Owned Audiences and the Inbox as a Search Platform

Google has become the world’s largest publisher—and for brands that relied on organic search, that’s a crisis. In this episode of the Beyond the Search Bar podcast, I chat with host Russ Macumber about how search is changing and the role that email marketing can play as the Google Search monolith crumbles.

Here’s a breakdown of our conversation:

2:47 – My hot take on search marketing today
3:36 – The five ways brands can be more visible
6:50 – How I got into email and digital marketing
10:20 – Tech changes in the email industry on two fronts
12:42 – How search has fractured into an environment that looks like the inbox environment
15:03 – Why it’s dangerous to replicate your email strategy across mobile channels
17:57 – How consumers expect brands to recognize their cross-channel activity
19:23 – How owned channels support SEO (and why I don’t like to refer to email marketing as “owned media”)
20:20 – Optimizing your email messages for inbox search, and for AI summaries
20:53 – How Google and Microsoft are big email inbox providers and big AI players
24:35 – What Google is doing in the AI commerce space related to email
26:54 – Why Google’s Personal Intelligence program is super smart
33:00 – Marketing to machines who act on behalf of your customers
34:40 – My preferred term for optimizing for search done by AI engines
37:01 – What I think is the most underrating marketing tactic right now

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