Answerphone

Welcome to The Beat by Rockstar CMO. I’m Ian Truscott, a CMO, trusted advisor, strategy consultant, and Chief Bottle Washer at Rockstar CMO. In this newsletter, I’d like to share a mix of what’s caught my eye, topics from our podcast, and our street knowledge blog.

Hello!

As you’ve probably heard, there is a new SEO in town, whether you call it GEO (Generative-AI, Experience Optimization), AIEO (AI Experience Optimization), or something else, as marketers and content publishers, we need to think about how we make our content attractive to the robots.

Do we? Well, I think so, a lot of credible sources are reporting that people are swapping Google for ChatGPT (and others) for their research, I know I am, and of course, Google is now forcing AI-generated research upon us with its AI overviews.

And, with tools like ChatGPT, we are seeing that sharing sources is becoming the default in the user experience, rather than having to ask for them, likely in response to users wanting more transparency and early competitors, such as Perplexity, that adopted this approach.

Therefore, generative AI will generate traffic to our websites.

The bad news, of course, is that there will be less traffic in general to fight for, as a big chunk of online research becomes zero-click, in that the generated answer satisfies the visitor’s immediate need, and there is no click through.

However, SEO for the robots is now a thing.

And what I like about what I'm hearing regarding how to optimize content for robots is that it sounds very much like classic content marketing, as the key to wooing the attention of the robots is providing answers.

This is, after all, their raison d’être; they get educated by websites and then synthesize this to provide answers to their users. Therefore, if we want to influence generative IA and be quoted as a source, we need to take on the role of educator.

What robots love, at least in my experience, is data, research, and statistics. Not only do we need to revisit the basics of being the best answer to a question our audience might ask of the robots, but we should also share any data or research that supports this premise. And hopefully, our brand gets a mention, or a little skepticism remains among users of these tools, and they click through to the source.

This is all similar to what SEO was all about: convincing Google that our content was relevant to a specific keyword and training it to choose our content. However, this isn’t about keywords; it’s about being the answer to a question. Which, unlike the early days of keyword stuffing for SEO, actually works for the human reader too.

So, in a break from my recent run of 80’s tunes, I picked something a bit more contemporary with Answerphone, by Banx & Ranx, Ella Eyre and Xxng Bane, to christen this email’s subject line.

Cheers!

Ian

Ian Truscott | Chief Bottle Washer Rockstar CMO

PS - if you read last week’s rant, I did actually send that email to the editor who graciously washed me back into the article.

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This week’s street knowledge

What caught my eye on the topic and a bit more from me…

This week on the podcast…

Latest on the pod as I continue to publish twice a week…

Get your Monday Marketing Mojo Working

Something jolly poppy to get your content marketing mojo working as someone is calling your content answerphone.