We’re living in the AI era. From software and healthcare to data and other industries, AI is fueling technological disruption on a level unseen since the arrival of the personal computer. But beyond the business applications of AI, another revolution is unfolding in the realm of consumer behavior—specifically, search behavior. 

In late 2024, Google’s share of the search industry market fell below 90% for the first time in nearly a decade. AI is the culprit. Now, for the first time, users have free access to AI answer engines that not only crawl the open web, but provide custom responses to their queries in real time. Suddenly, the company that invented the modern search engine is now locked in a battle to win eyeballs from LLM tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, X’s Grok, and many others. 

SEO isn’t dead. But search itself — the way we find, vet, and interact with digital information — is being turned on its head. And in the middle of it all? Your brand, which still needs to reach, educate, and persuade potential customers and users in organic-ish ways.

That’s where Generative Engine Optimization comes in — a discipline both similar and unlike SEO in fundamental ways. In this guide, we’ll unpack GEO, explain how it differs from Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) and traditional SEO, and share what smart brands are doing to future-proof their visibility in a post-keyword world.

What is GEO?

Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) is the practice of improving your brand’s visibility in AI engines. 

Unlike traditional SEO, where the goal is to rank a website highly on search engine results pages, GEO is about ensuring your brand and its content is referenced in the responses generated by tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Bing Copilot, Google’s AI Overviews, and others.

These tools don’t just fetch and display a link to your website. They synthesize and construct responses in real time based on a blend of training data, live web content, and contextual interpretation of your query.

For brand leaders and marketing teams responsible for converting unaware audiences into qualified prospects, the question is no longer just, “Are we ranking?” It’s “Are we a part of the answer?”

An example of GEO (missing) in action

Now, I personally think it’s defensible — albeit misguided — to read all of the above and think, “so what?” After all, marketing is a field dominated by cycles of hype and decompression. We’re obsessive about the latest thing. And Google’s been around for 20+ years, so maybe all that staying power means users will just stick with it.

So to illustrate the point, let’s define GEO by its opposite and share what a lack of LLM visibility actually means for your brand: 

• A user asks ChatGPT, “What’s the best B2B CRM for startups?” The answer includes two competitors and a product roundup, but your brand isn’t mentioned.
• A prospective customer types a question into Perplexity instead of Google. The AI cites three articles — none of which are yours — as the foundation of its recommendation.
• A decision-maker using Google SGE gets an AI-generated answer at the top of the page summarizing key takeaways from five sites. Yours isn’t one of them.
  

In each case the user gets what they need, but your brand is nowhere in sight.

That’s the challenge GEO is designed to solve. It’s not about optimizing for search results but about optimizing for inclusion in AI-generated narratives.

GEO vs. AEO vs. SEO — What’s the Difference?

To understand where GEO fits into the broader picture, it helps to zoom out.

Over the past two decades, SEO has evolved from keyword-stuffing and backlink chases to a more nuanced, intent-driven discipline. But now, AI is accelerating that evolution, splintering search into multiple surfaces: Ranked results, featured answers, and full-blown generated responses.

Let’s break down the distinctions:

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Traditional SEO is about ranking web pages in search engine results to drive organic traffic.

• Goal: Earn clicks from high-ranking links on Google or Bing
• Tactics: Keyword targeting, backlinks, technical site health, content quality
• Success Metric: Organic traffic and page rankings
  

Many brands should still do SEO — but SERPs are increasingly crowded and click-starved as search engines add AIOs, paid results, and more dynamic content. 

Answer Engine Optimization (AEO)

AEO is about structuring your content to be surfaced as the direct answer to a query — whether in a featured snippet, knowledge panel, or voice assistant response.

• Goal: Be the answer, not just a result
• Tactics: Clear formatting (Q&A, bullets, tables), schema markup, concise definitions
• Success Metric: Featured snippet placement, voice response inclusion, zero-click visibility
  

AEO emerged alongside voice search and smart assistants. It’s about incorporating tiny bits of information that engines can extract instantly.

Generative Engine Optimization (GEO)

GEO focuses on getting your brand included in AI-generated answers; i.e., the synthesized, conversational outputs produced by tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google SGE.

• Goal: Be referenced, cited, or paraphrased in AI-generated responses
• Tactics: Authoritative content, semantic depth, entity, schema markup, presence in trustworthy sources, systematic content freshness
• Success Metric: LLM visibility, brand citations in AI tools, brand sentiment in AI tools
  

Similar to AEO, GEO is about formatting for extraction. But it’s also about building enough context and credibility that AI tools pull you into the conversation even if the user never visits your site.

We should note that some brands and search thought leaders still use different terminology for the practice of optimizing content for AI visibility; e.g., it’s not unheard of to read “LLM SEO” out in the wild. At Tuff, we prefer GEO. 

Rethinking SEO Strategy in the Age of LLMs

Until recently, SEOs have followed a tried-and-true formula: Publish high-quality content, earn links, rank well, and capture clicks. The idea that every business is a publisher was huge for its time.

But in 2025, that playbook is fraying.

According to SparkToro’s 2024 zero-click search study, nearly 60% of all Google searches now end without a single click — a number that’s been steadily rising year over year. 

Why? Because Google has long invested in keeping searchers on its platform rather than referring them to sites directly. Before the AI boom, they did this by answering more queries directly — through featured snippets, maps, and carousels — often satisfying the user’s intent without requiring them to visit a site. 

Now, that dynamic is expanding both in Google Search and beyond. Generative AI tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Bing Copilot are starting to function as end destinations themselves by delivering synthesized, citation-lite answers to complex questions. Users don’t need to click through to get the gist. And thanks to LLMs’ ability to summarize, contextualize, and personalize, the barrier to finding information is trending toward zero — and so is the barrier to creating content.

Generative content tools are flooding the internet with basic, surface-level explainers. As a result, top-of-funnel, Wikipedia-style content is rapidly becoming commoditized, and brands that keep churning it out are seeing diminishing returns. 

So, where does that leave marketers?

It doesn’t mean you should stop publishing content. But it does mean your content strategy needs to shift from “publish more” to “publish smarter.”

What brands should do instead:

• Double down on differentiation. Move away from generic explainers and lean into content only you can produce: Product deep-dives, original data, founder insights, customer stories, and technical how-tos.
• Refresh content consistently. According to data from AirOps, 95% of all pages cited by ChatGPT were either published or refreshed in the past 10 months.
• Shift down the funnel. Instead of chasing top-of-funnel traffic, use content to nurture evaluation-stage prospects, educate on key pain points, and reinforce product value. SEO is no longer just an awareness channel. It’s a trust-building tool.
• Structure content for AI surfaces. Write content in a way that’s easily extractable and reference-worthy for GEO. That means structuring answers clearly, using schema, and building semantic authority around your niche.

The bottom line? Brands still need to publish. But they need to be strategic about what, where, and why. In an environment where AI answers dominate and clicks are harder to earn, content must do more than fill space. It must anchor your presence across a fragmented, answer-first internet.

Your Next Move: How to Future-Proof Your SEO Strategy

The rules of search are changing, but the goal remains the same — show up where your audience is looking for answers.

In the era of LLMs, that means expanding your SEO strategy beyond ranking pages to earning presence across traditional search, answer engines, and AI-driven interfaces. Here’s how to get started:

1. Conduct a GEO audit and test your visibility  

You can’t be the answer if you’re not formatting for answers.

• Ask ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Bing Copilot industry-specific questions. Is your brand, product, or POV mentioned?
• Check which sources are being cited, and reverse-engineer what they’re doing right.
• Use platforms like Profound to monitor and benchmark your presence across generative engines — even when you’re not getting the click.
• Add schema markup, internal linking, and modular Q&A formatting to make your content snippet- and voice-ready.

2. Build an Answer-First Content Library

Think beyond blog posts. Create layered content assets built for human and machine consumption.

• Modular formats (e.g. quick definitions, comparisons, data tables) make it easier for AI crawlers to pull and summarize information.
• Product marketing content — e.g., feature breakdowns, use case pages, competitor comparisons — is more defensible and harder to replicate.
• Integrate content with your brand voice, narrative, and hard-to-replicate trust signals. 

3. Redefine Your KPIs

Rankings and organic traffic still matter. But they’re no longer the whole story.

• Track AI citation mentions and content visibility across AI platforms.
• Monitor your “answer share” across key question categories in your space.
• Consider SEO performance alongside downstream metrics like demo requests, sales velocity, and pipeline quality.
• Think about visibility as the new ranking. 

Build a GEO Strategy in 2025

Search is changing. We’re here to help. Whether you’re looking to expand your content efforts this year, future-proof your existing content library, or figure out a strategy that does a little bit of both, we can help. 

Reach out today to kickoff your free GEO strategy call with one of our content strategy experts.

The post GEO, AEO, and LLM SEO: How AI Is Reshaping Search (And What Brands Should Do About It) appeared first on Tuff.

While new tech and tools can sometimes seem like shiny new toys or passing trends, it’s evident that AI has created significant opportunities in growth and marketing, enhancing workflow, output, and results. 

Over the past year, we’ve been experimenting with various AI tools to enhance the quality of our work for clients. In doing so, we’re constantly gaining insight into what AI can’t currently replace, where we need to focus our internal resources, and ultimately how to strike the right balance between strategy and execution. Our goal is to deliver the best work while passing on as many benefits and cost savings as possible to our clients.

Here’s an overview of how each team at Tuff is currently working and leveraging various AI tools: 

Creative Team: 

If creative production were a restaurant, we wouldn’t use AI to say, “Make a pizza,” because you’d get some sort of inedible round-ish shape that sorta resembles what we only can assume is supposed to be a pizza. We’d certainly not be able to serve it to a customer. We can’t even say, “Here’s the ingredients and a recipe… now make the pizza.” But with the right supervision and coaching, we can use it to prep the ingredients, making the process of creating a delicious pizza easier and usually less of a hassle. TLDR: It’s a great resource for sourcing sources.

Day-to-day, it’s an amazing tool for jumpstarting or reviving your creativity when you’re feeling stuck. It can improve average source files and assets, within reason. Plus, it’s fantastic at blending reality with fantasy (think of a DALL-E image of your product in space, underwater, or in Switzerland) to grab attention. It also helps us stay organized and cuts down on admin tasks, so we can spend more time on the fun stuff. Here’s how our performance creative team is using AI to speed up production while maintaining top-notch quality:

CRO Team: 

Our CRO team is all about helping our clients grow using a range of tactics like: landing-page optimization, customer-journey mapping, A/B testing and multivariate testing. They are also experts when it comes to email marketing, website design, and information architecture, bolstered by analytics covering tracking, and traffic analysis. 

This team comprises a diverse set of experts, including web designers, UX copywriters, and developers. They leverage AI tools like ChatGPT, TurboScribe, Natural Readers, DALL-E, Figma AI, Jasper, and Asana AI. While they haven’t fully automated everything with AI, they’ve significantly accelerated and enhanced tasks such as content drafting and refinement, transcription, background removal from photos, image resizing, and more. This has freed up time to focus on strategic and creative initiatives. 

Paid Media Team: 

Our paid media team sees AI tools like ChatGPT as great for enhancing your work rather than replacing you. They’ve had the most success using AI to:

• Perform research, like coming up with initial keyword ideas for search campaigns
• Uncover insights in large data sets to inform media budgets and campaign optimizations
• Generate inspiration for ad campaign copy

Using AI for these tasks saves time, allowing them to focus more on our accounts, make efficient optimizations, and dive deeper into overall media strategies. The paid team mainly uses ChatGPT for these tasks:

SEO and Content Team: 

Here’s our SEO and Content team’s take on using generative AI for content and SEO:

We strongly believe that unedited AI-generated content shouldn’t be used for customer-facing material, especially not for long-form pieces or in B2B settings. People can easily spot AI content, and we don’t want our brand to come off as lazy. So, that’s a firm no from us.

However, there are a few tasks where AI tools like ChatGPT have been really helpful:

1. Meta Description Writing: It’s tedious, boring, and short. Plus, Google often rewrites them anyway. Let the machines handle it!
2. Content Excerpts/Executive Summaries: Perfect for summarizing existing content for blog previews or for giving a quick overview of a brief/outline to clients.
3. Suggesting Alternate Content Titles: While we still tweak these a bit, it’s now much quicker and easier to brainstorm ideas.

AI is a big help for our SEO and Content team by taking care of the most tedious and repetitive tasks that don’t show up in the final copy. It’s great for things like writing meta descriptions, summarizing content or topic ideas, and rewriting small portions of text.

AI is also fantastic for brainstorming. It can suggest keywords when you’re out of ideas, and then you can check those suggestions with tools like Semrush or Ahrefs.

Conclusion: Let AI Handle the Tedious and Repetitive Tasks

We’re always testing new tools, and here’s our takeaway as a growth agency right now: use AI for the boring tasks that don’t add much value but need to get done. This way, we can improve the quality and speed of our work, deliver better results to clients, and free up our time for running more and better experiments.

By freeing up time, we can continue to repurpose that to deeply understanding our clients’ products, audiences, and business models, which enables us to create and implement strategies for sustainable growth. And ultimately, the more tasks we can streamline, improve, or outsource to AI, the better we can adapt our operating model to meet our clients’ evolving needs.

Ellen Jantsch

Ellen is the founder at Tuff and one of the team’s core growth marketers. She is a versatile marketer with expertise in multiple channels – from ppc to seo to email to others – responsible for the experiments and testing.  She is happiest when she’s on the ski hill or outside pointing her mountain bike downhill.

The post AI-Powered Growth Team: How We’re Leveraging Generative AI Opportunities and Passing All the Benefits Directly to Our Clients appeared first on Tuff.

With the rise of AI and other tech tools, creating content quickly and affordably has become more accessible than ever. But here’s the kicker: is all this content actually making an impact?

At Tuff, we’re embracing AI across our creative process, from testing multiple variations swiftly to streamlining everything from concepting to final assets. This not only allows us to pass savings to our clients but also enables us to serve our clients faster and more efficiently, without compromising on quality.

However, there’s one crucial piece that can’t be overlooked: a solid creative strategy. Without it, your content won’t consistently engage your audience or drive revenue, no matter how much you produce or how efficient the process is. Sure, AI has improved our creative process and outputs, but without a strong creative strategy, success can still elude us.

In this post, I want to dive into why we believe that authentic, low-fi assets can actually outperform their slicker counterparts when it comes to developing ad creative that will  maximize your media dollars.

The Cost of Playing it Safe

As organic reach declines, the natural response is to pump out more content faster and cheaper to increase your chances of being seen. Doubling down on paid media often goes hand in hand with this approach. But the reality is that pouring resources into run-of-the-mill content doesn’t necessarily lead to revenue. It just drives your waves of messages into a sea of sameness, regardless of your audience targeting and budget. 

In crowded online (and offline) spaces, generic content blends into the background making standing out tougher than ever. At Tuff, we’ve seen firsthand the power of breaking the mold.

The Rise of Authenticity

One of the most exciting content trend developments we’re seeing is in B2B marketing. Influencers and user-generated content (UGC), once reserved for consumer brands, are now becoming staples in B2B creative. Why? Because behind every business is a human decision maker who responds to visuals and messaging just like you would. In a space flooded with charts, graphs, jargon, and salesy buzzwords, it’s genuine human connection that stands out. By partnering with influencers and content creators to embrace UGC, B2B brands can build trust and connect with their audience in meaningful ways.

B2B Ads With Personality: A Case Study with goHappy

Let me give you a very specific example using one of our existing clients, goHappy. Rather than sticking static assets, we decided to level up by collaborating with a content creator to test a couple of user-generated videos tailored specifically to their audience. Our main priorities with these assets were nailing the messaging and ensuring standout creative design.

• Strategic Messaging: By utilizing goHappy’s persona research and applying insights gleaned from our previous message testing results, we had a solid head start in understanding what types of tedious HR tasks our audience struggles with and some of the language they’re responding to in ads. We also knew that the average HR manager appreciates work related humor, so video scripts were written with some spicy HR memes in mind.
• Creative Design: Nothing humanizes HR like adding some personality. We turned to a UGC content creator marketplace called Twirl to help source a creator that would deliver our scripts in an engaging way. (Our creator, Amanda, even has HR experience, so we knew it was a perfect match!) From there, the Tuff motion team added gifs, goHappy branded motion graphics, and sound effects to her footage to bring additional life to the videos.

The results speak for themselves. After introducing the following 3 video assets to our LinkedIn ad creative mix, we were able to improve goHappy’s CPL by 34% in just 30 days.

Putting People First: Practical Steps for Your Strategy

Now, goHappy is just a single example, and there are numerous ways to infuse your ad creative with a human touch and authenticity. Here are some practical tips, based on what we’ve seen work across our client accounts, that you can start implementing today:

1. Know Your Audience: Dive deep into who your audience is and what their day-to-day struggles are. Aim to help them solve their problems, not sell them your platform. Lean into value propositions, customer research, and agile message testing to determine what your customers care about and how to get their attention. Create Intentionally: Consider the most impactful ways to get your message across to your audience. If it’s a quick message, a static graphic is great. If it requires some explanation, video is your friend. Keep in mind that your viewer is always a human, even in B2B.
2. Test and Learn: Experiment with different approaches and learn from what works (and what doesn’t). As long as you have a creative testing framework, no under-performing content is wasteful. A nimble approach allows you to adapt and evolve your strategy over time.
3. Embrace Technology: Use tools and automation to streamline your content production process. This gives you more time for strategic thinking and ensures your messaging stays human-centric. Currently, we’re finding great support from tools like Envato, Stocksy, Adobe Stock, Pexels, Unsplash, and Artlist.io.

By prioritizing a people-first approach and embracing a nimble testing strategy, you can create content that stands out and drives real results. Whether you’re a big brand or a scrappy startup, these insights apply to businesses of all sizes. By putting people at the heart of your strategy, you can cut through the noise and make meaningful connections that drive growth.

The post Authenticity: A Critical Component for Effective Ad Creative in the AI Era appeared first on Tuff.

Welcome to our AMA featuring Derek Coleman, our Head of SEO at Tuff.

As one of our original team members at Tuff, Derek has not only collaborated with every one of our clients over the years on their SEO endeavors, but he’s also played a pivotal role in shaping our entire SEO and content team, as well as our perspective on organic growth. From handling technical SEO to crafting content strategies and executing digital PR campaigns, Derek has successfully navigated the evolving search landscape for companies across nearly every industry.

Ready to dive in? Derek answers SEO-specific topics like: 

1. How brands should adapt to the shift in search engines providing direct answers on the SERP, resulting in decreased website traffic.
2. Thoughts on the recent March 2024 core algorithm update targeting AI-generated content and how brands should adjust their content strategies accordingly.
3. Effective methods or metrics for measuring ROI in organic efforts.
4. Predictions about the future of SEO for brands and tips on how they should prepare for potential changes or advancements in the SEO landscape. 

We’ve transcribed Derek’s answers to these questions below. If you’d rather hear directly from him, check out this video:

With search engines providing direct answers on the SERP, resulting in decreased website traffic, how should brands adapt to this shift?

Focusing on long-tail keywords and bottom-of-the-funnel content is crucial. While AI excels at generic top-of-the-funnel content, diving into specific pain points of your audience is key. Conduct interviews, understand their needs, and tailor your content accordingly. This targeted approach, coupled with long-tail keywords, can help maintain traffic despite evolving search experiences.

Additionally, prioritize online customer service by building a comprehensive knowledge base. Utilize AI to ensure 24/7 support, providing quick and accurate responses to user queries. Leveraging thought leadership and user-generated content further strengthens your brand and content quality, contributing to sustained traffic levels amidst industry shifts.

What are your thoughts on the recent March 2024 core algorithm update that targets AI-generated content? How should brands adjust their content strategies accordingly?

So, Google’s been busy with updates lately. They rolled out a core algorithm update and a spam update. These changes are aimed at cracking down on mass-produced, low-quality content. Google’s keeping an eye on how often content is churned out. If you suddenly go from publishing once a week to a hundred times a week, it raises a red flag and could lead to penalties.

For most brands, sticking to best practices and focusing on top-notch content should keep you in Google’s good graces. Following Google’s guidelines is key here. And if you’re dabbling in AI-generated content, consider keeping it separate from your main domain, like on a micro-site. This way, if there are any penalties, they won’t drag down your main domain’s reputation. Google’s paying close attention to high-volume content publishers, so it’s wise to tread carefully.

When it comes to organic efforts, what methods or metrics do you use to measure ROI effectively?

There are several approaches you can take, depending on your business goals and key performance indicators. 

For most of our partners, we typically set up goals or integrate directly in Google Analytics and ensure tracking is configured properly, whether it’s in Google Analytics or Mixpanel. For example, if lead generation is a priority, we establish a benchmark for how many leads are generated from organic traffic, specifically non-branded organic traffic. This ensures that any activities on the branded side don’t skew the results. We assess the current performance in generating non-branded organic traffic, set projections and goals for the next six months, and outline the associated costs, such as fees for content creation or CRO efforts to enhance pages and landing pages for a successful strategy.

Then, we track progress over three to six months to see the impact. We measure how many more leads we’re generating and evaluate the value of those leads to the client’s bottom line. This helps us understand the effectiveness of our organic efforts and make any necessary adjustments. 

On a related note, though not directly about ROI, here’s our favorite SEO forecasting template for planning traffic growth. Clients love it, and it’s one of the most downloaded spreadsheets on the Tuff website. It’s a fantastic tool to help you see the potential impact of your SEO efforts on your traffic.

Looking ahead, what are your predictions regarding the future of SEO for brands? How should they prepare for potential changes or advancements in the SEO landscape?

Here are my thoughts on the future of SEO and AI:

I believe AI platforms are going to face a content shortage soon. OpenAI, for example, has already scraped a lot of available content and now has a deal with Reddit to access more. They’ll probably try to secure deals with other platforms like Facebook and YouTube as well.

As long as publishers keep producing content, AI platforms will eventually need to strike deals with them to access that content. This could involve partnerships with major publishers or even smaller-scale agreements with individual WordPress publishers. There might also be a model similar to YouTube’s monetization strategy, where publishers get rewarded for their content.

AI platforms know that without fresh content, their models can’t improve. 

So, I think we’ll see more AI-generated links to articles, which won’t be too different from our current search experience. High-quality content will still rank best, whether it’s on platforms like Gemini or OpenAI. They’ll pull content from publishers and link back to their pages, driving organic traffic.

To stay ahead, continue focusing on producing top-quality content. Also, think about user intent. When researching keywords, see what type of content ranks—YouTube videos, infographics, etc. Diversifying your content formats is key. Don’t just stick to text; create videos for YouTube, short clips for TikTok, and more. This will boost your brand presence and authority, making it harder for AI to replicate your content.

Nobody can predict exactly what will happen, but it’s going to be interesting to watch it unfold!

Ellen Jantsch

Ellen is the founder at Tuff and one of the team’s core growth marketers. She is a versatile marketer with expertise in multiple channels – from ppc to seo to email to others – responsible for the experiments and testing.  She is happiest when she’s on the ski hill or outside pointing her mountain bike downhill.

The post AMA on Generative AI, Organic Search, & Google I/O with Derek Coleman, Head of SEO at Tuff appeared first on Tuff.

Here’s one of the biggest challenges our startup partners face: Hitting growth goals with limited resources.

Now more than ever, marketers are expected to do more with less. As a marketing agency that works with startups of all stripes, we’ve seen how AI can be a game-changer for these teams, helping them work smarter and get more done.

According to a recent study by LinkedIn and Ipsos, nearly half of B2B marketers are now using AI in their strategies. And guess what? Interest in AI courses is still skyrocketing. People want to learn how to use it, particularly using tactics under the umbrella of “Generative AI.”

Our startup partners, whether they’re in education, fintech, e-commerce, or elsewhere, often wonder how they can tap into AI without sacrificing their brand’s identity. So, we’ve put together a no-nonsense guide full of the latest trends, practical tips, and best practices. It’s all about helping startups stay ahead of the curve and keep their edge in the market. Let’s dive in.

Using AI to Redefine Startup Marketing

AI has quickly become a cornerstone of modern marketing strategies, providing invaluable insights and predictive capabilities. Using machine learning and natural language processing, AI has the ability to sift through data, uncover patterns, and forecast outcomes like never before. Let’s take a closer look at the latest AI trends reshaping digital marketing and discover how you can leverage AI to supercharge your startup marketing efforts.

Personalization and the Customer Experience with AI 

Successful marketing is never one-size-fits-all, and in order to really see growth and results, you’ll need to personalize your messaging to each audience. The good news—AI has completely changed the personalization game in startup marketing.

Example

For instance, if your startup specializes in eco-friendly home products, AI can help you comb through customer data, such as purchase history and website interactions. Through AI analysis, you can discern patterns indicating preferences and behaviors.

Armed with this insight, you can craft marketing messages that resonate with different segments of your audience. For environmentally-conscious consumers, emphasize the environmental benefits of your products, while for budget-conscious buyers, highlight the cost-effectiveness and potential savings.

Understanding all of the ICPs (ideal customer profiles) that fall within your target audience requires extensive research, and tailoring your marketing message to every ICP can be challenging. But AI can help you better understand your ICPs by analyzing individual preferences, behavior, and context. 

For every partner at Tuff, we’ll conduct an audience deep dive when onboarding a new startup or scaleup partner. These deep dives give us an opportunity to work directly with our clients and get an inside look at their target audience. 

During this process, we’ll often use AI to help us gather information about each audience segment. We’ll then use this data to build out customer personas, value propositions, and message testing frameworks. You can learn more about our strategic messaging process here.

AI-Powered Content Creation and Distribution 

Creating captivating content for your startup—from blogs to social posts, emails, and ads—can be made simpler with AI platforms. (Check out our curated list of our preferred AI content production companies.) While our Content and Creative Strategists form the core of Tuff’s content production, they often enhance their efforts with AI for increased efficiency.

Our creative process at Tuff is rooted in data. This means that we always analyze our partner’s ad account data before developing creative. During this process, we’ll take a closer look at which type of content and messaging has historically resonated best with the partner’s target audience. We’ll then use those insights to inform our next round of creative. 

We also rely on AI to keep us aligned with emerging channel-specific trends, informing our creative tests effectively. Additionally, we leverage AI to conduct thorough analyses of our clients’ competitors’ social ads, gaining valuable insights into effective creative approaches.

This data-driven approach extends to our content creation as well. While our blogs and case studies are always written by Tuff team members, we utilize AI to streamline research and develop content outlines, enhancing our efficiency in delivering impactful content. In short, it allows us to jump right into writing. 

Predictive Analytics for Strategic Decision-Making

When building a growth marketing strategy for a startup, it’s impossible to predict the results and how much your advertising is going to cost without historical data. In this case, marketers often use predictive analytics to help them make those initial strategic decisions.

By using AI to gather data, analyze patterns, and foreshadow future trends, predictive analytics can help you forecast what your campaign costs and ROI will be. This information is super helpful for marketers trying to determine which channels they should activate and how much budget they need to allocate to each channel based on the predicted outcome. 

Chatbots and Conversational Marketing

Many of our startup partners have implemented AI chat bots on their websites to engage with customers and enhance the user experience. These conversational chatbots utilize natural language processing to interact with customers in real time and deliver personalized responses to each user. HubSpot recently shared their top 18 AI chatbot recommendations that integrate directly with existing HubSpot workspaces.  

Navigating Ethical Considerations in AI-Driven Marketing

In the realm of AI-driven marketing, startups face the challenge of balancing efficiency with ethical considerations. As you lean into AI to develop marketing plans and streamline processes, it’s crucial to consider ethical standards to maintain trust with your audience (or partners). Here are four steps startups can take:

• Bias Mitigation: Utilize AI tools to analyze data and uncover biases in marketing strategies. Regularly review and adjust algorithms to ensure fair and unbiased outcomes in targeting and messaging.
• Diversity and Inclusion: Leverage AI to gather diverse perspectives and insights for marketing campaigns. Ensure that AI-driven decisions reflect the diversity of your target audience to avoid exclusionary practices.
• User Autonomy: Implement AI-powered personalization strategies that respect user privacy and autonomy. Provide clear opt-in/opt-out options and transparent data usage policies to empower users in controlling their information.
• Collaborative Approach: Talk with industry peers, follow experts, and collab with stakeholders to navigate ethical concerns in AI-driven marketing. Share best practices, insights, and lessons learned to collectively advance ethical standards in the field.

By considering ethics in your AI-driven marketing strategies, startups can use AI effectively while maintaining trust with their audience, ultimately building stronger connections and moving the industry in a positive direction.

What’s Next?

McKenzie Fowler

Hey there! I’m McKenzie, a Growth Marketer at Tuff who lives in Nashville, TN. After years of experience working at agencies in paid media, I found my way to Tuff in 2021 to work with startups, scaleups, and established brands on full-funnel growth strategies rooted in data. When I’m not working, you can find me taking my dog Burley to the park, traveling with friends and family, or winding down at the local yoga studio. Let’s connect.

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