Mike Bayly, a former staff member of Expert, has moved onto greater things and is now based in London and working as Sales Founding Lead at Passionfruit Marketing. Passionfruit is a budding marketing specialist in the industry, “Passion Fruit Marketing ... We do marketing consultancy, strategy making, campaign creation, and branding”.

Mike wrote lots of great blogs for us during his time at Expert and he continues to do so in his new role. He has given us permission to share the following blog he has written.

Why frogs? This image represents a lot of the changes we're seeing in marketing that many aren't planning for. Examples in the realm of Search...

• "Google" is synonymous with search. But as AI improves and information is delivered directly in chat formats, the need to sift through links decreases. This threatens Google’s business model, leading to lower click-through rates. Brands that rely on paid ads will find attracting attention even tougher.
• AI-driven search is becoming the norm, with people increasingly using ChatGPT, Siri, and Meta's AI assistants in WhatsApp, Messenger, and Facebook. This fragmentation of media channels requires brands to be present across more, diverse platforms.
• More and more search is happening across social media (Google has dropped to third place among 18 to 24-year-olds behind TikTok and Instagram). Showing up with organic content on social becomes a priority for brands targeting these audiences.

Questions that come to mind...

• How do you prioritize search optimization across multiple platforms like Meta’s AI Assistant, Siri, OpenAI, and social search engines? It’s naive to think the AI landscape & channels are fully developed – we’re barely in the first innings of this shift.
• How should marketing teams structure themselves to specialize in optimizing each key channel, that requires a buffet of skillsets?
• What will search optimization look like with different AI models & technologies driving the back-end of these channels? This creates a skill gap void between today’s SEO specialists and AI data engineers.
• Social search engine marketing prominence will continue to rise - how can marketers balance budgets between paid media and organic social content to maintain an 'always on' presence as social search engine marketing grows?

The winners will be those that begin making changes now and plan ahead. Trialling and testing to avoid being left behind.

The rest will be looking for princesses to kiss- 🐸