Traditional bottom-of-funnel paid ads are becoming unsustainably expensive, and standard SEO strategies are losing their impact. Marketing budgets are tightening, yet the pressure to deliver growth has never been higher. Brands are forced to find new ways to grab attention, but many are still wasting millions on inefficient channels rather than building their own distribution engines.

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Host David Walsh sits down with Casey Hill, Chief Marketing Officer at DoWhatWorks, to dissect what is actually working in B2B marketing right now. They discuss the critical shift toward optimizing websites for both human intent and machine indexing, moving beyond generic calls to action. Listeners will walk away with actionable frameworks for creating proprietary distribution channels and leveraging public data to make smarter growth decisions.

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Casey brings a wealth of knowledge from analyzing tens of thousands of real-world website experiments. He shares a personal misstep from his early days on LinkedIn, where posting highly valuable but dry test data completely flopped. By shifting his focus to novelty and replicability, Casey built an organic content engine that now drives forty percent of his company's closed business.

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Guest Bio

Casey Hill is a growth veteran and the Chief Marketing Officer at DoWhatWorks, a technology startup fundamentally changing how brands approach conversion rate optimization. He has over a decade of experience scaling software companies and providing institutional guidance to top global firms on pricing, market analysis, and inbound marketing. Throughout his career, Casey has garnered millions of views across social platforms by pioneering creative growth levers. He brings a deeply analytical yet human approach to B2B marketing, commanding an audience of over 26,000 followers on LinkedIn who tune in for his insights on what top brands are actually testing.

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What We Cover

• The decline of traditional channels: Conventional paid ads and standard programmatic SEO are showing severe diminishing returns. Marketing leaders must adapt as the core line items for enterprise budgets shift toward new models of discovery.
• Flipping the testing script: Instead of guessing and failing internally, companies can observe public data from major brands. Analyzing thousands of verified tests allows teams to make data-backed decisions faster and cheaper.
• The power of novelty and replicability: Casey learned that highly valuable data alone does not win on social media. Content needs a unique angle and an easy way for the audience to replicate the success in order to gain real traction.
• Why Learn More kills conversions: Ambiguity is a massive barrier for website visitors trying to understand what happens next. Specific calls to action generate significantly higher click-through rates because they set a clear expectation for the user.
• The rising bar for social proof: Static logo bars are no longer enough to build credibility with buyers. The market demands higher trust signals, making contextualized video testimonials and verifiable quotes far more effective.
• Optimizing for humans and machines: Modern websites must balance creative design with rigid structural clarity. Clear subheaders and specific capability language help pages index properly in large language models while keeping users engaged.
• Building a distribution engine: Proprietary data and built-in distribution are the two most defensible moats in marketing today. Without a reliable way to distribute content organically, brands are forced to rely on highly inefficient paid channels.
• Owning the category through content: Instead of paying influencers for one-off promotions, brands should focus on associating themselves with a specific industry category. Creating assets that get widely cited by other publications creates a powerful long-tail effect.
• Bringing influencers in-house: A highly underutilized strategy involves hiring creators to run owned media assets like newsletters or podcasts. This gives the brand long-term ownership of the audience and lead flow while leveraging the creator's existing trust.
• Writing for a person of one: Creating content designed for a specific persona yields much better results than writing broad, generic copy. Speaking directly to one ideal buyer increases the chances of generating valuable shares and saves.

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Resources Mentioned

• DoWhatWorks - A platform that aggregates real-world A/B test data from major brands to help companies optimize their websites.
• DoWhatWorks Substack - Casey's weekly newsletter offering deep-dive analyses on proven website optimization strategies.
• WhisperFlow - A voice-to-text tool praised for balancing a highly creative website design with functional clarity.
• Sundial - A startup highlighted for its clean website layout and highly specific demo call to action.
• Glean - An enterprise SaaS company that doubled its homepage click-through rate by eliminating generic button text.
• Ramp - A financial company cited as a great example of clearly organizing multiple products in a website subheader.
• Brex - Another financial brand praised for its clear capability language and website structure.
• Claude - An AI tool David used to instantly audit and restructure his custom-built website.
• Supabase - Mentioned for a unique profile text strategy that resulted in long-tail content distribution.
• Gusto - Referenced for hiring economists to produce category-owning content rather than standard promotional material.
• SparkToro - Rand Fishkin's company, noted for building visual content specifically designed to be shared in private team channels.

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Safe Doesn't Scale is hosted by David Walsh, founder of Limelight. New episodes drop weekly.