P2P Marketing Director Lisa Zhao On Beating AI And Google with SME Content

Google has been giving hell to review websites. Most AI spammers have been rightfully wiped out by the latest algorithm updates, but way too many qualitative websites have been caught in the crossfire, losing all their traffic and most of their revenue overnight.

Website Planet invited Lisa Zhao, Managing Director of P2P Marketing, to reveal their formula for high-quality marketing content that helped them thrive in times where content has become a commodity and Google is wiping out years-long websites in the blink of an update.

P2P Marketing is an online resource providing actionable insights, current industry trends, and exclusive advice from experts in the field of digital marketing. Another perfect target for Big G, who has incredibly survived the core updates hell.

Lisa is a growth and database marketing leader with a successful track record of growing businesses and turning around organizations. Prior to joining P2P Marketing, Lisa was a senior director of Personalized and Email Marketing at Walgreens and previously a management consultant at Deloitte-Monitor. In her current role, she is dedicated to establishing P2P’s network of marketing subject matter experts (SMEs).

What problems are you solving for your customers and audience?

The digital marketing landscape is evolving rapidly. Marketing went from writing punchlines and designing attractive billboards to today’s data and tech-driven tactics. AI Tools are pushing the evolution further. It has become inevitable that digital marketers today need to learn new tools and technologies quickly in order to keep up.

P2P Marketing aims to share our knowledge through marketing how-to guides and agency and solution reviews. Our team is hoping our legwork of testing individual tools, reading online reviews, and synthesizing pros and cons, can help fellow marketers/ businesses in their evaluations. We also hope our guides on topics such as how to write cold outreach emails with templates can help our readers jump-start their process.

Everyday, we get emails from our readers on how much they appreciate our posts. That’s what keeps us going. I think we stand out with the breadth and depth of our content. We are proud of the quality standard we hold.

What makes people eventually choose you over your competitors?

Our content is all written by writers with digital marketing backgrounds, so we think we know what we are talking about 🙂

Seriously, though, in our previous capacities, we had to go through many of the same decision processes that our readers are going through right now, whether they are marketers choosing between software solutions or small/medium-sized businesses looking for agencies to solve a specific problem. Hence, we know the important considerations and gear our reviews to address them.

We also try to shortlist our agencies and solutions to avoid decision fatigue. By now, we have developed a comprehensive review framework, so all comparisons are apples-to-apples. We try to include solutions or agencies to cover a wide range of industries they serve and sizes of businesses, so our readers can find a good fit.

Since you started, what helped you grow and retain your audience?

P2P has done a great job producing in-depth content that ranks well organically. However, like many other websites, we experience many ups and downs from Google algorithm updates.

Since I started, we have introduced monthly email newsletters. I have previously managed the email program at Walgreens for 2 years, so this comes quite naturally. Most of the email addresses we have were acquired over time from various avenues. Some were from email course signups, and some were from loyal readers who sent in compliments.

We have tested different content. Results have shown that our readers prefer how-to content more vs. agency/ software reviews, as the latter often indicates needs at the moment. Overall, our email open rates are in the 20-30% range, which is really encouraging!

👉 You can sign up on our home page. Just Google peertopeermarketing.co

Additionally, we have revived the LinkedIn channel, as we see ourselves as a B2B business. Hence, LinkedIn seems to be a natural fit to promote our content on social media. We’ve been garnering followers quickly there. We aim to update with our latest content twice a week on a variety of topics in digital marketing.

* We’d love to hear from you any suggestions!

What is the current techstack you use to run your online business?

We are a WordPress site hosted by WPX. We switched to WPX a couple of years ago and have been really appreciative of the technological prowess and super responsive support team.

We use Hubspot for our customer relationship management, including their handy contact form plugin on our site.

Our email newsletter is powered by Brevo, formerly SendinBlue. Again, our newsletter sign-up box is a Brevo plugin. Brevo’s built-in filters keep our email lists fresh and are quite handy and intuitive to use. They also have a responsive and knowledgeable support team.

Lastly, as a content site, we use Grammarly extensively to keep our brand voice and tone consistent among different writers.

What’s in the roadmap for your future?

P2P grew rapidly over the past couple of years. As expected, there have been scrappy decisions along the way. In the short run, and as a matter of fact, we have already started streamlining our processes for content creation, incorporating SEO best practices routinely, so we continue to stick to the EEAT (Experience, Expert, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness) standards.

We have also started inviting industry experts in the digital marketing field to share their personal experiences on various topics. The first in the series is A CMO’s Reflection on Customer-Centric Marketing Strategy, by Mindy Heintskill, who has held multiple senior marketing executive positions, including 2-times CMO, and my former manager at Walgreens and now a friend and mentor. I really think our readers can benefit from these truly inspirational leaders, learn from their experiences and mistakes, and achieve their own professional success.

Artificial intelligence is an interesting topic that we have increased focus on. We have tested and reviewed many tools, including copywriting tools, voice generators, email generators, and design generators. These have consistently been our top traffic posts, signaling massive reader interest. We’ll continue to beef up content in that arena and experiment with incorporating some of the tools to increase our own productivity. We truly believe this is our opportunity to embrace the future!

What do you see in the future of your industry?

We operate at the unique intersection of online content and the digital marketing industry. We essentially market digital marketing services and products.

There will be many disruptions along the road as search engines adopt different uses of AI technology to make their search results more useful to end users. We strive to provide authoritative content, so we stay relevant in this changing SEO landscape.

Another potential outcome of this changing landscape is further consolidation, so brand building and having a unique and authoritative voice will help us stand out in the competition. P2P already has a strong brand name, and we will continue to hold ourselves to high standards to maintain and grow our brand equity.