Audiences and Algorithms: What to do in a Confusing AI + Marketing Environment

I am constantly glued to my X feed, trying to keep up with everything AI, especially its impact on marketing.

Google Search + organic traffic are still dominant, but we also have rapidly scaling AI searches, and it’s unclear if this is replacing Google + SEO or if it’s an additional channel, like social became.

It can drive you wild trying to make sense of it all. How do you sift out the signal from the noise? When do you hyperscale with AI and when do you leverage manual human intelligence and creativity?

This is marketing message and a mantra I’ve been developing in my head. It’s the only thing that makes sense to me right now, where I sit as a marketer and business owner, trying to help other business owners scale and grow. This is a general playbook as an elevator pitch that just makes sense:

Scale value to audiences via algorithms.

Breaking that out a little bit more:

Companies should seek to scale the value they offer, give, harvest from their target audience. Their target audience is the people in the carefully selected target market a company chose among all other target market choices in their competitive market map. Other companies may compete and also target the same market, or choose a different part of the market map. Audiences spend a lot of time online and on their phones, and a lot of time in social feeds, using Google Search, and now on AI chat apps. All of these mediums heavily rely on algorithms to surface user-generated content or create new content via AI algorithms. What this means is that companies need to think deeply and build a strategic plan about how they will scale value to their target audiences, via algorithms. All of this is part of a system that is executing on a marketing strategy, which is part of a business and corporate strategy. If all of these systems are working together, the business will likely grow well.

Value means:

• Value is subjective, and the company, market and customers decide on value, in a complex assortment of ways.
• Your company generates more market value, which earns you more in return via revenue, awareness, pipeline, and credibility.
• It may sometimes be wise to scale a company’s credibility before its revenue.

Philosophical Questions on Scaling Value

• Are we letting perfectionism get in the way of servicing more customers and prospects?
• How do we scale our presence in our target market?
• Have we intentionally selected a specific set of target audiences that we can serve even better by scaling value just for them, while ignoring non-target audiences?
• What do new shifts in AI and LLM technology open up to us that we never had before?
• How might we scale more value to our customers and prospects, buy leveraging AI?
• What are the intentional limits to scaling value that we want to set to best help our business and customers?
• If we hyperscale on services, products, messaging, etc, will that help or hurt other areas of our system?

Scaling Value is a lot better than CCDV to a TM

Philip Kotler used this phrase: Creating, Communicating, and Delivering Value to a Target Market in some speeches. It never caught on. It’s very niche. But it’s very accurate.

Philip was distilling all of his marketing teaching over the years to this phrase that is universally applicable to all business, incorporating targeting customers and providing value:

1. Creating Value – first you have to create the unique value your company has and want to scale
2. Communicating Value – but you must broadcast this value to the target audience or else no one will know
3. Delivering Value – you must use virtual supply chain logistics via third party, owned, earned, and paide delivery mechanisms to make sure the value gets to them
4. to a Target Market – it’s way more powerful if it’s to a target market, rather than just a general market