Digital marketing pushed our focus to bottom funnel. Will AI push us back to the top?

This article originally appeared in a special CNP Lab Report titled, "Your digital place brand," published by City Nation Place. You can get a full copy of the report here: https://www.citynationplace.com/your-digital-place-brand

Place promotion organisations are often asked a simple question: what results did your marketing deliver?

The answers come in familiar forms. How many investment leads were generated. How many people relocated. How many visitors booked a trip. These are the numbers that appear in reports and justify budgets.

The challenge is that these outcomes prioritise the end of a decision process, whereas place marketing's strongest value comes much earlier. By the time a company contacts an investment promotion agency (IPA), or a skilled worker decides to move, much of the decision has already taken shape.

That creates a problem: organisations are measured at the moment they have the least influence over the decision itself.

The structural misunderstanding of digital marketing for place promotion is a big reason why. Over-optimization pushed marketing towards short-term attribution. That emphasis on one part of the journey has now left many place brands exposed as AI condenses research, comparison and action into fewer steps.

It raises a question: are IPAs and talent hubs truly influencing complex, long-term decisions, or merely facilitating those likely to happen anyway?

Why leads became the dominant metric

The focus on leads came from the rise of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) strategies and performance marketing. Digital tools made it easier to track clicks, form fills and enquiries, creating pressure to optimise towards direct outcomes.

That model works well for shorter sales cycles, larger budgets and high-volume sales teams. It also drives much of the B2B marketing advice found online. But location decisions are different. Companies and talent spend months or years forming opinions before engaging directly with an organisation.

The ability to measure leads created a tendency to value what was easiest to track. Brand marketing was de-emphasised, market preparation became secondary and short-term lead capture became the dominant way to show value.

The risk of continuing with that mindset

AI is bringing the awareness-consideration-conversion stages closer together. A single chat can reinforce perceptions, compare locations and suggest next steps. The point of influence, where your location earns its way onto the consideration list, is increasingly controlled by third-party tools drawing from everything they can find about your place.

When an AI assistant answers "where should we expand?" it synthesises from public perception, not from your lead-capture funnel. Places with weak brand presence are invisible at the exact moment a decision is forming.

If brand marketing is undernourished, consideration and conversion will weaken. People cannot choose you if they do not understand you, trust you or see you as relevant before they move to the next stage.

Websites and social media still matter, but they are now part of a wider discovery system rather than its centre.

What alternatives to measurement do we have today?

None of this means leads do not matter. They do. But they should sit within a broader measurement system, and their relationship with marketing success needs to be better defined.

That system can include perception monitoring through surveys, social listening and AI analysis. It can include brand lift indicators such as direct traffic, branded search growth and referral increases. Depending on scale, conversation share across media and social channels is another way to show awareness traction.

Deeper into decision-making, organisations should track inbound referrals, close rates and enquiry quality, all of which should improve through effective marketing. This requires cleaner CRM workflows that show how people move through the decision process, shifting from a leads-only view to one that includes reactivated leads and influenced opportunities.

As place brands focus on value over volume, improving how people perceive a location matters more than increasing raw lead numbers.

Many forces shaping long-cycle decisions – reputation, familiarity, perception – have never been perfectly measurable. That does not make them less valuable.

What you should be doing now

Place organisations need broader ways of thinking about marketing performance beyond lead generation.

Perception, visibility and engagement will become more important indicators alongside traditional enquiries as AI shapes how locations are discovered. We propose that "reputation" be considered a core KPI of investment promotion agencies, talent brands and any place organisation that does not currently treat it as one, going beyond the sales-oriented metrics that have long governed government decisions.

This changes what’s required for CRM and analytics systems that connect activity across longer decision cycles: how enquiries first discovered a location, how often they returned, where referrals originated and which channels influence higher-quality opportunities.

For many place brands, this requires a larger internal conversation about what marketing is capable of doing as audience behaviour changes: capture existing demand, shape future demand or both.