Niching Down, Planning for Digital Marketing Success, and Adapting to AI with Corey Morris

Hello, hello, hello, everyone, and welcome back to Agency Journey. I'm your host, Kuba Gretzar, and with me on the call today is Corey Morris, owner and CEO of Voltage Digital and author of Digital Marketing Success Plan. Corey, how are you doing today?

I'm doing great. Thanks for having me.

It is awesome to have you today. I think the origin story behind this is a little bit of a conversation with Gray and I'm really glad that we managed to get have this conversation. A lot to dig into. We just discussed of the call what we might dig into and I think it could easily fill three episodes. So let's see what we fill this one with. But first, for the watchers and listeners to get to know you a little bit better before we start talking about agency stuff. Corey, what is the most fun thing you've done this year thus far?

I just got back from vacation with my family and it was, it was a little extra special this year because I had been through a lot with a car accident and some other things and so be able to go on vacation was awesome. So, yeah, I just got back from the beach.

Okay, awesome. Any highlights from that?

We only only spent one day away from the beach, so I actually got to spend more time just resting this time than. Than any vacation I can think of in the past with my kids.

Are you the kind of person that spends mostly the time sun tanning or do you just get into the water and not get out for hours or.

I apply layers and layers of sunscreen because I don't tan, I just burn. So I try to stay under an umbrella or if I'm in the sun and water, which I enjoy just layering it on and not forgetting, not having some red streaks, different places where I missed.

Yeah, I mean, we're similar in that respect. I'm, you know, I'm from Poland and I'm like the Polish flag. I only got white and red as the two settings.

Yeah, it's all like 99% of my ancestry is in the. In. In the UK or Ireland. So it's all in areas that aren't used to seeing the sun.

Yeah. A suboptimal genes for sun tanning for.

Being in the Midwest. Yeah. Being in the Midwest of the US or enjoying going to. To the coast. Yeah, it doesn't help.

Yeah, exactly. Okay, awesome. Well, very nice to chat this vacation. Glad you're back to record this episode with me here on Agency Journey today and we'll dive in Before I ask you to introduce yourself more fully and more background around your Agency. I want to ask you the traditional agency journey question. Here it comes. Corey, what is your number one tip for agency operators?

Yeah, it's one that I didn't really dive 100% into until about a year, a year and a half ago. But for me it's. It was niching down and specializing, becoming a specialist rather than a generalist. We were stretched really thin. We were trying to do everything for everyone. And I've been through workshops, read books for years about the power of niching down. I know it's not for everyone and it means different things to different people. But for us, we started with our service line and horizontal niching and going from a large number of services that we did in house down to just two things, just websites and search marketing. And so for us, that was a scary thing to put all my trust in the fact of narrow it down and it'll pay off, but it definitely has.

I think a lot of agency owners are facing that kind of challenge. So could you share what was the most useful for you to get through this niching journey and to actually arrive where you are?

Yeah, so understanding what we did really well was where we started. So I know a lot of agencies, a lot of, you know, organizations will start with looking at verticals and industries that they serve. And we actually did it the other way around. We looked at our service offerings and we worked through, you know, looking at what are we. If we were looking at everything and tiering it into good, better and best and looking at where we could have a distinctive advantage and be in a pitch and make a claim against anybody else in North America versus where we're just okay or we sound just like everybody else. It's hard to like differentiate in a pitching process or to, to a prospect or a client, you know, some of the things that we were doing at that good tier. We weren't doing malpractice, we weren't doing, you know, doing anything bad for our clients. We were doing okay or a good job, but it wasn't distinctive in a way that, you know, you can go down the street and find three other agencies that say all the same things and do it at the same level. So some of those things for us that we, we narrowed out of for like realized and also that we didn't necessarily enjoy them, or maybe we only had one person kind of wearing that hat on staff, not even doing it full time. Things like social media or some of the email marketing and automation where we have to try to know that seven different platforms that our Clients are in and be experts and all those, a lot of those were challenging and kind of distracting us from our core services where if you would take the top ones when we rank them in an honest way with the team members in the room, nobody getting fired if there wasn't at the top or anything like that. But just thinking about how we were going to reposition search, both SEO and paid was right there at the top as well as websites and getting into the unique way that we leverage our expertise for doing web design and development. So that process really helped us. We planned on embarking on a two or three year journey to kind of transition out some of the old legacy services and then be focused on the new. And we got into last year and I decided we realized working trying to be in two different models and sell things two different ways and not saying no, or the distract, you know, the distractions or the challenges of trying to hold on to some things versus letting them go, I realized that that was creating some stress. So we accelerated that and we launched a new website at the beginning of this year and really, really planted that flag. It was, it's scary Any, any change where you're changing your business model is scary. And it had taken me a few years to, to really get to that point, but I'm glad I did looking back because we've had some big wins this year in the services that we want to do and I just had to trust it and move through and, and it's. I'm excited for where we're going now, but definitely know what, what niching means to you or specialization. And that doesn't mean that you have to do what we did and chop off a whole bunch of services. If you have great conviction around certain verticals, go there and map out who your target audience is, make sure there's enough of them. But then, you know, for us, I think a point where it was great on paper versus a plan to execute it and see it all the way through was probably the second biggest challenge after one was defining it and two was taking it and actually putting it into practice, into action. Like I said, we started with a two or three year plan. It was kind of a wide open thing. We're going to just try to do this or we're going to do this without steps. And then when we got really serious about it and added steps to it and took bold actions, that's when it paid off.

Okay, that's awesome. It's great. One more thing I'm curious about here before I ask you to more properly introduce yourself, et cetera. So if you were to look at yourself from before the snitching process, you know you want to do it, what kind of message would you send to yourself in the past as a kind of warning about this is going to be hard, or don't forget about this or don't miss this. With the benefit of hindsight, what would you say to yourself?

Yeah, I. I would have told myself to do it sooner and not have as much time to drag my feet around it, to model it out, plan for it, and have a bigger roadmap with lots of off ramps if I needed to, you know, take a step back or slow something down, but have it planned out, have a timeline in place and just go for it. That's ultimately where I ended up. But it was a little bit messy getting there as I drugged my feet when we were busy on something else or, you know, some big project came in, it didn't quite fit. You know, we took it on and then it was a further distraction and pushed us further down our timeline.

Okay, wow. So some more urgency. A little bit more urgency around the. The whole thing.

Yeah, Yeah, I think so.

That's interesting for me to note because urgency has been really on my mind lately in terms of the things that I'm into here at Zenpilot Projects, and. Yeah, just funny that it's kind of coming back to me in that way. Okay, well, thank you so much for sharing your number one tip in such detail. And now, by all means, please tell us and the watchers and listeners a little bit more about yourself, your agency, kind of the chapter you're in right now.

Yeah, so that story I just kind of shared in connection with the tip all happened here at Voltage, which is the agency I'm owner and CEO of. We were founded in 2005 as a traditional creative agency and then kind of morphed into a digital agency. And then ultimately, like I said, when digital wasn't, you know, it was niche enough in like 2015. And then that space has gotten so crowded and hard to differentiate out of. And so that's the transformation we made, fully made last year, was going all in on the two things that we do best of search and websites. So in addition to that, I write for Search Engine Journal, Search Engine Land, Forbes, and writing and speaking over the years inspired me to write my first book, which. Which comes out in mid July. And so I'm excited about that. It's called the Digital Marketing Marketing Success Plan. So it has a separate website Some great resources and gives away essentially a big piece of our framework of how we work with clients through a five step process to get from start to ultimately their plan in the first 90 days. And so I'm excited to give that away both both to brands and organizations out there as well as to other agencies as well as we're all in similar boats with trying to tie things to ROI and make sure that we can, I guarantee necessarily, but set ourselves up for as much opportunity for success as possible. So yeah, I'm involved in a lot of different hats that I wear and things going on, but those are the two biggest things right now with Voltage and the marketing success plan.

Okay, that's awesome. So I want to talk with you about the book. I'm curious about the book and I want to dig into a little bit of it definitely in a moment here. But first, some of the watchers and listeners and yours truly are wondering, okay, so you're writing for Search Engine Land and Forbes. How does one can you give like a 12 minute class on like, how does one actually get to do that?

Yeah, I worked my way into Search Engine Journal for first years ago. I'm trying to think back to how many years ago, probably 20, 15 or 16. Through networking they have opportunities to pitch or submit to be a writer. Like I, I, you know, you can find those through their websites or to reach out to them and they'll look at, you know, writing samples and opportunities if you want to be a contributor. But for me it was through networking through different industry events. So I had a chance to start speaking first and that's what helped me translate over into writing. And writing comes natural to me. So I really enjoy speaking. I've done it. But the first speaking gig I got was at SMX West. So Search Marketing Expo connected with Search Engine Land and that was back in 2008 or nine, I believe, right when I was fairly new to SEO. The first time I pitched just pitched a topic to them and I was selected. So then I thought, oh, this is going to be easy. I'll get selected to speak every time. That is not the case. I learned that the hard way. But through speaking at events and attending events as well, like some of the top search events like SMX and pubcon and others. Over the years I've gotten a chance to meet people and so through that I got to know them way back then, Executive editor at Search Engine Journal and we met and talked and I got vetted through their process to start writing. And then eventually some of Those same networking and connections through that led to Search Engine Land and Forbes and others.

Okay, awesome, awesome. So what I'm hearing is it does start like, you know, in the beginning, it did start with a cold pitch, but then you kind of. You're at a conference, you meet some people.

It helps to have some good writing samples. It helps to even, you know, in my case, it helped that I was speaking as well. And so some of the thought. Have having some thought leadership on display that you can point to some type of portfolio. You don't need to have, you know, 100 pieces or 100 speaking gigs, but having some of that. So if somebody knows of you, that helps, right? That helps you skip five steps. And if they don't know of you, just being able to show that you've been doing it for a while, even if it's on your blog or, you know, LinkedIn or wherever, being able to demonstrate that, yeah, networking is great too. I mean, I know one or maybe two of the publications also, once a year when they have open contributor spots, will ask, you know, other contributors, hey, who do you know? And I'm careful with who I recommend because it's my name on the line too, my recommendations. So I'm. I'm careful based on, you know, some of the same criteria. Have I heard. How well do I know this person? Have I heard them speak? Have I seen their writing? And so there's a bunch of different avenues, but I think having some of the content already out there and demonstrating your thought leadership before you want to pitch is definitely advisable because that's what they're going to look at and consider.

I hear you. I hear you. I'm continuously fascinated by this world of networking. A few episodes back, I had the pleasure of interviewing Kurt Schmidt, and the episode was all about networking. He has a book about it. He has a whole framework for it. If any of you watchers and listeners are curious, really recommend that episode and connecting with Kurt in general. So that's a plug for a previous episode. I am curious about the book. I want to dive into the book right now. Corey, can you tell me a little bit more about. About why you wrote it, who you wrote it for, what it helps them solve, what makes it unique?

Yeah. So my book is, as I mentioned a minute ago, is the Digital Marketing Success Plan. That's a trademark that I have in the works. But I was trying to really go back to what matters the most and what's the challenge. So if you think back to some of the challenges, I was trying to differentiate voltage around when it came to niching down and being. Being the best at. I'm tired of the perceived commoditization of these different services so. Or the mystique behind them or the mystery and so there's a whole bunch of different reasons for it. One is it's a big transparency thing for me to give away our flagship kind of process and service out to the world and show what what we go through and put it in a book format for anyone to self implement or, or even take aspects or slices of whether it's a brand or even another agency we partner. Probably 30 to 40% of the work we do is agency to agency partnering with others as well. So. So taking whether it's taking the whole thing and doing a start to finish or taking a slice of it or a piece that somebody might be missing from their process is exciting for me to share and give away to the world or give away for the price of a book. For many clients they'll work with us to have us do the full process with them and for them to walk through it. And I'm working on some potential courseware as well that will be kind of a guided version without having to work with us as well. So all those things are coming. The book comes out in just a few weeks from the time we're recording here and we're targeting mid July in terms of its publishing and launch. So basically it features my five step planning process called START and that's an acronym for Strategy Tactics, Application Review and Transformation. So we dig into why this is necessary. I have my own painful origin story in there of how early in my career as an SEO I'd been through some of the best training at the time in the 2000s with Bruce Clay and certification and took over, moved into a role doing SEO. A few years into my career I was super excited, did all the things for one of my first clients that you should back then got it. He was a local attorney, got him ranked at the top of Google locally for a whole bunch of terms. He was getting traffic, even showing conversions through Google Analytics. We're a few months in. I'm excited to sit down with him and walk him through this report. I'm like thinking he's going to be super excited too. We get to the end and I could tell something was off and he's like Corey, that's all great. You know I see all this green and all these great graphs in this report but. And he's like we did get the phone calls and the form submissions that you show here. But I didn't get a single case, I didn't get a single new client from this. And so that was a moment for me early in my career where I realized that even doing all the right things with KPIs and with all the marketing stuff, it wasn't enough. And even if I showed him 10 more reports like that for 10 more months, I was still going to get fired at the end of the day because it wasn't impacting his business. And so tying things to business outcomes became a brutal lesson. I learned through that. And thankfully there's a positive end to that story where I was able to get deeper into his metrics and understanding his clients and to get there. But in so many cases, when someone is shopping for SEO, quote unquote, you know, on the client side or you know, gets advice from an agency or like a special, even a specialist like me who's, who might say, hey, you know, you should, let's just turn on some Google Ads and figure out how it goes. Clients can spend a ton of money trying to figure it out and Google will take your money whether it's working or not on the ad side. And agencies will take, you know, we're billing for, you know, our retainer or our time or whatever on the, on the agency side as well. And so it's really expensive to just turn it on or try to figure it out as you go. But at the same time, nobody wants to be in a planning mode or a strategy mode for like six months. Clients want to start today and want to start getting toward roi. So for me, you know, we developed what, you know, we call the digital Marketing Success plan. It's the ultimate deliverable. You get to at the end, you get to your own at the end of the start planning process. Process. And again, the book gives it all away with the concepts. The how to some arguments I make for better ROI mapping and better ROI formulas and funnels to develop than just some of the basics. And I'm excited to get it out into the world here shortly.

Okay, so there's a few ways we can explore this. First of all, could you share one more time just so I know which threads to pull on the start acronym, I got Strategy targeting and then strategy.

Tactics, Tactics application review and transformation. So strategy is doing all the auditing that you would want to do of the past, doing, you know, the outside, some of the outside research and really pressing in. And there's so many, I can't tell you how many Times, you know, we'll sit down with a client and one person will tell us with conviction exactly who their target audience is, and then the next person around the table will have a different version of that, and then the next person will question or challenge the other two. And being on that same, you know, there's a lot of trust but verify, you know, take this. You know, we can assume that the client and I do trust my clients, that they definitely know their business and their audience. But we want to validate that and make sure that everybody's on the same page. We understand the goals. The ROI math actually works before we take it and apply it. So strategy is critical with getting to that core key set of metrics that we want to target. And then tactics. I have intentionally have it after strategy so many times people will put tactics ahead of strategy or have a checklist or best practices they do for certain marketing channels. Well, if they're independent from the strategy, you're not driven to it by it. That's where you can get way off over here and spend a lot of money and do all the right things, but not have it really connect back to roi. So tactics is important. Even though we're a specialist and we only do the things I mentioned earlier, we try to put everything on the table, even channels and things that we don't do, and explore things to make sure that we don't leave something like programmatic or automation and email workflows and any channels that could be working together or independently to go drive toward those goals. We don't want to leave them out or make assumptions and start with one that may be five times more expensive or in the wrong part of the funnel than another. So putting all the tactics on the table, doing the research, the projections and comparing those all back to the strategy and seeing how they can support that and connect to it. The review step. So I mean, the application step. So strategy, tactics, application. This is where it's very tempting to now start creating inventory and assets, right? Display ads, text ads, email templates, landing pages. But you can do too much upfront and, you know, and then have to throw away some of them or you're ready to start and you realize that, oh, you need all this stuff. Oh, I need. Now I need to go spend, you know, more dollars or more time when I've got my plan and I'm excited, you know, excited to start, but I don't have the assets I need. So getting pretty deep into understanding what you need to do, what assets you need to start and Planning out your assets, where they're going to live and getting engaging, creative or others in that process is important. We're not actually creating anything at this stuff, but we're creating the entire list of what we need and then moving into review. This is where we bring a lot of things together in terms of data and KPI and this is where all the data strategists and nerds get to nerd out. Because this is where we're getting our analytics synced up, we're getting any of our KPIs defined and mapped out for our dashboards, getting attribution modeling correct. In fact, my team right now is working on some cool brand new server side analytics tracking methods that we don't know very many people who have been able to implement. And we're working through some systems and third party platforms that struggle with them. And so we're trying to solve something kind of new and unique there. But getting your data house in order and getting it right and none of those platforms out of the box track roi, because that's unique to your organization. They can't take into account hard costs like outside software tools or agencies, or even some of the soft costs or the trade offs of having your staff working on this versus that. And so being able to configure and understand the full ROI calculation and lifetime value and those things that are more complex and are, are variable to your business is what we work through in that step. And then the final step really helps this turn into an actual plan. Something that can be accountable, objective, actionable, and that is the transformation phase. So that's the last T and that's getting your project management system synced up, getting everything loaded up, understanding that what trigger points and what intervals you're going to look at for milestones and having everything planned out for as far out as you can go, whether that's you're looking at it like sprints or you're looking at this like a full year plan, getting it mapped out so it actually happens and is accountable and budgeted for and you can manage those resources properly to stay on track. There's so many shiny objects out there. We got this far in the interview before I said the word AI. But there's so many distractions of where our industry is going that if you don't have a plan and you know a CEO gives you a drive by and says, hey, what about this audience and you take your focus off what you're doing today to go chase that, or AI emerges in some new way that's disruptive even further or Google changes everything overnight. You're gonna go chase those things and maybe take your foot off the gas over here on what's working. And you need to have a framework that has enough agility into it to do both so you're not also ignoring all that, putting your head in the sand and just saying we're just gonna keep doing what works today and then get left behind. So having balance in that is important to make sure that's in your plan and that you don't just get excited and go. And then if it wasn't managed properly or set up to be managed properly through your systems, then you know, you get distracted or three people take vacation and then it falls three months behind. So those are the five phases. Strategy, tactics, application review and transformation. And again, like I said, I've got those outlined and really unpack some how to in each of those sections in the book as well.

Okay. Okay. So I'm curious, I think I would love to skip to the end here actually talk about the transformation piece of it, the execution piece of it, kind of how it gets put into day to day operations. The word I'm kind of orbiting around right now is accountability. And also focus. What you mentioned, this balancing act between executing the plan that was agreed upon as well as being flexible to what comes in a very dynamically changing landscape. That really resonates with me. So tell me about kind of the way to. I mean, the planning, of course, I understand the depth of thought that goes into it. I understand, well, what's the key to sticking to a plan, to actually making sure that it gets consistently executed.

Yeah. So I mentioned the example of getting distracted or having a CEO come by and say what about this? And then without saying timeout, how does that fit our priorities? If I'm going to have to come back to that CEO or executive or board or whoever shareholder at the end of the year and report on return on investment of the digital marketing budget or investment for the year. It's going to sound like I have a whole bunch of excuses if I started down this path for three months and then it's like, well, you asked me or somebody asked me to explore this or the industry changed and I did this. Well, then you're not going to be able to show ROI or you know, overall for anything. You just did a bunch of stuff and chased it around. So accountability is important. That's a word that I mean so many. And I have some of the stats too. You know, people are switching jobs frequently still, maybe not as fast as the great resignation, but people don't stay in the same seats as long. And a lot of people, the plan doesn't outlive the people because it's not documented or it's not accountable. And it feels like you're starting over anytime that a person leaves or if you didn't have it. And so the goal here, and another word I use is getting it objective. And that's where I want it on paper or in a deck or somewhere in a digital document where it's not just in someone's head, or it's not just the way we've always done it, or we're just doing the channels and tactics that we've always done. But the strategy from the top down is agreed upon, it's visible. And anytime we have what I call a triggering event, which would be a legit thing like Google changed the algorithm overnight, we lost visibility, or our product team just launched a new product, okay, we need to work that into our marketing strategy as well. Or the CEO did come by and say, hey, I want to test this. Any of those and a hundred other examples would be a trigger event where it's like, okay, timeout. We got the plan on paper or digital paper somewhere we can go back and say, how does this change priorities? How does this fit? We don't have to go take six months to figure it out, but we can take a time out for a minute and go look at that and see where that fits in. Do we need to reallocate budgets? Do we need to change our KPIs to do we need to pull in new resources? Do we need a new website? Do we need, you know, things that need to support any of those triggering events? But it's, it's critical to have it planned out, mapped out and accountable. Instead of being in someone's head, it gets really personal. If you're doing your job and you've got your plan all in your head and someone comes and challenges it, or can't see it, or hasn't agreed or have buy in on it or understanding of what's in it, and then you've got to change it or you leave. And now they're starting from scratch again. The company is so all of those aspects of managing the plan, managing its expectations, revisiting at least annually. But again, those triggering events and having the agility built in will allow you to not feel like you're just blindly running the plan, whether it's going to work or not. But if there is no plan or we're just changing, changing our tactics every two weeks. We're not giving it a fair chance to see it through either. So finding that right balance really is the key of implementing it and building a culture of accountability around what you expect out of it.

So what I'm hearing from you is the get it objective piece of it boils down to having a plan actually written down. So what I'm curious about, and I think a lot of the watchers and necessaries would be too, is can you give us a look at what that plan written down looks like? If it's a document, what are the sections? What is the key to? It can be very overwhelming to try and put down the whole plan in writing. So how is it structured?

My team at Voltage does it in different stages. We work through those five stages of start planning and make sure with our clients that there's their touch points. We're presenting it throughout so we don't go through all five stages and then have this overwhelming massive deck. So in the first stage, you know, the strategy piece, that's kind of the messiest one because there's a lot of workshopping to get everybody on the same page about what the goals are. But then those kind of get locked in and we carry those through the rest of the process. And there's a lot of, you know, everybody does auditing differently. So if you've got data, you know, if you're doing it from the search perspective, you've got it in Screen Frog or Ahrefs or different software that you use to crawl and pull these things together. And so there's a lot of appendices or, you know, it's not like it's a big research paper that's 90 pages. It could be, I don't know that that's the most helpful way to format it.

Right.

But for us, we use a lot of different, you know, slides and decks to pull in things that link out to the nerdery behind them, like you know, a crawl report or a UX audit or whatnot that really summarize it. But ultimately, if you can get it to like one slide per step or stage, that shows, you know, we are, this is our strategy and it is to reach this many, you know, SQLs or MQLs or whatever. If you're B2B and you're doing Legion or E Commerce, sales and transactions like, and really show the math all the way through and then show again the tactics of where you're doing it, what, you know, what resources you need to do it and how it's going to map out. That's your, you know, light executive level version of it that's supported by all the work that you did to get there.

So it's kind of a portal to additional kind of sources of information that live in certain tools. Like there's layers to it is what I'm hearing.

Absolutely. And those layers can be pretty messy. I mean, you don't need to go pre unless you're, you know, presenting to a board, you know, and they care to see your keyword research spreadsheets.

Right.

That you probably don't need to pretty those up. Right. And it's getting really down to what you're going to be able to use going forward and really the high level aspect. So you can keep it front and center to make sure that you're staying on track with it.

Okay, so another word I heard from you little while back is that you make certain arguments in the book. I'm curious what you would say are the most controversial arguments that you make in the book. Stuff that somebody else in the space or the target reader would be surprised to hear. The stuff that you had to defend the most. That's the most kind of against the grain, what comes to mind in terms of either strategically or tactically the claims that you make there.

It's kind of funny that you ask that because being someone who's been in my career went through heavily in SEO itself. And so, and that's what I still write about to this day. So having anything that you write about or state from a stage or from a blog post or on social media, naturally an SEO, a very skeptical community who likes to argue and debate things and try to define truth or debate what truth is when there's so many relative things there. Just by saying anything, you're, you're almost having a pov. For us. I, the one I mentioned earlier, you know, we, you know, there's very basic marketing funnels out there and a lot of sales and marketing teams will put up this funnel that's got like three stages to it. Yeah, it's really a lot more nuanced than that. If you're trying to calculate roi, not everybody comes through a one, two, three step thing and there are so many different hidden expenses. And so I also mentioned earlier, you know, things that software doesn't calculate, things that get a little bit uncomfortable at times. We've had instances where we've sat down with marketing leaders in their organizations and made them a little bit uncomfortable. Not on purpose, but we start asking some like business math and business ROI math beyond just the marketing KPIs. And that's gotten a little interesting because we're not trying to embarrass anybody, but if they can't answer the question, we'll back off of it. We'll work with them on the side. But what's interesting, the bigger the organizations, the more disconnected they are in terms of need to know information and connecting the dots. So for us it's not necessarily controversial, but where we get into situations where with some of the content, where it's challenging is where we're trying to connect the dots in the math. So some marketing leaders in their brands and organizations might feel a little bit challenged by it if they can't answer the question and don't know the math. And they've been doing the role for a long time. And again, I'm not trying to get anybody fired or embarrassed. I'm just trying to pick up from where you are and help you move it a step forward. Because at some point a CFO or CEO somewhere is going to want those dots connected. And if we're going to make the wrong do the wrong math to compare marketing KPIs to actual ROI. So in some cases we push really hard and really challenge to get there. And that's really the angle I take with the very first appendix in the back of the book where I go through some formulas for accounting for all of the math and where it gets a little bit uncomfortable, me included. I'm not sitting here saying I've got it all figured out is when you have, going back to my story earlier, if I don't have control over those things on the client side and I'm giving them all the leads that they can handle and they're messing up the leads or the product sucks, or the customer service is bad, or the sales team can't close them, but they look qualified. Even if that's not my problem as a marketer and I have no control over that at the end of the day, you know, I get six months into a campaign and they're spending money and even if all the problems are on their side, I still get fired. And so it's challenging because so many marketers are in their comfort zone of living in this circle of nerdery. I do over here, I only do SEO or I do paid search, or I do all those things. I can't control the client, my challenge and the point of discomfort there probably is if you're just getting the marketing KPI's and leaving it up to chance that the client's going to connect the dots and see it all the way through and fix all their own problems or not blame you for them. That's kind of on you for leaving it there. So that's the tough love I give to my own agency here in my building and to myself as well as the rest of the agency community. On the flip side, you know, I would challenge clients to also, you know, make sure, and I do through that to make sure that they understand the whole picture and aren't just putting unfair expectations on marketing to go solve all the problems too.

Right, right. So I would love for you to make this a little bit more concrete for me. You mentioned uncomfortable questions that you might ask. Any examples of those like what might get asked that would cause this discomfort?

Well, and it starts with, you know, marketers know their marketing metrics. They know how much they're spending, they know, you know, how many leads they're generating or how many sales it's gener, you know, dollars in e commerce sales. Where it gets more challenging is when you start to get into business metrics. What is the target profit margin for, you know, sales, what are profits, what are especially for privately held companies now I'm getting into personal data now or I'm asking about what their resources cost, what they're spending on marketing, what they're spending on operations, what the lifetime value is, how they make money and profit. And I'm not asking, you know, what does the CEO make or, or what, you know, do they have a yacht? I'm not asking any of those questions, but I'm asking, you know, we're getting some real questions that they are often not prepared to answer or not thinking about or don't care about because they got too many other things on their plate. And as a marketer, it's not their job to connect the dots or fix CRM or get into it or get an illegal, or they're not the cfo. So being able to get a lot of those answers is important for us because we can track it back to give them better leads. But it's uncomfortable when we start asking questions that maybe, you know, are above their pay grade or their role or, or unfortunately maybe they were in a more traditional role or, or you know, old school organization that really didn't care as much about attribution and, and just know that if I spin in marketing it'll correlate to better sales. And so I don't want to turn it off. Sometimes that can get, get challenging when we're like, well, what is your average? You know, even things that I would think I would want to know like average cost per lead or you know, full investment of in your team and what you're getting for that back. Especially because now we're talking about people and I'm not again trying to get anybody fired. Just want to understand the full math equation so that when someone asks from the very top, we can, we can confidently answer that you got a 10x ROI on your full on end marketing investment.

Right? Yeah, there's possibilities to uncover good news here too. So I've got, Corey, I've got two remaining question marks here really, before we tie a bow on this episode. Really informative thus far. One other thing you mentioned and just I wanted some clarity around that. You mentioned conversations around the stuff that software doesn't calculate. What would that be?

Yeah, and that goes back to. All right, so if I'm, if I'm putting myself on the brand side and if I'm working with an agency, I know, you know, I know what I'm paying to the agency, but software doesn't know that. So software will start, you know, whether it's third party software, you're using Google Analytics or whatever it might be or a combination of everything and you're trying to get down to what is my ROI equation, what you're getting, you know, from ad networks, you're getting return on ad spend or you're seeing raw values there, you're seeing all these channels separately. Even if you can roll them together, they're looking at ad spend, they're looking at, they're not, they don't know how much you pay your internal staff, they don't know how much you're paying your agency. They don't know, you know, they don't even take into account how much the software costs and factoring that into, you know, their roi. So there are a lot of these other components that we're having to stream together. Whether we're doing it in our own, you know, looker dashboards or our own data sets or trying to work into, you know, any level of business intelligence information. So getting all, getting the whole roll up is important and sometimes very difficult to get because some of that is private information. Again, if I'm looking at, you know, helping, if I'm doing consulting and helping a CMO understand their full marketing investment, they've got to be able to find payroll data and information like that to be able to put it all together and understand that if this team costs money in addition to the software and the ad expense and content creation fees and web development fees and all that too.

Okay, all right. Yeah, that is entirely clear to me. Now, you might be in the green looking at just your Google Ads account, but you factor in, for example, payroll, it might turn out to be a different story. I get that. So the last question I've got for you before we, you know, ask you to share where people can find you, et cetera, I mean, I left something pretty big for last, but I, you know, talking with somebody who's in the world of SEO, I cannot not ask about, I forget the name for it now, but. Well, the kind of shiny object, elephant in the room, so to speak, is AI. And the trend or the change that's happening is, you know, used to be you Googled and you got a bunch of links. Now you get answers direct, kind of generated by AI based on the pages that are out there in the World Wide Web. I'm just curious, from your perspective as an expert, where do you think this is all going? How will this influence SEO work? Does SEO have a future? Is a sensational way to ask about it. How do you see those things?

Yeah, I appreciate that question because that's such a big part of my world right now. Going back to right after ChatGPT launched and changed. Changed the marketing world and broader parts of the world as well. I was going through this journey of focusing in and niching in down into search with SEO being a big part of that. And a couple of agency owner colleagues challenged me on that and asked me, they were like, huh, that's bold.

Huh?

Don't. Do you think SEO's still going to be around? And I said, whether SEO has been declared dead how many times over the past 30, 20 years since it came out, and whether this is the time that the term actually and it does die, I'm okay with that. Or if it morphs and evolves like it has. And now it's accounting for search, generative experience and results and AI results in search. And we're optimizing around that. That's a new frontier and an area for us to work in. What I came down to, and a title I almost went with for a book, was that was be found, because that's ultimately, there's always going to be a brand out there and their target customer that they want to be found by online. And whether that's, you know, AI results or the traditional SEO results, or Google Ads or local search or whatever, or holograms. That maybe are the next thing, whatever it is, there will always be that gap and a need for brands to have help being found. And so, like I said, whether we keep calling it SEO for the next 10 years and it accounts for optimizing for AI results and helping train and prompt AI, or if it gets finally left behind and maybe it does die and we're doing AI optimization or whatever it is, I'm not as concerned about that as I am with just making sure that we stay on the pulse of what's happening with it. When Google hastily rolled it out not long ago and made AI overviews a big thing, it was showing up everywhere. But it was also telling you to put glue on pizza. Right. And doing stupid things.

I saw some of those, yeah.

And so just a few weeks ago, Agency Management Institute's Build a Better Agency Summit, I heard from Jim Stern and he was one of the speakers in one of the sessions and he had some stats that showed that maybe 85% of search results early on were showing AI overviews. And then in some categories it was down to 15%. Just a couple, you know, a month or two later, as Google's trying to settle in and make this the most useful experience to their ultimate customer, which is the searcher. So they're not going to, you know, we'll see it ramp back up and we're prepared for it. But at the same time we have to remember that Google can't just keep giving crap to the ultimate searcher, their customer, and hold on to their market share and them being a for profit business and their customer being the searcher and not the agency or the brand, they don't owe us anything. We've got to just keep, keep our focus there on, on Google and OpenAI and all the other opportunities for where our clients can be found.

I like that, I like that. And I especially like the thought be found because there's always going to be a way to get found, whether it's, you know, whether the search is happening through Google or whether it's happening through ChatGPT or Claudo or whichever. Big fan of Claude. Personally, this reminds me of an episode that I recorded alongside Gray with James Carberry from sweetfish Media. That was an agency breakthrough, which is kind of a spin off podcast limited series that we ran. And he said, you know, the way he kind of explained the clout of Sweet Fish Media really struck me back then. That was a year ago almost, he said. He didn't say that. We're top ranked. Top whatever. For Podcasting agency, I think the keyword was. But like if you search for B2B podcasting agency, I think it was. If you ask ChatGPT about it, we're in the top three. You know, they spit us out. And that's the statement of clout right now. And I think, you know, personally, I think this is the direction where this is going. So a lot of what you're saying meshes with that and with my view as well. Cool to hear that. Alrighty. So I think at this point, Corey, it would be great to tie a bow on the episode and to allow you to share with our audience, you know, where they can find you, follow you, how they can get updates on the book launch, anything else you might want to leave with them that would be a great time to share.

Yeah, sounds good. So to find the agency, it's Voltage Digital. That simple. I did mention that we partner with a lot of other agencies as well, so we got some great partner content of how we do that as well. For the book, it's the Digital Marketing Success Plan, but that's a really long name. So the URL is the DMSP Com. So I've just got it down to an acronym and for anything to find anything about me or my writing or anything else.

Corymorris.com Corymorris.com that's simple. Okay. Are you active on LinkedIn?

I am.

Okay. So find Corey on LinkedIn.

Great place to connect as well as I've got a lot of great content about the book and pointing back to that there as well.

LinkedIn is the best. People cringe at it. Maybe not in our space, but you know, outside. Like my friends always tease me about, like, I spend more time on LinkedIn than any other social media platform. Okay. It's got great insights, it's got great people.

I love it.

It's. Yeah, it's one that you can really learn from for a change. But anyway, that personal mini rant over. Thank you so much, Corey for coming on the episode watchers and listeners. If this is your first time with Agency Journey, welcome. Don't forget to follow us. Don't forget to subscribe to rate the show. Follow ZenPilot on YouTube. We've got a lot of good stuff there. And send this episode or any others you find interesting to a fellow agency operator so they can learn too. That'll be my CTA for today. Corey, thank you so so much for coming on the show and good luck with the book launch upcoming. As of the time of the recording quite possibly the book will be out by the time this is out. So if it is, go grab it. Dear watchers and listeners, gonna be worth your time. Digital marketing success plan. And that's it for me. Any other final thoughts?

No, I just appreciate it, had fun and look forward to the next one. Thanks.

Yeah, thank you everyone. You stole my final line. I always say, see you in the next one. We will see you in the next one. Watchers and listeners, thank you so much for watching for today. Bye Bye.