Your Brand Is Still The Most Important Element Of Your Marketing Strategy, Even In The Age Of AI
- Jul 1
- 6 min read
Updated: Jul 3
TL, DR: Sustainable growth comes from building a brand ecosystem that is resilient to platform changes, rather than trying to win with any individual channel. Treating SEO, social media, PR and GEO (Generative Engine Optimisation, or AI Marketing) as vital expressions of your brand strategy, rather than separate marketing disciplines, is going to be more effective than ever in digital’s tumultuous landscape.
There is currently a lot of noise around what is and isn't working in luxury digital marketing. From whether SEO is dead, are carousels better than reels, why luxury has stagnated etc. etc. While much of this commentary is scaremongering, there are significant shifts in the digital landscape that require consideration.
One thing that is not new, or changing, however, is the importance of your brand identity. How and where your brand shows up is an essential and core part of any luxury marketing strategy. It should build the foundation and drive the decision-making process, from the platforms you choose to be seen on, the features you contribute to, through to the partnerships you create and social trends you choose to tap into (or avoid).
Some would argue that this is, and has always been, a given (likely brand marketers). But as your brand still needs to be discoverable online in order to grow - and this is becoming harder than ever to do - optimising processes, channels and outputs while still protecting your brand identity is becoming more than a necessary balancing act, and more of a brand strategy in itself.
A Strong Brand Strategy Builds SEO Into Its Foundation
A good SEO strategy has always gone hand-in-hand with a strong brand strategy. Keyword choices directly reflect your brand’s tone of voice and intentions, on-page copy and content convey your brand’s persona and purpose, and you can use various SEO levers across your website to highlight brand priorities - this has not changed.
Brand Strategy Director, Chris Bullick, stated in a Majestic webinar, that ‘if you have a strong brand, SEO becomes less important’. This is largely true, though I think it is fairer to say that if you have a strong brand, SEO becomes easier, but it is still important. A strong brand awareness drives (cheaper) traffic to the site, makes securing editorial placements easier, directly encourages referrals and brand mentions and builds a trusty slipstream from the top to the bottom of your marketing funnel. All of these factors are hugely valuable for SEO too, which strengthens your brand position, and on goes the cycle.
Claire Taylor framed this well by saying: "If your brand isn't recognised as a known entity in your space, you're competing with one hand tied behind your back, regardless of how good your content is." Though I would add that both your brand and its content need to be discoverable to compete in the first place, and that comes down to SEO.
One of the biggest upheavals in recent digital times is the claim that SEO is dead, given the rise of AI Overviews and decline of clicks from search results. With the emergence of more and more SERP features, and now the introduction of AI Overviews, plus the competition from social media and LLMs as search engines, the golden era of the page 1 ranking dream may be ending. However, the value of SEO is not.
What has changed is the directive of the channel. What used to be an exhaustive SEO strategy - the technical groundwork, the meta data optimisation, H1s, breadcrumbs, internal linking and so on – has become a fundamental part of having a website as standard, rather than a marketing strategy. To effectively increase traffic, and to grow your audience, now requires a far more proactive and multi-faceted approach.
SEO should only be used to strengthen your brand’s presence, never to dilute it. Contrary to what your typical SEO agency might have you believe, SEO does not have to be ugly. In fact, incorporating specific performance drivers, such as optimised CTAs or titles, within your brand's tone of voice and visual codes, rather than instead of, is a far better way to appease your target audience if executed strategically. This is especially true for luxury fashion brands where expectations are higher and a certain restraint is non-negotiable, as it can strengthen brand awareness and loyalty over time.
AI Visibility Is Still Brand Visibility
There are a significant number of claims around AI that are unfounded and unreliable. But what does stand is that AI Overviews and Generative Engine Optimisation are becoming increasingly more present in our digital landscape, whether we like it or not.
A primary, and by no means inconsequential, concern around the relevance of SEO today is how AI Overviews are capitalising on clicks from search results, as discussed in Daniel Foley Carter’s study which found the average clicks for a page ranking in position 1 from May 2023 to May 2026 has dropped by over 60%. This has been supported by an Ahrefs study highlighting that in less than a year, click reduction had increased from 34% to 58%. Such alarming findings have prompted discussions of ‘Google Zero’, a day when Google will no longer send traffic outside of its own search engine to external websites.
Before treating this as a reason to abandon SEO entirely, however, it is worth noting (i) LLMs use search results to retrieve data, so making your website discoverable is essential for both SEO and GEO (ii) where those clicks are going instead. As pointed out in DOTT’s Clicks Are Emigrating article: “The clicks are not dying. They are emigrating: to assistants, to consented search, to fewer and better visits that arrive already convinced. Traffic was never the point. Customers were.”
As mentioned in the Edelman Brand Trust Report: Among the 55% who use generative AI platforms, 91% say they use them for shopping in some way, including researching brands, comparing products, and summarising reviews, which makes them a very valuable traffic-driving source. The report states that what shows up in AI is shaped by "reputation, relevance, credibility, and clarity”, i.e. PR and brand awareness.
This, therefore, makes AI visibility a brand issue. The brands that will appear in AI responses are those that have built a genuine brand entity, which is to say a coherent and well-distributed reputation across credible editorial sources, social presence, SEO structure and PR coverage. As Claire Taylor argues, this is the goal: “building your brand as a recognised entity across multiple touchpoints, not optimising each channel in isolation”.
PR Is Essential In Building A Brand Entity
And what is an essential part of building a brand entity? PR. Particularly in luxury marketing, PR is integral for a brand’s positioning within a cultural or societal context that builds credibility, and it is this context placement that not only provides backlinks that strengthen SEO performance, but also builds the demand that fuels the brand searches, directly feeds into LLM citations and strengthens the entire marketing funnel.
Yet the evolution of digital has created more complexity for PR too. Teams and agencies are now navigating a more fragmented media landscape with legacy titles facing reduced budgets, influencers and content creators driving their own channels, and one in three journalists now self-publishing independently. This means that finding genuine connections and building authentic brand relationships is more important than ever as LLMs, and users, are trying to connect the dots across so many more platforms.
This is where aligning SEO and PR across brand content strategies makes each more efficient while pursuing the same goal: building a brand that is recognised, trusted and discoverable across every relevant touchpoint a potential customer may encounter. Backlinks and brand mentions, through to securing social media coverage and wider content distribution, are all then expressions of the same purpose: building a brand entity, and it is only through building a holistic brand entity that you can expect to resonate with an AI-led digital audience.
So while it seems we are all currently at the mercy of these rapidly shifting platforms, regulations (or lack of) and technology, what remains within your control is the clarity of your brand. Instead of treating SEO, PR and social media as separate channels, use them as mechanisms to drive a consistent brand identity across relevant touchpoints. This consistency builds reputation over time, and reputation is increasingly determining how brands are surfaced and recommended in the age of AI marketing. In this sense, investment in your brand strategy becomes investment in AI visibility.
If you are looking for support in navigating this digital landscape, and how to best communicate your brand strategy across these platforms, please don't hesitate to reach out. I offer digital marketing audits as well as ongoing consultation services.
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