Our interactions with our clients are strategist-led, which offers a lot more value and immediate return on our clients' time and investment. We don’t use traditional account managers or project managers, which shifts the focus from marketing as a work product to marketing as a sync product.

\ We also don't necessarily hire marketers. We tend to hire folks with industry expertise and then teach them the marketing component or put them into marketing roles. This adds extra value to our clients because it offers a different vantage point than where they’re coming from.

\ Acclivity Agency is also female-owned and operated. This is significant in traditional B2B spaces and industries as we provide a different perspective than male-dominated organizations, which is valuable specifically for the industries we serve.

\ Many clients are surprised by the breadth of our services and how we use other tools to achieve marketing results that would not normally fall under the marketing umbrella.

\ We use many things, like SEO, PR, and events, that many folks don't automatically include in the marketing umbrella. We leverage these to get different results.

\ We have all these skills in-house, so we do a lot more for our clients than many agencies that specialize in these spaces.

What lessons have you learned?

One of the biggest lessons we learned as a B2B marketing agency is that you can do your best work, but if a client can’t see on their bottom line how you’ve impacted them, eventually, they will look at marketing as an expense.

\ Early on, there were times when we took on clients, we focused on creating content and making sure everything was pretty, and we still got fired. Even though every time we’d ship something, the client would say they loved it, we still got fired.

\ Now, when we go into clients, we don’t do anything we can't put on the dashboard. It is unquestionable the impact we're having on your business. You can see exactly how much money we're making you or how much we're impacting your business.

\ With that mindset, we provide high transparency for our clients, which makes our jobs easier. We know which numbers we need to move to keep the clients happy and to impact their business.

Why did you decide to participate in HackerNoon’s Startups of the Year event? What would it mean for your startup if you won?

Representation and leading by example are important, and those are some of the things that we showcase by being in the competition. We're also doing cool stuff, and we want to tell our story.

\ Representation matters, and it’s important to see women in leadership, especially in tech positions. We think it’s important to showcase businesses that value flexible work and remote work.

\ Occasionally, we get some crunchy deadlines, but for the most part, we have twenty percent training and professional development time that we allot to everybody.

\ We focus on developing relationships internally through coffee chats and team cards, and we get a lot of positive feedback from the team that we support work from anywhere.

\ By putting it out there and saying, “you can run an agency - it can be profitable, it doesn't have to be stressful, it doesn't have to upset people's work-life balance, it can be fulfilling, it can be enjoyable. It can be challenging in all the best ways. It can be successful, and it can be run by a woman even if it's in a male-dominated industry.” We lead by example and show people that it can be done.

\ It doesn't have to be the way of old agencies, where interns get burnt out every two months because they're running like crazy, and the account managers swap out every six months due to stress.

What future plans do you have for your business startup? Where do you see it in 3-4 years?

We've never done our own marketing. All our business to date has been referral, word of mouth, and personal networking, just from people working with us, seeing our work, and knowing who our clients are.

\ One of the things we wanted to do, which we've made progress on in 2024, is start our own marketing.

\ We spend all our time and energy on our client marketing and kind of ignore our own. Based on the success, growth, and established brand benchmark we’ve seen, we would like to have our own robust marketing by the end of 2025.

How has the business sector changed in recent years? How do you believe it will change in the future?

There's a lot of experimentation with AI, but sometimes you have to wade through the weeds to get to the good stuff. You must make mistakes using it, figure out the prompts and the engineering, and go through this growing pain until you get that refined output and that tool that is really going to change how we do business.

\ We think because we have a big focus on content, communications, and digital platforms, we must work with AI. We know some people are like, “Aren’t you worried it’s going to take your job?”. No, we’re not, because it’s only going to take people’s jobs that do generic tasks that have been done a million times.

\ We work and serve an industry of innovators, where people invent new things and solve new problems. AI is still a long way away from being able to write content or figure out positioning and marketing copy for completely novel solutions.

\ AI is a trend we’re stoked about and not worried about. If we stick with our innovative market type of client, there’s always going to need to be a human that translates.

\ We really like the shift towards relationships again. It’ll be interesting to see where social platforms land by the end of 2025.

\ We’ve got a few big movement pieces in progress right now, such as the big exit from X and redistributing themselves on Threads and BlueSky and similar. Eventually, we think there will be subgroups that land in each one of those.

\ We can get people to consume content, but the population's desire and demand is that they want connections; they want relationships again. If social platforms continue to feed empty content, we think people are going to start seeing that as 100% toxic.

\ You’re going to see an entire generation just decide that something's not cool anymore. We’re already seeing this trend in platforms that offer that human connection, belonging, and align with people’s identity. There's an interesting battle going on between the technologies that are out there currently.

Any closing words?

Remain awesome.

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