The Marketing Mistakes Costing Founders Customers with Lauren Schafer

If your marketing isn't generating qualified leads, the problem probably isn't your budget—it's your strategy.

In this episode, Lauren Schafer shares why so many businesses waste money on marketing that never converts and what founders should do instead. From Google Ads and landing pages to LinkedIn, AI search, and employee advocacy, you'll learn practical strategies that help your business get found when buyers are actually ready to make a decision.

In this episode, we discuss:

• Why sending paid traffic to your homepage is one of the most expensive marketing mistakes you can make

• How to improve Google Ads performance through better targeting, monitoring, and conversion-focused landing pages

• The biggest reasons marketing campaigns fail—even with a healthy budget

• How to build a consistent LinkedIn strategy that increases reach and credibility

• Why employee advocacy often outperforms company pages on social media

• How to turn your company culture into content that attracts both customers and top talent

• What AI search tools like ChatGPT and Gemini look for when recommending businesses

• The SEO strategies that still matter in an AI-driven world

• If you had to cut your marketing budget in half, where you should—and shouldn't—spend it

Whether you're a founder, CEO, or marketing leader, this conversation will help you stop wasting marketing dollars and start building a strategy that creates visibility, trust, and qualified leads.

If you enjoyed this episode, follow Scaling with People, leave a review, and share it with another founder who wants to grow smarter—not just spend more.

Transcript

Welcome And The Visibility Problem

SPEAKER_00 0:02

Welcome to Scaling with People, your weekly playbook for turning chaos into compounding growth. Each week we go under the hood with battle test experts in all areas of business, from marketing to sales, operational finance, and people, plus product and leadership, to unpack the plays, numbers, and systems that turn chaos into compounding growth. Learn straight from founders and experts who've done it and continue to do it successfully. There's zero fluff, just moves that you can still immediately. This podcast is brought to you by Guide to HR. Human expertise, AI-powered impact. Welcome to Day's Scaling with People Podcast. I'm Guinevere Curry, your host and executive advisor and fractional CHRO with Guide to HR. Most founders think marketing is broken because they're not reaching enough people. Wrong. They're invisible in the exact moments that matter most. On today's episode, we're joined by Lauren Schaeffer with two plus decades of marketing and strategy experience, who's turned visibility into measurable growth and proves that posts and hope, okay, I'm guilty of that for sure, is the fastest way to burn budget. We break down how to show up, when and where it counts, why LinkedIn is still the most underutilized growth lever, and how fractional marketing delivers enterprise level ROI without the full-time cost. Well, Lauren, welcome to today's podcast. Excited to dive in, but before we do, share a little bit about yourself to the audience.

SPEAKER_01 1:26

We'll do. Well, first, Guinevere, thanks so much for having me. Um excited to talk with you today. So um a little bit about me. So um we do, I own Lakehouse Digital. We're a small digital marketing agency that we're really strong in analytics. But um, about me, we're based in North Carolina. I am from the Raleigh area. Um, I've got two college kids married, I've got a Beagle, met my husband doing marketing originally, and um we are still either he's in market research and I'm in digital marketing. So um, so, anyways, we do a lot of marketing talk at my house.

SPEAKER_00 2:03

Dinners must be an interesting conversation.

SPEAKER_01 2:06

Always, always.

SPEAKER_00 2:08

So diving into topic, where

The Hidden Waste In Paid Ads

SPEAKER_00 2:10

are companies burning marketing dollars without even realizing it?

SPEAKER_01 2:14

That is a great question. Um, one of the biggest things that we see that they are the biggest waste of marketing dollars is not in paid ads, but in monitoring their paid ads. A lot of people are like, we need to do Google ads, and they just start kind of throwing things out there without understanding the algorithm, without checking on them, and without putting out those those guardrails. So I'll give you an example. Um, we had a we've had a client before that they came to us and they were spending more than $20,000 a month in Google Ads, which is a ton of money to be spending. And another agency had actually set it up for them, but they had all set it off and then they just let it coast. They hadn't been with the other agency in a while and they had just been coasting because it was set up. And I'm like, that is a ton of money. But they're like, we're not getting leads. So we did a deep dive in, and it wasn't that it was set up incorrectly, it was they also didn't go and put the other guardrails up. For example, most of their clients are in one industry and they're in the United States, and a lot of their traffic was coming from um Australia, from China, from Singapore, from some of the other countries, which for this company that does business only in the United States and mostly on the West Coast, it was just not a fit. So they were getting so much traffic that never converted into a lead. So the biggest thing we see that is just a waste of is is not running paid ads, but it's not knowing whether it's on LinkedIn or Google or or Meta, any of the above, it's not doing the correct targeting and setting it up so it's really efficient ad spend to reach exactly who you want to.

SPEAKER_00 3:59

Yeah, and and I find too that uh a lot of times that people will spend money on ads and then they'll send them to the website. And your website is not necessarily a lead generating, converting tool. It's more knowledge and saying, yeah, I'm an expert at XYZ. And so thinking about where you're actually sending people if they do click on your ad to make sure they convert and they're qualified. I love the fact that you called that out. I mean, like they're getting, they're getting leads, but they're not qualified for what they do, and so they're wasting a lot of money. I mean, you're gonna spend 20 grand, but you make 40, that's fine. But if you spend 20 grand and you make nothing, that's a problem.

SPEAKER_01 4:32

It's a big problem. It's a big problem. So um fun story though. We took theirs and we got it down to like 5,000 a month, which is still a large, a large amount of your budget to allocate just to Google ads that is significant. But we were able to get it all US traffic and just the city, the main cities that are in their industry that might be leads. But it's just a matter of making sure that you know all the details and all the algorithm changes and are kind of on top of it. But it is what you said too, that landing page, whenever you get there, just sending it to their homepage does not mean the that the potential client is going to know what to do next, whether it's a a call to action button, like buy here. Or if it is, you know, if maybe you're sending it to them through your services pages, which really talk about the value and address their pain point. If it's a generic page, they don't know what to do and they'll just leave. And then you paid for that click.

SPEAKER_00 5:30

Yeah, yeah. Oh, uh my heart hurts, and so is my wallet. Listening to this. So yeah, you we kind of like teased up a little bit about knowing when and where

Targeting Fixes And Better Landing Pages

SPEAKER_00 5:40

to find your target audience. As we dive in, I'm curious, what are founders and business owners that you're working with get completely wrong about visibility right now that's just costing them their growth?

SPEAKER_01 5:52

One big area I think is social media. Um, whether you get a tremendous amount of engagement or just a little bit here and there, I think this is where a lot of people can either they're very inconsistent or they they rarely post or they post at the completely wrong time. So what time you're gonna post, let's say on LinkedIn is completely different from when maybe that same user is on Instagram. So at night, most Americans now are on multiple devices at one time, right? You might be watching whatever streaming show that you're on, watching sports, watching a movie, but at the same time that you're watching, chances are that you also have your phone in hand and you might be scrolling. So at night, when people people are not on LinkedIn as much at night, but they are looking for more of that social stuff. They're on TikTok, they're on Instagram, and they're on Facebook at night. So if you post it at 7 a.m. in the morning on Instagram, it is hidden. You know, it is so buried deep in that feed that it probably won't be seen. Versus if you do that at night, even if it's similar content, but on LinkedIn, people, when they get on LinkedIn, they're in a business mindset. So, and they usually get on first thing to check their notifications. If they're active LinkedIn users, there's certain times that are peak time. So it's going to be that kind of morning in their time zone. And a lot of people forget about that part too. So if you are, if you're posting on the East Coast, but your target market is in California, you have to like think about when are the California people that I want to reach, when are they first getting online? So it'll be fresh in their feed. So all of those strategies, um, the time of the post is really important. Making sure you tag other things to show up and kind of multiply that reach is really important. But the number one mistake we see from companies is that they are just posting inconsistently. So they might post twice in one week, and then we don't hear from them for three or four weeks because they're busy. But then when they're not on there, their competitors still are. And so someone is staying top in mind. And if you're not posting, it's not you.

SPEAKER_00 8:07

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, the buyer's journey, when you're interacting with someone, it's only one to three percent of people that are ready to buy. So you got to really target that 97 to 99% and be part of their journey and be in front of them constantly. Yeah. Yeah. There's uh go ahead.

SPEAKER_01 8:23

I was gonna say there's a lot to staying top of mind, even sometimes being consistent. Um, we always

Social Timing And Consistency That Wins

SPEAKER_01 8:30

want the engagement, especially if we're we're working with a client. We do a lot to encourage um their employees and to coach their employees on how to comment and engage on their own company's post or to share their company's post. So, like employee engagement when they share, it gets so much more traction because there's a trust factor there from a human that says, I work here, I believe in it enough to share with my own network. So getting that engagement is so important and your employees can do some of that for you. But at the same time, um, it's better to have just consistency out there, even if it has little to no engagement because you're still staying top of mind. You definitely want the engagement, but just because you're not getting any does not mean that people are not seeing it.

SPEAKER_00 9:17

Yeah, that's so true. I actually worked for a couple of organizations where they've had tools that you as an employee sign into, and then it gives you the approved topics and postings that you can share to your own network. Uh, we actually did a couple competitions, you know, how many uh the top poster, the top influencer, the top um reshare slash comment. Um, and we would do some fun things, you know, 50 bucks for those three tops and we it's a lot of fun. So there are some tools out there. What do you think about that? Like having some functionality that for organizations that do have 20, 30 plus employees. I mean, obviously these are organizations where I had a couple hundred and more, but I think you can even use it for your 2030 plus org too.

SPEAKER_01 10:00

Absolutely. I mean, if you only have five or six, like we we practice that here at Lakehouse when there's, you know, less than 10 of us, but we we try to practice what we preach. But for those companies, um, I will tell you my one pet peeve with that, just for analytics, because we love being able to see what content resonated with people. And especially if you're doing a competition to know which one was the best. We always tell our clients is let the company post it first from their page and then let the employees share. We've come in a few times when they give assets to the employees, which is also it's not a terrible thing because then you know it's on message, it's on brand. Um, but when their employees just share it as a brand new post, the company cannot measure it so that we can't compare the analytics like this post did well. We got this many shares or this much engagement from it, this campaign worked better, versus if individuals share it as a fresh new post, we can't see those for the company.

SPEAKER_00 10:59

Yeah, that makes sense. And then of course, if someone's coming into the company page or seeing the post and they're seeing the activity on that post, I think that just drives a little bit more like, oh, this company is really legit and there's a lot of activity, people standing behind it versus maybe being tagged. When you're tagged, it's a little bit hidden because it's not on your company page. You kind of have to go and look for that you've been mentioned. Um, so that makes a lot of sense. You've spent over 20 years turning visibility into a measurable growth. What's the pattern that you see across companies that actually help them scale?

SPEAKER_01 11:31

So I think one of the biggest things is like we just said, you treat, especially LinkedIn for companies, you treat it as a team sport. Um, I know this has been said for years, but just posting alone and the, what did you say, the post and hope? Um, it's great. But when when when companies know, when their employees understand the value of them resharing, of them tagging someone, um, especially of them sharing. If you've got photos because you've been at a conference or because someone was speaking on a panel, or um you guys are out maybe doing some service as a group, you're doing some team building and go volunteer in your community. People are still more curious than ever about who they're doing business with or who they could potentially. So we always are saying for for companies, tell them to reshare, let give them some guardrails to know this is this is a great way to share. Um, and share and tag people on LinkedIn. You're gonna be a little bit different on Instagram or different things, you know, different mindsets there. But um, we really encourage people to know how to share, but also to know how to correctly tag people, to really extend that reach, to tag other companies. If you're on a panel, for example, let's say you're at a conference and you're on a panel with three or four other people to have a candid photo that you share from a as a company. You tag all the people from your company and the others that are on the panel, their companies. And each one is is just multiplying that reach that you're gonna have to get more top of mind, more brand awareness, more. Oh, wait a minute, who was there? It creates a little bit of FOMO when they say, why wasn't I there at that conference? Why wasn't I on that panel? But it makes them take that click.

SPEAKER_00 13:17

Yeah, for sure. I actually flipped the script being an HR. I've used it for my advantage of being an HR and building the company culture. So uh one of my organizations, we did um health challenge. And it was during, it was during toward the end of the pandemic days, and uh we did a walking challenge. We we also uh what did we do? We uh donated, uh I think it was like a 50 cents for every mile the person walked. Um so and we had an internal challenge, and then it was anyone that and you had to reach a hundred miles um to be eligible for then a drawing on top of all the money that you're making for this charity. We did it for souls for souls because you know, every time you put on your shoes, right? I love just connecting it all. And that's a global company. We were uh the global net uh nonprofit, we were a global company. So then I was like, well, let's publish people actually hitting that hundred mile. We uh it was in a month. Um, and so

Employee Sharing Without Losing Analytics

SPEAKER_00 14:10

total totally doable, right? But yeah, at the same time, it stretches a lot of us who, especially during the pandemic, we were lucky to get a hundred steps in, right? So we did that and we started posting and we started posting about, oh, you know, so-and-so hit their hundred miles today. We celebrated them, and then we actually celebrated the winners. Uh, we announced how much money we were able to donate to the charity, tag the charity and everything like that. Didn't think much of it other than like just like publicly celebrating our employees, right? Yeah. Uh fast forward two, three months later, I'm on an interview, I'm interviewing someone, and I'm like, why us? Why do you want to come work? And she goes, I saw your post about this thing that you're doing inside your org, that you're, you know, charity, that you're getting people to move. It's, you know, you're having these fun competitions. And that's the culture I want to be a part of. And I didn't actually recognize what I was doing at the time, but realizing that how you can share your stories that are happening internally inside of your org, when appropriate to do so, of course, actually shows your culture and can drive more people to you as an employer. But I also think it helps in some of our conversations with our clients too, because they're seeing what good we're doing. They're seeing our employees are engaged and happy and they're, you know, moving and everyone knows health is so important to the mind. And so it just was like a win-win-win celebration for the whole thing. And again, the power of LinkedIn, right?

SPEAKER_01 15:29

Yeah, I love it. I love it. One thing for a while we were trying to do from an HR perspective on social media is, you know, if we were doing some things on LinkedIn and we were trying to occasionally show culture, but a lot of companies were saying, we want to be on Instagram, but we're B2B. So what's appropriate? What's not? And this is where that HR culture really could take off or make make it more appropriate. Um, and it's gotten a lot more appropriate for everybody to be on Instagram, but for the B2Bs, like one of our best posts ever on behalf of one of our clients was an Instagram post. And it was just an outing that it was for lunch, but it was Sanco de Mayo. And they saw people that were usually super buttoned up, super straight laced on the panels, you know, but they had on sombreros and it was so unexpected, but it got to see the human side of people. You know, when they're not buttoned up, they all enjoy liking, they work together, they like to work together, they have a good culture. You could tell everybody looked like they wanted to be there, and it did so much for their hiring. So yeah, part of social media that a lot of people forget about.

SPEAKER_00 16:39

Yeah, for sure. I mean, I just recently we had the pet day, right? Um, and I saw someone post that uh their chief uh motivational officer, their dog. You know, uh so it was cute. They were dude, they did a whole like pet um competition, like share your pet pictures and things like that. And so I just love that because uh again, it it adds the human touch of the company. Um, but let's go back to I I could probably talk about that all day long, but let's go back to marketing. And and we talked recently about um when and where your audience is. So, what does that actually mean to reach someone when and where they are in today's market?

SPEAKER_01 17:16

So that there's a lot of ways we could answer that. Um, but you really have to understand who your market is, who is your actual target, who is the buying, um, who has the buying power, who has influence over the one that's buying. So if you are, let's say you're a med tech device and you're trying to get into a hospital system, the procurement officer is gonna have that final say, but it's gonna be the nurses that might be using, you know, if it's whatever the device is that's actually using it day out to say, I need something better, I need something different. And they have the influence, even though they're not the final buying. So I think the first thing people need to do is they need to understand who exactly they are trying to reach. They need to understand how am I solving a problem for that person before I can even talk about

Culture Posts That Drive Hiring

SPEAKER_01 18:10

where and when to reach them. So you really have to say, is there a pain point? Is there value that I'm bringing? And how can I really speak to them to say, this is worth you taking a second to listen to? Because people are busy. Every scrolling to to stop that scroll on social media or to get their attention and email or in an ad, any of the above, it it's a lot more effort than it used to be.

SPEAKER_00 18:35

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 18:36

One of the biggest things we see for a while, social media was huge and it still is is continues to grow. But for a while, people started to kind of forget about email marketing. And regardless, we've got diehards. I'm on social media every day because I have to, but I enjoy it too. But at the same time, there will not be a day, even if I'm on vacation, that I don't look at my email, right? If everybody's not on LinkedIn every day, if everybody's not on TikTok every day, I'm pretty sure they're gonna check their work email. So, one, making sure that you don't forget those channels, those touch points where we know they're tried and true and they work, but you've got to be strategic. So, my um one of my biggest tips, and I say this as soon as we are talking to um clients and talking about taking on their marketing strategy, I'm like, you need to know from day one, I'm not going to send your monthly email on the first day of the month at 8 a.m. We're not gonna do it. It's what everybody else does, or they send it at 9 a.m. And well, if you look, start watching your email on the first day of the month now, and you're gonna see like you get bombarded because that's what everybody's doing. So you have to stand out. So doing in the a different time, maybe in a mid-morning sin, maybe an early afternoon sin, maybe a Sunday afternoon sin for those emails is catching people when there's not as much competition, but they're still trying to keep up with their inboxes, right? So that that's one thing. Another one is if they have, and a lot of us do have like the endless inboxes, um, is if you put a really long subject line, it just becomes noise when they're looking at what do I need to open right now. I'm a big fan of really short to the point subject lines, very short. We start with a verb, maybe one emoji if it's if it's because again, if you're looking at like, you know, you can see 20 things in your inbox and they all have long subject lines, it's just a lot of text. Yeah. But suddenly, if I see like that green checkbox check box, like, you know, checking this off your to-do list today or some whatever it is, if there's one emoji and it's appropriate and polished and everything else for a business to be sending, it's gonna grab your eye. So you have to do things that stand out, whether it is email being forgotten, if it is posting at the right time. So knowing people, you know, at nine o'clock at night on the East Coast versus nine o'clock at night on the west coast, people are going to be on their phones scrolling. So it's it's meeting people where they're at, and then it's understanding even, is my target market on Instagram? Are they on TikTok? Are they going to be people that are doing a lot of research on Google and I need to make sure that my AI visibility is there? Or all of the above. So I think, but you really have to understand who you're trying to reach.

SPEAKER_00 21:25

Yeah, I think that's so fair. Yeah, really having that strong ICP understood. And then where are those people? Um, that makes so much sense. So I'm curious like, how do you see AI changing how buyers are discovering companies now?

SPEAKER_01 21:41

That is absolutely a moving target. That's a really fun one. It's a really fun one. So there's a lot of ways to be seen in AI now, but there's one way to not be seen, and that is just to keep doing what you've been doing for the past 20 years. Um whether you're on chat. GPT, on Claude, on Perplexity, on Gemini, any of those, you have to understand again who your market is and which one of those AI AI engines might be where your people are because they're not all created equal. But there's certain things like they're still going to pull from blogs. They're looking for social media consistency. Like, are you regularly updating your website with new information, with new either new services? Are you getting things like Google reviews? Um, those are trust factors. AI for a while was just like could put stuff in and it would spit stuff out. Um, and it got really good at that. And then people learned how to game the system a little bit. And now AI is really looking for that experience and they're seeing, are they putting out consistent things? Are they answering questions? So the biggest thing I say to people as like an easy tip that you don't have to be a developer, you don't have to be a coder to

Meet Buyers Where They Actually Are

SPEAKER_01 22:55

do is in some of your pages, are you putting some question and answers? Because if your question matches what what most people are gonna put in Google and it's a direct match and then a simple to the point answer, it's gonna show a lot of these AI people when they're they're scanning and they're in that, they're looking at all the indexed websites, it's gonna say, oh, they have a question and an answer that matches what I'm trying to find for this user. So that's one way. Um, a lot of video, podcast, audio, a lot of them are being cited more and more. Um, Google owns both YouTube and Gemini. So Gemini is gonna source a lot of things on YouTube. So, like putting your podcast on there, if you've got, if you've made some good quality videos, if you've done some great webinars that are shareable on YouTube, it's making it so that you are easily found with specific experience. So if you're just gonna go out there and say, let's say you're an HVAC company, the HVAC company is gonna go through and say, um, okay, here's what we offer. We service these kinds of brands, these air conditioners, and we can be out at 24-7, we're on call 24-7. Well, that's what everybody says. But if instead they say, here's the most common things and how to fix them before they happen, right? If you say, when we've seen this in our area, we know if we're in the southeast, we know you have a lot of humidity. And so these things might factor in. But if you're showing exact expertise, you're mentioning your local area. If you're more of a local service provider, like an HVAC company, um, like a healthcare provider might be very, very local. Um, you need to be mentioning that. So AI goes, oh, they know what they're talking about. They have experience. And by the way, they're also here in Raleigh. Um, it's all those things that kind of make sure that you get that you're showing up, but posting consistently and making sure your Google reviews are solid because it's a third-party vouching for you then.

SPEAKER_00 24:53

Yeah, that is so true. So I'm curious, like you say, you know, posting content, what what are what is the fastest way or our fastest ways to build authority on LinkedIn without becoming a full-time creator? You know, if you're a founder or business owner who doesn't necessarily have a team that can post on your behalf, or you don't really think about I need to spend the next six hours on my weekend scheduling all this content for the next week. Like, how can someone build authority on LinkedIn without becoming a full-time market content creator?

SPEAKER_01 25:25

That's a great question. I think there's a couple of steps that make it doable without seeming overwhelming because it can seem really overwhelming and it can easily then get put on a back burner because you're like, I just don't want to think about that right now.

SPEAKER_00 25:38

And the instance starts to happen, which is I think is worse than you not doing anything, right?

SPEAKER_01 25:44

It is. And then it just snowballs, you know, or we have some perfectionists, they're like, no, no, no, it's not just right. And we're like, but you have to be, you have to be out there. So what we say to people, if they're trying to do it consistently themselves, even if you set aside 30 minutes a week and 15 minutes on a Tuesday, 15 minutes on a Thursday, or whenever you want to do it, and do two posts a week. Um, two posts a week is a minimum what we say for LinkedIn for a company page. Like to be active is saying top of mind. You don't have to post every day. So a simple post, um, just that is clear. Are you adding value? If someone wants to stop and look at yours, like, are you just telling them how great you are? Are you telling them how you're gonna solve their problem? So speak directly to somebody's pain point. Um, and then it's a two-way streak. As much as LinkedIn is a business platform, it is first and foremost a social platform and their algorithm rewards that. So it's not all just throw stuff out there as post and then hope you suddenly get all these leads. You have to do a little bit of nurturing. And even if you say do 10 minutes, I'm just gonna do one post real quick. Spend that extra five minutes commenting on other people's.

SPEAKER_00 27:04

Um Do you comment with the company page or your personal page or both?

SPEAKER_01 27:10

I do both. I tend to do more commenting from my personal page. Um, occasionally, if it's more appropriate, we will do it from our Lake House page on LinkedIn. Um, and sometimes we occasionally do it as both because um somebody on my team might comment and then I might come in and comment as Lake House. So sometimes it's both. If it's something like if it's somebody that we we really know, we it's a big topic, um, there's different points of view, even within our small team or different things. But the commenting is is really good because social media is a two-way street. So it's kind of like if you're that guy at a party that you get stuck talking to, if you're at the party, you're talking to some guy and he is just talking about himself. Let me tell you how great I am, let me tell you my accomplishments, let me tell you the new car I have, all the things that gets boring really fast, right? For the one that got stuck talking to them. And you have to treat social media like that. Like you can't always just be like, look at my company, look how great we are, look at the fantastic awards we have, all the things which you think are building confidence, but you need to be talking about them and their pain point, but you also need to be doing that in comments. So if people are having a question, they're looking for a referral partner, they're trying to recruit somebody, you're doing a great thing when you say, Hey, I've got somebody actually that would fill that job. Let me reach out for you. It takes you two seconds to do that. But for those two people, one the job searcher and one the one that's trying to recruit, you've just created a great connection and you've created a really positive experience for you or your company, whoever made that connection for them. And then it's it goes into um just the the theory of reciprocity of just being a really good, if you do something, people want to do something nice back and then they're start commenting back. But you've got to treat it as a two-way street and you can't be just throwing stuff out there and hoping people then choose to engage with you if you're never engaging with other people's content as well.

SPEAKER_00 29:10

I think that's so powerful because there's so much content out there. There's so much noise we talked about earlier. And if you're not actually engaging with people, you're not creating that relationship. And I really think when we fast forward to the future, with AI doing so much for us, and AI, our AI, my AI is talking to your AI. What is gonna happen is the relationship between you and me as human beings is what's gonna drive the actual outcome that we're looking for. And so to start with that interaction as more human being and relationship building on LinkedIn, that just seems like the smartest approach for sure.

AI Search Visibility And LinkedIn Authority

SPEAKER_00 29:45

So uh as we wrap up, I have a question for you. It's gonna be a tough one because obviously you want people to spend money in marketing because that's what you do as a fractional. But as a fractional, you might be coming into an org where they're spending, like in your example, they were spending 20,000 on that uh Google PCC. But if you had to cut a company's marketing strategy in half, what would you actually keep?

SPEAKER_01 30:07

I would actually keep right now, more than anything, I would keep their SEO. Um, it's providing new content that is SEO, is usually the best long-term strategy that over time is the most cost effective. If you need short-term wins, that's paid ads, but they're very expensive. Ads can get very expensive. People do not need normally do not need to spend 20,000 a month on ads. Um, the average company does not. But the one thing if we had to say, if you could only do one thing is invest in your SEO strategy, making sure your sites are optimized for both Google and the AI search engines, which falls under SEO, and that you're creating new content that ours right now, we we write on topics that we know people are, we have software that tells us what people are searching for right now and how rankable it is. So we we match that intent on whatever our client services. But once we get a really good blog article, it has some QA's at the end that matches that AI visibility search that they're looking for. But that also becomes the easiest. If you've got, if you can outsource that, if you could only do that with your marketing, that one blog post just became the easiest social media post ever. So it can, you can get somebody else to do that, and then it can check the box for if you are now going to try to do some things on your own, like post a couple of times a week. There's an easy post. You know, wait a few months and you can re you can start repurposing some of those. You can pull a quote from that article and also make it your social media. And now you've also got content, whether you do a LinkedIn newsletter, it's great content, the same blog content. Or if you need to send out an email, you want to make sure that you just give people a snippet of it and then hey, read more here. And you're getting them to click to your website. So the SEO can really be repurposed, but it's maximizing it for search and it's giving you an asset that you can repurpose yourself in multiple ways.

SPEAKER_00 32:13

That's awesome, Lauren. Well, I feel like we could continue talking for hours on this topic, but I appreciate you joining us. And for those listening, I hope you got several tippets like I did today. And we appreciate you joining us today. We look forward to you having joining us on the next one. Until then, have a great day. Bye everyone. Bye. That's a wrap for today's episode of Scaling with People. If you got value from this conversation, do me a favor, share it with someone building something big. And hey, I'd love to hear your take. Drop a comment, shoot me a message, or start a conversation. And don't forget to subscribe so you never miss

The One Channel To Keep Plus Wrap

SPEAKER_00 32:45

the bold, unfiltered strategies we drop every week. I'm Gwynabre Crary, founder and CEO of Guide2HR, where we help high growth companies scale smart with people for strategies and AI powered systems that don't just keep up, they lead. If you're building fast and want your HR to move faster, head to guide2hr.com and let's talk. And remember, scale isn't just about speed, it's about people. Until next time, have a great one.