Nearly every client we work with is using AI, and almost all of them are running into the same hurdles.
Specifically, they’re not sure where to focus their attention when everything feels urgent.
Instead, they’re running AI experiments in siloes but haven't figured out how to connect those into workflows that scale. They're sitting on insights and stories that only they can tell instead of translating them into sharper messaging, case studies or campaigns.
Marketing leaders are spending a good part of their week supporting the sales team, attending trade shows, and juggling a thousand other priorities.
The AI technology that was supposed to help leaves them feeling more scattered, but they can’t afford to ignore it.
More than three-fourths of business professionals consider AI critically important or very important to their success in the next 12 months, according to the Marketing AI Institute’s latest report. Yet only 29% have a plan for how they’ll use AI in the next few years.
Without a gameplan or a coaching staff, teams run harder and faster in too many different directions without knowing if they’re winning.
A marketing agency can help you set and measure clear goals, develop a strategy for growing revenue and use AI to go to market faster, all with a foundation that distinguishes your brand in spaces that are increasingly crowded with AI sameness.
Here’s where the partnership earns its keep and what it looks like in practice.
The ideas that resonate most with your audience tend to be locked inside the heads of your subject matter experts. They’re busy professionals who are often too close to their industry to recognize what others would find intriguing or helpful.
Getting to those insights takes a skilled interviewer who knows which questions to ask and how to follow up to get the specific examples and quotes that make a difference.
AI is fantastic at summarizing transcripts and drawing out key themes, but deciding what makes the cut and how to take something from good to great comes down to taste and judgment.
A marketing agency with professionals who have spent years building brands and writing content can help your team develop a position and an authoritative voice. They’ll challenge safe assumptions and help your brand stand out in your sector.
This is why every branding project we do starts with discovery. The conversations we have with your team and your customers help us identify what’s most important to a prospective buyer. They give us proof points to back up your branding.
It’s easy to say “Our people are our differentiator.”
That may be true, but if that’s what all your competitors say, you have to go beyond the surface-level statement and show what that looks like.
When we developed a brand identity for The Groove, a startup enterprise consulting firm, we dug deep to uncover the elements that truly set it apart. A big part of that is their people, but only because they had more than 20 years of experience delivering cloud technologies to over 1,000 clients. Before we could write a single word of copy for their new website, we had to understand their brand story, personality, and their promise to their would-be customers.
From there, we created brand guidelines and a messaging framework that would define both the website and their overall marketing strategy.
With this foundation, it’s much easier to use AI to scale your brand. There’s one single source of truth to use as checks and balances for future content. That creates a consistent message for every email, ad, content deliverable, and blog and social media posts.
Instead of our team spending hours writing and the Groove spending hours deliberating over it, we can spend more time having the important conversations, like how to highlight a recent win with a customer.
Buyers now start their research with AI, and nearly everyone is seeing the impact of the zero- click environment. The content that gets cited in AI Overviews and answer engines is influenced by Google results, and SEO best practices are still critical, but there’s much more to the story now.
Getting found is no longer about ranking for specific keywords, but being retrieved, mentioned, cited and trusted by AI systems.
More AI-generated blogs isn’t the answer. A Semrush analysis of 42,000 blog posts found content written by people appeared at the top of Google’s search engine results 90% of the time, compared to just 9% of posts purely generated by AI.
While content needs to be authoritative, it also needs to be structured for answer engines. It needs to provide quick, clear answers and have a clear hierarchy of information, with headers, subheads, bullets, bold font, and charts where it makes sense.
But while SEO follows stable, repeatable rules, AI is much more unpredictable. The same prompt can return different brands and citations every time it’s asked. There are no fixed positions and no consistency across different models, including ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Perplexity.
Monitoring all this requires advanced solutions, and developing strategies to respond to it demands continuous testing and validation. This is only possible with experts who aren’t willing to take industry claims or tools at face value.
It’s one area where our team really shines.
For instance, one of our manufacturing clients already ranked among the top results for thousands of keywords when we started working with them, but in a zero-click environment, even the top-ranking pages were driving less traffic than they had previously. The obvious move was to keep looking for new variations of the same keywords and publishing new pages, playing a “numbers” game hoping to offset the impact.
Instead, we found the highest-converting pages and expanded each one to rank for 100 or more keywords through deeper content, FAQ sections built from what AI models were surfacing, optimized alt text, and video.
Within weeks of relaunching one page, its ranking keywords more than doubled. It went on to rank in AI Overviews and hit No. 2 in Google. That client now has an $8 million deal driven by organic traffic, plus $1.5 million in new pipeline added in a single quarter.
The pattern holds across industries.
A welding client closed a deal worth more than $119,000 from a ChatGPT referral. A safety device company closed $260,000 in deals from the same source. A software company serving clinical professionals landed a $250,000 deal off an AI referral, and another software client grew traffic 258% and doubled its conversion rate in 10 months.
As we’re seeing AI increasingly retrieve answers from other sources like LinkedIn, YouTube, and Reddit, we’re investing more time helping our clients build a stronger presence outside their own website.This is as true in revenue operations as it is in content.
If you're not starting with clean, well-organized data, any automation you build is going to be messy. That means people receive emails that are generic at best and ill-timed or wrong for them at worst.
Someone needs to manage the integrations and the technology you’re using and recommend improvements.
For instance, you can set up a prospecting agent that reaches out to contacts at companies who appear to be a good fit. But without someone actively monitoring the agent's output and making adjustments like refining the targeting list or you could find yourself reaching the wrong people with messages that don't sound like you.
There’s also a learning curve with AI technology.
When we first start working with a client, our RevOps team reviews their technology (such as their HubSpot portal) and audits their data, workflows and automations to identify areas for improvement. Then they make recommendations for AI assistants or agents that could be helpful and train the sales team on how to use them.
One example of this is a sales assistant we created for a client who sells complex, custom engineered solutions for on-site power. Because these solutions require a significant investment, the sales and finance teams were spending considerable time preparing a financial analysis to demonstrate the potential savings and returns they could achieve by reducing utility power during peak times.
The sales assistant asks for a few inputs and returns a value so the team can give prospects a quick estimate right on the call.AI will give you endless ideas and plenty of advice.
You could ask for a dozen strategy recommendations to promote a new product and get some great ideas, but someone who has worked with that audience and knows what has succeeded is even more powerful.
Similarly, you could spin up a website page in seconds, but someone with a background in design and user experience knows how the average person will scan the page, where they’ll click and where they tend to drop off. They also know how to use monitoring tools to refine the page. Something as simple as changing the placement of a call to action can make a significant difference in conversions.
We have ongoing conversations with clients about how to reduce the number of clicks it takes for visitors to find what they need and how to incorporate all the elements that improve SEO and AEO while maintaining a logical user journey. In one recent example, a clinical research client wanted to make the patient recruitment side of their website more prominent and improve conversions. We used Claude to review top-performing websites in their industry and identify common patterns between them. After consolidating the takeaways, we created a mockup of proposed updates we could share with them. We talked through each step of the new user journey and what updates would need to be made, including integrating key touchpoints with their clinical trial management system so patients could find studies faster.
By combining AI-driven market research with the judgment of a professional design and user experience team, we’re confident we can help them achieve their goals of recruiting more patients.
Paid media has changed more than almost any channel in the past two years. AI-driven bidding, predictive targeting, and real-time optimization contribute to smarter spending, but only if someone makes smart calls about strategy, creative, and audience.
With so many channels and data points, it can be difficult to know what’s working, and that changes as search evolves. Set it and forget it won’t cut it. That’s why our team manages the campaign structure, designs the ads and makes the call on which channels are best for specific audiences. Then we use Google Performance Max, Meta Advantage+, LinkedIn's predictive targeting and StackAdapt's programmatic tools to deploy the most effective ads at scale.
We’re constantly fine-tuning dashboards and reports to give our clients a clear picture of performance and making adjustments based on what we learn.
For Total Security Solutions, a manufacturer of custom bulletproof barrier systems, we built highly customized dashboards to show metrics including:
With these insights, our team could spend more on the channels that had the best performance. This led to several early successes, including a 44% increase in sales qualified leads during the third quarter of last year, a 22% reduction in the cost per lead, and a 19% increase in ROI.
Now, a year and a half into the partnership, we’ve continued to exceed monthly sales goals and refine our targeting.
Most marketing leaders asking 'Why hire an agency when we have AI' are really asking a harder question: Do we have the capacity and expertise to build a marketing system that produces predictable pipeline?
For most B2B companies, the honest answer is no, and not because they lack smart people. Building a high-performance, AI-integrated marketing engine requires deep expertise across actively-managed brand, content, SEO, design, paid media and RevOps systems.
AI gives every team access to the same tools. It doesn't give them ten years of knowing which strategies succeed in manufacturing, MedTech or SaaS. It doesn't give them the editorial judgment to know what's worth saying or the discipline to say it consistently across every channel. And it doesn't give them the system architecture that turns good content and smart campaigns into revenue you can forecast.
AI helps us build it faster. We make sure you’re building it better.
Let's talk about what a connected marketing strategy could look like for your business.