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What are the best brands doing to stay relevant, build trust, and create content smarter?
At Share Your Genius, we have the same questions, so we're tapping the best in the space for their answers—one voicemail at a time.
Join us each week for quick hits of insights from b2b marketers and leaders.
Adam (00:09): Brandy Morton knows all about staying relevant. As a fractional CMO and a founder of her own marketing agency, she makes it her job to make sure organizations that she works with and works for shows up in the conversations and places that prospects are trying to find information. She understands the importance of evolving demand generation and what that means in 2026 and 2027 something you
probably expect but might not know how to fully activate, and that's AI search. I asked her one simple question. Where should she be focusing her efforts if she's trying to drive growth for a marketing team in 2026 and 2027? Unsurprisingly, she talked about AI, but the breakdown that she provided all about how to show up in that AI search is a master class.
This is an absolutely must listen and I'm so glad she gave me a call.
Brandy Morton (01:15): Hey, Adam, sorry I missed your call. I could pick just one demand gen channel to focus on, it's going to be AI powered search. And I know AI is like the cheapest buzzword we have right now, especially marketers. For me, the best part is that it's like the perfect blend of old school and new school. I've been in marketing a long time and so I'm always fascinated when we've got a way to amplify and optimize old school tactics and best practices with new technology and innovation and this is a place where I feel like I've got a couple clients who are in different markets but using similar playbook and it works.
So if you think about it for B2B, it's like 87 % of buyers are using Gen.ai in their decision.From the acceptance that they've got a problem all the way down to their short list of vendors, they're using AI. They're typing questions. They're looking for vendors. trying to get as much information as they can before they pick up that phone. I love this so much because if you think about AI-powered search, it's inherently conversational and contextual.
Instead of searching, you're engaging in we have a great opportunity as marketers to really dive in and our clients with people from people. I know it's the old adage. If you can be helpful and timely and really take advantage of what AI can do for us, you can absolutely win, particularly in the B2B space. Success really depends on you being able to create and activate content that's relevant but it's also discoverable by humans and AI audiences.
It's a shift. I talk to my clients and say, hey, is your brand going to show up? And if you don't know, that's your first project. A couple of my clients… their first project was actually optimizing their blogs for AI-powered search. Again, old new school meets new school. A blog has so many elements that LMMs love, structured point of view, original we're way past the days of keyword stuffing, So it's another build helpful content that actually answers questions that buyers are searching you think about it, it ranks is great. You get cited by ChatGPT.
And so you can optimize that one blog for your human searcher and also for answer engines, got a client, B2B were doing their best to think about ways to leverage their existing website but also build a diversified, resilient And so we layered an AI forward SEO strategy on top of traditional search for and then blended in the blog concept as well, after six to eight months, their AI citations 56 % growth in their top 10 had steady month over month growth in their blog and glossary visits, and really pulled together an integrated strategy overall for Demangen that resulted in marketing with sourcing almost 65 % of all of their new business, which is huge. And then on a different scale, I had a growth-minded client who was looking to expand into new markets. Her goals were really around driving year-over-year growth during peak season, expanding into some new markets for her. So we rebuilt her blog engine for high-intent traffic, specifically for AI-powered.
And so she was able to get 5x growth and keyword visibility, multiple number one organic rankings for some of those high intent services that she has. And she's experiencing now a big chunk of her customers coming from those target markets that we were optimizing and publishing for. It's just a really great place to put your energy and your resources because the results can speak for themselves.
And no matter what scale you're different than SEO. It's not just getting ranked in the results, an answer engine is going to pick its best answer, synthesize it, and it's going to reward all these things you can add. If you're small, you can measure it manually, build up lists of buyer prompts. I've actually done this with my clients and run them across the engines. See where you rank. See where your position is. See if you get cited. are some folks that have
platforms that already have visibility built in, you think about some rush, for example, it's got a visibility checker that you can use and it's got automated prompt monitoring. You can competitors and citations over And I always tell folks,
What does this look like in practice? Start with your highest blog content, for example. Add some data, put some citations in there. sure you're leveraging your SMEs for authentic points of view types of questions people would sure it's skimmable and formatted in a way that's easy to parse. Then just go with it. That's the first. Run an audit. Start to build for it. I really believe that AI powered search is the best place to put time and it is not just a buzzword and you can really get some compounding results.