Playbook Broken: The Innovator's SEO: Navigating the New Age of Search with Matthew Kay

Welcome to Playbook Broken, where outdated marketing tactics are left behind. Marc introduces Matthew Kay, the new head of Search for Active Campaign and co-founder of the Tech SEO Connect conference. They discuss the rapid evolution of SEO, driven by AI and changing user behaviors, and how traditional methods are becoming obsolete. The conversation covers the rise of new search platforms like TikTok, the pitfalls of performance marketing, and the importance of brand building in the current landscape. They also explore the concept of 'nihilist SEO' and the challenges of maintaining meaningful optimizations in a rapidly shifting environment. Tune in for insights on creating effective, future-proof marketing strategies. 00:00 Introduction to Playbook Broken 00:37 Meet Matthew Kay: SEO Expert 00:54 The Changing Landscape of SEO 04:15 The Death of Traditional Playbooks 07:41 New Rules for Modern Marketing 10:24 The Future of Brand and Performance Marketing17:24 Nihilism in SEO: A Critical Perspective 21:30 Force Yourself: Overcoming Challenges 22:23 Conclusion and Final ThoughtsThis podcast is produced by MarTech, a Third Door Media property.

In the first episode of Playbook Broken, Marc Sirkin, CEO of Third Door Media, dives into the fast-evolving world of marketing and why traditional playbooks no longer work. Joined by Molly St. Louis, co-founder of Mosaic Group Media, they explore the effectiveness of social selling, the decline of traditional PR, and the complexities of brand measurement in today's AI-driven landscape. Molly shares insights from her career in media and marketing, including her personal journey of adapting to AI technology. Tune in to hear how these disruptors are navigating and reimagining marketing strategies in a rapidly changing digital age.Timestamps00:00 Introduction to Playbook Broken00:40 Meet Molly St. Louis: A Marketing Unicorn03:31 The Evolution of AI in Marketing08:23 The Power of Social Selling14:44 The Importance of Authenticity in Marketing18:22 The Essence of Social Selling19:52 Strategy Workshop Introduction20:29 Brand Measurement in Performance Marketing22:39 The Value of Brand and Attribution Challenges32:10 The Role of AI in Modern Marketing35:25 Conclusion and Final ThoughtsThis podcast is produced by MarTech, a Third Door Media property.

Share of search is a marketing metric that looks at all of the branded searches beging done in your category and tells you how many of those searches are looking for you.As marketing metrics go, share of search is relatively quick and easy to find. You can use low-cost or free tools that many marketers are already using to gather the data.Perhaps best of all, share of search is also a really good proxy for understanding your market share.Liam Moroney is the CEO of Storybook Marketing and a MarTech contributor, and he’s become LinkedIn famous for his takes on the importance of brand marketing and brand recall in B2B marketing.In this conversation, Liam discusses how marketers can take advantage of share of search, what they’ll learn from its data and potential pitfalls to be aware of.Host: Mike Pastore, Editorial Director | MarTech.orgGuest: Liam Moroney | CEO | Storybook MarketingThis podcast is produced by MarTech, a Third Door Media property.

Marketers have more tools to help build and measure brand than ever before, but understanding the impact of brand marketing remains a challenge for many organizations.Benoit Garbe is the President of QUINT Advisory, a member of the Tracksuit advisory board and the former CMO of AB InBev.Garbe sees a massive opportunity today for organizations to reframe brand and, in the process, the role of the CMO and marketing, with marketers acting as the coordinator of all brand activity.He sees three metrics that are leading indicators of how a brand is performing. They are:Top of mind: Brands need to be present when someone is thinking about entering your category?Consideration: Is your brand seen as superior, different, trustworthy and more innovative?Advocacy: Are people talking about and recommending your brand?Good news for brand marketers: These metrics used to be measured far down the road. Today, they can be measured closer to marketing campaigns and help them judge success much quicker. #marketing #brandmarketing #brandbuilding #brandmeasurement #CMO Host: Mike Pastore, Editorial Director | MarTech.orgGuest: Benoit Garbe | President | QUINT AdvisoryThis podcast is produced by MarTech, a Third Door Media property.

The past two years saw incredible innovation around AI, and in the past year, much of the AI developments focused on AI agents.Our conversation with Scott Brinker, editor of chiefmartec.com and VP of platform ecosystem at HubSpot, focuses on how AI agents will change the way we manage our marketing technology.While examples abound of AI agents being used in customer-facing applications, they’re making headway in martech stacks, where they can take requests for data, then reach out to various applications in the martech stack like the CRM and CDP to get the data and find answers.What does this mean for marketers and marketing operations professionals who lead the martech orchestra today?According to Brinker, those roles are about to enter a golden age with the help of agents.What remains to be seen is how marketing and marketing ops pros will get their hands on agentic AI. A number of new and existing vendors are battling for market share with AI agents with no clear winner in sight.Our conversation also touches on the current state of the data layer in martech, where data increasingly flows to a data warehouse or data lake.Where this all gets really interesting is where the data and the agents come together. The organizations with the best data will be favored to win.#ai #aiagents #artificialintelligence #agenticAI #marketing #martech #marketingtechnologyHost: Mike Pastore, Editorial Director | MarTech.orgGuest: Scott Brinker, Editor | chiefmartec.orgThis podcast is produced by MarTech, a Third Door Media property.

A good website, quality content and some solid search engine optimization practices — that was one the recipes for building an audience, regardless of the business you’re in. For years, if you were trying to build community, grow readership or attract prospects and customers to your website, understanding how to create content that pleased both site visitors and Google was the skill you needed to master.Today, when people put a question into a search engine, they often get back… the answer. That’s a great user experience for users, but not so great for organizations that benefited from — and often monetized in some way — that traffic that came from search engines.Even if your SEO and content marketing game is on point, Google users, for example, often need to scroll past some combination of AI overviews, videos, suggested searches and sponsored results before they see your page. In this episode of Conversations with MarTech, we talk to John Miller, founder of Scribewise, about how the game is changing when it comes to audience building, what it means for websites that rely on organic search traffic and more.#seo #contentmarketing #searchengineoptimization #marketing #organicsearchHost: Mike Pastore, Editorial Director | MarTech.orgGuest: John Miller, Founder | ScribewiseThis podcast is produced by MarTech, a Third Door Media property.

Marketing operations plays an important role in any large or mid-sized marketing organization, orchestrating technology, working with data and basically making sure everything that supports marketing is working as it should. Marketing operators are like the plumbers, electricians and mechanics of the martech stack. But they’re not alone.Alongside marketing ops in some revenue organizations, there are roles in revenue operations (RevOps), sales operations (SalesOps) and even GTM Ops. In this episode of Conversations with MarTech, we’re looking under the hood of marketing and discussing the people who orchestrate all of the pieces you find underneath. Our guide is Mike Rizzo, the founder of MO Pros, MarketingOps.com and the MOps-Apalooze conference. He’s built a community of marketing operations professionals that gathers online and in person to talk marketing ops, martech and how marketing makes its sausage. #martech #marketingoperations #mops #marketing #revops #marketingopsHost: Mike Pastore, Editorial Director | MarTech.orgGuest: Mike Rizzo, Founder | MarketingOps.comThis podcast is produced by MarTech, a Third Door Media property.

There’s never a dull moment in influencer marketing, which faces a significant challenge this year with the law banning TikTok in the United States.Even without the platform that made it famous, influencer marketing is now a significant channel for marketers. It’s also big business for both content creators and brands. But how did we get here?In this conversation with Natalie Silverstein, Chief Innovation Officer at Collectively, we cover the origins of influencer marketing, going back to long-form written content and the “Mommy Bloggers,” to the short-form video we associate with influencer marketing today.Our conversation also covers the state of B2B influencer marketing, where the platforms are different, but the strategy is much the same: Authenticity, personality and reputation lead the way.Host: Mike Pastore, Editorial Director | MarTech.orgGuest: Natalie Silverstein, CIO | Collectively#influencermarketing #socialmedia #socialmediamarketing #tiktok #marketingThis podcast is produced by MarTech, a Third Door Media property.

Mark Stouse, the CEO of Proof Analytics, predicts a revolution is coming to go-to-market (GTM) strategies, and it’s starting as soon as 2025. Stouse is working on a book for which he spoke to hundreds of CEOs and CFOs from Fortune 2000 companies. He granted anonymity to these leaders in order to get a frank assessment of their GTM strategies.In this episode of Conversations with MarTech, Stouse shares some of what he heard from executives who feel they lack the analytics to truly understand what works and what doesn’t work in GTM today. To C-suite leaders, unknowns are risks. And there’s simply too much risk in marketing, sales and customer success right now tor leaders to make effective decisions and appease shareholders. If you’re interested in the future of GTM strategy and how it’s going to impact the work you do and the skills you need to develop, our conversation with Stouse serves as an important guide. #gtm #gtmstrategy #marketing #b2bmarketing #sales #b2bsales #riskmanagementHost: Mike Pastore, Editorial Director | MarTech.orgGuest: Mark Stouse, CEO | Proof AnalyticsThis podcast is produced by MarTech, a Third Door Media property.

The playbook for helping customers find your brand changed many times over the past several decades. Along the way we’ve seen billboards, phonebooks and even skywriting. Most recently it’s revolved around the website and search engines.But the way people look for information about brands is changing. Artificial intelligence is just one example. As more people turn to generative AI to conduct searches, the familiar game of search engine optimization is changing.As consumers become more comfortable talking to voice agents, however, online visibility strategies will undergo radical transformation.As marketers, we invest a lot of time and energy in our website’s design, carefully selecting images and colors. But what happens when customers explore your website without ever seeing it?In this conversation with Len Devanna, VP of Customer Experience at Cortico-X, we’re talking about the next frontier of customer experience, which will rely less on what your customer sees and more on what they hear.#customerexperience #cx #voiceagents #aiagents #artificialintelligenceHost: Mike Pastore, Editorial Director, MarTech.orgGuest: Len Devanna, VP of CX-Strategy, Cortico-XThis podcast is produced by MarTech, a Third Door Media property.