Marketing in the age of AI – Lars Lofgren

Lars Lofgren: 00:00

You either have to be the influencer or you're gonna pay the influencer. Mhmm. Like, that's where marketing is going because, like, AI's eaten up all the other channels.

Justin Jackson: 00:18

Today, I'm joined by Lars Lofgren. He's done marketing for all sorts of companies, Automattic, Dropbox, Crazy Egg, previously built a 7,000,000 annual revenue affiliate business. And currently he's focused on doing enterprise SEO, the big time for clients. Lars and I met you, we, I think we met, we were both speaking at MicroConf.

Lars Lofgren: 00:39

That sounds right.

Justin Jackson: 00:40

And you are just consistently one of my favorite people to listen to.

Lars Lofgren: 00:45

Thank you. I appreciate that.

Justin Jackson: 00:46

I'm eager to get into your perspective on a lot of stuff. This is a theme that you brought up. I think it was on Edward's show. This idea of founder led marketing

Lars Lofgren: 00:57

Yeah.

Justin Jackson: 00:57

As a superpower.

Lars Lofgren: 00:59

The founder led marketing was always a cheat code. Well, now it's now it's not even like a cheat code. It's almost going like a requirement because it's, like, the only way to break through and the only way to build any sort of defensibility on, like, an LLM world. Right?

Justin Jackson: 01:13

And we just saw that with Transistor because, you know, we were able to launch. I had an audience already. I had connections already, and it opened so many doors.

Lars Lofgren: 01:23

Yeah. Yeah. You're not starting at zero. You're starting at ten, like, right from the get go. It's totally different.

Justin Jackson: 01:29

Yeah. This is why it's so hard to share a marketing playbook with someone else is people will say, well, what did you do? And so many so much of the time, it's like, well, you would have to be me Yeah. In order for some of this to work. I think the general principles are things you just identified.

Justin Jackson: 01:46

Like, you know, if you're going to do affiliate marketing, it has to be a category. Like web hosting has always been the like

Lars Lofgren: 01:54

So we got really deep into web hosting, and, we did very well. That's it's a it's a whole it's it's one of the most competitive areas of Google, and there are so many reasons why. It's got the volume. It's got the payouts. Everybody knows it.

Lars Lofgren: 02:09

There's yeah. There's a deep, deep history behind that.

Justin Jackson: 02:11

And this is something Ruben Gammes pointed out to me early in Transistor's Journey. Again, this is all these advantages that you stack as a founder. It's not just founder led marketing. I think we're gonna talk a lot about what are the attributes or what are some things you might wanna stack as a founder. But, you know, I had this relationship with Ruben Gomes, and he just looked at Transistor.

Justin Jackson: 02:31

And he's like, dude, this is the web hosting business, which already has all sorts of established norms for affiliates and everything else, but it's just smaller.

Lars Lofgren: 02:40

It's much smaller. Yeah.

Justin Jackson: 02:42

And so, like, I think Most

Lars Lofgren: 02:43

b two b categories are like that. Most like, web hosting is the big one. Yeah. At least it's like SMB, b two b, but it's like the big one in, like, business. Everything else is smaller from that, like, everything.

Justin Jackson: 02:58

Yeah. And it's not I mean, let's say the global podcast hosting market is a 150,000,000. That's pretty small. But if you want to build a business that's two to five to 10, you could you could probably do it in the smaller niche. Is there anything else you can think of that's like that?

Justin Jackson: 03:14

So you have web hosting and then you have podcast hosting as a smaller subset. Are there any other categories like that? Do you think like CRM for equipment manufacturers?

Lars Lofgren: 03:23

Yeah. Think all the above. One, like if you have a SaaS business, I would still, as long as you have like a defined category of some kind, I still think an affiliate program is worth it. It will be smaller than it was. It will be more complicated than it was because in the past you could just go to, hey, who's ranking on page one for my product category?

Lars Lofgren: 03:46

And then I'm going start reaching out to all of them and see, you know, if I can connect with them and if they're interested, I know they can send me customers. It was simple. But the the SERP for Google has gotten so fucking out of control that it's like figuring out who has traffic and who doesn't is actually, like, harder than it used to be. And it's not all about the traffic flow anymore, which is really wonky. Mhmm.

Lars Lofgren: 04:07

It makes sense to me, but it's like, you don't even care about the direct traffic. Like, if you're really savvy throughout I'll give you a tactical thing. I want that. And you got some budget to burn. And you if you're comfortable kind of playing, like out on the edge a little bit.

Lars Lofgren: 04:24

Yeah. I don't think this is risky. It's just like, you're gonna you're never gonna be able to prove the ROI on your budget. And this is gonna be more viable if you're in kind of like a bit of a niche or a less competitive segment. So if you are squarely in, like, CRMs and you're going head to head with Salesforce, this is gonna get very expensive.

Lars Lofgren: 04:40

But if you're in some random niche that, like, there's the competitors aren't that intense, like, this will probably work out. Find the figure out who's ranking on page one for, like, best X, whatever your product category is. Go find them all. You can probably go into like page two as well. And then start reaching out to the content managers, you know, affiliate managers, blog managers, whoever's trying to like runs those blogs, you wanna find that person.

Lars Lofgren: 05:08

Mhmm. Reach out to them, get them on a call, and see if they are open. And what you're gonna pitch them is you don't give a fuck about the traffic. You don't give a fuck about cost per click or any of that. You don't give a fuck about affiliate tracking.

Lars Lofgren: 05:23

Yeah. The hell with all that.

Justin Jackson: 05:24

Yeah.

Lars Lofgren: 05:24

Yeah. All you're gonna do is say, hey. If you put me if you put my new business on your list of best x, I'm going to pay you a flat fee x per month. I'm just gonna send that check over to you for as long as and you if you wanna haggle, maybe you can get to number one or even, like, number two, number three would still be If they're like stingy and like have some morals and, you know, don't wanna put you straight to number one. Yeah.

Lars Lofgren: 05:49

So, but if you just get into like the top three, pay them a flat rate, tell them you don't even give a fuck about the tracking because what the way all these fucking systems work is, you know, like, there fewer people now the reason the affiliate model doesn't work nearly as well is way less people go straight to Google and look at the classic 10 blue links to get their research. Right? Instead, they're just looking at the AIOs at the top of Google or they're in ChatTPT or Perplexity or whatever the fuck. So they're not even getting into those pages, but what do all those algorithms use? Yeah.

Lars Lofgren: 06:21

The fucking top 10 posts most likely. Not always. There's some exceptions. But the the the single biggest lever to get into LLM references is to get into the top 10 rankings, or if there is another page from other sites, some other company already in the top 10 rankings, getting listed on that page. Yes.

Lars Lofgren: 06:41

And then the odds of you getting referenced and all the LLM start to go up. Now what's gonna happen is people will be in their LLM of choice. They're not gonna see that page. It's never gonna show up on that website's analytics. It's never gonna show up on your affiliate tracking dashboard of any kind.

Lars Lofgren: 06:58

But they're gonna be asking about, hey. They're they're gonna think ChatGPT is, like, super personalized, and it's fucking not. And they're just gonna be like, hey. Give me the best CRM for this business. I have three employees.

Lars Lofgren: 07:09

I'm in this industry. And then ChatGPT just gives, like, here's an SMB CRM. Good luck. You know? Mhmm.

Lars Lofgren: 07:16

But you will start showing up more often.

Justin Jackson: 07:18

On those

Lars Lofgren: 07:19

lists? People that see it will come to your brand directly. Right? They'll Google your brand. They'll come to your website directly.

Lars Lofgren: 07:25

And then for some unknown reason, you'll be like, Yo, our signups are up. I don't know why. You'll never know why. And that's okay. Like that's probably the If you're willing to spend some money and you're on faith, that's probably the best ROI you can get right now.

Lars Lofgren: 07:43

That well, that and Reddit, which is a whole other fucking thing.

Justin Jackson: 07:46

Yeah. So I think we're gonna talk a little bit, throughout this conversation about some of these pillars of AI marketing strategy, that exist right now. By the way, anyone listening should definitely follow Lars on LinkedIn and Twitter. You're posting on Twitter as

Lars Lofgren: 08:00

I do a little bit of Twitter, mostly on LinkedIn. And then I have a newsletter, larslofgren.com.

Justin Jackson: 08:05

So I'd actually be interested about your LinkedIn strategy because you and I were friends, but I hadn't seen you posting forever. No. All of a sudden

Lars Lofgren: 08:15

It's a ghost.

Justin Jackson: 08:16

Lars, you just start showing up with lots of engagement. And I'm assuming you're writing those posts by hand or are

Lars Lofgren: 08:24

Everything you using by hand. No. All my content. Yeah. A 100% by hand.

Lars Lofgren: 08:29

Every LinkedIn, every email, every tweet, every blog post.

Justin Jackson: 08:33

Yes. We should just talk about it right now. You have this formula that's not that complicated. Basically, it's always deeply personal, often vulnerable, and often real. So stuff you wouldn't expect people to be talking about in the typical performant kind of that's

Lars Lofgren: 08:56

what I

Justin Jackson: 08:56

try to do. Yeah. And it's just when you see content like that, so like the one everyone talks about is see, your stuff is also really You can tell it as a story. So I could be like, Oh, my buddy Lars was just at a white hat SEO conference. Everyone's miserable.

Justin Jackson: 09:17

And then he goes to the black hat SEO conference. Everybody's having the time of their life. Right?

Lars Lofgren: 09:22

That's the story. Yeah. Yeah. That is 100% happening.

Justin Jackson: 09:27

But it's so great because first of all, I think so many people are so polite, you know? This is one thing I think I learned from Noah Kagan at AppSumo. He's just so like blatantly raw and it feels open. Right? He's just he'll just write out what he has to say, how he's feeling, and that's it.

Justin Jackson: 09:49

And you're doing the same thing. It's like, hey.

Lars Lofgren: 09:51

Yeah. That's the goal. That's what we're trying do.

Justin Jackson: 09:53

I went to this conference and it was kind of a downer, you know?

Lars Lofgren: 09:57

It was Moz by the by the way. The last, not the most recent one. The one it was like a year or two ago. The last one in Seattle. That was a depressing fucking conference.

Lars Lofgren: 10:07

And it's a

Justin Jackson: 10:08

and they're having a bad time because by the way, are is Moz, like the SEOs that go, are those mostly, like, e com people? Are they mostly

Lars Lofgren: 10:18

There's a lot of agencies. I think some e com, some SaaS. The I'm not, like, super tapped into the Moz community. Yeah. Myers is very, very white hat.

Lars Lofgren: 10:28

Yes. Like, extremely white hat. Like, if if I went to if I pitch them on, like, how to do link building, which I've done a lot of link building. Yeah. And not all of it was white hat.

Lars Lofgren: 10:39

Yeah. So if I was like, here's how to actually build links, I would probably not get accepted at the conference. And that's Got it. I'm I'm throwing a dick at them. It's just their vibe.

Lars Lofgren: 10:48

Right? Yeah. There's plenty of stuff I get out of their conferences, and it's it's got plenty of cool people in the community. But it doesn't mean

Justin Jackson: 10:54

you don't to black hat people having so much fun right now?

Lars Lofgren: 10:57

So, you know, we talked about, like, their AI, which is, a big shift that has changed so much. But even if you put all the AI stuff aside, the Google algo has gotten more unhinged in the last couple of fucking years. And and there

Justin Jackson: 11:14

what you've been saying. It's

Lars Lofgren: 11:15

like Yeah. It's fucking insane. If there's one thing for people to take away, in the current environment, regardless of your business model, and I do deeply believe this, and I see it over and over and over and over again. Is to succeed in the current SEO environment, you need a certain level of quality on your content, which is like, in my opinion, fairly average. Okay.

Lars Lofgren: 11:38

But there are very few benefits, if no benefits, to exceeding that level. Got it. Like if you just, there used to be a world, like if you wanted to do the pure white hat approach and like really overinvest in content quality, make search users happy, make the blogs better, make the guides better, make the website better. If you just overinvest in quality, like it might not get like a perfect payoff, right? Or like you might like the ROI ratio might be like, but like you would still move the needle forward, Right?

Justin Jackson: 12:08

You

Lars Lofgren: 12:08

could still get somewhere. If you just keep investing in quality, you would go forward. Yeah. Today, that is not necessarily true. In most cases, like, you hit that quality cap pretty fast, and then every dollar after that gets you fucking nowhere.

Justin Jackson: 12:22

Yeah. This is what's been surprising about what you've been talking about Yeah. Is that that because Google's guidance is still I I don't know how

Lars Lofgren: 12:29

they Write for people. Don't write for SEO.

Justin Jackson: 12:31

Yeah. Write

Lars Lofgren: 12:32

for people. It's all this fucking bullshit.

Justin Jackson: 12:35

Yeah. And and you're saying it doesn't actually, like, you're actually seeing, like, worse content ranking better.

Lars Lofgren: 12:43

Oh, yeah. All the time. The the the amount like, the overall content quality that I see ranking and winning is worse today than it has been in like the last ten, fifteen years.

Justin Jackson: 12:57

Okay. So let let's use a practical example because I'm I'm interested in this. So let's say that you were previously you wanted to rank for best nonalcoholic drinks, And the way to do that in the past would be I'm just going to Google, see what's out there right now, I'm going to beat them on everything. I'm going beat them on the quality of the content. I'm going to beat them on research.

Justin Jackson: 13:16

I'm going to beat them on presentation, organization, and then links. So, but is, is that is now is Google just over ranking on links or has it?

Lars Lofgren: 13:28

Neither. So yeah, this is what's changed. Well, first of all, if you just go in and be like, I'm going to do a better piece of content than everybody else that's currently ranking, that's not going to get you necessarily anywhere, like at all, especially if you start there. And links, so this is, you know how I say it, like sometimes there is like a thread of reason to what Google's doing, but they sort of like, flop it at the end. This is kind of a perfect example.

Lars Lofgren: 13:56

Like links matter. Links used to be a cheat code.

Justin Jackson: 14:00

Yeah.

Lars Lofgren: 14:00

Straight up cheat code in Google. Like, if you wanna get to the top of best web hosting, extremely competitive, I'd be like, all right, you better get really fucking good at link building. Yeah. And yes, the content has to be good enough. It has to be pretty solid.

Lars Lofgren: 14:12

But then what gets you to number one for those extremely competitive categories is can you build higher quality links at a higher volume without getting caught? Right? Yeah. And this this is not organic link building. Right?

Lars Lofgren: 14:25

You're not paying for links either, but, like, you have to find a way to build high quality links to your page and your site. If you do that better than anybody else in your space, you win. Okay? It used to be like, tactically, it was very difficult. The execution was always really hard, but the strategy was straightforward.

Lars Lofgren: 14:42

Solid content, shitload of high quality link building, you win. These days, that formula is not that simple at all, which creates all these weird holes in content quality. Content quality actually matters less than it ever has, in my opinion.

Justin Jackson: 14:57

Yeah.

Lars Lofgren: 14:58

But what matters more now than ever in my career to the point where it can get you crazy outcome, go build an entity footprint across the rest of the web first. Mhmm. And so if you think about we take a step back and we think, okay, how do LLMs think? And Google thinks, even the Google basic rankings, they have more similarities to LLMs than you would think they do. Yeah.

Lars Lofgren: 15:25

So if you optimize for LLMs, you're kind of already optimizing for Google. There's a lot of overlap between the two. But if you think, okay, how do LLMs think? They think in entities, right? Individual topics, individual items, and they're just associating everything with everything.

Lars Lofgren: 15:39

So, like, best you know, if they're CRM. CRM is a topical product entity. They've that's a thing. And then you can here's all the branches. Here's the mind map of every product that fits within that CRM category.

Lars Lofgren: 15:52

Yeah. There's all the sub segments within CRM. Right? It's just one giant informational tree, mind map, and everything has, like, scoring relationships, mathematical relationships between it all. Google isn't just looking at links in order to figure out entities and you judge whether or not entities are like trustworthy.

Lars Lofgren: 16:13

They're looking at the entire web. Yeah. So they're looking at Reddit, they're looking at YouTube, they're looking at social, they're looking at everything else. And this is what burned both gray hat scammy marketers, and then also a lot of like legit folks too in the SEO space. If you go build a website in your entity and you're just relying on SEO and links, like you don't have that footprint everywhere else.

Lars Lofgren: 16:43

Right? You don't, you don't have reviews. You're not on Trustpilot. You're not on g two. You don't have a Google business profile.

Lars Lofgren: 16:51

You're not on Reddit. No one's talking about you because you have a brand new business. Like, you haven't built up your brand, but more importantly, you haven't built up that, like, entity across the web. Mhmm. And if Google's looking at your shit and says, like, wait.

Lars Lofgren: 17:04

Who is this entity? They won't even look at the content. Yeah. They'll just say, hey. We don't know who they are.

Lars Lofgren: 17:09

We don't know this thing, so we're not gonna rank them. And we're not gonna feature them in Gemini or AIOs, and then Google's not ranking you, so perplexity doesn't see you. You're just JET GPT, and then you're just a ghost, and then your domain tanks. This happened to me, actually. So now, like, if someone's like, hey.

Lars Lofgren: 17:28

I'm building this new business. It could be SaaS. Could be ecommerce. It could be anything. I used to tell people like, look, you could start on SEO, and I love starting on SEO.

Lars Lofgren: 17:35

You can't do that anymore. Because you have to think, okay, how even if I wanna rank for some stuff down the line or get featured in Perplexity or Gemini people are asking questions about a certain thing down the line. I have to go build an entity footprint across the rest of the web first. Mhmm. And if I do that well enough, SEO will be the reward at the end.

Lars Lofgren: 17:58

Right? So it's no longer a very viable way to do the entire journey. It's now a big payoff if you do the journey somewhere else. Yes. Which for someone that like loves SEO is like kind of heartbreaking.

Lars Lofgren: 18:10

Yes. I'm like, damn it, I like doing this shit. Now I gotta do other shit. That that is why I'm on LinkedIn. And, like, that that fuck I had that realization of, like, fuck.

Lars Lofgren: 18:20

I cannot do SEO exclusively anymore. This sucks. Yes. I guess I have to go get on LinkedIn. I fucking hate LinkedIn.

Lars Lofgren: 18:28

But now I'm on LinkedIn. Right?

Justin Jackson: 18:30

So Yeah. I think this is such a let's talk about this. Let's talk about so brand new business. The old playbook doesn't work anymore.

Lars Lofgren: 18:39

Well, one of the play there's plenty of playbooks that still work. It's the it's the SEO, like organic, like inside sales funnel. HubSpot popularized that shit. You know, my first job was at Kissmetrics. Yeah.

Lars Lofgren: 18:52

And I ended up leading marketing there for a little while. And our whole funnel was that same fucking model. Mhmm. SEO, tons of traffic, like and that that's a classic tried and true, was tried and true. It's still a classic, but it's gonna be a a dining classic.

Justin Jackson: 19:09

And I think the the kernel of truth behind what made SEO work is still true, which is if I'm starting a new podcast today and I need somewhere to host it, I'm going to think my first question is what is the best podcast hosting? Now it's just that the way I'm going to get my answer could be on Google, but then there's going to be some sort of AI overview. Could be on ChatGPT, could be on YouTube, could be on Google where I type best podcast hosting space Reddit, could be me going to LinkedIn and asking for recommendations there. It's just, I'm still asking the same question. It's just that in the old days, if Google got 80% of that inquiry action, now it's spread out, right?

Lars Lofgren: 19:57

Yeah. Yep. Yep. It's on a bunch of different platforms. The platforms are really messy.

Lars Lofgren: 20:01

They don't have clear leaderboards anymore. And I think, you're mentioning about like, oh, they're gonna ask like like a huge chunk. I think people are starting to figure out that like AIs are like, especially for research, have issues. Mhmm. So where do people go?

Lars Lofgren: 20:17

I see this constantly. Everyone's going to, like, VIP invite only memberships type of things or paid memberships. People are going into private WhatsApp groups. Mhmm. They're like, hey, I need an agency for this.

Lars Lofgren: 20:32

I need a tool for this. And now it's like, word-of-mouth is actually, like, back in vogue. Yep. Not necessarily because people, like, prefer that because it's kinda it's difficult. The sample size is so much smaller.

Lars Lofgren: 20:44

But like all these platforms are getting so muddled and kind of shitty. Yes. Like I don't go search for anything anymore. Yes. I'm like, why?

Lars Lofgren: 20:52

Here's Google what's funny

Justin Jackson: 20:54

is that, because you've talked, you've talked about this kind of footprint model, right? So now you need a bigger footprint

Lars Lofgren: 21:03

and more channels.

Justin Jackson: 21:05

Yeah, yeah. That is to me just kind of fits who I am. And so right now I'm loving it because I that's how I've done Transistor from the beginning. I just set up a big footprint.

Lars Lofgren: 21:17

Yeah, you're ahead of the curve.

Justin Jackson: 21:18

I'm to be everywhere. I'm going to be on podcasts. I'm going be on Reddit. I'm going to be and I think the yeah, the it's it's gotten a lot more fragmented, but the opportunities are there, especially across the spectrum of marketers. So like, again, you have a different approach than I might have.

Justin Jackson: 21:43

But if you look at this, there's lots of opportunity for arbitrage right now. Like just yesterday, I noticed and maybe this has been around for a while, but now I'm seeing a lot of Facebook groups show up in Google search results. And Quora's showing up again, like it was gone and now it's back.

Lars Lofgren: 22:00

Going down and up. It's like the LinkedIn pages, they go down and up and Quora and Facebook. Yeah.

Justin Jackson: 22:06

So it's harder in the sense that you're it is a lot more maybe the challenge is that you could just spray and pray and that wouldn't be in a good approach. But I think if the overall job that you're trying to do now is building reputation across a bunch of different channels. So if you appear on a podcast, your reputation goes up. If you post a good post on LinkedIn, your reputation goes up. If you give a killer conference talk and tell a great story that 10 people tell in their private WhatsApp groups, your reputation and your footprint has increased and your reputation has gone up.

Justin Jackson: 22:52

Do you think, is that the approach for right now? Is there something I'm missing? Is there more nuance to it?

Lars Lofgren: 22:59

Yeah. Yeah. Well, yes and no. Like I think the easier way, for probably a lot of folks listening to this, probably like founders, probably building their own SaaS businesses. That's your audience, right?

Lars Lofgren: 23:09

Yeah. Yeah. So I think, you know, for the longest, longest time, like, if anybody was like, hey, what's the, like, go to move that'll just completely hack this whole organic funnel? And it's always been that founder led marketing approach. Like, get yourself out there.

Lars Lofgren: 23:28

You are the founder, CEO, CTO, whatever. Start talking, don't talk through your branded channels because no one wants to listen to shit that's been that way for decades. But get out there yourself, tell your shit in whatever channel. And what I used to tell everybody is if you're going the organic route, pick the channel that resonates the most with you. Yeah.

Lars Lofgren: 23:50

And it could be, you know, if you love to write, go do SEO. If you love video, go to YouTube. If you love to talk and interview and do all this stuff, go do podcasts. Like, find find the medium that really resonates to stick with it for a couple years before really, like, a decade. That's when it gets really good.

Lars Lofgren: 24:07

Yeah. But go go pick the channel and go after it. And it would always work. And it would also like, if you if you stuck with it consistently, like, you would get your you'd get your all of your channel firing in your go to market motion, all this bullshit. Mhmm.

Lars Lofgren: 24:25

It would accelerate things way faster than, like, any other method if you did that founder led marketing. It was always like a power move, a cheat code. It just completely accelerated everything.

Justin Jackson: 24:34

Yeah.

Lars Lofgren: 24:35

Now now what I tell people is, not only it's it's still like a power move. It'll get things moving better than anything else, but the alternatives also, like, really suck. So, like, your options, like, in the past, you could still build, like, a halfway decent blog without doing all the founder led marketing stuff. Right? Yeah.

Lars Lofgren: 24:56

You could still build these other channels. But the problem with AI, AI has, like, raised the floor on quality, like, pretty high, which means if you just do average, you might as well just do AI, which means everybody else is doing the same shit, which means you're just it's noise on noise, slop on slop. You do all the fucking automation stuff and prompt engineering and all these agents working together so they keep the context windows tight and do all this fucking insane shit. Like, it's still the same generic content quality as everybody else. So you're not going to like stand out.

Lars Lofgren: 25:27

Like you don't really have, like if you want to do organic, you don't really have a ton of options outside of the founder led marketing. Like what I've told a number of people is like you either have to be the influencer or you're going to pay the influencer. That's where marketing is going because every other channel of AI's eaten up all the other channels, right? So you have to build your own audience. Or if you don't build your own audience around you, you're going to have to pay someone that already, that spent the last five years building an audience around them.

Lars Lofgren: 25:59

Or you're going to pay Google and Facebook for their tolls.

Justin Jackson: 26:01

That's it. Yeah. Yeah. So, or partner up with somebody. I think that's going to become, you know, that's what made the Transistor partnership so great is my business partner, Jon, was a great engineer.

Justin Jackson: 26:14

I was great at a lot of things, but marketing was one

Lars Lofgren: 26:16

of them. Doesn't have to be the whole team. Someone on the team has to do that influencer thing. Yeah. And that's just as true.

Lars Lofgren: 26:22

It's, it's, I mean, it's been that true in B2C for a little while now, but all of B2B is going that direction.

Justin Jackson: 26:30

Interesting. What what's the state of paid acquisition these days? I I haven't done hardly any paid acquisition. What's what's the I mean, personally, it feels like the time to buy Facebook stock because it feels like that's the one channel like Instagram ads is going to just grow and grow and grow both in the consumer and in B2B. What are you seeing?

Lars Lofgren: 26:50

So I'm not super deep into paid. Tell you that. So this is more like speculation on my part. From what I've seen so what's happened across a lot of like pretty big B2B programs that I've seen in marketing budgets, and this has happened in like the last two years, right? So like Google, both the algo and everybody switching to LLMs, a lot of massive sites are just in decline.

Lars Lofgren: 27:15

Traffic's just dropping everywhere. And if you're a head of marketing at some massive software company, you're like, fuck. This doesn't look good. Yeah. And so the instinct has been to slash content budgets, slash the organic budgets, drop headcount, purge teams, and take all that money.

Lars Lofgren: 27:37

And I I know multiple major marketing programs that have gone through this. They've taken all that money, and they're just piling it into Google Ads. Wow. Or whatever. And and these are significant ad spends.

Lars Lofgren: 27:48

These are, you know, 6 figure per month type ad spends. Yeah. And in isolation, that can make sense. But if everybody does that at the same time, the cost per lead just goes up, right? The cost per customer just goes way the fuck up.

Lars Lofgren: 28:06

So everybody's like, paid is very much zero sum. Much, are you willing to burn more cash than your competitor? Have you the ability to burn more cash than your competitor? Yes or no? So, I mean, I've always liked organic.

Lars Lofgren: 28:19

I'm an organic guide. I like building organic engines. So that's what I'm focused on and trying to build out for the future. But I see everybody running to paid and that makes me nervous. I was like, there's no way this is going work out long term.

Justin Jackson: 28:33

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, for me, it just seems, first of all, I've just never been good at it. And second of all, I found the tooling very difficult. Like just even setting up Google AdWords, I found like just the tooling around that is not easy.

Lars Lofgren: 28:48

It's a whole thing. And

Justin Jackson: 28:50

once you get it up and running, it's like, the problem to me, it seems is like that marketplace is so efficient that if I'm bidding on best podcast hosting or podcast hosting, the market is so efficient. And I've talked to people, they just say, like, yeah, we put a dollar in and on a good day, we get a dollar 10 out like that. And that just seems to me like a massive, like, why would I do that for just that kind of return? But people don't know what else to do or maybe they're not tracking it.

Lars Lofgren: 29:21

So there's a lot of sloppiness on tracking.

Justin Jackson: 29:25

Well, the other thing is I know people that have, they've stopped their paid acquisition side and the results, at least according to them, are they're still getting the same amount of leads. It just turned out that Facebook was taking credit for

Lars Lofgren: 29:42

that week. Classic problem. This is so fucking classic. I got so, you know, I worked at an analytics startup for the first part of my career. So I got, like, really deep into attribution.

Lars Lofgren: 29:52

Yes. In fact, the attribution model for Kissmetrics, I wrote the product spec for that.

Justin Jackson: 29:57

Okay.

Lars Lofgren: 29:57

And actually went live. Yeah. So I geeked out on this shit for a while. It's funny now I don't give a fuck about attribution. I just don't care.

Lars Lofgren: 30:06

But, like, if I if I was if I was running a paid program, I would care. Yeah. What happens and this is true across not just, like, Facebook and Google, but you think of any paid acquisition program of any kind, sponsorships at events, catalogs, anything and everything, right? Branding, billboards, all of it. And you know the retargeting tools are like the fucking worst at

Justin Jackson: 30:34

Yeah, I've heard this.

Lars Lofgren: 30:35

Yeah, they're so bad. So marketing tool, if you get into the dashboards, they are extremely generous with themselves. Facebook, of course, will say like, oh, yeah. That random person, they saw our ad. So, of course, that sale is our sale.

Lars Lofgren: 30:54

Bullshit. Okay? Mhmm. A lot of those people were going to purchase anyway. Like, if you send out an email to your your list, let's say you're an ecommerce company, sell like socks or something.

Lars Lofgren: 31:06

And you sell, yeah. You send out an email like, hey. Look at our most popular pair of socks for the whole year. And, of course, you're gonna sell a bunch of those socks. Yep.

Lars Lofgren: 31:17

A percentage of those people were going to buy that pair of socks on that day regardless of the email.

Justin Jackson: 31:23

Yeah.

Lars Lofgren: 31:24

They that last night, they had decided, hey. I need a new pair of socks. Now they're and they just happened to buy and like they clicked through the email on the same day. So the trick on, like, if you really want to get into attribution and proving whether or not something is actually generating money, you got to get The term is called incremental revenue. Or, so it's like, you can't just say, like, use a basic last click model.

Lars Lofgren: 31:47

You have to say, okay, out of the people that went through this funnel or went through this campaign or went through this ad, we need to be able, we need to run a test, we need to set things up in a way that we can measure who was going what is the percentage of people that were gonna buy that no matter what we did? And that's our organic kind of bucket. Yeah. And then the ad is only going to get credit for the incremental lift. Mhmm.

Lars Lofgren: 32:12

Right? No one tracks that incremental lift.

Justin Jackson: 32:14

Yeah.

Lars Lofgren: 32:15

Retargeting has a horrible reputation to this because they just spew ads at everybody, right, all over the web after they've already seen your fucking product. And a bunch of people were gonna buy that thing anyway, but now your ads are like following them around. They're fucking like bodybuilding websites, and they're selling like podcast software. And that retargeting ad is like, hey, we showed the ad even though, you know, they came back three hours later, like we should get credit, right? No, they fucking shouldn't.

Lars Lofgren: 32:44

I talked to I'm not gonna name the company, But I I talked to this was years and years ago when retargeting was, like, hot. And this is a big if I named the company, most people would, actually fucking know the name. So this is not some small rinky dick shop. This is Yeah. This is, a big brand.

Lars Lofgren: 33:01

And I talked to one of their, like, hardcore marketers. She she was sharp. She was fucking on it. Yeah. And we immediately started driving on this.

Lars Lofgren: 33:09

And I asked her, well, have you been running those incremental tests on all these retargeting programs? She was telling me she was doing a bunch and she's like, yeah, yeah, yeah. I tested all of them. I'm like, did any of them actually return any ROI? She's like, none of them did except for one.

Lars Lofgren: 33:24

Wow. She tested like a dozen and I was like, okay, so which one actually got you profit? She's like, some obscure retargeting tool I'd like never even fucking heard of. Like all the popular ones were just shoving junk. Yeah.

Lars Lofgren: 33:36

So this is this is a very common trap with paid. You have to segment your funnels very clearly. I mean, the other big trap that everybody uses, especially smaller or mid sized shops is they'll say, okay, you know, they'll do a bunch of organic originally and they'll be like, okay, or, you know, they'll just take their entire marketing budget, look at their entire revenue and their their their normal lifetime value and cost per, customer and all that stuff and just, like, aggregate it all. Mhmm. Then, okay, here's our baseline metrics for the company.

Lars Lofgren: 34:05

And then they go use that for their paid program, But the paid leads cost, like, three times as much. And it just destroys the profitability, but they're not segmenting it out. Right? So you kinda you gotta do both. You gotta watch both.

Lars Lofgren: 34:17

Mhmm. You gotta make sure it doesn't get out of control on both sides. Most people don't do the work to actually analyze the paid program. Regardless of how tactical they are, like at the top, you know, in Google Ads or Facebook or wherever, like how sophisticated they are getting the clicks, usually the rest of the funnel and the tracking and most of the programs I've looked at have been just complete garbage. Yes.

Lars Lofgren: 34:40

And you have to retool everything.

Justin Jackson: 34:41

It almost feels like the best time to do paid is at the beginning when you don't have anything else going on, because then you can prove it. It's like, unknown brand. Nobody knows about us. My my friend Jordan Gal is doing this with Hey Rosie, which is automatic phone answering for your business. It's all it uses AI voices and stuff like that.

Justin Jackson: 35:02

But at the beginning, they're like, let's just put a bunch of money in Instagram ads. And it did build the company. You know, they got a lot of kind of notoriety from it. And it was testable because they're like, well, we don't have anything else going on.

Lars Lofgren: 35:17

That's true. Yeah. The positive thing I will say about paid, regardless of the platform, especially coming from like a B2B side, is there's generally a profitable flow of customers that you can get on each platform. If you're willing to put in a little bit of you can get some profit, whether it's Facebook, Google ads, you wanna do the Instagram, you know, whatever, you can generally get a flow going that will give you profitability. Yeah.

Lars Lofgren: 35:46

The few things to keep in mind is, you know, like, organic and paid are kinda like the inverse of each other. Like, organic, initially, the ROI makes zero fucking sense. Mhmm. You're just burning. And whether it's time or money, you're burning countless, countless amounts of money on like trying to get one fucking customer.

Justin Jackson: 36:04

It adds up quick.

Lars Lofgren: 36:05

Yeah. And if you do the ROI in the early days, it doesn't make any fucking sense. That's why a lot of people don't do it. But the nice thing about organic is the further down you go, it starts to scale. And it goes from making absolutely no money to making shitloads of money with like very reasonable amounts of inputs.

Lars Lofgren: 36:23

Right? It'll flip over time. Like the metrics all get better the longer you do it. That's organic. Paid is the reverse.

Lars Lofgren: 36:32

So in the early days, there's usually a very targeted customer flow that you can get in front of. The ad spend can be pretty low, and you can generate some profit in some customers. That happens to a lot of small businesses, whether it's SaaS or e com or whoever, like they start with it because they don't know what else to do. Like, okay, I'll do Google Ads. Yeah.

Lars Lofgren: 36:52

And they get that flow going and they're like, okay, this is working. I get customers. I'm putting in X. I'm making Y. You know, the attribution's pretty simple, like you said, because there's nothing else fucking going on.

Justin Jackson: 37:02

Yeah.

Lars Lofgren: 37:02

And it works. The trap people run into is, remember, is that reverse of the organic. So like all the, the best customers are on day one, right? And, you know, if you start doubling your paid budget, your customers don't double. Like the output is not doubled.

Lars Lofgren: 37:21

There's friction in

Justin Jackson: 37:21

it. Yeah.

Lars Lofgren: 37:22

Because all these algorithms, you have to start expanding, you know, their own in channel footprint and you widen your net. And the more you widen your net, the less intent there is behind the customers or the prospects. The prospects aren't in your wheelhouse nearly as much, so they're not gonna be as a fit. The conversion rates are shittier. They're not gonna hang around as long.

Lars Lofgren: 37:42

They're not gonna have the same repurchase rates or the same, or they're gonna have higher churn rates. Mhmm. And the the whole metrics all the metrics are just gonna be worse. Yeah. The further you scale paid, the worse it gets.

Lars Lofgren: 37:54

So what I'd say to most SaaS businesses, like, you're exploring paid, go do it. But just realize there's gonna be a sweet spot you hit pretty early.

Justin Jackson: 38:01

Yeah. Are you

Lars Lofgren: 38:01

okay with that? Don't try to just, like, scale it endlessly unless you, like, really know what you're doing. Yeah. Just take that nice, reliable flow of customers, put it on autopilot, make sure it doesn't get fucked up, and then go spend your time on your other, like, marketing efforts, whatever that may be.

Justin Jackson: 38:16

Yeah. Yeah. It's probably gonna be organic. How are you feeling about attribution these days? The rest of this episode is reserved for members of marketingfordevelopers.com.

Justin Jackson: 38:28

Members get access to full interviews, which often include behind the scenes tips that we don't necessarily wanna share publicly, just realities that don't often get covered in the public media. Members will also get access to our Discord where we discuss all sorts of things, answer questions. In the age of AI, anybody can build almost anything. The hard part now isn't the building, It's marketing. It's finding customers and getting them to care.

Justin Jackson: 39:03

Marketing for developers is a community of people who are figuring this out in real time. Again, if you want the full episode, go to marketingfordevelopers.com, become a member, and you'll get access to our private podcast. Okay. Back to the show. The cost of building software products has gone down dramatically.

Justin Jackson: 39:24

So what's left? And in my mind, I'm like, what's left is people with distribution. What's left is people that so, like, if for you, it just seems like there's a lot of potential because if there is a founder out there or a company that's out there that's like looking for we're looking for that piece, which has become the hardest piece. Now distribution was always hard. That's always been the hardest.

Lars Lofgren: 39:51

Always hard. Yeah. It's only getting harder. Yeah.

Justin Jackson: 39:54

What stands out? And, and like you said, if LLMs consistently return average, so they'll write you an average blog post. They'll write you an average YouTube script. They'll write you an average Reddit comment. Who are the smart people?

Justin Jackson: 40:10

And I I'm I was making this argument on my other podcast because I'm basically like a and I mentioned you actually by name. I said, if you're a Lars Lofgren or you're a founder like Adam Wavin who's just so fucking good at being a personality online and you know how to find customers, it's gonna be people like that that can rise above the noise in creative ways.

Lars Lofgren: 40:34

Yeah.

Justin Jackson: 40:35

I think the value if marketers are worried right now because of ChatGPT, the same thing that's happened all the time in every category is happening now. So the watermark of like, if you were a shitty marketer, the watermark has gone up. Yeah, you're already drowning. You're drowning. You're underwater.

Justin Jackson: 40:53

So it's the people who are standing tall, who are above that high watermark, who can still stand out, that are going to kick ass right now, at least until the machines figure it out. And the people that are curious, like, for me personally, let's see that everybody starts using these Clodbot machines. Have you heard of these? You know? Yeah.

Justin Jackson: 41:12

Let's say

Lars Lofgren: 41:13

the viral Twitter shit. Oh my god. It sounds terrible. But let's just but let's

Justin Jackson: 41:18

just say let's just say that the future of marketing is, and you've already said it, the future of marketing is no websites. Now just have an API endpoint that's communicating with everybody's clawed bot around the world. If that's the future of marketing is creating content that LLMs can consume. Well, who's gonna kick ass at that? Is it gonna be people saying typing typing into chattypety, please help me, you know, do this marketing.

Justin Jackson: 41:45

This is the marketing is the one place. Good marketing is the one place that I feel like we're still so we we still have so much leverage because if if if there's just way more average content, way more average approaches to doing marketing, what's going to stand out is the people that know how to creatively rise above it.

Lars Lofgren: 42:09

Yeah. Well, it's it's one part scale but one, the other big part is like the emotion, right? Like if you can get all of your facts even if LLMs get to the point where there's no hallucinations and you can get any information you could ever want from an LLM, I don't think we'll ever get there. But let's say we do get there. At the end of the day, people still want to connect with other people.

Lars Lofgren: 42:31

Even in your industry. 100%. You still wanna have a connection. You still wanna follow people you respect. You still wanna have conversations with them.

Justin Jackson: 42:37

Yep.

Lars Lofgren: 42:37

You still wanna get inspiration from them. There's there's still that person like, we're not even though I'm a hardcore introvert. Right? Like, I I could go months without talking to anybody. Totally fine.

Lars Lofgren: 42:47

But, just but, like, I recognize that, one, I'm the anomaly. And two, even I have my limit. Like, we want to we are social creatures. We wanna connect. We wanna have we also even through content, like, is like, content is not gonna disappear even if AI could do it better because a big part of content is, like, reaching through time and space to connect with another person.

Lars Lofgren: 43:11

Like, if I know that like like, I I'm on your newsletter. I get your little missives every however every other month or whatever you Yeah. Yeah. And it could be about some random whatever you took your kid skiing and all were like, oh, yeah. You know?

Lars Lofgren: 43:23

I'm like, great. That's cool. Like, Justin's living the dream. That's amazing. Keep doing it.

Lars Lofgren: 43:28

Like, and that there's like, you're not connecting with me directly, but there's still connection.

Justin Jackson: 43:32

That's And I'm

Lars Lofgren: 43:33

still paying attention to email. And I'm still getting excited when the email comes in. Like, I have other newsletters that that's a part of, and there's people that I follow online. And I really hope they never do AI content because I don't I wanna hear them. I wanna hear it through their voice and get that emotional connection.

Lars Lofgren: 43:48

It's not even just having the best content. Having that emotional component and that connection with someone Mhmm. Is actually extremely fulfilling in so many ways. Right?

Justin Jackson: 43:59

I mean, this is why I'm actually quite bullish on podcasting right now is because look at every AI CEO, Mark Andreessen, every AI yes. Yeah. They they're doing all this fucking crazy automation, and everything's not human. It's all a machine. And then what do they do?

Justin Jackson: 44:14

They all go on podcast and

Lars Lofgren: 44:16

talk about it. Massive amounts of PR through the CEOs and their personal branding. Yes. Harves that. That's how they built their fucking companies.

Lars Lofgren: 44:25

They're not using their AI tools. They're just fucking showing up the podcast.

Justin Jackson: 44:29

That's right. It's it's and and it doesn't take a genius to go, you know what? I mean, you've talked about this too. Maybe paying to be a part of this mastermind is a good investment. Maybe me going to more conferences and just hanging out and talking to more people, good investment.

Justin Jackson: 44:48

Yeah. Maybe me doing a podcast, good investment. Yeah. There's things events. I think events, like if you're the kind of person that's just like, you know what?

Justin Jackson: 44:57

I could put on a little meetup. Seattle, you know what? I'm just gonna go on meetup.com, create an event and say, hey, this is for everybody who's in B2B enterprise SEO. We're all going to get together. Massive benefit to all of this kind of human scale stuff.

Lars Lofgren: 45:15

Yeah. I think there's huge demand for that right now too. Yeah. People want people are getting sick of just the endless slop and is this AI? Is this fake?

Lars Lofgren: 45:22

Yeah. But when you're at a dinner table with someone, you're like, oh, yeah, they're real.

Justin Jackson: 45:26

They're real. And then what happens after those events? Everybody posts this is a classic LinkedIn post. Last night, I was at Lars Lofgren's SEO enterprise meetup, and we all talked about this. And here's what was surprising.

Justin Jackson: 45:39

And, you know, like, people love

Lars Lofgren: 45:41

tag me to get me to like it so that it hits the feed. Yeah. Yeah. I do so. Sure.

Lars Lofgren: 45:45

It's fine.

Justin Jackson: 45:46

Lots of opportunity. Well, you you are one of my favorite people in marketing. Just a stand up guy. We gotta do this again.

Lars Lofgren: 45:55

Yeah, would love to. I love doing these things.

Justin Jackson: 45:57

We need to we need to do a ski retreat, marketing ski retreat sometime soon.

Lars Lofgren: 46:04

That sounds like a great idea actually.

Justin Jackson: 46:09

Yeah. SEO snowfest as soon as it snows.

Lars Lofgren: 46:12

Yeah. It's like three people.

Justin Jackson: 46:16

But still worth the investment.

Lars Lofgren: 46:17

Yeah, totally worth it.

Justin Jackson: 46:18

We don't you don't need scale anymore.

Lars Lofgren: 46:20

No, you don't. You don't. And as long as I can write it off, man, great.

Justin Jackson: 46:24

Dude, we'll make it happen. All right. Thanks again, man. Thanks, Justin.