Your Unique Marketing Recipe: What Was Once Old Is New Again

Why the Answer to Marketing in the AI Era Isn’t Something New

Right now I’m getting pounded with the same question over and over again. Doesn’t matter what industry the owner is in.

“Dean, what I was doing to market my business used to work. Now leads are down. The phone’s not ringing. Google’s changing. Social media is changing. What the heck am I supposed to be doing with my marketing right now?”

Sound familiar?

First, don’t panic. Some owners are pulling out of marketing altogether, and that’s usually a bad idea. Others are throwing money at every new AI tool that promises to fix it. That’s not a proper marketing strategy either.

So here’s my answer, and I’m coming right between the eyes with it…

Stop chasing new. Stop chasing flavor-of-the-day marketing. Figure out what you need your marketing to do, then choose the ingredients that fit your business. I call it “Your Unique Marketing Recipe”. I built it long before anyone asked ChatGPT for a recommendation, and it matters more now than it did the day I built it.

Executive Summary (TL;DR): Marketing has three jobs: Visibility, Credibility, and Reach. When marketing stops working, the answer is rarely a brand-new tactic. It’s diagnosing which job is broken, then doing the fundamentals slightly differently for a world where AI helps buyers decide. That’s Your Unique Marketing Recipe.

Same Question. Different Decade.

The question hasn’t changed in over twenty years. Only the villain has.

When I started out, marketing was manual. The Yellow Pages were everything. In the cleaning industry, where I’ve done a ton of work, owners added five-arounds (flyers left on the houses around every job) to squeeze out more business. Commercial companies were cold calling like crazy.

Then the internet showed up, and all of that stopped working like it once did.

So owners asked me what to do. Then it was Google. Then Facebook ads. Then SEO. Now it’s AI.

Same question. Every single time.

There’s a French proverb I use all the time. It goes like this…

“Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.”

Now, I’m not French. But it means the more that things change, the more they stay the same.

Marketing is marketing. Tactics change. Marketing doesn’t.

Back in 2012, I was brought in as a featured keynote speaker to deliver a workshop at ARCSI’s major annual conference. If that name doesn’t ring a bell, ARCSI was the Association of Residential Cleaning Services International, and back then it represented only the residential cleaning industry. Today it’s part of ISSA, known as ISSA Residential. And ISSA Show North America is now the biggest event of the year for the cleaning and restoration industries.

This was a big deal. I’d spoken at ARCSI’s leadership conference before, but this was their biggest stage. And the industry was starving for the kind of marketing intel I brought into that room.

Afterward, owners chased me into the bathrooms to get more wisdom out of me. True story.

The tactics were already shifting back then. The questions? Haven’t moved an inch.

And here’s the part most marketing advice skips. There is no universal recipe. Two companies selling the same service in the same town can need completely different mixes. One has deep relationships and lousy follow-up. The other closes everything it touches, and nobody’s ever heard of it.

Why on earth would they get the same prescription?

Your Marketing Still Has Three Jobs

Direct answer: Every marketing tactic you’ll ever use does one or more of three jobs: Visibility, Credibility, or Reach. That’s it. Three.

Humor me for a second. Picture a fresh, home-baked apple pie sitting right in front of your face. Cut it into eight slices. The whole pie is your target market, the people you’d love to do business with.

Visibility: The Slice That Already Knows You

One slice is the people who already know you. Customers. Past customers. Prospects. Referral partners. They’ve seen you, heard of you, or done business with you.

Your job with that slice? Stay in front of them. Because out of sight is out of mind, folks. A customer can love your work and still blank on your name when a neighbor or colleague asks for a recommendation.

Ouch.

Credibility: Give Them the Confidence to Choose You

Knowing your name doesn’t close the deal. People need enough evidence to trust you with their home, their building, their health, or their systems.

Reviews help. Case studies help. But here’s what really moves the needle: showing how you think. Why two proposals for the same job can be miles apart. What a buyer should actually compare. When you’re the WRONG fit.

That tells a buyer more than one more promise of “excellent service” ever will. Everybody says that. Nobody believes it.

Reach: Go After the Other Seven Slices

Now look at the other seven slices. That’s a lot of pie. Great-fit buyers who don’t even know you exist yet, and they can’t choose a company they’ve never heard of.

Reach gets you in front of them. Not the biggest audience. The right one.

One Ingredient Can Do Several Jobs

The tactic is not the strategy. The tactic is an ingredient.

Think of a kitchen cabinet stocked full of them. The skill isn’t owning every spice on the shelf. It’s pulling the right one at the right time. Some ingredients do one job. Some do all three. That overlap is leverage.

But don’t let it set your priority. If weak proof is costing you deals, proof gets you your next dollar. Not another campaign aimed at strangers.

What AI Actually Changed

Direct answer: AI didn’t change what marketing is for. It changed where buyers decide, and it made them a whole lot pickier about what they want.

Discovery used to happen in one place. Somebody typed “house cleaning near me” into Google and scrolled. Done.

Not anymore. Now a buyer might hear your name from a friend, ask ChatGPT about you, watch your video on YouTube, check your reviews, visit your website, and then maybe call. Or skip the friend entirely and just go straight to AI.

And they’re not typing cryptic keywords, either. They’re talking to their phone like it’s their personal assistant:

“I run a small retail store downtown. I need a commercial cleaning company that understands retail, services my area, and has a great reputation. Give me the best three, their contact information, and why I should call each one.”

See how much more specific that is? Swap in an IT company that supports medical practices, a wellness practice, or a landscaper who handles commercial properties. Same move.

I’ve run that kind of test dozens of times. You get a short list, with reasons attached. While I was on Straight Talk, the podcast Jeff Cross hosts for the ISSA, the worldwide cleaning association, Jeff ran it live as I talked. He asked his AI which carpet cleaning companies to call in his market.

It gave him two. Review counts. Links. Phone numbers. Reasons to call each one. Even questions to ask when he did.

He knew both companies personally. And he agreed with the picks.

Which reminds me of a joke I used to tell all the time…

Two buddies are hiking in the woods when a grizzly steps onto the trail. One of them quietly slips off his backpack, pulls out a pair of running shoes, and starts lacing up.

His buddy whispers, “Are you nuts? You can’t outrun a bear.”

He double-knots the second shoe, stands up, and says, “I don’t have to outrun the bear. I just have to outrun you.”

That’s the game right now.

You don’t have to beat every business on the internet. You just have to be a better answer than the competitor chasing the same buyer. And you’re doing it for humans and machines at the same time.

Now here’s the part owners miss…

Google no longer has the same unwritten arrangement with your website that it once did. Putting up a page doesn’t mean Google indexes it and starts sending you traffic. We’re seeing it on our own websites and on the client sites we manage: Google knows the content exists and still chooses not to show it.

Let that sink in.

Google’s still a major player. It’s just not the only game in town anymore. ChatGPT and the rest of the AI crowd compete with it now, and every one of them wants to serve up the best answer and the best companies.

Are you one of them?

Stop Throwing Money at AI

Direct answer: The fix for marketing that isn’t working is almost never a new AI tool.

I know. That’s not what the software guys and AI consultants want you to hear.

Everybody’s selling one right now. AI to write your posts. AI to build your pages. AI to “handle” your marketing.

Same trap, shinier packaging.

If your recipe is broken, AI will help you produce brokenness faster. More of the wrong thing, at scale. That’s busyness, not business.

AI amplifies. It does not absolve.

The tool is never the edge. What you feed it is. Genius in, genius out. And when you do bring AI in, pick the right AI tool for the right job.

Now here’s the good news, and I want you to really hear this. It’s not like you need to do all brand-new things. You need to do the right things slightly differently, because AI changed how they’re being used. That’s adjusting, not starting over. It’s the Adjustment Gap most owners never close.

It’s not about doing more things.

It’s about doing fewer things, better.

Diagnose First. Prescribe Second.

Direct answer: Before you add or cut a single tactic, figure out which of the three jobs is broken. Otherwise, you’re just guessing with your checkbook.

If you and I were sitting across the table, here’s how it’d go.

“Dean, we need more leads.”

Okay. Walk me through the ones you’re getting. Are they the right people? Are they booking conversations? Are proposals turning into customers? And when they don’t, what stops them?

That’s usually where it gets quiet.

Here’s how I read it. Prospects keep shopping you on price? They don’t see what makes you worth more. That’s a Credibility issue. Past customers never come back? When’s the last time they heard from you? That’s a Visibility issue. You close the right prospects like a champ, but too few show up? Now we’re having a Reach conversation.

Then follow a few recent inquiries from first contact to closed deal. A missed call. A slow estimate. A lead nobody followed up on. Any one of those can make good marketing look broken.

Buying more attention won’t fix a leak.

And watch how you hand out credit. The buyer found you on YouTube, checked your reviews, and booked through your website. The website gets the credit. The video gets nothing. So you stop making videos.

See the problem?

Same rule as any business bottleneck: find it before you fix it.

Four Ingredients, Done Slightly Differently

When Jeff (referenced earlier in this article) asked me where an owner should start, I didn’t hesitate. Four ingredients: a strong website, YouTube as your content engine, social to distribute it, and email to own the relationship.

None of them are new. Each one works differently now. Your diagnosis decides how much weight each one gets.

Your Website: Fewer Pages. Better Pages.

“Websites are dead.”

Bull crap. They’re not dead. At least not yet, and not for the foreseeable future.

What’s dead is the 2016 SEO playbook: piles of mediocre pages some SEO company told you to build because more pages meant better SEO.

Baloney.

AI doesn’t want to wade through volumes of junk. Before it recommends you, it wants to know you’re the real deal. The reviews to back it up. Useful content. A point of view nobody else has.

You’re better off with a five-page website that’s rocking, plus a blog that says something useful, than a 30- or 40-page website stuffed with filler.

The number isn’t the point. Junk is. And the data backs it up, too. Ahrefs studied 75,000 brands and found almost no relationship between how many pages a site has and how often AI tools mention the brand. It’s a correlation study, not a guarantee. But it points in the same direction I’ve been pointing for years.

Your site still has to nail the basics: who you are, who you serve, why you’re different, and why anyone should believe you. Then answer people’s questions before they ask them. FAQs, folks. FAQs. And make the next step stupid simple. Want the full checklist? Here are 15 website best practices for modern search.

I hate to tell you this, but a lot of the websites I look at aren’t good enough for this environment. I’m telling you because I care.

Your website may not be where every buyer discovers you anymore. But it’s where many validate you. My website audit guide walks you through how to check yours.

YouTube: Let People See How You Think

“Dean, I’m no good on video.”

I don’t care. Figure it out.

I’m serious. People buy from people. When they see the face of your company, it builds credibility, fast. And that face doesn’t have to be yours. Don’t want to be on camera? Fine. Put the person who explains the work best in front of the lens.

Start by answering every common customer question on video. Every one. Then connect each video to the matching page on your website. That’s the one-two punch: AI reads the transcript, figures out who you are, and heads to your website for the full picture.

And skip the polished TV show. Nobody’s asking for it. People love raw. They love real. A little bling is fine, but your message and your credibility are what really matter here.

YouTube does all three jobs at once: Visibility, Credibility, and Reach. In that same Ahrefs study, brand mentions in YouTube titles, descriptions, and transcripts had the strongest correlation with showing up in AI answers of anything they measured.

Not bad, huh?

Social: Every Post Needs a Job

Posting is not marketing.

“We post five times a week.”

Great. What’s each post supposed to do? Build Visibility? Credibility? Reach? If you can’t answer that, you’ve got a schedule, not a strategy.

And please don’t hire a social media company for $1,200 a month and let them post random junk. That’s the worst thing you can do. It doesn’t just waste money. It actively hurts your credibility.

Here’s the shift I’m watching. As AI floods the feeds, people want human again, which is why human skills matter more now, not less. People can tell when AI wrote something, and nobody cared.

So be human. Start with something only your business can say. If AI helps you draft, feed it a Keystone Asset so it sounds like you, not everybody else.

Then go where your buyer actually hangs out. Selling to consumers? Maybe that’s Facebook and Instagram. Selling to businesses? Maybe it’s LinkedIn in a big way.

Email and Your Database: Own the Relationship

“I’ve got 10,000 followers on Facebook.”

Great. That’s a vanity metric until you own the names.

What happens if Facebook goes away tomorrow? Or decides it doesn’t like something you said and kicks you off? I’ve seen it happen, folks.

If the platform disappears, so do your 10,000 followers. Poof. How will you get them back if you don’t even know their names?

You’ve got to own the database. If you own the database, you stand a much better chance of winning.

If you don’t? You’re playing a risky game.

So drive people from YouTube, social, and events into your CRM. Keap, HighLevel, HubSpot. I don’t care what you use. Just own the relationship.

Then work the list. And no, I don’t mean “we’ll be there at three instead of four.” That’s a scheduling update, not marketing. I mean keeping people warm, staying in front of them, and building credibility between transactions.

Email is one of the best Visibility tools there is. I’ve been screaming that for twenty years.

What was once old is new again.

Paid Media: Run the Numbers Before You Bury It

Direct answer: Don’t keep or kill paid ads based on what you’re hearing. Keep or kill them based on your numbers.

You’re hearing a lot of junk about paid ads right now, and some of it’s true. There was a frenzy when Facebook ads worked like gangbusters. Not anymore. Go do a Google search right now. What shows up first? Often it’s an AI summary, and plenty of people read it and decide that’s good enough. Google says ads can still appear above, below, or inside those AI Overviews, but the page they’re competing on has changed.

None of that tells you whether YOUR ads work. The numbers never lie.

So picture this. You walk up to a soda machine. You put a dollar in, and three come out. Every single time.

Would you ever walk away from that machine?

Of course not. You’d stand there all day feeding it. That’s what profitable marketing is. It doesn’t matter how much it costs you. It matters how much it makes you.

So run the numbers. Take what you spent and divide it by the customers it produced. Put that against what a customer is worth over the lifetime of the relationship. If the machine pays out, keep feeding it. If it doesn’t, check the targeting, the offer, the proof, the landing page, and the follow-up before you pull the plug.

Feelings don’t scale.

The Five Commandments of Choosing Your Ingredients

Direct answer: Once you know which job is broken, these five questions decide which ingredients make the cut.

They come straight from my original presentation, and they’ve held up for well over a decade.

Know Thy Target Market

Who exactly do you want, and where do they hang out? It always starts here. Always. If you don’t know where your buyer pays attention, every other decision is a guess.

Know Thy Financial Fitness

Know your numbers. What can the business actually sustain in money, time, and capacity? A campaign that brings in work your team can’t deliver profitably isn’t doing you any favors. It’s a headache… period.

Know Thy Strengths

Writer. Presenter. Schmoozer. Which one are you? Which ones are on your team? A writer can own articles and email. A presenter belongs on video and on stage. A schmoozer should be out building referral partnerships. Do what you do best and hire out the rest.

Know Thy Passions

What will you actually commit to doing consistently? A tactic you abandon after six weeks doesn’t belong in the recipe. But careful. Loving networking doesn’t prove you’re meeting the right people. Balance the heart and the mind here.

Know Thy Risk Tolerance

What can you afford to test, and what has to keep working while you learn? Keep a profitable ingredient running while you test the next one. Don’t bet the farm on an experiment.

Your Unique Marketing Recipe FAQ

What is Your Unique Marketing Recipe?

Your Unique Marketing Recipe is a framework Dean Mercado developed for choosing marketing tactics. It starts with the three purposes of marketing (Visibility, Credibility, and Reach), diagnoses which one is holding a business back, and selects tactics based on target market, financial fitness, strengths, passions, and risk tolerance.

What are the three purposes of marketing?

Visibility keeps a business in front of people who already know it. Credibility gives buyers enough evidence to choose it. Reach puts it in front of qualified buyers who haven’t heard of it yet. A single tactic, like a strong YouTube video, can serve all three.

Are websites still worth investing in with AI search?

Yes. A website is often where buyers validate a service business after an AI tool, a referral, or a video introduces it. A small, strong website that answers real buyer questions beats a large website padded with thin, repetitive pages.

How is AI changing the way customers find service businesses?

Buyers now ask AI tools for recommendations in plain language, describing exactly what they need, and often get back a short list of companies with reasons to call each one. Service businesses with strong reviews, useful website content, and helpful YouTube videos give those tools more reasons to recommend them.

Should a business stop marketing when leads drop?

Usually not. Pulling out of marketing when leads drop often makes the problem worse. The better move is to diagnose which purpose of marketing is broken (Visibility, Credibility, or Reach) and fix that before adding or cutting tactics.

Does the business owner have to be on camera for YouTube to work?

No. People buy from people, and seeing the face of a company builds credibility, but that face doesn’t have to be the owner. Any team member who explains the work well can be the face of a service business on video.

Your First Move: Test It, Then Audit It

Direct answer: Start with a two-minute test, then audit every ingredient you’re already paying for.

Monday morning, run the test yourself. Open ChatGPT, or whichever AI tool you use. Ask the question your ideal buyer would ask, the way they’d actually say it: what they need, where they are, what matters to them. Then ask for the best three companies and why.

Now look.

Are you on the list? If not, read the reasons it gave for the companies that are. That’s your gap list, handed to you for free. Then ask it what it knows about your company by name, and see if it gets you right.

Then audit your recipe. Sit down with whoever runs your marketing, inside or outside the company. For every ingredient, answer five questions:

• Who is it for?
• Which job does it do?
• What does it cost, and what does it make?
• What result proves it belongs?
• Who runs it without you?

That last question is the big one. It’s where a marketing plan becomes a scale plan, and where you move from operator to orchestrator.

Because if you’re the only one who knows which customers need a call, which posts to write, or how to close the big account, your marketing runs through you. That’s how the Owner’s Prison gets built, one “only I can do this” at a time.

Documented beats remembered. If your business needs you to scale, it won’t.

My original slides from back in 2012 said “Less is More!” and “No Superheroes!” Still true today. Keep what works. Fix what’s leaking. Stop funding what nobody can explain.

And sometimes you need someone at the table who isn’t emotionally attached to your business. Somebody who’ll look you in the eye and say, “Let’s see the numbers.” If you’re not sure where your marketing is breaking down, start with the free S.C.A.L.E. Bottleneck Buster™. It’s a diagnostic, not a sales pitch. And if you want to work through it together, explore private business coaching. Not everyone’s a fit, and that’s intentional.

AI changed the ingredients. It didn’t change the need for a great recipe.

So, what’s in yours?

Here’s to your success.