AI Mentions Turn Brand Visibility Into Consideration
Brand visibility and discoverability are only part of the much bigger marketing job of becoming a considered brand. Showing up where your potential customers go looking isn't a trivial thing, but being discoverable doesn't mean you get discovered. Visibility is effectively a form of distribution, placing your brand on a shelf, whether physical or digital to be found by qualified buyers who pass it. But, as every one of us knows from a supermarket visit, it takes a lot of energy at point of purchase to bring our attention towards brands we aren't familiar with, and it's very dependent on the purchase type. Showing up in an LLM answer is a form of shelf space, and we've imbued it with magical qualities. We believe that because AI mentions a brand that buyers will consider it over others mentioned. And, of course, if we're not at all familiar with the options, then it will serve as a meaningful list, just like if we went into a store and asked a sales associate for recommendations. But, we as marketers have to ask two important questions: 1. Are our buyers coming into an LLM question without prior knowledge? 2. Are they coming into it without prior exposure to other listed brands? If the answer to either of these questions is no - and it usually is in B2B - then prior brand exposure gives very unfair advantage to the brands who have it. Being visible creates opportunity, but it's in no way a level playing field. You're not only competing with the other mentioned options in the list, but much more so with what buyers come into the question with in their minds. Brands they've heard of will have advantage over those they've not, because familiarity reduces perceived risk. Brand awareness is not a passive effort, where we can plant seeds and place our brand in places and come back to developed consideration. It is very active, and proactive, needing us to continue showing up to as many buyers as we can, to better the odds that when they come looking we'll gain that advantage. Being where they come looking is important, but even with AI it won't replace the largescale effort of being known ahead of it.
Branded Search Turns Brand Health Into Real‑Time Data
Brand does not need to be a mysterious and vague concept to report on. With a defensible metric like branded search, we can give very real shape to brand and show with real precision how our efforts are building it....
Data‑driven Marketing Masks Unscientific Assumptions
Being data-driven does not necessarily mean you are being scientific. In fact, it's often more common that it masks a totally unscientific approach to how we conduct and prove the impact of marketing. Marketing is a very complicated thing because...
Tech Leaders Must Embrace Marketing for Real Growth
A lot of tech leadership has a disdain for marketing because they were convinced that to need it is to be a failure. “Advertising is the tax you pay for being unremarkable” - Robert Stephens This ridiculous mentality that has...
AI Disrupts SaaS Pricing by Lowering Build Costs
SaaS is far from dead but it is definitely experiencing some massive changes in perceived value relative to price. Anyone who has taken an economics classes is familiar with the Price Elasticity Curve, where demand changes in response to price....
AI Shifts SaaS Pricing: Value Over Discount
With AI disrupting SaaS buying, it's never been more important for marketing leaders to understand the 4Ps - particularly price. The big narrative on LinkedIn is all about marketers using AI to better execute, but when it comes to actually...
Reach and Resonance Both Needed for Effective Marketing
Resonance is not a replacement for reach, but rather a qualitative input into it. You often see the narrative, especially when reach is getting harder to achieve like with declining organic LinkedIn, that the real focus anyway is on resonance....
Customer Journey Isn't Marketing Journey—Don't Linearize Growth
It's a pedantic but important point to say that the customer journey and the marketing journey are not the same thing, and the marketing journey is certainly not just a subset. When we decide to buy something, there's a certain...
Marketing, Not Sales, Should Spot Emerging Competitive Threats Early
Waiting for a competitor to start winning deals is far too late a moment to be taking them seriously, because sales data is a lagging indicator. Yet this is how it works in a lot of B2B organizations, and it's...
AI Marketing Is Reactive; Brands Need Proactive Awareness
There is still a big brand marketing gap in the industry and the massive push to use AI isn't solving it. Most of what's being done to attract business with AI right now is reactive marketing - showing up in...
Stop Chasing Unicorn Prospects; Target Experienced B2B Buyers
When we apply a performance marketing mindset to the top of the funnel, we can end up putting a lot of effort and expense into building an audience that often isn't big enough, and sometimes isn't even real. In B2B...
Brand Fuels Performance; Performance Rarely Builds Brand
It's often said that "brand drives performance, and performance builds brand", but in many cases only the first half of that statement is true. Which is problematic when you have a program whose budget heavily favors performance marketing. Brand definitely...
Word of Mouth: Byproduct of Growth, Not a Tactic
Word of mouth is not a tactic, but rather a byproduct of growth. This is an important distinction, because we tend to look at things in marketing through a tactical and operational lens, where we can take steps to predictably...
Buyers Satisficing: Time Constraints, Not Fear, Drive Choices
It can be too easy to look at buyer research and come away with a perspective that buyers make overly-safe, incomplete, and sub-optimal decisions. Worse, it can be too easy as a marketer to see buyers as needing us to...
Small Brands Must Build Perceived Size, Not Just Presence
The necessary trick of the small brand is to look bigger than you are. Many of the tools are simple ones, like leaning heavily on the logos and testimonials of clients, and more recently attention has gone towards AI by...