By “How do I convince my boss/team/client to invest in my audience’s true sources of influence? Especially when those sources are so hard to prove attribution?”
Friend, I hear you.
So, for this week’s 5-Minute Whiteboard, how about we try a little mental jujitsu to get everyone aligned on the reality of how the modern web works, and how people make purchase decisions. You’ll be surprised how far this tactic can progress an otherwise intractable argument.
Transcript
Today, I was talking to James Lawrence from Rocket in Australia. He had me on his podcast. We had a great chat. I’m sure the podcast will come out soon (Update: It’s out now here!).
And he told me about this research from a few years ago, as in the Harvard Business Review about how B2B buyers buy. And I thought it was just fascinating because he quoted this out that essentially when they ran this survey, this is Bain and Google putting it together, that buyers make a list before they begin their search process, before they go to Google and start looking at top lists and, you know, whatever. Go to ChatGPT and do their consideration set, ask around.
They already eighty to ninety percent of them already have a list that of of three, usually three vendors that they are considering. These are like the brands in their space, whether it’s an ERP solution or an audience research tool, you know, whatever it is they’re buying. And ninety percent of them choose one of those three that they started with on day one. Which means if your brand in b to b is not already in the publications, at the conferences and events, in the sources of influence, the podcast and YouTube channels and you know LinkedIn videos and all that kind of stuff that your audience is consuming.
You’re not gonna be in those three. You won’t be in the consideration set. You will not be in the ninety percent of where people buy.
And so the problem the problem is that when an agency goes to pitch folks, especially in b to b, I’ve seen this a ton and I’ve been talking to a bunch of agency owners about this. That they go and they say, hey, our marketing plan is to get your brand into all the places that your audience pays attention. These these YouTube channels, these podcasts, these events, these publications, these industry journals, these research, areas. Great.
Except the client is there like, no. I only care about AI. All my golf buddies are talking about AI. AI is the future. Get me in chat gbt.
And it’s, you know, it’s a little weird. It can be if you’re if you’re a little bit of a, you know, realist about where the numbers are at now, ChatGPT at the very, very maximum is maybe one percent the size of Google search. It’s got, if you add up all of the, prompts that people send it, you’ll get about five percent, but recent research has shown that about seventy five percent of those are for productivity types of things that you can’t do in Google. So one percent. This is weird. It’s like putting all your paid search money into Bing instead of Google.
But there is another way. What if instead you do some jujitsu here?
As the agency, you can say, we’re gonna get you into AI tools. We’re gonna get you into ChatGPT. We’re gonna make sure that when relevant questions and prompts are entered, you are one of the answers.
That’s great, says the client. How are you gonna do that?
The same thing. It’s exactly the same thing. Because large language models are words that frequently come after other words in trusted documents that they have indexed for their models, PR. PR is how you get into AI.
You get your brand name mentioned next to the words and phrases that people associate you with and you will be in the model the next time it updates, which can be three, six months. Right? It can take a long time for this to happen, but it works. And I think this is a powerful way to do something great for your client that also actually wins you the business.