Storytelling Over Data: The Secret to Modern B2B Marketing with Lori Highby

Marketing Isn’t a Department in Manufacturing – It’s the Missing Engine

Marketing and manufacturing haven’t always been close companions. But that’s changing, and fast.

That’s one of the key takeaways from a recent conversation I had with Lori Highby, founder of Keystone Click and co-host of A Broadcast for Manufacturers. Lori’s not just another voice in marketing, she grew up around machine shops, CNC drills, and blue-collar roots. And today, she’s helping manufacturers rethink what it means to be seen, remembered, and trusted in the digital age.

This isn’t just about making things louder or trendier. It’s about making things work smarter.

Marketing Isn’t a Campaign. It’s a Commitment.

For years, marketing in manufacturing was treated like a side hustle, maybe a brochure here, a trade show there. The idea that marketing could be a strategic engine inside an industrial business? That felt like a stretch.

But Lori’s point is clear: if people don’t know you exist, how are they supposed to buy from you?

Brand awareness isn’t optional anymore. It’s foundational. If you’re only thinking about marketing when you need leads, you’re already behind. Because most of your audience, the other 95%, isn’t ready to buy right now. They’re researching. Watching. Remembering.

And when they are ready? If you’ve been consistently showing up with valuable content, proof points, and a clear story, they’ll already know who to trust.

Storytelling > Spec Sheets

Manufacturers love data. Torque specs, tolerances, measurements. And that’s important. But Lori’s been doing this long enough to know: it’s not the data that gets remembered. It’s the story behind the data.

Tell me about the challenge you solved. The time you delivered a custom solution under pressure. The way you helped a customer recover from a failure. That’s what sticks. That’s what moves people.

Specs tell me what your product is. Stories tell me why it matters.

So yes, keep the data. But wrap it in something human.

B2B Doesn’t Need More Noise. It Needs More Relevance.

You don’t need a TikTok strategy. You need a relevance strategy.

Lori talked about the shift in the buying journey, how it’s moved from handshake deals and donut drop-offs to search engines, AI tools, and content libraries. Buyers aren’t starting with your sales team anymore. They’re starting with ChatGPT.

So if you want to be in the running, you have to show up in those early moments. That means having content that doesn’t just describe what you do, it addresses the real pain points your customers are Googling, asking AI about, and trying to solve.

And here’s the kicker: the customer doesn’t care when you were founded or how many awards you’ve won. Not until they trust you can help. You build that trust by showing up again and again with content that proves you understand their world—and have solved problems like theirs before.

Programs Win. One-Offs Don’t.

This was one of my favorite parts of the conversation: Lori’s take on consistency.

If you go to the gym once, you’re not walking away with six-pack abs. Same with marketing. You don’t “do” a blog once, or post on LinkedIn once, and expect the phone to ring. It’s a long play. The benefits compound over time.

That blog post you wrote five years ago? It might still be one of your most-visited pages today. (Lori has the analytics to prove it.)

So stop thinking in terms of campaigns. Start thinking in terms of systems. Systems that build trust, create awareness, and make it easy for your customer to say yes when the time is right.

Final Thought: Marketing Isn’t Soft. It’s Strategic.

Manufacturing teams have no problem investing in a half-million-dollar machine they can see and touch. But digital marketing? That’s where the hesitation sets in.

Lori gets it, but she also challenges it.

Today’s buyer is already on the journey, whether you’re visible or not. Marketing isn’t fluff. It’s not decoration. It’s the engine that makes sure you get found, understood, and chosen.

The shift isn’t about spending more. It’s about thinking differently.

Because in manufacturing, marketing isn’t just about selling more. It’s about earning the right to solve someone’s problem. And if you do it right, they’ll remember you when it counts.

Contact Lori

Lori Highby

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Transcript

Justin King:
How do you think about kind of knowledge versus data?

Lori Highby:
Data is important, but storytelling is more important. Storytelling is what’s going to connect with people and storytelling is ultimately what people are going to remember versus the data. I can guarantee everyone’s got responses to emails in their inbox where they’ve answered a question. That customer is probably not the first time that question has been asked. And that is great starting point for creating content on your website, on your social media. I read some data recently that really of your target audience is probably somewhere in that buying decision stage, only 5%. So you need to make sure that you’re continuing to add value to that other 95% of your target audience so that when it is time for them to make that buying decision, you are top of mind. You’ve already proven that you’re the best resource for them.

Justin King:
Highby she’s one of the voices behind this amazing podcast called A Broadcast for Manufacturers, also called abfm. I love the pun on broad. It’s intentional. Absolutely. On brand. For the amazing women in this podcast, it’s such a fun listen for me personally. In her day job, Lori’s agency called Keystone Click, is on this mission to help manufacturers do marketing differently. Not louder, not trendier, but smarter.

Justin King:
She brings this sharp perspective, deep industry knowledge, and just the right amount of challenge to how manufacturers think about their brand, their message, their customers, their product. I love digging into this world of marketing with Lori. From strategy to storytelling and everything in between. Enjoy the conversation. Let’s start, Lori, by just an understanding. Like how did you, how did you venture into this B2B complex world of manufacturing and consulting? And yeah, you have your own podcast too, right?

Lori Highby:
Yeah, yeah, yeah, sure. Great, great question how I got started? Well, my dad was in manufacturing, so I grew up visiting the tool and die shops and seeing how things were made. And it was always just so neat to go and, and see the CNC machine that he was working on that was drilling holes or whatever it was. And I was just, you know, even from a little kid, just fascinated by how things were made. And you know, living in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, very blue collar, very industrial community and working at two other advertising and marketing firms before starting my own, we always had manufacturing clients. So one of my favorite things to do is tour facility and see how things are getting made. And with my magic in the marketing world, digital marketing specifically, I noticed a trend amongst a lot of manufacturers. They’re doing amazing things but doing an absolutely poor job at telling that story to the world.

Lori Highby:
And that’s something that I’m really passionate about is helping manufacturers tell the story about the awesome work that they’re doing in order to help them attract the right fit types of clients and customers for their organization. The podcast that I have, I co host with two other gals, we call it a broadcast for manufacturers where pun intended. Yep, broad. Two broads talking broadly about manufacturing. So something where we’re passionate about and, and lots of different conversations and we like to, you know, push the, the comfort zone on some topics occasionally. So especially being, you know, women in manufacturing is, is, you know, outside of the norm already.

Justin King:
I have four daughters, so I’m very passionate about like, especially as I talk to them, like what, you know, how, how to best leave your mark as a human first, of course. But two of them have ventured into this side of, of manufacturing and distribution with me so far and I just always have kind of a passion of learning more about, you know, especially just watching how they can be extremely successful, especially being entrepreneurial. What is. So, you know, manufacturers and marketing is not exactly a, you know, a tight, tight fitting puzzle piece. Right?

Lori Highby:
Not a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.

Justin King:
Not a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. That’s a better description. A lot of, a lot of manufacturers actually look at marketing as not real marketing. They kind of look at, you know, rebate programs and channel marketing and things like that. Can you tell me first, like how you would even describe what marketing looks like instead of a manufacturer?

Lori Highby:
Yeah, great, great setup and question here. So there, there’s a client that we worked with again, a tool and dye shop actually they did custom tooling. So they, they made the tools that would ultimately, you know, other tool and die shops would be using. And they’re really well known in the Wisconsin market and they’ve been around for 40 plus years. And they went to a trade show in Iowa, I mean a neighboring state. Right. And the comment he said to me was, nobody knows who we are. Well, that’s marketing’s job, which is first and foremost brand awareness.

Lori Highby:
It’s letting the world know that you exist and that you solve problems and it’s getting clear on what’s possible. Specifically those problems are that you’re able to solve. So that when someone raises their hand and says, this is the problem I have, your name should be the first name that comes up if you are the solution provider to that specific problem. And then the next phase of marketing is that lead gen component. And I think the big challenge that I hear a lot of manufacturers think is that marketing should equal sales and it doesn’t always do that. Marketing is letting the world know that you exist and you have a solution to a very specific type of problem. And that’s, again, brand awareness, which could then ultimately convert to leads, but then that’s where it transfers to the sales team to close the deal. So.

Lori Highby:
But marketing can be involved in nurturing your current customers as well and reminding them that you exist and reminding them of your offerings. Because we all know we’ve got shiny objects coming from all different directions. Our inboxes are full. You know, social media ads are coming from all different perspectives, but it’s hitting the right message at the right time in front of that ideal customer. And that’s what marketing’s job is to do.

Justin King:
How do you deal with the. I would consider myself a marketer. I don’t think I’m good at helping other people market, but I consider myself a marketer of us and me. And what I know is it takes time. It takes often a lot of time. You know, it’s. It’s a, it’s a long play, not a short play. There’s.

Justin King:
There’s maybe short wins you can get. But so often the, the real benefits happen, you know, a year down the road, two years down the road, five years down the road. How do you, how do you communicate that to your customers? And, and how do you make sure that they kind of understand and buy more? So buy into the fact that this is a long play. Do you agree it’s a long play?

Lori Highby:
Oh, 100%. It’s a long play. To do it right is a long play. And that’s a big argument that I have, too, because a lot of, you know, a lot of assumptions are made in that, oh, now I’m paying for marketing, so this light switch turned on and I should get a bunch of new business. And that’s not the reality. I mean, we have to think about our own experiences as buyers. And if there’s an ad that’s put in front of you for a brand I’ve never heard of before, I’m not going to immediately make that purchase. There’s a level of trust that needs to be established and developed.

Lori Highby:
And that trust is really focused around adding value and really showcasing that. You are an expert. You have insights to share, you have experience and proof that you can do this thing. And that’s a long story to tell. And it takes time to establish that trust. If you think of a brand that you’re, you’re loyal to or you’re passionate about, you didn’t just magically wake up one day and become, you know, obsessed with this brand. Brand. It took time for you to have this established trust in your, in your mind that this is a brand that you’re always going to buy and purchase.

Lori Highby:
So I’m a big fan of Apple. I’ve had an iPhone for goodness, who knows how long I’ve had it. I’m not even going to think about that. I have Mac products, you know, for all of my computers. And this is built over time. This trust has been built over time. If there’s a brand new phone phone or a brand new computer that comes out, it’s going to take a long time for me to establish for that trust to be established, for me to make that purchase. So amongst in the manufacturing world, it’s the same thing.

Lori Highby:
You know, there has to be trust that says you can do the thing that I need you to do. You’re an expert at it and I want to see the proof that you’ve actually done this for someone else before. And I’d say that last part is probably more important today than it’s ever been. And that’s a long game. It’s a long cycle, especially a major purchase or a major investment that’s being made. And more times than not, in the manufacturing world, you already have an established vendor partnership and something went significantly wrong and that’s why you’re looking to find a new partner to work with. That is a long decision to make for someone to be in such a world of hurt that they’re making this change with that partner. But you have to prove that trust because they’ve been burned by someone else too, typically.

Justin King:
So one thing that I think that I kind of struggle with this when I talk to manufacturers is what is the balance of marketing for manufacturers inside the channel? The distributors that sell their products and actually the ones that are buying it. But then the, the end customers that are pulling that product through the channel and those that are ultimately making the decision of buying their products from distribution, how do you see the balance between the two or the split between those two?

Lori Highby:
I think it’s gonna be different with every single customer that we work with. I mean, we have to really understand is it coming, is it the end user at the end of the day that’s creating that demand, or is it the distribution channel that’s creating that demand? And we were just meeting with a client yesterday that this was the exact conversation where we had, where we learned it’s the end user that is ultimately creating the demand for the machine part Ultimately, but the goal that we’re working on right now is to educate the distribution channel and be advocates within the distribution channel to also create awareness so that when the end user is creating the demand, there’s less reservation for the distribution channel to kind of provide, you know, get it in the supply chain and move the product faster at the end of the day. So I think there’s a balance of the communication advocacy needs to happen on both the end user and the distribution channel side. But it’s going to be different, you know, across. Every business is set up differently. Their distribution channels are set up differently. So it’s really understanding the nuances of what’s important to your target customer. What are the pains that they have that ultimately you’re able to solve for.

Justin King:
How do you talk to executive teams? So so often what happens, I think this is very related to E commerce at the same time, like, hey, we need E commerce. It’s a, it’s a kind of a requirement in the middle of the company. Yeah, there’s budget that happens at the top of the company, but it’s never strategic until it reaches the executive team. They understand it, they believe in it, and then they’re able to, you know, apply resources and budget. How, how do you talk to CEOs or maybe start with the idea of how is marketing perceived kind of across the board. I know you deal with all kinds, but in general, how is it kind of increasing exposure as marketing is a need inside of a manufacturer.

Lori Highby:
Yeah.

Justin King:
Versus just a. Yeah, I think, I.

Lori Highby:
Mean, an observation that I’ve had, and this is a constant hurdle that I’ve, I’ve jumped over, especially in the digital ecosystem, is that manufacturing in general is familiar with a tangible product. You know, and there’s no reservation on investing half a million dollars in a new machine and get it up and running and, and building product. But there’s a lot of hesitation on investing dollars where you can’t actually touch and feel the outcome. So it’s a lot of education, a lot of education about understanding the customer journey, which is changing today. I mean, it’s been changing. And digital transformation is extremely important for every business, not just manufacturing, but understanding that today’s buyer starts their research online. And that’s part of building that trust is making sure that you’re at that front, part of that customer journey and helping to prove and answer, you know, the challenges or the problems that are being faced. And that’s all education.

Lori Highby:
And then really it’s just thinking about your own personal experiences when it comes to making a major investment in your personal or professional life. You start with research, you start looking at, you know what, this is the problem. These are my options. What other experiences have people had with this? Are they positive? Is it positive outcomes? Are they unhappy with it? Okay, now I’m going to reach out and call someone and do some further Q and A, and then I’m going to make a buying decision. And you want to make sure that you’re showing up at every single stage and that’s how you end up building trust. And this is a very condensed story that I’m typically telling, but at the end of the day, it’s a lot of education because, you know, old school manufacturing sales was dropping donuts off at the office, shaking hands, showing up at the trade shows. And those days are far and few between.

Justin King:
Now, you talked a little bit about that customer journey. How has this been shifting and changing, especially? I mean, I used to speak about how millennials are coming. Right. And now they’re here. That’s a little bit of an outdated message here. And now we have Gen Z. How is that, how is that journey starting to shape? And what are the kind of the core differences that you’re seeing today versus, you know, five, ten years ago?

Lori Highby:
Yeah, I mean, I’d say first and foremost, it’s, it’s leveraging information online and it’s not even going to Google anymore. It’s going to ChatGPT and Claude and, you know, all these other AI platforms because they’re just using these tools to conduct that research that I was talking about. I mean, a lot of the evolution of these AI tools has been really research focused. And if someone’s got a problem, they’re going to go to the tools, these AI platforms to try to understand potential solutions. And again, this is where you need to show up as that expert. And the way you do that is making sure your site’s properly optimized for AI. But these, these AI tools are going to drive to your website you want. That’s why the blog content is really, really valuable.

Lori Highby:
Having videos and podcasts and this type of educational content is ultimately what’s going to make sure that you’re going to stand out compared to your competitors. When someone starts searching for that pain that they have, they don’t necessarily know the solution to the problem yet. So talking about the solution isn’t going to get you found. It’s talking about the problem and that you understand how to solve that problem. That’s how you’re going to get found online.

Justin King:
I Remember talking to a CEO of a distributor and they said, you know, they came with their issues and problems and we were talking about all kinds of things, content and marketing and E commerce, morely on the E commerce side. But the conversation came up a blog. And he was like, I don’t know how we can pull that off or why we should do it. And, you know, just a long conversation. I asked him just by chance, like, how did you find me? I said, well, I was on, you know, I was somewhere and saw a blog and I read your blog and it resonated with me that you actually understood that I was like. I said, did you hear what you just said? Don’t you find that a little bit ironic? I said, I didn’t know how you found me, but I had a feeling.

Lori Highby:
Yeah.

Justin King:
And so I want to come back to the ChatGPT stuff. I think it’s interesting, but on this idea of content, I mean, it’s so foreign for a manufacturer to think about this versus, like sales sheets, no problem, right? They’ll think sales sheets all day long. How on earth do you get them into a muscle of creating content?

Lori Highby:
It is extremely challenging, I can promise you that, because it’s, it’s, there’s a lot of this is the way we’ve always done it mentality in the manufacturing space. And I’m sorry to be blunt, but this is just what I’m observing.

Justin King:
Yeah.

Lori Highby:
And the here’s the new machine we bought, right? Like, that’s the kind of content they want to promote, which is great. But at the end of the day, they don’t care about what the solution is there. They care about, can you solve my problem? That is all that matters. And can you do it on time and on budget, you know, and high quality? All, you know, all those boxes need to be checked obviously too. But when it comes to content, the easiest starting point is to think about the questions that you are asked. I can guarantee everyone’s got responses to emails in their inbox where they’ve answered a question that that customer is probably not the first time that question has been asked. And that is great starting point for creating content on your website, on your social media, and in the form of a video, whatever it is, but it’s always thinking about those FAQs or the big questions. And an exercise that we like to put our clients through is to pick, you know, what is your core offering, your core deliverable, and think about all the what questions, all the why questions, all the when, all the who, all the yes, no, questions.

Lori Highby:
And then you’ve got about a hundred different pieces of content that you can create by simply picking one product or one service offering and going through that little exercise and, and even just asking everyone on your team, from the shipping person, the customer service person, what are the questions that they are asked, all of that content throughout the entire customer journey. From here’s the challenge I have to. I’ve been buying from you for five years now. They are still asking questions, right? So in the question answer approach, which has always been good for Google, is going to be even more important for AI because again, people are going to AI to figure out a solution to a problem that they’re experiencing. And people are typing in questions. They’re not just typing in two or three keywords like they are in Google. AI has trained users basically to formulate full conversations. So you have to think about that with the type of content that you’re creating.

Lori Highby:
I want to circle on that blog post real quick because I’ve been the biggest advocate of blogs for ever and I get a lot of pushback. Oh, we don’t have time. It’s not, it’s not worth it. What’s the ROI of a blog post? Yada, yada, yada. I’ve had all of those questions. We have a blog post that was written on our site, I want to say, 12 years ago now, and it is still one of the top 10 visited pages on our website. So the three to four hours that I had a team member, you know, take to craft that really valuable, informative piece of content has still been one of the top Most visited pages 12 years after the fact. So the investment on that is bringing awesome traffic to our website because it was a very thoughtful, well crafted piece of content that adds value to our community.

Justin King:
What was the topic?

Lori Highby:
It was about the open loop concept in marketing, like always bringing people back. So if you think about Netflix, right at the end of an episode, the next one is starting or there’s a cliffhanger in a series, you want to watch the next episode because there’s something. The idea is like there’s always this open loop and you always want people coming back for more.

Justin King:
I think, I think you were when you kind of talked about writing a blog for the customer. I think, I think in the e commerce world we have this kind of constant struggle. I think website development in general, we tend to think about how do we tell our story when it needs to be, how do we fit ourselves into our customer story. Right. And so often it becomes all about us. So our websites like our history about us, like nobody cares about that until they’ve built a relationship with you and trust and all that, right? Yep. Nobody cares that you’re, you know, started in 1912, right?

Lori Highby:
Yep, yep.

Justin King:
And yet, yet we tend to write and think and build things that are all about us and not for the customer. And, and so much of B2C. The beauty of B2C is helping customers see themselves in that product. Right. That’s the magic of B2C. And we can do the same thing in B2B. And so that really resonated with me. How do you.

Justin King:
So much of manufacturing is data, right. Product data, specs of something and something you said around ChatGPT and the questions, the type of questions you were asking were more about the knowledge of the product versus just what makes up the material, the height, depth, width of the product itself. How do you think about kind of knowledge versus data?

Lori Highby:
I think it’s a mix of the two. The data is important, but storytelling is more important. Storing storytelling is what’s going to connect with people and storytelling is ultimately what people are going to remember versus the data. If you can capture someone’s attention with the storytelling that has the data infused in it, you’re going to hold them longer than if you’re just spitting out data points. Again, you know, a lot of manufacturers love to share. This is the machine we have and this is its capabilities. It can do things 3 tons of whatever or you know, whatever. That’s great.

Lori Highby:
But that’s the same message that, you know, 10 other companies are saying. If you have a story behind the process or the way you help someone else solve this major problem that they have, that’s going to resonate better and that’s going to pull them in to help want you to help them solve their problem. They, that they have. That’s what it comes down to. People have problems and they’re looking for solutions and you, you’re going to capture them by sharing that you’ve done it for someone else before, not the fact that you’ve got this expensive piece of equipment.

Justin King:
Often when I hear people kind of talk bad about marketing, they, they always talk about one off things that they’ve done. How do you, how do you think about programs versus kind of events or one time thing? You know, I went to that event once, I wrote a blog once, I did a video, I opened up Instagram once.

Lori Highby:
I love that. And I have a standard answer for this actually. You know, if I just went to the gym once, I’m not gonna walk away with six pack abs. You know, I need to be consistent to maintain my personal health goals. And it’s the same thing with marketing. If you want results, you have to be consistent in those activities that you’re doing. Again, to build that brand awareness, to build that trust, to ultimately capture someone at the point in time where they are interested in learning more about their services. Just because you’re pushing information out there, that doesn’t mean that your ideal customer is ready to buy.

Lori Highby:
I read some data recently that really 5% of your target audience is probably somewhere in that buying decision stage. Only 5%. So you need to make sure that you’re continuing to add value to that other 95% of your target audience so that when it is time for them to make that buying decision, you are top of mind. You’ve already proven that you’re the best resource for them and there’s minimal reservation for them to move forward working with you. But that takes time and that’s being consistent. It’s not a one and done game. It’s. It’s a long game.

Lori Highby:
It’s a long strategy for sure.

Justin King:
I can tell you how many times I’ve personally had someone say, I’ve watched your stuff for 10 years or I’ve been reading your stuff for, you know, eight years. But last week I had this specific problem and I knew you could help. Right, so. So marketing was working all along and then it was the right, you said it, it’s the right time. It was the right time. The problem kind of showed its face at that time and then the marketing comes in that they now remember what we’re doing. So I mean, I actually think it’s fascinating. I’m curious, any thoughts? This.

Justin King:
Most of marketing is memory. It’s not experience. It’s not a customer experience that matters. It’s the memory of the customer experience that matters. Right?

Lori Highby:
Yeah.

Justin King:
And so, so much of, so much of memory.

Lori Highby:
Well, yeah, yeah. I actually never really thought about it that way, but it is, it’s, it’s an, it’s someone else’s experience which is ultimately a memory. Right. So it’s.

Justin King:
Yeah, that’s right.

Lori Highby:
It’s. Or someone’s personal experience. Like. Oh yeah, I, I’ve been watching Justin’s podcast forever and like there’s amazing content that continues to show up. So when my pain is so heavy that I’m confident he can solve my problem. But it’s because of the consistency and the high value content and you’ve proven that you are a trusted resource I.

Justin King:
Guess part of the memory thing is if I’ve seen a bunch of irrelevant information for a long period, I could have seen something 10 times, but it was irrelevant. Right. It was all about them. Didn’t really speak to a problem I had. Like it won’t be in my memory because it just doesn’t. It’s not relevant. Right.

Lori Highby:
Yep.

Justin King:
When something kind of jogs my memory, oh, that’s a problem that I have. Not that I’m. That I’m going to solve it today, but it’s a problem I have. I tend to remember it. Your, your comment about storytelling. I mean, I think you said it even that storytelling is important. If you can embed data in the storytelling, then people remember the story and the data. I just think that’s a pretty interesting thing.

Justin King:
I always think about like the Amazon experience that I don’t actually remember the Amazon experience. Everybody says the Amazon experience is amazing. I don’t remember my last purchase on Amazon. I can tell you I remember two things. I remember I clicked the button and the product showed up.

Lori Highby:
Yeah.

Justin King:
Like that’s what I remember. I don’t remember finding it. I don’t remember looking at the image. I remember I hit the button. It was a one click buy now. And then the product shows up and it’s the memory of that experience that matters so much. And speaking of memory, bad transition. But I think we’ve watched over the last, watched over the last, especially the last two months.

Justin King:
Search traffic, move away from Google to chat. I know that’s something you’re really passionate about doing. Tell us how to think about that. Move away from Google to chat and what we can be doing to at least be able to track this trend and figure out how we’re going to deal with it ourselves.

Lori Highby:
Yeah. This is something that’s really important and I don’t think people are paying enough attention to it. And I personally am struggling with the educational component of this because I’m still teaching people about why Google was important. Right?

Justin King:
That’s right.

Lori Highby:
But Google, I just heard on a podcast, I don’t have the exact source of this, but I heard it this morning while I was in the car. Google is now offering basically severance packages to their search team for early retirement because they’re anticipating a significant downsize in needing anything on their search team. Knowing what’s happening with AI, that in and of itself should tell people that if Google’s making these massive changes, you need to be making changes to really focus on what’s happening with AI. So when it comes to that whole customer journey. It’s making sure that the AI platforms can find your website and cite you as a source to the information that it’s providing. So We’ve built an AI optimization audit and the domain is cleverly aioptimizationaudit.com where you can get. There’s a free report Google, a free report and a paid report. The free report is only going to look at Perplexity.

Lori Highby:
The paid is looking at Claude Chachi, pd, Perplexity and Gemini. Basically what this, it’s an AI agent that we built and it’s going to go first look at your website and make assumptions about who your target audience is and how they would ultimately be using the AI platforms to search for, which should be your, your company. And then it’s going to go to these AI platforms. So the free one, it’s going to Perplexity and it’s going to create the role of your ideal customer basically and then enter in these different types of search queries or prompts and basically figure out who’s showing up, are you showing up, is your competitor showing up? And, and give you some ideas on what changes you need to make to your website as far as types of content. Maybe it’s a technical structure of your site, but at the end of the day you want to make sure that you’re showing up and it’s not your competitors. When your ideal customer is leveraging AI.

Justin King:
Tools to do their research, what are you seeing as you do that?

Lori Highby:
It’s really interesting because, so I get a copy of every report that’s pulled and I’ve been looking and some companies, their site looks beautiful, but they have zero results. There’s nothing showing up. They have zero exposure in AI and that’s more either the depth of the content or the technical structure of the site. But then we, we’ve got some clients that it’s about, you know, 56% exposure. So that’s basically saying that we, we created like three potential Personas and we, we mapped out about eight different questions each Persona could potentially enter in and you showed up 50% of the time as a, as a result. Like, oh, that, that’s amazing. That number isn’t very often, but I have seen it in two reports so far. It’s more on the, like anywhere between, I’d say 0 and 5% is basically the trend that I’m seeing right now.

Justin King:
What, what do they do with that? So let’s say they, you know, I’m, I’m sure even you can get to down to the product and SKU level and things like that that start to matter for a manufacturer. Like for those that have some significant improvement that’s needed and they feel like they are a top category product that should be shown as a solution. What do, what do companies start thinking about doing in results of that?

Lori Highby:
Well, I would look at how your site is set up. So AI optimization is going to be very. There’s a lot of similarities with search engine optimization and I’ve been doing SEO since the early 2000s and even though there’s been lots of changes over the years, the core principles still are there. Right? You need to have a technically sound site that is easy for the spiders to crawl, but now it’s really easy making sure that the LLMs, the AI tools, know how to access your site. And really the schema markup of your site is going to be more important than anything else. But you got to make sure it’s accessible. So having gated content is not going to help you. I feel like gated content is kind of going to slowly die away because you want to prove your expertise and you want your brand name associated with the valuable information that people are searching for.

Lori Highby:
Because it’s out there. There’s no more secret recipes. It’s out there. You just want to make sure it’s your brand that is associated with the secret recipe, the non secret secret recipe. And then it’s making sure that you have that valuable content. It’s, it’s answering those queries, it’s proving that you can do this and it’s having a unique story to tell. That’s the other important factor here. You want to make sure that you don’t sound like every other company that’s out there because then that’s just kind of adding to the boring, dull AI generated content.

Lori Highby:
And it goes back to that storytelling. You have unique case studies, you have a unique process. That’s the type of stuff you want to share and that’s what’s going to get attracted by these different LLMs.

Justin King:
I have a feeling, Lori, that there are a lot of companies out there that feel like they missed the Google boat. So a lot of companies printed money at different times on the Internet, right? Printed money off of email, printed money off of Google, printed money off of YouTube, printed money off of advertising on Facebook, printed money in E commerce. And some companies that really kind of got in early understood it, leveraged it, they were able to literally just print money off the backs of this. And I have a feeling that after seeing those trends over and over again that this one people might actually want to say, okay, we want to get in. We want to get in early, not late on this trend because it’s so obvious that it’s moving to these LLMs and AI tools.

Lori Highby:
Yeah, I 100% agree with that. And, and I would say, you know, I in general is still very much in the early adopter stage and the more I speak about it, I see more and more hands being raised when I say how many of you use AI and but then I’m learning. The types of questions that I’m getting really tell me that they’re very, very, very entry level on their AI usage. But I imagine this is going to continue to grow and everyone’s going to continue to learn. So now is an optimal time to really make sure that you are setting your business and your website and your brand up for success when it comes to the AI search game.

Justin King:
That’s amazing. Lori. How do people get ahold of you and talk to you?

Lori Highby:
Sure, great question. I’m very active on LinkedIn. Just Lori Highby Otherwise, keystoneclick.com is our website for our business and you can check out the aioptimization audit.com to run.

Justin King:
Your first free report which is good for Google. That URL is good for Google. Will it be good for chat GPT we don’t know yet.

Lori Highby:
Crossing fingers.

Justin King:
Lori, thank you so much for being on. Appreciate. We definitely want to have you back and going a little deeper on some of these topics. Appreciate it.

Lori Highby:
Awesome. Thanks a lot. This was fun.

Justin King:
Thank you.