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Agency Forward explores the future of agencies as tech and AI drive down the cost of tactical deliverables. Topics include building competent teams, developing strategic offers, systemizing your business, and more.
New episodes delivered every Tuesday.
Chris DuBois 0:01
Hey everyone, today I'm joined by Chris Dreyer. Chris is the founder and ceo@rankings.io where he leads a team of SEO specialists to help law firms and personal injury lawyers dominate first page rankings on Google. Chris is a powerhouse in the SEO game, and I was very excited to capture his insights. But when we started recording, we went even deeper than expected, getting into agency operations and Event Marketing. That in this episode, we discuss why niching up is a necessary strategy. Channels SEO focused agencies should consider the importance of data in decision making and more. Today's episode is brought to you by Zen pilot. There are lots of tools out there for agencies to manage projects, but any project issues aren't usually caused by the tool. They're from your own processes. Zen pilot helps agencies implement their project management tools, while streamlining operations, so your team can move from chaos to clarity, you can see for yourself at Zen pilot.com/forward. And now my conversation with Chris Dreyer. It's easier than ever to start an agency, but it's only getting harder to stand out and keep it alive. Join me as we explore the strategies agencies are using today to secure a better tomorrow. This is agency forward.
How much from your perspective, has the SEO game changed?
Speaker 1 1:31
Oh, geez, it changes every year, it's more competitive. Right now. It's a bloodbath. It is extremely competitive, the there's a big consolidation occurring, because when you put way around things like number of reviews, and instantaneously, you know, benefits the largest players in the space. And I know it says, For example, when when it goes to when you're talking to local L, L. So local SEO, you're talking about relevance this some prominence when they're talking about prominence, and they get to a review, count and score. The count is always going to be influenced by volume. So there's benefits there. There's a lot of issues with helpful content. And I know a lot of people been complaining about AI and the top of funnel being a eaten up in all the forums and UGC stuff. But look, there's been rich snippets, Google's been taking our traffic for a while. Those are zero clicks scenarios. And now it's just more of that. And to be honest, it's it's a cost. It's very cost prohibitive to continue to reward top of funnel content, because a lot of that content already exists. So it makes it really challenging for Google to crawl the web, just energy and consumption. So we can dig into any of those. But that's that's the issue that's occurring right now. Right?
Chris DuBois 2:52
Yeah. And I've seen the information gain, I guess, being that critical piece for new content, especially with top of funnel. Yeah. And it's so apparent that companies are just missing out on that, like, they're just let me just regurgitate what everybody else is doing. And hopefully that gets me on the top spot. No. Regret, actually, let's just go a little deeper on that, then. I think AI is probably causing a lot of agencies specifically to lean in more on the quantity side than the quality side, but just saying, Well, I can do more. Now I can do this faster. And so essentially, we're getting more, maybe not the highest quality content, like how are you addressing that within your your own agency to make sure that's not the case?
Speaker 1 3:42
Well, let's talk about that just in general, a lot of it has to do with the monetization structure for the agency. Most of them are doing cost plus, so if it's ours, that's one thing. But if you're doing units, like number of articles, or number of words, in order to enhance profitability on the short term, which will jeopardize your you know, your client, it's more of an agency benefit to do cost plus, is to use AI to generate it, you know, for less costly. So it deals with the monetization structure when you get to value based fees. And you're talking about, say, Me in the legal space, where it's, we're talking about cases and revenue impact to the firm as opposed to units capacity and output and things like that. It's a big problem. So that's where you see these content vendors, your text brokers that are there's many in the legal space, they're going to, they're all cost plus. So they're going to use AI to drive you know, to generate content less cheaply. It's a race to the bottom for commoditization. So those are the issues. On the flip side, those and look I use several years ago, we outsourced a lot. And there's there's a lot of reasons for this right When you're talking about labor arbitrage, you're talking about a full time employee is high effort, they take a lot of effort, culture training, they get high control, you get them to do whatever you want. In the agency space, you got freelancers, that's medium effort, medium control, because you don't hire a freelancer that doesn't know the craft. But someone else can take their time if you hire up workers and someone else can just grab their utilization. And then you have at the bottom, the vendors, that's low effort, low control, the effort, the control is because they know how to make the widget but you can't tell them how to make the widget. Right? So where I'm going with this on the on the AI in a long winded way of saying, you know, in the past, I would outsource content, but I made a decision to bring it in house from because they wouldn't do some of the things I needed, specifically enhancing content, and really researching and going deeper and providing value. So they're all structured for a commoditization productization type of method, which is a problem, and that's why many of them are decreasing in revenue.
Chris DuBois 6:07
So nebrodi, incredibly valuable in that insight, bringing things in house, because no one else can do, like, you know what that right way is, where you you are thinking more strategically than just the delivery of a, like an asset, right? You're not just, this isn't about the blog post, it's about the outcome of the blog post, or whatever that asset might be for an agency. I can, I can appreciate that. Thank you.
Speaker 1 6:33
Yeah, it comes down to the core and context, right. That's why a lot of people say, don't outsource your main thing, it's because you can do it better, you don't have the option to outsource. So what's core for me is SEO, I think we're one of the best in the world at it. So for me to go to try to outsource that, it's, you know, it's not going to be as good. But there are some things that are context, like payroll, and HR and stuff like that. Now, we do have an HR person, that's amazing now, but in the past, that was context. So we would outsource that, because that company that provided HR, it was core to them. So we're getting their core capability right
Chris DuBois 7:13
into you, you're getting the best from everyone, I think it something else that does when you outsource any of your main main offers is that it dilutes your story, right? You you can't actually go to someone and say, We are the best in the world at this. Because they'll just look at whoever you outsource and be like, well, those guys are the ones doing the work. Like you have to make it part of part of your business. So in researching for this Epson, you have found a story from you about your biggest hiring mistake. And I guess it was over hiring, I might spoil the surprise for everybody. But then that forced you into having to jump into other work within the business to be able to ensure you're, you know, set up how your structure you know, all the right moves moving forward from that work since we're focused here on the future of agencies, I guess, what lessons did you learn from that? That would be a valuable takeaway for everybody?
Speaker 1 8:17
Good question. The bigger you get, the more important data is to make decisions. In the beginning, when you're an agency of seven, you've got everybody at one meeting, and you kind of understand what everybody's working on and what their capacity is, and you're meeting with them frequently. And there are things like time tracking that people are just opposed to like, I'm not going to time track, I'm not going to whatever, but like, Okay, if you don't do that, then you can't accurately measure utilization and forecast capacity. So it comes down to really being more data oriented. So every single employee at our company, every single one has KPIs that we measure on a weekly basis. Some of those are based upon capacity, others based upon quality. And each individual role has their own KPIs that we measure. And it's also they are employees will record them, and then the manager will then rate them. So this is what they think they're doing. But this is what the manager thing. So there's not this disconnect, right? It's, oh, I'm crushing it. Well, I don't know you're not really because these other employees are doing this. So you know, things like time tracking. There's a couple tools. A lot of people talk about the common ones like harvest and things like that, but there's one that I like called meme time. It automatically time tracks everything. So it's not a terrible burden. You can get a summary and it helps you make decisions. That's the biggest thing is I in the past I wasn't using data enough to make decisions around capacity and and now we are
Chris DuBois 9:54
so I'm a fan of time tracking. So you get that data. But I guess one of the The pushback that I hear a lot with an agency teams that they feel like they're being micromanaged. How do you get around that? Perhaps?
Speaker 1 10:07
I tell them, Yes, you are being market micromanage you're working for me. You know, do you want to be on the boat or not? Right? So I have a more. My culture is different. I'll just, I'll just be real, we're very competitive, are we're an EOS traction based agency, we don't have a leadership, Elton, we have a war room, Milton. Our core values are not team play player smacking on the ass style. It's foxhole mentality, like, I don't care if you don't like the person, but you're in the foxhole with them, I don't care. Like do your work, have their back. And True Grit, right and play to win, send and delete, like, if I send you a task. If I give you a task, I'm not, I don't need to follow up. It's done. That's your responsibility. So it comes from the culture, like people can have the rah rah stuff. But when it comes to SEO, it's war. It's the epitome of war. We're pushing for territory. Every client that we're pushing to get number one, or number two is taking more global territory. And that's how we treat it like we have these little battles. And so I kind of went on a little rant there. But I think that the statement like if someone said that to me, it wouldn't fly just because of our culture.
Chris DuBois 11:25
Well, then, having such a strong culture, and like clearly outline, it also makes it probably easier on the hiring side, like to know who is a good fit and helping them like kind of disqualify themselves. Right? Oh, yeah,
Speaker 1 11:37
we don't, there's there's no playing the game because it's fun, we play to win because winning is fun.
Chris DuBois 11:44
Going back to the KPIs that you have the team set, how much is that like a kind of mutual conversation where we're saying, Hey, this is what do you want to own? Where can we get the most from you? Or is it more of a we need someone's own this like your because this is your position.
Speaker 1 12:01
A lot of it starts from the top the leaders are our leaders job is to is to, you know, lead by example, to really understand our directors are really reinforcing the strategy and owning their department or managers or then quality control on processes and things like that. So it starts from those directors. And it may be, for example, like our on page specialists, like one KPI would be number of articles published. And because that's a core component of their job, another account managers could deal with NPS or response time, and just, it's really specific to each role.
Chris DuBois 12:46
I want to shift into talking about niching up. Sure, because I'm a firm believer in the strategy, I think you are as well, given in the book that you've wrote on it. I guess how do you explain the concept to people who believe that generalized offers are the only way?
Speaker 1 13:08
Really good question. I'm trying to think how stern I want to be here. Most people are bootstrapped. Most people don't have aren't taking on debt for capital or have a lot of capital to influence marketing decisions. If that is the case, niching is a great way to maximize your capital capital. When we when we are CEOs, we're playing the game of capital allocation. To go after a super large tam requires a tremendous amount of capital. So what most people don't think about when it comes to niching is it's maximizing profit and your capital allocation. Because just little things, perception, like even though if I say that I'm in legal, I may have never had a lawyer client, but by the way, there's a perception that you understand legal right, every brain surgeon has their first brain surgery. So there's a perception of expertise that's going to help you on your win rate. You're going to speak the same language, you're going to you're going to aim your marketing dollars in the most efficient way. And the downside is very real, the small tam but you can't attack a large tam until you have a lot more capital or something truly unique, which most of us as much as we want to talk about these blue ocean scenarios. It's it's most individuals are not attacking a true blue ocean.
Chris DuBois 14:41
I think one of the challenges with a large tam is that there's also a lot more competitors in the space that you're fighting over. Yeah, and many of them are niched, right. And so if you can find that smaller niche where you maybe there's only one or two other competitors, like it's easier to kind of bump elbows when you you're not going against a horde of about There's, yeah,
Speaker 1 15:00
I see this, this this arc, in my opinion, that's that's optimal, is you start off as a generalist, and try to do everything and try to identify where your strengths are and whether it's opportunity legal. There's many people that have done that. So you could say that but like, let's say you had some in manufacturing someone funeral home, so and so but you find your opportunity, then you niche into it to maximize that opportunity. But after you start to generate revenue, then there's then you want to spread back out. So it's kind of this arc. That's all centered around capital allocation and targeting. Right?
Chris DuBois 15:36
How do you recommend, like an agency would start with figuring out what niche they should actually target? Yeah,
Speaker 1 15:43
if you've been in the game for a little bit, this look at your data start to segment your revenue. So by category, we did the same. We were we were 100%. Legal, I started out of the gate like that. But I identified that a large subset of the revenue was from personal injury law, extremely like 70% of our revenue from less than 50% of our clientele. So it was a clear decision to really focus in created a personal injury podcast, we have a personal injury conference this year, we have three of our BDR, specifically to PII, all these different components, the marketing, where we're marketing, where we're going to conferences, or the conferences where PII congregate. I'm right, I have a book coming out later this year on personal injury marketing. So it's, it's not saying no to every others, but it's really laser, you know, focusing the laser on that group.
Chris DuBois 16:34
Right? Are you Is it the conference like self hosted a year bring? Yeah, so
Speaker 1 16:41
it's called PIM con, it's going to be in September, we have a, it's at the Venetian in Scottsdale, it's gonna be a big one. I know a lot of people like to dip their toe in the water and do these small events. And I decided to just go all in and we're, we've got a ton of money budgeted towards it, over a couple million bucks, we're gonna have really elite people there. So that was a decision that came after the Podcast, the podcast generated the audience, to have the ability to do the conference.
Chris DuBois 17:12
Right? I was talking with Marcus Sheridan a couple of weeks ago. And that was one of his big things looking at the future was that like in person events are going to take off, primarily because you don't know when things are online. Now, it's like, we're coming in not able to trust it immediately. You have to you almost have to be a skeptic, because, hey, I can create anything. So people are going to start wanting more of that human connection to actually build those relationships for business. And so I think that's, uh, yeah, running a conference like that is probably a huge blow. I mean, it's a huge endeavor, right? But also a potential huge win, if you can, if you can nail it, because like, you're gonna be set that's just ingrained. You, you and your agency in everyone's heads as the ones who brought that together. So yeah, I guess. Let's go a little deeper on that. Just like what are some of the setting up a conference? It's known? Like I said, like, no small endeavor, right? Like, what are some of the things that I guess have surprised you with having to set up a large event that you might not have thought about beforehand?
Speaker 1 18:19
Well, I'll tell you a lie here. And I'll tell you where I've went wrong. To I'll be really candid. So the hardest thing about a conference is selling tickets, the Chris No brainer, but it's like you have to incentivize great urgency to sell tickets far out, because a lot of your costs for celebrities or talent or the event, it's not like, Hey, you got an event, 12 months from now, let's just 12 payments. So they're all going to come in on a in a February, you know, a big percentage of them. So the cash flow is a little different. I got this from a mentor appear in my space, send a lot of events, it's Michael mogul. He's done some gigantic events. And we had a conversation like there's three main pillars, one is content. Another is networking. And the third is fun. And you can have a conference that does all three or you can really emphasize and one of those components for us. We wanted to focus on content and networking and we have the fun but it's really emphasizing the content we really want to teach and educate and be the thought leader there so you know things like you know so let's just start with each of those content. We're not having any breakout sessions we're not doing any panels we are selecting the speakers we're not taking you know investments for from people to speak the pay to play style. The on the networking, it's gorgeous location, a lot of networking activities, right Phoenician and then on on the fun side, we got David Spade as a comedian after day one One, we've got, you know, dueling pianos we've got, we've got a DJ, we've got a lot of different fun activities, some golfing stuff, some spa stuff. And so we're trying to hit all those components. We got a keynote, Michael Phelps, he's, you know, the conference called good to goat Personal Injury marketing go from good to goat, got the goat of the Olympics, Michael Phelps at the end. So all these different things, I will tell you, it is very, very difficult. It is a business of its own selling tickets and getting you know, the vet your vendors, the vendor stuff's easy. That's, that's an easy game, selling out your booths, it's the tickets and making sure you get the attendance to make it worthwhile. And there's a lot of ways you can go wrong there. It's like, okay, well, you can sell 10 tickets to one firm. But that's only one buyer unit. So you want to focus on buyer units in terms of the amount of people that you have in the crowd that can actually buy your services, you get 100 people there, but if it's 10 people, each firm, you get 10 people that can buy your stuff. And so that's one component, but where I went wrong. On the first event, I think the vent I'm doing now would have been like the second or third. I look at all the space and all these conferences have panels and breakout sessions. Well, duh. Okay, so you take MT MP a big one, they've got like 80 to 100 speakers, that's 80 to 100 people that are talking about the event on their social media, hey, I'm speaking at this in this right. So they have AD evangelists ad influencers. I've got like 12 to 14 people talking about my event. So guess where those tickets are coming to me, like, all on me not not the influencers and the natural networking, which is fine. It just it's it's more capital intensive.
Chris DuBois 21:51
It's faster. It's not an area of marketing that I've ever explored. And so it's just interesting, but I think you will likely see more, even probably agencies being created to assist with this specifically. Oh, yeah. 100%. Yeah, as we get into it. So what do you what do you kind of foresee as some of the biggest challenges for agencies in the future?
Unknown Speaker 22:15
Big question.
Chris DuBois 22:16
Yeah, very loaded question.
Speaker 1 22:19
Well, let's just say let's, let's take the SEO side, right, a lot of agencies are selling SEO services. And you're gonna have to consider diversifying into other channels because of how fragmented it's becoming. Looking back in the day TV had all the audience on cable, and now it's like 30 different apps. Right, and no one watches commercials. So that's fragmented you you take even Google Now you got LSA and Google ads on the organics it's it's fragmented, and people are starting to use chat GBT for their answers and or go to Bing. You take social media back in the day, it was meta. Now it's Tiktok. And Instagram, and I know meta is still you know, Facebook and Instagram saying the different channels, it's there. Where we're at right now it's, it's more fragmented than ever to get someone's attention. So the omni channel, a lot of people talk about it. It's one channel isn't the gravy train that it used to be? It's in, there's diminishing returns at a certain point, right? So you're gonna have to I think many agencies are going to have to quit being stubborn, and start to look at how they can provide value to their client base in other areas besides just SEO?
Chris DuBois 23:45
Yeah, it's an interesting perspective. There's something even with SEO. Yeah. And like you, you hit a point where it's like, we own the top spot on all bays. But that's all like we're getting a majority of the search, we
Speaker 1 23:58
look at brand and how it influences search, and click through rates will click the rates as part of their search algorithm. I mean, there's a patent around click through rates. Tony Robbins said, I'm gonna, I might mess this up. But he said something like, don't fall in love with your product or service fall in love with helping your client. And it's so true. You fall in love with TV, look at it, it's dying, unless you're hitting boomers. It's going to streaming. It's going to YouTube, YouTube. And so you have to play the attention arbitrage game if you're a marketing agency.
Chris DuBois 24:38
Right. So for those who have kind of, in or embedded, I guess, are ingrained in that one thing, right, the agencies that have been doing SEO for years, and now we're seeing those diminishing returns and need to start shifting, adding, you know, other options into their offers so that they can actually get the results that they're promising. Like, how do you even begin to start? You know, planning where to go? Well, it's
Speaker 1 25:05
gonna sound really basic, but 99% of the listeners don't do it. It's asked their clients. If you have a podcast, it's also a good feedback loop. You bring on a heavy hitter in the states, like what's working for you? Where are you generating leads, oh, you're this and you start to hear it over and over, like, I should probably do that. And once you rise to the top of that taxonomy, you can start to synthesize information and create. But it really starts with a consistent feedback loop.
Chris DuBois 25:40
Right? More, yeah, more reasons to start a podcast now than ever, and get publishing on on social media and stuff for your own brand, so that you can hear what people are saying.
Unknown Speaker 25:51
Yeah, absolutely. Awesome.
Chris DuBois 25:54
So I want to move into two final questions for you. With the first being what book I'm going to caveat this with, besides your own. Do you recommend every agency leader should read
Speaker 1 26:09
the boutique by Greg Alexander's? Amazing. Am I gonna give you one more because I can't just do one. I would say ready fire aim by Michael Masterson credible. But yeah, I
Chris DuBois 26:21
was gonna. I have not heard of the boutique. And so I'm hoping like people listening get value from hearing the book recommendations, but it's purely selfish. I'm just trying to find more stuff to add to my TBR list. Last question is, uh, where can people learn more from you?
Speaker 1 26:40
Yeah, you guys can check out my website. It's ranking style. But if you want to connect with me personally, I'm most active on LinkedIn. So if you search for Chris dryer and dryers, Dr. E ye are sent me up on LinkedIn and say hello.
Chris DuBois 26:55
Awesome, Chris. Appreciate you joining.
Unknown Speaker 26:57
Yeah, thanks so much, man.
Chris DuBois 27:03
That's the show everyone. You can leave a rating and review or you can do something that benefits you. Click the link in the show notes to subscribe to agency forward on substack. You'll get weekly content, resources and links from around the internet to help you drive your agency forward.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai