GenAI is already telling your brand’s story — are you guiding it?

As digital transformation reshapes marketing, generative AI is redefining how brands create content, engage customers and scale operations. GenAI’s capabilities — including its role as a consumer connection channel — give marketers a better understanding of the customer journey, enabling a more personalized approach. 

But that doesn’t mean much if brands aren’t AI-ready.

What does it mean to be AI-ready?

Being AI-ready means understanding how generative AI impacts your brand and building strategies to harness and inform that impact. Generative AI models are already sharing our brand stories. Marketers must understand what that story is and how to inform an accurate telling of it.

Dig deeper: GenAI is telling your brand’s story — with or without you

Strategies of an AI-ready brand

Being AI-ready helps brands be more in tune with consumer behavior and trends to stay one step ahead with their content action plan. Most content plans focus on attracting customers, but with the rise of AI search, brands also need to build trust by becoming a reliable and authentic source of information in their industry.

The point of the strategy is to appeal to generative AI and captivate audiences by creating a comprehensive AI-ready brand.

Authoritativeness and original insights

An AI-ready marketing strategy has a two-fold approach: 

• To create content that helps consumers make buying decisions.
• To help AI search tools recognize your content as dependable and authoritative and generate clear responses for searchers. 

When pulling citations, AI prefers content that offers something valuable. That makes following the E-E-A-T (experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness) concept critical for generative search visibility and recognition of your brand as an expert resource. 

Original insights and authoritative content supply generative AI tools with distinct talking points and information about a subject where others may miss the mark. 

Include proprietary data, expert quotes and first-party perspectives demonstrating your brand’s knowledge and credibility. That builds trust with human audiences and signals authority and topical relevance to large language models (LLMs) and other AI learning systems.

Dig deeper: New content strategies for handling AI-powered search

Scalable audience insights and opportunity analysis

Trends, consumer interests and behaviors can shift quickly. Remaining agile keeps your brand prepared for those changes. That includes doing the groundwork to ensure you understand your target audience’s evolving needs at scale as your brand grows.

Watching competitors and understanding customer habits and intent can help your brand adjust its marketing strategy for the AI landscape. This will support efforts to meet consumers where they are and drive more effective, successful campaigns.

You can enhance your marketing strategy with AI by:

• Developing buyer personas and lookalike audiences using faster, deeper insights.
• Examining market conditions, conducting research and analyzing data with generative AI.
• Increasing scalability and competitiveness through more dynamic, insight-driven decisions.

Failing to integrate AI into these processes can lead to reduced agility and the risk of falling behind in the market. For example, our agency uses AI-powered proprietary technology to distill target audience needs and missed opportunities into actionable takeaways, informing our marketing experts at scale.

Deep, interconnected content

Digital transformation means building enduring topical authority, not isolated content assets. Content should be part of an organization’s overarching digital infrastructure and not seen as a stand-alone entity. 

Content as an isolated entity drives a temporary, noncohesive impact. Content as infrastructure, in comparison, takes content management and distribution and converges them into an organization’s content data structures, frameworks, and workflows. By creating deep topic clusters and strong interlinking strategies, marketers can outperform the competition because they provide generative AI with a holistic and synonymous brand message. 

Generative AI depends on internal linking — linking a page on your website to another page on your website — because of its ability to comprehend topic clusters and pillar pages and see the complete picture of your website’s content. By using descriptive anchor text for internal linking, search engines can better understand your content and make connections between the content on your site.

Our research shows that SEO best practices can help brands create content that’s discoverable for Google’s AI Overviews, increasing the chances of being featured in key real estate at the top of the most widely used traditional search engine.

Lowered silos around content, SEO, data and brand 

Being AI-ready requires effort from the entire organization, including cross-functional collaboration between creative, technical and analytics teams. Offer your teams training programs to upskill them, fill knowledge gaps and create fluency in machine learning and AI. 

It may also be valuable to perform an AI-readiness analysis to understand where an organization is with resourcing and strategic goals and to get a feel for where employees are with AI knowledge.

AI is rewriting the rules of digital discovery, but the brands with staying power will invest their digital transformation strategies in comprehensive AI readiness.

Dig deeper: AI readiness checklist — 7 key steps to a successful integration