Stop Hiding Behind The Brand

Stephan Bajaio 0:00

Stop hiding behind your brands. It's not helping you. Stop thinking of yourself as something that has to be only looked at from a machine perspective. True loyalty lives in experiential understanding of who you say you are and then proving you actually are that. Companies that do that are going to be the winners in the next five to ten years.

Joeri Billast 0:38

Hi Joeri, thanks so much for having me on. I'm really excited to be here. If you don't know Stephan, Stephan Bajaio, he's a CEO, co-founder, and CMO with over 20 years in SEO and digital marketing. He helped brands like FedEx, Comcast, and CMSWin in search. And now he co-founded VibeLogic to help businesses navigate the collision of AI and organic search. Excited to have you on, Stephan. So when you look at marketing today, what do you see that most executives are still missing?

Stephan Bajaio 1:20

That's a fun question. I tend to be contrarian. Anyone who knows me will know that about me. I'm not one to hold back, so I won't hold back today. And I'll share with your viewers and listeners my really unadulterated thoughts. So I have played a lot of those roles. I've been a co-founder, I've been a CMO, I've been an SEO forever. And I'll tell you, one of the biggest things I see that happens frequently is executives get stuck on marketing by blog, marketing by the latest thing, marketing by what's sexy and not by what's uh necessary. So an example of that is there's always seemingly something new in digital. Now it's AI, before that it was voice search, before that it was AMP and it was mobile. And if we can just keep going backwards in time, and I can take you through two decades, the dot-com world where I first started in the dot-com boom and bust, before people were even willing to put credit cards into the web, right? They always go for the sexy thing. And in fact, what you'll notice with the life cycle of a CMO specifically, because let's say the CMO drives the marketing, um, the marketing within an organization, what you'll see is that their lifespan is about two and a half years. They'll come in, they'll say, I gotta fix a bunch of stuff, but then there's a new tactic I want to put in place, something something novel. So six months to a year is like fixing/slash getting ready for the new world. By the way, site migrations also happen to follow the same kind of like you'll see site migrations almost happen every two and a half years. It's not a surprise that also lines up with CMO lifespans. Um, and they'll look to make a change, they'll put in something new, and then the last year or half a year is validating what they did actually made a difference. So it's not sexy to go and look at your own teams and do the introspection that isn't just to say we got to replace all this or fix all this, but rather say, do we have it correct? Have we thought about how to structure everything appropriately? And it's funny because at Conductor, one of the companies I helped co-found a million years ago, an SEO SaaS platform, when I found and I would later use in VibeLogic, our agency, an assessment process. So I always thought, you know, when I was running the professional services team at Conductor, we turned it into like 65 people, and we would go into these major Fortune 500 companies assuming that they knew what they wanted, assuming that they were all kind of built similarly. They weren't, they're all different, they're all very different, and their capabilities to execute ranges wildly. So your ability to go in and assess a company and understand one, what is the dissonance? Because the belief of what actually is occurring within the organization, whether you had asked the head of product, the CEO, the CMO, the head of sales, everyone will look at the same question and answer it slightly differently. And if there's a lot of difference in that answer, it's really important you get to the source of that and fix those problems, because it doesn't matter what new tactic you're using in marketing, if these things aren't aligned internally, you're not gonna get the right stuff out the door. And recognizing the dissonance and then setting a roadmap of what needs to be changed and what needs to be fixed and where you need to apply more or less resourcing, buy-in, all that stuff, all comes from that kind of source, I want to say. So not enough introspection, way too much bright, shiny objects.

Why Shiny Tactics Keep Winning

Joeri Billast 4:55

Maybe one of those objects, and I don't know if it is shining, it's the visibility in in LLMs. I just finished my marketing retreat, my AI marketing retweet here in Sintra. We discussed is AI visibility showing up, and of course, there's a lot of discussion going on there, lots of products and tools and services on the market. But I think I read somewhere that you said that LLM visibility is a bit overhyped right now. So, where exactly do you think the market is confusing novelty with the real strategic value?

Stephan Bajaio 5:31

Yeah, I think uh I don't get popularity points. I have a lot of rooms for saying what I'm about to say, but um I want you to think about this like the 1849 California Gold Rock. Okay. Um, which by the way is why the San Francisco 49ers are coal. Um the 49 Gold Rust, the people that really made money, the most of the people that actually made money were the ones selling the picks and the pans, not the ones going for the to try and get the gold. And the reality was that by the time a lot of people made it out to California and actually took the actions and tried to do this stuff, a lot of the time, even if they found a little bit of gold, it it wasn't enough. It disappeared. The vein of gold wasn't there, and they kept mining and they couldn't find, and so a lot of people just ended up going broke. And the same thing holds true with kind of chasing LLMs right now, right? The shape of the LLM, what we're expecting right now. One, which LLM are we talking? Are we talking about ChatGPT? Are we talking about perplexity? Are we talking Claude? Okay, so there's the variety of that, which was reminds me of the old days in SEO with all the different search engines, right? Which engine do you want to rank for? Ask Jeeves, and you want to add Bing or Yahoo, or there was uh a lot of, and then there was international search engines too. So, one, it's really not as much about owning that visibility. So Rand Fishkin at SparkToro did a great study. If you haven't read it, I recommend you all go look for it about the frequency of what shows up in the LLMs, the order in which they show up, and the fact that that's not really holding. So, in other words, you and I can put in your same prompt, and we're not necessarily going to get the same results, let alone in the same order. I think the same prompt generates the same results one out of a hundred times, and then it generates the exact same rankings of those results, rankings something like one in a thousand times. Then SAMRun's just put out a study about the content that actually ranks in search engines, which is good because people need to recognize this. I think only 10%, not even, of the content that ranks position one is AI generated. Google has actively gone out and said, you know, content that is automatically written with the LLMs is not necessarily the right thing to do. So I think a lot of people are too focused on something that's going to change. Okay, it's like this isn't just algorithms. What an LLM looks like today is not what an LLM is going to look like tomorrow. In fact, it's as simple as this. I will ask every marketer out there do you think a chatbot is the best UX UI to provide large language model data? Is it a great UI? Is does this seem like the best model you could have? This to me is the deep dee de dee deed deed de version of LLMs. We should not be building toward this. This is not the future. The future will happen and it'll come, but I guarantee you it won't be in the shape form that we can all predict. So instead of trying to like bet on the future and say, oh, I'm the first to action, I think that's what's the sexy part about the LLM, right? It's that shiny object syndrome we just talked about. I'm gonna act and I'm gonna gain territory and I'm gonna but hold on a second. The way they cite is changing constantly, references are changing constantly. What they're based off is changing constantly. The the the the choices and ways they provide the data is changing constantly. We're gonna have data in there soon. That's gonna add a new level of complexity. Like, don't worry, you'll have enough shiny objects in the next like two to five years. But right now, I think it's a fool's error to go and chase that rabbit.

The LLM Visibility Gold Rush

Joeri Billast 9:35

Yeah, it makes uh a lot of sense. People are always going for the latest, and they think this will fix everything, and they want to it obviously often it's good to be first, but it's not good, you know, to just go in, just use AI because you know AI is sexy. Like it was with social media. Go on social media because you should be on social media, but without any plan or any goal. So let's talk about the unsexy fundamentals that companies need to fix if they want to stay visible and stay trusted, no matter search evolves. I gave also a TEDx talk about that recently, about in the era of AI, how trust is actually important. But yeah, so talking about the fundamentals, what would you say are those?

Stephan Bajaio 10:22

Well, there's a lot of uh unsexy fundamentals, honestly, and what it comes down to thinking through the things that will make you ingested, and I hate using the term ingested, I should probably come up with a better term for that, but uh how you will be assessed by the engines, right? Uh by whatever engine that is, and I think that I think that a lot of that is I think a lot of that can be done in some pretty obvious ways, and then in some less obvious ways. So we we obviously have schema as part of what we're doing, information architecture, right? How we set that up, on-page SEO, which again, I don't even like I hate to say this, but I don't even like the term SEO. I never did, and in fact, most SEOs don't like that term, at least we didn't until people started deciding our future and adding AIO, AEO, GEO. And the thing is, it's it's really about the O, right? It's it's it's not about this, uh, it's not about this concept of like trying to optimize for the engine, right? It's about optimizing the data, the data itself. Like what will be, I don't know the future LLM. You, Joeri, don't know the future LLM. It's safe to say that. We as people who live and breathe this stuff every day, it's okay to say we don't know what the future and future engines will look like. But it is safe to say they'll require signals and data from us in order to be able to use that information and turn it into whatever they choose to. So if we don't expose that data, if we don't format that data, if we don't think about that data in the context of how it'll possibly be used, it's our fault, right? That we didn't do a good enough job to get it included in ways it should. The unsexy structural technical stuff that makes for good SEO also makes for good crawlability, which these things are gonna have to do. It makes for good legibility or good contextualization, and the more you send these signals, the better off you're gonna be in whatever chooses to interpret your signals in the future.

Joeri Billast 12:44

Yeah. Makes sense. Now, things that we discussed also during the retreat, during our mastermind session, was about being visible but visible for humans and for the machines, of course. Humans are influenced by the machine, and the machine suggests decisions, and then the humans will decide based on that. It was interesting. I had the conversation with Mark Schaefer during the retreat, and he gave the examples about diapers. So he has a grandchild, and his grandchild is really good, he said, in pooping, and so he needs diapers, but he will not buy the diapers, it's the parents who will buy the diapers, and the parents will be influenced by the AI. So it's knowing who you are actually making content for, working for. So I'm curious to hear your thoughts to how to balance that. So the visibility for machines and for humans.

Stephan Bajaio 13:36

Yeah, I mean, so I've always kind of said, and I think that this is the direction it has to go in, which is for machines, you can do all the technical stuff to make it more crawlable and understandable. But the reality is, and that's really the bare bones basics in my mind, that is difficult more difficult than it should be in certain companies, because an SEO doesn't necessarily control the dev department or the content team that writes about stuff. So it's it's it's something that we're very used to in my space of SEO in not being fully in control of your future. But what I would say is you really do need to write for the human. And more than F, right? As AI, nonsensical content, to be honest, it sounds like the same, forgive me, crap, over and over and over again. Getting you can see it now, you can feel it now. Uh, anyone who's been around AI content enough has seen that it feels AI, not because the word is repeated, not because it says something crazy, but because it just doesn't, it doesn't hit right, right? And I think in a world where we are going to be overwhelmed with options, overwhelmed with opportunity, it's the same reason Steve Jobs wore the same black shirt over and over again, decision fatigue, right? You want to make things easy for your human counterpart, you want to make them feel seen with your content, you want to solve their problem before you sell them anything to build trust, right? These are the things that are gonna matter as we move into a world where content creation is easier than ever, but not necessarily better than ever. It's always been the case that when you're able to take something to the masses and allow it to be, I guess, used everywhere. MySpace is a great example of this, right? We gave the ability to people who didn't know how to build a website to build their own page. Man, did that get ugly. Did anyone see what those things look like? So just because you can doesn't mean it's good, right? And just because everyone has access doesn't mean quality in this case is a good thing for content value, right? So if the lowest common denominator is gonna get really low, you're gonna have to drown out a lot more noise, a lot more decision fatigue, a lot more stuff so the human can feel trust. I think brands are gonna have to focus time and effort, is human trust, like you talked about, building that trust, not doing it always for an engine. The engine will follow. But once the trust is built, the loyalty is built that will follow through. But companies need to be willing to wait on the ROI for that and trust the process. That's harder to do than say, but it's something the best companies in the world do.

Joeri Billast 17:32

Yeah, it's everything in marketing, it takes time because otherwise it's just like you know, you have all these people that try to do the shortcut and you get all these funny messages. Yeah, maybe they think that that will work. Something also I think you bring to the conversation is empathy. Yeah, empathy and usefulness. And the eye cannot, even talking about his chatbot, you know, cannot feel the empathy that is probably needed in certain situations. So we need to be careful that we don't use the humanity aspect, right?

Unsexy Fundamentals That Still Work

Stephan Bajaio 18:06

Yeah, it's surprising to me, by the way, how many brands um who should be empathetic miss out on that. They completely miss it. They're I was thinking about this earlier, and I was saying to myself, they kind of act like they're in high school. Like they want to be the cool kid and they try too hard. Versus being cool kind of happens for a lot of people in college, where it's like you've kind of accepted your own quirks a little bit. Or maybe that happens later in life. For me, it was in college, and you're like, hey, I am who I am, and I'm owning it, right? Instead of whying always about the latest trend, latest thing, and running after people, right? No one likes to be chased. Everyone kind of likes a little bit of chase in their own life. Brand uh that makes you feel something is really good, right? Versus having a brand run after you all the time, feel kind of stocky and aggressive. And I think brands haven't the ones that really get it understand the stress, the issues, the real audiences that they're trying to help, and they get into an obsess over how to help them in any way they can, everywhere they can. You know, that's they've missed this concept where they thought cool was as they would define it, versus cool is actually, especially now with a younger generation, is just authenticity. And there's a lack of authenticity in brands, right? That just that humanity seems to be like as soon as I put a logo up, I'm not a person anymore, right? That's going to miss more and more as we see a lot of AI just cranked out easily and not necessarily giving the stories behind the companies. You know, I've always been, especially in the B2B space, I'm always amazed when I hear a story about like a CEO of a of like, I think there was a CEO back in the day of Comcast. I'm not sure if he still is, and he had started as a lineman, like literally one of the guys that puts the lines up, right? And I went to the profile on the site, and like they hardly mentioned much of his stories. Asked, how long's he been in the company? And that this is a case of like the guy works his way up the mail room, and 20 years later he runs the multi-billion dollar company, right? And and they weren't pushing that. That was almost like an afterthought, you know? And then funny enough, I'd had a few of their technicians come out to my house and I talked to them about working at the company, and they they each kind of gave me a similar story. They'd been there for 20-something years. They they mentioned the CEO and how proud they were of him, and like this concept of like the every man kind of story they were giving me. And this was one particular case. But what I thought so interesting about that is like, oh, this is a real life face to your company. Yes, it could be flawed. Yes, he could make mistakes, yes, yes, yes. But this is the idea that people don't leave this company there with them. The company does right by their employees. There's a good feeling to that. Like, you want to promote that feeling to your consumer and let them feel like I'm a part of something, right? There's a lot of, I think there's a lot of studies that have come out about the younger generations, I think it's Gen Z and younger, that are looking for purpose-driven organizations and where they spend their money. And it's very interesting that you don't have to be a.org to be a purpose-driven organization. But if you can put humanity behind what you do, that can go a really long way. So I'd say, like, stop hiding behind your brands. It's not helping you. Stop thinking of yourself as something that has to be only looked at from a machine perspective. True loyalty lives in experiential understanding of who you say you are and then proving you actually are that. Companies that do that are going to be the winners in the next five to ten years.

Joeri Billast 22:18

Yeah, I love that. Um, but when you tell this, you know, to a CFO or CEO, I also talk about this in my book, by the way, the future CMO is measuring everything, of course. Because in the future CMO, I call it a trust-driven marketing function. What metrics or signals would you watch to know whether a brand is truly earning attention rather than renting it?

Write For Humans Not Machines

Stephan Bajaio 22:46

Yeah, you know, it's interesting because I think of things in terms of like, and and these are not gonna be easy. Metrics to deal in trust, right? But for me, a lot of trust comes out in the form of LTV, so lifetime value. But unfortunately, that's like a lagging indicator, and it's a very long one to figure out, unless you're in a SaaS where renewals might be shorter or something like that. I think a lot of customer-specific metrics, things you can use, a product like GainSight or one of those life cycle products that's going to let you understand what consumer does once they become a customer. Loyalty scoring is definitely one of those, especially in B2B, I think is overlooked constantly. Too many B2Bs I work with just don't loyalty scoring as a model to understand who are their true evangelists in the market and use them appropriately and score them appropriately. Um just like a oh yeah, here's another credit for, you know, no, no, no. I'm not talking that kind of loyalty. I'm talking about the kind where someone's going to be a great advocate, they'll be your next case study, they're going to introduce you to five more potential clients that are going to be one prospects. Trust trust matters and visibility follows. So I that's one of the things that people don't seem to understand is that when you've built the trust, and and this is a problem that I think most marketers look at it incorrectly. We've been taught this funnel concept, right? Of like we've taken from awareness to consideration to you know down the funnel, and then like how many people are charged will happen after the purchase? Demand should stop at the purchase. That's crazy. An hourglass, more sand will end up at the bottom, even if you're not a subscription service, right? I mean, I lived in SaaS for 14 years building conductor. Like I I'm acutely aware of renewals. I know their valuations, I know the value, but I've never really met a company that only wants to sell you something once, right? And then doesn't want to have a relationship with you again, doesn't expect you to try and even promote if you could only have, let's say it's a roofing company, you're not gonna get your roof replaced every year, right? But you are gonna tell others and you are gonna be an advocate for them and you are gonna recommend them and you are gonna all of that goes in ways, places, shapes, and forms that is not visibility online necessarily. It'll come back. WhatsApp groups will talk about you, and you'll never know about it. Um, you know, it'll find its way into next door and other social media local platforms where people give advice and recommend. Uh, it'll be done around the dinner tape. What's the ROI on? Well, I mean, we could sit here trying to calculate how many molecules are in my office. And while scientifically we could probably figure it out, I think our time and effort would better be spent, I don't know, doing other things. Chasing of the metrics for justification becomes a lot of the reason why I find, and and this isn't to say metrics and ROI, okay. I'm definitely of the opinion those matter, but I think because it's digital, we over-index on it. Somehow we're okay with a billboard that we can't tell how many people actually saw or acted on, and we're fine with spending tons of money on that because it's traditional media, we're fine with television ads, we can't necessarily tie back to the ROM. But then because it's digital, for some reason, we try to squeeze every little bit of out of it, and we spend more time throughout what what we do actually actionate. And that's a bunch of analysis paralysis that marketers do that wastes a ton of time. Marketing is a verb you need to execute against it, you need to action it. You cannot sit there and just pontificate about what could be, because unfortunately, like this happens in SEO all the time. You could be God's gift to SEO. I've said this. You could have if the content team doesn't create the content or the dev folks won't go along with actually changing some of the elements or cleaning up some of the tech on the site, you're not ranking. Doesn't matter how smart you are, how capable, how right your strategy is, it's not gonna land. So that's more of where I think a lot of the problems in companies lie is they don't organize themselves properly. They don't the the unsexy part about how these things work together to create agility um to execute. That's where companies need to focus their time. That's their number one competitor, Joeri. Right now, most major companies I work with, oh well, that guy's ranking better than me, or that guy's performing better, or that guy potentially uh this is a great one the other day. Uh, company was like, I don't know how they were able to get money to spend an ad in the Super Bowl. And I was like, Because your ignorance isn't bliss, it's their market share. Right? It's their market share. You are your own worst enemy. Organizationally, most companies are siloed, they aren't structured for the future, they aren't ready for digital, they took their offline version of marketing, they threw it online and said, I guess everyone will just take a silo channel, we'll go. And and that wasn't the right thing to do. And then finally, we're at this place where it's like all the channels are melding and mushing together, experience a user ends up having, they don't live in a channel, and we're all scratching our heads here, going, like, how come this isn't working the way we want? Because it's not the way the web works. Right, we didn't structure ourselves for that, and we're surprised. It's kind of shocking or anything.

Joeri Billast 28:37

Well, you made me thinking too. But that's my job. It's uh yeah, yeah, it's uh well, well, really insightful conversation, Stephan. But the time goes fast, we're already at the end of this podcast episode. But I think we have lots of more thoughts and ideas. So if people want to follow you, if they want to connect with you, where would you like me to send them?

Stephan Bajaio 29:01

Sure. LinkedIn is my drug of choice. So Stephan Bajaio, S-T-E-P-H-N, B-A-J-A-I-O, LinkedIn, or vibe logic.com. So vibrogic.com, feel free to reach out there. That's our website. We help lots of companies of different sizes get visibility across the large spectrum of search landscapes, whether that's LLMs and search engines and all the different places they need to think about getting in front of their audiences, but are you there? And frankly, they're thinking about it too myopically. So we help them look at it a little bit differently and position themselves where their decisions are being formed, right? So that's our goal is to help companies do that. And I'm excited to have the opportunity to help folks out there. And Joeri, thank you so much for the platform, the time, and hopefully I've been able to share a little bit of what I've learned along my past 20 years.

Joeri Billast 30:03

Thanks so much, Stephan. It was really a pleasure to have you. Same. Guys, what an amazing episode. As you know, there are always show notes, so everything that Stephan Stephan mentioned will be found in there. Also, his links. I want also to show my gratefulness to my sponsor RYO, who has both sponsored the retreat and is also now supporting this podcast episode. If you feel like it's useful for people around you, other marketers, other entrepreneurs, maybe your neighbor, be sure to share this episode with them. If you're not yet following the show, this is a really good moment to hit the subscribe button. If you haven't given me a review yet, if you give me these 5 stars, it really goes a long way. And of course, I would like to see you back next time. Take care.