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Welcome back to AIM! This week, we're diving into Google's new AI marketing framework that maps out exactly what you need to master by 2026. We'll also spotlight a tool that helps you organize your relationship with your customers, because good CRM is the key. Plus, a quick win to audit how your brand appears in ChatGPT results.
Let’s make this week count! 🤝
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📰 Main Story
Google's Three AI Strategies to Future-Proof Your Marketing in 2026
The Challenge: With AI reshaping everything from creative production to measurement, marketers face a fragmented landscape of tools, tactics, and competing priorities. Most teams are experimenting without a clear framework, and that's a recipe for wasted budgets and missed opportunities.
The Solution: Google's new Ads Decoded initiative outlines three core AI strategies designed to help marketers prepare for 2026. This isn't vague thought leadership; it's a practical framework from the team building the tools you'll be using.
The Three Pillars:
AI-Enhanced Creative Performance: Move beyond A/B testing into AI-generated creative variants that adapt in real-time to audience signals. Google's data shows AI-optimized creative can improve conversion rates by 15-30% when properly implemented.
Measurement Accuracy: As privacy regulations tighten and cookies disappear, AI-powered measurement fills the attribution gaps. The framework emphasizes first-party data integration and predictive modeling to maintain visibility into campaign performance.
Customer Engagement: AI enables hyper-personalized experiences at scale, but only when you've built the data infrastructure to support it. The strategy focuses on unifying customer data across touchpoints to power meaningful AI interactions.
Why This Matters Now: Marketing industry forecasts highlight that 2026 will be defined by rapid AI advancement amid economic uncertainty. Brands that master these three pillars will have a significant competitive advantage. Those still experimenting will struggle to catch up.
Your Takeaway: Audit your current capabilities against these three pillars this quarter. Identify your weakest area—creative, measurement, or engagement—and make it your Q2 priority. Google isn't releasing this framework to be helpful; they're signaling where their platform is headed. Align your roadmap accordingly.
🛠️ Tool Spotlight
Close — The no-BS CRM built for sales speed
What it does: All-in-one CRM that brings calling, email, SMS, and AI notetaking into one place, so your team spends less time clicking and more time selling.
Best for: Sales teams who want a cleaner, faster alternative to bloated CRMs.
Why it matters: Close's built-in AI Notetaker transcribes and summarizes every call automatically, AI Enrich pulls real-time customer info from the web so reps skip the Googling, and AI Summaries surface what actually matters from calls, emails, and meetings. Automation workflows keep deals moving 24/7 without manual busywork.
Quick tip: Use Close's AI Email Rewrite Assistant to draft follow-ups based on call transcripts, saving reps 30+ minutes per day.
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⚡ Quick Win of the Week
Audit Your Brand's AI Search Presence in 15 Minutes
Your brand is already appearing in AI-generated answers, or it isn't. Either way, you need to know. Here's how to find out.
Step 1: Open ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity. Ask each: "What are the best [your product category] options for [your target customer]?"
Step 2: Document which competitors appear in each response. Note how your brand is described (if mentioned) and what attributes are highlighted.
Step 3: Ask follow-up questions: "What do customers say about [your brand]?" and "What are the pros and cons of [your brand] vs [top competitor]?"
Step 4: Create a simple scorecard: Did the AI mention you? Is the information accurate? What's missing?
Why it works: Research shows that AI mentions function like advertising; they boost brand recall even when users don't click. Understanding your current AI visibility is the first step to improving it.
Expected result: A clear baseline of your AI search presence with specific gaps to address.
Time investment: 15 minutes.
📈 This Week in AI Marketing
Why it matters: Top creatives use ChatGPT and Midjourney for idea springboards and research; agencies report freed time for higher-impact concepts while enforcing fact-checking and brand craft.
Why it matters: Elon Musk's Grok cites a fictitious "Grokipedia," revealing hallucination risks. Add a source-check step to content workflows this quarter.
Why it matters: Generative engines like ChatGPT and Perplexity prioritize topic coverage over keyword phrases. Your content must answer immediately, use clear headings, and be citable. Focus 45% of PR budget on always-on commentary, 30% on evergreen assets, 20% on schema integration, and 5% on experimentation, all built for AI extraction, not search rankings.
Why it matters: A Wall Street Journal investigation reveals companies are investing heavily in GEO tactics to ensure their products appear in AI recommendations. This signals a new competitive battleground. If your competitors are optimizing for AI search and you're not, you're ceding ground in the new buyer decision cycle that spans both traditional SEO and generative AI platforms.
Why it matters: Optimove's 2025 report shows 73% of consumers have made purchases based on AI recommendations. The trust gap is closing faster than expected. If you've been hesitant to integrate AI into customer-facing experiences due to trust concerns, this data suggests the market has moved on without you.
📚 Learn Something New
This week: Mastering the 70-20-10 AI ROI Framework
The basics: Mid-sized companies should allocate 70% of AI budgets to people and training, 20% to process redesign, and 10% to technology. This shift drives adoption, faster time-to-value, and measurable ROI, often outperforming larger tech-first spends.
Why it matters: Most teams buy tools and expect magic. Instead, successful AI adoption requires role-specific training, clear use cases, and adoption metrics tied to business outcomes.
Common mistakes:
Buying the fanciest tool without training your team.
Ignoring existing AI in Microsoft Copilot, Google Gemini, HubSpot, and Salesforce.
Measuring tool purchases instead of adoption.
Best practices:
Audit existing AI in your tech stack first.
Budget for training tied to campaign outcomes.
Measure adoption, not purchases. If teams aren't using it, it's a waste.
Start small: one workflow per quarter, one tool per team function.
Questions? Just write a comment below. I read all the comments and respond to them.