AI is having a huge impact on company visibility and B2B marketing, but it presents an opportunity to leapfrog your competition if you act early – and it’s easy to do. Here’s a simple guide for non-marketers and business owners.
On one level, AI could be dismissed as just another buzzword that follows in a long tradition of must-dos and must-haves – remember when everything from food blenders to washing machines were turbocharged or nano or smart? But dismiss this one at your peril. AI is in fact fundamentally revolutionising how marketing works – the upsides – if your company is AI-savvy – is that you can grab a cheap and easy lead on your competitors. And the downsides? Well, if you believe your company currently has a market reputation, that it is visible on the internet and is talked about, all that is likely to vanish in short order. And as the adage has it, if you can’t be seen, you can’t be bought.
GroupWhistle work across all forms of clean energy and zero emissions vectors, including hydrogen
Is PR dead?
There are many reasons for this. Public relations for instance – ensuring your company is visible in trade media – has been suffering a long decline in effectiveness as your customers, in common with all of us, spend more time informing ourselves digitally with content selected by algorithms. And on the off chance that your new customer-in-waiting happens to pick up a copy of Widgets Monthly while waiting to see the the dentist with a feature on your new product, the opportunity to see still relies on the customer a) turning to the right page b) being in a buying window and c) taking the initiative to jot down your company name or search for a phone number.
So PR is less effective than it used to be (spoiler alert, this is about to fundamentally change..) and search and algorithms moved into its place to define the content that we are pushed through digital channels. And this had become the new normal that B2B marketing had embraced – good keywords to ensure positive search rankings for your company, a balance of organic and paid content on LinkedIn and you were three quarters of the way home to finding customers – or customers finding you.
How AI is impacting business visibility in the marketplace
AI has swung in like a wrecking ball to knock down these presumptions. Key to this is how search works, as this is the bedrock of how visible and easy it is for customers to find your business. All of the cat-and-mouse engineering that has developed in the past decade to make company websites findable as companies like Google changed their search algorithms are being swept away because large language models (LLMs), not old school SEO, is defining which companies, brands, products and services appear at the top of web searches. And serving up AI-generated content at the top of search listings (if you like an acronym, AEO) is just the start of AI having a pervasive impact on the visibility and authority of your company and its products and services.
What are LLMs looking for?
So our attention turns to the LLMs. How does B2B marketing influence these AI models? Well, it turns out that we already know the answer. LLMs value trust, authenticity and authority. The LLMs understand that earned media coverage in newspapers, magazines and tier 1 media websites will have been filtered through reputable journalists and editors who conform to codified editorial standards. This is the embodiment of trust, authenticity and authority. So the message is clear – old school PR is back in vogue, so whatever else, make sure your marketing team or agency starts with press coverage first to power your GEO or generative engine optimisation.
With its founders drawn from Formula 1, GroupWhistle serves many motorsport engineering companies in the development of their sales-led marketing communications and PR
PR first, but targeting and paid a close second
Remember however, if you are leading all marketing activity with PR, this will ensure visibility for your company and its products and services, but alone will not deliver growth for reasons we’ve already discussed. So if your agency is really smart, it will marry up this analogue earned media storytelling with powerful targeting. This gets over the ‘chance’ that the right buyer will be reading the right magazine, website or newspaper at the right time.
So what does this mean in practical terms? For efficiency’s sake, our approach at GroupWhistle is to place less stories in the media – focus on quality, not quantity (gone are the days of clients being impressed with the thud of a press cuttings file on the desk at month-end) and re-use this published editorial in other channels. We use good stories as content for CRM email sends as soft contact with prospective buyers – a two minute read from an authoritative journal is a much better way to drive engagement with a customer than a traditional CRM email.
Reformat and re-use editorial content
We also re-purpose the editorial thread in the story in other paid channels where we can be forensic at targeting specific organisations and job descriptions to drive sales, whether paid content on LinkedIn or re-purposing our feature story from Widgets Monthly into mid-reel digital audio ads on suitable business podcasts that have done the hard work for us in aggregating the right audience profiles that our clients want to sell to.
As a technology-first specialist agency, GroupWhistle works at the heart of the automotive technology sector to help businesses secure investment and go to market
How to choose channels and re-targeting to drive sales
As such, this editorial kernel delivers visibility AND provides the content for targeted engagement with prospective customers. GroupWhistle’s approach to choosing channels to share this material is based on the typical sales duration for the product or service type and the time it takes to move a new customer from awareness of your product or service to consideration and purchase. From this estimation of sales duration, we calculate the number of times we should communicate with the customer-to-be (so-called re-targeting) and plan selection of channels and content formats that are appropriate for each stage of this process.
Do we take our own AI medicine?
Having read this, you might well ask does GroupWhistle use AI in its marketing process? Well, yes we do. How we use it will be the subject of our next article, but suffice to say, as useful as AI is, it can’t ring a journalist and pitch a client story! At least the robots can’t take over this. Yet.
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Liam Clogger is MD at GroupWhistle, a specialist communications agency that help drive business growth for companies leading the change in advanced engineering and clean energy
If you’d like some advice to make your company communications AI-ready, we’re always happy to help at GroupWhistle – drop us a line at enquiries@groupwhistle.com or use the contact form below.