Podcasting in the Age of AI + Growth Marketing for B2B Tech & Complex Services

Ep 12: Podcasting in the Age of AI: The Game Has Changed, and Here Are The New Rules with guest John Taylor http://www.podcastmarketing.site + Growth Marketing for B2B Tech & Complex Services with guest Dominick Dejoy http://www.osricdigital.com

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Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:14

And welcome back to the Link Through Social Podcast. We're pleased to have another guest with us this week. It's John Taylor. John is the founder of the Act Three Agency and the creator of the listener discoverability optimization LDO strategy. He helps B2B and B2C podcasters grow their audience by making their shows more discoverable across platforms like YouTube, LinkedIn, and AI search tools. Through strategic messaging, AI SEO and cross-platform optimization, John helps podcasters turn great conversations into content that consistently attracts and converts a podcaster's ideal listener and client. Welcome to the show, John. Great to be here. Thanks for having me. My pleasure. Before we get started, maybe you can just uh give us a little bit of uh your background um and uh how you came to this point today.

SPEAKER_02 1:18

Sure. Um well I have been in digital marketing uh ever since it wasn't digital. Um ever since dial-up and before then too. So I've been in digital marketing for you know at least 25 years and uh in various industries. Um and up until about COVID, I was uh working in digital marketing in the beverage industry and wine in particular. Uh I was helping wineries with uh with marketing. And that's when I actually started getting into podcasting. Uh my first podcast uh was around 2017, um, when um one of my clients said, Hey, would you do a podcast? They don't know what they are, but we're supposed to do one. And so um I got started podcasting there. And then um post-COVID, uh I started my own agency. And at first we were doing, you know, general digital marketing. Um, but I quickly sort of discovered that podcast marketing was a niche um that needed some help and that I had uh experience for. So uh since then, um been doing almost exclusively podcast marketing and over the last you know 18 months, two years, especially um working in that intersection of AI and podcast marketing. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 2:40

Well, yeah, that's uh it's funny you should say that uh at the end there. This has uh been a big focus on our show, the Linked Through Social Podcast, is you know, the the emergence of AI, how quickly everything is changing on a day-to-day basis, John. And right you know, how can how can podcasters you know keep up with this fast moving AI? Uh how can they come into the age of AI?

SPEAKER_02 3:09

You know, it's such a fundamentally good question because it speaks to the contrast uh uh of AI and humanity, right? There will always be a need for podcasters, podcasters who have something really good to say, have a unique position, have a good story. The human element of content creation, whether that be podcasting, movies, book writing, all of that, it's all always going to require a human. And so your job is safe. My job is not safe. I know I will be out of work within two years. What I do will be fully replaced by AI, but that AI will be monitored and tasked by a human being. And we're actually working on those tools right now. We're working on the tools that are going to take us out of business. And what a podcaster, I think what a podcaster really needs to know about AI really is just sort of keep your eye out there, you know, keep keep your finger on the on the pulse of what's going on, because there will be incredible new tools coming out rapidly that are going to help a podcaster um grow their audience, grow their audience in their very specific niche, uh help them, you know, really connect with other people who are looking for the kind of content that they're producing. So stay human and don't don't worry about the AI. It will come find you and it will it will it will be there um to help you. It it's just it's just a tool. It's just a tool. And I you know, I say this to people all the time, you know, you you have a guy who was hammering rocks with a with a with a or hammering nails with a rock, right? And then the tool, the uh a hammer was invented, and it's just a tool, and it just made things more efficient and it just made things better. And so the hammer will come to you and uh and you'll learn how to use it, and it'll be super easy and and you'll be fine. Just be here.

SPEAKER_01 5:24

So don't fear AI, but but be excited for the opportunities that AI are gonna present to a podcaster.

SPEAKER_02 5:31

Exactly.

SPEAKER_01 5:32

Yes. So uh I was uh reading your bio and uh I wanted to ask you this question. Um, why do we need to stop chasing keywords and focus on the real?

SPEAKER_02 5:46

That's a yeah, really good question. Um the whole the whole paradigm of search is changing. And that sort of single, double, or triple or long, what do they call them? Long long tail keyword searches, that's all going the way of the dodo. It's it's now when somebody really wants some information, they really want answers, they're gonna go into their AI. Whether that's Gemini with Google or Claude or ChatGPT or what it what it whatever it might be, people are now turning to these um these AIs to get more comprehensive answers. And so that's you know, so so that it's it's so much more time-saving and it's it's it is it's it's better. Um uh, but it is putting the the whole keyword search thing in the dust. Um and that's you know, if if if from a podcaster perspective, you know, that's something you're really gonna want to keep in mind, is is just how does AI search find you? Um and that's a really, you know, it's sort of a really important thing to keep in mind because the paradigm used to be, you know, how does Google search find me? Well, now it's okay, how does Gemini find me? How does Chat GPT find me?

SPEAKER_01 7:07

You you you mentioned a few of the the popular uh AI platforms. Uh what what personally is your favorite uh so far? Like we said, everything's changing, huh?

SPEAKER_02 7:18

Yeah, yeah. Well, I'm I I regularly use Chat GPT, um, probably because that's where I started. Uh, but I'm more and more using Claude. But I am mostly using Claude on the agentic AI side. So as I mentioned, we're building tools um to help podcasters uh, you know, uh grow their, grow their audience. And part of that is through using agentic AI to do all kinds of market intelligence. And these little agentic AI bots will go out and gather up your uh analytics, for example, and then read all of your transcripts and then come back and say, when you produce content like this, it gets more listens and impressions than content like this. And having read your transcripts, I now have three episode ideas that I think will be more popular than your previous episodes. And you can have an agentic AI go out and say, I found these two posts on LinkedIn and these three posts on Reddit that have to do with your content. So I think you should reply to those. I have drafted a reply for you. Do you want me to post it? And you know, so there's just it's it's very exciting. Uh, but it's something, it's one of those features that Claude has with their agentic AI that I that that we're starting to use.

SPEAKER_01 8:41

For sure. Uh yeah, I um I actually produce a podcast for a uh very well-known dog trainer here in Canada. And um he did an episode last week on Claude. He he was using Chat GPT and um uh he based his whole episode uh on uh how the advantages of using Claude and how it's really helped him uh with his podcast and also his uh dog training um business uh that he does online. So it was uh very interesting that you uh that you mentioned that one.

SPEAKER_02 9:17

Yeah, it's an increasingly popular one.

SPEAKER_01 9:19

Oh yes, yeah, 100%. So converting listeners into clients and customers. Uh as a podcaster, what are a few of the key tips that you could provide to actually converting the listeners?

SPEAKER_02 9:36

Well, I would say it would seem like this was a no-brainer, but um honestly, one of the things that I see is that uh podcasters don't put the actual calls to action across all of their platforms, right? If you want to convert someone from a listener to a client, let's say you're a coach and you have a coaching podcast and you want to convert that person into a coaching client, you need to have a link in your everywhere that your podcast appears across your entire digital footprint that a listener can click on and get to you. And um one of the things that we like to do is, and I again I know this sounds really fundamental, but you'd be surprised if you look like do I have it in my YouTube channel description? Do I have it in my YouTube video description? Do I have it in my, you know, everywhere that you've got your your footprint? And one of the things that that that we like to do is make those um links uh trackable links. So you use a service like uh bitly, bit.ly, yes uh create uh your conversion link. Um, and you you you have one for your podcast platform and one for your YouTube platform and one for your LinkedIn. And if you want to get really granular, do one for every playlist you have, a different one for every playlist you have on YouTube. Yes. And then not only can you then see what platforms are converting better than others, but down to what content is converting better than others. Um, so that's a that's a really smart way of using the data uh to really find out what's converting or not. But generally speaking, overall, what you really want to do is make sure that you're just optimized across all those platforms. So, like we talked about in the intro, if you're on, you know, you've you've got your podcast directory, your YouTube channel, you're using LinkedIn because you're a coach, uh, you've got, and you're doing, say, TikTok, you know, as as your primary social channel. Um, you just want to make sure that you're you have message consistency across all of those platforms and that you're treating each one of those platforms algorithm the way it needs to be treated. YouTube, another example, the same example. YouTube's a search engine. It's the number two search engine owned by the number one search engine. The way that you do your copy, your mark, your, your pro your um descriptions, your everything like that. The way you do that has to be made for a search engine. It has to have more why do I and how can I statements within the copy. You need to treat it the way that algorithm wants to be treated in order to surface you more. So those are some tips that uh uh people can use to really help.

SPEAKER_01 12:37

That's wonderful, John. So your your website is uh podcastmarketing.site S-I-T-E. And uh if they uh if our listeners and viewers go on that site, what are they gonna find? And um is there uh an easy way to uh inquire about uh your services and such?

SPEAKER_02 12:58

Absolutely. So if you go on that site, you're gonna find a variety of different services that we provide, uh, but not all the services that we provide, but you will find uh a bunch of them. Uh and again, they all have to do with podcast marketing, with listener growth, with conversion growth. So yes, podcastmarketing.site is a great place to go. If you reach out to me, um if you go, if you just drop me an email, john at act3agency.com, act the number threeagency.com, drop me an email and I will do a 20-minute in-depth video analysis of your uh podcast uh ecosystem and tell you what you can do to uh optimize it better and and where it's lacking and where you're doing well and what to do from there. So yeah, drop me an email. Be happy to send you that for free.

SPEAKER_01 13:46

That's wonderful, John. Well, I appreciate you have having you on the podcast today. So once again, it's John Taylor and it's podcastsmarketing.site. And the name of his agency is the Act Three, the number three agency. And uh, we really appreciate it. You have a wonderful day, and uh the link through social podcasts will be back right after this.

SPEAKER_00 14:13

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SPEAKER_01 14:59

Welcome back to the Link True Social Podcast. We're joined by another amazing guest today, Dominic DeJoy, and he is from OsricDigital.com. Dominic, welcome to the podcast. Thanks.

SPEAKER_03 15:15

Happy to be here. Thanks for having me on.

SPEAKER_01 15:17

So, Dominic, uh, why don't you uh before we get started, uh just tell us a little bit about yourself and uh your your professional background.

SPEAKER_03 15:27

Yeah, so uh I mean I run Oswick Digital. It's a paid media agency that specializes in kind of B2B, B2B SaaS, anything, but also some complex services as well, anything with a kind of like sales-led motion. Um before that I was in-house at uh Prequin, which is a data provider in the alternative asset space. Uh it's now part of BlackRock. Um, and then before that, I I had a few uh few things in my 20s that were kind of more entrepreneurial, but um I would say my main kind of tech job was in uh was it was was that was at WonderKind. Well, at the time it was called Bounce Exchange, which is kind of in the between Martech and Adcom space. So that's basically my background.

SPEAKER_01 16:09

All right, nice. And uh you can uh uh go to Dominic's website. It's osricdigital.com. That's osricdigital.com. So Dominic, let's uh let's get started. Um maybe you can uh share with our viewers and listeners out there, because we are on YouTube and on all the different podcast platforms. Um how is AI changing search engine marketing and its uh place and demand generation?

SPEAKER_03 16:42

Yeah, so a lot of people are think are talking about this, of course. It's changed it a huge amount at the top of the funnel. So um most B2B websites are seeing significant losses of traffic in the last couple of years, like since 2024, which is really when the you see like the adoption really take off and start replacing some search behavior. And um, in addition, because of AI overviews now, um there was a study that was done recently that almost 60% of searches end with zero clicks. Um, so basically the kind of blog strategy that people were using to get traffic uh has doesn't really work anymore. I mean, it works in the sense that you'll get impressions from citations and things like that, um, but it doesn't really work for getting traffic. Um at the bottom of the funnel, curiously, we've actually seen search, especially paid search, work a little bit better. Um and uh there are two reasons for that. One is that AI overviews are for the most part not triggered on more transactional searches because Google doesn't want to totally cannibalize their their um paid search platform. The second is that that is that they've started baking uh the ads more and more into the cert. So as a result, click-through rates have gone up quite a bit. Um so yeah, I think that's that's that's my broad take, but we can zero in on any of that.

SPEAKER_01 18:04

Sure, sure. Yeah, the the the emergence of AI is is it's just moving at such a rapid pace. It's it's changing not day by day, minute by minute. It's just uh incredible. And in our type of business, um obviously you've had to uh pivot to some of your strategies over the last couple of years. Um what are some of the things that you're you're foreseeing in the near future uh as far as the AI integration into marketing?

SPEAKER_03 18:39

Well, I mean, so there's a a huge amount of demand for GEO, AEO. Um, I think it's hard to really invest too much in building out like a team to execute the tactics that work for that. Um just because it is changing so fast and because also the platforms of choice have changed, changed so fast. What I mean by that, right, is that around a year ago, you probably could have said, you know, it's a waste of time to do optimization for anything besides ChatGPT. Its dominance was almost at the level of Google's, right? And that has completely changed in the past year. Um it's also the case that the LLMs, at least when they when you get to the level of vendor selection, are just extremely credulous. By that I mean they just repeat whatever they read in press releases and listicles and things like that. Um, but I can't imagine um I can't imagine them being this credulous for like the like you know, the the for too long into the future, right? You you would you would at least hope that something like PageRank would get developed, and it would start, you know, um uh evaluating sources more critically.

SPEAKER_01 19:48

Interesting. So the tactical side of B2B paid media, um what works, what doesn't right now as as we speak.

SPEAKER_03 19:59

So page search still works amazingly well. Uh if you I mean in some markets maybe you don't have enough search volume or it it it's overfunded, but for the most part it works amazingly well. Uh provided that um provided that you target the right keywords and you don't give Google a lot of leash to kind of um get creative, basically. At least when you're initially setting up the account in the first three to six months. So you need like you still need to do basically exact match if you there's not enough volume for exact phrase, lots of negative keywords, basically manual bidding. Uh don't turn any automate, like like like decline all of the automated suggestions that Google gives you. Um so you you have to manage it very tightly. Um and also, I mean, you need a good website, decent landing pages. Um that that does quite a bit of the work as well. Um, I guess that the kind of like middle top of the funnel, um, what needs to happen really is you have to replace the discovery mechanism that was pure previous your blog was previously doing. Um so LinkedIn is a big part of that um in B2B. Um the problem with LinkedIn is that you know organic reach can be, I mean, on the company page, it's impossible to get any organic reach anymore. And and and to get organic reach, uh since they changed the algorithm as an individual is increasingly challenging. I mean, you need a strategy um to to to start having LinkedIn actually kind of give you give you give you reach over time. Um I if you're there is a playbook, right? Uh we don't have time to like fully go through it. It's like a six to twelve month playbook where you have to train the algorithm. Um a lot of my clients are kind of too impatient for that. So we do a lot of LinkedIn ads, a lot of LinkedIn thought leader ads, um, and then promotion of kind of organic, organic posts, and then like the the ad the same ads that that LinkedIn that have been corded to LinkedIn strategy since like 2019 or so. So like a mix of those things. Um I won't say that's everything that works. I mean, I think YouTube is still a kind of uh blue ocean for a lot of terms that um would be too competitive to go after on Google.

SPEAKER_01 22:10

So right, right. Yeah, uh you you brought up a really good point. There's there's a lot of uh entrepreneurs, uh small, medium-sized business owners that you know they really don't have the patience. They want to see instant uh instant uh success. And and uh some of these uh campaigns that you have to set up uh with with these new uh ever-changing uh uh sets of rules um take some time. And uh we we have a lot of uh small business owners uh that listen and watch uh the Link Through Social podcast. Um any advice to uh a small a small size company that maybe only has four to six employees? If that, um where where where are they where should they be putting their money as far as trying to get the word out about their their service or their brand or product?

SPEAKER_03 23:11

Well, if you're four to six employees, I mean basically you don't have any real kind of like market power. So you can't be marketing the way you would, the way um the way someone with like dominant market share in a niche would would would market. So like you're not gonna be, you're not gonna market the way Microsoft does in the kind of PC market, or the way Apple does where you're selling against Microsoft, or even the way like Linux does, um where you're kind of selling against Apple and Microsoft, right? You have to think at a more kind of um like what's a defense what's a defensible market space that I can kind of saturate enough that I can get enough leads or exposure to sustain myself. Um a lot of the a lot of these businesses I assume are local, and that's a great advantage because you can kind of create that um create that defensible space by just layering local terms on top of whatever it is you do, and just focus pretty much only on that. Um I think that you know, I mean that if you're in New York City or London, uh, you know, you don't target you know New York keywords, target, you know, whatever bur whatever like borough you're in or uh or neighborhood, because a neighborhood in New York City can have 200,000 people. That's as big as like a small size, you know, small to medium sized city.

SPEAKER_01 24:29

So yes, yeah, no, for sure. Um okay, just before we uh wrap things up, uh Dominic, uh your website is uh osricdigital.com. That's O-S-R-I-C. And I also noticed uh you have a leonard landing page, Dominic DeJoy, uh D-E-J-O-Y.com. And um if anyone wants to uh reach out to you, is there any final words you'd like to say about uh your business?

SPEAKER_03 24:58

Yeah, I mean, I the best is probably just through LinkedIn, that's just under my name. Um my my personal LinkedIn is probably better than my company LinkedIn, or if people yeah, want to want to chat or whatever, then yeah, just set send me a message on LinkedIn or connect with me there.

SPEAKER_01 25:13

Perfect. Well, Dominic Joy, uh appreciate uh your time and thank you for joining us today. And uh we hope to uh speak with you again anytime sometime in the near future. Awesome. Thanks, Paul. Okay, so that's uh Osric Digital, osricdigital.com. And uh you can also reach out to Dominic DeJoy on LinkedIn, as he mentioned. The Link Through Social Podcast will be back right after this. Don't forget to check out linkthroughsocial.com to find out about all of our social media management services, AI solutions, and podcast producing. We also are very involved with festivals, music events, uh different sporting uh events, MMA as a social media partner. So if you want Link Through Social to be your social media partner for your event, all the promoters out there, be sure to contact us through our website, link through social.com. Well, that does it for this edition of the Link Through Social Podcast. Thank you once again. Please keep sharing, liking, and of course subscribe to our YouTube channel, and you can find that all on link through social podcast.com. Until next week, take care, everyone.