CMO-ing in 2025: 10 GenAI-Powered Tactics to Stay Ahead

Drew: Hello, Huddlers. I'm really excited to celebrate episode 450 with you today. I know 450 is a lot of shows, and it's appropriate because today we're going to be commiserating with you all as we enter this "more with less" mandate, which it seems like every single day I talk to a CMO and they say, "I don't know how I can do anymore, but I'm still being asked to do it."

So in this episode, Drew and Drew, which means I'm going to be asking myself some questions, we're going to cover what I think is a digital decathlon. We're going to cover 10 ways that I think you may be able to do more with less that will help you meet this moment. So we're going to jump right in. Okay. So first of all, Drew, I think you have something to say about penguins. Isn't that right?

Drew: Of course I do. You may have seen that on Disney Plus and the National Geographic Channel, there is a show called The Secrets of Penguins, and yes, I've been watching it. My wife has been joining me, but here was an exciting little part of it. Poppy Borglund, who is the founder of the Global Penguin Society, you know, the organization to whom we donate 1% of revenue at CMO Huddles, is on episode two. It's great to see Poppy and all the fine work they're doing with the Magellanic penguins in Argentina. Now, just as a reminder, why do we keep talking about penguins in CMO Huddlesland? Because a group of penguins is a huddle, and there are so many things that CMOs and penguins have in common, not the least of which is they're dealing with a lot of change. They're dealing with a change in their environment and they're adapting, and how they adapt in these harsh, changing climates is kind of extraordinary. You'll also see, and this is the first time they've actually captured on film, the incredible teamwork that these folks are able to do, that these penguins, this huddle of penguins, is able to do in order to catch more anchovies. And then finally, the training that they're doing with their protégés, their offspring. I love that. It's super sweet in episode one. So you'll want to see how they're doing that and how they're working together. So all right. And of course, occasionally the penguins are sliding on their bellies, so I think penguins, CMOs, and marketers can learn a few things about it. So definitely watch that show, and let's get on with this episode. So what's your first question, Drew?

Drew: All right, what's the story with this idea of developing your digital double?

Drew: Okay, so we're trying to do more with less. That means we need two of us. This is something that Lisa Adams has written about extensively, this notion of digital twins. In the show notes, you will find a link to Lisa's LinkedIn post that describes how to develop them. The idea is that you can educate this thing on yourself, create sort of a GPT of yourself that you can use to partner with to help think a lot more things through. As she said, digital twins are AI simulators that mirror how you think and work. So it's double the pleasure, and it's kind of fun because, you know, it makes sense. I'm talking about digital twins and I'm interviewing myself. Also, just so you know, we are testing an application I saw at a conference in New York called The Artist in the Machine. It was a great conference, really inspiring, and I saw this founder of a company called Wysely, W-Y-Z-E-L-Y. And they have actually an application where you can create a digital twin, and I'm excited to test that. Okay, so that's number one. Develop your digital double. Okay.

Drew: What's number two? The idea of sample synthetic studies?

Drew: Okay, I see we're going to go long on alliteration on this thing, right? Yep. Okay. So the notion of synthetic is it is no different than so many different types of synthetic. According to John Lombardo, the founder of Zappi, a synthetic research company, synthetic is often better, whether we're talking about diamonds or rubber or all sorts of other things that we use every day. But he's collaborating with some of the most sophisticated brands in the world to reinvent marketing research. As John described it, seeing him talk about this a couple of times—in fact, we had him on a bonus huddle—you create these, basically your personas, your digital twins, you conduct research against them. The beauty of it is, rather than traditional research where you go out and if you don't get the answers, you can't go back or you have to keep doing it, here you can do a quick test. If you get the answers that are working or you realize, "Oh, we made a mistake," then you can revise it. So John notes that synthetic research is three to four times faster and half the cost. So definitely, if you're planning some market research, check out the notion of synthetic research. And oh, by the way, both Lisa Adams, who I mentioned a second ago, and John Lombardo will be at the CMO Super Huddle. I just hope you're getting some FOMO. Okay.

Drew: Number three is bridge burgeoning buyer behavior. Wait, what the heck is that? Okay.

Drew: So this one comes from our Trust Radius, a partner for us with the CMO Super Huddles. They have a new B2B Tech Buying Report that reveals some dramatic shifts in buying behavior. I can point out a few of them. I write about it. If you go to RenegadeMarketing.com, you'll find a blog post that I wrote about it. 72% of buyers now encounter Google AI's overviews during the research process, so they're not clicking through. So what that means is now they're relying more on prior experience, they're relying more on review sites. Obviously, Trust Radius is really happy about that, but it makes sense. 77% of buyers are looking at user reviews when making a software purchase. So one of the things that I just want to emphasize is the buyers are changing. The way they buy is changing, and they are really counting on trusting their own experience, but validating it with—it's like trust and verify—validating it with their own peer experience. And analysts play a role. So savvy CMOs are focusing on building the trust with a wide range of sources so that they can continue to drive traffic, and I'll get to more on that. And by the way, we will include a link to my blog post, and we are delighted that Trust Radius is a founding sponsor of the CMO Super Huddle, which is in Palo Alto on November 7th. Okay.

Drew: All right, Drew, what's number four? Work on your workflows. Okay, what's that?

Drew: Well, if you've been following along at home, you know that I am a firm believer that the real opportunities with generative AI content is the low-hanging fruit. Yes, you're going to do it, you're going to use it in all sorts of ways, but the way you'll find massive improvements in saving more, doing more with less, is improving your workflows. And so, Noah Breyer of Effic—he talks about this a lot. A lot of times it is looking at your existing processes and perhaps building tools, actually creating things that will, you know, it takes a little code that will improve these processes, and these will allow you to make some great leap forwards. One of the things that Noah has done—Noah and his team have done it with Amazon—they had one killer writer who was just amazing, and they basically were able to replicate the process that writer went through and sort of the style and tone and manner of the writing. So they put those two things together, so now they have a multi-step writing tool that other folks at Amazon can use. It's amazing. Anyway, guess what? Noah Briar will also be at the CMO Super Huddle.

Drew: Okay, what is number five? Now we're back to content and virtualizing your videos. Okay, what's that all about?

Drew: This is one I'm really excited about. Video content has never been more important. I mean, LinkedIn is pushing video. We've seen it in a lot of other areas where video is working better than stills, but it's still—creating video has been hard. It's expensive. There's all sorts of steps involved, and so I had a conversation the other day with Samantha Stark from a company called Fusion, and she's helping her clients leverage AI-generated video to create some amazing content at a lot lower cost and a lot faster. And she shared how they're using platforms like Sora, VE, and LTX Studio. And these are really like, you know, dare I say, game changers. So I am about to go through the process of creating a video working with Samantha. I'll be able to report back on how hard or easy it was, and we're going to do a bonus huddle with Samantha in a couple of months. Oh, and guess what? Samantha will be joining us at the CMO Super Huddle, so be sure to ping me for an invite for when Samantha is at the bonus huddle. That's in July. Okay, we're moving along.

Drew: Okay, next up: relentlessly repeat—no, relentlessly reap repeat revenue. Okay, that is an alliteration, but what's it about?

Drew: Okay, well, let's see. We've mastered demand gen and ABM, but are you missing something? And this is really a key thing. I love the folks—I've gotten to know Shan Pathy from Boomerang AI. And he talks a lot about how difficult it is to get net new revenue, but where the real opportunity is, is when an existing customer goes to a new company and then buys your product or service at the new company. And this is sort of—we know from their data it's like 50 to 75% of new revenue having a direct or indirect link to an existing customer champion. And what's so interesting about what Shan Pathy said is most companies underutilize their champions because they're not tracking them. So if you know that champions are changing jobs, like 25% are changing every year, and you're not making them a priority, then you're missing out on a lot because it's so hard to land net new. But these people are basically not net new. So it's more difficult than you think to track these folks. That's why you want to talk to the people at boomerang.ai and find out how the heck they do it. We're thrilled that they're a sponsor because they are delivering, they're answering the question: How do we drive some quick revenue? Okay, that was that one.

Drew: All right, number seven is dive deep into deep research. Okay.

Drew: I know we've already talked about synthetic research, but this is something different. This is a new part of all of the GPTs. They have this function called deep research, and you see it, and I guarantee you, once you start using it, it will transform the way you think about strategic initiatives. We had Nicole Leffer, who, if you don't know her, you want to follow her on LinkedIn because she has some great, great content. There's some game-changing functionality because it's multiple steps. It's not just one thing—go find this bit of information—but you can have it create... We had a challenge where we had a membership and they had certain skills and we wanted to find out other skills so we could do matching within CMO Huddles. I created a deep research project, and it was able to provide... We start with our information, then we have it go out and search the web. We gave it specific places to search, and then we asked it to help us organize it, and then we asked it to help us build the database that could then be searched and even could push it a bit farther into an application. We're not there yet, but this is very early days of deep research. If you're buying the $20 ChatGPT, you get 10 of them a month. So use them wisely, but get started there. It's phenomenal. Oh, and guess what? Nicole Leffer too is planning to join us at the CMO Super Huddle. So you can probably see why we're confident we're going to sell all 101 tickets, so don't wait. You can go to cmohuddles.com/super-huddle and get your ticket now. Okay.

Drew: Land your brand on LLMs. Okay, that one sounds spicy.

Drew: It is a little spicy. So this is a mystery area that everybody needs to be thinking about right now, which is as both Google and all the rise of the GPTs out there or the LLMs, you are going to see your organic search traffic decline, particularly your Google traffic, because people aren't clicking as much.

So the question becomes, how do you make sure that you show up in ChatGPT or Gemini or Claude or whatever these things are? And nobody, to be clear, nobody that I know has a perfect answer to that. And by that, I mean where they've done the research, made some changes, set up a control and a test, and shown that they can impact.

But my friend John Hall, who's a strategic advisor at Relevance, is getting close, and he said, and I'm going to quote him, "We've moved the needle with GEO," as they call it, generative AI search, through a combination of new types of content, evolved SEO strategies, feeding the Gen AI engines data. It's sort of taking the best SEO and then evolving it.

And here's a key framework that I think is true and is going to work, which is, and quote John again, "Your content must answer the specific questions your buyers are asking and be available across multiple channels where it can be indexed and referenced." Okay, we're going to spend a lot more time on GEO in the coming months in CMO Huddles, and I hope that by the time we get to the Super Huddle, we'll have a head of test where we can actually show you those results.

And of course, John will be there at the Super Huddle to share the progress, and maybe some other folks out there will have cracked the GEO nut. Okay.

Drew: What else you got, Drew? Okay, we're at number nine. We're running, we're almost at the end here. Okay, yodel on YouTube. What are you doing there, Mr. Alliteration?

Drew: All right, so here's the thing that we've noticed a lot. I mean, CMO Huddles and Renegade Marketing content has been on YouTube forever. Honestly, we weren't getting a lot of traction. We recently started creating some 92-second versions of just calling them YouTube Shorts.

And we're using a couple of tools, both Descript and Descript, to generate these things pretty quickly. They're not necessarily, they're no higher quality than the other content that we've had, but we've been shocked that without maybe a little bit of tagging, we're getting a couple thousand views where our average long-form videos might get 30 on a good day.

So a couple of things to note that we've uncovered: the algorithm rewards consistency. So think about repurposing existing content into regularly released, like every single week you release one of these 92-second versions. Again, I don't think you need Hollywood production values, just valuable information presented consistently in short form.

So that's it. Get on with it. Take your existing content, cut it down, 92-second sound bites, and hopefully you'll see the same results that we have. Okay.

Drew: We're getting to the finish line. The last one is Captivate Curious Clickers. Okay.

Drew: Yeah, let's talk about that. So one of the things that we do know is your organic site traffic is likely to drop.

And I think I heard recently that HubSpot's organic traffic was, I heard the number 80%. That sounded outrageous. But even if it's only 50% or 30%, it's still a huge amount of traffic declines. Some of you are probably experiencing a lighter one. So what this means to me is those people who do come to your site better be treated to an amazing, an amazing experience.

And by that, they better be able to find whatever it is that they were looking for as quickly as possible. And I have a couple suggestions on how to do this. One, we have been, we installed Weblist.ai on renegademarketing.com, and it's a, if you go there, you'll see a little red search bar, and you could literally type in anything you want.

I mean, you can say, "Why do horses not have five legs?" And it'll come up with an answer and then find a way to get you to other content. But what's amazing, we've only had it on the website for maybe a month. We're already seeing an increase in time on site. Visitors are discovering more of our older content, but it's because it's relevant, and it's just a phenomenal tool because it answers any question that they have, regardless of whether our website answers it, and then it finds a way to make that answer relevant to it.

So that's one approach. There's another thing that we're launching on cmohuddles.com with a good partner of ours called Sayl. And this is another kind of a different kind of bot, but this one is more of a Q&A-based that is really designed to take sort of chatbots to the next level and help you have a conversational flow.

It suggests questions in it, and then of course you can add your own. We don't have results yet on it, but very excited, both for the ability to improve the experience, but also for us to see what are the questions that people are asking. Because what we'll quickly find out is when they ask these questions, if they click through and then become a member of our starter program, we know that we have the right content for them.

If they're asking these questions and they don't join, we know we have a problem and we have to address it with the content. So you can see this on CMOHuddles.com. You can think of it as a smarter, better chatbot, but it's a lot more than that. So we're excited about that. Okay.

Drew: All right, Drew, that was quite a digital decathlon. And here's the thing that I think you want to make sure that people understand is there's a lot that I threw at you. You can't do all of these at once, but identify two or three that offer the greatest potential. And I think that's important. When you think about all of the things that are going on in generative AI, it's easy to, "What about that? What about that?" Bright shiny object syndrome.

If you start with the challenges that you're having, which, and you know, put the customer at the center of your challenges, "How do we help the customer get to make a better buying decision?" That kind of thing. Then you'll sort of sort through and you may find, well, I don't need my digital twin, but I really need a tool like Weblist AI to optimize my experience.

There's also certain ones of these have learning curves than others that, and investment costs, so put them on a list, get started. We'd really love to hear which of these 10 approaches you are fast-tracking. Okay. All right, well, that's my version of the digital decathlon.

Show Credits

Renegade Marketers Unite is written and directed by Drew Neisser. Hey, that's me! This show is produced by Melissa Caffrey, Laura Parkyn, and Ishar Cuevas. The music is by the amazing Burns Twins and the intro Voice Over is Linda Cornelius. To find the transcripts of all episodes, suggest future guests, or learn more about B2B branding, CMO Huddles, or my CMO coaching service, check out renegade.com. I'm your host, Drew Neisser. And until next time, keep those Renegade thinking caps on and strong!