What are AI Optimization Services, and Does Every Business Need Them?
AI optimization aligns business services and offerings to meet consumers’ increasingly demanding needs
Do businesses need AI optimization services? Like a recently separated mom’s Social Media status, it’s complicated. If you take three minutes to consider AI marketing for your business, 2.9 minutes ago, AI got smarter, and there are new things to consider now. AI thinks for itself. As you read this, AI is learning and making itself better, and as a result, AI has one of the steepest adoption curves of any recent technology.
A McKinsey & Co. 2024 survey (chart below) shows that AI adoption is most prevalent in marketing and sales.
The good news is that with all its complications and rapid rise in the consumer adoption of AI, if you play your cards right (and play them fast), as Alain de Lille wrote, “All roads lead back to Rome” (you’re Rome).
What is AI Optimization?
When done thoughtfully, AI optimization, or prompt optimization, is a marketing method in which a business’s website, search engine optimization, content marketing, social media marketing, etc., is optimized and structured to be found and chosen by qualified prospects who enter detailed prompts (prompt optimization) into various AI software platforms to find business services.
As consumers become increasingly comfortable shifting from search queries to detailed AI prompts to find specific answers to their needs, AI tools rapidly and seamlessly infuse themselves into various methods along the consumer journey.
What Has to be Optimized?
AI optimization (currently) addresses two specific use-cases:
- Stand-alone, such as ChatGPT, Gemini, or others.
- Optimization within search engines such as Google’s AI Overviews or Bing’s Copilot, when a potential prospect searches for needed services.
What is the difference between an AI prompt and a search query?
AI Prompts are different from search queries. Search queries within a mainstream search engine are often concise, five words on average. Search engine optimization services is the marketing method used to optimize a business to appear when the right search query is entered by a well-qualified prospect. AI prompts are much more detailed, sometimes paragraphs of information, as the user is typically looking for detailed and concise answers, and oftentimes, additional information that enhances their prompt. Prompt optimization services deal specifically with developing the authority and content to be sourced by AI platforms as answers to potential customers’ deep questions.
Who needs AI Optimization Services?
The better question is, who needs to pay for AI Optimization Marketing Services?
Some businesses will need to engage more deeply with AI marketing services than others, but at varied degrees, AI will touch every company at every level at some point.
If you’re a local pizzeria, right now, there are better ways to spend marketing dollars than directly optimizing for AI; however, if you’re a large franchise with hundreds of local pizza locations, leveraging a complex multi-location marketing strategy, AI optimization either has or shortly will become the most significant part of your overall multi-location marketing strategy.
The more complex your business is, the more AI optimization will play a significant role in customer acquisition.
A stand-alone family-owned pizzeria is not all that complex. They serve a local market and survive based on their food quality, reputation, and brand authenticity. The fact that they are not a franchise works for them. They are considered part of the community fabric, not a multinational conglomerate. AI optimization marketing will take other forms in the small and micro-business segment, such as the betterment of geo-specific delivery services, reservations platforms, and coupon marketing applications. As AI becomes exponentially smarter, these tools will better connect the right consumer with the right service.
Like a Swiss watch, the more complications, the higher the maintenance cost (and value). A large organization with many complexities, such as multi-location structures, a high degree of competitors, specific customer types, complex product/service as seen with manufacturer marketing, as well as various other complications.
A complex entity will rely heavily on AI optimization as AI will infiltrate all segments of a larger, more complex company. Complex clients with complex needs are using stand-alone AI tools to assist in sourcing vendors. Multi-location structures, whether local businesses or large chains, risk sending damaging mixed signals to the ever-listening AI platforms.
How Can a Business Use AI For Marketing?
AI is one of the most significant advancements in consumer engagement since the search engine. AI provides access to data and abilities that were never possible before. AI is helping prospects find the right provider and, conversely, helping providers find the most qualified prospects.
Sometimes it’s appropriate to go it alone, take it upon yourself to dive deep into AI’s incredible marketing power to help your business achieve more. However, to quote Uncle Ben (as told to Peter Parker), “with great power comes great responsibility”. Be responsible, do your homework, and engage with an experienced digital marketing company or marketing consultant to guide you through the labyrinth of existing and emerging AI platforms and AI-infused tools gaining favor with your potential customers with every passing breath.