The Agents of Change Digital Marketing Podcast

You've got a spreadsheet from a trade show three years ago, an email list, a CRM that half your team updates, and an e-commerce platform that knows more about your customers than you do. That's first-party data, and it's worth a lot more than most of us are getting out of it. This week I welcome back my old friend Tim Hayden, CEO of BrainTrust Partners, to talk about data sovereignty: getting off rented land, pulling your scattered customer data into one place, and putting AI to work on it without handing your business over to someone else's model. If your marketing decisions are running on guesswork and national averages, this one's for you. https://www.theagentsofchange.com/643 Need help with your branding, website, or digital marketing? Reach out to me (Rich Brooks!) today at https://www.takeflyte.com/contact

Louise Brogan is a LinkedIn strategist, author, and digital visibility expert. She explores LinkedIn Live, Events, and prerecorded video, including ways to attract viewers, plan recurring broadcasts, and choose between personal profiles and company pages. They also discuss vertical captions, repurposing content across platforms, and the simplest first video to create.

Want your business in Google’s coveted Map Pack? Explore the essentials of local SEO, from optimizing your Google Business Profile and earning meaningful reviews to creating useful service and location pages. The conversation also covers local ranking factors, consistent business information, and building community connections that lead to valuable local links.

Sue B. Zimmerman, an online marketing educator, speaker, business coach, and Instagram expert, explores Substack’s potential for audience growth. She discusses newsletters, podcasts, live events, free and paid tiers, and connecting Instagram with Substack. Sue also shares how partnerships, hands-on experimentation, and simple publishing tools can help entrepreneurs and businesses expand their reach.

Jesse Harris, senior editor at ACS Brand Lab with a background in chemistry and chemical engineering, explains how marketers can unlock the expertise of reluctant subject matter experts. They explore building technical credibility, making marketing relevant to scientists, turning interviews into reusable content, simplifying complex ideas without diluting them, and showing experts the impact of their contributions.

Tracy Friedlander, a former professional French horn musician turned online business strategist, explores Substack’s potential for entrepreneurs and marketers. They discuss built-in discovery, portable email lists, Notes, live video, podcasting, and paid tiers. Tracy also explains how service businesses can repurpose existing content, build trust through free value, and turn engaged readers into subscribers and clients.

Andy Crestodina, co-founder and chief marketing officer of Orbit Media, is a veteran B2B digital marketing strategist. He explores whether GEO is truly new or simply SEO with a new label. Topics include using AI for research, uncovering buyer intent, replacing rigid checklists with sales insights, creating content that answers real questions, and deciding when tactics like Reddit, schema, and freshness actually matter.

Vivienne Wagner, founder and CEO of Houndstooth Media Group and an SEO and AI visibility expert who helps businesses get recommended by AI. She explains why clarity matters more than volume. She shows practical tactics like updating Google Business Profile, shaping review responses, and building pillar pages to become an AI referral magnet.

If your Google Ads budget keeps climbing while your results stay flat, you're not alone, and you're probably starting in the wrong place. My guest this week is Jeff Coleman, founder of Factor Four Marketing, who has spent more than two decades building results-driven Google Ads campaigns for everyone from local service companies to Fortune 500 brands. Jeff makes the case that most businesses jump straight into keyword research when they should start with their ideal customer profile instead, and once you make that shift, everything from your ad copy to your landing pages gets easier to build. We dig into what really makes your business remarkable (hint: it's probably not "great service"), why Jeff builds landing pages before finalizing keywords, and how to train Google's algorithm to send you better leads instead of just more of them. If you've ever looked at your ad spend and wondered whether it's working for you, this episode is for you. https://www.theagentsofchange.com/635 Need help with your branding, website, or digital marketing? Reach out to me (Rich Brooks!) today at https://www.takeflyte.com/contact

Here's a question I ask every business owner who complains their marketing "isn't working": when's the last time you actually looked at your website like a stranger would? Because nine times out of ten, the traffic is fine. It's the website that's dropping the ball. My guest this week is Irwin Hau, founder of Chromatics and Conversion Cow, who's analyzed close to 70,000 websites (yes, 70,000) and built an entire framework around the psychology of trust and conversion. Before he was auditing websites for a living, he was a card illusionist, which honestly explains a lot once you hear him talk about how easy it is to manipulate attention online. If you've ever wondered why people aren't calling, filling out your forms, or sticking around past the homepage, this episode hands you the four questions your website needs to answer, and the simple, often free fixes most businesses are missing. https://www.theagentsofchange.com/634 Need help with your branding, website, or digital marketing? Reach out to me (Rich Brooks!) today at https://www.takeflyte.com/contact