How Buyers Use ChatGPT Before Choosing B2B Vendors

This approach not only initiates the sales process on a positive, helpful note but also cultivates the kind of warm, referral-generating relationships vital for B2B vendors and contract manufacturers. By focusing on optimizing for high-intent, profitable queries, companies can achieve top-10 search engine result positions within three months, driving a volume of leads that can facilitate significant business expansion. This strategy isn't about broad reach; it's about laser-focused engagement with the most valuable prospects, leveraging AI-driven search to transform how businesses acquire and retain clients.

Beyond Ads: Building Enduring Lead Generation with AI-Optimized Content

Stephen: There is a timeline to the shelf life, so to speak, of a web page. But I am seeing stuff that it's it's April right now. I am seeing pages that were published all the way back in I want to say September that are still generating a decent amount of citations and traffic for a couple of our clients. And so it just depends on what that content is in your industry. But whereas ads will go away as soon as you stop them, this content will continue generating leads and then therefore sales far, far beyond when you post them or are doing anything about them or even thinking about them. Next question is: can you walk through a real example of a contract manufacturer that went from not showing up in AI at all? To getting cited across multiple platforms. Yeah. Yeah. I will go through without getting specific, I guess, on the client, so that I can get specific on the numbers, but they were not showing up in any of the AI search platforms at all.

Stephen: And we have some case studies on our website, you can go and find them, but they were not showing up in any AI search when we started, and then we started posting content with structured data. And focused questions and answered and semantic texts and a lot of interviews and a lot of high expert, high-value content that was being put forward to these people who are asking these questions and structured in a way that AI likes to digest them and read them. And now they're getting cited.

They're getting cited left and right., it's it's attributing for over a quarter of their leads, and it's only one portion of their effort. And so what we're doing currently is contributing far, far, far more than it costs, in terms of what they would pay for these really, really high value leads if they were to chase them down other ways.

Stephen: It'd be thousands in ad spend, it would be countless hours of cold outreach, but they're able to do it here in a way that these people don't even feel as though they're being sold to, which is a really important part. It not only helps the Relationship with the customer once they become a client, it helps them more efficiently pass through the whole sales pipeline. You don't have to do as much effort in terms of selling them. Once they get to your site, they already are getting to your site because they view you as a trusted source of information within the industry. And so that's how that's why I really like this marketing. And so we'll go up to question eight now, which is what are the biggest mistakes you see contract manufacturers making with their online presence? I think that there's two.

Stephen: And one of them is not having one at all. Not having an online presence is just it's a miss. It's another way that people could find you that they're not. And having an online presence of this nature is showing your clients that you are willing to answer their questions before they ask them.

You're willing to help them without anything in return. You're giving them information that will help them without asking anything from them. And that goodwill that you're You're putting out there and showing openly to your clients or your prospective clients does not go unnoticed. Those people view you as a source of information, a source of trust, a source of expertise, a source of even benevolence. And people generally, when they have already been helped with you, have a certain amount of, in sales they call it reciprocity, but it's just human nature to want to reciprocate when somebody's nice to you.

Stephen: You're just more likely To treat them more kindly and more warmly when they've already proven that they will do something nice for you without anything in return. And so that just starts off that process and starts off the whole sales process and communication process and then actual client relationship on a very helpful, warm, and just positive note, which is really important because if you're a contract manufacturer, if you are a B2B vendor, anything in that. That space, that the lifetime and the returning aspects of customers is so important. Return customers is the lifeblood of a lot of these companies that are doing contract manufacturing, technical and regulated manufacturing or B2B vending., those contracts that are going to keep on coming back and then have a good relationship with you and then give referrals your way, those are the most valuable clients. This helps start people on that exact path.

Securing AI Visibility: A Competitive Edge for B2B Vendors

Stephen: That's generally what I would say about it. And I would say when we were looking at a group of about 70 different companies that were in this space, it was it was only about 20 of them that had any AI visibility, but they had a overall an insanely weak digital presence. And so if you're one of those 70 companies that we're looking at, and only 20 of them Have a presence online that shows up anywhere in AI search, then you could become the one out of almost not even five of those 70 that shows up continually in AI search. Compared to a hundred other companies, you could be one of only a few that people are getting shown when they look for something in your industry. Now, who knows if they're even getting to you or finding out that you exist? Whereas if you start doing this now, they not only will know you exist, they will know that you are the best in the industry and the most helpful. And they won't even hear about the other guys. It's a really, really helpful way to get in front of your customers and let them know that you're gonna be a great partner for them to move forward with.

Logan: If a contract manufacturer has multiple capabilities, should they have separate content for each one or keep it all one page or one concept?

Stephen: That's a great question. And what we do Is because we amass so much content from our clients and because we're publishing so much of it, not in a spammy way, but in a really high quality way, we're able to cover a lot of different topics and get a lot of those different capabilities out there. I even listed off one of the companies earlier in this, but they were listed and being cited for I think three different queries across all six. And it was I wanna say Over 30% of the time anyone was searching in any six of the major platforms, they were getting cited for these specific queries. And they were insanely technical, but they were all about different products, different product lines, and different capabilities that they had as a manufacturer.

Stephen: A lot of manufacturers have almost infinite levels of capabilities for what they could do because every contract is different. But there's a lot of times a handful or a few handfuls of specific areas that they might focus on. We would start broad and get a good spread of capabilities on the website and get a good idea of where the traction from AI search is, and then really get a foothold in a few of those and then start building from there. No matter how many capabilities you have or how many product lines or materials or different abilities that you have as a company, we can we can still Get a solid amount of traffic from whichever are the most profitable or all of them.

Stephen: If you're really looking to get an idea of the product market fit of something, it's another great way to do it because you're going to the place that's the most dense in terms of where people are most serious about being customers. That's that's what I would say. A lot of our clients end up with a couple handfuls of between five and ten pages that just end up being the most commonly cited. For the first few months, first handful of months, even.

We take a look at what people searched to get there, what the questions that people were asking were to get there. And then we either double down on those or we look at the structure and we optimize more of the content for that.

Stephen: And then we usually will end up growing that traffic on those pages as well as others because of that. It's a process of testing, but we pretty immediately can get an idea of what works because there's so much content with so much specific information on it. It that gets made in such a rapid fashion with us. We'll go to the next question, which is question number 10. Almost done here. How long does it typically take before a manufacturing company starts showing up in AI search results after they begin building content? So with us, I like to tell people three months, even though it usually is about two months.

Stephen: What's really nice is within the first three months, I don't think we've had Any clients so far not reach average search engine result position of top 10. That's really important because for certain LLMs, certain like chat GPT, and I think I think perplexity, but I know chat GPT specifically, you need to be in the top 10 of results to be cited. But we're doing that usually within the first three months. I haven't experienced any client not reach that. You're getting a lot of SEO traffic, and that SEO traffic is. Is helping as well. But specifically the AI search traffic usually follows directly from there. We'll start experiencing that within the first month or two. And then the AI search traffic, which is a little bit behind, will usually be in the first two months, three months.

Stephen: And then by then you're usually getting a very, very, I want to say significant percentage of your leads will likely be coming from AI search, depending on how many other forms of marketing that you're doing. If this is your only source, then you're going to be experiencing a lot more leads than you're than you're likely used to, to the point where, it might be something where the expansion might be lending itself to expanding the business in other ways,. But we can't really say exactly what that would look like for each industry. But if you're not doing any forms of marketing or any forms of digital presence online or anything, and then you go straight into this, I would say that within a handful of months, you'd be getting a very, very decent amount of your business.

Stephen: Directly from this, depending on also on your own abilities, your own capacity, and how long your sales cycle normally takes, obviously. With that, with that, I would also say those numbers are growing every day because AI Search is growing every single day. It's a good note. But the next question is: what happens to the companies that don't do this? Do they keep getting passed over?, technically, yes. There's not a pretty way of putting it, but if you're not structuring any of your content, Content for AI search, you're not putting any content out there, then the number of people who are going to referrals, who are going to trade shows, who are getting their next vendor elsewhere is shrinking. And the number of people who are going to AI search for their next referral or contract is growing.

Stephen: A lot of people started to experience difficulties in their business a handful of years ago when PPC ads started to get more expensive, and that Their main source.

A lot of clients or companies started to experience a significant decrease in traffic leads and sales from their SEO efforts. Early last year, there was a significant drop off when there was a growth, significant growth in AI search. And then again, when AI search and AI overviews entered Google search, and that statistic is only growing. If your normal Normally getting your clients from any other source, they're likely going to decrease over time. And if you were to start doing AI search work now and getting content that's helping your customers and that is easily digestible by AI search now, you'd gain a pretty good foothold in it.

Stephen: And you'd probably experience your sales leads, traffic, etc., growing rather than shrinking. But a lot of people are experiencing difficulties pretty much in most other areas. Of marketing currently. Whereas on all of our clients, we're experiencing growth. One of our clients last year they sell seedlings, they sell plants online, and they sell it nationwide. Their winter season is usually insanely slow. However, we grew their organic traffic, we grew their AI search traffic, we grew their actual sales that were normally coming from organic traffic more than. And they had the previous year in that same time period, even though this was a specifically slow period, and they cut back all of their ad spend down to a fraction of what it once was.

Stephen: And so we were able to experience that even in the most quote unquote harsh of conditions, which is honestly just a testament to how well this works. The final question of the day is if an owner of a contract manufacturing company is listening to this right now and Wants to know where they stand, what's the first thing that they should look at?

Logan: That's a great question because I do get this question from business owners all the time. It's just really, how do I even know where to start? And to understand where you are ranking or how you're being cited or talked about in AI search, we have a tool, HubSpot, I believe, has a free tool as well. There's a lot of other free tools online. I personally really like our tool, but I don't want it to tell you to only go onto our website and get an AI search result test from there. I will say ours is one of the most accurate that I've seen. Ours is pulling from six different platform. Ours is pulling these real time. On our end, the data is coming through with real searches.

Logan: It's putting through more queries than the majority of these tests that I've seen online are willing to. Because, essentially every time that you do one of these tests, it's costing that company to run more queries. And so when you see a lot of these companies that are even tools that you can pay for each month to that track your company, they're they're limiting the amount of queries that you're allowed to track each month. Ours doesn't do that. We want our clients to be able to track all the queries and we want to make sure that we're tracking as many as are necessary for it to be useful for the client. You can only track somebody at once in terms of what's useful.

Targeting High-Value Clients Through Semantic Search Optimization

Logan: Them if you're not targeting them they just won't be growing so we're we're making sure that we're optimizing for only the highest value highest intent ones so that we're a little bit more of a laser focus on the types of customers that you want rather than a shotgun to just see what happens. But we're not limiting that we want people to know we want business owners to know how they're being spoken about and how they're being cited in AI search at all times. That is our goal. We want business owners and managers and sales managers and marketing managers and directors to be able to get more customers and more leads by being the most helpful to their customers and their clients. That's it.

Logan: And so you can do this yourself, even just by figuring out what the questions that people are always asking you are, and then answering all the questions and putting those up on your website, almost like FAQs, but even more granular in terms of customer profiles, customer experiences, customer pipelines. About your whole sales pipeline and all the questions people ask in there.

I can't guarantee that it'll be easy to structure it in a way that AI search wants to read. But at the very least, company owners could do that and it would still be very helpful to their customers. With that, I think I will end it out for today. But I hope that this was helpful for you. And if you're in contract manufacturing regulated or highly technical or even just a vendor of B2B goods, then feel free to reach out.

Logan: I'm happy to answer any questions and just be able to help if I can, whether or not you're our client. Reach out to us and I'll hop on a call with you and we'll we'll go through it and I'll I'll tell you and everything that I can that might be helpful. And if it works out for us to work together, then amazing. And I think that we could do some real, real great work for your company and help you get more leads and more customers. Thanks very much and I will be back soon. Bye-bye.

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