As buying patterns change with AI, time to revisit your positioning

A version of the this post was originally published on the PinTale blog

The digital marketing landscape appears to be set to go through a seismic shift thanks to the advent of Generative AI tools.

While SEO has served as the bedrock of online marketing for over two decades, the rise of generative AI is signaling a potential decline of SEO’s effectiveness as a core tactic, not to mention the $70 billion industry.

Generative AI tools, like Google’s Bard, ChatGPT, Microsoft’s Bing AI, and even new tools like Perplexity, are poised to re-engineer this process. Instead of presenting users with a list of links, these tools will increasingly provide direct answers to users in chat format. Google’s hand is likely being forced by others here, like OpenAI.

Yesterday, the user experience was more like “search, click, search again, click, search again click click click”, but where we’re going will look different: “search, ask a question, ask another question, refine refine refine” … never leaving the search tool or chat experience.

Get ready for zero-click searches

Google calls this “Search Generative Experience (SGE)” which is a new feature that uses generative AI to provide answers by aggregating data from multiple organic search results.

SGE will directly change the traditional Google search results page (SERP), which is used to prioritize organic links. For years, Google has been evolving their SERPs to give more prominence to the content Google drives by their own features. AI will only expedite this.

This means users get comprehensive answers without clicking on as many links. And as a result, businesses will not get as much traffic.

This also means consumers will more frequently make their buying decisions before ever visiting a company’s website, which means the old inbound marketing funnel is collapsing.

So how should marketers adapt when LLM’s render a core tactic less effective?

Well, for one thing, your “found traffic” is likely to be more qualified (silver lining!), representing consumers looking to make an actual purchase. However, you will likely get a lot less of that traffic, so you will need to do a better job of converting the ones you get.

How will you do that? Well, you’ll need a compelling, clear and consistent message to tell those ready and willing buyers. Your website needs to do an excellent job positioning your products and telling your story.

This isn’t anything new, of course. The foundation of some of the greatest brands in the world (Apple, Nike, etc…), especially B2C brands, use story and brand messaging at their core to grow and thrive. The traditional brand marketers and storytellers around us are well positioned to make a more meaningful impact on company performance once again.

As such, focusing on your core messaging and positioning should be at the core of your tactics as you look toward the future. The more inconsistent you are with your content, the less effective your whole go-to-market strategy becomes (more to come on this soon).

So how should marketers do this? It starts with figuring out what is the most effective message you have today. Ask yourself a few easy questions:

1. Do we have a compelling message or story that is unique and focused on the customer’s story, not our company’s needs?

2. Does that message consistently lead the way when it comes to closing deals?

3. Is that message consistently deployed across our organization?

4. As the message changed over the years, did we clean up the old messaging?

If you’ve answered NO to any of these questions, let’s talk.