Jeremy Rivera: Hello, I’m Jeremy, your Unscripted Podcast host. I’m here interviewing Lorrie Thomas Ross. Why don’t you give yourself an introduction focusing on the things in your past that should make us trust you as an expert in your niche.
Lorrie Thomas Ross: Well, you can’t see my gray hair maybe, but I am Lorrie Thomas Ross. I am also known as the marketing therapist. I have been the CEO, which stands for Chief Enthusiasm Officer of Web Marketing Therapy, Incorporated for, this will be our 19th year.
I have been on a mission my entire career to help great leaders and organizations have a happier, healthier, and wealthier relationship with marketing. I am a self-professed recovering salesperson who personally navigated the challenges of sales and the ick and the yuck and then transitioning into being a seller of online advertising and many other things that I sold in my career to being in marketing and buying advertising and suddenly drinking from the fire hose of search and social media and video and all these things.
Experience and Credibility
For me, helping leaders navigate that in a way that is less focused on the tools and there’s a lot of stress and anxiety around, you know what do I do? Should I do this? Should I post this many times a week? Should my articles be so many things? Oh my gosh, I’m getting the email saying my site’s not getting indexed in Google and I’m freaking out. All of that fear is highly unnecessary.
My work over my 30 something year career now has been dedicated to putting those puzzle pieces together. So marketing clicks. I do a lot of public speaking. I taught for years for UC Santa Barbara and UC Berkeley. There’s the “Why Should People Trust You” because these major universities put me in the seat to educate their students. I found, and I worked in corporate for years, my students were just wonderful—mostly corporate employees, but also small business owners, entrepreneurs.
I found myself in these weekly classes with them just moving mountains. I mean they would come in with their marketing challenges and we would just unpack things and they’d make great progress and here I was in corporate still having the 50th conversation of why we needed to update the metadata so it doesn’t say “company name colon home” on the freaking homepage.
I love the nimble nature of small business. I love the entrepreneurial mindset. I’m definitely one of those dot-com veterans. I was in the industry in 1999 and that’s a whole other podcast that we can talk about. I wrote a book with McGraw-Hill on online marketing. I thoroughly enjoy helping folks navigate how to make marketing better.
Key Quotes
“The only constant in marketing is change, especially digital marketing.”
“I liken AI to having a virtual sparring partner.”
“Quick and dirty’s always quick, but you always end up dirty.”
“LLMs and AI are your most popular and least trained customer service representative.”
“Content is king and then those of us that are like uber nerdy, we’re like, no, it’s the whole freaking kingdom.”
“No one’s gonna see everything. And so you can find ways to share things again and again.”
“When we have this educational approach to marketing, it’s ethical, it’s effective, dare I say fun.”
Key Interview Takeaways
🔹 AI as a Marketing Tool Evolution
- AI adoption mirrors the early days of social media – resistance followed by inevitable integration
- Use AI as a “virtual sparring partner” for ideation and content development, not replacement for human expertise
🔹 Content Strategy in the AI Era
- Focus on “information gain” – creating content that adds new value rather than recycling existing information
- Content strategy must now educate both humans AND AI systems about your brand. If you’re doing notary services in Cookeville you have to tell both groups more about your signature services not generically but specifically about your workflow and process.
- Quality and educational value matter more than quantity, even with AI’s content generation capabilities
🔹 The Five Factor Framework
- Credibility: Building know, like, and trust through design, copy, and photography
- Usability: Ensuring seamless user experience across all touchpoints
- Visibility: Strategic presence across search, social, ads, email, and PR
- Sellability: Clear differentiation and value proposition versus competition
- Scalability: Treating marketing as investment, not expense
🔹 “Marketting” Philosophy
- Shift from promotional marketing to educational marketing
- Ask: “Who’s your ideal audience? What do you want to help them understand?”
- Education becomes your North Star for all marketing decisions
🔹 Content Repurposing Strategy
- “Create once, distribute forever” – maximize content value across multiple channels
- Blog posts can fuel social media, email newsletters, videos, and more
- Systematic approach to content creation prevents burnout and increases efficiency
Target Audience and Ideal Clients
Jeremy Rivera: Is there a particular vein or niche like do you really like working with lawyers because they’ve got things dialed in more and they tend to have a bigger budget or you know corporate law firms because they’re going toward B2B. Like where’s your niche in terms of your favorite clients at? Like what type of business do you enjoy working with the most?
Lorrie Thomas Ross: I speak on behalf of myself and my entire team at Web Marketing Therapy when we say that we love intentional leaders. And these are leaders that operate with values. Not only does the business provide high value, but as leaders they have high values. And that makes them better employers, it makes them more open to messaging that is not only on brand but on purpose.
I’ve had a long career and I got “should on” a lot as I’m sure you have in your career. You should niche in law like you’re really good at that. Something in me always knew I didn’t have to follow someone else’s suggestions necessarily. I’m a critical thinker and while we have lots and lots and lots and lots of lawyer clients and law firm clients we work for doctors, we work for authors, we support folks in real estate, the homeowners association industry, coaches…
But at the end of the day, the reason we get up every darn day and keep doing what we’re doing is because we genuinely love the folks that we’re working for.
The AI Revolution in Marketing
Jeremy Rivera: So what it as we transition because I’ve been in the game too since like 2007 so I’ve been playing the SEO field for quite a while and I’ve seen several large transitions in terms of how the marketers are approaching the market. And it does feel like there is something in the past two years that feels different in terms of challenge.
Maybe it’s new technology, maybe it’s the final public adaptation to realize, hey, LLMs are here…
But I’m interested in your view on how you’re seeing that sea change impact on how leadership leaders are approaching their business, how leaders are approaching marketing in general.
Jeremy Rivera is the founder of SEO Arcade and host of the Unscripted Small Business podcast.
Lorrie Thomas Ross: I am finding that it actually reminds me strangely enough of the onset of social media where I would get hired to speak at conferences and convince these mature, aka older, that social media wasn’t going away. The only constant in marketing is change, especially digital marketing.
This has been for the folks that are like, “I’ll never use it.” It’s like you have been using it. It’s everywhere. You don’t even realize how much you’re using it. So coming at it from a place of no judgment, right? It’s natural for us to go, you know, but… Everyone’s in a different place. Just being a user of the media, you can’t not pay attention to it, especially when it comes to search. AI overview results are dominating Google search results.
AI as a Virtual Sparring Partner
It’s not the tool. It’s how and why we use these tools that makes marketing magic happen. I liken AI to having a virtual sparring partner. You know, I can’t sit in an office like I used to when I had like 20 co-workers and I could turn my chair around and go, “hey Jeremy, I want to run this by you,” but I can go to chat GPT and I can say, “I am a senior copywriter and I’m trying to write this and do this and this and here is what I need you to do and here’s the questions I want you to…”
When I started in this wild web world, there were no books, and if there were books, they were obsolete in a minute because any references to platforms were dead or they didn’t get their next round of funding. And so we just have, it’s human nature to judge what we don’t understand. I come at it from a very psychology of marketing perspective.
This isn’t lazy, crazy or bad if some people are afraid of it or won’t use it. Everyone’s going to be using it and they’re already using it even if they don’t know they are. But just getting in there and it’s not going to be perfect, right? I think about the stupid stuff I posted on Facebook in 2006 or whatever, like, you know, I didn’t know what I was doing. So we just have to be willing to create, execute and monitor and rinse, repeat.
Content is Reigns Supreme – Just Needs To Be Wiser
As marketers, we cannot not be paying attention and in SEO, what do they say? Content is king and then those of us that are like uber nerdy, we’re like, no, it’s the whole freaking kingdom. The power of content is even more powerful right now and as we’re, as an agency owner, as we’re writing content on behalf of our clients and whether that’s about pages or service pages or blog posts, videos, all of this is data that’s getting populated into Google, into AI.
Being aware of, it goes back to writing really great content, right? I mean, think about, you’ve been in the industry for a long time as well. All the tricks and the cheater stuff, it’s like, quick and dirty’s always quick, but you always end up dirty. This is, keep writing great content.
The Leveling Playing Field
Jeremy Rivera: It is interesting. I think it does even the playing field a little bit in terms of smaller brands and big brands… because it was difficult to outsource to overseas and get a pool of talented enough Filipino and Colombian and overseas writers to create your content at scale. And so only larger agencies set up the outsource teams to do that and create bunches of content in that.
So with the leveling of the playing field… you know, levels a bit of the content marketing playing field and made me realize there’s a portion of SEO, there’s a portion of online marketing that got so stuck in doing our keyword research sheets that we didn’t stop to think about what happens if I could get, I’m not worried, you know, because a good month is I got four articles, but if I could order as much content as I wanted and have it in my hands in the next week?
So if you were talking to your clients and you’re saying the barrier to entry to creating content is almost nil, what do you do with that playing field?
Lorrie Thomas Ross: I think of some of our clients, we have quite the range. We have the ones that are like, “are you guys using AI? Oh my gosh,” and they’re freaking out. We educate them on the power of it and all this thing. And then we have the ones that are almost abusing it where we call it at our company “AI barf”. Like, the client just AI barfed on us. And it’s like, there’s no coherent thoughts and they just see a bunch of organized content.
Quality Over Quantity
When it comes to the ability to have massive, massive, massive amounts of content, we also have to think about our ideal audience and we have to think about how we are showing up in the world. We talk at Web Marketing Therapy about voicing your value and your values. We also are big, big, big proponents of being educational. It’s about serving and supporting your clients. The old school rules of pushing and promoting your products and services, that stuff is like infomercial dated.
But if we’re pulling in folks and we’re writing quality content that’s educational, that’s empowering them that might also be search rich and AI rich… Being educational is powerful, but also being mindful of just how much you’re putting out there. You can also wear out your audience if you’re pushing out too much content, especially on social media posts.
I wonder if there is almost too much content being pushed out that it could also create a flag. So that’s where my more conservative marketing mom brain kicks in of like, I don’t want to get in trouble here. But it also is a matter of just management.
Information Gain and Content Strategy
Jeremy Rivera: The other thing, I was talking about this with Michael Mcdougald of Right Thing Agency… about the concept of information gain in your content. And if you are purely sourcing from the raw database that all LLMs know everywhere of that, you know, 60% of the internet that everything trained on, then does the content that you’re generating actually represent a gain in information gain to the world?
or is it just recycling and pulling from that same pool contributing to that snake that’s started to eat itself? I saw an insane statistic that suggested that up to 50% of content online has crossed through an LLM in some way.
Research shows that AI-generated content can “poison” future AI models when models are trained on synthetic data, leading to what researchers call “model collapse” – a degenerative process where AI systems lose quality and diversity over time.
Lorrie Thomas Ross: Yeah, I mean we’re seeing it more and more for our clients that were beyond the marketing process, sometimes part of the lead sales process. Best marketing question you can always ask is how did you hear about us? And I’m hearing more and more and more. We found this author speaker, or we found this law firm, or we found this specialist doctor through ChatGPT or through an AI search. And so yeah, these are website leads. These are ones that are getting not pushed marketing but getting pulled in from search results.
AI and Content Strategy
I was talking to Matt Brooks of SEOteric, and he said, LLMs are mostly like, AI overviews are really high up in the funnel. They’re generalist in their knowledge and information. So it creates an opportunity for you to be the one who…
educates about your brand through your content and educates about further down the funnel because I think it was Mike Buckbee. I love his quote. He said, LLMs and AI are your most popular and least trained customer service representative. So if you think about your content creation path as
doing more to educate LLMs about your product. So your content strategy is not human only, it’s human and bot.
Jeremy Rivera: I think that our SEO mentality got so far afield from… you know, just kind of, we need to create all of this top funnel, top of the funnel content to get all of these eyeballs and all of this traffic.
Jeremy Rivera: As a website owner did you actually say what you do here? Let’s come back to that. You know, like I was trying to get gravel recently for my driveway in Cookeville and I didn’t know how it works. Do I call a quarry?
Does it come in a big truck? Does it dump out in a single pile? Is there a different kind of gravel? The answer is yes, there’s different kind of gravel. You can get it spread out or dumped in a pile and depending on the size of the dump truck is how many tons that you can get at a time. You know, like none of the gravel bros in my community even had a website, much less websites that actually like talked about the process, you know?”
We really never honed in on, well, what is the messaging that matters that tells somebody that’s going to buy this thing? What are the steps to do so?
Lorrie Thomas Ross: I think having spent a whole career being so focused on service, I see all the things, the search, the social, the email campaigns, the videos, the photography, like how does it serve that ideal audience and how do we keep being relevant and being useful to them and the answers come and now how are we putting that out there so that we’re getting pulled in and it’s being creative and it’s just being open to what’s happening. It’s that create, execute, monitor. How can we keep paying attention to where the traffic’s coming from, what’s working, what the opportunities are, what’s missing.
Holistic Marketing Approach
Jeremy Rivera: What’s your unifying theory on how to bring together these disparate marketing channels? Because I know SEOs for a while, we just kind of were like such hot dogs. We’re like, yeah, we’re going to get all the traffic and we’ll write articles and this.
It feels like we’re getting pulled back down to earth and need to connect with our peers or think of us as bigger than just SEOers and think of us as more… more of digital marketers.
How do you navigate that skill set and that cross channel connection?
Lorrie Thomas Ross: We have a very holistic approach just because we come in often as advisors, sometimes trainers, and everything does work together. I use the analogy of, you know, if you want to get super fit, you can’t go to the gym and work out seven days a week and then eat a whole bunch of junky fast food and expect to have meaningful results.
How we look at our marketing puzzle and putting those puzzle pieces together so things click does require that holistic approach. We think of it as multitasking marketing and another philosophy I have just from observing and serving so many folks over my career is, we make things too difficult.
Content Repurposing Strategy
How can we do a smaller photo shoot? Or how can we roll out videos in a way that the video content can also get transcribed into blog posts and that video can get embedded onto web pages and live on the YouTube channel, which is our second largest search engine, right, powered by Google. How does it support SEO, doing all the right practices?
But looking at how everything can fit together, you know, how YouTube videos can drive traffic to the website, how a really well-written blog post with the video in there, they can bridge that credibility gap and someone can actually watch a human, you know, speaking and create that connection.
A really well written blog post can give you the what do I post on social? What do I share in my email newsletter? If you’re creating that content, you can repurpose it again and again. And I always think about, you know, when I’m posting to social, like if you open that blog and there’s a really great intro sentence or two, that’s your caption.
I see, and also that great content does multitask for search, whether it’s the video on YouTube or the blog post about the video or the post about the post or the really well architected webpages.
Research from content marketing experts confirms that information gain becomes even more critical as AI-generated content proliferates online.
Hidden Content Gold
Jeremy Rivera: Now, I worked with a small agency and we working with a lawyer and tucked away on the backend of a page was this PDF. And he mentioned it on this call that he had been… he mentioned a very famous killer who had been on death row. He was the defense attorney for the last guy that was electrocuted.
And this PDF was his experience at the execution and that was like deep… like really deep, incredible content that was stuck in a PDF attached to a post that was vaguely about appeals. I’m like, we gotta, we gotta, we gotta redo, we gotta pull this out.
We gotta make this a focus blog post… some of these things that are within these organizations are extremely powerful stories and they’re just not repurposed. You know, like I think it’s Ross Simmons says, you know, create once, distribute forever.
Lorrie Thomas Ross: For sure we say tell them, tell them, tell them and tell them one more time and I’m always trying to find ways to get into these busy entrepreneurs brains or small business owners where they’re wearing five hundred hats.
I take it a level deeper, playing to psychology, and I’m like, look, let’s get over ourselves, right? Let’s check where you go at the door. People don’t wake up and go, “I wonder what this company posted on X and on your blog and on social media.” I’m like, here’s the reality. No one’s gonna see everything.
And so you can find ways to share things again and again, not like a robot where it’s like copy paste over and over again, but there’s this feeling sometimes like, “oh, we did post that,” or “we did a blog post about that.” Yeah, do another blog post about it and link back to the original one and it doesn’t have to be a long one.
Key Frameworks and Takeaways
Jeremy Rivera: As a kind of wrap up here at the end, what’s your key takeaway that you give people when they’re starting with you? What’s a mentality or a process that you always engage that has a really big impact?
Lorrie Thomas Ross: There’s two. One is our five factor framework that just like our logo on webmarketingtherapy.com, you know, alludes to there are five factors that you need to have in place to make your marketing click:
The Five Factor Framework
- Credibility – know, like, and trust. That’s design, that’s copy, that’s photography, all that.
- Usability – If people can’t use your website or figure out how to link to the full thing or go to your website from the YouTube video, you have a usability problem.
- Visibility – This is why we’re connecting today. Search, social, ads, email, PR, all the things. Offline marketing.
- Sellability – Why you versus the competition. Reality check. I’m not the only marketing agency in town. What makes us different? Having that ability to voice your value and values, testimonials, all of that.
- Scalability – We’re not spending time and money on marketing. We are investing. When we’re strategic about how we spend our time, our money, our resources, then those small steps, just like a good stock, right, small steps compound over time to make a big difference.
Additional reading: Studies on AI content detection and model collapse prevention highlight the importance of maintaining quality in an AI-saturated content landscape.
MarkEDing: Education-First Approach
And the other thing that I teach is this concept called MarkEDing for education, , it’s a mashup of the words marketing and education.
Instead of thinking about marketing in that old school, “I gotta push my products and services,” which in fact, if you Google the definition of marketing, definitions like that still come up today. Instead, and which makes us all feel gross and like, “ugh, marketing’s yucky, marketing’s ugh.” It doesn’t have to be.
I always ask whether it was my students when I was a professor or now my clients, who’s your ideal audience? What do you want to help them understand? And then that begins to guide the content you’re creating, maybe the photo shoot that’s gonna help better illustrate what you’re doing.
When we have this educational approach to marketing, it’s ethical, it’s effective, dare I say fun, and it suddenly flips the concept of marketing and helps prioritize, it helps you look critically at like, “whoa, our homepage doesn’t clarify that we’re an organic winery when we actually are. We don’t use that word. We only have the seal at the bottom of the website.” Those little things can make a big difference. Education becomes your North Star and your guiding light.
Information Gain: Key Lessons and Insights
| Topic | Traditional Approach | New Insight from Interview | Actionable Application |
| AI in Marketing | Fear or complete replacement mentality | AI as “virtual sparring partner” – collaboration not substitution | Use AI for ideation and first drafts, add human expertise for final quality |
| Content Creation | Focus on keyword density and SEO tricks | Educate both humans AND AI systems about your brand | Create content that positions you vs. competitors with unique insights |
| Content Strategy | Quantity over quality approach | “Information gain” – adding new value vs. recycling | Ask: “Does this content teach something new or just repeat what’s already online?” |
| Marketing Philosophy | Push products and services | “Marketting” – education-first approach | Lead with “What do you want to help your audience understand?” |
| Content Distribution | Create separate content for each channel | “Create once, distribute forever” | One blog post becomes social captions, email content, video scripts, etc. |
| Marketing Overwhelm | Try to do everything, use every tool | Five Factor Framework focus | Audit against: Credibility, Usability, Visibility, Sellability, Scalability |
| Client Selection | Take any paying client | Work with “intentional leaders” with values | Choose clients who align with your values and are willing to do the work |
| Content Frequency | Post constantly to stay relevant | Quality over quantity, strategic timing | Remember: “No one’s gonna see everything” – repurpose thoughtfully |
| Marketing Measurement | Focus only on vanity metrics | Treat marketing as investment, not expense | Track ROI and compound growth over time |
| Future-Proofing | React to each platform change | Understand psychology of marketing principles | Focus on timeless principles: serving audience, building trust, being educational |
Connect with Lorrie
Jeremy Rivera: Thanks so much for the conversation. It’s been a blast, Lorrie. Last thing is, where can people find you? Do you have a social media poison of your choice where people can interact with you?
Lorrie Thomas Ross: I love LinkedIn, Lorrie Thomas Ross and my company’s web marketing therapy, so we’re easy to find that way. But yeah, I mean, I’m on all the channels. I do particularly like LinkedIn just because it’s a little more professional. And if you mention this podcast, I would love to have a connection call. But yeah, thank you so much for doing what you do. And this has really been a delight. I saw this on my calendar today and was really looking forward to it.
Jeremy Rivera: Thanks for coming on, I’ll see you around.
Lorrie Thomas Ross: Take care.
This interview was hosted by Jeremy Rivera on the Unscripted Small Business podcast. Jeremy is an SEO consultant and founder of SEO Arcade, helping businesses forecast their SEO potential and develop data-driven content strategies.
