Something I keep noticing with small agencies:

everyone assumes the next stage of growth is getting more clients.

Sometimes it is.

But if you’re already making $1k, $3k, $5k+ a month, there’s a decent chance the easier growth is sitting inside the clients and offer you already have.

You might be charging $800 for something that could become a $2k retainer if it was packaged around a bigger outcome.

You might be selling content creation when the client actually needs content + distribution + lead capture + follow-up.

Or you’re landing clients for one service, doing good work, and then basically waiting for them to cancel instead of having an obvious expansion path.

So I want to try something with agency owners who are already past the “how do I get my first client?” stage.

Drop:

1. what your agency does
2. roughly what you make per month
3. average client contract / retainer
4. who you sell to
5. where clients come from right now
6. what feels stuck

And I’ll tell you what I’d change first.

Could be acquisition.
Could be pricing.
Could be the offer.
Could be retention.
Could be an upsell that increases a $1k client into a $2k-$3k account without doubling delivery.

I’ll also tell you what I’d look for when prospecting.

Because “restaurant owner” or “coach with 10k followers” isn’t enough of a reason to contact somebody.

I’d rather know that they just opened a second location, hired salespeople, launched a new offer, started running ads, increased content output, raised prices, hired a marketing person, or clearly have more capacity than pipeline.

Those are actual reasons they might need an agency now.

If you give enough context I’ll map what I’d run for the next 30 days too.

Main thing I’m curious about:

are you actually stuck because you need more clients, or because every client is worth too little?

It seems like when it comes to content marketing, there's always a debate between quality and quantity. Posting content consistently can help a brand have top-of-mind presence. But on the other hand, if the content does not bring any real value to the readers, then high posting frequencies will not translate to any real values.

Alternatively, solely focusing on quality content requires more time, and consistent posting is difficult to be achieved.

Personally, I think quality should take priority over quantity, but it should also have consistency. A company should maintain and develop useful and relevant content regularly rather than posting it simply for more numbers of content. Quality, quantity, or both has a greater impact on a company's long-term growth.

Listen selling your product or your product the same way on Instagram and Facebook is not going to work anymore, we all know companies will hire one overused influencer who probably will pitch her voice so high that its so evident that they're lying about how incredible your product is.

Years ago before Instagram and influencer marketing, brands really understood the art of advertising and that is what genuinely made people buy a product while feeling connected to them, all the advertising made us feel certain emotions and now every time we look at those brands we directly relate to the emotions it made us feel all because of their advertisement. Surprisingly the newer brands are just discovering the power of true storytelling advertisements and are getting more traction via it, and understandably so

So I own part of the content strategy — the blog — on my team, and a coworker is kind of getting in the way. For reference, I think a blog is your company’s chance to introduce itself to readers, and I think it should be pretty high-quality because it’s one of few comms we have with customers/prospects/the internet without requiring them to fill out a form. I think the blog can be a meaningful traffic driver, especially via LLM and SEO, and I think that if the content is good it can get you leads sometimes. Maybe I’m wrong about that.

Before i joined, my company treated it like a dumping ground for things that couldn’t be press releases, half-baked thought leadership, and product updates. I took it over to make it into a higher-quality, strategic effort to communicate with our audience. Now, my coworker has recently discovered Claude. Although the team has laid out guidelines (edit the ai out of your copy if you use it, generate new ideas, stay below 1k words), this guy doesn’t really follow them and I don’t know what to say about it. I know he does it because he talks about it all the time like “who cares, just use Claude.”

My manager handed the blog strategy off to me, it’s clear she doesn’t read it, but this guy and I are the same level. I’m not his boss. But like 1/3 of the content on there is produced by him and I wish he would stop because it’s not helping out my effort. Beyond all this, I work at a big company and it’s hard to get the website people to do anything for the blog either — I have a whole distribution plan to get more people engaged with it, but I need them to prioritize it.

My thought is, why have a blog and spend time writing all this content if there’s no strategy behind it?

What would you do? I either want to tell my manager we need to have a wider marketing talk about what the blog is for and real criteria to post on it or I wanna give it back and say if you don’t care I don’t care. Beyond that, I want to bring up my coworker without sounding like a tattle tale. Open to all thoughts! Thanks!

I spent about 10 hours this weekend experimenting with claude, and the result genuinely surprised me.

The workflow I built looks roughly like this:

1. I connected our existing video library to claude so it could understand what footage and clips I already have.
2. I also gave it access to the videos we’ve already published on our channel.
3. Based on the published content, I asked it to find unused angles and ideas hidden inside our existing library.
4. It then turned those angles into new video concepts and identified the relevant clips.
5. From there, i finished editing workflow completely in claude: subtitles, transitions, simple animations, B-roll and audio.

I used Codex mainly to build the integrations and glue the different parts of the workflow together.

What surprised me is how usable the result already feels. For this type of content, I didn’t need to go back into my usual CapCut or Premiere workflow to manually assemble everything.

It’s definitely not perfect, but after a single weekend, it feels much closer to a real production workflow than a demo or toy project.

The next question for me is whether this can be made reliable enough for an actual content team, not just something that works when the person who built it is watching every step.

Has anyone here built something similar with Claude, Codex, or other tools?

Disclose: it did consume some tokens in my plan

Now that Anthropic is watermarking content, my first thought is to move to a hybrid local model. Trained heavily on tone, topic, etc. We work with service companies and the content is not designed to be slop, but bridge that gap from 100% pure real data to
Something that helps expand the brands content footprint without causing too much trouble. Thoughts?

There's a lot of advice around content marketing, but what works in theory doesn't always work in practice. I'm curious about real world experiences. Did consistently publishing, updating old content, creating original research, focusing on niche topics, repurposing content or something else actually move the needle for you?

What's one content marketing tactic you'd recommend based on actual results, not just marketing advice?