Authored by Ian Stirling, CEO, Streets Consulting
As we reach the halfway point of the year, I have been reflecting on the conversations I have had with clients, prospects, founders, and senior leadership teams across the market.
The businesses are different. Their sectors, stages of growth and immediate priorities vary. Yet the underlying concerns are remarkably consistent.
These are not theoretical questions. They are rooted in very real commercial needs.
Businesses are looking to scale, win new customers, attract talent, capture investment and expand their sources of capital. They know they need to communicate more effectively, but the routes to attention, trust and influence have changed. Three themes have surfaced repeatedly:
There is a genuine fear among businesses that they are becoming lost in the shuffle. In some cases, this means losing opportunities to better-known competitors. In others, it means losing out to companies with inferior services or products, but a stronger digital footprint and a better understanding of how modern discovery works.
Search engine optimisation remains important, but it is no longer the whole picture with GEO, AEO and AIO all playing a part.
For marketers, communicators, founders and the C-suite, this matters because the audience has expanded. We are no longer communicating solely with people. We are also communicating with the systems that increasingly influence what those people see, read, trust and shortlist.
Our team is advising a growing number of organisations on how to “show up” more consistently and build credibility with a new, highly discerning audience: the robots. That may sound glib, but it represents a serious shift in how reputation and opportunity are formed.
AI platforms do not simply reward volume. They look for authority, consistency, relevance, corroboration and credible third-party signals. A company cannot assume that a polished website or an occasional LinkedIn post will be enough.
Being discoverable now requires an integrated body of evidence.
Having worked in a fractional CMO capacity in the past, I am acutely aware of how the model has evolved.
For start-ups and scale-ups, the appeal is clear. They can access senior strategic leadership, wider experience and a broader delivery capability without immediately building a full in-house function.
Increasingly, these businesses see marketing not as an expense, but as a catalyst and an investment in growth. What has been particularly interesting this year, however, is the growing relevance of the model among more established enterprises.
These organisations are not necessarily looking to replace an incumbent marketing leader. Instead, they are asking us to bolster the strategic vision for the function, sit alongside an existing Head of Marketing or CMO, and provide access to a deeper bench of expertise. They want an extension of their own team.
They are not looking for another project manager or an agency that operates at arm’s length. They want senior people who can understand the business, challenge constructively, bring outside perspectives and then lean into delivery across the full toolbox. We bring this to them through our CMO-as-a-Service offering.
That might include positioning, content, campaigns, digital channels, executive visibility, events, media engagement, sales enablement or internal communications. The value lies in the ability to connect those areas, rather than treating each one as a separate activity.
At its best, the model gives a leadership team greater strategic confidence while giving the in-house function more capacity, capability and momentum.
This question comes up frequently, particularly in the context of discoverability and owned-channel growth. The immediate answer is yes. The longer answer is that PR still needs to be earned.
Third-party media coverage is an important validator. It creates credibility with human audiences, but it also provides the independent signals that search engines and generative AI platforms value. And guess what? GEO loves corroboration. And how quickly this discussion returns to #1 – discoverability.
That said, the fundamental question behind good PR has not changed: what do you have to say, and why does it matter?
Fabricating news for the sake of activity will get a business nowhere. Neither will dressing up a minor internal development as a market-defining announcement. The strongest PR is rooted in genuine expertise, useful insight, real evidence and a clear understanding of what matters to the audience.
Engagement with journalists remains high when businesses can offer something relevant. The value is still there, and I believe PR is returning in force as organisations recognise that owned channels and earned media should work in tandem. It is not one or the other.
There is undoubtedly more content in circulation than ever before. But there is also a wider audience, more channels and more opportunities for good ideas to travel. The challenge is to create something worth discovering, then build the credibility and distribution around it.
If any of this resonates, my diary is always open for a conversation about what it may mean for your organisation and how we might help.
I would also recommend reading ‘Writing for Robots’ by our practice lead, Andrew Dunn, and his latest instalment, ‘The Written Page Against the Machine: Earning the AI Citation’. Its central message is even more important now than when it was first published several months ago.
The good news is that you have not missed out completely.
There is still time to catch up, particularly with the right partners beside you.
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