Leveraging AI

296 | How AI Gets You Better Leads - Instead of More Bad Leads with Andy Crestodina

• Isar Meitis, Andy Crestodina • Season 1 • Episode 296

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What if your biggest growth problem isn’t a lack of leads—but too many of the wrong ones?

Most business leaders assume more traffic, more campaigns, and more leads equal more growth. But what if the real opportunity is creating fewer, smarter, higher-converting interactions?

In this conversation, Andy Crestodina breaks down how AI is transforming B2B lead generation—not by creating more marketing noise, but by helping companies deeply understand buyers, optimize conversions, and align messaging with customer psychology. The result? Better leads. Better conversion rates. Less wasted effort. 

Andy shares practical frameworks and AI-powered tactics for optimizing landing pages, creating stronger calls-to-action, building smarter personas, and turning websites into conversion engines. If your business is generating attention but not enough qualified opportunities, this session gives you a roadmap.

In this session, you'll discover:

• Why more leads can actually create more overhead instead of more growth
• How AI helps identify and attract the right audience—not just a bigger one
• Why conversion optimization starts at the end of the buyer journey 
• The hidden psychology behind high-performing CTAs 
• How AI-generated personas can sharpen messaging and improve marketing relevance 
• Practical AI workflows for auditing landing pages and improving conversion rates 
• Why doubling conversion rates can transform growth faster than increasing traffic 

Andy Crestodina is the Co-Founder and Chief Marketing Officer of Orbit Media and one of the most respected voices in B2B content strategy, SEO, conversion optimization, and digital marketing. With 25+ years of experience helping businesses grow through data-driven marketing, Andy combines deep expertise with practical AI applications to improve lead generation and conversion outcomes. 

Connect with Andy on LinkedIn:
 https://www.linkedin.com/in/andycrestodina/

About Leveraging AI

If you’ve enjoyed or benefited from some of the insights of this episode, leave us a five-star review on your favorite podcast platform, and let us know what you learned, found helpful, or liked most about this show!

Isar Meitis

Hello and welcome to the Leveraging AI Podcast, the podcast that shares practical, ethical ways to leverage AI to improve efficiency, grow your business, and advance your career. This is Isar Matis, your host, and I am truly, deeply excited about today's episode from several different reasons. Reason number one, our guest today, Andy Crestodina, became a good friend and somebody that I truly, truly enjoy, A, meeting and speaking to, and B- Mm-hmm learning from, and we're gonna do all of that today. So that's reason number one. Reason number two is you heard me say previous times on this podcast, I mean, a business can live without, social media. A business can live without operations. A business can live without accounting. A business can live without a lot of other things. It cannot live without clients. If you don't have clients, you don't have a business. And to get clients, you need leads. But the truth is, you don't need more leads, you need the right leads. And actually, in the best case scenario, you need the smallest amount of leads you can that are the right leads because then you're not wasting overhead on leads that are not going to convert. Now, the trick is obviously how do you get the right leads? And to do that, you need all your offers and all your marketings to align with the needs of your target audience. That what drives real demand with the right leads that will turn into more business with the least amount of overhead. Now, the right way to do that is to do this as data-driven as possible, so you can actually verify the things that you're testing and learn over time and improve over time. Now, this was good marketing forever, like literally since the beginning of time. But now we can do this at scale with the help of AI, because AI can help us figure out exactly who's our target au-audience is, what their needs are, test different variations, and verify it based on data. Mm-hmm. This is literally a machine that can generate more money for your business if you know how to tweak it. And lucky for us, Andy does. So if you're wondering why does Andy so good at this, I will give you a few notes. First of all, he's the co-founder and chief marketing officer at Orbit Media Studios, but they have been doing marketing at the top level, winning awards for a very, very long time. And Andy has been the knowledge in his head on how to do marketing correctly in a very detailed and data-oriented way is Second to none. I've literally haven't seen anybody that can do it as good as him. But in the past few years, he took his passion to AI, and he's able to combine both these things. So he takes his deep understanding in how to do marketing correctly together with, "Ooh, this is how I can automate this with AI to make this, A, more detailed, B, a lot more efficient," into these magical outcomes. And every time I get the privilege to see Andy speak about what he's doing right now, I'm literally blown away. I'm sure you will do, too, and we're gonna learn a lot on how to customize our marketing together with AI to get better results. And so I'm truly excited and humbled to welcome Andy back to the show. Andy, welcome to Leveraging AI.

Andy Crestodina

Thank you for having me, Isar, and for the lovely intro. Uh, it's 100% true. The focus of my career, 25 years, has been on B2B lead generation, and we have grown this business without ever buying a single ad. So it's organic B2B lead gen through digital. A lot of it is about search conversion optimization. search I love. I've been in SEO for 25 years. But I'm even more excited about this topic of just not the cheese, but the mousetrap. Yeah maximize the percentage of people who take action once they land on a website. all the traffic in the world does nothing for you if your conversion rate is 0%. So we're gonna walk through my latest and greatest on how to maximize the conversion rate.

Isar Meitis

Yeah, I love that. You know, I've done, uh, I don't know, five or six years ago, I was a guest on a podcast, and the, the topic of the podcast, she was like a big, like, sales guru, and she's like, "Okay, what do you wanna talk about?" I said, uh, "What, what should we name this episode?" They said, "You want less leads." I'm like, "What?" They're like, "Yeah." Good. That was-

Andy Crestodina

great title.

Isar Meitis

It's a great title, right? and it's tr- I truly believe it's true, right? Yeah. More leads doesn't lead to more money. It leads to more overhead. More sales leads to more money, and this is exactly what we're gonna talk about, so I'm, um, on a very personal level, passionate about this topic.

Andy Crestodina

Me too. I mean, it's, uh, it, it's rarely spoken, those words, because the number of leads, I mean, marketers often there's like a silo and, you know, marketers are, are here and salespeople are over there. And so marketers often don't even know the quality of the leads. Uh, so I've had the, the benefit of being on, doing sales and marketing simultaneously for so long that, I, I see everything you said is 100% true, and efficiency's a good thing, and really it, it doesn't, all the traffic in the world with no- with a low conversion rate means nothing. All the leads in the world with a low MQL or SQL number means nothing. So I could see businesses growing in the future with less traffic and fewer form submissions, but a greater total net new number of highly qualified leads because AI made your messages shorter and sharper and more resonant and, AI search made it easier for people who really, really need, care deeply about what you do, easier to find, uh, find you. Uh, together these things combine so that the internet just got better, your leads got better, the buyer was happier to have found you more efficiently. it's, uh, very likely that this is the outcome for brands that do it well, no question

Isar Meitis

Amen.

Andy Crestodina

So I'm ready to jump in. Yeah, should we- I really

Isar Meitis

hope, I really hope- Yeah that's where we're going.

Andy Crestodina

Well, I mean, the internet's so noisy. You know, it's always been a consequence of, of good digital is just that you generate lots of noise. Um- Yeah and I think that, it's not the type of efficiency people talk about when they say AI improves efficiency, but that is a type of efficiency. It improves- Right the, the, the, uh, the ways in which buyers find the right brands and the ways that brands speak more specifically to the right buyers. I agree. So yeah, um, let's do this. Uh- Let's dive in we just saw each other at a conference. You and I are brand... we're both in the same circuit apparently, because we, we see each other at a lot of events. but the, but you've invited me to Anamander to share some of the things that I talked about the last time we saw each other, which was in San Diego. Here we go. A point of view. Are we ready for this?

Isar Meitis

Let's go.

Andy Crestodina

Okay. Uh, so m- my thesis in life is that, uh, conversion is sort of like a chain. People talk about funnels or there's all kinds of metaphors, but if you think about it as a chain and about each link on that chain having its own success metric, then I believe that if there's something wrong at the end of the chain, that nothing else matters. So there's lots of sites that we work on. This, our agency, Orbit Media, is 100% focused on websites, building and optimizing B2B lead gen websites. And if you look at sites and you see that there's a problem at the very end of the path, nothing else helps. So I like to start conversion optimization from the end going forward. This is a really basic one, Isar. Uh, this is just a really kind of a high-level perspective. But if you think about it this way, the best contact forms, the call to action aligns with the language on the contact head for, uh, page header. Next steps are clear. There's no unnecessary fields. Faces, the sales rep's face is on the page. Most people haven't tried that yet. The commitment on the call to action, the verb is kind of a low commitment verb, like schedule a call or chat with an expert. And you know that little kicker, the microcopy underneath the button can improve conversion rates. Lots of research on that. These are all things I've known, studied, learned from experts for years. Anytime I see a list of best practices, like the one I'm showing you right here, an audit for that. I could build an audit prompt for that. I could make a page, I could make a, a prompt that just scans your contact page and identifies gaps. So I've done this a million times. I do this all the time. Uh, there's, there's much more, uh, interesting ways, I think, to do that, but if you just take a screenshot of your contact page, we're gonna go deeper in a moment, but it will immediately show you, put in the call to action on, that that brought the person here. That's one of the the inputs. The screenshot of the contact page, plus the call to action that brought them here. And this uh, contact page audit, uh, prompt, and it will tell you how well you did. And if there was something wrong or broken or bad or high friction, it will recommend the remedy. So classic handy prompt Screenshot plus detailed audit prompt equals, uh, scoring system plus recommendations to the page. That was just a warm-up, Isar. I'm just... We're just getting started. Yeah.

Isar Meitis

I, I wanna say something that already jumps into my mind that I think a lot of people are getting wrong, and, and I believe, if I'm reading between the lines, is relevant here. You need different landing pages depending on the marketing message you use to get them there versus the same landing page for everything, because people expect to see something, and if they get to something they expect less, then the chances they will convert is lower. Is that a true statement based on what you just said?

Andy Crestodina

Absolutely. There's nerdier ways to say it. Uh, there's increased cognitive load if the message on the, the traffic source or the button is different from the message on the landing page. So this is why it's kind of a disaster when I meet people who just have like, tons of different PPC ad groups all sending people to the homepage. remember, there's a true story in the life of every visitor to every webpage. If you... The more you know about them, the more specific you can tune their experience. So why would you have the same page for all of these different ad groups or email campaigns or social- Yeah or paid social creative, you know? Or, or calls to action, so.

Isar Meitis

And a- and again, until today, there was a reason. You needed to create more pages, and that took time and money and efforts and resources, and now actually AI can build these pages for you, which there's no excuse anymore.

Andy Crestodina

No excuse. There's, uh, there's a little bit of extra setup in analytics if you want to see, the path. I mean, you might have to make multiple reports. But in the end, it... Ultimately what we're doing here is we're tracking the percentage of people who made it from one, right? It's, like, the chain. You wanna see the completion rate on the form, which in analytics is a path exploration. If you've got six contact forms, no problem. You wanna measure them all separately anyway. That's how you're gonna learn. But this is a screenshot of an example of where you can see the completion rate. Very few marketers, I think, know the completion rate on their contact forms. But you can see it's right there.

Isar Meitis

so that's a thing. So this is Google Ana- like GA4, I assume- Mm-hmm which is Google Analytics- Mm-hmm which is available for free to any website that you have. It takes about 20 minutes if you know nothing about this with, uh, well, following a YouTube video, and three minutes if you know what you're doing to connect it to your website. and then you can have a page that shows you exactly what's the conversion of your- Mm-hmm page. Now the-

Andy Crestodina

Mm-hmm

Isar Meitis

question that I have for you, uh, which I'm sure you know the answer and I don't, can this data flow dynamically to any AI tool?

Andy Crestodina

Well, it can flow dynamically out of GA4 into all kinds of other tools, and has for many years. Uh, I know my... the hardcore analytics pros that I know spend very little time inside analytics itself.

Isar Meitis

Yeah.

Andy Crestodina

They are using it as a source of data to populate. You know, they pull it out and it goes into BigQuery, and they pull it out from there and it goes into data, it goes into Looker Studio, or it goes into Tableau, Yeah Google Sheets or whatever the thing is. It... in this use case, that's actually nice because look, I had to do the math. What? Like, wait, I have to divide this number myself? yes, you do, because it didn't give that to you. So yeah, formulas and tables and charts and custom. For all of our optimization clients, we build custom, uh, Looker Studio reports that, uh, show these things, and then if there's a change, you measure the pre/post. I don't think you necessarily need to A/B test some of these, by the way. it's, um... You know, if your contact page is bad, just think of it as a bug. Uh- Yeah, yeah, yeah fix it. You know? Yeah. not everything needs to be an A/B test.

Isar Meitis

And I think the other thing that is interesting here is it doesn't matter what the value is right now, as long as it can keep on increasing that value, right? It doesn't matter if it's- Mm-hmm 1% or 15% or 40%, as long as- That's right you can get the number higher tomorrow because of things that you're doing, then you're getting more clients. And I think the really interesting thing is, and again, I used to run a large travel e-commerce company, and, and those who don't understand it don't understand it. If you go from a 1% conversion to a 2% conversion, that's not an increase of 1%. That's 100% increase.

Andy Crestodina

100%.

Isar Meitis

Cause you just- Doubled doubled the amount- 2X of people who actually filled up the form. And people don't get it. People are like, "Oh, it's only a 1% increase. Why would I invest so much effort in that?" I'm like, because you're going from 1% to 2%, that's a- That's right 100% increase in the people who filled up your form, and that's very- Mm-hmm very significant.

Andy Crestodina

And, and if it didn't generate more noise, like, who it's for and how you help and, you know, the, the... If, if there's qualifying questions there, for example, which sometimes works. But no, that's... that doubling of form fills without any other change to your marketing, this is my point. Like, why don't we all start here? this is the money click. Like- Yeah fix it. so that's my last link in the chain here, and that's how you measure that. the previous link in the chain before that takes a bit more, more research. Uh, that's the call to action that they clicked on that brought them to the contact page, which we give as an input to our audit of the contact page. But, uh, for this, this is aligned more closely with psychology, so I don't just do a simple audit prompt. And my recommendation here, and I'm gonna show a very simple, this is like Andy 2024, uh, way to know your target audience The way that I do this now is just, like, exquisite. It's, like, super, super detailed. But I think if you're getting started, this, this will get you partway there. It's a persona generator prompt that if you just fill in the basics about your buyer, hopefully you know your buyer well enough. empathy is the key to marketing. Data-driven empathy is the key to digital marketing, and now with AI this is, like, we can get way better empathy than we ever had before. so I fill in these blanks on this, and I then, uh, put it into

Isar Meitis

whatever-

Andy Crestodina

So let's

Isar Meitis

just to step back for the people who are listening and not watching- Sure let's give them a little bit- Sure, sure of what's in here.

Andy Crestodina

Mm-hmm. I'll read the whole thing. Okay. "You're an expert in B2B persona development, skilled at crafting detailed, actionable insights that support website strategy. I'm giving you a page." give it your homepage, give it a screenshot of your homepage, give it your brand. Yep. "Based on the brand information and, and audience insights, draft a persona overview that has job titles, industries, company size, geography, roles, skills, responsibilities, challenges, pain points, key problems, and a narrative overview what's a day in their life like. What value do they get from your product or service? What problem are they really trying to solve? What aspects of your service are top of mind for them?" Emphasize the most critical insights for shaping website messaging and content and conversion strategy. So that's the whole prompt.

Isar Meitis

something interesting that I would add to this prompt. Mm-hmm. Uh, not questioning you by any means, but I would be interested- No, I'm ready to learn I think if the... The only thing I would add is if, if the AI cannot figure out who it thinks the job titles are for or the re- roles- Mm-hmm or whatever, that is an even bigger input. Because if it's not clear from your website- Oh,

Andy Crestodina

sure

Isar Meitis

who is it for- Yeah then you have a bigger problem than optimizing for your target audience. It's not even clear who your target audience is.

Andy Crestodina

Yeah. It sort of does an amazing job, but I have versions of this and alternate methods where, you give it, much more detailed information. Uh, I'm always impressed by how well it does. my Claude project persona generator has a lot more analysis in it. It analyzes things like psychology. It looks for opportunities to trigger cognitive biases. It tries to understand deeply the buyer, the, the group, like the buying committee.

Isar Meitis

Yeah.

Andy Crestodina

It's got, you know, the transformation in their life, what they have before and after, how they feel before and after. There's like... I've built a whole series of prompts, this is just the first one, that build all these, beautiful buyer personas. but this one anyone can use if we're just getting started here and- Yeah and, and, uh, for you and I today. so what it comes back with, so I just dropped that in. it often works just with a URL. Uh, a bit lazy. We'll go much farther with this. But it comes back and it's like here are their industries, here's the company size, geography. Here, here's the story in their life and their challenges and their frustrations, and you can just imagine, this is why you have a visitor. this is the psychology. This... You know, when the page loads, pixels appear on screen, eyeballs see pixels. What happens in their brain? That's what's, that's what we're here for, right? That's what, that's what we're doing. That's why they're, that's why we have this page. It's not just to say, "We're a great brand, and we love us." It's about alignment. So AI becomes an amazing tool for that. All kinds of interesting things that, um, This is just what it gave back to me that, uh, when I took these screenshots. But, uh, but yeah, you can see, like, for example, these are the biggest problems we're trying to solve These are the most critical takeaways that the website has to have in its messaging. so whatever it gives back to you, I recommend, and I did this for years, I have other methods now, my AIs are a bit more integrated today. But simple, fast, easy way, just take that out of the AI and make it into a separate file that you can use in all kinds of other methods and models and meetings or wherever you go. So let's say you go through this little process and you have a persona and it's sitting on your desktop. Now that becomes a key input for all kinds of other prompts, and in this case, we have an, a prompt that audits, uh, or generates calls to action Calls to action have to align with psychology, right? There's a-- This is one of those moments when the words, those six words or four words in the CTA need to really connect with them in the moment. Like, is it an urgency-driven thing? there's a deadline. Or, uh, is it a big trust-based thing? Uh, talk to an expert. You know, you can just imagine all of the, all the ways this might align or not align. So the persona plus the screenshot of the page with the CTA, and a nice, uh, CTA generator prompt, which we could share all these prompts and we don't have to read them all. My prompts tend to be pretty detailed. This is probably a 600-word prompt. But it basically says, "Make me some calls to action." I want them include the microcopy text that appears under the CTA, which can improve click-through rates. That's, uh, the kicker, a friend of mine calls it. don't miss opportunities to trigger loss aversion. look for opportunities to leverage social proof. Uh, urgency, certainty, all of these things must be aligned. So AI comes back with a lovely list of possible calls to action. And trust me, they are all better than contact us. Most people never think about it. Like, come on, you had the money click, like, the most important click, the desired action or outcome. You really haven't even... You just phoned it in. so there's a beautiful list for those listening, maybe come back and watch on YouTube someday. But there's a beautiful list on screen right here of CTAs that you could just imagine the click-through rates would be high, right? Get your website optimization plan. Find your biggest gaps. Start improving conversions today. Right? Turn more visitors into

Isar Meitis

leads- Yeah, again, I assume your test was your website, right? Hence why- Yeah these are the call to actions. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Andy Crestodina

Exactly. I'm using my... So Isar, you and I present a lot. Uh, it's hard for me to know what to use as examples. Of course. I just use my site for these because, um, I'm not gonna offend anybody, and it's not a niche conference that day.

Isar Meitis

Yeah

Andy Crestodina

but same metric. A Google Analytics path exploration will show you the click-through rates on your calls to action, which is another number very few marketers know. What's the CTR of your CTA? What percentage of marketers know what that is? Like, it's a problem. But there's the data. It's right there. You got it. Yeah. so then

Isar Meitis

we go on

Andy Crestodina

a

Isar Meitis

service page- Again, for those of you who are not marketers, CTR, click-through rate, CTA, call to action. So what's the click-through rate? What percentage of people click on your call to action button? Uh, and, and again, all you have to do is either change it and see what happens based on one of the recommendations, or if you're a little fancier, do an A/B test and actually show two versions of the button- Mm-hmm to two different kinds of people, and then over X number of clicks, you will know which one works better.

Andy Crestodina

Exactly right. It's, uh, it's usually the bigger brands that have the opportunities to do the A/B testing because you need quite a bit of traffic actually to get certainty. Agreed. But if your calls to action have verbs like learn or click or contact, I pay a lot of attention to verbs and have for years. You know, friends ask me to audit their site, I'm looking at the verbs. The, um, uh, but AI now makes it possible for me to literally codify and standardize the methods for looking at these pages based on 25 years of conversion optimization and lead gen. So-

Isar Meitis

Yeah

Andy Crestodina

the prompts now include the, all of this thinking in the prompt. and they go... you build them out as quad projects, and they, they do many other things in the end. But just for today, I mean, it's useful to have this perspective and, and feel free to borrow some of these prompts.

Isar Meitis

Uh- And, and I'll say one more thing. Mm-hmm. I mean, most of us, uh, I would say probably all of us, it would be safe to say, have less experience than you on the psychology and, and these, all these concepts of marketing. However, Claude or ChatGPT or Gemini or Grok or whichever you want is probably better than you, not you- Mm-hmm Andy, you the listener, in doing this. And so you can ask it of like what aspects do I need to pay attention to when I decide on my CTA? And it will tell you the psychology and the urgency and like all the things that Andy knows- Mm-hmm in his sleep that most people don't know, these AI tools know, and that will be a very good starting point. So when it gives you all of this, you're like, "Okay, I would like you to build a prompt that includes all of these-" Yes "in the prompt when you're considering and even potentially define weights." Do you care more about urgency- Mm-hmm because this is something that you're selling that happens in two weeks? or you care more about, the relevant people and then which words will attract them because you're trying to build a 10-year relationship versus something that you're selling tomorrow and that's it. So you, you can guide it to the things you care about more and build weights into the things to consider, and they will be even better to adjusting the potential CTAs for you and your needs for that particular thing you're trying to sell.

Andy Crestodina

it's, uh, uh, everything that I learned, I learned from experimentation or from other experts. So I, I, I love giving them credit. Justin Rondeau, Brian Massey, Nancy Harhut, uh, Joanna Wiebe, Talia Wolf. I mean, these are people who've The- their entire careers have been totally focused on the psychology of, of web users and, and website visitors. It is, So no, I think we're always learning, uh, each one of us, and, a lot of, uh, partly what I've done over many years is just, you know, learn from the best and then test and, and experiment and then things that work, turn those into best practices. Those best practices get turned into prompts. Those prompts get t- get turned into, like, these audit Claude projects, and the impact is great. I mean, it's really, it's, um, uh, it's a great skills leveler because people with Who haven't done decades of conversion optimization can get better ideas faster. Uh, and really that lead segues perfectly into the next prompt, which is a persona alignment prompt, which To summarize it, it asks AI to make a table to show the ways in which that's, that page as given to AI as a screenshot align or misalign with the psychology of that visitor. Now, we've already made the persona, so th- these subsequent prompts are fast. You just take the prompt and drag in the persona and drag the screenshot of any page. One caveat that comes with this, there are pages on websites that speak to deci- to specific subsets of a persona. Like I had a call like an hour ago with a company that targets, sports, casinos, government, education, and, healthcare. Well, I could either make a persona for each, perfectly reasonable, or I find at Isar it works quite well to just tell the AI, like, "Focus on this, this vertical." Give it the persona alignment prompt, give it the persona, give it the screenshot, and tell it, "Hey, we're focused just on casinos for a minute here, okay?" And it's, it's smart enough that it, it will give you meaningful responses without you having to go back and generate a new persona. I'm really using composite personas here that include multiple audiences. It's a common question at conferences. but there, but, um, I'm finding the results are quite good, and if you, when you need to narrow it down, you can just do it in the prompt.

Isar Meitis

Yeah. One more thing that I will add from a very tactical perspective, for getting screenshots off the page... Well, first of all, you can give it a link. It usually works as well. But if you want the stringshot, the screenshot, there is a cool plugin, it's a Chrome plugin called GoFullPage. And what it will do, it will take a screenshot of the entire page, because many landing pages- Mm-hmm are more than just the above the fold. Actually, most landing pages. Mm-hmm. And so you can scroll and scroll and scroll and scroll. So if you want all of that in a single or two screenshots, uh, you can use GoFullPage. Again, it's a free plugin- Mm-hmm and then it gets you a really long, skinny, kind of like screenshot of the entire page that you can give AI, uh, to see everything on the page. Because if you give it the HTML, if you give it link to the website, it doesn't really see the website. It looks at the HTML, which are two very different things. So I always, when I try to optimize pages or give it access, I do both. I give it the link, and I give it the screenshot, and it can see the visuals, and it can read the HTML and see what's behind the scenes.

Andy Crestodina

Thanks for bringing that up. Uh, I, I do that literally several times a day. Uh, I'm constantly looking at pages and, and getting feedback from AI on pages. Uh, a couple of tips. Yes, GoFullPage is the one, exactly the tool I use. Uh, although sometimes Snagit is nice. It's a paid tool from TechSmith called Snagit- Yeah where you can get scrollable areas or specific areas of pages for other use cases. But, uh, uh, here's the slide I sometimes use to explain, or I'll, I'll read it. Uh, the, that there's three ways to give a, a page to AI. One is to copy and paste the text of the page or give it the link. Some sites still block AI, and it doesn't come through. If it can get it, that's great. The full-page screenshot is our, as you just said, it gets the visual hierarchy. It can see with computer vision, like, the It will see things that it wouldn't have gotten from the link. For example, uh, if the prompt is gonna audit the extent to which the page used supportive evidence and social proof or client logos or as seen in media logos, those in the code don't surface very well. Like, it might miss that. But if you give it the full-page screenshot, it literally sees the whole visual hierarchy, uh, is, instead of just crawling the page like Google Bot or, you know, uh, ChatGPT Bot. You can also upload the, the HTML of the page, which gives AI more and different things. you know, like meta descriptions and title tags if you're doing an SEO audit prompt. But the full-page screenshot I like. I One caution, you may have to scroll down the full page first just in the browser to get all the JavaScript to run to render all the page blocks or to get all those counters to count up their numbers. You know, the People do fancy visual things on pages. Also, GoFullPage will miss sliders if there's content that's behind, that's in a second or third slide, or content in tabs. So if it's really important stuff and you're confident the visitor will open the tab, you know, maybe you take separate screenshots of tabs. Annoying, worth it. Just thought, glad you brought it up Yeah.

Isar Meitis

You, you say annoying, right? It's five more minutes to potentially get multiple new clients. I think the ROI is there.

Andy Crestodina

I know. Our expectations for speedos are high. But, but I'll do that. I will take the time. I'll scroll down. Oh, there's a tab area. I'm gonna get screenshot of these three tabs, drag those into the AI with it. it's that extra level of detail and, and, uh, uh, attention make a difference.

Isar Meitis

Yeah.

Andy Crestodina

So the persona alignment prompt that has AI do three things. First, it makes a table that shows the extent to which these, the, the page itself aligned with the, the visitor's emotional triggers, uh, the way that it the extent to which w- it had clarity around their information needs. Uh, it makes suggestions for improvement. Then it makes the color-coded heat map matrix that's mostly just useful for meetings. it shows like, or red, yellow, green to see, like, if you missed something. But then at the bottom, it will make for you a list of missed opportunities. So it's gonna say, like, "Your persona cared a lot about this." Uh, I just did one, uh, a, a different call earlier today. Uh, this is a company where they make stuff that has to go live at a certain time. Zero out of five on the rating scale AI gave it for that. So-

Isar Meitis

Yeah

Andy Crestodina

screenshot, persona, which we already made, persona alignment prompt. It comes back with a s- literally a score. And Isar, I'll make this a question. I'm Do you agree? I'm not looking for specific pass, fail, yes, no. Give me a rating scale so I can judge myself Do you do stuff like that? Yeah,

Isar Meitis

yeah, I do. so very interesting. So what, what you don't see on the screen is that Andy has, uh, like the persona need as a category, then a score between zero and five, and then the explanation or the comments on what to change on that page in order to get it right. and what I do, and it's very similar approach, I very rarely go to the pass-fail. I go for a range, and I always ask for a recommendation and a justification. Mm-hmm. So I always say, "Okay, tell me what the score is, tell me what you recommend out of three different options, and then tell me why you recommend this option versus other options." Because then I can agree or disagree with the outcome based on what was the reason, based on like, well, I, I don't know why I picked one versus the other. So now when I ask for all these things, and I do this almost every single time with the AI, and actually what I work mostly in the Claude universe, so it's built into my claude.md, basically the rules on how the AI engages with me. Mm-hmm. So it does it all the time for everything I ask for. It literally gives me several different options, and then it tells me which one it thinks is the right way to go, and it tells me why it thinks it's the right way to go. And if I don't have time, I just say, "Yeah, go with your recommendation," which would have been the default- Mm-hmm if you just don't do this. But then in many, many cases, I would say more than 50%, I either have a follow-up question like, "Okay, but what about this? What about that?" Because now I know the justification and I know it's missing something. Or I think differently because of whatever reason, literally more than 50% of the times, which means if I would have just let the AI run, it would have done something that is not optimized.

Andy Crestodina

I love that. I think that's a great way to use AI is to, y- have it give you things in a way that y- you still need to think about, look closely at, evaluate, judge. You want its rationale. I love when it does that, justification or rationale as a column, and it tells you, like, how- Yep you know, why it scored it a certain way. Uh, but there, there will be things that you as the marketer know better than the AI. You've ridden shotgun on sales calls. you know the target audience very well, or you know your brand or, you know, it missed something for good reason or, for whatever reas- I mean, it's, it's, it's common, you know, for me to dismiss huge, huge sets of recommendations like-

Isar Meitis

Yeah

Andy Crestodina

"Nah, not what I'm doing today. Thanks, though." Yeah. uh, b- but I find this, and you can see over here on the right these, The rest of this chart then shows you specific, ideas for things to try. You can think of these as hypotheses, testable hypotheses for areas of the change. if there's more than are easy to consume for you, you can have AI prioritize this in a table. That table could have columns for level of effort and likelihood of impact, which is basically how you would prioritize any conversion improvement, right? Is this easy or hard to do? D- does this affect a large or small percentage of visitors and, how likely is the impact? So that, that is, um, uh, uh, you know, to go from the AI generated insights to the action that drive outcomes. These insights themselves don't make a difference yet. Um-

Isar Meitis

Yeah. I think another interesting thing in, in all your outputs is they're always in a table, so it's very- Mm-hmm easy to understand what's going on while not having to look at a very, very long, you know, document that's like, oh my God, I'm not even gonna read this. Mm-hmm. So if you have a table, and especially if you prioritize the table, kind of like, uh, priority one, priority two, priority three, and in priority one there are four lines, each one with six columns with exactly here's the section you need to change, here's why you need to change it, here's what you probably want to test, here's the potential outcome, you're gonna read these four sections- Mm-hmm with 12 different or whatever, 18 different boxes, and you're gonna try whatever it says versus you're gonna get a 12-page document like, okay, I don't have t- time to read this right now. So I think the format of the output makes a very big difference in how much action you will actually take.

Andy Crestodina

Yeah. I, it's, uh, it's like analytics. the report N- no reports affect marketing outcomes. Reports themselves don't affect anything. You have to take an action on it. Yeah. and a huge problem in digital marketing, I think, is that there's just so many things the marketer can do in a given day. just add up the number of things that you could do today as a marketer, it's, like, a lot. So- Yeah uh, prioritized actions, I think that's, uh, I'm glad you highlighted that because, if you had... Ask yourself this, like, if you had four hours this month to do marketing, what would you do with that time? Time boxed to four hours. That's it. What would you do? I am biased because I've seen the impact so many times, and our agency does nothing but, build and improve websites. I think this is it. I think this is what I would do. I would do persona gap analysis on the homepage, the above the fold content on the homepage, and just see, like, is Are you sending people to, like, a super weird message that does, that says, speaks nothing to what they're looking for? Very common

Isar Meitis

that's awesome.

Andy Crestodina

So past that, yeah, there's all kinds of other types of persona and prompts. I started to mention these. when we build persona generators as custom GPTs or Claude projects, they include many more things, like a how-- a prompt about how they make decisions. Are they methodical? Are they emotional? Are they spontaneous? Are they deliberate? It'll make like a two-by-two quadrant on that. Who else is in the buying committee? What is their stance to this deal? What questions must they have answered before they become a leader or sign a contract? What objections do you have to handle before they become a leader to sign or sign a contract? What supportive evidence best supports your answers and evidence or s- answers and, um, objections? and again, like what their life is like. So these become very long documents. Let's say today it'd be a .md file that has... Well, I'm not, I'm not hitting the context window limit much in Claude, but, uh, I'm still keeping these as like a separate external file where, uh, they get updated sometimes. Uh, I like them in separate places because if I want to make this a Gemini Gem, takes me two minutes. You know, you can test these things in different AIs. I know that some people are keeping all of their prompts now in GitHub and just calling them from their model of choice. But regardless, you're gonna train your assistant, custom GPT, Gemini Gem, Copilot agent or Claude project, on this massive set of persona prompts to create these beautiful persona, uh, type reports that go far beyond the little prompt we started with. Uh, and, and then, uh, you have a tool that will just bang these out and they're beautiful, and they have exquisite detail on all the things that, you know, the reasons why people do and don't make decisions. Early stage, mid-stage, late stage questions, objections, you know, I literally am making personas like twice a day now. It's really how I get ready for a meeting. Uh, I've got a folder, like this growing folder where I just like sometimes, literally several times a day I've generated personas. I've done two today so far. Isar, while we have time, I want to share one other big idea. Uh- Yeah. I

Isar Meitis

w- I, I want to talk about this for a minute. Uh- Sure and again, I, I'm sure that people that are listening to this for the first time are gonna like, "Oh my God, that sounds like a lot of work." And it is a lot of work, but the truth is it's the right work. Meaning, going back to what you said, and again, I-- you, you said it better than I do. If, if you as a chief marketing officer will have four hours to change the results of your company- Mm-hmm that would be what you invest in. And I agree with you 100% because there is a decent chance That you can double the amount of relevant leads that you're gonna get by just doing this, and again, I'll quote you again, without doing anything else. Mm-hmm. No additional ads, no changes in marketing, no new, uh, posts on social, nothing. Just keep on doing what you're doing today. Just optimize the conversion of the traffic that's already coming to the website. And so let's assume researching Implementing, experimenting, and tweaking this will take you an entire week.

Andy Crestodina

Sure. Yeah.

Isar Meitis

That entire week might double your business without changing anything else. That's right. And so it sounds like a lot of work. And, and again, from a very personal perspective. All the stuff that is obvious to you, Andy, is very far from obvious to me. Yes, I've heard about it. I've, you know, ran companies. I had marketing teams. I did marketing roles myself back in the day. so I, I heard, but the level of detail that is obvious to you is not obvious to most people, but it is- Mm to AI. Maybe not at the level that Andy can do it- It is but it is obvious to AI. So if you say, "Okay-" That's right. here's what I wanna do. Let's walk step by step. I wanna go as deep as possible into every rabbit hole you want." And again, you spend an entire week in figuring this out. You might double your business- Mm-hmm from your existing traffic. It's mind-blowing

Andy Crestodina

it, and even if your site's well optimized, you know, it, even, uh, and it's not weird, a 5% lift, a 10% lift over the lifespan of a website-

Isar Meitis

Yeah

Andy Crestodina

it, terrible, bad experiences and, and high friction w- user flows, you can't I've s- I've seen them double, with a week's worth of work. But even a 10% lift to your conversion rate, just imagine. Uh, there's lots of companies now that are having greater lead flow with less traffic. AI's taking my traffic. Don't worry, we're fine. Yeah. Uh, it Yeah, SEO is so famous, but CRO is so unknown. If you want some urgency around this, log into analytics if it's the only thing you do. Go to the real-time reports. There are people on these pages right now, today- Yeah as you're listening to this show. There are people on these pages right now. What aren't they finding? What question did you fail to answer? What objection did you fail to address? What claim did you fail to support with evidence? Those are fixable in, just by logging into your CMS. even if you gotta get approval on the changes, it might take a, hopefully not more than a week. But our point here today is that they're exposable in minutes. you can see. Like, these reports will show you where the gaps are. Uh, this is, exactly, you know, the This is the lowest hanging fruit in digital because if your visitor cared a lot about X and you forgot to mention X, uh, guess what? Every webpage has a back button. You can never overstate how competitive the internet is. that's a UX feature you cannot remove. Yeah. Your website has a back button, and wherever the traffic source was, there's 100 other companies that are right in that mix. And, and, and, uh, uh, I wish people could see, I wish more people could watch session recordings and just see how fast the mouse moves, and look at analytics and see how short the visits sometimes are. Just how urgent, how hard to capture and then keep attention. how-

Isar Meitis

Yeah, that's the other thing, by the way. That's also very easy to look at. That's what I send people to Google. Yeah. I say, "Just look on time on page." Time on page. Sure. Average time on page, two seconds. I'm like, "What? How can it be two..." there's so I, I've worked so hard to build this page. How can the average time on this page could be What did somebody learn in two seconds? Mm-hmm. But that's the average. That means there's people that spend less time than that on your page. Yeah. And so it's exactly these things that once you start understanding that And I love the way you said it. there's people on every page of your website, unless you're a tiny page,

Andy Crestodina

Yeah

Isar Meitis

all the time Right now,

Andy Crestodina

flowing through. What are

Isar Meitis

they doing? Yeah.

Andy Crestodina

They're flowing through.

Isar Meitis

Yeah. What's happening? I love that.

Andy Crestodina

What aren't

Isar Meitis

they doing? Yeah. You, you said you have another cool thing to add, so what is it? I'm really curious.

Andy Crestodina

Yeah. uh, I, I've been Uh, this is after several years of experiments and this, like, big unlock. Uh, so everything w- we've done so far, we've leaned on AI, and I'm gonna agree with you, Isar. it's a better conversion optimizer than me. It's read one million times more research studies than I have. Uh, it's excellent at that. But one thing it doesn't know is my specific audience, and for that buyer, which is the voice of the customer, VOC. If you have the voice of customer that you can use to stress test a persona, the quality of the insights in that persona Uh, be-become much greater. Now, if it'll sound obvious in a second if you haven't heard of this or thought of it yet, but where can you find a lot of voice of customer? Where can you get the language that your buyers use when they are thinking about your category, specifically your brand? The answer, you know what I'm gonna say, don't you? I

Isar Meitis

do.

Andy Crestodina

it's in your call recordings.

Isar Meitis

Yeah.

Andy Crestodina

AI and COVID were perfectly timed because the- uh, s- we are all on virtual calls. I was on a call, this isn't a joke, I was on a call earlier today with more note takers than people.

Isar Meitis

It happened, to me today as well. It actually flipped after about five minutes, but in the first five minutes there were like six or seven note takers and the three of us, and then the rest of the people joined as well.

Andy Crestodina

Yeah. Uh, if, if you watch sales call recordings, they often start with, "Oh, sorry, my note taker's here. Do we need that one? How many? We don't need all these. Let's r- take some out." Like, that's how common call recordings are. Okay, so I'm gonna show you a manual version of this. I'm using Fathom. You can choose Run a Venture, pick whatever note taker you like. Uh, great. Tunnel in, extract, process. But, uh, even without that, I think that, a low-tech way to get this value is simply go to the call, go to the transcript, copy the transcript, move that into a big document, save that document down as as a markdown file, give that markdown file to AI, tell it to clean it up because you're gonna use this in several ways. Remove all the, the icebreaking conversation, remove all the schedule next steps conversation. Uh, you might even, if you're just focused on the audience and you're doing marketing and improving lead gen, you might actually have it remove all the m- the sales rep's language as well, and then you can fit more customer language into a smaller file. Now, you might wanna merge these into one big markdown file. You might wanna put them all into a Claude project that becomes your sales call analyzer. Uh, you're gonna be... Y- you might use this thing in many ways, you know, for- forever after. Uh, you might update it frequently if you make a change to your sales calls, or you might create a cadence under which, uh... I know a guy who built it so that granola automatically goes into a markdown file that automatically updates the persona continuously based on, uh, a waiting system of recency and, you know, the, the language in the call. So if you have a bunch of sales calls in a markdown file, in a Claude project or custom GPT, you can give your persona to that assistant and ask it to make improvements to that or evaluate that persona against the actual voice of customer What you get back after that is a persona that has, uh, actual, like the way that I build them, quotes from prospects sprinkled throughout the persona. that's pretty real. New insights that AI missed, right? It, AI joke is might as well stand for average information- because it summarizes the internet. This isn't w- now we're using first-party data. It's your own calls with your own prospects in their own moment of decision, describing in their own words their specific issues and problems and goals and hopes and dreams and fears. You can imagine, right? So the stress-tested AI-generated persona, th- vetted against, in my case, you know, 115 sales calls, it makes some changes. It's a little different. It ch- it added some questions that prospects have. Those become website content that will improve conversion rates. It added, uh, objections that they had that ha- that should be addressed in their web experience as visitors before they'll, before they're, we can expect them to become a lead. So yeah, my, my little thesis here is that, you know, of all the ways that we can maximize the empathy, the degree to which our personas are empathetic, and the quality of the responses when we use those personas to get conversion insights, no persona, brand forward, clever over clear, the worst way to write a webpage, right? It's like, who has two thumbs and thinks they're great? We love us. Uh, next would be the sales team, which I think is not as good maybe, Isar. I'm gonna kind of agree, right? Like, the sales team doesn't think about marketing. They don't remember anything but their last call. Uh, you know, they're, they're biased toward their own views. They can't give you a report that shows these are the top 15 questions and what percentage of- Hmm prospects ask this question. So yeah, you either th- you know, AI personas are next, but the pressure-tested or stress-tested AI personas, uh, against the sales calls, probably one of the strongest, marketing tools in the tool belt that I can imagine because, you could use that to test your ads. You could use that to test your, uh, your, you know, your emails, your cadence, your decks. run, uh, give that pers- that stress-tested persona against a detailed AI audit prompt with your pitch deck What's missing from your pitch deck? Yeah. This goes past marketing. And it's one thing I love about AI is it doesn't really draw lines. Like, past marketing directly into sales. Great. It's just outcome focused. It doesn't have those biases that humans have of like, "These are the edges of my job. I stop here," you know? It doesn't care. It's just trying to drive, um, revenue for your brand.

Isar Meitis

Amazing. Absolutely brilliant. I will say one last thing that going to strengthen your last point. So I don't write my proposals, right? So AI write all of my proposals. The way it writes all my... A- and I'll say something else. my proposals convert at a stupidly high rate. Now, part of it is because people have been listening to the podcast for a year and a half, and they know me, and they want me to come and work with them. But partially because they're very well written to exactly what the audience pain points are because I don't write them. So- going back to what you said, is there's a, I have a fully automated process after every prospect and/or client call. The AI gets... I use Fathom just like you, but it doesn't matter. Whichever call recording you're using. It goes through that and said- Mm-hmm did the person ask for a quote, proposal? Did Isar offer one? If it says yes, it goes and says, "Okay. What did the person say? What are their problems? How did Isar explain that it relates to them?" Goes and done online research about them. What else does this company do? Have they done any big things in recently? How does that tie up to what they said? Like it does all of the work that most people write proposals are too lazy to do, and then it writes the proposal in their language, the way they express their problems. So it's ex- Love it exactly everything you're saying. Only what you're saying is even more- Oh, right in the heart. You nailed it Well, no, what you're saying is even better- It's so good because you're saying do this on a much larger scale, not just for that one person- Sure but for anybody who comes through your website, which is freaking brilliant.

Andy Crestodina

Yeah. but, I mean, it's... Honestly, if you could have one thing, sales or marketing, you'd choose sales, right? High... So sales is the bottom of the bottom of the bottom of the funnel. Yeah, yeah. Using that other proposal is the ultimate Isar. I would never take anything away from what you just said. Uh- Oh, no. But

Isar Meitis

it's-

Andy Crestodina

But it, it's the same theme, right? Empathy. It's alignment. It's the words that they would use. It's p- what they care about described in the words they would use. It's, you know, they open your proposal, it's like they're looking at a mirror. You know? Yeah. That's the job. They open the webpage, you know, "This is reading my mind." Yeah. That's the job. So it's, if nothing else, I mean, listening to this show hopefully kind of disabuses some marketers of that idea that the website's about their brand. Yes, but no. It's really about the alignment between the brain of the visitor and, their confidence that they can, that choosing you won't embarrass them is sort of what it comes down to. Yeah.

Isar Meitis

yeah. Brilliant, Andy, as always. Uh, if people want to follow you, learn from you, work with you, hire you, what, what are the best ways to do that?

Andy Crestodina

Well, as I said, we do B2B lead gen websites. We fix, uh, uh, digital marketing problems by improving the foundation, and you can read all about that at orbitmedia.com. Uh, that's also where my blog is. Almost all of our posts these days include prompts. All of the prompts we talked about today are shared on our blog. But LinkedIn And events is how I connect with most people. So if you find me on LinkedIn, there's a blue button that says follow, just skip that. Look for a connect button and say, "Hey, saw you on Isar's show." and then, I don't know, uh, sync up with us on a travel schedule, dear listener, and we'll hang out with Isar in some random city.

Isar Meitis

Yes. We'll probably, whatever other next big conference, we'll probably both be speaking again, and that would be awesome. Uh- Yeah Andy, this was fantastic. Thank you so, so much for sharing from your experience and knowledge and skills, and, uh, it was amazing as and beyond what I expected.

Andy Crestodina

I enjoyed this, and I would never miss the chance to hang out with you. It's always good.

Isar Meitis

Thank you

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Isar Meitis

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