996 Vivienne Wagner:

Wings of Inspired Business Podcast EP996 – Host Melinda Wittstock Interviews Vivienne Wagner

Melinda Wittstock:

Coming up on Wings of Inspired Business:

Vivienne Wagner:

I won’t say I fired my dermatologist, but I just took skincare advice from AI from ChatGPT. I had a sensitivity to a product that I had been using for years, and I couldn’t figure out what is happening. I took it to AI and said, give me a list of the ingredients now give me a list of ingredients that are known irritants. Now give me a list of ingredients that might counteract poorly with each other. I didn’t go searching for something per se. I went with a specific question for the detective. It encouraged me to stop using all of my existing products that I’d used for years. And I argued with it, and it was like, just because it’s chemicals doesn’t mean that it’s bad for your skin or this formulation. And just because it’s natural doesn’t mean you won’t have sensitivity to it. And I said, okay, fine. I from ChatGPT clicked the link to the product it gave me, which I had never heard of this product before, and I purchased it based on what ChatGPT told me to do.

Melinda Wittstock:

Vivienne Wagner’s conversation with ChatGPT gave her more than the perfect $10 cleanser; her interrogation, as it were, tells a powerful story of how people are now finding their ideal products and services, and it’s upending some – but not all – the established rules of what we know as SEO.  Bottom line, people are searching for solutions not products, so today Vivienne, who runs the boutique digital marketing agency Houndstooth Media Group, shares all the best practices for how to get discovered in AI conversations.

Melinda Wittstock:

Hi, I’m Melinda Wittstock and welcome to Wings of Inspired Business, where we share the inspiring entrepreneurial journeys, epiphanies, and practical advice from successful female founders … so you have everything you need at your fingertips to build the business and life of your dreams. I believe in paying it forward, so as a five-time serial entrepreneur, I started this podcast almost 10 years ago to catalyze an ecosystem where women entrepreneurs mentor, promote, buy from, and invest in each other. Because together we’re stronger, and we all soar higher when we fly together and lift as we climb. Please take a moment, hit subscribe so you never miss an episode, tell your friends and colleagues, and we appreciate it when you help this wisdom get discovered with a 5-star rating and review. 

Melinda Wittstock:

Today we meet an inspiring entrepreneur who helps mid-sized businesses turn their websites into revenue-driving assets through strategic SEO and AI-driven optimization. 

Vivienne Wagner is the Founder and CEO of Houndstooth Media Group, a boutique digital marketing agency navigating the rapidly evolving landscape of marketing in the era of artificial intelligence. 

Melinda Wittstock:

AI is fundamentally transforming how entrepreneurs are discovered by their ideal customers. While many of the rules of traditional SEO still apply, consumers are now increasingly turning to AI for research to help them solve specific problems, and it’s vital for brands and businesses to show up in those chatbot conversations. Vivienne says AI now acts like a “personal referral”—recommending solutions based on complex data and context rather than simply listing search results.

Melinda Wittstock:

So, how to show up on Claude, Gemini or ChatGPT? It’s a toolkit that encompasses everything from nuanced website copy, focusing on specific solutions for specific people and keyword-rich image file naming to leveraging FAQs and author bios to establish authority. Vivienne says it is vital to establish organic discoverability, and avoiding reliance on “rented” social media audiences, and tailoring content to genuinely reflect customer pain points and needs as revealed by AI-powered research. It’s a strategy that has the benefit of reducing reliance on paid ad spend, and increasing qualified website traffic. Through her SEO & AI Optimization Audit, she helps companies uncover missed opportunities, identify weaknesses, and build a clear roadmap for competing in today’s evolving search landscape.

Melinda Wittstock:

Let’s put on our wings with the inspiring Vivienne Wagner.

[INTERVIEW]

Melinda Wittstock:

Vivienne, welcome to Wings.

Vivienne Wagner:

Melinda, thank you so much for having me.

Melinda Wittstock:

I am so excited to talk to you because you’re right on point about how AI is really changing everything about, you know, marketing, how our vision as entrepreneurs, how our solutions actually get discovered by the world, and it’s changing really fast. I know you’re doing a lot of webinars on this right now. What are the big changes that people are mostly missing?

Vivienne Wagner:

Well, one of the changes that they’re mostly missing is that AI has really become the new personal referral. And if they take just a hot second to think about how they’re searching for things online and then connect the dots that their customers are doing the same thing, it gives them some clarity, and they know how to position themselves so that they get found. And then recommended. That to me is the number one thing that people need to do, is recognize that it’s changed that much.

Melinda Wittstock:

Exactly. Let’s keep it really simple. If you’ve used Google all these, you know, couple decades and you search for something and it’s going to give you that AI summary now, at the top of it, right? So, if the AI isn’t really indexing your website, you can get missed in that this. So, like, SEO has really changed.

Vivienne Wagner:

Absolutely. I’m an SEO expert. This is one of my favorite topics. And actually, Google recently released a core update that said, stop trying to figure out GEO and AEO and AIO. And Old McDonald had a farm with all of the EOs.

Vivienne Wagner:

It said SEO foundations are still what is the primary concern here. And because remember that AI summary that you mentioned, AI does not pull its answers out of thin air. It is leveraging websites and information that have a really good SEO foundation so that they’re found in the first place. So, when we talk about Googling things, what I tell my clients when I’m kind of breaking this down for them is it’s really helpful to think of Google like a librarian. You can Google something and that librarian is going to point you to a bookshelf with several different titles and expects you to go read them yourself. Whereas the AI is like a detective who’s going to read those books on your behalf and then bring you this sort of singular answer, and then it turns into a conversation, and then suddenly you’re getting recommendations from AI. That’s why I say it’s the new personal referral. And when we think about how have we been searching for things lately, that starts to ring true.

Vivienne Wagner:

Maybe some of us aren’t even starting at Google. Maybe we go directly to CRO, to cloud or to ChatGPT increasingly.

Melinda Wittstock:

Because it’s much more efficient. Like I go into Claude or I go into Gemini or like whatever I’m using and, and it’ll just do a much more comprehensive and depending on how you prompt it, you just get better results. 

Vivienne Wagner:

It is, but what’s important, what you just said, it’s how you prompt it. Keep in mind it now prompts you.

Melinda Wittstock:

Right.

Vivienne Wagner:

So, like, for example, let’s tell you a quick story here. I basically just, you know, I won’t say I fired my dermatologist, but I just took skincare advice from AI from ChatGPT. I had a sensitivity to a product that I had been using for years, and I couldn’t figure out what is happening. Long story short, I introduced two other new products that didn’t interact nicely with my existing product and therefore none of my products were working for me. It was making me have like a rash and hives on my face. And I’m like, I can’t have this. I took it to AI and said, here’s the products I was using. Give me a list of the ingredients now give me a list of ingredients that are known irritants.

Vivienne Wagner:

Now give me a list of ingredients that might counteract poorly with each other. And so, it started as a conversation, okay, so that’s the important, like I’m trying to figure something out. I didn’t go searching for something per se. I went with a specific question for the detective. And long story short, it encouraged me to stop using all of my existing products that I’d used for years. And I got in the habit of going, well, I saw this product, couldn’t this work? It would say yes or it would say no. And then I brought it a product, and it said, no, you can’t use that. And I argued with it.

Vivienne Wagner:

I said, why not? Why can’t I use that? Look at all these natural ingredients. Look at, you know, I don’t want to, I don’t want to use chemicals. And it gave me a cleanser that would look like a $10 drugstore dime store cleanser. I’m like, I’m not going to put that on my face. I argued with AI about it and it pushed back Melinda it was like, just because it’s chemicals doesn’t mean that it’s bad for your skin or this formulation. And just because it’s natural doesn’t mean you won’t have sensitivity to it. And I said, okay, fine. I from ChatGPT clicked the link to the product it gave me, which I had never heard of this product before, and I purchased it based on what ChatGPT told me to do.

Vivienne Wagner:

Guess what? It arrived. It was great. That is my new cleanser. Now, how did that happen? That would not have happened a year ago where I took the advice of a machine that told me to buy a $10 cleanser and it would solve my problems. But it did and I did. And so here we are. And that for me is this big lesson of, you need to make sure that AI platforms not only know who you are and can see you, they have enough information about you and know who you are so that they recommend you to the people who need you.

Melinda Wittstock:

Right. So, this is more than the crapshoot of just the promotion of, like, being at the top of the rankings. It’s like, how credible is your product?

Vivienne Wagner:

Exactly. And again, I’ve never heard of this product. I never would have googled this product by name. Somewhere in their product description or on their social media or somewhere, it made it really clear that this is for people who have skin sensitivities of some kind. Something happened. It’s an allergic reaction or some chronic condition or somewhere in there. This company had that much context and that much nuance so that AI could pair me, their ideal customer, with their product that worked for me.

Melinda Wittstock:

Right.

Vivienne Wagner:

That’s the context and nuance that people are missing.

Melinda Wittstock:

So, from a website perspective, then, say, take any product. It means being quite radically transparent about what you’re doing. Like, not just marketing bromides. Right?

Vivienne Wagner:

Right. But so like, we’ve worked with like medical spa people. I’m like, okay, so who are you trying to target? Oh, we work with anyone who has skin. That is not true. That is too broad. Who’s your ideal customer? Who needs you? And so, the more clear that a business owner is on the audience that they’re trying to reach, the better off they’re going to be in the search results. Because who wants to waste their marketing dollars and energy attracting people who aren’t a right fit for your business? That’s a waste. It’s much better to really have your messaging and position in the market clear.

Vivienne Wagner:

Because like Google, at the end of the day, this is SEO ready. Three things. Who are you? What do you do? And who is your ideal customer? Who needs you? If it’s clear on your website that those are the three things that you need, that’s where you get to start sort of backfilling with the nuance. That’s where you get to say, you know where for people who suddenly have an allergic reaction to all of the products they used for years, like whatever that looks like.

Melinda Wittstock:

Yeah. So if you say that website, we’re for these people, right? AI is going to pick that up. If you’re searching or if you’re having a conversation, it’s going to find that because you might go into Claude or Perplexity or whatever you’re using, ChatGPT and say, hey, I’m having this, you know, this, this issue. And so, any site that’s actually saying, yeah, we’re, we’re, we’re solving that is going to come up, right?

Vivienne Wagner:

I mean let’s, let’s be clear. You must first have a solid SEO foundation. Like you should have SEO 101 like dialed in on your website. But the next layer that gets you seen and recommended is where you have that nuance and that context. And by the way, that’s not limited to your website. AI is looking at what are you putting out on social media, what is your messaging there like? It can see all of that, it can also see what other people say about you and it’s forming opinions, it’s evaluating all of that and indexing it that way in a way that regular old Google search has never done.

Melinda Wittstock:

Right. So, this is interesting because approaching it from a different way around in the early conception of TailsTrails, my son’s business he’s recruited me into. This is a hyper local app that’s connecting people in real life community around their dogs. Using dogs to, you know, do what dogs do naturally, to connect human for real world belonging, right? So, one of the first things we did was a deep dive into AI to understand what people were saying about dog ownership and dog parks and like frustrations and whatnot through millions of Reddit conversations, right? YouTube comments, all of that stuff and, and really painting a deep picture of what was missing in the market, what people were really saying about it, who our ideal avatars would be. There are so many ways in which to use this. So, it helped to really constrain but also like laser focus, the marketing message, even down to the copy and how the copy hits the avatar like that.

Melinda Wittstock:

So much of that was AI research. And so, and what was fascinating about it was how quickly you could get a really good overview. Overview from like millions of Reddit comments.

Vivienne Wagner:

Yeah, no, you absolutely can, because you know why? Those are the humans asking the questions. Those are the humans having the discussion. And in the, in the end, we want to reach humans for our businesses. We’re not trying to reach AI as a customer; we’re trying to reach the humans. And the humans are talking about all of this. So, you need to know what the humans are saying. Right. And so, for you, for your business, like, what was missing from their experience as, you know, a dog owner, what wasn’t perfect, what do they wish they had more of? And it sounds like you have come in and you’re going to be able to launch something that helps to fulfill that.

Melinda Wittstock:

Well, one of the big surprising, just anecdotally, one of the big surprising things was how much dog owners were frustrated by lack of safety or like ill-matched dogs in unleashed dog parks, or like, like wanting to be able to control their experience better. Like.

Vivienne Wagner:

Yeah, right.

Melinda Wittstock:

And, and that ended up being like a huge part of this. How can we make sure that all connections made are really safe connections and that the, the dogs are matched? Right. So like, you don’t put a big dog with a little small dog that activates say, a prey instinct, or you don’t. Right. All these sorts of things. And it’s a crapshoot in say a dog park, but now it doesn’t have to be. And so, in terms of building the website around it now, it’s like hitting those things that people are actually talking about.

Melinda Wittstock:

So, to what, what extent does that then help, say, TailsTrails app get better discovered? Because it’s actually meeting people where they are in those Reddit conversations, for instance.

Vivienne Wagner:

Exactly. And, and I can see those Reddit conversations and Quora and you know, anything else, AI sees that. So, you can manage to get yourself mentioned in those, those threads. That’s actually really good for your visibility.

Melinda Wittstock:

Yeah, 100%. Okay, so if you’re starting this from, say, you don’t know much about SEO, and, and there’s been all this conversation about, oh, SEO’s dead, it’s now GEO or AI EO or whatever, right.

Vivienne Wagner:

Old McDonald had a farm.

Melinda Wittstock:

Right? Let’s just go back to the basics. So, what are the basics that everybody has to really have on their website? You know, they’re building a website right now, or they’re trying to figure out why they’re not getting the right customers.

Vivienne Wagner:

Right. So, there’s several SEO basics that I’m like, why don’t people know this yet? And then I just, I remember that I’m a nerd, slap myself in the face and like, bring this back. Google needs to read content that’s on your website. So, I’ll see websites where it’s just a really big, beautiful picture and some like, witty, clever tagline and that’s it on their homepage. And they’re trying to get people into the, the interior pages of their website based on that. That’s great for the customer, for the visitor who actually gets there and sees it like, oh, how clever. What interesting messaging, but it’s terrible. For discoverability, Google needs to read the content that’s on your website.

Vivienne Wagner:

Image things like image file names. You can’t put a photo on your site that’s called, you know, img123. That means nothing to Google and it’s a missed opportunity to give it more information. You should name all of your image files, something that’s keyword rich and relevant to the page. It’s helping to paint a picture of who you are, what you do, and who you want to be working with for Google. And that’s like SEO basic things. You need a title tag that’s like the, the COVID of a book that you’re, you know, the librarian’s going to read the title. You need an H1, which is the, the heading at the top of the page that’s actually on the page that, that people see.

Vivienne Wagner:

Because those two things are very important to Google. What’s the title? And then give me the table of contents here. What’s. What chapter are we reading on this page? Google has to have the opportunity to understand what you’re about. And that happens with written copy on your page. Image file names and like some of those basic things like title tags and H1s filled out. And I get, you know, that’s SEO 101, but it’s surprising to me how many people don’t do that. So, if, if there’s somebody who’s starting to build their own website, you need to ask your developer, what are you doing for SEO for me? And usually the developer will be like, I don’t know, what do you have? What’s your strategy? And I’ll implement it.

Vivienne Wagner:

But you’re usually expected to come to your developer with the strategy. So, AI as a productivity tool or operational. Take your website copy to AI to Claude or notebook or whatever you want. Here’s my website copy, here’s what I do, here’s who I’m trying to attract, here’s the services I have. This is my customer avatar. These are the pain points they have. Like, give it all of the information, then give it your copy that you’re planning to put on your website page by page and go, am I in alignment here? And I bet you dollars to donuts you’re going to see, oh, no, this is missing the mark. You’re missing information.

Vivienne Wagner:

There’s all sorts of things that is not going to be clear to Google. So, we think as a business owner, we know what we’re talking about and who we’re trying to attract, but if we’re in the box, we can’t see it.

Melinda Wittstock:

So that’s so interesting about the image names because if you’re building, say like TailsTrails, I’ll just use this as an example. It’s being built in Claude Code, right? And so, Claude Code is going to recommend things that are good for Claude Code, right? Like name this according to the section, right? Because it’s optimizing for development, but it’s not necessarily optimizing for SEO. 

Vivienne Wagner:

That is true.

Melinda Wittstock:

Right. And so, I’m just thinking, oh gosh, I’ve got to go back and look at all titles of all our images again.

Vivienne Wagner:

Right. Keyword research is very important, but not everybody has the, the time, the temperament or the bandwidth to do extensive keyword research, which is something that we, those keyword opportunities that show up simply because you started looking are often amazing. But if you go back to Claude and we see this all the time on websites that we’re doing an audit on for people, they’re like, nothing’s happening, we’re not getting seen. And I’ll look. And I’m like, well, these four pictures on your homepage are named top right, middle center, like it’s, it’s clear they were named as directions for the developer as to where to put them.

Melinda Wittstock:

Right, exactly. And that’s what. And that’s what Claude Code recommends, actually. Right. Because it’s optimizing for the build.

Vivienne Wagner:

But when you’re asking, you know, I’m not familiar with Claude Code, somebody like mentioned it to me the other day and I was like, so your Claude is giving you code, but what’s the platform you’re building on? Like, that code might not be helpful. So, like I won’t speak intelligently about Claude code, but what I would suggest is go to Claude or whatever you’re working on and say, what is the main focus of this page? And give me, like, if there’s four images, say, give me four image file names that are in support of what this page is about, this topic. I want them optimized for these images, optimized for search. What should we rename the file? Images. And they should be lowercase words separated by dashes, right?

Melinda Wittstock:

Yeah, yeah, yeah. 100% this and keyword rich, of course. Right. It’ll recommend things like making sure that you have really good FAQ.

Melinda Wittstock:

So, your FAQs are actually answering questions. That seems like, like a good thing to do.

Vivienne Wagner:

Yeah, it is, because it’s your opportunity to mirror somebody’s search back at them. But what’s. Because, like, they might literally be looking for, you know, how. How do I xyz? Like, whatever it might be, you want to make sure that the most popular search term, how they phrase it, that’s the FAQ on your page. How many people are using it? How often are they searching for it? All of that. If you can mirror that question on your FAQs, that’s great. Where a lot of business owners then drop the ball is they do not answer in a keyword rich conversational way. So, for example, if we have several bridal shop clients, and I’ve seen before, do I need an appointment? Well, do I need an appointment? That’s what they’ve listed as the question.

Vivienne Wagner:

How about, do I need an appointment to try on wedding dresses? Now, that’s a much more keyword rich question. But then don’t answer it with yes, don’t do that. Instead, yes, you need an appointment to try on wedding dresses. The experience is like this, that, and the other. And you can book your appointment here with a link to the appointment. Like there’s an opportunity to be conversational and keyword rich, both of which are things that AI is kind of looking for. So, it’s a great opportunity. I’m glad you mention that because it’s definitely something that people should be keeping an eye on.

Melinda Wittstock:

Yeah. So, what are some other things apart from, you know, the FAQ and the H1s and the, you know, all of that? What are some other hints?

Vivienne Wagner:

Right. So that’s like basic SEO. We have a framework that we work in with regard to making sure AI sees you also, because obviously you need the SEO. So, putting that aside, AI is also looking for authority. So, any one of our business owners out there, you’re probably a subject matter expert in what you’re doing. Whatever it is your business is, you’re a subject matter expert. And so that really needs to come through on your website.

Vivienne Wagner:

So have a dedicated about me page or about the company. If you’re blogging, which is excellent for SEO, you need to add an author attribution box. Like a little snippet of who wrote it. Because businesses don’t write blog posts. People do. And for years and years, like our agency, we create content, we write blog posts for clients and whatever. And we would always just sign the blog post. The byline of Acme Toy Shop wrote this blog post.

Vivienne Wagner:

No, it didn’t. And AI doesn’t believe that AI is constantly looking for citations and sources. And that’s the new holy grail for, for business owners. Not to be the top of the search rankings, but to be cited and mentioned in AI conversations, because that’s where that personal recommendation and referral comes in. But so, like Melinda, if you’re writing blog posts, sign it with Melinda wrote this blog post and a link to a full page about you. Because now AI is looking at you going, okay, subject matter expert, look at this authority. And then it links to your personal page, and this is where you should be tooting your own horn.

Vivienne Wagner:

All of the organizations that you’ve, you belong to, all of the accreditations that you have, all of the experience and expertise that you have, all, all of your secret sauce, put it out there. Do you have a lot of press? Link your press in there. All of that paints a picture for AI, that you are somebody who is authoritative and credible and that gets you noticed and gets you cited. So, if you’ll notice that wasn’t just something technical, like you must get a developer and do this on your website. This is content oriented. Tell your own story. So, none of it’s technical. And every business owner who knows their own resume should be able to do this.

Melinda Wittstock:

Right? Exactly. This is so important because often founders are so busy building things, they forget that all of the expertise that they’ve accumulated to get them to the point where they have a great product or service, and they skip over that. Right. It’s maybe under LinkedIn.

Vivienne Wagner:

Yeah, well, you know, and I live in a glass house I should not be throwing stones. LinkedIn’s very important. I hate LinkedIn.

Melinda Wittstock:

I know.

Vivienne Wagner:

My team has to prod me to, hey, we posted something on the company page. Could you please go and, you know, repost it on your personal. Okay, fine. I don’t like that at all. It’s a pain for me. Some people love it, and that’s great. 

Vivienne Wagner:

And things become a real slog when you absolutely hate doing it. So even if it needs to be done, you can have somebody else do that for you. We manage LinkedIn accounts for our clients. We write blog posts still for our clients. So, it’s important to know that you don’t have to create the content and write the blog post yourself. You just need to be able to stand behind it with your name. So, make sure whoever you’re having write your blog posts, they’re not churning out AI slop, as they call it. That it actually provides value and actually showcases your unique expertise and the problems you solve, the benefits you bring.

Vivienne Wagner:

Make sure that those blog posts provide real value and have your name signed to it. You don’t need to add more to your plate, but you need to take ownership of the. Of what’s produced by your company.

Melinda Wittstock:

Right, exactly. So, tell me a little bit about the before and afters of the clients that. That come to you. Where are they usually in this mix? And what is the end result? How long does it take?

Vivienne Wagner:

You know what, it’s so amazing because there are times when, like, within 30 days, we’re seeing, wow, look at those numbers. And that’s what’s so great. Some of the numbers, it’s. It’s data. It’s another data point and has a big picture. And you can see because it’s quantifiable. So, for example, we have a client. We started doing what are called pillar pages for her.

Vivienne Wagner:

I do discuss it on my webinar in depth. But think of it like a super blog post. Really long. Because it’s not necessarily written for the humans. It’s written for the machines.

Vivienne Wagner:

And it links out to other pieces of copy and content that you’ve created over the years. We did a couple of these for her, and you’ll often see them like the ultimate guide to… Or how to Choose a…. Like, it’s a how to guide. It’s got tons of information. We published it was for one of our bridal shops; we published four pillar pages in the fall of 2025.

Vivienne Wagner:

The ultimate guide to like spring, summer, winter, fall weddings. The ultimate guide to those. Because that will attract all of these different brides planning a wedding in the one of those four seasons we in the fall of 2025, they published. By December, the traffic had spiked and most importantly, AI visibility spiked. It immediately started going up because Google crawled the pages and indexed them and then AI sourced them. So, their AI visibility went up, the audience went up, and importantly the mentions of her. Her shop went up and we had. She was sending me screenshots of texts that she was having with her stylists who were saying the bride that they’re working with right now came in because they found us on ChatGPT or Claude told them to come like they, the proof is in the pudding.

Vivienne Wagner:

And that was within 30, 40, 50 days of those pillar pages going up. It was that much of a spike because AI was like, oh, hello, you know, and that was something that was sort of Geo-local. They’re in the Detroit area. So, I mean, they’re not trying to attract brides in Montana. They’re trying to attract brides in this area of Michigan. And it was working and AI knew it and is sending them. So, we have situations like that where it starts working really quickly. We have another client and this is sort of a cautionary tale about putting all of your eggs in one basket.

Vivienne Wagner:

She has a company; it’s like wigs and beauty supply and all of that. She had brick and mortar stores, but she also had e commerce, and she had 30,000 followers on her Facebook page. And she would go on there several times a week and she would do Facebook lives selling her products. And they were selling. And so, she had this great audience. Well, her Facebook page got hacked.

Melinda Wittstock:

Oh no.

Vivienne Wagner:

Taken away from her. And overnight she lost a 30,000-person audience overnight. And she was beside herself because, you know, once something happens with Facebook, good luck, you might as well just. You’re not going to get anything back. Right. But it really demonstrated the danger of renting your audience. And so, when we started working with her, she was worried about income, like sales had dropped. And we assessed her site and we’re like, well, you’re naming your wigs like this.

Vivienne Wagner:

This was a product description. You’re naming your wigs Sasha123, the Debbie425. Like nobody’s searching for those. And I realize it’s helpful for your inventory to name that, but that’s not what people are Searching for. Do you know what? I found her, Melinda? I found her 30,000 monthly searches for people looking for various types of pink wigs. And I’m like, do you sell pink wigs? A couple. Okay, you’re going to sell more of them, you’re going to add to your inventory, and you are going to properly describe these pink wigs using these keywords that I’m finding. And we replaced her audience with real certain.

Vivienne Wagner:

Like she owns that audience now. So right on her own terms if she’s not at the back.

Melinda Wittstock:

This is the thing about building things on Instagram or whatever, like just, just a little algorithm tweak or like, yeah, like being hacked. Oh my goodness. I know actually too many people that that has actually happened to, right?

Vivienne Wagner:

And it underscores the importance of you need to diversify your visibility. If you are only seen to that 30,000-member audience on Facebook and Facebook kicks you out. Now what? You’re starting from scratch. I mean, if you wouldn’t put all of your financial planning in one basket, you shouldn’t put all. It’s kind of the same thing, right? You shouldn’t put it all in, in one place. Diversify. So, yes, build your social media audiences, build your email list. You actually own that.

Vivienne Wagner:

Make sure that your website’s getting found. Like here. Here’s another audience story. We have a client who was a psychologist. She took her entire practice online and we were building her a new website, and she goes, well, I treat depression. My team and I, we treat depression. So, in looking to see what are people saying about depression, it’s kind of like the law of supply and demand. We want high demand, lots of people searching for certain keywords, and we want low supply, meaning there’s not a lot of other websites that are competing that have the answer for those high demand searches.

Vivienne Wagner:

But sadly, depression is, I guess, at an all-time high. It’s a saturated market. There’s high demand for help with depression. There’s also high competition from other websites. But in the course of us looking for that, we found tens of thousands of monthly searches for people who needed help with their pornography addiction.

Melinda Wittstock:

Wow.

Vivienne Wagner:

And we’re like, that’s an interesting pattern. So, we took it back to her and said, do you treat this. She goes, well, I mean, I can. So, she got certified to specialize in this. So did her whole, her whole team. And she has a full page dedicated to this kind of addiction because it still is in the depression ballpark. Are you depressed because you’re watching porn. Are you watching porn because you’re depressed? It’s a chicken and the egg.

Vivienne Wagner:

Regardless, it was insight into what the people who needed her were actually searching for. Because we search for our pain or to answer our questions, we don’t search for our cure because we might not know the cure yet. I don’t know anybody who’s ever gone to WebMD and typed in cancer, but I’ll go to WebMD and go, I have a splitting headache, and my symptoms are going to be laid out for me. And my answer is either going to be somewhere in the range of, you’re dehydrated, drink some more water, or it’s going to be, oh, dear, you have a brain tumor. It could be anything in between. But we go looking for our pain and the problems that we want to solve. So that comes back to what we were talking about at the top of the call. Who are you? What do you do? And who are you for? Who needs you? What are their problems?

Melinda Wittstock:

Right, right. I call this “founderitis”. Where we can, we, we get blind spots because we know our business so well, right? We can sort of think that everybody else does, you know, and, and you can lose perspective.

Vivienne Wagner:

Yes, 100%. And we’re so busy working in our businesses. Right. Whether we’re in our day to day or whether we’re working on our big vision, where are we going next? We have a shorthand that we use, we use language, we know what we’re talking about, but it might not be clear to the person who needs us. And that’s where that discoverability really comes in and bringing it back to the, the nuance and the context. So, like, what are your services? That’s fine. What’s the impact for the people who utilize your services? That’s bigger. What are the problems you solve? That’s better.

Vivienne Wagner:

And so, you can list your services, but unless you’re also describing the problems they solve and the benefits to your, your customers and clients after they utilize your services, that’s not enough information for AI to recommend you. Right?

Melinda Wittstock:

Exactly. Oh, man, there’s so much to talk about. This is great. I can’t wait for your webinar. I’m just gonna have to make sure that we give everybody all the details of how to sign up for your webinar, Vivian.

Vivienne Wagner:

Absolutely. I’ll send you a special link that you can share in, show notes and send to your audience. And yeah, it’ll be an on-demand webinar where I’m going to Go over and teach all of this point by point, show you how this works and the easy things that, that business owners can walk like start fixing tomorrow and start to improve their business.

Melinda Wittstock:

That’s great. Thank you for doing that. That’s absolutely super helpful. Now something else that you know a lot about is the paid ad versus organic strategy issue. A lot of people spend a lot of money on paid ads to varying degrees of success but get frustrated with organic because it’s hard to be discovered sometimes with organic. So, let’s, let’s talk about that for a little bit.

Vivienne Wagner:

Yeah, absolutely. So again, everything, I’m so boring with this everything should have an SEO foundation dialed in. If you do not make it clear to Google some of the basics about what you do when you pay to target words that you should be naturally, naturally ranking for on your own. It’s the analogy I’ll use is like you might be demoing and remodeling your kitchen and dining room and you might be in the middle of all of that work. There’s orange Home Depot buckets sitting around. There’s drywall dust and painters tape everywhere. It’s just not an inviting space yet. But at the same time, you’ve also sent out invitations to come to dinner and hired a bartender and a caterer and you’re planning this lovely dinner party.

[PROMO CREDIT]

Wings of Inspired Business is brought to you by the podcast, Zero Limits Business Growth Secrets where Steve Little – serial entrepreneur, investor and mergers & acquisitions maestro – shares the little-known 24 value drivers that spell the difference between a $5m business, and a $50mm even $500 mm business. It always pays to understand what’s driving the underlying enterprise value of your business. So, check out Zero Limits Business Growth Secrets at zerolimitsradio.com – that’s zerolimitsradio.com and available wherever you get your podcasts. More information about valuation growth at Zero Limits Ventures.com

Melinda Wittstock:

And we’re back with Vivienne Wagner, Founder and CEO of Houndstooth Media Group, a boutique digital marketing agency.

[INTERVIEW CONTINUES]

Vivienne Wagner:

You’re paying to bring people to a space that really isn’t inviting yet. And so, as a result, you could still have your dinner party, but it’s going to cost you more money and it’s not going to be as fun or any of the other things, things that you, you might expect from a nice dinner party. So, your advertising dollars are not going as far as they could. If you just made a couple like simple adjustments on your website, your advertising dollars stretch farther or importantly they can be reallocated to a higher, higher competitive area, if that makes sense.

Melinda Wittstock:

Yeah, exactly, because people, you know, we live in this time of infobesity. I call it like there’s just so much in the attention economy. 

Vivienne Wagner:

Infobesity. Yeah, I love it. Yeah. 

Melinda Wittstock:

All this time is finite, but there’s an explosion of content and so many people saying things to varying, I don’t know, it’s hard to navigate through to the point where like you become sort of almost brain dead, like navigating through it as a, as a potential customer, but then as a business trying to really stand out in all that noise like to really grab signal in the noise.

Vivienne Wagner:

Well, that comes back to like the paid ads too. I see clients all the time. They come to me and they’re paying for Google search and, and you know, Meta ads or whatever. And one of the, the keywords they’re targeting is the name of their business. Why are you doing that? If somebody’s Googling the name of your business, they already know the name of your business. Why don’t you instead compete on what is one of the services you provide? Because they don’t know you yet. If they’re Googling your name, they’ve heard of you, but if they don’t know who you are and they’re googling their problem or their pain, you should be putting your advertising dollars behind that so that you come up as a solution, potential solution in the search results.

Vivienne Wagner:

I’m no ads expert. We’re strictly organic. We really don’t do any paid advertising or anything like that for our clients. We have partners that we work with. But that’s just common sense to me.

Melinda Wittstock:

Right, right.

Melinda Wittstock:

So, so say for instance, you get a good, you get your SEO good, you get a good organic, you know, following going. And the holy grail of course is community and the type of community where your customers are referring you to other customers. That, that’s the holy grail with paid spend. I mean it seems to make sense that you double down on what’s already working.

Vivienne Wagner:

Yeah, well, so if, if it’s already working organically and it’s attracting the right audience because you don’t want that misalignment. So back to a bridal shop example. If you are a high-end luxury designer inventory bridal shop, you don’t want to attract a bride on a budget. There’s a misalignment there. You want to attract the people who need you can afford to pay you and value what you bring and, and you know, you solve the problems. So, when I see ads that are just this non-strategic, targeting certain avatars and certain keywords like that’s not your, that’s not your actual ideal client. Why are you spending money so broadly? Why are you, you know, casting this big wide net instead of like choosing the bait and catching the fish, you actually want like. It’s very interesting to me.

Melinda Wittstock:

I think a lot of people double down on guessing rather than knowing. I mean, years ago, I had. I founded a social intelligence company. And what we did is we perused the entire Twitter fire hose to understand what people were saying just in their casual conversations, and what clues from that we could divine about who your ideal customers and micro influencers and influencers were. And it was remarkably accurate. But here’s the thing.

Melinda Wittstock:

We had all these enterprise clients that would spend a lot of money on gathering all this data, but then wouldn’t do anything with it. And the funniest one was a financial service like a fintech company. Their founders were determined that they served baby boomer clients. And so, we put a lot of time and effort, as we always did, to really understand the product. Much like what you do, Vivienne, of really understanding the product and who the product really served, understanding that and what they were building. We went out to really peruse all these millions of Twitter conversations. And what we found, it was millennial women, actually, who were their ideal client. We presented all of this to them, and they just chose to ignore the data.

Melinda Wittstock:

That company does not exist anymore. Like, it was right there. These are your people who want what you’re selling. Okay, so, like, if we could do that, circa 2013 to 2016, now you think with AI and everything, there’s no excuse not to know this.

Vivienne Wagner:

There really isn’t. And, and what I think you just described isn’t a technology problem. It’s not a research problem. It is a founder, business owner problem where they have it in their mind that this is what they do. And they are in the box not understanding who their actual ideal audience is and what they are looking for. They don’t want to see it. It’s very strange to me.

Vivienne Wagner:

I mean, we come across this too. Here’s everything. Here’s what we see. Here’s what you need to know. No, thank you. They don’t want clarity. And some of that is just like there are certain business owners that just. They know what they know.

Vivienne Wagner:

They don’t care about knowing what they don’t know. They just have it in their mind that this is how it is. And those situations are so sad to me because like you said, that company is not in business anymore. And this is such a great opportunity. Business ownership, entrepreneurship, it is such. It’s a. It’s a wild ride. But it’s such a blessing to be able to do that, to be able to craft one’s own economy while helping people and building a team.

Vivienne Wagner:

And like there’s so many good things about being a business owner. And I feel like when you won’t look at the actual data that’s before you, the actual truth before you, or at least consider it because you know, people will come to you with the truth all the time. Is it actually the truth? Like you can still do a little, you know, litmus test there, but they’ve done themselves such a disservice and you know, the people who need them a disservice by sticking their, their heels in and saying, nope, this is how we’ve always done it. This is what it is. And, and not listening and expanding and, and growing. It’s just sad to me.

Melinda Wittstock:

I think the one, one of many ingredients of an entrepreneurial success, but this one is, is critical is the open-minded curiosity and enjoyment of learning. Because if you don’t have that because there’s so many things changing around you all the time that you can’t control. So, you’ve got to have that mindset. And it’s a complicated one because at the same time you need that grit and relentless focus, right, to get to where you’re going. And you’ve got to combine this relentless focus with flexibility. And, and the two were sort of seemingly contradictory.

Vivienne Wagner:

But yeah, they do seem, they do seem counter intuitive. Like to hold both of them, you

Melinda Wittstock:

need to hold both like you do. You just do.

Vivienne Wagner:

Right. Well, and I’m going to butcher who the Supreme Court judge was Justice Harlan way back in the day. And somebody had said, well, you used to vote differently and now you’re changing your opinions. And this justice came back with, well, I would rather be right than be consistent. I always remembered that because, yeah, like you might be right, right now, but there’s going to be other information that comes in that requires flexibility. It requires reexamination of what you always previously had held to be true and you need to adjust accordingly. Like, it’s just business is no different. It’s no different.

Vivienne Wagner:

Especially right now with AI and technology and the changes in customer behavior, all of that. If you aren’t paying attention and adapting, you’re going to miss out 100%.

Melinda Wittstock:

So, Vivienne, before we jump off this conversation, I’m just really curious about your origin story. Like how did you end up doing what you’re doing?

Vivienne Wagner:

This is a 100% accidental business. I did not mean to start an agency. It just kind of happened. Long story short, I had been in public administration and policy. I worked for a public affairs firm which is basically like PR for politics. I’d been doing that and then I wanted to stay home with our youngest son. And so, I quit my job and was just going to stay home with the baby. And I won’t say I got bored because we had four sons.

Vivienne Wagner:

Never time to be bored. But I just, I started a blog. At a friend’s suggestion, I started a blog. And you know, I think back in that day, I published my first blog post. Not fully understanding that was on the Internet. I don’t know what I thought I was doing. I thought it was some private thing that only like my uncle was reading or something like that. But I, long story short, developed an audience.

Vivienne Wagner:

I had a DIY lifestyle, fun crafting blog, a mom blog, all of these things. I developed this audience. I started working with companies and brands. I was an original old school influencer. Not with social media so much, but with blog content. I had so many fun opportunities through this and that was really kind of my college and learning how because bloggers at the time, we didn’t make any, we didn’t sell anything, we didn’t provide a service. We just created content and then figured out how to get people to come to the blog to read the content. Because then our ads paid out, companies would send us things or give us sponsored post opportunities, affiliate income, all of that.

Vivienne Wagner:

And I set it up well, because I haven’t posted on that blog since 2016 and I still get money every month. It’s free mailbox money because I know how to draw people to a website and I know how to leverage, leverage Google. So that’s where I got all of my knowledge here, like real world, doing it for myself. And the agency started because I had a friend who was a real estate agent, a luxury real estate agent in Los Angeles, who her brokerage wanted her to write a weekly blog post for their brokerage blog. And she didn’t have time. She said, can I hire you as a ghostwriter to write these blog posts for me? I said, sure. Started doing it, but then looked at what her brokerage, this high-powered luxury brokerage, was doing for their digital marketing. And this is back in 2013.

Vivienne Wagner:

I’m like, that is not how you do it. And so, long story short, I ended up revamping their marketing department, turning it from just marketing to digital marketing. And in the course of doing that, started picking up individual clients here and there, managing their social media, building websites, all of that stuff from my dining room table. Just me a one woman show there. And I started getting help from friends who also knew what I was, what I needed to do. They were also bloggers and that was well, 2013. So, what is that 13 years ago? And now I’ve gone from me at my dining room table. I have a team of 16, and we work with clients all over the country.

Melinda Wittstock:

Oh, amazing. Well, I want to make sure Vivienne people can find you and work with you and, and tell me just a little bit about your ideal customer. I mean who, who, who you, who you work with the most? Are they mostly product company or they be service companies size?

Vivienne Wagner:

You know, it’s, it’s really interesting. I think about this question because I’m asked it a lot. We don’t have a particular size or industry or anything like that because we can work with anyone. Since the Internet works the way the Internet works, if we understand what you do and basically who you’re trying to reach, we can work with you. We don’t tend to work with any corporate clients because I like to work with the decision makers, not a committee. So corporate doesn’t seem like a good fit. Same thing with anything that’s a government organization. And I will say the one thing that we don’t work with, we don’t work with people who are unkind or unreasonable.

Melinda Wittstock:

Right, Right. It’s really important to know who you don’t work with. Like just nailing that down right from the start.

Vivienne Wagner:

Yeah, we, we’re very clear on our core values. We hire on them and we fire on them. I just stopped working with the client this past week because it was no longer a fit and the relationship was just like, this isn’t, isn’t working. You’ve gotten unkind and unreasonable. So, you know, we parted ways, wished them well. When you work with somebody who’s not a right fit, it’s the hardest money you’ll ever earn. So, I’m really not choosy, that’s the wrong word. But discerning about that sort of chemistry and dynamic because we’re not order takers, you can’t come to us with your strategy and expect us to implement it if it’s not a good strategy.

Vivienne Wagner:

We are collaborative partners and that’s how we approach our relationships with our clients. And those are the, those are the people who are the best fit to work with Houndstooth Media Group.

Melinda Wittstock:

Right, Wonderful. Well, I’LL make sure that I have all the ways to get in touch with you and your webinar and everything in the show notes. And thank you so much, Vivian, for putting on your wings and flying with us today.

Vivienne Wagner:

Oh, Melinda has absolutely been a pleasure. Thank you.

[INTERVIEW ENDS]

Melinda Wittstock:

Vivienne Wagner is the Founder and CEO of Houndstooth Media Group, a boutique digital marketing agency helping mid-sized businesses turn their websites into revenue-driving assets through strategic SEO and AI-driven optimization.

Melinda Wittstock:

Melinda Wittstock:

Melinda Wittstock:

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Melinda Wittstock:

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