Curated Expertise | Hundreds of Hours Distilled into Simple, Actionable Insights
In recent months, I learned from leaders making changes: speakers at conferences, B2B marketers, MarTech experts, and AI specialists. They shared how businesses can use new technologies to improve marketing strategies. Understanding how to make decisions based on data and knowing AI’s role in targeted campaigns is key to staying competitive.
Here are key points and practical advice from about 100 hours of expert sessions, playbook reviews, and interviews to give you quick and useful insights. This information can enhance your marketing strategies and help teams adapt to market changes.
The sessions highlighted the importance of continuous learning and experimentation. Brand builders should create a culture of innovation, where trying new methods can lead to exciting discoveries. By encouraging creativity and open-mindedness, teams can better leverage Generative Engine Optimization or “GEO”.
What the experts said:
- Brian Gorman (“Life Sciences Marketing Group – The SEO Evolution”, Nov 2025) Company: North Carolina Biotechnology Center:
“We’re seeing a drop in organic clicks, but an uptick in audience reach—not on the home page, but in snippets, summaries, and AI-driven answers. GEO is showing up whether you work for it or not.” - So What? Track your brand mentions in AI answers and snippet features. Don’t just chase homepage traffic. Use tools like Wake AI to see where your audience finds you now.
- Madison Gray, Adobe/Marketo Summit panelist (Oct 2025):
“Brands who treat their search strategy like an ongoing conversation, not a checklist, are getting cited by Perplexity, Bing Copilot, and Gemini.” - So What? Make every page answer a real user question. Update content regularly, and audit how AI tools summarize your site. Start dialogues in forums and comment threads to fuel the engines with natural language.
- Amanda Lin (“Life Sciences Marketing Group – The SEO Evolution”, Nov 2025):
“For us, cross-team syncs uncovered missed terminology and questions that AI surfaces daily. We started populating prompt libraries for every launch.” - So What? Run a 30-minute team brainstorm, list every question and challenge customers bring up, and use those as prompt seeds for analytics and content strategy.
Expert Tool Recommendations
| Tool/Platform | Purpose & Best Use | Pro/Win | Con/Risk | Speaker/Self Insights |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| SparkToro | Audience & influencer analysis for niche targeting | Uncovers hidden channels | Costs add up; data depth varies | Brian Gorman: Found 3 new webinar outlets via SparkToro |
| Reddit / Quora | Market pulse + trending questions | Authentic, current | High noise; time sink | Amanda Lin: Source for prompt ideas at every launch |
| Wake AI | Tracks your brand in LLM answers | New GEO metric, great for AI audit | False positives; evolving tech | Brian Gorman: Used to measure snippet/answer wins |
| Google Search Console (AI) | Only true Google answer box monitor | Free, robust | Doesn’t cover Perplexity/Gemini | Adobe Panel: Use as official baseline |
| Semrush | SEO health, competitive tracking | Deep analytics | Pricey | Adobe Panel: Run monthly for site tune-ups |
| Perplexity | Brand’s footprint in GenAI | Fast, easy to compare | New tech, may miss B2B | Self-testing: Instant GPT answer check |
| Jasper | Content, blog drafts | Speed, templates | Needs a lot of human edit | PowHER: Draft, then edit for voice |
| GrammarlyGO | Polish, structure | On-brand clarity | Can flatten your style | PowHER: Best for reports, risky for marketing copy |
| Notion AI | Research, notes, Q&A | Flexible, cheap | Not built for SEO | Self: Agile for internal docs |
| Zoom (AI) | Synchronous transcripts | Saves time, easy archive | Privacy trade-offs | Self/NCBiotech: Must vet AI note accuracy |
Field Tip:
For maximum impact, pick 1–2 platforms for every active campaign. Don’t use them all at once. Focus your workflow, then automate/report what works for you.
Expert Insights (AND How to Apply Them!):
- Brian Gorman, SEO Evolution Host (Nov 2025):
- “Audit your AI presence like a backlink profile. If you’re invisible to Perplexity, start there. If Perplexity or Wake AI can’t see you, neither can your audience.”
- Action: Run a Perplexity and Wake AI check for your own site today. List what shows up first. Does your brand result match your intent?
- My takeaway: After my first audit, I saw validation that my portfolio site is indexing and surfacing ME as the most likely individual in response to a “Who is Stephanie DeLong?” search.
- Amanda Lin, NCBiotech (Oct 2025):
- “Nothing beats hearing user pain points in their own words. Reddit and Quora still surface what Google Trends can’t.”
- “Schedule 30-min team brainstorms to record every customer question, then put those into Quora/Reddit and match your content.”
- Action: Run a team Q&A session this week. Feed the real questions into a Reddit or Quora search. Discover which gaps your site should better address.
- Madison Gray, Adobe Summit Panelist (Oct 2025):
- “Brands who win GEO are tracking AI analytics in GSC and shaping content to match real AI answers. Never ship content without checking how Gemini or Bing summarizes it.”
- Action: Check your top pages in Gemini/Bing this week—do they summarize your content or miss the mark? Tweak your intro or FAQ for better results.
- Challenge: Take 1 quote, do the action, share your new result in the comments. I’ll respond, and you’ll see what GEO looks like in real life.
Direct Takeaways from the 2025 Adobe Summit
1) From the “Data Storytelling with Analysis Workspace” Session (Trent Thayer, Adam Gilbert):
Start smarter conversations: Take a screenshot of your dashboard, let AI analyze, and use its suggested prompts to spark stakeholder questions that get beyond basic numbers.
Visualize with emotion, not just charts: Implement advanced Analysis Workspace visuals. Try Journey Canvas and Customer Journey tools for mapping real user experiences. Avoid the “bar chart trap” and structure every dashboard as a story with a clear setup, problem/tension, and resolution.
Privacy = Trust:
Review and document all privacy settings before using AI-driven features in your reporting. Stakeholder trust starts with strong data governance.
Blend AI with human context:
Use AI for initial ideation, but always interpret outputs with your expert understanding of the business, never “AI alone” for storytelling.
2) From “Workspace Features You Should Be Using” (Poornima Thakur):
Try the Calculated Metric Playbook (downloadable below) by Mandy George, a hands-on guide to automating and scaling custom metrics (not just for AI, but for any dynamic reporting flow).
Best Practices:
Leverage conditional formatting and dynamic drop-downs for more interactive dashboard insights.
Use attribution models to highlight true campaign impact, rather than generic traffic spikes.
Expert Move: Before your next campaign review, run one of Mandy’s playbook drills on calculated metrics and pair with an AI-powered storytelling tool from Analysis Workspace. Anticipated Result: Stakeholder buy-in, emotional resonance, AND actionable next steps, all from your dashboard.
3) Direct from Adobe Summit: “Solving Adobe Journeys Beyond Email”
Speakers: Stephen Cave, Nimasha Jain, David Kangni
Pro Tip:
Document all test profiles and campaign setups. Track every version and touchpoint as you optimize customer journeys beyond traditional email.
Why it matters:
Detailed setup docs make debugging and fine-tuning much faster. You spot issues and bottlenecks early, scale successful flows, and build org-wide playbooks that work.
Quick Challenge:
Before your next journey launch (or audit), create a template for logging every profile, trigger, and step. Compare outcomes weekly. Create double the impact and simultaneously halve the troubleshooting.
4) Expert Panel’s Real-World Advice:
Automate for Impact: Instantly segment your data and get key takeaways by running AI-powered prompts in analytics tools like Google Search Console or Wake AI. Start with “What’s changing?” and filter by your top audience segments.
Use System Built-Ins: Activate auto-insight features, like Gemini’s site summary or Perplexity’s brand presence reports, to save hours and catch patterns missed by manual reviews.
Pair Machine with Human Judgment: For every AI-generated summary, add 2–3 lines of expert commentary: Does it match your real value? Where does it miss audience nuance? Share these notes in your next team review.
Be the Governance Hero: Run a quarterly privacy/data audit (template coming soon). Make sure every stakeholder knows where their information goes, and document explicit consent for every new tool integration.
Pro tip: Announce your privacy process as part of client onboarding. It’s a trust multiplier, not just a compliance task.
My own practices:
- This blog provides insight into how I adjust my brand for current networking and hiring standards, while also addressing the question, “Who is Stephanie DeLong?”.
- I challenge myself (and you) to regularly check “brand discoverability” in Perplexity, ChatGPT, Copilot, and Google. I ask: What story appears first? Does it reflect my values and impact?
- To improve my learning and maintain my authentic voice, I created a prompt library to evaluate my visibility and messaging. It usually takes around 12 iterations, many edits, and sometimes a few coffee refills to finalize it.
- Try it: Run a discoverability test with the prompts below. Then, edit thoroughly and make your story stand out. The best brands grow by questioning their initial impressions.
AI’s Advice: How to Win at Generative Engine Optimization
- Be the best answer, not just another result.
- Craft every page to solve the whole problem. Readers (and LLMs) cite what’s clear, deep, and current.
- Blend technical greatness with genuine empathy.
- Schema markup, lightning-fast speed, and robust interlinking matter, but relevance and credibility comes from listening to real user pain, over simply following checklists.
- Turn every audience question into a story.
- Build your FAQ with direct language, stories, and personal analogies. Your voice cuts through when you share specifics, not generic tips. LLMs can’t replicate lived experience.
- Prompts Worth Trying (Copy-Paste into Your AI Tool):
- “Summarize the competitive strengths of [my brand] in 3 sentences based on [current reviews/industry trends].”
- Why? See instantly what the market believes about you—adjust your content to reinforce or clarify where you excel.
- “List the top 5 questions customers ask about [service] in Reddit, 2025.”
- Why? What’s unsolved in your niche? Answer these on your site, then measure the impact in your analytics and SERPs.
- “What gaps would keep my website out of Perplexity’s answer box?”
- Why? Get a roadmap for rapid improvement—address those gaps this week for measurable growth in AI-driven search.“Mix technical best practices (schema, site speed) with old-fashioned customer empathy. The tools change, but relevance and credibility win.”
- “Capture every audience question—then answer it better than an LLM can by layering in stories, analogies, and direct experience.”
The Final Takeaway
Awareness marketing is about showing up in trust exactly where it counts. Algorithms and people are both hunting for credibility, not just visibility.
GEO champions aren’t sitting around waiting for a playbook. They’re testing, iterating, and winning right now.
I’m working in the trenches too. Want the edge? Choose one insight from above, put it to work this week, and let me know how it goes. The next wave starts with what we do, not just what we read.
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