Kelly Cheng

I’ve completed 15+ Reddit AEO discovery audits, and there’s one pattern that keeps showing up, no matter the industry. ~75% of Reddit threads that rank in Google or get cited in AI-powered answers are evergreen. Not trending. Not fresh. Often 6+ months old with little to no recent engagement. That’s the part most teams miss. Search and answer engines don’t reward recency alone. They reward relevance, depth, and sustained value over time. This creates a tension for marketers: Reddit can influence AI-powered discovery, but it’s not a quick win channel. You don’t “drop in,” post once, and move on. If Reddit is part of your AEO strategy, you’re playing a long game. What this means in practice: 🧤 Engaging on Reddit to influence modern search requires long-term investment, not campaign thinking. 🌱 If a high-performing thread is too old to engage in, re-seed the conversation. I’ve seen refreshed threads outperform, and even replace, older evergreen ones. 🌲 Your best odds come from showing up early and often in the subreddits that matter. Today’s conversations are tomorrow’s evergreen sources. The real takeaway: Reddit isn’t a growth hack. It’s infrastructure for earned authority in AI-driven search. Curious how others are seeing this play out. What’s worked, what hasn’t, and where teams are getting stuck?

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Behind every great marketing team is a great agency partner (or several). As the CMO of Zappi, I hire agencies with the same care I hire an FTE for my team. Here's the reality most CMOs face: Your headcount is always going to be lean. Your budget is finite. Your internal team can't be experts at everything. And you need to move fast. This is where agencies become critical. They give you: ▶ Flexibility you can't get with full-time hires ▶ Scale up for a launch, scale down after ▶ No long hiring cycles when you need to move quickly ▶ Specialized expertise your team doesn't have ▶ Deep knowledge in specific channels ▶ Cross-industry perspective from working with multiple clients ▶ Access to tools and tech you don't need to own ▶ Speed that changes everything ▶ Faster implementation than building in-house ▶ Teams ready to execute immediately ▶ No learning curve on new platforms or tactics The best agency relationships aren't transactional. They're partnerships. The agencies that understand your business. Know your customers. Challenge your thinking. Bring ideas, not just execution. At Zappi, our agency partners are essential. They enable us to punch above our weight. To compete with companies 10x our size. To launch campaigns that would take months to build internally. The mistake CMOs make? Treating agencies like order-takers instead of strategic partners. (By the way... same mistake when insights teams are treated this way, too!) The best CMOs I know: → Share business context deeply → Include agencies in planning early → Give them room to bring ideas → Build long-term relationships, not project-based transactions Your marketing results depend on your team AND your partners. Choose agencies that align with your values. That feel like an extension of your own team. Who embrace similar ways of thinking. And that stand to help you learn and make you even better. Shout out to Avery Akkineni and our partners at VaynerX VaynerMedia (pictured with the wonderful and hilarious Rob Mayhew). 💚 Follow me (Nataly Kelly) for more CMO advice. #CMO #marketing #agencies

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 https://lnkd.in/p/eUXffT6N Revenue leaders know - the most significant challenge today isn’t reach, it’s precision! That’s why, I’m excited to share the latest expansion of atlasIQ. With these new capabilities, sales and marketing teams can now: - See exactly which accounts in their TAL are evaluating solutions - Identify who on the buying team is engaging and what content is driving decisions - Align go-to-market execution to superior intelligence that outperforms generic intent providers This is the kind of advantage marketing and sales teams need to drive pipeline efficiency, deal velocity, and higher win rates. Jeffrey Rokuskie, Romano DiToro Ben Luck Chris Vriavas Jim Riesenbach Jim KellyBen Lefkowitz Anna Eliot Michael McGoldrick Marty Fettig Anthony Iafolla Damien Charles Andy Gram Robert Karpovich Erin Neilan Kathleen McKnight Carolina Barcellos Williams

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Programmatic has never been just a line item on a media plan. It is the engine. When programmatic and content syndication actually work together, something shifts. Buying groups see you more than once. They recognize you. They trust you. And they raise their hands faster. At LeadSwell, we see it all the time. It is not about squeezing one more click out of a single contact. It is about surrounding the right accounts, warming them thoughtfully, and then capturing real intent when it shows up. Revenue teams do not need more noise. They need signals they can act on. They need pipeline they can forecast without crossing their fingers. Build the system. Align the motion. Let the revenue follow. #Programmatic #B2BMarketing #LeadSwell

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User-generated content isn’t a luxury for enterprise brands anymore. It’s a core visibility requirement. Google and AI search engines are hungry for "first-hand experience." But most teams think they need a massive community department to make UGC work at scale. You don’t. You need a repeatable framework. By focusing on expert-led UGC and technical structured data, you can operationalize trust without draining your resources. Stop waiting for a perfect community. Build the system that captures it instead. Want to know how? Check the link in the comments.

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It's crazy to me that brands spending millions of dollars per month solely optimize budgets based on user-based attribution, the most flawed and gameable metric possible. I've seen countless setups where clients will put 5 or 6 different adtech vendors on a plan and optimize solely based on who's driving the lowest trackable CPA. That is the most broken way to optimize. It favors whoever just sits at the bottom of the funnel waiting for a layup. Unfortunately, this isn't basketball, and layups don't add value. The ones holding budgets, measuring success in this way need to have a come-to-Jesus moment, talk to their vendors, really understand how their tech works, analyze their trackable CPAs directionally, run additional tests like incrementality, MMM, or some other form of validation other than last touch wins all the budget. This setup is so common it's led to the internet we have today, massive ID fraud and congested web pages to serve that very competition.

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Measured is proving that consistent incrementality testing is the competitive advantage in modern retail. Their new analysis shows 5 proven strategies, including how PMax with brand exclusions is driving a 25%+ increase in incremental ROAS. Don't guess—test and measure. Great read → https://goo.gle/3JVJCRf

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Here's a stat that might surprise you: Most businesses are making critical decisions with only 20% of their available data. I see this pattern everywhere - teams drowning in scattered information across different tools, platforms, and conversations. Your customer insights are trapped in help desk tickets. Intent signals are buried in analytics dashboards. Behaviour patterns are spread across a dozen different systems. The frustrating part? All that data could be telling a complete story about your customers and driving smarter growth decisions. That's exactly why we're diving deep into this challenge on September 24th. We're hosting a live product tour showcasing the major launches from Fall 2025 Spotlight - specifically how to bring structured and unstructured data together across your entire organisation. We'll be walking through real product demonstrations plus a live Q&A with our product experts. September 24th at 2PM BST | 3PM CET | 9AM ET → Registration link in the comments. Can't make it live? Register anyway - we'll send you the recording!

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💥 A sizzling agentic AI acquisition -- this one called Qualified -- on top of a recent spree tells us what Salesforce is building for #Agentic AI. it's ambitious: 👉 *Qualified* is a B2B lead management tool that turns site visits (and phone calls) into Agent conversations, back and forth, answering questions, booking meetings. It's grounded in CRM if you've seen the visitor before - past interactions, firmographics, etc. so the messaging is targeted to the company, user, role and product interest. Qualified is a major acquisition compared to the others (except Informatica and Own Company, which were more about data integrity) ... founded in 2018 by former Salesforce execs w/ $163M in funding, incl. from Salesforce Ventures. So what does it bring to Agentforce? A person who uses both Qualified and AF said: "Qualified is like an Agentforce 'light' optimized for sales and marketing ..." Easier to deploy, more narrowly focused. so it can be turned in a 24/7 SDR to capture leads while Agentforce does everything else like reanimating ghosts. It has an AI SDR Agent called Piper (as in Pied I assume) that captures and nurtures leads using web chat, 2-way email; and text, voice, video on the site itself. It was always integrated w/ Salesforce so it's a natural fit. What about the other Agentic AI acquisitions? Here's why they go: 👉 Spindle AI - models different scenarios, predicts what will happen, and recommends better scenarios. it uses what's called a neuro-symbolic approach to quickly build and improve impact forecasts for things like pricing & packaging changes, sales mix, etc. 👉 Apromore from Salesforce - also provides "process intelligence" simulating and optimizing processes. this is designed more to provide real-time view of actual business processes in action (like a BI command center) that can help identify opportunities for automation (via #Agentforce) and impact on KPIs 👉 Regrello - can be used to actually create the automations identified above. so it's kind of like Robotic Process Automation (#RPA) for the Age of Agentic AI (AAA). its founder said Regrello's goal is to "eliminate the friction" 👉 Wail - meanwhile, you can improve all your Agents and processes with better SQL, right? Wail builds a "semantic layer" of enterprise metadata so it gets connections and governance rules; then uses this to let users describe what they want in natural language, turning it into SQL, knowing where the data sits, its connections, who can use it. 👉 Convergence AI practical spin, this can be called an "adaptive system" that helps AI agents do things that humans do in real (digital) life. things humans do well but bots don't like handle pop-ups, weird interactions, errors, site changes. 👉 Zoomin - and behind the scenes, Zoomin makes unstructured data available from manuals, articles, APIs etc. to provide accurate and complete product info. (it doesn't have to be product info but that's their focus.)

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B2B marketers are shifting their investments to where they see real impact. According to Factors.ai new LinkedIn Benchmark Report, @LinkedIn ad spend grew by 31.7% across surveyed customers, far outpacing Google's 6% growth. The data reveals a strong move toward platforms delivering more targeted, valuable engagement. https://lnkd.in/gV5PC2r2 #B2BMarketing #AdSpend #DigitalMarketing #LinkedIn

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The Death of the "Granular" Performance Marketer 🪦 Stop micro-managing your campaigns. You're killing your ROI. 🛑 If your Google and Meta accounts still look like a patchwork quilt of 50+ hyper-segmented ad sets and "exact match" silos, you aren't being "thorough." You’re being an obstacle to your own growth. The era of the "PPC Plumber" is over. We have entered the era of The Aggregator. Both Google and Meta have made their stance clear: Aggregation is the new best practice. Why? Because AI needs data volume to breathe. When you slice your budget into 100 tiny segments, you starve the machine. Here is the new 2026 performance playbook for those who want to lead the industry: 1. From Granularity to Aggregation 📉➡️📈 Stop trying to out-think the algorithm on "who" sees the ad. Consolidate your structures. Use Broad Match (Google) and Advantage+ (Meta). By aggregating your conversion data, you give the AI the statistical significance it needs to find your next customer at the lowest possible CPA. 2. Creative IS the New Targeting 🎨 In a world of broad audiences, your creative does the heavy lifting of filtration. The old way: Targeting "Men, 25-34, interested in hiking." The new way: Using a video that speaks so specifically to a hiker’s pain points that the AI learns who to target based on who stops the scroll. Your job is no longer to find the audience. Your job is to attract them. 3. Feed the Beast (Signal over Setup) 🤖 The most successful marketers in 2026 aren't the ones with the best manual bid adjustments. They are the ones with the best first-party data signals. If you feed the AI high-quality conversion data, it will work for you. If you feed it junk, it will scale junk. The Bottom Line: Shift your time away from "pulling levers" and toward Creative Strategy and Data Integrity. That is where the alpha is found today. Are you still holding onto granular control, or have you fully embraced the "Power of the Machine"? Let's debate in the comments. 👇 #PerformanceMarketing #GoogleAds #MetaAds #AI #GrowthMarketing #DigitalAdvertising #CreativeStrategy

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Interesting to see the gaps in priorities between brands and agencies. It seems that brands choose to retain the core work of their brand marketing in-house while tasking agencies to handle performance related activities.

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