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I help companies make marketing make sense.
Most of the leaders I work with aren't…
Most of the leaders I work with aren't…
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Kerry Guard shared thisMost elite consultants and B2B fractionals don't have a lead generation problem. They have an offer-market fit problem. They remain trapped on a stressful pipeline roller coaster—delivering brilliant results for a client one month, only to realize their pipeline has gone completely quiet the moment they stop actively grinding for the next deal. In this episode of Back On T-R-A-C-K, I sit down with Garrett Jestice, Founder of 10x Solo and former B2B SaaS CMO, to break down how to stop running a frantic, bespoke hustle and start building a highly repeatable revenue engine. We dive into: • Translating B2B SaaS product-market fit frameworks straight into high-ticket services. • The "Offer-Market Fit" framework: Selling the exact same outcome to the same buyer on repeat. • Designing a high-converting, low-friction "intro offer" to open corporate doors seamlessly. • How standardizing your delivery model instantly protects your calendar and scales your profit margins. Stop reinventing your services for every single client proposal. It’s time to win your best clients on purpose. Join us live on Back on T-R-A-C-K.
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Kerry Guard posted thisI'm going page by page through existing blog posts for some of my clients right now, instead of writing new ones. Teams with 200, 300 blog posts, and the AI doesn't cite any of them. The content isn't bad. It's the same talking points, same "top 5 ways to improve your security posture" that every competitor published last quarter. The AI has no reason to pick yours over theirs. It's looking for something it can confidently reuse, and if your version doesn't add anything new, you're background noise. So instead of writing more, I'm going page by page through what already exists and asking one question: does this page say something that no other page on the internet says? Original data. A real client pattern you documented. A first-person account of what actually happened when you tried the thing everyone recommends. That's what AI pulls in. The generic stuff is what AI already has forty versions of. It doesn't need yours. Gartner predicted traditional search volume would drop 25% by 2026 as buyers shift to AI chatbots and virtual agents. That shift is already here. And the content that survives it isn't the content that covers the most keywords. Every single page has to say something only your experience allows you to say. Not a rewritten intro. A specific problem solved in a way no one else can solve it because they haven't lived it. If your content team is still running a volume play, this is the quarter to stop. Because the AI is already deciding what's worth citing, and for a lot of brands right now, the answer is nothing.
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Kerry Guard posted this94% of brands invest heavily in traditional SEO. 62% are technically invisible to generative AI models. That's from Semrush's own research, published alongside their Brand Visibility Framework launch. The company that built the rank tracking industry is now telling the market that rank tracking alone isn't enough. And the numbers get worse when you zoom into specific verticals. BrightEdge is tracking AI Overviews on 48% of all monitored queries now, up 58% year over year. In informational categories like cybersecurity and devops, that figure runs closer to 80%. So if you're a cybersecurity brand and your board update still leads with "we rank in the top 10 for 73% of our priority keywords," you're reporting on a surface that covers maybe 20% of what your buyer actually sees. And then there's the Ahrefs data from February. 300,000 keywords analyzed. 58% drop in CTR for the top-ranking page on queries that triggered an AI Overview. You can be number one and still lose more than half the clicks you used to get. I keep coming back to this: the rank number is still in the Position column. You can still see it if you look for it. But it's not where your eye lands anymore. The icons are. AI Overview markers, Things to Know, Featured Snippets, People Also Ask. That's where the visibility actually lives now. The data is weeks old, not years. And it's moving fast enough that the companies who built their entire business on tracking rankings are pivoting their own product strategy around it.
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Kerry Guard shared thisI pulled up Semrush for our own brand: let me tell you what was working and what wasn't working so you can learn what I've learned. Our AI visibility score looked healthy. The green kind of number you'd screenshot for a board deck. Then I read the prompts it was scoring us on. Half of them we have no business showing up for. Wrong category. Way too top of funnel. The number was real, but what it implied was not. HubSpot just published great data showing buyers are in AI search before they ever reach you. That part is settled. But watch what comes next, because we have done this before. Visibility score is the new MQL. We chased MQLs for a decade until everyone admitted the number went green while pipeline stayed flat. Inbound started as "be useful" and got operationalized into gate the PDF and fill the funnel. The trust problem we are all fighting now is the bill from that. The new word arrives with a new dashboard but maintains the same temptation: “Chase the green number until it is the only thing you are optimizing, and it stops meaning anything.” So before that visibility score lands on a board deck, pull it yourself and read the prompts behind it. Count how many you would actually want to win. If the green number is built on questions your buyer never asks, it is measuring nothing.
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Kerry Guard shared thisSo fun fact. Last week I celebrated my 16th anniversary with my husband. It's usually a time where I regail the tale of how we met on the beaches of Hawaii, engaged in the beaches of Washington State, and married on the classy beaches of Ocean City, New Jersey. It's as fairy tale as it sounds. Maybe one day I'll turn it into a meet-cute novel 😊
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Kerry Guard posted thisI had a client who is an executive coach. We were going after terms around business coaching. He wasn't showing up at all. Not in search. Not in AI. Nothing. And I couldn't figure out why. The content was good. The site was solid. We were doing the work. But I couldn't get him any visibility because the message we had and the category keywords we were targeting were misaligned. Business coaching and executive coaching attract completely different audiences and completely different content ecosystems. And the AI systems that are deciding what to recommend? They care about that distinction more than we realized. So I switched him over to executive coaching. Restructured the website in terms of how the content needs to function now for search visibility. Got the messaging and the category in alignment. In 15 hours, he was showing up. He was being cited. 15 hours. This is the thing I keep coming back to. The content can be great. The site can be strong. But if you're in the wrong category, if the message and the keywords aren't aligned, none of it lands. The AI has no reason to surface you because it doesn't know where you belong. If you've been writing a lot of top-of-funnel content for a really long time and you go into Semrush, you might see a 17% AI visibility score with mentions and citations showing up, and you think things are working. But it's because the tool is bucketing you in a very broad category. It's misleading how you're actually showing up in the market. You're showing up too big, and you really need to niche down. We couldn't figure out what keywords to go after, what prompts to optimize for, what content to write, until we put the positioning and messaging together first. Category, then content. If your visibility feels stuck, send me a DM. The first thing we do is diagnose whether your category and your messaging are actually in alignment.
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Kerry Guard reposted thisKerry Guard reposted thisCustomers don't experience your company in silos. As Megan Ratcliff explains, buyers see one brand, one journey, and one experience—regardless of how many teams are involved behind the scenes. That's why go-to-market alignment matters. Sales, marketing, product marketing, enablement, and customer success all play a role in shaping the customer experience with your business. Listen to the full episode here: https://lnkd.in/epcsny5n #GoToMarket #CustomerExperience #RevenueGrowth #MarketingLeadership #B2BMarketing
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Kerry Guard shared thisMany corporate boards operate under the belief that the only way to hit ambitious pipeline goals is to push marketing teams to the point of burnout. High turnover is seen as an unavoidable cost of scaling a B2B company. That belief is completely misplaced. In this episode of Back On T-R-A-C-K, I talk with Jane Serra, Global Head of Marketing at memoryBlue, about how she delivered 40–70% year-over-year revenue growth and navigated three corporate acquisitions in just 12 months—while keeping an incredible 100% of her team on board. We dive into: • The operational reality of successfully pivoting a GTM engine from SLG to PLG. • Moving upstream from transactional SMB sales to land high-value enterprise accounts. • The "Slinky Detangler" approach: How to strip the vanity metrics out of your marketing strategy and lead your people with absolute heart and clarity. You do not have to sacrifice your workplace culture to hit your quarterly revenue targets. It's time to learn how to scale your pipeline and your people simultaneously. Join us live on Back on T-R-A-C-K.
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Kerry Guard posted thisFor some of my clients right now, I'm not writing new content. I'm optimizing what already exists. Every single page has to solve a specific problem and be crystal clear about what it's solving and for whom. A single page that's built right doesn't just rank in Google anymore. It can show up in an AI Overview, get cited in ChatGPT, surface in Perplexity, or win a Featured Snippet. Four different surfaces from one asset. But only if the page is specific enough that an AI system can confidently pull from it. The old playbook was: write a broad blog post, target a keyword cluster, hope for page one. That still matters as a foundation. But the new question is whether that page gives an AI engine a reason to recommend you by name when someone asks a question in your category. And the answer, for most pages I audit, is no. The content isn't bad. It's just not specific enough. It reads like every other page on the topic, with no original data or first-person experience an AI can extract and reuse. Perplexity is a totally different system from Google. I don't fully know how it's built. Nobody does. But what I do know is that the brands showing up across all of these surfaces have one thing in common: they solve a very specific problem better than anybody else for that audience. So before you publish the next blog post, ask: could an AI confidently cite this page when someone asks about our category? If the answer is maybe, the page isn't ready.
Kerry Guard replied to a comment
11h
Margie Agin, such a good point. Having first party data fe surveys and conversations, while always important, has now become table stakes.
Kerry Guard commented on a post
1d
Or it's just screaming into a void because it gets zero visibility. Wrong category means no search alignment. Wrong message means zero LinkedIn impressions. The leading indicators speak for themselves. More is not more.
Kerry Guard replied to a comment
2d
Quincy Johnson, MS AHAHA. I'll be sure to tag you in when I finally get around to it ☺️
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Kerry Guard reacted on thisKerry Guard reacted on thisYour SEO expert doesn't understand cybersecurity. Neither does your digital marketing or creative design team. I have nothing but respect for SEO specialists, paid media teams, designers, and digital marketers. They know things I don't, and I'd be foolish to pretend otherwise. If I needed to scale paid search or improve technical SEO, they're exactly who I'd call. But here's what really steams my ham 🐖: Those "package deals" many of these agencies like to offer. Notice that the promise is usually volume. A ton of volume. Not quality, relevancy, or accuracy. Not content that captures your ICP's attention and builds trust in your brand. Even worse, they could destroy your brand credibility by slinging slop in public with your logo tacked on it. Cybersecurity isn't a "topic." It's an industry made up of dozens of specialties. Cloud security isn't application security. IAM isn't endpoint security. OT isn't CNAPP. No one person knows all of it. They couldn't possibly. Good cybersecurity content requires domain expertise, not just a subscription to ChatGPT. 🎤 Hell, I'd give a PMM the first pass at writing ad copy over a random generalist agency. (Sorry, PMMs. You're great at messaging. Copywriting is a different sport.) Let your SEO team own SEO. Let your digital team own digital. Let your designers own design. None of them should be writing your content. If you want content that earns the attention of your smart and skeptical buyers, make sure someone with real cybersecurity knowledge has their hands on the wheel. #MicDropMoment
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Kerry Guard reacted on thisKerry Guard reacted on thisMy first marketing "campaign" didn't have a dashboard. It had a jewelry counter. I was working at a jeweler that didn't even have a website. So I started posting on Facebook — just photos of the pieces, nothing fancy. Within weeks, people were walking into the store holding up their phones. "Do you have this ring?" "Is this necklace still available?" And when we didn't have it — they asked if we could make it. No pixel. No UTM link. No multi-touch attribution model. Just a customer, a phone, and a post that made them walk through the door. I've never forgotten how clean that signal was. It's the kind of attribution every marketer chases for the rest of their career and rarely gets that obvious ever again. That experience is what hooked me. Not the tools, not the channel — the impact. Watching something I made move a real person to action. From there, I went to work at an SEO company and learned the technical, structural side of marketing — the stuff that doesn't show up as fast as a walk-in customer, but compounds over time. Between those two jobs, I got the two halves of what marketing actually is: the spark that gets someone to act right now, and the system that keeps working long after you've stopped thinking about it. I've carried that combination through every role since. However, the title has changed, the job hasn't: I'm a growth marketer. I care about driving real impact and going for effect — not activity for its own sake. Still chasing that feeling from the jewelry counter. Still trying to build the thing someone holds their phone up to. What are you still chasing?
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Kerry Guard reacted on thisKerry Guard reacted on thisWhen I got booked to speak at TEDxNormal, one of the first things I did was to book an appointment with Organic Headshots. I've been going to Kirstine Walton and Michelle Kaffko for years, and know that they'll always get me exactly what I need - whether it's a corporate headshot, an action photo speaking at an event, a social media profile, a book cover, or something else. So grateful to them!
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Kerry Guard reacted on thisKerry Guard reacted on thisPresence at home and presence at work are connected One of the most useful things in the blog is the reminder that the way you show up at home and at work is usually more connected than people want to admit. The leader who avoids hard conversations at home often avoids them at work too. The leader who controls everything in one place usually brings that same pattern into the other. That means the work is not compartmentalized. You do not get to be emotionally unavailable in your marriage and fully present with your team, or vice versa. The same internal pattern is showing up in both places. That is why self-awareness matters so much. You are not just improving one relationship or one business process. You are shifting the person doing the leading. The shift does not happen by accident. In the blog, the author had to make structural changes first — limiting when work would show up, setting clear boundaries, and making deliberate choices about when to engage. Then came the deeper practice: curiosity, honesty, and being willing to ask for help when needed. That is the real work. Not just better time management, but better self-management. If you want to understand whether your leadership patterns are helping or hurting both your business and your closest relationships, take the Growth Ceiling Audit. https://lnkd.in/gnJuTCpv
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Kerry Guard reacted on thisKerry Guard reacted on thisWhile researching The First, The Few, The Only, I interviewed many women who had moved to a new country to build a career and life. Their stories were filled with courage, fear, and joy. Some of the bravest women I've interviewed. If that's part of your story, this one is for you. Image credit: femmenova.club on insta
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Kerry Guard reacted on thisKerry Guard reacted on thisCutting costs might fix a budget issue right now, but it doesn't generate more revenue. Brandi Starr ☆ talks about the difference, and why it's so important to make sure as leaders, we are focused on finding the ways to create those revenue engines. Latest episode of Markigy: The Science of Marketing Strategy Podcast out now :-)
Experience & Education
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MKG Marketing
View Kerry’s full experience
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Volunteer Experience
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Volunteer
Philadelphia Ronald McDonald House
- 4 years 11 months
Children
While the tasks I performed were mundane everyday efforts like doing dishes, taking out the trash, or cooking dinner there'd be the rare occasion when I'd get to spend time reading to a child or throw a football around or hold an infant. In those moments I got to be reminded how small my problems were and how resilient kids were even on their toughest days.
Projects
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Soaring out of the valley of growth
I met the Rutkowski Law Firm in July of 2024. In the first six months, we created 24% more growth y/y by revamping the newsletter and creating nurture sequences. In Q1 of 2025 we relaunched their website and launched digital ads. While Q1 was a tough quarter, Q2 evened out and Q3 grew 22% y/y–that's with a CRM migration!
All channels are working together as a single engine –
– Google Ads
– Google Business
– Organic Search
– Community
– Email
– Organic Social
–…I met the Rutkowski Law Firm in July of 2024. In the first six months, we created 24% more growth y/y by revamping the newsletter and creating nurture sequences. In Q1 of 2025 we relaunched their website and launched digital ads. While Q1 was a tough quarter, Q2 evened out and Q3 grew 22% y/y–that's with a CRM migration!
All channels are working together as a single engine –
– Google Ads
– Google Business
– Organic Search
– Community
– Email
– Organic Social
– Intake
– Sales
With a solid marketing foundation, our marketing is back on track and we're working towards some lofty, but exciting goals for 2026!
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