The AI Marketing Playbook for SMBs.

The AI Marketing Playbook is a six-part guide for small and medium businesses that want to add AI to their marketing without wasting money on agency fees or tools they never end up using. It covers building your strategy, building your content, getting found in both Google and AI answers such as ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, and Perplexity, setting up automation, choosing AI helpers, and measuring the results that come from all of it. The six parts run in the order a business with 5 to 50 people actually needs to do them, so each chapter builds on the decisions made in the one before it rather than treating each topic as a standalone task.

The playbook is written for founders, owners, and small marketing teams at businesses between 5 and 50 people, usually earning $500K to $10M in revenue. It assumes the reader already runs a real business with real customers and an existing way of bringing in revenue, since several chapters build on that base rather than starting from zero. It is not written for a brand-new startup with no revenue yet, for a marketing agency serving other businesses, or for a large company that already runs a 20-person marketing department with its own specialists in each of the six areas the playbook covers.

Start with the Strategy chapter before touching any tool or publishing any content. Deciding who the ideal customer is, how the business is positioned against competitors, and which main topics the content will cover is the decision that determines whether every later chapter builds on a solid base or has to be redone once the gap becomes obvious. Jumping straight to making content without that groundwork is the single most common reason an AI marketing effort produces a burst of activity in month one and then stalls out by month three, once the content has nowhere coherent to point.

Most businesses need every chapter eventually, but the order that makes sense depends on where the business already stands. A business with solid fundamentals but no real AI presence yet should work through Strategy, then the chapter on getting found in Google and AI answers, then the Content System. A business that already publishes every week but has no clear strategy behind it should instead go Strategy, then the Content System, then Measurement, so the existing publishing habit gets pointed at the right topics before anyone checks whether it is working. The order shown in the sidebar is the default path, not a fixed rule every business must follow.

The behind-the-scenes technical work that keeps a site healthy and easy for both Google and AI tools to read typically takes days rather than months, since most of it is one-time setup. The content system and the results-tracking dashboard build up gradually over a 90-day stretch as new pages go live and enough data accumulates to read a trend. Most clients start seeing real visitors arriving from AI answers such as ChatGPT or Google AI Overviews within 60 to 90 days of getting the technical basics in place, provided they keep publishing new content every week during that window rather than stopping after the initial setup.

A traditional SEO guide aims to help a business rank higher on a Google search results page. This playbook aims to get the business named and linked across Google, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and Microsoft Copilot, treating a regular Google search result as just one of several places a customer might now encounter the business rather than the only one that matters. The technical setup and AI-tool decisions covered in this playbook, such as which crawlers to allow and how to structure a page so an AI engine can quote it directly, simply do not appear in standard SEO guides written before AI answer engines became a mainstream way people search.

A marketing agency is not required to follow this playbook. It is written so a founder or a small in-house team can implement most of it directly, using tools such as HubSpot, Claude, or ChatGPT in place of an ongoing agency retainer. Some businesses still choose to bring in a fractional CMO or an outside consultant specifically for the Strategy chapter, since positioning and ideal-customer decisions tend to benefit from a second, less biased set of eyes, but the five execution chapters that follow Strategy are built to run without any outside help once the direction is set.

Use the playbook as a gap check against the existing team's work, rather than as a start-from-zero guide to rebuild everything. Read the chapter on getting found in Google and AI answers first, because that is where most established teams carry the biggest blind spot: their content already ranks reasonably well on Google, but it remains invisible to ChatGPT and Perplexity because nobody on the team has done the schema markup and self-contained passage writing that those AI engines specifically need in order to quote and cite the page.

The strategy, content, AI-visibility, and measurement chapters apply to any business with 5 to 50 people, regardless of where that business is located. A handful of the examples used throughout the playbook reference Vancouver and British Columbia specifically, because that is where José works with clients day to day, but the underlying method, meaning how to define an ideal customer, set a position, choose content pillars, and apply GEO fundamentals, does not depend on the business operating in any particular city, province, or country.