We don't know enough about AI, but we know it is here and it won't go away. We also know it has, will and will continue to affect marketing. Here’s how to embrace compound marketing and turn AI GEO doom into exponential visibility.
Welcome to compound marketing strategy
There’s an old legend, adapted to many Eastern cultures, that goes like this, in a nutshell:
Our hero requests an audience with the king and challenges him to a game of chess. Trusting his game skills, the king happily accepts. As is customary, a bet must be placed before the game begins.
The challenger says “If I’m able to beat your majesty, I’ll only ask for a few grains of rice. One for the first square in the board, two on the second, four on the third, and so on. Every square doubles the rice on the previous one”.
The king agrees. It’s just rice, after all, and he has plenty. After inevitably losing the match (else we wouldn’t have a story to tell), he realizes he has to pay over eighteen trillions grains. An unfathomable number. For reference, this would amount to 700 years of today’s global rice production.
Depending on the version of this story, our hero ends up collecting payment, either by becoming king or marrying the princess, or simply walking away after delivering the moral of the story.
What does this have to do with anything?
Small efforts do add up
Five years ago, we had clients making a lot of money on paid ads alone. Others started the SEO game early on, and got a positioning strong enough to drive traffic and generate more leads than they could process. Others’ reputation in their industries allowed them to rely on handshakes and tradition.
We’re in the age of everything now. If you don’t split your efforts, you get zero because the main job of AI-first research for procurement will be to put the pieces of the puzzle together, and summarize them in a way that reflects who you are across every possible touchpoint.
Reputation is now a result of an exponential process:
Brand x product x reputation x tech x content
Times anything else you want to add that can be particularly relevant for your industry. Location, facilities, supply chain, influence in the industry, everything.
The problem of multipliers is simple: Get zero in any of the factors, and you’re screwed.
You’ll hear a lot about G - E - O
GEO is a spin on our beloved/hated good ol’ SEO, and stands for Generative Engine Optimization. Essentially, the new tricks you need to learn so AI-first searches can find you, understand what you do, and consider you in their responses.
Unless you’re an extremely early adopter and excellent at changing fast, this is your newest zero. Let’s fix that.
What we know so far
Search and research habits are changing. Feed four or five brands to Perplexity and ask for a competitive report. It will be close to decent, and save you a day of increasingly cumbersome website reading. The more savvy and comfy we feel using these platforms, the less we’ll have to click on several Google results to do the boring work.
Top of funnel searches no longer drive traffic. If Gemini’s Overview gives me a detailed recipe for grandma’s traditional style soup, why would I bother clicking? The millions of pages with DIY basic content, definitions, glossaries, recipes, are still relevant for domain authority and positioning, but expect traffic to those to go bye bye.
The customer journey just got shortened. This changes everything in B2B. Say you look for “Pros and cons of BigCommerce”. Clearly an informational intent query. Your preferred AI tool gives you a quick summary, ending with a “Would you like to see a demo?” related question. Suddenly, it gives you options for agencies, including links to landing pages for on-demand content. In five minutes you went from “just looking around” to becoming someone’s lead.
The speed of change is and will continue to be very fast. Gen AI is a new product, and one that demands global adoption to be profitable. Interfaces, user experience, touchpoints, and use cases will continue to change. Us humans have a particular way of finding unexpected applications for anything. Play-doh was originally a wallpaper cleaner. We don’t know what this, whatever this is, will look like years from now.
Content is (still) king
Google is still winning. AI is not a threat and search engines are not going anywhere. It’s a huge opportunity. Nobody else has a larger dataset or can make more money with it.
Therefore, content integrity and quality are key for search engines, for many reasons:
- GenAI relies massively on internet data, particularly on top ranked search engines results to create content.
- If incoming content is rubbish, so will be the result
- If the result is more, worse, watered-down garbage, you just won’t use it.
These companies are working hard on fixing these absurd feedback loops. The ones that suggest putting glue on your pizza or that everyone loves gouda. Errors that can cost millions and make you liable.
So human content is more important than ever. B2B sales and relations require expertise. Understanding clients, accounts, markets, industry, channels, mood, pace, codes and private jokes. It can’t be simulated by an AI agent. Not convincingly enough to beat the other guys.
What you know, what’s impossible to transfer, your unique understanding and experience, is worth more now than two years ago.
AI is not here to replace marketers. On the contrary, I believe that it will ultimately incentivize real, brilliant, well structured and interesting content.
The sum of all that content is measured by what bots understand as “sentiment”.
Yeah, more buzzwords
“Sentiment” is just a word for the interpretation of how artificial intelligence thinks your brand is perceived by the market. It’s the assumption, the educated guess the machine can make after jotting through your data in a fraction of a second. This includes:
- Your website, documentation, case studies and articles.
- Interviews, videos, social network mentions
- The love or hate you get on Twitter (it will never be X, come on), Reddit, customer or press reviews.
- Your perceived reputation, transparency, reliability, culture.
You’re not in control of the narrative anymore.
See for yourself. Head to Perplexity and ask:
- “What’s different about <my brand name>?”
- “What’s different about <my competitor>?”
Do you like what you see?
I didn’t.
Persuade against the machine
When I used AI to research my own agency, I quickly spotted content gaps. The report assumed we were on the high-end price-wise. I believe we’re very competitive. Looking “pricey” means we might be scaring people from engaging, raising their hands and saying “we’d like to talk”.
That means homework:
- Creating more content that really digs into what we deliver, so we’re clearer on the bang per buck balance.
- Putting together benchmarks comparing what we do with other agencies in our sector, so there’s an anchor for visitors to make their own comparisons.
- Linking all of that with content about our warranties and track record, so we can reduce objections or fears.
- Doing a lot more in terms of client definition, expectations, value, return of investment, so you or anyone visiting our site thinks of us as an easy choice.
In addition to the pure content, we worked on the technical part:
- Formatting this secondary content to make it easy for the AI to drive conclusions
- Analyzing and working our content schema markup to make sure it’s exactly what the search engine needs
- Pushing SEO harder than ever, as top-ranked pages and domain authority also increase the odds of being featured in Google Overviews, recommended brands and links, and research sources.
None of this is new, not entirely. It’s the same content optimization and website optimization. Authority and relevance are still the biggest priority.
What changes with this new channel is how it interconnects everything.
Back to the idea of compound marketing efforts, SEO, GEO and beyond. Everything in between. Everything now.
Give your customers great quality content and information. It’s easier than ever for them to find you and see your entire history. All the good, and all the bad.
All the content you create will help the artificial intelligence reach the right conclusions, and paint a more accurate picture about you, and what you can do for your clients.
Make them love you, warts and all.
Find me here if you want to have a chat.
Santiago.-
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Rule of thumb
This is not a drill. When do we stop thinking about AI as something “new”? I don’t know the protocol. What I can clearly see is that:
- The more you do, the more opportunities you’ll discover
- Technology and digital customer experience are a commodity, not something that can be postponed. Have a plan. Have a budget. It’s unavoidable.
Just a few pointers. For help making plans and setting priorities, check out our Blueprint service.
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