Zoom is kicking off a major clean-up of its older online content after discovering that outdated material was being surfaced by AI, and in response is now shifting its brand strategy towards creators, influencers and comedy.
Speaking at HubSpot’s Unbound conference in Boston, Zoom chief marketing officer Kimberly Storin revealed the company had only recently discovered that some of its older content was actually working against the brand’s visibility.
“I just learned yesterday, for example, that a lot of our historical content was actually holding us back from visibility,” Storin said.
The discovery, she said, prompted Zoom to begin “a big process” just a day later to scrub older content from its digital footprint.
“We’re doing it now, we’re undertaking a big process to scrub a lot of the older content, which was being cited and was now out-of-date,” she said.
Regularly refreshing online content to improve SEO rankings is not new. Google’s core quality algorithms evaluate websites on a site-wide level; a massive backlog of ‘low-quality’ or ‘thin’ content can actually drag down the search rankings of your best pages.
However, it seems that AI search engines and chatbots may have moved the situation on.
Content scrubbing is not often discussed among Australian brands. However, the lighter touch, content pruning is more common – working to improve SEO visibility over time.
Zoom’s three-pronged AEO strategy
Storin said scrubbing outdated content is just one part of Zoom’s broader strategy to improve its visibility in AI-generated answers, with the company taking a three-pronged approach across its website infrastructure, content and third-party citations.
The first focus is ensuring Zoom’s website is technically ready to be crawled and understood by large language models, including “having the right schema, crawlability and FAQs”.
The second is its core content strategy, with Zoom looking at the prompts people are regularly using with AI tools and creating content designed to answer those questions.
Storin said there is significant overlap between traditional SEO and AEO, but brands now need to consider that they are “marketing to humans, but we’re also marketing to agents”.
The third part of the strategy is citations beyond Zoom’s own channels.
“These citations are coming from your content, they’re coming from your website, they’re also coming from your G2 reviews, they’re coming from Reddit, they’re coming from LinkedIn, they’re coming from media outlets and they’re coming from analysts,” Storin said.
She said a combination of PR, reviews, social media, media coverage and analyst commentary can all contribute to the authority a brand has within AI systems.
“If you’re looking at any one of those pillars without looking at the others, you’re not looking at the full picture,” she said, adding that the three areas must work “in concert”.
And while the brand scrubs away at its old content, it also looks to overhaul the way it shows up to audiences, moving away from relying so heavily on its existing library of brand content and towards “more human voices and cultural relevance”. Rather than simply producing more content, Storin said the company is increasingly focused on who is telling the story.
An example of Zoom leaning into humour is through its latest ‘Zoom Ahead’ campaign, where the brand worked with comedians and entertainers including Kate McKinnon and Colin Jost.
Its latest spot features McKinnon attempting to “destroy” Zoom, only to find herself using the platform’s own features – including its AI tools and meeting notetaker – to do so.
For Storin, working with recognisable and funny personalities gives Zoom a way to communicate its expanding product offering without simply producing another traditional product-led advertisement.
“We know Zoom is part of the cultural zeitgeist,” she said.
Storin said Zoom is also rethinking its approach to creators and influencers, arguing that consumers increasingly trust people rather than brands to tell them what matters.
“People trust influencers now much more than they trust brands,” she said.
And she’s not wrong. New research from the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) shows that everyday content creators and influencers now shape how a majority of consumers discover and trust new products, outperforming traditional corporate brand channels.
What is the brand doing differently?
This recent shift has led Zoom to develop a broader creator strategy globally, including working with customers who can “act as advocates for the brand” rather than simply producing conventional branded content.
The company has also been encouraging its own employees and executives to become more visible on social media – with the brand launching a 30-day social challenge within its marketing team, taking a snapshot of employees’ follower counts on day one and again on day 30, while encouraging them to share their own stories rather than simply repeating the Zoom corporate message.
The approach has since been extended to Zoom’s executives, with the company providing individual coaching to help them become more effective spokespeople online.
“Some executives need more hand-holding than others,” Storin said. “Some of them might be too comfortable where, like, reel it back in, which is also a good problem.”
The shift represents a broader change in how Zoom thinks about its brand presence, with Storin suggesting that marketers can no longer rely solely on the content they have historically produced or expect to maintain complete control over how their brands are represented.
For Zoom, that means cleaning up the content that no longer reflects the company, “while putting greater emphasis on the people, personalities and communities shaping conversations around the brand”.
And there’s been changes internally too.
Storin said the company has subsequently increased its investment in social and content talent too, while repurposing some existing roles to reflect the changing marketing landscape.
“We have grown that team and are changing some of those roles to be slightly different than they were a couple of years ago,” she said.
B&T travelled to Boston as a guest of HubSpot.
