
The Importance of Positioning For Agency Owners
Agency owners: Unlock the power of positioning! Learn strategies to differentiate your agency and drive growth in a competitive market.
Positioning is crucial for any successful agency owner looking to thrive in today’s fast-paced market. This informative podcast explains why a clear position can transform client perceptions and drive business growth. You’ll better understand how effective communication shapes brand identity while attracting the right clientele. Join us as we uncover vital strategies.
With Special Guest Special Guest Corey Morris, CEO & Owner of Voltage Digital.
This Week Show’s Sponsors
LifterLMS: LifterLMS
Convesio: Convesio
Omnisend: Omnisend
The Show’s Main Transcript
[00:00:00.910] -Jonathan Denwood
Welcome back, folks, to the WP Tonic Show. This is episode 938. Yes, 938. I can’t believe it, nor can any of my guests think it. We’ve got a great special guest this week. We’ve got Cori Morris here, CEO of Voltage Digital. Cori has a lot of information and experience about building a digital agency. And advise if you’re in that area trying to develop your agency. We’re going to be talking about positioning, SEO, and partnerships. Cory was mad enough to write a book, The Digital Marketing Success Plan—poor soul. I’ve had a few friends who have written a book, like my co-host. It made them aged. It made Kirk lose his hair. We got a ton of information. Cory, would you like to give the listeners and viewers a quick 20, 30-second intro before we go into the central part of the interview?
[00:01:25.280] – Corey Morris
Yeah. And first, thanks for having me. Excited to get into our conversation today. As you mentioned, I’m the owner and CEO of Voltage. We’re a digital agency focused on search marketing and websites. My career and background started in project management in a webshop and moved into SEO and, more broadly, digital marketing, and now here I am.
[00:01:52.680] -Jonathan Denwood
All right. That’s fantastic. And I’ve got my patient and great co-host, Kurt. Kurt, would you like to introduce yourself to the new listeners and viewers?
[00:02:02.590] – Kurt von Ahnen
Jonathan. My name is Kurt von Annen. I own an agency called Mañana Nomas. We focus primarily on membership and learning websites and moving your Scorm product to WordPress. I work with Jonathan directly at WP-Tonic and the great folks at Lifter LMS.
[00:02:16.930] -Jonathan Denwood
That’s fantastic. We’ve had a lot of new listeners and viewers. Thank you for your comments and support there. You are much appreciated. Before we go into the critical parts of this great interview, I’ve got a message from one of our major sponsors. We will be back in a few moments, folks. Three, two, one. We’re coming back, folks. I also want to point out we have some fabulous recommendations and special offers for you, the WordPress professional or power user. You can get this list of offers and the best WordPress plugins and services. You can get all these fabulous goodies by going over to wp-tonic. Com/deals, wp-tonic. Com/deals. What more, my beloved WordPress tribe, could you ask for?
Probably a lot more, but that’s all you’ll get from that page. Sorry to disappoint, I’ve made a career of it. They seem to like me saying that, Cori. I get more feedback about my little end comment than the whole of the show. I’ll tell you, Cori, doing YouTube or podcasting is an excellent way of keeping yourself balanced because you can’t have any ego. No ego. No ego. So, Cory, you gave a little insight about your background, but can you tell us more about your background and how you got into the world of crazy digital agency ownership?
[00:03:58.770] – Corey Morris
Yeah, it’s It’s an exciting story. I’ve worked in a couple of other agencies. None of what I do in my career comes from my college degree, like most of us in the digital world. I came out of school, thought I’d be an account person, and wanted to work in an ad agency. This was before Mad Men, so that’s not what inspired me. But No, I thought I’d be in. I’m very disappointed, Cory. No, later, that was an exciting portrayal with highs and lows of what I had in my mind from perceptions. I was always interested in the marketing mix and all those things that went into advertising. I ended up in my first job in a spinoff that was a digital entity from a traditional advertising agency. I was given the title of Project Manager before WordPress, and before anything, the open-source revolution happened. That was probably one of the best things I could say about what happened in my career. I’m a project manager between three developers who are developing from classic ASP to ColdFusion and even some static HTML and CSS websites and clients.
[00:05:30.480] – Corey Morris
So I learned a lot of soft skills in terms of project in managing client relationships. I learned how to resource and do project management and also picked up some basic Photoshop skills and learn HTML and CSS because I’m sitting here with developers getting annoyed at me, and I’m getting annoyed too, to have them go change an image or go change a sentence on a web page. That was great for me because that was in the early mid 2000s, right before everything went open source. It also allowed me to raise my hand when it came to answering the question of, Well, who’s going to do SEO for the agency that was growing? I got to transition over into that role, get some great training in Southern California from some of the industry pioneers, if you will. And from there, worked my way up in agency roles and then had to make a decision of what I wanted to do and be Which, thankfully, I was always able to realize burnout or get a step ahead of it and think about my career and getting to what the next thing was. And so I did get an MBA, and then I thought, well, I’m not using this right away either.
[00:06:47.900] – Corey Morris
But thankfully, that’s what I- Do you see a track record here? When I realized I wanted to do managerial things and better refine my understanding of accounting, not doing accounting, but understanding what to take from it. And some of those other things, I got to lean into that later when I moved into management and leadership roles. So fast forward a bit, I ended up in voltage. I I was the one person digital marketing team. I’d broadened out from just SEO to paid search, social email as we got around 2013. And it was an opportunity to hear an in a creative shop in a web shop to add another function and expand for clients. Through that, I started getting tagging along to new business pitches and meetings and actually got less scared of the word sales and actually realized that I love translating the nerdery over to a business owner or a decision maker and find the right fit. So as we grew, I moved up into leadership positions and then a few years ago went through a succession plan with one of the original cofounders.
[00:08:05.320] -Jonathan Denwood
I think you have discussed that in previous interviews that you bought the existing agency, didn’t you? You had the lovely experience of that process as well, didn’t you?
[00:08:20.090] – Corey Morris
Yeah, it was an experience- You seemed very calm and relaxed for something like that.
[00:08:26.660] -Jonathan Denwood
Because normally, I’m I’m well fucked up, Cory. I’ve been in this game too long. I’m well fucked up. But you seem very calm, Cory. It’s unusual in digital agency owners.
[00:08:41.540] – Corey Morris
You caught me on a good day, right? I always talk about the roller coaster of it, and that’s what I equate it to. We’re always trying to flatten the roller coaster or get off of it and move it to a different model. I’ve been through several iterations before I purchased and then after the purchase to get our, narrow our positioning and niche down and find some stability and be able to be more selective in the clients we take on versus being desperate and having to take on everything every moment.
[00:09:14.930] -Jonathan Denwood
That’s Right. Over to you, Kurt.
[00:09:18.080] – Kurt von Ahnen
Well, it’s really not one of our presets, but you mentioned it in your answer. So I just want to follow up on this one piece, Cory, that I think is a linchpin for a lot of agency types that might listen to this. And you said that you had an innate ability to recognize burnout before it happened. I’m super interested in that. What creates that ability? Are you just super self-aware? Do you work out a lot? Could you feel a difference in your work energy? What was the signal to you that I need to make a change before the change makes me change?
[00:09:52.170] – Corey Morris
Yeah, that’s a great question. And that’s not to say that I have it all figured out. I went through some pretty heavy anxiety earlier this year that led to me making some further changes in terms of our positioning and structure. But earlier in my career, for sure, as I was trying to figure out before I knew I wanted to be an agency owner or a You can question my judgment on that. But before I knew that I wanted to be in a leadership and get further away from doing a lot of the day to day work, what I was able to recognize is, especially as a project manager, I got two years into that and I’m I either want to go do the craft of the trade. I started feeling like an order taker in between. I’m like, No, I want to do the cool thing. I want to make the thing, or I want to be the strategist or whatever. I was able to get work late, work with the guys, have them get me into the code and teach me some things, seek out that next role when the SEO role became available and go get that training, move into that, master that, but not sit in that seat so long that I’m stuck in it, I can’t move out of it, or I’m just burn out and want to go have a career change entirely.
[00:11:06.400] – Corey Morris
The next evolution was back then in 2012, 2013 is go be a more integrated digital marketer and not just be so narrow in SEO. Then again, you’re too into managing clients. I want to build and manage a team and mentor and teach and manage. Then it got to, okay, master that, have other people equipped there, what’s the next That’s where that one accidentally fell in my lap of, Hey, I’m tagging along in this. I really like the new business part. It’s exciting, the strategy on the front-end. So be able to recognize it. Sometimes it was an accidental thing. Other times, I could feel that stress and strain, and it’s like, I have to move past it. Now, to your point, outside of the career signals, I’ve had a lot of ups and downs with weight and health and everything else, and also grounded by my family and personal beliefs and things like that, too. So anytime any of those get way out of whack, that’s where we all feel it and be able to recognize it as key before you get past a threshold that’s really hard to come back from.
[00:12:20.120] – Kurt von Ahnen
For me, personally, I pull an all-nighter, and that’s okay once in a while, but if it gets to be a routine, then you’re overcommitted and you got to figure something else out. But There’s gages. If I stick to our path here, the next question deals with positioning. Listening to some of your previous interviews, you discussed the importance of positioning connected to having a successful agency. Can you tell the listeners and viewers what you mean by positioning? What you specifically mean by positioning, and then, of course, the benefits of it?
[00:12:52.210] – Corey Morris
We used to do branding. We don’t anymore, and that’s actually connected to this to a degree where we narrowed our focus service, what I realized is that I could not sell things and do them at the level that I considered to be great. If we did the almost good, better, best on services, We had a bunch that were okay or good, I guess, if you’d put it in that category, but only a couple that were in the best, and that would be WordPress design and development and search marketing, both SEO and PPC. So we got to that point where I didn’t want to do anything just halfway or okay or be trying to pitch or sell something that wasn’t authentically going to be delivered at the same level. So if I’m going up against a social media agency, I’ve got one social person. That’s just one piece of what we do on our team. I don’t want to have to go say that we’re so great at that to try to be a huge agency that is great at that and then have it fall apart later on me. I wanted to get really authentic in who we were, both externally and internally.
[00:14:05.700] – Corey Morris
And so our positioning got a lot easier when we just narrowed it down and niche down to the two things that we do well, that all of our experts love doing, that we have all the accolades and credentials for and have the authority to be talking about that level, because then we can authentically deliver at the same level of what we’re talking about on the front-end. And so if your hearing me talk organically with you, it aligns with, even if I use different words, it aligns with the voice and tone and positioning and the feel you get from my website, from any touch point, any article I write, any interview I do. You feel that lack of authenticity and transparency, hopefully. Hopefully, I’m not going to go into my next conversation in an hour and somebody will be like, I heard that interview, but you’re not that same person. But a lot of that’s really helped because we’re not having to try to put a mask or an image of something that we’re not or be everything to everyone, which is a really hard place to be unless you’re a global agency and you have strengths in a lot of different places.
[00:15:14.270] – Kurt von Ahnen
Yeah. That being everything to Everybody is a really difficult mask to wear. You got that.
[00:15:18.970] – Corey Morris
The second line on my website is, We’re probably not full service or integrated anything. That’s on purpose. That’s not a slight to my friends who own integrated full service agencies, but I was tired of being in that world, trying to make up for shortcomings in service areas that, to try to win a deal that weren’t my strong suits that would ultimately create stress and strain on my team. Team trying to figure out how to do something that we’re not staffed or equipped to do very well.
[00:15:50.680] – Kurt von Ahnen
Yeah, perfect. Jonathan?
[00:15:52.650] -Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, just to give you some critique. Obviously, I listened to some of your previous interviews and I agree with what you said in those interviews and what you’ve stated here. My only critique is SEO and WordPress development, they’re still very broad categories. I developed a word that isn’t real, actually, but I do that quite regularly, actually, I nichify. I love that word, but it doesn’t exist, actually. So these seem still very broad categories. Have you nichified more down to Pacific areas or industries, or would you just disagree with the statement I’ve just made, really, Cory?
[00:16:44.570] – Corey Morris
No, I love that, and I appreciate that phrase because that’s… So our starting point was we have to get narrower on service delivery, and then from there, combined with that is we don’t want… We were stretched in also trying to manage 70 active clients in a smaller size agency, even with 20 people. When we were at 20 people, it was hard to manage that many clients and keep them all happy or to provide value that’s more than just production level work. And so for us, we wanted to get our client roster narrowed down and focus on quality versus quantity. And in doing so, we’re at, I think, 32 active clients now, hopefully getting closer to 20 at some point. And in doing so, some of that positioning as well is getting more into a premium space. So while we do have a… On the WordPress and the website of my team, we do have a design build modular more budget friendly product. A lot of what we do in the custom design and build process is more high end positioning in terms of who we’re serving in terms of their websites and what types of businesses and industries So while I haven’t necessarily planted a flag and said we do search and web for these three verticals, naturally there are patterns in there that you’ll see.
[00:18:10.160] – Corey Morris
And a lot of B2B, a lot of service industry, professional service or manufacturing-focused companies that are about lead generation and lead quality, and quality not quantity. I say that, and we’re not 100% there because we do have some high-end brands that we do e-commerce for. But if we looked at patterns, a lot of it is based on more of a premium product, both on on search and web, and aligned with lead generation and getting into the ROI math and making sure it works for our clients.
[00:18:53.160] -Jonathan Denwood
So obviously, you’ve been around a number of years and the agency has. So hopefully you get some degree of recommendation. I’ve always found that I have had some really good clients from recommendation, but they’ve been rare because people If you’re doing a pretty good job for them, a lot of people, just struggling for the right word, they don’t understand, because they don’t understand what they’re hiring for you. That makes it very difficult for them understand the value that they’re bringing to some degree. They only understand when you’re no longer there, and they’re dealing with a much poorer experience. But am I correct? Because I think you’re based in Kansas City. Is that correct? Are you a higher region? I thought Kirk just moved into your area. Do you get most of your as a high-end regional city player? Is that how you get a lot of your new custom and your new referrals?
[00:20:12.430] – Corey Morris
Yeah, that’s a great question. So there is a Kansas City, at least, connection to most of our clients. Even though our three biggest clients are on the Coast and in different areas, there was some connection for two of those three. One of them actually came in through our thought leadership content and actually heard me in an interview, a partner agency. And that’s another category, too. Probably 40% of our revenue is through other partners who either don’t have the depth or don’t have the subject matter that we have. We’re easier to partner with only doing two things instead of being an integrated full-service agency where there’s real or perceived competition. Or complexity. But we actually rebranded a little bit. Our domain name was voltagekc. Com. But then we started working with a couple of Fortune 500 companies around the country. And I got a question from a board, board members like, are they a boutique, Kansas City agency? Can they serve us? I’m like, no, we can. You’re absolutely the right partner for you. So we are proud of our Kansas City roots. We don’t shy away.
[00:21:30.100] -Jonathan Denwood
That’s one of the conglomeries of being a regional high-quality agency, isn’t it? Because one of it is the fact that it draws people. But when you’re dealing with a larger client, it can go against you a little bit, can’t it?
[00:21:44.590] – Corey Morris
Yeah. And so what we did was we tried to balance that well. We actually updated our domain name and redirected everything to voltage. Digital. It wasn’t to get out of the Kansas City market, but it was to properly reflect the fact that we’re positioned for North America and beyond. So we lost a little bit of our own. We knew we were going to some of our own SEO juice for Kansas City rankings, but we also were able to increase some of our national exposure and credibility with some of the other thought leadership and media we were doing to properly position who we want to be for the next decade.
[00:22:24.660] -Jonathan Denwood
Based on my experience in working for a large regional agency, in Reno. It’s also a lot of your work quasar government, i. E. State, partnerships between the private sector and regional government, nonprofits. Did you build up a certain book of business in that area?
[00:22:50.080] – Corey Morris
Not really. Not too much. We accidentally started working with a bunch of nonprofits over the years. We On the WordPress side of things, we’re able to… We landed a client who’s a performing arts center and figured out how to most elegantly and gracefully integrate their ticketing system. Essentially, the ticket master for performing arts is T-New by Tessa Tura, and not very many people had implemented it well. You go through a beautiful WordPress site and you go over to buy a ticket, and now it looks like a half broken page, right when you need to put in credit card information. And so we- That crucial moment. Yeah, so we accidentally worked our way in there and had a number of clients where that caught on, and those were all nonprofits from performing arts centers to the KC Symphony Orchestra to a large museum in New York. So things like that happened. And naturally we would have different organizations from sports to colleges to others that nonprofit come in. Not as much government with the hoops to jump through there, but on the nonprofit side, it’s always been gratifying to be able to support them and find ways to give back to.
[00:24:17.340] – Corey Morris
But yeah, it’s interesting. That was an accidental thing for us to have a number of nonprofits on our roster.
[00:24:25.450] -Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, I’m just basing it. It was almost 10 years ago when I was actually working for a large… It’s called Noble Studios. They had over almost 100 people working for them at one time. That was an education, Cori. Education that I don’t want to go back to. I think it’s time for us to go for our middle break. It’s been a great discussion. We got some great things to discuss in the second half. We will be back in a few moments, folks. Three, two, one. We’re coming back, folks. I just want to point out, if you’re looking for a great hosting provider that provides not only fantastic hosting for your larger projects, but also all the tools and functionality that you’re looking to build that great website for your client, why don’t you look at becoming a partner with WP Tonic? We specialize in large membership, LMS, and community-focused websites, but we can host whatever project you’re looking at. We got over 15 years experience and eight years in running one of the best WordPress podcasts in the market for the WordPress professional and junkie. To find out more, all you have to do is go over to wp-tonic.
[00:25:50.910] -Jonathan Denwood
Com/partners, wp-tonic. Com/partners. We love to build something special together. So Over to you, Kurt.
[00:26:02.290] – Kurt von Ahnen
Well, I want to take us back before the break. Cory, you had mentioned partnerships in your answer. My own personal journey to agency ownership was very slow, very painful. I was a freelancer for the longest, thought I had to do everything myself. Then I found the WordPress community. The community led to connections. I realized I didn’t actually have to hire people. I could partner with people and fill in some gaps. But this is from your perspective. So what insights do you have or strategies for people in that in that growth gap that are like, maybe you haven’t even considered what a partnership looks like?
[00:26:43.370] – Corey Morris
Yeah, Similar to your story, being part of the community has been huge. I’ve been locally. I’m part of formal and informal agency owner communities or networking groups. I am a member of Agency Management Institute, AMI, if anybody knows Drew McLean, who and his wife, Danielle, own and run it. There are plenty of other groups, though, around the country that are similar. I’ve been in a digital agency, mastermind group. But through that, and most of those groups have strict rules against selling in the group, which I appreciate because they’re protecting the community. But authentically, through engaging in the community, it’s so much easier for me to go seek out even locally another agency owner and say, Hey, we haven’t bumped into each other before. Would you like to grab coffee? And then you end up sharing war stories or getting to know each other on a personal level or having a joint therapy session, whatever you need, whatever it turns into. But through a lot of those, it’s been an opportunity for me to dig into how other people are running their what their common challenges are or what my unique ones are. I guarantee that anything that I ever thought was a unique challenge just to me was not unique to me.
[00:28:09.380] – Corey Morris
Somebody else has gone through it, somebody else has solved it. Through bonding in a lot of those ways and talking about our positioning, naturally leads to conversations of how can we partner up together. Over time, that led me to developing partner pricing and even a partner agreement that’s got three tiers to it of what the referral commission looks if you hand it off, how we co-brand and work together with a discounted partner rate, and what it might look like if I’m white-labeled behind the scenes. Common things, but I had to start creating my own platform and make sure those pricing points worked for everybody. I also had some stop and starts that didn’t work with a guy who became a really good friend, but our agencies were so similar in size and rates that we couldn’t carve out enough to make it work to partner with each other. So understanding who an ideal partner might look like, lead with relationship first and naturally let things organically happen if it’s a good fit and not force it and be selling in the community and turning everybody off. And so a number of things like that that I continue to refine over time and to be able to be easy to work with and easy to be a friend, a partner, someone who can do work together or a referral source, both ways.
[00:29:31.320] – Kurt von Ahnen
I love the way you framed a lot of that. It reminded me… My original work experience was like automotive and power sports industries from a service perspective. Running a big service center for a large Ford dealership or Chevy dealership or whatever, those dealerships don’t have an exhaust shop. They don’t really have a performance alignment and suspension shop. When someone comes in with a Nismo 350 or something, the dealership will write the ticket. They’ll write it, and then they’ll send it to a sublet, to a contractor to say, Okay, put these struts on, put these shocks on, and adjust the camber to this or that because this guy is going to autocross this car. I’m way off the subject for our podcast audience, but that’s how a car dealership works. When I was hearing you talk, you hit something that I think is super important for other agencies to hear, and I want to stress it. You mentioned partnership pricing, right? There’s a reason why a lot of us here in the States have to run offshore to find contractors and workers to help us because a lot of people in the States think, Well, I’m an agency or I’m a freelancer and I charge $120 an hour.
[00:30:44.880] – Kurt von Ahnen
Well, you know as well as I do, I can’t pay somebody $120 an hour for a referral job because I got to mark it up to $200 an hour to make the margin, right? How do you approach that subject with potential new partnerships or people new to that relationship about what partnership pricing would look like? Then how does that work?
[00:31:06.550] – Corey Morris
I’ve learned that being open and honest, really not holding it card. If they’re going to be a partner, they need to know how I do pricing and have enough transparency, at least, to be able to understand how they could market up and where we both win. We don’t do things. Yes, for web projects, estimate things by hours internally, but we don’t present that to an end client, and it works best when we don’t present that to a partner either. If we can have the conversation be around value and overall budget, then we’re in a good place. If that $15,000 web project is something that they can figure out in their pricing model, overall, if we’re maybe just doing and they’re doing design and all the account management strategy and documentation and everything else, if they’re selling it for 100 grand and we’re happy and fulfilled and profitable at 15K for our piece, and they have all their profits in place to sell for 100 grand, everybody’s happy. If the client is happy and sees the value in it, the end client, we all win. Being able to talk about how our business models work and how we win helps because then you don’t get into something where it’s like, well, we all all scraped by and they couldn’t market up enough to make profit and it was a big hassle.
[00:32:35.620] – Corey Morris
I discounted before I even talked to them about it and I barely made any profit. Then the client had scope creep and we got in a gray area and we had to write off some things. Nobody made money. It’s painful. Those partnerships don’t last. Being able to understand how we make money, our clients make money, and what profit and value looks like with guardrails and not pricing ourselves out of deals is important, Yeah, that’s a perfect answer.
[00:33:03.590] – Kurt von Ahnen
Jonathan?
[00:33:05.140] -Jonathan Denwood
So the book, The Digital Marketing Success Plan, what’s a couple of things? Oh, he’s got it. He’s prepared himself. The true professional, folks. So what are one or two of the key concepts that you hoped people got from the book? Apart from building around positioning, why did you decide to write it?
[00:33:41.430] – Corey Morris
There are seven or eight real stories in the book where I changed client names to be able to go really deep.
[00:33:50.900] -Jonathan Denwood
Why?
[00:33:51.950] – Corey Morris
Because I wanted to be able to give the full story and the pain story. I see on the digital marketing side, especially, clients who are just doing a checklist of tactics and hoping to see ROI or getting frustrated or working with an agency who is just doing best practices bare minimum and they’re spending a lot of money or who is just jumping straight in like paid search and spending a ton of money in Google and figuring it out as they go.
[00:34:22.020] -Jonathan Denwood
And Google will take our money, whether it’s working or not.
[00:34:27.560] – Corey Morris
Agencies will take your money, whether it’s working or not.
[00:34:31.620] -Jonathan Denwood
I will. That’s okay. I’m only kidding. When regulars of this podcast understand my dark English, Nicole.
[00:34:43.910] – Corey Morris
So So basically what it came down to for me is I wanted ultimate transparency. I wanted to get our ultimate best process for how we go through the strategy and planning development process, the research we do up front, the auditing, the set up, the getting ready, and documenting a plan that is objective, actionable, accountable, that doesn’t lead us into floating around or chasing shiny objects or putting it on the shelf two months in and then wondering at the end of the year where our ROI came from, and it was a bunch of excuses. Our typical 90-day process, I give away here. People are like, Well, are you worried that other agencies will see your full process? I don’t If it helps them in some way, great. Take that sliver that you don’t do and add it in your process. It makes us all better and gets us away from having to sell against perceptions that agencies are out to get you, or there’s a bunch of magic and hocus-pocus that happens that sets up misaligned expectations and everything else on the client side, or clients giving up on working with an agency and just giving up on some of the digital marketing channels as a whole, thinking they’re the problem, not necessarily that maybe the approach that was taken was it.
[00:36:05.100] – Speaker 4
So I’ve got a five step process in there. It’s an acronym called Start from strategy to tactics to application, review, and transformation. And it really is a the $20 print version or the $10 Kindle version for your own personal ability to implement or on the agency side, we’ll help implement that process for you. But ultimately, it’s being able to articulate it on the front-end instead of everybody’s got a process. We all do, and I’m not saying anybody’s is better or worse than others. But for me, it was, I want to get it out there on paper. I want to shine a light on all the things that cost agencies’ relationships, give them a bad name, cost clients a lot of wasted dollars, or just make marketing ineffective. For them overall.
[00:37:02.240] -Jonathan Denwood
I think you remarked, you discussed this in a previous interview that I watched that you mentioned. I’m not sure if it’s linked to your book, but hopefully I’m not off totally track. I think you mentioned about competing with a $5,000 quote with a client where you’re probably going to be quoting 2015 to $20,000 and some of the struggles. Is that also in the book, that area?
[00:37:35.330] – Corey Morris
Yeah, basically- I am right about that interview that you did when that came up, wasn’t it? Yeah, that’s definitely one of the many examples. We could probably have an entire episode on apples to apples pricing and quoting and how we overcome the fact that somebody’s nephews, uncles, cousins, sister-in-law sitting in their basement can do this for $250. Why did you quote 5,000? Or whatever it might be. But it’s definitely important because often… Another example is, and this is a discipline that I’ve had to learn, too, is prospect comes along and says, I wanted to do a PPC, and I’ve got $50,000. And they put the bag of money on the table. It’s easy for me to We do PPC. We’re a Google partner agency, and you’ve got the money right there, let’s go. And just rush into it and skip a bunch of these steps. And not say time out. Is paid search even right? Is it going to reach your goal? Or are you going to be pissed off at us in three months or six months when it doesn’t work?
[00:38:49.950] -Jonathan Denwood
I think when it comes to, this is my position around paid search, I treat it as gasoline on the fire. But if you got You haven’t got a strong business model and you haven’t got the right messaging and verbiage and you’ve proven the business model, it ain’t going to do much for you apart from lower your bank account. Would you agree with that?
[00:39:15.550] – Corey Morris
I 100% agree because what we talk about is if you’re not ready, if you have any holes in your brand strategy, your product development, your sales process or apparatus, you have no business. We need to take you a step back and bring in a who’s an expert in those areas to refine those before you’re ready to actually work on a digital marketing strategy and implement it and start spending dollars. A lot of times the symptoms of this are we’re running paid search or even SEO leads or leads from any other source come in and the sales team is frustrated that every prospect is beating them up on price. Well, that’s because we didn’t tell a good enough story on the front-end because we didn’t have a good enough product development or brand development to help us differentiate and And so every one of those 10 blue links or there’s three to five paid search ads is telling the same story, and they’re just bouncing around now looking for price because they can’t tell you apart.
[00:40:10.530] -Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, that’s great. Great. Back over to you, Kurt.
[00:40:14.570] – Kurt von Ahnen
I love Jonathan’s example of pouring gasoline on a fire, right? It just amplifies whatever the results are. If you don’t have a fire in the firepit and you pour gasoline on it, all you’ve made is mud in the bottom of the fire. It really is just an amplification of it This is going to fail and it’s going to be a really expensive failure or it was going to succeed anyway, and we’ve helped it succeed more quickly. This is the fun part of the conversation, Cory. We ask almost everybody this. Artificial intelligence, AI, are there special tools that really jump off the screen for you and your agency that you found have really increased your productivity, profit, stuff like that? Or is AI really still just a distraction in your space?
[00:41:02.130] – Corey Morris
It’s a little bit of both, but I’ll dig into that, so it’s not a cheap answer. It’s still very much a tool and not a solution. So a tool for efficiency, a tool to unify maybe some data sources and sets that would take more time or maybe one person’s human brain might miss, right? Just like if you’re looking at your own copy, you’re going to miss your typos or whatever. It has accelerated a lot of auditing, crawling, some of the manual things that we would take days to do or that we’d have servers doing instead of putting it out into somebody else’s AI cloud to do. But at the same time, in many cases, we have to be really careful with governance of how it’s used because we have clients who are in financial spaces, healthcare spaces, very regulated and compliance-driven industries. They who expect us to be the steward of doing the right things or bringing to them the risks that they don’t even know about yet, even though they might have a huge legal team. There’s a lot of great power that we have that we have to carefully and judiciously use as we work through it.
[00:42:19.620] – Corey Morris
As you mentioned, also, where we are with it, I talk to clients and colleagues about we have to have structured time. We have a task force that meets bi weekly to talk about make sure we’re not all off on our own island testing different tools or spending a billion dollars on what we’re testing in silos. But to bring that together and make sure it’s for a purpose. I also like to have structured, scheduled, intentional time for testing. So you don’t feel like you’re getting behind. We all feel like we’re behind, right? Everyone does. But there’s the balance of burying your head in the sand and ignoring it versus chasing shiny objects to no end and ignoring what’s working today, where you’re making money today. So having balance, having structured intentional time and processes to go test versus having it be the thing that gets squeezed out of your day and you do it at midnight or you don’t get to it or vice versa. You start your day with it and you don’t get the rest of your work done or you take your focus off what’s working.
[00:43:22.950] – Kurt von Ahnen
Yeah, and as a follow up to that, which of the AI tools jump off for you? I mean, are you We’re going to quickly chat GPT OpenAI. Are you into Claude and llama and Gemini and all these other things?
[00:43:36.740] – Corey Morris
We are not as deep into the safari of animals and names that you just mentioned.
[00:43:44.410] -Jonathan Denwood
I’m sorry, are you priced out on having no effect?
[00:43:46.540] – Corey Morris
We are pretty heavy into GPT and some of our own models, but we’ve got accounts across a lot of different things. And we will when we find a problem or something that either we don’t have time to do, we have too many, we have, haven’t solved it yet, that’s perfect grounds for testing a new one or testing something else? We’re not as heavy on the image side and or creating final product with copy, but so it’s a much more research based to the opportunity. So there are probably a dozen of them, but they start with GPT.
[00:44:30.790] -Jonathan Denwood
I’ve been using a lot of AI, but I gradually have increased the amount of AI I’m using, but I’ve combined it. I’ve chosen this strategy, Cory. I combine it with a lot of video, a lot of podcasting, giving Google a lot of signals about how knowledgeable am I or WP tonic around And some of the content is done well. Other content has gone down quite rapidly. Other content, Google seems very indifferent to it. It doesn’t give it, doesn’t penalize it. But I’ve always and I You’ve edited the content, spent time editing the content, getting Kirk to look over the content, adding audio, adding video, giving signals to Google. And it’s been a very mixed bag. Does that reflect your own experiences with your own agency around this subject?
[00:45:41.500] – Corey Morris
Yeah, in terms of how it performs, definitely. It’s been mixed. We can get past the filters and things like that. You can run it through three different AI tools to pass every- I don’t bother doing it.
[00:45:54.310] -Jonathan Denwood
I’ll just give it extra stuff.
[00:45:56.210] – Corey Morris
Yeah. What I’ve realized, too, at at least personally, because I write for Search Engine Journal, Search Engine Land, and Forbes, and a couple of others, and they have standards where you can’t use it or use standards on it. But what’s interesting is when I was testing on my own blog and in my own other channels, my frustration is still to this day, is it would take me more time in editing something that I generated than just write it out of my head in 30 minutes, sitting on my deck at 11:00 PM. I could get a thousand post out there versus spending an hour and a half fine-tuning something that I never felt like was 100% the way I wanted it. And so that’s the world I still live in. But in terms of your question on the performance side, yeah, it’s definitely a mixed bag. Everything I see, it’s like some people are rocketing to the top with AI-generated content, and some people can’t get a single post into Google because they’ve been flagged for a number of reasons.
[00:46:59.040] -Jonathan Denwood
Do you think on I’m deluding myself? But I just try and place myself in Google shoes that if you don’t add extra value for video, podcasting, editing, whatever the added value, and you’re competing with really strong experts in a particular area, they’re not going to rate your stuff at all well anyway because you’re not providing anything for it to be rated much higher than the competition. Or am I deluding myself?
[00:47:29.250] – Corey Morris
Yeah, there’s It’s an interesting line, and it’s Google trying to own the zero click search results and be the publisher or answer. It’s still content that it’s on the aggregator side and it’s a free platform when it comes to monopolies and antitrust and all the stuff that’s trying to say have protections over free speech, like the social platforms or social networks. But what’s really interesting is if Google could answer the question with or without me and with or without giving me traffic, who is Google for? We have to remember that Google’s customer and the bulk of its revenue still comes from the end user, not from the publisher, but would Google have any content without the publisher? That dichotomy will always exist, even if Google loses badly in court and has to break up and divest some of its units or whatever. And as others rise, and if search GPT rises and other AI-driven search engines. There will always be, I always go back to this, there will always be someone… When I think about the agency side, there will always be a brand that wants to be found by their target audience.
[00:48:42.420] -Jonathan Denwood
You’ve mentioned this before in your other interviews, haven’t you?
[00:48:45.850] – Corey Morris
Yeah. And that was going back to the inspiration for writing my book; that’s where I started, but that was too much of a high lofty thing and not very tactical or tangible. If Google is smart, they will understand that and not go too far one way or the other. And so we see those- It’s a tricky place for them, right? Yeah.
[00:49:10.940] -Jonathan Denwood
Back over to you, Kurt.
[00:49:14.570] – Kurt von Ahnen
Well, I think I get the… This puts us to the last question. This is our famous question. If you had a time machine, H. G. Wells, or if you’re from the homeland of Jonathan, Doctor Who.
[00:49:26.540] -Jonathan Denwood
Our last guest, Katie, was an English lady the previous week.
[00:49:31.850] – Kurt von Ahnen
She said she never saw Doctor Who.
[00:49:34.340] -Jonathan Denwood
I was shocked. I didn’t know how to communicate with you after that.
[00:49:39.790] – Kurt von Ahnen
It was a short circuit. Right at the end of the show, we were all just short. I was in, and I got to shock Cora. The question goes like this, Cory: If you had your time machine or your TARDIS and could return to the beginning of your career, what advice would you give yourself?
[00:49:58.290] – Corey Morris
Yeah, I would- Don’t come on this show. No, but I would go right back to the topic we discussed. We spoke of your burnout, and I mentioned career direction decisions. I think at different intervals, I would have been quicker to make decisions and more decisive. The decision-making framework for me is something that, when I became the sole owner, I had to learn quickly, and I couldn’t… There was probably a risk in not taking action, and sometimes that’s even bigger, but it’s perceived to be a hidden one than taking action. So I’ve learned to make quicker, more decisive decisions rather than to… I’m a thinker; I’m a crafter. I like to look at all inputs. But to be able to make decisions, whether it was on my career in different roles, and not to waste six more months or a year and just try something or to wear, put on an extra hat and learn something faster is something that I would do differently if I could get in the time machine at a few of those intervals in life.
[00:51:16.160] – Kurt von Ahnen
Yeah, that’s pretty insightful, and in reality, it takes a lot of balance because there are people like me; I fail forward quickly. I jump in, I go, boom, we’ll try this, we’ll try this, we’ll try this, we’ll try this, we’ll try this. And if I slow down a bit, maybe it would be more balanced, right? So there’s a middle.
[00:51:34.790] – Corey Morris
I’m on that other side where I’m naturally more processing, cautious thinker, maybe a little bit more conservative in decisions, where that We’ve had to learn the hard way in several situations where that’s as harmful, if not more harmful than just decide on your side of it, Kurt, like you do.
[00:51:55.800] -Jonathan Denwood
I have to weave, so I’m a dyslexic, so my thought patterns are slightly different from those of the average person, Cori. It can be very insightful, but I’ve accepted it now. It’s been a great interview. I’ve enjoyed it. Hopefully, you might consider coming back in the new year. Absolutely. What’s the best way for people to learn more about you, your thoughts, and your insights, Cori?
[00:52:27.030] – Corey Morris
Yeah, there are three quick ways for agency services or free consult, voltage. Digital, for speaking or any one-off coaching, koreymorris. Com. If you want to learn more about the book and its resources, it’s called the Digital Marketing Success Plan. That is such a long domain name that I’ve got a shorter one, the dmsp. Com.
[00:52:51.410] -Jonathan Denwood
I might buy it. You intrigued me. And that’s how I praise folks, as you know. We will be back next week with our notorious Roundtable show, probably the last of the year, and I’ve got a super expanded panel. Obviously, in the world of WordPress, we have a few things to discuss, but we also have some of the leading stories in the world of technology. My monthly Roundtable show has become notorious in WordPress, but it’s always great fun. I enjoy it. We’ve also got some great guests in November, which is fantastic. We will be back next week. We’ll see you soon, folks. Bye.
[00:53:42.460] – Corey Morris
Thank you.
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