How Salesforce Solved The SEO Issue

27:39So the way that we started is we looked at our competitors who are ranking on keywords that we really cared about. Keywords specific to volume, particular strategic areas or business. And we just listed out those keywords and we started publishing content against those keywords. And we published that content at the right length. There's a lot of detailed thought that goes into how do you win that specific keyword. And we had a lot of success. One keyword or long tail keywords or both? Both. Okay. Both. We did kind of clusters. Yeah. And we said, you know, this is a cluster of keywords. So let's publish around all of these keywords so that we can ultimately win this very, very important keyword.

28:23And it worked incredibly well. And this was starting two years ago when you came into Salesforce, right? That's when you started doing this with Sales Cloud. Yes. Okay. Sales Cloud. And it's all of the content shows up as Sales Blazer. So if you go to salesblazer.com, that's where that content lives. It's all about how you, you know, how sellers can meet their career goals, can solve their business challenges. It's not necessarily about, you know, hey, here's the thing you need to go buy from Salesforce. So good. I think this is my thing that I'm harping on all the time to any marketers, like just do good thought leadership, do helpful content.

29:03Would you read this content? Or are you constantly just pushing, you know, your products and building content around your products all the time versus get outside of that and think, what is this person actually looking for online? Like, even though this is B2B, they're still a consumer and they're still looking for career tips and how to be, you know, how to make money, whatever it might be. So I love that. Yeah, you called that out. Yeah. And so you just start with the data, right? What do people want to know? They want to know what they're searching for, right? And so that's how they vote. And so we, I'm a little bit competitive.

29:35And so we say every search is a competition and we want to win them all. We only want to win the ones that have high enough volume in us in order for us to invest the time and money into that specific keyword. But we've been really, really successful at doing that. And we're now rolling out their service blazer. There's a lot of other kind of community things that bring both the content and the community together that we've launched across Salesforce. Agent Blazer is another another example so then when we started to see all this like LLMs and Google started to change how search worked right it was just last summer that you know the AI answers started coming in and they weren't even coming in for every question right now anything you query there's some sort of an AI answer at some varying level and so we panicked a little But because we're like, oh, my gosh, like all this work we've done, all of this money we've invested in all of this content, it's just going to go to the wayside.

30:43Wow, this is a really scary moment for marketers because we're so reliant. You know, digital and organic traffic is an incredibly important part of our pipeline number. And then what we realized is actually we're getting traffic from the LLMs and it's not super high volume. We started tracking this last July. But what we see is this hockey stick where the traffic coming in from LLMs is really, really high. It's growing incredibly quickly. And when they come in, they fill out a form 40 % of the time. 40%. Yeah. Yeah. That's incredible. What was that compared to before just for reference-ish? Paid media, probably about 15%.

31:32Yeah. It's pretty wild. So organic, probably more like 25%. So it's significantly above even our organic traffic coming in and filling out a form, which is like, okay, wow, that's like the light bulb. Right? We have to switch from this thinking that our websites are intended to capture early funnel traffic, which is what we've all been told for many, many years to, nope, you have to put the content on the website because all of that early funnel is going to happen in LLMs very, very soon. for your leaders and innovation. It's happening right now. For everyone else, it's very quick follow as Google has now deployed so much of the AI answers.

32:20That's fine because your website is still going to be the thing that captures them. It's still going to be the thing where they get specific information and maybe they won't be filling out forms. That's fine, but they will still go into chat. They'll talk to the agent. If you go to, I'll give you an example. of where we see customers really engaging well online with our agent is if you go to help.salesforce.com, it's incredible. Agent Force answers our service questions so incredibly well that I think it's like we just passed a million solved cases. Yep. I think we actually pulled, so we had on Bernard Slowey.

33:03He came on our other podcast, experts of experience that shout out sponsored by Salesforce. And he pulled that page up. Is that the one with the big search box that you just type in anything you want? Yeah. Yeah. So yeah, we had a whole episode talking quite a bit about that and how many cases you're solving and like the tickers going up at like every second. Yeah. Pretty impressive. And it just crossed a million. it's i mean it's so so so so impactful and so let the agents do the talking let the agents answer the questions um and then trust that if you put good thought leadership content out there the llms the you know all of the the normal search kind of capabilities will actually guide people to your website when it's the right time for them to come to the website yeah so i mean i'm sure every marketer's like, whoo-wee, okay, so everything we did, it's still good, especially if you have good traffic going to those pieces of content, you have good thought leadership.

34:02I mean, I always say, I think you need to have it in all forms, like written, audio, YouTube, like you should be showing up in a very omni-channel way so that these LLMs can find you in many places. What about when it comes to structuring it? Because that's been a big question is, okay, I have all my content there, but these pieces still aren't getting pulled by these LLMs and they're finding my competitors. article or a clip from YouTube that's, you know, just okay. So how do you guide your team on structuring the content so that it gets found? Yeah, I'll tell you, I am certainly not the expert at how to do the backend SEO work.

34:36I have incredible teammates that do that. But there's this guide actually that G2 just put out. And G2 is great at search. I talk about them all the time. It's like it's our second website, right? If you search for XYZ solution, XYZ product, XYZ software, you will get a G2 answer right after the brand, if not before. And so they have clearly figured this out. They're obviously ahead of the game in thinking about how they approach LLN search. They released a report. It's the 2025 buyer behavior report that just came out. Yep. We got it up. Pulled up on the screen. Oh, yeah. It's small right now.

35:24We've got to pull it up. Yeah. It's so great because it gives you the very specific details that as a CMO, I don't know to do, but that my web team knows to do. And so there's like three pages in there that I think you're just really, really valuable that everyone should kind of understand and just action immediately. Yeah, I love that. And for anyone who can't see the screen right now, we will link up this G2 report as well in the show notes because it looks very helpful. Yeah. Okay, so structuring it well, making great content. Is there anything else in this space that you are either experimenting with right now?

36:04Yeah, when it comes to content SEO, and making sure that you're found everywhere? The only other thing I would say we're really kind of learning and experimenting with is how our agent answers the questions that come into our marketing site. Right. So we have help.salesforce.com that gets answered with service answers. But how does it have what happens on our pages where we're trying to communicate and progress someone down the funnel? Right. And so we're experimenting right now and learning about how do we how to make sure the agent is doing the right thing, surfacing the right content that is still thought leadership, but also helping to continue to progress them.

36:46There's there's a lot to learn. And that's based. And it's I think it's going really well, but we're still experimenting there. Yeah. Okay. So for anyone who's thinking about building their first agent, are there any pitfalls where, you know, I mean, I'm imagining, okay, I'm trying to sell this, eventually this product. And instead, this agent got caught up in news and being a thought leader, and it never ended up having any conversion or like any stories like that of things to avoid or missteps that people might take early on. Yeah, I guess just lots of lots of testing. Right. Just test and test and test again.

37:23Try to trick it. And obviously, you know, at Salesforce, we sell these things. So we know how they work very well. You have to choose a trusted provider. Because it's, it's not something that I think I personally think people should be building on their own, because there's just too much risk to your brand. I think go with a trusted provider where you know you can put the right information out there and that you're going to have the right guardrails. It's incredibly important. Okay, so we were just talking about G2. And I'd love to hear your perspective on third-party sources. I mean, that was a big piece to SEO back in the day was these best of lists, the best CRM, the best this.

38:05And G2 giving, you know, here's what the customers are saying. how do you think about these third party sources or even thought leaders that are being the drivers of you know how you're possibly going to be found they're incredibly important right because you know it's these lms are using this all of this context and making decisions on which is valuable and not valuable we actually publish our own best of lists and that's something that has been it took a lot of approvals yeah to get your competitors on them i always yeah okay yeah we do okay um and And we try to be balanced in these things. We also come from a position where, if you look at Gartner as an example, we are a leader in every magic quadrant that we care about.

38:50So we do come from a strong leadership position. So that's a little bit maybe unique to Salesforce versus where we just have this wide breadth of skills where we really are the leaders. But G2, I talked about kind of how they come in. And they also, it's from social, it's from, you know, it's across a variety of areas continuing that third party validation is really important because it does feed the LLMs. But it's also like people are still going to go and look at the Gartner reports, right? They're going to look at G2. and G2 is still seeing that, I don't know if the traffic's going up or down overall, but they're still seeing the top Fortune 500 and also SMBs both visit the site.

39:38So I think it's do the same things we've been doing, but pay attention to when they're coming in from LLMs and how does it change their behavior. Yeah, I'm wondering if there's any metrics that you used to have in maybe your QBRs that now you're throwing out because of, I mean, this different buying behavior. I mean, I've seen a couple stats. I think it's like 80 % of the B2B buyer journey is already made up by the time they're talking to sales or by the time they've already done all their research. They've already looked at G2. They've looked at Gartner. They follow some influencers on LinkedIn.

40:11So it makes me question like what kind of metrics maybe are shifting within your org that you're like, we used to look at this one really strongly and now we don't and we look at these instead. I am so hyper focused on metrics. I don't think I've really given any of them. Okay, you're holding on all of them. But but it's because they tell you something about that kind of part of the journey. Like I think there's still I don't have I don't have any metrics that I've really truly walked away from. I will give you an example though, of how I change metrics across the maturity of the business. Yeah.

40:46So for example, sales cloud, When we first took on our SEO journey, I remember saying to our CEO, I'm going to publish 70 articles in this particular quarter. And he's like, great. That's a lot. 70. Yeah. One a day. More than one a day. Yeah. But that's what we're going to do. And sorry, less than one a day. Let me back up. So 70 articles in a particular quarter. that's a lot in a specific month. We actually ended up going way above that because we found a bunch of articles that were actually things that had been created and were able to optimize and get some early, easy kind of wins and increase that.

41:35So we very much in that phase of the business where we were not showing up in SEO the way we wanted to, we focused on volume of content. now i don't need more content i need that content to perform better so we're doing some of the things like adding in the the various types like adding in infographics and adding in more this richer type of content into some of those keywords so that they kind of move from position five we always want to be in position one two or three and so we're making those kind of optimizations But now on my service cloud side, that part of the business, which I just started working with a couple months ago, they don't yet own all the keywords we want to.

42:19So you need those 70 articles. We're pushing hard on publish, publish, publish. Keep quality, but publish. And we work with this really great agency that's helping us do this across both businesses. and I just talked to their CEO recently and said, okay, what are all the things that have worked on sales cloud? What's working or not working as we're doing this in service cloud? And so now we're applying those learnings across both teams and it's great, but you do have to measure and think about businesses differently based on where they are, their maturity in that specific part of the funnel. So I'm guessing the newer products that are within your purview, similar, like we just need to get content out there right now versus Sales Cloud is optimizing content that probably is getting a lot of clicks, but it's a little older.

43:16Yep. I had to think about it. Yep. And it's also, you know, we still publish probably, I think we're still publishing about 10 articles a month in sales cloud because there's still things that are important to talk to our audiences about right now. But on the service cloud side, we're doing 70. And on the marketing cloud side, we're doing a lot of publishing there. And then, of course, on commerce cloud as well. Mm-hmm. So cool. Is there any formats that you're betting on when it comes to content right now that maybe is newer than, of course, just written content and blogs? Is there anything you're experimenting with or you want to experiment with?

43:54I wish I had a more creative answer for this, but I just want to win an LLM and that's long-form content, like through and through. It's different types of long-form content, right? The best of list we talked about. um yeah i think it's just it's it's less about any other form until the until llms start recommending videos as you know a high a high quality piece of content i think we're just focused on long form right now yeah i did see a stat that youtube is being shown like 103 percent more than the previous year when it comes to showing clips of videos and using that as answers and because they're pulling all the transcripts to these videos now and then using it to surface that content in the LLMs.

44:43I love that. So don't sleep on video. Yeah, I love it. Subtle pitch for what we do. But yeah, video's coming in strong. I love that. I know that. That's great. I'll send you this thing we just, this wrote about it too. And I'd love to hear your thoughts on it. So, I mean, we've talked so much about AI now. And of course, a big focus is you have a lot of people under you, I'm sure. and getting them upskilled, comfortable. Like you said, the messaging is even different now where maybe a year ago, if you were using AI, I was like, no, no, you can't use ChatGPG. No, don't write that. It's like, you're cheating if you do that.

45:18You're not thinking. And now if you're not, it's like, why aren't you being more efficient and using these tools at your disposal? So how do you measure this within the teams that you work with to make sure that your team is comfortable with AI? Yeah. So Salesforce is so ahead of the curve on this. Every company does these employee engagement surveys. We actually ask, how comfortable are you using AI tools? And then we track it quarter over quarter and we see how is it trending? Hopefully it's getting much better. Obviously it's only going to go up, but it's an important measure and it's a reward, right?

45:59So leaders are like, wow, Amber, your team's really comfortable in AI. Good job. Same for any of the leaders. And that is exciting because it gives the team permission to use these tools. And we share it on social so they get accolades from their peers when they share interesting ways that they have solved this, their challenges. My product marketing team actually just got together and they all submitted things they were using across different parts of the funnel. And they hosted a webinar. They shared it out on channels. I mean, they're just really doing a lot of things that are supporting each other in this.

46:44One way that I encourage people to get their teams more comfortable is encourage and share how you're using it in your personal life. so I'll tell you a little story for me yes please I just got back I did two weeks in Japan with my family my husband my son and I went to Japan I planned the whole thing in Gemini personally and then I came back and I wrote a prompt that is about three pages long that I can now input into Gemini and it creates this itinerary that is so incredible it's better than any itinerary you've ever gotten from any travel agent. Like I feel so strongly about that. And now when I want to plan our next trip, all I have to do is change the details of the trip because it already has all my family's preferences built into the prompts.

47:36And so that's an example. And I've kind of shared that kind of verbally with my team of like, I'm using this in my day-to-day life. Like, how are you using it in your day-to-day life? Because when you use it in your day-to-day life, then the professional uses start to open up, right? You start to think about, oh, I could do this or wow, I hate doing this part of the process. Is there a way AI can help me do that? And just, I think having people showcase that work, get excited about it and reward it rather than it seeming like they're cheating or, or, you know, that, you know, AI is going to take jobs, right i think there is a huge fear around that and i think the people who especially marketers who are going to be really successful are the ones are like i'm going to use this to superpower myself versus worrying about you know is this going to take my job like no i'm going to make this my superpower yeah and that's what people who are coming in earlier in the the their careers that's what they're going to do, right?

48:43They're all going to be trained on generative capabilities in college, right? And so they're going to come out very skilled at being able to do this. And so we have to make sure that as we're further in our careers, we continue to learn. We continue to try to find new ways to do things we've done forever. I love the idea of like blending what you're doing in your personal life and bringing it into the office because to me, that is the world we're in now where, I mean, back in the day, you would go into the office and you would have access to a tool that you couldn't get on your personal laptop.

49:18And so you could only do it on that company laptop. And the worlds were very separate. And now it's like, you're using the same tools for work life, home life, and what a fun way to get your team trying things out with no risk by being like, look, here's a fun personal thing I did. And I think it says a lot about you as a leader doing that as well, because there are a lot of leaders I talked to who have not even played around with it. And it's like, well, no wonder your team is timid to use it because you're not showing them it's okay. You're not giving them a permission slip and showing how you yourself did it and played around and messed up and got wrong answers and got right answers and how, you know, so I love that you're showing up for your team like that and giving them that permission.

49:58Yeah, that's fun. And I am nothing if not like hyper efficient. And so I extra love it because it just makes me so much more efficient. Yeah, yeah, I love that. So when it comes to this comfort level with AI, I mean, do you have numbers of what you're looking at where, you know, it started out and only 1 % of people said they're comfortable? Or is it proving through task based work? Like you need to be able to do something to prove that you're comfortable with it in these surveys? Like, how do you actually measure? It's more of a, like, do you feel that you know how to use AI to better your work efforts?

50:34So it's kind of, it's almost a yes, no kind of a question. And yeah, people are trending very, very positively on it. If they say no, does it guide them to something to help? It doesn't right now. I do think, though, that we're looking at it, like, and I'm looking at it now across these businesses, and we have different levels of answers. all four of the major teams that I lead are all actually trending very, very positively. But some are trending more than others. And so we're leaning into the ones that are trending higher where those teams are sharing more. And having them do more of that sharing now on our cross-functional team so that everyone starts to see like, oh, yeah, I can try that.

51:18Yeah, it's great. Your guild coming back in strong. It is. I love it. Okay, this has been amazing. Now I want to future cast a bit and just hear what are you most excited about over these next 12 months? What are you working on? What big projects or what are you most excited about? So from a product perspective and the things that we get to talk to customers about, the next 12 to 18 months at Salesforce, we're going to be talking about things that we never imagined possible. And getting to tell incredible stories about products that do really incredible things, like that is exciting. that is so much fun to think about.

52:02Like, how are we going to help sellers be so much more efficient? How are we going to help them enjoy their jobs more? How are we going to help those businesses grow in ways that they couldn't have before? And there will be winners and losers in that, right? The companies that really embrace these technologies are going to be on the winning side. And we're going to get to tell all these great customer stories. On the service side, I think no one wants to call into a call center, right? People want to get answers to the things that they need. And when they call to a call center, they really want an answer that's very specialized to them.

52:39They want that high touch need. For all their basic answers, they just want the answer digitally. And so we're going to make all of this. And customers are now making this all very, very, very possible. and then on the marketing side right there's the end of the do not reply that we talked about right like that's as marketers that just warms my heart right that we can actually just have these conversations happening and send really qualified nurtured leads to our sellers with all the context so that when they do get to that you know that that very final stage of actually talking to someone, that conversation is really valuable for that person because it comes with all the context.

53:27It comes with all the nurturing information. And you can see across the whole company who's been engaged. And then I think the other thing we're focused on from a marketing perspective. So that's kind of what I'm thinking about from a business perspective. What are the challenges we're going to get to solve? And I'm so excited to get to tell those stories and to do it in ways that LLMs love, but also through these beautiful customer videos that you talked about previously. We just met yesterday to talk about what are the stories you really build for Dreamforce, that sort of thing. So I feel very honored to be able to get to be at Salesforce and be in marketing at Salesforce.

54:10From a team perspective, so we talked about kind of those six priorities. the one that I haven't really dug into yet but that I did a lot of at IBM and a lot of it live person is the account-based marketing yes and the guild hasn't started for that yet it's it's a murky complicated techie kind of thing that needs to happen agent force is going to make that so much more possible, especially with Data Cloud, because it kind of connects the data across all of these capabilities. So at Salesforce, we are customer zero, so we use all of our own capabilities. So we will be able to use our Salesforce capabilities to build out this account-based marketing approach and do it digitally, not just the kind of high-touch stuff that we've been doing so far.

55:04And the thing that I think is really exciting about that is, you know, previously, I've thought about it as you do account based marketing, because you want to be really efficient with your dollars, you want to spend it on the account that you really want to win, and you want to make those experiences better. Now, I actually kind of flip it the other way, where I want our customers to have really incredible experiences that are helpful to them. And the way that I can do that is by really focusing on what do these accounts need? How can I answer that across the breadth of this business? And then how do I arm the sellers to answer that?

55:54And then how do I make it easy? Like you think of like the champion inside of a company. How do I make it easy for that champion to be the champion? And I do that by using account-based marketing to influence the full buying team. And so kind of combining all of these things and account-based marketing is something that it's not the fastest process. And so when you kind of asked me about, you know, 12 to 18 months, my mind immediately goes to account based marketing because it's not a speedy process. But I do think it's one of the most meaningful things we'll do in marketing across our apps business in the next 12 to 18 months.

56:33Yeah, that'll definitely be it could be a whole episode of us talking about that, because that has also been a theme that's been coming up of how many buyers there are now on one deal. And it used to just be the CTO or the CMO. And now there's so many other decision makers who are involved that you have to get buy-in from. So I still think ABM, ABX is the future. And you have to have a longer-term thinker who's in charge of that program who knows you're not going to see anything for 6, 12 months maybe until that deal finally lands. It's true. A couple stats of how it worked at LivePerson. So at LivePerson, we saw 71 % increase in our new logo leads and actually 55 % increase in new logo wins.

57:21Like it really, really, really works. But it takes at least a year. Okay, it took a year there. Yeah. Wow. But you've got stats of success from a previous company. So you know it works. And I think people will follow you anywhere because of that. I'm convicted that it works. I'm 100 % convicted that account-based marketing works. You just have to have the patience to do it. I love that. Well, this was a masterclass in all things marketing, agents, AI, LLMs, SEO. So Amber, thank you for coming on Marketing Trends. This was such a fun conversation. Where can our listeners, our YouTube viewers, everyone find more about you and what you're up to?

57:58Yeah, well, welcome to connect with me on LinkedIn. I think that's a great place to connect. And then, of course, Salesforce is doing incredible things. our website is a great representation of that. And you can also just search for us in LLMs. See if I'm right. There you go. All right. Thank you, Amber. Awesome. Thank you so much.