2257 - Insights on AI, Social Media Strategies, and Client Engagement from Azarian Growth Agency's Hamlet Azarian

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1:05With us right now, Hamlet Azarian. Hamlet, you are the founder and CEO of Azarian Growth Agency. You're found on the web at azariangrowthagency.com. Hamlet, thank you for joining us. Thanks for having me, Josh. Yeah, absolutely. Hey, and before we get going into what you do, the growth that you help create, personally, what do you do? What are you into right now outside of work that other people may not know about? Maybe it's music or movies or TV shows you're into, hobbies, gaming, like anything like that. What are you doing right now outside of work that you're into? Oh, my God. I wish I had the time to do all of those amazing things you just said.

1:45But the reality is right now I'm doing my best to be the best that I can for my money. I know. Dad of the year. Yes, yes, yes. And my two-year-old daughter. So it's a nine-year gap, which makes it a bit challenging. Wait, what was the age of the other one? Two. Yeah. Oh, so you have a two-year-old. and an 11-year-old. An 11-year-old, yeah. What are you and the 11-year-old doing? Basketball. He loves basketball, and he is playing in AAU. And I don't know if you've ever seen the latest things happening in AAU basketball, but every weekend you're at a different arena or a court, and there's competition occurring.

2:27So most of my weekends I spend with him and driving around to the different basketball games. Nice, nice. When you're not playing basketball together, are you watching anything or are you doing anything together? We also love to go to escape rooms. Yes. Oh, my gosh. Yes. I haven't been going as often as I used to. I would, I believe my, what we tried to keep count a while back. I think we've done over 40 rooms. You know, we need to go together if I'm ever in Florida. whatever we're on a 19 room streak that we've been able to get out oh my gosh so close it was like the last minute to go and we're like oh my god we're gonna lose we're gonna lose and we were able to figure it out at the tail end of it oh yeah i mean we we have a pretty okay win rate the reality is if it's a small group some of the rooms are i mean you just you can't feel bad i mean there's just so many puzzles.

3:25It's just the likelihood of getting out. If you've got under four people in the room, it's just going to be very, very hard. So yeah, I remember the first one we lost and I'm like, you know, come on. There's like, there's no way we could have gotten all that done. And, you know, and after you've done a one, after you've done a bunch of them, like you start to see, I mean, there are common patterns. There are common. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. And you definitely learn, like, yeah, I think each person knows their superpower. And that's really good, which is why I think, you know, escape rooms are great for team building, because then you can process afterwards.

4:03Okay, so Julie, we all kind of noticed how you showed up in the room. And, well, it was surprising. uh apparently you know you got a little frazzled there right and so it's there's there's plenty of opportunities there but like you know just with kids and stuff you know just being able to do that so i i love that that's so cool but yeah you're right i live in orlando uh it is definitely one of the capitals of escape rooms so we have plenty to choose from amazing well hamlet let's talk about Azarian Growth Agency, tell me who you work with and what you do. Sure. We work with, our customer profiles are two different distinct ones.

4:45They're either businesses that are doing, let's say one to 10 million already, or have raised capital about a million dollars or so, and they're founder led, and they're trying to figure out their go-to-market strategy. So they're no longer the main CEO or the founder is not the one driving the sales for them. Our second group are larger businesses. They might have anywhere between$12 to$20 million or so in revenue, and they're trying to break out to hit the$50 million mark. There's a reason I'm mentioning those two things, as at the$10 million mark, leverage becomes a different game in terms of capital that's available to you.

5:23And the same thing happens at around the$50 million mark, as well as the valuation of the organization. So we help those businesses be able to scale up and use modern data-driven approaches to drive repeatable marketing strategies. Yeah. So obviously now speaking to a room of CEOs, I want to know what is working well. Truthfully, what is really working well today? We're recording this kind of middle of 2025. What has maybe fallen out of favor a little bit? And what should we all be watching for in the months and years ahead? I know your audience is very much into B2B, so I'll talk very much around that, right?

6:07I think a lot of people think the B2B is a funnel from top to bottom, but the reality of what we realize, it's more like a pie, and you're consistently baking that pie, and you're looking for who in that pie is ready to be in market today. So what's working really well are the different signals that you're able to acquire these days at scale. So there's incredible tools like Clay, C-L-A-Y, that allows you to take your full CRM. So if you're using HubSpot or if you're using Salesforce or any CRM in general, you can upload it into Clay and then at that time start enriching it and then at the same time start listening to signals.

6:50So what are signals you might ask. Signals might be things such as if your ICP has any news that's breaking and you don't have to actively constantly be researching this as soon as the news breaks and you now have a message that you can send out about it. So it might be that they want a new contract or they want a new bid or anything of that sort. So you now have a signal that allows you to have an automated email to go out at the same time. Another signal might be that there's job movements happening in your ICP, right? So a person that you might be selling into or have a relationship with already has left and is now working at another organization, this would be a great opportunity for you to do two things.

7:33One, secure and make sure the relationship that you had at your existing customer is in good hands. Who's the new person coming in? Be able to reach out to them and establish that. But more importantly, where did the other person end up? How do you follow up with them and congratulate them on their new role and their new position. And maybe that becomes a leverage for you to be able to go into that business as well, too. So I see a lot of, Hamlet, I see a lot of, obviously, on your website and on your social media talking about, obviously, implementation of AI and kind of where that fits in in a marketing stack.

8:06Where are you using AI with your current clients right now? And where should we all be evolving to pretty quickly, because it's just become the industry norm? So the core of our agency is around five years, and the timeline is not a coincidence. In June of 2020, this is roughly around when OpenAI released their models available. At that time, it was very rudimentary, right? So there was a lot of hallucinations. There was a lot of prompting that you needed to do. So we've been an AI-first agency since day one. So we're five years into it. So how do we help support this implementation for our clients?

8:49What we do is we have it running in every department. This could be in sales. This could be in operations. This could be in customer support. This could be in marketing. But before we start going on a full-blown AI implementation, what we really try to do is understand what your current process is. what are the repeatable tasks that you're continuously doing and how can an AI enable either your current team to be able to free up time. And what you're really trying to get to is in a 40-hour week, if there's 10 or 15 hours that are repeatable over and over again, can you unlock those hours and allow AI to do it in one or two hours and free up that knowledge worker to be able to think more strategically or to try to do something more with their time that they're not capable of today.

9:44Yeah. And, you know, Hamill, I'm thinking about like your clients. It's kind of weird. Like I've seen some marketing agencies say, oh, no, we don't use AI for anything. You get all real human work. Like, and as a client, I'm thinking like, okay, I understand at what you're saying however that feels really inefficient to me today like if you if it's an ego driven like oh no we don't use it i'm like why not because like it's a tool and if you use it properly within your stack like that's just going to give me far greater output far greater speed to market um i don't want people using abacuses to do my math yeah no we've been using it from day one.

10:30So we don't hide behind it. But like we, we are actually our belief is this is the reality. We don't think AI will take over, right? So we think it's going to be another tool, it's going to be your co partner. And what you really should be thinking more now is what is the AI I can hire or implement that will support my role or my team members to make give them superpowers, right? So the roles are shifting. And it is, in my belief, and I haven't lived that long, but I've lived enough to see when the internet came around and how dramatically improvement that gave to my life. At that time, I was in college.

11:13Then when mobile phones came around and what happened there. AI is going through a similar time now. If you're not actively utilizing it, you are going to miss out on tremendous opportunities to upscale not only your team, but also unlock new time and new ways of thinking. And the new ways of thinking that you really need to take a minute and kind of process is system thinking. And what system thinking means, again, is the repeatable tasks that the organization does on a day-in and day-out basis. AI is perfect for it to come in and be able to run that component for you. Not automatically. No, no, no, no, no.

11:55You might end up looking pretty foolish. It's almost saying, well, my car has, and I don't mean like a true self-driving car, but let's say your car has lane assist. And so you're like, I'll just take my hands off the wheel, see what happens. Like you can, I don't recommend that. Probably shouldn't. Yeah, exactly. So I'll give you specific things that we do. So we build out in the beginning of any client engagement, we will sit down and build out core files. And these files are the center of what everything that the AI agent will be referencing. So these will be everything from brand voice, customer persona, overall strategy documents of where we're headed, case studies of who are the type of clients that you have served and how well have you done it, any content that you have written in the past, blog articles, which ones that you actually like, any public placements or news, anything that kind of gives you the full picture of who you are as an organization, which becomes sort of the feeder of what all everything else that will be used.

13:08So these core files then are turned around and can then help support content production. So content production becomes much easier because it has a reference of all this. And now all you do is you put an outline together, you do the research, and you're able to write high quality articles. Or it can be used for sales, right? So now when you have a call, before you even go into the sales call, you're able to do research on who the prospect potentially is. So it kind of helps empower SDRs to do thorough, better research. And within the call, if you record it, it's able to coach you post-call like a really good sales manager.

13:49And then in addition to that, it's able to prepare and create proposals for you to be able to move the prospect down the funnel as well. Yeah. One final question here before we start talking about how folks connect with you and so forth. Let's say a friend of mine, okay, it's me. They're getting ready to launch a SaaS platform. They have an okay social media. Like as you're kind of looking at, okay, you're going to bring a new product to market. It's definitely a little bit of a shift from your current offerings. In our case, you know, we're able to serve down market in a way that we've never been able to.

14:30And we're kind of thinking about our social media. Like what should we be doing in social media? You know, I'm thinking behind the scenes stuff right now. like if we're a few weeks or a couple of weeks out from launching our beta, is that kind of what you would be doing or would you just be teasing or like, what would you be teasing? Yeah. You would, you would be teasing. You'd be like, I'm excited to be sharing what we've been working on and then kind of highlighting elements of that. So there's, there's a gentleman named Rand Fishkin who does a really great job with it. So he does a really good job of on LinkedIn particularly.

15:06So if you go pay attention to his LinkedIn profiles, he's done a great job of using founder-led marketing and how to tease within the product. There's another gentleman named Adam Robinson. He's also on LinkedIn, and he does another great job of doing a founder-led SaaS product and how he kind of teases within that. What Adam does really well is he gives you the good and the bad and the ugly, right? So he talks about what's gone well, what is he struggling with, what are the challenges that he's currently facing and he hasn't been able to power through or build through. I think those types of strategies, particularly the founder-led strategy on LinkedIn, does incredibly well, particularly related to SaaS products.

15:57Great tip. Thank you so much. I'm taking notes furiously here. Okay, so let's talk about Azarian Growth Agency at the website azariangrowthagency.com. You already talked about who would be ideal for you, right? Particularly, yes, you're right, a very B2B audience that listens to this show. How do you typically begin to figure out if engagement makes sense with someone? What usually happens in a conversation, and how would someone initiate those beginning steps? No, of course. So what we initially do is, you know, once you can connect with me on LinkedIn, if you're interested in kind of learning overall the process, or you can go on our websites and complete one of our work with us forms.

16:41And then once you do what we will do is we will evaluate and have an introductory call. if you are a listener of josh's show you will get me on the call i promise just mentioned that you were you were on uh you you listened to me on josh and i'll i will make sure i'm available for the call and what we will then do is we will have a conversation usually 15 to 20 to 30 minutes understanding what you have been doing who your customer profile is what your persona is what in general is your industry. And then post that, I would probably ask if I feel like we can help you. We just don't take on every client, that we are not that agency.

17:20We are more interested in finding true partnerships that we can add incredible value to. If I feel like there's an overall fit, then we would go into what's sort of like a exploratory audit phase. It's a very short one. We don't charge for this. This is 100 % free. And what we will do is dig into your data, understand exactly what you've been doing, what's been working well, what hasn't been working well, and come up with sort of a 12-week roadmap and strategy of what we would be doing the first 12 weeks of engagement fully built out. And then if you're aligned with that, then we're off and running.

18:01Well, I love that. And Hamlet, you're a pretty good, you're a really good LinkedIn follow. I think you have some other resources as well. In fact, if I'm at azariangrowthagency.com, I hover over learn, man, you've got webinars, podcasts, interviews, blog, case studies, guides, tools, academy. Do you mind maybe just highlighting a couple things that folks might want to dig into? Of course, of course. So I believe knowledge, at least in today's age, is meant to be shared. It's not meant to be locked up into one's mind or one's behind the black box curtain. And with that philosophy, I've started what's called our sort of Growth Labs webinar series.

18:50And what we do there is we actually showcase all the latest, greatest technology that's happening within our agency. and we open source it to every other agency, every other potential client and how we actually go about doing it. One of the most recent one I did was on Agentic AI. It was done at Tech Week. It had well over 500 people that had registered it, close to 180 people that had attended to it. Prior to that, I've done things like going deep in patents in Google. I have 20 years experience of SEO on Google. One of the things, I know you talked about things I nerd out on. This is one of the things I nerd out on is reading patents.

19:30I know it's a very dry subject matter, but I like reading it to understand the technology elements of it and how it can be utilized. So in that particular webinar, I went deeper and talked about the different patents that came around and how I believe Google will be using those patents for the new search, which helped to be true, which AI reviews came around and all of those things came around because of it. The other thing I have is an academy. So the academy really is for the next generation of marketers. 100 % free. We host different cohorts for it. We've now taken that course over to Udemy.

20:07So we're helping the next generation of both marketers overall learn and learn the principles and fundamentals of how we do things, which is a data-driven approach to marketing. I have an educational blog where we're writing different content pieces. I have ultimate guides where we really break everything down and kind of follow the process from end to end. And then we have different tools and resources that you can utilize to quickly calculate your return on ad spend or, you know, overall, what do you need to do on SEO to be able to rank? Whatever it might be. So the different internal tools we use and calculations we use, we've also open sourced those as well, too.

20:47Love that. the website, azariangrowthagency.com. You can hover over link or you can hover over learn. Or again, you could just mention that you heard this conversation on the Thoughtful Entrepreneur. And you can spend a little bit of time with you, Hamlet. Again, Hamlet, Azarian, founder and CEO of Azarian Growth Agency. The website, azariangrowthagency.com.

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