How to Get Your Brand Mentioned in AI Search, with Ross Simmonds, Founder & CEO of Foundation Marketing | Ep. 441

24:56Ross Simmonds:don't most people have no idea taste taste comes from doing it a lot so that's yeah that's um I think that, but I always think about it as like a science experiment. Like you have to go into like your own channels or rented channels and test a hypothesis that you're trying to say. So like, cause a really, uh, a research report or, uh, a guide should be answering a question. You're trying to like, your audience is trying to like solve or trying to go deeper in. So if you haven't, if you're writing a report on a topic that hasn't been had, doesn't the hypothesis hasn't been proven that people care about it, then you're just, you're, you're, you're, you wasted all that time.

25:47Ross Simmonds:So that's why I always say like test the hypothesis and test like angles of it and then go to like craters and other people and surveys to prove or disprove if this hypothesis is true or not. And that's what scientists do with like, they don't just get money to like do something that is fake. They have to have some sort of traction for people to put money behind their scientific project. Exactly. That's what I love about social, because I think that with social, you're able to experiment at a lower risk and at a lower cost. So if you have an idea, if you have a belief, if you have a viewpoint or a perspective, you can go on X and Zeno to post.

26:34And if you get no retweets, maybe nobody cares. If you get a lot of retweets, you get a lot of shares, a lot of comments, a lot of replies, you've hit something. You've struck a chord of some sort. You could take an Instagram video, same thing. You can create a video, takes a few minutes to record a video, upload it. People respond. How did they engage? Maybe you do it on your story. Did you get any reactions? Same with on Reddit. You can go into a subreddit where your ICP is, put up a post. Doesn't take a lot of time. You can do it while you're walking, wherever, and see how people respond. If you get engagement, then it should be a signal for you.

27:08And if that signal is that people care, then maybe you can make this bigger. Maybe you can repurpose it. Maybe you can actually run an ad promoting it. Like look for signals that people care about a topic or a subject or an idea and then go deeper. It's the same thing as what this whole distribution angle for me came from. It was like 2010 and I tweeted out a post that was like create once, distribute forever. and it went viral. And I was like, huh, I'm onto something. I'm going to go deeper down this path of talking about distribution. So with marketers, I think it's important to look for signals of this could be successful and then go deeper there.

27:50Ross Simmonds:Yeah. And I think one thing is like, you don't, don't give up if one of your, your angles is wrong. Like you, like you probably like work that one liner over a couple of times to get to like that one liner that you knew was true but that people would understand in the simplest terms what to what to do um and that's where i think a lot of people mess up too is like you gotta refine the hook of like what you're trying to say in the simplest form that someone is going to um understand i mean i just think that people underestimate that if it works on one platform and you just know with another platform how to speak the language of another platform, it's going to work on another platform.

28:37Ross Simmonds:It's true. Yeah. Like I've taken viral posts from Twitter, moved it to LinkedIn, moved it to Instagram, but I just tweaked the format and how it works and it went viral. And that's, some would say that's taste, but I would just say that's just like taking something that worked and refining it. Yeah. Yeah, I don't know who said it. Great artists don't copy, they steal. It's like if something is working, then take inspiration from it, modify it, tweak it for the platform, for the audience, and then give it to the people. Because I know we started off with this, AEO, GEO, SEO, like talk track. I want to go into it a little deeper because I think there'd be some questions on like okay like attribution since it's like zero click or how do i find my search terms that i should go for now that they're on llms like i can't just google it so what is like your like the how of like reverse engine and engineering llms to get to where you want to for sure to find out what to do so the first starting point is to understand search intent so the same search intent philosophies that we had for Google matter with LLMs.

29:55So when people are looking for things, they typically have an intention. It's either an informational intent, navigational intent, commercial intent, or transactional intent. If it's informational, it means that they're looking for information and answers. For example, if I ask a platform, what is the best Disney movie of all time? I'm simply looking for information and I want the LLM to tell me that Mulan is the best Disney movie of all time. If I'm looking for a transaction, I might say, I want to buy a pair of Nike shoes, whatever it might be. That's a transactional query. Commercial might be, I'm trying to decide between Nike and Adidas.

30:34That's a more commercial intent where I'm deciding between two things. And then the final one is navigational, which is where I'm saying, I just want to go to Marketing Millennials website or find me the Marketing Millennials podcast and I want the internet to navigate me there. For most brands, a lot of the questions that fall into each of those buckets will have low value, meaning they're not actually worth that much to them because at the end of the day, that person isn't close to swiping a credit card or filling out a form to get a demo. So what you actually care about are the commercial and transactional queries that people would ask Google, but then you modify that to what they would ask in LLM.

31:18And those become what in the AI tracking world we're calling prompts. So you are tracking those different prompts on a regular basis. And depending on your tool of choice, there are a ton of them. You can use Profile, you can use Aerox, you can use HubSpot AEO, you can use Peak, you can use Scrunch. There's so many of these AI tracking tools. You upload all of your prompts and it's going to run an analysis every single day of those prompts against chat GPT, perplexity, Claude, more expensive, but they'll do it, Grok, all of these things. And it's going to give you an insight into what websites are being cited when those prompts are used.

31:57The reason why I love to focus on commercial and transactional is because it's closer to the dollar, but it's also the ones that are going to influence your buyers and help you determine and whether or not you are able to influence your buyers to choose you over a competitor. Now, once you are tracking all of that, you're gonna do pretty much everything that me and Daniel have already discussed today. You're gonna create the YouTube videos, you're gonna create the website pages, you're gonna do landing pages, blog posts, all of those things. But how do you know if you're moving the needle? There are three simple things that I think every marketer who is actually caring about AI visibility needs to focus on.

32:33One is once your prompts are being tracked, you're going to look at your share of voice in the model. So how often is your brand showing up for these queries versus competitors? And if you see that a competitor is ranking you in the share of voice, then you're going to do things to move them down and move you up. That is one metric. The second thing that I want you to do, and your CRO team might hate this, but on your website, what I would encourage people to do is actually have a form that says, after they fill out, after they book a demo, after they buy, ask the question, how did you hear about us?

33:12If your sales team facilitates the sales call, ask them on the call, how did you hear about us? And when they say ChatGPT, when they say club, when they say perplexity, keep it track inside of your CRM. And if you're a really good salesperson, maybe say, could you show me the prompt that you use to track that? And then maybe they'll even give you a glimpse into the prompt that they used and show you the entire conversation. That's next level. That's like Jedi stuff, but that's what you want to get to. Now, the third thing that you can track is referral traffic. So with the first two metrics, you're able to see share of voice.

33:45You're able to see actual conversions connected to LLM optimization. And then the third one is referral traffic. Do not expect the world from this, folks. Like people are not clicking a lot of the citations. They're getting their answers and then they're going to direct traffic, which I also believe you should be measuring as a part of your AI visibility efforts. Direct traffic means people might have heard of you from Google, etc. And then they just went directly to your site. But you want to track referral traffic. How often are you generating organic traffic or referral traffic, sorry, directly from these sources?

34:18Those are the three things that I would use to measure it. So let me recap it really quickly. Update, upload all of your prompts using search intent as the primary update efforts. You're going to make sure you're focused on commercial and transactional. You're going to do a whole bunch of things like reviews, YouTube, Reddit, blogs, website, landing pages, UGC, all of that stuff to increase your visibility. Then you're going to monitor it inside of the platform that you choose, keeping track of your share of voice versus competitors. You're going to track referral traffic from the various LLMs.

34:49And you're going to beg and plead for your team to allow you to ask your customers how they heard about you so you can source revenue and dollars directly back to LLM visibility. One thing I also want to ask you, because we talked about at the beginning how AI can do 10 jobs that a marketer couldn't do before.

35:12Ross Simmonds:We also talked about distribution. But I also am seeing that it's given the ability, but now there's a bunch of distribution slop out there. It isn't like, so how do you get above the distribution slop? And that's like, because I think you're still going to lose if you have distribution slop, because at the end of the day, you are marketing content. So like marketing needs to be better than the average to stand out. So how are you recommending the distribution using AI, but in a way that comes out as a good end product? Yeah. Yeah. If you give a bad marketer AI, you're going to get bad content.

35:58If you give a good marketer AI, you're going to get good content faster. If you give a great marketer AI, you'll get great content faster. I think AI is an accelerate for everyone. And depending on the marketer, you're either going to accelerate slop, you're going to accelerate goodness, greatness, or something magical that we've never seen before. The most important thing for every marketer who's going to embrace AI, which I recommend you do, is to ensure that you are setting it up so the AI is trained on your voice or that you don't even touch it until you actually find your own voice. I think cracking the code of understanding your voice, your brand's voice, and then uploading and creating an MD file or some type of memory within the LLM that picks up on the nuances of your tone, that picks up on the nuances of what an AI-ism is and ensures that you don't mention it.

36:52Those things are key. So like my biggest piece of advice to marketers is to upload a brand voice, upload brand guidelines, upload the things that you don't want an AI to say. So long M dashes, as much as I love them, maybe you upload into the memory of your LLM that you don't do that, right? When we built distribution.ai, because we recognize the rise of AI slot, we wanted to give our users full control over their ability to make sure it sounded like them. So you can upload your own style guide. You can upload your own voice guide. You can say, I never say in the ever evolving world of, we have removed all of the delves and all of the things, the syntax that an AI would sound like to make sure that it sounds a little bit more human.

37:37So the key is to make AI work for you and not to just outsource your taste, your thinking and your entire voice to an LLM.

37:48Ross Simmonds:I'll go a step further with that too. I because at the end of the day if you're trying to optimize for your whole team like if you have your own instance of Claude or your own instance it's hard to like make sure that everybody gets it so I like to create like even a notion page or something else and then continuously update it outside where people could pull from that so I'll be like uh if if it's doing too many m-dashes or is doing too many things that aren't me. I'll update the Notion file, update that file outside where everybody has access to. I love that. So people could write for, and this is for if you're writing as your CEO or someone else.

38:36Ross Simmonds:There's also another way if you're trying to do a brand voice, like your brand voice is supposed to be ever evolving. It's changing. It's not the same thing. And one doc is never going to be enough. So you need to add like, don't do the dull like say diving into it don't do have extra m dash it don't um we say this and not that we say that and not this into a place where it's shared because you don't want it to be in one person's memory it's like the same problem where like people didn't document before their like processes and then that person left the company and then you had to redo the whole thing so i think md files are great if you if people are really good at sharing the md file but if The problem with MD files is you got to keep sending the new one.

39:22Ross Simmonds:Otherwise, so that's my extra step, I would add, that I think I've done because I've seen the mistake of me doing an MD file and then people writing not in the brand versus the marketing millennials. Yeah, I love that. Keeping it reactively fresh and up to date with the current trends as well as your own voice and things that might be shifting. because even our opinions change on things, right? Like if you use the same memory from 2024 and I've shifted my perspective, then you might say things that I used to believe that I didn't. So I love that take. Good call. I want to ask you one last thing about like, I know distribution would be one answer, but besides distribution, what are like most companies that come to you lacking when you see them not finding success on search, on content, on AEOE, whatever acronym you want to name your search.

40:25Ross Simmonds:What are people coming to you that are like not, what's a common thread? The biggest issue with the way that most marketing teams have been built is that they are in these silos that don't allow them to work together to achieve the overarching goal of increasing their AI visibility and their source revenue from AI visibility because they are in different worlds. Like the PR team matters so much more for an AI visibility and SEO, GEO, AI SEO world than ever before. The social team matters more than ever before for this entire equation. The SEO team is sometimes separate from the website team. Both of those teams need to have a seat at the table.

41:13The brand team, the influencer team, all of these different teams, for some reason in a lot of these organizations, have never worked together. They've been given separate metrics. They've been given separate paths of what success looks like. And they are not being given a collective metric around we all need to work together to increase our AI visibility. I think this is a gift to CMOs. I think now CMOs should finally wake up to the fact that they should have never broken everything out into a silo and that the team itself should have always been focused on the overarching brand success in the eyes of the customer.

41:58and together we now have a clear metric in AI visibility to see whether or not our teams are working together because if you're not able to get your social team to be active or managing a subreddit or engaging in reddit then you're in trouble if you can't get your social team to work well with customer support who needs to possibly answer some of the negative feedback you're getting about your latest product launch you're going to have some problems if you don't have your PR team ready to distribute content that is related to awards that maybe your marketing team has spun up or that review sites are giving you and they can't quickly send out a press release and they are stuck in their own way of not being able to break the usual format for how they do PR and outreach, you're going to have a very hard time.

42:49Not to mention now with the rise of YouTube and you being able to influence both Google and LLMs with YouTube content, the team that used to own YouTube might now have additional eyes on them saying, why are our thumbnails so bad? Why do none of our titles actually make sense? And why do we keep using our own brand name at the beginning of each thumbnail? Why are we calling it webinar when no one types that in when they're looking for our content? These are the questions that your YouTube team are now going to have. Now, if that YouTube team sits under social, they might be wondering, well, we haven't even been promoting these videos on our YouTube, like on our social accounts.

43:32Content teams might say we haven't even been embedding these YouTube videos on blog posts or landing pages. And the SEO team might say we haven't optimized any of these for search, whether it's the title, the description, the thumbnails, etc. So the biggest problem that we see at Foundation on a regular basis is companies coming in. They're like, we want to increase our visibility in AI, but they have teams that are so fragmented that we then need to do education to help all of the teams come together to work together and then achieve certain outcomes as a unit instead of in isolated silos. And to me, it's a beautiful thing.

44:13That's how we should have been doing it from the beginning.

44:15Ross Simmonds:Yeah, I've always had the hill that I would die on that as a marketer, like you should be a T-shaped marketer and understand that your role in SEO and your role in social, how it impacts the whole marketing. Actually, the whole of business, to be honest. True. Let's just do the whole of marketing in general. So if you were in social and know that AEO is imported to social, then you would know to achieve my goal as a social person. I need to go work with those other teams. And I understand maybe the high level of how AEO works. You don't have to go learn the whole craft and be an expert. but you should know that how aeo impacts social how search impacts social how sub paid social impacts your organic social how the managing team is going to do it how whatever your whole org you should know with how it's impacting your role so you could do your role better and i think the opposite is true too which you said is like all marketing teams should set a goal yeah that navigate is not silo based.

45:29Ross Simmonds:It's team based. It's like the opposite of what I'm saying, which is like team. And then everybody will become, work their way to T-Shade marketers because if it is a whole company goal, you have to understand those roles to do your job better. Exactly. Yeah, like you're seeing shorts, you're seeing TikToks, you're seeing Instagram reels show up in the SERP, show up in citations on LLMs. it's the best time for someone who's even in social to be thinking about other metrics and stop thinking exclusively about around impressions, likes, engagement rates. Those things matter. Don't get me wrong. But you also now are making yourself more valuable because you're impacting other areas of the business.

46:13So I say it's the best time to be a marketer. We all have a role to play now.

46:17Ross Simmonds:Lastly, I mean, I just had my hill to die on. What would be your hill to die on as a marketer? Ooh, my hill to die on is that every year, probably by Q4, most brands have created enough content. And what they really should do at that point is probably just replay the greatest hits and stop being on the hamster wheel of create, create, create. And they should probably tap into something that they produced that had a signal of it being a banger, but they got stuck on that hamster wheel and they kept going and doing the same thing instead of reusing that. That would be one of the hills that I would die on for sure.

46:54And I think the last one, which is far out thinking, but I think autonomous vehicles are going to fundamentally change the way that all of us do marketing and no one has caught on to it yet, but marketing inside of vehicles when nobody is driving is going to change the world.

47:09Ross Simmonds:I love that take. Cause that's, that's like a future, it's like your Reddit take and 10 years from now, we're going to be in the podcast and talk about that why have people marketed in autonomous vehicles? I think, but you're already seeing it kind of like whatever's on the screen, even as apps, like if Spotify is on it versus Pandora or someone, like whatever apps on there is like a download for an app that you might have on your phone. But I want to go back to that hill you would die on, like the hill you die on, like remixing greatest hits. I think fundamentally it gets hard for marketers when people are telling them that your goal is to create 30 pieces of content because it's going to help AEO, EEO, GEO and stuff.

47:57Ross Simmonds:Where you could create 30 pieces of content based on a content that you already created that knows will work, you're thinking about like creating a bunch of new 30 pieces of content. And I think that's where people get screwed as marketers. Like we have these like audacious goal to produce a lot of pieces of content, but like we could just be remixing greatest hits, greatest hits till they die. Just like people have said forever, like don't turn off an ad if it's still working. You don't turn off a piece of content. You haven't turned off your create one distribute forever because it's still working and it still matters.

48:38Ross Simmonds:I think it's getting hotter now. It's hotter now than it ever is. Yeah, I think that's exactly it. Like I would even argue last year, some people created some great pieces of content that drove revenue, sales, pipeline, leads that they could run again and they would see success. But everyone has short term memories. And I think here's the other piece, because as a marketer, we are obsessed with the brands that we work with. We are obsessed with the brands that we serve, that we're in, etc. If we are in-host. and you see it every day. And you might assume that everyone knows that this thing went live, but nobody knows.

49:16Everyone has so many other problems and challenges. They are completely distracted. So promote the thing that you created. Promote your business. No one knows that you just launched. No one knows that you just got a new job. Very few people know. So promote yourself, promote your content and get over the fear of being judged by other people for being too promotional, all of that stuff.

49:38Ross Simmonds:I like, I'll end on that. I think you, you have to, in life as a marketer, like you have to be your own hype person, whether it's internally online, like you think your, your boss is going to be your best hype person. You think your coworkers, but no, like at the end of the day there, everybody has a selfish tendency. even if you're like the best person we're wired as humans to be for ourselves a little bit because that's survival so yeah lastly where can people find what you're doing I know you have five different things you're doing at once where can they find all of that I mean if they're listening to this they should check out the Ross Simmons show which is my podcast they should definitely subscribe check out some of my recent episodes if they're finding this on video then check me out on YouTube and if you're on any of the platforms just give me a search Ross Simmons and then give me an ad.

50:32If it's on LinkedIn, be sure to let me know in the notes that the marketing millennials and Daniel sent you so I can accept your connection request. But yeah, folks can find me all over the internet. But before we wrap, I do want to say thank you, Daniel, for having me back on. Always a blast chatting with you. I love the content that you've put out for the last few years to the market, to the community, for the industry at large, and helping marketing marketers, marketing professionals at large just get better at their craft so keep doing what you're doing i hope to see it last for another 10 to 15 years

51:02Ross Simmonds:i hope i hope we're both still rock because i've been watching you for the last five to 10 years online and you've been crushing it so it's like lasting long is the hardest part of creating content which is true um so well thank you so much for coming on i appreciate you anytime thanks so much for listening keep tuning in to hear more great insights from the coolest marketers from around the world if you haven't ready make sure to subscribe and follow the marketing millennials podcast on apple podcasts spotify youtube or wherever you get your podcasts and if you like what you hear i would greatly appreciate you giving us a five-star rating it helps bring more marketers into our community I zeint.稀网洞.

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