While ChatGPT and TikTok, each in their own way and with their own specificities, are increasingly appealing to tomorrow’s generations (Z, Alpha, etc.) with advanced and personalized recommendation features, GAFAM resist by offering similar services, at least on paper, to audiences that remain massive and dominant. Changes in usage are coming, but they are part of a complex ecosystem of diverse interfaces, in the process of changing, and whose borders are increasingly porous.
Regarding the search for information online, the various web giants engage in a war for attention that is increasingly fragmented between search engines, conversational chatbots, social networks, marketplaces, applications and specialized platforms. All the data from these research tools that allow us to reach audiences with purchasing power demonstrate this: brand and influence are ever more central in the ability of advertisers to generate business through digital channels.
Indeed, the top of the funnel of the decision process which leads to the purchase or lead tends to become opaque. For a request for first-level information or discovery, many tools are now capable of offering very complete answers, without the need to visit a website: ChatGPT, Perplexity or Copilot of course, but also the increasingly “no-click search” oriented search results pages, AI Overviews and AI Mode powered by Gemini at Google.
Knowledge is power: customer knowledge at the heart of brand development.
The Mountain View giant has understood this for a long time: to remain the most dominant tool and master global knowledge, it is essential to store data, but also to aggregate information from different sources : Wikipedia, brand sites, historically directories, LLMs, social networks or UGC (User Generated Content – like Reddit or Quora) platforms today.
If AI-Gen disrupts the historical approach of Search Marketing consisting of identifying keywords and audience crossroads (with the illusory promise of strategies with incremental performances totally uncorrelated from branding actions) it also constitutes a good opportunity to put the marketing creativity on the path to a brand message focused on needs. For a brand, it is strategic to convince, to prove, to generate desire. Growth comes at this price: identify ways to influence a decision-making path that was not initially headed towards your product or service. And what better way to do this than this fantastic marketing laboratory that social networks represent?
Comparing the signals coming from the different platforms used on a daily basis by your marketing targets is an excellent way to understand the arguments to be deployed to meet needs, to raise pain points and to propose a relevant offer. Your raw material then becomes multimodal (text, video, PDF, white papers, images, infographics, etc.) and multi-platform. Your website is just one of these distribution spaces, at the heart of a much larger galaxy of content, but coherent through the prism of information clusters. It is in fact through this mode of production and analysis focused primarily on the needs of the search buyer persona that it will be necessary to analyze the performance of your Digital Marketing strategy.much more than by the sacrosanct web traffic, a KPI which will continue to lose its meaning with the growing complexity of pseudo data-driven attribution models, based on data modeling which primarily serves advertising agencies.
Global Search synergy to propel your marketing projects.
More than ever, organic web content will need this multicastingto be supported by Media actions to reach their full potential. The depth of response of the AI-first engines also demonstrates how the provision of differentiating elements will probably be the only way to emerge, to surprise, to be discovered or rediscovered as a brand. The synthesized information, aggregated from various sources, leaves little room for brands that have not yet acquired top-of-mind status.
To make the difference, it will often be this additional content that allows you to stay on the surface: first party data, in-depth studies, rich content demonstrating social proof (user reviews, customer testimonials, business cases, feedback, etc.). So many levers allowing demonstrate expertisewith all that this involves in internal communication and workflows to pass information and data from one department to another. It is therefore in the synergy of working methodspotentially thanks to automation, that marketing teams will be able to pilot the enhancement of singularitywhile having a real role going back to continuous improvement of the product or service.
The social trend, an unrivaled source of opportunities?
Apart from the top brands which have their own and self-sustaining flows of brand traffic, nothing attracts more audience or generates more interest than the hot news trend, whether positive or negative. The figures are indisputable, whether on Google Trends, Discover, News, or on the trend dashboards of different social networks. This is why consolidated monitoring of these trends is an essential element to integrate into your cross-functional workflows, in order to feed your market knowledge. Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, LinkedIn, TikTok, so many data sources to complement traditional Google and Bing Search data.
In all cases, understand hot topics and underlying trendsintegrate social codes into your Content Marketing strategy, reprocess feedback from Community Management such as user reviews are now essential axes for building new sources of profitsand imagine tomorrow’s offers.
Dealing with these subjects as a team, which can be common to SEO, SEA/Media, Social, but also to other services, or even going back to CODIR, becomes an invaluable source of teaching for more effective actions, carried out jointlyand can lead to stronger positions taken, less dependent on an isolated lever.
The human, the machine and convictions to defend.
Ultimately, this social approach to Global Search must guarantee a stronger impact, and measurability centered on the marketing project and no longer on a siled approach to the performance of different acquisition levers which, by essence, bring and influence each other..
The context of AI is a revealer of a period of transformationas digitalization was before. The opportunity to putting business performance at the center and branding in the same teamthanks to marketing “basics” such as influence, the right message at the right time in the right place, matching supply vs. demand and deepening customer knowledge.
A lot of common sense ultimately, and actions focused on the end consumer, which digital marketing levers that are a little too disembodied have sometimes tended to dehumanize. In the age of machine learning, it is high time to put humans and their deep motivations in their rightful place : at the center of the marketer’s concerns.
