🚀 Human-Led AI Marketing Strategy for Legacy B2B Growth Teams | Featuring Dan Salganik 

Welcome to Marketing in the Age of AI, the show for leaders who want real results, not more noise. Join Emanuel Rose as he helps business builders turn AI from a confusing add-on into a practical advantage with clearer messaging, stronger trust, and smarter systems. If you felt a shift happening in real time, you're not imagining it. In the agentic pivot, Emmanuel calls it the move from experimenting with AI to building with it.

So it supports your team, your brand, and your growth. Let's get into it. Hi, I'm Emmanuel Rose. Today I'm marketing in the age of AI.

I'm talking to Dan Salganik, managing partner and co-founder of Visual Fizz. Chicago Digital Agency. He's led since 2016. Dan builds growth strategies and client programs for startups and enterprise brands alike.

We'll focus on practical AI adoption, real client use cases, how agencies choose tools, and the team changes required to deliver measurable results. Dan, thanks so much for joining me today. Let's get into what works. Yeah, I'm excited about it.

Thank you so much. Appreciate you having me on the air here. Yeah, you bet. Well, talk a little bit to me about what kind of verticals you're working in right now.

Yeah, yeah, it's funny. You know, I probably since I wrote this, you just mentioned startups and it's probably even already changed quite a bit. I heavily focus on B2B. So visual fizz, that's what we really enjoy working on.

I do have B2C clients. I've had them. But B2B clients within what I call infrastructure or builds, manufacturing, industrial, construction, technology, those are areas that we really like to focus on. I love mid-market businesses and larger, and I enjoy working with companies that have been around for 30 to 150 years.

So I call them established brands, but you call them multi-generational, heritage, et cetera. But we've skewed around from other areas, but that's really our true bed and butter. Yeah, that's great. Yeah, I call them legacy brands, but I love working with those legacy companies because they have such established SOPs.

and sometimes you could just, you could innovate small things and get massive changes for them, right? Exactly. I mean, that's a big piece of it is it doesn't take a lot to make a massive shift in these organizations, especially ones that have not really turned the lights onto marketing all that much yet. So when they do find the opportunity to work with a marketing agency, and oftentimes we are one of the first ones they've ever worked with, the results are pretty astounding.

And many of them are like, why have we not been doing this for a long time? But you have to start somewhere. Yeah, for sure. Well, walk me through a use case that you guys have been, you know, that's something that's been in the last two or three months.

What do you got going on that's working? Two or three months. Oh, I have a good one. We are working with a major commodity business in the industrial space.

And they had a goal. I'll try to keep the numbers loosely vague just for the sake of their numbers. In the many hundreds of millions, and their goal over three years is to hit the billion dollar mark from a sales perspective. Granted, we do have a unique time in our country's kind of economy when commodities are not as easy to obtain.

And they had a huge strategic shift given all that. But we've been working with them on a kind of newly executed brand and brand delivery. But more importantly, at least for the timing purposes, a new website, which is geared towards pushing out more of the locations that they've recently acquired over the past few years that have, for lack of a better way to put it, never gotten the love that they needed. So we established those.

We put them together as part of the brand. We've developed a game plan to scale those out. And one of the big wins that I'll say we had for this particular client is within five days, five business days of launching the website, we paid off the website because they were able to find or rather the other way around. A lead found them in the market that was never really an organic lead driver.

So we kind of felt like it likely came from the quality of the site and being found on the channels. and that ultimately was big enough to cover the entire expense of the website. So that was a huge opportunity and a huge gain for a client like that. Yeah, I love that.

I love it when you get a chance to rehab old digital properties and get some value from that. What are you seeing in terms of the shifting around SEO and GEO and how are you managing any of that? Yeah, it's an interesting one. I think you really have two sides.

You have the folks who are, you know, yelling on LinkedIn that SEO is dead and GEO is the future. And then you have the others who are kind of like, well, SEO and GEO are just kind of cousins of one another. And ultimately, a lot of the basis of SEO is just being transferred into GEO. Now, you can't go in that blindly and say, let's just do what we've been doing.

But I think, you know, you just have to evolve with the times and understand that, as an example, web traffic may go down. But the intent and quality of the traffic that does come in may go up. You know, I just read something recently that I thought was really interesting. I knew it fundamentally, but never thought about it this way, where customers or companies in general will be thinking, oh my gosh, my web traffic is down X percent year over year.

That's crazy. How come? A competitor must have stolen that traffic. And you have to think to yourself, no, nobody likely stole that traffic.

Like you're not, you know, it's not me competing against you anymore. It us working to be basically referenced on these AEO GEO platforms and people no longer are always clicking through to the website the way they were So you just have to design for new behavioral change And that's a tricky one. But from the fundamental and technical side of things, the shift isn't all that great. You still need clean code.

You still need mobile optimization. You still need good quality websites. You need good content. You don't want to put out garbage.

and I'm actually seeing an opposite shift where people who are putting out too much AI content and not thinking about it, they're actually not getting indexed the same way. So it's, you know, it's an SEO variant. Yeah, I think one of the things I've seen, especially with some of the older brands that I work with, that we have developed so much content for them over the years, right? And the LLMs don't typically look at stuff older than 18 months.

And so I built a tool that will go and rehab old content, bring it back as new content, and that way has a chance to get indexed and referenced by the LLMs. So I think, you know, that's one of the interesting things that it's created for us. But, yeah, I agree with you that we're really just at it. Call it an enhanced SEO awareness.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think you just have to think people have changed the way that they ask questions. And it's ironic because back in the day you would search something like good restaurants near me.

And it's like we're talking like cavemen for Google. But now I find I'm a perfect example. You know, I'm a millennial, but I'm using my phone voice to text all the time. And instead of actually even searching, I'm like, I'm looking for a restaurant that has availability with an outdoor patio, a Friday in this neighborhood.

And you can get so finite with your answer that there's an opportunity to improve that user journey for people. But it does come with the caveat like it is going to be you can't always win anymore with good restaurant near me or Thai restaurant. It's like people are now searching in a different way where they can easily get more information and not have to search dozens of websites to find that information. yeah and it is interesting how uh you still have to have the website uh but but you know people aren't necessarily going to visit it because the agent went in and got that information and brought it forward yeah and you can't attribute the lead um for example we do get people who find us by searching top blank agency in blank top top mark you know in marketing agents in Chicago.

And sometimes I don't know where they come from. And I do take a lot of, put a lot of work into the attribution of my leads, but it literally could have said, hey, Visual, this is a great agency and you could call them right here. And that's it. And that's all I know until I asked them physically, how did you find us?

And back two years ago, you could easily have found where they found us pretty quickly. Yeah. It's so crazy, isn't it? How we worked so hard for so many years to get attribution clarified.

And then we had a pretty granular there for a while. And now attribution again has become a little more fuzzy. You can't get too comfortable with anything you do. You know, that's a big thing.

I try to train my team and I'm like, you know, I have a very senior level team and I'm like, guys, the minute that we stop learning, we become, you know, dinosaurs. And, and there's a lot of what I'm calling like the tick tock generation ultimately that can just they get it right away and i have a team that skews older intentionally because i have a more senior level team um and so education is like at the forefront of everything we're doing even if it costs us billable hours like we have to stay relevant or we will start losing yeah there's no question and something as dynamic as this uh we we saw it over the weekend right where fable gets released i'm using it i'm digging it of getting really good results and then just gets paused and uh and you got to go back and uh you know do something else so yeah what does your personal ai tech stack look like where are you living and where are you creating right now geez i'm i'm testing so much um i'm gemini is my go-to for like general q a just basic stuff day-to-day it's on my phone i wear google shop so why not right.

Everybody has it. But I've been really, and I'm not a coder at heart by any means. I've tried so many times to become a developer and I hate it. But I've been really messing with Claude lately for my own personal kind of plan.

We have a handful of sales tools that I really like using, but none of them speak to each other. So ironically, right before this call, I'm working on between Claude and Make and a bunch of other things, connecting my three different tools. Because what I've noticed is that they're all coming in with such different results on first party and company level data of, again, attribution, who's coming to my website. And I have no way to qualify them and build out like a process.

And I do like manual outreach to be candid. Like I'm still a little against AI for outreach because I think you do lose something unless it's perfect. And so I'm like weighing all that out. So that's really neat.

A lot in the project management space, I think that's a huge area for, it's a ripe for opportunity. And so my PMs within the ClickUp side of things use AI. They're using it for transcription and utilizing that to develop a plan around our projects. One thing I'll say we don't use it for is final product.

There's very rarely a case unless we tell the client out front, hey, this is built by AI. It saves us time. We were the ones behind it. We just formatted and cleaned it up with AI.

I'm a big believer that I don't want to sell my services as a human-led organization with a byproduct of solely AI. The way I see this, human builds it, AI improves and cleans it, human qualifies, quality controls it, sends it out. But without the sandwich of the humans, I don't know. It still feels to me like we need that interaction Yeah I like that where you got AI in the loop instead of human in the loop Yeah I think human led especially because in marketing agencies you are looking for new ideas.

And I love AI. So I come to this with a lens of excitement, but cynicism and realism to some degree. Like I re I mean, I've embraced it quite a bit, but as an agency, you know, I'm also finding that like clients are, some are pro AI and some are against it. And I like to say, I use it as a tool for efficiency.

So they get more hours per dollar ever than ever before. So the efficiency is up, but the by-product of our work is still human driven. And now I found it's become a luxury because people want something designed and developed by humans. So I'm trying to be cognizant of both sides and build something that fits both ends of it too.

Yeah, no, it's an interesting transition. And Claude Design and some of these other things are really starting to put the squeeze on creative work. And maybe not to the level that you and I see, but in the in kind of the secondary competitive competitors, right, where what people are expected, they can build by themselves is really being up level. And so it kind of it's an interesting transition.

And how how much longer do you think that we have agency work like you and I have experienced the last couple of decades? That's a good question. You know, I think there's room. Here's how I see it is AI will take over a lot of the entry level everything, right?

Entry level bookkeeping, entry level agency work, everything. But I think that within the organizations, like at least like visual, I can speak to that. The reason why we've kind of stopped working again with maybe the straight up startups or sub X million dollar revenue companies and really focusing on mid market, especially these non sexy industries that people aren't talking about all the time. Those markets are so far off from AI that small improvements do make a big difference, as we talked about.

But I don't think they need AI in their day to day to constantly take over their jobs and their lives. So I think there is time. And I think that there is that human element, because like one thing I'm doing to kind of answer your question in a different way is creating defensibility for my agency, because that's something we're all thinking about. And so lately, we've heavily focused more on sales and rev ops and demand gen and like not community focus in terms of like raw, raw community, but ultimately the entire internal and external communication standards, like that whole piece of it, which I think is still very much and will always be human driven versus can I make a LinkedIn post?

you know i've seen that go down from my revenue side but high quality web development like proper really good quality seo ai driven websites um continue to grow year over year yeah that's cool i think what i've noticed is that we're able like you were saying to do more with the spend that the client has by lever leveraging claude and and some of the you know perplexity and some of these other tools and so uh and even to the point of using it uh using some um like pay-per-click products that that do some of the uh development and then monitoring success and putting ad spend in places where you're getting value so are you seeing some things at that level also yeah yeah i am um I'm trying to think of even like a scenario because I like to respond in stories.

But I mean, the short answer is, yeah, I think there's a lot of like ways that people are being creative and others are being creative. But like one of the things I've noticed even pre-AI being what it is today, and it's only going to get more extensive, is I think one of the biggest shifts that we will see as agency folks is I see it as, you know, you have this tiered system of Leo Barnett and FCB and the big Edelmans and the big boys in the room. And I think those guys are the most in trouble.

They have the most to lose. And then these almost non-existent or haven't really launched yet agencies or maybe onesies, twosies agencies, those side of the spectrum are really going to see challenges. That's why all these companies that are over $1,500 million are only growing by acquisition and not by new clients. They're buying agencies that are $5, 10, $20 million dollar revenue agencies.

And I think one of the big things is that as you dive further in, the client that was at the 100 million agency is now at the 50, the 50, the 20, the 20, the 10, the 10, the five, five, two, but there's nothing kind of below that. So I think if as long as you've established yourself already, there's opportunity because each group is kind of going down by one level. So that's why we as a tiny agency, 20 people chose to work on mid market, it. These are companies doing 200 million to a billion dollars plus, even though we are, you know, rather small agency.

It's semi-intentional. Yeah, that makes sense. I'm curious what you would recommend for somebody who hasn't had an agency before and how they would go through the process of finding an agency to work with and ultimately what the value of that is. Yeah, yeah.

I mean, the first question I ask individuals, especially if they're on the lighter end of the startup spectrum, let's say pre-series A, or even they haven't been seated, is do I even need an agency? I have a lot of individuals that come to me and they're like, I want to do all this stuff. And I'm like, okay, first question is, if I send you an invoice at, let's say 5,000 bucks a month, is that going to hurt you Like does that emotionally impact you Do you feel like oof Even if we doing great work like you know it doesn happen So does that hurt Like you like ah if the answer is yes then it probably too early for an agency And I say find a contractor find a maybe maybe a one, one person shop, two person shop and go that route versus, you know, like a visual fizz.

When we're past that stage, let's say again, mid-market or smaller organization, and $20 million, $30 million a year revenue, you really want to define who that right agency is in a couple of different ways. The first one is, do they know what they're talking about or they're kind of BSing me? I'll tell you, this is a challenge I face because we've been a agnostic agency from industry perspective for a long time. We have a lot of B2B, but my focus has always been hire the right people.

So my team is driven again by 15, 20 year experienced folks, driven by their vertical and then horizontally for some while. So it's like, I'm not going to have 10 companies that have made dental scalers. It's not my expertise, but I have 10 or 20 or 50, 30 manufacturing and industrial clients. And I'd say, let's say half have seen really good results.

The other half have seen good. And then, you know, occasionally things happen, they're not as good. So as long as there's a realistic approach to quality, it doesn't have to be one-on-one because the other thing is just again this is something i feel very passionate about i'm not a big fan of truly verticalized agencies to the extent of i do paid search for dentists because that you know you know for sure that that agency is doing this the same thing for 50 companies or 100 companies and it's backburnered and i know this profit margins they're very very high there's a reason for that so i'd say find an agency that knows what they're talking about find the right culture fit because one of the biggest things, like even as B2B, you still work with people.

And I'm a big believer, like you should like working with the people that you work with. And it should be very much like symbiotic in terms of the relationship. And because I talk to my clients sometimes more than I talk to some of my family, you know, so do you like them and trust them? Are they capable of good work?

And do you see like opportunity to grow from, you know, ultimately a quality standpoint? If the answer is yes for all three of those, I think that's a surefire way to feel comfortable with a company that you're going to end up working with for a while and very closely and invest a lot of dollars with. So, yeah, I like it. Those are three good, three good decision making tools.

And I agree, you've got to you've got to enjoy being around the person or the primary people just because you do end up spending a lot of time and needing needing to be able to agree and disagree and not and not take it personally. right yeah oh yeah i mean i i always tell my clients um we just don't we don't say yes because they told us we should do something you know because we're the marketing people and they're oftentimes not and of course we respect them and it's very much like a relationship hey i'd love to but like we've done this 10 times it never works if you want to spend 50k on this campaign you could but we really advise not to do it you know or sometimes a ceo which you know bless them but they want to do some crazy thing like, hey, let's buy a Super Bowl ad.

And you're like, you don't offer what these people actually want. You just want the Super Bowl ad. If you've got $3 million, which I think it's a lot more now, $3 million, let's spend it elsewhere. Not an issue that I deal with very often because my clients don't buy Super Bowl ads, but we're not afraid to say no because we want to make sure that the client's happy with us.

I tell my clients all time, like, listen, another agency will tell you yes for everything. I'll tell you no, this is not the path you should take. Just because you heard you should do social for XYZ doesn't mean you have to do that. Let's take a route that actually makes sense because I've done this for 15 years and I've worked on 30 of companies that are not too dissimilar to you.

So yeah, that's important for me. I like it. Yeah, I know. I love it too.

We want to build assets and we want assets that ROI. Yes. And that often is not the one that strokes the ego of the person making the decision. Yes, 100%.

Yeah, exactly. All right, Dan. Well, you and I could keep going all afternoon. I think I really enjoyed the conversation and spending time with you.

Visual Fizz in Chicago, Dan Salganik. And your contact information will be down below if people want to have a conversation with you. And I really am thankful for your time. And I hope you have a good afternoon and evening.

Thank you. I appreciate it. Thanks for having me. All right.

Thank you. Well, it's good to have an agency, number one, because it's good. Like Dan was talking about, his team and himself, they're continually educating themselves and engaged in learning about what's working and what's not working. and it brings in a third party to help make decisions and maybe bring up things that are uncommon or uncomfortable.

And that's critical in this dynamic change that we have found ourselves in. I hope you found value in the conversation I had today with Dan Salganik. Yeah, I know I did. I also hope that you take some time today to spend with your favorite LLM and that you find a way to reclaim a few hours from your work week.

And with that time, you continue to upskill, that you spend it with your friends and family, and that you get outside in the nature away from the screens. It's Emanuel Rose, Marketing in the Age of AI. Thanks for listening to Marketing in the Age of AI. Be sure to subscribe wherever you heard this podcast so you never miss a future episode.

Your copy of Authentic Marketing in the Age of AI is available at amazon.com or emmanuelrose.com. You can also connect with Emmanuel on LinkedIn.

Thanks again for listening, and we'll see you next time.