The brief about digital availability
Stop optimising your website. Start optimising your brand.
We’ve been told modern marketing is about targeting high-value segments, earning the loyalty of heavy buyers, and relentlessly pursuing directly attributable clicks and conversions to show ROI. All of this is dangerous nonsense.
Marketing science has proven, repeatedly and across categories, that extraordinary acquisition of new and irregular users is how brands grow market share. Looking for proof? Read the decades of work by the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute.
And the highest contributing sources of new audiences online are Google’s big three of Search, Discover and News, plus the social platforms, and if you’re good at it, digital PR. Any of which can be amplified with paid budgets. All of which are being reshaped by the emergence of AI.
What doesn’t change is that being presence across these channels allows your brand to regularly reach the total addressable market.
This has to be done with a clear understanding that the vast majority of people won’t click through to your website and won’t convert this month. And that’s not a failure. At any given time, only a small fraction of users are currently in-market, meaning they are actively researching or ready to buy. Most users are out-of-market, meaning they are not currently looking to convert, or may not even be aware of the need.
Digital channels should be strategised to act as occasional touch points that reinforce brand preference, so that when users do move in-market, you ultimately win the conversion and increase your market share.
Why this works: laziness, not brand love
Brand loyalty exists, but not for the romanticised reasons marketers like to tell themselves. It exists because people are lazy. And rationally so.
People don’t carefully evaluate all possible options on the market to find the best fit. We satisfice. Effectively ignoring most brands in favour of consciously considering only a small set. You do this every week when you’re standing in front of a supermarket shelf and immediately pick up “your brand”.
This also happens when we ask an AI Chatbot for the best options, click on the first result in Google search, or rely on Google Discover to surface interesting content. We don’t adopt these behaviours because we believe they are the best recommendations, but because they’re good enough.
To get into that consideration set, you must leverage the exposure effect. Essentially people prefer brands they see more often. This increased familiarity begets liking, liking begets usage, and usage begets an even more favourable attitude towards the brand. Which results in habitual brand loyalty.
Audiences repeatedly convert with the same acceptable set of brands out of habit, not devotion.
These routines change only if the brand becomes unavailable, for example it’s out of stock or you moved out of the service region, unacceptable, maybe due to desire for a healthier lifestyle, or is displaced by an alternative that earned the users attention.
And that last one, displacement, is the whole game of digital availability. Show up often enough, in enough places, and familiarity does the rest.
The job of marketing is to breed that familiarity. To make people feel like they see your brand everywhere online. But to do that, you need to win over the algorithms and AI systems that gate keep visibility on these platforms, especially Google’s.
If not clicks, what’s the KPI?
If we’re going to stop worshipping attributable clicks, we owe the business a replacement scoreboard. “Trust me, digital brand building works” is not a convincing argument.
The answer is not raw visibility.
The leading indicator is Share of Voice. Les Binet & Peter Field’s work shows that brands that hold a Share of Voice greater than their market share (Excess Share of Voice) tend to grow share over time. This is the closest thing we have to a real-time salience gauge, and it’s the metric you can actually action.
The lagging indicator is direct and branded traffic. When people arrive by typing your brand name or coming straight to you, that’s mental availability made measurable. The proof that all the unattributable exposure across all those channels has lodged the audience’s in memory. It’s the outcome.
Now I do recognise that direct sessions is a dirty measure. “Dark traffic” (links shared in messaging apps, private channels and the like) gets miscounted as direct, so you can’t read it naively.
Which is exactly why you don’t lean on any single number. Use share of voice as the leading signal, branded and direct traffic as the lagging confirmation, and validate with a staggered rollout across topic groups to keep the whole system falsifiable rather than a faith.
Such strategies rely on achieving two things: growing the brand’s digital availability, essentially getting onto virtual shelves, and its brand preference, being chosen off those shelves.
We’ve covered being chosen in the briefs on Showmanship and Distinctiveness. So today, we will talk digital availability.
AI assistants are becoming the front door to the internet. Understand what AI Mode, Gemini, ChatGPT, Claude and more say about your business… and your competitors.
See your AI share of search with a free audit. Uncover what’s driving AI recommendations and understand how AI bots interact with your website with Scrunch.
Destination vs distribution
You need omnichannel organic coverage. Your content to be on Google Discover, News, Shopping, Lens, Maps, Apps, AI Chatbots and a spread of social networks.
The problem is how most brands get there. Ambivalence turning suddenly to urgency. You walk into the office and it’s all abuzz on the need to be on W Social. Right now. So off you go, spinning up a profile and a first post with no thought to audience fit, ongoing maintenance or opportunity cost. Next month it’s “launch an MCP. Right now.” Such an approach is exhausting for your teams and destined to fail, leaving a trail of dead profiles and half-baked products in its wake.
The brands that win validate audience fit, then strategically connect relevant channels into a distribution engine. The digital equivalent of supply chain management.
Historically we’ve obsessed on becoming the destination. Building the biggest website. Maybe maintaining a half decent app.
When it came to distribution, our focus has been on pushing content to Google Search via XML sitemaps.
And this is where most brand’s call it a day. But this is not a robust system.
Worse, it relies on pulling bots to the website and waiting for them to index the content. Smart distribution switches up the story. Proactively pushing content to platforms to drive distribution.
For example, by sending detailed product information through RSS feeds into Google Merchant Center to earn share of voice on Google Shopping. But understanding you need more coverage than what Google alone can offer, also use RSS for Amazon Seller Central or whatever large aggregator is relevant to your market. And remembering that it’s the Bing index powers Copilot and ChatGPT and Meta AI, and Bing’s favourite way to ingest content is IndexNow, add that as an endpoint too.
But pushing product content is only relevant to in-market audiences. To reach the total addressable market, the system has to go wider.
Add a News sitemap for article distribution into Google News. And integrations for other worthwhile news aggregators, like Flipboard or MSN Partner Hub, both of which also run off RSS.
But the widest reaching surface for article content is Google Discover. Which many brands find is challenging to break into. If that happens, step back and ask yourself: Is the issue my content or my domain?
There’s a simple test. Take a story you genuinely believe is strong that hasn’t got any Discover traction and pay to have it republished on a media portal you know performs well for that topic. Ensuring the contract includes Discover impression and click reporting. If the article doesn’t perform on the media site, fix your editorial strategy. If it does, fix your domain’s topical authority.
And regardless of the result, continue to do paid publishing with partners, or digital PR, or whatever it takes to get your brand regularly featured on these surfaces. Whether through self-publication or collaboration, it doesn’t matter, as long as it builds brand salience.
Once you’ve cracked the code on good content, understand that it won’t get the reach it deserves if it’s only in article form. People consume content in video, audio, and short-form snippets. Embrace this multi-modality. Use smart automations to cascade content across more formats and platforms.
YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, WhatsApp, TikTok, LinkedIn. Wherever your audience spends their time, you need an active presence. Even though many won’t drive significant attributable clicks back to the website. If you skip them, you cede market share, because you’re not reaching these potential users on these platforms. Or on the distribution platforms that source from those distribution platforms.
I know, it’s all a bit meta, but these platforms offer otherwise unachievable presence. Google Search reserves exclusive placements for Shorts, Reel and Tiktoks. Discover shows YouTube videos & Twitter Posts. Two of ChatGPT’s most cited sources are Wikipedia & Reddit. This all means that the fastest path to brand growth is often with content hosted off-site. That makes off-site content not a nice-to-have but an integral part of the distribution strategy.
This is where AI actually belongs. Not in content generation, but in content transformation. Writing platform-specific social captions. Adapting images for different sizes. Reconstructing the content of an article into video, audio or chat form.
Take the human expertise, taste, curation, or whatever is the actual moat and let the machine multiply the reach. With APIs and AI, systemising this scale is relatively simple.
Stop treating distribution as an afterthought. Reach infrastructure is where investment compounds. Build a robust digital supply chain. Expand your brand’s digital availability. Consistently show up wherever your audience is with something valuable to say. And hold yourself accountable to the right scoreboard.
I understand we’ve spent over two decades prioritising destination and optimising the website. But that was never your primary asset. It’s time to prioritise distribution, optimising the brand.
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That’s it for this brief.
Till next month,
- Jes