Scaling Startups with Vibe Marketing
From personal and painful experience as the founder of ArtRatio, I admit that the journey from idea to a profitable business has often been a battle. Sometimes it feels like you are trying to push a big, stubborn elephant up a hill.
You talk to customers, you build prototypes, you demo at trade fairs, you talk to customers, you request feedback; only to receive either stone-cold silence, or a revenue graph that peaks during marketing events but flatlines after that.
As a result, cashflow suffers, debt grows, and morale reaches breaking point. Sometimes you wonder whether your emails are getting through to customers at all.
For startups, consistent demand (and consistent revenue) are basically the ‘Holy Grail’.
To achieve both, startup founders now have the option to shift from a traditional research-heavy content marketing strategy to an agile and iterative, AI-assisted approach.
This is ‘Vibe Marketing’.
Marketing vs. Sales: What’s the Difference?
First of all, let’s take a step back and examine both sides of the coin, one that is called ‘Marketing’, and the other that is called ‘Sales’. Often these terms are used interchangeably, with confusing results.
Marketing: Getting Customers ‘Into Your Shop’
Imagine you have a physical retail outlet in a busy city centre. Everything you do to get customers to come ‘to your shop’ is Marketing. This includes social media presence, word of mouth, Google Maps, and banner ads on lamp posts.
All of this is marketing.
As soon as your customer steps into your shop, we are in ‘Sales’ territory.
Marketing normally targets many customers at a time so, by definition, it is a “1-to-many” activity. Marketing creates opportunities, generates leads, and offers a ‘dream’.
Sometimes, this dream is realistic; sometimes it is overinflated and even ridiculed by the product development team who are tasked with building it.
Sales: Whatever happens ‘in the shop’
A customer invoice has the details of only one customer on it, which means that, by definition, sales is a “1-to-1” activity.
Whenever a customer asks for a different coloured jacket or larger shoes, this is 1:1 personalised customer service, a sales-related activity. When you offer a discount or a customer loyalty programme, this is sales-oriented customer engagement.
Sales converts each lead into a customer (hopefully), creating revenue, and turning dreams into a tangible reality, with concrete pricing, delivery terms and opportunities to up-sell or cross-sell.
In other words:
For a startup to survive then, marketing must create a steady stream of leads walking through that door so that sales can consistently close those deals.
Unfortunately, this is easier said than done. The problem here is generating consistent leads that have a commercial intent.
Not just window shoppers.
I am talking about real customers with a real and immediate problem that needs solving.
Vibe Coding to Vibe Marketing
To understand ‘Vibe Marketing’, we must first understand its predecessor, ‘Vibe Coding’.
Vibe Coding
Vibe Coding is the practice of building software by giving natural language instructions to an AI assistant rather than manually writing every line of code.
Instead of worrying about syntax, an app developer might type in the following prompt to an AI assistant, such as Claude or Gemini:
“Build me a gaming app for 10-16 year olds with a gothic feel”
The AI assistant would handle the technical heavy lifting and generate the code for the app.
The app developer can then test the app, and iterate repeatedly with follow-up prompts such as:
“Make the app more intuitive”
Or
“Add 3 levels of difficulty”
Each time, the AI assistant is iterating a new version of the app, the founder is evaluating the result, and perhaps getting feedback from Beta Testers.
Vibe Marketing
‘Vibe Marketing’ applies this same philosophy to content generation.
In this case, we feed AI assistants with natural language prompts to generate marketing content, for example copy for a web article, a marketing campaign or a banner ad for a trade fair.
Example prompts might include:
“Build me a technical article for architects working on green buildings”
followed by:
“Use simpler language”
followed by:
“Add five reputable links”
Each time, the founder evaluates and iterates.
As many times as needed.
The AI Advantage: Flexible, Fast, Low-Cost
Just as Vibe Coding allows a single person to build complex apps at speed, Vibe Marketing allows startups to iterate through versions of marketing copy, testing out the messaging until the ‘tone’ (the vibe) is just right.
This approach has the following advantages:
- Flexible: You can easily pivot your tone or target audience
- Fast: You can go from idea to published article in minutes, not days
- Low-Cost: You can reduce the need for expensive external copywriters
The Holy Grail
My own experience is with ArtRatio, a company specializing in the sustainable display and conservation of art & luxury collections.
Despite having the good fortune to have worked with prestigious clients like Harvard University and Sotheby’s Institute, we have always faced the hurdle of a lack in consistent demand.
ArtRatio’s revenue was consequently volatile: high one month, non-existent the next.
In the startup world, consistent demand is the ‘Holy Grail’ because it removes this volatility. It stabilises cash flow.
To achieve it though, a business must aim to rank for search terms that have steady, year-round volume.
Identifying Keywords with Consistent Demand
So, how do you generate this consistent demand?
In short, you must own your Niche.
In the world of Vibe Marketing, your niche is defined as the set of all your ranking keywords, i.e. the search terms for which your website is ranked on a Google search results page.
Vibe Marketing allows you to target high-volume terms, like:
“how to lose weight”
At the time of writing, this term is searched in Google approximately 118k times per month in the US alone (according to Ahrefs, a popular digital marketing tool).
The demand for this keyword has been consistent going all the way back to 2015. Apparently, people have been trying to lose weight for a long time.
Those 118k searches result in 86K clicks, giving a Clicks Per Search (CPS) metric of 0.73, or 73%.
More important is the Cost per Click (CPC) at $0.80, the average amount that advertisers are willing to pay per click to appear in sponsored slots on Google Search.
Other keywords with consistent demand include:
“how to write a resume”
This keyword has 80k searches per month in the US, with $1.40 CPC and a CPS of 1.08. Clearly a very lucrative keyword, inciting great interest from advertisers.
Finally we have the keyword:
“how to bake a potato”
This search term has 36k searches per month in the US at the time of writing, but a CPC of only $0.02, indicating that this is not considered a commercially- relevant keyword by advertisers.
You may have noticed that all three keywords are considered ‘hard’ or ‘very hard’ to rank for in Google.
I never said this was going to be easy.
Positioning and Revenue
In 2026, the 1st position spot on Google search results captures approx 40% of all clicks. This image shows the remaining click distribution:
If you have a 1% conversion rate (i.e. 1% of leads actually buy something) and an average customer spend of €10 per month, the above 3 keywords would potentially generate revenue of close to €9k per month.
Instead of a monthly revenue chart that looks like this:
It would look more like this:
Finally, to understand your niche in more detail, look at these three metrics:
- Demand for your niche: This is calculated by multiplying your ranking keywords by their Search Volume (per keyword)
- Lucrativeness of your niche: Calculated by multiplying your keywords by the Cost Per Click (CPC) for each keyword.
- Difficulty of your niche: Calculated by multiplying your keywords by Keyword Difficulty, per keyword.
Avoid ‘AutoPilot’ SEO Tools
While AI is powerful, “AutoPilot” SEO tools that blindly generate articles (and backlinks) are a tempting but dangerous trap.
Google rewards EEAT: Expertise, Experience, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness, so to avoid getting ignored (or worse, penalised) by Google, we recommend the following tips:
- Fact-check and revise everything the AI assistant produces
- Add your own ‘voice’ to ensure the content doesn’t feel robotic
- Tune your content to the emotional state (the ‘vibe’) you want to offer your customers
Think of your AI Assistant as a super-super-smart 12 year old child. Right now, AI has about that level of maturity.
Would you give Admin rights to a 12 year old child?
Your Path to Consistent Revenue
If your goal is to earn consistent revenue from your digital property (website, app or social media page), you no longer need to rely just on manual content creation.
You now have the option to leverage AI-assistants using a more agile and iterative approach, which allows you to rank for the terms your customers are consistently searching for every month.
By combining the speed of AI with your unique founder’s voice and your accumulated expertise, you can transform your startup into a consistent, revenue -generating machine.
