Lead with Help
The Power of a Lead with Help strategy as LinkedIn declines in efficacy, companies plan for zero traffic from search in 2027, and Claude watermarks content.
I'm testing writing this newsletter in Trello, where no AI assistant bugs me while I'm figuring out what I think about a topic.
Search traffic is bleak, so let’s lead with help
For years I’ve counseled companies to think about their marketing as an opportunity to Lead with Help. We’ll get into why that’s more important than ever.
What does it mean to Lead with Help?
Close your eyes and think about how your company best serves its customers. About the work that your team does that delights the people who actually pay for your product or service.
Think about those customers before they worked with your firm. Knowing what you know about them — especially if you’ve empowered your client success team to take great notes in your CRM — you probably have a good idea of where they were stuck.
Now, build a tool or content that helps them and give it away. Have the experts on your team, the people in the weeds, create how-to videos to help users get more out of your product.
Now, as you consider the prospects that are outside your marketing funnel, a Lead with Help strategy is the opportunity to build trust and nurture them. Free access to the assessment, the white paper, the research report, the whatever tool that offers a peek into how your company could really help them if they purchased or subscribed.
We know that sometimes the competitor that’s hardest to beat is “what if I do nothing.” Lead with Help upends that nameless competitor because you prove yourself to be the trusted partner they seek out when they want to engage with the problem your company solves on their terms. These meaningful, durable content assets for prospects make a difference over time for prospects that think they’re better off doing nothing about the problem your company solves.
Why? As your content strategy shifts to an effort to create durable artifacts and you connect them to a Lead with Help marketing strategy, you both reaffirm your positioning and become the trusted partner they look to when they have a question or a hope that can tie to what your company does in the market.
Why is this shift important?
Well, AI slop is a big reason. Recently LinkedIn added a button to report AI-generated slop. LinkedIn used to be the place where we’d post articles and info because it’s where our customers, prospects, strategic partners, employees, referral partners, and future hires all hung out. But now, with shifts in the LI algorithm combined with the onslaught of AI slop, you can’t be sure your audience will ever see your content. Nothing more sad than a webinar announcement hitting your feed three-weeks after it took place.
You need durable artifacts on your site (and drive people there with multi-channel strategy). Time to speak at conferences again too. You need your best people and your company to be known and trusted.
Why change now?
I’ve preached Lead with Help for many years. The article I read last week on the future of search combined with the Claude watermarking of content created on using its tools shouts the need to move away from reliance on search and slop to drive lead volume. You need connection and trust. It’s time to lead with help.
Condé Nast CEO Roger Lynch, who admitted on the tech news web show TBPN in May that his elite publishing house was already preparing for the worst when it came to the future of inbound traffic referrals from Google. “Last year, I told our teams: Assume there’s no search,” Lynch told the hosts. “You have to have your businesses planned as if search is zero.”
and then:
Amanda Natividad of SparkToro, offered a sobering stat (well, unless you’re a product manager at Google) about “zero-click” rates these days. “Sixty-eight percent of all U.S. Google searches end without a click,” she said—meaning that users get what they need directly in the search page (or just get distracted, I guess) without having to visit any outside sites. That’s an increase from 45 percent a decade ago. Another grim figure, per TheTelegraph: While appearing first in Google search results used to mean getting a click 27 percent of the time, that number drops to 11 percent when there’s an AI Overview up top.
If you add the Claude Watermarking to the decline in the efficacy of search, it’s easy to see a path to Google SEO rejecting AI tagged content.
How Claude marks content
1. Embedded watermarks in text When a supported Claude model generates text, it weaves an imperceptible watermark directly into the text itself. You won’t see it, and it doesn’t change the meaning, quality, or readability of Claude’s response. Because the watermark is part of the text, it will travel with the text when it’s copied and pasted elsewhere, and may persist through some editing. Watermarking will be applied at the model level, which means it will be present no matter which Claude product or surface the text comes from.
2. Signed provenance metadata When Claude generates a supported file type, such as a .svg, .png, or .jpg, it will attach signed provenance metadata. This metadata follows the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA) open standard, which is used across the industry to record information about content provenance. If a signed metadata label is present, it signals that a file was processed by Claude and lets you detect whether the file has been tampered with.
Detecting Claude’s marks We’re also working to enable users and other third parties to detect Claude’s embedded watermarks and provenance metadata. Detection checks whether a piece of text or a file carries a supported Claude mark. If a supported mark is found, it indicates that the content may have been processed by Claude.
It’s bleak. But points to the power of having durable content assets on site (drafted and targeted toward buyers) that you can use to build an audience.
What can you do?
Build a Lead with Help strategy to establish your experts and your company as the go-to firm for your clients and prospects. I’m happy to chat with you if you’d like to learn more about a Lead with Help approach.
Reply to this email or click this link to talk about Lead with Help for your company.
About James Burdine.
James is a successful marketing leader, strategist, and craftsman who blends proven growth strategies and voice of the customer insights to drive sales and build brands for companies that demand results.
Bishop Linville
Bishop Linville helps leadership teams understand their customers, articulate what makes them different, and build brands and names that accelerate growth.
