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 use. It covers your plan, your content, getting found in both Google and AI answers (ChatGPT, Google AI, Perplexity), automation, AI helpers, and measuring results, in the order a 5 to 50 person company actually needs to do them.

Founders, owners, and small marketing teams at businesses between 5 and 50 people, usually $500K to $10M in revenue. The playbook assumes you have a real business with real customers. It is not a guide for brand-new startups with no revenue yet, for agencies, or for large companies with a 20-person marketing department.

Start with Strategy. Deciding who your ideal customers are, how you're positioned, and the main topics you'll cover, all before you pick any tools, is what decides whether the rest of the playbook builds on itself or falls apart. Jumping straight to making content is the most common reason AI marketing efforts stall in month three.

Most teams need every chapter eventually, but in different orders. A business with solid basics and no AI presence yet should do Strategy, then getting found in Google and AI answers, then the Content System. A business already publishing every week should do Strategy, then the Content System, then Measurement. The order in the sidebar is the default, not a rule.

The behind-the-scenes work that keeps your site healthy and easy for both Google and AI tools to read takes days, not months. The content system and the results tracking build up over a 90-day stretch. Most clients start seeing real visitors arriving from AI answers within 60 to 90 days of getting the basics in place, as long as they publish content every week.

Traditional SEO guides aim to rank higher on Google. This playbook aims to get your business named and linked across Google, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and Copilot, treating regular Google results as just one of several places customers find you. The behind-the-scenes work and AI-tool decisions in this playbook simply don't show up in standard SEO guides written before 2024.

No. The playbook is written so a founder or a small in-house team can implement most of it directly, using tools like HubSpot, Claude, or ChatGPT rather than agency retainers. Some businesses still choose to bring in a fractional CMO or consultant for the strategy chapter, since that part benefits most from outside judgment, but the execution chapters are built to run without one.

Use the playbook as a gap check rather than a start-from-zero guide. Read the chapter on getting found in Google and AI answers first, since that is where most established teams have the biggest blind spot: their content ranks in Google but is invisible to ChatGPT and Perplexity because nobody has done the schema and passage work yet.

Yes. The strategy, content, AI-visibility, and measurement chapters apply to any 5 to 50 person business regardless of location. A handful of examples reference Vancouver and BC because that is where José works day to day, but the underlying method (ICP, positioning, content pillars, GEO fundamentals) is not location-specific.