Episode Summary
In this episode of Seven Figures and Beyond, host Greg Shuey wraps up the final episode of a four-part series, tying together the full framework for building customer-informed, AI-optimized content that fuels long-term eCommerce growth. He introduces the Growth Flywheel—a continuous, repeatable system built around four key stages: listen, build, amplify, and learn. By listening to real customer feedback, transforming those insights into content, amplifying through SEO, AI search, and owned channels, and learning from performance data, brands can create a self-sustaining marketing engine that compounds over time. Shuey emphasizes that when content truly reflects customer language, it not only improves rankings and conversions but also drives trust and cross-channel consistency.
Key Takeaways
- The Growth Flywheel Framework: Success in content marketing depends on continuously cycling through listening, building, amplifying, and learning from data, not one-time campaigns.
- Customer-Led Content Drives Compounding Growth: Using real customer language and insights strengthens SEO, conversion rates, and overall brand trust.
- AI Optimization is Non-Negotiable: Every content piece should be optimized for both search engines and large language models (LLMs) to train AI systems like ChatGPT and Gemini to recognize your brand.
- Distribution and Repurposing are Critical: Content must be promoted through SEO, AI search, email/SMS, and even short-form video testing on TikTok or Reddit to maximize visibility and validate messaging.
- Measure, Analyze, and Refine: Tools like Google Search Console, Peec.ai, and post-purchase surveys reveal what’s working and help refine the next cycle of content creation.
Questions To Ask Yourself
- How can my brand collect and analyze customer feedback more effectively to fuel the “listen” phase of the flywheel?
- What content formats or channels are most effective for amplifying our customer-informed content?
- How can we integrate AI and LLM optimization into our existing content workflow?
- Which metrics or tools (Google Search Console, Peec.ai, surveys) best help us measure compounding growth?
- How can we repurpose our best-performing content to create consistent messaging across all marketing channels?
Episode Links
Greg Shuey LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/greg-shuey/
Episode Transcript
Greg Shuey (00:01.762)
Hey, everyone. Welcome to the Seven Figures and Beyond e-commerce marketing podcast. I am your host, Greg Shuey. I created this podcast to help direct the consumer business owners and marketers who are stuck and who are just grinding and they’re they’re working hard every single day to try to find new and best practices and different ways that they can grow their businesses. So if you’ve tuned in over the last three episodes, we have spent a lot of time talking about
content development, content optimization, content promotion, and really the backbone of that has been starting with customer research and then leaning into your findings to build that out. And we’ve walked through this framework and this framework has really changed the way how I produce content, how we do it inside of our agency, and then how we do it for our clients. So
The first of these four episodes, we started with how to collect customer feedback and doing that on a budget because a lot of brands believe that customer research, good customer and market research is expensive and it doesn’t have to be the second. We talked about how to use AI to analyze that feedback and pull real actionable insights out of it. The third
We talked about how to take those insights that you pull out of your research and AI pulls out of that research and then turning those into a content strategy that actually drives strong organic growth, paid growth, and actually turns those visitors into paying customers. So today we’re going to close the loop. going to finish up this micro series.
Greg Shuey (02:21.526)
and we are going to bring it all together by talking about the growth flywheel. Now this growth flywheel is a simple, repeatable system for turning customer informed content into ongoing traffic, trust and sales. I’ve hit on this before. When your content speaks your customer language, it improves everything. Okay. From keyword rankings,
to conversion rates, to customer retention, a rising tide lifts all boats. So if you can get that dialed in, it is going to improve the performance across the board for all of your marketing, not just your SEO and your content marketing efforts. Customer-centric content does just that. So let’s take some time. Let’s pick apart this flywheel. So if you’ve been doing any kind of marketing,
Whether it’s digital, whether it’s traditional, whether it’s content marketing, whether it’s SEO, you know and understand that growth is not just a one time campaign. You can’t just do SEO once and expect it to work. You can’t just do billboard advertising, put up one billboard for one month and expect it to work. Any kind of marketing in order to have success, you need to have this flywheel that when you push it and you push it again and you push it again, it just gets faster and faster and faster.
This flywheel, I believe, is even more relevant and important when it comes to SEO and content marketing, because those marketing efforts compound over time. They get bigger and stronger. And as long as you keep pushing that flywheel, it’s going to continue to compound. Also, every new piece of content that you create doesn’t just attract new visitors. It doesn’t just attract new customers.
but it makes your next piece of content even smarter and more powerful. Let’s talk about how. So here’s how it works. You’ve got four pieces of it, right? First, listen. So you collect the data from real buyers, surveys, reviews, chat logs, social mentions, whatever. Second, you build. You turn those insights into content that answers, solves, and resonates with your ideal customer. Third, you amplify that content.
Greg Shuey (04:40.908)
So you take it and you distribute that content through multiple channels like organic, paid, social, owned channels, any. Fourth, you learn. This is where the flywheel really starts to roll. So you measure the performance of each of your content pieces and then you feed those learnings back into your next round of content. And then every single quarter, every single launch, every single campaign, you repeat that cycle.
And the very best part of this kind of marketing, like I mentioned, it compounds over time. Each time you loop that flywheel, your understanding of your customer deepens, your messaging sharpens and your growth really starts to accelerate. That’s what I mean by taking those things, your customer understanding that gets deeper, your messaging that you know you need to tweak because it didn’t quite hit. You take that and you invest that into your next piece and then it’s going to make it even stronger.
So this seems super simple to me. It’s super simple and straightforward, but to a lot of brands, they flat out ignore it. You know, they just say, this is my editorial calendar. These are the content pieces I’m going to create. These are my topics. I know exactly how I’m going to create those. And they’re not taking this learning piece at the end and putting that into their next piece. And I guess, you know, at the end of the day, they’re doing this to their own detriment. So, you know, I guess it is what it is, but if you can take these four pieces and you can continually do it,
every quarter, every launch, every campaign, you’re going to start to see really amazing growth for the business. All right. So one thing that we haven’t really gotten deep in over the last three episodes is the distribution piece. Once you’ve built content that is truly dialed in to what your customers actually care about, that is what we’re trying to do. Producing content that they actually care about.
You’ve got to take that content and then you need to get it in front of them or else it’s just going to go somewhere and die, right? It’s going to die on your blog. No one’s ever going to see it. It’s never going to rank in Google. People are never going to find it. So we have to focus on the distribution side of this. So let’s take the next couple of minutes. Let’s really break down the most effective distribution channels for this type of content and how each plays its part in the overall flywheel. So I have
Greg Shuey (07:06.776)
four of these that I really like to lean into. One of them’s kind of uncommon. Not a lot of people do. It’s going to be the last one that we talk about, but I think it’s definitely high value. So the first one obviously is SEO. The SEO guy here is talking about it. So SEO landing pages, SEO blog posts. This is going to be the foundation of everything that you do with your content pieces.
This is your long form content. This is your evergreen content. These are your category guides. These are your how tos. These are your comparisons. These are your FAQs. All of it. All of your content needs to be optimized for search intent and written in your customers actual language. We want to create that connection with them. You want them to read it and say they wrote this piece for me. That is exactly how you earn traffic.
and how you earn credibility at the same time. It’s also how you get people to share your content because if it hits with them, there’s a high probability that they’re gonna share with people that they know who are experiencing the exact same problem. Whether that’s an organic post on Facebook, whether that’s a direct message on Instagram, whether that’s shooting a text message to their next door neighbor with a link to that post. That is how you get them to share it. Once you build that, and we’ve talked about this,
Use your AI analysis to inject verbatim customer quotes into meta descriptions, your H2 tags, your FAQ schema. That is how you start showing up in Google. That is how you start showing up in chat GPT. That is how you start showing up in AI overviews. And people also ask kind of those rich features and those rich snippets that you see in Google these days. So that’s the first one. The second one is ensuring that we have AI optimized content.
and then we’re optimizing for the LLMs. So we build the content to be helpful. We build it in the customer language. We then come back in, we optimize for SEO, and then we optimize for the LLMs. Every piece of content you create, no matter where it lives, this can be your blog, this can be YouTube, it could be wherever, it needs to be formatted and optimized for the LLMs. That means that you should have structured questions, concise answers.
Greg Shuey (09:27.502)
clear next steps, proof points, all of those things. As you’re building this content, you need to keep in mind that we are building the training data for the LLMs. We are training chat GPT, Gemini Perplexity Claude. We are training them on who we are as a brand. We are training them on how we help our ideal customer. And then we are training them on exactly how we speak to those individuals.
You are teaching the machines why your brand deserves to be referenced when someone asks, what is the best product for X, whether it be coolers, Apple watch bands, iPhone cases, protein bars, healthy snacks. I’m just looking at my desk right now. Men’s wallets, elbow braces, any of those things, right? So that is what we are trying to do and accomplish with this kind of optimization.
Now that we have our content, now that it’s optimized for search and AI search, the next thing I like to do is start using this content in your email and your SMS marketing. This is where you close the loop with your own audience. If you’re not working on building your own audience and you’re not nurturing your own audience, that that’s a discussion for another time, but you are missing so much opportunity to drive revenue growth.
I’ll just leave it at that. As you take this content, what you want to be doing is you want to be turning your best performing blogs or FAQ content into micro education emails. So you should use snippets of your customer language as subject lines because that is the emotional resonance that drives opens and clicks. So for an example, if someone said in a product review, finally a bag that fits everything without being bulky,
That should be your email hook. Your email hook should look something like this. Finally, dash a bag that fits everything without the bulk. If people talk like that and they think like that and it’s true, there’s a pretty good chance that people are gonna see that as a subject line and they’re gonna open the email over something that maybe you just came up with off the cuff or maybe something that you had chat GPT come up with. This kind of information, this kind of data, this kind of verbiage performs.
Greg Shuey (11:53.568)
Outperforms everything else. So take some time to think through how you’re going to use that content for your email and your SMS. Alright, this last one. I don’t see a lot of brands doing this, probably because they don’t have the team to do it. Or they don’t have the bandwidth to do it. Honestly, a lot of the brands I talk with, they are either a brand owner or they are a sole marketer inside of the organization and they’re wearing 9 million hats.
Like they don’t have the bandwidth to do this, but using TikTok, Reddit and YouTube shorts to test and validate new content angles before you scale them can be incredibly powerful. So I’m talking short form videos. These are like 20 seconds long, quick demo videos, or even getting on Reddit and posting a thread and seeing what people respond to in terms of that conversation.
It’s really going to help you reveal what messages are resonating, what messages stick before you commit to that, you know, 1500 to 2500 word blog post, which at the end of the day doesn’t take a ton of time per se. It’s not fast by any means, but if you’re strapped for time, that 20 to 32nd short form video that you throw up on TikTok and Instagram can bring a lot of validation to the different topics that you want to write.
You don’t necessarily need this piece, but again, I think it works really well and can be very powerful for a lot of brands. After that, you then take what resonates and you fold it back in to all of the content that you’re producing. So let’s talk about repurposing. We haven’t spent a lot of time on repurposing in any of our episodes. So we’ve got a few minutes here to be able to talk about some of these things that you might be thinking about. Honestly, this is where I see most brands start to burn out.
They are just so focused on producing the next piece of content and the next piece of content. But you’ve built all this amazing content that is helpful, that is written in your customer’s language. You should then be taking time to reuse that content. The really cool thing about repurposing is that every insight you gather, every message you create, every quote from your customers can be sliced and diced into multiple formats.
Greg Shuey (14:16.226)
You don’t just have to do blog content. right. We talked about blog content. We talked about email. You can take those insights and you can summarize the top three takeaways as part of a three-part email series. You can take your PDP FAQs and you can turn those into social posts, right? You can record a 22nd video answering that question on tick-tock. You can create open up Canva and you can create an image with a question and an answer. There’s a number of things that you can do there.
taking a customer quote and turning it into an ad. If you’re not using customer quotes for your meta ads, you are missing a huge opportunity to drive visibility, clicks, and growth for your business. So turn those exact words into creative headlines. You can also turn those exact words again, open up Canva and make an image ad with the customer quote and the number star review that they’ve given you and post that as an ad.
You can take a case study. I not a lot of econ brands unless you’re B2B or are typically publishing case studies. You can do that. You can take that to user generated content. So if you did a case study around a specific customer, you can have that customer then record a 15 second version of it. Comp them with 50 % off their next purchase. Like get creative in how you’re trying to get people to help you build this content. So once you have your foundation of amazing content,
At the end of the day, it’s all about multiplying its impact, not the effort that you’re putting into it. And I think that that’s really important to understand and remember is multiplying impact, not trying to just do more, do more, do more, but impact of an individual piece. And here’s the kicker at the end of the day, when you repurpose based on what your customer said they cared about, the performance gap between channels shrinks. So suddenly your SEO, your email,
your paid ads, your influencers, your billboards, whatever. They are all saying the same thing with the same messaging, with the same emotional tone. And when you have that consistency across channel and across every single touch point along the buyer journey, it absolutely crushes. Crushes. So you’ve got to really get that dialed in across all of your channels. So one more time.
Greg Shuey (16:41.036)
what the customer actually cared about and then using that over and over and over and over again. That’s really where the magic happens. So let’s talk about the learn part of the flywheel. I’m a big believer in measuring. I’m a huge believer in analytics. I’m a huge believer in data collection and interpretation. If you’re not measuring the results of your content pieces, you are not
compounding. So I use three specific lenses to understand what is actually working when it comes to my content. The first one free tool. Everyone has access to it. Easy to set up Google Search Console. This is where you track your visibility growth from the search. Well, I guess not search engines from Google. There’s also Bing Webmaster Tools. You might want to set that one up as well gives you insights into being.
but this is going to help you see impressions, clicks, as well as keyword opportunities. You’re going to want to look specifically at query themes. So are you showing up for more question-based searches or more brand trust search terms, such as like, is brand X worth it? Are American Eagle genes good? Right? Those are the type of things that you’re specifically looking at. This tells you
that your authority is growing and that what you’re doing is working from an SEO standpoint. All right, the second tool, which I’ve talked about a lot on the podcast is PEAK, P-E-E-C.A-I. I love it. I think it’s a fantastic tool. I also know that lots of other businesses are starting to roll out tools like this and we’re testing a lot of them. The cool thing about PEAK is it looks at Google.
And it looks at how you’re showing up in AI overviews and those types of things, kind of the AI piece of Google. But it also looks at the other LLMs and you’re able to load up your questions, your prompts, your queries that you believe that people are searching for. And it is actively going to go out and see how you rank. I know that that’s not the proper term, right? How you show up for those particular queries. It also gives you insights into the different third party mentions that are being pulled in.
Greg Shuey (19:06.2)
that can give you insight into where you need to be in terms of getting your brand mentioned in conversations and those types of things. This is really how we quantify whether our clients content is owning the conversation outside of Google in terms of AI search, in terms of optimizing for AI search and so forth. And so it’s definitely a tool that I would recommend having a look at and taking for a test drive.
All right. The next are post purchase surveys. This is another one that you’ve heard me talk a lot about. We’ve even had some of the guys from no commerce on the podcast before and they’re really powerful, right? So when someone places an order, you can trigger a survey and you can ask them how they found you. And if you ask them, how did you first hear about us? Then you can start to tag content mentions by type.
So you can list out all of the exact ways that they may find you Google, Facebook, Instagram. saw you in a store, blah, blah, blah. But you can also put an other in there where people can provide additional insight. And over time, what you’ll see are channels and topics that are not just driving traffic, but are driving customers. And
The key piece here is when you collect that, right, you can download all of those responses out of NoCommerce or whatever post purchase survey tool you use. I mean, you could even use a Google form, put in embedded on your, on your thank you page. Doesn’t matter. Just collect the data, please. You can take all of that information and feed those learnings right back into the listen phase of the flywheel. Right. That, that is where we start to get really powerful insights and we can start taking action on those learnings. Once you figure out what these learnings are, then
next quarter or your next content piece, you’ll prioritize more of that content and you’ll make sure that you’re using more of the type of messaging and the insights that you get out of this tool to help make it much more powerful. So here’s the beautiful part about all of this. Once you’ve built this flywheel, it never stops turning and it goes faster and faster and faster the more you push on it. So you listen through gathering reviews, gathering
Greg Shuey (21:20.714)
survey data, as well as mulling through performance data. You build new customer informed content. You amplify it across SEO, email, paid, et cetera. You learn what worked and you feed that back into the next round. The more you spin it, the more efficient your marketing becomes and the more impactful your marketing comes. And the cool thing about this,
is the way that most businesses operate is they just have random blog posts that they’re producing. So, you know, we need this post created this week. We need any this email created this week. It’s not doing that anymore. Right. You’re actually building a growth engine that’s built specifically on customer feedback. So your customers are the fuel. A.I. is your engine to take that that fuel and analyze it. The content is the output and the data that you get back out of your content.
is how you steer the ship. That is really the future of organic growth at the end of the day. That’s literally it. So let’s bring this one home. If you follow this whole series, I know it’s going to be a little recap as we, as we started the episode from collecting customer feedback to using AI for analysis, building a research led content strategy and now creating the flywheel. You’ve got everything that you need to build a high
performing content marketing system that truly grows smarter with every single turn of the flywheel. Your content shouldn’t just attract traffic. It’s great if it does, but that traffic should compound trust and drive repeatable scalable growth for the business. So here’s my challenge for you. A lot of brands have been spending a lot of time over the last couple of months doing planning for 2026.
A lot of them are taking a small break over the next couple of weeks to get ready for Black Friday, Cyber Monday. Obviously, as you get back into finalizing your planning, as as you get into the beginning of December, you should take the time to pull up your top five performing content pieces for the year. You should analyze those and then ask yourself, what did these pieces have in common?
Greg Shuey (23:40.888)
How can I feed those learnings back into my next round of content that I produce? Probably starting in January. How am I gonna take those learnings and then how am I going to make my content that I’m producing in January much stronger? If you can’t go through all of these steps, that is probably the most simple and the fastest way to get started. And it’s how to start getting that flywheel spinning in the right direction. So if this series has been helpful, you these last four episodes,
It would be amazing if you could share it with another brand owner or a marketer who’s ready to stop guessing and start compounding. Thank you so much and hope you tune in again next time. Take care.
Greg is the founder and CEO of Stryde and a seasoned digital marketer who has worked with thousands of businesses, large and small, to generate more revenue via online marketing strategy and execution. Greg has written hundreds of blog posts as well as spoken at many events about online marketing strategy. You can follow Greg on Twitter and connect with him on LinkedIn.