With AI, Your Website No Longer is the First Point of Contact with Prospective Clients

Together: AI, your website and the “Confirmation Process.”

Artificial Intelligence has your entire website in its pocket, plus nearly everything you’ve ever published online or discussed on a recorded webinar or podcast.

Think of it as a giant buffet.

When someone is looking for a service like yours, they may ask an AI tool to search the virtual Internet banquet for information and resources.

Your hope is that the request for information about you will deliver a rich snippet or short summary.

Your further wish is that it is meaty enough to pique the prospect’s interest.

Let’s call this an appe-teaser.

Tasty as it is, that paragraph is not sufficient to make an appointment to speak with you. It will not convince the person with purchasing authority or justify a buy decision to oneself. To get the full flavor, the potential buyer visits your website to learn more.

As discussed in The Confirmation Process vs. the Buyer’s Journey, your website is key to confirm:

  • You are the person they heard about/saw/read about.
  • You are the professional they seek/need because you have the skills to solve their problem.
  • You have the respect of colleagues in your field and your clients.

It’s been documented that B2B buyers in a complex sale actively engage with materials online, and do not passively receive a company’s communiqués.

In fact, companies that capture an email address and nurture the relationship along the buyer’s journey are, in my view, shoving food down the prospect’s throat.

Accordingly, potential clients may be loathe to submit an email address, fearing a deluge of promotional emails.

What’s to be done?

I recommend that you actively produce content on the appropriate platforms of interest to your potential clients, marketing your business and driving viewers to the website via external activity:

  • Being quoted in the news
  • Publishing articles
  • Appearing on podcasts
  • Giving workshops and webinars
  • Producing newsletters
  • Writing posts on industry blogs
  • Creating videos

All these information-laden works are promoted on social media; they are linked to and housed on your website.

Your website no longer is the first point of contact with prospective clients.

Still, that does not diminish its essential role in the confirmation process and as the repository of all your content.

Follow an omni-channel approach for your insights to be aggregated by AI tools and also be found by more prospects and referral sources.


This Month’s Tip

Play the content multiplication game.

  • A podcast guest appearance becomes an article
  • A newsletter becomes an e-book
  • A blog post becomes a video
  • A LinkedIn post becomes a webinar
  • And so on and so forth.

To test the content multiplication approach, I asked Perplexity, an AI tool, the same question several times:

Is Janet Falk a Public Relations professional for ____?

I used different audiences: business owners, consultants, attorneys and nonprofits.

Each time, Perplexity delivered a rich snippet with variations that corresponded to the multiple sources it tapped to compose the summary: articles, my website, my LinkedIn profile, podcast appearances and a directory profile.


Contact

What does AI serve up about you? Contact me at Janet@JanetLFalk.com, book an appointment here or call me at 212.677.5770. Let’s review your website and digital presence to ensure you provide a full meal of content that confirms you are a master chef with a five-star buffet.

This newsletter was inspired by a recent interview with marketer Jay Baer.