It feels like just yesterday I wrote about looking backward to understand where you should go with marketing because it was.
This morning I replied to a post on LinkedIn. Someone was wondering how to organically optimize for Artificial Intelligence chatbots like ChatGPT. I’ve only hit on AI briefly, because I’m far from an expert on it, and haven’t gotten too many chances to really adopt it into any workflows. Yet it is all the rage these days.
Organic Marketing – Informing Your Customer
The conversation started when an acquaintance asked “What is the best performance marketing agency for tech?’ How do you influence that question (in ChatGPT).” This is an extremely interesting question. Does it matter though?
After a little back and forth, my response was as follows:
Unless you’re doing something to hurt your place in search and AI ranking factors you would be better served to focus on marketing holistically. That’s the idea Google has attempted to espouse. One would hope AI would function similarly.
We wrote content so our customers have the answer to their queries. We asked for reviews as social proof to convince new buyers our product or service was worthwhile. The added benefit was increased organic rankings.
AI as a reason for more marketing should just tell you to keep producing scrapable content to help your customers.
Me – On LinkedIn
The Point
Sometimes we focus too much on the tiny details. We don’t have to worry about how a particular artificial intelligence is scraping the web to return the best answers. We don’t have to game that system the same way we don’t have to game SEO and Google. There’s a lot of content in the world wide web that’s ranking where the author didn’t give a single thought to SEO. They simply wrote a useful piece of content.
Starbucks is not going to be the answer to “Where can I get the best cup of coffee?” even if they have 100 AI experts gaming their content to the algorithm. There’s too much pent-up angst against them. Their brand doesn’t stand for “Best cup of coffee.” The Starbucks brand stands for consistency; a local-feeling experience you can get anywhere. Is it the best cup of joe in the world? Probably not. But it is a decent cup of coffee. On the other hand, Starbucks will probably always win “Where can I get a cup of coffee?” and maybe even “Where should I go for a cup of coffee?”
Instead, focus on the controllable.
- Increase reviews
- Increase review rankings
- Consistently post to social media
- Increase engagement to social media
- Produce owned content
- Produced owned content good enough to receive links
When you’re all said and done, AI will have enough to scrape. And if you’re a coffee house, and people really love your coffee, maybe you’ll be the world’s best cup of coffee.
