How to Win and Manage Enterprise Clients with Alex Birkett

Hello, hello, hello everyone and welcome back to Agency Journey. I'm your host, Kuba Gryjcar and with me on the call is Alex Burkhet, co founder at Omniscient Digital, an organic growth agency that partners with B2B brands. Alex, how are you doing today?

Hello, hello and thank you for having me. I'm doing well. Sleepy for no apparent reason. I think as I've gotten older it's like you sleep too much, you sleep too little, you eat too much, you eat too little. It's a very fickle relationship. So. But I'm doing okay. I've got a coffee in me and it's a sunny day in New York City, so I'm doing well.

New York City, that's nice. I mentioned a few times on the pod that I've never been and always wanted to go, so I'm making more friends in New York. One of these days it's going to happen. On the subject of getting older, are you already seeing those, those memes where it's like a spinning wheel every time you wake up and it's like you select what part of your body is going to hurt, but half of the feels are everything.

Yeah, I see all of those, the 30 plus memes now and I'm like, I relate to all of these. I also realized that like my cultural understanding is, is slipping. I used to be like keyed into like all things new and hip and whatever. And I do try to keep up to an extent. Like I've got a Gen Z sister. But yeah, I was at a baseball game a couple days ago and everybody was doing this dance. Like, you know, they have the jumbotron and like they pan out to like different people in the crowd and there was a song and everybody knew the same dance. And my buddy, who's the same age, we're like young, 30s, 32ish. He's like, how does everybody know what this is? And I was like, my friend, this means that we're not, we're, we're not hip anymore. So we, we've gotta, you know, Google this stuff now.

Yeah, yeah. I still, I, I, I never learned how to do the floss. I think I stopped at like YMCA and the Mac arena for those, you know, like those I can do on a whim. All the rest, I think it was.

The soldier boy was the last one that I remember doing culturally that everybody did together. Maybe Gangnam style, I don't know.

Oh, Gangnam, yeah. That one I would recognize, not so much be able to do anyway. We're on Agency Journey. We're about to talk a little bit, well, actually a lottl bit about your agency experience and your agency. And I'm gonna give you like a whole segment to introduce yourself properly, talk about your agency in just a second here. But first, because our audience is hungry for knowledge, hungry for insights, I thought we would start with the traditional Agency Journey question, and I think you may have already heard it before. If not, well, then I guess I'll just find out your answer on the call live. Alex, what is your number one tip for agency operators?

Yeah, it's funny you asked this because we said, you know, I listened to the wrong podcast to prep for this. So I actually did not prepare for this question. So top of the dome, top of the brain Differentiate why you? You know, I think if you drill down into that question, it answers a lot more. It solves a lot more problems than just the positioning on your website. It helps solve, you know, services, product packaging, pricing, positioning, geographic, you know, focus. There's a million options for services. It's a competitive space almost no matter what you do. So why you?

Right. I love that tip and I would love to know more about your ways of differentiating. So you're saying that's something that agency operators should do. Can you share, again, top of the dome, or from anywhere else, what kind of tips you would share for how to differentiate? Especially some of the agency spaces can seem a little bit commoditized. So what's the key here?

I think you have to understand how the decision making process is made in purchasing whatever services you offer. And, you know, you could cut this a million different ways where you can compete on different edges. So the first obvious thing people decide on is price. So if you are the most affordable option in comparison to other options, then that's obviously a differentiator, right? Do you want to compete for price? Is that the right way to do things? Like, I would argue, probably not. We've chosen not to do that. There's, you know, like, culture fit or like, do you enjoy working with this person? And, and that's actually a factor, right? Like you're, you're going to be spending a lot of time working with this agency. So do they seem like they would be interesting to have weekly calls with? Do they seem like they're smart, kind, you know, good, strategic partners? And the way that we do that is, is not just like messaging on our website, although we do hope to like stamp our personality across all the copywriting messaging we do. That's where Things like the podcast come in. That's where things like the newsletter that I write every week comes in. Especially these episodes that we call kitchen side on our podcast because it's just the three founders kind of talking shop, talking about the behind the scenes conversations and issues of the day. And we've heard from prospects and clients that they listen to these and they get a sense of what it's like to work with us. They feel like they're in the meeting room with us. We've actually heard that from people and hiring talent, like people say the same thing. They're like, oh, I understand, like what you guys are all about. And even to the individual person, like what your mental models are.

Yeah.

You know, there's a lot of ways to differentiate, I think, you know, which services which, which, like what your, I guess, promise or value proposition is when it comes to other, you know, like you said, organic growth agency, which kind of fits into these buckets of like SEO or content marketing. And if you position against content marketing agencies, what we've done is very deliberately be more mathematical and analytical. So we're very much into attributable revenue, tying efforts back to attributable results. So just building out some analytical capabilities is a big differentiator there. But it may not be if you're doing performance marketing. Right. So it's very context dependent.

A lot of interesting threads to pull on here. I think this is a perfect segue. Let's take that box here of you talking a little bit more about omniscient digital in a little bit more detail what you do and kind of how you've chosen to differentiate yourselves. I'm particularly curious about the culture, tone of voice, piece of it, what you've chosen, how you've arrived at it. Maybe because it's just my own professional curiosity. I have a copywriter background, you might say, so I'm always curious about these types of things. But yeah, tell the audience a little bit more. For those that never heard of omniscient yet.

Yeah. So omniscient in some ways what we do is banal. Right. We build SEO programs primarily for B2B brands. We say we work with ambitious B2B brands so they kind of span company size. The thing they have in common is that they're not dipping their toes, they're not kind of testing content and SEO. They really believe in a long term vision and they want to be like a category leader. So we work with enterprises at the scale of say SAP, Adobe Loom, Slash, Atlassian, and then earlier stage startups, I think the earliest we go is probably around like if they've raised a seed, significant seed, but they have big ambitions and they've got a lot of space in front of them and we build out like a comprehensive program. So we do the SEO, the consulting, audits, research, roadmap, building, technical SEO. But then we also have an editorial team and we do content production. So multi format, typically blog posts, but also landing pages, programmatic enablement, ebooks, white papers, original research, and then digital PR as well. So kind of everything under this like organic marketing, organic content umbrella. We don't do paid. The analytics we do tends to be just in service of the organic programs that we're building. So we're not, you know, doing major web redesigns or anything like that, really just building growth focused programs.

Okay, gotcha. Two ways I want to go from here, but I'll start with, and this is fairly specific, but I'm imagining like some of the listeners of this podcast and this is something that I'm also like personally curious about as well. You mentioned big enterprise clients. So like imagine the portion of the audience here that is working with such large clients. From your experience, do you have advice on working with them? What works, what doesn't, what's been key to, you know, winning these accounts and then keeping them and you know, not getting caught in their red tape, for example.

Hmm. Well, the red tape's the interesting part. So I think you actually have to think really, truly, do you know how to serve these, these types of corporations? Because the challenges are very different. So with an early stage startup, I believe that strategy is very, very difficult in that the opportunity costs are very high and the resource constraints are also very high. So you don't have as much money, you don't have the strength and advantages. So let's just take for example HubSpot. I used to work at HubSpot. HubSpot is a public company with an amazing product line. Multiple products, multiple users, tons of customers. They have a content team of like, I don't even know how, how many it is now, but I would guess in the dozens. They've got an SEO team, they've got international, they've got a domain rating of like a million. Right? So you can publish and just rank the next day. Their strategic challenges are very different than a company who is starting out potentially. Let's say they're like some sort of an AI product. Maybe they make like AI design and user experience tools. Right? User experience design tools with AI infused. They just raised a seed. They've got 10 employees total, maybe one marketer. You know, it's like they, they really have to be judicious about what, what topics they choose to go after, what, what their path is. Because if they waste any effort, that's like a big cost to them. Whereas like you can kind of afford to waste more or experiment more or have small failures at the high scale. So when you work with enterprises, a lot more of the challenge is actually in getting things done, getting things pushed through, understanding the multiple layers of approval, the stakeholders and even the politics involved. So you'll often have, even on sales calls you'll have four or five different people, possibly from different teams, understanding how maybe they have conflicting goals, maybe they have composite goals that they work together from, but maybe they have different angles. So you have an editorial or a PR or a brand person on a call with an SEO or website manager or maybe a technical or performance marketing person. Maybe their goals are the same, but the way they look at things is different. So it's really like, you know, do you have experience managing all of those different stakeholders and do you have the confidence that you can take an idea or an action or experiment a proposal and get it through this kind of multi, layered, multiphase gated system? So I actually think it's like kind of difficult if you've never done that before. And we all came from big companies like we, we were, you know, in leadership at companies like HubSpot and Shopify Workado. So we'd kind of seen how the system works internally. So we had a little bit of a experiential background there. Yeah.

Okay. So I would love.

Sorry. Winning those deals is a totally different. You asked that question too. That's a totally different thing.

Yeah, yeah. And I think I would love to hear more about it. Like, this has sparked my curiosity in a big way. But you talked about managing stakeholders and I would love for you to take me deeper into this. Here's what I'm curious about. Like what works when, you know, a partnership with an enterprise client might be, you know, stalling. Right. Because there's, there's a bunch of things you can do. I imagine there's like documentation you have shared. I imagine you have check in calls, I imagine you're exchanging emails. Do you have any like, you know, judo moves here? Like a type of email that usually unblocks something or a type of, you know, you grab somebody else for a call? I'm guessing here because I don't have that experience. But what have you Found, you know, for, for anybody listening who's like experiencing stalled deals, not deals, stalled partnerships like that. I mean, you know, getting caught in that red tape. Can you give me some detail or like share some tactics or moves that, that work here?

Yeah, I'm. I'll give you the hacks or judo moves, but I'll also give you the politically correct answer first, which is actually important. So it's important to have a standardized process that you can explain and visualize. And then it's important to have a process of iterating from that. So our director of editorial is very good at that. He's Samuel Lund. He's got a Six Sigma green bell. And all of our editorial processes are super ironed out. They're visualized. It's all kind of automated within airtable. And then he's got this process. It's, you know, the five whys. So if something is getting bottlenecked and weighed down, we just start to ask, like, why? Like, what's the, what's the problem? Until we drill down to the root cause and then we experiment to fix that. So that's the unsexy but actually true answer. And then a couple hacks. So one. One thing that I like is, it's. It's like Occam's razor. I actually think you and I met because I shared some midwit meme. Do you remember this?

Yes, I have seen that one. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that one always hits.

Yeah, like the really, like low IQ and the really high IQ person. It's just this really simple Occam's razor. Like, it's almost so silly, but it's like the right thing to do. And then in the middle, everything's so complex. You know, I'm explaining process and five wise and all of this. I had dinner with a sort of competitor friend, but a competitor. And I was like, how do you get people to do things right? Like, you don't do content production. You don't manage the execution. So like, how do you facilitate that and make sure that people actually get things done on, on the client side? And he's like, well, if they're not doing it, I just call their boss and I just, I just tell their boss that they're not doing it. So he's like, I just go behind the scenes and I tell their boss. I'm like, hey, your, your person here. John's not doing, doing his stuff. So there's really simple ways that you can sort of like incentivize. And the deeper thing there is like, you have to understand people's incentives and how power structures work within the company, how things actually get done, who pulls the levers, and then another thing. So this is more something I learned at HubSpot. But like, when you're building ambitious long term programs, there's always going to be a stage of stasis in the beginning where it feels like you're plateauing because SEO specifically is very much like investing in that. Like the early days, maybe you don't have that much money, the compound returns aren't coming. So like you don't have this massive hockey stick. It kind of comes later. And then things start to compound on each other. But people get anxious, especially executives. They're like, where are the results? So I like to do feedback loops, close the loop, right? So if you can like front load any sort of momentum or any sort of small wins and say, even if it's vanity, right. We, we really care about revenue and customers. But even if there's sort of vanity metrics that are moving, oh, hey, we published this page and wow, after one week it's already ranking on page two. That's cool. No traffic's coming in, no conversions. But like, you can point and especially if you give credit to the person who even just press publish, they didn't even have to do much of the work like on that side because then they get that little dopamine hit and they're like, wow, there's some momentum here. Or like, hey, we built 10 links. Or like, what, whatever, like small wins. So it's like I need like a framework for this, like a win ladder or something like that. But you ladder up into these very ambitious longer term programs by, by sort of communicating and giving credit for all the small wins along the way.

Yeah, yeah. People talk about the snowball effect, right? And the snowball starts small, but you got to start rolling it somewhere. That's so funny. Actually, our CEO Gray just posted about this on LinkedIn the other day where it's like, you know, the remote context kind of the number one thing. Maybe not the number one thing, but one of the top things that remote companies are missing is actually creating momentum, and that is through celebrating wins. And that's not, not super easy in a remote context. But like it is, it is true. Like however much you can do in that respect, it can only help build momentum. That's cool. And I'm really glad we got into some of the judo moves and the hacks here because I think, you know, the audience listening to Agency Journey, they Do like something that's immediately applicable. So now we had a pin put in that. Let's unpin it. Winning kind of these big clients. Because I like as you're talking I'm collecting more and more questions to dive into a little bit later. But we, but I am curious about like winning these big accounts. Again, similar question to the previous one. What works here? What's the general philosophy? And then what are some moves that you've seen work?

Okay, so this is kind of a frustrating answer because this is also a little bit of a snowball effect. It's like a chicken and egg problem. So actually when we were first starting out, one benefit that we had was that we all worked at large B2B brands. So we had kind of a network of other executives who maybe went on to other companies. That was a huge advantage for us and they had already trusted our experience at those companies because they had worked with us. But one thing I learned is that people at enterprises are risk averse. So if you haven't worked with a similar company like them, they're unlikely to work with you all things equal. And you know, us being a maybe smaller agency is also sometimes a disadvantage. But we talked to a guy who we actually did a small project with them, so we actually did close them. But they are an enterprise software company. Not like the biggest like a Salesforce or something like that. But we were at a conference and you know, after like happy hour after a couple peers, we're like, hey man, why didn't we, you know, why did you choose not to do a long term engagement with us? And he's like, honestly, the CEO said, you know, like basically you didn't have a Salesforce logo on your, on your website, right? It's like because we hadn't worked with all of those big brands, there was some inherent like hesitation around working with us. Um, so it's a frustrating thing because to work with maybe enterprises you have to have had worked with enterprises. And obviously there's always a starting point. So I think if you can ladder up, you know, some of the case studies that we got early on really helped us. Jasper was probably one of the breakthroughs. They were not an enterprise. They were actually extremely early stage to the point they were actually called something different. They were called like conversion AI. Then they changed to Jarvis and then they got like a cease and desist and, and then you know, they were so early on that we, we helped stand up their, their blog and started from scratch. But the case study was impressive enough and they Grew into a point where people know them, right? They're, they're a well known brand name now. So that started attracting other large brands, maybe small public brands later. Stage growth scale ups, you know, and you close more of those, you get more of those logos and then you get a big public company and then that big public company turns into more and it just sort of snowballs up. Now a more tactical component is this is sort of the trade off you have to think about is if you work with enterprise brands there's maybe more security involved in that. It typically is longer contracts, they're a little bit less budget conscious, but there's still headaches, especially in the procurement process. So if I work with a series A startup, you know, I can talk to the founder and they'll close, you know, a week after we shake hands and say this is, you know, like let's do this. Whereas like you shake hands with you know, somebody at an enterprise and you've got to go through procurement and legal and security and like this maybe months long process and then you're arguing about net 60 versus net 30 terms and it's just like, you know, it's, it's kind of like choose your, your suffering, right? It's like there's always going to be problems, there's always going to be trade offs. So you know, whether it's startups and like the inherent fickleness and capriciousness of working with startups, maybe they change the budget or pivot their strategy versus like maybe the more red taped procurement heavy bureaucracy of enterprises, you just sort of choose what you want to, what you want to have to deal with.

Yeah, yeah. So that goes into a lot of the nitty gritty of working with these enterprises and I'm happy about that. I'm wondering also about the sales process itself and what are some of the plays here that you've seen work? Because there's a bunch of different things you can do, right? Free console, there's an audit here, there's a test project. Some people even do an initial piece of content for free as a taster to try and win these accounts. So what's worked in your case?

Yeah, we don't really do the taster, we'll do during the opportunity analysis, just a brief landscape check to see if there is or what opportunity there may be in search. Typically they have employees internally that have pursued this. They're, they're kind of like actively seeking somebody. So they've already mapped out some opportunity and if it's a public company, they have growth targets and this program has to facilitate those from, from their team.

Right?

Yeah. So what lessons have I learned? One thing recently that I've learned is that having multiple people from my team involved in the sales process helps a lot with these deals versus startups, where it's a lot more straightforward and simple. And there may be used to dealing with smaller teams, but I think enterprises are keyed in on the fact that maybe, you know, I'm the founder, so like, yeah, I'm going to be involved probably in some of these bigger deals, but I'm not going to be the main kind of point of contact in the account manager. And they want to meet that account manager. So we've started to bring in the strategy team into sales calls, especially with larger deals. That was a learning of mine. Yeah, it's sort of a trade off, right? Like with the, the whole sample and taster. Like I actually, I have a mentor of mine, I shouldn't say which company, but anyway, he's helped us work with some larger brands and one thing that he told me was you're giving them way too much, like in the first slide deck, like you're, you're giving them an abundance of information which causes like, information overload. You know, we have cognitive burden. It's hard to like parse out what's important and what's not if you give them kind of every little thing. And then he's like, you got to tease it a little bit, right? Like maybe say, hey, here's where you are in relation to your top five competitors, but don't give them a list of keywords right away. Right? Like that's for second convo, that's for fourth convo. That's for like, you know, maybe later in the process. So I, I've actually learned conversely to sort of pull back and that's across the board. That's not just enterprises, but I think it depends where they're at in the buying process. And I like to index. I'm like, are you like, very serious about SEO as a channel and you're just choosing the right partner? Are you thinking about whether to invest in SEO or content? Are you thinking about, you know, where do you want to put your dollars pay partnerships? Like, you know, that's a totally different conversation than if you're just choosing among the top five. And like, you know, we're just kind of competing to be the best person there. So you got to think about like, where they're at in the journey.

Gotcha, gotcha. And you Mentioned one more thing. You talked about security that, you know, these enterprise accounts are a little bit more particular about, you know, the details. I do wonder, and this kind of goes in the direction of AI, although I don't want to, like, I'm trying to not do the cliche thing of, you know, SEO versus AI, where's that going? We've been there, right? And maybe the conversation will take us there anyway. But I wonder if there's any particular guidelines or if you've seen that if it's happening yet where it's like the, the client might say, you know, that they, I don't know, they want content at scale, they don't particularly mind if AI is used. Or on the other hand, they say, you know, it needs to be all, you know, organic, kind of handcrafted, crafted from the minds of humans. Like, is that something that's happening right now? I'm just guessing here, but I wonder what the landscape is like.

Yes and no. The conversation moves so fast and it's changed, it changes in tenor every few months depending on what OpenAI has released that month. So last year, yeah, it's, it's, it's very confusing to be an SEO right now. Last year I would say a lot of companies were trying to ask that we do use AI and they were trying to lower the cost of production, assuming that there was some sort of a free lunch or arbitrage opportunity to say, hey, could we produce twice as much for half the cost? And like, obviously, like, if you mathematically work that out on a spreadsheet, it makes sense. So like I said, I would fault nobody for thinking that way. I would probably think that way too. Obviously there's a risk incurred, right, if the content quality is bad and you spread yourself too thin. We've seen a bunch of these case studies where brands will produce thousands and thousands of generic shallow content traffic will spike and then it'll drop precipitously. So I think larger brands have seen some of those now. And specifically you have to be more risk averse, like the larger company you are, if you're a public company, you have shareholders like you have, you have a lot of people who have a stake in your company. And, and the upside is lower on, on risk taking the downsides higher. Sort of expected value, game theory, calculus, right? And then earlier stage, you know, you, you take big risk. Starting a company alone is a big risk. You're, you're hoping for a home run and maybe you can take some of those, those bets because the downside is you know, you can't lose much if you don't have much to begin with.

Right?

I'm digressing. Nowadays it. The, The. The conversation almost flipped 180. So now people are like, I hope you're not using AI, Right? Are you using humans? Like, how are you using AI? I think it's actually getting a little more intelligent in some ways. There was a pendulum that slipped all the way back to the other side where they didn't want AI. And now I would say it's. It's hitting the point where they're like, hey, we use it a little bit, right? Like, we use it to, you know, ideate different titles or, you know, repurpose content for our social feeds or something like that. I'm curious how. How y' all are using it. And then I explain, you know, we use it as part of the research and, you know, sort of synthesizing and grouping keywords. We use it for ideation and maybe polishing an essay, but we don't use it to. To generate the ideas and the content itself. And then the. Yeah, the conversation kind of ends. I think it's. It's hitting a stage where it's like a little bit less fear and greed or hype. Like, it's less sensational now. And now it's about how do we actually implement this from a utility perspective? How do we actually get use out of this?

Yeah, I hear you on that. And I think definitely for ideation, I mean, I've used. And I think all of us at this point have used AI in this space countless times to at least get something on the page, because my mind is drawing a blank, right. And I know I can at least get something that's in some cases terrible, but I know how to fix it, and that's such an unblocking move. So I hear you on that, and I promise I'm not going to get into AI too, too much. So I actually wanted to take a turn here. You mentioned something that piqued my curiosity. I think I'm leading into every question like that on this episode. So sorry about that and being repetitive. But anyway, you mentioned your director of editorial, and I know you also mentioned kind of before we started recording, you were hiring for. I think you mentioned Director of Organic Growth. But, you know, feel free to correct the record here. What I want to ask you about is like the Omniscient Org chart a little bit, because I'm hearing titles of roles that I haven't heard before. And I just wonder for a Shop like this. How are you organizing this in terms of like who reports to who, what are the teams? You just got me curious about how this is structured for a company like yours.

Yeah, I mean we're small, so think under 20 employees. We've got three co founders. I typically look after revenue net, new client, acquisition, marketing and then R and D. So figuring out what new services we want to build up. David and Ali, operations, finance and then services and then so our structure is set up where, you know, part of the business is strategy and SEO really. So we've got account manager, slash organic strategists who work with clients and then SEO analysts who help, you know, do technical SEO, programmatic, keyword research, et cetera, building out, you know, the actual nuts and bolts of the programs. We have the editorial team, so that's going to be editorial leads again, Sam runs that team. And then we have writers and we have a ton of freelance writers. So we typically work long term contracts with freelancers. Typically, you know, if we can work with a writer who has a specialty in say like data or AI or fintech. Right. Hopefully we have a few clients that can work across those different clients. Then we have digital PR team, so that's a small team as well. We all work in conjunction with each other and then project manager and then the way we structure all of this is in pods. So there's a few different pods and you'll have like an organic growth strategist and an editorial lead who run a pod together and they work on all of the same accounts together.

Okay, so tell me more about the freelancers part of it. You mentioned you work with a ton of them. Is there anything in particular that's working for you in terms of like structuring the cooperation? Do you want them to kind of bring their own ideas? How should I say that? Should they be experts in the field or are you looking at this more kind of reporting, journalistic kind of approach with content? I'm just curious about like what kind of freelancers do you attract? How do you work with them, like what are the terms, etc. I would love to get more detail on that.

Yeah, the more subject matter expertise they have in the field, the better. You know, sometimes that it's rare that somebody's like a developer and they, they want to be a freelance writer or something like that. Typically they'll have more experience just writing and interviewing people in that space. But it's critically important because we work with a lot of semi technical companies. So I wouldn't say like technical, technical to the level of like code in the articles, like, you know, written for developers. But we, we do write in a lot of data. We have a lot of data brands and data products that we work with and you sort of have to grok different concepts, like what is anomaly detection, right? Like how do you fix data quality upstream and downstream? There's different things that, like if you don't have any understanding of the space, it's just going to take so long and you're going to, you know, have substantial sort of issues when you, when you produce a piece of content, how we work with them. Sam is going to be a better person to ask specifically for the relationships. My understanding is the longer term relationship we can have with a freelancer who is great, the better. We want to have a deep bench of writers and breadth as well, or at least a recruiting process by which we can find and vet people pretty quickly if we wanted to get into a new space. But when you find a trusted great writer who hits deliverables, hits deadlines, who can grok a new client's editorial and brand style guidelines and can interview subject matter experts to get that product understanding to contribute to information gain about a topic. So you're not just doing a book report about the top 10 existing Google search results and just rehashing that. I mean, that's a gem. You want to, you want to keep working with them as long as you can. There's one more thing about that is, you know, if, if somebody is a subject matter expert or is passionate about the industry, I find that they come to the table with a bunch of new ideas that I wouldn't have, may be spotted. So you have a limited view of a search landscape or a topic landscape. You do what you can to like, interview, you know, the client, the audience, the salespeople to do keyword research. But if somebody's writing day in and day out about data quality tools, right, they'll write an essay and they'll, they'll ping me and say, hey, this, this one section that we had in this piece, you know, I think this is important. Maybe we should do an entire article on this. And I did a little bit of keyword research and I found that there's search volume and you're like, let's go. That's amazing, right? So you get more of that, you know, it's kind of ideas that you can't get if you're not like passionate and kind of steeped in the space. So there's an additional strategy, benefit and you have to source that too.

Exactly. I feel like, you know, with a writer, you may not be looking for the person who has all the answers, but at least they should know what the conversations are that are being held in a given space. And then ideally they're able to also find people who have good answers or good POVs in those particular conversations is how I would tie a bow on that. And one more additional piece I'm kind of going kind of bit by bit because there's a lot of things that I wanted to pick on. So you also mentioned you do digital pr and we don't have a ton of space left to dive into this, but I would like to get at least a taste of. So how is that being done these days, digital priority, particularly in this, in the space that you're in? Again, my question boils down to the audience wants to know kind of what's working and in some cases what's not and what to avoid. What would you say?

A lot of people say backlinks don't matter, they don't work. That's not true.

Okay.

Most things matter. It just depends when they matter. So we've done link building for extremely enterprise clients and we've seen the needle move on core product and service pages in the early days. It helps to just build up that domain authority and basically say, hey, this is an entity worth considering when you're ranking website. So we do link building in kind of a classic sense, right? Guest posting, editorial link building, and then we do passive link building. Right. So as part of our roadmap building, sometimes we'll reverse engineer topics that may be picked up by journalists. It's obvious stuff. There's no secret here. It's like definitional pieces, statistics pieces. Just thinking through, like, what would somebody link to if they found this at the top, top of Google search results. And then probably the more interesting part is doing original research. So we actually have a couple examples. I believe they're on our website, but I'm not totally sure. We did a research report for Jasper. This was like earlier on in the generative AI days. A lot of nebulousness there still is, obviously. Yeah, yeah, but we help them, you know, conduct research, survey an audience of marketing leaders, analyze and synthesize that data and produce a gated white paper about that as well as, like, you know, sprinkle that through their existing content. We did one for vendor as well, on the state of sas, I believe. So we'll do, you know, research and reporting as well. Um, and that's that's one of my favorite things to do. That's one of the coolest projects we can take on.

Yeah, yeah, I, I can, I can certainly attest to that. I have a project kind of in my past that I ran. It was a survey of CTOs. Not only was it like, you know, the company is still using that to this day and kind of made it a core part of their messaging that this is, you know, we serve ctos, here's our service. But also like, our expertise is, is informed by this survey and we stay close to kind of the, the CTO Persona and what they care about. That was great. But also working on that, grabbing some partners for the report, grabbing some incentives for the partners. You get some free content that you would usually have to pay for, or you get access to some tools that you would usually have to pay for. There's a lot of ways to structure these sort of projects. They're fun to work on, not to mention they let you make a big splash in the scene.

And if you think, you know what is going to be hard to fake or hard to. Or hard to replicate in the future. Right. If AI continues to get better, it's probably going to be able to write a listicle or maybe a what is piece, but like, if you have unique data, first party, third party data.

Exactly.

You can replicate that. Right. It's your data. So I think the future proof nature of those things is amazing too. And yeah, great success. I used to do those at HubSpot all the time. Do you remember when Drift came out, when they were doing like the conversational marketing and they're saying like, forms are dead and chatbots are in.

I remember that. Yeah.

I was running freemium growth, so across multiple products, but HubSpot launched a free forms tool and we conducted research on, you know, forms versus Chatbots versus, like, basically different conversion modals people could use. And you know, in relation to all of the hype around Chatbots, it actually turned out that our audience, thank God this was the way it turned out, people preferred forms. So we, we did a research report and wrote this essay that was like, forms aren't dead. Right? Here's the research to back this up.

Exactly.

So it's cool. You can, you can kind of do thought leadership and change narrative structures that relate to your product. As long as the data goes your way, which you hope that it does, and sometimes it doesn't. So.

Well, at least you've got, you know, at least you've got like a white hat approach to that. Because I do know. So there are people out there who are like, here's our conclusion. Now let's find some data for it. You know, and that's.

Take the data. Yeah, yeah, you can usually read through that now, or I can. I can usually tell when somebody's just like, cherry picking, and you're like, okay, exactly, exactly.

But, you know, still, there's. There's a need to stay vigilant. Just because something has got the word report slapped on it does not mean that it's something that you can trust. But, hey, it's the Internet. You know, you. You can never really trust anything here. So I have one last question to tie a bow on this, and this one is, like, a total wild card for you. I asked about a lot of things that sparked my curiosity, but here's what I would like you to picture. You know, listening to this might be a few hundred agency owners, like, over the lifetime of this episode. And I was just wondering if you had an audience like that, you know, all agency owners looking to, you know, looking to grow, looking to survive in the market and thrive. Actually, what was. What is one thing that you would tell them to either stop doing or start doing. And it can be in any kind of. Any kind of aspect of being an agency owner. It can be mindset, culture, it can be strategy, whichever. But what would you point out as, you know, one thing they should start or stop?

Yeah, I was thinking about this recently, actually. So this is a great question. This is true in any space, but there's obviously a lot of saturation. There's a lot of agencies out there, right? And you see, like, sort of the highlight reel or like, the Success Theater on LinkedIn of like, oh, we're crushing it. Like, we're, you know, we're doing this amazing work. Here's a chart that shows, you know, chart goes up. And I think agency owners, any founder obviously, can get too fixated on competition, but the reality is that the pie is extremely large. And I think you can hurt yourself by being too obsessed with competition and what other people are doing. Because the reality is too, when you see these highlight reels in success theater, if you talk to the founders behind the scenes at a happy hour, they'll tell you, yeah, it's not all like that. Like, this client is difficult. We had to fire them. We got this massive client churned. I've seen some of these case studies where you look a year later and the traffic crashes. You're like, it was actually not the success story that you think so it's. It's all sort of an illusion on the Internet. So I. I think the best thing you could do is just like focus on being the best version of yourself. Which is corny advice, but I think it's true. And I'll give you an even cornier analogy because, okay, I was at a concert a few weeks ago, I'm a big punk rock fan and no Effects was doing their Farewell tour. Not everybody loves no Effects. They're brash and offensive and all of that. But I loved him growing up because I skateboarded and they're a big skate punk band. And you know, I saw him on the Farewell tour. They've been doing it for I don't know how many decades. And they had a couple openers. They were good. They were punk bands, right? You think, okay, four chords, shouty vocals. It's a formula. And I think that's what happens when you think, all right, what does an agency like me do? And you look at everybody else around you, you can start to fit into category bucket. And this kind of ties back to the first point I made, which is why you are like differentiation thing. And I thought no Effects is a punk band, but more so they're no Effects. Like they're a one of a kind. They are doing their own thing. And they've done that their whole career, for better or for worse. People love him and hate them for it, but I don't think they ever sat down and thought, what would a punk band do? What would this competitor of ours do? And I think that's what I try to aspire to is focusing on, I guess, serving the client, building the best service and product that we can do and speaking in the way that we want to speak.

Yeah. So grow along your own path. I get that. And Corny or not, any music or kind of band related analogy is a hit with me as a, well, I now have to say former bass player in a metal band. So, you know, adjacent to punk, not entirely there. I'm more of a like Bad Religion kind of guy. If I were to point out one punk.

Oh man, I love Bad Religion. I saw them back when I was in high school at Warp Tour and.

It was one of my favorite concerts.

I've ever been to. Yeah, they're peak for me also because Greg Graffin is like a PhD, like professor at like UCLA or something and he's from Wisconsin, which is where I'm from.

I think I heard that at one point. But it's like a piece of trivia that Came in, went out, now it's back in. And it's gonna be probably back out at some point.

But anyway, the metal is funny. You were like, metal is like, like punk, but, like, like, everybody's a great musician. Yeah, punk is just like, everybody's a horrible musician.

My background is. I had a friend who was a guitar player. I mean, still is, right. And he was just complaining about not being able to find a bass player. Right. And they had. The band is like progressive metal with, like elements of black. It's. It's hard stuff. And I basically learned to play the bass from scratch to join a progressive metal band, you know, which is like the deepest of deep ends, except maybe jazz, you know, I was gonna say.

That'S like almost like the acumen of like a classical musician at that point.

Yeah. Well, they guided me well, the rest of the band did. And I managed to lay down, you know, some tracks and we managed to play some gigs before I had to kind of pass it on to somebody else. They're actually looking for somebody else right now. But anyway, so that was a side track that we went on at the end there. But it's nice. It always goes to show there's a personal element to it. And we're all here living life and work is just one part of it anyway, in terms of life. All good things in life must come to an end. And so will this episode in just a moment here. So before we finish off, Alex, can you tell the audience, you know, where to find you, where to follow you, what to do? I've been part of your newsletter for I don't know how long, and I don't know actually how I ended up on the list. It was some kind of, you know, freebie or some kind of event. But that's kind of. Kind of how I knew the name Omniscient Digital. But, yeah, tell the audience kind of where to go, what to click, and what form to fill out.

The email list is my favorite thing that I do. I love writing long form and it gives me time and space to explore ideas in depth. So I highly recommend, if you like long form, sign up for the Field Notes newsletter. I am going to start posting on LinkedIn more. I do, sort of irregularly now. That's obviously a lot more short form. It's going to be truncated versions of the ideas that I'm writing about on the newsletter. And then we have a podcast as well called the long game. Probably 50% interviews with growth and marketing and demand gen leaders, and then probably 50% kitchen side episodes where like I mentioned before, it's just the three of us founders sitting around talking about analytics and SEO and whatever.

It's a great mix. And then how would you say who should be reaching out to you in terms of working with you directly and becoming a client?

Software companies with ambitious goals and vision who understand SEO, believe in the value.

Just wanted to get that piece in in case anybody like that is listening and is a match because that's, that's obviously useful to get a new client source from an episode like this. And that is it for this episode of Agency Journey. Alex, thank you so so much for the conversation. It went places and punk rock too, so I really enjoyed this one and I hope you watchers and listeners did too. If this is your first time listening to Agent's Journey, don't forget to subscribe. We're on YouTube. Just look for MPilot on YouTube and all of the episodes of Agent's Journey are there, as well as ClickUp tutorials and a lot of other free training that will improve your project management and operations. That's what we're about here at Zenpilot. In terms of newsletter, I run one too. Zenpilot.com newsletter and you'll be getting first class operations. My musings, all of our best Zenpilot content and then some content from around the web curated to help you improve your agency operations. So a lot of good stuff. I hope you will subscribe. And that's it for this episode. Alex, any final thought to share with our audience or shall I click the button?

I don't think so. Thank you for having me. This was a great conversation.

Yeah, this was super cool. Thank you Alex for coming on and thank you watchers and listeners and I'm going to see you in the next one. Bye bye everyone.