Hey y’all,

Digital marketing update coming in 3, 2, 1…

• 41% of B2B pros start with AI, then validate via traditional search while 35% start with traditional search, then use AI. Either way, it’s the classic “trust but verify” model. And it verifies the importance of combining both SEO and SAIO to gain visibility and trust. 

• Wayfair CMO Paul Toms talks about the “mindset to commit to AI before it benefits you.” It is a bit like the “build it and they will come” mindset from Field of Dreams except you are building relevance before the intent exists. Wayfair is also using AI to do “test dimension validation” to ensure product descriptions and imagery are accurate and trustworthy. 

• “…these tools you use to monitor AI platforms will help you choose prompts to monitor. The problem is you can’t really trust it. Whether it comes up with the prompts or you do, you need to validate them against what your customers are actually asking AI, and that’s hard.” We agree with search expert Dale Bertrand. We tell our clients that the AI monitoring tools are great for directional data. AI is only just so good at summing up human behavior.

• Attention content marketers: you should read Orbit Media’s Blogging Statistics 2026. The story documents why, “nearly one in five content marketers can no longer tell you whether the work they do is working.” A few findings we found interesting include:
  • None of the use cases for AI correlated with stronger performance. “Marketers just got faster at making the same things.”
  • Marketers who always research keywords as part of their blog content development (who were just 18% of the total) reported the highest level of strong results. “SEOs make good content marketers.”
  • Not all marketers measure the results of their blog, and those that do are not using the metric that most correlates with strong results — brand visibility in the form of rankings and AI mentions. “Traffic is the most watched metric and the weakest.”

• The secret to writing better emails ➡️ tell a better story… you know, one that feels like it should be whispered in your audiences’ metaphorical ears…one that encourages their participation… one that highlights your unique insight.… Though Ann Handley’s insight is best used on newsletters… you can pull out some good tidbits for marketing emails too!

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Dream on, fam 🤘

Natalie

Jia Jiang put himself through 100 days of rejection therapy.

100 days of outrageous questions like: 

• Asking for $100 from a stranger
• Asking for a free room at a hotel
• Asking PetSmart groomers to trim his hair

The groundbreaking discovery here was not his bountiful resilience to rejection (which he developed through his experiment), but only a small percentage of the people asked had genuinely negative reactions.

The point: if you’re scared to ask something, chances are others are more accommodating than you think. Many people genuinely want to help each other. 🙂