Kipp Bodnar (HubSpot’s CMO) and Kieran Flanagan (Zapier’s CMO), lead you down the rabbit hole of marketing trends, growth tactics and innovation. On the way you’ll pick up undiscovered strategies to give you that slight edge for success. These are not your typical twitter thread regurgitated marketing tactics that everyone is doing. These are new methods, with unfiltered examination of successful fresh ideas.
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Experience for things where you want a visual result in YouTube and TikTok are a better experience when you want short videos. And so for the queries and questions that their intent is fulfilled better with that, then they'll move over there. But for other stuff, Google search is the best user experience. And for those, I don't see that they would be disrupted. The only reason why that would be disrupted is somebody had built a better search engine, which is possible but very hard. Yeah. So you're saying right now that to you, the search landscape is more continued search chat, GPT, and other LLMs. But so far, those are all additive that, like, humans are just searching and consuming more, and there's more transactions. And you're still seeing growth in the overall Google search traffic volume for, like, commercial keywords and and all of those things. Is that is that accurate? Yes. And what I would say is that in order for that to be the case, the pie needs to be bigger. Yes. And usually when these new services start growing, there is a share of the pie that goes somewhere else, but the pie is growing at a roughly similar rate. So you don't see total Google searches going down. It's that there's this shift slow, and then the pie is just getting bigger and bigger because more and more people are using search and and the Internet and things like that. Yeah. It's interesting. And maybe I'm just trying to push on this to try to win because I've done so many LinkedIn posts about the death of Google search. And maybe it's because I'm in a tech bubble. I was I'm nervous about that where, like, just ad hoc, so many people I know are using perplexity versus, like, a Google. And even my own Google usage has gone way down in favor of AI chat assistance. The thing that I mostly find it valuable for is it basically is like an assistant to do the search, go through all the blue links, and then formulate the answer after it has done the research for the blue links. So, like, a layer on top of the search engine. And that's basically what perplexity is. Right? It's like an AI agent that sits on top of the search engine, goes through the blue links for you, and then synthesizes the answer.
Earn links and all that good stuff go into the core website to lift that up versus kind of distributing it across a bunch of different sites. I once had a college professor that said, Hey. I want you to do a review of every paper that you send me. And one of those reviews is I want you to look for every time you use the word vary or every time you use the word just. He's like, those are useless words. Cross them out and delete them. And I I was like, oh, that's really good advice. You're writing does get a lot better if you do that. If somebody hands you a proposal to do a microsite, just cross it off. Just delete it. Just be like, no. We're we're just not gonna do it. It's just not it's not gonna be a thing. Gonna go to the important work. Exactly. We're gonna go do real marketing, not microsite. Right. Do the actual things that matter. Right. We have to do a show where you just write Jingles for, like, 5 really popular brands. And that should be the show. Oh, I should do that. Yes. You and Claude should rate jingles for, like, 5 popular brands. Or, like, you can do three do 3, and then we'll do them, but we we should have a marketing jingle show, which would be awesome. We need to do that. Okay. Now that we've hit the controversial topic of micro sites, let's go into websites those four areas that you outlined, Kieran, like, let's walk there. Alright. Traffic will need Jen. I think we can probably gloss over a little bit on the search side of things because we've done a bunch of search. We did a video that really goes through the future of search and AI agents and how they're self contained platforms and probably will not send you as much traffic. We have Ethan Smith coming on the show to talk a lot about this, which that episode will be out in a couple of weeks. So we all agree. Right? There is real potential for search to be disrupted. So you might build your website in a way where you're not having to think about traditional search engines as much. That seems like a point that most of us agree on. Yeah. I think that's not very controversial at all, actually. Yeah. That's not controversial. Alright. Let's get into one that I think is, like, good to ref on. So the other reason you have a website is to create content marketing. Right? You wanna drive inbound marketing. You wanna do white papers, case studies, blog posts, don't know. When I was really decided to go into marketing and I ended up in B2B, I was always depressed when people talk
Turn that on in HubSpot. I'm just gonna do it because I can't find anybody. I can't find anybody. Yes. I know, Kieran, you've seen the same thing at Zapier because we've talked about it. But, like, it is very hard to get people to wanna do the work and who are focused on, like, grinding it out. And the best leaders are not strategist, by the way. Like, the best leaders are deep s experts in the craft Thinking about craft. Deep in the craft. Like, right before we started recording, Kiera, you're sitting here telling us about all the custom GPTs you're building because, like, you're deep in the craft. You're not, like, just reading books and thinking about stuff. That's who you wanna hire. Yes. You wanna hire a marketer that's doing custom GPTs at night. You only wanna hire hackers for a startup, especially. I don't care what they hack, whether it's marketing, sales, or or product. But what happened was tech since maybe, I don't know, 2018, something like that, tech went mainstream. Yeah. It did. When you guys joined HubSpot, it was still a weird thing to do, wasn't it? You were still your parents probably thought you were weird. My parents' side was making the worst decision in my entire life. Whole idea. Yeah. Now, like, it's what you do after school. Maybe I'll apply to y Combinator. Maybe I'll go work at Zapier. Maybe I'll go work at. Like, it's utterly mainstream, and it's good, but we needed to absorb so many humans that we lost the hackers. Right? We went from, like I call them pirates and romantics, but I think your end's right there hackers. And it used to be tech companies were, like, 50%, 80% hackers. Now they might be 5%. Right? The problem with most companies is what happens is you have really great ICs. You have these really great people who can do work, and then you're, like, oh, that person's great. I'll build a team around them. And then you lose that person, and you get a bunch of okay people, and then that person's not a great manager in a way. And it's that kind of continuous thing that the company does. But I'm actually okay if someone says, okay. Well, I I really wanna move into strategy. If you've earned your stripes, what I've found recently is people wanna move in this strategy and they haven't earned their stripes. Yes. What are you gonna go do? Like, go build a pretty subpar strategy because you never did the work in the first place. Like, the reason to get into these roles is to do the work. That's the most enjoyable part. I think people wanna be a manager before they get to be a manager, and then all they're really doing is moving boxes around and playing with budget. Like, I see that time and again that we've lost the
Range kinda going down. The guy's an SEO expert, and he's like, my website visitors just going down down down. This is everyone's life right now that has a bunch of search traffic. It's like when you're haunted by something, everything you see is just a reminder of how bad that thing is. And that's what it feels like if you're an SEO these days. Yeah. I guess I'm trying to think back to my days when I used to be in SEO. Maybe it the equivalent of this was, like, there was this, pretty big update called I think it was Penguin. Oh, the Penguin. I'm pretty sure it's backlinks. I think I lost a couple of sites about this Google payment update and when it was. You lost, like, 3 sites, you told me. I think I lost a bunch of sites. Sometimes I remember Kieran's life better than Kieran remembers Kieran's life. Yeah. So April 2012, fight website spam by penalizing those relying on manipulative link building tactics. Basically, they could have just said those relying on sketchy link building tactics, e g Kieran Flanagan. So I remember, like, a couple of major updates in that first penguin 1 in 2 12 felt a little bit like this one. I do think if you were hit by that update, you kinda, like, deserved it. Like, I felt like I deserved it. I was, like, sitting there going, I probably deserved it. It was a learning lesson for me. There was one site that was, like, a really good site that I had. Maybe got carried away with doing some things that were working really well, and that got hit. I felt bad about that. But for the most part, all my sites that got hit should have been hit. You know, you took the pain. You were like, I have to just, you know, improve the ways that I do marketing and improve the way that I do search. This update is a little different in that. I think a lot of the people who have been hit actually are trying to do the right things and create really good quality content. And they have been really kind of annihilated in this update. So there have been 2 updates. We're gonna talk about those. I'm gonna share just the saddest Reddit page on the Internet as part of this discussion, and then we're gonna talk about how you should think about evolving, what you should think of doing going forward. Alright. So, Kieran, there were 2 Google algorithm updates. The first one was in February where you were just talking about the Penguin update in 2012.
Basically, play on an episode Kieran and I did about a year ago. We did a marketing channel power ranking. We did a power ranking of the channels marketers needed to use in the moment, and now we're doing AI tools that marketers need to use in the moment. And I wanted to start, Matt, with honorable mentions. Anything that we're like, oh, it maybe is not in the power ranking now, but 6 months from now, 12 months from now, maybe it could be. And I'll give you mine first for you to react to, which is have you seen I think it's hume, h u m e. Yes. What's your take on hume? Yeah. So hume is really interesting because actually listens to, like, the inflections in your voice. It listens to try to figure out if you're angry or happy or sad or depressed, And it notices, like, micro inflections in your voice to add additional context to the discussion you're having with it, which I think is gonna be really powerful down the line, but it is still very, very early. I actually played around with Hume a little bit on one of my videos, and I just talk to it normal, like the voice I'm talking to right now, and it's a I detect anger in your voice. What's wrong today, Matt? And I'm like, where did that come from? So it's got a little ways to go, but I think it's really, really interesting. Yeah. And I think why it makes my honorable mention list for marketers is because the the Hume demo that we just showed a few minutes of, and Darren will link up in the show notes. What's interesting about it is the demo is essentially like a real time concierge on a website, which you could imagine if you could talk to a website, it can detect your emotion, get the details of what you're trying to get through, not just from the specific words you're using, but from everything about your voice. That being a very powerful way to guide a website, make sure you're finding the answers you need as quickly as possible, which is exactly what a marketer is trying to do. It's not to a place where you can do that today,
