This week, Bill explores the rapidly evolving impact of AI on B2B marketing and manufacturing companies. From the rise of AI-powered search tools to the implications for your digital content strategy, this episode dives deep into how artificial intelligence is shifting the rules of engagement for marketers and the C-suite alike.

Bill shares what we're learning from our clients, discusses how Google’s AI Answers and new search experiences are disrupting traditional SERP strategies, and offers practical steps for manufacturers to future-proof their marketing efforts in this dynamic landscape.

This week, Bill explores the rapidly evolving impact of AI on B2B marketing and manufacturing companies. From the rise of AI-powered search tools to the implications for your digital content strategy, this episode dives deep into how artificial intelligence is shifting the rules of engagement for marketers and the C-suite alike.

Bill shares what we're learning from our clients, discusses how Google’s AI Answers and new search experiences are disrupting traditional SERP strategies, and offers practical steps for manufacturers to future-proof their marketing efforts in this dynamic landscape.

Thank you for joining the Missing Half podcast where we're discovering what's missing in manufacturing and B2B marketing. I'm Bill Woods. Today we're going to talk about something that everybody's talking about, AI, specifically AI in marketing. I've had the opportunity over the past two months to make presentations at the request of several organizations. When I asked them, what do want me to talk about? What would you like to hear about in marketing, specifically in B2B marketing? And every one of them came back with AI. It's all everyone wants to talk about. And AI is impacting everything we do every day. It's being integrated into the way we operate, in the way we conduct searches. In some cases, it's replacing the traditional Google search function and allowing us to dig deeper, faster into finding solutions to the problems we have in our everyday lives, in our businesses, and certainly, it's allowing purchasers and buyers to find information and organize it more quickly.

So as we took a deeper dive into what AI's impact can be on manufacturers and B2B marketers and what the C-suite needs to understand as they craft their strategy towards implementing ways to not only deal with AI, but hopefully take advantage of it and position their businesses in a better way, we came up with a number of tools, frameworks and checklists. But before we jump into that, let's just really talk about what AI is doing and how it's interacting and what we need to think about as we prepare for this massive shift that's occurring in the market.

So as we all know, AI is everywhere. And more and more individuals at their companies where they're allowed are adopting AI in their daily work practices. And whether they are using that to search something very simple or developing complex prompts to really analyze situations and prepare comparisons, the rate of adoption is really accelerating. We've seen this not only with personnel using ChatGPT or some of the other large language models to search their own companies to see where they stand. We also see it where individuals who don't know a lot about a topic are really trying to get a deep understanding if they're new to a position or need to come up to speed really quickly to develop some knowledge and understanding so that they can do a better job in their purchasing function. And we're just seeing a tremendous adoption of AI.

The first thing we're seeing in AI is AI answers on Google. While Google only has about 18% of the search share in the market, it is still kind of the gold standard of what everybody refers to when they think about search. And when we look at the AI answers that are being developed and the citations that are being earned by companies, the early indications are that the companies who have good content, who have paid attention to SEO and who have optimized their content are earning those citations more rapidly than others. That isn't the entire story though. We are also seeing that companies who have invested heavily in videos and in other non-traditional content are earning citations at a higher rate as the algorithms seem to favor more rich content. We have to make sure we're thinking about our content strategy and showing up online in the AI answers section with rich content that is optimized to answer the questions that people are having.

We're also seeing the shift with Google to the AI search mode, which is going to present new challenges, but is probably going to further deprecate our paid search and organic SERP rankings that have kind of dominated the scene for the past several years. So when we look at the AI impact on the aspect of Google, the AI answers and AI search are certainly predominant and need to be minded.

One of the things we're seeing that's very important is looking for ways to understand how AI is interacting and the large language models are interacting with our content and how they're delivering results to our potential clients.One of the things we're seeing that's valuable is looking at the questions that are being asked in the query streams, and then also making sure we are part of the answers that are available for AI to those common questions.

And this is often a misstep, especially when we're looking at mid-market or smaller manufacturing and B2B companies that haven't been paying as much attention to this. They've been more of a here's who we are, what we do, and here's our features and benefits, as opposed to looking at the buyer persona and their problems and solutions that really iterate with them and meet them where they are.

Recently, we conducted a study for one of our clients where we took an in-depth look at their search performance on Google. We looked across the entire spectrum of where they're showing up, everywhere from their Google Places listing across multiple facilities to their paid ads, to their normal organic rankings, as well as their paid rankings. And then also kind of compared and contrasted that to what we were seeing in the AI answers and in the AI search mode. And this kind of brought us to some conclusions that there were some places where traditionally we didn't have gaps for this client because they were dominating in those traditional areas, but then they were not taking advantage of the opportunities available in the AI search mode or in the AI answers. So there's a lot of opportunity for those companies that and marketers that pay attention to this shift early on to get early gains, maybe some easier wins, and really focus on how to optimize for AI answers and AI search mode with Google.

At the same time, when we think about Google only being 18% of the market, we have to think about the other LLMs and the other tools like Perplexity, Claude, ChatGPT, and the other tools that are emerging, and how we're going to address those. And when we think about content, and we think about showing up, we're going to have to start using these tools to simulate the buyer journey and the buyer experience online to make sure we understand and are providing the content that is being requested by these purchasers. One of the exercises and tests we ran was we went through and basically created an RFQ for a buyer of a specific product from one of our clients and asked the questions that they would ask in the buying process. Now, if you want to do this and you want to simulate the buying experience, you need to take a deep dive into your records, find other RFQs that have been presented to your company or work with the sales team to make sure you're preparing the proper prompts that would be typical or indicative of what your various buyer personas would be using to search for your product. But in this, if we can prepare a proper simulation and get in a better understanding of how our buyers are going to behave, we can then simulate the responses from the LLMs and determine if there are gaps that we can possibly fill and make sure we're answering those questions.

One of the things we're looking at and we're hearing different comments about and concerns is pricing and how can manufacturers and design heavy or engineering heavy manufactured products deal with the probability that we're going to have to provide some type of pricing ranges that would be more in depth than what we have historically online to help those buyers who are using AI to research, compare, contrast, and then prepare their proposals for their purchasing decision makers. That's a question that we haven't answered yet, but we're exploring and trying to figure out how do we develop dynamic pricing that's representative of customized products that are not able to be listed as a quote unquote buy now experience for more fixed price products? So there's a lot of moving pieces currently in this in this arena and we need to make sure that we are paying attention to this dynamic shift.

One of the comforting things that is really becoming evident in this entire process is the fact that AI is kind of like a return to core principles. The core principles of making sure we have really excellent content online. And when we talk about that and when we've talked about that in the past, it is largely focused on the website. And do we have keyword-optimized landing pages? And do we have pillar content? And do we have case studies and white papers? And do we have testimonials and social proof and all the things that kind of make a great website and really help buyers move on that journey? The world of AI is going to force us to look beyond that traditional approach and really understand that our content everywhere has to be optimized for AI. There have been a lot of movements and a lot of work done to make sure that YouTube videos, that social media, that everything we put online is optimized for search. The importance of this for AI is going to be magnified because AI can look everywhere fast. While in the past, we've probably been able to get away with being a little sloppy as an industry, a little bit lazy because humans would give us some grace, they would be willing to watch through some more of the video. They would be able to kind of like fill in the gaps in the story. AI will not. Or if it does, it will hallucinate and possibly create a narrative that is not accurate or does not represent our companies in the way we would like them to be. So when we think about optimization everywhere, that's probably the second most important point, which is we have to make sure that we're optimized everywhere for AI search. So it's going to take a new approach, require additional resources to make sure that everything we do is available and ready for the LLMs to interact with and present that information to the user.

If you're a marketing manager or in the C-suite of a manufacturer or a B2B company, you should be asking the question, what should we be doing with regards to AI and marketing? We are all standing on shifting sands and there's a lot of movement and a lot of variability in what's happening in the market. And we have to make sure we are in front of the trends and reacting and responding to what's happening. So here's a couple quick steps we would recommend. Number one, actively monitor all of your content, online presence online, not only with traditional marketing tools, but just by actually doing physical prompts to use the LLMs to search through your content and make sure that you're showing up the way you should be. Make sure that when you're doing these searches, you're not doing them from your perspective, but you are taking on that buyer persona's perspective of their problems, the solutions they're looking for, and using any voice of customer research you have to make sure you are really owning their space and not looking at it from the manufacturer or B2B service provider's perspective.

Number two, whenever you do these searches, make sure that you understand and identify all of the gaps that exist and then prioritize an approach to fill those gaps and make sure you're showing up with the right information at the right time in those LLMs.

And third, probably the most important thing to do and what seems to be resonating over time as the most consistent principle is develop really good, consistent and high quality content. The LLMs are responding to rich media. They're responding to media and content across all platforms and they're sifting out the ads. So they're going to sift out anything we pay to move ourselves above good content because we don't have good content. So the return or we're going to go back to the future of really great content is going to be king. And we have to make sure that it's optimized and available for these LLMs.

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