29 – Navigating the Evolving Dynamics of Digital Marketing with Kalicube’s Jason Barnard
Your host, Thomas Watkins, talks with the CEO and Founder of Kalicube, Jason Barnard. Jason discusses the evolving landscape of digital marketing, and provides a wealth of insights into the importance of productizing services, understanding Google’s algorithms, and the strategic approaches necessary for effective digital marketing.
Jason emphasized a significant shift in Google’s algorithms from “strings to things.” This change means that Google is moving away from merely matching keywords (strings) to understanding the actual entities (things) those keywords represent. This evolution has profound implications for search engine optimization
Introducing Jason Barnard and Kalicube
[00:00:05] Thomas Watkins: Welcome to Product Led Growth Leaders where we learn about the bold path of building digital products that sell themselves. Let’s listen to product leaders who can give us a glimpse into the innovative thinking process, showcasing and celebrating these awesome folks. I’m your host, UX and product design veteran, Thomas Watkins. Welcome, everyone, to Product Led Growth Leaders. We’ve got an exciting, fun guest today. He is a speaker and educator and entrepreneur. He’s had a long history with SEO in Digital Marketing. He is a serial founder and entrepreneur of multiple media companies.
[00:00:52] Thomas Watkins: And today, he is the CEO and founder of Kalicube, a Digital Marketing agency and software company. And you might correct me on one of those two things, but Kalicube empowers business leaders to future proof their brand online. Jason, glad to have you with us.
[00:01:10] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): I’m absolutely delighted to be here, Thomas.
Understanding Jason Barnard’s Relationship with Product and Brand Management
[00:01:13] Thomas Watkins: And to say your full name is Jason Barnard, folks, in case I didn’t say his name already, which I think I didn’t. So, Jason, why don’t we start off with you telling us about your relationship with product and the whole concept of being a product person and guiding a product, having a vision and making it come into fruition. Tell us about your kind of relationship with that kind of work.
[00:01:39] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Right. Well, my relationship with product is that Kalicube is a company, but it’s also conceptually a product. And the product is how do we manage brands? So it’s a service product. If we look at Google, Google sees products and services as the same thing. So Kalicube services are actually products, which hopefully makes sense. Kalicube offers business leaders and their corporations the opportunity to manage how their brand is perceived and represented online across their entire digital ecosystem to their audience, but also to engines like Google, Bing, ChatGPT and so on. So it’s a double attack, one on the audience perception and representation, the other on engines perception and representation. It gives you self determination for your brand online.
The Connection Between Services and Products
[00:02:35] Thomas Watkins: So let’s explore a piece of that, just for a minute. That Google sees services and products as the same thing. And of course, we know that they’re over, there’s the overlap, right? Like a software product provides a continuing service for people, but it’s not a service product the way we think of it. Explain for us a little bit about maybe the importance of recognizing that dynamic and where that might affect us when we’re strategizing on how we present ourselves online.
[00:03:08] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Well, somebody told me a year ago, you should productize your services, and that’s a business advice. And from that perspective, what I’ve done with Kalicube is productize the Kalicube services. So I’m now presenting those as pseudo products. And as you say, it’s simply an ongoing service of maintenance of a brand, which is conceptual and yet it’s still a thing. And we can talk really quickly about things. A thing is for me an entity, and entities are the foundation of everything that we do. An entity is an identifiable thing. You, me, Kalicube, the company, a film, a music album, a product, a service.
[00:03:55] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And a service is conceptual, whereas everything else I just mentioned is physical. But then also an entity is a topic. Economics is an entity. So entities, things are actually both physical and conceptual. And if we think that way, service is product.
Productizing Services for Scalability and Effective Communication
[00:04:15] Thomas Watkins: Yeah, and then it becomes, as a business, it’s a question of scalability and things like that when you’re talking about productizing your service. So at 3Leaf, we do UX. So if I was to productize it more, I might say, we do a research report and it costs X amount and it takes this amount of time and then it becomes more something that you can package as an entity versus a concept that you’re providing.
[00:04:42] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Right. And then we can come to if you’re going to communicate with Google what it is you offer as a service, it needs to understand it as a thing. So you need to identify, you need to productize it. But then what’s interesting from our perspective is if we come in and talk to our clients and say how are we going to communicate this to the search engines like Google and Bing and ChatGPT? The answer is, whatever it might be, we figure out how we can explain it. And it almost always turns out that it’s much better for explaining it to the audience, the people.
Prioritize What Works in Digital Marketing to Achieve Results
[00:05:15] Thomas Watkins: Great. And so tell us a few things that people get wrong about Digital Marketing.
[00:05:23] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Digital marketing, generally speaking, is that it’s throw spaghetti at the wall and hope something sticks. That’s the huge mistake everybody makes. And it’s actually the problem we solve at Kalicube is that we will tell you which pieces of spaghetti to throw at the wall and we’ll stick some superglue on it. So we’re absolutely sure it’s not going to fall off the wall because there are so many things you can do from a personal branding perspective. For example, I can guest on podcasts like I’m doing today. I can write a book, I can have my own podcast. I can write a blog, I could write for Forbes magazine. I can write for Search Engine Land, I can go to conferences in person. That’s seven things just off the top of my head. But which one do I do first, and which one do I invest the most resources into? And the answer to that is, it depends on which peer group I personally want to belong to.
[00:06:14] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): So if I want to be an entrepreneur, I need to publish on Forbes, not on Search Engine Land. I want to guest on podcasts because that’s a great way of getting me in front of the right audience if they’re entrepreneurial podcasts. My own podcast is a huge investment of resources. That’s not necessarily the priority right now. So what we can do at Kalicube is analyze 2 billion data points that we have in our SaaS platform that we’ll talk about later on. And we can analyze those 2 billion data points to understand in any particular niche, what are the priorities, what are the things we need to do 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th. So what we can do for our clients is help them to prioritize their investment and their effort and their time in the right things at the right time, depending on the peer group for people and the market and industry for the corporations.
Grow Your Business with Kalicube’s Data-Driven Approach
[00:07:03] Thomas Watkins: So it sounds to me like what you’re doing is you’re using context and not just sheer. So the throwing the spaghetti at the wall, you are doing things, and you’re not using any guiding, thinking or principles or context, and you’re just seeing what works, and then you don’t know why it worked even if it did. And so the difference is that you’re using some of your, the billions of data points to connect to that. Is that what’s going on?
[00:07:32] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Yes, absolutely. And you’ve just given me a three. Everything in Kalicube is in threes because that’s how we learn. So there are three levels of how you can go about your Digital Marketing. You can throw spaghetti at the wall, try everything, and hope. Number two is you can use previous experience so you can get. A Digital Marketing agency will tell you, this worked before, therefore we should do this, and it will work again. And as you said, we don’t necessarily know why it worked, and that’s obviously weak because we don’t know why it worked, and we don’t know if it still works, and we don’t know if it will work in this particular circumstance.
[00:08:05] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Then you’ve got the third level, which is all that data, where we can analyze 60 of your competitors, 100 of your competitors, five of your competitors, it doesn’t matter. But we can analyze that and see what is currently working and what is currently not working. And the nice thing here is we’re not trying to track everything online. We’re asking Google what it sees working within that industry. And Google is looking at everything, so we don’t need to. And with using Google as a synthesization of what works and what doesn’t in any given niche, and that is super smart because it’s data driven and there’s no guesswork.
Jason Barnard on Shifting Away from Agencies and SaaS Challenges
[00:08:45] Thomas Watkins: Now, before we started the interview and you had mentioned that you’re not serving agencies anymore, could you get a little bit into that?
[00:08:57] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Right.
[00:08:59] Thomas Watkins: First of all, what that means, what I just said means, and then why?
The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard) [00:09:05]: In 2015, I built a SaaS platform based on the idea that Google was moving what they called from strings to things. And I can explain that really simply. Previously, Google was counting words in the page and counting links to the web page to decide which content was most appropriate to solve the problem the user had when they were searching. So you search on Google to solve a problem or answer a question. And Google was simply count words in the page and count links to figure out what the right answer was, which is why the results weren’t always brilliant, why sometimes we had to scroll through three or four pages to find the right answer. They said, from strings to things. Meaning instead of seeing Jason Barnard, J-A-S-O-N B-A-R-N-A-R-D, as a series of characters, they understood what Jason Barnard is, who he is, what he does, who he can help, and is he credible. And I built the SaaS platform in 2015 when Google announced this, because I thought Google can already do it.
[00:10:06] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Turns out they couldn’t. They were talking the talk but not walking the walk. 2023 was the year they started walking the walk. And now, the SaaS platform actually truly means something. The problem we’re having with the SaaS platform is even though we’ve got 2 billion data points, even though we have a wonderful interface, that makes it for me, relatively easy to understand exactly what the data means and what needs to be done, what the priorities are that we need to give to our clients when we got agencies using it, because they still have the strings mindset. The platform and the data and the presentation of the data doesn’t make sense right now. So we’re spending a lot of resources trying to onboard agencies into something they haven’t yet fully taken on board. They get the idea, but they’re not working that way. So integrating the platform into their current production process or their current service process has proven to be impossible.
[00:11:07] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): I think in a year or two, it will make sense, but right now our best strategy is to be a pure agency with an internal proprietary tool that we just use for us. I think it’s a huge waste of all the development and the smartness I put into it, but that’s the way life is.
[00:11:27] Thomas Watkins: It is. Anytime you start a startup, what I found from working with a lot of startups is you’re trying to build value. And I guess it’s back to kind of the spaghetti on the wall thing a little bit, but you hope it’s a little smarter than the spaghetti on the wall, but you don’t know what the audience will take toward value wise, and you might build something that is, oh, wow, they really like this thing over here. We thought that was just a side thing, right? And the stakeholders might have yet another idea of what they think needs to be sold. So that’s a interesting journey.
[00:11:58] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Yeah. No, it brings another interesting point, is what I have always thought was brilliant about the platform is not what anybody else appears to see. And what I now realize is that I haven’t been empathetic enough to the other people, the people using the platform. And so I have the choice of adapting to them or just carrying on the way I am and serving clients directly. And I’ve chosen to keep going as we are, serve our clients directly, and hopefully it will become useful to other agencies. But at the end of the day, making money for my business is the point.
The Impact of Google’s Knowledge Panels on Search Rankings
[00:12:35] Thomas Watkins: Correct. And so I want to double click a little bit more on that strings to things concept because it’s so interesting. When I think of that, I think about when I Google something, if I Google the name of an athlete and I see in the corner, it’s got their name, it’s got certain things like their height, their weight, and things that you would care about for an athlete, and it’s clearly treating them as a thing. And then if I Google the name of a movie, it’ll show the movie and then movie things. And so it feels like Google’s been doing that for a long time. But you’re saying they just now did it. So did they present on their interface and kind of pretend, was it a fake it till you make it thing that they were doing?
[00:13:17] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Right. No, it’s a brilliant, brilliant question because you’ve just pointed out that I was being too geeky. Is that what you’re talking about there is what we call a Knowledge Panel. It’s an information box of the facts that Google has understood in its Knowledge Graph. Now, a Knowledge Graph is just like a huge machine-readable encyclopedia. So it’s like Wikipedia, but tens of thousands of times bigger. Wikipedia has 6 million articles, 6 million things. The Knowledge Graph, Google’s Knowledge Graph has 54 billion.
[00:13:50] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): So the scale is completely mind blowing. And it can represent things. A famous movie star, a famous sports star, a movie, myself, my company, it can represent them on the right-hand side of a desktop search in the form of an information box of facts. And it’s been able to do that since before I built Kalicube Pro, my platform. The platform was initially designed to optimize for those Knowledge Panels on the understanding that those Knowledge Panels were huge, or the understanding behind those Knowledge Panels was hugely important to Google’s main algorithms. And the fact is, there’s been a disconnect between the two up until last year. So I had imagined that Knowledge Panels would, or the understanding behind the Knowledge Panels, excuse me, would be integrated into the main algorithms much earlier, but the first integration we truly saw was September 2023, and the latest was March 2024. And Google have integrated the understanding, the things behind the strings, the things behind the Knowledge Panels, into their main algorithms.
[00:15:03] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And that has thrown the entire search engine optimization industry into disarray, because it means that without understanding who you are as a person, a corporation, a film, a product, or a service for that matter, Google cannot or will not prioritize you in the search results. And that’s what’s changed.
Why Google Needs to Know Your Thing and How to Make It Happen
[00:15:29] Thomas Watkins: Okay, so that helps crystallize it more where, so being in the things framework, you can’t just splash words on your website anymore and say, like, oh, well, you know, I’ll get included in the things because those are just strings. And so, you either have to depend on Google being sensitive enough to detect that you’re a thing and that the stuff that you want to be considered things are out there in Google, or you have to leverage something else to fill the gap to make it a thing. Is that?
[00:16:06] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Yeah, but basically, there is nothing else to leverage other than things. But how do you teach Google about things? And this is the foundation of Kalicube is we treat Google like a child. It’s a child that wants to understand. It understands 54 billion things, but it’s got a lot more to understand, hundreds, thousands of billions of things. And it’s up to me to educate it about my things. Out of those 54 billion, I’m in there, one of us, one me, one Jason Barnard. I need to educate about this specific Jason Barnard, who I am, what I do, which audience I serve, what topics I’m an expert in, so that it can understand when I will be relevant to its users.
[00:16:53] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): So, for example, there’s a Jason Barnard, who’s a podcaster in the UK about music. If Google understands that he talks about music, he’s called Jason Barnard. I talk about Digital Marketing. I’m Jason Barnard. If he can understand the two are different, it will be able to present him to somebody who’s interested in The Beatles and me to somebody who’s interested in driving traffic through Digital Marketing. That’s the key. And you think about people’s names, it’s very ambiguous.
[00:17:22] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): I can go on with the Jason Barnards. There’s a circus clown in South Africa. There’s an ice hockey player. There’s a professor at San Francisco University. There’s the CEO of a company called Lithium something in Canada. Each of them needs to be individually understand with the same string of characters that represents them. So that’s the strings. Google now says, well, it’s actually four or five different things, each of whom has a specialty and each of whom will be relevant to a different audience.
[00:17:51] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): If I can understand the things, I can give a much better answer than if I’ve understood just the strings. That was cool. I like that. I just made it up. Sorry. I’ve never said that in my entire life quite like that. So thank you.
Why Clear and Consistent Branding is Essential?
[00:18:04] Thomas Watkins: Make sure you remember it. That’s, you know, you could use that. Right. So, okay, so this is really fascinating, and so let me ask you this. So the stuff that you are talking about, it’s based on years of understanding Google, working with Google, how well does this translate to we don’t know where things will go with LLMs, the extent to which Gemini and ChatGPT and all this stuff will shape the future and how people find information? Does this transfer the stuff, these concepts you’re talking about, into the LLM world?
[00:18:42] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Absolutely. Because all of these machines work exactly the same way, is they’re all trying to understand the world. And if we’re educating one of these machines, we’re educating them all, because they all use the same dataset, which is the World Wide Web. They all have more or less the same technologies. They all have the same aim, which is to satisfy their users, bring their users to the solution to the problem as efficiently as possible. So we have the same data, the same technologies, the same audience, and aim. At that point, the education becomes the same. And the education is actually very simple. They’re simplistic children that learn by repetition.
[00:19:26] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): So if we are clear and consistent about who we are, what we do, and which audience we serve across our entire digital footprint and we stick to creating a digital footprint that’s relevant to our audience, these machines will understand. So I say Jason Barnard is an entrepreneur and writer. Bloody bloody blah. I can’t remember what the rest of it is. Jason Barnard the podcast says Jason Barnard is a podcaster specializing in music. The circus clown says Jason Barnard is a circus clown in South Africa. If we’re, each of us consistent about how we describe ourselves across all of our digital footprint, and the Jason Barnard podcaster about music tends to appear much more on podcasting and music sites.
[00:20:08] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): I tend to appear on Digital Marketing sites and the circus client appears on circus sites. Then it’s very easy for Google to understand those three different entities, those three different things, and that makes a lot of sense. So it prioritizes for you as a person that you should focus on clear, consistent communication on relevant platforms. That’s the secret to Google. It’s the secret to ChatGPT, it’s the secret to Bing Copilot, it’s the secret to Gemini, it’s the secret to Perplexity. And truth be told, it was the secret yesterday, it’s the secret today, and it will be the secret tomorrow. But it’s no longer secret because I just shared it with you.
Kalicube’s Advantage in Achieving Global Digital Success
[00:20:52] Thomas Watkins: So what makes this universal? It’s not that you adapted and you figured out how Google does things, that your method is based upon the statistical reality of how fitting functions work and how entities are realized and clustered together out of just the statistics of data. That’s what you’ve figured out and that’s what you’ve put into your method.
[00:21:17] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Yeah. So it’s a universal solution. It applies to any kind of thing, entity. It applies around the world. It applies to all the different machines. It’s timeless because it worked yesterday, it works today, and it will work tomorrow. And the key that we have at Kalicube with the SaaS platform we have with our 2 billion data points, is that we can identify exactly which of the buttons to press for these machines and which priority those buttons have. So an example would be your digital footprint.
[00:21:48] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): I have 5000 mentions of me online. Our software will go through, find all of the 5000 mentions, all the 5000 profiles, mentions, articles about me, articles I’ve written, videos, podcasts, and it will prioritize them according to their importance in the minds of the machine. And that importance, interestingly enough, depends on its understanding of who my audience is. So if I’m on a podcast about music, the importance of my entity is going to be right at the bottom. If I’m on a podcast about Digital Marketing, the importance will be much higher. So the algorithms in my system, in Kalicube system will figure out which of the buttons to press in which order to make the machines happy. And ironically and delightfully, what makes the machines happy is what serves your audience. So if you walk the walk for your audience, the machines will be happy and simply emulate you walking the walk in their own search results.
How Kalicube Engages with Clients From DIY to Done For You
[00:22:48] Thomas Watkins: This sounds terrific. So for the audience who wants to engage in Kalicube, what does an engagement look like? You are an agency and you provide a service, so they would engage with you and then you would approach that like any other kind of consulting practice.
[00:23:05] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Yeah, somebody, a client who just signed up with us said that they understand they could do it themselves and we offer all of this information for free. You can go to our website, kalicube.com, PDFs all you want, articles, everything is explained. The client we just signed said, but I don’t want to go through all of that to figure it all out. I just want the pieces that make sense for me. I want you to take the weight, I want you to take the strain. I want you to be my personal trainer who tells me every day what I need to do in the right order to amplify and maximize the effect of every marketing effort I make for my personal brand. And he used the example, I think it was LeBron James he mentioned, saying best basketball player in the world.
[00:23:51] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): I’m English so I don’t know anything about this. He throws the best hoop in the entire universe and no trainer can tell him how to throw the hoop better. Thats not a term, but it is now. What his personal trainer does is take the weight off his shoulders so he doesnt have to think about how hes going to train tomorrow and just says do this, do that, do that, do that, do that, and youre going to be on track. So its kind of motivational, prioritizational, amplifying what we already have to make much more with no strain on the person themselves. I would imagine in sport in particular, the more LeBron James is thinking about what do I need to do tomorrow, the less mind space he has for what he’s actually supposed to do, which is get the ball in the hoop.
Connect with Jason Barnard Across Multiple Platforms
[00:24:36] Thomas Watkins: Nice. Jason Barnard, how can people connect with you, Kalicube, anyplace else, LinkedIn or any other places where you share your ideas?
[00:24:46] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Yeah. Well, I’ll give you a really nice last comment Is the Brand SERP, which is the search engine results page for a brand, a person, a company, a music album, a product, a service, a film is designed by Google to give you the information on the right-hand side that’s factual to give you a summary about the person or the corporation or the film. And on the left-hand side, the recommended places to engage with that entity. So if you search my name, Jason Barnard J-A-S-O-N B-A-R-N-A-R-D on the right-hand side, you’ll see a factual representation summary of who I am, what I do, who I serve and my life without even leaving Google, you know enough about me to understand where I come from, what I’ve done in my life. And on the left-hand side, the options for engaging with me. You start with my own website if you want to research my life.
[00:25:38] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Second, my company website if you want to do business with me. Third, Twitter, if you want to chat with me on Twitter. Fourth, LinkedIn, if you want to go onto LinkedIn and talk to me there. Fifth, the articles I’ve written recently on Search Engine Land, on Forbes. So the beauty of the Brand SERP, my Google business card, if you like, is you get to choose how you engage with me. And I think that’s one of the prime things that people say in doing business, is let the client decide how to engage. Let the client decide what platform to use. That’s the key And that’s what the Google Brand SERP, Google business card does for you.
[00:26:16] Thomas Watkins: Awesome. Really, really interesting stuff. Jason Barnard, loved having you here. Thank you for being on the show.
[00:26:23] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Well, thank you for having me. I really enjoyed that. You asked some brilliant questions and I’ve said things in ways I’ve never said them before and I’ve been talking about this for twelve years.
[00:26:31] Thomas Watkins: Thanks. That’s awesome. See you next time, everyone, on Product Led Growth Leaders. Thank you for tuning in. Join us next time on Product Led Growth Leaders. Take care.
