Ep #154: Ask What Won't Change

Transcript

In this episode, we’re gonna talk about what has changed and how to position yourself appropriately so that you can get all the things that you want, which is relevancy efficacy, income, authority. Let’s get into it

 All right, so as I say this, like you already know that everything is changing, right?

It’s this whole AI thing that’s changing everything. And I wanna talk about a quote that I think about from time to time, which is like the Jeff Bezos quote, and I’ll paraphrase it. It’s something along the lines of, “Don’t ask what will change, ask what won’t change over the next ten or twenty years.” And I think there’s a lot that’s changed and a lot that won’t change, and let’s talk about that.

So one thing that’s changed, as is Google Search. And Google Search, or SEO in general, I think is going through a re- a reinvention, and I can’t say I’m upset with it. As a business owner, I find it a little bit harder to land on how to optimize for it. But as a consumer, being able to get a bespoke result on Google based on my search history, it’s nice.

It’s novel. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, Google made effectively their biggest update to Google search since its invention, which is to give you an AI overview. And if you click through that and drop it down when you’re on mobile, then you can just chat with Gemini based on its understanding of your intent, search history, et cetera, for a personalized result.

What this means for the marketer is You know, it’s tough. How do I optimize for SEO right now? You optimize by optimizing for the logged-out user, the user that’s in incognito, but then also it can be different based on where they are geographically. So do you run three hundred or five hundred queries and kind of randomize logged in, logged out, et cetera, across the world to figure out where a ranking is like where your client is ranking?

It’s tough. I’m sure smart people are figuring that out, but we’re seeing that SEO is changing, and it is becoming more personalized, and I think that’s very interesting. I think anyone that runs an SEO agency is significantly reconsidering their SEO agency’s position in the marketplace.

So a couple things. For a long time, they might have been selling content creation. Now everyone’s yeeting out content. SEO agencies are positioned to maybe get backlinks. You could say that’s white hat, gray hat, black hat, whatever. But SEO agencies have gotten backlinks from whatever means.

They either buy them or they ask for them on sites or whatever. So it’s this process by which companies– SEO companies are having to reinvent their tactics in order to remain relevant. It’s hard but I’m sure some people are gonna do very well with it, and I’m not saying that it’s a bad industry to be in, but you can’t dabble in SEO anymore.

You gotta be, like, great at it if you’re gonna run an agency for it. Similarly, PPC agencies, we’re seeing how everything’s changed over there. If you ever run ads, and if you’ve never run ads or you aren’t currently running ads, I just encourage you I don’t know, quarterly just to go in and play around and set up a small campaign or whatever just to see how much things are changing.

Things are changing so significantly. You go in and build an ad in Meta’s Ad Manager, and Meta is gonna try to suggest new headlines, new text variation. It’s gonna AI generate new images for you, and some of them are utterly terrible, but some of them are okay. Sometimes you write a couple headlines, and it gives you a couple more, and you’re like, “Eh, you know what?

Let’s test it.” Meta has taken on this op– I don’t know, responsibility maybe to test more ads for you. And we’re finding that the old work of agencies pulling levers to create ad campaigns and identifying audiences based on their propensity to do things or their history of things or data that you pull from elsewhere or whatever, like while that still may be useful, we’re seeing that the bottom of that agency world is just being cut out because Meta’s just “Give us decent creative.

We’ll make variations on that creative just to prove it. Give us a destination, like a outcome, like a landing page that you want a conversion from or whatever, and we’ll just drive traffic, and we’ll get you the result.” So we’re seeing even PPC agencies getting destabilized. We’re seeing the funnel builders get destabilized, people that did product launches.

I remember years ago when I was back at the agency, wow, man, how twelve years ago or whatever, we were charging a hundred and ninety-five dollars an hour for landing page builds. And when I would write copy these, these folks that I would work with had never seen good copy before.

Now, passable copy gets kicked out by Claude, and we’re finding that funnel builders are struggling to service the clients and make the same rates that they used to. They have to deliver more work, or they’re just getting paid less. Obviously, it comes in the copywriters. Copywriters are feeling the same way.

They’re just getting crushed by and large. Obviously, the cream of the crop’s gonna rise to the top. They’re gonna still do well, but we still see this great destabilization. I think it’s fair to say that the bottom eighty percent of all of those trades are gonna struggle, and I think eighty percent is a pretty scary number for a lot of folks.

Eighty percent. Are you really in the top twenty percent of, your agency’s model? Are you the top twenty percent PPC? And that is not just an ability to deliver results, but it is the ability to get and keep clients. I think for a lot of folks, maybe they’re technically very good, but they’re very poor at getting and keeping clients.

And it becomes harder now because these companies are going elsewhere. They’re not getting adequate lead flow. The, the agencies aren’t getting adequate lead flow. They’re not converting, they’re not building a book of business, and they’re just seeing like a slow atrophy. Definitely a scary place.

I think eighty percent will struggle, twenty percent are gonna do okay, and I think one percent are going to crush it. I think it’s hard to be in that one percent. To be realistic, I think it’s hard to be in that one percent. Oftentimes, those people have a ton of case studies and proof. It’s hard to be new at the game on something that’s already very digital and, try to position yourself as the number one.

Certainly not impossible, but I think very difficult. A lot of incumbents that are doing well to reposition themselves, and I think a lot of agency owners are in a precarious position where they have a heavy team, they’re starting to lose clients. As that happens, the burden falls on the business owner.

If you’ve never had a team, you don’t maybe know this feeling, but I’ll tell you, it is a heavy feeling when you’re responsible for putting dinner on the table of a lot of families. They could be across the world. It still holds the same weight. Someone in your backyard, like your neighbor who you’ve employed to work in your agency or someone in the Philippines or India or wherever those people are still counting on the paycheck that you deliver, and it becomes an emotional thing, and it’s very difficult of “Do I take this team that I’ve known and loved for years and start laying people off, or what do I do?”

And oftentimes the indecision leads to the business owner making less money because they say, “All right, I’m gonna keep the team despite revenue going down, and I’m just gonna eat it. I’m not gonna take a paycheck this month, this quarter.” And that becomes really difficult. So you’re paying all these people for this work, thinking that you’re gonna kickstart things, and it just is a struggle, and it’s tough.

I-in a similar vein I was talking to my neighbor. He came out outside. I w– and we were just chatting, catching up, and this guy was saying that his son just moved home from college. He’s like his son’s got a degree in like in biology and is just struggling to find paying work, and maybe he can get an internship.

And it’s the whole story that you’ve heard a thousand times before of it– it’s hard to get into business. That same kid is like starting to dabble in the AI stuff and seeing like what he can do and, like he needs to eat too. He doesn’t want to live at home forever. So what’s he gonna do? He’s gonna pick up a Claude account, and he’s gonna study and learn and try to build some stuff and directly compete against other people is what he’s going to do.

He can get– knock out a beautiful website pretty quickly, and maybe that website’s in biology, but maybe it’s also in like business opportunities, some way for him to make some money quickly. So we see that. We see these young digital natives are getting online, and they’re stuck, like they can’t find traditional work.

So what do they do with their idle hands? Maybe they play video games, maybe they watch a lot of Netflix, but like also maybe they compete directly against these agencies. And instead of saying, the agency owner currently is saying, “Oh, maybe I have to lay some folks off or figure out how to like reshuffle this human labor,” this younger person is coming in and saying Why would I ever need anybody else?

I could do it myself just with a bunch of AI stuff. I could watch a couple YouTube videos and stand up an agency overnight.” And I think that pressure is gonna aid in eating that bottom eighty percent of the market. It’s gonna be tough for that eighty percent. So what do you do among this destabilization?

And the answer is just really clear, right? You just climb to the top, go to the top, be the top. And I think the top person will always be the leader and the strategist, and that’s the place you want to be. The leader and the strategist. That’s the person who’s always going to be able to make sense of the destabilization and share that with the clients.

Let them know what they’re seeing from a marketer’s perspective. Someone in finance is going to have a very different perspective about what’s happening, and maybe they’re going to be grateful. They’re going to say, “Ooh,” and with finance now we have access to all of these all this data, and we can crunch all this data on a local LLM, and we can do all these things we’ve never been able to do before.

And now you have a CFO that’s maybe only working ten hours a week, but they’re providing massive value because they have access to all these tools. That stuff is awesome, but companies need someone in the marketing seat who’s seeing what’s happening and making a distinction and decision about how to move the company forward during this kind of wild time.

The most fun place to be is also to be at the adults table and calling the shots. If I could choose where I’d want to be, it’s like, do I want someone to tell me what to do, or do I want someone to tell me a problem and let me get to solve it? Ooh, baby, I want to solve that problem.

I think you do too. I think you enjoy the dopamine and the struggle and the, the, the learning that you have as a result of really putting your mind to something and working on it. And in the marketing department, really the only r-role for this is the CMO. And I think that there’s talk around like fractional CMO and how that’s different than CMO.

And I just want to tell you that kind of fundamentally it isn’t. There’s a couple things that are different, but fundamentally when I’m a fractional CMO for a company, every single person sees me as the CMO. When I’m introduced, it’s, “Hey, this is Casey. He’s our CMO.” No one says fractional CMO, right?

It’s just like a weird distinction that’s not necessary for anybody else except you and maybe your CEO and maybe the CFO. That’s it. For everyone else, they just see you as the de facto marketing strategist and leader, and that’s the goal. That’s where you want to be. You want to be in this elevated position of strategist and leader.

That’s the big idea. And in order to do that, you have to be great. So one of the things we do inside the accelerator is I help our CMOs elevate to the next level and create reasons why people should trust them. So it becomes like just natural. Like, why wouldn’t I work with this person that’s in front of me?

That’s the level that you want to get to of such authority that people are like, “Oh yeah, you? Yeah, you’re the one that I want.” It’s not like they are choosing between a group of people that are, all kind of similar and they’re trying to choose the best. You stand out as the best. That’s the ultimate goal is that you’re the person that people look at and say, “Yes, I want you because you’re the elevator.

You’re the best. You’re the one that can articulate it clearly, that knows my problems and that can solve them.” And I just think that as time goes on and we think about where the market’s going and what we’re all doing to remain relevant, to capture new clients and get more income, and just do all this required stuff that we have to do as, as maybe family people or people that just want to have a good living.

The goal here is to elevate yourself to that top role, have multiple clients so that losing one doesn’t, hurt you, and just becoming the person that people seek. Not the person that has to go and convince someone, but instead the person that just says, “Here’s what I’m doing. I got a spot left,” and then people say, “I’d like that spot.

I’d like to work with you. It would be awesome for us to work together.” That’s where you want to be. If you want my help doing it, just head over to cmox.co/show. That’s cmox.co/show and just schedule a time with my team and see if we can help you. I’m confident that if you have the experience of being a marketing leader, you’ve led people, you’re damn good at marketing strategy, and you’ve got some shadow sides that you want to work on, like your ability to prospect or sell or service or keep clients long-term or stand in a boardroom or, push back against when clients try to step on your boundaries, that kind of stuff.

If you want specific help on that, that’s what we do. We help you get to that next level. So go ahead and book your call right now, cmox.co/show. See you soon.