r/digital_marketing

we've been testing tools focused on LLM visibility tracking and prompt analysis, and Profound is one of the more specialized ones in this space.

That said, some teams prefer broader platforms like Similarweb for competitor intelligence and AI traffic insights, while others stick with SEO suites like Semrush that are expanding into AI features. For those working on GEO/AEO, what tools are you using as alternatives to Profound for tracking citations, prompts and AI brand visibility across ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity?

We’re noticing inbound leads are getting lost in long form flows, and out setup with chilli piper rn is expensive for what we ACTUALLY need. Is there a cheaper platform that handles this??

If you could recommend only one SEO tool for keyword research, technical SEO, or competitor analysis, which would it be and why? I'm interested in hearing real-world experiences.

A few weeks ago we pitched a brand. A full pitch deck: positioning, content direction, reel concepts, everything.

They said they would handle it themselves with their in house marketing team.

Fair enough? Happens.

What happened next that their Instagram started posting the exact reel ideas from our pitch deck.

First reaction? Frustrating and honestly got a lesson that DON'T JUST GIVE OUT DECKS IN HAND TO ANY CLIENT PERSONALLY ;).

Second reaction? We watched what happened.

The reels landed flat. Low engagement, no real traction, no comments that meant anything.

And that's when the real insight hit us.

They copied the tactics. Not the thinking behind them.

See, a reel concept without the positioning strategy underneath it is just content. It looks the same on the surface but it has no roots. No clear voice. No reason for someone to stop scrolling and think "this brand gets me."

That is the part you can't copy from a pitch deck.

Has anyone else in creative services been through something similar? Pitched ideas that got taken but watched them fail without the right foundation? Or any similar events.

Genuinely curious how others handled it.

Took one creative concept, just changed the wrapper, and ran it as a standard banner on one set of placements and as a native styled unit on another set with similar traffic volume and audience targeting. Expected the native version to outperform purely because of format trust, and it did on click through rate by a decent margin. What caught me off guard was the bounce rate after the click was almost identical between the two, meaning people clicking the banner were just as likely to stick around as people clicking the native unit. The usual story in this sub is that banner blindness makes static banners basically dead weight, but the people who do click a plain banner seem to already know roughly what they are getting into.

I genuinely do not know if that means banner blindness only filters out uninterested clicks rather than killing performance outright, or if my sample was just too small to trust.

Between seat-based pricing changes, sneaky add-on fees, and arbitrary feature-gating, our predictable monthly software budget has become completely erratic.

We’ve decided to freeze all new software adoption for the next quarter and do a scorched-earth audit of what we are actually paying for versus what we use. We've been on a hunt for platforms that offer transparent, stable pricing structures that don't shift the goalposts whenever the market feels like it.

I'm looking for a marketing partner to help grow my software engineering business.

I build custom software, web applications, AI-powered solutions, SaaS products, and help businesses with cloud migrations. I'm looking for someone who can generate leads, build client relationships, and drive business growth while I focus on delivering great technical solutions.

If you're experienced in B2B marketing, lead generation, or business development in the tech space, I'd love to connect. If this sounds like you—or you know someone who'd be a great fit—send me a message!

The debate around SEO vs GEO is mostly missing the point.

It reminds me of the early cloud days. Some people were saying cloud was exactly the same thing as an on-premises data center, and in a way, they were right.

Technically, it was mostly the same thing. The real difference was how budget was allocated, CAPEX vs OPEX, and the skill set needed to manage the new environment.

I think GEO is similar.

GEO is not just another SEO tactic, and it is not another dashboard category. In practice, it is becoming a resource allocation problem and a skill set problem.

The companies that win in AI search will not be the ones publishing the most content or tracking the most prompts. They will be the ones that are easiest to understand, verify, and recommend.

Try a simple test inside your company.

Ask 10 people: Who are we? What do we do? Who are we really for?

Sounds simple, right?

In my experience, you will often get 10 different answers. Sometimes very different answers.

That is the essence of GEO.

If your own team cannot describe the company consistently, why should ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, or Claude understand you clearly?

This is why I think a new role is coming: Brand Authority Architect.

Someone who sits between SEO, brand marketing, PR, content, product marketing, and leadership.

The best way to describe this role is as a kind of compliance officer for marketing.

Their job is to align the brand message across every source, cut budget from work that creates noise, like useless AI slop blog production, and invest in the channels that actually build authority.

If this sounds like nothing new, that is because maybe it is not. It is almost the same ingredients, just a completely different cocktail.

Technically, an SEO executive can become a Brand Authority Architect.

But in my experience with people in this space, most will not adapt. They will keep shipping small technical website fixes while the real budget and influence move somewhere else.

Wdyt?

TL;DR: getting AI content to rank is easy, getting it to sound like you is the hard part. What worked for us was having the model extract style guidelines from our own writing, curating that list by hand, and feeding it only the guidelines instead of writing samples.

We've been making content with AI since ChatGPT came out, and honestly the ranking side of it is the easy part now. You match your headings to what AI is searching for, answer the question right after the heading, then back it up with a fact or a quote or a table. Machines eat that up.

The annoying part is content written that way comes out really dry and academic. Which is fine if you only care about ranking, machines like dry academic writing. But most of us also have humans reading the stuff and caring about the brand, so it matters.

First thing everybody tries is telling the model to add more warmth and personality, and it's just cringe. It'll give you a personality, it's just an unlikable one, and it still reads as AI. Telling it not to sound like AI doesn't do anything either, you can't really ask it to stop being itself.

What helped was calling out the specific tells. No "it's not x, it's y" framing, cut the empty adverbs (absolutely, actually), don't force every sentence to be a mic drop, no em dashes. That gets it to stop sounding like AI, but it still won't sound like you specifically.

Giving it your old articles as samples kind of backfires too, at least for us. It doesn't know what you liked about them so it grabs the wrong stuff and starts repeating the same phrases over and over.

The thing that worked better: in a separate chat, dump a bunch of your writing in and have it write out a long list of style guidelines it thinks it can pull from your writing. Then go through and keep only the ones you agree with. When you go to write real content, you just give it the curated guidelines, no samples, no example phrases.

Then it's just feedback over time. Every draft you mark up, and if you end up rewriting a chunk yourself, paste your version back and ask it what rule it should add. We've got clients past 100 guidelines at this point and the newer models handle a list that long no problem.

One thing I'd flag if you try this: make sure none of the voice guidelines end up breaking the SEO structure you started with. Easy to fix the tone and quietly wreck the part that was getting you ranked.

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El flujo de trabajo ya está estructurado. No requiere diseño ni implementaciones técnicas. Te enfocás puro y duro en la estrategia y la gestión:

​Manejo y optimización de campañas de Meta Ads para una cartera de 5 a 10 cuentas.

​Coordinación con diseñador in-house para pedir las piezas creativas.

​Comunicación activa y diaria con los clientes (soporte y reportes).

​💼 Requisitos:

​Experiencia demostrable de 1 a 2 años gestionando múltiples cuentas en simultáneo (Excluyente).

​Capacidad analítica (mucha cancha con ROAS, CPA, CTR y presupuestos).

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​📩 ¿Te interesa o conocés a alguien? Escribime al privado (DM) compartiendo tu experiencia con volumen de cuentas y tu CV o LinkedIn.

signed up for rocketreach about 3 months ago and starting to question if it's worth the cost. paying like a hundred bucks a month and the email accuracy is honestly hit or miss. probably 60-70% of emails actually work, which isn't terrible but not great for what they charge.

the mobile numbers are where it gets rough. most of them are outdated or just straight up wrong. tried calling 50 contacts last week and maybe 8 picked up. for a tool that's supposed to give you direct dials, that's pretty bad.

the search filters are decent, I'll give them that. can filter by company size, location, job title pretty easily. but the chrome extension is buggy as hell and crashes constantly when I'm trying to pull linkedin data.

what really gets me is they count every single search against your credits, even when they don't find anything. burned through 200 credits in a day just searching for contacts that didn't exist in their database. my manager was not thrilled about that one lol

been looking at a few other contact data providers like Apollo and Prospeo to see if the grass is greener. rocketreach just feels like they're coasting on name recognition at this point. is anyone else having similar experiences with their rocketreach subscription?

You only get one

Spent the last few months working with early-stage brands across food, fitness, and lifestyle.

Same pattern every time:

1. Consistent posting, okay design, decent product
2. Events and word of mouth work well
3. Online presence barely converts

The instinct is to blame the algorithm or the content frequency. The real issue is almost always the same, the brand cannot answer "why us, in 3 seconds, with zero context" in a way that lands on a screen.

That's not a content problem. It's a positioning problem. And no amount of reels fixes it.

Curious if others working with small brands are seeing this too.

I'm experimenting with Gemini Pro for AI-generated UGC videos and have been getting mixed results.

This is the prompt I'm using:

   Please use the attached photo as talking photo.

    A casual, friendly young Taiwanese woman in her mid-20s, looking directly at the camera, talking. She has a natural, light makeup look, wearing smart-casual office attire like a pastel blouse. Bright, well-lit modern office or cozy cafe background. Shot on an iPhone 15 front camera, vertical video aspect ratio, cinematic lighting, photorealistic, UGC style, TikTok aesthetic, highly detailed face, 8k. --ar 9:16 --v 6.0

    Scene 1
        Script: Zoning out in meetings? Can’t keep up with your boss?
        Video: UGC-style; Taiwanese girl looking relatable but expressive.
    Scene 2
        Script: Check out this lifesaver!
        Video: Girl looks pleasantly surprised, holding up her phone/product.
    Scene 3
        Script: Just tap record, and let AI handle the heavy lifting.
        Video: Girl points to the top of the screen.
    Scene 4
        Script: Meeting over? Get a full summary in just one minute!
        Video: Faster pace, highlighting "one minute" and "summary."
    Scene 5
        Script: Replay audio and export to PDF in one click. So easy!
        Video: Girl looks relieved and relaxed.
    Scene 6
        Script: Download now for a 3-day free trial! Click the link below!
        Video: Enthusiastic, urgent tone; gestures strongly toward the bottom of the screen.

Overall, I'm actually quite impressed with the results:

• The generated scenes closely match the prompt.
• The voice sounds surprisingly natural (although not perfect).

However, one major issue is that the spoken dialogue doesn't faithfully follow the script. The model frequently skips words, paraphrases sentences, or omits parts of the script entirely, even when I explicitly provide the exact wording.

I'm wondering:

1. Are there prompt engineering techniques that improve script adherence?
2. Is this simply a current limitation of Gemini Pro's video generation model?
3. Has anyone had better success with other AI video platforms that can generate talking-head UGC videos while following the script almost word-for-word?

I'm happy to pay for a service if it produces significantly better results.

I'd especially appreciate recommendations from people who have actually compared multiple platforms for this use case (e.g. realistic talking avatars, UGC-style ads, TikTok creatives, etc.).

I'm a journalist who runs a US-based digital marketing agency featured in Forbes and Entrepreneur.

To celebrate 4th July, I'm offering American small businesses a free online presence audit. I will analyse your current strategy and show you the gaps - how you can rank on AI, show higher on Google, and ultimately drive more business.

This is with no obligations at all.

If you're interested, drop your company website in my DMs.

And happy Independence Day!

so i've been following ai video development pretty closely lately mostly because of how quickly things have been moving and seedance in particular has caught my attention. the current version already does things that felt impossible a year ago in terms of scene length and motion control and there's been some chatter suggesting a new model might not be that far off.

from a marketing and content perspective this is worth paying attention to. ai generated video that's actually controllable and long enough to be useful changes the production side of things significantly, not just for big teams but for smaller brands and solo marketers who are already stretched thin on content creation.

i don't have anything concrete on a timeline but the pace of releases in this space has been faster than most people expected. curious if anyone else in here is keeping an eye on it or already experimenting with ai video in campaigns and what the practical experience has been like so far.

One trend I've noticed over the years is that everyone wants to create a viral campaign.

In reality, most successful businesses don't grow because of one viral post.

They grow because they consistently solve customer problems.

If you're building a marketing career:

• Learn how customers make decisions.
• Understand your product before promoting it.
• Focus on retention, not just acquisition.
• Read analytics before making assumptions.
• Think long-term instead of looking for shortcuts.

Consistency has created far more business value than virality in my experience.

Hopefully, this saves someone else some hours.

Ran a small RFP last month for AI search visibility services. Mid-market B2B, trying to figure out whether we show up in ChatGPT / Perplexity / Gemini when someone asks about our category. Six agencies pitched.

Every single one of them had a proprietary "AI visibility score." Every single one. When I asked how it's actually calculated:

• two said they couldn't share without an NDA
• three basically said "we ask the LLMs a bunch of prompts and count how often you appear"
• one had a slightly more technical answer but couldn't tell me how many prompts they run, how often they check, or what they do with the fact that you get a different answer every time you ask the same question

I came out of every call more confused than when I went in.

For people who are actually doing this, what does the real methodology look like? Specifically: how many prompts are enough to trust the numbers, how often should you be checking, and is anyone actually tying this to pipeline, or are we all just dressing up guesses as data?

Not trying to bash GEO as a whole. Just trying to figure out where the line is between real measurement and the emperor's new dashboard.

AI has made it easier than ever to create content, but that also means the internet is getting flooded with the same generic posts, blogs, captions, and ad copy.

This is where human taste becomes a real advantage.

Anyone can ask AI to write a blog or social post. But not everyone knows what angle is actually interesting, what message fits the brand, what sounds too robotic, what customers care about, or what makes people stop scrolling.

For example, two companies can use AI to promote the same service. One publishes generic content like “we provide quality services at affordable prices.” The other uses a sharper message, real customer pain points, strong visuals, proof, and a tone that actually matches its audience.

The second one wins, not because it used more AI, but because a human made better creative decisions.

AI can help produce content faster, but taste, positioning, storytelling, and brand judgment are still human advantages.

I recently launched a small everyday jewelry brand called Vanyaara and I’m trying to figure out the smartest organic marketing strategy before spending heavily on ads.

The brand focuses on nature-inspired, feminine jewelry with colorful stones, pearls, and shell-inspired pieces. The target customer is someone who wants jewelry that feels elegant and wearable daily without luxury-brand pricing.

Website: vanyaara.com Instagram: @vanyaara.jewelry

Right now, I’m testing Instagram content, influencer gifting, and short-form videos. My biggest challenge is figuring out what angle will actually convert: founder story, styling content, product close-ups, UGC, gifting, or lifestyle/emotional branding.

For marketers here, what would you focus on first for an early-stage jewelry brand with limited budget?

Also, what would you avoid wasting time or money on at this stage?