Com­pound Mar­ket­ing in the Age of Everything

Wel­come to com­pound mar­ket­ing strategy

There’s an old leg­end, adapt­ed to many East­ern cul­tures, that goes like this, in a nutshell:

Our hero requests an audi­ence with the king and chal­lenges him to a game of chess. Trust­ing his game skills, the king hap­pi­ly accepts. As is cus­tom­ary, a bet must be placed before the game begins. 

The chal­lenger says ​“If I’m able to beat your majesty, I’ll only ask for a few grains of rice. One for the first square in the board, two on the sec­ond, four on the third, and so on. Every square dou­bles the rice on the pre­vi­ous one”. 

The king agrees. It’s just rice, after all, and he has plen­ty. After inevitably los­ing the match (else we wouldn’t have a sto­ry to tell), he real­izes he has to pay over eigh­teen tril­lions grains. An unfath­omable num­ber. For ref­er­ence, this would amount to 700 years of today’s glob­al rice production.

Depend­ing on the ver­sion of this sto­ry, our hero ends up col­lect­ing pay­ment, either by becom­ing king or mar­ry­ing the princess, or sim­ply walk­ing away after deliv­er­ing the moral of the story.

What does this have to do with anything? 

Small efforts do add up

Five years ago, we had clients mak­ing a lot of mon­ey on paid ads alone. Oth­ers start­ed the SEO game ear­ly on, and got a posi­tion­ing strong enough to dri­ve traf­fic and gen­er­ate more leads than they could process. Oth­ers’ rep­u­ta­tion in their indus­tries allowed them to rely on hand­shakes and tradition.

We’re in the age of every­thing now. If you don’t split your efforts, you get zero because the main job of AI-first research for pro­cure­ment will be to put the pieces of the puz­zle togeth­er, and sum­ma­rize them in a way that reflects who you are across every pos­si­ble touchpoint.

Rep­u­ta­tion is now a result of an expo­nen­tial process:

Brand x prod­uct x rep­u­ta­tion x tech x content

Times any­thing else you want to add that can be par­tic­u­lar­ly rel­e­vant for your indus­try. Loca­tion, facil­i­ties, sup­ply chain, influ­ence in the indus­try, everything.

The prob­lem of mul­ti­pli­ers is sim­ple: Get zero in any of the fac­tors, and you’re screwed.

You’ll hear a lot about G — E — O

GEO is a spin on our beloved/​hated good ol’ SEO, and stands for Gen­er­a­tive Engine Opti­miza­tion. Essen­tial­ly, the new tricks you need to learn so AI-first search­es can find you, under­stand what you do, and con­sid­er you in their responses. 

Unless you’re an extreme­ly ear­ly adopter and excel­lent at chang­ing fast, this is your newest zero. Let’s fix that.

What we know so far

Search and research habits are chang­ing. Feed four or five brands to Per­plex­i­ty and ask for a com­pet­i­tive report. It will be close to decent, and save you a day of increas­ing­ly cum­ber­some web­site read­ing. The more savvy and com­fy we feel using these plat­forms, the less we’ll have to click on sev­er­al Google results to do the bor­ing work.

Top of fun­nel search­es no longer dri­ve traf­fic. If Gemini’s Overview gives me a detailed recipe for grandma’s tra­di­tion­al style soup, why would I both­er click­ing? The mil­lions of pages with DIY basic con­tent, def­i­n­i­tions, glos­saries, recipes, are still rel­e­vant for domain author­i­ty and posi­tion­ing, but expect traf­fic to those to go bye bye.

The cus­tomer jour­ney just got short­ened. This changes every­thing in B2B. Say you look for ​“Pros and cons of Big­Com­merce”. Clear­ly an infor­ma­tion­al intent query. Your pre­ferred AI tool gives you a quick sum­ma­ry, end­ing with a ​“Would you like to see a demo?” relat­ed ques­tion. Sud­den­ly, it gives you options for agen­cies, includ­ing links to land­ing pages for on-demand con­tent. In five min­utes you went from ​“just look­ing around” to becom­ing someone’s lead. 

The speed of change is and will con­tin­ue to be very fast. Gen AI is a new prod­uct, and one that demands glob­al adop­tion to be prof­itable. Inter­faces, user expe­ri­ence, touch­points, and use cas­es will con­tin­ue to change. Us humans have a par­tic­u­lar way of find­ing unex­pect­ed appli­ca­tions for any­thing. Play-doh was orig­i­nal­ly a wall­pa­per clean­er. We don’t know what this, what­ev­er this is, will look like years from now. 

Con­tent is (still) king

Google is still win­ning. AI is not a threat and search engines are not going any­where. It’s a huge oppor­tu­ni­ty. Nobody else has a larg­er dataset or can make more mon­ey with it. 

There­fore, con­tent integri­ty and qual­i­ty are key for search engines, for many reasons:

1. GenAI relies mas­sive­ly on inter­net data, par­tic­u­lar­ly on top ranked search engines results to cre­ate content.
2. If incom­ing con­tent is rub­bish, so will be the result
3. If the result is more, worse, watered-down garbage, you just won’t use it.

These com­pa­nies are work­ing hard on fix­ing these absurd feed­back loops. The ones that sug­gest putting glue on your piz­za or that every­one loves gou­da. Errors that can cost mil­lions and make you liable. 

So human con­tent is more impor­tant than ever. B2B sales and rela­tions require exper­tise. Under­stand­ing clients, accounts, mar­kets, indus­try, chan­nels, mood, pace, codes and pri­vate jokes. It can’t be sim­u­lat­ed by an AI agent. Not con­vinc­ing­ly enough to beat the oth­er guys. 

What you know, what’s impos­si­ble to trans­fer, your unique under­stand­ing and expe­ri­ence, is worth more now than two years ago.

AI is not here to replace mar­keters. On the con­trary, I believe that it will ulti­mate­ly incen­tivize real, bril­liant, well struc­tured and inter­est­ing content.

The sum of all that con­tent is mea­sured by what bots under­stand as ​“sen­ti­ment”.

Yeah, more buzzwords

“Sen­ti­ment” is just a word for the inter­pre­ta­tion of how arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence thinks your brand is per­ceived by the mar­ket. It’s the assump­tion, the edu­cat­ed guess the machine can make after jot­ting through your data in a frac­tion of a sec­ond. This includes:

• Your web­site, doc­u­men­ta­tion, case stud­ies and articles.
• Inter­views, videos, social net­work mentions
• The love or hate you get on Twit­ter (it will nev­er be X, come on), Red­dit, cus­tomer or press reviews.
• Your per­ceived rep­u­ta­tion, trans­paren­cy, reli­a­bil­i­ty, culture.

You’re not in con­trol of the nar­ra­tive anymore. 

See for your­self. Head to Per­plex­i­ty and ask: 

• “What’s dif­fer­ent about <my brand name>?”
• “What’s dif­fer­ent about <my competitor>?”

Do you like what you see?

I didn’t.

Per­suade against the machine

When I used AI to research my own agency, I quick­ly spot­ted con­tent gaps. The report assumed we were on the high-end price-wise. I believe we’re very com­pet­i­tive. Look­ing ​“pricey” means we might be scar­ing peo­ple from engag­ing, rais­ing their hands and say­ing ​“we’d like to talk”. 

That means homework:

• Cre­at­ing more con­tent that real­ly digs into what we deliv­er, so we’re clear­er on the bang per buck balance.
• Putting togeth­er bench­marks com­par­ing what we do with oth­er agen­cies in our sec­tor, so there’s an anchor for vis­i­tors to make their own comparisons.
• Link­ing all of that with con­tent about our war­ranties and track record, so we can reduce objec­tions or fears.
• Doing a lot more in terms of client def­i­n­i­tion, expec­ta­tions, val­ue, return of invest­ment, so you or any­one vis­it­ing our site thinks of us as an easy choice.

In addi­tion to the pure con­tent, we worked on the tech­ni­cal part:

• For­mat­ting this sec­ondary con­tent to make it easy for the AI to dri­ve conclusions
• Ana­lyz­ing and work­ing our con­tent schema markup to make sure it’s exact­ly what the search engine needs
• Push­ing SEO hard­er than ever, as top-ranked pages and domain author­i­ty also increase the odds of being fea­tured in Google Overviews, rec­om­mend­ed brands and links, and research sources.

None of this is new, not entire­ly. It’s the same con­tent opti­miza­tion and web­site opti­miza­tion. Author­i­ty and rel­e­vance are still the biggest priority. 

What changes with this new chan­nel is how it inter­con­nects everything. 

Back to the idea of com­pound mar­ket­ing efforts, SEO, GEO and beyond. Every­thing in between. Every­thing now.

Give your cus­tomers great qual­i­ty con­tent and infor­ma­tion. It’s eas­i­er than ever for them to find you and see your entire his­to­ry. All the good, and all the bad.

All the con­tent you cre­ate will help the arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence reach the right con­clu­sions, and paint a more accu­rate pic­ture about you, and what you can do for your clients.

Make them love you, warts and all.

Find me here if you want to have a chat.

San­ti­a­go.-

❆ ❈ 

Rule of thumb

This is not a drill. When do we stop think­ing about AI as some­thing ​“new”? I don’t know the pro­to­col. What I can clear­ly see is that:

• The more you do, the more oppor­tu­ni­ties you’ll discover
• Tech­nol­o­gy and dig­i­tal cus­tomer expe­ri­ence are a com­mod­i­ty, not some­thing that can be post­poned. Have a plan. Have a bud­get. It’s unavoidable. 

Just a few point­ers. For help mak­ing plans and set­ting pri­or­i­ties, check out our Blue­print ser­vice.