In this episode of Consulting Spotlight, host Michael Bernzweig interviews Steven Schneider, founder of Trio SEO. They discuss Steven's journey into SEO, the importance of quality content, unique strategies for B2B SEO, and the evolving landscape of digital marketing. The conversation highlights the significance of understanding search intent, the role of AI in content creation, and the need for long-term planning in SEO strategies. They also explore emerging channels in B2B marketing and the future of monetizing AI in search.
In this episode of Consulting Spotlight, host Michael Bernzweig of Software Oasis interviews Steven Schneider, founder of Trio SEO. They discuss Steven's journey into SEO, the importance of quality content, unique strategies for B2B SEO, and the evolving landscape of digital marketing. The conversation highlights the significance of understanding search intent, the role of AI in content creation, and the need for long-term planning in SEO strategies. They also explore emerging channels in B2B marketing and the future of monetizing AI in search.
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Michael Bernzweig (00:00.457)
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I'd like to welcome everyone to this week's edition of the Consulting Spotlight. I'm your host, Michael Bernzweig, founder of Software Oasis. And this week we're being joined by Steven Schneider. He is the founder of Trio SEO. And with that, Steven, welcome to the Consulting Spotlight.
Steven Schneider (00:22.318)
Hi, thanks for having me, Michael. I'm excited to be here.
Michael Bernzweig (00:24.741)
Yeah, no, we're excited to have you aboard and we did take some questions from the audience, but I'll be honest with you. Really, I think for anyone that's on the episode, and we'll try to sprinkle a few in so they don't have my head, but one question that I like to ask for anybody that may not be familiar with either yourself or Trio SEO, can you?
share your backstory, kind of getting to where you are and everything that's going on over there at Trio.
Steven Schneider (00:55.906)
Yeah, of course. I've been long time fan of SEO. I accidentally fell into it long ago in college when my friend, mentor kind of showed me the ropes of old school affiliate marketing through Amazon and building niche micro sites. And long story short, we kickstarted our first company in college, scaled that up to a portfolio of about 40 different brands published three to 400 articles per month and scale that to seven figures.
After kind of learning the ropes of the content creation game, I left that company, took some time off and just kind of randomly fell into LinkedIn or what we now know as new LinkedIn and the content creation process there. met Connor Gillivan, Nathan Hirsch, my two partners now at Trio SEO, just through small talk and networking on LinkedIn. And they had just came out of an exit through free up and were SEO kind of experts of their own field.
And so we found that there was a lot of overlap between our journeys up to that point. And so we, as entrepreneurs felt like it was a great idea to join forces and kickstart a B2B SEO agency that helps CMOs and founders scale their SEO through inbound and organic content and leverage a lot of the same strategies that worked successfully for our own companies over the years. And except now we get to help others do the same. So was really fun to
come in and kind of put on a fractional SEO hat and tinker with people's companies and businesses and really help bring SEO to life for them.
Michael Bernzweig (02:28.966)
No, and that's exciting and that is our audience. have a lot of people who are running different organizations in the B2B space, whether they're consulting organizations or B2B SaaS, you know, in the mid to enterprise level space that are looking to bring on new clients. I think that's the ultimate goal for everyone. So at the end of the day, it sounds like you're working towards the same end goal. So just to give everyone a little perspective,
So what year is that that you kind of transitioned from college into the workaday world and it doesn't sound like it was a smooth transition. It sounds like you had really even while you were in college started with the whole SEO thing.
Steven Schneider (03:14.446)
Yeah, so that was right around 2016, 2017 era. And yeah, I was on the finance MBA fast track. That was kind of my path. I was just going to go to corporate and sell my soul for the next 40 years and look back. But yeah, I kind of quickly did whatever I had to do in order to avoid getting a real job, quote unquote, out of the gate. And then the 2020 slash 2021.
Michael Bernzweig (03:27.73)
Sure.
Michael Bernzweig (03:40.648)
you
Steven Schneider (03:41.039)
Google algorithm updates, COVID, it was the perfect storm with Amazon also cutting commission tiers. That kind of switched gears for that first company and really kind of made me rethink risk levels and what I was doing long-term. So I kind of took some time off, know, reevaluated, tried to go into a normal work setting. Entrepreneurship is definitely the only path for me. And so we started the company for Trio SEO around 2022. 2023 is kind of when we started.
Michael Bernzweig (03:47.08)
Sure.
Steven Schneider (04:11.242)
examining what the realism of that looked like. And then we started taking beta clients around that time. So going on two years and it's been a wild ride looking back over the kind of lifeline of that journey.
Michael Bernzweig (04:21.806)
Yeah, entrepreneurship is nothing other than a wild ride. And I think a lot of a lot of individuals, you're either cut out for it or not. And if you're looking for stability, don't or or a straight line from point A to point B, it's not not entrepreneurship. But for the rest, it definitely can be an interesting path. So that's a lot of content in the early days. You said several hundred articles a month, huh? More.
Steven Schneider (04:49.974)
Yeah, yeah, we, was a, an army nonstop.
Michael Bernzweig (04:53.672)
Was it a more is better at that time or is that what you were finding like once you got the formula locked in and all of that or
Steven Schneider (05:00.686)
Yeah, essentially it was a numbers game. think back then, like the crazy thing is that we built all of those sites and all that revenue with zero backlinks. So it was purely just high quality SEO on page content. And yeah, sure. Some sites didn't work out, but it was a very big numbers game. had a whole acquisition system for reaching out to, you know, old sites and saying, Hey, it's just kind of similar. How you get a postcard in the mail. People want to buy your house.
Michael Bernzweig (05:28.2)
Thanks
Steven Schneider (05:29.41)
We would do the same thing with websites. but yeah, no, were publishing 10 to 20 articles per month across various sites. So yeah, it's stacked up at scale.
Michael Bernzweig (05:40.827)
And you know, it's so interesting. I look back to some of the SEO and what we were doing in the early years and a lot of it, a lot of the strategies that worked years ago still work today. But obviously at the end of the day, there's a lot of, there's just a massive volume of new content being generated.
daily, you know, and a lot of this is due to AI, but in the early days, so I launched software Oasis back in 98. So I've got a couple of years on you, but in the early, early years, what we did to get relevant content out there that didn't exist anywhere else on the internet was very unique. We actually had a whole network of college professors all around the world that were,
writing articles for us and writing in academia, way different than writing in any other space. In fact, most of them didn't use the internet and they researched on microfiche and all kinds of other sources that you're not gonna find anywhere with AI or any other tools. So I think, it's just finding what you can do that's different.
Steven Schneider (06:33.123)
Love that.
Steven Schneider (06:56.384)
Yeah, it's funny. It's so funny to say that. Yeah. I was just thinking back. What reminded me is that when we were in college, we had this epiphany one day where we were trying to scale content. Cause it was still, you know, we had maybe one writer or two and we had to use up work and try and find a writer that was high quality, but also still within a college entrepreneurship budget was hard to do. And,
Michael Bernzweig (07:18.994)
budget.
Steven Schneider (07:21.398)
I had this kind of realization. was like, well, why don't we just ask, we can put a job posting on the college job platform and college kids are good at writing. have to write papers all day. So let's just get college kids to write affiliate articles for us. And anything at that pay rate is gold because you know, when you're college, you're broke. So it's like great writers, affordable costs. Yeah. And it worked really well.
Michael Bernzweig (07:33.18)
Yeah, here you go.
Michael Bernzweig (07:43.814)
Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And that worked, yeah.
Steven Schneider (07:49.686)
We got shut down, unfortunately, for that, but it was great. I it worked well for while it did.
Michael Bernzweig (07:52.626)
Thank
Michael Bernzweig (07:56.507)
I love it. love it. Well, you know, and that's a big part of it. And I think for anybody listening to this podcast at the end of the day, you know, if everybody's going left, you need to go right because doing the same thing that the rest of the crowd is doing, you're just going to end up at the same place. And it's just a matter of finding the tactics that, that work and are repeatable. And at the end of the day, if it's SEO and traffic that you're looking for, figuring out what drives traffic and then just doing more of it, you know, it doesn't, you know, even
small wins if you find something that's moving the needle just a little bit and you can replicate it that that's huge so so in and we always like to leave the audience with some actionable strategies and things like that so it sounds like the focus of
of Trio SEO is in the B2B space. And, you know, it also sounds like you've had experiences in other spaces as well. So are there tactics in the B2B space that are unique that may not work in other industries, but what you've seen great success with for driving relevant traffic within an ICP?
Steven Schneider (09:11.33)
Yeah, I think some of the more secret quote unquote strategies that I always like to tap into are digital assets and tools. And I think that things like quizzes and calculators, especially calculators, I think that they have immense value. so for example, like we have a client, a trio SEO that is in the and a space. And so they, you know, have a valuation calculator. And when they came to us, they said, Hey, we have this great calculator.
It works extremely well. It's probably one of the best in the industry. If you can just bring us as much traffic as possible to this thing, we'll do the rest, but we can handle the rest of the job. So leveraging a tool like that, that can keep your ICP engaged and offer incredible value. And then at the end of day, just trading their email in exchange for a report or an email PDF or some sort of summary, desired output. That's a very valuable system and I'm kind of a machine if you do it correctly, because
You funnel in all this high intent traffic. People get to use the tool to get their problems solved. And then from there on out, they're built into the ecosystem of the brand. And so I think that the more ways you can figure out how to deliver value and keep them in touch with your sales and marketing team from there on out, you'll, it'll just pay dividends on the road. It works so well.
Michael Bernzweig (10:27.048)
love it and it's, it's neat to hear from someone that's been in the trenches and has done so much of this, uh, you know, and some of it is just a grind, you know, some of it's just effort and a lot of work, but, um, you know, one of the things that I think a lot of, um, a lot of SaaS founders are faked out by at the end of the day, you know, a lot of founders feel like their code, their design, their solution is their moat. I think.
at the end of the day, we see a lot of no code and low code tools getting quite a lot better, especially in the last several months. mean, at the end of the day, you have tools like Replet and all kinds of other tools like that that are even perplexity. mean, if you're using perplexity and they've got coding built right into it, which is what a lot of these tools are using on the backend, a lot of these tools
are at the end of the day making it very possible to put out small tools like that without any coding knowledge and to be able to put out some lead magnets that add a lot of functionality as a founder and then to use those to drive traffic is a big hack. mean, that's crazy good, but.
You know, I think that that's really interesting. So calculators you've seen different clients very successful with, quizzes you've seen clients successful with. Are there some things that a lot of companies are trying that, know, darn it just doesn't work that.
Steven Schneider (12:12.684)
Yeah, I think the biggest thing has to be AI content. And I think AI content has a place in the strategy. If you have an editorial team vet everything and add value on top of that. But when you're just creating content for the masses and trying to check the box, because somebody on your marketing team or content team said, Hey, we more blogs. That's where things start to get slippery. So there should always be a focus on quality versus quantity. And so.
Being how easy it is to create content nowadays, it can start to become dangerous if you merely just create it for the sake of creating it. And I think that people who come to the site and even Google crawlers will identify good versus bad. And at the end of the day, you're going to be putting a lot of work and resources and time and energy into this thing that doesn't actually produce any value. And that's a really hard pill to swallow when
You spend time on it and you look back a couple of months later and you're saying, well, where's the ROI on this? And because you tried to cut corners, there is no ROI. And so I think that taking a more controlled methodical approach is actually what allows people to reap the upside longer. and I think that your competitors will jump on top of you and keep running the race. If you're one of the people that try to kind of go down the other path.
Michael Bernzweig (13:34.503)
Yeah, and I think that's a very interesting point that you make there because a lot of organizations fall into that trap of more is better with content and sometimes it's quality over quantity. And I think at the end of the day, and this is something, if you look at it from the perspective of the traditional search engines, Bing, Yahoo, Google, the rest of them.
you know, every single year, you know, for the next several years, their traffic is actually going down. And the reality of it is with their traffic going down, they need to figure out how they can grab a portion of this new market share in a very fragmented market that, is just emerging. mean, you have a lot of players and AI, have Grok and Gemini and perplexity and
you name it, DeepSea, there's so many players in this market. And other than chat GPT, no one has really emerged at the forefront of the pack. And I think that's gotta be very scary for a lot of traditional players. So, you know, from their perspective, you know, they're not stupid at the end of the day, if it's something that's out there that can be synthesized by AI.
They can do it. So you're not getting anything over on any of the traditional search engines. But I think the important thing is figuring out, and maybe this is a question for any content that you put out, how is it that I can add value to the internet? What unique voice can I add to this piece that's gonna expand the internet and give these traditional search engines something worthy of indexing and ranking?
Steven Schneider (14:57.9)
Yeah, 100%.
Steven Schneider (15:24.718)
Yeah. I think, I think there's a lot of really easy, quick wins that people can implement such as talking to SMEs within their inner circle or stakeholders that are important to the process and getting, know, if they have an article on, um, you know, the, best, um, CRM platforms of 2025, you know, talk to the people who are actually using those and living in them and figure out why do some of them suck.
Like what is the actual truth behind the matter instead of just trying to make this. Perfect piece of content. And so I think that there's a lot to be said around offering a contrarian view in content and having it sourced by people who actually know what they're talking about will go a long way. And then obviously adding in those tools that we talked about or making it one step further to bring in the video content or mixing in some alternatives from LinkedIn or YouTube. So.
I think it just kind of looks at how is that content currently stacked up against competitors and where the gaps lie that allow you to get that edge on it when you think about it.
Michael Bernzweig (16:32.328)
that makes a ton of sense. And I think, you know, we're obviously speaking to the same audience of B2B SaaS and consulting organizations who are trying to figure out that same thing. How do we bring aboard new clients? One thing I will throw out is a special for anybody that's listening to the podcast today. Coming up July 10th, we actually have our virtual tech conference and summit, which is for specific
B2B SaaS and consulting companies looking to form strategic partnerships. For anybody that goes to the site today, you will see a giant orange button at the top of the site where you can claim a free pass to get into the summit. So that's always a lot of fun. But I think a lot of organizations that are trying to figure out the whole SEO game in the year 2025,
I think a lot of organizations are shaking their head. There's been a lot of changes over these last couple of months that are really pushed to the front by the fact that...
know, traditional search engines are trying to figure it out. All of these new AI search engines are trying to grab market share and it's just a major disruption in search. So now what are you seeing on your end with clients? Are they struggling with these same types of issues?
Steven Schneider (18:03.982)
I think across the board SEO is seeing a inverse relationship between clicks and impressions due to generative search and how Google is showing more search results. It's very easy for people to get the generative search answer and feel like that is enough. And then they leave. But from what we've seen, it really ties back to the relationship between intent. So top of funnel content will inherently drive more impressions than clicks because the answer is right there in front of them. But
If you have a service related keyword or things and keywords that are looking for exact, you know, transactional services, all that sort of stuff, commercial based intent. That's not going to get solved via generative AI search. So people are going to want to click through, read about your team, read about the case studies, the expertise you bring to the table, all the social trust, et cetera, et cetera. And so I think we're going to see a change or what I'd like to call maybe an evolution.
in how searches adapted, but we're starting to see clients even rank in chat GPT and appear for a lot of the chat GPT were based search just based on following the same basic principles from SEO. It's high quality content, good site architecture, you know, all the technical SEO components and authoritative domain ratings. so I think if you follow those, there's no reason to reinvent the wheel. You can actually really benefit from AI.
Michael Bernzweig (19:30.532)
I just want to pull on a little thread there. You mentioned search intent and that's a massive concept that, you know, I want to make sure we define for a lot of individuals who might be listening to this episode. Years ago, know, organizations would say, hey, a visit's a visit, a click is a click, but can you kind of go over what are the different kinds of search intent from searches?
Steven Schneider (19:59.939)
Yeah. So we, we basically think about it the same as any old traditional marketing funnel, top of funnel, mid funnel, bottom of the funnel. So if you think about the customer or your ICP in terms of where they are in that journey, the final destination in an ideal world would be them giving you money, like as simple as it gets. So if that is considered bottom of the funnel, those keywords are going to be something like B2B SEO services or
Michael Bernzweig (20:18.321)
Yeah.
Steven Schneider (20:27.594)
SAS SEO agencies. So people who are searching these in are very heavily focused on trying to find a problem to, or solution to their problem. However, if they're working up the funnel, middle and top, then they're more in the discovery or informational stages, trying to work toward that solution. So maybe they're what are SAS SEO best practices. Maybe they're trying to do it themselves before hiring an expert.
maybe they're very far removed and they're looking at what is SEO, like what are the benefits of SEO? So based on where they are in their own journey of self-discovery is where we take a look at how each keyword in an SEO strategy maps to a specific intent and what is the, the desired content that they expect to see. So same thing is that if someone's looking for services, they're not going to want to land on a blog.
And if someone's looking for an informational guide, they shouldn't expect to land on a sales copy focused page. So it's a, you're trying to just play customer psychology, which is all marketers do at the end of the day and guessing their next step before they know it.
Michael Bernzweig (21:36.753)
Yeah, and don't know if it was A. Raffs or Maz or one of the other, you know.
tools that first came up with the whole concept of search intent, but clearly you start with informational intent and work your way all the way towards transactional intent, which is the ultimate goal, but navigational intent and commercial intent is absolutely a part of the whole mix and all important. It's all relevant to getting to the end goal of signing new clients and transacting business.
That's really...
Steven Schneider (22:13.688)
Yeah, it's a, it makes quite the difference. We, we always try and ensure that our strategy is just kind of based on our own experience in entrepreneurship are so bottom of the focus, bottom of the funnel focused, very high intent focused because it's very easy for marketers to tackle top of the funnel content and then wonder why it doesn't produce any leads. So it's a huge disconnect.
Michael Bernzweig (22:36.552)
Yeah, and you know, think another whole component of all of us is, you know, your marketing funnel. You know, at the end of the day, you could bring in all kinds of people, but if it's not converting at the end of the day, you know, a big part of it is, you know, your landing pages. Another component of it is everything that happens along the way. And I think figuring out your buyer, you know, how is it that they actually purchase and consume services within the
segment of the market that you're in. I was looking at a recent study by Hootsuite. Hootsuite has been in the social media space for years. For many years they ran a very traditional SaaS playbook and grew consistently, but over the last couple of years stopped growing.
And I think they were trying to figure out why is it that we stopped growing and at the end of the day, the consumer has changed. know, the way they buy their type of services is what changed. And once they tweak their funnel.
They literally went from a couple hundred million in revenue recurring every year to about 400 million in the last year or two. So neither one was anything too shabby to shake your head at, but figuring out how to get from one to the other is in very short order is really understanding your clients. And I think that's a big part of all of it. So now when you're...
Steven Schneider (23:55.234)
Wow. Amazing.
Steven Schneider (24:08.162)
Absolutely.
Michael Bernzweig (24:14.024)
First working with a new organization, what does that journey look like? How do you get started? Is it more of an advisory role, trying to map out a whole plan? Or what does your journey look like with a new client?
Steven Schneider (24:30.082)
Yeah. So from the time someone decides to work with us, say signing, et cetera, they takes us about two weeks ish to map out the strategy. taking a look at their brand, their competitors, gap analysis, keyword strategy. we build their brand brief so that our writers can start to kind of understand who are their ideal customers. what's the messaging like, what's the tone, CTA structures, et cetera. mean, there's a whole playbook that we pretty much have mapped out at this point.
So we really kind of use the, the first three ish weeks to map that out. And once we kind of have a roadmap in place, we work in 90 day sprints. So there's always going to be a 90 day plan at the end of the 90 days, we reassess the next 90 days sprint. So being able to kind of think in those cycles has allowed us to really stay agile, but also go after quick wins and really kind of have some compounding results. And then from there on out, once the strategy is in place,
We write the content, start slow, get the teams comfortable with each other. and once we kind of have a good, comfortable footing in place, we ramp it up from there. And then it's a very autopilot process. We, we write the articles, human written, human edited. We upload the content, optimize it on site. We publish it for them internally link, make sure everything's indexed and optimized. And we send weekly reports out every Wednesday morning for the client to stay in the loop on progress updates, analytics, et cetera.
And it's pretty much our way to take that off their plate and know that this is what we're doing. Very transparent. You can do what you do best. We'll do what we do best. And then we meet in the middle every 90 days.
Michael Bernzweig (26:09.794)
Awesome. Now, I think that that's another big question. think a lot of organizations, you know, may have a very, you know, sprint like idea of how SEO works, but it is a marathon for sure. How do you, when you first engage with a new client, prepare them for the amount of time and effort that it requires to be done effectively?
Steven Schneider (26:36.44)
Yeah, it's, it's a real honest conversation at the end of the day. you know, we, people are kind of self-aware nowadays that SEO is a game of delayed gratification. That's fine. Others come to us and especially startups are always a little more antsy because they have, you know, Obligations and VCs, you know, appear down their neck and they have results they have to deliver on. so for that reason, we typically try to just let them know, Hey, it's just not a good fit. Like your money is.
Way better spent on PPC than SEO. If you have to deliver 90 leads in the next hundred days or something like that. And I think having somebody, a client, especially that has that long-term vision and has already in place a short-term marketing strategy and can be fine with a setting up an established long-term marketing strategy. Those are kind of how we think about it. So we let them know, you know, some sites are.
much more primed for success than others. If we look at a site and maybe it was started yesterday, we're just are honest with them like, Hey, this is going to take at least a year to even see some traction. Like, you willing to endure that pain for better or worse words, or are you willing to, you know, and kind of see what it would be like if you came back to us in six months and did some work yourself. So I think that it's, you just have to kind of be realistic with the outcome. Like we are never going to just take someone's money in order to increase our P and L like.
Michael Bernzweig (27:53.084)
Yeah.
Steven Schneider (28:00.974)
We are business owners first and foremost. We know how that works. We know what it's like to be in their shoes. And so we wouldn't want anybody to take our money for six months and be like, whoops, sorry. Like it really sucks. Like that's just not how we do business.
Michael Bernzweig (28:12.614)
Yeah, and know, and that's what it's all about the ethics of doing business. But at the end of the day, mean, it's time or money. mean, really, the reality of it is, you know, organizations either need to have time to, you know, grow organically, which we've done over 27 years, I'll be honest with you. Or, you know, the money to, to run other kinds of strategies to get to where you want to get to.
Steven Schneider (28:22.168)
Exactly.
Michael Bernzweig (28:42.748)
even this, podcast, mean, we're several hundred episodes in, you know, here we are. We're at the point where we're receiving close to 80,000 downloads a month, but that didn't happen overnight, you know? So all of these things are just a matter of consistent effort and, you know, focusing on the end goal where you want to get to and, figuring out how to get there. So that's.
Steven Schneider (29:07.148)
Yeah. And I think the important thing I always like to communicate with clients or people who are about to kind of go down that path is that SEO is like investing in a retirement account or a 401k account. It's like, it's a very delayed game with compounding results where PPC might be a better play for you because that's going to be an instant return. So I think that the more kind of self-awareness and communication we can just introduce into the SEO community, it just kind of helps bring it more alive than make it this.
a black magic strategy that people are still little uncertain about.
Michael Bernzweig (29:41.629)
Yeah, so two topics I haven't heard anyone talking about related to AI that I wanted to get your take on. So one is this, you know, all of these different players are, you know, working in a very fragmented market, not really a clear direction on who's going to emerge as the leader.
But obviously everyone has their own favorites. at the end of the day, AI is heavily subsidized, you know, in terms of the cost of producing search results with AI. you know, should things not change, I think everyone's going to have a rude awakening one day when they wake up and get the real AI builds without all that subsidy in there. But for a lot of these organizations,
What do you see as the ultimate
revenue source. mean, if you look at an organization like Perplexity, they have some amazing results. And I know they've started to figure out, we incorporate advertising and still, you know, deliver the value to our consumers that they're looking for, which at the end of the day is just the best quality of results or not really, you know, is there a way to monetize AI search?
Steven Schneider (30:59.33)
Yeah, I think it'll definitely be a PPC paid advertising game. think that it's probably going be very similar to like the Facebook story where you just get so big that you're not going to turn people off to anybody who already has a switching costs that they have to incur by leaving and going elsewhere. think that you just flip the switch at some point, you turn on ads and you instantly can generate a ton of revenue. The other thing that comes to mind would be the affiliate play.
Michael Bernzweig (31:22.972)
Yeah.
Michael Bernzweig (31:28.04)
Yeah.
Steven Schneider (31:28.154)
And anybody who can get results from shopping immediately gets directed to Amazon and that's a commission right there. So I think that there'll be unique ways to monetize AI, no doubt.
Michael Bernzweig (31:40.336)
Although as you saw when you first started in the journey right after the pandemic, Amazon is somewhat of a monopoly at this point and they don't have to give out the same kind of revenue share to affiliates anymore. So a lot.
Steven Schneider (31:52.695)
the
Yeah, but I think Amazon is also incentivized to play ball to some degree, because if they have that much traffic, them being AI or chat to PT, I think that team Amazon would be a little ridiculous not to say yes to even a 3 % affiliate play on hundreds of millions of uses.
Michael Bernzweig (32:16.046)
I don't disagree with you at all. So shifting gears a little bit, obviously, you know, traditional search, AI search, all of these things are relevant, but what other channels in the B2B space do you feel like are under recognized? You know, clearly LinkedIn is the market leader in terms of B2B, but are there other channels that you think are important?
for B2B search, maybe social channels or just some other spaces where businesses are hanging out on the internet.
Steven Schneider (32:53.292)
Yeah. LinkedIn is definitely one of them. am full of Koreans there. I think that the caveat with LinkedIn though, is that people create really boring content around companies rather than building their personal brand to direct people to the companies. So that's kind of where I think that would be more advantageous. I think that Reddit actually has a bunch of potential if done right. since Reddit is more raw and more community-based, it feels more authentic.
So I think that if there's a way to communicate case studies or content or statistical breakdowns, things that are actually engaging without it feeling like it's salesy or that there's like a secret ultimate, like alternative motive behind it. think that they're exactly, or like, you know, it's like, by the way, at the end of the case study, check out this thing. And like, I think it just has to be done right by teams. and I think that social media from a brand perspective is blowing up. Like we look at.
Michael Bernzweig (33:38.47)
Like we're trying to get a link in there.
Michael Bernzweig (33:47.816)
day.
Steven Schneider (33:52.481)
accounts like Duolingo or Jack in the Box or Wendy's like all of these like weird corporate companies that have a very Gen Z slash millennial vibe to them. And I think that that's very powerful. think that when people can see a brand doing social media, like they do with their friends and throw out memes and jokes and all sorts of stuff, that is all the more reason to communicate with that brand. so
I think you actually have to remember is like, who is the audience that you can currently engage with, but also on the other side of the coin, who is the audience that you want to appeal to to win the next generation of evolving business folks? So how do you appeal to the masses that are, will soon be your ICP, but not currently your ICP.
Michael Bernzweig (34:43.622)
Yeah, and something that struck me, we have found a couple of channels, Blue Sky and TikTok have been really interesting channels in terms of our marketing strategy, mainly because I think these are channels that most organizations don't think of when they first think of B2B.
Blue Sky has obviously seen some tremendous growth over just a very short period of time. And I think a lot of organizations think of TikTok as the place where kids go dancing. I think there is, know, seeing, you know, monday.com and HubSpot and Salesforce and all of these other organizations on the platform, it makes you scratch your head and say, is there a B2B audience on a platform like TikTok? So I think that's...
Steven Schneider (35:41.859)
Yeah, I think it, I think it's all about how you create content that communicates whatever you're trying to get across. And I think that those platforms are probably more top of funnel focused, but when you are a platform like HubSpot or Salesforce or however you want to call it, like you could just create top of funnel content all day and that's immensely valuable. It's fine.
Michael Bernzweig (36:01.062)
Yeah, you need every, yeah, absolutely. And I don't disagree with you. mean, think especially in the B2B space with consulting and SaaS, I think a lot of organizations find that bringing in traffic from all of these different channels challenging in some ways in that initially, your clients need to both...
I guess I would say get to the point where they need what you're offering. 97 % of the people that meet you in any of these channels don't need what you're offering at that point in time, but they may at one point. But they sure as heck, the 3 % that does need what you're offering, they don't know who you are, they don't trust you, they may like you, but they have to get to that point where both the...
need and the trust kind of align that they can decide that you're the right organization to pull the trigger with to move forward with. So that's a big part of what our community is all about. A lot of organizations trying to get to that point of trust with one another so that they can actually refer clients to one another that are ready to pull the trigger.
Steven Schneider (37:17.624)
Yeah. Yeah. And just where people hanging out when they're not working. I think that's important to think about too. It's like people will always scroll their phones on random stuff. And I think that it's important just to show up and kind of be there for the sake of being there.
Michael Bernzweig (37:27.058)
Sure.
Michael Bernzweig (37:31.832)
Absolutely, absolutely. Well, this is neat. think this is a pretty great deep dive. I think we covered a lot of ground and a little bit. I did mix in a few of the questions from the audience. So hopefully, hopefully I don't get any any hate mail over the next next several days once the episode goes live. But I really appreciate your time and getting to connect in this way. Overall, for anybody that
would like to reach out to Stephen Schneider over at
trio seo we're leave a link in the show notes and will actually make all of the details available right there across all of our channels for anybody that may not be familiar with if it's your first time listening to the consulting spotlight there are also two sister podcasts there is the software spotlight which is focused on b2b sass and there is the career spotlight which is focused on
organizations, HR, individuals that are kind of transitioning from one career to another career so you can
you know, subscribe to any of the three podcasts on your favorite podcast player. For anybody that wants to keep up with everything that's going on over here at Software Oasis, just go to softwareoasis.com, backslash subscribe. You can get on our weekly newsletter list. We send out an update every week and we have all kinds of great things going on, including our summit, which is coming up July 10th.
Michael Bernzweig (39:10.586)
So anyways, Stephen, thank you so much for joining us on the webinar and podcast today.
Steven Schneider (39:16.398)
Thank you so much. This is great.
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