The Grow and Convert Marketing Show

In this episode, we share our client stats for the month of February. We analyze the leads we've received, we share why we don't work with software development companies as clients and share some ideas on how we'd attack SEO if we were a software development company, and then we spend a lengthy time discussing if we should hire an editor. The main challenge going forward is that we need to free up...

Seven months into one of our engagements, the CEO asked us "when will the volume of high-quality leads start to go up?" The typical answer from most marketers is to say "I don't know" or "it depends," but we wanted to provided a more data driven answer. We knew that the client was likely 1-2 months away from seeing a big lift in the volume of leads due to where they were already ranking for high-i...

In Episode 7, we bring in a guest. David Klose, one of our content strategists, joins us to talk about his experience updating blog posts. More specifically, we discuss 2 client accounts that had declining results (both ranking and leads) and how there was a need to get rankings back up. David shares the approach he took on two different accounts to bring the accounts back from a low in the engage...

In Episode 6, we get recommended as an agency from a known entity in the startup space, but the prospect wants a service that we don't really offer. We debate whether we should create a new service offering to take on the new client. Content brand post: https://www.growandconvert.com/content-marketing/content-brand/ Timestamps: 0:00 Episode Preview 0:42 Doubling Agency Intro 1:00 Prospect approach...

In Episode 5, we recap our first month since starting our challenge. We grew the highest amount in one month since starting our agency. We share our client count, where the mix of revenue is coming from and then analyze the 3 new clients that signed on for February.

In Episode 4, one of our strategists is having trouble with an article interview and Devesh needs to jump in and take over the interview to steer it in the right direction. We ask the question, is this a good use of Devesh's time? We haven't really built any processes around interviewing, do we now need to build more training or processes around interviewing or is this a one-off issue? We talk thr...

After doing some analysis on clients that dropped in 2023, we realized that we have an issue with our churn rate. On average, clients stick with us for 12 months, which in other words means: we turn over all of our clients every year.  In Episode 3, we talk through various ways to improve our churn rate: From changing pricing, to contract length, to various other ideas. 

We signed a new client on a year long contract, sent them the first article and they weren't happy with it. On top of that, the strategist and writer that was managing the account didn't feel like they were a good fit to keep running the account. In Episode 2, we talk through what we did to resolve the situation. We weighed various options from: 1. Is it worth it to keep the client? 2. Do we need...

We're starting a new series where we document our journey trying to double the size of our agency over the next couple of years. This is episode one of the series where we explain why we're ready to scale our business, what our goals are, and why were documenting the journey on Youtube. Then we do a deep dive into our business during 2023, share why clients churned and our plans for 2024. We hope...

In our latest episode, we interview founder Ian Landsman about how he started the help desk software Helpspot back in the early 2000s and how he's lasted 15+ years against funded big name players like Zendesk, HelpScout, and more. We get into the details about what he did in the early days to launch his company, why he never really had a focus on marketing until recently, and we share some of the...

We're trying something new. Many of our clients have really interesting backgrounds and stories, so we decided to interview them.  In this podcast, we interview the Vocal Video team to learn where they got the idea for Vocal Video, learnings from their experience selling their past company TechValidate to SurveyMonkey, how their past experiences informed their marketing strategy, why they chose SE...

There are many people that don't know how to calculate the ROI of SEO. In particular, they don't understand a key principle of SEO's ROI: it gets better as time passes. Why? Because unlike paid channels where you need to spend more for every extra click you get, in SEO you start accumulating or stacking pages ranking at the top of Google search results, while your spend doesn't increase.  So as yo...

In the past couple of months, we've had an increasing number of people ask us our thoughts on ChatGPT and how it will affect the world of content marketing and content writing. We've seen people take extremes: People saying they are going to use ChatGPT instead of hiring writers or content marketers going forward. Then the opposite, people saying ChatGPT has no value in writing or content marketin...

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....

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 thi...

In this episode of Grow and Convert Deep Dives, we share our mistakes that we've made when hiring writers and how we've developed a process to solve it. We go into detail on our process and share things that we've implemented to help us screen writers, test them and train them. We hope you enjoy. Here are the sections: 0:00 Intro- How to hire blog writers 2:42 Mistakes we made when hiring blog wri...

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 t...

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 differ...

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 w...

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 Ar...