyway.

Right, right. And that's, and I think this is important because this has changed dramatically in just the last couple of years. I mean there is a time when organic search would have been many people's number one and almost everybody's top, you know, top two or three. So that's kind of the point that I want to make. This article did kind of put forth like a recommended new model that's kind of worth kicking around. To me it feels sort of obvious. But they did want to offer a solution. So I just kind of want to throw this out there and get, you know, get your take on it. So they say the new model, if you're going to do organic, it needs to have these three elements and it's connection plus authenticity plus surround sound. And so connection is basically, it's got to be first person, expertise, content. It can't be scripted, it can't be generic. It can't be that corporate faceless content. In other words, there's got to be some type of key person of influence, some type of person associated with that. It can't just be some boring, nameless, faceless brand. There's got to be. People want to connect with other people. Second, they call this authenticity. And that is they simply said it's more important that your personality be consistent even than that everybody agree with you. And they were citing these examples of all these different personalities out there that are highly influential and they're not even always liked. So when they were talking about people like Logan Paul who are influential and who do move product and who still are not liked by large segments of even the audience that they influence. But what they are is they're consistent. And where people get frustrated is when they don't know exactly who they're getting. And the other example that they used was the difference between Trump and Harris in the. In the last presidential thing. Plenty of people don't like Trump, but even when they disagreed with him, they would at least consider him to be more authentic than she was. Because love him or hate him, he is what he is. And so this idea of having positions and owning positions, and I think it's good because they're basically saying, don't worry about being canceled. Right. I think we're kind of past this sort of cancel culture era is what they're saying. Like, just go out there, be you, be who you are and own your position. Be authentic. That's what the market wants. And then lastly, the last one was surround sound. You got to be everywhere all at once. It's not enough just to have a blog, obviously. You need to be on podcasts. You need to be YouTube. You need to be on all the social channels where your audience hangs out. And they cited HubSpot as being the example, like the ultimate example of a business that had a blog. Had. Has a blog that gets a ton of traffic. They get a ton of organic, but they still went out there and they acquired newsletters, they acquired podcast networks. Because if you also go and look again at this last presidential cycle, they're calling it the podcast election because that is now where people are. And so it's not enough just to own media. That is your website. You have to always think about where your people are and make sure that you've got the surround sound. So that was the idea. Connection. Make sure that there's some real person who's the face of the brand authenticity, have actual positions and stay consistent with them. And then surround sound, there's got to be at least three different channels that, that you're operating in at all times where your market is. If you want to have an organic content strategy, the new organic content strategy model.

Yeah. And, and I mean, one thing we didn't really talk about, like, if I'm thinking about the school, how do I do that? Can I. Can I do affiliate marketing? Can I get a bunch of affiliates that are referring me people, strategic partnerships around that? And is there a way to identify my audience to where I could reach out through targeted email marketing or even direct mail? You know, the old. The old school direct mail. The other would be One that's near and dear to our hearts would be event marketing. You know, how, how can I find the events? Because I'm always looking for who's aggregated the attention and eyeballs of our icp. Right. So if the ideal customer profile is identifiable at a place where somebody else has already gotten it together, that's really all searches. Search is a form of media. It's a, it's a place that's aggregated a bunch of people that are searching for a bunch of things. But it'd be, I mean it'd be pretty daggone far down the list for anything that was hard to rank for, which is going to be any buyer intent keyword, unless you're in a hyper, hyper niche or you're trying to rank for your own name. It's, you know, it's pretty tough. But I do like, and HubSpot obviously followed this strategy. I do like acquiring other people's media to effectively piggyback on the effort and the work that they've done. And you also know that they're already ranking. So you know, there's a, there's a big benefit there because then your search marketing activities will definitely bear fruit. And, and you, you don't have to start from zero, but starting from scratch for search would be, would be tough.

Yeah. Especially if you know that the audience for search is probably getting a little bit smaller every day of the people who are using search, that's getting smaller. The segment that is actually going to click through to your website is probably getting smarter because the results are getting replaced with AI and so they're getting what they need. It just if you have it and it's there, continuing to invest in it makes sense. If you're starting from scratch, it's not a channel that we would double down on to begin with. So I do love the idea though and where I would be doubling down, I know where we've been investing a lot more is organic social owned media channels, podcasts, like the one that you're listening to right now, YouTube. Although it's not an owned channel per se, it is definitely a channel that you have a lot more control over. And so these different channels where, where your audience is, wherever they are, you should endeavor to be. And I, and I do like the idea of saying from an organic perspective, three, let's try to have at least three places where, where we are living at any given time. If you add their inbox to that, in addition to that is that surround sound concept that they're referring to. That, that I thought was cool.

So anyway, like that, yeah, I was just looking. From 20 to 24, Google went from 92 to 89 of the market for search. But chatbots, AI chatbots in just the last two years have gotten 8% of the market. And I think as people adopt that, that's gonna weigh skew. It'll be interesting to see if they kill chat, if they kill AI chat like Google killed. The usefulness in my opinion of search. Because once they start Google, I gotta think for sure is not gonna stick with the 20amonth model. They're gonna go advertising because they've already got AdWords and they've got a history of doing it. It'll be interesting to see what the others do. But for me it's just like cable TV. I'd way rather pay 20 bucks a month to not see the ads and just get the answers that I'm looking for than to sift through all the crap that they throw at you. That is ads which as an advertiser, you know, it's, it's tough to say that, but the user experience of, of search ads is awful. The whole, the whole clutter now that the first page has gone from three simple AdWords blocks to almost an entire page of sponsored results, you know, is indicative of how bad that experience is. But apparently it's still good enough for the market that they can get away with it because if they couldn't, they wouldn't.

The fact though that they're having to load more and more ads on it to continue to hit their revenue targets and to please the Wall street suggests that, you know, they're really having to, to, to squeeze yeah, water out of these rocks and you're going to have diminishing returns on that. You can just only put so many ads there for so long to where the, the user experience is so bad that people stop, stop showing up. And when that happens, it happens fast. It happens really, really, really fast. They leave a little bit at a time and then they leave all at once.

Yeah.

So I'd be careful, I'd be careful if I were, if I were Google.

What do you use when you're searching for something now? Where do you go? I know I still go to Google.

I still mostly go to Google because it's habit and I have not yet created the, the habit of going to chat gbt. But I, when I think about it, I will go to AI. I will. But, but if it'll be a secondary thing if I'm not finding it or if I just happen to remember I haven't yet developed the habit. But it is coming. It's starting to do. But it'll be my second deal, not my first.

Yeah, I'm AI first for almost everything except visual things. And I'm YouTube for, for that. So I'm probably. And I, I. My AI is dependent on what I'm looking for. Because of the limitations of Chat GPT not being completely up to date, I think it's still August of 23 as we record this, you know, which is more than a year ago that it got updated. So a lot of the stuff I'm looking for is more current than that and it'll tell me, you know, well, my data set ends on this date. They gotta fix that or they get their lunch eaten by Google. Because I go to Gemini anytime I want something that's more current just because it's more current or if I'm having it look through results of videos and things like that because obviously Google's connection with, with YouTube. So if it's, if it's like a current thing I'm looking for, I'll go to Gemini. But I generally prefer the results from Chat GPT and then Claude is for like special use case things for me still that require, you know, I'm like, I'm looking for something that's got emotional intent or I'm looking for, you know, a longer kind of thing that's going to consistently look through all the data, not like front load the front and end of it. And then, and then it's. I'm looking for how do I do something or tell me about this thing and then I want the story. Which is an interesting change for me because I'm a book person first if I want to learn because video takes too long even on 3x speed. It's a linear experience, whereas a book is, you know, hop around and find what you want and, and then I'm going to go to Google, I guess after that. And I want to go to TikTok because I know everybody's looking there, but I just don't find it to be as effective a search engine as the YouTube search engine. So.

And I don't trust, I just don't trust any of the influence, a lot of the influencers on there because you're incentivized to say the crazy same.

Yeah, there's a, you know, crap. There's a lot of crap.

Yeah, it's just so much crap. I will tell you. Yeah. And my, so my wife though her, her new Search engine of choice and this website, by the way, their traffic is up. I want to say it's like 19% over the last quarter. Maybe it's quarter of a quarter. Uh, they're profitable for the first time ever since going public. Reddit. Yeah, since Google, since Google stepped in and started AI fying everything. It pissed her off. She's like, this sucks. I hate the user experience, that whole thing. She's actually found in many cases that she can get better information on a lot of subjects by, by going to Reddit and having, like, real people actually talk about not everything, but, like, having some real people actually share real experiences on stuff and combining that with other search information. She's actually using Reddit a lot for opinions and I, I don't think she's alone.

So for opinions, I think Reddit and Quora are decent, but it's, there's a lot of sifting there too. It's, there's so many people. You'll see it's the same post over and over. And the, the way that they sort it is also wonky, I think. But yeah, if you're, but I'm, I, I, I have an idea of what I think she's searching for and those kinds of things. I think you, you are looking for, you know, opinions and consensuses and things like that. So I think that's a, that's a good place for that. That's, that's interesting. It's cool.

The fact, though, that we no longer have clear and obvious habits, it shows just how kind of broken this is and how disrupted it's become, which, again, I think speaks to the fact that this is probably not a channel I would be doubling down on as a business.

Yeah, yeah, I agree. The other interesting thing for me lately, because I got back into one of my hobbies and, and when I'm looking for specialty things that are rare and hard to find, it's Facebook groups. It's still Facebook groups. Maybe it's because the things I'm looking for are, are older. And so Facebook has an older crowd. And the people that would be on Facebook groups are older, but as a place to find people that gather around a, like, interest. Facebook group still seems to be one of the better places to go and find that. And Facebook Marketplace seems to be kind of better than Craigslist, which is very sketchy these days, to find maybe things that, you know, that you might want to buy that you can't find in other places. And for me, it's interesting. I don't know about you, did you ever use ebay much?

Oh yeah.

Yeah. So I used ebay all the time and the user experience on ebay got worse and worse and worse and worse. And now I'm on much more specialty sites for buying things and ebay almost never has them and they're misclassified and over keyword stuffed. They're like you talk about something that needs to fix. Their search engine, Facebook, Edge and Apple Mail and, and ebay, they, they have the worst search engine experiences of any of them for me. But it is interesting that all of those would qualify as search. It's not just Google. So if we're talking like generally, yeah, maybe, you know, but just seems very fragmented and very hard compared to paid.

Yeah. So is that the final say? So for anybody who's listening, if you're out there and you're currently offering search engine marketing services, I think we just created a ton of enemies. They all now officially hate us. They're going to give us like one star reviews.

Awesome. I like it.

Doesn't change the fact that we're right.

I like it. Cool. Well, if you guys found that helpful.

Please share it with somebody else.

And we would love to hear your feedback. And if you found something that's working really great in search for you, please tell us because we are happy to be proven wrong and excited to find new things, even if it's an old thing that's become new again. So thank you, thank you guys and we'll see you next time on the Business Lunch. Ever wondered how some people build real.

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