Getting your brand noticed on the internet isn’t getting any easier; in fact, it’s just got a lot harder and if we are right, it’s also going to get more expensive. So now is an ideal time to start considering the alternatives that span all channels.  

The history of internet brand marketing in five paragraphs

When Google was founded in the 1990s, it was a significant boon to businesses. The internet, until then, was great for brands, as long as they were already well-known; if you weren’t well-known, then getting your brand in front of users was a nightmare. With Google’s Search engine, everything became findable. However, a new problem began to arise. How do you make your brand more visible to Google than the competitor brands?

The answer was Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). Spending cash on SEO would get you to the top of the Google’s search page. This worked for a while until Google finally got a business plan and brought in advertising to their search – namely Google Ads. Promoting your brand was now more expensive, not only did you need to pay a SEO agency, but you also needed to pay Google to get to the top of the page. 

Fast forward a few years and along comes social media, which, like Google was effective at finding you new customers and was initially free, but then every other brand saw the benefits. So, 10 years later, you now have search and social SEO costs, there’s search and social advertising (Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest etc etc), and there’s a new cost for influencer marketing.

Now things are starting to get really expensive for brands and it’s forcing brands to prioritise their online marketing channels. Some brands chose to ignore search and concentrate on socials and influencers, but while that reduces costs, it has the downside that it doesn’t work for all demographics. Some consumers prefer the web, others prefer a particular social, so by concentrating on one channel, you may miss out on an audience that could make a real difference to your business.

As a marketer you have a real problem when it comes to grabbing your online audience and it’s a very expensive problem. The bad news is that problem has just got worse and it will become even more expensive; AI is your new headache.

Generative AI Search: Why GEO is the new SEO?

If you do a Google search you’ll find that the top area that used to be the prime Google Ads real estate is now - more often than not - taken up by an AI-assisted answer and the answers are displayed directly on Google without a user needing to click-through to your website to find out more. On top of this issue, there are now more and more younger users (Gen Z’s in particular) who are starting to avoid Google entirely and are now using AI engines such as ChatGPT to do their searches for them. So now you need to be top of ChatGPT as well as top of Google to be seen by your prospective buyers. Unsurprisingly, the SEO agencies are now asking for more money to get your brand content AI-SEO-ready, or as it’s increasingly been referred to, Generative Engine Optimisation or GEO for short

There are no prizes for guessing who is going to be the next business that comes for your money to promote your business above the competition? The future (near future, in fact very near future) costs are going to be; Google Ads, SEO, social search, AI search, Influencers and AI advertising. That’s now a very large list of things that you need to look at just to get noticed, and for more and more businesses it’s going to be too expensive to cover all the bases. It’s also going to be two or three times the work load for your online marketing and advertising people, and these people are not easy to find and are not cheap to employ.

What’s the answer to this problem?

If you’re looking to cut costs then the “easiest” answer is to only advertise where your customers are, and if you subscribe to the Pareto Principle then first concentrate on the big spenders.  So identify your audience(s) and then find out where they search; is it socials?  If it is, then which social(s) are they using? Or is it the web, or is it AI? While this approach will help you find the most cost-effective marketing channel for your core market(s), it won’t give you growth and it may not even provide you with enough leads to replace your normal attrition rates.

The secret to great marketing is to get your brand in front of the customer before they even start to think about buying. Brand and product awareness is what you need, you want your products and your brand to be there in their head before they start to search on the web, on socials or via AI.  So that when they come to search they are already thinking of your brand.

Content, content, content

So how do you get your brand in your customers heads and how do you do it without having to spend all of your yearly marketing budget in ten seconds by advertising everywhere socials, web, TV, radio, outdoor etc? One answer is to invest in content rather than advertising. Make them come to you by creating the answers to the questions they’re going to ask, so that your brand is found through organic search and via AI search.

Creating content that your prospective customers want should be a must-have for every brand. Not only does it improve your chances of being found on Google, but it also gets you into the AI search engines. It’s also very cost-effective. Unlike paid advertising, which only works when you pay, content is there working for you 24/7/365. You create it once and it works for you for as long as you keep it on your site.  Additionally, you can reuse the web content on your social media channels; using the full content on LinkedIn and FaceBook and in reduced snippets on Twitter(X), Instagram and BlueSky.

If you’re daunted by the idea of creating content then there are lots of content agencies who will do it for you. Yes, it may seem expensive, but this will be a one-off cost rather than a regular monthly overhead like Google Ads and you’ll have the content on your site for as long as you need it – never delete content if you can help it. You could look at AI to help produce content for you. AI tools like Claude will do a very good job of producing articles for you from just a few guideline sentences. But make sure that you look at any content it produces before you publish, as it’s not an expert and it’s only basing its information on what it has found on the web.

Lastly – here’s the plug for us - there’s PRShots.  With PRShots you upload your images, videos, lookbooks or press releases to our media platform and you’re then in front of an audience of 20,000 media and influencers who are looking for content to help fill their pages/websites and socials and we’re available 24 hours a day, seven days a week and 365 days a year. There are no hidden costs with PRShots, we charge a fixed monthly fee – with prices to suit all brands and marketing budgets - and nobody gets preferential treatment, there’s no dynamic pricing on the position on the page or on the keywords you use.  We’ve been doing this for over 25 years and we’re so confident that PRShots works that we offer a monthly no-commitment trial. Choose one of our non-PAYG contracts and use the site for a month and if you’re not happy then leave with no costs.

Alternatively, if you want to see how it works this second then try our £50 PAYG offer which gives you a taste of how PRShots works and you can be up and running today.