Little Talks

A tiny Christmas tree, a debate about when it's acceptable to start decorating for the holidays, and a little confusion over Jeff Bezos' hair.

Just another normal episode of Little Talks.

Somewhere in between all of that, Sam and Roop actually managed to talk about what makes a great B2B website homepage. And with 2027 right around the corner, it's a good time to give yours another look.

Because there's a big difference between a homepage that looks good and one that actually helps your business.

This week, we talk about...

After three weeks apart, Sam and Roop are FINALLY back together on Little Talks! And naturally, they have plenty to catch up on.

This week, they're tackling SEO for AI and what brands should be thinking about as we head into 2027.

With more people getting their answers directly from AI, website traffic isn't quite what it used to be. But before you start panicking over your analytics, Sam and Roop have some good news. Less traffic doesn't necessarily mean less business.

They talk about how brands can improve their chances of showing up...

Roop’s on vacation this week, and Sam has plenty to talk about after spending a few days in Buenos Aires for the latest MAGNET Global Network principal meeting.

He shared some of his favorite moments from the trip and what he learned from agency leaders around the world.

One of the biggest topics? AI, of course. But unlike last year’s conversations, which were largely about uncertainty, this year’s discussions focused more on how agencies can actually use AI to do better work. That includes investing in young talent, building stronger strategic partnerships, and be...

Tell us what you think!

LinkedIn doesn't have to be boring. There, we said it.

This week on Little Talks, Roop and Claudia are back with more from UNBOUND, this time talking about all things LinkedIn and how brands can show a little more personality.

One thing we heard over and over? Not everything needs to be so polished. A quick walk-and-talk video, a real opinion, or someone from your team sharing what they actually know can go a lot further than another perfectly written company post.

It also helps to know why you're posting in the first...

If you've listened to Little Talks for a while, you probably know we're big fans of Jay Schwedelson. So when Roop and Claudia saw him on the UNBOUND schedule, obviously they had to be there.

This week, they're bringing some of their favorite takeaways from his sessions back to the podcast, starting with what's changing in email.

As AI summaries become more common in Gmail, Apple Mail, and Copilot, the actual text in an email matters more than ever. Those tools can't read words that are part of an image, which means a beautifully designed...

The gang is back together after two weeks of travels! Roop and Claudia recap UNBOUND and share with Sam what actually stuck with us after a few packed days of sessions, speakers, product announcements, and a whole lot of AI talk.

Some sessions were all-in on using AI to do more. Others made the case that as AI-generated content becomes easier to make, human judgment, trust, and personality matter even more.

We're probably somewhere in the middle.

But some of our favorite sessions weren't about AI at all. Astronaut Suni Williams talked about...

Sam’s on vacation this week, so Claudia is officially comes out from her behind the scenes roll producing the podcast and joins Roop on the mics!

And the timing couldn’t be better because the duo is getting ready to head to Boston for HubSpot’s UNBOUND marketing conference.

So this week on Little Talks, we’re previewing which sessions made it onto our schedules, and what we’re most excited to hear about while we’re there. AI search strategies are obviously high on the list this year, but so are the very human sides...

It's easy for media plans to become routine.

Search works. Social works. So year after year, the same dollars keep going to the same places.

This week on Little Talks, Matt Fogarty, SVP of Sales at Mogl, joins Sam and Roop to talk about why it might be time to rethink that approach.

Tools like The Trade Desk are giving mid-market brands access to more data, premium inventory, and insights that were once mostly reserved for companies with much bigger media budgets.

That doesn't mean search and social are going anywhere...

LinkedIn. Facebook. Instagram. YouTube. TikTok. Reddit. Threads. And probably three new platforms by the time we finish writing this.

Does your brand really need to be on all of them?

This week on Little Talks, Sam and Roop talk about whether brands should actually be doing less on social in 2027. Not necessarily posting less, but being a little more intentional about where and why you're posting.

A hundred thousand views looks great, but 20 shares from the right people might actually mean more. And three good posts a week can do a lot more...

Annual planning always looks great on paper.

The budget makes sense. The priorities are clear. Everyone knows exactly what they're doing. And then the year actually starts.

This week on Little Talks, Sam and Roop talk about planning for 2027 and why a good marketing plan needs enough structure to keep everyone focused, but enough flexibility to change when something starts working (or really isn't).

It starts with knowing your audience, connecting marketing goals to business goals, and choosing three to five priorities your team can actually move. From there, media, analytics, content, and...

Most companies have values. The bigger question is whether anyone can actually remember them.

This week on Little Talks, Sam and Roop talk about how LFG became a big part of Littlefield culture and why, six years later, it’s still something we use every day.

LFG came out of a pretty difficult time for the agency in 2020. As we rethought where Littlefield was headed, we also wanted values that actually sounded and felt like us. We landed on Littlefield Team First, Freaking Go to the Edge, and Gotta Adapt or Die.

...

"Can you knock this out by tomorrow?"

On its own, it's usually not a big deal. But after the fifth "quick request" of the week, those little asks start adding up.

This week on Little Talks, Sam and Roop talk about the capacity problem facing in-house marketing teams. Between sales requests, trade shows, last-minute projects, and everything in between, it's easy for strategic work to get pushed aside by whatever feels most urgent.

The conversation isn't about saying "no." It's about making the tradeoffs visible. Every new project takes time away from something...

AI has made marketing faster. From writing and research to brainstorming and campaign planning, the tools keep getting better.

But as Sharon Toerek, Owner and Founder of Legal+Creative | Toerek Law, explains on this week's Little Talks, moving faster also means being more thoughtful about how you use AI.

Sharon joined Sam and Roop to discuss the legal side of AI, including intellectual property, data privacy, and why those conversations can't wait until something goes wrong.

The takeaway wasn't that marketers should avoid AI. It was that every team should understand the tools...

Planning isn't usually the problem.

Most teams have goals. They have strategy sessions. They have whiteboards full of ideas and calendars full of kickoff meetings.

The hard part is what happens after all of that.

This week on Little Talks, Sam and Roop discuss Traction by Gino Wickman and why it's had such a big impact on the way Littlefield Agency operates. The system isn't flashy, and that's kind of the point. It creates a rhythm that helps teams stay focused, solve problems, and actually follow through on the things they said were i...

AI search isn't coming. It's already here.

This week on Little Talks, Sam and Roop talk about one stat that caught everyone's attention: AI referral traffic to U.S. retail sites is up 393% year over year.

That's not just another marketing number. It's a sign that buyers are starting to search differently.

Instead of scrolling through a page of links, they're asking AI tools questions, comparing options, and getting recommendations before they ever visit a website. In fact, AI-referred visitors are converting at a much higher rate because they're arriving with more context...

Trust is one of those things marketers talk about all the time, but it's hard to point to on a dashboard.

This week, Sam and Roop discuss why that doesn't make it any less important.

When you're selling equipment that costs six or seven figures, people aren't clicking an ad and making a purchase that afternoon. They're talking to coworkers. Reading reviews. Watching YouTube videos. Asking AI questions. Checking Reddit. They're figuring out whether your company is worth trusting long before they ever talk to sales.

That's why trust is more than a...

Most equipment marketing is built for the buyer who is ready to own. That makes sense. Ownership is the big, shiny goal. But it also means rental buyers can get treated like a side audience, when in reality they may be the person with the most immediate need in the room.

On this week’s Little Talks, Sam and Roop talk about why rental buyers think differently and why the marketing should, too. These customers are not always dreaming about pride of ownership. Sometimes they have a machine down, a job to finish, or a three-week project th...

Friend of the podcast Jay Schwedelson is back on Little Talks this week, and as usual, he didn't disappoint!

Jay joined Sam and Roop to talk about his new book, Stupider People Have Done It, and somewhere between marketing, AI, LinkedIn, TV, coffee, and life advice, we landed on a simple idea: people still trust people.

AI can help you move faster. Social proof matters. Your LinkedIn page shouldn't look abandoned. But as Jay pointed out, "humanity is the algorithm." The brands and people that stand out are usually the ones willing to sound like...

AI has made it incredibly easy to make more stuff.

More blogs. More emails. More social posts. More everything.

The problem? Nobody was sitting around wishing there was more content on the internet.

This week on Little Talks, Sam and Roop talk about what happens when everyone has access to the same tools and can create the same types of content. AI can absolutely help. It's great at research, first drafts, and speeding up the work. But the one thing it can't generate for you is trust.

That’s where brands st...

Marketers love a good audience segment until it gets too broad to mean anything. “Business decision-makers” sounds nice in a media plan, but it does not tell you much about where those people actually spend time, what tools they use, or what signals point to real intent. That is where things get interesting, and occasionally a little uncomfortable, because our phones know us better than most dropdown menus do.

On this week’s Little Talks, Sam Littlefield sat down with Ben Bring from Sabio while Roop was out somewhere in the Colorado mountains doing Roop things. Ben’s big id...

Agency size has a funny way of becoming a security blanket. It feels measurable, which makes it feel useful. A 60-person shop sounds safer than a 25-person shop, at least until you remember that all 60 people will not be in your reporting meeting, your strategy call, or the late-afternoon scramble when priorities shift.

That is where Sam and Roop spent most of this week’s conversation. The episode is not a tiny-agency rally cry or a big-agency takedown. There are great partners at every size. The real issue is whether the team assigned to your business has th...

This week’s episode of Little Talks is a special one. After 10 years at Littlefield Agency, Chelsea Clement joins Sam and Roop on the podcast one last time before heading into her next chapter: becoming a full-time mom.

Chelsea has been a huge part of Littlefield for the last decade. If you’ve interacted with our team, followed our content, listened to the podcast, or honestly just spent five minutes around the agency, you’ve probably felt her impact whether you realized it or not. She’s thoughtful, wildly organized, hilarious, calm in the chaos, and somehow always k...

Dealer marketing can look really organized at the corporate level and still completely fall apart in the field. A portal gets built, assets get uploaded, launch emails go out… and then a dealer posts an off-brand phone photo five minutes later.

This week, Sam and Roop talked about why that happens. Most dealers are not trying to ignore the brand. They are trying to sell in their market, to their customers, in real time. And when corporate marketing feels too disconnected from that reality, they will find their own way.

That’s why the conversation kept...

A lot of teams still talk about AI like it’s some far-off future conversation. But in reality, the shift is already happening, and fast. The more interesting question now is not whether the tools are improving. It’s what teams choose to do with the extra space those tools create.

This week, Sam and Roop reflected on conversations coming out of the latest Magnet meeting and kept landing on the same idea: AI and agents are most valuable when they create more room for strategy, thinking, and better decision-making. Faster workflows matter, but only if they lead...

Everybody loves a quick win, especially when revenue goals are staring you in the face. But in B2B marketing, the fastest-looking result is not always the most valuable one. Long sales cycles, budget timing, research-heavy purchases, and multiple decision-makers mean trust usually builds long before a deal closes.

In this week’s episode of Little Talks, Sam and Roop chat about how that pressure shows up for marketing teams every day. We see it with brands selling complex equipment, serving municipalities with fixed budgets, or trying to stay in front of buyers over months or even ye...

In B2B marketing, there’s a familiar disconnect: the people building the product and the people selling it often speak different languages. When specs and performance lead the story, buyers can drop off before they ever reach a decision. The opportunity isn’t to simplify the product. It’s to translate what it does into what it means.

At the upper funnel, that shift is strategic. On a recent episode of Little Talk, we unpacked our benefits ladder approach, moving from product attributes to functional benefits to the emotional drivers that actually influence decisions. Even in B2B, b...

The word “vendor” gets tossed around a lot in the agency world, and if you’ve ever been in a purely transactional relationship, you know why it doesn’t feel great. You brief, they execute, they invoice and next time you’re starting from scratch. No momentum, no pushback, no one really in your corner.

That model works for some things. But for growing a brand, it definitely has a ceiling.

Own this week’s episode of Little Talks, Sam and Roop dig into why real partnerships outperform vendor relationships and what that actually looks like. The id...

One of the most common things we hear from brands thinking about engaging in a content program is, “we just don’t have that much to say.” And man, oh man ... We're here to tell you that’s just not true. The problem isn’t a lack of ideas or topics, it’s where you’re looking and who you're writing it for. Your content shouldn’t be about you and trying to constantly sell, it should be about your customers and their issues and needs.

One place Roop likes to point out is to start with your customer se...

Trade shows are expensive. Between booth space, travel, swag, staffing, and all the little costs that sneak up on you, it's not unusual for a single event to run well into five or six figures. And yet, when leadership asks "was it worth it?" most teams fumble the answer. Not because the show wasn't valuable, but because no one set up a real way to measure it in the first place.

This is something we talk about a lot at Littlefield Agency, especially with clients who are heavy in the trade show circuit.

So when...

There’s a moment every in-house marketing team knows. You look up at 6 p.m., your to-do list is longer than when you started, and the big strategic work still isn’t done. You were busy. Really busy. But doing what, exactly? That gap between daily execution and long-term strategy is real, and it’s one of the most common challenges marketing teams face.

At Littlefield, we work alongside in-house teams of all sizes. The best partnerships don’t feel like vendor relationships. They feel like true collaboration. We’re not here to replace your team. We’re here to s...

Change is hard. It's always been hard. But the rate at which B2B marketers are being asked to adapt right now, juggling AI adoption, cross-functional alignment, proving ROI, and meeting digital buyers where they are, it is genuinely unlike anything we've seen before. The pressure is coming from every direction with CFOs expecting more with less, sales and IT teams that need to be brought along, and a technology landscape that looks completely different than it did just two years ago.

Sam came back from the Master B2B conference in Chicago fired up about this...

Many businesses hire agencies to execute tasks: build a campaign, design an ad, launch a website. But the strongest agency relationships go beyond simple execution. A truly strategic agency sees itself as a partner in growth, focused on outcomes like revenue, customer acquisition, and brand positioning rather than just delivering assets.

For Littlefield Agency, that partnership means asking “why” before saying “yes.” By understanding the real business objective, we can recommend the right solution and push back when we don't feel like something will move the needle. Strategic partners also think beyond individual campaigns, looking at the customer...

On this week's episode of Little Talks, we return to favorite topic: AI. In marketing, AI isn’t just moving fast, it can also be unstable. Tools launch, raise funding, and pivot in the same week. The hype cycle that once took years now takes months, and sometimes just weeks. That pace can create some real fatigue for those of us in the AI trenches. A lot of new platforms are simply wrappers on some other foundation's models, meaning one native feature release from a major player like Google or OpenAI could erase an entire product or start-up overnight.

Likes and views feel good, but they don’t pay the bills. Vanity metrics are easy to report and look great in a slide deck, but they’re tough to connect to revenue. On this episode of Little Talks, Sam and Roop discuss the real shift marketing teams need to make, no longer chasing attention but instead measuring impact.

If marketing is working, you’ll see it in the pipeline. Are we generating real sales-qualified leads, or just form fills? And if marketing disappeared tomorrow, would revenue take a hit? Are we spending $1 to make $3 or just to get...

It's Monday morning quarterback time! After the biggest football game in the world is over, it's time to discuss the marketing world's big game—the commercials.

Roop, Sam and Claudia go through the highs and lows of this year's Big Game ads, ranking their favorites and least favorites once again. Who did it right and who wasted their money? The game itself may have been a snoozer, but we think there were some spots worth staying awake for.

So grab your leftover buffalo wings and cheese dip, and join the gang as they cover the bi...

Fresh off their new website launch, Grasshopper Mower's, Michael Simmon, joins Sam and Roop to discuss some of the things to consider when developing a new website for your brand. It's not all pretty pictures, designing a new site involves a lot of planning and strategy to ensure your investment returns dividends for you and your business.

From SEO and AI SEO considerations, to user experience and measurement plans it can be overwhelming. Mike's takeaway? Give yourself enough time to do it right, and put your customer at the forefront of most every decision. Think about how...

We touched on them last week with Chris Kizer, but in this episode, Sam and Roop dive a bit deeper into the specifics of what we know about OpenAI’s new ChatGPT ads. When are they rolling out? Who will see them? How much do they cost advertisers? What sort of analytics can we expect?

Lots of questions, and a handful of answers that aren’t all that great. But some promising new formats from the tech giant look like they’re coming down the line.

 So join us as we geek out (and tem...

All healed up and feeling great, our Media & Analytics Director, Chris Kizer, finally joins Sam and Roop to recap his stellar presentation (and learnings) from a MAGNET retreat that started the new year. Chris is a human calculator that brings next level media performance and reporting to our clients. Give this episode a listen to get some insight into what's happening now and what's coming up for the marketing media landscape, including some notes on the newly announced OpenAI ad platform rolling out to ChatGPT.

Chris shares practical takeaways agencies and in-house teams can use, from evolving...

Our scheduled guest had to take a rain check, but fear not! Chris Kizer will be our guest next week as we discuss all things media heading into 2026. This week? You’re stuck with Roop and Sam again, but they have a topic we think most of you can relate to—hating all the AI slop flooding your social feeds (and, in some cases, your TV). And no, AI didn’t write this, we used an em dash on purpose!

The gang discusses Merriam-Webster’s word of the year, slop, and how AI-generated images and video contributed to its r...