The rise of remote work has introduced new challenges for startups to solve. Brands today still grapple with misaligned schedules, fragmented communication threads, and meeting fatigue, underscoring the need for new solutions.

Yac needed a content engine to drive trial sign-ups in a crowded space

As an asynchronous meeting platform, Yac helps remote workers collaborate effortlessly and reduces time spent in unproductive meetings. By prioritizing flexibility and focus, Yac addresses the core frustrations of remote work.

However, competing against the likes of Slack and Zoom with a polarizing message is tough. To carve out its niche, Yac needed messaging that resonates deeply with its audience, embraces its unique perspective, and isn’t afraid to challenge the status quo.

Yac is an asynchronous meetings platform that helps remote and globally distributed teams improve communication, increase productivity, and communicate across time zones.

Yac’s partnership with Grizzle led to a 3x increase in trial sign-ups

Before Grizzle: Low organic visibility, lack of consistent user engagement, and difficulty converting blog traffic into sign-ups.

Grizzle built an integrated content program across the entire user journey

The Yac team has a tremendous amount of remote work experience and expertise. As a growth partner, Grizzle’s job is to elevate their opinions and build a content engine that achieves Yac’s true north objective: user sign-ups.

Here’s how we helped drive that growth.

1. Gain a deep understanding of the audience

We started by gaining a deep understanding of Yac’s ICP. There are two pillars to our audience research approach:

1. Qualitative research: Speak to Yac users to understand why they invest in the product, their underlying pain points, and their goals.
   
2. Quantitative research: Develop a macro-overview of the market through audience intelligence, competitive analysis, and trend analysis.

This helped us serve Yac’s ICP on the channels they engage with and speak their language. Furthermore, understanding their problems fueled topic ideation and keyword research while uncovering distribution opportunities.

On the back of this research, we developed a content strategy that sat within the sweet spot of three key areas:

1. What their audience wants
2. What they’re uniquely positioned to offer them
3. What will generate results

Quality is critical, but content must contribute to business objectives—whether that’s revenue, SQLs, or brand awareness.

2. Establish thought leadership with product-led content

Creating content about running effective meetings is easy. Making it resonate with a time-poor audience is the challenge. The key to crafting engaging content for busy people lies in harnessing unique insights and offering practical advice, all while aligning it with Yac’s solution. 

To do this, we conducted regular subject-matter expert (SME) interviews. We took the opinions and expertise of Yac’s executive team and wove them into the narrative of our content.

The result? 

Articles that not only educate but challenge conventional thinking—empowering remote leaders with fresh, actionable approaches to managing meetings.

Furthermore, we used the product ourselves on a day-to-day basis. This familiarity allowed us to tie features to jobs-to-be-done (JTBD), create content with demonstrable real-world applications, and inspire readers to convert into users.

3. Improve UX and technical SEO foundations

Search is a cornerstone in the success of Yac’s content engine, driving both visibility and engagement across the site. Quality content is key, but an intuitive site architecture and good technical SEO foundations are critical.

From the very beginning of our engagement, we helped Yac implement small and structural changes to their website to improve crawlability and UX. These changes ensured the website was primed for search engine success.

We also provided and implemented content optimization recommendations, unlocking quick wins while we developed their long-term content strategy. This two-pronged approach ensured Yac’s content not only reached their audience, but delivered a seamless experience that converted visitors into users.

4. Build an audience with distribution and repurposing

Content shouldn’t exist in a vacuum. To succeed, every piece of content must work hard to achieve results across key channels. This is especially true for startups where every dollar must be spent wisely.

For Yac, this meant creating “compounding content”—hitting multiple goals from a single piece article, from driving traffic to building brand authority and targeting user acquisition.

This meant repurposing content across two core content channels:

• Founder-led and company profile content on LinkedIn
• Email newsletters and content to provide value straight to subscriber inboxes

Each post and email is crafted to match the unique qualities of each channel. We also collaborated with experts and influencers to amplify content and access a wider audience.

After Grizzle: Significant 3x sign-up growth, a scalable content engine, and 831% more organic traffic driving MRR with their target audience.

Semrush has gained a reputation as one of the best SEO tools on the market. After building a team to grow SEO performance, they needed to improve existing content while establishing high quality standards to take their organic growth to the next level.

Semrush needed a content engine to capture more search visibility

Semrush is home to some of the best marketing talent in the world. Following their acquisition of Backlinko in 2022, the content team quickly grew to adopt a product-led philosophy for SEO content.

To achieve this, they needed to build a roster of talented editors, writers, and agency partners to help them reach their ambitious production goals. Which is where Grizzle comes in.

Semrush is a marketing SaaS platform that offers SEO and content marketing tools. Founded in 2008, they’re one of the leading digital marketing platforms on the market.

Semrush's partnership with Grizzle helped increased organic traffic and content velocity

Grizzle has produced over 160 articles for Semrush to date, contributing to a 64% increase in non-branded search traffic.

Grizzle helped Semrush produce high-quality content at scale

Producing content at a high volume is no easy feat. Doing so while maintaining your tone-of-voice and a high bar for quality is even more challenging. It requires the right talent, training, and content operations that won’t buckle under pressure.

Luckily, both Semrush and Grizzle have it in spades. Together, we produced content that delights readers while increasing search traffic and trial sign-ups.

1. Product-led content that ranks and converts

Embedding your product as a solution to user problems and jobs-to-be-done (JTBD) adds value and increases product awareness in a contextual manner. Semrush advocated for this approach from the very beginning of our engagement, allowing us to hit the ground running.

Getting the right balance is tricky. Overdoing product mentions will turn readers off and reduce dwell time. But it's difficult to contribute to business goals when underselling your product's value.

The best way to do this is by coupling DIY approaches with relevant feature walkthroughs:

Readers are given everything they need to solve their problems by themselves. Or, they can sign up for a free Semrush trial and use the product to speed up the process.

2. Meeting and defining high-quality editorial standards

Scaling content production volume is a common request we hear as an agency. But you can’t jump right into 20 to 30 articles a month right out of the gate.

To ramp up, you need a strong foundation. This means detailed content guidelines, getting the right talent in the right seats, and setting standards for each piece of content.

For Semrush, this meant starting at four articles a month. We use these initial projects to collaborate with them on content guidelines, get writers up to speed, and build out a team of editors and strategists.

From here, we can ramp up and meet the ambitious goals Semrush are hungry for.

3. Scaling content operations to 30+ articles a month

With the foundations set, we were slowly able to ramp up production to over 30 articles a month.

Our process for ramping up content production looks like this:

1. Writer recruitment and training: Sourcing, vetting, and training writers with marketing subject matter expertise.
   
   
2. A strong editorial  team: Talent density is critical for an agency like Grizzle. We hire and nurture the best editors and strategists in the game.
   
   
3. Smooth content operations: Robust yet flexible processes allow us to keep projects on track and deliver content at scale with minimal hiccups.
   
   
4. Detailed feedback and unlimited revisions: Writers need guidance in order to improve. Further, getting it right doesn’t always happen the first time, which is why we make revisions until our clients are satisfied.
   

Finally, as Semrush built out their own team of writers and editors, we guided and trained them on our editorial processes and mutual benchmark for great content, making our partnership truly collaborative.

Folding seamlessly into Semrush’s existing operations made  life easier, but none of this would have been possible without Semrush’s vision or dedication to quality.

How do you increase publishing velocity while maintaining high-quality content standards? This is the challenge Pipedrive aimed to overcome in the face of ambitious organic growth goals.

Since 2016, we’ve worked with Pipedrive to scale their organic growth program, helping them produce and optimize content and run digital PR campaigns to increase brand awareness and SEO performance.

Pipedrive needed its content & SEO program to drive revenue

In the wake of achieving unicorn status, Pipedrive adopted a more aggressive approach to organic growth.

They’ve dominated the SERPs with a strong brand presence in the sales industry for years. However, organic channels must contribute to business objectives across all departments.

Pipedrive’s highest priority is capturing search traffic to achieve quarterly user and trial sign-up goals. This means targeting in-market buyers who are researching CRM solutions with purchase intent.

“We’re a small team working in a space that has a number of high-profile industry leaders, not to mention dozens of smaller companies across different markets. So, competition for Google Search traffic is fierce."

Pipedrive is a CRM and marketing automation platform that helps over 100,000 sales teams and small businesses scale their sales activity and generate revenue. At the time of this writing, customers have generated more than $85 billion using Pipedrive.

Pipedrive's partnership with Grizzle increased global revenue by 39%

By partnering with an agency that integrates seamlessly with existing strategy and operations, Pipedrive increased revenue across global markets by 39% in 8 months.

Grizzle helped Pipedrive scale their content production and SEO program

Ambitious growth goals often require an aggressive increase in editorial production. This means laying the foundation by building out efficient content operations systems and setting consistent editorial standards.

Most importantly, it requires prioritizing content and activity that attracts user sign-ups.

1. Target in-market audiences with bottom-of-funnel content

For SEO to contribute to user sign-up targets, we must first identify problems and jobs-to-be-done (JTBD) that indicate commercial intent or are relevant to product features.

However, different topics and keywords require different approaches. Sometimes, an article is needed, and other times, a landing page is more appropriate. It all comes down to search intent.

For example, writing SEO-driven landing pages is a different beast from blog articles. It means deeply embedding ourselves into the product, audience, industry verticals, and job roles Pipedrive caters to.

But the results are worth the effort. The landing pages we produce for Pipedrive not only rank in Google, but convert searchers into leads and trial sign-ups.

2. Ramping up content production while maintaining quality

When people talk of increasing “content velocity,” they usually mean publishing as many articles as possible—regardless of quality. But this leads to poorly written blog articles that fail to build trust.

By establishing high editorial standards, we can increase production cadence without harming content quality or performance.

We started with four articles a month, ramping up to 15 and 30 over the period of months. This allowed us to create high-quality blog articles at landing pages at scale while achieving Pipedrive’s ambitious user sign-up targets.

Our number one priority is producing the best content on a topic, allowing Pipedrive’s marketing team to focus on strategic activities and experimenting with new formats and channels.

3. Improve the performance of existing content

Alongside net new content, we helped Pipedrive update and refresh existing articles and landing pages. The team at Pipedrive have a clear vision of what to prioritize, and it’s our job to analyze those pages and ensure resources are used intelligently.

It starts with a content analysis. Every stage of the content journey is measured, including performance metrics and editorial quality. This helps us determine the activity needed to improve or maintain traffic and conversions.

A content credit system allows us to allocate resources based on how heavy an editorial lift each piece of content needs to improve performance. For example, some articles may require a complete rewrite, while others need some light copy editing and restructuring.

This allows us to accelerate our content optimization workflows and ensure the Pipedrive team gets more bang for their buck.

“As any SEO analyst or content creator knows, the playing field is constantly changing, so you need the agility to be able to adapt. Facing the thousands of tweaks and improvements our SEO tools recommend would be daunting if it weren’t for Grizzle’s credit system, which helps us prioritize our task list.”

By producing authoritative content that spoke to the pain points of their audience, Pipedrive also increased user sign-ups by 33% and 4x organic traffic.

"With this system in place, we’ve been able to optimize hundreds of high-performing content pieces, achieving a 30% growth in tracked keywords ranked 1-3 in the last month alone."