Marketing and AI knowledge: what you need to know as a business owner

Marketing and AI are evolving faster than ever and for owners of small and medium-sized businesses, it can be hard to keep up with what actually matters for your business. What is the difference between SEO and GEO? When does it make sense to use AI in your marketing strategy? And what does a real campaign look like in practice?

This page is the knowledge hub for marketing and AI at Vester Marketing, run by Karina Vester Schultz, an independent marketing consultant with over 10 years of experience from international companies. Here you will find definitions, strategic explanations, campaign examples, and answers to the questions SMB owners ask most frequently. Everything is written in plain language and without unnecessary jargon.

Use the table of contents to jump directly to the topic most relevant to you right now.

What is marketing nowadays?

Marketing is the collective term for the activities a business uses to attract, inform, and retain customers. In 2025, the majority of marketing takes place digitally, through search engines, social media, email, and increasingly through AI-generated answers. For a small or medium-sized business, good marketing is not about being present everywhere, but about choosing the channels and initiatives that fit your target audience, your budget, and your business objectives.

Karina Vester Schultz at Vester Marketing helps SMB owners navigate this landscape and prioritise the initiatives that actually deliver results, rather than investing in everything at once.

SEO: How to be found organically on Google

SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) is the process of improving a website’s visibility in Google’s organic, that is unpaid, search results. An effective SEO strategy ensures that potential customers find your business when they search for the products or services you offer, without you paying per click.

SEO is divided into three disciplines: technical SEO (the technical foundation of the site), on-page SEO (content and structure) and off-page SEO (backlinks and authority). A long-term SEO investment is one of the most cost-effective marketing channels for SMBs, because the traffic continues even when you are not actively investing.

→ Read more about SEO at Vester Marketing

→ Understand SEO terms in detail

AI search and GEO are the new visibility

AI search is the collective term for search platforms that generate direct answers rather than exclusively showing links, including Google AI Overview, ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Claude. These platforms are fundamentally changing how users find information and which businesses appear as credible sources.

GEO (Generative Engine Optimisation) is the discipline of optimising web content so that it can be identified and used as a source in AI-generated answers. GEO builds on the principles of traditional SEO but places heightened demands on content structure, entity density and authority signals. Karina Vester Schultz at Vester Marketing works professionally with GEO optimisation as part of her consulting practice.

Businesses that optimise for AI search early gain a competitive advantage that is difficult for late movers to catch up with.

→ Read more about AI search and GEO

→ Understand GEO concepts in depth

SEA and paid search are the quick results

SEA covers paid visibility in search engines, primarily through Google Ads. Unlike SEO, SEA provides immediate exposure and is particularly relevant for product launches, seasonal campaigns, and in markets with high competition for organic search results.

SEA and SEO complement each other: SEM creates quick visibility, while SEO builds a long-term organic foundation. A key difference between working with Vester Marketing rather than an agency is that there is never an incentive to spend more of your ad budget than necessary. Our advice is always based on your ROI, not on the agency’s revenue.

→ Read more about SEA and Google Ads

Content marketing is content that works

Content marketing is the strategy of creating and distributing valuable content that attracts and retains a defined target audience, to generate profitable customer actions. In practice, content marketing is about producing content that helps your target audience rather than exclusively selling to them.

Effective content marketing supports all other marketing disciplines: good content improves SEO, strengthens GEO visibility, and provides something concrete to share on social media and in emails. For SMBs, it is not about producing as much as possible, but about producing the right content and content that answers precisely the questions your target audience is asking.

→ Read more about Content marketing

AI in your marketing strategy: What is changing?

Artificial intelligence (AI) is affecting marketing on two levels: as a productivity tool in day-to-day marketing work and as a change in how search engines and platforms function. It is important to distinguish between the two.

AI as a productivity tool

AI tools such as ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini can be used to accelerate a wide range of marketing tasks: content drafts, keyword research, competitor analysis, ad copy and briefing of partners. AI does not replace strategic judgement and human understanding of a business’s context, but it significantly reduces the time it takes to produce and test content.

AI as a change in search behaviour

AI is also changing how potential customers find information. Google AI Overview, ChatGPT, and Perplexity are increasingly used as primary search tools, particularly by professional users and B2B decision-makers. This means that your business’s visibility no longer depends only on whether you rank in Google’s blue links, but also on whether you appear as a credible source in AI-generated answers.

What does this mean for your SMB?

For owners of small and medium-sized businesses, AI development means it is possible to produce more and better marketing content with fewer resources – but it requires knowing when AI output is good enough and when it needs human revision. It also requires that the website’s content is structured and formulated in a way that makes it suitable to be cited by AI engines.

→ Read more about AI search and GEO

Campaign examples: Here’s what your campaign looks like in practice

One of the most frequent questions Karina Vester Schultz receives from SMB owners is: ‘What do I actually get out of this?’ It is a good and relevant question. Marketing is an investment, and like all investments it is reasonable to expect a concrete explanation of what the money is used for and what you can expect in return.

Under Marketing Knowledge, you will find examples of what a real marketing campaign can look like for a small- or medium-sized business, from initial analysis through execution to follow-up. The examples are either anonymised cases from real collaborations or realistic scenarios that illustrate the decisions made and their typical outcomes.

What do the campaign examples cover?

Each campaign example describes five elements: 

• the starting point (type of business and challenge)
• the chosen strategy (which channels and initiatives)
• the execution (what was done and in what order)
• the results (concrete figures and observations)
• the lessons learned (what works and what would be done differently).

SEO and Marketing Glossary: How to Understand the Terms

Marketing is full of abbreviations and technical terms that can make it hard to understand what is actually happening and what you are paying for. At Vester Marketing, one of the goals is to make you more knowledgeable, not more dependent on external help.

In the SEO and marketing glossary you will find clear, precise definitions of the terms you most frequently encounter: from technical SEO terms such as hreflang, Core Web Vitals and canonical tags to AI search terms such as GEO, LLM and passage indexing. All definitions are written by Karina Vester Schultz and based on over 10 years of practical experience with search engine optimisation and digital marketing.

→ Go to the full SEO and marketing glossary

Frequently asked questions about marketing and AI

Below you will find the questions SMB owners most frequently ask about marketing and AI with short, direct answers. An extended version with over 35 questions and in-depth answers can be found in the FAQ hub.

If you have any further questions, please check out my FAQs on SEO, SEM, and AI search

Why choose Vester Marketing as your marketing partner?

Vester Marketing is Karina Vester Schultz, an independent SEO and marketing consultant with over 10 years of experience from international companies. I do not work as an agency with fixed product packages and an incentive to sell you more than you need. I work as your personal partner: honest about what works, transparent about what it costs, and focused on creating results that can be measured.

All Google accounts are always created and owned by you. I work exclusively with white-hat methods in accordance with Google’s guidelines. And one of my primary goals is to make you independent and not dependent on external consulting.

I work in Danish, English and German and have experience with businesses in B2B, e-commerce, SaaS, construction, legal and many other industries.

My competencies within marketing and AI cover:

• SEO: technical SEO, on-page, local SEO, international SEO
• SEM: Google Ads, keyword research, campaign structure and optimisation
• AI search: GEO, SGE optimisation, LLM retrieval and passage indexing
• Content marketing: content strategy, on-page optimisation, AI-assisted production
• Analytics: Google Search Console, Adobe Analytics, heatmaps
• Languages: Danish, English, German