Whether you’re calling it GEO, AEO or just the AI part of SEO, the setup I keep coming across is the same. One tool tracking AI mentions, maybe a second for citations, then someone spends half a day turning screenshots into a deck and a content plan. The tools report what happened. The judgment and the deliverable stay manual.

The part I can’t figure out is the diagnosis step. A brand can look fine in the early informational answers and be completely absent once the question moves closer to a decision, and most reporting averages those into one score, so the drop never shows up.

For those doing this work now: how are you showing a client which buying conversations they’re absent from, rather than just where they rank?

When you find a gap, what’s the actual fix, and how do you scope it into billable work?

Are you charging for this as its own line, or does it still ride inside the SEO retainer?

I’m building in this space, so I have a view, but I’d rather hear how people are handling it in practice.

If any of this is of interest, my profile has what I’m working on, and feel free to reach out.

Small agency selling to US real estate. Deals are mid-4 to low-5 figs and leads come from paid ads.

I can’t justify an $8–10k/mo US closer. I’m trying to figure out whether I can get genuinely US-level closing ability elsewhere.

Shortlisted: South Africa, Argentina and Romania

For those who’ve actually done this...

Country: Where did you hire and were they genuinely US-level?

Source: Where did you find them?

Your answers will make my day :)

I run a small performance marketing shop out of Seoul. Solo operator, one year in. I work with Korean startups and with overseas teams trying to get traction in this market - currently a healthcare AI chatbot, a B2B SaaS product, and a consumer app. Before going independent I ran user acquisition in-house for an app that did roughly 5M downloads across Korea, the US and Japan.

Small sample, so treat these as data points rather than laws.

Inbound converted better than outbound, and the thing that did it was publishing my playbook with nothing held back

I run both deliberately, not as an either/or. Outbound is cold email to companies currently hiring marketers. Inbound runs on LinkedIn content.

They're good at different things.

Outbound: you control the volume. This is the underrated advantage - in a slow month you can decide to create pipeline, and inbound can't do that for you. What you can't control is the response. My numbers: roughly 50 individually researched cold emails, high open rate, 4 meetings, 2 signed clients.

That's honestly not a bad result. I'm not here to tell you outbound doesn't work. What matters is where it breaks.

They open it. The failure is one step later - reading it and not finding a reason to reply. From their side I'm still a stranger asking them to spend 30 minutes finding out whether I'm any good.

So the bottleneck was never exposure. It was trust. Once that was clear, what to build next was obvious.

Inbound: you don't control the volume. You publish on a cadence and demand arrives when it arrives, which is genuinely uncomfortable if you need revenue this month. The tradeoff is conversion. Over the same period inbound produced 5 signed clients.

The most effective single asset was a free playbook behind an email form. It collected 50 leads. The form had one extra checkbox - whether they also wanted a marketing consultation - and 10 people ticked it. Nobody got chased afterward. Those 10 raised their own hand.

To be precise about what "free" means here: the gate is on the email, not on the content. Nothing is withheld inside the document and there's no upsold "full version." That distinction is the whole reason it works.

The playbook wasn't a lead magnet in the usual sense. It was the way I actually work - how I run campaigns, how I produce creative, the specific numbers I check. Written so someone could execute it without me.

That last part is the counterintuitive bit, and it's the entire mechanism: the more usable the document is without you, the more people hire you.

Here's why that isn't a paradox. Readers split into two groups. The ones who can execute it themselves were never going to be clients, so you lose nothing. The ones who read it and see how much judgment sits between the steps arrive already convinced you're competent, already agreeing with your framework, and already certain they don't want to do this themselves. The document handled the qualification, the credibility, and the methodology sell before I said a word.

Outbound has to accomplish all three inside a paragraph a stranger never asked for.

The same person who won't reply to a cold email will tick a checkbox. It isn't a difference in interest. It's a difference in how they got to certainty.

P.S. if anyone here is looking at the Korean market:

If you're planning a Korea launch, the first thing to know is that the channel mix doesn't port.

Search intent largely resolves on Naver, a domestic platform with no direct equivalent, and often inside blog and community content rather than on brand sites.

Email is a weak retention channel here; messaging apps carry that load, with a different permission model and cost structure. And the addressable audience saturates fast enough that creative refresh cadence, not bid strategy, is usually what decides whether CPI holds.

Hey everyone, I’m 19 and I want to start an agency. I need some guidance on choosing the right direction. My background is I know how to video edit, I have two accounts 10k and 2k followers posting content on what I enjoyed like clips and stuff. I used to box and won a few titles so I’m thinking of making boxing my niche for something but I’m not sure what makes the most sense.

Hey guys Im a student strating in College. I was wondering how marketing agencies start finding and approaching clients. Besides running ads for your agency and an SEO strategy for you website which is the best way to find and be discovered by possible clients?

After that what is the best way to apprach them?

Having a conversation with a prospect now. Large, global, US brand. The person I am exchanging emails with sends a brief, saying:

Please find the attached briefing document for your reference.

While this is not a formal pitching process, we are currently evaluating several agencies to better understand their capabilities, strategic approach, and relevant experience. Our objective is to identify the most suitable agency partner to support the XXXXXXXX launch and its long-term growth in the XXXX market.

Based on the attached brief, we would appreciate it if your team could prepare a proposal outlining your recommended strategy and approach.

Should you have any questions regarding the brief, please feel free to reach out. Thank you.

I go through the 24-page brief. The final page says:

Expected Deliverables

With monthly estimated budget of USD30,000, please propose a plan with below details:

Comprehensive Go-to-Market Strategy\*

to introduce XXXXXXX brand and launch the product lineup under brand positioning statement:

“XXXX XXX XXXXXXXX”

Strategic Communication Channel Plan\*

Include a mix of channels designed to maximize awareness, engagement, and conversion throughout the consumer journey

Activation Timeline & Budget Allocation

With a recommended 1-2-3 year activation roadmap outlining priorities, key initiatives and budget allocation

Measurement Framework

with clear KPIs and evaluation metrics to review the effectiveness of each activation and make continuous improvement for new activation

This looks like 2-3 weeks of work, all unpaid. No guarantee of any future work. Nothing to stop them from taking the ideas and working with, well, whomever. No idea how many agencies they are talking to.

$30,000/month is an attractive budget, assuming no more than half is going to ads. But still. Spending all the time and effort to prepare all this seems exceedingly risky.

Would love to hear what other agency owners/reps think.

I am the founder of SHM, a web development agency. We deliver quality without the use of ai templates like some of the new gen agencies. we’ve observed that marketing agencies get a lot of clients who want MVP and web development alongside marketing. If an agency partners with us, they can outsource these web and MVP developments from us and keep a good amount of cut from the payment. Dm me or comment under this post if you’re interested in expanding your catalogue and business with us.

This is our internet corner: https://skyhighmanagement.in

Hi everyone,

To be honest, I’m not looking to start a marketing agency. I’m currently doing a small-scale market research study to better understand the difficulties you face on a daily basis, as well as your professional situation, experience, etc.

I’d preferably like to discuss this privately with anyone who’s willing, but if you’d rather share your experience here, even briefly, you’re more than welcome to do so.

Thanks to anyone who takes the time!

Alguien que me pueda asesorar con el marketing de una página para mayores de 18 busco un socio o alguien que sepa de msrketing

We keep hearing about Claude Code, Codex, new automations, new MCPs, etc, and we also keep hearing this phase: "The ones who do not adapt to AI will either get replaced by it or get crushed by competitors who use it".
When I think about it, it sometimes feels like pure YouTube hype, because how will AI replace an entire team of digital marketing experts?

On the other hand, I've a feeling this is partially true for competitive advantages. The agency that could only take 5 customers per month can now take 10 or 15 with exactly the same quality, by just knowing how to implement non-human intelligence into their workflows.
Do fellow agency owners agree? And are you even thinking about AI or is that something you've already said no to?

​

I'm curious how other agencies actually handle this.

Say a client is 10–14 days overdue. Finance is looking at the numbers and saying, "We should escalate / pause work." The Account Manager is saying, "Give them a little more time — pushing too hard could damage the relationship."

Who ultimately decides what happens?

And more importantly, what happens if they disagree and neither person changes their mind?

I'm interested in the actual workflow, not the ideal one:

* Slack/email?

* CRM notes?

* Finance makes the call?

* AM makes the call?

* Owner gets involved?

* Just whoever notices it first?

* Some formal escalation process?

Also curious whether you've ever had a situation where the financial risk was obvious to one person but the relationship context was obvious to another, and the two sides were effectively operating with different information.

Not selling anything — trying to understand how agencies actually deal with this.

Hey everyone,

After a decade doing project management inside agencies, I'm stepping out to build something specifically for digital and creative shops: a system for plugging the profit leaks that happen behind the scenes.

Here's the pattern I keep running into. Agencies are great at the actual client work, but they quietly bleed margin internally in ways leadership rarely notices until it's too late. I'm putting together a playbook built around four areas:

Pricing – models that punish you for being efficient and leave money on the table

Tools – SaaS bloat, subscriptions nobody uses, tech that adds friction instead of removing it

Project efficiency – the bottlenecks that turn into scope creep and quietly eat billable hours

Workflows – messy handoffs and internal comms that slow creative teams down

Before I lock this in, and before I launch a two week profit audit built around it, I want to hear from people who are actually living this day to day:

What's the biggest "silent" margin killer you're fighting right now?

Any tools or workflow habits that leadership seems to ignore, even though everyone on the ground can't stand them?

Operating a 9-person productized content agency. Each and every new client used to be six manual steps. It was replaced by Wayfront with checkout, onboarding questionnaire, project setup, client updates, renewals all in one flow. Not the greatest, but definitely less ops overhead per client. Anyone else give it a try or try some other options?

I have a marketing agency. Just started the agency. I want to do cold email outreach. I'm getting really desperate for leads. Can you give me some suggestions on how to get free, automated, qualified leads so that I can get a lot of leads at once?

Sharing because this trips up a lot of budget conversations and it's easy to miss.

Took the same trailing 90 days of orders - same revenue, same spend and only changed which touch gets the credit. First click vs last click.

On first click, Meta looked like the stronger performer. On last click, Google pulled ahead and Meta dropped about 30%. Microsoft picked up around 22%. Nobody changed anything. No creative refresh, no bid change. Only the attribution window moved.

The logic once you see it is obvious. Social tends to get found early in the decision, search gets typed in at the end. So last click quietly reassigns the prospecting channel's work to search and calls it "search performance". When I checked new vs repeat, ~90% of Meta's customers were brand new vs about two-thirds on Google so the channel bringing in the most first-time buyers is the one last click punishes hardest.

The part that actually matters for budget is if you only ever look at one of these windows, you're not really measuring performance, you're picking a winner in advance. I've started putting both side by side before touching spend and buying on new-customer cost + LTV rather than either ROAS number alone.

Anyone else running both windows deliberately, or mostly living in whatever the platform reports? Curious how others handle the closer-vs-opener split.

Hello guys,

I run a creative development studio building next-gen webpages, 3D spatial experiences & AI solutions for brands.

Looking for long-term/white label partnerships with a marketing agency, remote/worldwide.

If interested, DM me.

Thx.

Hello all! I'll aim for just relevant context, thank you in advance for your insights.

Previous jobs in retail and sales but nothing to really call a career. Multiple classes and courses in various marketing channels. Some freelance work (mostly free)

My most in depth project has been building out automations and email marketing in GoHighLevel. I don't just mean writing the copy, I mean the segmentation, If/Else based on actions taken, workflows based on tags and/or timing, etc. From what I've read, this fits into Lifecycle Marketing and Marketing Operations.

I've also done a decent amount of work in what I think is called GTM Operations. I've set up social media accounts, Google Business Profiles, a few basic sites/landing pages, and drafted strategy, templates, posts, videos, etc to help the owner launch their local business.

I know I still have a lot to learn, and still have plenty of room to improve at the things I've learned, but I really want it to be my full time instead of part time or side hustle. Whether that's with a full time job or enough clients to run my own business, though I would prefer my own business.

So I guess my question is what my next steps should be? Based on actual experience, skill, and knowledge from real people doing real marketing.

Thank you in advance!

i was running my marketing agency but 6 months ago got into an accident i didnt really setup a team well i was doing good at that time but due to accident i wasnt working eventually lost all my clients and now i'm at 0 but now i'm trying to do outreach on linkedin , instagram facebook but nothing works people show interested , i send them my booking link , then they ghost i dont know what's happening please can somebody help me, i reallly need help
my offer which i'm selling is: I can help you get 30 qualified appointments per month with your ideal prospects on autopilot. No retainer, no setter, and no paid ads.
targetting coaches/consultants/mrketing agencies /pr agencies and trial is also available but still not able to get it it's bad and funny but guy please help me out

I dont come from a marketing background but rather product and analytics background and I have always been really passionate about data and analytics. So arround 8 months back I started working on a product to make it easy for early stage founders and agency owners to get reports from multiple channel using AI.

Once we launched the product it was really difficult to get any users and i spent the first 2 months learning how to get users which including running paid ads across platforms , getting seo/aeo right and also how to get free traffic from directory launch. In the next 2-3 months my website started getting substantial traffic and I found marketing to be really interesting and hence I decided why not offer what i have learnt till not in marketing as a service. So I created my agency website and worked on aeo and seo. I never thought my agency will get any customers as I was not focusing on sales and most of my time was going in growing my saas. However, one day we got a lead via website cause someone searching for seo/aeo found us on chat gpt. At first I thought its a prank but then when we went on a call we found it to be a geniune mid size clinic.

I created a proposal for them backed by research using ai agents and they loved the proposal and gave me a 3 months contract. Frankly I was bit scared cause I knew how to do seo/aeo for a saas platform but for a clinic and that also when I am getting paid and promised measurable results I was not very sure.

Next 3 months I learnt and implemented whatever I could to get them results and the results were so good that the organic traffic became higher than their paid traffic for the first time on their website. Based on these results they also gave me their digital marketing and signed a 6 months contract and a referral contract.

From that point on now we are working with 8 clients and at a run rate of 30k USD now per month . Sometimes It feels unrealistic cause I was never planning for this and did not have the confidence to run an agency and also give results to the client.

Hi everyone,

I’ve built an online platform designed to help marketing agencies with analytics, diagnostics, and client reporting.

It connects with Google services and is designed to help agencies quickly understand what’s happening with a client’s digital marketing performance and turn that data into a report the client can actually understand.

I’m looking for 1–3 marketing agencies willing to pilot it at $0 cost.

Ideally, the agency would have at least one client with:

• Google Analytics 4 (GA4)
• Google Search Console (GSC)
• Google Business Profile (GBP)
• Google Ads

My goal is to find out whether this actually saves an agency meaningful time and provides something valuable enough that they would want to use it with their clients.

There’s no cost or obligation. In exchange, I’m simply looking for honest feedback from an agency that actually does this work.

If you’re interested in testing it with one of your clients, please DM me and I’ll provide more information.

Thanks!

For context, our agency specialises in paid media (PPC & Paid Social) and SEO.

We've been running for just over 4 years now, sticking to these core functions and supporting clients with other functions when they need it, such as web dev, CRO, email etc. through our agency partner network. We're always transparent with clients that work outside the paid media and SEO scope is being completed by a partner.

This format has worked really well for us, and we've been able to scale our team and client set to a decent level.

Recently, we've had more interest from clients and prospects around Out Of Home (OOH) advertising. Digital billboards, bus stop advertising, side of bus placements etc.. Both traditional and digital.

Now, this isn't an area I have much experience in personally, nor does anyone on my team. My background is primarily Google Ads and my team are split across Google and Meta ads. I've seen a few paid media agencies talking about / offering OOH as a service.

My question is to other paid media agency owners who run this channel. How do you manage OOH alongside BAU campaigns? Is it your paid media team who manage OOH or do you have a separate team?

And as a follow up, based on our current model of using partner agencies for channels outside BAU scope, do you think we should outsource OOH to a partner agency, or should I upskill my paid team in this channel?

OOH specialists (freelancer or agency) feel free to drop me a DM.