The Future of Digital Marketing (James Dooley Chats With Craig Campbell)

James Dooley: The future of digital marketing. Today I'm joined with Craig Campbell, and we're going to go through future trends and how we can future-proof what we do, not just with SEO but holistically with digital marketing.

Where do you see the trends moving towards at present in the AI era?

Craig Campbell: I personally think data is a big key part of it.

With AI, people have built their own scrapers and are utilising data, then retargeting people. SEO may or may not die, but I think a lot of people are asking where else they can get traffic from. Whether it is scraping, emailing people, retargeting people on Facebook or something else, I think things are becoming less reliant solely on organic traffic. Even yourself, probably subconsciously over the years, you have always been looking at other things, whether that is investing more in pay-per-click or doing lead generation. I know pay-per-click works for one of my ecom websites because I get a massive return on investment from it in a niche market. For people doing lead generation, if you can spend X and make Y back through data, retargeting or other channels, it is a smarter way to get multiple traffic sources. That is what we are all looking for now.

James Dooley: For sure.

Not many people know that the majority of my profit is made through PPC. I initially go into things with an organic SEO approach, but once I find winning campaigns, I double, triple and quadruple down on PPC budgets. If I can spend £10 and get £30 back, I am going to spend £10,000 a day if I can get £30,000 back. It has much more scalable potential. With SEO, it is hard to keep scaling across so many keyword variations. If a domain is known as the premium brand, it can be hard to rank organically for terms like cheap or affordable. With PPC, you can set up different ad groups and landing pages for everything and scoop up the whole market. I do not think enough people are doing paid ads, whether that is PPC or social media. Do you do much with Facebook ads, YouTube ads or other social media ads?

Craig Campbell: We try different things.

For one of my websites, the age demographic is 55 plus, so social media is not that great. We would love to do more TikTok because there is traffic there for certain demographics, but it depends on the niche and audience. Years ago, I used to tell people to do Quora ads for cheap traffic because fewer people were doing it then. Now everyone is jumping into Facebook and Google, so costs are rising. But as long as there is a return on investment, I do not care. If I spend £10,000 and get £20,000 back, my next question is what happens if I spend £20,000? SEO still matters, but you can get slapped around with it. Feeding the LLMs and adapting to AI search is just how things are evolving. You might not be getting huge clicks from LLMs right now, but you have to think about whether that traffic grows in two or three years. You need to look at any traffic source you can get your hands on, whether it is free, paid or holistic. Something else you mentioned before recording is email lists. People still are not building them properly, which is mad.

James Dooley: I think taking people offline into an email list is huge.

If you build everything on Twitter or Facebook, you are one bad move away from having the profile deleted. You do not truly own those platforms. But if you can get the email address, add people to a CRM and nurture them, you control that audience. Both of us are hungry for traffic. Once you have an email list, you can send out a podcast, product launch or Black Friday offer to 30,000 or 40,000 people straight away. You can generate sales from day one and drive viral traffic back through to your site.

Craig Campbell: Absolutely.

When I launch a YouTube video, one of the first things I do is use the assets I already have, whether that is social media, a mailing list, push notifications or something else. I do not see many people using push notifications anymore, even though they have been around for years. People do not realise the importance of that data. We are now in a market where data is money on the table. If you do not use it properly, you are missing out.

James Dooley: A massive one for me is branding.

Building a personal brand and a business brand is key. Trying to get a KGM ID or a knowledge panel matters because it can form part of the training data, especially within Gemini. If you can form part of the training data through a knowledge panel, it is one of the cheapest ways to get into the LLMs. Branding is now one of the only real digital moats because everyone can scale websites quickly, even if much of it is AI slop. If you add data, surveys and information gain, that is even better. For me, a personal brand and business brand are essential for the future of digital marketing. You have always been a massive advocate of this. You have grown the Craig Campbell brand to a huge level. How did you get into that early?

Craig Campbell: It was not some weird vision where I knew this was where things were going.

It was pure luck. I followed Matthew Woodward at the time when I had the agency doing client work. He was the affiliate guy building his personal brand, travelling the world and speaking at conferences. He was living the dream, while I was dealing with clients and struggling to scale the agency. There was a slow transition into making more money through affiliate work and moving away from clients. Matthew Woodward was a big inspiration for me. I wanted to speak at conferences, build a brand, do affiliate marketing and create more opportunities. It seemed like the right move at the right time. Once the brand started growing, opportunities came from it. You know this yourself with YouTube. People ask to work with you, invite you onto projects and bring business opportunities. That makes you double down on it even more. It has all worked quite naturally for me, and I am still hanging on.

James Dooley: Another massive one for the future of digital marketing is social media and cross-selling.

If you have a large following on Instagram, you can leverage that audience and push people towards TikTok, Twitter, Facebook or other platforms. You need to build across the board and cross-platform as much as possible. We have invested in a sports betting brand, and we are trying to move people offline from those platforms into Telegram and WhatsApp. That lets us send daily newsletters, daily horse racing tips and betting offers that drive users back to the site where we earn affiliate commission. That is the future of affiliate marketing. It is not just about ranking keywords. It is about getting traffic through to your affiliate sites from multiple sources. Anyone looking at the future of digital marketing needs to think holistically across more platforms.

Craig Campbell: Absolutely.

YouTube has been good for both of us. I do not do much on Twitter or LinkedIn, although I have a decent following on LinkedIn and know I should do more there. Going forward, you need to double down across all of those platforms and work them properly. YouTube has always been more favourable for me because I enjoy it more than writing tweets. But there is traffic in all of them. Anyone doing digital marketing needs to exploit every platform they can.

James Dooley: Anyone watching this, what do you think the future of digital marketing is?

Have we missed anything? Do you believe writing books to build authorship or podcasting like this is the future? Let us know in the comments. Craig Campbell, it has been an absolute pleasure.

Craig Campbell: Thank you.