Revolutionizing Agency Growth: Crafting Compelling Content Strategies in the Digital Realm

Hello Everyone. Today we have with us, Skyler Reeves, Founder and CEO of Ardent Growth. Ardent Growth works as a content marketing partner with marketing agencies that are too busy to market themselves. Skyler, Welcome to the show. Excited to have you today.

Thanks for having me. Glad to be here.

Skyler, why agencies? If you could share your journey into content marketing and what inspired you to specifically focus on digital marketing agencies?

Yeah, so I think we worked with, I think, like most agencies when they started, we tried to figure out who we enjoyed working with the most, who was the most profitable, the general thing. Over time, we realized we had one agency reach out to us and ask us if we’d be willing to create some other content. It was the first agency we worked with, and I said, Sure, I liked the Founder, I liked the brand. We knew their audience pretty well. We started creating content for them and quickly got them some pretty great results. We realized we enjoyed the relationship.They just made everything easier for us. We didn’t have to explain why we were doing what. They just gave us the reins and told us to grow the revenue, and that’s what we did. After that, I asked the team, I said, How do you guys feel about us trying to do this some more with other agencies? And they were on board with it. They liked it. The clientele was great to work with, and everything is like working with yourself, basically, really is what it felt like a lot of times.

So we started working with them more then we realized that some of the technology that we had developed was beneficial to them as well, and so that opened up additional revenue streams for us as well. And yeah, it’s like getting to do work for other agencies. It’s like being a nice fractional marketing team for other folks and getting the exposure that you might like marketing in different ways for other types of customers without having to do it internally on your brand.

How challenging has it been after that one client? Has it always been as easy as it was with the first client? Or I understand agencies don’t have time to market themselves and for themselves, but then still, how easy is it to work with them or get approvals and stuff like that?

Yeah, so far it’s yet to be difficult. I think it’s mainly because of the way that we approach it. So we tend to approach what makes a good fit as another marketing agency who works with us is someone who was the founder. They don’t have a marketing head, right? They don’t have a marketing director of marketing, etc. They want to market themselves, but they’re too busy, and they’re much more focused on the operations side or the sales side, typically. And so the way we structure the relationships is that we come in and we’re literally like a fractional marketing team in the sense that we’re there directly in the CRM. We’re involved in a lot of the meetings of what’s going on internally with the business. And so we don’t have to worry about approval because the approval comes from our side. We handle approvals ourselves, and what we’re held accountable for is revenue growth. And so as long as we’re growing revenue, that’s that. And so we haven’t had to deal with a lot of approval issues or anything like that. I think that structuring that way is what’s helped there.

Otherwise, it would be a nightmare like it is with any other client.

I think one good point is that, like you said, your work is directly related to the revenue impact it’s creating. I think it then makes it easier from the approval side and everything. Because as long as getting that output, I think the owners, what else would they need?

Yeah. We’ll take input while trying to understand, okay, do you have a brand? Have you established what direction you want to go with this brand? And we discuss those things, but we discuss those things during strategic meetings. And it’s just like what you would do if you had an actual CMO, right? You would discuss with your leadership team, Hey, here’s what we think. What a good idea to do, what a good direction to go with the business would be. And then you would expect your CMO to execute. You don’t expect the CMO to be going to the head ops to ask them what their opinion on some piece is, right? And so that’s how it’s been. But now folks who want to have more granular control and want to run it all, those are the founders who tend to be more on the marketing side and less on the sales or operations side. And so they’re also usually not the ones that are looking for us. I think they’re usually just looking for an extra pair of hands, right? They’re just looking to help with execution, not necessarily with the entire marketing function of the conversation.

Right.

So the right fit is an agency that doesn’t have a CMO for themselves, and that’s where the right fit is.

Yeah. And I think a lot of agencies, even if they do have a CMO, really probably shouldn’t be a CMO at that point. They should probably be head of marketing or a brand manager or something like that. And so it’s usually folks who don’t have one of those and where the founder just wants to do marketing, they know they need to do marketing, but they just can’t seem to pull themselves out of the more important areas of the business with good reason. I think in the long run, the CEO shouldn’t be doing the marketing anyway unless it’s what I would call company-level marketing, where they’re using it to broadly influence to bring in additional talent or to tie their name associated with the brand. I think that’s useful. But your standard execution of the strategy shouldn’t be on the day-to-day of the founder, so not in the long run.

Its keyword research becomes very critical. I know you do a lot of work on that, a lot of research. What does your keyword research look like? Because the keyword research will define the topics to write about and will define everything around the content strategy as well. So what does your keyword research look like?

So typically the way we approach it is what we call the total searchable market. Anything relevant that a person could search for that you could eventually do business with, whether you offer that product now or in the future, we just pull all the data in, and then we take all that, crunch it through an algorithm that we wrote, and we end up with a map of the market. And then we use that. We have another algorithm that helps us prioritize it. That way, you end up suppressing a lot of the more irrelevant topics at the current point in time. They get suppressed down toward the bottom, so you don’t run into them. And that’s what we use to inform the high level. But we also try to blend it with qualitative research that we’re getting from, say, the sales team or we’re directly from their market. So we’ll survey their market a lot of times, and we try to find that overlap between what’s the problem areas that the customer has. And then sometimes we even end up going back and iterating on that keyword research again once we uncover new insights of the way a customer describes a problem or something like that to bolster it even more to get this more.

But we try to find that overlap between what are their problems, what’s the customer talking about, and what they see as valuable with what we have in the actual quantitative data research side of things. And then the last component is also looking at it from the perspective of where the business wants to go. What are they focused on, where do they get their margins, etc. So try to combine all three. But from a keyword research standpoint, it’s give me anything and everything relevant and we’ll let the algorithm shake out the rest.

What are your thoughts on topic clusters?

That’s a broad question. I think that from a search standpoint, I don’t know a better way to go if you’re trying to tackle things from a search standpoint. I think broadly speaking, clustering topics together, There’s not a better solution currently, because if you don’t, what you end up doing is you’re always going to run into mistakes of saying, should I create one page or two? Or maybe you create two pieces of content that end up cannibalizing each other later, or you create one piece of content, but it really should have been two. And you also, I think if you don’t cluster them together, you don’t see the big picture of how much value is contained within a subtopic of the market. And so being able to cluster all together, you can start to see, okay, maybe on its own, this one topic didn’t seem like it would be very valuable to our business, but when you see it aggregated with everything else that’s very similar that has a high degree of similarity and overlap, you start to see what that real value would be. And then it also can help with, I think, everything from how you structure your site, how you set.

Like, if you’re going to spend money creating content for your website, let’s make sure we spend our money in the most opportune places possible. Otherwise, you’re just pulling in keyword research sorting by what? Something like volume and Katie or something, which just works if you don’t have anything else. Something’s better than nothing, but that’s a rather pedestrian-type approach, I think.

Yeah, I think a lot of people end up making a mistake where they’re creating a lot of pillar pages and subpages, but there’s no strategy involved. And some people follow a strategy where, Okay, fine, I want one pillar page and let’s say three or four sub-pages. But like you said, there’s no formula to it like one page and three pages, or let’s say one page and unlimited pages. As long as that individual subtopic in itself has some relevance and value, only then will it have some traction. Otherwise, you’ll end up having some sub-pages which are of no value at all.

Yeah. And there’s another comment angle I think I see a lot of people miss when they’re approaching this is recognizing that, okay, once you have a map of say, this topic that you want to tackle and that you want to own, and you say, Okay, maybe we’re going to create these 10-20 pieces around it just to see what does it look like to begin to penetrate this market from a search perspective. There are a lot of topics in there that maybe aren’t going to show up in your data, or maybe the intent of the search doesn’t align with what you do as a business. And one thing you don’t want to do is I wouldn’t go address that intent based on search. I realize that’s what would get you ranking for it. But the thing is, if there’s a secondary intent and it aligns better with your business, just go after that. It’s okay if you’re ranking six or seven for it because the people are searching for that. We’re eventually going to click on that result or find the result anyway. So don’t just bend yourself to the will of search because you’re bending yourself to the broad market who’s never going to buy anything from me anyway.

That’s one key problem. I think another one is misunderstanding or not realizing the power that having an entry point topic can give you to drive people to other pieces of content that they would never search for. Absolutely. But can apps 100 % position you for that market in a way that, again, they just never would have searched for something like that to help you start to tell your narrative to give your story to these people? And that’s something I see a lot of folks miss out on because they get tunnel-visioned on the SEO side of things. They’re not thinking about the broader picture of what this looks like down the funnel and/or what this looks like if I wanted to share it on social or how I get tracks around this. Not necessarily share the content on social media, but I don’t think that works very well. It just gets suppressed too much. But how do you share the ideas, the concepts, the narrative on social media?

Yeah, I think a lot of people are too focused on just looking at the list of keywords ranking for the competition, the pages the competition has, and what they are missing. And a lot of times, everybody has not got it right. A lot of times, there’s a whole set of things that are missing there. It’s almost as good as a vacuum, and it’s as good as a Blue Ocean, where you can have that authority and you can drive and control all that traffic.

Yeah. We have an article I wrote about this two years ago or something like that where we were arguing against this common approach of doing a content gap analysis where most people will take and say, Okay, what are my competitors ranking for? What are they ranking for that I’m not ranking for? Okay, I get it. Go fill those gaps in. Sure. But there’s often a much broader picture, that’s why we call the total searchable market, that your competition hasn’t even tried to tap into yet. And so it’s up to you when you begin to see that on figuring out, okay, is there a reason why they haven’t gone after this? Is it not very valuable? Or have I found an opportunity where I can be in to lead the market versus just playing catch up with everyone else? Because anytime you benchmark on competitor data or try to look at what the competition is doing to inform your strategy, to me, that’s, again, It’s not a winning strategy. You don’t win by chasing after competitors. You win by making them chase after you. Exactly. And so you want to look at the bigger picture and see where can I begin to either go after things that they haven’t done before or where can I begin to have different and unique opinions or unique take on topics that I think everyone else is getting wrong.

And that’s something we frequently do because there’s this common, and we’ve all seen it on Google, where we search for something and all the results are very homogeneous. I think it’s a byproduct of one person, quote-unquote, got it right. Then everyone else just tries to copy them, and everyone else is also too afraid to try anything new, to try something different. They would rather do something that they think is going to work and try something that may work better, but it’s more unknown. Oftentimes, when you try something more unknown, you start to realize that, okay, the only reason why search looks like that is because everyone is just blind following the blind half the time. And so we make it a point to say, do we fundamentally agree with the premise here? And if we don’t, it’s nice for marketing agencies because oftentimes there is a lot of just wrong stuff out there. An example, we did this recently for one agency that was looking at a fairly broad keyword around their market. And every article was complete. The core theme was around strategy, and every article was pretty much just focused on the tactical execution side of things on say, social and SEO.

And if we think about what marketing looks like holistically here, you’ve got market research, you’ve got segmentation, you’ve got targeting, positioning, messaging, right? And setting objectives and all that. And then you get into product pride with 4P’s and promotion, that tactical execution on the communication channels. That’s just like one-eighth of marketing. And then all the articles were all based around that. And so we said, Okay, let’s take the bigger picture view. Let’s call out how wrong everyone else is. So we did.You’ve seen this, I’m sure, plenty of times, and everyone else has too, where you’ll search for something and it’s all the X, Y, Z guide, the ultimate guide, etc. I think we named ours not another guide to this. We quickly picked up traction because one, we’re able to hit that intent that Google is looking for around that guide and the keyword, but we’re also trying to make it stand out a bit more and take a very different angle. Yeah, I think that a lot of people miss out on, they don’t look at the bigger picture. They get too myopic in what the competition is doing.

Let’s just go talk to your market. If you just spend time talking to your market, they will guide you and tell you exactly what you need to do, and you’ll be so far ahead than what you ever would just by copying the competition. Because there’s a lag time where your competition is. What is your competition? You don’t know if it’s working for them. You don’t know how long ago they tried that.

I was about to tell you the same thing. We have hyped that reverse engineering term so much in SEO. Not all, but a lot of our tools that we’re using are looking at the top 10, seeing what all they have and just copying. Again, it’s important you need to make sure that based on the intent and what Google considers top 10, it’s very important to make sure you have all of that. It’s also important to see what they’re missing. The tools are not going to get you that. We went to talk to one of our clients and we told them to just talk to 10 of your clients and show them your content and just tell them what the things that they would also like to see which is missing there, and that gave them some really good topics which the tools would not have. I think it’s something that a lot of people miss. And maybe our viewers can try that activity of talking to their clients, seeing the topics that they’re not getting in the tool, and seeing the traction it gets.

Yeah. And two things off the back of that. One would be, sometimes you’ll look at the broad topic as a whole, and maybe you think everything out there is pretty bland about it, and you’re not sure you want to go after that topic because you don’t know how valuable it would be for you, It may be HubSpot’s ringing for it in Semrush and HRS, and as an agency or something, you’re like, What am I going to do here? For one, you can beat them. I’ll just go ahead and say that right now. You can beat those large players who do it plenty of times. But I think it’s looking, if you’ve clustered your topics together, it’s looking within the cluster to find where’s an angle within that cluster where you could go after, and yeah, you may not capture the entire available volume, the entire traffic that’s available within that topic cluster, but you can capture a sub-segment of it that would be very valuable to your business for people who have that type of problem. That gives you a much more narrow and specific angle to take with your piece.

And another thing, if you don’t always have time to talk to your customers, you can’t get them to give you good feedback or whatever, because I realized it could be difficult depending on the volume of content that you’re putting out. It would be as simple as just going and reading some of the pieces that are ranking, just actually read it and read it from a critical perspective and ask yourself. Just assume that there’s something wrong. That’s the way we always approach it, is to assume that there’s something wrong and that there could be something better. And I think it’s very easy for people to go read, let’s say you’re competing against other agencies on the Serbs. I think it’s very easy for you to go read their content and just ask yourself, do you think this is good? And I’d start to find flaws in it. And when you find those flaws, note those down. And that can give you some insight into how you might be able to create something that’s going to provide a new perspective or unique information. The whole concept of confirmation of information gain can be baked into that. But you also need writers who are going to need to understand the craft or at least researchers who understand the craft so they can form that narrative.

I understand. Skyler, since you work with agencies, I’m sure you also have agencies that are focusing on multiple niches. In those scenarios, how do you prioritize your content?

Whenever an agency, like Verkree Considers an agency that does have multiple.

Yeah, an agency.

Typically, it comes to a handful of things. One, we’ll ask ourselves like, Okay, maybe they’ve started focusing on a new industry and they want to get penetration in that market. At that level, we’re looking more at what’s going on with the business. What are we trying to accomplish this year as a business? What are sales focused on? What are our advertising efforts focused on? How do we get that to align with the content marketing side of things? Because all the content we create can help enable sales, can help enable advertising, and we get feedback from both as well. So it creates a more synergistic approach. That’s one thing. Other scenarios would be, let’s say they’re not necessarily going after a new industry, but we want to prioritize within the area. What we’ll do is we’ll start to look at, okay, where do you have your best margins? What are you able to consistently deliver at high margins with a good balance between volume and margin? We use that to say, if you could sell more of X, what would it be? And we’ll use that to inform the direction that we go.

That so far has not gotten us wrong. And if they don’t know those numbers, then that ends up being something where we will periodically take off the marketing hat for a bit and put on our operations hat and say, okay, let’s help you understand what is driving revenue in your business and get that problem solved first because that’s a big constraint that we need to have answers to. That impacts every area of the business, so we’ll try to help them solve that first. It’s usually when I get more involved and it’s less of the marketing role and more of, Okay, let’s do CEOs here, agencies collaborate and figure out how we solve this problem for you. But yeah, so that tends to be word-well-focused. Or if they have the resources, it’s divide and conquer. If they’re doing well in some areas, we’ll look to say, Why are you not doing so well? And sometimes evaluating if it’s even worth going after that. That’s usually what it’s going to be. It’s just looking at the business level.

In your case, I know you do the content for the agencies, but let’s say an agency is doing its content, and this will also hold when they’re trying to work for clients and they have a content team. It depends on the type of writers and the tone of various writers and stuff like that. I’m sure you handle a big content team. Any advice or tips that can help you scale content and still make sure the consistency is there?

Yeah. So let’s say you’re approaching this for your customers, I think you can either play the quality game, or You can do quality with quantity but you have to dial in your process towards quality first. You cannot create something that’s high quality without having, You have to have someone good in play. Editors are probably the best thing. If I were to say what’s the trick? It’s to just have really good editors who can scale themselves across multiple areas. So it’s not super helpful, but it’s hiring A players who know what the hell they’re doing. That’s probably the biggest part. But because writers, you can teach a writer to get better over time. Editors are quasi-strategists, in my opinion. They just have to have a knack for it. They’re always looking for how we shape this, having a director on a movie set. They’re seeing that. They’re trying to see the envision. It’s not just an editor who’s just cleaning up. It’s not a copy editor, you know what I mean? It’s more like an editor-in-chief. That would be one. Other than that, I would say there’s nothing wrong with asking, are we going to be quality over quantity?

One or the other, and just picking one and going that direction with it. You can charge more for quality and do charge more, but do less, or you can charge less and do more and leverage GPT or mouse-source writers, templates, and things like that. But when you do begin to try to mix them, I think because it’s hard even when you add more people into it, you want to keep a writer working on the same account as much as possible. That way, the narrative is consistent. And then say, from a clustering standpoint, it can help, too. Here’s a little tactical tip. Let’s say you want to go after this big set of content, this big topic, and craft it in such a way, What I would say is if you’re writing a book for it, just write the entire piece, and don’t worry about trying to publish it as you’re finishing the pieces of it. Get the whole thing done, write this massive guide, and then begin to split it up across the topics that you need. That way, everything is consistent, and everything from a research standpoint, you’ll go back, you’ll edit as you learn to discover new things as you’re going.

That’s been one way to help put out a large batch of content, but it’s much more of a not much is going out, right? It builds up and then the game releases, and now you have this corpus of content that you published. That’s one way to do it. But another way I’ve seen, if you look at HubSpot, what they do is like minimal viable content, so they’ll publish a piece of content. They’ll publish a piece of content with the medium level standards, and then they have an entirely separate team whose whole job is to come back in behind it and begin to periodically update that content, whether it’s with new information or enhancing it with media assets or tools, or templates, or whatever it’s going to be. It’s their job to come in and take it from that C-level type content to that A-level type content. That would be another approach, but you want to have two different types of teams because if you have someone good at the details trying to simultaneously do volume, you’ll run into issues. I’m not going to say it’s not possible, but it’s difficult.

Skylar’s favorite client story.

This was when we got hired by an agency that was somewhat outside the beaten path, but they were trying to close a deal with a large global e-commerce/software brand. And they reached out to us and said, They’d already pitched the company, lost the deal, or didn’t lose it. The company was like, Hey, we think you folks are solid, but this pitch didn’t land. Try it again. And I’m thinking that’s nice of them to give you that shot. They want to work with you. They just really knew what it was. They needed better material so they could take it to their leadership to get the proof. And so the agency reached out to us and said, Can you help us with this? Is there anything you can do? I said, Yeah, I think so. When do you need it? They said, Yesterday. I said, Okay. I said it was on a Friday when everyone was having this conversation. I said I’ll pull in some of the team. I said We’ll make this work. We’ll get to you by Monday. They said, Okay. Normally we wouldn’t work weekends, but I charged them a lot for it.

I said I’d charge them a pretty hefty amount. I told them, I said, If you don’t land the deal, I’ll pay you back, whatever. I was like, I’m pretty confident we could do this. We took all of that, crunched all the data over the weekend, and put together a deck for them, like a seven-page deck that was more like a sales deck. They were originally trying to pitch this deal at around 400K for the year. I told them, I said, This is closer to a $1.9 million deal. That’s what I would be pushing for if I were you. I gave them the data, and they went and pitched it and ended up closing it at 1.8. That was a big win for them, and it helped them survive that year with a lot of the stuff that happened in tech with everything slowing down. For me, seeing that big win for them was a big win. I love that they broke out of their self-limiting beliefs of how much they thought they could charge. Yeah, definitely. They had some- Big differences. Yeah, they were a little worried. They were like, I don’t know that we can pitch this amount.

I was like, You need to pitch this amount. They did, and they won it. That’s probably been my favorite one, at least for the past couple of years.

For agency owners watching, could you share a content strategy like a quick win that they can implement immediately?

Yeah, here’s one. I know you folks probably do this with a lot of your customers. We tell them they need to make comparison-type pages or a list of the best of X-type things, and maybe they want to push back against it because they don’t want to put themselves amongst them. They don’t talk about the competition. So two things there. One, I know you don’t have a problem with this, but tell them that the conversation is going to happen one way or another and they can either participate in that conversation or they can sit on the bench. But for agency specifically, we’ve, for several, because we try to keep them compartmentalized within a certain area either by service or by industry. That way, we’re not competing with ourselves. But what we’ve done is we’ve gone after those best agencies for X-type articles where we’re talking about the competition. We’ll send them over there. That’s fine. And it is converting into leads and into close one revenue, too, at a crazy rate. Make those pages. That’s what I would do. If you’re in the healthcare industry or the dental industry or whatever it is, just talk about your competition and be charitable, right?

We’ll talk about what makes you good and who you’re for and make it clear who you’re not for. And it’s okay if people go to your competition. If they’re not a good fit for you, you don’t want them anyway because they may be a good fit for someone else. So from a pure conversion standpoint, that’s been a great one. It’s great and stuff around that. From a broader strategic perspective, I would say a strategy should follow directly from your business strategy. So your business strategy is you define what winning looks like for you, and then from there, you decide where you are going to play such that you will win, or you have an unfair advantage that you’ll win. How are you going to play the game such that you have an unfair way to win? So are you going to play where you’ve chosen to play? And then from there, you’re looking at asking these questions of, so the two other components are, what are the must-have capabilities? So what has to be true for me to win? How do I want to win? Where do I want to play to achieve whatever it is you’re trying to achieve?

And then lastly, what are the systems that we need to have in place to give us the feedback loops so we can consistently iterate on this? And it’s the core systems that without them, wouldn’t drive this unfair advantage in the market. And so that’s the business strategy, right? And if you want to learn more about that, just go read anything by Roger L. Martin. But once you have that established, your content strategy just directly derives from that. The strategy will be, Okay, we decided we want to play in this market. Cool. Create content around that market. Focus on what are the problems you can solve. Balance out your traffic sources. Identify where the constraints are in your business. Strategy is not what a lot of people think it is, where it’s this idea of, Let me go look at some topics, and, Oh, should I create something around this or that? No, it’s about, Go survey the market. To find out where your constraint is in your business. If you survey 100 people in your target market, do they know who you are? If they don’t, you have an awareness problem. You need to fix that first, and then that will inform your content strategy for that year, right?

If you survey them, they know who you are, and let’s say you’re even top of mind, but they’re not often considering you when they’re looking for this. Maybe they’re oftentimes looking for in-house. Well, then you have a consideration problem. Fix that. Same thing with preference and down. You just have to identify what the constraint is. First, set your objective around it, and then the strategy just paints itself once you know what the problem is, you just create content to solve that problem for yourself, just like you would for a customer.

Thank you for that. Skyler, in the end, I know we’re short on time, in the end, I like playing a quick rapid-fire round of three to five questions. Are you ready?

Yeah, sounds good. Yeah, go for it.

Your favorite part about Thanksgiving?

That’s a good question. I don’t know, rolls maybe? I like those.

Yeah, whatever comes to your mind.

Yeah, rolls or potato wedges are probably the two things. The food is great. I think it’s the rest you get afterward.

Are you a morning person or a night person?

Both. I’m more of a morning person. I like to get up early. I get more done in the quiet time in the morning 100 %.

Tea or coffee?

Neither. I’m more of a water or red bull. It’s two extremes there, but not a big fan of coffee, and not a big fan of tea.

What was your last Google search if you remember?

I think it had something to do with HubSpot’s new lead object. I was looking around to see something to do with some of the properties that they don’t have documentation on yet. I think that was the last one I looked for.

If a movie was made on you, what genre would it be?

Probably an action comedy, and it would look at my time in the military. That’s probably what it would be around.

Skyler, thank you so much for your time. It was fun having you.

Yeah, thanks for having me. I enjoyed it.