Emily Amos From Uplift Content

Emily Amos is the founder and CEO of Uplift Content, a SaaS content marketing agency that writes case studies, ebooks, and blog posts for high-growth software companies like ClickUp, Calendly and WalkMe. 

It’s important to Emily to build meaningful relationships with customers, partners and peers inside the content and customer marketing communities. She thrives on asking questions and listening deeply so she and her team can provide advice, strategies and content specific to their customers’ unique situations and challenges.

Please tell me all about your agency and what makes it unique?

Most content marketing agencies are full-service. Uplift Content, on the other hand, is not and that’s what makes the company unique. Rather than be mediocre at dozens and dozens of different service offerings, Uplift is highly skilled at just 3 things: writing case studies, ebooks and blog posts. 

And because Uplift Content only writes for B2B SaaS companies, the Uplift team has a very good understanding of the challenges and opportunities in this industry, and can create content that helps its customers drive revenue.

Can you describe your journey to becoming an agency owner?

After spending her 20s galavanting around the world traveling and teaching English as a second language, Emily was ready to embark on a new career. She knew she was a decent writer, so took the leap and became a freelance web writer. She eventually became the writer that many of the local web developers turned to when they needed content for the sites they were building.

After 11 years as a freelance web writer, she decided she needed a change. Ironically, she’d never really loved writing, but what she does love is running a business. She enjoys the strategy, sales and marketing, and operational side of things. She decided to start a content marketing agency and have a team of freelancers do the writing and editing while she takes care of running the business.

As a marketer, she knew that she’d have an easier time marketing her content marketing company if she had a narrow focus. At that point, she had one B2B SaaS customer in San Francisco and thought that could be a good niche for her. She knew that if she had one B2B SaaS customer, she could get two. And if she could get two, then she could get four. Six years later, they have a full roster of B2B SaaS companies all over the world. 

What do your customers like most about your agency?

Uplift Content’s customers are content marketers and customer marketers at B2B SaaS companies. These marketers are under constant pressure to produce copious amounts of high-quality content, but they have a hundred other competing priorities and not enough people power or writing skills.

Uplift Content’s customers like that Uplift’s team is a flexible and agile resource that becomes a true partner to them in creating a consistent flow of strategic and valuable content that moves their target audience through the buyer’s journey.

By outsourcing content creation to Uplift Content, their customers love that they’re freed up to work on other strategic initiatives that drive value for their companies.

Let’s face it, agencies are a dime a dozen. How do you make your agency stand out?

What sets Uplift apart is that they take the time to really understand their customers—including their customers’ company, software, target audience and industry as a whole.

B2B SaaS companies like to work with Uplift Content because they’re NOT a full-service marketing agency that does a bit of everything. Uplift’s customers like that they have a singular focus on creating hard-working, high-performing content for B2B SaaS companies like theirs.

Uplift’s customers have a good experience with Uplift because they’re there for them every step of the way. Uplift team members check in. They respond to emails. They answer phone calls. They care. They make sure things are flowing and moving along smoothly.

For Uplift, it’s important that they create content that meets their customers’ business objectives, but it’s equally important that they’re able to support the marketer as an individual to make a greater impact at work—and be recognized for it.

At Uplift Content, they thrive in long-term relationships with their customers. Their very first customer was with them for six years, and that really speaks to the relationship they developed and the value they were able to add to their customer’s team.

If you could pick your dream brand to become one of your customers, which brand would that be?

A dream brand that Emily would like to work with is a brand that is customer-centric and cares about developing respectful relationships with its employees, customers and vendors. Uplift Content values a collaborative work environment where everyone’s skills and insights are valued.

What would you say are the top 3 strategies used by your agency to land new clients?

Our top three strategies to land new clients are SEO, LinkedIn and our newsletter. 

SEO: 90% of Uplift’s leads come from organic search. The Uplift team has been focusing on developing informative, helpful and well-optimized content since it launched in 2007. It took about 3 years for the content to gain enough momentum to really start getting found in Google, but once it did, Uplift has been benefiting from solid traffic and leads. 

LinkedIn: Emily has a social media manager who is an excellent writer and really tuned in to what kind of information Uplift Content’s audience wants to see. They post three to four times per week and Emily makes a concerted effort to engage with her connections every single day. LinkedIn has really helped with increasing Uplift’s brand awareness and has helped position Emily and the company as an expert in their niche.

Newsletter: Uplift sends out two newsletters each month. One newsletter is focused on the company’s audience of content marketers, and the other newsletter is focused on the company’s audience of customer marketers.

For each newsletter, Emily interviews a content marketing or customer marketing leader and shares their insights, best practices and advice in a video, blog post and newsletter. Uplift then uses influencer marketing by asking the leader to share those content assets with their network. While Uplift doesn’t get many leads from the newsletter, it’s a powerful way to build brand awareness and thought leadership.

What works best when it comes to retaining clients at your agency?

Open communication and delivering high-quality content are the two primary ways that Uplift Content retains its customers. Regular check-ins and active listening build trust, and producing tailored, relevant content creation is crucial, requiring an understanding of the target audience and market trends.

Ultimately, though, it’s all about developing long-lasting relationships with customers—relationships built on trust. It’s about really caring about their customers and their customers’ success.

What are some of the pain points you experience as an agency owner?

The industry Uplift Content serves, which is B2B software, has gone through some major upheaval this year with mass layoffs and big budget cuts. This has had a trickle-down effect on content marketing agencies like Uplift’s because companies are moving content production in-house due to budget constraints. It also means that not as many new leads are coming through the door. 

Since October 2023, Uplift Content is down by 25% in revenue and number of customers on their roster. In 2024, the agency will be focusing even more on human-to-human interactions by attending industry conferences, engaging with folks on LinkedIn and in industry Slack groups, and using industry influencers in their content marketing. These human connections are crucial for building awareness, trust and loyalty.

What advice do you have for someone who is just now starting their agency?

As an entrepreneur, it’s easy to feel like you’re being pulled in 10 different directions with 100 competing priorities. Emily was lamenting this recently to someone she admires, and they said to her: “What’s the best use of your time to drive your business forward?”

Emily feels that we don’t often slow down enough to really think about the answer to that question.

If Emily could go back in time to the early days of her business, she would tell herself to really figure out what she needs to do with the limited time she has to make a difference in her business.

All too often, it’s easy to procrastinate by doing the easy, low-value work. But instead, we need to prioritize the tasks that drive growth for our company. Often, these require real brainpower. They’re sometimes a bit daunting because we may not have done this particular task before. Or we know we need to push ourselves to do the task even better than we did it before. It’s easy to put off because it’s hard.

Perhaps there’s a task on your to-do list that you know will make a difference in the growth of your business, but you keep finding excuses to push it to tomorrow. If this is you, Emily recommends this: Schedule it as your first task of the day. You’ll not only get it done, but you’ll enjoy a huge sense of relief at having finally finished it. All the other stuff can wait.

Can you think of a time in your agency journey when you made a mistake and learned from it? Please explain.

Everything Emily has learned on her entrepreneurial journey has been learned the hard way—but they are all lessons she won’t soon forget. 

One of the bigger mistakes Emily made in the early years of her agency journey was not tooting her own horn enough. She’s shy by nature, so has always struggled to put herself out there in sales and marketing. And networking was always particularly tough. 

Over the years, Emily has learned to have conversations rather than blatantly sell, and that is much more palatable for her. She’s also learned to reach out and make an ask—the worst that can happen is a ‘no’, right? 

Looking ahead, what do you think will change about the agency landscape in 2024?

In 2024, Emily feels that video will continue to dominate the agency landscape. Content marketing agencies will continue to try to find ways to add video to their content calendars so that users have various formats to choose from when consuming content. And rather than expensive, on-location video shoots, agencies will be turning to remote video recordings or automated asynchronous video recordings to scale video production.

Personalized content will also feature heavily in 2024 as content marketers work to segment their audience groups and deliver more customized messaging. And agencies will continue to experiment with AI to generate content.