See the show notes for this episode: S 01 | Ep 51 Exploring the Complex Landscape of B2B Marketing | Show notes
0:00:00 - Alex Shevelenko
Welcome to Experience-focused Leaders! I am delighted to introduce you to Jim Yu. Jim has been a friend for a few decades but, more importantly, for all of you, he is the founding CEO and now executive chair of BrightEdge, which is the number one enterprise search engine optimization platform. It has over $100 million in revenue and is used by 57 Fortune 100 companies. So, Jim, welcome to the pod! Excited to dive in with you into all the things that it takes to build a leading marketing technology platform. As a CEO and as a marketer.
0:00:51 - Jim Yu
Great to be here, Alex! Excited to chat!
0:00:56 - Alex Shevelenko
We were doing one joint project while we were getting our MBA together. And you pretty much did the whole project for both of us in moments of rapid execution. That's when I realized that I got into the same class with this really bright guy, Jim. And then I realized that you also were able to get into college really at a young age. Do you want to tell us a little bit of the backstory, of just how smart you are? Because I think the world needs to understand that we're not just talking to somebody who only works hard but has a combination going on there.
0:01:38 - Jim Yu
I think I'm happy to tell the story. As you mentioned, you and I went to business school together. And, Alex, you were always one of the crazy smart guys in the class. You're always a guy thinking about strategy, thinking about things from a very strategic angle. So that's one of the things I always remember and it's just an all-around nice, nice guy. So it's great to catch on.
Gosh, it's almost 20 years since business school. My story in terms of graduating young is I fell in love with computers at a very young age. I started programming when I was seven years old.
0:02:36 - Alex Shevelenko
Seven years old, just repeating. Repeating in case somebody didn't hear.
0:02:42 - Jim Yu
I had one of those computers where it was the first generation Intel chips, the 8088 processor. It was one of the early desktop computers and I learned about BASIC, a very simple programming language. I started programming games, and as I got into it, I started to want to build more complex software. So I started taking a programming class in C because the lower-level language was C. I was nine years old and I took a college class in programming in C.
I also really enjoyed math. I started taking calculus when I was 10 or 11. Then started full-time when I was 12 and graduated when I was 16.
0:03:42 - Alex Shevelenko
Other characteristics that I think a lot of those that are more entrepreneurial folks would have. So when you were just starting with BrightEdge, I remember having a chat in the early days, and you were like the definition of scrappiness. Do you want to tell the story of the Costco runs? All the stuff that you were doing to make ends meet in the early days, just so people understand that it's not just about the brainpower which you have, the work ethic, but also this maybe immigrant scrappy mentality that helped you get there.
0:04:27 - Jim Yu
You're definitely bringing me back to some fun. I think nostalgia is an interesting thing. I remember fondly those early-stage days. So I started BrightEdge. I quit my job at Salesforce. My wife and I just had a baby, so it was like I always knew I wanted to start a company. I had this idea that everything was going to go not just online, but people would have to be able to be easily discoverable online, and the big companies will need to optimize their digital presence for search.
So the first thing I realized we needed to build was this index of the web2. I built the data cube. But the way we had to build the data cube—because we were bootstrapping in the first part of the company—was we needed a lot of machines and a lot of bandwidth for our followers. Because you got to go index all the stuff. And because we hadn't raised money, what we needed to do was get a lot of machines. We were like, “How are we going to do this?” We had $3,000 into the company.
And so we were like, “We have to do this within this budget.” We were scratching our heads, super constrained, and then we figured out that Costco had at that time a super generous return policy. You could buy the machine, use the machine, and then return the machine within six months. So what we did is like, “Okay, we'll buy these machines.” Because the way you build an index is there's a lot of scrolling and a lot of processing, but you can then afterward compress it all down and then serve it out of a single index. And so we bought all these machines. Got to know a lot of folks at Costco really well, and did a lot of the $1,99 burgers and hotdogs, the right entrepreneur-friendly lunches.
Lemuel was crashing on my couch. He was living with my wife, our baby and I in a thousand-square-foot apartment, so talk about scrappy. The apartment was stuffed with these machines from the kitchen to the table. And then we're running these machines 24/7 because you're building these indexes, you're running them and saturating all the key resources of the machine. So you're tuning it to maximize the processor, maximize the I/O, so that it's indexing really quickly and then ultimately compressing it down and then serving it off the index.
We basically got to know the folks at Costco. Well, we returned the machine. They were very friendly about it. Now they've changed the return policy. I don't think we have anything to do with that, but I don't think you can do this anymore.
0:07:35 - Alex Shevelenko
I just want to give you a shout-out and, by the way, I was very proud of myself because at some point my co-founder was living with his girlfriend in an apartment that I moved into.
0:07:49 - Jim Yu
You know, we were doing our thing.
0:07:51 - Alex Shevelenko
And I thought, “This is so cool.” But we didn't have stacks of computers and we didn't have a kid.
0:07:57 - Jim Yu
The computers are really interesting because, in the summer, it gets really hot. So we had all these machines, and they were literally generating all this heat. The thing about the machines is you can't let them overheat because otherwise, you burn out the drive. And so then, we got this portable air conditioner, but it was pointed at the machine area.
0:08:25 - Alex Shevelenko
Yeah, so it doesn't melt.
0:08:28 - Jim Yu
So then we were like sitting there coding.
0:08:32 - Alex Shevelenko
And you're sweating.
0:08:36 - Jim Yu
I was keeping the machine cool, building the index, and that's how the data cube was built. Yeah, it's one of those things where, you know, as a founder, I feel like embracing the concerns, creative problem-solving, and figuring out whatever I have to do to achieve that outcome. I'm going to blow through those obstacles and constraints and make it happen.
0:09:00 - Alex Shevelenko
So let me ask you about this.
It's a little controversial and there is this notion of the immigrant founder. I have a feeling that what prepared me for whatever entrepreneurial or other things I'd be doing was the immigrant journey, more than any kind of academic training. And knowing that if my parents, at a certain age, moved with the kids and did their thing, then I could handle whatever was coming at me. And I feel, whether it's immigration or just living in a difficult environment financially or otherwise, folks just develop this extra bit of resilience that then helps them go and do great things. Now we're all joking about this, but you're a hundred million plus in your recurring revenue business. In those early days, did you feel like that particular part of the journey was the defining part or core part of your success?
Guide us a little bit on that.
0:10:26 - Jim Yu
I think that's right. In hindsight, it's very interesting. Because it's been 16-plus years since I started BrightEdge, so looking backwards, you see these interesting dots that are there.
I think, for entrepreneurs, resiliency is super important. My parents were immigrants. I grew up as the only Asian kid in a trailer park in South Dakota. Whatever I’m facing as an entrepreneur, I can always go back to the trailer park. I shouldn't have made it this far anyway, but in hindsight, it's also really interesting until much later. The why behind what you're doing in a long journey of building a company is very important.
I think resiliency starts with that chip on your shoulder for a lot of us. For me, it was the guy who grew up in a trailer park. That gives you this ability to plow through.
Sometimes a lot is driven by fear of failure. It's like, “I just can't fail, I will find a way and make it through.” But eventually, there's a moment when it’s not about that anymore. And then it's like, “Why do you get up in the morning and go just as hard?” And so there's this bit that flips. That, I think, has to happen, when you're not doing it out of fear of failure, but you're doing it out of love of mission. And so why start to evolve in that journey? Because it's not just about the money. Of course, it's important, but you're not starting a company just to make money. There are many other ways where, as we know, business school's expected value is higher.
0:13:09 - Alex Shevelenko
Yeah, there's easier ways to make a lot of money, especially if you graduated high school at 16.
Let's tap into that because there is a fear motivation. But maybe there's just something you call a "find a way or make a way" mentality. I think that's different than fear. Maybe something in the DNA or some sort of a habit that you're like, "Hey, we can make it through this!" And fear could be a part of it but it doesn't have to be. And then on top of it, there's also the shiny beacon on the hill. What's our mission? What's the promised land that we're taking? But a lot of people talk about promised land and wax poetic about the future but just lack the stamina or scrappiness. And I think somehow it almost feels like you need the two together.
0:14:30 - Jim Yu
It's not one or the other. There's an element of grit, perseverance, creativity and problem-solving. That is part and parcel of the journey of building something. It's hard, by definition. You're creating something, you're putting yourself out there every day and it's hard. There's definitely an element of grit and perseverance but I think there's always this dichotomy where you need both things
0:15:16 - Alex Shevelenko
In my own head, coming from this sort of scrappy refugee, immigrant background, I remember I was really impressed the first time I stayed in a four-star hotel as a consultant that was delivering a very limited amount of value.
In retrospect, it was definitely enjoying disproportionate benefits of a particular job, and that was fun the first time, but then it wasn't as enticing afterward. Then there was like, "Ok, we want to travel and see everything." No matter what challenges you come up with yourself, at some point you get bored. So you fulfill the dream of some sort of success, whatever benchmark. But it's not really meaningful. That was my kind of discovery.
When is that for you—and especially when you're building a company for 16 years—you've reached certain milestones when you're successful, and you can move on to do other things? When did you start feeling like, "Okay, I've done it."? Was it at Salesforce? Was it at Stanford? Was it midway through the company journey? Have you had that moment?
0:16:51 - Jim Yu
I have not had that moment. I feel like there's a thing I was reading. "You've never arrived, you're always becoming." You're always changing. You're always trying to figure out what are you trying to become. I haven't found that yet.
There are moments when I feel like, "Oh, we just did something really, really cool!" I remember maybe there's these parts along the way when it's like you look back and you say, "Wow!" So, whether it's you sign your first customer, raise your first round or you are up to a certain milestone, those are fun. I think as an entrepreneur, a lot of times it's easy not to celebrate that or just move on to the next. I think I do a lot, but it's always a bit of like, "What are you going to become next?"
And I think that's a helpful way to keep learning because, especially in our business, just what you and I do in tech, the change is insane. That's what makes it exciting, but it also keeps you on your toes. Every part of these businesses and these ecosystems is going through disruptions, and it's pretty fascinating.
0:18:31 - Alex Shevelenko
Well, let's dive into our business in particular and maybe the niche of people that we're serving, which are enterprise marketers, maybe in some cases, mid-market marketers as well. So everybody has heard of search and the importance of Google in our lives, the broader category for this is the revenue or performance marketing portion of that. You were obviously doing some of that for yourself and your pet projects. But when you look back now at the role of search in the last 15 years and going forward, it almost feels like, at some point, it was all important. Now it's shifting and the noise around the eye. It's a little bit more contested, and you're beginning to worry about what's the future going to be. So guide us a little bit on the broader space around search engine marketing.
0:19:35 - Jim Yu
I think search in general has been really important almost since the beginning of the internet. Because at the heart of the power of the internet is that it connects all the different types of information. There was an NSF project that connected the universities and departments of different divisions of the government, and so, almost since the beginning of the web, with this decentralized model, you needed a way to organize all that information, to make sense out of it.
Google obviously came up with a model that was just better in terms of its algorithms, performance, relevance and all these things that proved that it could be a very powerful end-user tool for getting access to information. But for the most part, it didn't fundamentally change for the last decade or so. There's been a lot of incremental powerful innovation. But the model itself of putting a keyword and getting 10 kinds of different links of interesting information. It was that you make sense of yourself as an end consumer. That model has been in place almost since the beginning of the internet, since before Google. Now, when we started the company, what was interesting is those were the early days of search engine marketing. So most of the focus at that time was on pay-per-click I did on a keyword and a little bit of ad space. You click on it, I convert an intent, results in performance, results in revenue. And so we were really going after helping companies earn their audience and be able to be easily discoverable online through search engine optimization with technology and then help them drive business performance and revenue from that.
For the most part, a lot of that has been a very interesting and very important category. It's something that almost every business, whatever industry they're in, something between 30 to 60 of all their online traffic comes from organic search. And so that is why it went from something where, when I was starting BrightEdge, when we were explaining what we do, people were like, "What is that? Why would we do it? It's just paid for the click." And now it's something that certainly every enterprise and most companies know about and do something about. So that's been kind of the evolution. Now, this moment is pretty interesting because of GenAI. And AI has been around for a long time in search.
In fact, one of the reasons that OpenAI, the MentorChat, started was a debate between Elon Musk and the founders of Google. They were like, "Hey, you can't have one company that basically gets all the engineers who know AI in one place." The original thesis was to create an open-source version of AI for the benefit of the planet, rather than a closed system of AI that's only benefiting the largest search engine in the world.
That was the original intention behind Open AI. As they built that technology, they were really going after this mission of artificial general intelligence. They were trying to make AI closer and closer to human intelligence and capabilities, and they achieved something with the transformer model with GPT, something that actually started to become very interactive and unlock a lot of new capabilities.
So there's Gen AI with it, and so that is actually for search. I think it doesn't make the search less important. The fundamental use case of search, of organizing information, making sense out of all the world's information, putting it at the fingertips of consumers, whether they are retail consumers, businesses that are shopping for software or any kind of use cases, that's a core use case of finding, organizing information, is still really critical. It's always going to be important, but the way that manifests itself is going to start to change, and I think—for the first time in the last six months—I think you start to see Google making its moves, obviously, but there's kind of fractures in the world order of search.
0:24:11 - Alex Shevelenko
So, interestingly, just last week, we interviewed the Chief Business Officer of Perplexity who happens to be my brother amongst plenty of things.
So it was another intimate episode of RELAYTO.
But it was really interesting to see how they obviously, as a small, relatively small company, do not want to go and tackle Google head-on, but there is a change in user expectations of what you're going to get from an average search at Google versus the more AI powered search.
One of the implications, obviously, is that some people who are investing in various SEO platforms, like yours, to build up their organic reach capabilities, now have to worry, well, what happens? Are we going to be a trusted source? Is Perplexity going to rate us as a trusted source and display us, or not? How do we get ahead of that? So, guide us a little bit on what you are advising to your clients at BrightEdge, who are obviously making very sizable investments, just given the size of those organizations, and many of them are very retail and retail e-commerce focused. So for them, this is very critical. What are the top three pieces of advice that you offered to them that you could share with our audience?
0:25:45 - Jim Yu
Yeah, I think that's a great question, so maybe a little bit of background on how we think about some of these new search engines and how the world would evolve.
So, we've built this thing called the BrightEdge Generative Parser™. So historically, the way we get data, the data cube that we talked about earlier is we build these things, technology that can parse information as we're crawling the web and looking at search engines and things like that. Over time, we built these visual parsers that could render the page and then calculate where things are being placed visually on a page. As search became more interactive, now that search has become generative, we built sort of a generative parser that interacts with these AI search engines and then looks at the kinds of experiences that they create with the AI versions of search. So with that technology, we've been pointing it at Google's AI version, as well as the new AI search engines like Perplexity, Vue.com, and the other Microsoft versions and things like that to see if this market started to change. What's really interesting, one of the big findings that we had is that these AI search engines, at the end of the day, still have to get information from a source they have to find and cite.
In the case of Perplexity, there's a citation. You have to find high authority sources of information. What is that? Well, that is the equivalent, in a way, as what in classic search is the top-ranking stuff. It's like authority, yeah, what domains rank? Well, because you still have to figure out what is the right source of information that the AI is going to use when it's answering questions.
0:27:39 - Jim Yu
The first thing is you still have to really manage your site and your brand authority. Then, the next thing that's really interesting is what are the topics where you have a right to win? What are the topics where you have topical authority? If I'm Nike and I'm creating content about picking the best basketball shoes or the latest innovation for running shoes or any kind of different types of sports equipment, I have a right to win in those topics because that is the heritage of my brand. That is what I have authority for. That is what all the audiences will turn to me for as one of the sources of that.
So you want to make sure that you clearly identify what are the topics where you're going to create content where you have a right to win, and that's going to be through. Whether it's Google's engine or any of the other engines it will still go to those same types of sources in order for them to actually cite that type of content. The third thing that we're telling customers is, if you dig into the tactics of the AI, what AI search engines need to do. They still need hints. For example, let me give you a very concrete example. In the world of classic SEO, which is so very important, you have to optimize things like title tags, meta description, that the search engines use as it decides what things that you're trying to write about.
The reason I talked to you about it was figuring out the source. There are new tags, schema tags, where you can actually identify, “I am the organization that is publishing this information, I'm the author of this specific article or piece of content.” We believe that those types of tags are going to be very important for AI search engines because they're going to have to always tune back together who is the original source. Where was this first occurrence? And so there will be things like this and Google uses some of these already today. You want to make sure, just like you optimize the structure of your site today and put in the right tags. There's a new series of tags, schema tags, that you need to make sure you also audit your site for implementing. So things are changing, but some of the core things are still the same and you have to prepare for some of the future.
0:30:13 - Alex Shevelenko
So as a leading enterprise vendor, you basically just need to add that module and make sure your customers feel comfortable. So that makes a ton of sense and there are some really interesting things.
0:30:26 - Jim Yu
I would also say we've been playing with this a lot. So the other thing I'd say is think of the average searcher in two years. They will be 100 times better at searching, for whatever use case. The reason is the AI search engines powered by the core are all going to get really good at it if you put in a single query, it is going to know how to make it 100 times better and all the related things that you need to research. When you're trying to let's say, I'm trying to buy a guitar as a beginner, it's going to actually go figure out what's the right kind of music for me to get, what kind of guitar to look at, what are the ones that have the best reviews, which models I should compare, what's the price. It will just go execute all those queries and come back and summarize it all, because that is what the AI is really good at.
0:31:18 - Alex Shevelenko
It is really good at like executing a bunch of dancing at five different sites versus just one. So let's dive into this sort of authority, authoritative sources, right? So one of the interesting almost tragedies from my point of view of SEO, the way it works is that some of the most authoritative content that companies produce, particularly I've put in the B2B world. So let's just focus on the B2B. Many of our audience live in that universe.
So then they produce a 50 page ebook, a 15 page white paper, a four page study of a detail webinar or kind of event thing with customers that have lots of pages, lots of content. So first problem is most of it is gated, so it never even gets to the SEO world and it is literally the most valuable things in terms of content depth. That's not fluffy stuff done by some outsourced content farm somewhere is like it is substantive, cause it's the experts at that company that are producing it. And then the second thing is fine, I've ungated at some point or some of it like I'm a progressive marketer and I say gates are bad and we want to reduce friction for our audience and I'm just going to go and share this PDF with you. It's because typically the format for that is the PDF, because then it gets too messy to try to do it all as a web page. And anyway, having like 50 long, 50 page long web page is also kind of a nightmare to consume.
So what we end up having is some of the more substantive ideas that businesses, scientific organizations, nonprofits produce are these PDFs and Google parses them and you could have more insights on that, but you can't get something like you read this PDF and get to page land and page 54, which is the one that you need. Right, like none of that stuff is really possible in today's day and age. It was a traditional search. So we obviously have a point of view and relate to like how we're fixing that by taking those PDFs and you're breaking them down into atomic pieces of pages and making that all indexable and so on. But what's your take? You've seen 15 years, and folks at your company maybe have seen like of what B2B companies are doing and it feels like somehow just strange to me why. Why haven't they approached this with a little bit more thoughtfulness, and if maybe they have and it just hasn't worked?
0:34:25 - Jim Yu
I think for B2B marketers it's really really hard because the metrics change for them and the metrics drive a lot of the behavior of the B2B organizations and ultimately for a lot of B2B companies, the marketers really align with the different go-to-market motions that they have as a company.
So, for example, if they're just really short on, like MQLs, they just want to really tune up that lead convert page and they gotta tune that page up and get as many converts that they can get and a lot of times they get the content in order to get that lead time versus like chunking up and using it for different parts of the journey, which makes a lot of sense.
But the incentives have to align, because a lot of times the marketing team is going to be measured on very immediate objectives, like what happens with the CRO, is that I'm light on my revenue and I need like 30% more leads this quarter and I want to see that in a month or two. We face this challenge all the time where it's a little dollar ad spend, so there's levers they're pulling to try to quickly hit a certain set of metrics versus the longer term. What's the customer journey, or prospect or buyer journey, and what are the touch points? They're going to both generate the lead, but also be able to mature that lead in a process where it becomes a good pipeline.
0:36:18 - Alex Shevelenko
So let's agree that incentives drive behaviors like this. So one strategy is fine. Let's kind of like improve our incentives, let's really drive our alignment between marketing and sales. And it's not just about MQLs of fake emails or whatever people put in there, but it's actually moving people towards to sales, qualified leads to actually accelerating sales cycles and so on. So let's say we're a little bit more aligned on the kind of end product buyer experience, building trust, etc.
Still, I think marketers behave kind of in funny ways, because you could in theory have the same document, both gated and ungated, and the ungated version is going to gather you the SEO somewhere, and the gated version is going to be maybe the thing that you promote on social or email or other other kind of places where that it's more expensive and then you'll drive conversion. So because I think the average B2B buyer are they really that interested in avoiding putting their email? They're not going to go search, try to see. Oh yeah, but I could get that for free without download, so you could combine that and then, separately, there's this thing called delayed gating, which actually opens up the user experience to say, hey, okay, this is great, this is thoughtful, you built.
And yet, like we and we work with innovative marketers and even of those, not everybody is doing delayed gating, which is kind of an obvious behavioral change, because if you believe that you're doing something valuable you don't want to hide and put in these forms, that kind of first ask for your name and and then email, and then they say, oh, and this is the other trick that I see marketers use, and I'm curious that you're experienced with this is they would say, oh, it's a very simple form. It looks like you just have to put in your email and then you start typing in your email. The moment you've typed in your email it says, gotcha, we got you committed. But there's actually now the form expands and you have to fill in all this additional details and I'm going, come on, this is lame. You're destroying your brand.
Yes, somebody will kind of commit because they've already gone in there, but nobody wants to be tricked, not in B2B when, then not when you're trying to build trust. So you have this unique position, your CMO, obviously martech expert, SEO expert. But also you build, you sell to organizations with whom you have a trusted relationship. So how do you guys think and how's the thinking has changed, in trying to accommodate the SEO goals for yourself as the, obviously the lead capture goals and be a trusted partner to your customers?
0:39:39 - Jim Yu
We're trying to approach this problem also through the lens of how AI will change everything, right? So I really do believe that past of this gen AI moment, a lot of how marketing happens is going to quickly evolve, and so what I take to heart as I think through that is what we tell our customers is that your brand, your company has areas where it has a right to win, and you need to double down on those areas and become the source. And so what we're doing about that is we're taking all this data and all the information from our generative parser and publishing it up into every channel, into reports, and it's not gated at all. We just push out that information and the reason we do that is that is what we have a right to win it. We work with all the big brands. We have all this technology. We're looking at this massive corpus of information around how search is changing in all these areas, and by publishing that data consistently and publishing insights from that consistently, it makes us the natural source of information for anybody. To give you a concrete example, we used to have a really hard time getting general PR coverage outside of the trade parts.
So we have a great relationship with our core trade publications and we give them a lot of information and insight and have a great dialogue. But to get somebody like a Forbes or to get somebody like Associated Press or Wired or your broader kind of sort of PR and publication, it was just hard to be relevant to what they're covering. I just want to tell you this is going to be solved now that you're on this podcast.
0:41:47 - Alex Shevelenko
I just want to tell you this is going to be solved. Now that you're on this podcast, there's going to be between my mom and all the PR people in the press listening to this.
0:41:53 - Jim Yu
No, it's awesome and so a big part of like providing that out there. And then it ends up being something where, by providing that consistent point of view, we're getting a lot more sort of coverage and just from traditional PR and very interesting pubs and just interesting sort of conversations and being covered in stuff we didn't even pick because there's areas where people just cover the data, cover the insights, because it's an area of the market where we just have a right to win and so by understanding, as a brand and as a company, like what are the areas where you just have a right to win in creating marketing content around that, then you're very naturally just the source and that does generate. It's very interesting. I get interesting leads just from even marketing executives that just rebelled because they saw something that was covered in these areas, and so it's a little different than classic lead generation.
But as we're doing more and more and, by the way, our SEO itself on the areas around AI and search, that is a big chunk of what's growing, a lot of our needs and opportunities, because as you build topical relevance around, that right just becomes something where then you have landing pages about that. Then you and those don't have to be gated guides, but for our webinars on those things and those live kind of side by side, but how you were talking about those progressive forms, so we have a little bit of that, but we do that right next to our guides, we have long form guides on AI how do you opt, the ultimate guide to search generative experiences. We also put out a guide to Perplexity, things that we're seeing in Perplexity, and so those guides will have forms that can be spelled out at people's option. But you've got the whole guide there and people will fill it out.
0:44:03 - Alex Shevelenko
So part of your strategy is you're creating the downloadable guide that captures, deletes, and then you're creating a web-based version of that.
0:44:11 - Jim Yu
Also sometimes you're doing a webinar on it and then it ends up being a good sort of value add.
0:44:25 - Alex Shevelenko
So back to the PDFs. Let's say they are ungated now. And let's say, in the world of some more resource constrained companies, you just don't have the capacity. You're using some poor WordPress form that was developed a year ago. You can't just go and put this advanced 40 page guide that you formatted with Adobe or some other tool into a form. It's just too much work. So you basically have that. You publish this PDF, and I bring it up because in some industries, like education and dot orgs and dot govs, there are more PDF pages than web pages.
So if you assume an effort, like if you look at overall what's there, like through Google and search, you just get these crazy statistics. So these people are going to go start building super SEO friendly stuff, but they still have citizen services to deliver. Were there various academic options that they provide and so on. Is there something that you've seen that people do that make their PDF type of content more accessible. Is there a workaround? Is there some design things that people are doing? What's your take on that and what can people do to make the PDF work a little bit better?
0:46:04 - Jim Yu
Yeah, I mean, I think that with PDF.
So Google does call the PDF, but it's not. Like you mentioned, I think there's challenges with that, and so the main thing we do see a lot of people do with PDF is a little bit more.
They take chunks of it and snippets of it and then they pull that up and then put it into a web page and then they do the gating thing and that is a very common pattern that people do, but it takes work. So to your point, I think that approach is one where they can take the highest value PDF that they think they have and then basically they put a structure around it. We tend to recommend that B2B companies really make sure they have a good taxonomy. It's actually the flow of how you're structuring your site and the navigation that really helps drive the kind of good SEO across these different assets. And so usually marketers, even when they're doing the thing that I'm talking about, they don't do a very optimized job.
0:47:28 - Alex Shevelenko
Yeah, fantastic.
Well, thank you, sorry for getting into that, but I think some of the audience here, RELAYTO users, and I think that this is an important opportunity for them and a chance to hear from an expert like yourself.
And I kind of agree with you that the reusability like ability to embed a page from a document, for example, specific page allows you to really quickly build like mini landing pages inside your WordPress or Webflow whatever that are easy to navigate and then get people immersed inside, and maybe it's an executive summary version of the big report that they immerse in and then still go to the download and so on. So it makes a lot of sense, we're describing of trying to chunk it versus here's this 80 pages pitch, really credible report, but it's a monolithic thing that has the credibility but lacks the actual ability to find the things you care about because of all the friction in getting to it, and I bet Google penalizes that friction. Just by in virtue of the overall approach they have, that they reward ease of access and reward mobile friendliness and things like that, a good structure.
0:48:50 - Jim Yu
I think what you have with RELAYTO is really cool. Let's say a very common use is that I'm trying to do a launch, and I can quickly turn that navigation into a lightweight, mobile-friendly, easily indexable format.
There are many use cases where the marketer struggles because the alternative that we see people do a lot of is they hire an agency and spin up a microsite. And then it's just a fairly arduous process, requiring a lot of time and care to structure correctly, make sure it looks good, and get all the content. You see a good number of companies doing this process in many of these use cases.
0:49:52 - Alex Shevelenko
There was, let's say, there are roughly three roles in marketing, like three broad buckets. We were talking about that earlier. There's the brand ownership and the brand content role. There is the product marketing role, like the sales, the Salesforce experience that you've had and as a founder, you're basically product marketer in many big ways, and then there is the performance marketer, that's sometimes called revenue marketer role. You generally, your solution falls a little bit and more in the performance and revenue bucket. But at the same time, I as a kind of somebody that's responsible for overall brand, I want to make sure that you're in line with our guidelines, and whatever search engine optimized content we're producing is still on brand and obviously, a lot of search engine type of content could be related to product and the product is the one of the feeders of that.
So guide us a little bit on how do you feel different marketers succeed in the roles of CMOs. A lot of times was given the ticket size you deal with the CMOs, do they? Do you feel like people that come from one background, don't always succeed in the other, and they need to wrap themselves with a strong team? You've dealt with selling to various marketers for many years and so it would be helpful to understand, from your perspective as a vendor who's succeeding, who gets it, who doesn't, and what patterns are you seeing there?
0:51:50 - Jim Yu
So the first thing I say is, because we work with so many different industries, what I've come to appreciate is, as a marketing role, it's so different by industry. We work with over 50 percent of the fortune 500, and so TPG is very different than e-commerce, is very different than B2B, is very different than financial services. Like the role of the CMO is fundamentally really different by industry. But the food groups of brand marketing, product marketing and revenue marketing, those kind of major food groups really exist, they still exist in each of these areas.
But the question is minor, major, what are the kind of roles? So, in B2B marketing, especially for software companies, I think a lot of the time the power core does start with product marketing. The reason is it almost always starts with your company's positioning. That positioning is rooted in what are your core differentiators and the durable, long-term unique value propositions that you're providing to the segment of the market in which you target. For each of these companies, there's certain pillars of those that then from there derives the company positioning. Because it's rooted. So when you zoom out and zoom in, that stack marries up correctly and then the execution of programs for demand and revenue ties back into execution against that type of messaging and positioning.
0:53:43 - Alex Shevelenko
Because growing very fast with the wrong customer is not an idea, is a recipe for distraction and disaster, and even sometimes you can have false positives that you crush this market.
0:53:52 - Jim Yu
But that's not an idea. It's a recipe for distraction. And even sometimes you can have false positives that you crush this market, but that's not your actual ICP or your durable sort of where you're going to build your durable balance. So, and that almost always for a software product company, is rooted in your product differentiation, because and product differentiation is interesting because when you dig down into that, there are core areas where you're building moats and where you're going to have your doable differentiators. And so the strongest CMOs in B2B are very good at tying those things together. On the other hand, in CPG companies I mean, they are amazing at like the big idea, the creative, they know how to execute campaigns, they're storytellers and they understand what stories are. There's a qualitative attribute there in some of those CMOs.
They are very good at that aspect and that's paired with the most effective ones are paired with component now more and more of a quantitative kind of partner and that can flip. So you see some really strong quantitative CMOs that then pair it with a big creative campaign execution types and so. You don't see a lot of that in B2B market, B2B tech as you do in TPG, the power floors are a little bit different.
0:55:29 - Alex Shevelenko
I do wonder if that's going to be changing over time, because it feels like, as the market gets saturated and the product portfolios get awfully similar sounding and god bless B2B marketers for copying all the buzzwords pretty well I have a gut feeling that the brand and the kind of the content trustworthiness is going to stand out over specific product features. Quite soon. What's your take on that? Do you see that changing?
0:56:14 - Jim Yu
I think that any great marketing is great storytelling, and so I'm not saying or I think that's true in B2B, that's true in B2C and I think that's true in both, I think B2B marketing is tough, but it's more about what is the durable difference. What is the reason why your product exists and how is it different than everybody else in your space? I think that part is crystallizing which is super important. And being able to position that is a core part of how B2B marketing will work.
0:57:06 - Alex Shevelenko
So what you're saying is it's still core, you still need to find something core to the product and then you build out.
0:57:16 - Jim Yu
I'll give you an example. I was sort of connecting with Andy, who's the CEO and founder of Clari, and I think they've done a brilliant job of positioning revenue intelligence. If you think, like CRM has existed for a long time. Analytics and BI have existed for a long time, right. There's a lot of different elements of this but, like the notion of revenue intelligence and solving a revenue leakage problem ties together, they're different and the benefit in a way that if you're an executive, if I can get 15 more revenue, because I've been efficiencies that get pinpointed and I can act on quickly.
That's a lot easier to position and articulate as opposed to. I integrate with all these data sources, I have analytics, so there's a lot of core capabilities that are differentiators, but what is the durable difference? There is actually that it's able to give you the intelligence to pinpoint the things that are driving leakage.
0:58:26 - Alex Shevelenko
I see. So what you're saying is it's almost what we're describing here is, like some people would describe it as category design. So they designed this category around which their product is really well suited to support that particular category.
As opposed to some other products that maybe are great for sales enablement or sales intelligence or sales engagement or something like that, but then so I buy into this but, as you remember, Salesforce reinvents itself every year, depending on what the trend is. Now it's AI, but at some point it was all about social and at some point it was in building companies like SuccessFactors, I remember, literally every year we had to redefine our category, make it a little bit larger, reposition that or this thing, so it feels, at the same time, that it's getting really messy, even in the category area, so it feels like people are consolidating and everybody now is in revenue intelligence and so is the only advantage that Clari has.
Decides maybe some product hooks that they built in. Is that they were there first and they define that category. Or is that really that durable? Because great marketer is gonna go and say, well, we're now with revenue intelligence as well and they're going to have better campaigns and stuff like that.
0:59:56 - Jim Yu
I think the interesting thing is there's a good campaign and good marketing and there's great marketing. Salesforce is great as its SuccesFactors was great at great marketing but in moments. Like of all the different campaigns that Salesforce did, no software was a defining campaign, that defined a category and, frankly, Salesforce called itself SaaS. For a long time it didn't work and really it wasn't until the term cloud came along that really pushed it into the mainstream. And Salesforce but to the credit, they did a great job of kind of owning that as, hey, I'm a business card, I'm a sales card, I'm a customer class.
But those sort of moments and B2B marketing, I think it's yes, there's a lot of tactics that happen, but I think think the stuff that really moves those companies from a marketing perspective is certain campaigns, certain positioning and messaging, really sort of cement, how the market perceives that company and the space in which they operate. And I think there are lots and lots of good campaigns very few great ones, and I think it's harder now, to your point, than ever before of hitting those campaigns out of the park. Because there's just more noise. I mean there's more companies. Everybody's AI.
1:01:29 - Alex Shevelenko
If that's the biggest platform shift, that we're trying to capture, it almost becomes meaningless, like we even started to de-emphasize saying AI powered everywhere. Because you would have to be pretty stupid not to have this something AI powered if you're dealing with content, so I wonder what would be your advice in having this enterprise SEO platform category. Do you think it would be that easy to do it now? What would you do? Would you create a different category? Would you go all the way from the enterprise to the mid market to compete with folks like a Semrush and other players in there? How would you go about? What was a wisdom of 15 years redefining the category?
1:02:37 - Jim Yu
You had to build another search oriented startup today so if I were to build another startup today, I wouldn't go after this market because you have incumbents. I think when you're doing a startup, you've got to be really thoughtful about what category you're going after and why you're going to win. Now some categories are ripe for destruction. Some categories are just emerging, so it's going to be a new market. Startups typically are going after one of those two things: you're disrupting an existing series of incumbents or you're going after a brand new category. Once you've created a category, you do have a lot of benefits of being as long as you continue to innovate, as long as you stay ahead of the curve. If you stop innovating, you die.
And so I say I'd be very thoughtful about what category I would go after as a founder. And in particular, I think the thing that's different right now that was not the case when we started is that if I'm starting a company today, I would think really hard about why isn't GPT-8 going to kill my company. Because it takes four or five years for your company to start really owning a market. So by the time you're in your market, really hitting your stride, you don't want it to be something that's commoditized by whatever is on the warpath for the AI. Think about GPT-4, what is that going to be by the time it's GPT-8?
You don't want to be in the ripple effect of getting crushed just by those models getting smarter and smarter, more and more domain expertise. But there's a lot of areas where they're just not going to have domain expertise, and so I think one big part is starting a business. Today you've got to really think about just from a core sort of market perspective. How does that play out.
1:05:02 - Alex Shevelenko
If I double click on that, it almost feels what you're saying is that you actually need to be a lot more focused on delivering a total solution, because otherwise your data workflow goes much deeper, and then if you're going deeper, would ChatGPT care about insurance brokers, right? Is that like really that important to them?
1:05:38 - Jim Yu
And everything that they do helps you, right? You're going to benefit from the model getting better and better, so you've got to play the side of the coin correctly. But if you're playing the other side of the coin, you're just going to die. General legal tools, general health care, there's a lot of general things that would just get gobbled up, like the information would just be gobbled up, and it would be very difficult to win in those markets.
1:06:11 - Alex Shevelenko
And this is exactly like Google created little mini vertical search engines over time, like to address these niches that were just as good as some specialists. There's still room for the specialists because the category was large. But now you have, quote-unquote, Google is moving much faster.
1:06:35 - Jim Yu
You got Google, Open AI. Facebook dumping a lot of money into certain moves there as well. All the big players are going to pile on their versions and commoditize a lot of stuff, and certain infrastructure things are going to belong in the domain of the big cloud, like Microsoft and Google has their version of GCP and AWS will have their versions, and so certain parts, some of those could be good acquisitions. So if you're playing that out, it's okay.
Well, sometimes certain things are just going to lead to the market and just get gobbled up and that's a reasonable pledge. But you get to play out the timeline. It's one of the hardest things, I think. If you're starting a company, where do you think the market plays out? Because it's always not that symmetrical and there's a lot of non-linear dynamics in there that you're going to have to think through, and and you're making bets that you're moving around on, as these markets play, and so it's not easy.
1:07:38 - Alex Shevelenko
Let's say you're not, you're not starting a company. Let's say you're a marketer that wants to keep your job. Not all jokes aside it's tough In some segments of B2B, like recession, that we felt l a lot of very talented folks were simply let go because the marketing budgets were slashed and they were the first things to go. So you want to keep your job, you want to get good at your job.
One of the things that we think about at RELAYTO is how do we make our customers successful, how do we get them promoted? How do we get them to enjoy their work? And really feel like they derive meaning out of the what they create, so it's sort of creator economy. So it's pretty fortunate. Actually, like not every product has the the opportunity to feel like it taps into something fundamentally human, but in the enterprise, you still help people with their careers and movements so how do you think about that?
What advice would you have for people that are starting out early in their career? Or mentoring somebody who's early in their career, having seen and worked with so many marketers over the last 15 years, who are the ones that are succeeding? What did they do? What's a common pattern?
1:09:08 - Jim Yu
What we focus a lot on is customer success and watching how we can help marketers grow in their career, and the common thread I think that has endured sort of before and now is actually being able to communicate and align organizations. I think for marketers one of the hardest things is it's very rare that marketing lives in a silo and can drive revenue on their own. A lot of it is about alignment and communication. A lot of the soft skills are very important for marketers. And so I think that's one that's been true before is going to be even more important in the next era.
The second thing that is completely new is being able to manage AI, and so we built more and more of these co-pilot capabilities and autopilot capabilities, a lot of AI automation capabilities. But there's still human in the loop there. So the human creativity aspect, reviewing things still requires a lot of thinking, creativity, understanding of your company's brand, its mission. It's going to market what you're trying to differentiate on, where you're trying to win right in all these different aspects that just have a lot of nuance.
That's important for a person to be able to have that human judgment, at the same time being able to leverage the technology and being open to playing with the new technology and leveraging it in order to win. I think that's a very important and new dynamic that is now out there in the market. You can do things in one-tenth of the time that it took two years ago. There are a lot of use cases like that, and if you're not doing that, you should challenge yourself to play with it and learn to do it, because it's managing the AI.
1:11:03 - Alex Shevelenko
Well, brilliant bits of wisdom for the founders, for marketers. Jim, if people want to continue to tap your wisdom, where can they find you?
1:11:15 - Jim Yu
Yeah, follow me on LinkedIn. It's LinkedIn, https://www.linkedin.com/in/jimyu1/, and then also on Twitter, @jimyu.
1:11:25 - Alex Shevelenko
Perfect. Jim, so good to connect, so much fun, and huge congratulations on your success with BrightEdge. It's just super impressive to see how, from those humble beginnings you've built such a thoughtful and successful company and effectively led a category that's super critical for many of the largest organizations in the world. Congratulations and thanks for joining us!
1:11:53 - Jim Yu
Thanks so much, Alex, really appreciate it and really enjoyed it!