AI is changing how people search for information, but it is not killing blogging. In fact, it is making strategic, well-structured blog content more important than ever. In this episode of the Hit Record Podcast, Meredith Olmstead and Nida Ajaz discuss how AI tools like ChatGPT and other language learning models are reshaping content discovery, why blogs are becoming critical for AI visibility, and how banks and credit unions can adapt their content strategy to stay competitive online.
Key Takeaways:
1. Blogs are becoming critical for AI visibility. Recent research shared during the episode revealed that more than 60% of AI citations are pulled from blog content. That means blogs are no longer just a traffic tool. They are becoming a major source of information for AI-generated answers and search results.
2. Fresh, updated content matters more than ever. AI platforms prioritize recent and relevant information. Updating old blogs, republishing valuable content, and consistently creating new educational articles can help financial institutions improve visibility in AI-driven searches.
Community-focused content can help smaller institutions compete. Credit unions and community banks have a major advantage when it comes to local storytelling. Blogs highlighting volunteer work, member insights, surveys, and community impact can help institutions stand out against larger national competitors.
Transcription:
Meredith Olmstead:
Hi there. I'm Meredith Olmstead, CEO and founder of Fi Grow Solutions. We are a digital marketing and sales consulting agency. We work exclusively with credit unions and community banks. I am here with Nida Ajaz. She is our senior VP of marketing. And we were just having a really interesting conversation about whether or not blogging in the age of AI is dead, or whether or not blogging is dead in the age of AI, however you want to say it. So say hi, Nida.
Nida Ajaz:
Hi, everyone.
Meredith Olmstead:
So I said, "You know what? Let's hit record on this. I think this is a really good topic to share with our readers and with our viewers," especially because we have definitely seen over the course of the last six months to a year as AI has really started to gain traction in marketing, we've seen a resurgence of social media, for sure. So we saw social media was dipping out in the marketing realm, especially sometimes around dry topics like banks and credit unions and things. But it's definitely coming back because of AI because people want to see real people. They want to know if somebody is human, if something is authentic. They want to see the real people behind a brand again, and so they're finding that in social media.
So, Nida, was what you were talking about, "Well, I wonder if we're going to have a similar kind of impact, or if blogging is also going to be out because AI is going to be writing all the content now." So-
Nida Ajaz:
It actually is a...
Meredith Olmstead:
... it's a very good question. Yeah.
Nida Ajaz:
Yeah. It's a really cool thing because I think over time... I've seen clients as well as we're doing various services and we do content for them, and blogging has become more of like, "Okay, we'll get to it when we get to it." Well, recently-
Meredith Olmstead:
Right. Like an afterthought.
Nida Ajaz:
Yeah, like an afterthought. But recently I was just watching a session from HubSpot, and that's one of the reasons why I wanted to bring this title back up because I think it is a great conversation for you to have in your financial institution, like to our audience, they mentioned that they looked at 14 million citations of AI. When AI answers the questions, there's citations. Basically what they reference, they link it back to a website. And that link of citations from AI, 62% of them were blogs. I mean, that's a huge amount. Everyone's talking about, how do we get AI to rank us, or the AI visibilities that-
Meredith Olmstead:
Or talk about your products or services, yes, to reference your website. Yeah, so if over a vast majority, 60%, more than 60%, are coming from blog pages, then for sure you definitely need a blog and you need to be talking about your products and services and what you do on that blog, for sure. Okay, that makes sense.
Nida Ajaz:
Yeah. And the other thing to keep in mind... And yes, maybe the direct traffic to your blogs, it might not be going up, but these LLMs on the back end use it for learning about your brand through those. So you want to structure it in a way that it's scannable, it has data, more empowering data on it. But I think when we go through some of these examples... Because what I was thinking is, how are we using this or implementing this information for our clients? How can we restructure our blog strategy to apply to this new change of blogging?
Meredith Olmstead:
Yeah. Yeah, so it's not so much about trying to drive increased blog traffic necessarily for impressions, clicks, that kind of thing, but you really need to make sure that your blog is optimized to be crawled by AI bots and language learning models. So it's got to be organized in lists, it's got to be organized to be like you have a problem and there's a solution, those kinds of things, so you want to really structure content on your blog. And then you're not really so much worried about the actual amount of traffic, but just that the content there is accurate. So explain the story that you told me about the incorrect information they were talking about on the HubSpot pricing in the examples.
Nida Ajaz:
Oh, yeah, so they mentioned... It was a quick change that they did. So they noticed that AI was pulling up wrong, old pricing information for HubSpot whenever someone asks, hey, how much this costs or that costs into the ChatGPT or other LLMs. And basically they did one quick change of writing a couple of blogs on the new pricing, and almost immediately, within a day I think they mentioned in the study, that they saw change of the new pricing blogs ranking for citations. So really LLM at this point-
Meredith Olmstead:
In those chat results. Yeah.
Nida Ajaz:
Yeah. So you're thinking they're not looking at blog traffic at this point. They're not looking at backlinks, right? LLM really now is looking at the most updated information-
Meredith Olmstead:
Logs. Yeah.
Nida Ajaz:
Yeah. And it's so interesting, they were mentioning Google. When they looked at the study, it was ranking around two and a half, three-year-old blogs, but in AI it's almost one-and-a-half-year-old blogs. So how recent is the information that you're loading? So it's very important to prioritize what is going to be your blogging strategy for this new change.
Meredith Olmstead:
Yeah. And also to make sure that if you have old blogs that are still very pertinent to what you're doing, that you're repurposing them, that you're bringing them forward, that you're reworking them or making them again. So definitely making sure you're keeping your blogs refreshed and new.
Nida Ajaz:
Yeah, that's definitely a key aspect, to get them updated.
Meredith Olmstead:
What about for specific to banks and credit unions? How do you take that information and apply it for our clients?
Nida Ajaz:
Yeah. So I was thinking, going back to our clients, how could we adapt some of this strategy into financial institutions? And really for credit unions especially and community banks, you're so local; you're trying to compete with these big players. How can this AI strategy make it very easy for you to outplay them? And I was thinking about, what if we were to focus on the local events and the volunteer opportunities and the impact that you've made locally? And you probably write press releases and talk about it in your annual report, but have you really prioritized putting that content in a blog post and just publishing it on a regular basis, like this is what we do every year, and just making it available?
The other thing I was thinking about is featuring your key differentiations on your product offering, right? If there's certain offers that you're running, if your product... Especially with lending, if you have local in-house lending, things like that that you want AI to pull out when someone's asking about my benefit of banking with this credit union, what is it, you want to be able to give a direct answer to that.
Meredith Olmstead:
Yeah. And also remembering that blogs are dated. So I think some of that really helps to emphasize the recency of some of that content to those language learning models. Whereas product and service page content, it does have updated content and it will know when content has been updated, but blogs are dated in like, "Oh, this just happened." It's almost like a piece of news to that content, so that could make a difference and why it's being emphasized.
Nida Ajaz:
Yeah. That's very true. And we talked about in our webinar that we did end of Q4 of last year, we really did talk about credit unions and banks using their... They have so much data, through surveys, through just all these different platforms where you're consolidating all this data. How can you use some of those data points to come up with articles directly from your own hub?
And one of the other things that they had mentioned on here was that on AI search, data and stats rank really well. So maybe starting to think about, "Okay, if I don't do a survey already, let me find out, what are the major goals of my members," and sharing that information-
Meredith Olmstead:
On a blog.
Nida Ajaz:
... and building a community around it that, "Hey, you're not in this alone. You have other people dealing with the same exact problem, and this is what our credit union and bank is doing to solve this problem." So that in itself could be a great content strategy.
Meredith Olmstead:
Yeah. Absolutely. Absolutely. Awesome. Well, thank you so much for sharing. So it definitely sounds like blogs are not dead in the age of AI, and even though you can definitely write a lot of content with AI and with ChatGPT and all of those other language learning models out there, it sounds like you're going to have to also create content on your website that can be crawled and found by those language learning models in order to make sure that your information is getting in front of people as they're doing searches. So appreciate you sharing that.
If you're interested in learning more about marketing for your credit union or community bank, please visit us at figrow.com. We've got lots of other great podcasts, blogs, case studies, so come and check us out and get on our mailing list. Otherwise, let's just all get out there and make it happen.