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 the future of search engines, AI’s continued impact on marketing, and personal branding tips for introverts.

Weekly Personal Branding Tip: Start With Sharing Written Content and Graphics to Ease Into Personal Branding

Publishing written content on social media platforms like LinkedIn and X is a great starting point for introverts, or anyone feeling shy about personal branding, to build their personal brands.

Writing posts on these channels will give you credibility, expand your reach, and grow your network while letting you ease into the idea of people seeing and engaging with your content.

This may feel less vulnerable than publishing pictures of yourself on Instagram or publishing videos on a channel like TikTok or YouTube.

Come up with personal branding content ideas like weekly recap posts about your projects, sharing articles about your industry, and sharing polls to get your followers’ opinions on topics in your niche.

These content ideas get people in the habit of coming to you for thought leadership content and commentary without making you the center of attention visually. This is a nuance that can be comforting for introverts who are expanding their comfort zone online.

Read more: Personal Branding Tips for Introverts, From an Introvert​

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

The latest news from my desk focuses on AI technology's impact on the marketing industry. I published two new articles on this topic:

• ​How AI Will Create More Versatile Marketing Professionals​
• ​3 Skills Marketers Need in the Age of AI Technology​

Augment Your Marketing Skills With AI

The first piece discusses how my marketing team is using AI tools to expand their skillsets. For example, designers can become copywriters and copywriters can become designers. This has enabled my marketing team to approach projects with more flexibility, and makes marketing professionals more versatile.

Note: I am not saying AI tools suddenly make someone just as good as a talented designer or copywriter. I think people with top talent will continue to outpace AI tools, and even leverage them to advance their capabilities. However, AI tools can help people with lower skill levels in certain areas produce decent content and expand their own capabilities.

Focus on Learning These Key Skills in the Age of AI

The second piece focuses on the skills that marketers should be focused on as AI changes the marketing industry and workplace. For example, soft skills like creativity and empathy are predicted to be valued more than ever by employers. AI software literacy is another top skill identified by the World Economic Forum.

For marketers and content creators, this means staying up to date on the latest AI software developments, and experimenting with new tools like ChatGPT, Midjourney, and AI-powered video editing software.

AI technology is rippling through plenty of industries, and the marketing and content creation space is on the frontlines. This is because generative AI technology's primary use case is generating content, which is immediately applicable for marketers and creators.

Staying up to date on new tools and advancing our skill sets is the key to keeping up and getting ahead in a world that is increasingly augmented by AI technology.

This Week in Marketing: Gartner Predicts AI's Impact on Search Engines

This week Gartner published a report predicting a 25% decline in traditional search engine volume by 2026. This prediction is based on the prevalence of AI chatbots and alternative search engine solutions.

Search engines and search engine marketing have been a staple of the marketing industry for decades. The search ecosystem fuels huge portions of our industry —from brands advertising in search to content marketers, bloggers, and search engine optimization (SEO) professionals creating the content that fills search results.

That entire ecosystem is being challenged by new technology, like the utility of AI-powered chatbots that can curate and deliver responses to queries - the same role search engines play.

Vertical Search Adoption

Other search trends, like people searching for content within specific applications vs. broad search engines, is another development with the potential to cut into search engine usage.

For example, 40% of consumers now use TikTok to search for things they need or are interested in learning about.

This is called vertical search —where people go to applications that offer deep expertise and high volumes of content on a specific topic, or of a certain type.

Examples of this include searching for videos directly in YouTube, searching for music in Spotify, and searching for journalism on platforms like Medium. Many of these platforms have AI-powered content curation and suggestions built in, or are in the process of adding them.

The Future of Search

Zapier Chief Marketing Officer Kieran Flanagan walked out what this potential future would look like in this LinkedIn post and this one.

I do not write this next section lightly—I have been working in SEO and website creation for over a decade. However, AI and vertical search trends could lead us to a future that looks like this:

• Websites could become more like digital resumes or pitch decks for companies, and are no longer a primary inbound marketing channel (yikes!). Brands predominately share their website with people in an outbound motion to explain who they are and what they do. The number of inbound website visitors greatly decreases due to the overall decrease in search engine usage.
• New channels of discovery emerge, with chatbot platforms offering brands ways to get in front of their users. This could look like a combination of paid advertising as well as organic content, similar to the way search engines function today.
• Chatbots become individual marketing channels. Marketers approach them like they approach social media applications, using the platform's tools to present their brands in the best light, and to take advantage of whatever content creation and advertising options they offer.

This potential future for search engines may play out, it might be nothing like this, or it may be somewhere in the middle.

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. It also includes conducting your own research. For example, if you have a website, you should closely monitor your web traffic in the coming months and years to look for fluctuations or downward trends.
2. Monitor vertical search solutions, like chatbots. Are chatbots popping up in our social platforms? Are brands rolling out their own chatbots at scale? We should ask ourselves these questions, and be prepared to follow suit if AI-assisted chatbots emerge as a significant marketing channel.
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. Having audiences on multiple channels is a safe position should we see search engines and websites decline as a valuable marketing channel.

Read more: 3 Technology Trends Marketers Should be Watching​

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”