Pillar-Based Marketing and Podcasting with DemandJump's Ryan Brock

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This is a podcast episode titled, Pillar-Based Marketing and Podcasting with DemandJump's Ryan Brock. The summary for this episode is: <p><a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/ryan-m-brock/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Ryan Brock</a> is the Chief Solution Officer at DemandJump and co-host of the Page One or Bust! Podcast AND today's guest on The Casted Podcast.</p><p><br></p><p>He and Lindsay dive into the ever-evolving marketing, SEO, and content creation world. These two explore cutting-edge strategies, industry insights, and actionable tips to help marketers thrive. From pillar-based marketing and AI-driven content to the future of search and podcasting, they uncover the latest trends and empower you to elevate your marketing initiatives. Tune in and gain a deeper understanding of audience-central approaches, and unlock the true potential of creativity in a tech-driven era.</p><p><br></p><p><strong>Listen in for:</strong></p><p>🫡 04:12&nbsp;-&nbsp;11:05 Pillar-Based Marketing: Revolutionizing SEO with data-driven strategy</p><p>🎯 13:18&nbsp;-&nbsp;18:00 The power of listening to your audience</p><p>🗝️ 18:49&nbsp;-&nbsp;22:03 Unlock the potential of your podcasting through multimedia content</p><p>🔍 22:09&nbsp;-&nbsp;26:31 Podcasting in the evolving search landscape</p><p>🔮 27:05&nbsp;-&nbsp;29:53 Elevate creativity in the age of AI and embrace human aspect in content</p>
🫡 Pillar-Based Marketing: Revolutionizing SEO with data-driven strategy
06:53 MIN
🎯 The power of listening to your audience
04:41 MIN
🗝️ Unlock the potential of your podcasting through multimedia content
03:13 MIN
🔍 Podcasting in the evolving search landscape
04:21 MIN
🔮 Elevate creativity in the age of AI and embrace human aspect in content
02:48 MIN

Lindsay Tjepkema: Welcome to the Casted podcast. It's the destination for the most innovative and forward- thinking marketers in B2B like you. Each week I host conversations with brilliant marketing leaders on the tactics and tricks that they're harnessing to reach their revenue goals, rev their thought leadership engines, amplify their marketing voice in the marketplace and ultimately drive real business results. I'm Lindsay Tjepkema and co- founder of Casted. And this is the Casted podcast.

Ryan Brock: Ryan Brock, chief solution officer at DemandJump, co- host of the Page One or Bust! Podcast.

Lindsay Tjepkema: Ryan, thank you for being here. I'm glad to have you on the show.

Ryan Brock: Yeah, Lindsay, it's been a little while, been about a month, but yeah, we just had some fun in St. Louis. Didn't we?

Lindsay Tjepkema: We did. Yeah. I think that if that's any indication of what's possible when we team him up, we should do lots more like this.

Ryan Brock: Right. Like this. I love it. Podcasting about podcasting. I've already had you on my podcast. We're just going to do this forever, round and round and round.

Lindsay Tjepkema: That's my life, so I'm here for it. Okay, so tell me a little bit, we're going to get into all things pillar based marketing, which if you know anything about Ryan, you know anything about DemandJump, that is the thing. And it should be on your radar. If you're listening to this show, you're likely a marketer. It should be on your radar. So we're going to get into that. But before we do, it's a podcast about podcasting. You have a podcast. Tell me how it started and how it's going. Tell me a little bit about the show.

Ryan Brock: Yeah, so our podcast is interesting because DemandJump had already been planning to start a podcast with our co- founder, ex CEO Toph Day, who's now the president of Elevate Ventures. I owned a content marketing agency called Metonymy Media for over a decade and was one of the DemandJump's first customers for the product that we have now. And ended up selling my agency to DemandJump so I could come and do this sort of thing because the story is so amazing and I love telling it, and it does wonders for marketers. And they didn't know me that well, at least Toph didn't at the time. They didn't know what my strengths were, who I was or whatever. So when I came in, they brought me into a couple of meetings with the producers of the podcast, Caspian Studios, and they said, come in and you're a marketer too. We just acquired you. Maybe you can get some insight on what you would do with a show like this. You're our target audience, so what would you do? And they heard my radio friendly voice and my charismatic style and they're like, oh, we should put this guy on the podcast too. Toph and I became co- hosts of the podcast. It didn't even have a name yet, but eventually we arrived at Page One or Bust! because we thought it was fun. And that's really what it's all about. It's just about finding people where they are, which is the top of the search results and yeah, Toph and I co- hosted it for a while together then Toph, he made his exit to go over to Elevate and start up all the amazing things he's doing there like Rally. And then our CMO, Drew Detzler, who was an amazing human being and marketer and friend of mine, he joined up as the co- host and it's been amazing. We've been talking to, we've probably done 30, 35 episodes in the last year and a half or so. It's a twice monthly conversational sort of Q& A format, but we've been able to talk to a lot of really amazing marketers and SEO experts and stuff. So it's been a lot of fun.

Lindsay Tjepkema: I love it. And you also have a book, and so I'm going to tie this all together. You have a book called,

Ryan Brock: Pillar- Based Marketing: A Data- Driven Methodology for SEO and Content That Actually Works.

Lindsay Tjepkema: That actually works. And full disclosure, we actually are a DemandJump customer and it does, it actually works and we love it very much. Okay, so let's talk about pillar based marketing and what it is, why it is, how it is, and then I want to come back to the show again and the book again and kind of jump back from it and say, from a marketing perspective, how does this all work together? And kind of look at it from a bunch of ways. But before we get there,

Ryan Brock: Like I said, round and round, round, we're just going to keep going round and round. Yeah, I love it.

Lindsay Tjepkema: So yeah, tell me about what pillar based marketing, what the heck is it and what should everybody know about it?

Ryan Brock: Okay, so I'm going to start explaining what it is by saying what it's not. It's not how we used to do SEO. And as someone who owned and ran a content marketing agency who did SEO for many, many years, I've seen it all. I mean, I was there for Panda, I was there for all of these algorithm updates and big changes that have happened in the industry while people have been trying to figure out what is SEO, how do, what thing and what are the rules and what do we go about? And I've watched this industry sort of like, they've landed on this list of rules or constants or best practices, is maybe the nicest way of saying it that are like, these are the things you need to think about. These are the things you need to spend your time and energy on if you want to drive organic traffic to your website. And it's things like back linking, it's things like keyword density and competition and domain authority and all these things that if you were using a WordPress website and you had the Yoast SEO plugin, which everybody who has WordPress does,

Lindsay Tjepkema: Oh yeah.

Ryan Brock: You could still to this day see all of these standard established facts. We're going to judge your article based on these 20 metrics, and they're all operating under this base set of assumptions that A, you actually know what your audience cares about. B, you've chosen the right topic to write about for this article. C, your keyword specifically that you're targeting is the main keyword of this article. It's the only thing that matters. And like D, E, F, G, like that, all of these things that we think contribute to the rank ability of a page actually do. But it's all guesswork. It's all trying to figure out what's going to look measurable, what's going to look data driven.

Lindsay Tjepkema: It's super limited at the tail end of everything else that should be happening, right?

Ryan Brock: Right. There's this whole, like the way that I say it, I know Lindsay, you've like, you've started this business and you've been going through investor pitches and whatnot, and then you live in the world of trying to tell somebody about your TAM, SAM and SOM, right? I liken traditional SEO to starting with the serviceable, obtainable market. You're skipping to the SOM. You're forgetting that the actual behavior and the traffic that comes with it around any given topic is measurable and knowable. We have such a great, amazing embarrassment of data that we've been collecting, anonymized, of course, but we have data about how people generally think about things and it's all there waiting for us. But instead of thinking about like, take a step back, what does my audience care about? What does the landscape of competition around the market for organic traffic for a given topic, my business care about look like? Where are my competitors in that market? Who am I up against and what kind of a headstart do they have and how much more money than me are they spending? How am I going to go about actually capturing that market? Instead, we go all the way to the end and we say, our blog categories are SEO tricks, a day in the life, blah, blah, blah. And then you start there and you build keyword lists that you think align with your service offering that tell you things about like this is a high purchase intent keyword. So I'm going to focus on that one because I think it's going to drive transactional behavior, and I'm going to go for some of the ones that have a really high search volume. I'm going to target some long tail low search volume keywords, some zero search volume keywords because I want to look like I'm accomplishing things and I'm going to look at competitive score and I'm going to buy back links and do all this stuff so I can up my domain authority and make it easier to rank. There are so many assumptions that go into all of this. It's just bias, bias, bias up and down left and right. And so the joke that I make that I've made so many times, I probably should make this the last time I ever make it, is that when I started my agency, I had a full head of hair and I also did not have an anxiety medication prescription. I do now. Well, I don't have hair anymore, but I do have the drugs because it's like I spent a long time trying to justify investment from my clients into SEO, and I was largely confusing activity with results. As long as I'm looking at data, as long as I'm looking at numbers, putting it in a nice report, showing progress somewhere, and I'd have to look for that progress, then I could be okay with it. And of course, the bias that comes with SEO means that it's going to take six months, it's going to take six months for all these things that we were told, artwork to see if anything ends up ranking. And then you have to make a lot of assumptions about why that thing ended up ranking and try to build your next batch of content around it. It's a lot and it's just there's so much waste and there's so much bad user experience and so much cognitive dissonance in that process. And I always struggled with it to the point where I outright rejected it for a long time. And then I found the technology that we have at DemandJump, which says, forget all that crap. Let's look at Google's recommendation engine. Let's look at the way Google contextualizes a search amongst other searches that people who search for that topic are likely to also search. Without getting too deep into how the sausage is made, we can analyze a significant amount of data to the point where we can confidently map the TAM of any topic. You know a topic, let's say it's podcasting platforms or podcast solutions. If you know that, we can know that TAM, we can know all of the different ways somebody searches for information about that topic. And then importantly, rather than looking at something like search volume or competitiveness or whatever, we can look at how many times do certain terms show up across otherwise completely different journeys. So if you think about that TAM as a spiderweb of all these terms that connects facially, there are an infinite number of ways someone can move around that spiderweb. Well, that means that some terms that end up getting searched get searched more often than others across disparate journeys. I call it the infinite customer journey. You can't predict what it's going to be. And those terms end up becoming the most important topics you need to write about if you want to have actual coverage of a topic and demonstrate your authority to search engines. And so pillar based marketing is a methodology that takes that data analysis and translates it into a prescriptive and easy to follow step- by- step process that tells you, here's the data you need to look at. Here's how you need to analyze it, here's the outputs that you're looking for in terms of a content strategy. Here's how you're going to go about writing that content, what topics you're going to cover in that content, how you're going to link it together, how you're going to publish it, everything you need to actually drive what we found to be incredibly consistent SEO results. So we can take anybody with any domain score, authority score, and we can get them in the span of however long it takes to write about 16 to 20 pieces of content and get them on page one for dozens or hundreds of terms within a few days of publication. So it's crazy. It's fast, but it's also incredibly scientific, which is why I love it.

Lindsay Tjepkema: I love it too. And I know that was a lot. So go back, rewind it and listen again.

Ryan Brock: Yeah, sorry, I don't make clippable podcasts. I like, I'm really bad at that.

Lindsay Tjepkema: Oh, we'll find a way to clip it, Ryan. We will find a way. But the reason that I love it so much and the reason that we get along so well is that it's the why, right? You are going against the overly formulaic approach and kind of misinterpretation about the opportunity of SEO that says, oh, if I do these things, I get results. That's not how it works. That's not how it's supposed to work. It's not supposed to be pepper, some SEO on it at the end of making all these assumptions and writing an article, it's about understanding your audience. It's about understanding what are people looking for? How are people searching for things that they should find you for because you do provide the solution that they're looking for. And if you too could just meet up and they could find you, that would be great. And so there's a big human element there that says, better understand who your audience is, better understand what they're looking for, how they're looking for it, why they're looking for it, and therefore meet them where they are, meet them where they're trying to find what you can give them, and it works, which is really, really cool. Using the data truly to serve the humans and you know how I feel about human connection, and I love that. You're making it all make sense for all the people involved.

Ryan Brock: I come at this from a very human perspective because first and foremost, before I was ever a marketer, I was a writer and a storyteller, and when I took creative writing course work in college, it was a bizarre experience for me to get thrown into workshops. That's a big part of your experience when you learn to write. You get thrown into these workshops where you have to just expose your kind of unfinished work to your peers, and they're going to rip it up and you got to sit there and you got to listen to it, and you got to take their feedback and you got to hear your assumptions about what makes for an engaging story or a well- developed character or a logical plot. You got to hear real feedback about those things. And you've got to treat your peers not as threats, but as your audience and as your first audience and people who can tell you honestly what they think. I built my agency around that notion. Metonymy Media first and foremost was about hiring creative writers who understand how to work in that way, and that leads to some really great marketing creative output and collaboration with clients and stuff. But what that also does is it instilled in me just this understanding that the best storytellers, they listen first. They don't just go out and start shouting into a crowded room, but they find conversations they can join. They use storytelling as a way to connect to other people, not just dominate a conversation. And that couldn't look less like how traditional SEO functions. It's like, Hey, product service over here, get it right now. And you're just shouting. You're just shouting. And you don't care about what the audience thinks or what they're saying. And so,

Lindsay Tjepkema: Right. From the H1 tags, just shouting.

Ryan Brock: Right.

Lindsay Tjepkema: Yep.

Ryan Brock: And I mean, I was so guilty of this for a long time. It's just like, well, this seems like it'd be a fun blog to write, and why wouldn't a senior citizen with grandchildren want to read this article? We'd just make those assumptions, and that's because we were limited in what we could understand. But now, regardless of whether you're writing SEO content or not, and this works really well for SEO content, obviously, but we have Google's cataloging of how people move around learning about different topics right there. And we can, what we have, what DemandJump has that everyone else doesn't have is some really, really, really intelligent and patented data science that can help us unpack that and turn it into an automated strategy. But it's just listening. That's all it is. It's just listening before you speak. And it's so powerful.

Lindsay Tjepkema: Oh my gosh, Ryan, I love that because that's the best storytellers listen first. And that's literally what you're equipping marketers to be able to do is listen first and then respond accordingly, which is a beautiful, very scientific thing.

Ryan Brock: Yes.

Lindsay Tjepkema: And it's great.

Ryan Brock: Art and science. I mean, that's sort of like when Toph and I first started imagining the podcast, and then of course he's my co- author on the book. That was big to us thinking about that. That was a core theme in the book and in the way that we talk about pillar based marketing, that it is really art and science. It's the left brain and the right. You put them together, you give structure and within that structure, people can be amazingly creative. The way that, another metaphor here that I'd like to think about, and it's way bigger than even my head has room for, but I like to pretend, I think of what we're doing is being similar to what Shakespeare did with his sonnets. Shakespeare wrote his sonnets, and then there's 180 of them, and they're all the same length. They're the same rhyme scheme, the same meter, like dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah. And even structurally, you're going to get four stanzas, and then you're going to get a little couplet at the end that sort of resolves what other tension Shakespeare's talking about in the 12 lines that preceded. They're all the same. And so when you sit down in an English class and you read them out loud like your teacher made you do, it's boring as hell and you don't get it. And especially if you go home and you start reading them and you have to read 20 of them and then write a paper on it. It's just, it's obnoxiously boring. You don't get it. But Shakespeare knew that his audience was illiterate. He understood that his audience in Elizabeth in England could not read except for the rich people who were giving him money to do this. And so he knew that if he wanted to be popular and be successful, he needed to approach his audience where they were, which most often was in a pub, listening to some performer read the latest Shakespeare sonnets out loud. And if it's always the same rhyme scheme, if it's always the same meter, it's always the same structure, even if you're drinking, it's way more likely that you're going to remember what you just heard and repeat it to your friends later if it's familiar in its structure and its approach. And so I think that's why he's as famous as he is and still well regarded, is because he was man of the people. He understood how to bring them what he wanted to say, the true depths of his heart and soul, and his reflections on humanity and love and life and sin and all these other things. And he knew his audience. He just knew his audience and he understood how to do it. And I think that's sort of what we're trying to do here for marketers. So there's a little bit of a sellout angle here as well, but we're trying to say, look, this is how you demonstrate authority, not just to human beings, but to search engines. If you think about topics this way, and you go about your creative choices in this manner you're within a pretty tight structure, but it's a structure that actually leads to results because it does demonstrate authority and that you understand your audience.

Lindsay Tjepkema: Yep. And that's an interesting little segue into this is a podcast ultimately about podcasting. And you were talking about knowing your audience and who it's for and why are you doing it, and then you got into listening to content. So let's talk about podcasts. So you all have a show, as we talked about earlier. Everything that you just mentioned about pillar based marketing specifically speaks to words on pages, like written word. But as we know and as we've talked about a lot and why we're so excited to do all the things together, is that it's bigger than that. And it's about spoken word too. It's about whose it for? Why are you doing it, and how are you going to reach them? Which yes, is in topic, but it's also in format. And so tell me, pillar based marketing, podcasting, how does that play into, from your mind, that whole strategy and that whole approach?

Ryan Brock: All right, I got two answers for you. The first one is my well rehearsed one, the second one is brand new as of this morning. First of all, my show is, like I said, like a interview format Q& A. So we're not coming with like a we need to know what topics we're going to talk about, but a lot of podcasts are more scripted or more narrative in function and feature and format. And having that access to search behavior data, it's going to be just as valuable for that channel as any other. And that's sort of our long- term vision, honestly, is understanding how people think and learn about topics. How do we help marketers apply that to any channel in any way that they want to go? But with podcasting in particular, especially because of Casted, and it's so funny, Lindsay, I've been on the other receiving end of this so many times. Like being a host with somebody who's familiar with my technology, and then I'm like shut up. We don't need to talk about it, but I will because it's relevant. Yeah, thing, okay. You're less bashful about it than I am. But you look at technology like Casted. We can take our growing library, not just of a podcast content, but all of our video content and webinars and things like that of which we have a lot. And we can start parsing that and analyzing what are we talking about across these hours and hours and hours of content. And as we build our web pages around the pillar based marketing methodology, it becomes very easy for us to find out opportunities to incorporate into the written content of a page, a human content that in the form of a podcast, a podcast clip that we can create that matches exactly what we're talking about. Maybe it's a guest of ours so that here's another expert in this field who you might even recognize because they're well known and they're here talking about this in a way that lends some authority to what we're talking about. And the fact that multimedia content makes pages perform better in search, it just does. If you look at the top, several results on any short tail, what I consider pillar topic, who's at the top? It's people who have long pages with a ton of original video, audio, infographic, content, all sorts of stuff. It's not just static words. So I love that. It's so huge to be able to leverage technology in this way and say, okay, well, you can amplify what you're saying in so many different ways that this just works really, really nicely.

Lindsay Tjepkema: Yeah, it's really, really interesting to be able to say, okay, what do we know about intent data? What can essentially DemandJump tell us about what we should be creating and what are the best opportunities for us to reach our audience? And yeah, that absolutely is in the form of written content. And why wouldn't I also create that content in these types of formats and include it into content, that pillar based content? Because again, ask yourself as a human, it's much more interesting to read and consume a blog post that has audio and video content in it too. And then also from the marketing side, if people engage with that beyond just reading the blog post and click on that embed of the audio or video content, you get that data too. And it's just again, around and around and around. It just keeps going.

Ryan Brock: Wheels within wheels.

Lindsay Tjepkema: Yep.

Ryan Brock: Yeah, no. Okay. So my second response to this,

Lindsay Tjepkema: Oh yeah, brand new as of this morning. Do tell.

Ryan Brock: Yesterday Google had their IO presentation conference, I don't know what they call it, but they debuted what the new search experience is going to look like in the light of AI and Bard and all that. One of the things I found very interesting as part of the IO conference Google, they showcased, what is this new experience going to look like? What's search going to look like now that we have all this new, more contextually relevant technology? And one of the things that they're going to add is a perspectives tab. Right now, you could select images, video, news, they're going to add perspectives, and perspectives is going to show results from forums and video sites like TikTok. And ostensibly that means if you're doing a video podcast or if you're just posting podcast content, or if you're writing as an individual creator on Reddit or something, Google's saying, okay, like Gen Z in particular. But a lot of people don't really care what brands they have to say they want to bring in people. And it's funny because even on my show recently, I talked to somebody who was a LinkedIn influencer like expert, and she was like, if you have a brand, no one cares about your brand's LinkedIn posts. It's like you need to find people who are experts, people who are thought leaders, and let them be genuine and talk about what they know. And people are going to trust them more than they trust your brand. And it's so perfectly matched with a good podcast strategy. And Google is even acknowledging that just showing webpages or YouTube video links is not enough, that they have to start going more directly to the source. So to me, that means if your podcast content is informed by pillar based marketing data and you know that you're talking about things that people are likely to search about, you're likely to show up in this whole new perspectives tab even without having to publish it to your PBM pages on your website. That's a huge opportunity for podcasters. And of course, yeah, and it'll be fun to watch. Because I could be completely wrong about how it'll actually shape out, but this is how they're presenting it. I think it's, yeah, it's pretty clear what they're saying, and it's pretty cool because it does sort of lift the veil a little bit. As my CMO partner Drew would say, it opens the kimono to the sort of dark search experience of how are people searching for information outside of just the blue links on the search page. Technology isn't always the answer when it comes to marketing, and it comes to making a human connection, but in this case, it absolutely is. The reason Google sucked and was easy to gain 10 years ago is because their technology sucked that it was easy to gain, and it's just getting harder to do that because they're getting better at their one job, which you phrased it as helping give people the right information. I think that's a great way to phrase it. Another way that I phrased it is their job is to analyze and quantify authority. That's it. Their job is to say, here's a query. Who is the most authoritative source on this? And how do I get that information in front of people? Analyzing that is such a complicated thing, especially for just dumb silicon to do that. It's taken to this point for us to really start understanding what it takes to be a real authority. And that's why you see all the algorithm updates up to this point in the last nine months, they've all been about helpful content, reducing spam. And it's because Google understands the difference between someone who's just trying to sell something and somebody who wants to be an authority. And so one of the biggest challenges I'll get from people who are new to pillar based marketing is I'll tell them with a straight face, you have to answer this question, which has nothing to do with your products and maybe is so elementary, you feel like you're going to look stupid answering it as a big authoritative brand, but you have to answer it because people who care about all this other stuff that you also care about, care about that. And if yeah, you go to Google with your network of content and you say, I'm answering not just the questions that are going to tie one to one to my product, but all the questions someone has as they're trying to find a solution on this. I mean, what better way to show that you genuinely care about providing value? And that's my favorite thing about pillar based marketing, is it's like we're not trying to interrupt people's lives or give them something they don't want or do a bait and switch. We're just trying to provide value right from go, and we're realizing that our value as a thought leader is not the thing that we should be gate keeping with money. If we have solution for somebody, we can help make their lives easier, but that doesn't have to wait until they give us money. We can start right now, and that's a good thing.

Lindsay Tjepkema: Before I let you go, let's look at our crystal ball and say, what's the future look like? You and I were on a panel together about, you actually moderated it, about AI and marketing. So that, and knowing what we know about human behavior and everything that people are looking for, and everything you've talked about with pillar based marketing and we're going forward with amplified marketing, and now AI is coming in and the economy is crazy. Tell me what you think is in store for B2B marketers in the coming year to years ahead.

Ryan Brock: I think right now people do need to be wary of putting too much stock in generative AI as the end all be all replacement for your human writers. I don't think a lot of marketers are fully thinking that way anymore. And it's been a rapid change in the last two months even. The way that people have gone from, oh, I don't need writers anymore to, maybe I need some writers. And I just think the best advice I can give is to realize that AI for the creative process for writing and developing content is sort of a calculator. We've never had a calculator. We've had spell check and stuff, but that's not really a calculator. We've had the mathematicians equivalent of a calculator. The difference is you can't hand someone a calculator and expect them to become an award- winning astrophysicist who comes up with novel ideas about the universe and how it works. Similarly, you can't hand a writer, a writer's equivalent of a calculator and expect the output to just be automatically the best thing you've ever read. In fact, what you're going to find is that the bar is just going to get raised. And I think that's a really exciting thing. So I think it's, this is both in one, right? I think we should all be excited that number one, doing initial research, collecting the thoughts, understanding the general market consensus on a topic, it's going to be way easier, way faster. I know when I put together webinars and thought leadership presentations, I can get to the actual statistics I want to quote or quotes that I want to share in a fraction of a fraction of the time that it used to take me to sift through search results. Now I can just ask GPT- 4, Hey, do you have any stats on like how marketers feel about keyword cannibalization? Sure, here you go. And it's so much faster and easier. I love that. I think it's great. But if that kind of information is freely available and sort of regurgitateable by AI, that means everyone's got it. It's not an advantage anymore. And that means you have to learn how to build on top of that foundation something really truly compelling. And Google's saying pretty much the same thing. They're like, Hey, if you're trying to just cheat and get to the top of search attentions with AI, we're going to find it and we're going to shut it down. If you are using AI to help you create really, really authoritative and helpful content, more power to you, it's going to be good. So I don't think AI is something to fear. I think it's something to categorize correctly and then to really understand that writers who are really, really good and creative and excellent at communicating, they're just, their lives are going to get a little bit easier and they're going to be able to focus on the more human side of the work. And I think that's great. And I'm excited for the next two years, B2B marketers especially starting to understand where their thought leadership needs to live now in that world. Because it doesn't necessarily need to live in the world where you are answering that basic question that I'm telling you you have to answer. Maybe it's moving on to something more advanced and more high level, and that's good, I think. That's going to lead to smarter marketers, smarter consumers, smarter everyone.

Lindsay Tjepkema: More efficient, more effective, more fun. Well, that's a beautiful place to leave it. I'm excited for that too. Thank you so much for being here, and thank you for pillar based marketing and thank you for DemandJump, and thank you for sharing all your insights. Where can people find you? Where can people find the book?

Ryan Brock: Yeah, so I mean the book, you can find it anywhere online, a search pillar based marketing book if you want to, and you'll find it a lot of places online, no matter where you live in the world. Amazon obviously is there, but you can get it from Barnes& Noble and a bunch of other places too. Page One or Bust! Podcast, again, go to your favorite podcast provider, search for Page One or Bust! with an exclamation point at the end, because we're extra like that. You find that wherever you want. It's a good show. Lots of meaty content to dig into there. Find me on LinkedIn, Ryan Brock. I have a column that I publish every single Monday that's called The Pillar Column because it was the first thing that popped into my head. And yeah, I mean, literally I'm speaking on webinars with Content Marketing Institute, Search Engine Land, MarketingProfs on a almost weekly basis. I'm going to events all over the country this year, so if you're in SEO, in marketing, I'll be there. Come find me. Let's talk. I'll sign your book.

Lindsay Tjepkema: Perfect. Cool. Ryan, thank you so much for being here. It's been fun.

Ryan Brock: Thanks, Lindsay. This was awesome.

Lindsay Tjepkema: Hey, that's our show. Thanks for joining in. I'm Lindsay Tjepkema, and you can find me on Twitter at Casted Lindsay and on LinkedIn. You know the drill. If you like this show, you'll like our other episodes too. So consider subscribing, sharing with others, and maybe even leaving a review on your podcast platform of choice. And if you're ready to harness the power of podcasting for your brand strategy, make sure that you click the link in our show notes to subscribe to the Casted newsletter and to all of our shows. You can also go to casted. us for the latest content from our team of experts to yours. Until next time.

DESCRIPTION

Ryan Brock is the Chief Solution Officer at DemandJump and co-host of the Page One or Bust! Podcast AND today's guest on The Casted Podcast.


He and Lindsay dive into the ever-evolving marketing, SEO, and content creation world. These two explore cutting-edge strategies, industry insights, and actionable tips to help marketers thrive. From pillar-based marketing and AI-driven content to the future of search and podcasting, they uncover the latest trends and empower you to elevate your marketing initiatives. Tune in and gain a deeper understanding of audience-central approaches, and unlock the true potential of creativity in a tech-driven era.


Subscribe to The Casted Podcast on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, and for more on B2B marketing and podcasting, sign up for the Casted Newsletter.

Today's Host

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Lindsay Tjepkema

|Co-founder & CEO, Casted

Today's Guests

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Ryan Brock

|Chief Solution Officer, DemandJump