HubSpot - 📖 Outsmart AI 

Hey marketers! If you’re like me and are freaked out about a zero-clicks world, this week's master is for you.

Today’s lineup:

• 🤔 Keywords aren’t key to outsmarting Google
• 🤖 Choose your fighter: Getting ahead in the AI revolution
• 🚿 Find LinkedIn success … in the shower?

MEET THE MASTER

Name: Chima Mmeje

Job: Senior content marketing manager at Moz

Claim to fame: Chima's MozCon talk was showered with praise by none other than the SE-OG himself, Rand Fishkin, who also called Chima one of the "fresh faces in the SEO speaker scene"

Fun fact: Chima relaxes on the weekend by cooking complex dishes that take three hours or more

Lesson 1: Fight chaos with expertise

If you want a slammin’ cheese pizza recipe, are you gonna ask an AI that can’t taste? Or would you rather ask food blogger Tieghan Gerard about crispy tomato herb crust? 

One of Tieghan's fancy pizza recipes

I know where I’m turning, but with the rapid rise of AI-assisted blog posts, consumers are overwhelmed. 

“Consumers are looking for a reason to leave your content — they’re subconsciously scanning for AI words like ‘delve’ and ‘enhance,’” Mmeje tells me.

All this AI content is “just chaos,” she says. “It's just noise.”

In the age of AI, “quality” means one thing: expert perspectives.

Leverage your internal subject matter experts to become thought leaders who will bring experience and trustworthiness to your content. 

“People trust people,” Mmeje says. “It’s just that simple.”

Lesson 2: Build around big markets

🐶 Here's a fun fact: "Socks for puppies" actually has a search volume (MSV: 30). How cute!

A puppy wearing socks... You're welcome

But, at the risk of offending the small-but-mighty puppy-sock community, I think we can all agree that the term is far too niche to craft a full business around.

"The biggest mistake I see leaders make is picking a problem to solve without checking to see if people are actually searching for that problem," Mmeje says.

“Make sure you're targeting something that has enough search volume, because that means that there is demand. And demand means that your product is viable."

In other words, think bigger. "Clothing for dogs," for instance, has an MSV of 400.

Lesson 3: Optimize for topics, not keywords

“You can't just optimize for keywords anymore,” Mmeje says. “You need to optimize for topics, which are more holistic.”

If I’m looking for the best cheese pizza recipes, I may also want to know the best wine to pair with them. (Because I’m classy.) Mmeje says that marketers need to anticipate this. 

“You can't just have one piece of content on a topic — you need to have tons of content that answers all the follow-up questions a user might have.”

Google's aim is to provide answers right on the SERPs, so they never need to click-through again. Which is the stuff of nightmares for marketers right now.

Mmeje says, “Google wants zero clicks to keep users on the SERPs. Which means to get people to click through, nuance and context are going to be much more important.” 

Mmeje’s advice comes full circle: When you think about what AI can’t replicate — human perspectives, original data, conversations that yield nuance and complexity — that’s how to come out ahead in AI-powered search. 

Sure, the content is harder to create. But it's the only way to win.

A HELPFUL RESOURCE

LinkedIn’s guide to B2B success tools

If you're hustling for leads on the platform of professional people, then these are for you.

From data-crunching magicians like Supermetrics and Adverity to workflow whizzes Zapier and Dreamdata, here are LinkedIn's top picks for sprucing up your pipeline and magically creating more free slots in your busy schedule. 

Master your workflow and observe your colleagues pondering if you've undergone a data-driven transformation into a productivity guru.

CASE STUDY

How HubSpot's social team grew its LinkedIn presence by 84% — in 6 months 

Some takeaways from Bryna Corcoran, HubSpot's director of social, on how you, too, can reign victorious on LinkedIn: 

• Test your Twitter voice on LinkedIn. This means short, text-only posts — or what Corcoran calls "shower musings."
• Ask yourself three questions: Who is this for? What's my angle? And how can I connect it to culture? 
• Finally, take a personality-driven approach over a corporate approach. If you can post it as text or as a meme, go for the meme. Speak like a human — not a brand. 

Read the full post for more on why LinkedIn matters and how we personified our business.

OPEN TABS

• ⏪ Reverse, reverse: Musk tried to backtrack on his f*** you to advertisers last week at the Cannes music festival (Does it help if he says he just meant f*** you to some advertisers? No?) 
• 🏎️ Rev the engines: Need sound effects of cars racing or birds chirping? ElevenLabs just launched text-to-sound effects, an AI audio model that can generate sound effects for your next fancy marketing vid
• 💔 Nix your ex: Love that photo of you at the beach last summer, but hate that your ex made the cut? You're in luck – Apple just disclosed brand-new features at WWDC 2024, and one of them is the option to remove people from your photos (That's along with other major changes, like Genmoji, the option to create your own AI-generated emojis)
• 👀 Peep: LinkedIn’s list of recommended tools for tackling real-time analytics, attribution reporting, and B2B measurement like a beast

This week's email was brought to you by Caroline Forsey. Editing by Curtis del Principe and Laura M. Browning.
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