Modern Marketing Tips for Today’s Trends & Time Coworking
Disclaimer:
Everything below is a mix of what I observed and heard during the event. The goal isn’t to pinpoint "who exactly said what," but to share (usually) an outsider's view and overall perspective on these industries. I’m not here to act as a definitive firsthand source—readers should do their own research. I hope this inspires you to attend events, explore new industries, and hear what leaders are presenting. These notes combine my observations with thoughts on how things could run smoother and how ideas connect (IMO). I’m not an expert, you know? Just hanging out in the room with them. Enjoy!Topics Covered: Marketing, SEO, Trends, Wording, Customer Analysis, Market Research, Omnichannel Marketing, Sales, Coworking, Networking, Proof of Concept
This blog covers two events (one was major, one was minor). The major event was hosted by a team of marketing professional, one guys I’d actually heard speak before and remember his advice being extremely insightful (though that was back in my days of not taking great notes, so I was excited to attend again!) Another useful seminar. Before that, I attended a local co-working session advertised by a city hall, seeing what that was about. I like to learn from others and hear quick tips about trends of today. This duo of events seems like a great way to spend my day, even though I couldn’t stay the entirety of either… I was excited to learn more about marketing and communicating a mission.
Why Attend: It is so useful to learn about marketing and it is often fun to meet others in your community. Both of these events seemed to offer useful takeaways that I was sure would be worth my time and efforts to get there. One event was on the way to the next, so even though it was a little far, it was a fun way to spend the day.
Overall Event Reviews: Venue (3/5), Food (4.5/5), Speaker Content (5/5), Networking (5/5), Likeliness to Return (5/5)
Photo Collage & Commentary:
Notes from the Marketing Event:
Startup Entrepreneur Community Marketing
Nice introduction from the host: “Have I had a chance to meet all of you?”
And he was really nice talking to everyone- it was geniune. I’d met him before when I hosted a table at a entrepreneur event (and I think maybe even once before that) but it was nice to talk AGAIN. Very welcoming. He also even gave me some useful advice and I’d like to run into him again next time.
They went over the schedule (also nice) and had the goal to stay very timely and respectful of everyone’s schedules . Love that.
Topics: Overview in building a marketing plan, Customer discovery, Social media strategy, Networking break, Seo and pcc strategies, Amplifying your startups marketing by leveraging modern Ai tools, break, Best practice share and takeaways.
They are advertising a great 3.5 hour class in April for marketing. Should be a really great time. The location is far for me (and online classes are tough for me to keep focused. I love IRL! So, let’s see if I make it happen).
They even admitted that this started as the conversation, “Let’s do an SEO Summit” between the founder of this venue/group and some of the market guys… to see ‘how this goes’, get feedback (you guys wanna read my blog? haha).
He said, most people in this community are engineers and need help with the marketing side.
Stay for the after party, the networking is the best part. But we do ask that you get back at exactly the times… but out of the respect for the speakers and fluidity.
OMNICHANNEL MARKETING
Onmichannel is different than multi-channel (though often people talk about them as if they’re the same)
MULTICHANNEL: multiple platforms, not necessarily working together.
OMNICHANNEL: your messaging is coordinated… website, social media, emails, ads, in-person experiences are integrated to provide a consistent journey.
Seamless awareness of marketing across all online aspects.
If you’re not a marketing background expert but you want to think like one… use the “consumer consumption chain” models:
Awareness of Need: Are the customers aware of this or do we need to create awareness?
Research of Options: how do we solve this? Where do they research and for how long? Your competition is how they solve the problem today.
Selection: What are their criteria?
Consumption: What is their experience? Positives and negatives
Storage, Disposal, Repurchase: What are key considerations to drive repurchase?
Have you ever been upset because you didn’t get around to something by the time it expired? This is all your fault but very flustering: food, downloads…
Once you make the purchase, how do they consume and use it? Are their barriers?
They download your app… how many apps do they download and never use again? How do you get people to use and re-use it.
Deeply Understand your Customers:
Not just their demography, but their behaviors and pain points.
Where do my customers hang out? (Social media, industry blogs, YouTube, reddit?)
Should I be on TikTok? Facebook? - Idk!! Who are you trying to reach? What are their problems? Where are they having their conversations. Understanding your audiences will help you understand the right channels.
How do they like to engage (email? Sms? Communities?)
The foundation of understanding your customers need to be built before you dive into “where you should be”.
What problems are they trying to solve?
“People don’t buy drills, they buy 1/4 in holes” - it’s jobs to be done research, it’s a lot of ways to think about it. Understand your customers, what’s going on in their life, their problems and challenges.
Get in the mind of your consumer.
BRAND EXPERIENCE
Create a consistent brand experience.
Consumers should recognize your brand instantly. Whether they find you on instagram, Linkedin, or inbox… little visual indicators (such as brand colors, schemes, your look and feel… all of that with branding should make peopel instantly know this is coming from you).
Test, Iterate, and Optimize: Marketing is never ‘set and forget’, not in these days.
Use Ai and automation for scale. It drives ad optimization and helps analyze which creative perform best.
Track key metrics like:
Customer acquisition costs (CAC)
Engagement and conversion rates
Return on ad spend (ROAS)
At least once a week, once a month, work with your marketing team and understand your metrics. Your measurements should be tied back to the behavior you’re trying to train:
If your goal is to make awareness of the problem, look for awareness
If you’re looking to dominate market share, its looking at that…
Have your measurements match your goals
WHAT IS YOUR MESSAGE?
Omnichannel: every channel works together, but also a funnel. Are some channels you use to push towards others, is there a cyclical rhythm? Do they all work to make clients call-to-action?
- Startups tend to have a cohort of customers moving through in the same sequence. In the new company, everyone coming in is top-of-funnel.
Everybody is learning about your product… after 6 months, try to convert
It’s easier in an earlier stage brand/start-up, it’s easy to assume everyone is in the same place/funnel.
It can get complicated on a brand after you’ve been in the market for a few years. It’s tough to figure out who is still in “awareness” and who has been around a long time. CRM and the tools to track your customers become important. You can begin to track where the customers are and motivate them as tehy state to move through.
5 COMMON MISTAKES OF OMNIMARKETING:
1. - Trying to be everywhere too soon
—> omni does not mean EVERY!! 2 is every… sometimes one is fine.
— > sometimes all you want to do is “up your email campaign” or “linkedin fr lead generation”
As you begin to move into the other channels, master one or two before moving on.
Don’t feel you need to be everywhere, despite what your ad agency tells you
“If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.”
If you ask your agency where to be, they’ll offer their most expensive plan to you. They’re motivated.
it’s okay to push back and say “I want to be in a couple, or one”
2. Treating Every Channel as a Separate Entity
A common mistakes is to treat each channel as an isolated effort, running separate campaigns for email, social, and website without a unified strategy
It’s tough to figure out who on your team is in charge of each… often that can lead to points of confusion.
You need to mainstain consistency in the messaging and the sequencing.
The ad directs them to a call-to-action, you capture them into your CRM… you start emailing them and see how it pulls them back (think of how these campaigns and this experience all interacts with each other).
The funnels connects
3. Over-Reliance on Paid Ads
First party-data collection should be the number one goal of a startup… drive them to have to put a phone number with permission, email, whatever
Capture that and make it part of every young company.
A great call to action would be gathering their email, name, and interest
4.. Over-Automation without Personalization:
Too much automation (generic emails, chatbot responses) can feel robotic and alienate customers
It can be so overwhelming to get so much automation
Find your best leads and send them a persona email… people can’t believe when a human contacts with them, we’re so used to bots. Bring the human touch in where you can
5. Not Tracking or Optimizing Performance
Set KPI to standard things may hurt you… you want to set KPI’s to your business model, your goals.
Set CLEAR KPI’s (Key Performance Indicators) and regularly analyze your performance.
Iterate based on your data.
YOu need to evaluate and analyze the data on your ROAS.
How soon is too soon to write off that something is not working?
It depends a little bit on each channel?
- Awareness building can take months.Maybe the rule of 3:
People need to be touched 3-5 times with awareness before they start to remember at least your name and a rudimentary sense of your business. You live and die by this brand, but they don’t really know
Context is important too: how impactful is your advertising? How unique are you?
If you have very high engagement rates, it’s an indication you’ve got attention. YOu’ve got stopping power to your ads.
Low engagement shows you may want to move on from a theme or platform.
If things should be working, start A/B testing…
For social media, 90 days is a good time. Try some things, do some testing… usually you’ll know within 90 days.
Sometimes you need to be patient. You need to understand, as a founder… you may want to get daily results, but keep in mind you must be patient. These campaigns take time to be effective.
Some channels are more difficult than others.
How far is the purchase from the awareness? What’s the probability you’ll remember? The greater distance from seeing the ad and making the purchase… it’s likely someone will forget about it.
CALL TO ACTIONS
Have the Call-to-action available right away.
Call-to-action is part of every-bit-of-communication
Here’s what I want you to think or believe
BUILDING BUZZ
Part of trying to get funding for the marketing or video game, you need to build the buzz… how often do we need to touch base with the people on our discord and email?
Broad generalization: depending on how you’re spending.. if you’re blasting in a mass channel (or cost per interaction) - use your earlier marketing… 3-6 months out, see if you can segment he customers a bit by level of interest, response list.
Start to build database with some sort of call to action.
You want to segment funnel, find 20% - and start hammering them into oblivion.
CUSTOMER DISCOVERY:
- Used to be in the Air Force. Fell into the world of startups, wore every hat and tried every role.
Over the past decade worked in lots of startups. But wanted to get on the funding side of VC firms. Now a leader at the Alliance of Angles.
Most startups fail because there is no market need. How do we solve for that as marketers and entrepreneurs? It’s smart to find idea validation and beginning brand strategy.
Joke: What do you call a unicorn that can’t raise its next round? A unicorpse.
You have an idea… is it feasible to do right now? Can you execute it right now? Is it of value? Why you, why now?
GOAL-Driven Ingredients:
Your identity
Your knowledge base
Your network
Start with what you know. You do this work first because you are the one who can. It proves to you what you can do, who you know, and why it matters to you.
These are the given things you can work with your now (though there’s a lot you shouldn’t do as an entrepreneur). How do we figure out what we need and want to work on?
6C’s of Market Research: Once you do your in-depth research based on the C’s, get going:
Company: what is true and compelling about you and your P/S that will achieve your goals?
Customer: what is meaningful and will motivate prospective customers to engage
Connection: how do prospects prefer to engage and what makes you easiest to do business with?
How do your partners view you anyhow should you position yourself to enhance your relationships with them?
Free set of eyeballs from someone else and vise versa
Competition: Exactly what and who is it? How is your company distinct and more valuable?
Context: What is going on in (industry), tech, and business that influences audience priorities and perceptions?
Do a pastel analysis (idk what this is but sounds cool)
Problem + Value Prop + Customer Segment = MVP
If you don’t have these three, there’s no reason to do revenue streams, cost structures, etc.
All of this is the process I do as a brand strategist.
Clients pay me 1,000 of dollars to do this exact research
It’s the entrepreneurial process and marketing
Entrepreneurial and Marketing / Brand Pyramid
Purpose: Why / What is the reason this business exists
Value Prop: Who / Who are the key audiences we seek to serve / What: What ist he simplest definition of what we do?
Execution: How / Evidence/product or service, Company values/personality
Interview your customer and build a framework of your MVP. Find out their biggest problems and find out what value you can add to them.
Rather than “build it and they will come”
If you don’t have the right customer in mind, or if you have multiple customers, the message won’t ring true. You need to fiddle down and go to one customer at a time. Focus on who you’re targeting and what value you bring to them.
- What is the value of the feature that you bring to them?
- Brand strategy is the way you figure out what goes out.
Visuals and words can be handed off to an identity visual creator designer identity team. They design the look and feel of the company.
A lot of entrepreneurs have a great idea, wanna build the logo and buy the website immediately, but in fact, I recommend doing this much later in the process.
Wait and let your customers and market research tell you what it needs to sound and look like.
Joke: as a brand strategist, you’re kinda a business therapist.
BRAND’s CORE PURPOES: WHY/MISSION
A businesses’ core purpose and values can differentiate them from the market. A lot of businesses are already established and making sales, but they don’t even have their “why” or what makes them different.
Your “why, mission, purpose!” - How do you want to stay true to your core amidst a changing market.
How do you, as a business want to stay true to your core.
If you don’t know your core, keep asking “why”:
Root cause analysis.
You’ll get to the reason why you wake up every day and do the job you do.
What’s your authentic voice? What matters to you? Why are you doing this?
Mentoring is a way to serve others. It’s an introspective question… at the end of the day, businesses are about people. You’re selling to people.
Want to get started conducting interviews for my product.. trying to figure out what questions to ask. I want to validate the market but also figure out if we’re building the right product.
Customer Discovery in a Nutshell:
Who: early adopters
What: unbiased, open-ended questions
Where: In person, video, call (descending order of value)
When: Always
Why: Validate ideas, test hypotheses, understand nuances, refine roadmap, determine marketing language*
*Beginning of a brand strategy also fall out of this process!
Customer Discovery Interview Tips:
Tell me about yourself
Where do you go to find industry news?
Who are industry experts you like?
What events do you go to?
You want to go where they are —
How do you feel about the current solutions? What is lacking? What are you doing now to solve this problem.
Anytime you hear an emotion, drill in. “That must be really frustrating.”
Repeat back what you think you hard.
You’ll always get more if you repeat back what peopel say. It also shows you respect them and you’re hearing it. If you get it wrong you will get corrected and get more information.
You need to ask questions every time you hear emotions, to get at these needs and pain points.
“Customers don’t want oatmeal feature or a product, they want a resolution to their problems or to feel a certain emotion.” - Angie Parker
When is there right time to do price testing?
- You don’t know what your thing costs until you built it. You also dont’ know what you need it to cost until then, too.
There’s a rough estimate you can ask in customer discover, especially if you know it’ll be expensive, but generally you can wait till the MVP - then when you sign up for it, you may be asked “how much would you pay for this... what price point would it be too cheap? Too expensive?”
See if they’ll actually pay for it.
SOCIAL MEDIA //
The best ways to use social media
Whatever I present today, in 6 months, it’ll look completely different. Though these are the broad themes.
How is marketing changing?
It’s changing very quickly, at a phenomenal pace.
Ai is automating creative production, search engines are transforming how peopel find brands, and social media argo’s now reward community engagement over passive advertising.
What worked 5 years ago is outdated:
You need to understand where they’re going and where they shop
Don’t forget that even though the tools are changing, the process hasn’t changed dramatically
Your options are changing. We can do things that have never been conceivable before. Strategy people are just now catching up with this.
BRAND TRUST AND REPUTATION
Consumers are a lot more skeptical, attention spans are shorter.
Trust is being built different; reviews, social proof, and authenticity matters more than polished ads
Marketing professor used to hate when people said, “ I saw the best ad, but I dont’ remember who it was for”. Your social media post is cool, edgy - that’s so funny and amazing… but idk who it is by.. what an unsuccessful ad. You paid to entertain people. But what are you measuring? What is your goal?
Sure you may want really high engagement, but it won’t sell products.
Set objectives for yourself and your agency. Think through the consequences of what you’re trying to drive AND WHY.
Brand trust used to be, “what did my parents use?”
Brands generation to generation, you look to the thought leader in your family… “my dad was a Ford man, so I am too.” Some things get handed down.
People don’t trust as easily, where do they get their prompts?
Social proof is changing. Whose opinion they trust. Whatever you’re selling, who are they listening to?
Often people answer with what they think you want to hear, versus what they tell themselves.
What people report to you (versus their influences) it can be very different.
Ai: automating, making the marketing smarter, faster, and more efficient.
It’s making people more capable of execution.
It’s harder for us to know what is real (good and bad)
You can have purely organic pieces that are exciting to your audience, the algo will pick it up and push it out for free (so you’re probably creating compelling content that gets picked up and noticed more broadly)
Organic is getting back to the fundamentals… the better you know your customer and tie your message, the organic will be broader.
Social Media STRATEGY
Social media isn’t just about posting every day… it’s about engagement, community, and building trust.
Content marketing is a growth engine: blog posts, video explainers (you can hie someone to just build innovative content just for your brand )- content becomes part of your brand experience and how peopel experience your brand
Customers expect tailored experiences.
First-party data is now more valuable than ever. Conversational marketing is rising
Customer journey has changed: the buyers search online is even easier. You can research the most simple product categories.
Organic reach is limited - Algorithms favor paid and engagement-driven strategies.
It used to be in the olden days of social media that everyone would see what you posted, then they wanted to charge you for that and
The future is community drive and building relationships matters more than just broadcasting messages.
Different metrics have happened on different services. Websites are becoming a more viable place to market.
SHORT FORM CONTENT:
King at the moment
User-generated moment is popular at the moment
Content creators and influencer marketing is what people trust. They trust peopel, not ads.
Private communities and brand engagements - discord, reddit, telegram groups are driving deeper brand affinity
Live/livestream shopping and interactive content e-commerce is becoming an experience, not just a transaction.
B2B vs B2C:
88% of B2B buyers use digital content in their purchasing journey
63% of consumers discover brands on social media before making a purchase
Marketing today is about community, virality, and experience - need them to feel emotionally invested and part of the ecosystems.
B2B: linkedin is the #1 but there are many coming out there are competing.
Generaly speaking LInkedin is the bigges
Remember that you’re always talking to people. Make it entertaining, exciting, educational.
Instagram is growing a lot lately for B2B. Make it easy to understand.
Paid vs. Organic:
Huge shift… they’re trying to drive everyone into more paid advertising. Not too surprising, but it’s happening a lot lately.
Well… what is “paid”? If you spent money on it, it’s paid.
Boosted vs organic?
No.. it’s a blurry line, sorta paid, kinda paid, organic?
Brands must balance SEO, social media, influencer marketing, and paid ads to maximize reach.
Is organic dead? No, but it’s defitneiy harder…
And paid marketing is now a necessity.
But starts still need a mix of both
It’s beacoming more rare that you can post every day it it’ll do anything.
Orgnaic social media most reach is down 90% vs. 5 years ago.
Paid marketing: more important than ever.
Organic reach on platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Linkedin has dropped significantly
Paid ads allow startups to quickly test messaging, offers, and creative
More control over targeting with paid ads, you can choose your audience instead of relying on organic virality.
Paid Marketing Advice:
Use Ai-powered ad platforms to optimize spending
Retarget website visitors and engaged users; these have the highest ROI. Invest in Google Search Ads and Linkedin Ads for Intent-based traffic.
“Even your most loyal consumers will forget about you. Organic will help you stay top of mind, get referrals, it’s like weeding your garden.”
Founders:
You must be the face of the brand, speak from knowledge
Partner with expert content creators in your field and a brand fan
Help to lead thoughts and have your brand tied to a person.
Webinars, AMA’s and long-form content can help you build credibility. Ai can help you scale content output.
Social Media Users: 10% are clicky, doesn’t mean they buy anything.
Many don’t like to click and don’t like the algorithms doing what they like
You need to do all the traditional means of customer discovery.
If you rely on just the algorithms, you’re not necessarily finding your customers. This is misleading with the algos. Don’t rely on the engagement metrics, rely on the data to who/how they actually bought.
If you can figure out how people bought, you will avoid all of these problems.
Organic Posts have about 5% rates… so do you figure out if you want to boost things or not?
Organic still matters but it needs a new approach.
Search traffic is still huge. Google’s new Ai-powered search features are shifting how content is ranked, but SEO-driven content generates million sin revenue for startups
Commiunity-led marketing is rising. Private groups on Discord, reddit, and niche communities drive organic referrals.
Thought leadership is still powerful.
Organic Growth Advice:
Build an email list and own your audience
Invest in YouTube and linkedin for long-term organic content
Use Ai tools to optimize SEO and content faster
What if you’re a new brand? How do you build up organic?
- You need to start years ahead of time.
Kelly’s opinion: it seems like you should also have your audience within your world if you’re ready for it though. Like what are you doing?
Look at your competitors and see what is/isn’t working for them. Do research on your competitive market, see what people are doing who have been around longer than you. It’ll give you a clue as to what might work.
How do you differentiate an “influencer” from a “content creator”
- Influencer: large audience, tend to be good at selling who they know and their audience size
Content Creators: spoke model for brand, some connections, primary business is their ability to create for their audience and engage them
Content creators tend to be somebody you’d hire that is a subject matter expert or well-known in the industry. Well spoken, and can represent the brand.
Some people are very good at both:
You’ve got to be able to do both to withstand. Be able to connect with your audience.
If they can generate content and get followers, they’re nailing it.
Ai is a game changer for startups:
It isn’t replacing marketers but it’s fundamentally changing how marketing works.
It’s almost a pendulum swing.
Ai helps startups move faster, spend smarter, and optimize better than their competitors.
Even if Ad generators become perfect, it isn’t the end.
You still need to go to an agency and say “make ads”. Ai is like having a junior employee who can do work and analysis, that maybe you’re skipping over, but now it gives you that good summary.
Marketing we tend to make a lot of compromises to go do the things we’re all told we should do in school.
Ai-Power Ad Optimization: test headlines, images, CTA in real-time, reallocates budget to the best-performing ads
Reduces waste ad spend and minimizes ROI
Automate what matters.. startups don’t have unlimited time and resources. You need to find the right balance between personalization and automization.
Email marketing atomization
Social media scheduling and insights
Predictive lead scoring
Think about where to automate and where to personalize. Where does each make sense?
Ai is only as powerful as the data it works with. What is it trained on? It’s incredible at finding patterns and building relationships.
Train and feed your Ai to do new tricks for you, but it’s important to think about queries. If you’re in marketing, take some classes. Or even ask Ai for advice on how to get Ai to do its job even better. It will tell you exactly what to do.
Sentimental Analysis and social listening: Ai scans millions of social media posts, reviews, and feedback to detect brand sentiment and emerging trends.
Ai-Powered SEO Optimization: Ai suggests high-value keywords, competitor rankings
Hyper-personlizatoin: ai dynamic product recommendations, custom landing pages and predictive shopping insights.
“Landing pages can be customized on the fly for each user. This is exciting. It automates customer support and real-time responses.”
Ai can help you figure out the ultimate ad with the perfect ad components, the fish font, music, colors, everything.
Keep joking that everyone is taking such careful notes, “but dont’ worry, you’ll get your own slides.”. but to me, I get thinking a little like, “Well duh!! We like to take notes to pay attention. We’re taking notes to keep engaged. The email of your PPT will go right into my trash bin!!”
FIND YOUR COMMUNITY
Any tips on “googling yourself”: go ahead and do it! Then understand how you’re being thought of. Ping yourself once a month and tell me what the market is talking about with my product. Ask the Ai how your product is trending lately.
Where is your community hanging out? Think of your community… if you offer them something, it’s an experience. Are tehy doing you a favor? How do you get them interested, feeling heard? Customer discovery = the answer to 25% of questions ever asked.
What should people NOT do on social media? Common mistakes:
Cheap laughs, gimmicks.. they’re not always wrong… maybe it’s worth the setup and reason. If not, it’s got to tie back to the brand. Don’t skip over the brand of your customer.
Jumping onto latest platform, don’t feel you need to be everywhere. Every platform isn’t right for every brand.
Be as authentic as you can to yourself and what you’re trying to do. Don’t overdo it.
People you’re selling to most likely have the same interests.
Ask peopel what you could be doing better… showing vulnerability lets people help you.
Some of these companies ruin you, the moment you put money into paid ads, after you stop - it never hypes you up again.
Bing = opposite - rank a lot once you spend money - test again and again, it works.
- - If you have right ad, it’ll break through. Do more boosted organic.
- - when you go from organic to boosted, to then paid, then back organic— the organic will completely die.
———>. it doesn’t happen for everyone
Marketing strategy: pick a marketing platform to pour money into - maybe your yotube… then have that YouTube funnel everything to organic followers. Have one paid that funnels to your organic. Divide them.
PPC/SEO
How do you show up organically on google? Not just paid ontop - but showing up as most relevant and providing value.
Some Questions:
Everyone introduce yourself -
One guy: Runs SEO agency, for 9 years with partner who has done it for over 50 years. Worked with billion dollar companies, small mom/pop companies, startups… also build own SEO tools which makes us “weird” and unique
Another: Worked in SEO for over 15 years, worked with T-Mobile and Alaska Airline, local SEO, now hired to do projects on SEO for the companies he used to work for.
Another: Working at EBAY pay-for-click over a decade, hometown is fun to say.
Another: Owns a marketing agency that specialized in ECommerce, full-time over a decade. Originally had own amazon/ebay business, grew it and helped build other businesses.
Another runs a SEO, Marketing, Analytics agency locally
How fast is Google changing? What does Google look like today? Especially now with Ai and the future looking bleak…
“Zero click search” is the hottest thing in SEO right now. It used to be websites to help you get the answer, but now google gives the answer before you jump into the website.
It’s only going to get harder to compete. ChatGPT and LLM’s are still going to need to source their data from somewhere (not just another LLM) - so that is the biggest tip to start with for people. You want to be the authority and do whatever you can to get picked up.
Ai is coming up here, but also there’s Ai whiplash. People are tired of it force-fed down their throat.
Companies are forcing crap down peoples’ throat while also trying to be cutting edge. At the end of the day, you have to solve the need for the customer. They need to solve a problem so they’re going to google.
No one lies through their search bar. It’s one of the best research tools out there and it’s free.
Google will tell you what everyone is searching for and its a free
SEO is still a real thing, organic still works - it’s still an effective strategy
3. Create great content, relevant content.. the LLM’s need to source it from somewhere. Is that the mantra people need to follow or are peopel trying to change their stragegy
Stick to the fundamental, create good content, have good technical structure… google will content, find it, and you’ll show up
Nuances have entity search and intent search, they lean towards this new strategy… but the basic fundamentals still work really, really well.
SEO — one of the things that has changed… informational content that may have usually driven peopel to your website, it is declining. That type of traffic still will get attention, but it’s less than it was before. Google is showing it right in the search results or peopel are turning to CHAT GPT. Informational content has been effected
But opinions, content that drives real value (like our coworkign space just wrote an article: 10 things to remember for a work party… - getting the holiday theme and collaboration 5x’d their readerships)
Having local service pages still helps. YOu’re still going to show up. Maybe not in the map result for local business, but you will show up below it.
Ai has changed things and continue to when it comest o SEO
4. Google just announced their diversity update for local ratings. IF you rank in the map you don’t rank in the listings or vice versa. Will they stick to this, test it, and realize they should switch it?
They did this in the past, it sounds like when they used to have featured snippits. It’s hard to say.
They don’t want to reward organic with two free listings anymore
Make sure you get map listings or work on the organic strategy a little more
Focus on local page or pivot, but its too early to know what direction that goes
We are finding that everything is getting pushed more and more towards paid more than ever. It used to be paid search at the top, and then some at the bottom - no… now it’s all local service ads, two paid searched…you have to search halfway through the page to find it. Whatever benefits paid is the way to go.
DOJ trails leaked that the head of paid organic was like “you gotta help us out”
Organic update, showing the pack doesn’t allow you to show up in others. Usually the “map pack” is favored where your location is. If your location is in bellevue, you’ll rank better locally for your business. But when it comes to a lot of businesses, in the past, different locations have different pages.
Remember that the 2nd largest search engine is Youtube.
But I just found out that two of my favorite YouTubers are scammers…
5. Paid searches have changed dramatically over the past few years. How should people be thinking about it in this day and age?
How many people here interact with P-max?
PMAX = a product that google is pushing that has anything that is item based, shopping, PLA ads… anything mobile has this format.. the shopping format. Google wants to take feed-based ads, maybe 4-6 items… it’ll basically rely on all the same infrastructure as those shopping campaigns on YouTube.
Our algos can tell you how much money is good to spend on these things, then they report to you on the conversions. Its that trus
The number one thing Google has been trying to make happen is this.
Youtube and Google have all of these placements where they’re trying to monetize everything as well as they monetized the search.
Simplification by Google has made a marketer’s life as boring as possible. They’ve streamlined everything.
As marketers, without the visibility and the “trust us” from google, where are the safeguards?
How do we test, how do we do incrementally?
It’s like the bond and the mortgage crisis… if you mix in bad things and stamp it all as good, you’re suddenly stuck with something that doesn’t have good quality as a whole. It’s totally nonsense.
Ad sides are becoming more competitive than ever… $10M/year, now $15M… but now because of more competition and Ai… the costs per click is completely skyrocketing.
The playing field is getting leveled, so now our conversion data is the only things that can tell us what it’s worth
6. What should a startup do with the first 60 days of their marketing?
How much time on SEO? SEO is not going to solve all of your problems. Customer discovery is where I’d start… see if your audience is even using SEO to make purchasing decisions.
B2B things can get insanely competitive, so start with a competitor analysis and start with the domain authority of competitors to make any traction through the SEO channel.
Then start a blog around just this… build up an influencer persona, make newsletters to send out to your following.
Traffic that is not valuable, then start putting more money not into the campaign.
You need to make a website, too. You want a strong technical website that google can crawl. If it can’t be crawled, it can’t be found.
Make sure everything is sound. Get the engaging content and stories. It’s going to take a long time and not happen overnight.
When he started at a startup they were getting 15k clicks a month, but by the end 4m… the basic fundamentals help google find your content, help people find you on google, then you get the engagement.
Engagement is what you need… on social media (it excites the algorithm)
It notices when you visit something more and more, it’ll have those metrics.
The more you engage the more you see their posts. Boosted or paid.
Makes me think of Shazia “liking” every one of my posts but not clicking hahah
7. What tools do you use to do research?
Spartoro: fantastic and you can use it for free at a limited capacity
Tells you your influencers and brands and twitter that your people like, it helps you figure out where they’re at
Reddit is one of the last bastions of authenticity that you can find these days:
I think reddit is ruined already. I’ve seen it downfall.
You can figure out traffic engagement and how strong your website is… your DR: your domain rating, or DA: domain authority — it shows how competitive the keywords that you’re going after… will it cost a ton of money to capture this?
If you write that article, is it going to rank?
Become the platform and become savvy
You can watch how people interact with your website, look at how they scroll, how their mouse moves.. are they clicking around? There are many places you can optimize on your site…
What do you do after they get to your site to make money.
Type in whatever search query you think your user is going to type in.. then click in the search engine right before you click search.. then see other articles and things related for other query ideas. Don’t hit enter. Watch one letter at a time - real/time searches people are performing.
8. What should be your paid search campaign goals?
Figure out costumer and have the messaging right, so when you run the ads and the social ad strategy, have the brand knowing what your customer’s hooks are. What will grab them and make them convert?
Social… what is the offer? What are you doing to get them to take action? You got to have an offer… free trial? 10% off? What? Be creative with this.
Make sure you have a good landing page with good copy. Get some foundational pages and supporting blogs. Even though the blogs aren’t going to rank that well. Then run ads and test messaging. Test it with engagement as well.
See what messaging is most engaging with that customers.
Run a conversion ad and try to get people to do it.
It’s easy to spend a lot of money quickly on Google… be careful and hope you start getting sales.
Leverage the automation we already have. Dynamic search ads are much better than guessing off keywords that people might be looking for… instead let google crawl your page and go bid on these keywords. In the past you may have had to do guesswork on that.
Branded searches may be something you are interested in.. you want to be showing up in, that’s your own standpoint. But Ebay is religious about it… if someone is searching your brand, if you put a brand on your own SEO - are you getting that incremental traffic? Or are you stealing free things from yourself by doing it twice and paying.
It all starts with automation and leveraging whatever you can from these websites for free.
Not doing brand search since 2013/2014… its an accidental fire if we do it online.. Ebay branded search study, you can see… but google loves branded traffic - they love telling you you’re getting conversions through paid ads.
Freakenomics is about half-accurate and they did a podcast about this.
9. How do you know sample size? What is enough for a PPC test for a startup? What is enough spend, impressions, the process?
Is the metric you’re looking at too sparse?
Is there another metric, like anywhere to see the quality of click… did someone spend extra time, more than just someone bought something?
Your company may be selling something really luxury, how to get between the traffic and conversions that is predictable and valuable and not just shooting in the dark…
Try to figure out user behavior to turn it into conversion.
If someone spends 2 min on your website, it may trigger something.
10. Give 1 minutes of as much SEO advice as possible, each of you:
Have you seen the movie gone in 60 seconds?
Play around with LLM’s, deepseek, chatgpt… fun fact: a ton of CEO’s don’t like using Ai, but honestly they dont know what they’re talking about. Ai - if you use it with SEO or PPC, still make it robin… you are batman. It will crash your vehicle, don’t let it lead the show.
Do the audience research. Google is teh best free tool out there, so find out what people are looking for related to your product and search it. Do your research, it’s the Wild West. It’s a hot mess but there is value. See what influencers are talking about - why? Who are they talking about? Will they come talk about you? Many of these services will give you free access… improve your organic visibility.
Create engaging articles and content… Ai can definitely help with the intense searching and entity, but don’t let it crash your car.
A/B testing is your friend, only listen to what the data tells you. Figure out how to use data as a way to approach it like a friend, in context. You’re not always going to go and know every business detail about your own business, but use the tools to figure out how to ask the right questions based off of A/B testing.
Use form of controls to see what helps you. Data-based creativity.
What you measure will improve. Weight loss— give everyone a scale and then suddenly they get thinner.
Prompts can be half a page long or more.
Canva is really adored by everyone. Canva is better than adobe suite. You can create everything you need, even video editing.
If you’re going to run Facebook ads, know that reels (and have them in teh format of UGC… but not an influencer you paid to do it, but a format of content you’d watch… woudl you watch it??)
This is the greatest pizza you’ve ever seen in your life!! (You ask, wow!! What restaurant is that? And figure it out yourself)
Those ads work well on meta, you do your own research.
Don’t forget about accessibility - low vision, limited visibility, yet they use the internet. It’s a huge pool of money by not having an accessible website (you can even get sued for it)
Notes from the Co-working Event:
Even though this event happened before the other, it was a little more “less to talk about but still important”. So, I wanted to put it second, since it honestly has a bit less structure. More just “observations” and feedback/insights. Not a lot of “learned info” from presenters cause there were almost no presentations, really.
- They are actively recruiting for (volunteer/paid?) mentors for their accelerator: 15 weeks sessions, 15-20 deliverables expected to complete for homework.
Coworking doesn’t have food or snacks, monthly meetings. I told them to start having tea or drinks offered (or just say, bring your own supplies).
The host gave me his card and said he can help with anything, with any of their resources. I told him, what types of resources? But he just said it depends on your question. I wasn’t a fan of this response.
At first, only the host and one other man was there. He was retired but just attending and asking people why they’d want to come to an event like this. I wasn’t sure of my exact answer, but I wasn’t sure of his reason to join either.
I’ve been to a few coworking events before, each have their own vibe. Some are silent, some have structure. This one started silent but turned social nonstop about 15 minutes in.
A guy showed up who had spend him and his wife’s entire life savings on a project. It was hard to tell what project he was going on about, though , because he had two startups he was running at once. One for special needs kids, he was working to kick that off. The other was up and running, but he wanted millions more invested to really get it going.
When I asked him to show me his site - because what he was describing was a product I may actually use, he showed it to me and it was full of glitches.
Many questions I’d ask him about his site he couldn’t answer or just brushed off.
The guy was showing off his product, its a website to book meeting with companies.
He said he wanted million more to produce things, explainers, get a team… I simply told him that investors want to invest in you if they believe you can get a project done. They can’t see into the future, they can only see what you present them with.
The retired man said he was an investor and a partner out of a group in New York. He worked in local and international investing.
He said that VC groups are interesting. Decades ago it was all done through banking and private money if you can find it. Different environment these days for entrepreneurs, plenty of money.
Seattle compared to other markets has a gap between PreC funding, funders want more prototype and early market stage.
Preseries A, preseed is preferred by this guy. “It’s nice if a business has some idea of how to get to market, maybe even got to market in a small way to test out the legs. “
Many companies dont have market experience, not the concept.
There is discussion, too, on the excitement for FIFA and how cities are preparing. Shuttling people and use of the lite rail.
More peopel showed up, all with similar goals from this event (since the retired man was asking) - the goal to meet others and get out of the house a bit.
It was nice to meet some people and probably good for everyone to share ideas with each other.
A few of the people who arrived late were graduates of the accelerator program. I love that they have follow up coworking for graduates to attend. So smart.
Many people said it was their first time at someting like this. So they didn’t even know what to expect. As for me, as I said, I would have expected tea 😂. But it was still a great time.
Conference “Overall Rating” Further Elaboration:
VENUE -4 /5
Room for Improvement: This place is tough to get to (and a bit unphotogenic, their ceiling in the presentation room! I’ve thought that every time…) but besides that, the vibe is awesome and they always exceed expectations. It has plenty of space and a good room for hosting prsentaions. There are also plenty of places to step away and network. It’s a good venue.
FOOD - 5/5
Allow me to Elaborate: I am never disappointed by their spread. It has a mix of everything (though idk what they had for dinner. I had to leave early to get my daughter from daycare).
SPEAKER CONTENT - 5/5
Allow me to Elaborate: These guys have so much great knowledge to share!! I learned so much and am always impressed by the quality of speakers in this city. We got like 100 years of experience from these people, combined. It’s fantastic to learn from them.
NETWORKING OPPORTUNITIES - 3.75/5
Room for Improvement: This place has such a nice community and they make lots of time to network. There could be a bit more structure to get peopel chatting, but it’s nice that you don’t HAVE to. It’s easy to be a bit anonymous here, too.
LIKELINESS TO RETURN - 5/5
Allow me to Elaborate: For sure. This is such a high quality place to visit and spend your time. I like how they have length events filled with efficient pieces. It’s respectful of everyone’s time and high quality.
Kelly’s Remaining Questions:
What were some times that presenters celebrate their good work lately?
When did they succeed recently? What is working for them?
Is it possible to thrive simply off organic impressions? Is it too wishful or wouldn’t it be its own marketing campaign?
Seems like “marketing” is a lot like “improv” where sometimes you learn too many rules and you forget how to act. How can someone become insanely great at marketing, yet not overthink things?
What are the qualities you want in your marketing team?
Can’t we be rethinking marketing entirely? The audience is sick of marketing as we know it… and fakes are getting exposed.
Until next time, I wish you the motivation and success to search for opportunities around your area. Search and explore: Who is out there giving talks? There are new things happening all of the time
Find relatable or interesting topics you like and check them out! Maybe even something hosted at a cool venue, if there’s no other reason to go. Let’s see what you can learn and discover not too far from home. 😊
