Reddit, YouTube & Fresh Content: The AEO Playbook

0:00Andres Figueira:There's so many factors that come into play whether a company is going to be successful or not, even if you're doing great, you know, world class marketing.

0:06Abdo Mazloum:How everything began with Webtimize.

0:08Andres Figueira:I started in an extra bedroom in my apartment and, you know, from here to there, one client to another, referring you from one client to the other and you work your way up.

0:15Abdo Mazloum:Is there any type of preference in how you work with these clients? First, you've got to believe in the brand, what the objective is, what's the mission and vision of the brand.

0:23Andres Figueira:And you feel like you can make a difference. Self-evaluate yourself whether you can make a difference for that company or not.

0:29Abdo Mazloum:Are you marketing the company's services in order to get more clients or has it been an organic growth?

0:35Andres Figueira:We're coming up more and more often into answer engines. A few inbound leads that came recently, I asked them, how did you find us? Like we switched on ChatGPT or did a prompt and your agency came up.

0:50Abdo Mazloum:Hey everybody, thank you for tuning in. My name is Andres Figueira and I'm going to be your host for the day. This show is brought to you by the Global Talent Company, helping fast-growing teams hire exceptional remote talent from Argentina, South Africa, and beyond. We connect companies with world-class professionals who bring skill, reliability, and a global perspective to every role. And just for our listeners today, we're offering an exclusive 10 % discount on your first hire. All you need to do is visit GlobalTalent.co, click Start Hiring, and mention the podcast listener discount when we reach out.

1:21Abdo Mazloum:And today with me here, I am speaking with Abdo Mazloum, a founder and CEO of Webteamize, a Montreal-based digital marketing agency that's providing consulting services to local and international businesses. And with that said, Abdo, it's a pleasure to have you on the show, man. Welcome.

1:39Andres Figueira:Thank you, Andres. I'm happy to be here with you.

1:42Abdo Mazloum:It really is very interesting to be able to speak with what I believe is my first Montreal-based company. Avdu, in order to get the audience a bit more in context, would you be able to tell us a bit more about your background, how everything began with Weptimize and what it actually does in your own words? Absolutely.

2:03Andres Figueira:First, thank you for having me here. I'm honored to be your first guest from Montreal. I've been in Montreal since 2002, so almost 24 years this summer. I really like the city. I'd say a lot of experience. All my adulthood was in Montreal. So I've learned a lot. I did my university here, not very far, and Bishop's University, which is about an hour and a half from Montreal. As soon as I graduated from Bishop's, I moved back to the city. And that's where I got into web development. So I worked for an SEO agency as my first job, an SEO agency, a web developer for an SEO agency. That's where I learned about SEO.

2:42Andres Figueira:And then I shift jobs a little bit. I got into e-commerce, iCongo, which was purchased later by SAP. And then I got my real first full-time job in SEO at Essence, one of the biggest luxury retailers in Canada and I would say in North America too. When I joined, it was a startup back in 2010. I stayed there for four years. That's where I learned about paid search, display.

3:07Abdo Mazloum:Social was just starting there.

3:08Andres Figueira:Paid social was just starting back in the day between 2010 and 2014. So that's where I had my first leadership experience too, where I had people reporting to me and managing a team of four by the time I left. Then I went to Beyond the Rack, another Montreal startup that was doing really well at the time. I was there for a year and then things were not doing well and I moved on to another agency. where I led a team from the start. It was an affiliate marketing agency that needed someone to develop paid search, display, social, SEO, which we did for what I did. I led for about a year, a team of 11 people.

3:47Andres Figueira:And that's where I said, now I have 10 years experience in the digital space. Why not start my own business? And that's when I really took Weptomize seriously and built, well, We incorporated a company and then grew it from one person to five people within six months. We had rent in our office. I started in an extra bedroom in my apartment.

4:08Abdo Mazloum:Okay. Yeah.

4:10Andres Figueira:And from here to there, one client to another, referring you from one client to the other. And you work your way up and you have enough income to hire more people and rent the space and then scale from there. We've gotten a long way. We scaled at some point to 31 people back during COVID when a lot of stores were closed and the e-com was booming at the time and launching new e-commerce sites. Sales were really high and really scaled very fast. We learned a lot at that scale and then things didn't go as well as we'd have liked. So we slowed down after that to scale back up. Now we're at 25 people.

4:47Andres Figueira:We're sitting at 25 people, a few million in revenue per year and still growing. We think that 2026 will still be a growth year and looking forward for the future to come.

4:58Abdo Mazloum:Wow. I love how you gained your experience in those 10 years before WebtoMize in different areas like SEO, paid socials, and you weren't gathering everything until you said, hey, I'm ready for an agency. That sounds like the proper preparation in order to take on an endeavor such as this one. And Abdel, in terms of once you started and you said, okay, webtimize, this is going to happen. I'm going to create this agency and start hiring people. When you were in your own office in your extra spare bedroom, how much time was it since you consolidated the company and got your first client?

5:31Andres Figueira:When I was at Beyond the Rack, I did do some consulting, a little bit of consulting at a time. Some people reaching out. So yeah, you have your full-time job. You have a side hustle. You're helping my gym. I did their website. I did some of it was for free for friends and family experiencing that my first experience as an entrepreneur. So you build that network, right? Like you have 10 years experience, you build a network of people and these people are going to refer you to do some work for them. And when I quit and I was like, yeah, now it's serious. Send me if you know anybody who needs a site build, who needs campaign management, anything like email marketing.

6:07Andres Figueira:We take it. Anything that is digital, we take it. We learn it. We fake it till you make it. Although we had the experience. So yeah, when you're starting out, you take anything. And sometimes it was a mistake to accept any type of client.

6:18Abdo Mazloum:Of course, of course.

6:20Andres Figueira:Some clients are not good for business too, which suck up your time. And you end up losing some money if you put a lot of effort on a client that likely will not perform if they don't have a strong brand, strong customer experience, a great product, high competition. There's so many factors that come into play, whether a company is going to be successful or not, even if you're doing great world-class marketing, if you say.

6:41Abdo Mazloum:With that understanding of that maybe some clients don't work as well or might not be a proper fit with you guys, have you found yourself or have you noticed any patterns in the type of clients that you are taking on? Is it a certain kind of size of company, certain industry, or is there any type of preference in how you work with these clients?

7:00Andres Figueira:First, you've got to believe in the brand. I think at first, as I said, you really would take anything. If you're starting off as an agency founder and starting to grow, you would take anybody, which I think is a mistake. First, you really have to understand the brand, what the objective is, what's the mission and vision of the brand. You believe in that mission and vision of the brand, and you feel like you can make a difference. You should self-evaluate yourself whether you can make a difference for that company or not. And once you believe, you have to have a strategy, right? You put the strategy, you lay out the strategy, you communicate the strategy with the brand owner or the representative, whether that's an e-commerce director or manager or VP.

7:41Andres Figueira:If there's alignment there, then it's good to tackle it. And the expectations have to be set. Do they have a defined budget, right? Are they a startup? They have no budget, which is not great if you're starting off as a marketing agency trying to support a company that doesn't have a budget. Ideally, they need to have a budget established. Do they have any track record? What's their run rate? What's their revenue? You need to ask all those questions and understand. Ideally, you're looking for businesses that do over a million, established enough to be able to support them in some capacity as a marketing agency.

8:14Andres Figueira:They're big enough to work with an agency, and they may be also small to have an in-house team. Although in some cases we work with clients that have in-house teams, but they need extra support and execution and expertise and technology. Being an agency, you can afford to buy licenses and you have your proprietary tools that you've built for some brands and they make sense for other brands. So there's pros and cons to work with an agency or build your in-house team, I would say. Okay.

8:42Abdo Mazloum:Okay. No, but yeah, from what I'm hearing, then I noticed it's having a certain amount of revenue, being able to afford what the agency is offering. Because if they don't even have a budget, then how are they going to pay for the different ads and everything like that? So I get it. And how many clients are you managing, let's say, monthly? Or do you have a certain wallet of clients that you're just taking care of? And maybe you could tell us a bit more about that.

9:05Andres Figueira:We have an average of 50 clients on an ongoing basis. Monthly retainers, there's times we had less, more. But after eight years really working at it full time, we got at a rate of 50. And we're prepared to take on 10 more, no problem, the next year or so. Yeah, you're going to lose some, you're going to win some. So it's going to always average itself out.

9:27Abdo Mazloum:You mentioned that, okay, you started alone in your spare bedroom, then you even got an office, but now you are 25, if I'm not mistaken, the amount of people you have helping you out with this?

9:35Andres Figueira:Yeah, for sure. Having a strong team is the foundation to take on more business and service more clients. Of course.

9:42Abdo Mazloum:No, I'm just asking because 50 clients, I feel it's a lot. So I'm just saying, okay. And in terms of how, what's it called, how Weptimize works, is it a remote first company or do you have everybody go into an office with you where you're working together in order to be able to handle things quicker?

9:58Andres Figueira:We have an office about 5 ,000 square feet, I'd say. It's big enough to host everybody at the same time, but we have a hybrid model. Most of our teams are in-house or locally in or around Montreal. We have some people that are external or overseas that support us as well. but the majority of the team are actually local. And we encourage people to come twice a week to the office. We're about eight times a month. That's the policy we have now. We've shifted. It used to be once a week, but we're always evolving and learning to see what's the right model. For now, it's hybrid.

10:32Abdo Mazloum:I totally understand. And being in the office, I feel it really helps with the fact that you can get solved a lot more things quicker. And that really helps out. Even if over a coffee break, you're chatting about something, you could have an epiphany and then just get this done rather than the remoteness of it. Sometimes I get lost in time zones and in translations. But okay. And Abdo, are you guys using AI in any strange or peculiar way that you would be able to tell us about?

10:59Andres Figueira:Of course, of course. It's been several years now. We're using it. Google, being a Google Premiere partner, they're all over AI today. And they're shifting from being like a search engine to become an answer engine in a way. So I'd say, yes, you have to. We've been testing with all the tools that Google provides, all the smart bidding stuff. We work with ChatGPT as well. That helps us with content. Gemini, now in SEO, it's becoming, in a way, the SEO becoming EO or GEO. All the optimization around being retrieved by the LLMs. So that's what we're working on. And we have developed some of our own agents as well to support us to do things faster, whether it's reporting and generating insights.

11:44Andres Figueira:So yeah, we have a technical team who's well-versed in that and constantly doing testing and there's more and more. We spoke to a company recently too that does alerts and recommendations after you plug in your accounts onto that tool. Yeah, it's a new tool that is being developed using Cloud and tokens as well. So basically connecting your media accounts to their tool and then it generates recommendations or alerts daily. weekly real time to help with optimization so basically to do more with less and you're really using the technology or ai to help you to yeah do more with less i now understood a bit more of

12:24Abdo Mazloum:where and how webtimize began the level of clients and the style of clients that you guys manage would you be able to also tell us a little bit also about your marketing philosophy and if you have any philosophy or way of thinking about marketing that you try to do with all the different clients you have, or if it's more like a come and serve and you understand them and then it adapts, but maybe you could tell us a bit more about that.

12:48Andres Figueira:Again, as I said, we're a data first or data driven agency. We call ourselves performance marketing, performance marketers or a performance marketing agency. Doing how to do that by having a strong tech infrastructure to support with all the marketing decisions that you take. First is really understanding the customer objective? What is the customer objective? And then does that objective align with the inputs that are required, the inputs being the right budget, they have the capacity to produce the right creatives, the flexibility in how you run things, you do campaigns, what are the guardrails that you have to put into place?

13:28Andres Figueira:Really understanding that from a customer's perspective. and then if you validate all that, there's alignment there. You put in a media plan in place. You also run it by the client. You get the feedback. You can obviously make some changes to it. And then you run. You start trafficking this type of campaign or the campaigns and you look at the results and you establish those baselines and then based on those baselines, you make more adjustments and iterations and more tests and improvements to meet the customer objective. There's times where you may not meet the customer objective and most of the time what didn't perform well was it competition?