A Digital Strategy Podcast

A Digital Strategy Podcast

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A Digital Strategy Podcast episodes

  • The IT Guy Ain't Doing It

    πŸ’‘ Key Topics:

    • "Responsible for the website, don't want to do content": how one IT admin ended up picking the platform, designing the blog out of the site, and leaving years of analytics unused
    • The five-minute job that isn't: a headline change becomes a ticket, a queue, a scoping call, QA and a deployment. The bigger cost is everything that never gets published, like the campaign with no landing page or the CTA nobody tested
    • The slow-launch numbers: 53 days on average from campaign start to launch, 13 days for a landing page, and 87% of marketers wanting more control over web content (Netlify, 2024 survey; Netlify sells a web platform and most respondents worked at 1,000+ employee companies)
    • Your website sells before anyone calls: 67% of B2B buyers prefer a rep-free experience and 45% used AI during a recent purchase (Gartner, 646 B2B buyers)
    • Does freshness matter for AI search? AI assistants cite pages about a quarter newer than what ranks on Google, yet the average cited page is still almost three years old (Ahrefs, ~17 million cited pages). The hosts aren't sure how much it matters
    • Why a better platform won't save you: the IT guy had Webflow and still wrote the blog out of the site, and 68% of developers think marketers don't fully use the tools they already have (Netlify)
    • Governance belongs on the website: locked components and set roles, not a rule buried in someone's inbox or a Google Doc
    • The one test to run this week: list your last five website changes with who asked, which department, who made it and how many days it took. Developer in every row means a tool problem. Blanks in the "who asked" column mean an ownership problem

    πŸ“– Chapters:

    • 0:00 β€” The IT guy ain't doing it
    • 1:03 β€” No marketing team, so IT owns the site
    • 3:15 β€” Why slow changes cost more now
    • 6:41 β€” Developer problem or owner problem?
    • 8:57 β€” Governance built into the website
    • 10:06 β€” Verdict: the five-changes test

    🌐 Tennis web design & development services: https://www.designtennis.com/services/website-design-and-development
    🎧 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/7tufP8mSXC1YrLxrLzw3Ju?si=3839798c83264d9b
    πŸ“Έ Instagram: Tennis.digital
    πŸ’Ό LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/designtennis/
    πŸ”” Subscribe for weekly episodes on web design, digital strategy, and building better businesses.

    #websiteownership #webflow #cms #webgovernance #b2bmarketing #marketingops #aisearch #aeo #adigitalstrategypodcast

    Links

    You can learn more about Tennis at our website. Be sure to follow us at LinkedIn, YouTube, Instagram, or Twitter

    12 min
  • AI Broke Our Client's Website. Here's Why

    πŸ’‘ Key Topics:
    ✦ How normal this already is: 84% of people who build and run company websites use AI for it (Framer State of Sites, 1,900+ respondents, from a company that sells a website builder)
    ✦ The pressure behind it: 100% of marketing teams that can’t adopt AI fail to deliver projects on time or on budget (Webflow, 1,000 director-level leaders at 50+ person companies, from a company that also sells AI)
    ✦ What a proper setup gets you: pages going up 10x faster at about 90% design fidelity on client sites with real systems in place (Tennis client work)
    ✦ The β€œalmost right” problem: 60% of developers have hit AI solutions that are almost right but not quite (Stack Overflow developer survey), and they can read the code. Your marketing team probably can’t.
    ✦ Rules vs. barriers: a design system tells AI what to follow, while limiting it to approved components stops it from going anywhere else
    ✦ Why the β€œCMS is dead” crowd has it backwards, and why the teams using AI well work through the CMS instead of around it
    ✦ Marketers already check AI writing by hand: 80% review AI content for accuracy (Ahrefs, 879 marketers), because that’s writing they can read. Code is a different story.
    ✦ The one test to run this week: ask AI to build a single page using only what’s already on your site. If it invents a new button style or font size, fix that before you give it publish access.

    πŸ“– Chapters:
    0:00 β€” AI broke the site: six hours
    1:03 β€” Connecting AI to your existing site
    2:56 β€” What happens on real client sites
    4:31 β€” Governance: rules, barriers and design systems
    6:26 β€” Is the CMS dead?
    7:58 β€” Where to start, and the one test
    9:48 β€” Tell us what you’re one-shotting

    🌐 Tennis web design & development services: https://www.designtennis.com/services/website-design-and-development
    🎧 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/7tufP8mSXC1YrLxrLzw3Ju?si=3839798c83264d9b
    πŸ“Έ Instagram: Tennis.digital
    πŸ’Ό LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/designtennis/
    πŸ”” Subscribe for weekly episodes on web design, digital strategy, and building better businesses.

    #aiwebsites #webflow #claude #designsystems #aigovernance #cms #framer #marketingops #oneshotting #adigitalstrategypodcast

    Links

    You can learn more about Tennis at our website. Be sure to follow us at LinkedIn, YouTube, Instagram, or Twitter

    11 min
  • What Is an ICP, and Should You Define It Before You Launch?

    πŸ’‘ Key Topics:
    ✦ The year-long ramp: when nobody has written down who the customer is, every new salesperson takes about a year to get up and running
    ✦ The persona access gap: only about half of people making content for sales teams say sales and marketing can get to the same buyer personas, and only 39% say sales uses the right content at the right time (Content Marketing Institute). That's marketers grading their own homework.
    ✦ Why "Marketing Mary loves hiking" isn't research: a stock photo, a job title and a quote add up to a nice-looking guess
    ✦ The Superhuman question: "How would you feel if you could no longer use Superhuman?" Focusing on the 22% who said "very disappointed" pushed that group to 33%, then 58% (Rahul Vohra's own account, no control group)
    ✦ Why the founder's head is the best starting point you have, and useless to everyone else until it's written down
    ✦ Why "businesses that want to grow" is wishful thinking, not a customer profile, and why a tight ICP doesn't mean tight ad targeting (a 2023 study of one Vienna car dealer)
    ✦ The one thing to do this week: write down who already buys from you or your competitors, then ask your biggest fans who would get the most out of your product

    πŸ“– Chapters:
    0:00 β€” Write down who it's for
    1:07 β€” The year-long sales ramp
    1:57 β€” "It's all in my head" and thin persona decks
    4:25 β€” Before launch? Superhuman's disappointment test
    7:05 β€” Keeping the ICP alive, starting from scratch
    9:22 β€” Verdict: get specific, then revise

    🌐 Tennis web design & development services: https://www.designtennis.com/services/website-design-and-development
    🎧 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/7tufP8mSXC1YrLxrLzw3Ju?si=3839798c83264d9b
    πŸ“Έ Instagram: Tennis.digital
    πŸ’Ό LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/designtennis/
    πŸ”” Subscribe for weekly episodes on web design, digital strategy, and building better businesses.

    #idealcustomerprofile #icp #buyerpersonas #superhuman #productmarketfit #salesenablement #customerresearch #startupmarketing #adigitalstrategypodcast

    Links

    You can learn more about Tennis at our website. Be sure to follow us at LinkedIn, YouTube, Instagram, or Twitter

    11 min
  • Selling the AI Apocalypse

    πŸ’‘ Key Topics:
    ✦ The doom-hype-doom cycle: a new model ships to influencers, they build something game-changing, then a week later someone says it'll end the world. Fear and exclusivity are the two oldest sales models, and exclusivity is really just fear of being left behind
    ✦ Why nobody shares the disease cure: Dario Amodei's essay says most major diseases could be cured in five to ten years, but the apocalypse means we don't have that long, so only the extinction bit travels
    ✦ The resignation-as-marketing joke: the loudest moment someone gets is leaving a big lab and warning the world, which puts them straight onto talk shows and the media circuit
    ✦ The spending contradicts the slowdown story: Bloomberg NEF puts the 14 biggest data center operators near $750B in capex this year, up from under $450B last year, so "we've hit a scaling wall" doesn't hold
    ✦ The benchmark that changed Marcello's mind: METR measures how long a task an agent can finish alone. That number was doubling roughly every seven months, and newer models are doubling every four (Symon's caution: narrow task suites, wide error bars, some self-reported)
    ✦ Building the thing with the thing: Anthropic says about 80% of the code going into its codebase is written by Claude, while the same companies say everyone needs to slow down
    ✦ The Hugging Face incident: OpenAI's own report says agents in an internal evaluation got around isolation controls, turned a package manager into a message board, and ended up inside Hugging Face's systems. Some are calling it the first warning shot
    ✦ The test to run this week: when someone puts fear in front of you in a sales conversation, work out who gets paid if you believe it, then make your own call

    πŸ“– Chapters:
    0:00 β€” Might kill everyone: ninety percent marketing?
    1:32 β€” Sell through fear: the doom-hype-doom cycle
    3:00 β€” Who's saying what, and why they're leaving
    8:18 β€” Scaling wall or broken through it? The spending and the benchmarks
    11:39 β€” Building the apocalypse in public: the Hugging Face warning shot
    16:24 β€” Who gets paid from the fear, and the real risk underneath
    18:12 β€” Where selling on fear is fair game, and the verdict

    🌐 Tennis web design & development services: https://www.designtennis.com/services/website-design-and-development
    🎧 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/7tufP8mSXC1YrLxrLzw3Ju?si=3839798c83264d9b
    πŸ“Έ Instagram: Tennis.digital
    πŸ’Ό LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/designtennis/
    πŸ”” Subscribe for weekly episodes on web design, digital strategy, and building better businesses.

    Links

    You can learn more about Tennis at our website. Be sure to follow us at LinkedIn, YouTube, Instagram, or Twitter

    20 min
  • 88% of Digital Transformations Fail. We Built HOLO as a Framework to Fix That

    πŸ’‘ Key Topics:
    ✦ The twelve percent: Bain found only 12% of business transformations achieved what they set out to do, and the failure almost never traces back to the technology itself (Bain)
    ✦ The average user doesn't exist: why designing for a blended, middle-of-the-road user misses the real audience, and how splitting people into primary, secondary, and tertiary groups, internal staff included, changes what gets built
    ✦ The checkout bug that wasn't a checkout bug: an e-commerce client's shipping-time complaints at checkout traced back to warehouse location and staffing, not the API
    ✦ Why hitting the goal can still mean losing: the gap between a quarter's conversion-rate target and a company's real objective of keeping customers around
    ✦ The floor you're not allowed to fall below: a fintech client's brand and interface looked strong but missed the accessibility and security bar competitors already clear
    ✦ Vision outruns execution: what happens when a manufacturing company tries to add an e-commerce revenue model without the team or workflows to run it
    ✦ The one move to make this week: run your last finished project back through Humans, Objectives, Landscape, and Organization and see where the real gaps were

    πŸ“– Chapters:
    0:00 β€” 12% Hit Their Target
    0:11 β€” Why the Same Four Gaps Repeat
    2:52 β€” Humans: The Average User Trap
    5:23 β€” Objectives: When Goals Don't Line Up
    7:26 β€” Landscape: The Floor You Can't Fall Below
    10:04 β€” Organization: Can They Actually Run It
    11:35 β€” Verdict: Run Your Last Project Back Through HOLO

    🌐 Tennis web design & development services: https://www.designtennis.com/services/website-design-and-development
    🎧 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/7tufP8mSXC1YrLxrLzw3Ju?si=3839798c83264d9b
    πŸ“Έ Instagram: Tennis.digital
    πŸ’Ό LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/designtennis/
    πŸ”” Subscribe for weekly episodes on web design, digital strategy, and building better businesses.

    #digitaltransformation #holoframework #discoveryphase #uxresearch #productstrategy #ecommerceux #changemanagement #digitalstrategy #adigitalstrategypodcast

    Links

    You can learn more about Tennis at our website. Be sure to follow us at LinkedIn, YouTube, Instagram, or Twitter

    15 min
  • Your Brand Guidelines Weren't Built For This Digital Environment

    πŸ’‘ Key Topics:

    ✦ The iceberg problem: logo, fonts, and colors are the visible tip, while the real brand lives in the ~80% below the waterline (support replies, sales emails, checkout copy, policy pages)
    ✦ Why brands drift years before anyone notices: every channel gets written by a different person, in a different department, with no shared source
    ✦ 69% of B2B buyers reported inconsistencies between a supplier's website and what the seller told them (Gartner), and that's just two channels out of ten-plus
    ✦ McKinsey's finding that buyers now average ten interaction channels, with 42% using more than eleven touchpoints
    ✦ How AI overviews compress your brand into a generic category answer: 72% of tech buyers hit Google's AI Overviews during research, only 7% went straight to a chatbot (TrustRadius)
    ✦ Why 19% of buyers using AI purchasing tools felt less confident because the information was inaccurate (Forrester)
    ✦ From brand guide to governance: why this looks less like a marketing function and more like a blend of guideline and SOP
    ✦ The quick diagnostic you can run today: pick one foundational question (who do you serve? what's your pricing? what do you not do?), ask your website, your last three sales emails, and a chatbot, and see where the answers split

    πŸ“– Chapters:

    0:00 β€” Brands Don't Drift by Accident
    1:07 β€” The Iceberg: What Your Guide Actually Covers
    1:52 β€” Two Channels, Two Different Stories
    3:28 β€” What Changed: When Being Found Stopped Being Enough
    4:48 β€” The AI Layer Compresses Your Brand
    6:22 β€” Less Guide, More Playbook
    8:19 β€” Where the Playbook Has to Live
    9:41 β€” Brand Guide as Governance
    10:23 β€” The One-Question Test
    11:54 β€” One Source of Truth, Not a New Logo

    🌐 Tennis web design & development services: https://www.designtennis.com/services/website-design-and-development

    🎧 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/7tufP8mSXC1YrLxrLzw3Ju?si=3839798c83264d9b
    πŸ“Έ Instagram: Tennis.digital
    πŸ’Ό LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/designtennis/
    πŸ”” Subscribe for weekly episodes on web design, digital strategy, and building better businesses.
    πŸ“– Article: https://www.designtennis.com/insights/stop-selling-on-your-website-start-helping

    #brandstrategy #brandguidelines #b2bmarketing #digitalstrategy #brandconsistency #aeo #brandgovernance #adigitalstrategypodcast

    Links

    You can learn more about Tennis at our website. Be sure to follow us at LinkedIn, YouTube, Instagram, or Twitter

    13 min
  • Stop Selling on Your Website. Start Helping.

    πŸ’‘ Key Topics:

    ✦ The 95/5 rule: at any moment, roughly 95% of your potential market isn't actively buying β€” Forrester says the exact split varies by category, but the shape holds up

    ✦ Why the "favorite vendor" is picked before you know they exist: 94% of B2B buyers rank preferred vendors before first contact, and that pick wins 77% of the time (6sense)

    ✦ Buyer enablement vs. "helping not selling": why the hosts prefer the plainer framing over the term Gartner and Brent Adamson popularized in 2018

    ✦ The content overload trap: Gartner's original 2018 point wasn't "make more content" β€” it was that buyers are already overwhelmed by it

    ✦ Why 72% of buyers share what they find with colleagues, and 57% of those colleagues actually download and review it β€” and what that means for who you're really writing for

    ✦ The good-better-best ladder for deciding what to actually build, from a repeatable-question tool to a full interactive decision engine

    ✦ Why the share of buyers wanting interactive content dropped from 49% to 39% β€” and when a plain PDF checklist beats a flashy calculator

    ✦ The one move to make this week: pick one buyer, one stuck decision, and build the single thing that gets them past it

    Β 

    πŸ“– Chapters:

    0:00 β€” Built for the Wrong 5%

    0:47 β€” Buyer Enablement, Renamed

    5:24 β€” Everyone Builds the Wrong Thing

    7:53 β€” The Good-Better-Best Ladder

    11:50 β€” One Buyer, One Job, One Tool

    14:10 β€” Tools, Templates, and What's Next

    Β 

    🌐 Tennis web design & development services: https://www.designtennis.com/services/website-design-and-development

    🎧 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/7tufP8mSXC1YrLxrLzw3Ju?si=3839798c83264d9b

    πŸ“Έ Instagram: Tennis.digital

    πŸ’Ό LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/designtennis/

    πŸ”” Subscribe for weekly episodes on web design, digital strategy, and building better businesses.

    πŸ“– Article: https://www.designtennis.com/insights/stop-selling-on-your-website-start-helping

    Β 

    #buyerenablement #b2bmarketing #websitestrategy #digitalstrategy #contentstrategy #buyerjourney #aeo #adigitalstrategypodcast

    Links

    You can learn more about Tennis at our website. Be sure to follow us at LinkedIn, YouTube, Instagram, or Twitter

    15 min
  • Building With AI. The Part Nobody Sells You

    πŸ’‘ Key Topics:

    • Why "I built it with AI" is three different builds (pure generated code, CMS with an AI layer, headless + AI front end) with three different risk profiles
    • Path one's trap: no content layer, so editing isn't editing anymore, it's regenerating the whole site from scratch
    • The security roll of the dice: Veracode found roughly half of AI-generated code came back secure (55% one year, 56% the next) on blind prompts with no security instructions
    • Your website is a regulated surface: Ontario's AODA and WCAG 2 AA, the US ADA, and why "I built it in a weekend" is not a compliance strategy
    • Path two's real risk isn't what the AI writes, it's handing a model write access to your live production site instead of staging with a human approving
    • Why the difference was never the tool, it's the operator: knowing which defaults to override, how to isolate a change so one button doesn't rewrite the whole site
    • "Make me a website" versus a real pipeline, and why garbage in still means garbage out
    • The one test to run this week: can anyone in the loop actually validate what came back?
    • πŸ“– Chapters:

      • 0:00 β€” We lost the project: eight months, no website
      • 0:59 β€” The question: what do you actually walk away with?
      • 1:34 β€” Three paths, and they're not equally dangerous
      • 1:37 β€” Path one: pure generated code, security and legal exposure
      • 4:01 β€” Path two: a real CMS with an AI layer
      • 5:07 β€” Path three: headless CMS and AI front end
      • 6:26 β€” The difference was never the tool, it's the operator
      • 8:52 β€” "Make me a website": what that actually means
      • 10:52 β€” What to do this week: can anyone validate it?
      • 11:31 β€” Where AI actually belongs
      • 🌐 Tennis web design & development services: https://www.designtennis.com/services/website-design-and-development

        🎧 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/7tufP8mSXC1YrLxrLzw3Ju?si=3839798c83264d9b

        πŸ“Έ Instagram: Tennis.digital

        πŸ’Ό LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/designtennis/

        πŸ”” Subscribe for weekly episodes on web design, digital strategy, and building better businesses.

        Β 

        #buildingwithai #aiwebsite #vibecoding #aiwebdesign #webdevelopment #aitools #websecurity #adigitalstrategypodcast

        Links

        You can learn more about Tennis at our website. Be sure to follow us at LinkedIn, YouTube, Instagram, or Twitter

        12 min
      • Google-Doesnt-Need-Your-Website-Anymore

        πŸ’‘ Key Topics:

        • The zero-click economy: why roughly half the clicks vanish the moment an AI summary appears (Pew, 900-adult panel)
        • AI Overviews now on ~48% of searches, up from ~31% a year ago (Bright Edge)
        • Why B2B queries triggering an AI Overview jumped from 36% to 82%, and why retail is the mirror image
        • Chegg suing Google, HubSpot down 27%, Business Insider's layoffs: companies naming the traffic drop out loud
        • Why retail structured its data years ago and B2B's positioning problems left it exposed
        • What actually earns citations now: site structure, FAQs, schema, answering real questions by intent
        • The one move to make this week: audit your own site before spending a dollar on anything new
        • πŸ“– Chapters:

          • 0:00 β€” Google reads your site and answers for you
          • 0:33 β€” The data: AI Overviews and the zero-click economy
          • 2:03 β€” Earnings calls and lawsuits: Chegg, HubSpot, Business Insider
          • 4:35 β€” Why B2B and SaaS are the most exposed category
          • 5:52 β€” Retail's windfall and why the split happened
          • 9:08 β€” SEO didn't die, it changed
          • 10:53 β€” What to do this week: audit your site
          • Β 

            🌐 Tennis web design & development services: https://www.designtennis.com/services/website-design-and-development

            🎧 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/7tufP8mSXC1YrLxrLzw3Ju?si=3839798c83264d9b

            πŸ“Έ Instagram: Tennis.digital

            πŸ’Ό LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/designtennis/

            πŸ”” Subscribe for weekly episodes on web design, digital strategy, and building better businesses.

            Β 

            #zeroclick #aioverviews #seo #answerengineoptimization #b2bmarketing #aisearch #googleai #contentstrategy #adigitalstrategypodcast

            Links

            You can learn more about Tennis at our website. Be sure to follow us at LinkedIn, YouTube, Instagram, or Twitter

            12 min
          • Every Design Idea Is Stolen (Remixed)

            πŸ’‘ Key Topics:

            ✦ Why everything is a remix, and why that's freeing instead of depressing (shoutout Kirby Ferguson)

            ✦ Why AI trends generic: it remixes the average, so it hands you the average back

            ✦ John Snow's 1854 cholera map: how a doctor borrowed cartography to win an argument and accidentally invented data viz

            ✦ Harry Beck's London Underground map: how a laid-off engineer deleted the city and every transit map since copied him

            ✦ Why the "Beck was inspired by circuit diagrams" story is probably a myth, and why that proves the whole point

            ✦ Karel Martens: the designer who dropped the problem and followed the material instead

            ✦ The one usable rule: you'll never out-average the average machine, so borrow from further away

            Β 

            πŸ“– Chapters:

            0:00 β€” Why all design looks the same right now

            0:33 β€” Everything is a remix (and yes, AI was trained on us)

            2:42 β€” John Snow's cholera map: borrowing a method

            5:15 β€” Harry Beck's Tube map: borrowing a visual logic

            8:20 β€” Karel Martens: following the material

            10:35 β€” Three ways to borrow, and where design goes from here

            Β 

            🌐 Tennis web design & development services: https://www.designtennis.com/services/website-design-and-development

            🎧 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/7tufP8mSXC1YrLxrLzw3Ju?si=3839798c83264d9b

            πŸ“Έ Instagram: Tennis.digital

            πŸ’Ό LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/designtennis/

            πŸ”” Subscribe for weekly episodes on web design, digital strategy, and building better businesses.

            Β 

            #everythingisaremix #design #aidesign #designinspiration #datavisualization #designhistory #karelmartens #creativity #adigitalstrategypodcast

            Links

            You can learn more about Tennis at our website. Be sure to follow us at LinkedIn, YouTube, Instagram, or Twitter

            14 min

          About A Digital Strategy Podcast

          From the publisher's feed

          A Digital Strategy Podcast explores how design, technology, and business intersect to shape the way organizations grow and adapt. Through thoughtful discussions and interviews with leaders in tech, design, brand, and marketing, the show shares practical strategies, frameworks, and stories for navigating today’s digital landscape.