Mandy Hornaday: Welcome back to Growth Activated. I'm your host, Mandy Hornaday, and today's episode is one every B2B marketing leader needs to hear. We're diving into one of the most pressing and fast-changing topics in marketing right now. How AI and large language models like ChatGPT and Gemini are fundamentally transforming how buyers discover brands, and what that means for your content, SEO and demand gen playbook.
Mandy Hornaday: My guest today is Mark Goloboy, a marketing strategist and AI consultant who helps both startups and enterprise companies rethink their go-to-market through the lens of AI. He runs Market Growth Consulting and has built a powerhouse agency focused on fractional leadership, AI enabled services and LLM optimization. We talk about why SEO as we know it is evolving and what's quietly replacing it, how LLMs actually decide which brands, sources, and competitors to surface, the overlooked power of PR, social, and paid media in LLM-driven discovery, and how AI tools are enabling wild new use cases from content factories to Gong-powered revenue insights. Plus, if you're a marketing leader wondering how to stay relevant in the AI era, Mark shares his top advice on what to start doing today to prepare for what's next. This is one of those episodes you'll want to take notes on. Let's dive in.
Mandy Hornaday: Hey, Mark, welcome to the Growth Activated podcast. I'm so excited to have you here today.
Mark Goloboy: Thanks, Mandy. I'm excited to be here.
Mandy Hornaday: Awesome. Well, Mark, I'd love to start with a little bit of your background and how, really specifically, what you're doing today, because I think you're doing some awesome things for a lot of really cool companies within the AI space. So bring us through what brought you to where you're at today.
Mark Goloboy: So I grew up on the sales-facing side of marketing and marketing operations and demand gen roles. And I worked my way up into full marketing leadership. And now I get to do that for smaller companies in a variety of ways and bigger companies in a different variety of ways. So for smaller companies, we do fractional CMO, where we assign a CMO while they're going through times of change or growth. And that person leads marketing. And then we fill in individual contributors and agencies to get the work done. For larger companies, we do consulting projects, where we do everything from strategy to technology to AI projects that help advance marketing and sales efforts. And we do executive staffing where we place director through CMO level, either as a contingent staffing agency or as what I call a contract temp to perm, where we place a contractor for three to six months. And then whenever the client thinks they're the right person, the consulting engagement converts to a placement and they end up as a full-time resource.
Mandy Hornaday: Yeah, I know we've worked together in the past at a small B2B SaaS startup, which is where we had the pleasure of meeting. And what is so impressive to me, and we'll get to what I want to talk to you about in this interview here shortly, but what is so impressive to me is how robust of an agency you have built in like the last two years, maybe the last three years.
Mark Goloboy: It's funny because we worked together when my model was, I'm going to assign myself 100% to one company and then I'm going to do that over and over again. And then when that didn't scale, I just started doing the same thing for multiple companies at the same time. And that's just grown and organically developed into a really, what I think is pretty fun to run consulting firm.
Mandy Hornaday: Yeah. Well, and so many people are really interested in going fractional right now, maybe building their own thing. I did an episode a couple of weeks back on my transition into fractional work, and it's been one of our most popular episodes. So before we transition in, what advice do you have? What are you really glad you did in the last few years? Maybe advice you took from people or didn't take from people? And, you know, how has it been since then?
Mark Goloboy: I'll say two things. One is not to limit yourself to a single service. A lot of the advice that I got coming in was master one service, get really efficient at it, templatize it, do it over and over again. And I did the exact opposite, which was to say yes to whatever clients asked me for if I thought it was interesting work that I could do well. And by doing that, it allowed me to get bigger fast because I didn't have to find someone that was an exact buyer for an exact thing. I could just hear where people had sales and marketing challenges and help them solve them. The other thing that I tell people as they're starting out is sales is the hardest thing. And if you're doing this type of consulting, you're an expert in it, it's not going to be hard for you. The backend stuff of finance and accounting and HR is easy relative to sales. You can hire an expert to do it. It's just a cost. But sales and finding clients is absolutely the top priority throughout, from day one to however long you're doing it for. And you shouldn't spend a moment on your website or your legal or your finances before you sell your first client.
Mandy Hornaday: Interesting. Yeah. So luckily in my own path, I'm on the consultant bench for another agency. And so I haven't had to do a lot of the business development work myself. I certainly get inbound referrals and that's really nice for me, but I think that the sales part, someone had shared with me when I first started, you shouldn't be looking to bill 40 hours a week. You should be looking to bill maybe 20 to 30 hours a week because you have to still run your business, and business development and networking being a huge part of that.
Mark Goloboy: Yep.
Mandy Hornaday: Awesome. Well, thank you so much for sharing your tips around that. But I know you've really built a name for yourself within the AI space and implementing AI strategies within marketing teams right now. I know you offer a lot, but I think from what I've seen and heard, that's one of the really interesting parts of where you've differentiated yourself maybe against all the other agencies out there right now. So I'd love to dive into what we were talking about a few weeks ago with SEO and how that's evolving and how you're encouraging teams to optimize for the LLM. So let's start there. What, in your perspective, what is the current state of SEO?
Mark Goloboy: I think SEO will continue to be important. And anyone who says LLM optimization replaces it isn't thinking hard enough about it. But there is a change happening that companies need to start to understand. When I go and start researching a tool, the first place that I'm asking is an LLM, a large language model, like ChatGPT or Gemini. And I don't have any love for any one tool. Those are just the two I'm using today. They're all better than you need, but you should understand which of them your clients are using by asking them. Once you understand that, you can start to see that all of the writing that you're doing for your website needs to evolve to be some writing for your website with Google in mind and some writing for other places that the LLMs use as authoritative sources for your company, your brand and keywords, and your competitors' brands and keywords. And when you start to open up your perspective to include all of that, you start to look at your current content strategy and think about it differently in terms of spend and effort.
Mandy Hornaday: Yeah, absolutely. And I guess there's also a term I've been seeing all across LinkedIn right now, which is this idea of search everywhere optimization, which I believe also includes social and things like that, right, across TikTok and Instagram and all of this. Just generally speaking, getting users what they need based on where they're searching. So in the work you're doing, are you also focusing on this idea of search everywhere optimization? Or are you predominantly focusing really on optimizing for traditional SEO and the LLMs?
Mark Goloboy: We're thinking about it as holistically as we possibly can, right? And it is hard to wrap your head around. Like this is hard stuff. But what we're seeing is that the large language models are using sources that people aren't thinking enough about. So that could be things like social. We know that it's things like PR and kind of broad communications, because those things from the LLMs' perspective have higher authority. We just haven't taken them seriously enough for the last 10 years, right? They were always important, but we as marketers didn't quite consider the importance of them. And now that the LLMs are using them, we need to rethink our position on things like press releases and the power that they can have in the LLM optimization space. And then the next one I'd say is paid media, where we're spending a lot of money with Google on search engine marketing that should be experimented with. Well, you should be experimenting with taking some of that funding and focusing it on places that the LLMs are using to prioritize buyer research about your brand.
Mandy Hornaday: So fascinating, because I feel like we've been, to your point, traditional PR and things like press releases, that feels like it's been a low priority for the last few years. And so when you think about some of these PR places, if we take SaaS for an example, what are some of the sites that come to mind that are really important in SaaS that maybe we haven't as marketers been prioritizing that you're seeing?
Mark Goloboy: So we see a couple of different things. We use an LLM analytics tool that I can explain deeper. And what it does is generate hundreds or thousands of prompts to query the LLMs about your brand and keywords and competitors. And when we look at the result of all of those prompts, we see sites coming up that we would not have expected. So we see clients' websites coming up lower than expected. And in this place in the top slots, we see review sites and industry paid media, and other publications that in many cases you can spend money on. Sometimes they're your competitor sites. But what we find ourselves doing is recommending to clients that they take some of the money they're spending on Google Ads and, for the sites that are coming up as authoritative to the LLMs, start to experiment with paid media to those sites. And some of them are ones that we haven't spent money on in a long time, like G2 and TrustRadius and Capterra. But for some industries, for some clients, those sites look very important now.
Mandy Hornaday: Interesting. Now, are you seeing that the LLMs are prioritizing organic content over paid media, or does it seem like an even playing ground right now?
Mark Goloboy: It's different for every client we look at. When we go and research this using the analytic tools for everything from large to small companies, we've looked at this for public companies, we've looked at this for small private companies, and what we see is different for each industry and client. So it shows us that we need to look at this analytically. And one of the things that we do to show clients what this looks like is we will, in one tool, show them what happens when you just query and say, and this is a query that everyone should run, what does the company do? Who are their competitors? And how do they rank for the features customers buy most frequently? And just by asking ChatGPT or Gemini that exact question for your company, personally, like if you look at your own company that way, you will learn things that you need to do differently from the LLM's perspective.
Mandy Hornaday: Wow, what is this tool that you keep referring to?
Mark Goloboy: Sorry, the tool is called Brand Luminaire and I'm a partner, another company developed it. This came up, I was on a webinar last year, it was like September, October timeframe, and the founder was presenting a different tool that he had developed and he said, we're about to launch an LLM optimization analytics tool. And I followed up with them and became an early adopter, and I'm now selling that to clients and selling the balanced SEO and LLMO or GEO, depending on who you ask, LLM optimization services on top of it that help clients understand how to rebuild their content strategy around LLMs.
Mandy Hornaday: Wow. Yeah. So I also am curious, because it's interesting that a lot of these sites that maybe we haven't focused on now have this heightened importance. How frequently, or have you seen, will the LLMs change what they're prioritizing? And therefore, if we are investing heavily organically in some of these things that maybe we haven't touched in a few years, will that work then get wiped away with a simple algorithm change? Or how are you seeing that right now come to life?
Mark Goloboy: I've seen some cool stuff. So first of all, it's different by LLM. So it's not a one size fits all, even from a, you know, some sites will prioritize things above others, right? So when we look at it through the lens of Gemini or ChatGPT or Perplexity, we see different things by LLM for the exact same company. Then I'll share another example where a client did a pretty massive SEO project that changed what they were publishing to be much more focused on the LLMs. And they were able to move up their rank in how the LLMs processed them from eighth to fifth. So that still means there's four sites, one competitor and three paid media sites, above their own website. But they were able to move up, and hopefully over time we see them move from five to four to three and on up, right?
Mandy Hornaday: Yep. Well, and I imagine right now, I haven't necessarily heard of anyone really focusing on this. This is fascinating. So it seems like it's probably a little bit of a greenfield opportunity for marketing teams to get into. When we show people what this looks like, do they jump?
Mark Goloboy: Not entirely. So most of the clients I'm speaking with get it and want to embrace it. Some don't understand it, don't understand why it's valuable and will never be clients because of that. Because they won't understand the value, so why would they pay money for it?
Mandy Hornaday: Yeah. Well, and proportionally, I think from some of the data I've seen, Google is still massively dominant in terms of search. And so how are you advising your clients? What is the dream state in terms of how they should be compositionally focusing on traditional SEO versus optimizing for the LLMs?
Mark Goloboy: Perfect looks like understanding of which things Google and the LLMs understand about you, and understanding how people will search in Google and prompt in the LLMs to learn about you. Then finding ways to write into your website that optimize for Google, and then take those same things and publish them in an optimized way to the paid media that are higher authoritative sources. So you're able to do both with the same writing effort and a little bit of variation, while redirecting spend from Google to the LLMs as your industry changes. You're right, Google is still massively dominant. But you need to ask yourself, is Google going to be 90%, 80%, 50% of buyer research two years from now? And start investing toward where you think it's going. And whatever that is forces you to think, how am I going to adapt? And that start to move toward that is going to be super valuable as the world changes. Because if it's later 40% or 60%, you're ready for it. You've already started the thinking, you can change your investments a quarter or two out. But if you don't start, you're going to be left way behind.
Mandy Hornaday: Yeah. And how, let's say someone's really interested in trying this and getting a tool like Brand Luminaire. How would they measure success? How would they show that this is actually making movement? Cause I think, to my limited understanding, it's still hard to track data within the LLMs, right?
Mark Goloboy: So complicating this whole thing is that I am an everyday user of multiple AI tools that I've never once clicked in. So when I do a prompt, when I learn from an LLM, I'm often copying data and manipulating it and presenting it. All my contracts say that we use AI for 100% of what we do so that we never have to think about that, and the clients expect it. But I don't click, so there's nothing to measure on the other side of it. So this becomes less of an SEO analytics exercise and more of like a brand exercise, like tools like Brandwatch that a lot of corporate marketers would know, where you have to look at like, what is our reach? What is the sentiment? When I ask questions, does it come back positively or negatively? And you have to think about those things. So I would say the way to measure it is by doing some targeted work to say, like that one client I mentioned, let's see how far we can go up from eight and invest in that and watch analytically using this tool. Do we move up? Let's look at a place where the LLM says we're weak. Let's write about how we're not weak there, presumably because you're better than they represent. And let's see if we can change the perception a month from now, three months from now. Let's invest in it over time because, in the worst case, you're writing better for your website. In the best case, you're getting the benefit of Google and the LLMs and driving your business forward toward growth because you did it.
Mandy Hornaday: Absolutely. So can you see numbers like reach and impressions?
Mark Goloboy: You can, yeah. The tool that I use, the tool that I look at, and if anyone wants to see this, just ask me. I can demo it. I'm a reseller. It's not my tool. I don't want to represent myself wrong. I work with the founders. They're great. But this is a tool that we build services on top of. And if anyone wants to see it, they just reach out to me. But the tool shows your brand, your reach, which brand and product areas you're weak and strong at, along with your competitors, and you can look by LLM. So you can look at Google, Claude, ChatGPT, Perplexity and Facebook, so Meta. So, you know, it's good to be able to see, and as new LLMs become popular, they'll add them.
Mandy Hornaday: Okay. Now in the spirit of this idea of search everywhere optimization, where do you feel like social fits into this overarching search strategy?
Mark Goloboy: I think that it's closer to the PR piece, where it's kind of an evolving story. So right now PR is overweighted compared to what you and I would have said it was five years ago, right? It's more important now. How much more important? I don't know. You know, I would love to know that, but I don't know. I just know that it's more important and that the LLMs are using press releases in an overweighted way. So you should take advantage of that by writing keyword rich summaries that say you are the number one product for this industry and this use case, and start to consider things that you never would have, like mentioning your competitors' names. So that's something like you and I would have never done as demand leaders, right? And now suddenly there is a benefit to publishing an article that says these are the top companies in this market and we're number one.
Mandy Hornaday: Yeah. Which is something that we would never have done.
Mark Goloboy: Right.
Mandy Hornaday: Well, and I literally just did an episode last week about what's happening within marketing roles, like where is demand increasing? Where's comp increasing? Where's demand flattening or decreasing? And funny enough, PR is one of those roles that year over year, I mean, it's just declining. But it's interesting. I feel like this is a really big opportunity for those PR experts out there to position themselves and align themselves with AI, because there's an opportunity here.
Mark Goloboy: There's a PwC yearly analysis on AI jobs, and that includes compensation. For the same roles, an AI enabled person is going to make 56% more comp. So you can look at that PwC study. I think it came out last week or the week before. I think it's their third annual version of it. And it is one where I thought about the PR role that you were mentioning. That PR role is declining. They're going to decline faster because they're going to be replaced by AI enabled people. So the number of jobs will go down. The value of the AI enabled PR person who understands all of this will go up.
Mandy Hornaday: Wow. And when you say AI enabled, what does that mean for the layman over here? Is that just leveraging AI in your work or does it go deeper than that?
Mark Goloboy: I was hiring a head of marketing for a client, and I do that. They've been a client forever and the CMO was promoted and I was hiring her replacement. One of the questions that I asked of all of the candidates, I was doing screening and asking people about pipeline and forecasting and account-based marketing kinds of things. One of the questions that I asked was, tell me about a new AI use case you've uncovered recently. And several people didn't have an answer to that question, and they were instantly crossed off my list. So the people that I was interviewing that had a good answer, whether it was personal or team or something they're playing with, I want to see curiosity through an AI lens. I wanted to see that they were trying stuff, they were learning, they were hitting roadblocks, they're getting past them. That's what they'll need to do in a role running a marketing department now. Can they have those conversations, and can they hire people that can use AI to do their jobs better and faster? That's AI enabled.
Mandy Hornaday: Yeah. I was just sitting there thinking about what would I say if you asked me that question? I've got lots of ideas, but I think the thing is, there's this fear of, are the things that I'm thinking about using AI for, how far behind am I? Or is everyone else already using AI for these things and I'm just behind? I think comparatively, we naturally compare ourselves and it's really hard to find what the benchmark is with all the noise out there right now.
Mark Goloboy: I think there are a lot of people who say they're better with AI than they are. It takes a humility, and I would recommend just trying it. Like the way I say it is, every day I look at my calendar and say, did I block an hour or two for something that I could use AI for to save some of that time? It doesn't have to be perfect. It isn't like I'm going to put in a prompt and be able to click send on an email two minutes later. It's that I was going to spend two hours writing a proposal, and maybe I could take the transcript from my Gong call and put it into AI and ask it for an outline of the proposal that I'm going to write. Maybe that'll save me a half hour, an hour. That's pretty significant for two minutes of work. And it's not that any of it is production ready or that I don't need to spend time reviewing it. It's that it gives me a starting point. It makes me a little bit better, a little bit smarter, a little bit faster, and then I build from it. But just being willing to try, I think, is the thing that I guide people on. It's like, just try, just use it and try it. A lot of people say it has to be this, like this is the only tool you should use. I don't think that's true at all. I think it's whatever you feel most comfortable with, because they're all better than what you need.
Mandy Hornaday: I love that statement. They're all better than what you need. That's great. Well, Mark, before we move on from the SEO conversation, if people wanted to get started today as SEO practitioners, where would you recommend them to start? And it sounds like actually this isn't even just an SEO conversation. This is probably a conversation you're having with your brand team, your content team. So where would you recommend marketing teams to start if they're really interested in optimizing for the LLMs?
Mark Goloboy: I think it's important to ask the LLMs where your brand stands. So to go into ChatGPT and say, what is my company's best and worst features? What are the things that customers love about me and hate about me? You know, and just ask and learn from what you get back. Trust what you get back, because it's not going to be exactly what anyone else sees, but it is representative of how your brand exists in that buyer's research. And when you think about a $100,000 average contract value deal and think about the number of buyers who are going to investigate your brand, one of them is going to go to the LLM and say, what is this tool and is it good? And you should be asking those questions of the LLMs yourself and with your teams. And you should be challenging your teams to learn something and present it back, that they learned from an LLM query prompt and brought back to your team, and then highlighting those people so others do the same, and promoting them when they rise to the top.
Mandy Hornaday: I love it. Well, that's amazing. I can't wait to use the tool myself. I'm going to be reaching out to you. I just took on a pretty big new client and I think this is perfect for them. So I'm excited. Well, Mark, I would love to hear, where else are you seeing marketing teams leveraging AI? What are some of the coolest use cases you're seeing right now that feel out of the box, but also like highly productive?
Mark Goloboy: I'll highlight two that we're building out. One is we're finalizing the solution for, and one we're getting to develop. So the first one is a public company asked us to create a content factory. So they are taking product specs, that lots of our companies have, that have all of the expertise you want to get to customers in ways that you can't unlock. So they want to take their product specs, pump them through an AI factory and produce web pages, marketing collateral, and sales and enablement collateral. So we are getting to build the backbone of that, which is a tech infrastructure tool. The writing components of that, the translation, they want to translate it into seven languages for a total, American English plus seven. And we're going to get to produce that for them so that they take, well, the initial scope is 50 product specs, 200 web pages translated into 1,400 more. So we're going to produce 1,600 web pages for them through this new content factory and then keep going to other content types and keep building it. That's pretty cool. Phase two is a feedback loop from SEO, LLM optimization, and Optimizely on-site testing, so that every month when the product specs update because they've had new releases, we factor in new learnings from SEO and LLM optimization to make the content better. And like, that's brilliant. Just the request from the client is brilliant and it's nice to get to work on it. The other one I'll mention is we have a client working with Gong. So they're recording all of their calls. They have transcripts from all of those calls, and we're going to build a management insights tool that is an AI pipeline, so for those in the know, a RAG or agentic pipeline, that looks across all of those calls, centralizes the information and develops for management insights on at-risk customers and large opportunities, whether that's expansion or new business. So we are going to generate for management insights that allow them to know when to jump into a conversation quickly to either save a customer or get a new customer. And I couldn't be any more excited to work on that one.
Mandy Hornaday: That's awesome. I have been playing around with, I do marketing assessments as a part of the work I do for clients. And a lot of it involves doing external interviews, internal interviews. And it's been really fun to, you know, synthesize all of that information and see what comes out. I will say I still have an edge over what insights ChatGPT has. I think sometimes it does a great job analyzing what's there, but I think as humans, we interpret things at a higher level, of course, right?
Mark Goloboy: Of course. I'm sure one day it'll get there, it'll replicate ours. I am thinking of it as an enabler at this point, but there are definitely some things that I do that it will replace over time, and that's a little scary.
Mandy Hornaday: Yeah. Yep. For the content factory, I'm so curious, because I've been wondering this, I'm sure a lot of people have been wondering this for a while, is whether AI generated content will actually perform well for things like Google and the LLMs. Are you, early indications, seeing, I mean, it sounds like you're putting a lot of non AI generated content in to guide it from a foundation perspective.
Mark Goloboy: So I think the original approach, thinking about this coming from product specs, I think negates a lot of the reason why AI generated content doesn't perform, right? So by starting with product specs, and being more and more specific about thinking about what we produce in terms of how it will be represented in Google and the LLMs, but starting with product specs, which are original information, I think we have a shot to really advance the practice. This model is one that started with an SEO experiment that increased their traffic 30 to 50% on the same pages. So it's not that we're asking the LLMs, hey, write me a page about this kind of tool or use case. We're starting with new fact from the product specifications and developing websites faster, and in more languages faster, about them. So I'm really encouraged that it's going to be not just net positive, but like multiples positive.
Mandy Hornaday: Yeah. Wow. We'll have to keep up and see how that goes. I'm fascinated myself. Wow. You are doing some really cool things. I could talk to you all day, Mark, but you've given so much great advice just in this episode alone. Any final words of wisdom for B2B marketing leaders out there that are navigating this, I hate to say new normal, I feel like that's so 2020?
Mark Goloboy: I think it's just embrace it. You know, there's a quote from Paul Roetzer at the Marketing AI Institute. He does a weekly podcast that I highly recommend, because he talks about everything happening in AI, and you can pick which ones matter to you. Like, it's not that everything that he says is relevant, but there's one or two things I learn each week that help me be better. And Paul would say, AI won't replace marketing. Marketers who use AI will replace marketers who don't. And I think that's brilliant, and it's a good guiding principle to say, you can be one of two types of people. You can be skeptical and keep doing things the same way you did five years ago, or you can embrace the stuff and get better. And I encourage everyone to be in the bucket that gets better.
Mandy Hornaday: Awesome. I love that. Well, Mark, if people are interested in working with you, having you come into their organization to help implement some AI adoption, or even learn more about this Brand Luminar tool, Luminary...
Mark Goloboy: Luminaire.
Mandy Hornaday: Oh my goodness. I'll get it right one of these days. What's the best way to get in contact with you?
Mark Goloboy: I am a very functional branding person. My company is Market Growth Consulting. I am at Market Growth Consulting, the most functional, blunt marketing you could ever see. I used to tell people I loved REI, the outdoor store. The actual name of REI is Recreational Equipment Incorporated. And I love that. It's so functional. Anyway, so mark at marketgrowthconsulting.com. People can reach out to me and ask me any questions they have.
Mandy Hornaday: Awesome. Thanks so much for joining us today. This has been wonderful.
Mark Goloboy: Thank you, Mandy. It's been great.
Mandy Hornaday: Thanks so much for tuning into this episode of Growth Activated. I hope this conversation sparked new ideas, challenged your thinking, and gave you practical tools to help elevate your impact as a marketing leader. If it did, I would love for you to pass it along to a friend or a colleague in B2B marketing. The more we grow together, the more we raise the bar for what marketing leadership can look like. And as always, in the meantime, keep activating growth for yourself and your company. See you next time.
