The Value of SEO in Content Marketing Ft. Amy Stewart | S2 Ep6

Ian Binek - Optimize Your Marketing (00:01.496)
Hi everyone, welcome to the Optimize Your Marketing podcast. My name's Ian Binek and I'm your host today. Today we're joined by a content expert. Her name is Amy Stewart. She's the Associate Director of Content at PayScale and she has some awesome insights to share on storytelling today. So I'm really excited to introduce her. Amy, thank you so much for being on today. How are you doing?

Amy Stewart (00:08.475)
Today we're joined by a content expert named Amy Stewart. She's the Associate Director of Content at A -Scale. She's also the head start of Insights to Share on storytelling. So I'm really excited to introduce her. Amy, thank you so much for being on today. How are you doing? I'm doing so good. Thank you for having me, Ian.

Ian Binek - Optimize Your Marketing (00:31.992)
The pleasure is all ours. We're so excited to just dive into some of the things we have to share today. But before we get started, just want to address our listeners so they know what to expect. So in terms of questions we're going to be asking Amy today, we're going to be asking her about some of her priorities as a director of content at her organization. What do those look like? How does she allocate her time appropriately? After that, we're going to get into some of the strategies that she uses to grow some brand awareness for the organization she serves.

And then we'll be talking through any kind of feedback loops that she has on strategic growth for her company. So whether that's in the marketing or sales side, it'd be awesome to hear about those. And then we'll wrap up with three quick questions. One is about AI and where she thinks that AI is going to impact the marketing industry and the content that she's doing for some of these organizations and what she thinks the most underrated and overrated digital marketing strategies are in 2024.

So we have a lot to cover, Amy. Are you ready to get started?

Amy Stewart (01:34.235)
Let's do it!

Ian Binek - Optimize Your Marketing (01:36.216)
Awesome. Okay, so as I mentioned, first question, I really want to get a better understanding of your priorities as a content lead at PayScale. Could you kind of give us a little bit of information on what that looks like?

Amy Stewart (01:49.531)
Yeah, so I'm going to interpret interpret question as, you know, what what you do in your current position and of those things that you do, what are the most important things and how do you decide what those most important things are? So I am the associate director of content at PayScale but PayScale at PayScale is PayScale So we have quite a few people who create and manage content at PayScale. There's PayScale. kinds of content that different folks manage. I lead our thought leadership in what we call hero content, which is

Ian Binek - Optimize Your Marketing (01:54.488)
Fair.

Amy Stewart (02:19.035)
Primarily at the center are research -driven reports. So if you are not familiar with PayScale, PayScale is a B2B software and data company, but we also operate an online salary survey, which has 60 million profiles from individuals who are uploading their information about what they make and their compensable factors. And we provide that data to organizations as well as to folks who fill out that survey to help them understand.

what their pay range is and where they fall along that range. We utilize that data in a variety of ways and one of them is doing research reports. So we ask custom questions within the survey and we produce research reports that provide insight and interesting facts and figures on what is happening in the labor market and what is driving people to do various things in various ways. So I am...

one of the leads, not the only person on the team, but I am one of the leads for creating those research reports. I also create our B2B research report, so we do a big survey every year. It goes to over 5 ,000 participants and we write a 100 page report from that data for HR leaders and compensation professionals on what is happening in their industry. So I write that report too. So

Those are my big priorities. It's always a, hey, we're running the survey in Q4. It takes three months to gather the information. We got to create the survey, vet the survey, do all the QA and quality analysis. And then we run the survey, we field it. We pull the data in early January and I write that report, that 100 page report in about two and a half weeks. So that is a big thing that happens every year. And then that's followed by a cadence of reports of reporting.

editorial throughout the year, which usually is terminated in the year before. So we have an editorial calendar that's decided previous year and we just cram through it throughout the year. It is somewhat agile, so not everything is 100 % locked into stone, but we have a general sense of what is coming for the year and then we pivot as needed for a variety of challenges and things that come up throughout the year. So those are my biggest priorities. I'm also

Amy Stewart (04:30.939)
content lead or one of the content leads for our annual conference that we have at PayScale. So I'm creating the session content and identifying and sourcing speakers and managing presentation decks and all that good stuff that happens in the end of Q3. So I have a big giant report in Q1 and then a big conference in Q3 and then a lot of reports throughout the year that follow a editorial cadence.

Ian Binek - Optimize Your Marketing (04:55.832)
That's a lot and that's really cool. I have to say I've never met someone that does the thought leadership, this much thought leadership. And so I actually have two following questions that I'm really curious about. So the first one was, because I'm very much in the demand gen space and advertising space, so I was curious, and you may not know the answer to this, but how do you guys like...

best distribute those reports? Is it through email primarily or are you guys just doing like a full, I'm sure there's like a full funnel like digital campaign behind this, right?

Amy Stewart (05:29.659)
Yes, there is an integrated marketing approach. I am not on the DemandGen team. I do collaborate with members of the DemandGen team. So yes, we do have an email database with like half a million contacts. Yes, we do have social media channels where we push.

we push various messaging. We have a PR program, which I am more intimately connected with because I write the key messaging for all the reports that go out and review the press releases and make sure all the data is correct and work with our PR coordinators on gathering press. And we get somewhere in the range of like billions of impressions on

just through PR. So there's a lot going on and there's advertising and there's someone that manages our social media marketing. I always love to talk to other marketers because I feel like marketing looks different in every company that you talk to. Before I worked at PayScale, I was at a company that had a marketing team of like three people.

So it's very different when you are a very small organization and how you can be small but mighty versus a larger organization. There's a lot of coordination and a lot more specialization in who does what. So there is a whole cadence for the demand gen side of things, but I really don't touch that except as a collaborator and as an assist for the folks who are managing those campaigns.

Ian Binek - Optimize Your Marketing (06:53.176)
Yeah, that's really cool. Billions of impressions is wild, but makes sense. I mean, it's a hundred page report and you guys are a thought leader in the space, so makes sense that nearly everyone is seeing that.

Amy Stewart (07:01.915)
It's really more, sorry, the impressions as a UVM. So in PR, when we talk about impressions, we mean like if you get a placement in the Wall Street Journal, how many people read that newspaper holistically, not how many people saw your particular piece. So that is an aggregate of all of the readership of the press that you are getting placements in.

Ian Binek - Optimize Your Marketing (07:19.864)
Okay.

Ian Binek - Optimize Your Marketing (07:26.424)
That's cool. I've actually never heard it mentioned that way, but again, this is just like a separate side of the marketing world that I'm not super well versed in. So that's really cool to learn that. Amy, second question on that first answer you gave was, like, how do you guys measure success from that report? Because I imagine there's so much data that you're getting, right? So how are you changing it every single year based off of the data that you're getting back?

Amy Stewart (07:44.667)
Amy Stewart (07:55.003)
I don't know if I am authorized to answer that question on this podcast in detail. I mean, I can say that we have a variety of tools that we use and our marketing operations team would be the better team to answer that question within PayScale. It's very interesting to me because again, I came from a small marketing team where I was controlling kind of everything, creating the strategy and the execution and the promotion and the measurement. And at PayScale, all those things are divided.

Ian Binek - Optimize Your Marketing (07:58.456)
That's fair.

Ian Binek - Optimize Your Marketing (08:08.888)
Mm -hmm.

Amy Stewart (08:22.523)
So the measurement is so far removed from where I am. But it's happening and I know it gets filtered up to leadership and they make decisions about things, but sometimes I don't even see it. It's very interesting.

Ian Binek - Optimize Your Marketing (08:32.76)
That's fair. Yeah, no, and I was kind of expecting that response too because I mean, I've worked in like big, large marketing corporations before. I worked at a company called NCR and they, I guess like a way that they measured their thought leadership, right, was through like social listening tools. And so anytime that, you know,

For example, pay scale was mentioned in any, like basically the software is scraping all social media and just checking out and seeing how many times pay scale is mentioned. So I imagine that's probably part of it, but that's really cool. And yeah, I completely understand. Like that's not really like your job is to make the report. Someone else has to figure out like the data.

Amy Stewart (09:11.483)
I just don't know if I'm authorized to share the numbers on how well things do. I do have access to like dashboards in a tableau spreadsheet. I can look it up, but I don't know if I'm allowed to share it, so I'm not going to. But I am fascinated by your mention of the social listening because I came from that space. I worked for a company called Visible Technologies, which got bought up by Cision many, many years ago.

Ian Binek - Optimize Your Marketing (09:22.136)
Sure. no worries, no worries.

Amy Stewart (09:39.611)
online reputation management space, which was where I couched social listening. And I would love to do more of that. That to me is fascinating. Like hearing you talk about how there are organizations that are measuring conversations in online spaces and then making decisions about how well they are doing based on the uptick in those conversations. We do measure like mentions within media, like traditional media, which is part of that.

aggregate within PR, but I think the social listening piece is kind of niche. And there's a really interesting, fascinating space there that would be really fun, I think, especially if you're doing the kind of research driven thought leadership that I'm doing to see like, did people read this report? Did it change their mind about something? But I would love to hear more about that.

Ian Binek - Optimize Your Marketing (10:30.407)
That's, yeah, no, that's super cool. I unfortunately don't have a lot more to share, but maybe we could save that for another conversation. Sure, sure.

Amy Stewart (10:36.635)
I mean, I could imagine the entire program. Just don't have the budget to do it, but that would be really fun conversation.

Ian Binek - Optimize Your Marketing (10:44.088)
Yeah. Cool. Well, let's move on to the next question. I wanted to ask you about maybe some examples of content strategy that you would implement. Let's put a spin on this a little bit. So I know we don't necessarily want to talk about the intricacies and strategy that you're doing at PayScale. So instead, if you were coming in as a consultant to maybe like a middle market company and they wanted to become a thought leader

and you were saying, hey, this is how you do it. What would be your strategy to get started and get them on the right track to becoming a thought leader in their industry?

Amy Stewart (11:25.179)
I love fantasy scenarios because you can kind of go anywhere with them. I will answer as if all of these things are true, which they would, may not be in like a tangible situation, but it really helps to say something that is new, something that is original, that is unique, and something that is valuable to the audiences that you're trying to reach.

Ian Binek - Optimize Your Marketing (11:35.704)
Sure.

Amy Stewart (11:51.835)
What I don't recommend for at least a thought leadership program, maybe it has a place in content marketing, but as a thought leadership program, you don't just wanna spit out lots of kind of small bite -sized content that is just a derivative of other things that already exist and are out there. I think to truly be a thought leader, you have to be doing something that is proprietary and that is fresh. So if a major publication isn't going to pick it up and run a story on it, you're not really

producing thought leadership, you may be producing valuable content, but you're not necessarily producing thought leadership. So to me, thought leadership is more aligned with journalism than other types of content is. At PayScale, we have proprietary data to be able to generate those reports. If you don't have proprietary data, you have to come up with something else that is fresh and original. So either you're going to be paying market research companies to help you run unique surveys to answer unique questions, which can be expensive, but can be worth it.

or you're gonna have to come up with unique insights that no one else has. So the company I worked at before PayScale, we didn't have data, but we did have consultants. And so those consultants were able to deliver articles to the press, unique spins on case studies within projects that they were leading. And we were able to turn their lived experience into thought leadership based on their expertise and knowledge.

which was unique and proprietary and fresh and interesting and valuable. So that's really where it begins is what kind of content is this and is it something that no one's seen before or is it useful to them and some kind of challenge that they're looking to solve.

Ian Binek - Optimize Your Marketing (13:32.888)
Sounds, I mean, it's a great approach and it sounds very rooted in the marketing sense, right? You're just trying to, like again, you're trying to establish yourself as a thought leader and you have to think like, what do people actually care about? So I love that you're like, hey, it has to be something new, like something that someone hasn't heard of before. It's actually kind of interesting. So inside of our agency, we're trying to do a little bit of thought leadership. And so we've invested in some like internal scraping tools that'll allow us to

scrape Google ad competitors and understand as far as like the tech industry or specifically speaking like in the cybersecurity industry, we're getting a better understanding of like who is spending the most, what are they selling, like which ads, like what is their angle in their ad copy? And we're starting to write posts about this and include it in our newsletter. So we're kind of taking a similar approach. You have to do some first party research, right?

Another thing that we're actually doing too, which is kind of interesting is you mentioned surveys. Something like really easily you could do this is to, and any organization could do this, is to send emails, like mass send emails to their ICP, ideal customer profile, and say, hey, we're interviewing X ICP. And so far, like 50 % of them have said X or Y or Z, whatever you want to say.

We're curious, what are your thoughts on these two questions? Can you give us a quick answer? And that kind of like, I guess you could say like cold email actually delivers pretty high response rates because I think, like you said, like people are interested in giving their opinion, especially as they've matured and they've been in their position for a long time. They want their opinion to be heard. So I think it's really cool. And I just wanted to throw those two strategies out there that you mentioned the high levels, the high level, like this is the approach. I have some tactics, I guess.

in order to do that.

Amy Stewart (15:28.827)
I would consider that qualitative research. So there's two types. There's quantitative research and then there's qualitative research. So the quantitative research need to have a data methodology. It needs to be statistically viable numbers that you're getting from the survey that you're sending out. The qualitative research is more like what you're talking about where you're sending out a questionnaire and people are responding with freeform answers and you're using those freeform answers to develop insights into how people are solving challenges based on the expertise and their

Ian Binek - Optimize Your Marketing (15:48.664)
Mm.

Amy Stewart (15:58.139)
and their perspective that they are supplying. That's not that different from like a focus group, which is not a new concept in marketing, it's just digitalized. So I think you're doing something that has been done, but you're doing it in a new and interesting way, which is more accessible and I think something that people value being asked to be a part of, especially if they have a good relationship with your brand.

Ian Binek - Optimize Your Marketing (16:19.064)
That's true, that's awesome. Cool, Amy. Now I wanted to go into the next question now because we've talked about what your priority, where they lie, and we've talked about some strategies, but I wanna get into how does the content you're doing relate to the strategic growth of pay scale? And again, we've kinda talked about how you're not really into the numbers, so that's okay, but I'm curious.

Are there feedback loops in for the rest of the marketing team and perhaps even the sales team that are active in this kind of content that you're building?

Amy Stewart (16:57.691)
We're all pretty closely connected through a variety of communication channels. So I do have access to, for example, Gong, where I can listen to sales calls with customers if I have a mind to. We use, I think, CRAN for competitive intelligence. So I can look at that for insights to see what our competitors are doing that maybe we're not doing, but customers are reacting to, which can be interesting.

I also try to talk with customers just as much as I can. And I think that that is something that not enough marketers do. Not no one, people do, but I think there are a lot of marketers that can kind of get into the creative and technical side of marketing and forget to talk to customers. And it can be mind blowing the way a customer perceives some offer that you have or service that you provide or technology that is a

is a subscription differently than how your internal team talks about or values that same thing. So going to industry events with your ideal customer profile is present and talking to them about their challenges is a way that we get some of that feedback. But we have like content or sorry, we have like channels on Slack where people will share in the organization, interesting insights and things. So I think there's a lot of ways that.

you can get that information. I'm also pretty active on LinkedIn and I do connect with a lot of the folks who would be considered an ICP on LinkedIn, whether they are customers or not. So I want to hear what they're talking about, especially if they're active and some of them are. I listened to those conversations, I digest it, and I really ask questions about not just how do I get eyes on this piece of content that I have created, but what is this content solving?

Like what challenge is it solving? What insight is it providing that the customer doesn't already have or is asking about? So I really try to understand what our customer's job is as best as I can as a lay person and translate that into concrete value -driven content. So that's really where the focus is for me in my position.

Ian Binek - Optimize Your Marketing (19:15.288)
That's a great answer. I loved hearing that you have access to Gong. I think I really feel like the pandemic or the COVID -19 pandemic, I feel like that really escalated the usage of these kinds of tools for listening into sales calls. So that's really cool that you're using that. I think a lot of organizations don't do it enough or they don't even have like their AI bot on a call or they don't, they're just not tracking those things.

especially with AI now, you can take a look at a hundred sales calls in a day and it'll just, it'll basically summarize everything about each call. And then you can, I mean, you can find similarities there and then write about them. So that's really cool. I wanted to ask the CRAN and competitive intelligence tool, like I've never heard of that before. What kind of insights is it, is it providing to you or is it, is it maybe there to confirm some of the things that your customers are saying?

Amy Stewart (20:14.172)
That would be a better question for our product marketing team, which manages that tool. I've just mentioned it because I like it. We get like kind of notifications on it and I always read them because I think it's interesting when they say, hey, customer released this or customer said or sorry, competitor released this or customer said this about this competitor's offering. And then it's just kind of it's kind of interesting just to keep tabs on that. So it's a tool for managing those types of communications and insights. I don't even know if it's the best one I have not done.

Ian Binek - Optimize Your Marketing (20:20.056)
Okay.

Amy Stewart (20:34.303)
What kind of insights is it providing to you?

Ian Binek - Optimize Your Marketing (20:42.04)
sure.

Amy Stewart (20:42.363)
kind of research on competitive intelligence tools, but I think it was a good addition for us.

Ian Binek - Optimize Your Marketing (20:48.44)
Yeah, no, okay. That makes sense. I think overall what's really interesting is that the work you're doing is strictly for the end user and you're not even really thinking about the search engine results page, right? Like you're not focused on SEO at all. I'm sure there's, okay, maybe I'm wrong. I'm curious, how does SEO play into what you're doing?

Amy Stewart (21:14.459)
So this is a surprise question because it's not on the list of things that I was supposed to prepare for. That's okay. I got my start in an SEO agency. So full resume, I was an English teacher. I have a degree in English and a master in teaching or a master in education. And then I got a job as an English teacher, decided I don't like this job and got a job as an SEO copywriter at an agency. So I had this agency experience in SEO, SEM and online.

Ian Binek - Optimize Your Marketing (21:17.688)
Sorry.

Ian Binek - Optimize Your Marketing (21:34.552)
It's

Amy Stewart (21:42.651)
reputation management, which was the full control of search engine results pages back in the day when that was something companies still did. I don't know if they still do that today. PayScale does absolutely have an SEO play. So I think that depending on what you're talking about, like there are, there's definitely value to ranking in search results for queries that people are making that can lead you to their content.

I do think that that space is changing the most of any space right now because of the recent AI tools that Google is experimenting with and pay transparency legislation has also impacted how often people need to actually search for a salary. So that is an internal struggle that we're having in our organization. But I think that SEO is still one of the more valuable and I think underutilized channels by a lot of

marketing departments, not ours, but there are still a lot of marketing departments out there that spend a lot on advertising when they could be owning traffic through a more organic content strategy that is producing valuable content regularly that people start to know your brand for and then come to you, as opposed to you having to pay to get in front of them. So I still consider that a valuable channel and I don't think there are

very many organizations that wouldn't want that. There may be some limits to some organizations having the capacity to go after those searches based on the competition in their particular market space.

Ian Binek - Optimize Your Marketing (23:23.16)
Yeah, I'm glad that you had an answer prepared for that, even though I wasn't preparing to ask you that. But it's so interesting because that first party research that you're talking about is amazing for SEO. And so I was like, I imagine they probably piece it up together, put it into articles. Yeah. So that's cool. I think it's a great segue into our question about AI, actually. So I was going to ask you, I mean, what do you feel?

Amy Stewart (23:37.083)
We do.

Ian Binek - Optimize Your Marketing (23:49.528)
like is going to happen to the content marketing industry as AI improves.

Amy Stewart (23:54.779)
It's not great. I think it's not great. But that being said, I've been seeing this coming for a long time. The release of ChatGPT 3 or whatever it was back in 2023 that caused a lot of kerfuffle in the world was not entirely unanticipated by people who have been in the SEO and content marketing world for a long time. I've been hearing people talk about we're building

machine learning engines and someday we won't need writers. I've been hearing people say that for 15, 20 years. When I was a new copywriter, I had developers telling me, your job won't be necessary because we're putting all of the copy to produce product descriptions for e -commerce pages. And I'm like, great, I don't want to do that writing. It's fine for me if you build a machine that does that.

I think the interesting proprietary research is something that will be the last to fall if it does ever fall when it comes to AI. That being said, I do feel like AI is a danger for content marketing jobs at large. And my biggest fear is that it produces content that is lazier, less original.

less factual, which we've seen already with misinformation, and ultimately less valuable to customers, because it can really only repackage and regurgitate things that's fed into it. It can do that in interesting ways, and some of that content that's produced is still usable and helpful. But I think that it's not the type of writing that I want to take my personal career, but I do still feel that it will impact

content marketing agency all up and other professions too that are related to writing unfortunately. And I honestly hope that there's gonna be more regulation around it because I think there is kind of an existential threat when it comes to AI, not just taking jobs but removing the ability or the need to think. I think that's bad for society and for humans in general. And I have a fear that this generation is going to

Amy Stewart (26:14.971)
be the last one that had to learn that discipline through trial and error and practice, and that we will have generations coming up behind us who just don't know how to do that. And I do have concerns about that.

Ian Binek - Optimize Your Marketing (26:29.528)
It's a really interesting answer. And I think it kind of sheds light on something that I've even noticed too, as you know, as an agency we're viewed as like somewhat thought leaders too, in terms of like staying cutting edge with what's going on in the SEO space and what's going on in the demand gen space. And it's funny, some of the questions in like a consultancy capacity, we get asked from older generations that they are tech savvy, but you know, they're not super focused on AI right now as much as like,

you or I would be, right? That's primarily something we need to be focused on and understand about. They'll ask me questions like, can't we just, we don't need a content market anymore, we can just have AI. Can we just get an automation set up and it feeds them a prompt? It's always a tough conversation because it also comes down to, it's kind of a tough market for some people and they want to cut costs as much as they can.

They're like, well, we just, we don't need content anymore. Let's just get it out. And it's, it's not how that works. it's such a hard conversation, but I think it takes someone like you who's extremely deep into the profession to understand and kind of relay that information to other people is yeah, like AI can do some of the things that content marketers do, but like there's no oversight on it. And it's not even really that good. Cause like you said, it's regurgitated information. It's you can't be a thought leader off of that. It needs to be first party.

Amy Stewart (27:30.555)
Yeah, no.

Amy Stewart (27:46.811)
Thank you.

Amy Stewart (27:52.955)
Yeah.

No, not for now. And the question was like now or in the future. So we don't know how good AI is going to get at this. It might look very different in six years than it does in six months. So that's kind of the thing I'm thinking about of the exponential potential growth of AI could become an existential thing within our careers, like within the next 10, 10, 15 years.

Ian Binek - Optimize Your Marketing (28:17.336)
That's right. Yeah.

Amy Stewart (28:22.523)
I hope to still have a job after 10 or 15 years. So to me, this is a serious question. But if someone were to ask me, do you think your job is in danger right now from AI? AI cannot do what I do. AI not right now. It's not gonna do what I do in the near future either. And the type of content that I write is gonna be one of the last types of content to get replaced by AI if that even becomes a thing. You have to consider to like...

Ian Binek - Optimize Your Marketing (28:34.232)
Yeah.

Amy Stewart (28:47.483)
the content that's being repackaged from all of this stuff that's being fed into it from search engines, once that like explodes, all of that content is going to start to look identical. And that's not necessarily a good thing. So the more unique original content hopefully is going to float to the top because that might be what people actually want to see and to read and to learn from.

Ian Binek - Optimize Your Marketing (29:02.712)
Yeah.

Amy Stewart (29:12.763)
And if the search engines are smart, they're gonna realize that they're gonna start deprioritizing content that looks like it's been rehashed using AI. So that investment you make in that regurgitated content now might hurt you in a few years. You might get penalized for that. Using utilizing whenever technology replaces search engines in the future, because I do think that's a shifting space. But just, you know, still though.

At large, I have some existential feelings about it. In the Industrial Revolution, there were a lot of positions that were eliminated from machines in a similar fashion. You used to have, you know, hand, like people who wove by hand, farmers that planted by hand, those types of skilled professions disappeared with the impact of machines being able to do that work. And there is a kind of repeat element happening now with knowledge workers.

My concern is can you really do that when it comes to thinking? And if you can do that, what does that mean for society? Because if we all stop thinking, I think we're in trouble.

Ian Binek - Optimize Your Marketing (30:14.104)
you

Ian Binek - Optimize Your Marketing (30:18.648)
very valid concern, but I agree with you. I don't think that there's any risk for any content marketers like you right now, at least for at least a few years probably. Exactly. Very fair. Okay, Amy, well let's get into the last two questions I want to ask you and I think I'll let you determine which one you want to answer first. So what do you think is the most

Amy Stewart (30:26.395)
right now.

least a few years but again I still want to be employed in 10 years so I am concerned.

Ian Binek - Optimize Your Marketing (30:48.504)
underrated marketing strategy and then conversely what do you think is the most overrated marketing strategy?

Amy Stewart (30:55.355)
answer the overrated one first because I think we just talked about it. I think AI -generated content for me is overhyped right now and to your point there are business leaders that think you can just replace marketers with an intern who asked ChatGP to write an article and that's not how that is not going to work. It's gonna it's gonna result in you know bad investments that that are gonna feel pennywise and pound foolish in the long term. So I do think

Exploring AI is good. Buying AI tools for your teams to learn how to use those tools is good. But putting all of your eggs in that basket and replacing your skilled people with AI engines is myopic at best and can potentially cause you some strain down the road if you make that decision. As far as most underrated, this is a tough question to answer because I think the

most effective marketing strategies vary widely by company.

like not every marketing strategy is gonna work for every company. There are some companies where putting billboards, like ads on billboards or in stadiums is the most effective strategy and companies where that makes no sense at all. There are companies where buying PPC terms or trying to rank in organic search makes all the sense in the world. There are companies where that doesn't make sense at all. So I think it's really about how do you master integrated marketing? How do you get your messaging and your strategy and your

content and distribution efforts to all align in order to get you to a goal that you have hopefully preset so you know whether or not the campaign is successful. I know that's a vague answer, but I feel like it is something that gets overlooked as people chase different channels, thinking, this one will do better, or this one will do better. I think it really comes down to what is your differentiation, and then how do you get that differentiation in front of customers, and that's gonna vary by company.

Ian Binek - Optimize Your Marketing (32:59.352)
I love the answer. I think, I know it's broad, but at the same time, you're kind of alluding to something that would just kind of maybe be categorized as strategy or strategic planning, which is how can we put ourselves in a field that we are most likely going to win every single time? And so I agree with you. I think it's a great answer. And I think that's the most, I would say it was the most broad answer, but I think that there is no one answer to go.

Amy Stewart (33:27.035)
Sorry, but not sorry on that one.

Ian Binek - Optimize Your Marketing (33:29.08)
Exactly. Great, Amy. Well, that's all the questions that I have for you today. Really enjoyed the responses, really enjoyed the back and forth we had. I think it's a really good insights for our audience too. So thank you so much for being on.

Amy Stewart (33:44.827)
Appreciate it, thank you for having me.

Ian Binek - Optimize Your Marketing (33:47.828)
And before we close, just want to address our listeners again. If you guys enjoyed this podcast, please be sure to give it a follow. Maybe give it a rating. It takes two seconds, but it really helps us grow. And with that being said, thank you so much for listening and I'll see you in the next episode. Thanks.

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