There’s a shift occurring in online marketing.
It feels very familiar to me.
It’s the kind of shift that is easy to predict, yet most people don’t take advantage of it.
Often in hindsight you tell yourself you saw the shift coming, understood it, yet did very little in response to it.
This time can be different. This time you can go after the shift and be early.
Let me explain how…
The Obvious Opportunities
I started out in 1998 with my first website. From that point forward I lived through several major shifts in online marketing.
By this I mean the emergence of new channels to find customers that become the de-facto methods used to market what you sell.
Every channel starts small, becomes hugely popular and then becomes incredibly busy. Ideally you start using these channels before the incredibly busy phase.
Here’s a brief recap of the emergence of marketing channels:
1. Websites/Newsletters/Forums
I got my start with a website and a very basic newsletter, then used newsgroups to promote my website.
This was during the late 1990s when search engines were basic, the Internet was much smaller and simpler, and most communities existed in forums and newsgroups, long before social media.
Simply having a website and spending time interacting with a community was enough to get customers.
2. Google/Blogging/SEO
In the early 2000s Google rose to prominence and became so dominant no other search engines mattered any more.
Blogging became one of the best vehicles to take advantage of organic Google traffic, which also lead to a new industry – SEO (Search Engine Optimization).
In my career, this is the shift I capitalized on the most. I was early, I was consistent, and I got almost all my customers from Google for free using my blog.
3. Organic Social Media/Facebook/Twitter/Instagram/YouTube
Facebook launched a new type of Internet and introduced the concept of a content feed (or a ‘wall’ as it was once called), which is still the dominant method we discover content today.
During the early days of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Reddit, YouTube and all formats of popular social media, you can be early grow a following and benefit from organic reach.
As platforms mature, organic reach drops, competition increases and the emphasis tends to move to a ‘pay to play’ format for reaching people (paid ads).
4. Paid Advertising (Google, YouTube, Meta, Amazon)
I remember the early days of paid Google ads. People were making incredible amounts of money because it cost pennies to purchase traffic.
The same can be said for the early days of Facebook, Instagram and more recently TikTok Ads.
Sadly, I was very much ‘stuck’ in my comfort zone of organic content so I never took advantage of paid ads.
The Fifth Shift
Now we move on to the fifth major shift to an emerging platform for attracting customers.
There’s no need to guess what it is – Artificial Intelligence – specifically chat based discovery.
There are a couple of things to understand about this shift:
1. What AI is choosing to surface as recommendations are based on variables that have in the past been a part of SEO.
For example, articles and link building still matters, especially reviews from authoritative external sources.
Right now it appears that peer review sites are heavily influencing AI results. Making sure you have good scores and many reviews in G2, Trustpilot and Clutch is important.
Ranking factor variables are constantly changing, but people who focused on SEO/Content marketing in the past are benefiting from it as people shift to using AI chat for product and service discovery.
2. AI uses context to give you tailored answers.
This is what makes AI special – the ability to synthesize vast amounts of information and pull out relevant answers, tailored specifically to what it knows about you.
My prediction is over time this is going to make AI the de-facto choice for intent based purchasing, replacing Google search (although Google search is delivering AI chat answers from Gemini already, so the move is upon us).
It’s still early days for AI search, meaning you have a golden opportunity to optimize for it now. Hopefully you already invested in SEO in previous years, meaning you can build on an existing foundation.
Let’s not forget that paid AI search ads are now appearing in ChatGPT and as always, the movement to a pay-to-play model will happen to AI as well.
How this rolls out exactly, and how AI Ads will integrate into AI chat is only just now happening, but we know for certain that you will be able to spend money to get your product or service into the AI results.
All this spells a huge opportunity for getting free customers from AI chat and very cheap clicks from AI paid ads.
Remember, you only need to be better at this than the companies competing for the answers to the same questions you want to appear as an answer to.
Right now, most small businesses are only just starting to consider AI optimization as something to put budget towards.
It’s a dynamic space that changes every day, but it’s also built on assets that tend to give you an edge long term.
Take for example one simple thing you should start doing TODAY:
Ask your customers to leave reviews on G2, Clutch, Trustpilot or whatever reviews platform is relevant for your industry.
Get as many five star reviews as you can from real customers.
Don’t just send some emails asking once. Set up a system that keeps making the request and incentivizes the action.
Make sure it’s a natural long term process that doesn’t stop. Keep the reviews coming over time and your search results in AI will improve.
This is just one thing you can do to get in early and capitalize on the fifth shift.
Now is the time to do this. Don’t let apathy or past behavioural patterns lock you into repeating what is not current.
An emerging channel is only an emerging channel once.
There is only a brief window of time before competition erodes your advantage and the platform moves to force companies to pay-to-play.
The paid ads opportunity only remains cheap for a small window, again due to competition.
Take action now.
If you want more steps to optimize your future AI chat search results, hit reply to this email and let me know.
Talk soon,
Yaro
Coach @ InsideGrowth.com
Co-Founder & CMO @ 50hrs.com
