Welcome to the What’s Next Newsletter, the only thing in your LinkedIn feed today that isn’t making an obscure tangential connection with the upcoming election. (Oh wait…)
Will AI replace Search? And has Google’s mission changed?
We’ve known about the rise of Zero-Click searches for a few years – where users never click through from the search engine thanks to the necessary information being right there on the search result page – and now this writeup from Google’s Marketing Live conference points out that recent changes seem to be prioritising opportunities for advertisers over the original mission of Google Search “to organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”
If AI and ads really are going to push organic search results even further down the page, is it still a valid strategy to optimise for search engines? We still think its a relevant strand in a well rounded marketing strategy, especially if you focus on making a website that’s good for users as a first port of call. You just don’t want to be putting all of your customer acquisition eggs in one basket.
Are you asking the right (mix of) questions?
When we’re working with clients, its often our ability to bring an outsider perspective and ask ‘silly’ questions that adds the most value, and lets us go beyond the obvious. Our brand is a literal question, so it should be no surprise we love to get curious.
“Strategic questions can be grouped into five domains: investigative, speculative, productive, interpretive, and subjective. Each unlocks a different aspect of the decision-making process. Together they can help you tackle key issues that are all too easy to miss.”
Its easy to be carried by the mood of the room our our own personal habits and miss the chance to dig into the right details, so we appreciated this practical guide from HBR on finding your own neglected question styles. Well worth the longer read.
The best kept secret in Audience Research
Have you ever wondered who your customers follow on Instagram? Which SubReddits they read?
Figuring out where our audience hangs out online is one of the biggest challenges we face as marketers.
SparkToro is a great tool to explore where you might reach your audience, and the adjacent topics your clients are interested in. It can help with persona development, SEO and content strategy, and even building a PR list to target with your company news.
The free tier is limited to 5 searches per month, but you’ll still get value from that so long as you have a hard think before you start typing.
Their training videos are also a great resource and will give you tons of ideas and practical use cases.
(And bonus fact: SparkToro’s Amanda Natividad is credited with coining the term Zero-Click content. Her LinkedIn posts are gold, and the original post still holds up, and we refer to it often.)
