PR in the Age of AI

Tom Nixon (00:02.012)
S2E1718E18BNBPC. I’m trying to do the whole thing in acronyms, Curtis. I was going to do the entire episode in acronyms because we’re talking about AI and LLMs and PR and GEO, SEO, but I felt just short. That’s ten seconds in.

Curtis Hays (00:22.683)
Yeah, you lost me pretty quickly there, so I’m not following.

Tom Nixon (00:25.18)
Okay, good. Well, I lost half the audience too, but half of eight is only four. So we only lost four people. Welcome back everyone to Bullhorns and Bulls Eyes. We have a return guest today and she’s brought with her somebody who is new to the podcast and let’s just get them on right now. We’ll welcome them right away from Franco, an agency here in the Detroit area. We’ve got CMO Nikki Little and then we’ve got Lexi Trump, director of digital and AI.

Welcome to the podcast to you both.

Nikki Little (00:56.521)
Hi friends.

Tom Nixon (00:58.554)
Welcome, I should say welcome back to Nicky.

Nikki Little (01:00.659)
Yes, good to be back. Always happy to talk to both of you.

Tom Nixon (01:04.442)
Yes.

Curtis Hays (01:05.033)
talk about the peso model quite frequently now, so I got a really good education from Nikki the last time she was on and I’m like, Tom, isn’t that the peso model we talked about? So.

Nikki Little (01:08.609)
yes.

Lexi Trimpe (01:11.107)
fans.

Nikki Little (01:15.089)
I love that. Also an acronym.

Tom Nixon (01:15.288)
Also an acronym I’ll point out. Yup. Yup. So PESO, Nicky is certified to PESO and I think the agency is also certified.

Curtis Hays (01:18.687)
Yeah.

Nikki Little (01:24.341)
Yes, we have about 80 % of our team members that went through the PESO model certification and we also have a student program where we provide scholarships to students to go through the program as well. So we’ve certified, I think, close to 120 students in Michigan.

Curtis Hays (01:42.227)
And they’re out of Chicago, right? I’m subscribed to her newsletter. Yeah. Yeah.

Nikki Little (01:44.953)
Yes, Jenny Dietrich and her team are based in Chicago.

Curtis Hays (01:48.777)
Yep, that’s awesome.

Tom Nixon (01:51.27)
Cool. Well, that is not one of the acronyms that we’re going to be speaking about today. Well, maybe we will Curtis, but this was yeah. I know. Yeah. Curtis. Like he said, he’s like the newest. We got to get you certified Curtis, but this is sort of a piggyback off of an earlier episode, but also something that you observed a while back, which is why you wanted to have Nicky on. But it was your observation that your Bailey wek SEO or your former Bailey wick is now sort of because of the evolution there. It’s

Nikki Little (01:56.029)
we will. You know I’m going to talk about it.

Tom Nixon (02:20.612)
sort of starting to influence my former Baileywick and PR. but what was the observation and what are you seeing in search that sort of makes public relations more and more relevant, which is why we’re going to talk about that.

Curtis Hays (02:32.178)
Yeah, so as we kind of think about what we’ve talked about this season, we kicked off this season talking about zero click searches and that 65 % of searches within Google don’t lead on click. And that’s really because of AI answers. So we’re now getting answers to search results right within the search bar. But now we have people who are

I shouldn’t say now because it’s been a trend that’s been happening for the last couple of years, but we have people moving away from the traditional search engine, your Googles, your YAHUs, your DuckDuckGoes, not entirely, but for a lot of their queries, they’re moving to the LLMs. So your ChatGPTs, your Perplexities, your Grocks. Now Facebook has got Llama coming out. There’s a number of LLMs out there. And so we’re moving our queries over to the LLMs. And in my observation,

what I’m seeing within the LLMs, returned result on a question that you might have is not necessarily going through crawling a website and returning you the results purely based off of content that might be on a website, but it’s producing results to a user based on sort of its whole ecosystem of knowledge that it may have. So the LLMs have a sort of base set of knowledge, but now they’re being

sort of trained to crawl centrally. They have crawlers now. They don’t index. So we talked about this before. They don’t index in the same way that search engines index. They do consume that and learn off of content that exists. And they’re taking that content in off of the entire internet, including books and things that aren’t necessarily published directly to the internet. They have libraries of stuff.

journals and different things that might not necessarily be digital. And a returned result, a reference is going to take into consideration then all these other properties and not just necessarily your website. So I’m like, Tom, I’m seeing something interesting here. And it’s a play that our clients need to pay attention to because they’ve got to start thinking of other properties other than just their website. And so I’m like,

Curtis Hays (04:50.77)
We got to be thinking about that peso model again. are those? What are those words stand for?

Nikki Little (04:53.877)
Got it. Paid, earned, shared and owned. Uh huh.

Tom Nixon (04:55.513)
Yeah, well, Nikki plot twist, right? It’s now earned media is potentially back in the limelight and more important than ever.

Nikki Little (05:04.231)
Yes, yes. And I have to tell you from a new business perspective, the queries or the inquiries that are coming into us this year are heavily focused on earned media, brand awareness, reputation management, media relations, where two-ish years ago, there was more of a focus on digital and organic social. So it’s been interesting to see that. And it so much aligns with this, again, of importance of what you’re seeing surface through LLMs.

PR never should have stopped being important, but it’s increasingly important now.

Tom Nixon (05:38.01)
Yep. It, it, it’s w what’s interesting about it is that it’s, you need to optimize the entire internet. Lexi. know you have a question for Curtis, right? Which is why is he wearing that ridiculous hat? We’ll come back to that. But my question to you is, like you’re optimizing everything, right? Not just your own website. You need to optimize to your point, the ecosystem that the crawlers or the, the LLMs are getting smart on, right? Lexi.

Lexi Trimpe (05:48.312)
Yeah.

Lexi Trimpe (06:05.624)
Yeah, and again, there’s so many different, I mean, jumping off points we could talk about for this. I guess largely all of the same best practices and things that we have been preaching for years and years, right, are still continue to be true, right? It’s just even more so for different reasons, right? When we think about crawlers. So even in terms of, you know, credibility, building credibility, we all used to talk about backlinks and things back in the day, and then those lost all their value. Again, now it’s

out again, press releases, they’re now valuable again, putting things through the wire are valuable again because we’re adding content to the ecosystem. But your website doesn’t stop being important, right? Especially as we continue to talk about not only discoverability, but now when we talk about those zero click searches, the people that do come to your site now are gonna be way more likely to convert, right? They’re gonna be way more educated and they’re gonna be ready to do whatever that mid funnel activity is, maybe even closing.

depending on what your business is. So ensuring A, that we’re looking at the right things, but that we’re still optimizing the content on our site, but just optimizing it to be A, where users are gonna find it, and then B, if they are coming to the site, it should be ready for them.

Tom Nixon (07:20.496)
That’s a great point. Curtis. You’ve observed that in some of the data that we’ve looked at for clients is that there might be fewer through clicks to the website, but those who are to your point Lexi, that’s more purposeful. They’re not just like stopping in to get an answer, right? Because they’re getting the L L arms are giving them the answer when they get to your site. They’ve been there or they’re done. So because it’s very purposeful. Curtis. Haven’t we seen that?

Curtis Hays (07:42.931)
Yeah, we have clients here to getting 10, 11, 12 % conversion rates. Not necessarily because we’re doing a better job of advertising or those types of things to funnel the traffic. It’s just because the people who are actually clicking actually do have intent that they’re further down in that funnel. They can do their education in other places, which is why we’ve advocated for social media marketing and LinkedIn and thought leadership and all these other things, because they’re consuming that content off page. then

in all likelihood when they’re getting closer to purchase, they’re going to go into a brand search or something like that. They’re going to look up one of your SMEs by name, come to your about page, read that person’s bio and then say, yeah, I actually do want to connect with them and contact in some way. So the behavior is changing a little bit from a sense of, well, really the behaviors don’t change. It’s where they’re doing those behaviors, I think within the internet is what we’re seeing change.

Lexi Trimpe (08:35.662)
Exactly. And again, some of that top of funnel content, oh, I’m so sorry. Now, as I say, that top of funnel content, like we said, though, doesn’t stop being important. And I just want to emphasize that, again, the content that you’ve built on your website through all these years, all that SEO rich content, it’s not, again, null and void now. It’s just kind of being used for a different purpose, right? So I think still looking at where your traffic is coming from.

Nikki Little (08:35.669)
Exactly.

Tom Nixon (08:35.888)
Yeah.

Continue, no, go ahead, Lexi.

Lexi Trimpe (09:02.306)
there’s likely you’re going to start to see some more traffic from things like GPT and AI answers and things. think keeping an eye on that and seeing what traffic is still coming through those AI searches too is important as you are still working for that top of funnel audience.

Tom Nixon (09:17.358)
sure. And Curtis follow up on the hat. What’s going on with that?

Curtis Hays (09:21.556)
Well, we’re branding. This is branding. So the name of the podcast, as we all know, is Bullhorns and Bullseyes. And we felt like we needed to dial in the brand a bit. So we threw on a cowboy hat and episode four, I think it was, and it’s stuck ever since.

Tom Nixon (09:23.411)
that’s right.

Lexi Trimpe (09:25.4)
Get up.

Nikki Little (09:43.189)
was gonna say when we first started, you didn’t have the hat on and I was like, this feels wrong. I need you to put the hat on.

Tom Nixon (09:43.216)
Have a look back.

Curtis Hays (09:48.988)
Yeah. There you go. Yup.

Tom Nixon (09:51.408)
Yeah. So, Dickie, are you, we might as well explain real quickly what the peso model is for those who aren’t familiar and haven’t, heard us talk about it in the past, but they’re just joining us and then talk about like where earned sits in this and what, how AI is, you know, just kind of throwing everything all out of kilter again.

Nikki Little (10:00.263)
Sure.

Nikki Little (10:04.778)
Yes.

Nikki Little (10:08.755)
Yes. So about 10 years ago, Ginny Dietrich and her team at SpinSucks created the PESO model, which stands for Paid, Earned, Shared, and Owned. And what it comes down to is all four of those media types need to be working in harmony for

an integrated program to be successful. And in the past, I year or so, she’s updated the model to where now kind of everything ladders up to EEAT. So experience, expertise, authority, trust. I think I got those acronyms right, which is what we know Google has been kind of hanging its hat on for a while, right? So again, it’s the importance of nothing in your marketing and communications program should be siloed. Everything should be working together.

Ideally, you are investing in all four types of media and maybe you can’t put the same amount of budget toward all four types and maybe there are parts of the year and parts of your program depending on your company, depending on seasonality, depending on goals where you invest more budget into certain parts of the the pay soul model. But again, it’s everything’s aligned. Everything is working in harmony. So.

that earned media part of it, right? So PR, like you said, that’s always, we feel has always been a very fundamental part of the program. But now we’re in an era where we need to redefine PR in the age of AI. So Lexi mentioned it already. What’s interesting is that this is not really anything different than what PR always has fundamentally been. PR is rooted in gaining visibility and credibility for your brand.

by building trust and authority, it’s just the manner in which we are going about doing it is what’s changing. So we talked about the acronyms, right? So there’s GEO, there’s AIO, there’s what I want to talk about today is AEO, so answer engine optimization. And I think it’s becoming one of the most important strategies for brands that are looking to grow visibility in the era of gen AI.

Nikki Little (12:04.425)
What does it mean? It’s essentially structuring content in a way that AI tools view that content as a trusted source and includes the content in prompt responses. And we talked a little bit about it already too. SEO values backlinks, keywords, meta tags, still super important, right? No matter what the pundits say, SEO isn’t dead. How many times have we heard PR is dead? Media relations is dead. That drives me crazy when we hear that. So, hats are dead, right? It’s all dead, but.

Tom Nixon (12:30.098)
boy, hats are dead. Yep.

Nikki Little (12:34.325)
No, it’s not dead, but it’s just, again, of structuring your content. And PR is part of this in a way that Gen.ai rewards the content that has context and authority. So knowing all of this, PR is a really powerful tool in your toolbox to support an AEO strategy. Did you all know that there are more than 100 confirmed partnerships between AI companies and news organizations, and OpenAI has about 40 of those?

That was something I learned. knew that news organizations had partnerships, but as I was preparing for this and doing some research, I thought that was really interesting. understanding that, how should you be adjusting your PR strategy? Well, one, you should be pitching outlets or contributing content to outlets that AI models trust and cite.

pitching podcasts that include transcripts. That’s really important, right? Because if you get an executive on a podcast and they put it out through video, right? Or they put it on Spotify, great. But if there’s a rich transcript that goes along with it, that is gonna be great for the LLMs. We all know that it has news organizations have shrunk. A lot of them take press releases.

take a good portion of those press releases, publish them as articles, sometimes copy paste, right? And that’s actually a good thing for LLMs and increasing visibility of content. So as PR and communications professionals, we should be structuring our press releases to make sure that they are structured content, scannable, including bullets and summaries to increase pickup in LLMs. And then, I think you said it, Curtis, it’s like, it’s that ecosystem, right? So,

I think it can be daunting for somebody, especially a small team or somebody with not a lot of resources to be like, okay, so you’re going back to telling me that we need to be everywhere, right? Like we’ve got to be out in all these channels doing all these things. Yes and no, right? But again, prioritizing those outlets that are highly credible, highly trusted, but it comes back to earned media is part of discoverability, not just awareness. And we really need to help build credibility and reach.

Nikki Little (14:47.157)
through those outlets and we can’t just rely on traffic to our sites anymore.

Tom Nixon (14:51.556)
Yeah, well said it. I mean, this is obviously so important to your agency. I know that Franco has an AI task force, right? Is that something you had up Lexi? What is it?

Nikki Little (14:58.387)
Yes.

Lexi Trimpe (14:59.244)
Yeah, yep, sure is.

Nikki Little (15:01.205)
It sure is. I’ll let Lexi talk about this because this is her baby, but this kind of came about, we have to give major props and shout out to the Trust Insights team, Christopher Penn and Katie Robert, because they put together this AI training and certification. I learned about it last year and I was like, we have to invest in this. This is super important. We had already been doing our own research and learning a lot about LLMs and

How should our team be using chat GPT? What are the guidelines? How do we want to advise them on what to do, what not to do? And then when I found this certification, said, let’s go all in. Let’s take it a step further. We put Lexi through it. And then Lex, I’ll let you talk about the results.

Lexi Trimpe (15:45.58)
Yeah, so I think with that AI training, it’s really taken us from just stepping away from AI, acronym, analyzing it really of what it means for us, not just within our operations, but also how it’s impacting things, right? So outside of just looking at it from a much more tactical standpoint of first addressing, what do we want to solve for? And then how can we apply AI?

We’re also looking at similar challenges and how is AI then changing the ecosystem. So for things like AIO and GEO, not necessarily just going right into trying to optimize for, right? It’s first taking a step back and really saying, okay, what does this actually mean? Which is again, why I think I emphasize so heavily on that. This does not mean throw out all your website content. This doesn’t mean everything you’ve done doesn’t matter anymore.

Really getting to the heart of what does it mean and how can we continue to evolve with this content? Because again, this largely isn’t anything new. These are the same strategies that we’ve been applying for search engine optimization, optimization for things like our home devices. Again, just anywhere audiences are looking for content, you want to make sure crawlers can find it. And a crawler is a crawler regardless of what platform it’s working with.

Nikki Little (17:06.131)
And we did this with our agent. sorry. One last point on there. We did this with our team and I would advise any other teams to do this, but you have to start with the need. So don’t start with the, we’re just, we’re going to go all in on chat GPT, right? Because we, I’ve used chat GPT and that’s the one I’m most familiar with. Like we’re going to go all in on that. We started with the need and identifying what are the needs across our agency that we think AI can help us be more effective, efficient.

Tom Nixon (17:06.3)
Curtis what I love about- god.

Nikki Little (17:33.077)
productive, creative, whatever it might be. We know the things that AI is never going to be able to do, which is why we can continue to be in business, right? Because it can’t replicate that strategic thinking, the instinct, the relationship building, right? But there are things it can do to help us be more efficient and effective in our job. So we identified those, and what we call user stories, Lexi, right? That is part of the AI training and kind of

built out what are all the different needs. And then we spent time researching, testing out different LLMs before we came to the conclusion of which tool we were going to use agency-wide.

Tom Nixon (18:11.376)
Yeah, it’s.

Lexi Trimpe (18:11.47)
And continue to, right? Because it continues to change. I would also say that time after time again, too. There is no one tool that will continue to evolve. But yeah, I that was obviously a major component and continues to be a major component of our work.

Tom Nixon (18:16.55)
Mm.

Curtis Hays (18:27.252)
Yeah, we’re recording this episode today and when it goes live in two weeks, a lot will have changed in the world of LLMs. So you have to be ready for that.

Nikki Little (18:34.803)
Yeah, right?

Tom Nixon (18:35.676)
Yeah, shoot. We might want to put a pin in the. Yeah, we’re going to we better publish tomorrow. We’re going to be out of date already. Kurt. Yeah, there will be a new acronym. I’ll can edit the show notes at least. Curtis, my observation about your observation is that it’s interesting you’re wearing a black hat because over the years, there’s been all of these sort of black hat like tricks to hack the system to get in the top 10 of the Google search results.

Lexi Trimpe (18:36.952)
Every day it does. It’ll be another new acronym at least.

Nikki Little (18:42.313)
Right.

Lexi Trimpe (18:49.486)
You

Tom Nixon (19:03.642)
pages and you know, everything from keyword stuffing to I remember there was a, there was a client who discovered that their SEO company was creating pages of, of blue text on a blue page with all the keyword stuffed in it so that the person couldn’t see it, but the search engines could, backlinks we mentioned, not that that was the cool thing about the future, I think, which the future is now is I don’t think you’re going to be able to hack the system other than doing what we’re describing, which is the good old

Nikki Little (19:32.617)
Great.

Tom Nixon (19:33.382)
fashion practice of being visible and being in the places where people need content as do the AI scannables, right?

Curtis Hays (19:41.597)
Yeah, I mean, that’s where we’ve said, know, content, when you’re developing content, stop thinking about developing it for the search engine and keywords and whatever, but develop it for your target audience. Make it helpful, make it useful, make it the best you possibly can. When you look at creating it, it’s got to be great. You got to put that effort into it. But what I’m learning is, you know, the effort you put into creating it, you’ve got to put twice as much effort into actually syndicating it.

Lexi Trimpe (19:49.208)
Hmm.

Curtis Hays (20:11.368)
Right? So that’s where this PESO model comes into play that’s just to like create the content, throw it up on your website and wait for it to get found. Seems like doing half a job. You you got to do the other part of it to actually, you know, syndicate that content and you pay your investment. If you have a small budget, the money goes to wherever your audience is. I mean, that’s where you determine how to go about spending that budget from a marketing mix perspective. Right?

Nikki Little (20:14.41)
Yeah.

Curtis Hays (20:39.71)
Where’s our audience and how can we carve up that budget to make sure it gets in front of those eyeballs?

Lexi Trimpe (20:45.176)
And again, that good quality content, I’m sorry, but that good quality content, and I’ll emphasize this one more time because not only do we see it not, that keyword stuffing and everything not really working as much anymore. I think what we’re really seeing is that it never really worked per se. A lot of this traffic that we are seeing across sites for a very long time was increasingly garbage. So bounce rates and things going up and up.

Tom Nixon (20:45.424)
So.

Lexi Trimpe (21:13.12)
Again, now that we’re starting to see that, ultimately weeded out a little bit more and we start to see more of these high quality audiences come through. I think we’re getting a much more clear indication of what our audiences actually want from our content. And again, depending on what you have set up, tools like SEMrush will show you roughly, right, how some of your content is showing up in some of these AI engines. So you can still do some of that same sort of work that you were doing before.

and still be trying to see what content is actually pulling in eyeballs. But really what we’re seeing now is that high quality content is just way more important than ever.

Tom Nixon (21:48.932)
Yeah, Nikki. I think I’ve heard this correctly that every time somebody in our business in a blog mentions the field of dreams, if they build it, they will come myth. An angel gets their wings. So I’m going to give an angel his or her wings because what Curtis is saying was never really the case. But I think people did it. Think of it that way. Like I got great content on my website. Like people will find it right. That’s wasn’t true. Then it’s not going to be true now. And certainly the

The bots are not the call them the bots, the AI scanners, whatever they are, are not going to go looking for your company website for the most authoritative content on the internet.

Nikki Little (22:21.663)
Yeah.

Curtis Hays (22:27.348)
Or before you answer that, Nicky, I would also say too is by doing your model, call it your model, but the peso type model is you’re not dependent on an algorithm. So the algorithm could change tomorrow and there goes 90 % of your traffic. And to build a brand and to build an ecosystem where you’re diversified seems like a smart business decision.

Nikki Little (22:40.819)
Yes. Yes.

Right.

Nikki Little (22:52.885)
Absolutely, and I feel like we’ve been talking about this forever. Like Tom, we talked about this when you and I were in the advent of social media and talking about social media can’t be your home base, right? Like your home base still needs to be your website, right? Like don’t forego your website just because you’re gonna build this huge brand on Facebook because who knows how things might change. Look at it now, right? Like look in the past few years how these platforms and the algorithms on social media channels have deprioritized

linking out and clicking on links that send you to another platform. They want to keep you on platform, right? So if you let your website go to trash or you stopped doing earned media or stopped doing owned media, you have a lot of catch up to play now because if you were relying solely on getting

organic traffic from social channels to your site, you still can, right? Like we see this with our clients. Yes, you can still absolutely drive organic traffic through channels, but the algorithms have changed too. They don’t like that anymore. They don’t like you sending people off platforms. yes, like again, it’s so funny that we’re talking about this because it’s like, it all kind of goes back to where it all started of what we’ve been saying and talking about for years now.

Don’t put all your eggs into one basket. Don’t put all your budget into one marketing channel. You have to diversify it. And we’re seeing that being increasingly important in this era of AI now. So while PR is super important for that answer engine optimization and gen AI, so is owned content. AI models like headers, sub headers, question-based formats, bulleted summary. So structure your own content in this way to increase your chances of being included in LLM content.

Lexi Trimpe (24:27.47)
They also love structured social media content. Again, I hear this a lot of like, well, why am I bothered during social media if I’m not driving anything to my audience? That top of funnel awareness, things like TikTok videos, Reels, YouTube videos, all of those things that have transcripts in them that are then searchable are really important for that top of funnel discovery. And it’s gonna bring people at least to one of your platforms. It’s a shared platform that hopefully will bring them to an old platform, but that’s discovery.

Tom Nixon (24:54.524)
Well, the old mentality of I’m going to drive traffic to my website as a first action is so transactional and so outdated, right? It’s like not everything needs to be measured. Did I get somebody onto my website? Did they convert? Did they take my lead magnet? Because I tricked them into giving them my email address. It’s like way too transactional. And what you and I have been talking so much about Curtis is like observing the behaviors that happen way outside of the bottom of that funnel.

Lexi Trimpe (25:01.806)
I’m going to do it, so.

Tom Nixon (25:20.954)
Right? Even not even in the middle of fun, but to Lexi’s point, what’s happening out there in the world to just get people aware of us. Let’s not measure that campaign by how many conversions we got because it’s a different objective and a different action in different metrics.

Curtis Hays (25:34.165)
Yep, we just did this with a client where they’re selling fishing gear. We said all of your content is just selling your gear. It’s not doing anything else. Let’s do something that engages with your audience. Let’s do something fun and a 2000 % increase in engagement across users and then like a 300 % increase in likes to the page. it was like everything changed. Now our conversions didn’t change in that two week time period.

Nikki Little (25:50.719)
Love it.

Curtis Hays (26:00.597)
Because we’re building the top of the funnel, and we’re going to start remarketing to people at the second level who engaged here and start showing them the value of your equipment and why it’s different and why it’s better and those types of things. you know, all of that systematically is part of that marketing framework that we’ve talked about. And, you know, you don’t, like we said, put all your eggs into one basket, you diversify and tell these stories across the different parts, again, because the LLMs are, they’re looking at everything.

Nikki Little (26:30.483)
Right. And the way people find and evaluate information is changing. you know, we’ve been talking about don’t structure everything to get clicks to your website. Well, we already know people are using LLMs, TikTok.

as a search platform, what they used to go to Google and type in, they now go to those platforms and do their searches. So they might get information, they will get information without ever having to come to your website. So if you’re the type of brand that would hopefully be surfaced in their answers and all you’re doing is optimizing your content for search or investing in investing your dollars and getting people to click to your website, you’re losing out on that.

do you guys know that perplexity launched its own AI browser and open AI is getting ready to do that too soon too. Yeah.

Right. So I mean, think about that, right? If people start using open AI as a browser, what’s that mean for marketing efforts? So we mentioned this already, relying solely on tactics to drive traffic to your website, not enough. Digital advertising could face a major disruption and kind of going back to what we were talking about at beginning, adjusting your PR and comms strategy to align with those answer engine optimization best practices. It’s critical and investing in an integrated program. It’s non-negotiable.

Tom Nixon (27:52.656)
Yeah.

Curtis Hays (27:53.139)
Let’s talk about personalization because the key with this and I think this browser conversation and all this is that so you’re going to log into this browser just like you log into Google and Google knows a lot of information about you. I’ve been using chat GPT for the last two years. It has all this information about me. I could ask it who’s Curtis Hayes and it’s going to say, well, you’re that guy that wears a cowboy hat on the bull horns and bulls eyes podcast and you own an agency called kaleidoscope and here’s what you do and why you do it and all these other things, right? So it knows me.

Tom Nixon (28:13.404)
Abbi

Curtis Hays (28:22.248)
So when I give it a question, it’s answered as tailored specific to me. Like that’s where we’re moving towards. So this point of like knowing your audience, who it is you’re creating content for and knowing them so well that an LLM is going to work to try to match your content to the people that it knows. It’s not so much, hey, I’m gonna import a list or I’m gonna set up targeting inside of an ad platform.

Like the LLMs can actually match that for you. And I’ve seen this happen actually with case study content, where I’m looking for a software solution to solve a problem for a client. And I have a very complex question to Chai GPT that says, have a client in this industry with this problem, with this technology. Give me three options of who can help solve this problem. And it doesn’t link to feature pages. It’s not linking to a home page of a website. It’s linking to a case study that somebody wrote.

Tom Nixon (29:06.46)
it’s

Nikki Little (29:19.957)
Yeah.

Curtis Hays (29:21.332)
about a similar problem in a similar industry with a solution that I’m looking for.

Tom Nixon (29:28.506)
Wow. Yes.

Lexi Trimpe (29:28.852)
And I think it’s so important that technical and we’ll probably talk a little bit and probably hopping into this a little bit, but the technical considerations that are built around that. Just ensuring your content can easily be digested and categorized by regardless of whatever type of crawler, whether it’s SEO or AIO or whatever it might be is so important now.

And again, we’ve long talked about, you know, schema and structured data and marking up your site and everything, but that’s the exact reason why, right? Is so these search engines can easily find that content that’s tailored for that specific audience because it knows it from its site context. Find the answer to the question, because it’s really easy to find on this page, even if there is a bunch of other content there, right? That also, you know, makes that user journey really rich. So again, finding ways to make it easy for crawlers. We’ve said it earlier, you can’t just hope anymore.

More than ever, you can’t just hope you have to make it easy.

Tom Nixon (30:26.734)
it. Nikki. So PR is not dead. If you build it, they will come as a fallacy. Can I add a third one? I think maybe content is king again. Maybe

Lexi Trimpe (30:31.68)
of

Nikki Little (30:33.213)
Yes.

I think so, but right, but like helpful content that is put out on the channels that are viewed as credible, trusted, not crap content. Like I really hope anybody in a marketing role recognizes that just crap trash content, which also includes copying and pasting things verbatim from LLMs because that’s not the best content. It’s an excellent starting point. We use it constantly for drafts for…

Hey, I’ve got this paragraph and I just, you I don’t like the way it sounds. Help me write it more creativity, create creatively. I use it as a first draft or an outline all the time, but I’m always going back in and putting my voice or client’s voice and, like that kind of brand personalization in there, because if you just copy and paste it’s crap content. I really like to laugh when I see some of our competitors writing content and it’s like in today’s digital focused era, I was like chat GPT, you just copied and pasted that from chat GPT.

Tom Nixon (31:30.2)
I I use that I I don’t LinkedIn. said chat. GPT has a tell and if it says today’s fast paced environment or anything that effect it’s.

Nikki Little (31:39.301)
Come on, just edit that out. Yes, just edit that out.

Curtis Hays (31:39.314)
in the ever-changing world of…

Tom Nixon (31:41.85)
Yes, the ever changing world. Yeah. It’s like those all those movie trailers that always started out in a world, right? Same thing. So I agree.

Nikki Little (31:48.797)
Yes, yes. But yes, Tom, content is is king again, quality, helpful, valuable content on the right channels with the right signals is king.

Tom Nixon (32:01.914)
And I think the trick is what you said and Mark Schaefer has said this, who’s going to be a guest on our podcast is that the trick is going to be whoever can create the best, most human content is going to win because it’s so easy to get churn out C plus content all day. And that’s what most people are going to do. And to your point, you need to get it from C plus to A plus B plus isn’t even good enough anymore. I don’t think I think no one’s going to notice it. They’re going to be like, I don’t want to read another, you know, gen AI piece of trash. But if you hook me somehow,

Nikki Little (32:13.525)
Yeah.

Nikki Little (32:17.449)
Right.

Tom Nixon (32:31.654)
that I’m like, wow, that’s interesting. Then that’s, that’s your key to not only getting noticed, but then hopefully getting traction. So Lexi, what are some of the things that your task force or you or your agency or Nikki, you can answer this too. If a new client’s coming on board and we’ve, they’ve got, let’s say a modest budget put in your mind, whatever you think is a modest budget. They can’t be everywhere all at once, but they’re not a startup. How do you help them get them from help us figure out what to do to like action steps?

as quickly as most clients want you to get them there. What are some of the things you’ll get, take them through?

Lexi Trimpe (33:04.248)
So let’s narrow it into specifically in the digital frame because there’s so many ways I can go about this. think largely it all comes down to the same thing, Is first understanding who is your audience and how are they interacting with you, right? And how are they interacting with your own channel? So a lot of the times we often first start with your website just because again, it’s owned. We’re able to see a lot of that traffic. We’re able to see things like into your audience data and things and just understand them a little bit more without taking guesses, right?

From there, we’re able to kind of understand where they’re coming in from, right? What are those channels? Typically, where in their user journey? And then what content are they looking for and when? Understanding that path to purchase, path to conversion, whatever it might be, and how long that usually takes is really important. Because again, that typically hasn’t changed that much, right?

When they get to our site, they’re converting a lot faster, but that doesn’t mean they’re not still doing that research for six months. So it’s understanding where is your audience during what parts of their journey and figuring out where you’re able to actually measure that first. As we’re talking about some of the changes, right, specifically within the last year or so with some of the shifts in AI, the first thing we’ve been doing much in that instance is just understanding what does this look like for brands. So.

If you previously, you know, COVID, you know, on relied really heavily on some of that owned media content, we all went through that like massive push, right? 2018 on, and you were relying really heavily on unbranded search traffic, you’re probably taking a really big hit right now, right? But that doesn’t mean you’re not still showing up right onto some of these search engines. So first understanding kind of taking that temperature check, like we talked about earlier, understanding where your audience is coming in from.

And then you’re going to be able to optimize where it makes the most sense, when it makes the most sense and prioritize those things because we can’t all do all things at once.

Tom Nixon (35:05.017)
in Nikki, do all of your most of your campaigns follow that peso model? So is there a box or two checked in every quadrant? Typically speaking?

Nikki Little (35:14.747)
Not every. So not every client has an integrated program. Some we just do one or two pieces of the media side. Sometimes we’re working with internal teams who handle parts of that. Sometimes we’re working with other agencies, right? So in our world, it doesn’t matter whether we’re owning the full integrated program or we’re just owning a piece of it. We’re making sure that we’re aligned with our clients, internal teams or other external teams that are doing other parts of the program to

to again, make sure everything’s integrated, everything’s aligned. So we come at all of our work from an integrated, aligned mindset.

Ideally, our team is doing all of it, right? Because that’s the sweet spot, because then there’s a lot of efficiencies when we’re not kind of trying to get information from an internal team or another external team. It can work. It definitely does work. We have a lot of clients that we do work in that way. But again, when we can do all components of the Paceful model, there’s a lot of efficiencies gained there. And like you said, if the question of like somebody comes in with a healthy budget, know, where would you start? What would you do? In addition to what Lexi said, it

again, kind of goes back to the irrespective of the AI conversation, but say you get a great piece of media coverage. Well, that shouldn’t just live on that third party site. That can then be turned into a blog post, which can then be promoted in your newsletter, which should then be shared on social, which could then be turned into an ad, which could be sliced and diced in so many different ways, right? But that

does go back to the value of helping content to be found through AI, right? But it’s figuring out how do you maximize, how do you squeeze every bit and ounce of juice out of one piece of content or one piece of media to make sure it’s hitting all the various audiences on different channels.

Tom Nixon (37:01.924)
Yep. And we could use AI to make that process quicker and right.

Lexi Trimpe (37:03.149)
All right.

Nikki Little (37:05.277)
Yeah, absolutely. Right? Like take this blog post and turn it into a LinkedIn post and a Facebook post and an Instagram post. Right. And take this and condense it into 200 words for our email newsletter. So many things that you can do with AI. Bowen before that was manual. That would take hours. Right now you can get that done so much quickly, more quickly, but again, it’s going in and then adjusting it to your brand’s tone and voice, making sure it doesn’t sound

Lexi Trimpe (37:06.488)
so much easier.

Mm-hmm.

Nikki Little (37:33.257)
to AIE, making sure there’s not a lot of that in today’s era or the dashes. We could have a whole other conversation about dashes.

Tom Nixon (37:40.708)
no, I am dying on this hill because a client wants me to stop using dashes because chat GPT doesn’t know. I’ve loved the dash since before it was cool and I’m not throwing it away. Okay. Go back and read my early post. Yeah. So Curtis, have we answered your original question? Like, so your, your observation was correct. PR is more important than ever and PR means a lot more things than ever. so I’m assuming we’ve scratched that itch for you.

Lexi Trimpe (37:41.134)
It’s a whole 30 minutes there.

Nikki Little (37:47.583)
Yeah.

Lexi Trimpe (37:51.522)
Yep. I also use the word era a lot.

Nikki Little (37:51.763)
I believe that. I believe that.

Nikki Little (37:56.607)
you

Tom Nixon (38:09.652)
What next for you?

Curtis Hays (38:12.018)
Well, I think one of the most important things Nikki had said that I think everyone needs to take away is, and so I want you to reiterate this point because I think you kind of, you said it quickly as part of a larger point, but it’s really important that you guys actually adopted and took the time to implement an internal AI policy. And what’s happening in organizations is they’re not taking this seriously. There are employees who are using AI to do their jobs in a number of different ways, but

Nikki Little (38:30.025)
Yes.

Curtis Hays (38:39.368)
they’re doing it in silos because the organization itself hasn’t implemented a policy. And by policy, I don’t mean an acceptable use policy for AI. Policy needs to be so much more than that. So, Nikki, just give us a little snapshot of like, you know, how did you guys come about that? Did you work with a third party to implement that? Or what did that look like for you guys? Because it’s obviously you’re seeing success from that and really just bringing alignment that everybody’s using the same tools.

We’re all on the same page, so our output’s going to be very much aligned with the tools that we’re using as well.

Nikki Little (39:08.735)
Right.

Nikki Little (39:12.83)
Right.

So we started this back in November of 2023 when chat GPT started exploding and we kind of on the digital team were the first ones because we’re always the first ones to start experimenting and learning about the technology to then teach our team and our clients. But we said, okay, like we, this is a thing now, like let’s get in front of it so that our team members aren’t afraid or aren’t unsure. And let’s just put some guidelines in place. So we put together kind of do’s, don’ts, how you should,

use chat GPT, how you shouldn’t use it. We rolled that out internally. And then we also put it on the FAQ section of our website because we weren’t getting questions from clients just yet about how we were using AI, but we anticipated we were going to. So we wanted to one, assure them that they shouldn’t stop investing in our team because AI is a thing now, because there’s so much more you’re still going to get from us that you won’t ever get from an AI tool. But we wanted to show them that it’s just like social media, right? Like when social media came out.

that should be part of your toolbox. should be part of your program, but it’s gotta be used in an ethical way. So we kind of incorporated that in the FAQ sections of our website. Then, like I mentioned, we had Lexi go through the training. We created a task force that pulled in members from different teams. We kind of went through what Lexi learned in the training. We tested out different LLMs.

Lexi Trimpe (40:34.157)
I adapted that a bit, yeah.

Nikki Little (40:37.737)
Yeah. And then we ultimately decided on the one that we were going to have our, give everybody access to. So everybody on our team has a individual chat GPT account. have one Claude account that we use agency-wide. still, okay. I’m sorry. not supposed to say that. Strike that from the conversation. like we experiment notebook LM.

Lexi Trimpe (40:51.982)
They don’t need to know that. No one tells Antrope. We don’t share. Kidding.

Tom Nixon (40:56.092)
Mm.

Nikki Little (41:05.127)
Super cool, right? But like we acknowledge that we don’t want to overwhelm our team. So let’s just invest in and train our team up on the one tool that makes the most sense for us. And this is something that we’re starting to roll out to clients now is AI readiness. How do we help our clients marketing and communications teams do exactly what you were just talking about, right? Get smart on how to use it, get aligned so they’re not all off in a million different directions and they’re not using it in a way that could be

Curtis Hays (41:06.483)
Yeah.

Lexi Trimpe (41:06.583)
This is

Nikki Little (41:34.043)
unethical or inaccurate or detrimental in some way to the brand.

Lexi Trimpe (41:39.886)
think if you work in B2B marketing, you’ve probably heard of the five P’s approach, at least like once or twice. That’s what a lot of it was based off of what we learned in our trust insights training. Taking that one step further and I think modifying that a bit. And again, for those that aren’t familiar, the five P’s approach, again, centers around the people, the process, the platform, performance. There’s one other P that I’m probably forgetting, much like dodge ball.

But the people in the process are really what I came down to, right? What do our people need? What are they trying to achieve? And then what are the processes and platforms that we can put in place to make that happen? So before just diving in and jumping right in with the tool, which so many people do, they sign up for a real, real expensive content generation tools that are a thousand bucks a month for 30 seats. It’s also built entirely on open AI, but costs six times the cost.

There are some things that we really need to be looking into before we just start to adopt tools before really knowing how we’re going to use them. So that’s what we focused on largely before we even started any rollout was there was a solid few months of just planning and understanding what do we want to do and then how are we going to do it before we even roll out those tools.

Tom Nixon (42:36.506)
Mm-hmm.

Tom Nixon (42:58.864)
Well, that is very much the Franco way and the Nicky Little way. I know that is to be thoughtful about.

Lexi Trimpe (43:03.086)
you

Curtis Hays (43:03.922)
It’s a very mature organization to take that approach, Tom. It shows maturity.

Tom Nixon (43:07.43)
Yeah, exactly.

Lexi Trimpe (43:08.014)
50 some years.

Nikki Little (43:08.755)
Yeah.

Tom Nixon (43:10.364)
Well, this has been great. Curtis, is there anything you want to tease at? Cause I know you’ve got a pretty big AI project up your sleeve that we’re going to be rolling out here in the coming months, but is that still top secret?

Curtis Hays (43:21.096)
You’re putting me on the spot. Well, Tom’s alluding to this, and Lexi, because we’ve been working in a couple of different capacities. How you mentioned you can’t just put something into chat GPT and have something come out at the other end that’s not on brand, isn’t in the brand voice or tone and those types of things. So we saw that as a challenge ourselves. And so how do you train the LLM to be on brand so that you can put something in it? And I think more than anything, for me, it was

Nikki Little (43:44.639)
Right.

Curtis Hays (43:50.773)
Not to have it generate content, but to take content to have it go through the album to say, this on brand? Is this within the voice? Are we saying, you know, the do’s and don’ts that you sort of talked about, are we saying the things we’re supposed to say? We call our customers clients, not customers. Was that in the language or did somebody write something different? That it can very quickly go through that where you don’t necessarily need the time of the proofreading and editing level that you

Nikki Little (43:58.641)
Okay.

Nikki Little (44:10.165)
Right.

Curtis Hays (44:19.718)
might have otherwise had because they could do those quick checks for you and those types of things. So we are working on one of those types of things as a platform to hopefully someday release to clients, as well as just use internally as you have an evolving team that who have multiple people working on a brand, you all need to be aligned. So

Nikki Little (44:34.867)
Right.

Nikki Little (44:40.489)
Right. Love it.

Lexi Trimpe (44:42.51)
Yeah, understanding the people in the process first makes sense.

Curtis Hays (44:45.843)
Yep.

Tom Nixon (44:46.19)
Nah, more to come. Yeah. So the only thing left to do on that Curtis is come up with an acronym for it and then roll it out. Right.

Nikki Little (44:51.765)
There you go. Has to have an acronym.

Lexi Trimpe (44:54.19)
Let us know. We’re really good at acronyms. Let us know. Marge of that.

Tom Nixon (44:57.18)
See and see, got it. Kaleidoscope and creative mill, the CNC content factory in reference to the CNC music factory from back in the day. I kicked it old school, ladies and gentlemen. And with that, we will let you get back to your regularly scheduled programming. Thanks, Nikki. Thank Lexi. You guys will come back for sure. Appreciate it. See y’all next time.

Curtis Hays (44:57.524)
Tom’s good. I’m going to leave that to you, Tom, because you’re good at those kinds of things.

Nikki Little (45:15.561)
Thank you. Thanks for having us. It was fun.

Lexi Trimpe (45:18.456)
Thanks.