Discover how AI and social media are transforming brand discovery in Financial Services.

Social expert Katy Howell and Remarkable’s James Gray explore how platforms like ChatGPT and social media are reshaping how consumers search, research, and connect with brands today.

James Gray: There we go. We are live. Give it the first few seconds for people to join. And then we’ll do a nice intro for everybody. Okay. Right, there we go. It’s midday, twelve o’clock. Hopefully all you guys that are starting to come on to this webinar are joining with a cup of tea, cup of coffee and some lunch in hand. Welcome to the future of social search and AI for FSI. I’m James Gray, VP of Digital Remarkable. I’ll come on to a bit more about me in a second. And I’m also joined by the brilliant Katie Howe as well, who is CEO of Immediate Future. So, Katy brings with her a wealth of experience and some fantastic insights as well for you guys on this webinar today. And today we’re going to be diving into how social search and AI are reshaping digital marketing in the financial services sector but also changing customer behaviours as well. And it’s not just a trend. We’re witnessing a fundamental shift in in how people are interacting with brands how audiences are discovering trusting engaging with brands as well and Katy’s going to go into to loads about that the old funnel if you like is kind of gone it’s faster it’s messier and it’s actually mostly invisible as well so there’s lots of top tips and insights coming in from Katy shortly so yeah today we’re going to explore how to show up in this new reality how marketers can gain visibility, credibility and deliver results really in a space which is famously tricky when it comes to trust and compliance as well. So, yeah, Katy, if we want to get started. I’ll quickly rattle through our usual intros. I’ll introduce myself first. So, I am James. I’m VP of Digital Marketing here at Remarkable. I’ve got twenty plus years, which is showing my age now of experience. In this space across a range of trusted brands, including in the financial services sector. My specialism, if you like, and our specialism as an agency really is creating omnichannel experiences that convert. So, we need to be driving visibility, engagement and performance across all the plethora of digital channels and the marketing technologies available to us as well. And fundamentally in the agency here, I am very much the voice of AI at the moment, AI, AI. That is what I’m here to talk about today. I’ll pass you over to Katy. I’ll let you do your own intro, and we’ll get stuck in.

Katy Howell: Yes, I’m Katy Howell. I’ve been almost forty years in marketing, twenty one years doing social media. So, yes, fairly well experienced. At the moment, my passion is social search because it’s changing the game. And as you said, James, it’s really it for me, the super interesting thing, part of where we’re at as marketers is the fact that there isn’t a funnel. It is about throwing out the net and making sure that you’re seen and discoverable in a multitude of places.

James Gray: That’s right. So, we’re going to get stuck into a bit of a presentation in a second. For those of you that are online on LinkedIn or on StreamYard, please do drop us your questions and your comments. We’ll try and answer those as we go, because I’m sure there’ll be lots of cogs whirring as Katy goes through what she’s going to share with you today. And likewise, hopefully, when I share some insights around AI as well. So, drop those comments in and we’ll try and pick those questions up as we go. And also, you’ll see a little link at the bottom there that’s going along. Katie’s going to share some top tips and a social framework, which you can download from that link on there as well. So Katy, over to you.

Katy Howell: Fabulous. Yeah, we’ll press on. We’ll press on. Okay. So, the brilliant thing about search is that your social search is that your customers are already out there actively looking for answers. And they’re asking the questions on TikTok, on GPT, on Reddit, on LinkedIn. And they’re open to these new voices coming at them from different areas. And this is fantastic. really important that we understand that the kind of environment our buyers are in is very different now. There is a gap and the gap tends to be that the financial services industry needs to kind of catch up but I’ll go into that a bit more. Let me explain. So, we talk a lot about SEO and AI search, but here’s the thing. Social media has been quietly becoming that first place buyers go, especially in financial services. And this is not just a Gen Z or those awful side hustle TikToks. You all know what I’m talking about. This is CFOs, investors, business owners, and decision makers. And they are already using social media as a research tool. For instance, seventy three percent of affluent investors actively use LinkedIn to guide financial decisions. So, these aren’t passive scrollers. They’re choosing the platform they trust to do their research. Seventy five percent of B2B buyers. to vet companies, check the credentials, and see how you show up, both as a brand and, more importantly, as people. And yes, the younger, I say millennials. I’m not sure they’re younger anymore. But anyway, millennials and Gen Z regularly see content on investing. And they often look at that before they speak to an advisor or a firm. So, we’re not talking about theory here. It’s already happening. Biobehavioural has changed. And more importantly, technology like AI and LLMs are actually using parts of social to actually pick up those signals for its own analysis to put into responses. So, the whole thing is very lovely and connected. So it’s not a trend. And it isn’t just something that’s a flash in the pan. It’s how your buyers have actually changed their behaviours, which is a fundamental behaviour change. And they’re using social and AI now to evaluate and find the customers, the clients and brands that they trust in. So very simply, social search is the act of using social media platforms to find information. So that could be through keywords to peer content and creator led advice. And it kind of mirrors traditional search. It does include direct search, so people are going into their social profiles and actually specifically searching for something like, you know, recommended designer or whatever it is. But it also includes indirect discovery, and that’s how the algorithms will pick up on what that person is looking at and start to serve them more. So there’s kind of two ways in which social search works. And it’s really important to understand that financial services buyers use it very intentionally. As I said, seventy five percent use social to research vendors and seventy percent expect new insights from sellers on social before engaging in a conversation. So, there is an expectation now. And that kind of leads me to. the challenge that as financial services marketeers you have. So before we go down what you need to do, I want to be really clear that it’s in the context that I know that everybody is frantically busy and there’s lots to do. And financial services marketing is quite complex. And I think that we have to recognise that in part of changing the marketing plan that we need to do now is we need to understand that customer expectations are rising, whether they’re retail or institutional, they want personalized content, real-time answers on their preferred channel, and that includes LinkedIn. You might not like it, but TikTok and even obviously ChatGPT. Trust is low and it’s really fragile. And financial services, sadly, is one of the least trusted sectors. One wrong post, one slow reply and you lose confidence. And often we find, particularly in the financial industry, is that digital tools are often underutilized. So, there’s no real support. And of course, you have the challenge of compliance, which can sometimes put the guy on great ideas. So, you’re working within that framework and proving performance can be quite challenging. So, I’m going to tackle some of these issues. But first, I want to be really clear because I’ve got three really good ideas to help you. I want to be really clear that the change you need to make is actually quite straightforward. It just needs a bit of thinking through. So, you don’t have to go out and recreate everything and do more content and create more stuff. You don’t have to do any of that. So, it’s not about doing more. It’s about shifting how you think about what social is doing for you, because your buyers, whether they’re investors, retail investors or a B2B procurement lead or a startup founder looking for lending, then they’re not reading white papers anymore. They’re actually rarely going to your Web site. as well. So they’re kind of taking that flow in. So, it’s really important to understand how simple the changes are you need to make. So, you need to stop thinking about being just campaign led and start thinking about campaign always on visibility. You need to move from just talking about the brand and what a great away day you had and look, I’m on stand two, five, seven, blah, blah, blah. Those are almost irrelevant. What you want is an expert voice. Both social and AI want to see you as the person who’s in the know. So, you’re trying to, instead of pushing them to a website, what your aim is, is to pull them out of interest. And that means you need to think about helpful, useful content, thought leadership, not simply over polished, real human content, and making sure that you’re always adding in those little elements from the right human, the right descriptors, the right alt text, which is kind of almost going back to one on one SEO, isn’t it James?

James Gray: It is indeed. Yeah.

Katy Howell: Yeah. So, as he’s talked about, the funnel has changed. It’s now faster, messier, and damn it, can be very invisible you know in other words that bit which is you can’t see where it’s happening it becomes more and more challenging which means there are two answers one is produce content that goes everywhere well that’s great if you had endless budgets or endless time or you need to think really strategically how one piece of content can get into the other channels Because we know that buyers swipe through all stages of the kind of funnel in one scroll. And we also know that AI shortcuts the funnel journey because people go, give me the top three recommendations for. So, we need to think about that funnel. And what we’re putting into social, I often say social media is like the oil in the engine. It kind of reaches all the parts and makes them work better. And that’s the way to think about your content in social, that it’s actually feeding your Google searches. It’s feeding your AI. I mean, Instagram now is being searched by Google, so it’s feeding everything around you. And we see that quite frequently with things like an increase in email open rates when your social steps up. And I think we did some research on financial services brands, and it’s very clear that only one in five brands are actually optimising for social search. So, there is also, for those of you on this webinar, a massive opportunity. So, let’s talk about some quick wins you can get into place this summer so that you come out with starting blocks in September, ready to tackle the AI buyer and the social search researcher. Oh, that’s a mouthful. Quick win is nice SEO hygiene on your social content. So, it’s a really fast fix is make sure your posts are optimized for search. So, think keywords. Think about the language that is used. I’m going to come on a little bit to this. Because we know that inside social platforms, the signals that are coming through are natural language signals that they’re looking for. So not kind of build better futures with smarter investments, but instead your copy or your text needs to read how flexible pension plans work. and who are they right for. That is much more the kind of language that will be used when people are searching in social and in AI. It’s a much more natural language. So, the first thing I’d recommend you doing is going through the last ten posts that you’ve done or your top ten posts and making them AI friendly but also social friendly. The second quick win is thinking about how tools like chat GPT and Gemini act as curators. So they favour, what they want to see is more factual, well-labelled content. So, think bullet points, question-led headlines, short paragraphs, strong subheadings, your age too matters, for those of you who are geeky. But also alongside this, authoritative… Oh, that’s a horrible word, authoritative. Why did I write this down? Having authority matters, and it’s very… It’s sustainably obvious in financial services, but AI actually prefers voices with expertise, consistency… and trust signals. So named authors, job titles, LinkedIn presence is going to make a massive difference to how you appear and how you get recommended by both AI and social. The other part is make sure that the structure is right to make it reusable. So that’s posts with FAQs, clear definitions, or lists that are more likely to be cited or pulled in. This feels so like, and I’m sure James will touch on this, it really feels like one-on-one back to the nineties of search. If the bank broke, don’t fix it, though, right?

James Gray: Yeah, exactly. It feels like, oh, do you remember we used to do listicles?

Katy Howell: Oh, yeah. But don’t be vague. It’s really important that what you’re not doing is in your text, in your copy, you’re not being vague. You need to be really clear because when search translates into social and AI, it wants clarity because it isn’t picking up any other signals. um at the moment you know these things change the other part of course is now what there’s me talking about oh you need to write lists of things but don’t just do that because very quickly nobody will like you and it’ll be really boring uh so you have to write for the readers too so what that means is write the list by all means or the more a the way ai will think about you but then add the people feel you bit in the middle so Building in the emotional element. So they want clarity, but they also want care and they definitely don’t want corporate noise. It’s really interesting that that’s seventy percent of financial services buyers want new or different insight from providers. And I think that’s really important. They want to be educated. But alongside of that, it’s about being emotional, understanding what their pain points are. and what they’re looking for and what are their trust signals and that real talk kind of builds credibility and I cannot overemphasize thought leadership expert opinion will help you stand out on social and make sure that your tone is not so dry it’s quite a difficult one and it is quite a difficult balance but I’ve got a nice little case study for you next which I’ll just play the video I’ve got the sound off on this but just you can get a feeling so bottom line uh technology needs to increase its brand awareness And the goal really was to break the perception that finance is boring, and particularly because they’re targeting the CFOs. So, they wanted to be on the side of the CFOs, understand that it was really frustrating being in a company where everybody thought, A, you were boring, and B, that you were… They didn’t really understand what you were talking about. And so the ads that were targeted at CFOs tended to have all those awful, as you saw, sort of technology zoomy type stuff and people shaking hands and looking deeply into computers. So, we did the complete opposite and slightly took the mick out of everything. The consequence of that is that not only were we able in our copy to use the words that would make them searchable but also got the human attention to this. You know, the result in this, although we weren’t specifically driving for leads at this stage, was over seventeen thousand link clicks to the website and a really low cost per result. Excuse me, of point five nine pence. But the engagement rate was at two percent, which is really unusual for finance and B2B. So, yeah, we’re really pleased. We’ve won an award with that as an agency, we need to say. So, it can be done. You just have to think your way through it. But there are traps. So, you have to be very careful to mine those and jump over them. The most important, of course, is compliance. And you can see the FCA has issued a number of warnings. You really need to watch, if you use external influencers, what they’re saying and make sure that they’re well-educated on what can and can’t be said. Particularly the finfluencer. Awful name. I don’t like it. But, you know, the industry uses it. The financial influencer… needs to be really aware of what can and can’t happen. And that can often include your own staff. They’ll know the basics, but they won’t know it in the detail you as marketeers and comms professionals will. So yes, you want authenticity. We know that eighty eight percent buyers want authenticity. They want UGC. They want influencers and they want your people to talk. But I would also suggest is making sure that everybody gets very educated and that to a certain extent you manage that. The other part is the dying of the hashtag. And we probably got really used to that hashtag stuffing that happens on Instagram as consumers. It’s gone. And the reality is what you should be doing is focusing on the wording and the language and the sentences. Because unlike search where you can go holiday, July, Ibiza, What happens is in AI, we have more of a conversation. In social, we have more of a conversation. And we are more likely to ask, where should I go on holiday this year? Or why would Ibiza be better than… America, whatever it is. So, the point being is we are more conversational in those platforms. And that’s the language we’re using, which is why they’re dropping the hashtags. So, they don’t guarantee reach. They do work in some places. And sometimes it’s worth putting it on things like LinkedIn just for a check. But don’t expect anybody to search against it. And you can see even TikTok recommend alt text descriptive captions. So, it’s really important. So I talked about how social search is actually just about kind of looking to your social content through a different lens. So that’s the language. We talked about not doing it for robots, but the reality is where do you put all this stuff? So, what I’ve done rather than bore you to death with all the detail platform by platform is where do you add all these keywords? So, it’ll be anything from the file name of the image you upload or the video you upload to the alt text, which of course is for those that are visually impaired, but you can add elements in there. Each format, so whether it’s a carousel or a PDF or a video, has very different guides to it, to what you need to put where when it comes to keywords. And then you’ve got platform by platform, so what LinkedIn wants versus what Insta wants, what threads want, you know, it just keeps changing. And just having like a pre-posting checklist so if you download this uh it’s a couple of pages it’s a nice little frame which just helps remind you of all the things you need to do and there’s a couple of tips in there that balance compliance with discoverability so that you don’t overstep the mark and a nice checklist you can share it with your colleagues it just means You’re doing at least the basics really well and making sure that you’re encouraging AI and search to make sure that you come up top when people search. So, I hope that what you’re walking away with now is an idea that you need to refresh some of your older posts, which, if you download the guide, will just walk you through it. Ditch the banal. Write the way audience search, not the way in human language, not the way robots do it, if you see what I mean. Be smart and tell really human stories. So don’t get caught up in that. I need to write a list. Try and use. I hate saying this, but because, of course, compliance is compliance and regulations are regulations. But to a certain extent, use them as a guardrail. Don’t make them the all-consuming element. And then track the metrics that matter. Instead of worrying about how many likes you got, you should be looking at leads and search led discovery where you’re appearing in the AI search engine. So those are the elements. There’s a real whirlwind, but I hope it’s I’ve got some nice practical stuff in there for you.

James Gray: Yeah, Katy, that’s absolutely fantastic. And for those of you that had a chance to scan that QR code, that guide is phenomenal. So, I suggest you download it. It’s really, really good and really, really helpful. So hopefully people will download that as a link scrolling along the bottom as well for those of you that just missed the QR code there. So yes, thank you, Katie. And so much of what you just said then dovetails with AI, obviously, you’ve mentioned this, and SEO and AEO and GEO, which I’ll come on to. So if we sort of take the fundamentals there of what we’ve said about social, there’s lots of elements there about speaking to humans and being more conversational, et cetera, which really comes into the AI section as well. And customers are increasingly now AI powered. You and I and everyone on this webinar right now are definitely becoming AI powered. Even my mum, who is now in her mid to late seventies, I showed her ChatGPT and she was mind blown at the conversations she could have. rather than, as you say, searching three random words that kind of make a sentence and will kind of bring results. So search has changed as a result of that, in addition to everything Katie said about social. If we jump on to the next slide, Katy. The traditional search has changed. So LLMs now are reshaping user intent and behaviour. So, I’ve got some stats for you now, guys. You’re going to love this. Forty percent of Gen Z are using AI tools like ChatGPT before Google. And that’s obviously quite a March shift. To combat that, Google’s now got AI overviews and now AI overviews are being triggered by approximately twenty five percent of queries in some ineligible markets. Now, actually, that’s more in some industries, which I’ll come on to. Those AI overviews are here to steal your traffic. So, some major brands have seen a thirty to forty percent drop in visitors. So that organic traffic drop that we’re seeing is due to AI answering the question, that the user is asking upfront. And obviously that’s a challenge for people because we can’t, as Katie said, we can’t just post on social or we can’t just expect people to Google us and, you know, suck them into our website anymore. They’re going to be getting their answers elsewhere. And then what that means is that the traditional ten blue links, as we used to all fight for with our keywords and our general SEO practices, those results are declining, which means that zero click searches and AI summaries are absolutely taking over. um so it’s not just that users are going to LLMs and ChatGPT we know that’s in its infancy people using those to sort of discover however ai is now fundamentally injected in the old search experience as well so that whole shift is happening um and starting to affect the way that we need to um as marketers obviously work from our kind of content our SEO and our channel mix as well So a few other changes that have happened. We’re now in what I call the I want it now economy. I have a sort of separate personality where I’m actually a DJ. and in DJing in nightclubs and stuff, I’ve experienced this change as we move into this Spotify generation where they can have whatever song or whatever music they want right now, or how people can now go on Tinder to find uh relationships and people have this like instant demand economy deliveroo and you know hello fresh and all these things all these all these um solutions really are to this demand for everyone wanting everything now and uh users demand those concise direct answers uh not just links so no longer are they going to go through and click a blue link and go and read and go no that’s not right go back and so on that journey is is not happening so much anymore so now we’ve got ai we’ve got voice search mobile usage people want that answer there and then and often that’s in the platform that’s searching whether it’s an LLM or whether it’s on google Bing etc so that’s definitely a trend we’re starting to say goodbye to clicks and hello to the crocodile now some of you might know what this means this is a bit of a a weird analogy. But for those of you that are in SEO or those of you that look at Google Search Console, what you’ll notice is that your impressions chart is starting to perhaps go up, but your clicks are actually starting to go down. And what we’re starting to see is this crocodile effect where the mouth of the crocodile is starting to open and it’s zigzagged with its teeth as it kind of finds its feet. So, people in the industry are calling that the crocodile effect. And it is really starting to become visible. We’re starting to see it in some of our clients’ Search Console. So, as we’re working on their SEO and also now AEO and GEO, which I’ll come on to in a minute. So, impressions might be steady but click through rates are definitely dropping. And it’s not just the future, it’s the now and it’s becoming the norm. Google’s AI mode, which is kind of in beta but actually rolled out pretty much now, signals a future where that LLM style interaction and that interface is becoming the norm. And to reiterate Katie’s point as well, search is messier than ever. Discovery of your brand is messier than ever. It’s no longer linear. There’s not a funnel as such. People bounce around or enter your space through different places. So, Google, TikTok, Insta, Reddit. And also, the AI tools that we’ve mentioned as well. So that’s the challenge. And the landscape has definitely changed. Obviously, right now we’re talking to you in the financial services industry. So always good to kind of pull out the stats for you guys. But there’s a survey by Conductor, which is actually very recent. It was in July, published this month. analysed a hundred and eighteen million keywords, of which eighteen percent generated an AI overview on average. That’s a twenty nine percent increase from May, a hundred and twelve percent increase from April. So that trajectory is huge. Sixty one percent of those AI overviews are on desktop, thirty-seven and a half on mobile. Now, mobile serves things differently sometimes, especially if you’re looking for places to eat wherever you are. It’s got the local listings and all the other things in there as well. But that’s going to start to come to some sense of parity as well. um and the following industries have got the highest percentage so we’re seeing up to thirty eight percent of queries uh actually triggering an ai overview in it and in FSI it’s around twenty five we’ve got twenty four twenty five percent um but we also see that banking is twenty six so you know these different sectors are broken out differently but the question is are you optimizing for this right now and you bearing in mind some of the basics that Katie shared there in social as well and how social feeds AI and how these things work together. Have you got that customer lifecycle mapped out? Have you got all those different touch points kind of planned and plotted in? And are you optimising them all to talk to the customer in a way that they’re now searching? That’s the kind of big question, really. And if you’re not, as we start to see here, you’re going to be missing out on being present and being visible to your customers. So with that challenge, one of the ways to look at this is it’s about us having a conversation so search is becoming conversational in the same way as social is users are asking more complex questions so I did a webinar recently with Lalit Gupta from Google and we were discussing the impact of LLMs if you like on search behaviour and how that conversational flip has happened we’re starting to see now that Average search queries are now more than six words, where we used to type three words maybe at most to kind of trigger a response-ish. We’re now seeing six plus words, which means people are talking to Google, asking questions a little bit more. And that’s partly aligned with what we’re seeing in ChatGPT, where prompts in ChatGPT are over thirty-seven point one characters. It’s two times longer than a standard Google search. People are starting to ask loaded questions, stacked questions. And they’re asking for opinion and they’re asking for input. So AI driven platforms like ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot, they reward natural nuanced multi-part questions. Like we would talk to a friend in the pub asking a question about, you know, maybe we’re talking to a friend who does a bit of investing and dabbles, and you start to talk about what apps they use or what brands have they used. have they um spoke to oh I’m interested in this where would I where should I go um these sorts of questions are really starting to be surfaced now uh in these LLMs but also in google and users are no longer just typing keywords they’re starting conversations so it’s really important that financial services brands and brands in general actually structure content that works for the traditional crawlers so we still need to be doing that baseline SEO stuff and the ai interfaces but ultimately for users like all these technologies are actually trying to kind of catch up to being more human. Although the technology is pushing forward, they’re actually trying to be more human, more language driven, more natural. And you’ll see here, you may or may not be able to see here, but this screenshot is an example of a prompt that actually we were triggering for one of our clients who have some sustainable funds in their portfolio that they manage. And it’s a typical kind of question. I’m looking into investment options, but it’s really important to me that I know where my money is going and that I’m investing sustainably and ethically. Where should I begin? Can you give me a list of some sustainable funds or companies, blah, blah, blah. And that sort of question is what’s starting to be asked in these platforms. No longer is someone just going sustainable investment and expecting answers. They’re actually asking that question. And in this result, we saw a number of brands that were being surfaced where And our client, thankfully, was in the mix. But sometimes they’re not. And that’s because they’re not optimizing, not writing and producing the right content that answers these queries. So that’s super important. And it’s got to be conversational. It’s got to be really simply structured. It’s got to answer those questions. So this leads me on to some of the buzzwords, buzzword bingo time for you guys. You will have heard a number of these. You will have heard of SEO, hopefully by now, a lot of you are working in marketing and in digital in FSI. So, SEO is the kind of root of all of this, but obviously we have people talking about AEO and GEO. AEO is the answer engine optimization. So that’s kind of answering for things like AI overviews and things like that. And then GEO is generative engine optimization. So effectively, that’s the optimizing for things like the LLMs, your chat GPTs and things like that. So, one of the key takeaways really is to get your tech SEO house in order. So, get your website or wherever your content lives as optimized as possible. So, ensure it’s fast, crawlable, good, strong core web vitals performance, implement schema, whether you can on those various pages, particularly articles and authors and FAQs that are going to answer those questions. Make the content machine readable. So again, we see a lot of websites. Actually, we saw one brand who lazy loaded and injected a lot of content onto pages through JavaScript and things like that. That can’t really be read by a lot of LLMs or even search engines, actually, when their bots go out. So really important that you get those technical foundations in order. The next step, and this absolutely talks to Katy’s points, is about building authority. And that’s human and brand authority. So not just building the brand credibility and authority in a sector or an industry, but actually making sure that the people that are producing the content, so including things like author bios and credentials and things like that, and making sure that they’re authoritative as well that authority starts to stack so it’s the human plus brand authority that’s really important and then when you layer that with human and brand authority on socials you start to see those things connect and it’s really important that’s why we’re doing this webinar together that is a connected approach to this um so uh generating third-party validation is a real big part of that as well so Things like reviews and getting cited in third parties through digital PR is really important. We then have structure. So, structuring your content for context and continuity. Try saying that three times fast. Making sure that your content answers the current question but anticipates the next. That line for me is really, really important because we’re taking customers on a journey. We’re also answering, often we’re answering multiple questions that have been asked to an LLM. through our content. So, we want to make sure that we have content that answers a multi-stage question that might get asked in an LLM. So, make sure that we’re answering those questions. Make sure those articles maybe are linked or interlinked or feature in the same longer form piece. And making sure that architecture on your website is navigable by humans and bots to make sure that you can follow those user journeys to learn We did a great project with one of our clients in FSI where learning content became such a huge part of starting that journey and nurturing users through to finally a conversion to an inquiry, which was through really structuring that content in a way that passed the user and handheld them and signposted them to the next piece of content. Auditing and rationalizing your content estate. We do a lot of this for clients. It’s that keep kill, combine, refresh, update, however you want to call it. But auditing your content and making sure that everything that is being crawled and indexed is current, is up to date, is valid and is often join the combined piece right now is really what’s interesting, where we’re starting to bring in content pieces that answer multiple questions in one place so that they start to talk to some of those longer form mixed queries that people are putting in a little bit like the example I gave earlier around the sustainable investment piece. So definitely worth looking at some of your content where maybe you have some thin content that kind of answers a question. Could that be combined or is it actually completely arbitrary and it could be killed altogether so that you’re not wasting crawl budget things like that so removing outdated pages as part of that and actually refreshing those high performers is really key which is a classic Seo tactic um if we move on to the next one um site architecture um is a big one so we know that um sites need to have a bit of an information architecture or a site structure refresh now and again user behaviours change what they’re interested in um changes um but from a structural point of view for uh from an Aeo Geo Seo perspective across all of those Having really clear site structure, clear URL structures that you can follow through, clear breadcrumbs effectively, descriptive URLs, thematic tagging, so grouping content together in a way where you can use taxonomies and tags and you can link content to themes is really valuable as well. And that aligns with how LLMs build a content response. They look for sections and they kind of gel it and mash it together to create their answer. So, if you’re talking to that, then you’re going to be winning in that space and starting to group that content semantically. So really talking around the same topic in different places, but talking about it in the same way, the same language, using the same terminology to really connect all those things together. So, in essence, AEO, GEO, they still require good SEO. We’re not going to be moving away from that. And it may be that it goes away from being called search engine optimization to maybe search experience optimization. The jury’s out. Everyone in my industry is trying to coin the next term. But it’s really important that we look at optimizing for that customer’s experience, their query, their conversational queries, and the things that they’re asking for around seventy five percent is this figure that’s banded around of SEO and Geo success does rely still on traditional SEO best practice getting your house in order and making sure that those five tips that I just shared there are in place uh clarity structure trust signals all super important and again that lines with what Katy was talking about and now you’re not just optimising to rank you’re not just optimizing to hit one of those top ten blue links anymore there they’re gone really uh or they’re certainly a long way down the page um so now to rank inside ai tools or ai overviews you really need to be answering those questions um and being a bit more conversational um answering them succinctly, thematically, and ideally in a way that gets them referenced elsewhere. One of the layers of all of this is the importance of digital PR as well. And social plays a huge part in that. Social people sharing your content on social, referencing your brand on social. It hasn’t even got to be a link anymore. Just referencing your brand is enough to demonstrate authority. So really important that we’re following through with those basics as well. So that is a whistle stop tour. We’re around forty minutes in. We’ve had a couple of comments so far, which are actually just really nice comments. Thank you to we’ve got Samir Rahman. We’ve got Tom Platt as well. Just saying that really insightful points around digital tools being underutilised. The fact that we focus on shiny new tech and forget about adoption, trust and performance. Spot on. He’s loving the session so far, which is great. Thank you. And Tom, as well as just mentioned that your guide is really helpful, Katy. So that’s good. They’re not questions as such, but they’re just really nice points. Thank you to those of you that are on with us still. So, if you do have any questions, feel free to pop them in the comments on LinkedIn or in the chat, and we’ll pick those up. But I know, Katy, you and I kind of had a few questions for each other, I guess, really. A lot of what we do dovetails together really nicely. I just wonder whether, I suppose it’s an overarching question, How many of your clients would you sell? What proportion of your clients perhaps are are on this journey? Now you mentioned that one in five FSI clients are kind of brands are actually investing in social for discoverability, etc. But how are you sort of seeing that shifting? Are people starting to jump on this?

Katy Howell: Yeah, I think they are. The reality is that a lot of it is just about, it’s almost like it’s housekeeping and it’s a slight change in housekeeping. So it’s not a… big change as such and often as an agency we can just make sure it happens. But the bit that’s going to matter as this picks up as a source of research and insight, the bit that’s going to make a difference is going to be the quality of that content, which I think for some industries has been regularly quite poor. And you just need to spend any time looking at pages in LinkedIn to wonder why we bother sometimes. The problem, isn’t it, is that it’s often seen as a challenge of scale. Do more, do more. But actually, especially when you look at your list of the tips and if you look at some of the core principles that I’ve just mentioned there, Okay, there’s an element where some people need to do more, for sure. But actually, it’s often a case of just doing it better, more strategically, and with those fundamentals in place, isn’t it? Yeah. And it would be useful for me, I loved your presentation, but where do you see AI, like the future of AI search, really going? I mean, where is it going to change things the most dramatically? Yeah, I think… So one of the areas that we’re really looking at at the moment is around that agential experience, the agents, right? Where AI, so AI at the moment being used as search, it’s almost like people are on this weird precipice where they’re kind of still Googling, but kind of not. So they’re Googling, the verb to Google, where’s that going to go? But Googling and they’re asking LLMs similar questions to how they would ask Google. It brings up the people also asked answers and that kind of thing. We’re starting to see that shift, as I mentioned earlier, becoming longer form, more conversational, deeper. And rather than the how’s the what’s the when’s the where’s, I think what’s going to start to happen is people are going to start asking the AI to just do the thing. Now, investing or in financial services in general, that’s obviously going to be a challenge for it to do. It can’t quite do that yet. We’re starting to see it in in things like e-commerce where I wrote an article recently about optimizing for chat GPT commerce which is kind of coming people are starting to ask they’re still in that ask phase a little bit but they’re asking you know what are the top ten I need to buy a new blender. What’s the top ten? And you’ll get your top ten list and they’ll have the links to the retailer and you can click off and do that. But the roadmap for that is that actually you could just go carte blanche and go, right, go and buy me this. and that is fraught with challenges obviously um but that is where it’s going to go and now can we are we going to get to the place where um and I use investment as an example because a lot of our clients are in that space but um where you could feasibly build a portfolio get ai to build your portfolio at least to the point of handoff where you go yes I want to do that uh or give you that kind of built out list of yeah you could even say I have X to invest, right? Go and find me the ones that are going to give me the best return in the next five years, yada, yada, yada. Is that a good thing? I don’t know. Is that achievable with compliance, et cetera? I’m not sure. But I think we need to think like that, because the agential experience is definitely coming. We’re starting to see it more and more in our work lives, where we can ask co-pilot to go and do tasks for us, find and schedule appointments and meetings. And we’re starting to get to that concierge-esque service. with AI where in the same way as you trust a PA or you trust an assistant co-pilot, clues in the name, you should be trusting, you know, can we trust the technology yet? Possibly not. But will it go there? I mean, we’ve seen the acceleration and we’ve seen the development in the last few years alone. Feasibly, you could see us get into a point where we are starting to use these agents to do these sorts of tasks and optimizing for that is is we probably want to start thinking about that now because that’s the next challenge. And it’s a much more in-depth, isn’t it? I mean, we see it on social, which is, but I’ll give you an example of one I’ve just used recently is we’re looking at who will be one of our stock image suppliers. And I went to GPT and said, write me, this is, they know us. So, it’s already, they know the brand, the agency. Write me a list of what criteria for choosing them. and then go do the research and fill in the table for me. So just so that it got me past the, bit which we used to do which is searching in google making the list manually working my way through all of this it it shortened that period so if I’m doing it as a small business and an agency imagine what our buyers are doing and I’m thinking really in terms of insurance for instance the insurance industry as a as a company looking for business insurance Am I going to look at what are the core criteria? What are the loopholes? Where are the risks in this thing they’ve just sent me that are not clear and buried? All of these things are the things we need as marketers to be thinking about, thinking about the language you’re using, how it’s being picked up. So, I think you’re right. And social has this powerful play in giving you the authority and the expertise that is also validated by your buyer’s peers. And that’s really important. That social proof piece is obviously massive, particularly in a trust-reliant sector. There’s obviously challenges to that in that if that social proof is in any way falsified, good or bad, good or bad opinions of a brand, right? You need to protect your brand as well, negatively as well as positively. But if that is then what’s being read and sucked into AI, then that in turn feeds whether or not you show up in a top ten list of providers for. It could be insurance. It could be whatever it might be. In which case, that makes it even more important to get that brand protection in place, do that really positive engagement with your customers, drive that, you know, drive those positive reviews, those, it could be everything from TripAdvisor to review center to, to any of the kind of de facto and the ones you’d expect to see in financial services and beyond. Unless you’re working to I guess in a way control that narrative and make sure there is really positive feedback out there which you only get from delivering great customer experience um then you’re at risk of uh not only not showing up but actually almost negatively being impacted so it again it just layers layers on another layer of importance of getting um the social element right um but and that then feeding into your wider content strategy um to to elevate and build that authority and that trust that those good reviews are valid and correct and therefore your con and your content is valid and correct and then stacking all of that up so that the LLMs are trusting you as a cited resource um is absolutely vital particularly I think if you’re using, if AI and social are being used as the kind of the, one of the buyer group in the room. So from a B2B perspective, we know that this is increasingly happening. It’s the short list, the last three. And we all know we need to be on that first short list because if you’re not, you haven’t got much hope of getting on it. So that bit of, you know, we used to have the CFO, the procurement, the blah, blah, blah, all the people in the room. Now there’s this additional AI and social group. It’s really important that that’s why they’re always on because ultimately when we measure this stuff, the stuff we should be measuring are the leads that are generated, are the elements that actually bring us the business. It’s a very growth-focused kind of combination of social search and AI search. It’s very at that cutting edge. But my, you know, it’s really interesting. Whose fault is it if AI doesn’t pick you up? Is it the marketeer’s fault? I’d love to know. Well, this is actually really interesting. We’re doing some work at the moment around, we’ve gone, that’s forever the argument of brand and performance marketing, right? And I say argument, they are yings and yangs that kind of occasionally play nicely together and sometimes don’t. And, you know, often in our industry, and I’m sure this is in us, and I’m sure it’s the same for yourself as well, just that understanding of the importance of brand, which is the entire business that comes down to everything from, yes, branding and marketing and advertising and everything else, but actually the customer experience. customers owning your brand is obviously the classic there, but that brand marketing piece and the importance of that as a layer above everything else that the marketeers are doing or other people are doing, that’s super important. And actually what this future world might do is make it so that it’s everyone’s responsibility to be uh making sure the brand shows up right from customer service rep to the call center person to the senior investors to uh to your mds your marketing your CMO everyone uh is really contributing to making sure the brand is trusted and respected and delivering a great experience and that in turn will massively contribute to being featured in LLMs and things like that So I noticed Agnita has a question. I’m holding the glasses, this is so small, hasn’t she? Probably one for you. Do you want to read it out? Is it a good thing when a country is ranked top for using AI when most of the AI users are sixteen plus years? What does that mean for that particular country? Not quite sure where that’s leading. I mean, I guess the fact that AI particularly LLMs, but also actually AI and search is kind of trained by its users, right? So the user demographic is super important to how it learns and performs. So perhaps where we’re dealing with over typically large proportion of AI users over sixteen for various reasons. So also certain social platforms, right? There’s now age limits and things. Is it a good thing where you have a certain demographic box, if you like, where users are in? Can it create bias, I guess, is perhaps where this is going? Can it dictate and skew what is being showed? Yeah, for sure. That’s a challenge, I think. Yeah. And a colleague of mine said the other day that actually women are less likely to use AI at the moment. They’re a bit more cautious. And I thought that was really interesting. Again, it’s creating bias. And you’re right. You know, the ethics of this is a whole other webinar, podcast, probably a book. Yeah, we should write that down, Katie. It’s horrific. If you get into the detail of it, you know, I was reading this morning that they’re increasing our number of publishers that are cutting AI out and stopping it being searched. to do the training on. And it’s all this kind of stuff. We’re still a very new industry. The bit to focus on for me is not the technology. Having done this when, you know, I’ve watched all these platforms come to bear to this point they are today. I would say the thing that matters most is the behavioural change of our customers. That’s the bit that’s actually the most important thing. In other words, no matter how this pans out, the wish and desire and pain point and passion of our buyers is about finding answers quickly, about being able to source the insight and the answer to their problem as fast as possible in the easiest, less time. difficult way. That’s probably a bit wordy, but you know what I mean? And I think that’s where you have to focus, not on the technology, not on how many are doing this, but the actual fundamental behavioural change. Because it interests me knowing that people actually search in TikTok, they search in Instagram, they search in LinkedIn, which means that that’s where they feel they have trusted sources. So that’s the behaviour change. In other words, I no longer trust this stuff over here. I trust this stuff here. And that’s the bit we have to kind of get your heads around and go, yes, yes, there’s going to be bias. Yes, there’s going to be this. How do I make sure that while sands are shifting over the next few years and LLMs get their act together, how do I make sure that my brand keeps growing because my consumer is over there? Exactly that. And I think these are all the questions that I’m sure Hopefully, anyway, people are going to take away from this webinar, as well as taking away the tips and the insights that we’ve shared. Hopefully, also, these are the questions that people that have joined us today are going to take away with them and try and answer for themselves as we start to move forward with this new world of discoverability, as I’m trying to call it. But essentially, it’s search. It’s finding stuff, finding brands, finding products, services, solutions. So, I’m just mindful of time. We’re obviously coming towards the end. Katie, thank you so much. It’s been fantastic. And I know we’ve got a couple more of these sorts of sessions together. And hopefully those of you that have joined will make sure that you connect with us and the agencies on LinkedIn. and wider a field to sort of stay in the conversation around this. We’re all, I think, certainly from a social perspective and our side from both technological, SEO and the future, AEO and GEO side, really keen to have these conversations and extend these conversations. with you guys. So do please reach out to Katy and myself. Obviously, you’ve got the social framework below. But those of you that are interested or have any questions and want to extend this conversation, then please do reach out to us. You can visit our website, which is Remarkable. global, where we have lots of content. We’ve got downloadable white papers, as you’d expect. and loads of articles and blogs and things around this as well, as well as case studies. So yeah, please do reach out to us for more content or more information. Likewise, obviously, make sure that you check out Immediate Future as well. So yes, thank you, Katie.

Katy Howell: Thank you, everyone, for joining us. That’s been fantastic.

James Gray: And yeah, we’ll be sharing some of this content in the not too distant future. Thank you, everyone.