Hi Reader, welcome back to Brand Credential, a platform where I share insights on personal branding and marketing from my experience as a 10-year marketing industry professional.

This week’s edition will focus on technology trends impacting the marketing industry, driving website traffic with Google Discover, and building personal brands with transparency.

Weekly Personal Branding Tip: Be Transparent With Your Audience

An integral part of making your story a part of your personal brand is being transparent. By being transparent, you demonstrate to your audience that you are open, honest, and relatable.

Not only does this include sharing successes and advice, but also sharing failures, sharing lessons learned the hard way, and asking questions. You will come across as relatable and simultaneously boost your credibility.

This is one of the reasons the building in public trend has taken off among entrepreneurs on social media platforms like X and TikTok.

Building in public is the idea that creators and business professionals working on their own projects document their process publicly. The goal here is to receive real-time feedback and test demand for new products and services.

X is a channel where this trend has become popular, with people posting regular updates for their followers on their endeavors—both positive updates and challenges.

An example of this strategy being applied on X went viral when Yehong Zhu, founder of Zette, posted an X thread that offered a behind-the-scenes look at what her day is like as a startup founder in Silicon Valley.

This content idea was well received. Her peers were able to relate, and other members of her audience were able to learn about what it’s like having that job role.

We all have projects we can give updates on that would provide value. For example:

1. Starting to write on Medium? Help other writers by recapping your first month on the platform, including what you learned and earned.
2. Building an e-commerce store? Create content comparing different e-commerce platform options, and share tips for starting an online store.
3. Creating digital products? Give examples of your process so other creators can follow suit.
4. Completing a project at work? Share tips designed for someone in a similar job function.

These thought starters demonstrate simple ways you can turn what you are working on with your side hustles or day job into content that your audience will value.

Read more:

• ​Personal Branding Tips for Entrepreneurs​
• ​Personal Branding at Work — Tips for Employees​

Insight From the Head of Marketing: What I’m Building This Week

The latest news from my desk focuses on the technology trends impacting consumer behavior and the marketing industry:

• ​3 Technology Trends Marketers Should be Watching​

The piece covers the way advances in technologies like generative AI are driving new consumer behaviors.

These trends are changing where people allocate their attention, and in turn, changing how brands and marketers vie for that attention.

1. The Future of Search Engines

I covered this topic in detail in last week's newsletter. In case you missed it, the summary is:

1. Search engines are a cornerstone of the marketing industry, and the predominant way many brands and creators drive traffic to their businesses.
2. Consumer trends like vertical search and AI chatbot adoption are challenging search engines by introducing alternatives.
3. ​Gartner predicts this could lead to a 25% decline in traditional search engine volume by 2026.
4. Should people choose to search for information and content in specific applications vs. generalized search engines like Google, we would see a new landscape emerge for marketers.
5. Zapier Chief Marketing Officer Kieran Flanagan walked out what this potential future would look like in this LinkedIn post and this one.

Assuming no change is coming to this ecosystem could be dangerous, as we do not know how fast AI technology may change search engines and search engine usage, or to what degree.

What should marketers do to prepare for this trend?

With these unknowns in mind, here are the tangible steps I think marketers should take to prepare themselves for the future of search:

1. Monitor search engine changes. This includes tracking news from Google, OpenAI, and other key players in the space, and monitoring your own website traffic for changes.
2. Monitor the adoption of vertical search solutions, like chatbots and social media platforms.
3. Diversify your traffic and lead sources. Should search engine traffic decline, content creators and brands need to have new traffic sources. You should start putting those in place now. Look to growing platforms and mediums, like LinkedIn, YouTube, TikTok, and newsletters.

2. The Adoption of Generative AI by Marketers

Marketing is one of the fields where AI is seeing the fastest adoption. This is being driven by readily available AI tools that make our jobs easier and our productivity higher:

• New tools for AI-generated text, images, and video are on the market.
• The established tools we use every day as marketers are finding ways to integrate AI, with platforms like HubSpot, Salesforce, and Canva adding features to help marketers create content and execute marketing campaigns.

Tangible examples of ways marketers can use AI today that will only improve in the future:

1. Image, text, and video content creation. Mattel Chief Technology Officer Sven Gerjets shared a LinkedIn post that shines a light on what will soon be possible with end-to-end AI content creation workflows. For example, he produced a video with HeyGen based on an AI-generated script he created with ChatGPT. Combinations like this are going to unlock everyone's content creation capabilities.
2. The creation of AI-powered chatbots that can engage directly with customers.
3. AI-powered marketing automation that can create personalized versions of every possible customer journey.

What should marketers do to prepare for this trend?

As individual marketers, we can’t control these macro trends.

However, what we can do is learn to use AI tools now that have clear, tangible use cases (ex. content creation) and observe how larger unknowns like those mentioned above play out. That way, we are best positioned to ply our trade in a new, AI-augmented marketing landscape.

3. Digital Assets Gaining Real Value

Another important trend for marketers to monitor is the value people are placing on the digital components of their lives.

For example:

1. A survey conducted by immersive e-commerce company Obsess found that 62% of respondents and 74% of Gen Z respondents have purchased a digital item within a digital video game platform, such as Roblox.
2. Global gaming audiences spent approximately $54 billion in 2020 on in-game content. Total in-game spending is projected to be upwards of $74 billion in 2025, according to Statistica.
3. A survey conducted by Virtua and a consumer behavior professor from Bournemouth University found that 71% of consumers indicated that digital items are a part of who they are.
4. Furthermore, 70% of survey respondents indicated their digital items help create the perception of who they want to be.

These are just a few examples of a broader trend toward people placing real value on virtual products, virtual experiences, and the way they present themselves online.

What should marketers do to prepare for this trend?

As marketers, it is now the norm to focus on the digital portions of consumers’ lives. Outside of event marketing and retail marketing, most of the campaigns we run are digital and most of the purchases we influence take place via e-commerce platforms and CRMs.

I think we should be tracking the evolution of digital identity and digital commerce. This evolution will see people use digital assets to express and shape their identity online. It will also see larger portions of purchases take place online, as well as larger portions of those purchases being digital item purchases.

This Week in Marketing: The SEO Community Discusses Google Discover

Announced in 2018, Google Discover is a content curation user interface that Google introduced to web browsers and the Google app.

While it has been around for a few years, Google Discover is gaining increasing attention in the SEO community as it becomes a viable source of web traffic for website owners and marketers.

​How-To Geek summarizes Google Discover as:

As opposed to traditional Google search results, which are driven primarily based on a user’s search query, Google Discover acts more like a social media newsfeed algorithm. Discover gives you content recommendations based on your previous activity and preferences.

My Website’s Performance in Google Discover

My website is averaging around 45,000 views per month across all traffic sources. To date, I’ve received 6,200 clicks to my site from Google Discover.

Discover is not the primary source of my traffic by any means. 6,200 new visitors, potential newsletter subscribers, and customers for my books is no joke either.

I am sure there are other people doing well with Google Discover and driving much larger numbers than this. The point I am making is that my site is proving you can drive a meaningful amount of website traffic using Google Discover.

The strategies I used to get my content featured in Google Discover are:

1. I Shared My Unique Voice and and Expertise
2. I Didn’t Focus on Keywords
3. I Repurposed Content From Other Channels
4. I Followed Basic On-Page SEO Best Practices
5. I Wrote About Timely Topics

Having worked in SEO for over a decade, Google Discover feels like the original promise of blogging and website creation coming true:

1. You write content that you want to write about based on your lived experience and personal expertise — the blogger’s dream!
2. You are rewarded by Google sending people interested in that expertise to your content to learn from you and build community.
3. You get to share commentary on your niche that gets valued for your perspective vs. judged by which keywords it optimizes for.

With Google Discover and EATT, Google is making an effort to value content that shares genuine, unique expertise over more generic content that happens to have followed SEO best practices perfectly.

This is a big development for content creators who are already creating great content with a first-person perspective on other channels.

Keep Google Discover in mind as you create new content for your website, and look for opportunities to re-purpose content from other channels that could win a feature on Discover.

Read more: I Ranked 10 Articles in Google Discover  -  Here's What Worked​

More Ways I Can Help

That’s it for this week! As always, thank you so much for reading.

If you’d like more personal branding and marketing tips, here are more ways I can help in the meantime:

• Read more on my website, Brand Credential​
• Check out my latest Medium articles​
• Read my free book, “The Personal Brand Blueprint: A No-Nonsense Guide to Personal Branding in the Age of the Creator”