We are live with Megan Bowen who is the CEO of Refine Labs, which is a B2B digital marketing and a demand generation agency And I was also just checking out the numbers recently and something that sounded to me as well Is it you guys actually hit and correct me if I'm wrong with this 21 million in 2022 for ARR Which is crazy. So I'm super happy to have you on on the live stream again. Thank you. Yeah, thank you for having me Jordan I'm excited to dive into all the different topics that we'll cover today and yeah We've had we've had a crazy journey over the last six years.
That was our revenue figure at that time We've had some ups and downs. I'm also willing to be super transparent about the journey overall But we've also worked with almost 300 B2B SaaS companies as well over the last six years So it's been it's been an incredible ride and awesome to have such a big impact across the B2B ecosystem That's crazy. Well, I'm excited to get into it And the very first thing that I wanted to go into was if you could just give me some background of like how you Yeah, because I believe you're CEO of Refine Labs before and then you became CEO and what was your entire journey beforehand? Yeah, definitely.
So before Refine Labs, I operated in B2B SaaS companies And so I kind of interestingly I grew up in the account management customer success discipline So my first job, you know, my first kind of tech job was in my early 20s at an edtech company called Echok I was an account management customer success Then I went to a company called Zokdok and I built out their post sale function Then I was at GrubHub in seamless and I was there for their, you know to be part of the IPO and subsequent acquisitions after and similarly built out there kind of B2B account management function then went to manage by Q Started building out account management, but then that was my first time as a chief operating officer We exited to we work when I was a COO of managed by Q and had a quick stint at a Toronto based company called Platters That was back in kind of the food tech space the pandemic hit though that business was impacted I decided to move on and in the summer of 2020 the founder of Refine Labs Chris Walker reached out to me and Basically over like three months convinced me to join him as his COO at Refine Labs at the time the agency was very small There were a couple of employees There was a handful of customers and he was really looking for an operator to be his business partner And so you know at the time I had did not have a ton of marketing experience relative I had much more experience in sales and account management and operations But he was very persuasive and really wanted me to join the team. So I agreed and we we built the agency We have the COVID boom digital marketing had a crazy Just massive investment from VC and startups in 2020 2021 and 2022 That bubble kind of broke a little bit in the B2B SaaS space in 2022 and 2023. It's been a little bit of a contraction I was COO until January 24 Chris wanted to step away and start a new company Pissetto and asked me to take over as CEO and then Earlier this year he asked me to buy him out He said he wanted to get kind of out of the B2B marketing world and focus on some other things And so I was able to make that happen. So now I'm the majority owner and CEO of the agency So it's been an awesome.
It's been an awesome ride and I'm really excited for the future What's amazing and there's a lot of places to go into with this I have a lot of questions So I'm just really thinking of like what's the best direction to take this but yeah I do want kind of understand that what we're a what were the first tasks like at duty when you just started off being a CEO at refine labs where the first action he took yeah, sorry when I joined in 2020 or when I took over as CEO in 2024 when taking over a CEO got it so the great question so when I took the CEO seat in 2024 2023 was a really interesting year for the agency because so much was changing in B2B SaaS And we had really focused on paid advertising and digital strategies and from 2020 to 2022 But in 2023 Chris had a lot of ideas about ways we could evolve and pivot as an agency So we tried a lot of different types of things in terms of how we were pivoting the services that we offered and so 2023 was a great learning Year because we repositioned a few offerings we offered new things that we hadn't done before and Ultimately that after kind of that year of experimentation we came to a couple of conclusions People really depended on us for our digital strategy expertise and our paid media execution as well as our creative execution That's what we were ultimately known for and we were really really good at delivering results For almost every client we've worked with we've been able to drive a 50% increase to qualified pipeline after eight months of working together And then the other conclusion was Chris had really solidified a new idea that he had that is now what you see with Paseto his new company so at the end of 2023 we essentially made the decision Chris was gonna start this new company and See that through and kind of get that going and that we were gonna reposition or not even reposition We're gonna kind of go back to our roots and solidify our position as a demand-gen agency digital strategy paid advertising and creative content Production so the first thing that I focused on at the beginning of 2024 was clarity in our positioning This is who we are. This is what we're good at. This is what we do This is the type of customer we serve the other big important thing was any company that kind of grows up with a founder brand Especially a founder brand as you know powerful as Chris Walker's he was stepping away to a new company So we had to rebuild our marketing engine that was not reliant on him as the founder So I would say you know positioning strategy positioning clarity and then building a marketing engine that Had zero reliance on any one individual were the two priorities to ensure the future success of the agency So two things without one I'll go into the very first one of even Increasing the pipeline of anybody that you're working with by like 50% within the first eight months That's that's incredible. So when you're even starting off What are the first factors that you take into account when working with people and I think one of the ones that you said before was like Brand demand and expand model how much does that play a factor or and is there some other variable as well?
Yeah, absolutely So we have a very intentional onboarding process that takes the first sort of six weeks of our engagement with our customers And in fact we also do this as a project for people that may not be in a position to hire us as their agency of record Within that six weeks though. We focus on a set of audits and assessments and analyses that allow us to pinpoint Some key answers to some really important questions So what we want to be able to understand is when we do a look back over the trailing four to eight quarters What was the primary driver of pipeline production and what other things can we learn based on the data that's available to us? We'll run a close one close lost analysis. Why are we winning deals?
Why are we losing deals? We'll take a look at pipeline lead sources any attribution data that they may or that they may have available What are the trends and the patterns that we're seeing in terms of what's driving pipeline and revenue for the business? We're also going to take a look and do a deep dive into their actual paid media accounts What are they doing in their Google Ads accounts? What are they doing on paid social?
We also want to look at it through the lens of their overall creative and messaging strategy What are you know? What are the campaign strategies that are in market? What are the key messages that we're delivering? We want to validate who the ideal customer profile is are you know is the definition of the ICP the same as your you know What customers you actually acquire and is that targeting represented across your media strategy effectively, right?
And is that messaging resonating with them as well? And we also want to take a look at the digital buying journey experience And so auditing all of the digital properties websites landing pages the primary conversion flow is everything frictionless and clear in terms of giving the buyer everything that they need to know in order to make a decision and ultimately raise their hand and ask for a Sales conversation so over the six weeks we all of this we even audit their content strategy There are organic social strategy all of these things need to work together ultimately And to your point on the brand demand expand model What are what are we noticing in terms of budget allocation and strategy across these three core pillars and what they're doing? Well, what's missing? What can be improved?
And so after we look across all of those dimensions We then put forth a 12 month roadmap of what needs to happen in order to get that increase in qualified pipeline that everybody of course is looking for And we sequence our recommendations in terms of highest impact and front loading those in the first two quarters And mapping out what that you know four quarter roadmap is of what we need to do based on our findings Of course, we have our marketing philosophy and our frameworks and playbooks But every single business is different so that deep dive into all of the businesses data and systems and media accounts is really crucial for us to craft a very custom Strategy rooted in marketing fundamentals that is ensuring that we're basically helping our customer do what they hired us to do right? Which is to to grow faster and to hit pipeline targets more effectively And one of also one of the things like Chris is known for and I think you just refined labs as a whole is that fact of I think you can explain this way about and again But it's the fact of like first off creating the demand and then capturing the demand has that just been a philosophy that has encapsaled Our refined labs since today since then since today and is still ongoing Yeah, absolutely And so just to kind of define these terms whenever we would say create demand or capture demand what we're essentially representing is two different functions Of your go-to-market system. So when we say, you know capture demand what that is what that is intending to represent is for buyers that are in market today Actively looking for a solution like yours How are we making sure that we are getting in front of those buyers at the right time so that they raise their hand and come to us for a sales Conversation so in terms of tactics that can be you know running paid search because people are actively searching right in the AI era Thinking about how to increase your discoverability and LLMs It can be things like retargeting campaigns people that have already been to your website and might be circling you but continuing to nurture them through other means When we say create demand what we really were referring to was brand awareness, right? And so in the brand demand expand framework I would put capture demand under demand and create demand under brand or brand awareness and this is intended to represent The rest of your total addressable market that isn't actively in market today to buy but that they will be soon right next week next quarter next year How are we getting in front of those people?
How are we? Making them aware that you exist? How are we making sure they understand the problem you solve the solution your brand? How are we creating relevance and salience in their minds so that when they do become in market?
We are automatically part of that day one consideration set and so that's the you know That's one component of our strategy It's very typical and we see this commonly across companies that we audit and work with that because there's so much pressure to hit short-term targets that Large percentage of their budget is allocated to demand capture motions and not enough budget is allocated towards brand or demand creation motions That are really serving you know more medium and long-term goals And so that often can be one of the things that we're recommending in terms of rebalancing or reallocating Their total budget to have a better balance between those those two pillars you need both right you need to be doing both You need to be marketing to your whole total addressable market and you need to be marketing differently to those that are in market today And to those that are not yet in market I guess even like with the smaller companies versus with the bigger companies or maybe it's across it's the same thing across the board But do you find one of the more challenging parts also to kind of educate the even the company that you're working with that? You also have to think of this as a long term as well within the next 12 months Is that something that's usually difficult whenever you're starting off with new clients or do they kind of understand that? Yeah, I think it depends on the company stage and their maturity so In the early days of refine labs we did work with a lot of startups And if you're in an early stage company sometimes the only thing you can plan for is the short term because you only have a certain amount of money or runway And the other challenge with a startup is you're often still figuring out really core Fundamentals of your actual business who is our customer? How much can we charge?
Will they buy the thing we're selling? So marketing is more challenging early stage for a lot of reasons for more established companies Maybe a mid market or enterprise S company these companies have been around for a long time right they've been around for five ten twenty plus years They've achieved pretty significant revenue a hundred million five hundred million a billion in revenue, right? They have a go-to-market engine that is working However, what we find with companies at that size and scale in that stage is there's usually two major levers for improvement So there's often still an over allocation to demand capture So there's an opportunity to be much more efficient with things like Google search and other demand capture programs And then often there are brand awareness and in creation campaigns and strategies in place But they might not be being executed to the level of effectiveness that they could be in order to drive the outcome that we're looking for And in some cases still underfunded and need more funding to properly reach the full market And so the the challenges across an earlier stage in a later stage company, you know, they are different The overall approach is important for both but they're operating on Different timelines and a much larger company that's been around for a while is absolutely a bit more medium and long-term oriented than an earlier stage startup That is, you know, trying to hit some early milestones relatively quickly. Yeah, it makes sense We have a we've worked with long-clinin in particular too and one of the things that we keep hearing and maybe You can use your advice with this part is that they definitely want to opt the marketing budget for sure And they definitely have the potential to opt the marketing budget, but it's a little bit tricky as well talking to them Because sometimes the the mentality comes in like oh if we have more marketing budget, all right Let's just like up the Google Ads Let's up the Facebook ads, but I also know that Chris Walker like he's famous for dark social and fine Lab is famous for the dark social right and same with self-report attribution to kind of connect those two But if you like let's say that you were in this in my same position here I'm like we have all this budget Let's just keep upping the the Facebook ads or the Google ads What would be your initial reaction and this is probably like let's say $10 million company within that range Well, you're advice for that so I think a company that's at 10 million with proper infrastructure You should be able to look at the data and make the right decision based on that and the right business case So whenever you're thinking about spend on Google search for example You can go through a series of steps to really identify What is the right amount of budget to have here where if I spend any more than that?
I'm essentially just getting diminishing returns and so there's a relatively straightforward process now in terms of Facebook that can be used as both a Demand capture or demand creation channel depending upon the strategy that is deployed So sometimes people will use Facebook for what I'll call like a direct response or a lead gen where they are you know Either asking for your contact information in exchange for an asset or there may be you know asking you to sign up or a demo within the Facebook feed any type of Campaign where they're asking you for their information or to book a meeting I would put classify that under demand capture You're basically trying to get this person's name and information and a meeting from them because you want to do something with it right away Right and depending upon the company if you have a good offer if you have a compelling offer that can work and that can be effective For companies, you know for B2B companies that maybe have a very high ACB product You know my software six figures. I don't know if you're gonna have people scrolling Facebook signing up for demos Right, it's probably a more considered purchase and so the better strategy could be deploying a campaign That's more about driving awareness overall and so You know, there's not like a right or wrong answer that's applicable to every company So what you want to do is you want to go through a methodical data-backed process to understand what's working for this particular company What can our historical data show us and then what are the right things to consider moving forward? And then in terms of you know We have talked a ton about self-reported attribution and it's something we still use at the agency today However, we've expanded our strategies in terms of how to think about measuring the success of brand marketing overall And so that can be looking at things like share of search over time that can actually be looking at the entire financial health of the business and understanding overall total marketing investment relative to Contribution margin and customer acquisition cost and monitoring those metrics over time and if you're doing your brand marketing effectively You're gonna see positive movement across core financial metrics of your business because you're just becoming more efficient overall and acquiring customers and so over the last couple of years we've really diversified and Introduced more sophisticated measurement around brand to layer on self-reported attribution So that when we're working with a marketing leader and they want to make a case for budget or this and that we're able to have a much more Financially fluent conversation with the CFO and the CEO about the impact of these investments on the overall health of the business Yeah, because self-reported attribution was something that even I implemented with my own my own agency too And it was something that actually it was pretty interesting too because most of our leads originally they were coming in from From LinkedIn and then occasionally we would have one in the Instagram We just like check the box and I would say yeah Instagram and it would kind of surprise me too But the issue that I was always I was wondering about was like yeah, it's good, but also at scale I would always be worried about it that Sometimes it might be a little bit tricky to track exactly To track exactly how people are coming to to your site or does it work at scale as well? So any type of attribution whether it's self-reported attribution whether it's software attribution And neither of them are in of themselves are ever gonna give you the full picture And so my my stance on attribution overall is it's a valuable piece of data and information But you shouldn't be making decisions only based on attribution data It should be one input along with several others that help you make good decisions And so I think you know, yes at scale you can collect that information If you know depending upon your volume of in-bounds you're gonna want to build out the right infrastructure within your marketing automation platform to collect that data To group it and organize it and categorize it so you can look at trends over time But it's not the end all be all it's it's one way to measure something that's difficult to measure in terms of collecting These kind of discrete qualitative data points on how people remember remembering your brand essentially And so it's still part of the mix that we that we look at but it's not the only thing that drives decisions So I want to take a little bit of turn as well on this too and go a little bit to the the founder led founder led marketing in terms of even that's how I've seen Chris started refine labs too and I see you constantly posting on LinkedIn as well and I've liked quite a few of your things and What are your thoughts with founder led marketing versus diversification?
Yeah, and so My view is that founder led marketing is an asset not a strategy. So Founder led marketing with the right founder can be extremely powerful. We're a great example of that right with Chris and refine labs However, it's not a long-term strategy that you should rely on there's actually some interesting data out there that I've read that says a founder brand effectively Has a shelf life of like 18 to 24 months or something like that and maybe we wrote ours out a little bit longer than that But essentially if you're putting your entire marketing strategy and hinging it to one person You're basically hoping this one person can remain passionate motivated and excited to Engage and post and create content about this one thing like indefinitely, right? And when you break it down like that, it's just like it doesn't make logical sense that you want to build a whole business off Relying on one person for that.
And so I think it's an awesome way for companies to get started I absolutely think having founders and executives active on social media should be part of the full diversified marketing strategy mix But if you want to build a you know long-lasting and sustainable business It just has to be one pillar of the strategy and not the whole strategy And I mean, there's a million companies out there that have shown you don't necessarily need it to grow a business, right? So it's it's a powerful asset. It can work really really well. You should not be dependent upon it And although I do recommend executives being active in you know on social media platforms where their audience is spending time It's not required overall So it's one of the many different tactics that companies could decide to employ if it makes sense for their market No, absolutely and especially I mean a friend I've just focused on SaaS me to be companies as well and Connecting reaching out with your audience.
I've seen this is a very big thing But I'm always curious as well to like get the other other take as well because that's also how we we reach out And that's how we get clients to if you think of somebody who's like they're just starting off off their company versus somebody who's probably trying to reach the Maybe like six million AR for their company is there a particular suggestion that you would say hey Focus like 80% on founder led marketing and then add email marketing and adds in there at the 1 million And then going to like a six million would you say to like lower that number is there an approximate amount Yeah, it's a good question and so Regardless of your stage as a company I think one of the best things that you can do when you're earlier on and one of the things I think that was key to us building a Marketing engine at Refine Labs that was agnostic of any one individual is Make your target account list do the it's very hard to do it's sounds simple But it's very hard to do who are all of the companies that should and could be your customers based on what you are offering Make that list figure out who within those companies is gonna be the buyer of your product identify where these people spend time and Whether it's the founder or not produce and distribute content in the places that they spend their time and that is how you're going to get Brand awareness and inbound interest for what you're doing the founder brand or founder led marketing can be one way to do it It's not the only way to do it and it can be a cost efficient way If you don't want to spend money on paid advertising or you don't want to hire folks to develop a marketing engine That's not reliant on that one person. So it is a great way to get started But I think it Especially now on LinkedIn like LinkedIn is much more crowded LinkedIn is not affording creators the amount of organic reach that it did five years ago when we started You know our founder led strategy, so things are changing. It's not I wouldn't say it's you know the silver bullet That's guaranteed to work for every company go back to fundamentals Who's your customer? Where do they spend their time create and distribute content in the places that they spend their time?
Whether or not you choose your founder to do that is a decision that you can make based on the constraints and the resources that you have In terms of also retention I heard you in the another one of the interviews too and I remember my little foggy from this one But I think you mentioned that retention expansion and renewal of current customers was a very big growth lever That you're using at a refined labs and that a lot of companies should be using can you expand a little bit more on that? Yeah, this is particularly applicable for companies that are pretty large which I would classify as like enterprise companies So think any you know any company that's between five hundred million and a billion in annual recurring revenue When a company has reached that scale they have tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of customers Right and often companies scale to that size because they have multiple products and solutions Maybe they've built them in house. Maybe they've gotten them through acquisition So what you're talking about is hundreds of thousands of people that are already customers of the product that can Continue to use the product or buy other things that the company sells now your customer audience is a significant size and Relative to the size of your non-customer market, right? And so deploying the same types of strategies that you would deploy to acquire a customer can also be used to retain and expand and grow your current customers So think about it.
We can take a customer list and we can deploy different campaigns and messaging to your existing customers that focus on product adoption or new products and services that they can consider that they're not You know purchasing today and that that can be one additional lever to deploy digital marketing dollars and resources on top of of course the other things that you're going to be doing in the organization to retain and grow those customers and so Often digital marketing has been relegated to acquisition and there's a lot of creative strategies that can be deployed So now if you're a much smaller company and you don't have a lot of customers then the impact of that starts to go You know starts to diminish but for larger companies. It's a major growth lever more so the retention of them then continuing to Get an upsell cross-sell. Yeah, it's retention upsell and cross-sell And typically with those companies is there a certain lifetime value that you that you try and aim for or does it just depend on company based on company? I mean, yeah, when you think about making the decision to invest digital marketing dollars for you know campaigns to your current customer base the The core KPI is that you want to be impacting at the business is NRR net revenue retention Total you could use LTV like total lifetime value of a particular customer total number of products I can share one example without kind of sharing the details of the company itself But there's a company that we've worked with that has eight distinct products that they sell their average customer uses 1.5 of their eight products What if we got their average customer using three out of the eight products instead of 1.5 That would be massive revenue growth without any net new acquisition And so it's very common for companies at that scale that have these large product suites again typically They typically arrive there through a combination of building out more products and services are often acquiring other companies and folding them into the organization But then they don't spend a lot of effort to ensure that their customers are buying all the stuff that they sell And that's just one clear example that sort of shows how valuable that it can be That's actually really interesting because I never I didn't think of it like that Well, let alone like get a company on such a massive scale.
They're like yeah, there's a lot of them out there There's a lot of companies that are in that situation that I describe right not not startups But but larger mid-market and enterprise companies. Yeah, and this is kind of like a curious kind of like off the cuff Question that I think I heard if you're familiar with Peter Caputo on LinkedIn. Yes. Yeah, shout out to Peter Yeah, I really like and we had him on his live like a couple months ago and I hope I don't butcher this right now But he he mentioned I think that agencies were kind of gonna go like marketing agencies would make this transition and it become more like a Consultancies then just become kind of like a plug-and-play of Of not really speaking with the rest of the of the agency just becoming like their own selected department Do you also kind of see that as as being the future?
I guess that's already kind of the future in refined labs. Yeah, absolutely So we've always we've always positioned ourselves more as a strategic and innovative partner versus just an execution partner to our customers But I totally agree with what Peter is saying there essentially as we move forward in the AI era of the execution of a lot of things is gonna become very commoditized right and so what companies really need help with is our people that are Strategists our innovators are seeing what's working at scale across a wide portfolio of companies and can give them something that they can't get themselves in House right and can be that objective third party that is deriving insights and observations that are gonna be valuable in terms of strategic adjustments and so I think absolutely I think agencies that only focus on execution or taking orders that They will be at risk for being able to maintain that model over time and agencies that continue to lean into being strategists and providing innovative Solutions to their clients will remain in demand indefinitely in my opinion Mm-hmm and that's just on another point which is the hot topic of now, which is AI everybody Yeah, once the I have my own thoughts on this, but I definitely want to hear yours of the AI revolution the AI Bob will I guess maybe that people want to take advantage of Let me keep it very very open and then we'll dissect a little bit But what are your thoughts just overall on AI and AI implementation into companies? Yeah, and so like at refine labs our goal is simple We want to be the agency that all go to market leaders trust to you know connect marketing and sales strategy data Automation and into like a holistic go-to-market system brand demand expand right that ultimately drives business outcomes like at the end of the day That's why people are gonna hire refine labs or hire an agency I believe that if I hire you you can help me grow faster than if I did not work with you now In terms of AI, I'm not a fan of just you know using AI for the sake of it I want to figure out how are we using it to amplify what matters the most and so that is better strategy faster execution clear insight Identifying what a company's competitive advantage really is and so in terms of how we're thinking about it at refine labs because we've worked with so many companies over the last six years we have a ton of data and so we're working through the process right now of figuring out how we can develop AI powered benchmarks that we can share with our customers in terms of painting a picture of what Good looks like and being able to understand if this is what good looks like and this is where you're at What are the biggest opportunities that we need to be focusing you to get you to a better spot right? of course like we're also leveraging AI tooling and automation for repetitive workflows or for you know various aspects of paid media operations and reporting like Yes, that's a good idea like leverage these tools so that we can free up the time on our team to focus on what matters most right Which is finding growth levers and providing relevant and impactful strategic recommendations and then lastly You know I think a lot of companies are getting really excited by AI and they're like oh I use chat GPT for this And it's like okay That's cool like and it's good right but what we're trying to do is how do we run structured experiments with different types of AI tools And then actually identify based on the experiment that we run are we actually driving a better result?
Because of this use case so are we seeing better engagement in our campaigns? Are we seeing a lift in inbound conversions? Are we seeing an improvement to total qualified pipeline? If we can't connect what we're doing to business outcomes It doesn't really matter and I think the question that a lot of companies have today is Where does it make sense for us to leverage AI and where is it just doing it for the sake of it?
But isn't actually gonna help us achieve our goals And so what we're hoping to do because we work with so many different companies is how are we running these structured experiments? And how are we documenting the plays that really are impactful to business outcomes? And then how can we turn those into repeatable frameworks that our clients can apply with confidence? Yeah, because I'm constantly like seeing even the clients we've worked with too They're just like how can we how can we put AI into this and it kind of just feels like a like a shoehorn of it Just because I mean I wasn't alive in the I wasn't really alive in the dot-com boom, but I know that's I heard it was a big thing and Everybody kind of wanted to just like get on board with a dot-com and money was kind of just like thrown at a lot of things and maybe in my Subjective opinion it might be because a lot of people they don't want to like miss the second the second dot-com boom But sometimes AI isn't really necessary and maybe we just don't even like know the potential of it's quite yet to be honest so it might be that and I also thought as well of Again, this might have been an interview that you said but there might kind of be like a pendulum as well I think it was that what's old will be new again something along those lines you might have said Can you also expand on a little bit about that and what you meant about that?
Yeah, I think especially you know I would say probably the biggest immediate use case of AI over the last, you know year has been using it for content production, right? Whether that's LinkedIn posts or using it, you know using mid-journey for you know visuals or video or things like that And what's happening is because everyone's starting to use AI for content production It's all starting to look the same and people are now becoming more skeptical of like is that really a person or is this just AI? and so it basically Having a human produce content that shares a refreshing or unique insight Even if there's a typo or it's not like the perfect hook People are going to be able to start to notice that and humans are going to gravitate to that more over time So authenticity and trust and word of mouth are really core differentiators And I don't think you can really use AI to produce those those are very human created things And so AI is a very powerful technology. It's going to totally change the way we work.
It's going to change the way people buy and sell I mean, we're already noticing that today where people are going to chat GPT instead of Google for you know discovery, you know spoiler alert a ton of people are still using Google too. So like Google is still the Probably the most important channel But who knows what's gonna happen in the future, right? Do you have like AI agents, you know buying and selling things from each other on behalf of companies? Maybe and then what has to be true for those AI agents to you know learn about and decide to make a purchase However, is that really gonna be the case for a high six figure ACV product is an organization really gonna trust on an automation tool to Make those decisions.
I don't know right, but you know pulling back from that tangent. I think the main point is the sort of human authenticity and trust and Uniqueness is what is going to stand out and ultimately build a brand Established differentiated positioning and position a company to win and I just don't think you can outsource that to AI Yeah, because I think and this is honestly This is just something I found funny about myself I think that you made a post a while ago There was something it went something along those lines of that you can't like outsource anything that it makes it more I'm a butcher like the words But I think you said it makes it more like human made or like more more homemade or something along those lines And then I commented on one of your posts and I said I thought it was a funny I said if if if having spelling mistakes on your on your LinkedIn post makes it more handmade My point in post should be like an Etsy store. Yeah, I thought you're the quotes you're talking about I was basically saying like typos or like coming back in fashion because they're like Oh, this was written by chat GPT like she actually wrote this post And I sent it to one of my friends because I thought that I don't know I thought that was like the most clever comments ever and I was like okay I don't think anybody found that as funny as I did but it just reminded me when you said that I love it You're still laughing. I love it.
I know I thought it was so good, but now now I think that everybody's over it except for me yeah, so the two final questions to wrap it up was One being just with with AI specificity on like or website specificity I would say because I've seen that clicks have also gone down clicks have also gone down in terms of websites, but the conversions have increased significantly as well depending on what company you're on Do you also see that going on right now for? Well, maybe for like even fine labs and many of the companies that you've worked with and is there some kind of modification that we're Going to be needing to do with our own website with our companies own brands in order to care to AI searches Yeah, that's a good question. So yeah, I think broadly many companies are seeing that trend overall and you can argue that even if they're using Google They are seeing like the AI summary above the search results and not necessarily clicking on a search result versus reading the AI overview, you know Or they're using chat GPT or perplexity or grok to do some discovery So there's a few things that we've noticed and that we are are observing and kind of doing about it So what you know, we talked about self-reported attribution earlier in the conversation at refine labs We've been making a lot of changes to our website and our other digital properties to actually really focus on Consistency and clarity in our overall positioning and messaging and what we found is by doing that We refine labs is coming up a lot when people are searching for B2B marketing agencies in these LLMs And then we get the signal that that's happening because they're telling us in self-reported attribution, right? Chatchy B2, perplexity grok probably 25% of our inbounds at the agency are citing some LLM as how they discovered us But what's interesting is it's just sound marketing principles We're just making sure that our website is clearly communicating who we are and what we do We're making sure that any other mention of refine labs across the internet is consistent in that messaging as well And that's what the LLMs are trained on, right?
They're just reviewing the data on the internet and making, you know, logical conclusions and recommendations as a result And so, you know, clear and consistent positioning and messaging, that's like a classic business strategy, right? That's not new But a lot of people were able to get away with not doing that well and still grab eyeballs or inbounds And so now these basic marketing fundamentals are becoming really important The other interesting thing is like third-party brand mentions is another key driver in LLM recommendations And so that is something that we're focused on and encouraging our clients to focus on as well So digital PR making sure that you're being referenced and named across multiple credible sources online is just gonna increase the likelihood And the frequency with which your brand name is coming up But PR like fundamental marketing strategy, right? Like that's been around forever And so it's not anything new really I think it's doing the fundamentals correctly, but also doing them correctly from a digital standpoint since obviously the LLMs are scraping the internet Yeah, so kind of taking you back to going to the fundamentals And the last question to wrap up the session and it's the question that I ask everybody who comes on the live stream is What one piece of advice would you give your 21 to 25 year old self? I would I would tell her to Listen to her intuition more than what external voices are saying And I would listen and prioritize what you believe over what you hear from other people No, that was actually really good.
I like that one Your gut knows you're gut knows sometimes many times before even like the the your logic can Can figure out what it is but yeah, absolutely Yeah, I mean I could talk to you for a while Megan But I want to keep it within time range and yeah, thank you so much for jumping on the podcast Is there any any place I think I know the answer you're gonna say but anywhere people can can find you Um, yeah, I'm active on LinkedIn. It's the only social media platform. I'm actually not on any other social social media networks So you find me on LinkedIn or you can check us out at refine labs.com Perfect. Thank you so much Megan Bowen for having me for fine labs.
Thank you so much. Cheers