Recently, we’ve heard a lot of news about Artificial Intelligence (AI) and its expanded use cases. Its application in search engines, like the Bing AI integration, is a particularly interesting development for B2B search marketing. The announcement that the new AI-powered Microsoft Bing and Edge are available in preview is incredibly exciting. It could turn the world of search marketing on its head.
Before we dive into how this affects you as a marketer, here’s a little background. The new Bing and Edge bring together the best of Bing search engine and Microsoft’s Azure AI supercomputing technologies with a new, next-generation OpenAI large language model that is much more powerful than ChatGPT and customized specifically for search. The chatbot offers a more conversational search experience. Users can ask it follow-up questions and it will use that info to tailor its answers. The goal is to provide users with better answers to what they search for as opposed to just pointing to relevant web pages. This means that users can expect a more complete and personalized search experience.
Not only is this exciting for the future of searchers, but also for B2B marketers. With these changes, Microsoft’s ability to understand complex queries with greater depth and precision will also allow them to gain richer insight into user intent through conversational and personalized engagement. Over time this will deliver more volume and actionable opportunities for advertisers to engage with customers—all with the goal of improved ROI.
While we don’t know all the ways this will change search marketing, we can be sure there will be major impacts on paid and organic search engine marketing. A few things we anticipate:
As more momentum builds and the waitlist for the new Bing grows, they will likely see growth on their core search—as this is a part of joining the waitlist for the new Bing. More searchers using the AI search engine means more opportunities for marketers to engage customers and potentially get a better ROI from their paid search campaigns.
With the expected increase in traffic, more advertisers will likely invest in paid search marketing on the platform. The announcement could prompt some businesses to reallocate their search budget to spend on Bing advertising, if they aren’t already, or dedicate more resources to their ads here to capitalize on the increased traffic. Remember to be strategic when shifting your search tactics, especially during times of change. As Bing rolls out the full integration and we all have a better idea of how it will all work, you can check in with your strategy and see if changes make sense before you make any major pivots.
More marketers investing in Bing will also mean increased competition over keywords and paid search ads. One of the features of the new search engine is that the AI technology will be able to better understand user intent and use that information to personalize search results. Understanding search queries more holistically could impact the importance of specific keywords. Advertisers may need to adjust their keyword strategies to consider the evolving search landscape.
This isn’t just going to affect paid search. Using AI to understand a user’s search and provide more relevant and personalized results will result in a better experience for the user but could make it more challenging for marketers to rank for keywords. On the other hand, when you are able to rank, it’s more likely your content is reaching the right people. Meaning you may get better engagement and conversion rates.
So how can you keep up? Get to know your audience with tools already available. You can utilize intent data to understand the intent behind your target audiences’ searches and use that information to guide your strategy. As search engines get smarter, you need to lean on data. Making data-driven decisions will help you keep up with the changing landscape.
Overall, the integration of AI technology into Bing's search engine is likely to have a significant impact on search marketing. It will be important to stay up-to-date with these changes and you may need to adjust your strategies accordingly to remain competitive in the evolving search landscape.
Our biggest takeaway is simple: You don’t need to make changes to your strategy now. The potential of this new technology is still being explored but know that this fundamental change of the search experience will give us new opportunities to rethink traditional ad experiences, together.