AI changed the way people find you online. When someone searches for a plumber, coffee shop, or podiatrist, they don’t just get a list of links anymore. They get complete, personalized recommendations.
A lot of the purchasing decision now happens before people ever get to your website.
That doesn’t mean you’ve lost control, though. In fact, you can actually have more influence over buyers’ decisions by engaging them before they search.
We’ve studied and supported digital marketing strategies for over two decades, and this is one of the biggest changes we’ve witnessed.
In this guide, we’ll show you why it’s critical to show up earlier in the decision-making process and how you can set your business up as the top choice before buyers even start looking for options.
Contents
- How AI search is influencing the buyer’s journey
- Why you need to reach customers before they search
- How to influence buyers before they search
How AI search is changing the buyer’s journey
Here’s how influence happens in a traditional online search scenario.
Someone wants to keep their lawn green. They’d perform a search on Google with that goal and get a list of links. Only the meta description is there to sway which one they click.
The website had free rein to educate visitors on the best possible solution for their brown, patchy grass.
Now, AI shapes perceptions before a buyer ever taps a link.
Run that same scenario in Google’s updated search environment, and a buyer gets a small, curated selection of provider options with recommendations and explanations chosen by AI.
By the time a buyer lands on your website, they are looking for confirmation, not education. AI, not businesses, owns influence in early consideration.
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Why you need to reach customers before they search
The challenge for businesses has always been to influence a buyer’s perception before they’ve made a decision. With AI taking the lead in perception building, high-intent traffic to your site gets throttled (68% of searches now end without a click).
But also, and more importantly, it means the bulk of a buyer’s preference is formed before they hit your landing page. If you wait until a buyer starts a search, you’ll miss most of your chance to influence their decision.
This is where something called pre-marketing comes into play.
Pre-marketing is marketing to prospects during the early awareness and consideration phases of the buying journey. The earlier you enter decision-making, the stronger your influence over it.
If you reach buyers with pre-marketing, before AI or your competitors, you get to:
- Build their internal narrative around your unique value propositions.
- Establish your solution as the benchmark for comparison.
- Dictate how a buyer conducts future searches (more on that in a bit).
There are very tactical and measurable ways to jump into the pre-market phase of consideration. Let’s review them.
How to influence buyers before they search
To influence customers before they begin their search and claim your spot atop the set of options, show compelling messages in places that the right buyers trust.
That means location, message, and targeting work together…and build on each other.
Leverage the “halo effect” of trust
Before AI, you could wait until a buyer landed on your website to build trust. Now, you need to establish it very early—sometimes before the buyer even knows what their problem is. And it has to be strong enough to survive the eventual AI search, where you may or may not be recommended.
Display ads are a great play here. Not only can they be shown to high-intent audiences before they search, but they can also be strategically placed in environments people trust.
That’s a key advantage. Ads shown in trusted environments are perceived 74% more favorably. It’s called the halo effect, and you can use it to quickly establish confidence in your brand.
As the CMO at Integral Ad Science put it, placing ads in trusted places “…generates a very strong and positive halo effect for ads that are seen in high-quality environments.”
A straightforward example is a tourism display ad that highlights culinary options and is shown as fans read their favorite food column.
The halo effect transfers trust from a popular place to your ad.
The ad’s the same, but the location boosts its credibility.
In pre-marketing, brand messaging gains trust by being:
- Placed in spaces that have earned people’s trust.
- Contextually relevant to the content around it.
- Impactful, specifically to the target audience.
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Get in front of the right audience
When marketing earlier in the consideration process, you don’t have direct buying-intent clues, like someone performing a search for lawn care in their city. It’s easier to waste ad budget on a low-intent audience.
Layering audience-targeting strategies solves this. It doesn’t just help you find the right audience; it also lets you reach them at the right time while they’re in the right mindset.
These targeting strategies help you win in the pre-market:
- Audience targeting: Identifies consumers most likely to purchase based on demographics, location, behavior, and other factors.
- Interest targeting: Connects with audiences based on what they’re passionate about, reaching them in receptive, engaged moments.
- Contextual targeting: Aligns messaging with real-time content, increases relevance and trust (the contextual halo effect), and generates stronger engagement and brand preference.
Here’s how that could play out for our lawn care business. You’d target 30- to 45-year-old homeowners who live in your service zone. Then you’d refine the audience by focusing on people who have shown an interest in things like grilling out and hosting outdoor get-togethers. Finally, you’d target placement alongside seasonal home-prep or gardening content.
Each targeting layer has merits for focusing ad spend on people more likely to buy. Together, they let you create a continuous presence and expand the pool of buyers who are primed to place your brand at the top of their consideration list before they ever begin a search.
Own the consideration set with relevant storytelling
We’ve established that when you engage customers matters. Catch them before they’ve started their search, and you’ll connect before they’ve created a consideration set of options.
We’ve also shown that where you start that engagement matters because contextual trust, or lack of it, transfers to your brand.
How you connect with buyers, the message itself, is the third pillar of a winning pre-marketing strategy.
Messaging that cements your business’s place as the first option:
- Helps buyers identify what’s missing and why it’s a problem for them.
- Places the solution in a context that feels personal and relevant.
- Gives space for emotion that motivates action.
- Most importantly, frames your brand as the solution.
Branded content is the perfect example of messaging that achieves these goals. It builds a deeper connection through storytelling and creates the type of strong, favorable perception that survives future competitive research.
Branded content uses relevant storytelling to establish a lasting, favorable connection with target buyers.
Contextual storytelling also lets you own the criteria buyers use for future research.
Let’s say you’re the only lawn care business in your area to use environmentally friendly weed control systems. You’d publish a piece of branded content in a place your target audience trusts, explaining why such tactics are better for the health of the planet and the people who live on it.
Armed with that knowledge, readers will adjust their search to look for “the best lawncare businesses that use environmentally friendly solutions.”
The recommendations are different. And now, your business is at the top of the list.
By showing relevant messaging to the right audience in trusted spaces, you now control buyer perception and make your solution the benchmark against which all others are judged.
Expand your pool of buyers in the pre-market
Optimizing for search and AI visibility is still a crucial strategy for converting high-intent customers. But real growth doesn’t come from competing for the same pool of buyers. It comes from expanding it.
Get more people to start with you in mind, and you’ll find converting new business gets much easier.
Now, if you’d like to learn how our digital marketing solutions can help position your brand for success in every phase of the buyer journey, reach out for a personalized demonstration.
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