Navigating the Journey from Freelance Beginnings to Building a Thriving B2B Digital Agency

Hi everyone. Welcome to your show, E Coffee with Experts. This is your host Ranmay here. And today we have Daniel, who is the co founder at Common Ground Digital Marketing Agency with us. Hey Daniel, how’s it going?

Hey Ranmay. Ok, thank you. How are you?

Good, yeah, all good. Can’t really complain. Daniel, welcome to our show. And before we go ahead and pick your brains. Right, so let’s get to know the human behind the mic. Why don’t you talk us through your journey a bit. How it all started are you landed up in the SEO PPC space. Right, the digital marketing space at large. And a bit about your agency as well. What do you guys specialize in? What are your core offerings? And then we take it off from there.

Yeah, absolutely. Okay, so I’ll rewind the clock and where it began. So essentially I come out of college and I wanted to go and get a job. I didn’t know where I was going at this time of point, but everybody that I went to get a job was looking for somebody that went to university. So I was like, okay, I’m going to have to go down the university route and went to university. I chose a degree. I was interested in computer science. I wanted to build computers and then I did the first module and suddenly thought, this is not for me. So I looked into that. I goes, let’s move into computing. And then this is where I got my interest in websites and web design and development and stuff like that. So I went through my university degree really keen on building websites. I come out of there and went to a company called Dixon Store Groups. Now they are the owners of PC World, Chorus and Dixon’s here in the uk. I went there as a web designer. I enjoyed designing websites and I was really leading there. I’m doing really well. But what so fascinated me was like designing all of these things, but who’s actually seeing them?

How many people am I actually seeing? And I know that we’re getting millions of people to the website, but what about the pages that I’m designing? So then I start to get interested in, okay, how would get people just see my pages? So that’s where SCR has come into it and ppc. So I did a year of there and then my boss at the time decided to move on and start his own agency and asked me to go with him. I went with him and stayed there for two, three years building that agency. And they’re continuing to thrive at the moment. But I’ve moved away at this stage. I moved away from Oxford into Stevenage. So I decided to come back in Oxford and work for a company called Scoptimize. At the time, it’s run by Kevin Gibbons and Stuart Tufts and I was there until they rebranded and moved on. But it got to a point where I had a young daughter and she was three months old. We were just talking about our kids and I just got to a point where it’s time for me to try something different. So I handed him my notice.

I had nowhere to go and decided my journey into freelance work. And, you know, well, freelance. Everyone looks at freelance and think it’s this great, really easy thing to do, but it’s incredibly difficult. So I managed to grow my freelance operation and then my business partner now is someone I used to work with at SE Optimize. And he said to me, dan, do you want to join forces? And essentially, you don’t have to take your laptop on holiday with you at all times. And that was a real sort of big motivator for me. So I like a holiday. If I’m going on holiday, I don’t be doing work and stuff like that, which is what you have to do if you’re a single business operator. So, anyway, after a few discussions, we decided to form Common Ground and bring essentially my freelance operation together with his small business that he is running here in Oxford. Since then, that was the foundation of Common Ground. Since then, we are a remote B2B business where we’re focusing on that B2B industry where we’re delivering SEO, paid search and content marketing for ambitious brands that are really looking to increase their visibility, generate more qualified traffic and obviously generate leads which equals revenue for them.

So that, in a nutshell, is where I’ve gone from, like, university going into where I didn’t actually want to go, and into the space of SEO and now leading Common Ground.

Lovely, lovely. Quite a story, I must say. And Daniel, we all know that setting up an agency, starting it out is quite a challenging task. And then again after that, to keep the lights on, get your first client, set up. Operations, finance, hr. So many support functions. Right. No mean achievements. If you could tell us more about the initial challenges that you faced while setting up your agency along with your partner, and then how did you overcome those challenges? And any tips for our listeners who are trying to start their own agency or budding entrepreneurs out there?

Yeah, so I guess our challenge was slightly different to someone else just go from freelance to start a new business, because we were two businesses coming together. So whilst, like, businesses coming together is not unique in our situation, we were doing things slightly differently, so we had to conform to a way of working. Now the first challenge was obviously getting my model, which was a freelance basis with a hybrid team of freelancers that I was working with, to work with Matt’s model, which was an in house team of digital marketers. And so what the other thing that we had to try and get together was actually what’s our messaging? Because I was targeting a different type of company to what Matt was targeting. And how do we bring this all together? So essentially the way that we worked it out was doing it in small stages, keeping my operation, keeping mats operation, but how do we bring them together? And the way that we did that was kept an internal team as our strategic analysis and sort of the thinkers of what we want as an agency and then use the hybrid team to do some of the work to support us in terms of specialisms around conversion rate optimization, specifics around maybe technical, technical SEO that we may not have had this skill set in house at that particular time, analytics, et cetera.

That sort of then became the basis of our model going forward, where we have an internal team, specialism specialists, and then we have an external hybrid team that actually come in and help us and support us as and when needed. This allows us as a business to stay quite linked. It also allows us to increase our capacity at times of being busy and making sure our team is overworked. It also allows us to reduce our external costs and not reduce headcount, which obviously when we was going through things like the pandemic, the current situation in Europe and Israel and stuff like that, and obviously everywhere else, with the UK economy being up and down, that’s been really useful for us to ensure that we continue to be profitable and stay on margin.

Absolutely, absolutely. And you did mention about having a partner ecosystem. Right. So how do you feel it is important in today’s business to have a very strong partner ecosystem so that you do not really feel the hassle of growing and scaling and with the burden of having a fixed cost or on your head at all times. Right. So how do you handle that and what do you feel are the pros and cons there?

So I think there’s two ways of looking at the partner things. First, if I can, I’ll touch upon like I’ve got a business partner that helps me from a mental point of view and the back and forth and stuff like that, stay on point. I think that’s really important and is sometimes missed. But I think also what you’re touching upon here is like your partners in terms of the hybrid side of things. The external dis allows you to scale up and scale down. I think it’s very different and dependent on your business model and the way you want to approach things, whether you have an internal fixed cost that you have constantly need to make sure, or you use a variable resource that allows you that scalability. Now, I’ve always been keen to ensure that we have a variable external resource because I don’t want to be making hard decisions such as we’ve had a bad year or due to UK economy which is outside of our control. We have to make staff decisions or whatever that may be. I’d rather work with external hybrid people, in most cases, freelancers, and they take that risk and which is why they have the day rate that sort of supports that to be able to bring in them and scale up and scale down.

That, for me gives us as a company peace of mind that we will never be too busy and we’ll never be in a position where we have to make decisions that will be detrimental to our business based on things that are outside of our control.

Absolutely, absolutely. And you started out the way you mentioned and now your agency has grown to be one of the leading digital marketing agencies in the uk. What is the most pivotal moment in scaling Common Ground and how you, along with your partner, was able to achieve it?

Yeah, so I think actually that the biggest moment for us at Common Ground happened during the pandemic. So whilst obviously that was a really bad time for everybody and we took hit financially and everything from that personally, it enabled us to actually really focus on what we could do for our business. So during that time we went remote, as everybody else in the world did at that time, and we remained remote. So what that allows us to do is hire staff or hire resource from anywhere in the world. Our team is from the top of Scotland down to the south of England, west and east, and we’ve got. We potentially at the moment got a member of staff in every part of the UK as of today. So that was one big thing. It just opens up that talent pool. The second biggest thing for us was bringing in saps, so standard operating procedures, processes. And one thing that I’ve learned over these last four years is to go away from the word process and move more towards the word framework. And the reason behind that is essentially a process when you’re talking to somebody is, oh, okay, I need to follow this line after line.

Whereas a framework, while that allows you to do, is Follow it. Yeah, but it gives you the ability to go off as long as you’re coming back to that, whereas a process doesn’t really allow you to do that. So we’ve put lots of frameworks that has enabled us to be able to deliver the same mark consistently to the same high standard and generate the right results for our clients. So it’s almost becoming like a repeatable system that we’ve been able to create during that period we’re still using today, that we’re allowed to update regularly, that we’re reviewing regularly. We’re constantly just tweaking as SEO and digital marketing world changes across the board.

Absolutely. And the age old question. Yeah, Daniel, you do both SEO and ppc, what is your take when we say SEO versus ppc?

SEO versus well, actually I think they work together.

Yeah.

Or like I’m. We have internal banter within the team. We talk about the SEO and obviously trying to rank for it algorithmically and naturally versus paid, where you have to pay to be at the top. But essentially we’re all doing something to manipulate the search engines to increase rankings. Right. But if you look at it from a business perspective, they work really well together. So the paid side of things can mock up all of the conversions, all the cheap side of the conversion, the traffic. Whereas the SEO does the heavy lifting at the more expensive head turns and that type of element from the thing, you can also switch them over so that when paid is naturally working really well here. But SEO is not really working now. You can bring the PPC over here so that you can support your SEO elements. You can still get your revenue moving and really supporting the entire funnel from B2B perspective.

Absolutely. Absolutely. Very well said. I also align with this thought process that it has to be mixed bag. If you have the budget from the client, it has to be a mixed bag which kind of helps us send the right signals to Google if and then your end consumer as well if you found at all the places. Right. So it makes sense. And you guys specialize in the B2B niche. Daniel writes. What strategies do you feel work for your clients in the B2B space from an SEO perspective?

Yeah. So it’s predominantly because we are in B2B. It’s not really a technical heavy area to be in. So you don’t really need to have all of your technical audits and all of these things like you do if you was in the ecom section, like the faceted navigations and all of the sort of technical elements around crawling where we see the biggest impact, it’s not really sexy at all, but it’s the on page elements. So it’s how can you make the page harder? What gaps in the sector have you, what sort of keyword gaps are there? What opportunities are available for you to drive traffic? Now what we start to see is predominantly people go after the keywords that are long tail and they are the top of the tile and that’s top of the funnel. You’re trying to get as much traffic into the top, it’s worrying it down. We switch that over and think, okay, let’s target the commercial terms first. Because there’s only a finite number of commercial terms for any one company, whereas there’s an infinite number of sort of education, informative content that you can go after. So if we focus predominantly on the bottom of the top, bottom of the funnel, if you like the 10%, in a demand generation sort of world that I’m looking for an in market for purchases, that’s where we focus our keyword and our content.

We will then move up the funnel and focus on the 90% or the 80% that are not actually in market but want to know who you are, what you’re doing and then when ready you can make that purchase. So that’s the sort of key elements for us. There will be some link acquisition if we feel necessary, but it’s not the big priority. It’s all about making sure that the on site is as well optimized as it possibly can be from our SEO point of view.

Absolutely, absolutely. And finally, Daniel, you must have had a brilliant client experiences across all these years. But if I have to ask you about that one favorite client story, what would that be?

Oh, it’s a big one. And so I think actually we’ve had one recently. I’m going to say it’s my favorite, but I think it’s the most recent one that shows the success of what we’ve done. So we’ve worked with a business, they were startup business. They had when we started with them, they had no website, they had no visibility, no presence on the Internet, brand new to the market in car subscription. So it’s slightly different in terms of the B2B niche. We took that business from being nowhere to dominating their sector within nine to 12 months. This led to us winning a UK search award last year where we were ranking through a lot of those key terms. We were outperforming a lot of the big players and driving lots of traffic and leads and ultimately revenue to the business in question that to me, showed the power of SEO. If done right, invested correctly, and has the right strategy. It shows that you don’t need to be a business that’s had 10 years, 20 years of brand mentions and all of the history that you get that you can survive and actually thrive in sectors if you do it correctly.

Absolutely. Absolutely. Very well said. Really, Daniel, this has been a brilliant session, but before I let you go, we would like to play a quick rapid fire with you. I hope you’re game for it.

Let’s go for it. Let’s see how we get on.

Yeah? All right. Okay. Since we are in the uk, do you follow EPL by any chance?

Who started?

Do you follow the Premier League?

Yes, I do. Yeah.

Okay. Favorite team then.

For my sins, it’s Man United.

Oh, okay. So I’m also a die hard Man United fan. It’s been for ages now. There’s something in common there. Lovely. And not a very good time for us though. But yeah. Yeah. All right. Your last Google search.

Oh, rank tracker.

Okay. And where do we find you on Friday evenings, Daniel? After office or after work?

So I’m either in the gym or I’m sat down in front of the TV after I put my daughter to bed with a cup of hot chocolate watching White Collar.

Okay, the last one. What did you do with your first paycheck, Daniel? First paycheck of your life?

Oh, well, I’m a big saver, So I put 20% into savings. There’s a very. There’s a very funny episode on Friends where her dad talks about putting their 20% of your paycheck into savings. So I put it into my savings and then I went out and bought myself some place.

Lovely. Great. Daniel, thank you so much for taking our time to do this with us. Really appreciate it. And for audiences, if they want to reach out to you, how do they do that?

Yeah, absolutely. So you can find me on LinkedIn. Just search for Daniel Bianchini. Alternatively, I’m Daniel at Commonground Digital.

All right, thank you so much, Daniel. Really appreciate your time. Cheers, man.

You’re welcome. Thank you.