The Grow and Convert Marketing Show

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 SEO/content marketing as a channel, how they launched their product and more...

Please let us know what you think of this format.

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 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 this episode of the Grow and Convert Marketing Show, we discuss our journey creating an AI writing tool designed to mirror the way we produce content.

Unlike existing solutions that prioritize speed over quality, our tool first deeply understands your business before generating content.

After discovering that 83% of marketers use AI-assisted content despite quality concerns, we identified the fundamental problem: generic AI writing tools produce "Google research papers" that lack a company's unique voice and arguments.

Our solution?

A tool that analyzes your existing content to create a comprehensive "brand summary" capturing your business's value proposition, features, target customers, and pain points.

The highlight of our tool is the "super brief" feature - simply input a keyword and the AI analyzes search intent, SERP patterns, and suggests content formats while providing ways to pitch your business specifically for that keyword.

Key Learnings:

-Most AI writing tools fail because they don't understand your business's unique positioning and arguments
-83% of marketers use AI content despite quality concerns, primarily for time savings
-The "brand summary" approach ensures AI truly understands your business before writing
-Our tool generates strategic ideas (not just language), reversing the typical -AI writing workflow
-AI writing can be high-quality and conversion-focused when it understands your business first
-The "super brief" feature analyzes keywords and SERPs to suggest angles and approaches to produce pieces that will rank
-Effective AI content requires understanding both what to write and how to write it

We'd love your feedback about the tool and suggestions to make it better. Please leave feedback in the comments.

Articles that we reference in the video:
Pain Point SEO: https://www.growandconvert.com/seo/pain-point-seo/
How Marketers Are Using AI for Writing [Survey]: https://www.growandconvert.com/ai/ai-writing-survey/