Building a Web-First B2B Agency

Rebecca Dutcher, founder of Red66 Marketing, joins Curve Ahead to share how she's grown her web-first agency by 150% since 2020 while increasing profitability with a smaller team. After 15 years in agencies, Rebecca launched Red66 to help B2B companies build smarter digital marketing foundations and has scaled to a 13-person team in just eight years. In this episode, discover why websites remain the foundation of effective B2B marketing, how AI is changing content creation and search behavior, and why short-form video and authentic brand visibility are essential in today's buyer's journey. Rebecca also reveals how she's used EOS and people-first leadership to build sustainability without sacrificing culture or profitability. Whether you're running lean or building a team, this episode offers valuable insights from a marketing leader who's stayed ahead of digital trends

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In this episode of Curve Ahead, I'm joined by Rebecca Dutcher, the founder of Red66 Marketing, a web first marketing agency based out of Grand Rapids, Michigan. After 15 years in the agency world, Rebecca launched Red 66 to help B2B companies build smarter, more strategic digital marketing foundations. And in just eight years, she's scaled to a 13 person team and nearly doubled the business since 2020. In our conversation, we dive into why AI is changing the way marketers create, optimize and scale content, and how Red66 is staying ahead of the curve. We also cover the importance of short form video and authentic brand visibility in today's buyer's journey, especially for B2B brands that want to stand out. And if you're running lean or building a team, you'll learn how Rebecca used EOs and People first leadership to build sustainability without sacrificing culture or profitability. On today's episode of Curve Ahead, I am joined with the founder of Red 66 Marketing, Rebecca. Rebecca. Do you mind introducing yourself? Rebecca Dutcher. I'm the president and founder of Red 66 Marketing here in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Can you tell me what inspired you to found Red 66 Marketing? Sure. I. I had worked for agencies for about 15 years, three different agencies and kind of moved up. But I was always doing business development and client relationship. So I actually had a mentor suggest I finally hang out my own shingle. So I took that leap just eight years ago. How's it been for the last eight years? It's been great. Lots of growth, lots of lessons, little bumpy at times, but we've grown, you know, even since 2020, about 150%, so. So lots of growth. But this last year we've got, we've settled down a little bit. In a good way or a bad way? In a good way. We did a lot of capacity building, actually tracking how long it takes to deliver things. So we actually kept our revenue almost the same as last year, but increased profitability with 4 less people on the team. So you had mentioned that it was bumpy at times. Are there any stories that you're willing to share? Sure. Well, I mean, growing a team, there were a few mishires. There were some people I hired that were remote. That one completely ghosted us and kept a laptop and things like that and cost us a lot of money and paid budget errors. But also there's some that I took a chance on, really new grads who have tons of initiative and that figure it out mindset. And they have been incredible. Some have Been here for three years now. Learned a lot about just self awareness. Right. Leading a team, growing from myself and a couple contractors to now a team of 13. One of the biggest lessons is making sure you have the right mentors and talk to other owners who've been through it for guidance. You cannot do this alone. Yeah, a hundred percent. I think that's pretty common. Right. That business owners, especially in the early stages of it. Right. You feel like you're so alone, you're isolated, you're trying to do it by yourself. But you really need to start reaching out and having conversations with people who have been there or done that. And usually just like one or two steps in front of you because that allows them to have it recent enough in their mind that hey, I'm going through X. Right? And they're like, this is how I solved it. And you can look at it and be like, yeah, that totally makes sense. That's super easy. Why didn't I think of that? So, yeah, I mean, I think mentorship is really important when it comes to founding your own thing. Yeah, we floundered, you know, the first couple of years and took clients that we could get. I actually found eos about four years ago and that was great. We had an implementer that was really helpful, helping us get a solid foundation. We've moved on to system and soul. Now that's a little more people driven, but having that outside perspective and coaching has been a big part of our growth too. I've met with a couple of different founders who are using EOs or have historically used EOs, and they said that's a big contributor for one, finding purpose and focus in their organization, but also helping them grow the organization. Also it's been just to help clarify the vision, you know, where are we going, how are we going to get there? And making it, you know, with the rocks at least digestible, you know, taking one quarter at a time and seeing that momentum. In fact, this morning we just had a quarterly State of the Company meeting with the team. Just looking at how far we've come this year. Yeah, it's always important to reflect, right? Like, hey, we've done all of these metrics and sometimes I think at large organizations, you are so removed from some of the impacts that you're actually having. You just kind of see the numbers come through on a daily basis, but there's never really a time to step back as like a group or a division and be like, this is the true impact that you've had. On your clients or you've done like this is the results of your outputs. I mean, I love that small organizations are able to do stuff like that. Yeah. I mean you get so caught up in the day to day. You need to make time to celebrate the wins and remind people of the wins sometimes and just that look back together and look ahead. Right. How did we get to these goals that we're planning for Q1 and things like that and making sure that everyone is a part of it. Yep, completely agree. Is there A story behind Red 66 Marketing, the name of Red 66 Marketing? Of course. Everyone's got to have a story, right? Well, Red 66 is my Red hair. It's a strong, bold color. You know, people called me Red growing up, which I loved. Not really. And 66 was my number when I was the first girl to play football when I was 8 years old. So I was the first girl in the all boys league. Very cool. I mean I felt like it was football related, but it also sounded like an audible call. Red 66. Red 66. So I've used that in some fun language too. Right. Sometimes when you need to call an audible, whether it's marketing or business strategy, call us. We have a lot of fun with the football theme when we go to some different trade shows and events. For sure. Love that. Love that. So you mentioned that you guys have been in business for about eight years and you've grown from you and a couple of consultants to a team of 13. Can you talk about the evolution over that time? Like how Red 66 has evolved as an organization as like who you're taking on as clients, as like some of your services offered has have evolved. Yeah, well, I've always, you know, from my background, my mindset's always been, you know, website first. That's your foundation because I had a lot of SEO background. So that's where you start. And then the marketing services are a lot of the different lines in the water. So continued search engine optimization, paid ads, social media, email marketing, all of those things. And then layering on with other campaigns and graphic design and materials and things like that. So we started doing websites and just some content marketing. We've grown to do bigger, more complex websites and some other integrations, you know, connecting with CRMs. But a lot of our growth has been word of mouth and referral and just saying, yeah, we can do that and figuring it out along the way. Most of the time that's worked or we've learned those really good lessons. So a lot of Our clients, most of them are business to business. They're uniform rental and linen rental companies. For a preferred vendor for the CSC network, which is independent, so not the big nationals that are publicly traded. But we work with hydraulic fitting manufacturer, LED lighting manufacturer, again selling into other businesses. We've done some franchise development, marketing and a lot of professional services and then local home services. Very diverse. It is, you know, marketing. There's a lot of, we're all doing the same tactics. Right. Using different tools and it changes, but it's really about that message. Right. And the consistency. So we work with clients who, they're typically sales driven. You know, they have little to no marketing in house. They might have a coordinator, but they need someone who can help keep things moving and that's, you know, we become their fractional marketing department and we always joke that we're pleasantly persistent because half of our job is following up on things. Yeah. As a, as someone who has a project management background like that's been part of like a huge part of my career is just being kindly nagging people to deliver something for you. Hey, I still need this thing. Okay, we're three weeks late on this. When can I expect it? Can I expect it? This is the impacts of why it's late. We, we need to talk about this. So. Yeah, I totally get that. Yeah. Tell me about web first. So you're a web first marketing agency. I mean, I get the idea behind it, that drives it. But tell me why for you guys that's the most important piece for you? Because that's where most of the leads and things are measured. Right. Our work, your analytics and looking at where traffic's coming, what conversions are happening on the site, but it also puts out your brand. If they're business to business, that's really one of the only tangibles other than the service that's delivered that they might have with your brand. So it's, you know, there's a lot of history, there's a lot of, you know, the services and impact and even now and as the buyer's journey has changed, especially post Covid, but looking at people, they go online for information and they'll make their short list of who they're going to call before they even reach out to anyone. So what you have out there online is so important in not just getting the lead, but even moving them closer to their buying decision. So you make that short list. And now seeing AI's impact in SEO, having your own content out there that gets picked up by these language models is really important and but as important now as your brand. So we're seeing social and video becoming even more important than it was before from just SEO. Well, let's talk about that. Let's talk about the impacts that AI have you've seen or experienced over the last year, let's call it year and a half. It, it's really come on hot and heavy in the last year. What impacts have you seen with your clients and how are you advising them to either use or steer clear of AI? Well, internally we use it to make us more efficient. Right. So content creation but still we always review everything and make sure it's accurate. But when you see from a search perspective now the summaries, right, AI will summarize search and what you they think you're looking for but it pulls from what's out there. So we look at that for clients. So we create the content that it pulls from and we look a lot at people also ask to make sure those things are included in client content everywhere. You know, summer we use it to analyze data. A lot of our clients, they're multi generational. So they are, they already have kind of a culture of innovation. You know, they don't sit, stand still. They're always moving forward. AI has been around for a long time. You know, Google paid ads always had it different things like that. It's just now it's, everyone can use it and I have a lot of friends and I just read another article where people will just search ChatGPT instead of Google because you don't go down the Google rabbit trail. And that speaks volumes in the type of content you need to create. So you get picked up there, that's one thing. But it's, you know, it's still early. It's, you need to adopt it, learn and have some processes and how you're going to use it. And that's a big part of our. Q1 goals, is defining the processes. Defining the processes but also looking at what tools we're going to invest in as a company because we have people trying several different ones for different things. We've done a lot of prompting and keeping now some client projects. Nothing confidential, but looking at what's going to work best for us to improve our delivery, our quality of service and our efficiency for clients that stays on brand and just for fun sometimes in our meeting total sidebar. But you can ask chat to roast you just say with everything I've shared with you so far, how would you roast me? And I guess it's Pretty entertaining. I didn't have time to do it yet. Yeah, there's some pretty good ones out there. And it's like the other big one that's kind of made the rounds, especially with like entrepreneurs. It's like, what are of everything you know about me and my business? Like, what are other opportunities that I'm overlooking? Or like, how could I pivot to go. Go into this? And then like, I usually take it a step forward further than that. And it's like, okay, well now help me develop a plan to get from where I am now to where I want to be based off of what you know about me and my business and who I'm targeting and how I want to move it forward. Absolutely. We'll even use it. I'll go search to find out what it would return when we look for our client services in that area. Right. Or who is the best at this. Or give me the top 10 and then we look at why so we can reverse engineer that for our client strategy too. Yeah, that's actually a really good approach for search. I like Perplexity AI just because it has a, like a real time search functionality versus like using chat, where chat has historical data but it's not up to date as of the day you're trying to make the search. Heard a lot about Perplexity. I'm in several different Facebook groups and things like that are all about AI sharing tons of prompts and different tools and how do I do this? And marketing is always. It's always been like that. Right. There's always new things to try. You test, you measure, you repeat, and you keep getting better. So it's just now we have more tools where we can test faster and learn faster. Is that a good thing for marketing as a whole and your clients to be able to test and learn more quickly? I think so. Yeah. Right. Because there's the old saying, half my marketing dollars are wasted. I just wish I knew which half. That's old school. But now if we want to look at a competitive landscape or who's doing what and who's coming up top and why, we can do it in minutes instead of hours. Right. With manual research and creating spreadsheets and documents and links where then we can go in and fact check it. But it makes it so much faster for client work and impact. Right? Bigger impact, faster. Yeah. I was, I was talking with the founder and he was talking about like the half life now of things is much more accelerated because of the Access to AI and being able to find out all this information. And what he meant by that is like you always kind of see these business cycles that, okay, this advancement took five years, this advancement took two years. Now we're looking at like months where things are just taking months versus taking years to develop and bring to market. Yeah, absolutely. Even, I mean a simple example too is like content creation. We have a website where We've written over 150 pages in the last couple of weeks. That would have taken months or at least a month or two instead of a few weeks. Yeah, yeah, I, I need to better at my SEO strategy and write my 150 pages too. Right. Well, and it's for a new site, but that allows us to write websites, become more affordable, we can get them launched faster. All of those things that are good for clients and you know, and for us. What I mean, other than AI, what are the other big impactful trends that you're seeing right now? Short and even more brand building. A little behind the scenes. So people get to know your company, even if it's professional service, because it's, you know, it used to be just SEO, but now it's that awareness, word of mouth referral and they want to get to know you or what it's like to work with you before they ever reach out. Google Reviews is a good thing, right? That's part of it. But your social channels and what they see when they go check you out is even more important. Video is huge. I think that short form video also allows you to play into like the psychology of the buying cycle. Right. Like the more content that you're putting out and more that you're kind of in the face of other people, they're going to be like, oh, hey, remember that? You know, Rebecca does this thing like I saw that video on her talking about it. So I mean, I also love video. I tell people that I'm like a video first agency. I was having a conversation not too long ago about wanting to get into doing a newsletter and like, well, why don't you take your podcast episodes, look at the transcripts of them and then like pull out key points and then create your newsletter. I was like, wow, why didn't I think about. Exactly. And my team's pushing me to do more video too, because they know that me sitting down to write blogs might take a while, but they'll sit me down in the office and capture a video and then we can transcribe it and it becomes a Blog and we've got several video snippets to repurpose and use as well. I mean that's the beauty about doing podcasts, right? Is that you have a 25 minute, 30 minute conversation that can generate not only long form, but a bunch of short form content and whatever sort of write ups you want to do from that content. Yep. And it's real people, right? I mean, you know, sometimes content, if you're reading it or you know, heavily produced about videos and corporate videos can feel, you know, like the company controls the narrative. But when you're, you know, you've got a person that's behind the scenes and showing you things in some real time or you're having a conversation like we real things come up and it's just, you know, it's a more impactful conversation and outcome for those that watch. 100% agree. Like, part of the reason I started this is to one, learn from other people in the agency realm to like, okay, what are the biggest lessons learned? But like, do it outside of the polished PR bs that kind of crops up when you like have people, well, you know, this and this. Like, no, like, tell me your real story about what's really happening, what you're seeing, you know, how you did have bumps in the road and you know, I think everybody has those similar stories, but oftentimes it's so overproduced that it's not impactful when someone who's interested in starting a business gets a hold of them. And that's, you know, one thing we like to talk about clients for life because a lot of clients I had, even when I worked for other agencies are still with us today. And that goes back to 2009. And it's because of that transparency, right? Open, honest communication. If you know, we try something and it doesn't work, we know right away because we pull monthly reports, we're looking at the data and we don't hide anything. We're honest and then look at what's happening in their industry. So we can make a pivot if we need to. But it's that accountability, that honesty because, you know, no one wants to be sold. They want a solution, they want to help their business and the people that work for them to move them forward and they don't have time for a lot of corporate fluff. I think that your background though kind of lends to that relationship building aspect that you need when building trust with new clients to be able to bring on new work. So I mean, I think that A lot of people overlook the fact that being a marketing agency, it's a people to people business. Right. You are working with other people. You're having to build relationships with business owners and then have help them build relationships with their customers. So it's always people to people and you have to think and think about what it takes to build those relationships. Another thing we always joke or talk about is tlc, right? Think like a customer when we're, you know, even communicating with one of our clients, like, how are they going to take it? Like, would you want someone to say this to you? I am never a fan of talking about how many hours something's going to take. Right. Because it's not about ours. It's about value and outcomes. Same for our clients when we're working on content for them. You know, we're not just pushing content to the masses or these faceless organizations. There is someone inside, right, that has a pain or a problem and you have a solution. How do we get their attention and then how do we make the pain of, you know, switching providers less than the pain that they're currently dealing with? So it's, you know, because some of ours are uniforms, you know, they're three or five year contracts. So that's a big thing for a business to go through if you're going to upset, you know, 20 to 100 employees with a provider change. So we've got to really get into that mindset of the buyer. Yeah, I have a background in SAS CRMs, so I totally understand everybody. I came into somebody's office, they just did not want to talk to me because I was responsible for the implementation piece of it. I'm like, look, guys, I understand what you're going through. Like, I've done this a dozen times. Let's just sit down, let's have it out, right? Tell me how we can make this better. Let's foster and build like an actual relationship. Tell me like all the bad things that is going wrong now in your system. Tell me how obviously your leadership team has made the decision to make this switch. What functionality is missing or how can we, you know, better emulate what it is that you were doing historically? And then it's okay, here's how I'm going to structure, like your training schedule to talk through these points and then you'll have that realization that all these things are in there. It's just in there in a different way. So it's, I think part of it really is kind of just education from being that person providing that upheaval is really, it's important to educate the people that you're working with on the tool that they will be using in the future. And you make a really good point because thinking about like even after the sale, right. Or after the install, because most of us aren't done there's still a lot of work to do, you know, from a good like onboarding and getting to know the client. But even after implementation the service afterwards, because that's where you build the loyalty. Right. And the people that will refer you and will either send you praises or not. So there's focusing. Even post sale communications is becoming a bigger deal because it helps that stickiness. Right. Of the client for the business too. Yeah, 100% agree. I think that it's more important to have regular touch points after an implementation's been completed to create that stickiness so you have that retention long term. That's the most important thing to the business ultimately. I guess both businesses, one for the long term success of the business who's doing the implementation, but also the long term success of the other of your client is just making sure that you're communicating and setting up the channels to be able to do so and do so open and honestly. Because once the openness or the honesty kind of closes off, that's the beginning of the end of that relationship either with that individual or the overall organization. You've got to help them capitalize on that investment that they made with you and that relationship doesn't end. And that's one way we set up our company is that we have account managers. So all of our clients have one single point of contact. So they're not calling a web person, you know, they're not talking to a designer directly trying to manage all of that because they're executives, they have a million things to do. They want to know I can call this person for whatever I need and they'll get it taken care of. Yep. Yeah. I think that having great AMs or PMs is super important in an organization to make sure that the execution that has been put on paper and then the care afterwards is all being taken care of. And those are the people you ultimately really need to trust. Absolutely. So let's kind of get back into some of the trends. Okay. What are some of the big like other than AI and short form video, what are the big opportunities on the horizon? There's a lot with automation. Right. With CRM automation, email marketing and different triggers. There's also still social media not just video, but being out there and paid ads. So that continues to change. You know, Google has their PMAX options now, but social ads for brand awareness, not just paid ads for lead gen. So we're seeing all of these things evolve and adapting, you know, our strategies on how we use them. For each client we have a couple clients where you know, they're not sales driven and they say we don't need email marketing. It doesn't work because I never opened emails. Well, you never want to do business like you're trying to sell to yourself. But also if you've got a great sales team and you know that, great, let's just focus on lead gen and let them take it. So we're adjusting our packages a little bit so that we can serve clients that have that but then also for clients who don't with where their sales reps are, you know, buried. Chasing the big ones, that's where your marketing automation can help reach the, you know, the smaller targets and still stay in front of them with personal content it and as someone to reach out to. Yeah, I think that's actually super smart to base your strategy off of the type of personnel that your clients have because yeah, I'm working with a client right now that like the guys are brilliant at selling. So all I should focus on for them isn't necessarily like their full go to market strategy. It's just let's focus on getting them leads so they can sell and then we can start building the brand that way. Noted. Lesson learned. I like, I like this question. So marketing is ever evolving, especially digital marketing. What are some of the best publications that you lean into to kind of stay ahead of the evolution of trends and or changes? Well, I read a lot and I watch a lot of videos as you can imagine. I love Search Engine Journal. Also like the Social Media Examiner, I follow a lot of, you know, influencers and leaders on LinkedIn. LinkedIn also I sign up for a lot of webinars from different things, different people. But our team, we're all also part of the American Marketing association so at the national level and then our local chapters, so we attend their events and meetings with speakers so that we're always getting fresh information, ideas and content. Usually on a weekly basis. I save all of the articles that I've read and then I share them with my team with my little key takeaway. And I have a fun chrome extension called Pocket where I can just put things in my pocket and I can tag them so I can go back to them and it downloads them to my phone. So if I'm ever, you know, like bored and scrolling, I'll go there instead of just a Facebook or Instagram. Yeah, maybe I'll check that out because I have the tendency of like in Chrome just adding it to my read list and just never going back and looking at it again. It's just kind of permanently bookmarked on my read list and I just don't ever take the time to go back and address it. Yeah, yeah. For local SEO, I found two Facebook groups that I'm a part of too. I, there's a lot of good information there. But Tim Keller is great for local SEO and Google Business Optimization. There's also another one for SEO changes and SEO that they're sharing articles and people, you know, ask for help or how do I do this? And just looking at the dialogue in there, you learn things too. I am a part of the AI automation entrepreneur groups where they're like, it's a lot of prompt engineering, but I'm not a part of like the SEO thought leadership one. So maybe I'll be on the lookout for this. Yeah, there was a fun discussion yesterday and one that talked about SEO is now aeo. So it's, you know, the AI engine optimization, not just search engine optimization. Well, I have new places to go. Yeah, I think that's. I tagged an article the other day of someone who basically did a write up on how they got their business into being a part of what, like the reference pool for, you know, chatgpt and Perplexity and that, all those. So I wanted to go back and read it. Obviously it's on my read later list that may never get read. I'll follow up with you after to make sure you've read it. You can send me the link. I will, I will. Rebecca, you've been fantastic. I really appreciate your time today. I give all my guests 90 seconds at the end of the call to plug anything that they're passionate about. So in your case, that could be Red 66 marketing or just anything. So without further ado, the next 90 seconds are yours. Goodness. I'm really passionate about building our team and our culture. You know, just coming off our Q4, look back, we've been through a lot of change and one of the biggest things that has gotten me to where I am and our team to where we are and even with our clients is open, honest communication. You know, that relationships matter and just being transparent. Right. If you don't know the answer. You don't know the answer, but you're willing to figure it out, or you work with people that are invested in you and helping you figure it out. So that's helped us grow a team, even though they're a younger team. We have. Everyone's been there, like, two, three years now, and that's huge for us. But then you look at our clients who've been with us for years as well, and there's something in that. Right. That's in our culture and how we move forward. So we like to see everyone win. That's even, you know, kind of in our headlines. How did we help a client win? How did we help someone on the team win? And, you know, what can we do to help other people win? And if it's helping them avoid mistakes with, you know, a website or with other agencies or trying to do it all themselves, we're going to find a way. And that's just how we roll. Awesome. I love that. Thank you so much for your time today. You're welcome. Thanks for reaching out.