#46 - Already Obsolete

What worked in January might already be dead.

The half-life of strategy is shrinking. AI tools evolve monthly. Search behavior shifts. Paid ads tighten. Privacy rules expand. Algorithms adjust. And most businesses are still running last quarter’s playbook.

In this episode, we break down hard data on:
• Google Ads decay and why generic landing pages burn money
• The real relationship between press releases and SEO
• Why email marketing is still one of the highest ROI channels
• First-party data as the new currency

...and more!

SOURCES:

https://www.statista.com/statistics/237974/online-advertising-spending-worldwide/

https://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2014/03/17/what-is-a-good-conversion-rate

https://unbounce.com/conversion-benchmark-report/

https://www.salesforce.com/resources/research-reports/state-of-marketing/

https://privacysandbox.com/

https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/marketing-strategies/data-and-measurement/first-party-data-strategy/

https://www.litmus.com/resources/email-marketing-roi

https://www.campaignmonitor.com/resources/guides/email-marketing-benchmarks/

https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/guidelines/link-schemes

https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/qualify-outbound-links

https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/google-discover

https://developers.google.com/search/docs/fundamentals/creating-helpful-content

https://developers.google.com/search/blog

https://www.ibm.com/think/topics/sentient-ai

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/could-a-machine-ever-be-

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:02

You're listening to Over the Bull, where we cut through marketing noise. Here's your host, Ken Carroll.

SPEAKER_01 0:09

2025 might as well be 1825 on this episode of Over the Bull. Thank you so much for joining me this week. You know, uh I have a couple things I want to talk to you about. And uh first, you know, I want to talk to you a little bit about the speed in which the internet is moving. Then I want to share with you some rapid fire statistics that will hopefully blow some of the things you've been told out of the water to help you better prepare your business for success. And then I want to also talk to you a little bit about a lot of the noise going on on the internet today. You know, we tend to think that if someone has a lot of money, then they tend to know what they're talking about. And I'm not trying to undermine what some people are saying about the power of artificial intelligence, but I am saying within the context of what we know as humans that a lot of this is really hyperbole. So I want to take us out of uh Skynet and get us back down to reality and uh get us out of the sensationalistic talk when it comes to artificial intelligence. Don't get me wrong, it's a very powerful tool and it is dramatically impacting the world, but it's not going where people are telling you based on everything we know as humans, and even if it is, it cannot be measured. Okay, so let's talk about this dangerous assumption in business and especially small business, and that is if something has been working for you, it's going to continue to work. Now, in life there's something called a normalcy bias. It helps us get through life, that tomorrow's going to be like today, and the next day will be like that, but we know ultimately that's not true. However, we live our lives as though that's the case. Now, we're also used to living in time and space as we've always done it. And as such, we also don't expect the world of the internet to be moving at the pace at which it does. Now, when I'm saying that 2025 in terms of marketing strategies might as well be 1825, I believe that that's accurate in a lot of ways. I don't think I'm being oversensationalistic because the things we were doing going into 2025 is no longer anything that we do within the spectrum in which we work. We've changed so much. And so I want to talk to you a little bit about that. And so basically, this idea of a half-life of how long something is going to be relevant is dramatically changing. So you can imagine all the agencies and everything that's out there that's built their entire systems on solutions that are fading, how hard they're going to fight for that and how they're going to marginalize what's going on. Now, it could be because they themselves don't fully realize what's going on, or it could be that they're defending something in which they're clinging desperately on to because they simply cannot evolve at the pace at which things have to evolve or evolve. Okay, so technology, it's not a stop, guys, but it accelerated. I mean, think your favorite uh sci-fi movie, you know, when they hit warp speed. Uh we're hitting warp speed when it comes to internet marketing. And in some cases, we're able to predict certain things, we're able to make certain adjustments, and in other cases, we're having to think on our feet. That's the reality. If someone tells you they know where everything is going, they do not know what they're talking about, or they're trying to pitch you something. It's that easy. So here's the deal AI tools, um, they're evolving monthly. Uh, search behavior is shifting. Uh, paid at auctions are tightening, privacy regulations are expanding, attribution models changed, user expectations, those are changing, and platform algorithms as well. And here's the most uncomfortable part of what I'm telling you. Most businesses are still executing, based on playbooks, written in a time that is might as well be 1825. And so here's the real problem. It's not that you're behind, it's that the decay rate of strategy has sped up. So in 1825, things move slowly. In 2025, strategy expires quarterly, monthly, gosh, weekly, maybe even hourly, uh, as things move because just the way in which people engage. I've shared with you many times that I have certain people of a certain demographic and they never use Google anymore. They're solid Chat GPT people. And so reaching that audience, if that's your target audience, uh requires diversification because we're in this place where we don't know who's going to win the battle. We just know that a battle is happening. So while we're on the subject of acceleration, there's noise about AI becoming sentient. I don't know if you've seen this or not, but there are certain things making a circulation that you know the proverbial Skynet's going to become aware and uh then things are going to start shifting in different directions. So I want to be precise about something. When it comes to the idea of consciousness or sentiency, and then we talk about artificial intelligence reaching consciousness. Now, here's the reality of what we knew or know as humans. We can describe behaviors that appear conscious, but we do not have a reliable test for subjective experience, not even in humans. So AI systems today simulate reasoning and emotion through statistical prediction. They do not have verified inner experience. Could they mimic consciousness increasingly well? Well, sure they can. Could we definitively prove sentience either way? Not with our current scientific framework. So claims of AI becoming sentient are philosophical speculations, not empirical conclusions. In business terms, don't confuse simulation with awareness. Don't confuse sophistication with agency. And don't let philosophical noise distract you from strategic fundamentals. It's fun. I mean, I grew up in a time of sci-fi, and so much of sci-fi and meta and uh information, you know, the uh the pseudoscience stuff has actually permeated mainstream science. And uh I believe it was Nikolai Tesla who talked about uh science evolving to where you know you're chasing calculation after calculation, and we seem to get further and further away from the scientific method. It just seems like that is just part of what the culture has become. And now the the latest iteration of that is somehow sentience is going to take place. So, you know, you know, I'm sure you probably have heard that some people even talked about like, you know, transferring someone's consciousness to a digital environment, you know, really out there stuff. But here's the deal even if we thought that could happen, we can't prove that it's that person. You see, we can show what looks like it's that person, but we have no clue what consciousness is. And if you even step further back in uh neurology and other sciences, there are some very interesting debates about um the mind and brain. You know, is is the mind separate from the brain or does the brain cause it? And this gets into um different uh theologies and philosophies, but these are real debates that go on in the world. So I would say hit the pause button when you hear someone, and I don't care who they are and and what they've achieved in their life, I'm sure they're incredibly smart people and they're excited about what's going on, but if they're talking about sentiency or consciousness, uh I would just be slow because we can't define that for ourselves. So I think we should probably start a little more basic. Okay, so what I want to do now is I want to to migrate now that we've kind of diffused that. Uh it's a fun little snippet, isn't it? It's a it's a catchy thing that makes us think, but but now that we've kind of inoculated against that, let's move on to some rapid fire uh blocks of information. And these are intended to kind of give you some information I think is want to help you out. All right, so what worked in early 2025 when it comes to Google Ads? Broad match experimentation, looser landing page alignment, uh, generic AI written ad variations. Okay, now what works? Intent mapped landing architecture, data back segmentation, structured first party funnels. You see, traffic is not durable, conversion systems are. And so everything should be built around conversion systems. And so the idea of things being looser as they're run. Now, let me tell you about running Google Ads loosely. I talked to someone yesterday and she told me that they ran Google Ads. Now, the truth is you can. You can go to ads.google.com right now and you can spin up ads and probably have them running in less than 30 minutes, would be my guess. Now, I can tell you after spending you know decades uh with Google Ads, that when you get into it, there is a lot of nuanced details that drive and help your business grow through Google Ads. So what they do is when I say they, it's just different resources. When they talk to you about spinning up your own Google Ads, it negates all the nuances, you know, the so-called devil in the details. And when you deal with an agency, uh, if they're not on top of things and they're not putting the real effort into it, they can also spin up your ads in less than 30 minutes and just let them go. Now, the challenge is that they're not being fine-tuned. They're not uh weed eating the art. They're just letting them run. And so agencies and freelancers and individuals have gotten away with this to some extent, running ads kind of on autopilot, so to speak, which would maximize the return on investment for agencies, and it would uh give the individual the opportunity to run ads without using uh basically a professional uh person that understood it. And sometimes that would work. Now, even prior to 2025, that's still was, you know, a hit or miss kind of situation. I mean, the reality is no fun when it comes to Google Ads. It just doesn't sell as good. You know, it always sells good as, hey, let's start running your ads and they're going to show up the next day. Uh, not many people want to tell you the reality is that those ads have to run for weeks, sometimes four or six weeks to begin the optimization process, and it still requires a lot of adjustments on everything from how you're targeting people, who you're targeting, the content of the ads, where they go when they get to a certain landing page, optimizing that landing page, which again, optimizing, gosh, is such an overused, it's become a cliche in the uh the marketing world today. Uh, but optimization in the proper context basically means you set it up where it's the best possible experience to garner you the best possible results. Um, and and again, that word is so abused, I even hate using it uh sometimes. But anyway, uh this effect of running uh Google Ads uh on a very low-tag basis and then sending them to um these uh these landing pages. So I don't know if you do this, but here's here's a way to tell if your your Google Ads people are behind the times. If they are running your Google Ads to a web page and it's not your main website, they're wrong. Okay, it may still be working, it's wrong, and it's going to bite you because things are changing so fast. You need to shift, you need to make everything consistent to where everyone knows it's the same business. So your Google Business profile needs to go to your main website, uh the uh uh other stuff, Google Ads and all that, needs to be pointing to pages on your main website, not these little scrape pages uh pointing to never never land. And so uh people are doing that. This is why I'm talking about this because I know that this is still going on. Okay, the next thing I want to talk to you about is email. So email marketing. I heard a guy who is investing in some AI technology and he was talking about how email marketing is dead. Absolutely not the case. Email marketing is alive and well, and due to some changes on the internet, it's more relevant than ever. What I mean by that is you want to control the people, being able to communicate with the people, not the people themselves, but you want to control the way that you can communicate with the people that are visiting your website or interested in your business, uh, independently of having to go through what we call third-party data. In other words, you're using um Google or Meta or other people's data to hit a certain audience. You want to be able to start controlling that data. I share with you, uh, I think it was uh I forget the bookstore, but one of the bookstores, you know, when they sold, it was their data that was important. Uh it was their their email list, uh, their database. That that was where the magic was. It wasn't the uh shelves and shelves of books. Matter of fact, some of that stuff could actually be considered a liability in some respects. So here's the thing. Um lazy email is dead. Okay, sign up for our newsletter. I hope none of you are doing sign up for our newsletter. Um people don't want that just like they don't want to eat spam jelly. I mean, it's pretty much the exact same thing in terms of like consumption. So, what you want to do is you want to make sure that these uh your email campaigns are meaningful. Uh people treat their email addresses like they treat money. And so you want to make sure that you're giving them something of value uh for their email address. So um big uh important thing. So if you're not thinking email marketing or collecting email addresses or fine-tuning those campaigns based on what we're seeing with restrictions and uh just the way things are trending, that could be a huge mistake. Uh, not to mention that you know, most people, if you're paying for paid advertising, uh, believe the number on Google talks about your conversion rates, meaning full actions, uh, are somewhere between three to five percent industry-wide. Now, we hit much higher numbers than that, but the idea is let's just go with the 5%. So, what does that mean with 95%? It means they don't engage with your business because it's a higher commitment if you're if they're trying to get to buy services or something like that. So if you can do something that is low commitment, what we're calling frictionless um engagement, meaning there's no downside to it, then you're able to capture their information and then you're able to keep in touch with those larger part of the audience that didn't engage with your company, and then you can garner trust through letting them see your brand over time, which some people call uh top-of-mind awareness or T O M A, or uh there's other terms for it, but basically that's kind of the gist of it. Okay, so AI content. Okay, uh, this is the one that kind of really irks me right now. And the reason it does is because I see so many freelancers and agencies doing this. They're taking artificial intelligence and they're just building out these articles and publishing them. And what they do is they make it look as though they're doing a lot more work, and so the businesses that they they hire to do this stuff, they think that they're getting all this work upon work, and in reality, these agencies and freelancers are just running it through um, you know, Chad GPT or something like that. And by the way, we use Chad GPT, we just use it in the right way. Uh, but what you're saying is they're using it for uh blog articles, which is not how we use that. And then they publish it and and all these things kind of happen. But there are ways to integrate uh human uh you know sentient uh behavior with AI technology, and that's where the magic takes place. Now, it's just like with Google Ads. Okay, if I can run an article through Chat GPT and throw it on your website, I have five to ten minutes. If I build an outline using uh, frankly, expensive uh tools to get everything lined up right, and then I have to involve you as the client to make sure that it's personalized to your business, and then it gets human-touched, and then it gets modified, and then it gets cleaned up, and then it gets published. You can imagine that the first option is going to cost my agency or freelance uh company a lot less, and the second one is going to require a lot more overhead, plus I have to engage the client. You see, the second option works better. The first option feels better because you know you think things are happening. Now, I have seen businesses taint from option number one. They've come to us, I've looked at their data. And so you want to be careful about how you're using artificial intelligence. Harnessing AI is perhaps one of the biggest challenges because the potential for abuse is unlimited as well as its potential to do good. So, one analogy I used today with a friend and colleague I was talking to was I said it's kind of like uh nuclear. You know, nuclear can be used for a weapon, it could also be used for energy. And so, in one way it could be used for good, one way it could use bad. It's not the technology itself, it's how it's being used. And so if you're dealing with agencies and freelancers that are trying to maximize their profits and use the tool in that way without incorporating the higher overhead aspects of it, then basically it's a tool that's being used for bad. So just a word of warning, you want to make sure that when AI is being used for your business, you want to make sure that you're using the right principles and that you're involved in the content to make sure that it is gauged toward your business and it's not just general content because we have seen a crackdown with uh quality filters and you know, uh different engagement factors and uh, you know, just the way that authority is being built. You know, if everybody's going to use junk content that's generalized using artificial intelligence, the bar just gets moved. It's not like that's suddenly a magical thing that's just going to work. And so you need to think through that a little bit. This is also why you need to pay your agency, uh, frankly, more money today. Because if you're paying your agency very little and they're cranking out articles and working on your Google ads and doing some of this other stuff, you know, there comes a point where it's diminishing point of return and they're going to shortcut something. And so paying for your credibility and to make sure that everything is being done right is important. But I've also seen where people are paying premium prices and getting nothing out of it. So the cost by itself is not an indicator. Okay, so as we're moving through this, you know, what we can see is that AI is uh there was an old uh Charlotte Hester movie forever ago called The Agony and the Ecstasy, and it was about uh Michelangelo and the Sistine Chapel. There is an agony and an ecstasy to artificial intelligence. And there's also the mythology, you know, the new myth of the artificial intelligence, which ties into uh Sentiency and the uh the hyperbole people are bouncing onto in order to uh for whatever reason they're doing it, either just through not completely understanding what we even know about sentiency, but but the idea is that um the agony and the ecstasy when it comes to artificial intelligence is that it can be used for good, it can be used for bad. Google ads can evolve and be very meaningful for your business, or you can let Google Ads keep going the way that it's going. You can start getting the benefit from the traffic from Google Ads going to your main website, or you can still lean on the uh the Google Ads guy who's running it to this random page out there, and then you're not getting full credibility for it. So when you when you bundle all this together, it's simply this. Everything now has to work together and harmonize. And so the way we build a system now, we've we've expanded it in 2026, where we harmonize everything from assumptions down to messaging to aligning all the assets to reviewing to making modifications. And that's the way it's got to be, okay, because it's no longer a one and done. Uh when you look at statistics, I just got through publishing. Uh, this should be a pretty staggering statistic because you know, Google's been the king of the hill when it comes to digital advertising forever, you know, like it or not. And the idea is that, you know, now they've gone from in the 90s to in the 80s. It's because of the war going on. And so not only do you have to have a plan that encompasses everything, but you also have to have a plan that is leveraging different media outlets, you know, for or not media outlets necessarily, different um marketing venues, um, such as, you know, you take chat, you know, how do you get listed on ChatGPT? Well, what if ChatGPT falls to the wayside? What if that's the MySpace of 2028 and you've invested all your effort? What if Google becomes uh the Kmart of, you know, that was big in the 1980s? Uh what if Microsoft fades away? Uh what if uh one AI engine surpasses another AI engine and you've you've invested time in the wrong AI engine? You see, the the exponential repercussions of what's going on with marketing today has just absolutely blown up, and your plan has to use best practices. So what does this mean in terms of ways you're you may think? Like, for example, one thing that was common just a few years ago was people who would say, I have a trick to get Google business ranked higher. Now it was a trick and it was against Google's best practices, but these people would tout that as though they're brilliant and they have some kind of scam that's going to make a business more successful just based upon their scam. That doesn't mean they figured something out. They were cheating the system. Well, those cheats are no longer working. Those cheats hurt credibility. And so the idea is when you hear someone say, I've got a trick, or I've got this, or I got that, that's what's going to the wayside. What's going to the wayside are things like PBNs. Uh one of our podcasts, or I did a press release on PBNs, I think at the end of uh 2024-ish, somewhere in there, uh, where people uh SEO companies would build their own little private blog networks and then put backlinks on them to artificially bolster a website. And uh so, you know, those kind of things are just falling to the wayside. And you know what's working is best practice. Now here's the challenge with best practice. It requires a lot of work. I mean, a lot of work, which means that the overhead of competent agencies is going to increase if they're going to service more companies. And the ones that are cutting corners and cheating still are going to have higher margins because they're making more money because they have less overhead. And so if you look at it from that perspective, they could charge you less than a competent agency, or they could say they're going to jack their prices up to match agency uh prices, but then maintain higher margins. You see, these are the games that are going on behind the scenes with agencies. These are the back and forths. And so finding someone who operates ethically, especially in a world that's complicated and kind of, you know, um, the the real meaning is hidden behind words that sound good. Like we're going to SEO your business. Uh you should never go with anyone that says anything like that, but you may hear that. Or they talk about how quickly uh you're going to see results from Google Ads, or they talk to you about um a particular service or a particular thing. You got to be careful because there's a lot of used car salesmen in the world of internet marketing today, and some of them are going to look a lot more reputable than others, and in reality, they may be just as uh um unethical as the one that you can immediately recognize. That's why you got to ask a lot of questions, get everything in writing, and then make sure you stay engaged with that agency, and then say, okay, is this accurately representing my company or is it generic content? So you can kind of see where uh kind of the mindset and how everything works. And uh it's it's at a point to where you know, investing uh in digital marketing, you know, so look at it this way. Um two years ago, uh there are tools that do what's known as uh NAP optimization, name address, and phone number. These tools were considered optional by a lot of people. Now, I probably wouldn't have considered it optional two years ago, but I could see a business kind of overlooking it because what that tool does is it'll take your information and broadcast it across the internet and it makes it all consistent, your name, address, and phone number to build your credibility for your listing. It's it's a piece of it, not the whole thing. And and so what you would see is people would do that, and then you'd see these tools come out. Well, now that's that's non-negotiable. I mean, if you're serious about marketing, that's a tool you have to have. And so you see that the bar has been raised on that particular tool. And so what you're seeing uh across the uh the bandwidth is the same thing. It's just the the game is increasing, and now there are other things that are just non-negotiable, such as making sure that your plan is not a shotgun plan, making sure that you have the proper home base for all of your assets, making sure you're working with someone competently, making sure that your content touches human hands. Uh, those things are all incredibly important. And so if what I'm speaking to you is foreign, and you're paying someone to end quote do SEO on your website, then most cases I've run into, when I've run a report to go see if that work's being done, you're basically paying for that person to take a vacation in most cases. And uh it's kind of staggering when you bring someone in and they actually see that because all they know was that they were paying someone to do this mythical uh thing called SEO, and they never fully quantified it to the client, and uh they literally bought a bill of goods. So you need to be careful, and that's why I wanted to bring out some of these high-level points and to come full circle. Um 2025 in a lot of ways is like 1825. Um, the techniques that were used at the beginning of 2025, I would not use them today. Uh piecemeal systems are dying. Do-yourself website builders, you should have got away from that years and years ago. And if you're still invested in that and you believe because the herd is moving in that direction, just remember that most of the herd fails on the internet. And so these these systems are built for their success, not your success. And when you see uh them hiring, I saw one uh one of these uh big platforms and they hired a uh a professional actor and he was doing some crazy stuff in a video on their landing page. And just remember that this is all just it's it's the bread and circuses of the Roman Empire. They're just trying to bring you in and make you think you can do something for nothing. It doesn't work like that anymore. Now, I'm gonna give you the sunny side of this. The sunny side is you find someone who knows what they're doing, willing to work with you, they dot their i's, they cross their T's, they build you a plan and they build your credibility up over time, and you're patient and you can fund it. You're going to win. Okay? If you can get there, you're going to win. And what's great is the majority of people are going to use their do-it-yourselfers, they're going to hire the freelancers, they're going to do piecemeal systems, and the normalcy bias that will drive them over the cliff will continue to drive them over the cliff. You can be smarter, better, stronger, and ours of the market as long as you can achieve those things. Until next time, this is Ken with Over the Bull.

SPEAKER_00 31:57

Thanks for tuning in to Over the Bull, brought to you by Integris Design, a full service design and marketing agency out of Asheville, North Carolina. Until next time.