Everyone’s asking the wrong question about AI and websites w/ Randall Zaitz

Marketing isn’t just about new leads. Hang around with enough people in industrial marketing and sales and you’ll hear it pretty often: “Our customers know us for our flagship product line, but they have no idea we do all of this other stuff, too.” That’s when marketing has to step in. But how do marketing tactics change when we shift focus from getting new leads to getting more value out of the customers we already have? Brendon and Nihal are here to discuss.

Gorilla 76 Performance Marketer Brandan Davis breaks down how to use organic social as a testing ground for paid: which engagement signals mean a post has earned a budget, what has to change about that post before it runs as an ad and what to spend when you launch. Recorded live at IMC Live, September 17, 2026, with hosts Allen Fennewald and Sydney Jones.

We’ve brought back Wes Temple, Director of Growth here at Gorilla 76, to talk through how our agency is thinking about AI search, and what you, dear listeners, might want to consider for yourself. Let’s dig in. Connect with Wes on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/westemple/

Your company spends months on a product launch. The engineering is dialed in, the messaging is ready, and then the sales team walks out of the training asking how they're supposed to actually sell it. Stu Accola has run that meeting from both sides. He's spent 17 years in B2B industrial marketing and leads marketing for several Marmon Holdings brands, and his argument is that most launch trainings stop at the product. A complete sales training covers all of it.In this episode: • The two things a rep needs walking out: a clear picture of the right customer, and confidence • What goes into a complete and effective sales training program • The importance of engineering, sales and marketing alignment • Training distributor reps who carry hundreds of brands • Earning a seat at the table, and what to say to leadership to get one Stu offers a word of advice for any marketer trying to get invited into the sales training process. Tell leadership: “I just want to help your team win.”

This podcast has always been about equipping industrial marketers to do their best work and build their careers. So, for our 200th episode, there isn’t a more fitting topic than talking about those careers. Jon Franko, co-founder of Gorilla 76 and head honcho of all things people at the agency, has spent more time than anyone else we know talking to industrial marketers looking to grow their careers. He’s hired a bunch of them, including us. So we wanted to bring him onto the podcast to talk about what advice we can offer industrial marketers today: The skills, habits, and mindsets that set them up well. Email: [email protected] Connect with Jon Franko on LI: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonfranko/

Google's retargeting is one of the most affordable ways manufacturers stay in front of buyers who already visited the site but left without filling out a form. But on an increasingly crowded Google page, it also produces some of the most ignorable creative on the internet.Unless you do it right. That’s why we brought in Gorilla 76 Performance Marketer Brad Litwin on Aug 20 to talk through how to run Google retargeting ads that convert at a reasonable cost. Here are just a handful of things we get into: -Critical audience considerations -How to set your lookback window -The settings that quietly eat your budget, starting with ads in mobile apps -How to write and design effective retargeting ads

Brendon makes the argument that email might be the most valuable -- and the most overlooked -- tool in the industrial marketer's toolkit. Take a listen.

If you're not referenced, you're invisible.That's how Gorilla 76 founder Joe Sullivan frames AI search, and it's the problem we take on in this episode. Keyword stuffing doesn't work on an LLM. You either answer your buyers' questions well enough to get cited, or you're not in the conversation.This episode is a recording of IMC Live from August 6, 2026. Gorilla 76 Strategist Erik Schlosser joins hosts Allen Fennewald and Chelsey Trevino, plus a room full of industrial marketers asking their own questions.Erik says that most manufacturers respond to AI search backward. They feel behind, so they rush loads of blog posts, and rushed blog posts are worth less than three good ones. What actually earns citations is depth in a niche you own, published consistently, all of it pointing back to the same few things you want to be known for.In this episode, we discuss: • How AI builds trust in a source • Which SEO fundamentals still apply, and which signals are genuinely new • The content cascade: one pillar asset, cut down across channels, one through line • The importance of starting with a strong pillar piece • Heading structure, the inverted pyramid, and why FAQ pages get cited • Freshness, and how to handle it when your product is 70 years old • Thought leadership from a person rather than a company • Where a one-person marketing department should start.We also went through two worked examples: An in-house motor blog, which now outranks their own product pages in AI search, and a construction company’s personal stories, which earn credibility with LLMs and get shared by the families of the people in them.IMC Live runs twice a month inside the Industrial Marketing Collective. Next up on August 20: Brad Litwin on using Google retargeting to expand your reach.

We’ve brought back on Randall Zaitz, Gorilla’s Digital Creative Director and a friend of the show. Randall’s been writing about AI’s place in website development, and he has some thoughts on a much needed mentality shift. In short: AI is a tool. But not everything in a website build is a question of tooling. Let’s dig into the differences.

Podcasting has taken over manufacturing. At least, we think so. And today, we’ve brought back Gorilla 76’s Marketing Director Peyton Warren to talk to us about it. We’ve done them for clients, we’re doing it ourselves, obviously, here at Gorilla. Let’s talk about how the sausage gets made, whether it’s a good fit for your business, and the nitty gritty of performance and goals with podcasting.