Sowing the Seeds of Love

Welcome to The Beat by Rockstar CMO. I’m Ian Truscott, not a rock star, but a CMO and trusted advisor, and in this newsletter, I’d like to share a mix of marketing street knowledge that I hope will help unlock the rockstar marketer in you.

Hello!

This week, I have some thoughts on getting our ideas in front of the LLMs to educate our future buyers, which is the topic du jour amongst us marketing types.

We are still figuring out how to get our brand, solution, and products in front of the LLMs, and there is a lot to be said for a new discipline of AI optimization (AIO) or Generative-AI Engine Optimization (GEO), in that, in the same way we optimized for Google, we structure our content to be hoovered up by LLMs and hope that by prostituting our content to them, like we did with Google, then we get some linky love and traffic.

This is, no doubt, true; although the user experience is different, as Google shares pages and pages of results, and an LLM will tend to give one answer, we are seeing early success stories of LLMs driving traffic.

I didn’t want to dive it that here, what I want to discuss is that, as we dust off the idea that maybe investing in brand marketing is a good idea, there may be an opportunity to get in front of this.

We had this same debate about voice search (not that reality seems to have lived up to the hype with voice) but that to be successful with voice search is to be asked for by name.

Not for a consumer to ask for a new pair of sneakers, but a pair of Nike sneakers.

Aside from asking the LLM about us by name (the gold standard) one of our brand’s jobs should be to influence and inspire what our potential buyers would type into the LLM, pique their curiosity about solving the problem, share our perspective on solving it, and showcase our products and services.

When I was early in my career in pre-sales, the hot topic was “solution selling”, and one tactic of solution selling was to “reengineer the buyer’s vision”, a technique for promoting your approach to solving the problem, therefore the value of the benefits, features, and functions of your solution compared to the competition, steering them in your direction.

Let’s imagine your solution is strong in a specific workflow use case, and your competitors are not. You try to convince the buyer that workflow is essential to the solution they choose.

Of course today the buyer is doing their own research, often involving ChatGPT and it’s robot brethren, so there is little opportunity for the seller to make their mark on this vision.

If you want the buyer to believe that workflow is an essential requirement, you will need to have convinced them during the early awareness and research phase.

This is my hypothesis here. That our brand and content marketing needs to sow these seeds in the mind of the buyer before they reach for their AI buying assistant.

So that when they ask their AI buyer companion for advice, the prompt they use will steer them toward your vision of the solution. In my simple example, they research for solutions with workflow and the buyers AI research assistant responds with a need for workflow.

And that brings me to the tune that lends it’s title to the subject line - back to the late 80’s - “Sowing the Seeds of Love” by Tears for Fears.

Enjoy - have a great week.

Cheers!

Ian

I know some of you will love this return to the 80’s…