Episode Details

Is your agency constantly innovating and evolving in order to stay relevant? Clients needs are constantly changing as technology evolves. Are you keeping up with what clients need? Julia Smith has worked in digital advertising for over 25 years and has made a name being her client's mouthpiece. They even call her "the voice." She took that concept and formed her agency The Digital Voice, a B2B boutique PR agency that brings brands to life through engaging PR campaigns, awareness-driving communications, and immersive virtual experiences. Julia sat down to talk to Jason about how her agency has changed over the years, especially after the pandemic, and how this has ultimately had a positive impact on the agency. She also discusses the transition from being just a PR agency to being an experience agency, and what she wishes she had known when she first started.

1. Being a virtual voice. Before she started her own business, Julia worked at a company that didn't quite know how to label what she did. They settled on "the voice" to describe that she was basically the company's mouthpiece with everything she did. She represented them on stage and before the press and was their voice in sales and throughout all their business. She later took that concept with her when she decided to create her own PR agency and continued to represent her clients, organize events, networking events, speaking slots, etc for years after that. Every year brought different changes, but 2020 brought a real shift in the way her agency was doing things.
2. The transition to agency experience. For Julia, the last 18 months especially have brought a lot of change and evolution that has had a huge positive impact on them and their clients. "It made us stop. It made us think a little bit more about how we can use every platform possible," she explains. The agency went from relying on networking events, standing on stage, and getting their clients speaking slots to investing in a platform to now offer speaking events with live voting polls and 3D networking floors. How to use that on social media? You can use that same content of the speaking event and can take snippets of that to social media and do polls, write a news story based on that, do a thought leadership piece, do Q&A's and a podcast. This is what they now bring to their clients.
3. The impostor syndrome. One thing that Julia wishes she had known when she first started her agency is that, more than vanity metrics like whether or not you have a huge reach, it's all about who are you? Are they you for the message? What are you trying to say and who do you say it to? Now it is all about taking that and make it count and make it measure and show that the value is there. She used to let those vanity metrics get to her and have impostor syndrome but now she feels confident having a wide range of clients and loves working with startups. She has also accompanied some of her clients on their journey from being a small tech company to taking the step of going public.

Sponsors and Resources

Wix: Today's episode is sponsored by the Wix Partner Program. Being a Wix Partner is ideal for freelancers and digital agencies that design and develop websites for their clients. Check out Wix.com/Partners to learn more and become a member of the community for free.

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