How to build a discovery strategy that works across every channel
24 July 2026
Discovery marketing dictates that brands need to constantly think cross-platform when forging a strategy that appeals both to humans and algorithms. But what are the crucial consideration points to consider to ensure that strategy accounts for today's ecosystem, where a consumer will zig-zag between those surfaces? Our VP of PR, Beth Nunnington, gives the answers you need to navigate this landscape.
Many "this channel doesn't work" conclusions can be reframed as: "We ran it once, under-resourced, without iterating creative or targeting, and called it after six weeks."
Before writing a channel off, or investing further energy and spend in it, start with audience insight. Tools like SparkToro help identify which social, AI and media platforms your audience actually uses, along with the topics and themes that resonate with them. Layer competitor insight on top. Which channels are your competitors investing in, what traction are they getting, and why aren't you seeing the same? That's usually your cue to test properly rather than walk away.
A channel is structurally wrong only when no amount of execution fixes the underlying problem. Either your audience simply doesn't make purchase decisions there, or the format is fundamentally mismatched with how your brand needs to be encountered. Poor execution has different symptoms. Think flat or declining results despite genuinely changing the inputs, multiple times.
There's one other question to ask yourself before you draw any conclusions. Are all your other channels saying something different to the one that's "not working"? Discovery only works when every channel carries a consistent message to help machine understanding. If you're not getting discovered, the problem might have nothing to do with the individual channel. It could be that nothing adds up because the brand is being represented differently everywhere.
Last-touch attribution makes every channel fight for credit, when what you actually care about happens across all of them.
The traditional customer funnel no longer exists, and AI search has complicated matters further. A last-click model can't see a customer who finds you on social, checks reviews, asks ChatGPT, searches your brand name and then converts. Crediting only the last step tells you almost nothing useful.
I always recommend that clients ask a bigger question instead: is the whole system getting more visible and more credible? In practice, that means measuring against the questions at the heart of our Discovery System at Journey Further:
As part of our Discovery System, we track each brand’s progress for each question and tie every score to what it means commercially.
It's also important to separate early indicators from lagging ones. Citations, branded search and accurate third-party descriptions can improve within weeks, but they don't necessarily turn into immediate revenue. Focus on the positive brand signals you're earning. Those signals can't be bought, and their impact compounds: more LLMs recommending your brand, greater awareness, and a higher likelihood of being chosen.
You measure the impact, not the click you'll never be able to measure. Word of mouth, peer recommendations and group chats are real ways people find brands. Ignoring them because they don't produce a trackable click just pushes budget toward channels that are easy to measure but often shrinking.
These harder-to-measure channels rarely show up in attribution, but they show up elsewhere: a rise in branded search with no paid or PR activity behind it, more direct traffic, repeat visits, and "how did you hear about us" answers that never match your analytics. If branded search jumps and nothing else explains it, that's word of mouth doing its job.
The wider data tells the same story. McKinsey's analysis found that a brand's own website typically accounts for just 5 to 10% of the sources AI search references. The rest comes from publishers, reviews, communities and user-generated content. In other words, the places shaping whether your brand gets recommended are overwhelmingly the ones you can't track.
I can't draw a straight line from a WhatsApp group to a sale, but I can show you the brand is getting found in places that don't produce a click, and I can show demand growing as a result.
In practice, the move is to split the roadmap into activity that can move the needle quickly and activity that leads to compounding growth over time. And you need to be explicit that you're running both simultaneously, rather than asking stakeholders to choose between them.
Quick wins often come from high-velocity PR moments, amplifying earned coverage through paid social, or fixing fast technical issues. The longer-build work runs underneath, through activity like maintaining a steady drumbeat of quality long-form content on your website, adopting a holistic search approach that brings higher ROAS, or consistently ensuring your product information is up to date on Amazon.
What changes the conversation with clients is giving them something credible to report upward in the meantime. We know earned media can be picked up by LLMs within hours or days rather than weeks, which makes reactive PR a genuine short-term lever for brands that want to show improved AI visibility while the slower work beds in.
Organic media has never been, and never will be a ‘quick fix,’ but I can confidently say that when executed correctly like our PR and content work with Adobe Acrobat, you will see compounding and sustainable growth that will future proof your business in a way that paid media can’t. If you switched paid off today, would all your brand traffic instantly disappear? If so, you haven’t invested enough into organic brand building.
Stop thinking in channels (aka silos) and start with the problem and the goal. As Forrester reported in a recent survey, it’s an issue across the industry with 70% of marketing decision makers surveyed saying collaboration across teams was one of their top challenges when adopting a more agile marketing approach.
And that’s the same for a lot of organic specialists because the instinct is to treat organic as your go-to and bolt other channels around it. Instead, ask what's actually holding the brand back. Is it not showing up, not being understood, or showing up but not converting? Then work out which channels fix that, no matter who owns them.
The first thing we do at Journey Further is establish whether your brand is being found, understood and chosen: whether it's currently visible, accurately represented, and credibly validated by third parties across search, AI answers, social, review sites and community spaces, and where it's absent or inconsistent.
Almost nobody has done this properly. It immediately drags you out of thinking in rankings and into the wider picture, because you'll see the publications, creators and sources shaping how people understand your category, none of which you can control through SEO alone.
The same strong third-party coverage that builds traditional SEO authority is also what gets cited by LLMs and fuels word-of-mouth credibility. Earned media and digital PR feed multiple discovery surfaces simultaneously, which makes it one of the most efficient places to start.
You don't need to master every channel. You need enough of an understanding to ask the right questions of the people who do. Then own the one thing that runs underneath all of them: the credibility of your brand.
How do you distinguish between a channel that's definitively wrong for a brand versus one that's just being executed poorly?
Many "this channel doesn't work" conclusions can be reframed as: "We ran it once, under-resourced, without iterating creative or targeting, and called it after six weeks."
Before writing a channel off, or investing further energy and spend in it, start with audience insight. Tools like SparkToro help identify which social, AI and media platforms your audience actually uses, along with the topics and themes that resonate with them. Layer competitor insight on top. Which channels are your competitors investing in, what traction are they getting, and why aren't you seeing the same? That's usually your cue to test properly rather than walk away.
A channel is structurally wrong only when no amount of execution fixes the underlying problem. Either your audience simply doesn't make purchase decisions there, or the format is fundamentally mismatched with how your brand needs to be encountered. Poor execution has different symptoms. Think flat or declining results despite genuinely changing the inputs, multiple times.
There's one other question to ask yourself before you draw any conclusions. Are all your other channels saying something different to the one that's "not working"? Discovery only works when every channel carries a consistent message to help machine understanding. If you're not getting discovered, the problem might have nothing to do with the individual channel. It could be that nothing adds up because the brand is being represented differently everywhere.
How do you recommend measuring a discovery approach when many brands still place huge weight on single-channel attribution?
Last-touch attribution makes every channel fight for credit, when what you actually care about happens across all of them.
The traditional customer funnel no longer exists, and AI search has complicated matters further. A last-click model can't see a customer who finds you on social, checks reviews, asks ChatGPT, searches your brand name and then converts. Crediting only the last step tells you almost nothing useful.
I always recommend that clients ask a bigger question instead: is the whole system getting more visible and more credible? In practice, that means measuring against the questions at the heart of our Discovery System at Journey Further:
- Is your brand being found, is it understood, and is it being chosen?
- Are you showing up where people look?
- Are you being described correctly, and…
- Is that turning into demand?
As part of our Discovery System, we track each brand’s progress for each question and tie every score to what it means commercially.
It's also important to separate early indicators from lagging ones. Citations, branded search and accurate third-party descriptions can improve within weeks, but they don't necessarily turn into immediate revenue. Focus on the positive brand signals you're earning. Those signals can't be bought, and their impact compounds: more LLMs recommending your brand, greater awareness, and a higher likelihood of being chosen.
How do you account for channels that are harder to measure (word of mouth, WhatsApp communities, private groups)?
You measure the impact, not the click you'll never be able to measure. Word of mouth, peer recommendations and group chats are real ways people find brands. Ignoring them because they don't produce a trackable click just pushes budget toward channels that are easy to measure but often shrinking.
These harder-to-measure channels rarely show up in attribution, but they show up elsewhere: a rise in branded search with no paid or PR activity behind it, more direct traffic, repeat visits, and "how did you hear about us" answers that never match your analytics. If branded search jumps and nothing else explains it, that's word of mouth doing its job.
The wider data tells the same story. McKinsey's analysis found that a brand's own website typically accounts for just 5 to 10% of the sources AI search references. The rest comes from publishers, reviews, communities and user-generated content. In other words, the places shaping whether your brand gets recommended are overwhelmingly the ones you can't track.
I can't draw a straight line from a WhatsApp group to a sale, but I can show you the brand is getting found in places that don't produce a click, and I can show demand growing as a result.
What would you say to a client under pressure to deliver growth quickly when you know organic tactics take time?
In practice, the move is to split the roadmap into activity that can move the needle quickly and activity that leads to compounding growth over time. And you need to be explicit that you're running both simultaneously, rather than asking stakeholders to choose between them.
Quick wins often come from high-velocity PR moments, amplifying earned coverage through paid social, or fixing fast technical issues. The longer-build work runs underneath, through activity like maintaining a steady drumbeat of quality long-form content on your website, adopting a holistic search approach that brings higher ROAS, or consistently ensuring your product information is up to date on Amazon.
What changes the conversation with clients is giving them something credible to report upward in the meantime. We know earned media can be picked up by LLMs within hours or days rather than weeks, which makes reactive PR a genuine short-term lever for brands that want to show improved AI visibility while the slower work beds in.
Organic media has never been, and never will be a ‘quick fix,’ but I can confidently say that when executed correctly like our PR and content work with Adobe Acrobat, you will see compounding and sustainable growth that will future proof your business in a way that paid media can’t. If you switched paid off today, would all your brand traffic instantly disappear? If so, you haven’t invested enough into organic brand building.
What's your biggest piece of advice for organic specialists who don't know where to start with a wider discovery strategy?
Stop thinking in channels (aka silos) and start with the problem and the goal. As Forrester reported in a recent survey, it’s an issue across the industry with 70% of marketing decision makers surveyed saying collaboration across teams was one of their top challenges when adopting a more agile marketing approach.
And that’s the same for a lot of organic specialists because the instinct is to treat organic as your go-to and bolt other channels around it. Instead, ask what's actually holding the brand back. Is it not showing up, not being understood, or showing up but not converting? Then work out which channels fix that, no matter who owns them.
The first thing we do at Journey Further is establish whether your brand is being found, understood and chosen: whether it's currently visible, accurately represented, and credibly validated by third parties across search, AI answers, social, review sites and community spaces, and where it's absent or inconsistent.
Almost nobody has done this properly. It immediately drags you out of thinking in rankings and into the wider picture, because you'll see the publications, creators and sources shaping how people understand your category, none of which you can control through SEO alone.
The same strong third-party coverage that builds traditional SEO authority is also what gets cited by LLMs and fuels word-of-mouth credibility. Earned media and digital PR feed multiple discovery surfaces simultaneously, which makes it one of the most efficient places to start.
You don't need to master every channel. You need enough of an understanding to ask the right questions of the people who do. Then own the one thing that runs underneath all of them: the credibility of your brand.
Related Insights
Unlearning marketing’s biggest myths
What is discovery marketing?
Discovery Diaries: Robin Skidmore
How to build a strategy where consistency meets creativity
Discovery Diaries: Lydia Hinchliff
