AI-Powered SEO & High-Impact Content Strategies for SaaS: Kelly Peters' Approach

Absolutely. Thanks so much for having me. Excited to be here.

Yeah, definitely. So I started out in media. Like you said, I started out as an NBC page. If anyone’s ever watched 30 Rock, I was like Kenneth. I found my way into places like CNBC, like you mentioned, and then all the way into tech, into SaaS specifically. And I think those early experiences really taught me two things. First off, that the most complex stories need to be watered down and they can be told in a compelling way. Whether that be the financial markets at CNBC or in the SaaS world talking about HR technology, for example. I also worked in e-commerce and had to understand how the different fabrics really equated to a consumer experience. And so just telling things in a way, even if they’re very technical that the audience can understand. I think that really taught me that across a few channels. And then just making sure that you really humanize things as much as possible. Authenticity always wins across all of those various different audiences and formats I just mentioned, like ultimately find the human element and that’s, what’s going to be most relatable and engaging.

Yeah, I would say two things. It’s the innovation combined with the impact. So at Jazz HR, for example, I was able to really hone what I just described, that skill of being able to take a complex technical concept and explain it in a simple, compelling, engaging way to an audience.
And that tomorrow I’ve really been able to combine that with something that really is making an impact in a meaningful way, which is weather intelligence, as you mentioned, and resilience. I think no shock to anyone that climate change is really having an increasing impact on weather on all of us right now. And so by being able to market something that really, I believe, is having a transformative impact on the globe that combination was just, I couldn’t pass it up. It’s a really exciting place to be.

Yeah, definitely. I think this comes back to the storytelling, like we talked about and you mentioned in the question even.From all of those experiences in media, for example, what it really came down to is the ability to tell a story in an interesting and compelling way. And so I think I’ve brought that to tomorrow and we’ve been able to use it on the brand side to really get people excited, even if it’s something that seems really technical and niche. So for example, we have satellites in space, which is really exciting. We have four right now, and when we launched our first satellites, probably could seem pretty pretty removed from the audience who we talk to, which is like enterprise businesses at times. And so we really thought, like, how can we make this exciting to them so it doesn’t seem so pie in the sky, technical, oh, cool, you have satellites, but what does that really mean for me? And so we decided to actually create a documentary that went more into the story behind the company and we talked to our founders and said, what made you found this company and how did that lead to us, setting a rocket off with satellites. And we really got to see the motivation behind it and the passion and we connected that back to the story. Yes, of the satellites being launched and what their eventual impact will be, but really focused on like the humans behind that big technical story.

Yeah, so we have fully embraced AI. We’re a really small team on the marketing front, especially there’s four of us plus our CMO. And our mission is huge. As I just mentioned, we have satellites, so like we are really lean and scrappy. And so we, I’d say, whenever this was a year ago at this point that GBT was really coming onto the market, we said, look, we need to not just slowly adopt this. We need to go all in and embrace this. And that’s exactly what we’ve done. We’ve really integrated AI into every function. Across the marketing ecosystem. So we use it all the way from content creation with LLMs like Claude and GPT email marketing segmentation, like understanding new TAMs and understanding our ICP and targeting within those areas. We use it for outbound. We’re exploring tools like Clay, if you’re familiar with that outbound sales tool. So truly all different facets of marketing. And then like more broadly, I’d say that. As a result of that work that we’ve done on the marketing side, we really are leading the charge within the organization to cross functionally bring AI to the other teams as well and say, Hey, look, this is what we’ve been able to do on the marketing side. Here’s how we could see you integrating it based on our success. We also use it in the product, which I can talk about as well, but just operationally, like on the marketing side, it’s really a core part of how we operate and we couldn’t take the big swings that we do without it.

Yeah, I would say twofold. So first off, it’s the positioning of our product. And this relates back to the AI, pardon me, AI question. It feels like right now there’s like a gold rush of sorts with AI tools, there’s this new one, buzzword, all it’s doing all these amazing things, but ultimately it’s only as good as the data and the input that it’s receiving. If you put garbage into an AI, garbage is going to come out of it.

Exactly. Exactly. So first off, like on the brand side, what’s really important for us is to be able to clearly communicate the value of the data set that we’re using. We’re the only company in the world with our exclusive data set because of those satellites, like I’ve mentioned, and that’s really core to our value and our brand positioning is just the fact that data is true. the only proprietary set in the world that’s pushing into our platform and delivering the value can’t be seen anywhere else. So that’s number one. And then secondarily, I would just go back to what I talked about with being a lean team. We can’t do everything that every other marketing organization can do because we’re so small. Like we, if we tried to do every traditional marketing channel perfectly. There’s just no way that we could compete. And so we know that. And so I think that we are willing to take these bigger swings to punch above our weight, like the documentary, for example. Maybe we’re not hitting every single traditional marketing channel in the perfect way, but what we are doing is going really creative and using AI to our advantage to move quickly with the day to day operations so that we can really be even more creative and strategic with those big plays like a documentary, for example.

Yes, it’s definitely technical. In fact, I’ve been here for three years and I still talk to our scientists sometimes my eyes are almost crossing. I’m like, guys, you got to water it down. So first off, yes, just acknowledging it’s very technical in nature. I think not to beat a dead horse, but it comes back to the human element. So really looking at it through the lens of someone who is non technical, like I mentioned, we’re targeting enterprises across all industries. So trying to tell the data story. At the real world human level. I’ll give you an example. We just launched a new set of satellites. It’s a brand new technology about two months ago. Now we’re looking at more video content and rather than just telling the story again of look at the rocket launching satellites are on there. I am going to seek out people are customers who are actually boots on the ground. Receiving the data already and how it’s impacting them. So we work with farmers in Kenya. I’m talking to someone in Kenya right now to see if we could film their story and understand. Hey that data and the eventual data from these new satellites.How are you using it for your crops? What are you seeing on your phone and in the platform and like really bringing it down to Earth to tell the stories in a digestible way for you or me or the average person on the street.

Yeah, so I’d say we’re in a unique space for SEO because from a volume perspective, people really aren’t Googling, weather technology, to be honest, because a lot of times businesses, it’s more of a change management and problem education.hurdle for us. People don’t know what they don’t know about the weather. They don’t even realize that there’s anything they can do to solve for it. So we really don’t have a lot of opportunity on the search side for people googling things like weather technology, weather software. So two things that we really have invested in. Number one, we do actually get a lot of volume for the term weather API.

So we have a software platform, but we also have an API, and there is a lot of volume for that, and it’s, fairly targeted, mid to bottom of funnel, it’s developers, we know what they’re looking for, we know our weather API product is good, so we do create some really valuable, more traditional SEO content, I would say, to target that keyword, that’s one, secondarily, we are discovering some more long tail keywords, per industry. So even though broadly people might not be searching for weather technology within aviation, for example, they are searching for de-icing and wind because if the wind blows and you’re de-icing a plane, that fluid is going everywhere, you’re wasting it. So it’s more like pain based, long tail scenarios that people are searching for. And we are always continuously uncovering those. And of course, honestly, we have great PR also. So on the brand side we, as long as we continue getting featured where we are, we’re seeing really good brand searches. So that’s good. Tactically, what we’re doing to support those different prongs I just mentioned On the site. I would say a few things. One. It’s just the typical site optimization stuff. We’re lean and we didn’t have a developer for a long time, to be honest in house. And so we finally do have one. And he’s really made sure that our site speed and back end SEO is in a place that needs to be. So that’s been huge for us. Also More recently, we’re exploring things like Reddit. We’re really dipping our toe into how the user generated content field there can help us. Perplexity pages, things like that. So again, we’re really embracing AI and seeing how that can support us for SEO. And then I’d say more than anything else, just continuing to lean into video.

I’ve referenced it a few times now that we really are heavy on the video projects, and that has certainly supported us. And SEO. So our YouTube channel, we’re really growing it and investing in it, pointing back to our site, doing all the linking that we should be doing, embedding those videos onto the site.And as we know with LLMs, like they like that as well, having more video embedded. It was a long winded answer to say there’s not a ton of search. We are really optimizing every touch point that we can when people are searching beyond branded.

So I can speak to both, with the same answer. It’s that we are such a small team. We can’t compete with the larger organizations who have these massive budgets that they can just throw at Google AdWords, for example. We just don’t have that as an option. And yeah, it goes back to us being really scrappy and being really creative.And trying to do what we can organically, coming up with a cool idea for a YouTube video, and really making it nice to drive more organic traffic on the SEO side, for example. So it’s just trying to really get scrappy and think big, and not be We have buy in top down, which I think is really key in all of this.So we aren’t scared to take risks and fail fast if we need to. Maybe we take an SEO tactic that we’ve seen work within a larger organization. You know what? We tried it. It’s not really working for us. We move. We keep moving, and leadership supports that as well. So moving quickly, taking big swings, failing fast, and keep iterating.

Yeah, I would say I keep talking about space, but it’s because it’s such a cool thing to me that we are doing it as a company and like actually sending rockets to space. I don’t think I ever thought that I’d be part of an organization doing that. And so that’s a campaign I always go back to is supporting our space. Telling the story of our space launches and the impact that they’re having. So I already talked about the first documentary. It was amazing because of the breadth of audience we were able to capture with it.First off, we’re a small team. We made a 30 minute documentary, like on paper that should not work. So that was really amazing just to be able to do it. But the reactions that we’ve got from it have been so validating in doing projects like this. Investors have seen it. Employees saw it. Prospective customers.

Regular existing customers. It’s been seen in over 82 countries. People at ABC News outlets from a PR perspective have reached out to us and told us that they’ve seen it. And now we’re working on a sequel for it. And to me, it just really goes to show that’s a project where we talked about the human side of something.It’s very technical. And it has a huge impact that we were able to distill down in a very creative way. And it got attention across audiences. It’s just really sums up how we work for me just in one campaign.

Yeah. So I’d say more traditional stack that you’d expect. We use HubSpot. We use Salesforce. We work in slack a lot. Definitely. Beyond that, on the AI side, like we are really actively consuming and embracing all of the new little AI tools.For example, I use, on the LLM side, a combination pretty much every day of GPT, CLOD, and then Gemini. I use them for different things. That’s like my base full all day, every day is, a good LLM to write content for me, write emails, things like that. On the video side, we use Runway, if you’re familiar with that tool for AI video. We also use something called LetterDrop for social and for SEO optimization. It’s a really cool tool. If you haven’t seen it before, definitely check it out. It helps us to optimize our blogs, but also do things like keyword monitoring. It’s allowing us on LinkedIn to surface relevant keywords and push that to Slack so that our sellers can then go do targeted outreach. So that’s been a big one for us. We also are actively testing out different AI chatbots. I think that’s a hot topic right now for good reason. There’s a million out there on the scene and you have to find the one that works for you. We’re using those those are the major ones, top of mind, but talk to me in a week and truly, it could be different because we consume them and test them out for us so quickly. 8gen, that’s another video, one that we’re using for AI avatars mid journey. So yeah, the whole AI ecosystem, we are picking and choosing and iterating and, coming back to this one. Okay. We’ll see how that progresses and revisit in six months, things like that. We’re always evolving.

Yeah, I would say it’s really about the white glove custom treatment. When you come into our platform, we are not just saying, good luck, here you go, set it up yourself. Each industry and organizations operations are so unique. And like I said before, this isn’t a platform that they’re typically, or a type of technology they’re typically used to in their operations. Most of the time they didn’t even know there’s anything they could do about weather. So they’re not familiar with how to. From a change management perspective, even think about digitizing their protocols or operations, bringing in other teams to look at it. And so we really are going with you custom and understanding. Your existing protocols, what do they look like? Let’s digitize those for you. Now, when it’s raining, what threshold impacts you the most? Is it, if it rains, X amount of inches per hour? Do you know what that is? Okay, let’s talk through it. What you’re describing, we think it would be this amount. Let’s set that up for you. And a lot of companies prefer to set it and forget it. We do all of the work I just explained to you and then the best thing they can do is just be alerted when they need to take a recommended action. So it really depends on the company though. Some prefer to have more hands on ability to go in and adjust those thresholds and fine tune them. It really depends. So bottom line is all about white glove, really custom because this is a field that, Impacts every area of an organization. And so we need to make sure that we’re really fine tuned to their unique setup. And that’s what we do. We take the time, whatever it takes to get them set up like that.

Yeah, so we, first off, look at our actual product data, understand how people are using the different features, where they’re going, where they’re maybe getting stuck, typical things that you’d expect on like the product usage side, we also have NPS, definitely, and then I’d say more than anything, we, on the marketing side get on calls a lot. So whether that be a customer call or an actual prospect call, we use Gong. We can listen in. I myself, just for the past couple of weeks, which is why it took us a while to meet, like I was pretty much in sales mode. I was at events. I was talking to existing customers. I was talking to prospective customers and understanding their pain. And so we get our hands dirty. We are in those conversations directly a lot of the time, and that allows us to understand right from the source. what their pain is, how we’re solving for it, what they may need more from us on. So we’re hearing it first hand a lot.

Yeah. So we really look at our teams, all the teams you just mentioned as one go to market team. I’d say that’s been a really important shift for us and actually other organizations. It sounds like from marketers I speak to feels like a real true go to market team is a thing. I can, I feel like after there were so many silos, just marketing, just sales. So we treat really like sales marketing, customer success. All is one go to market team. Every week we have one big meeting where we go into all of the leads, both on the existing growth side and new prospects. We talk to each individual rep. We understand what they need from us. They hear from us what we might need from them. We asked them about customer conversations. If we weren’t a part of them, they give us feedback. So that one big meeting honestly has been really impactful for us. And it’s more open forum. If we have information sharing, we’re really careful to do that on the right channels and not waste people’s time. But that is a time to really. come freely, brainstorm, ask for things, and that’s been huge for us. So just viewing it from the gate as one big team and then offering touch points to just speak freely and brainstorm and save the information sharing for asynchronous communication.

Yeah, I would say AI video tools. It feels like every day. In fact, just before this, I was reading about one are evolving and advancing so quickly and they’re getting scary good, like runway, for example you can now animate things. It’s pretty good. Hey, Jen, the AI avatars, we made an avatar of our CMO actually, and we can use it for ads. For example, I’m not saying I would put this on a a digital billboard or anything in Times Square, but like for the everyday today videos where you just, you need something just to fuel the content engine, we can make this now in 30 minutes, which before would have included an entire video shoot would have taken weeks. And so that in doing it also in a personalized way, we’re able to have him, for example, talk about a specific company. So Using another tool, we can analyze their earnings call, and then the video can specifically call out pains that they’ve talked about at their highest level in their organization. And so I think personalized video at scale, that’s what I see moving most quickly and I think is going to have a huge impact.

Ooh, I think so. Let’s take a sip of coffee. I think I am. Yeah.

failed campaign? Yeah. Oh, great question. I think the unexpected lesson I have learned is you don’t know what you don’t know. I did a campaign around the financial impact of weather. Great idea for a campaign. I went and spoke to CFOs and I learned very quickly that I don’t understand accounting, for example. Like they very quickly got into the weeds. And I needed to have had more research beforehand.

Oh, good question. Who’s my favorite marketer right now? Oh, this is hard. Oh, I don’t know. I could definitely say our CMO Dan Sligan. If you guys aren’t aware go check him out. He’s really good. He’s posting a lot about AI and the amazing stuff that we’re doing right now. Yeah. Oh, man, I’m totally blanking. I should have reviewed there are so many good ones right now. Neil Patel. I like Neil a lot. Who else am I following right now? Give me a second because I’m Oh, Brendan Hufford. If you’re not familiar, he’s really great.He does a lot of sass content marketing. Brendan Hufford. I’ll say that right now.

Oh, I get for one campaign. I really want to do some sort of in person brand activation. Because we’re, brainstorming digital things all day, every day, obviously, especially post COVID, all of us. But recently the events that I’ve been going to and the results we’ve gotten from them have really inspired me to try to do something for our brand in person. I’m not positive what that would be yet. Something around weather would be cool. There’s such a thing as like a weather box stay with me here. What it is like basically a it looks like a shipping container. You can go in it and it simulates weather. High winds, rain and so something around dropping that in the middle of a big city, getting people in there, filming it. There’s something there. So some sort of like big in person brand activation, I think would be really cool.

The most unusual place I’ve ever been?

Cool question. I interned in Singapore, and I think that Indonesia, broadly, is the most unusual place because it’s each little island is so different and so I’d say actually just Southeast Asia, generally, to me, is the most unusual.

It was in Indonesia it really, truly felt like. I was outside of the Western world. Of course I was, but Singapore, it’s really modern. You’re it feels a little bit New Yorkish to an extent. But in that region, once you’re outside of areas like Singapore, it was a total culture shock in the best possible way. People were so creative. The ideas and the innovation is amazing.

Oh, my last Gen AI prompt was around this is actually, I think a good tip if you don’t use it like this yet. I asked GPT to act as a HubSpot support expert because we’re having we’re working on a DNS.

CNAME issue right now of trying to put up a landing page, but connected to the website. And so I asked it to act like that. I trained it on some relevant HubSpot support articles and it gave me an answer. And now I don’t have to go bug our IT team. It was, it’s amazing. So that’s a tip. I do it a lot. Take the support docs of whatever the system is, feed it in, ask it to be a support rep, and then interact with it.

Absolutely. Thanks so much for having me. I had fun.