People Changed How They Buy. Catch Up.

Exposure Ninja CEO, Charlie, recently spoke at an event called E-commerce Scotland about how we are helping clients get visibility in AI search, things like ChatGPT. After her talk, she got the same piece of feedback over and over again. Ah, this is the first time I've ever thought about how my customers are using AI to find my brand. This isn't people saying this is the first time I've thought about using AI because all of these people were using ChatGPT or Claude or Gemini on a daily basis inside their business. But instead, they weren't really thinking about how potential customers and buyers were using AI to find their products and services. This is an issue because the data shows that people are doing exactly this, evaluating your brand, building short lists, deciding who to go for, comparing different options, sometimes before they ever opened a regular search engine. And if that's happening, the marketing funnel that many businesses have been running for a very long time has a big blind spot right at the top. So, in this video, we're going to cover exactly what the modern buyer journey looks like, where the new gaps are, and most importantly, what to do about it. And I'm also going to give you a real client example of The Ordinary, where we helped them build an AI-proof marketing funnel that works for traditional search as well as it does for new AI-focused search. More on that in a few minutes. So, here's the bit that many brands are completely missing. Yes, they're using AI internally. We've all got ChatGPT or Claude or Gemini open, and we're constantly using it for writing emails, for working on automations, building out workflows, drafting reports, all that type of stuff. It's all internally focused, how we operate our business and do our jobs more effectively. And we know it works. All of this is sensible, but there's another area that's getting way less attention, and that is how your customers are using AI to research you and your competitors. Because the data shows that buyers are now using ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity to find which products and services to buy before they ever reach Google. In fact, according to SparkToro, 37% of searches now start in an AI tool, not a traditional search engine. Now, let's be clear, Google is not dead. There are still billions of searches happening per day on Google, and it's still the number one place that you want your brand to be seen. Just to be 100% clear. But, when searches do happen on Google, 60% of them now don't result in a click. Because when you search for something, increasingly, you don't need to go and click on these websites to find this information. You can see the information right here in the search results. You don't need to click through to a website to learn. You can do all of your upfront research in Google. And not just on Google, you can do the same on ChatGPT. What's the best accounting software for construction contracting businesses? Look at this, it's given me this entire short list with the pros and cons of each. It's even given me tailored results based on what it knows about me and the portfolio of companies that we own. And it's given personalized recommendations. The scary thing for many marketing managers is that all of this is happening kind of in the dark, right? This conversation is happening inside ChatGPT. These accounting softwares aren't going to see this inside their Google Analytics data. They might have no idea that I searched for this or that their brands showed up or didn't. Luckily, we have tools like SEMrush that allow us to see which brands are visible for certain searches across different platforms and allow us to do this in a pretty scalable way. So, here, for example, accounting software for construction contractors, I can see the entire response on Google AI overviews, and I can see which brands are being recommended, and it tracks that, so I can see how my visibility compares to my competitors. But if we go back to how this is changing the marketing funnel, many of the companies and products being recommended here aren't represented at all on the same search in regular, traditional Google. So, you've got software companies that are winning in traditional search, but are nowhere to be seen in the AI overview. And you've got companies that are doing really well in the AI overviews that are nowhere to be seen in the traditional search. And this is the marketing funnel blind spot that this evolution in search behavior is causing. So, what does this actually mean for you? Well, if your search marketing funnel is based on people Googling certain keywords, clicking on your website, reading some information on your site, and then converting through phone or form, that's awesome. That funnel still works, and it's worthwhile getting ranking on Google. But that is only one journey on an increasingly large and complex map. The rest of those search and research journeys are happening in AI tools in the dark, and we need to build a marketing funnel and a measurement system that works in this new world. So, let's talk about what a before and after marketing funnel looks like. Well, the before is pretty straightforward, we've just covered it. Somebody searches a keyword on Google, they see your website, they click on your website, they read a landing page, and they then fill in a form or give you a call. Pretty straightforward. It's linear, it's click-dependent, and you can see the whole thing happening in Google Analytics. And like I say, that still happens, it's still an incredibly effective and highly profitable marketing funnel, but it's only one route in a complex map. So, what does a next-generation funnel look like? Well, let's use this as an example. Let's say that an FD of a construction firm is looking for some new accounting software. They open ChatGPT, which has some knowledge about them, the business that they operate in, and what their job role and day-to-day frustrations are. They start a conversation like this. And at some point, they will start to build up a bit of a short list, which they might start comparing with each other. Now, maybe your brand is on this short list, maybe it isn't. Either way, you probably won't know because there's no visibility of this inside your CRM or analytics platform. Now, we're calling this funnel stage pre-awareness, and this is a funnel stage that didn't really exist three or four years ago. It's where these personalized short lists start to be built. Now, we move into the awareness stage, but this is now multi-channel. So, now we've identified a brand for our short list, we head over to Google, and we search them. But we're not doing this from a cold position anymore. We're not doing this knowing nothing about this software, for example. We're doing this knowing that it's been on our short list, we've already pre-qualified it, we know how it stacks up against competitors. So, we're a much warmer prospect than we would have been going onto this website, say, three or four years ago. Or perhaps they have a specific query, and they want to understand how you address it. So, in this case, maybe Equity Zero integration, and we can see that there's a page on the Equity Zero website here for Zero, but it's not great. But the range of queries that people are going to ask on Google after having done this shortlisting, pre-awareness phase, can be pretty wide, and they can go to different places. [music] For example, maybe somebody wants to get a third-party validation for their short-list choice. They might search for reviews, and in that case, they might be going onto review sites, they might be picking up Reddit reviews, trolling forum threads, they might find you on LinkedIn, they might be reading AI overviews about you, they may end up in a Slack community, if you've got one. This awareness stage is now a lot more spread out and varied. We then move into the consideration phase. So, let's say that me as the FD, I think this looks like a really good option. Well, I'm going to have to take that to different stakeholders in the business. For example, the CFO is going to get the budget sign-off, procurement is going to benchmark the pricing, IT is going to approve the integration. But each of those stakeholders is going to go through their own version of this process. They're going to be asking their ChatGPT, their Claude, their Gemini, their own set of questions to establish the viability of my proposed solution. So, you can see how the complexity of this marketing funnel is at a different level to what brands were facing even four years ago. Now, we're using a B2B example here, but exactly the same principles apply to a consumer sale. It might just be that that consumer is interested in particular aspects of your product or service, and they're searching for different types of things across different platforms. But if we stay with this B2B example for now, cuz it's relatively straightforward to think of these different decision criteria as actually different people. If we head back over to SEMrush, we can see how a brand's visibility for certain topics can vary. So, let's say that we're considering this construction platform, procore.com. We can see that we've got really good visibility for things like construction time management. Budget-related queries, we're not doing so well in. We've got some pretty low visibility scores here. But if we go over to the topic opportunities, these are ones where competitors are being featured, but we're not, we can see we're doing really poorly for stuff around expenses. We're just not showing up for these types of searches. So, if expense management is important to someone in the business, they're going to be getting a bunch of different recommendations rather than ours. Of course, the important thing isn't whether you're visible for expense management or not. The important thing is that you know the topics that you're visible for, that you're being recommended by these AI tools, and [music] if there are important topics where your competitors are being mentioned, you have a plan to close that gap. So, we've covered the pre-awareness, this is where the short list is created, the awareness stage where people start to search for us on Google, and it's our job to be seen in lots of different places. We've got the consideration piece, where that decision is being taken to different stakeholders, and we need to make sure that we're ticking all of their boxes. Next, we have the decision stage. And this is where the rubber meets the road and someone actually decides to buy from us. And I've got good news and bad news for marketers here. The bad news is that sales are taking longer to happen. If we stick with B2B for a second, the average deal now takes 272 days, and 81% of the decision-making happens before any conversation. Now, you're thinking, "Tim, where's the good news?" Well, the good news is that this 81% of the decision that happens before a conversation with sales is now the responsibility of the marketers. This is up from 70% a year ago. This means that marketing is responsible for more of the purchase funnel than it was even a year ago. And you already know the answer, of course. No, this doesn't mean that you've got any more budget. What this means is that by the time someone books a demo, requests a trial, gets in contact, they've already done a lot more of their research on your products and services than they had done previously. The decision isn't being made on that demo review or the call or the free trial. The decision was made a long time ago in an AI chat that your CRM knows nothing about. All right, so let me give you a case study of how this works in practice then. The Ordinary, the global skincare brand that you've probably heard of. Science-backed formula, minimal packaging, great pricing, super popular, massive global brand. We absolutely love their products and we're delighted when they wanted to work with us. And they've got a really strong in-house team. They didn't need someone to come in and do their marketing for them. They wanted a strategic partner to go further. So, they contacted Exposure Ninja. And by the way, if you want to contact Exposure Ninja, just head to our website, exposureninja.com. We can help you get this stuff nailed for your business. If you want to see what we would do for your company, then you can request a free digital marketing review at exposureninja.com/review. Or if you want us to carry out a detailed AI search visibility audit and show you where your opportunities are for growth, then contact us through the contact page on the website. Just head over to exposureninja.com and click the big contact button. Anyway, we started a campaign for The Ordinary which covered SEO, content, conversion rate optimization, and a bit of email marketing as well. But as we were working on this campaign with them, we actually evolved it to include AI search optimization because we could see the trends happening in skincare and beauty. We could see that their traffic mix and the behaviors of skincare customers were changing. So, what did we do? Well, we started with customer surveys. We started by understanding who their customers were and building out customer personas based on actual search behavior, not assumptions. This then allowed us to rebuild the blog and the content section on their website to be more customer-facing rather than brand-led. Because we had those customer personas and we'd done the research, we could work out what the questions were, the topics that their potential customers were grappling with to make sure that the content covered those. But rather than just publishing mountains of content, we built conversion paths into these content pages, meaning you could buy products from the content pages. You didn't have to go all the way through to a product page. This compressed the conversion cycle and allowed these content pages to generate a lot more revenue. Now, as well as refocusing the content, we also restructured it to do better in AI search, and this improved visibility in things like AI overviews on Google and inside ChatGPT. The results? A 395% return on investment in this work. A 555% increase on sessions on their blog. And remember, this is at a time where organic traffic across the industry is actually dropping. We were able to help them increase the number of organic sessions in their blog and content pages. 451% increase in blog-driven revenue. And a 14% hero product uplift in sales within 6 months. Boom! But a key point, we didn't run a separate SEO campaign and an AI search optimization campaign. The same content strategy delivered both. And that's what building a campaign for this increasingly complex marketing funnel looks like. It's about growing the surface area that your content appears and recommendations about your brand show up. Okay, so let's cover how to find your blind spots and then what to actually build. How do you turn all of this into an actual game plan? So, first, let's talk about how to identify your blind spots. Traditionally, SEO research has begun and ended at keywords. And that's cool. That covers the Google traditional search layer. But increasingly, it's no longer enough. The modern marketing funnel needs to consider topics and all of the variations of queries that happen inside a topic. That's where tools like Semrush can be so powerful. You might have amazing visibility for a certain keyword on Google. But looking at that topic as a whole and across AI overviews, AI mode, Gemini, ChatGPT, your visibility might be nowhere near as strong. And that gap between the traditional search and the AI search is where you're potentially leaking customers and revenue. Throughout this video, I've been using Semrush, and it is the tool that I find myself using most day-to-day. Uh they're actually sponsoring this video, and that's why we said yes to them because we already use it. They have something called Semrush One, which covers their AI visibility toolkit, which is by far, in my opinion, the best in the business, and also the AI visibility dashboard, which gives you visibility on what's happening in this new era of AI search. So, Semrush One covers both the traditional search and the new AI search. So, everything that we've talked about so far is covered inside Semrush One. You can get a free trial of Semrush One at exposureninja.com/ semrush-one. That's exposureninja.com/semrush-one. Or you can click a link in the video description. The AI visibility toolkit is also got a whole bunch of stuff that I haven't shown you here, but we've covered in previous videos, and we'll link those in the description below. But you can build your entire AI search strategy inside Semrush's AI visibility toolkit. It really is phenomenal. And I say that as a user of this tool every day. All right, then, last section. What do we actually do with this? What do you actually build? The first thing most brands need to do is pay more attention to this pre-awareness stage, this AI layer of getting coverage for different topics that are likely to be of interest to your potential customers. Brands get cited and referenced by AI tools when they're perceived to have a genuine authority on that topic. And that authority is seen in lots of places online. This means having clear, well-structured content that takes a position on things, expert-led pieces so that these AI tools can see that you really know what you're talking about, and there are people in the business that absolutely are top experts on this topic. But it's also about getting editorial mentions, being featured in industry publications, carrying out digital PR to get featured on best-of lists. We've covered this in recent videos, so I'm not going to go into loads of detail here. But these AI tools often use third-party websites to work out who is worth recommending in a space. If you're not being seen on those third-party websites, sometimes it doesn't even matter how good the content is on your own website, you're just not going to be recommended because those recommendations are coming from independent sources. And you're not necessarily converting anyone at this stage. This is brand building, this is awareness building. But unlike traditional PR, which was sometimes a bit fluffy or focused on vanity, this new era of digital PR is about building genuine authority, which is shown in search results. When it comes to the awareness and consideration stages of the marketing funnel, the content on your website needs to work in a zero-click environment. This means simple messages clearly conveyed, and those messages are consistent across all the content on your website and the content that is seen on other websites. What does that mean? Well, I'll give you an example. A very large multinational brand came to us saying, "We want to be seen as innovative in these AI search results. That's really the the value that we want to be associated with." The problem was that none of these AI tools were describing them as innovative because, to be honest, their content didn't reference much innovation, and the third-party content about them on other websites also didn't really imply that they were particularly innovative. So, we had to work with them across the organization to make sure that all of the teams were bought in on this innovation being a real core value, and that they could communicate this through the content that they were producing. Also important in this awareness and consideration stage is that the messages about your brand are being seen on different platforms. This might include LinkedIn, it might include Reddit, Quora, on YouTube. This is about getting those messages out on lots of different places to increase the likelihood that these AI tools are going to be recommending you. Remember, if you're in B2B, that 272-day journey, you need to be visible all the way along that. Then, at the decision stage, this is where people are navigating to Google, they're typing in your brand, and they're ready to make that purchase. This is absolutely crucial because, in some cases, this will be the first and last time that somebody ever gets to your website. We're noticing a lot of industries are becoming more competitive on branded paid search. This is where other brands are trying to snipe those branded searches just at the moment of conversion, just when somebody's ready, they've typed in your name, they're ready to buy, Another brand bidding on your keyword, bidding on your brand name to try and take away that click just before the purchase. You need to make sure that your branded search is absolutely dominated and that the landing pages people are going to are really well conversion optimized. If this is going to be the first time that someone lands on your website, they've already done the research about you, but you don't want to drop the ball by giving them a really clunky user experience that gets them confused or they don't see what they're expecting. If you put all of this together, you should see a chart that looks like this, where your mentions in these AI tools are consistently increasing. That means you're being recommended on a daily basis by ChatGPT, Google AI, Claude, all these other platforms. You're being recommended to their users who are then coming to your website and buying your products. But, as we've seen in this video, this sort of result requires a very new approach and a much bigger field of view. So, going back to the e-commerce Scotland example and Charlie's feedback from all the people who hadn't really thought about how AI was going to be impacting the buyer journey. The takeaway is that buyers are already forming opinion about your products, business, your brand [music] in places that you can't see. This is already happening now. You are already finding products and services on these chat tools. Your customers are doing exactly the same. There are hundreds, thousands, maybe tens of thousands of people looking for a business, a product, a service in your area right now on these AI tools that you probably have no visibility of. So, the marketing funnel isn't dead, but there are new stages, particularly at the top of this funnel, that most brands, most marketers aren't really thinking about. But, the ones that do build for this have a massive head start. This is a huge momentum-changing shift in consumer behavior. Tools like Semrush One help you identify opportunities to improve your visibility in these areas. And companies like Exposure Ninja help you implement those game plans to make this a massive tailwind to your business rather than a headwind. And don't forget, you can get a free trial of Semrush One at exposureninja.com/semrush-one. Thanks for watching. See you next time.