Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is undergoing a seismic shift, driven by the rise of Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO). AI-powered tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google’s AI Overviews are fundamentally changing how people search for information. Businesses can no longer rely solely on ranking in traditional Google search results; they must now optimise for these generative AI tools that summarise and recommend products, services, and content directly to users.

The Evolution of Search

For years, SEO and Google were synonymous. Optimising for Google’s algorithms was enough to ensure visibility. But with AI tools offering dynamic, summarised answers, search behaviour is expanding. Google’s AI Overviews alone are projected to reach over a billion users by the end of the year. Meanwhile, platforms like Perplexity and Claude allow users to ask complex queries, pulling from multiple sources to deliver coherent answers.

This shift means businesses must ensure their information is present in these AI-driven tools, as well as the sources these tools rely on. Simply ranking on Google is no longer sufficient—you must be visible everywhere your audience searches.

Two-Pronged SEO Strategies

Adapting to GEO requires businesses to adopt a dual approach:

1. Top of Funnel SEO
   Focus on being featured in AI summaries during the research phase. AI tools like Perplexity pull content from authoritative websites. By aligning your content with the queries and sources these tools rely on, your business can gain visibility as a trusted expert.
2. Bottom of Funnel SEO
   When users are ready to make purchasing decisions, your business needs to stand out in commercial searches. Optimise product and service content to reflect unique selling points that AI tools can highlight in their summaries.

For example, a business bank might ensure its standout features, like “award-winning customer service” or “innovative budgeting tools,” are prioritised over generic attributes like “no monthly fees.”

Embracing EEAT for Success

Google’s EEAT framework—Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness—is becoming even more critical. AI tools favour content that reflects genuine, first-hand expertise.

How to Implement EEAT:

• Showcase expert authorship with clear credentials.
• Include case studies, first-hand experiences, and multimedia content.
• Collaborate with industry experts to validate your authority.

Small businesses can leverage authentic storytelling and practical knowledge to build trust. Videos, in particular, can be a powerful way to showcase experience and passion in niche industries.

The Future of Search

As voice and visual search continue to grow, businesses must prioritise concise, conversational content optimised for AI tools. However, these searches often remain informational, with commercial intent still tied to more traditional search methods.

By embracing GEO, businesses can future-proof their search strategies and stay ahead of competitors.

Ready to Optimise?

GEO isn’t just the future of SEO—it’s the present. Thinkplus’s GEO Game Plan helps businesses assess their visibility in AI-driven tools and create actionable strategies to dominate the evolving search landscape.

Get started with a free marketing review and ensure your business ranks wherever your audience searches.

Embrace the change. GEO is here.

A Message from our Head of PPC

Last week, Tim had a long conversation about the most common (and expensive) PPC mistakes marketers make and how to avoid them.

After the call, Tom and Tim continued their conversation about how ads will appear in ChatGPT (it’s inevitable).

Tom is predicting that, when ads do come to ChatGPT, they’ll be powered by Microsoft Ads. When you think about it, it makes a lot of sense. The Microsoft Ads platform is already there. It just needs to be ported over and glammed up a bit.

With that in mind, if you start running Microsoft Ads today they’ll be optimised and matured for the any-day-now rollout.

If you’re not yet running Microsoft Ads, then if Tom’s team sets up your account this month (Dec), he’ll be able to get you another 2500 USD/GBP in free ad credit you can use to train your new ads campaign.

With Google already testing ads in AI Overviews, ChatGPT’s ads are surely only a few weeks or months away.

Interested? Send Tom and Tim a message today and they’ll get your proactive ads campaign set up.

The post The Best SEO Strategies for 2025 appeared first on Thinkplus.

Today we’ve got 5 different types of digital marketing strategies to share with you.

These are tried and tested strategies that are working right now for Thinkplus clients and our portfolio companies.

And there’s a lot of variety here, meaning there’s something for every type of business.

In today’s video and podcast we talk about:

• Cross-pollination
• AI Driven Search
• Upselling, Cross-selling and Subscriptions
• Video Content
• Audience Segmentation

Timestamps

00:00 — Cross-pollination Strategy
05:09 — AI Driven Search
09:26 — Upselling, Cross-selling and Subscriptions
12:57 — Video Content Strategy
16:22 — Audience Segmentation

What to Listen to Next

• Google’s AI Overviews to Reach 1 Billion Users by Year-End
• Why GEO is the New SEO (and How It Works)
• The Best B2B Marketing Strategies for 2025 ⁠⁠⁠

The post The Best Digital Marketing Strategies for 2025 (#338) appeared first on Thinkplus.

Over the last decade or so, the team here at Thinkplus have generated over 100,000 B2B leads for ourselves and our clients.

And in today’s video and podcast, we’re going to be breaking down three B2B marketing strategies that you can use:

• Being really, really helpful via content.
• Repurposing like a beast
• Thought leadership (but not as you know it).

These three strategies form the central pillar of any B2B marketing campaign. Then, you can build everything else you do off them.

What to Listen to Next

• Digital Marketing Lessons from Disruptive Insurance Companies
• Watch This Before Hiring a Marketing Agency
• Why You Shouldn’t Be Afraid of AI PPC Tools 

The post The Best B2B Marketing Strategies for 2025 (#334) appeared first on Thinkplus.

How to Create the Perfect Marketing Strategy for 2025: A Comprehensive Guide

If you’re reading this, you’re probably starting to think about your marketing strategy for 2025. Perfect timing.

While many agencies might try to sell you a “one-size-fits-all perfect strategy,” we’re going to do something different. Instead of prescribing a rigid plan, we’re sharing our battle-tested framework that helps businesses build strategies that actually work for their unique situations.

This isn’t theory – it’s the exact process we use with our clients at Thinkplus to generate measurable results.

Let’s dive in.

Stage 1: The Great Marketing Clear-Out

Before building anything new, we need to clear the deck. This isn’t just spring cleaning – it’s about identifying and eliminating practices that are holding your marketing back. Think of it as creating space for what’s actually going to move the needle in 2025.

One of the first things to evaluate is your content creation process.

If you’re still pushing out generic AI-generated content without adding real value or human insight, it’s time for a change.

We’re not saying don’t use AI – we’re saying use it as a tool to enhance your content, not replace human expertise entirely.

Another major area to examine is your decision-making process. Many businesses we work with start their journey making assumptions about their customers without any real data to back it up. This leads to misaligned strategies and wasted resources. In 2025, there’s no excuse for not understanding your customers deeply.

Let’s talk about outdated practices. We still see businesses clinging to old SEO metrics while completely ignoring the rise of AI search, or refusing to adapt to new platforms where their audience spends time. The marketing landscape is evolving rapidly – your practices need to evolve too.

Stage 2: The Deep-Dive Analysis

This stage is all about understanding where you really are, not where you think you are. It’s about hard numbers and honest assessment.

Understanding Your Marketing ROI

Start by looking at your overall marketing budget’s performance. Don’t just look at the total spend versus total return – dig deeper. How is each channel performing? What’s the true cost per acquisition across different platforms? Remember to consider both short-term and long-term investments.

Here’s a real example from one of our clients:

They were spending heavily on paid ads while their email marketing was receiving minimal investment. When we analysed the data, we discovered their email campaigns were generating their highest-quality leads with minimal spend. This insight completely transformed their strategy.

Resource Utilisation Review

Take a hard look at your marketing tools and subscriptions. We often find businesses paying for multiple tools with overlapping features, or hanging onto subscriptions they barely use.

This isn’t just about cutting costs – it’s about optimising your marketing stack for efficiency.

Stage 3: Setting Strategic Goals

This is where many businesses go wrong – they start with tactical goals instead of strategic ones.

Your marketing goals should cascade directly from your business objectives.

Let me give you an example:

Say your business goal is to expand into a new territory in 2025. Simply setting a goal like “increase social media followers by 20%” isn’t going to cut it. Instead, you need specific marketing objectives that directly support your expansion:

1. Build brand awareness in the new territory through targeted content
2. Generate a specific number of qualified leads from the new market
3. Achieve certain revenue targets from the new territory

We track all our clients’ goals in detailed spreadsheets, broken down by quarter and month. This allows us to spot early if we’re off track and make necessary adjustments.

Stage 4: Building Your Action Plans

Now comes the exciting part – turning your goals into actionable plans. This is where the rubber meets the road, and it’s crucial to be both ambitious and realistic.

The Data-Driven Approach

Consider one of our eCommerce clients who wanted to improve their customer targeting. Rather than making assumptions, we built a data collection system into their email marketing that allowed customers to self-segment through their interactions. This simple but effective approach led to a 13x ROI in just six months.

Flexibility and Testing

Your marketing plan needs to be robust yet flexible. Set aside roughly 20% of your budget for testing and responding to opportunities that arise throughout the year. These might include new platform opportunities that emerge, competitive responses needed, or testing new channels and approaches.

Regular Review Cycles

We’ve found that quarterly reviews provide the perfect balance between giving strategies time to work and maintaining agility. Monthly is too frequent and can lead to knee-jerk reactions, while annual reviews don’t allow enough flexibility to adapt to market changes.

Putting It All Together

Remember, the perfect marketing strategy isn’t about following the latest trends or copying your competitors. It’s about creating a data-driven, flexible framework that aligns with your business goals while maintaining the ability to adapt to changes.

Need help building your 2025 marketing strategy? Request a free website and marketing review and our team will help you identify your best opportunities for growth.

Remember: The best marketing strategy isn’t the most complex or expensive – it’s the one you can execute consistently while measuring and adapting based on real results.

Looking for more marketing insights? Subscribe to our podcast or check out our YouTube channel for weekly digital marketing tips and strategies.

The post How To Create the Perfect Marketing Strategy for 2025 (#330) appeared first on Thinkplus.

In This Episode…

Growth means beefing up your marketing resources to increase your website’s revenue.

But growth can be expensive.

That’s where scaling comes in.

Scaling is about significantly increasing your website’s revenue with only small increases to your cost.

And we don’t know about you, but that sounds way cooler to us.

It might sound too good to be true, but it’s not. You just need to be smart about how you scale.

So, in today’s video and podcast, Tim explains how to do just that.

What to WATCH Next

What to LISTEN to Next

• How To Triple Your Traffic in 2024
• How SEO Works in 2024

What to READ Next

• How to Optimise Each Page of Your Website

The post How To Scale Your Websites Revenue in 2024 (#309) appeared first on Thinkplus.

In This Episode…

The start of the year can feel overwhelming for a lot of marketers.

You’ve got loads of ideas that you want to try out.

Really big goals that you want to target.

But, not only do you have a limited budget, time, and the economy to play with, you also have pressure from above and from within.

It can all feel a bit much.

The key to success here is prioritising. But that’s easier said than done.

So today, I’m going to be talking you through a marketing planning and prioritisation exercise you can do to get your marketing tasks in order and start your year off right.

What to WATCH Next

What to LISTEN to Next

• “The most important marketing skill you should learn is…”
• How to Get to the Top of Google Again and Again (and AGAIN!)
• How To Effectively Scale and Grow Your Marketing

What to READ Next

• How to Triple Your Website Traffic
• What is Google Gemini? What Marketers Need to Know
• Powerful Lead Generation Strategies

The post How To Prioritise Your Marketing (for Busy People) (#304) appeared first on Thinkplus.

In This Episode…

Learn why the traditional marketing funnel might need replacing with a bow tie in 2024. Confused? Listen and learn all about how the bow tie funnel might be your perfect marketing strategy for next year.

Related Videos

You May Also Enjoy…

• STEAL this (Award-winning) LOCAL SEO Strategy (#255) 
• B2C Marketing Strategies for 2024 (and Beyond!) (#294) 
• How To Market a Service-based Business (#291) 
• How To Create a Perfect* Go To Market Strategy (#296) 
• Copy the Content Strategy Behind a $33M SaaS Exit (#256) 
• The Importance of PPC in an AI Search World (#286)

The post How to Create the Perfect Marketing Strategy for 2024 (#297) appeared first on Thinkplus.

In This Episode…

There are a lot of email platforms out there to choose from.

It’s hard to know which will fit your e-commerce business best.

They all seem to have different pricing, features and capabilities.

So, I’ve saved you a job and compared two of the most popular email platforms – Mailchimp and Klaviyo.

In today’s video, I take a look at their features, pricing and more.

It’s a must-watch if you’re running email marketing. And a must-watch if you aren’t (because you really should be)

Related Links

• Mailchimp
• Klaviyo

You May Also Enjoy…

• The Marketing Power of Gift Cards and Vouchers
• How to Plan Your Marketing Budget
• 615% Organic Traffic Increase With SEO and Content

The post Mailchimp vs. Klaviyo – Which is Best For Your Business? (#293) appeared first on Thinkplus.

In This Episode…

In the ever-growing world of business, some brands stand out with their remarkable success and rapid growth.

Think about companies like Slack, Mailchimp, Airbnb, and Monzo. Have you ever wondered what sets these brands apart?

It all comes down to their amazing brand positioning. We’ll explore how you can assess your brand’s existing positioning or build a strong one from scratch.

Understanding Positioning

Positioning is the foundation of your brand’s identity. It establishes the rules you live by and sets you apart from competitors.

Let’s take two vegan shoe brands on Instagram as an example. Will’s Vegan Store targets a more affluent audience, showcases idyllic images of people enjoying nature, uses neutral tones and prices their boots accordingly.

On the other hand, KOI Footwear appeals to a younger, trend-conscious demographic with bright colours, urban fashion and more affordable boots.

Both brands sell vegan shoes, but their unique positioning helps them attract different customer segments.

To establish effective brand positioning, you need to consider your place amongst competitors, where you and your messaging fit, customer pain points, and positioning in action.

Analysing Competitor Positioning

To stand out, you must first understand what your competitors are doing.

Analyse their websites, social media presence and advertisements. Identify their strengths and weaknesses.

By doing so, you may discover opportunities to improve your own brand’s website design, gain audience clarity or address any negative comments your competitors receive.

Consider why customers might choose them over you based on their positioning. Also, evaluate why potential customers might be deterred by your competitors’ positioning. By studying your competitors, you can learn valuable lessons and apply them to your own brand.

Understand Your Customers

Examine your existing and ideal customers. Focus on their pain points, objections, demographics and buying behaviour. Utilise surveys, market research, social media insights, customer emails, reviews and live chat responses to gain a comprehensive understanding of your target audience.

Additionally, pay attention to what customers dislike about your competitors. This information will help you pinpoint pain points and tailor your brand’s positioning to solve these issues.

Authenticity is key.

Highlight the aspects that differentiate you from your competitors and address your customers’ needs effectively.

Defining Your Positioning and Implementing It

Based on your analysis of competitors and customers, it’s time to define your brand’s positioning.

Condense it into a few words that encapsulate what you stand for, such as personalised service, trustworthiness, or ease of purchase.

Let’s compare two life insurance brands to illustrate this point.

Dead Happy positions itself as a rebellious alternative, using language like “make a deathwish” and emphasising ease and affordability.

Polly life insurance positions itself as the go-to brand for moms, using emotional language and stressing affordability.

Once you’ve defined your positioning, ensure it’s consistently reflected across your website and all marketing touchpoints.

Positioning in Action

Your brand’s positioning should be seamlessly integrated throughout your marketing efforts and wider business operations.

Consider the customer journey and identify how each aspect of your positioning connects with customers at different stages.

For example, if ease is part of your positioning, make information easily accessible at the top of the funnel, provide detailed product descriptions in the middle and ensure a simple checkout process at the bottom.

Monzo, a disruptive banking app, demonstrates effective positioning throughout the funnel by sharing relatable content on social media, highlighting the ease of banking with them and emphasising a fast and modern experience.

Mastering brand positioning is crucial in a competitive market. By understanding competitors, analysing customer pain points, defining your own positioning and implementing it consistently, you can create a unique brand that resonates with your target audience.

Authenticity is key, ensuring alignment between your positioning and the actual brand experience. Consistency across all touchpoints is vital for effective communication. With a strong positioning strategy, you can drive customer loyalty and achieve sustainable growth in today’s marketplace.

Related Links

• Will’s Vegan Store
• KOI Footwear
• Meta Ad Library
• GWI
• YouGov
• Gallup
• Direct Line
• Dead Happy
• Polly
• Monzo

You May Also Enjoy…

• How To Convert the 90% of Website Traffic That Gets Away
• How To Design the Perfect Buyer Persona
• Steal This $7M SEO Strategy

The post How Brand Positioning Will 10x Your Leads and Sales (#283) appeared first on Thinkplus.