Podcasting in the Age of AI + Growth Marketing for B2B Tech & Complex Services

INTERVIEW 1 - JOHN TAYLOR PAUL WRIGHT Welcome back to the Link Thru Social Podcast. We're pleased to have another guest with us this week. It's John Taylor. John is the founder of the Act Three Agency and the creator of the Listener Discoverability Optimization, or LDO, strategy. He helps B2B and B2C podcasters grow their audience by making their shows more discoverable across platforms like YouTube, LinkedIn, and AI search tools. Through strategic messaging, AI SEO, and cross-platform optimization, John helps podcasters turn great conversations into content that consistently attracts and converts a podcaster's ideal listener and client. Welcome to the show, John. JOHN TAYLOR Great to be here. Thanks for having me. PAUL WRIGHT My pleasure. Before we get started, maybe you can give us a little bit of your background and how you came to this point today. JOHN TAYLOR Sure. Well, I have been in digital marketing ever since it wasn't digital - ever since dial-up, and before then, too. So I've been in digital marketing for at least 25 years, in various industries. Up until about COVID, I was working in digital marketing in the beverage industry, and wine in particular. I was helping wineries with marketing, and that's when I actually started getting into podcasting. My first podcast was around 2017, when one of my clients said, "Hey, would you do a podcast? They don't know what they are, but we're supposed to do one." So I got started podcasting there. Post-COVID, I started my own agency. At first, we were doing general digital marketing, but I quickly discovered that podcast marketing was a niche that needed some help and that I had experience in. Since then, I've been doing almost exclusively podcast marketing, and over the last 18 months to two years especially, working at that intersection of AI and podcast marketing. PAUL WRIGHT That's funny you should say that at the end there. This has been a big focus on our show, the Link Thru Social Podcast: the emergence of AI and how quickly everything is changing on a day-to-day basis. John, how can podcasters keep up with this fast-moving AI? How can they come into the age of AI? JOHN TAYLOR It's such a fundamentally good question because it speaks to the contrast of AI and humanity. There will always be a need for podcasters - podcasters who have something really good to say, have a unique position, and have a good story. The human element of content creation, whether that be podcasting, movies, book writing, all of that, is always going to require a human. So your job is safe. My job is not safe. I know I will be out of work within two years. What I do will be fully replaced by AI, but that AI will be monitored and tasked by a human being. We're actually working on those tools right now. We're working on the tools that are going to take us out of business. What a podcaster really needs to know about AI is: keep your eye out there. Keep your finger on the pulse of what's going on, because there will be incredible new tools coming out rapidly that are going to help a podcaster grow their audience in their very specific niche and really connect with other people who are looking for the kind of content they're producing. So stay human and don't worry about AI. It will come find you, and it will be there to help you. It's just a tool. I say this to people all the time: you had a guy who was hammering nails with a rock, right? Then the hammer was invented. It's just a tool. It made things more efficient and made things better. The hammer will come to you, you'll learn how to use it, it'll be super easy, and you'll be fine. Just be here. PAUL WRIGHT So don't fear AI, but be excited for the opportunities that AI is going to present to a podcaster. JOHN TAYLOR Exactly. PAUL WRIGHT I was reading your bio, and I wanted to ask you this question: Why do we need to stop chasing keywords and focus on the real? JOHN TAYLOR That's a really good question. The whole paradigm of search is changing. That single, double, triple, or long-tail keyword search is all going the way of the dodo. Now, when somebody really wants information and really wants answers, they're going to go into their AI - whether that's Gemini with Google, Claude, ChatGPT, or whatever it might be. People are now turning to these AIs to get more comprehensive answers. It's so much more time-saving, and it is better. But it is putting the whole keyword-search thing in the dust. From a podcaster's perspective, something you're really going to want to keep in mind is: how does AI search find you? The paradigm used to be, "How does Google Search find me?" Well, now it's, "How does Gemini find me? How does ChatGPT find me?' PAUL WRIGHT You mentioned a few of the popular AI platforms. What personally is your favorite so far? Like we said, everything's changing. JOHN TAYLOR I regularly use ChatGPT, probably because that's where I started, but I'm more and more using Claude. I'm mostly using Claude on the agentic AI side. As I mentioned, we're building tools to help podcasters grow their audience, and part of that is through using agentic AI to do all kinds of market intelligence. These little agentic AI bots will go out and gather your analytics, for example, and then read all of your transcripts and come back and say, "When you produce content like this, it gets more listens and impressions than content like this. Having read your transcripts, I now have three episode ideas that I think will be more popular than your previous episodes." You can have an agentic AI go out and say, "I found these two posts on LinkedIn and these three posts on Reddit that have to do with your content, so I think you should reply to those. I have drafted a reply for you. Do you want me to post it?" It's very exciting. It's one of those features with Claude and agentic AI that we're starting to use. PAUL WRIGHT For sure. I actually produce a podcast for a very well-known dog trainer here in Canada, and he did an episode last week on Claude. He was using ChatGPT, and he based his whole episode on the advantages of using Claude and how it has really helped him with his podcast and also his dog-training business that he does online. So it was very interesting that you mentioned that one. JOHN TAYLOR Yeah, it's an increasingly popular one. PAUL WRIGHT Oh yes, 100%. So, converting listeners into clients and customers: as a podcaster, what are a few of the key tips you could provide to actually convert listeners? JOHN TAYLOR It would seem like a no-brainer, but honestly, one of the things I see is that podcasters don't put the actual calls to action across all of their platforms. If you want to convert someone from a listener to a client - let's say you're a coach, you have a coaching podcast, and you want to convert that person into a coaching client - you need to have a link everywhere your podcast appears across your entire digital footprint that a listener can click on to get to you. I know this sounds really fundamental, but you'd be surprised. Do I have it in my YouTube channel description? Do I have it in my YouTube video description? Do I have it everywhere I've got my footprint? One of the things we like to do is make those links trackable. Use a service like Bitly to create your conversion link. Have one for your podcast platform, one for your YouTube platform, and one for LinkedIn. If you want to get really granular, use a different one for every playlist you have on YouTube. Then you can see not only what platforms are converting better than others, but what content is converting better than other content. That's a really smart way of using the data to find out what's converting and what's not. Generally speaking, you want to make sure you're optimized across all those platforms. If you've got your podcast directory, YouTube channel, LinkedIn, and, say, TikTok as your primary social channel, make sure you have message consistency across all of those platforms and that you're treating each platform's algorithm the way it needs to be treated. YouTube is a search engine. It's the number-two search engine owned by the number-one search engine. The way you write your copy and descriptions has to be made for a search engine. It has to have more "Why do I...?" and "How can I...?" statements within the copy. You need to treat the algorithm the way it wants to be treated in order to surface you more. Those are some tips people can use to really help. PAUL WRIGHT That's wonderful, John. Your website is PodcastMarketing.site - S-I-T-E. If our listeners and viewers go on that site, what are they going to find? Is there an easy way to inquire about your services? JOHN TAYLOR Absolutely. If you go on that site, you're going to find a variety of different services that we provide. They all have to do with podcast marketing, listener growth, and conversion growth. PodcastMarketing.site is a great place to go. If you reach out to me - just drop me an email at john@act3agency.com, Act, the number three, Agency.com - I will do a 20-minute, in-depth video analysis of your podcast ecosystem and tell you what you can do to optimize it better, where it's lacking, where you're doing well, and what to do from there. Drop me an email. I'd be happy to send you that for free. PAUL WRIGHT That's wonderful, John. I appreciate having you on the podcast today. Once again, it's John Taylor, and it's PodcastMarketing.site. The name of his agency is the Act Three Agency. We really appreciate it. You have a wonderful day, and the Link Thru Social Podcast will be back right after this. SPONSOR MESSAGE - SMART POST APP SPONSOR MESSAGE Tired of stressing over what to post on social media? Meet Smart Post App, your all-in-one solution to create, schedule, and grow your content effortlessly. In just a few taps, you can generate engaging posts, stay consistent, and keep your audience coming back for more. No more guessing, no more burnout - just smarter content, faster. Whether you're a business owner, creator, or entrepreneur, Smart Post helps you show up like a pro. Start posting smarter today at SmartPostApp.com. Smart Post App - because your content should work for you. INTERVIEW 2 - DOMINIC DEJOY PAUL WRIGHT Welcome back to the Link Thru Social Podcast. We're joined by another amazing guest today, Dominic DeJoy, and he is from OsricDigital.com. Dominic, welcome to the podcast. DOMINIC DEJOY Happy to be here. Thanks for having me on. PAUL WRIGHT Dominic, before we get started, tell us a little bit about yourself and your professional background. DOMINIC DEJOY I run Osric Digital. It's a paid media agency that specializes in B2B, B2B SaaS, and also some complex services - anything with a sales-led motion. Before that, I was in-house at Preqin, which is a data provider in the alternative asset space. It's now part of BlackRock. Before that, I had a few things in my twenties that were more entrepreneurial, but I would say my main tech job was at Wunderkind. At the time, it was called Bounce Exchange, which is kind of between the MarTech and AdTech space. So that's basically my background. PAUL WRIGHT All right, nice. You can go to Dominic's website at OsricDigital.com. Dominic, let's get started. Maybe you can share with our viewers and listeners - because we are on YouTube and all the different podcast platforms - how is AI changing search engine marketing and its place in demand generation? DOMINIC DEJOY A lot of people are talking about this, of course. It's changed it a huge amount at the top of the funnel. Most B2B websites are seeing significant losses of traffic in the last couple of years, since around 2024, which is really when you see adoption take off and start replacing some search behavior. In addition, because of AI Overviews now, there was a study done recently that almost 60% of searches end with zero clicks. Basically, the kind of blog strategy people were using to get traffic doesn't really work anymore. It works in the sense that you'll get impressions from citations and things like that, but it doesn't really work for getting traffic. At the bottom of the funnel, curiously, we've actually seen search - especially paid search - work a little bit better. There are two reasons for that. One is that AI Overviews are, for the most part, not triggered on more transactional searches because Google doesn't want to totally cannibalize its paid search platform. The second is that they've started baking the ads more and more into the SERP. As a result, click-through rates have gone up quite a bit. That's my broad take, but we can zero in on any of that. PAUL WRIGHT The emergence of AI is moving at such a rapid pace. It's changing not day by day, but minute by minute. It's incredible. In our type of business, obviously you've had to pivot some of your strategies over the last couple of years. What are some of the things you're foreseeing in the near future as far as AI integration into marketing? DOMINIC DEJOY There's a huge amount of demand for GEO and AEO. I think it's hard to invest too much in building out a team to execute the tactics that work for that, just because it is changing so fast and because the platforms of choice have changed so fast. Around a year ago, you probably could have said it's a waste of time to do optimization for anything besides ChatGPT. Its dominance was almost at the level of Google's, and that has completely changed in the past year. It's also the case that the LLMs, at least when you get to the level of vendor selection, are just extremely credulous. By that, I mean they repeat whatever they read in press releases and listicles and things like that. I can't imagine them being this credulous for too long into the future. You would at least hope that something like PageRank would get developed and it would start evaluating sources more critically. PAUL WRIGHT Interesting. So, on the tactical side of B2B paid media, what works and what doesn't right now, as we speak? DOMINIC DEJOY Paid search still works amazingly well. In some markets, maybe you don't have enough search volume or it's overfunded, but for the most part it works amazingly well, provided that you target the right keywords and don't give Google a lot of leash to get creative - at least when you're initially setting up the account in the first three to six months. You still need to do basically exact match; if there's not enough volume for exact, phrase match; lots of negative keywords; basically manual bidding. Decline the automated suggestions Google gives you. You have to manage it very tightly. You also need a good website and decent landing pages. That does quite a bit of the work as well. At the middle and top of the funnel, what needs to happen is that you have to replace the discovery mechanism that your blog was previously providing. LinkedIn is a big part of that in B2B. The problem with LinkedIn is that organic reach can be difficult. On the company page, it's almost impossible to get organic reach anymore, and since they changed the algorithm, getting organic reach as an individual is increasingly challenging. You need a strategy to start having LinkedIn give you reach over time. There is a playbook - we don't have time to fully go through it - but it's like a six-to-twelve-month playbook where you have to train the algorithm. A lot of my clients are too impatient for that, so we do a lot of LinkedIn ads, a lot of LinkedIn Thought Leader Ads, promotion of organic posts, and the same kinds of ads that have been core to LinkedIn strategy since around 2019. I won't say that's everything that works. I think YouTube is still kind of a blue ocean for a lot of terms that would be too competitive to go after on Google. PAUL WRIGHT You brought up a really good point. There are a lot of entrepreneurs and small- and medium-sized business owners who really don't have the patience. They want to see instant success. Some of these campaigns you have to set up, with these new, ever-changing sets of rules, take some time. We have a lot of small business owners who listen to and watch the Link Thru Social Podcast. Any advice to a small company that maybe only has four to six employees, if that? Where should they be putting their money as far as trying to get the word out about their service, brand, or product? DOMINIC DEJOY If you're four to six employees, basically you don't have any real market power. You can't be marketing the way someone with dominant market share in a niche would market. You're not going to market the way Microsoft does in the PC market, or the way Apple does where you're selling against Microsoft, or even the way Linux does where you're selling against Apple and Microsoft. You have to think more in terms of: what's a defensible market space that I can saturate enough that I can get enough leads or exposure to sustain myself? A lot of these businesses, I assume, are local, and that's a great advantage because you can create that defensible space by layering local terms on top of whatever it is you do and focusing pretty much only on that. If you're in New York City or London, you don't target New York keywords. Target whatever borough or neighborhood you're in, because a neighborhood in New York City can have 200,000 people. That's as big as a small- to medium-sized city. PAUL WRIGHT For sure. Just before we wrap things up, Dominic, your website is OsricDigital.com - O-S-R-I-C. I also noticed you have a landing page at DominicDeJoy.com. If anyone wants to reach out to you, are there any final words you'd like to say about your business? DOMINIC DEJOY The best is probably through LinkedIn, just under my name. My personal LinkedIn is probably better than my company LinkedIn. If people want to chat, send me a message on LinkedIn or connect with me there. PAUL WRIGHT Perfect. Dominic DeJoy, I appreciate your time, and thank you for joining us today. We hope to speak with you again sometime in the near future. DOMINIC DEJOY Awesome. Thanks, Paul. PAUL WRIGHT That's Osric Digital, OsricDigital.com. You can also reach out to Dominic DeJoy on LinkedIn, as he mentioned. The Link Thru Social Podcast will be back right after this. LINK THRU SOCIAL MESSAGE & CLOSING PAUL WRIGHT Don't forget to check out LinkThruSocial.com to find out about all of our social media management services, AI solutions, and podcast producing. We are also very involved with festivals, music events, different sporting events, and MMA as a social media partner. If you want Link Thru Social to be the social media partner for your event, all the promoters out there, be sure to contact us through our website, LinkThruSocial.com. Well, that does it for this edition of the Link Thru Social Podcast. Thank you once again. 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