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Strategic Communications Advisory For Visionary Founders
Actionable
Takeaways
Research Your Current AI Visibility:
Go to ChatGPT and search for your product category as if you were a prospect. Ask questions like "What are the top [your category] solutions for [specific use case]?" This reveals whether you're even appearing in AI-generated responses. Since 50% of ChatGPT queries end without further clicks, if you're not in that initial response, you're invisible to half your potential buyers.
Implement the RISE Framework for AEO:
Use this four-step approach—Research (audit where you appear in AI responses now), Integrate (unify messaging across marketing, sales, PR, and customer success), Scale (double down on what's working, particularly podcasts and thought leadership), and Evaluate (measure by lead quality and sales feedback, not just volume). This framework helps marketers systematically address the shift from traditional SEO to answer engine optimization.
Prepare Your Data for Machine Reading:
Validate your website using schema.org markup to ensure AI can properly parse your information. With the rise of "micro queries"—where AI agents ask highly specific questions about products—your technical documentation, pricing, and feature descriptions need to be structured for machine interpretation, not just human readers.
Treat Sales Qualification Questions as Pre-Discovery Insights:
When prospects contact you, always ask "How did you find us?" If they say ChatGPT or another AI tool, they're 10 times more likely to convert because they've completed 99% of their research before engaging. This means marketing's role shifts from lead generation to facilitating self-education through ungated, comprehensive content.
Ungate Everything Except Your Demo:
The traditional gated content model is dead in an AI-first world. Buyers want instant access to information without friction. Reserve gating only for your product demo, where you can ask qualifying questions and personalize the experience. Everything else—whitepapers, case studies, guides—should be freely accessible so AI can index and reference it.
Integrate Marketing and PR Under One Message:
The separation between marketing and PR no longer makes sense when AI aggregates information from all sources. If your marketing team speaks one language, your PR team another, and your sales team a third, prospects face a translation burden that will send them to competitors. Audit your entire customer journey from RFP to onboarding using an AI assistant to identify messaging inconsistencies.
Conversation
Highlights
In this episode of The Marketing Front Lines, we speak with Ted Skinner, Vice President of Marketing at Fullintel. As AI transforms how buyers research and evaluate solutions, B2B marketers face an urgent imperative: adapt to answer engine optimization or risk invisibility. With 89% of procurement departments now starting their vendor search with AI, and the average search query expanding from 2-3 words to 23 words, the game has fundamentally changed. Skinner shares the tactical framework his team uses to navigate this revolution, explaining how marketers can position their brands to be discovered when AI agents—not humans—are doing the searching.
Topics Discussed:
- The shift from search engine optimization (SEO) to answer engine optimization (AEO)
- Why 60% of Google searches now end without a click
- How procurement departments use AI to begin 89% of vendor searches
- The evolution of search queries from 2-3 words to 23-word conversational questions
- Integrating marketing and PR messaging across all customer touchpoints
- Why first-mover advantage has compressed from years to months
- The difference between AI as a productivity tool versus AI as a strategic threat
- How agentic AI is already making purchases autonomously
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