Marketers of Technology
00:12:32 · Andres Figuera, Jason Alafgani
[00:12:32] S1: Okay. And how do you make sure you place yourself as an authority in the market and have and make sure that you come like that you're first in mind whenever a potential client is thinking about using a service like yours? [00:12:44] S0: It's just get it, I think there's there's not like a silver bullet, it's just sort of a constant effort of getting people interested, getting them down the funnel, getting them into conversations. And once people are in conversations and they can ask questions of you, that's when they can really start to see the nuances of different platforms, right? Everyone can build everything, but they choose to build everything differently. But then you start to like, people will start to understand the differences in vision and things like that. But just from like a website perspective, it's very hard. And you know, everyone says AI and you know, someone reads, you know, a buyer reads 10 websites, all kinds of different things, but to them it all feels kind of the same. They're not like, you know, people themselves are not like AI. We don't like have perfect recall of every single word and every single token, right? So, yeah, you hear, like, people... I I I... In my own head, I don't know where I learned this rule of thumb. It's like people remember 30% of what they see, of what they read. So you kinda just have to hope that they remember the right 30% enough to hop on a call.
00:13:47 · Andres Figuera, Jason Alafgani
[00:13:47] S1: I get that, man. I get that. And when you were mentioning, like, strategies that have really worked well for you, you mentioned, like, events, outbound, and SEO. But have you then tried to be... Since you're an AI company, have you tried to appear in the, like, example, in the new Google search, which actually is Gemini when you speak to them in AI? Like, are you working on the AI EO, I believe it's what they're calling it? [00:14:10] S0: Totally. Yeah. I've seen the different people are, like, trying to make it a new thing, like AEO or, like, Answer Engine Optimization. I've seen, like, GEO before. I can't remember what the g stands for. [00:14:21] S1: I've heard I've heard, like, 10 different acronyms for it. [00:14:24] S0: Totally. And I view them as like... It's sort of... I view it more as an evolution of SEO. So so yes. Absolutely. I'm I'm optimizing for the way that, you know, answer engines are looking for things. Most namely, in the past, like, say that you make a blog post, there's, like, you know, the headline and the subtitle or even a subtitle and there's a little blurb underneath. In the past, you may have optimized those things more towards, having a hook, like attracting a human reader to like really be interested in continuing down the page. While now more than ever, think just like simple clarity distillation upfront is more important because that's where the answer engines are going to pull their thing from. So yeah, it's definitely changed how exactly the details of how these pages materialize for sure. But thinking about both, yeah.
00:14:24 · Jason Alafgani, Andres Figuera
[00:14:24] S0: Totally. And I view them as like... It's sort of... I view it more as an evolution of SEO. So so yes. Absolutely. I'm I'm optimizing for the way that, you know, answer engines are looking for things. Most namely, in the past, like, say that you make a blog post, there's, like, you know, the headline and the subtitle or even a subtitle and there's a little blurb underneath. In the past, you may have optimized those things more towards, having a hook, like attracting a human reader to like really be interested in continuing down the page. While now more than ever, think just like simple clarity distillation upfront is more important because that's where the answer engines are going to pull their thing from. So yeah, it's definitely changed how exactly the details of how these pages materialize for sure. But thinking about both, yeah. [00:15:14] S1: The other day I was actually speaking to another guest on the show and their view of the AEO or AIEO optimization was that whenever we're writing blog posts now, you can't have a paragraph that says, well, as we said before, this is how the results for this strategy or whatever comes up, but you need to make each paragraph standalone by itself because the AI doesn't take the whole article, it'll take certain parts of it, and you just gotta make sure that whoever reads it, when the AI spits it out to them, it's completely... They don't need the context of the whole blog, but that they just understand that small part.
00:15:49 · Jason Alafgani
[00:15:49] S0: 100. Yeah. 100%. And there's definitely, you know, an art to that, and you're constantly reevaluating to see... The hard part is just the the data is more opaque when it comes to the answer engine side. Like there's these tools, you know, like there are some Silicon Valley kind of darling startups, their promise. But often what they do is they're just taking your query and like, and running it themselves via API and telling you, okay, this is how you show up based on that read. But it's far more complex than that. And it's far more complex than like, the way that you use ChatGPT is different than you use an OpenAI API. So it's very hard to replicate the two. So it's sort of this like, estimate... Like, the data that you get from it is, like, estimating what you might be getting versus, like, real data, like, you might get from a Google Search Console that shows you exactly the queries and exactly the pages that actual people had gotten through. So it's sort of this funny art of, like, of doing that. And often, like, with Google, for example, if if you're showing up in a... If you're showing up well in the answer engine, the AI overview preview thing, that'll actually lead to less clicks. But you might be doing something right in the sense that you're actually driving more direct traffic, that people are searching for Caddi directly. So it's an interesting thing of like having to... Kinda having to thread that needle. And the... What I've told myself is like, there's a bit of like a like a rising tide lifts all ships, which is just like... I guess that might be the the the wrong saying for this. But the idea is just are the overall aggregate organic searches, you know, going up? And like, you know, all the clicks of certain pages going up, that's great. SEO traditionally is working there too. But also just our... Is direct traffic going up as well. And as long as that organic is going up and you're like methodically testing new things and making sure that your growth rate is... The rate of change is increasing, then you're doing something right.
00:17:39 · Andres Figuera, Jason Alafgani
[00:17:39] S1: I get that, man. No. And I agree with you completely. And Jason, another question I do have is now changing the perspective a bit more towards the future. What would you like to say that you were able to accomplish by the end of this year since you started at Caddi? [00:17:53] S0: I really wanted to get inbound to work. And prior to me starting, there wasn't a like reliable flow of inbound. And I think we've succeeded in that. I think as far as from now, what hasn't been achieved and what will be achieved is I think I just want to have like full predictability across the three major channels that I mentioned, SEO, outbound, and events. And then ideally even discover like, have like a fourth channel ready to go of where to double down, you know, if one of the three were to falter for some reason. [00:18:24] S1: Okay. No, I get that. I get that. And if you were to give one piece of advice to anybody who could be in the same position as you, suppose it's a new head of marketing that has entered a company that offers AI services and they are a one man team such as yourself, What would you advise them that you would like to have known when you started?
00:18:24 · Andres Figuera, Jason Alafgani
[00:18:24] S1: Okay. No, I get that. I get that. And if you were to give one piece of advice to anybody who could be in the same position as you, suppose it's a new head of marketing that has entered a company that offers AI services and they are a one man team such as yourself, What would you advise them that you would like to have known when you started? [00:18:45] S0: Be like a... Be uncomfortable in sort of uncomfortable, you know, behaviors. You know, be comfortable being uncomfortable, I guess. So, like as a marketer in the past, you know, you may have worked primarily in Docs and have like, you know, Google Docs or Notion Docs or something, and have all your ideas there in very visual ways. While now I have my source of truth be the repo. So like the marketing repo has the website, but also has the things that just live locally for me. And I don't necessarily click into many of these things that are like even just like the local stuff, but they're there for my, you know, for my Claude when I'm doing that task in the future. So, like, the uncomfortable part is almost like seeing less of it, doing things less visually, and, you know, allowing and kind of working with the model with how it probably wants to work, I guess. Or at least... Yeah. Okay. Yeah.