Grow and Convert Deep Dives: Recent Episodes
Benji Hyam and Devesh Khanal
Grow and Convert deep dives shares our strategy and thinking on various marketing topics. Podcast by Benji Hyam and Devesh Khanal.
In the latest episode of Grow and Convert Deep Dives, we have an open discussion around a topic that we've been thinking about a lot lately: Should we reposition our business as a SEO agency instead of a content marketing one?
We thought it would be interesting to everyone to lay out the arguments, challenges and opportunities that we see in repositioning our business before we go through with it. We're still unsure if we're going to do it, but we'd be curious to what everyone thinks after they give this a listen!
Here's our old article on the reasonings for why we positioned ourselves as a content marketing agency and how we thought through that:
https://www.growandconvert.com/market...
Sections:
0:00 Intro - Why we’re thinking of repositioning our business
2:26 The story of what led up to us thinking about switching from a content agency to SEO agency
8:28 Our we hurting our business by branding ourselves a content marketing agency?!
11:48 We see an opportunity in repositioning as an SEO agency- the why
17:06 How most agencies and clients think about SEO vs. How we do
27:22 Recapping our arguments for repositioning our agency so far
28:45 Potential challenges from changing our positioning
36:35 Our current positioning/messaging and why it may be holding us back
39:39 Current thinking around where we’ll end up with messaging our service
41:43 Difference in positioning between SEO and content agency
43:13 Devesh rants!
44:53 Increasing the perceived value of a service
49:47 Challenges companies have with messaging their business
51:52 Reflecting on our past positioning and where we go from here
In this episode of Grow and Convert Deep Dives, we discuss a philosophy we have about managing remote workers (or workers in general): How to manage by outcomes instead of outputs. Oftentimes in our work, we come across other companies that have goals that don't move the needle, don't motivate employees, and cause more harm than good. We think this approach does the opposite.
We discuss how we think about goals, creating a great work culture, and how to effectively manage remote workers.
0:00 Intro- Managing by outcomes over outputs
2:07 Example’s in Benji’s career of output style management
3:58 Fear driven management
5:16 Having the right business goals, work backwards
6:07 Devil’s advocate - How would a business determine outcomes that are important?
9:57 Determining outcomes for a role you’re not familiar with
15:08 Mistakes management make and remote management principles
23:17 Grow and Convert’s examples outcomes over outputs
27:13 Outputs have a sneaky way of finding their way into goals
30:49 Goal setting - setting goals that tie to outcomes
36:33 Stop breaking large goals into small details
38:52 Tying examples back to G&C’s business
41:36 Using cloud-based remote tools to help manage people
Here are the sections:
0:00 Intro- How to hire blog writers
2:42 Mistakes we made when hiring blog writers
6:38 First big learning hiring writers
9:14 Problem #1: Mismatches in expectations and communication
10:52 Solution #1: Aligning expectations before writing: The questionnaire
15:51 Summarizing our mistakes we made early on hiring writers
17:16 Our writer hiring process
20:59 The test project
24:51 Summarizing learnings of test project
31:11 A question we added to our writing application
33:11 Two filters to help find writing applicants
34:01 How many writers make it through the funnel?
35:32 What are you looking for in the writing application?
38:20 Devesh Rant: Finding good writers is hard
39:27 Bottlenecks that arose in our writing process
40:32 What is the editor looking for in the writing? And coaching…
43:54 Why coaching writers is important
44:49 Don’t build processes too early
46:51 Hiring writers if you’re not a writer
48:08 The profile of a great writer
52:01 Why training writers is important
58:58 Summarizing our writer hiring process
In Episode 4 of Grow and Convert Deep Dives, we argue against the prevailing wisdom that landing pages convert better than blog posts. We share conversion rate data from two different clients of ours - both a mid-market/enterprise demo based SaaS company and a B2SMB self service SaaS company- and show how we're getting 2%+ average conversion rates on our blog posts and compare those stats to how their sites convert overall from organic.
Then we share data on what we've seen for average blog conversion rates and share what we think a good conversion rate target should be for each individual blog post.
Lastly, we share 3 examples of us outranking landing pages with blog posts and debate why we think landing pages are usually better to go after high intent keywords with-- and how we think they may have higher conversion rates (even if the landing page were to rank higher than our blog post).
This one gets pretty nerdy into the numbers, hope you enjoy it.
Articles mentioned:
https://www.growandconvert.com/conver...
https://geekbot.com/blog/slack-retros... (example 1)
https://scribemedia.com/memoir-ghostw... (example 2)
https://www.tapclicks.com/resources/b... (example 3)
Interested in working with us? Fill out the form below:
https://www.growandconvert.com/conten...
Sections of our podcast:
0:00 What we’re going to talk about in this video and why
3:53 Blog vs. Site Conversion Data, Client Deep Dive- Mid-Market/Enterprise Demo Based Sales
14:50 Measuring your organic performance relative to the rest of the site
19:55 [Graph] G&C blog posts conversion rates vs. all other organic sources
21:53 Blog vs. organic website conversion data client deep dive example 2- B2SMB, Self Serve
33:46 Landing Page vs. Blog Post Debate / Example 1 (Geekbot) - Self Serve
43:01 Landing Page vs. Blog Posts Debate / Example 2 (Scribe Media) - Service
52:39 Landing page vs. blog post debate / Example 3 (Tapclicks) - Demo Based Product
In Episode 3 of Grow and Convert Deep Dives, we took a question from Elliott Davidson, where he asked us: "What are your go to posts you know straight out of the gate will help you start lead generation for a new client engagement? Even better if they have no domain rating (DR) for the purposes of this conversation. i.e. founder story backed in with pain points etc." and answered it using 3 different company examples.
In this episode we explained how we would think about forming a blog content strategy in the first few months of a client engagement, specifically what topics we'd go after, what keywords we'd target, and more!
Sections of the episode:
0:00 Intro
4:35 How customer research ties into content strategy
10:05 A High-level overview of our content strategy
11:28 ParcelMaster content strategy
20:07 Quick note about selling in blog posts
23:33 Making SEO content interesting
26:54 What are disruption stories? And how we use them
36:25 Case Study Buddy Content Strategy
48:55 Summarizing the first 3 posts we’d produce for Parcel Master
51:33 Devesh’s “Rant”
54:03 Summarizing Case Study Buddy’s first 3 pieces
55:44 Testbox.com content strategy- rapid-fire
Websites we case studied:
https://parcelmaster.com/
https://casestudybuddy.com/
https://www.testbox.com/
Articles we shared
Rainforest QA disruption story: https://www.rainforestqa.com/blog/acc...
Work with our content marketing agency
https://www.growandconvert.com/conten...
Take our content marketing course
https://www.growandconvert.com/top-co...
In Episode 2 of Grow and Convert Deep Dives, Devesh and Benji discuss why they don't believe a media company content strategy makes sense for most businesses. They argue that this strategy makes sense only for certain types of businesses and that there are things you should prioritize doing prior to adopting a strategy like this. They share examples of "media company" content businesses, explain why the strategy is flawed, and share ideas on what you should do instead.
Articles mentioned in this podcast:
Geekbot Case Study:
https://www.growandconvert.com/conten...
Interested in working with Grow and Convert?
https://www.growandconvert.com/conten...
Interested in taking our course?
https://www.growandconvert.com/top-co...
In the first episode of Grow and Convert Deep Dives, our new series, where we go in-depth on marketing and business topics, we discuss:
- The backstory behind Pain Point SEO
- What Pain Point SEO is (and is not)
- Both B2C and B2B examples of how we've applied it to clients or other companies
- Common Objections that we hear about our process (and our answers to them)
- And how we'd get started