The Story of Krakow’s Wonder-child of AI App Development

Meet Miquido: the chosen one!

Chosen to develop amazing apps for Skyscanner, Abbey Road Studios, TUI, Herbalife or Nestle.

Based in Krakow, but with offices in London and Berlin, Miquido has delivered 100+ digital products and AI apps for music & video streaming, healthcare, travel, FinTech, and other industries.

The host of Mobiconf, the conference that brings at the same table 400+ designers and developers and 40+ speakers, Miquido is one of the most important players in the Krakow tech scene.

Miquido boasts with 170+ employees strongly experienced in mobile and AI app development.

Intrigued by the Miquido uplifting growth story, I decided to go on a journey to find out the secrets behind it.

Follow me to unfold the marketing, employer branding, and social media strategies behind the 1214% revenue growth that made Deloitte nominate Miquido in its Tech Fast 50 CEE 2016.

TABLE OF CONTENT

• Miquido’s Marketing Strategies Reverse Engineered
• Employer Branding and Hiring
• Miquido’s Inbound Marketing Strategies
• Summing Up

It’s gonna be a vivid narrative this one, so follow me.

Introducing Miquido: Krakow's AI App Development Company

Founded in 2011, it took 8 years to get to 170+ employees and be awarded by Deloitte in its Fast Tech 50 in the CEE.

In 2020, Clutch featured Miquido in its Top Polish App Developers in the 2nd place.

Furthermore, Miquido seems to want to step away from the traditional software development company. It’s developing its own products.

Which is great news.

But what are the assets that made Miquido so fortunate? Let’s hear it from former clients. It seems they are praised for:

• Goal-orientation
• Being really well-organized
• Delivering high-quality apps
• Fluid development process
• Responsiveness, good communication

Before dwelling into the research I’m gonna be a little party pooper and reveal to you some of my findings.

In the following section, we’ll dive more into Miquido’s marketing approach.

We will understand how crucial employer branding is in a very busy Krakow tech scene. You’ll also comprehend that building a community around you is beneficial for all your stakeholders.

Miquido’s Marketing Strategies Reverse Engineered

Today there are so many marketing channels out there, you feel like in an amusement park: intrigued, overwhelmed, what to begin with, which are the best ways of having fun without wasting money?

What about Miquido? What’s their weapon of choice in this martech playground? Are they delivering purposeful customer encounters?

I think it’s time to find out!

We’ll go deep into their branding strategies, then the inbound content strategy and other marketing efforts.

Employer Branding and Hiring

Employer branding is mirroring a company’s culture. Building a positive culture is the root of a strong employer brand.

Let's see which is Miquido’s approach.

• Company culture

It’s a culture that supports continuous learning, through organizing events, meetups and a training budget of 3000 PLN/year.

• Team

Storytelling & video = powerful tools to send the right message to a potential employee. Check out these videos about people at Miquido.

• Career pages: some of the best I’ve seen so far. Neat design, transparent responsibilities, benefits & salary.

The Miquido team is planning to expand, there are 10 hiring opportunities, and also 10 paid internship positions are listed on their website.

And a novelty in this industry, Miquido has a person in charge of employer branding.

Miquido’s Social Presence

Customer expectations are now higher than ever. There’s FOMO all-over the place (fear of missing out), everyone is in need of instant gratification.

In order to provide your stakeholders with an answer to their question, you must be wherever they are.

Now, let’s see how Miquido is addressing social media interactions when promoting their employer brand and AI app and mobile app development services.

Facebook

For Miquido, the Facebook profile is very much used for employer branding. No surprise there, because we’ve seen that they even have an in-house specialist dedicated to employer branding.

On a smaller scale, Miquido is promoting events and blog content on their Facebook page.

LinkedIn

The LinkedIn account mixing employee branding content with educational and sales-related content.

They are also broadcasting lots of news from the events they attend to, awards they receive, projects they do.

Events promotion can go two ways – building a brand in the eyes of potential clients or building employer branding.

From time to time their projects are featured in LinkedIn posts, from AI app development products to open source projects, like the one below.

From time to time, the blog articles and Medium content they create get shared on LinkedIn.

Community Building

The community you grow will be the very first audience to advocate for your brand. They’d be your evangelists, they’d make you aware of potential failures, and even make your business better.

Miquido understands this and does not shy away from engaging with new audiences.

From small-scale events to large ones (like Mobiconf), Miquido is taking risks, reaching out, and tapping into new audiences.

So, we’ve got events/meetups for designers, testers, and developers.

We’ve got hackathons, like this one in London where they were the Abbey Road’s (world-famous recording studio) partner.

They also co-organize conferences, like this one that speaks of Golang.

Aaand, the cherry on top, Mobiconf, one of the best mobile conferences in the CEE. That seems legit, considering they are an awarded mobile and AI app development company.

Miquido’s Website

The layout of the website is clean and fluid.

Social proof is everywhere.

Why do we always insist on social proof?

Our clients are getting more informed by the day. They do a lot of research before any buying decision. How can a business prove it deserves them as clients? How can they promise a meaningful experience?

Miquido is showcasing the portfolio, using client logos, case studies, and testimonials.

Testimonials are so powerful because they’re seen as being really objective. The more someone outside the brand speaks of you, the higher the credibility.

When reading the case studies you see even more social proof, as in awards received by the apps they’ve built, the number of downloads.

Awards are also showcased:

When we reach the Miquido blog, we see more proof of their good work: Miquido was named a 2018 Google Certified Agency, and it seems this is not happening to many development companies.

Ok, now I trust you, I’ve seen some case studies. I think I’m ready to get in touch. How can I do this?

Well, it’s easy peasy, complete our contact form.

They used to do some basic segmentation via their form about a year ago, before the rebranding, like below:

Now (March 2019), they are leaving out the segmentation and go straight for email and the option to book a call.

They are monitoring the actions of website visitors using Hotjar, so I assume that they are interested in conversion rate optimization.

Miquido’s Inbound Marketing Strategies

Like we’ve seen so far, software houses approach content marketing as a channel for lead generation.

In tech B2B (non-SaaS), sales cycles are long, because of the high product value. This means knowledge needs to be proved through original and useful content.

In this chapter, we’ll look into Miquido’s content marketing strategies around reach and act from the RACE approach.

• REACH

At this stage, Miquido is keeping its blog up to date.

The articles are written by marketers, the head of sales, head of R&D. It all depends on the content of the article and the background needed to write it.

Miquido also features case studies, that prove their expertise.

Miquido is also delivering content via Medium, and it seems this strategy pays off in terms of engagement.

They tackle topics such as AI app development or product design.

• ACT

Now it’s time to move readers further down in the funnel. For that, Miquido uses CTA’s inside blog articles, that invite to a newsletter subscription.

For the case studies, the CTA invites readers to connect with Miquido and talk about project ideas.

Miquido is also offering a strategic session to those willing to continue the conversation.

Now, looking a bit more into the numbers, it seems that organic traffic is growing slowly. This year it managed to get over 1000 visits/month.

This means that there’s room for growth, but we all know that content is not quite easy peasy, it takes lots of work and patience.

Miquido’s Paid Traffic Acquisition

Miquido is experimenting with paid ads as well, as per Ahrefs and Spyfu.

The keywords focus on the bottom of funnel keywords such as “ software companies in uk”, “mobile app development company in uk”, or “hire flutter developer”.

I haven't seen any display or remarketing ads yet.

Summing Up

So, which are today’s main lessons?

Like in Codete’s story, being all-in for events means you open up to new audiences, audiences that can become future clients or future employees.

Conferences, workshops, hackathons seem to be the solution for a world that gets more in more digital, where human interactions get more and more treasured.

Experiences are more valued than ever and by building true and humane connections might just be your trump card.

In the long run, focusing on a more scalable strategy, like inbound marketing, will also pay off.

And don’t forget the employer branding. When you compete with other tens of IT companies for the same talent pool, you must be really smart about it. It’s tough out there and you’d better choose your weapons carefully: from salaries and perks, through the right communication means.

Now, what other stories do we have upon our sleeves? Besides Krakow’s software houses outsourcing success stories, we’ve got software houses in Poznan, Wroclaw and Warsaw to watch out for.

You can find all the stories in our Growth Marketing Secrets of Top European Software Houses ebook.

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from Digital Marketing Automation Consulting | MAN Digital https://mandigitalblog.blogspot.com/2020/03/the-story-of-krakows-wonder-child-of-ai.html
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B2B Marketing Strategies in IT Consulting [Codete Case Study]

Based in Berlin, but with Polish roots, the IT consulting company, Codete, is in really good company, working with KIA, Cisco, BMW, Porsche…

120+ employees are working in projects related to cloud computing, data science, IoT, machine learning, artificial intelligence, from various verticals.

We had to find out what made Codete grow, how it’s dealing with employer branding in a very competitive tech landscape and how it markets itself.

So, follow me while I tell you the Codete growth story.

Codete: Krakow’s Thriving IT Consulting Company

With a portfolio of world-renowned clients, a continuously growing website traffic and being the host of a plethora of tech events, Codete is inspiring the Polish tech community.

We wanted to dig up among Codete’s marketing and employer branding strategies to see how they attract both employees and clients in a crowded tech market.

So, what’s the formula behind Codete’s success?

You’ll find out that:

• Building a community around you is a must
• Going inbound is a marathon, but with patience and strategic thinking, results will show up
• Employer branding is a long-term process that will make a difference in a noisy landscape

TABLE OF CONTENT

• Brand Awareness at Codete
• Codete in Social Media
• Traffic Acquisition at Codete
• Codete’s Content Marketing Strategy
• Codete’s Paid Traffic Acquisition
• Summing Up

Brand Awareness at Codete

Due to a dizzying array of media channels available, things seem to be getting out of control in terms of communication. Your stakeholders can speak of you on every channel in every corner of the world, and damage control is freaking hard now. It’s like walking on thin ice.

How can you deal with all of it and come out unharmed?

How can you build a strong brand?

This is what we’re trying to understand when analyzing Codete.

Codete in Social Media

Now, almost everyone has built at least one profile on a social media platform. So, as long as your stakeholders are active in social media, you should be there too. And that’s that.

So, what is Codete doing about it?

Let’s find out.

Facebook

For Codete, the Facebook profile is very much used for community building and employer branding.

Workshops, meetups, and other community events are promoted.

Also hiring posts are everywhere. It seems that Codete has some big growth plans.

Also for Berlin, hiring seems to be a burning issue. In March 20019, Codete was willing even to relocate developers to Berlin.

In terms of content types, Codete also seems to be embracing video.

LinkedIn

The LinkedIn account is not promoting the company’s services, but broadcasting news about events they organize or the hiring opportunities they have.

As on Facebook, videos are leveraged in LinkedIn as well.

No opportunity is missed to speak about awards, nominations, celebrations:

Employer Branding and Hiring

A company is only as good as its people.

Today’s IT consulting companies are trying to build a workspace that combines amusement and fun with professional and personal fulfillment.

What about Codete?

“Team building is our fundamental value” – they say.

And throughout the social media messaging they’re broadcasting this: from videos, photos, testimonials.

Interestingly, they’re building a personal brand around Codete’s founder and CTO, Karol Przystalski. He is a speaker at multiple events and O’Reilly trainer.

Now, we spoke of some events being hosted by Codete and promoted via social media channels.

These events are employer branding tools. They give Codete a voice among IT specialists around Poland and Germany and send a positive message that they are involved in the community and love to share knowledge.

Next, let’s take a look a bit at the perks Codete's employees receive: from career support to personal development and health perks.

Looking at the Codete vacancies, they want to hire at least 18 new people, mostly developers. Some of them will be assigned to specific projects, as this one:

The thing that caught my eye when investigating whether Codete does any paid ads, is this ad:

and this is its landing page:

Codete is trying to attract tech talent from Ukraine for its IT consulting business and is offering a relocation package for the whole family if need be! (We’ve covered the tech Ukrainian talent market here, if you need the bigger picture.)

Some testimonials from non-Polish employees are used for social proof.

Community Building

The marketing and sales environment has become so cluttered. We’ve got salespeople, marketers, short content, long-form content, video content, social media messages, chatbots.

So, for the jaded consumers, events might just be the answer they’ve been looking for.

So, what about Codete? Are they getting involved in the community by organizing events?

Hell, yeah!

Check this out!

We’ve got meetups, workshops (mostly paid) and a conference going on.

Now, let’s move on to CodeteCON, the conference organized by Codete.

In November 2019, in Krakow, the attendees have listened to speakers from Capgemini, BMW and more, across 3 tracks: Data Science, Back-end and Front-end.

Next, Codete even used to list online classes on the O’Reilly learning platform:

Codete’s Website

Moving on to Codete’s website, we notice a simple layout with intuitive navigation.

The first thing that you see on the website is the list of clients, which are top-notch by the way.

Is this making you trust the Codete expertise? Pretty much. And the short case studies are reinforcing this.

The services are as clear as possible.

So, no questions asked. Everything looks clear for a potential client.

Codete’s Traffic Acquisition

Now, let’s look a bit at Codete’s website traffic sources.

It seems that they’ve placed a bet on content marketing, and traffic is coming that way – 86% of it in December 2019.

In our next chapter, we’ll go deeper into Codete’s content strategy, we’ll analyze the whole funnel, based on the RACE framework.

So, let’s start.

Codete’s Content Marketing Strategy

• REACH

On the reach side of the RACE Framework, Codete’s developing a blog around topics such as technology & development, data science, consulting, big data, personal development, machine learning, project management.

The traffic is growing steadily. The number of organic keywords peaked at 1.8k in November 2019. Still, there’s more place for growth, because only around 100 keywords show up on the first page of Google results (on the US market, via Semrush data).

The content is written by marketers, engineers or developers, HR people, depending on the subject.

Besides blog articles, they have case studies that reinforce the fact they’ve got lots of software development experience and developed a stunning client portfolio.

Now, looking more at some numbers, the technical content on the blog accrues most of the traffic, as we’ve already been used to.

We’ve identified a keyword cluster around “java 8” and “java 11” for which Codete is really well-positioned in the organic results.

Looking at the backlinks that Codete gets, the ones coming from high domain authority websites point out to the homepage as well as to blog pages.

They got some good quality backlinks from Reddit, Financial Times, dev.to and more.

Co

• ACT

At the act level, users are getting more engaged with the Codete and it’s here where they become leads.

I haven’t discovered any lead magnets being used for lead generation purposes.

Instead, Codete makes use of a newsletter.

• CONVERT

At this level, this IT consulting company is developing paid workshops, which can serve two purposes: getting new clients or getting potential employees in the pipeline.

Codete’s Paid Traffic Acquisition

Now, let’s move on a bit to the paid marketing efforts.

As I’ve mentioned before, Codete used paid search ads to attract potential employees from Ukraine.

Also, search ads were being used to promote Codete or meetups Codete attended.

These are some display ads they used. Might be for remarketing.

In terms of Facebook ads, it seems hiring is still the focus.

Summing Up

So, which is the most important takeaway for today?

Brands use live events because they are an excellent channel to create experiences for potential employees and clients.

Marketers nowadays realize that the power of face-to-face marketing can go hand in hand with digital tactics. Codete understands this really well and takes event organizing to a whole new level, from organizing its own conference, to building workshops or hosting meetups.

In a very digitized world, human interactions and live experiences are more valued than ever. You can no longer hide behind a screen and prepare your digital marketing strategies. Real-life connections are a must.

Every company we’ve analyzed so far has left some unique fingerprints from the marketing point of view. If you haven’t read the rest of the stories, make sure you do.

The growth stories of Poznan, Wroclaw, Krakow or Warsaw are inspiring in the IT outsourcing industry, more info in our Growth Marketing Secrets of Top European Software Houses Ebook

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from Digital Marketing Automation Consulting | MAN Digital https://mandigitalblog.blogspot.com/2020/01/b2b-marketing-strategies-in-it.html
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Beyond the Outsourcing Stereotype: Krakow’s Software Houses

From the fertile ground of Krakow's tech innovation and development, rose Codete, Miquido, and Railsware. They are the 3 Krakow software houses for whom the IT outsourcing business seems like a cakewalk.

Krakow seems like a genuine promise for a better Polish future.

A future built around growth and technology.

That’s why in this blog posts series we’ll analyze Krakow’s resilient software houses, with their digital marketing strategies, and branding efforts.

You’ll find inspiration and realize that your ship hasn’t yet sailed.

Just watch, learn and apply the knowledge to your own business.

Krakow's Software Houses

With the rise of new technologies: robotics, artificial intelligence, big data, blockchain, the outsourcing industry has been shaken at the core.

Big industry leaders are lining up to face the speed and scale of digital transformation.

In Krakow, the digital revolution is at its peak.

Our quest now is to analyze some of the finest game-changers of this revolution.

Lots of software houses thrive in Krakow, from multinationals to local companies.

But, because we are Inbound evangelists, we’ve picked for our research successful companies that leverage content strategy in their marketing stack.

Come out, come out wherever you are: the content marketing, the social media strategies, the branding efforts!

Everything will come to light in the following blog articles. So, stay tuned for more!

But first, let's dig a bit into the Krakow IT success story.

Krakow’s IT Environment

First things first.

Let’s see which are Krakow’s assets in the IT outsourcing market:

• Income tax exemptions: the amount of tax exemption varies according to the value of the investment, its location and the size of the company
• The largest Polish market for BPO, R&D and IT, considering players employing at least 1000 persons

• Top cities of the future: Krakow ranks 9 in FDI’s report European Cities and Regions of the Future 2018/19. FDI is a service developed by the Financial Times, providing industry-leading insight and analysis, mostly investment-related.

• Business-friendliness – Krakow ranks second in FDI’s report European Cities and Regions of the Future 2018/19

• Krakow ranks 6th in Tholon’s Services Globalization Index. The index analyses the performance of a city based on talent skills, business catalyst, cost, quality of life, digital and innovation

Globalization city index

• Local talent pool: the second-highest talent pool in Poland according to McKinsey's report "Poland 2025: Europe’s new growth engine"
• High-quality university education. In the QS EECA University Rankings 2018, the Jagiellonian University came in 14th among 200 of the best universities in Emerging Europe and Central Asia region

• Krakow Technology Park: one of the most innovative R&D centers of its kind. It provides an industrial base for Krakow’s 15 higher education institutions and over 140 research centers. By 2017 the Krakow Technology Park managed to sign up 250 ventures which created 14,700 jobs.
• Incubators and accelerators that bring together startups, mentors and investors: Hub:raum by Deutsche Telekom, KPT Scale Up
• Important tech conferences are held in Krakow:

1. ACE! largest regional conference in Central Europe for building software
2. Digital Dragons, the leading game industry event in Europe
3. Cloud Developer Days
4. Devoxx, a developer community event
5. 100+ tech meetup groups, with more than 100 members

Now that we've got the Krakow IT story covered, we can move on to our software houses.

Codete – IT consulting and software development for digital business

Website: https://codete.com/

No. employees: 120+

Technologies: Java, Scala, AI, Blockchain

Services: DevOps, cloud computing, blockchain, big data, quality assurance, data security

Verticals: e-commerce and retail, travel, health, advertising, automotive, logistics, media, entertainment, fintech, crypto

Key clients: Leonardo Hotels, BMW, Home24.de, Wells Fargo, Total Fyber, KIA Motors, Probooking, Prosieben, Deloitte, Cisco

Offices: Krakow, Lublin, Berlin (HQ)

Managing Director: Artur Olechowski

Based in Berlin, but with Polish roots, it’s no wonder that Codete has among its clients, lots of German companies.

While many software houses in Poland go for North-American, Canadian, Scandinavian contracts, Codete doesn’t shy away from other markets.

With a portfolio with world-renowned clients, a continuously growing website traffic and being the host of a plethora of tech events, Codete can be an inspiration for every Polish software house.

Sharing IT knowledge is at the core of Codete’s existence: from CodeteCON, the tech conference, to meetups and workshop hosting, Codete understands how leadership is born.

It’s all about building trust and a thriving community around you, educating the stakeholders.

But, if you want to find out more, you’ll have to keep an eye on our next blog post.

Miquido – Building AI-powered digital products supported by data science

Website: https://www.miquido.com/

No. employees: 150+

Technologies: Java, Angular, Flutter, Swift, Kotlin, React Native, Angular, Golang, AWS, Kubernetes, Azure, Machine Learning

Services: software development, quality assurance, UX/UI wireframing, product design

Verticals: business, fintech, consumer goods, tourism, healthcare, social media

Key clients: Skyscanner, TUI, Aviva, Nestle, Herbalife, Santander

Offices: Krakow (HQ), London, Berlin

Reviews: 4.7 – Clutch (14 reviews)

CEO: Krzysztof Kogutkiewicz

One of the youngest companies we’ve analyzed so far, Miquido has been on the market since 2011 and has delivered 90+ apps. And to name just a few of their clients: Skyscanner, TUI, Nestle…

Awarded by Deloitte in 2016 in its Top 50 Fast Technology in CEE (2016 edition), Miquido has an inspirational growth story.

To know their story you’ll have to follow us in our next blog post, where we’ll tackle how Miquido does its inbound marketing, how it builds brand awareness and its social media presence.

Railsware – Great Products, Great Code

Website: https://railsware.com/

No. employees: 60+

Technologies: Ruby on Rails, Node.js, Angular

Services: mobile development, web development, AI and machine learning services

Verticals: business, fintech, finance

Key clients: Sendgrid, Calendly, Brightbytes, Quorso, Google

Offices: Krakow (HQ), Kiew, New York, Dubai

Reviews: 4.9 – Clutch (10 reviews), 4.9 – Glassdoor (11 reviews)

CEO: Yaroslav Lazor

12 years, projects for 60+ organizations, in 12 countries, collaborations with big names such as SendGrid, Google and Calendly – meet Railsware.

Nominated by The Manifest as a top player in Ruby on Rails development, Railsware is a software house with an inspiring growth story.

To know their story you’ll have to follow us in our next blog post, where we’ll tackle how Railsware does its inbound marketing, how it builds brand awareness and its social media presence.

Wrap up

This was just a glimpse of our 4 blog post series on the thriving Krakow IT outsourcing market.

This is part of a bigger playground, a playground where the rivalry between software houses in Poznan, Warsaw, Wroclaw, and Krakow gives birth to innovation and a strong tech community. It’s a rivalry that is shaping cities and mentalities.

But, before getting to the core of the subject, let me give you some spoiler alerts from my research. In short, these are some of my findings:

1. On the long-term, trying to find new business models from developing one’s own product, might be the best choice. Simply put, outsourcing does not scale. Companies such as Railsware (see Mailtrap) try to move the outsourcing stereotype having more like a SaaS approach. This comes natural, when you have 5+ years history of product development, right?
2. The power of open-source: you can open up to a whole new audience. Railsware seems to be good at it.
3. Embrace other types of management. Railsware just went for holacracy, a structure where every employee is involved in the decision-making process
4. Be all-in for events: from hackathons (the case for Miquido), meetups and workshops (Codete), conferences (Miquido is organizing Mobiconf), be where your stakeholders are: future employees and clients. Don’t forget that real-life connections are really valuable.
5. Scarce talent pool? Go abroad and hire. As projects come pouring in, why not? (Codete is offering relocation packages for developers from Ukraine)
6. Employer branding – take it to a whole new level when the competition is fierce. Hire an employer branding specialist if need be, like in the Miquido case.

Are you hooked already?

You can find out more software houses stories about it in our ebook: The Growth Marketing Secrets of Top European Software Houses – Poland Edition 2019

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How Did a Design Studio in Warsaw Get to Impress Philips and HP?

In the thriving Warsaw IT ecosystem, Polidea, 10Clouds, and SoftwareMill are crafting software solutions for top-notch Western Companies.

Turning 10 this year, the design studio, Polidea, has a lot to be proud of.

“Our ways of building strong business relationships have been created in the course of over 100 international projects” – Polidea

Top-level clients, 60+ employees, Clutch awards – Polidea seems to have it all.

But what forces pushed them here? How can you make strides in a very competitive software development market? How can you push a product/service forward?

Smart-arse marketing I’d say.

To check my assumption I began to deconstruct their marketing and employer branding strategies.

Follow me and see what I found.

Polidea, Warsaw Design Studio – Short Overview

Polidea is a #PositiveTech evangelist. It wants to have a positive impact on people’s lives through technological progress.

They even organized a conference in the name of #PositiveTech – MCE.

Also building open-source solutions complies with their mission. Take RxAndroidBLE for example, a powerful tool for Bluetooth Low Energy coding, that has received 2000+ stars on GitHub. Polidea is also very involved in conversations about their open-source solution on Gitter.

With 100+ international clients and a 10-year history, clients such as Phillips or Dolby, Polidea looks bulletproof.

Speaking of clients, let’s take a look at some of Polidea’s Clutch reviews.

• Strong communication and flexibility
• Technical expertise and thorough testing
• Creative and collaborative
• Delivered quality results at reasonable costs
• Rapid pace, meeting deadlines

So, what’s the formula behind Polidea’s success?

It’s time to uncover their secrets, their marketing secrets. So, follow me in my quest to understand the strategies behind Polidea’s growth.

You’ll find out that:

• Building a community around you is a must
• Going inbound can improve traffic, leads, and customers for your business
• Employer branding is at the core of all branding

These were just small spoilers of what’s coming up next, so stay tuned.

TABLE OF CONTENT

• Polidea’s Marketing Strategies Reverse Engineered
• Brand Awareness at Polidea
• Polidea’s Website
• Polidea’s Traffic Acquisition
• Content Marketing
• Summing Up

Polidea’s Marketing Strategies Reverse Engineered

Modern marketing is a less expensive game than ever before. All sorts of tools, resources are under our noses.

We entered the era of performance marketing where measurement and attribution are not science fiction anymore.

Still, not everyone is doing it right. And, as marketers ourselves, we go “Evrika” whenever we see digital marketing done great.

Now how does Polidea market itself?

Find out next.

Brand Awareness at Polidea

“If Coca-Cola were to lose all of its production-related assets in a disaster, the company would survive. By contrast, if all consumers were to have a sudden lapse of memory and forget everything related to Coca-Cola, the company would go out of business” – a Coca-Cola executive.

This kinda says it all does, it?

This is the power of branding.

Polidea’s Awards

In Top Polish App Developers by Clutch, Polidea ranks 12.

Going worldwide, in the same category, in The Manifest’s top 100 android mobile app development companies, Polidea ranks 66.

Employer Branding and Hiring

A good brand means that not only clients speak of you, but also employees and employee wannabees.

When employee branding is done properly your employees become your ambassadors.

Employees who work in companies with a strong brand are generally more enthusiastic, motivated and productive.

So, are Polidea employees showing any enthusiasm?

As Instagram or other social media channels suggest, people seem to have a very good time @Polidea. But we’ll talk more about this later.

Until then, let’s look a bit at their job offering.

Engineers wanted! – screams the careers section on the website.

But they also want to increase the biz development team.

The perks and salaries are transparent, this is a trend I noticed for other software development companies in Poland too.

On the careers page, the bot communication is specific to hiring, so Polidea is trying to maximize conversion rates with targeted chat messaging.

Polidea’s Website

Polidea claims to be a “design & development studio”, so they should be top-notch in designing their website, isn’t it so?

Let’s find out.

We are not UX designers, but, we are the end-users of a product, and we can provide some feedback, right?

First, let’s see if the buyer persona can easily find answers to its questions on the Polidea website.

• What does Polidea do?

Polidea’s main services refer to engineering, web development, IoT, cloud computing services, product consultancy, and design.

• How does your portfolio look like?

These are some of the Polidea clients.

Dolby, Philips, HP or Allegro: that says a lot about Polidea, right?

And take a look at these case studies (testimonials included):

• How can I reach out to you?

See “contact” in the website menu.

Or, chat with a business development representative via chat.

With a clear menu, easy navigation, a chatbot implemented, Polidea does a good job in proving useful to the user.

In autumn 2019 Polidea launched a micro-website that is dedicated to their design only services: meet https://utilodesign.com/

Polidea’s Traffic Acquisition

Direct and search traffic are responsible for more than 60% of Polidea’s website traffic.

Looking at the next graph we see that the organic traffic doubled since spring 2018 (US market data).

Further on, I’ll dive deeper into this data, so follow me.

Content Marketing

In an inbound strategy, content can be built with the purpose of serving the buyer across the whole journey. In our analysis, we’ll dissect the reach and act phases of the journey.

REACH

When building awareness, Polidea relies a lot on blog posts and non-gated case studies.

The main categories on the Polidea blog are engineering, design, business, news, and resources.

Among the blog posts, Polidea also lists interviews that tackle design, UX, blockchain, machine learning. This is quite a smart strategy and can get them backlinks and a brand new audience.

Some of the case studies are being repurposed for Youtube, because Polidea understands the power of video content, see this Folx example.

The blog articles drive natural organic traffic.

8 out of the top 10 pages by organic pages are blog articles, the other 2 are case studies.

The main subjects that drive organic traffic speak of React development, IoT. These topics go hand in hand with the PPC strategy as you’ll notice further.

Keywords from the react cluster seem to rank well in SERP.

By now, Polidea managed to place 56 keywords on the first page of organic results.

The technical blog posts are created by Polidea engineers. This is no longer a surprise, this is a smart habit we saw for most of the software development companies we’ve analyzed.

Polidea is sharing blog post content on Medium. The idea reposting blog content on Medium means opening up to a new audience. This is the power of Medium: getting a chance to get new traction.

Also, Polidea is quite involved in Medium communication around subjects such as product design, UX, React Native.

ACT

For the act stage of the buyer’s journey, Polidea uses a newsletter and lead magnets in the shape of guides.

In order to move the website visitor further down in the funnel, CTAs are being placed inside blog articles.

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On their micro-website, Polidea also pushes a design workshop.

Polidea’s Paid Traffic Acquisition

With an estimated budget of around 300$ a month, Polidea is using search ads as well as Google display ads.

The paid strategy focuses on the “web development nyc” cluster.

The previous strategy was also pushing for “react development”, as per the ad below.

Remarketing is also a go-to, these ads are following me:

Polidea’s Social Presence

Social media is here to stay. Your future current and future employees, current and future are there. So, you should be where your stakeholders are and engage in meaningful conversations with them.

Social media allows you to show a different side of your brand.

So, what’s the image Polidea is building for itself on social media?

Let’s find out.

Facebook

3000+ Facebook followers are updated about the latest articles on the Polidea blog, about the events they are hosting or attending to.

The picture painted on Facebook is about a company that gets involved in the community and is really knowledgeable about software development.

Polidea is pushing hiring announcements on Facebook. They are using videos, some of them have a reach above 2k.

According to Buzzsumo most popular posts are people-related.

Instagram

Just like most of the players in the industry, the Instagram account is the channel where Polidea is trying to build employer branding:

From promoting the team spirit, events they go to, team events, everything is trying to point out that Polidea is the place where you will find more than just a job.

Potential clients are not completely left out from the Instagram messaging. Take this post, for example, they are using testimonials as social proof, to underline the way Polidea deals with projects.

And another example speaks of product development at Polidea.

Twitter

The Twitter profile mostly replicates the content promoted on Facebook but also curates content from the industry.

Through the content Polidea shares, it wants to prove their technical knowledge is thorough and that they are building great design and apps. Also, they want to send a message that they value communities, by hosting and going to events.

The focus here is mostly about getting noticed by potential clients.

What’s noticeable is the fact that Gregorz Kapusta, the Polidea CEO is the front-man in the community they are trying to build around the company. A personal brand is shaping here: in social media and community.

What’s interesting is that Polidea marches ahead with the “uniquetech” hashtag. They want to associate their brand with #uniquetech, thus, they are giving potential customers another method to remember them.

LinkedIn

The LinkedIn account features communications that relate to both potential clients and potential employees. Which is understandable, considering these two stakeholders in most of the cases own a LinkedIn account.

Blog posts are being shared to prove the coding skills of Polidea developers.

Events also stand out on the LinkedIn profile.

#uniquetech – the hashtag is emphasized whenever there is an opportunity to pave way for a brand that wants to position itself as delivering unique digital products.

Conferences they attend, meetups they organize, it’s all promoted on LinkedIn. The idea is to support the fact that Polidea is an important member of the community. Also, they used to promote their actions under another hashtag of #positivetech.

LinkedIn is also leveraged for their hiring process. They promote articles speaking about how to be prepared for recruitment. And they post hiring announcements.

Community Building at Polidea

For 5 years Polidea organized the MCE conference, an event designed to inspire the tech enthusiasts.

Under the umbrella of #PositiveTech, the topics were following two tracks: design (obvious, cos Polidea marches as a design studio) and engineering. 400+ creators met at this conference in 2018.

2019 means a well-deserved break for these guys because organizing such an event is not easy-peasy.

But they are still getting involved in the community through lots of meetups.

Summing Up

So, what is Polidea really good at?

• Exceeding clients’ expectations through great technical knowledge, project management skills and design skills (they are a design studio, right?)
• Having a focused content strategy, going beyond blogging and developing long-form content, also repurposing content
• Mastering events and community engagement

Polidea – checked.

What else?

Have you read our piece on the Warsaw software houses?

Polidea is just a piece of a bigger puzzle. In order to solve the puzzle, you should understand how Poland got to compete with big players in the tech market. Read all about it here, in our “Growth Marketing Secrets of Top European Software Houses – Poland Edition 2019” ebook.

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How Does a 100% Remote Tech Business Develop First-Rate IT Projects?

Working 100% remotely and having Slack as a virtual office, SoftwareMill has a 10-year history of developing IT projects (just like Polidea or 10Clouds).

Listed in Top 10 Polish Custom Software Development Firms by Clutch, SoftwareMill is now moving towards building its own products and embracing blockchain. While they are developing one of the biggest cryptocurrency exchanges in Europe, one of their pillar blockchain products is blockchain agnostic transaction monitoring tool – CryptoHarvester.

In 2018, for the second time in a row, SoftwareMill was among the winners of the biggest stationary hackathon in the world,  HackYeah! The challenge was…a blockchain project. I wonder why? :))

Besides Blockchain and Crypto, they are Scala evangelists, being very much involved in the Scala community.

They even organize a conference around it!

So we’ve got the community, we’ve got passion…what else for SoftwareMill?

You’ll just have to find out next in our analysis where we let all secrets aside and investigate the strategies that brought SoftwareMill on the verge of success.

SoftwareMill’s Marketing Strategies Reverse Engineered

B2B marketing is going through a revolution, with a number of trends completely redefining what it will take to be a market leader over the next five years.

Shifting loyalties, savvier customers, automation tools, advanced analytics are transforming marketing from art to science.

Is SoftwareMill aligning with the new trends?

This is what we’re trying to find out next. We’ll reverse engineer the marketing and branding strategies to see what is fueling the SoftwareMill growth.

So, let’s move!

TABLE OF CONTENT

SoftwareMill – From Outsourced IT Projects to Building Own Products

Brand Awareness at SoftwareMill

SoftwareMill’s Social Media Presence

Community Building at SoftwareMill

Employer Branding and Hiring

SoftwareMill’s Website

SoftwareMill’s Traffic Acquisition

Content Marketing

Summing Up

SoftwareMill – From Outsourced IT Projects to Building Own Products

From Big Data, web and mobile apps, UX/UI design to consulting, SoftwareMill seems to know it all.

Is it really so? Let’s dive our noses into what former clients have to say about how SoftwareMill delivers IT projects. It seems they are:

• Proactive and passionate
• Communicating really well
• Highly skilled in project management
• Delivering quality results at affordable rates
• Committed and proving to be great at customer care

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From startups to enterprises, SoftwareMill projects are various: FinTech, telecom, e-commerce, energy, and logistics.

Now, SoftwareMill fell in love with blockchain and building its own products.

Check these out:

• A ground station software for PW Sat 2 satellite built by Students’ Space Association

• The aforementioned blockchain agnostic transaction monitoring tool – CryptoHarvester

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• Lawyer firms marketplace platform

• PoC of their own real-time indoor location tracking system – or how to turn an IT project into an innovative product http://indoor.softwaremill.com/

It takes some courage to move beyond the outsourcing stereotype. But this is a eat or be eaten game. Time will tell who will last until the end.

Now, the floating question is: how do you market services, products and most of all – a brand? How can you make your voice heard in a fiercely competitive market?

Well, we’re just gonna have to find out, won’t we?

We’ll drill into SoftwareMill’s digital marketing strategies, analyze the social media presence and branding building.

Before jumping into the analysis I want to give you some hints about what’s coming up next.

We’ll find out which are the main SoftwareMill assets in the new era of IT outsourcing:

• Conferences, meetups, workshops, hackathons, open-source contributions: SoftwareMill is everywhere, no wonder 50% of their website traffic is direct
• Building the proper employer brand
• Using Medium as a blogging platform can open up doors for your business

Follow me for more.

Brand Awareness at SoftwareMill

Today, digitalization is forcing companies to take a closer look at their brands so they can consistently cover the digital touchpoints. In a digital age, brands can be stronger than ever or more vulnerable than ever.

Now, news travel with the speed of light and if you don’t do well conflict management, customer care, you’re kinda screwed. Because it’s all being broadcasted live in the social media channels.

But enough with the chit-chat and let’s analyze the SoftwareMill branding efforts.

SoftwareMill’s Awards

SoftwareMill ranks:

• 5th in Top Custom Software development companies in Poland, by Clutch. It’s Warsaw peer 10Clouds sits on the 4th place.

• 12th in Top 50 Blockchain Companies by The Manifest

• among the top 5% of all teams screened by Digital Knights experts, a tech due diligence company that assesses the quality and performance of tech teams worldwide.

SoftwareMill’s Social Media Presence

As I’ve mentioned before, one of the social media’s super-powers is that it’s really useful in building the business brand or the employer brand.

On the other hand, it can also open Pandora’s box, when things are not done ok.

So, what about SoftwareMill, how does it build its social media presence?

Facebook

Facebook is very much used to build employer branding. Posts are related to the company culture, events they organize or attend.

They emphasize a lot on the fact that they are a 100% remote company.

Jobs are being posted on the Facebook page. From what we’ve seen so far, this is natural for software houses. It would be weird not to see this pattern.

Their Medium content is shared to prove that they are really knowledgeable in the field. They want to establish themselves as Scala and Blockchain experts.

Twitter

The Twitter profile also goes two ways: employer branding and proving expertise in Scala or Blockchain.

Lots of events are promoted, from workshops, meetups to the Scalar Conference they organize annually. They have a different Twitter account dedicated to the Scalar Conference.

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And the blog articles are not left out either.

LinkedIn

The LinkedIn account is really focused on building employer branding, community building and sharing knowledge. Client acquisition is not in the spotlight, unlike the case of the other software houses.

Blog articles are featured here, in an attempt to prove expertise in the field.

IT Projects are featured in order to prove they are really skilled.

SoftwareMill is also highly involved in open source. They contribute and host plenty of projects, such as: sttp, MacWire, Quicklens, and Tapir.

SoftwareMill is portraying a company culture where they learn together, share knowledge, celebrate success, get involved in the community.

Community Building at SoftwareMill

Engaging stakeholders customers in an honest and candid dialogue is becoming the cornerstone of marketing.

SoftwareMill truly understands this and lives by this mission.

And because they are really passionate about community involvement and Scala (the language embraced by Netflix, Amazon, LinkedIn, Walmart or Coursera) they began organizing the Scalar Conference in Warsaw.

Some of the videos from the conference can be found on their Youtube account.

Next, we’ve got meetups they sponsor or organize, hackathons they attend, conferences they partner with….really really busy guys.

Events

SoftwareMill partnered with students from Politechnika Warszawska to launch in space the 4th Polish artificial satellite! They contributed to this project by developing the PW-Sat2 Ground Station web app to communicate with the satellite!

Now, remember when I said SoftwareMill is turning 10 this year?

They are celebrating big time (they even have a dedicated subdomain to promote the anniversary).

How do they celebrate?

Through sharing knowledge. Yeah, they stand by their mission: webinars and meetups.

Employer Branding and Hiring

Today, people are increasingly mobile, able to easily switch from one job to another. There’s a hunt for talent, especially in the tech landscape.

Finding the magic formula for attracting and retaining employees is daunting. So, employer branding is critical these days, but how does SoftwareMill cope with the challenge?

Using social media, SoftwareMill is portraying a picture where employees have fun, have lots of learning opportunities, and feel like a big happy family.

They’re experimenting also with the transparency and management structure, check this out:

“In fact, a well-organized team, mutual trust and a sense of responsibility, as well as confidence in success, have made SoftwareMill operate as a teal organization from 2013. It introduced a flat management structure, full transparency — both decision making and financial. Oh, and everybody became a CEO overnight!”

They encourage learning a lot, be it technical knowledge or not.

This is why they’re holding reading club meetings and internal keynotes about the newest things someone has just discovered. They take their never-stop-learning-approach outside the company.

You can spot them attending numerous meetups and sharing the things their recently learned in a form of a blog post series: “TMWL – This Month at SoftwareMill We’ve Learned., where team members answer questions about what programming discoveries they made during the past month: see here Aug.

More about their culture on their blog.

Moving on to career opportunities, SoftwareMill is looking to hire developers and engineers.

The salaries and perks are transparent. They’re the only ones, so far, calculating the salary per day, net.

For hiring, SoftwareMill makes use of Facebook video ads:

As SoftwareMill is 100% remote company, they are serious about having a remote-first work environment and helping their newcomers onboard in a distributed workplace smoothly.

Recently they published the SoftwareMill’s Handbook for New Employees which describes 101 on how the work at SoftwareMill looks like and what to expect on your first days. Plus some tips on organizing an effective remote work for yourself.

Also, they have created a Slack channel where they can interact with potential employees, might they have any questions.

SoftwareMill’s Website

The layout of the website is simple and easy to navigate.

The menu is self-explanatory.

How is trust built on the website? Through testimonials.

And the portfolio page.

How can a prospect get in touch with them? A contact form, email, Skype.

In terms of conversion rate tools, according to Similartech, SoftwareMill is using Hotjar for heatmaps and session recordings.

SoftwareMill’s Traffic Acquisition

80%+ of the desktop website traffic comes from direct and search sources (according to Semrush).

In terms of direct traffic, I’m assuming the 27%+ (one of the highest seen so far for software development companies) is due to:

• Community events (meetups, conferences) where they promote their website
• No UTM tracking added to their links
• Sales activities: cold sales emails, events networking (they have at least 3 team members in charge of business development)

The main market is the US, where mobile traffic is also the most significant.

The organic traffic has reached its tipping point at the beginning of 2018 and went all the way to 5800+ visitors in November 2019 – on the US market only.

Content Marketing

I’ll analyze the content strategy from the reach and act points of view (see RACE framework)

• REACH

Organic traffic is a very important traffic source for SoftwareMill. And most of all that traffic comes to the blog. The blog is an important awareness touchpoint for all the tech companies we’ve analyzed so far.

The blog is updated about 2 or 3 times a week. They praise in having 80 blog articles written in 2018.

The topics covered are mostly technical, and some of them also deal with business-related subjects.

80% of the team members get involved in content writing (engineers included)! SoftwareMill’s Tech Blog is updated 2-3 times per week, mostly with blog posts written by developers, for developers.

Blogging on Medium

The blog is hosted on Medium, where the engagement looks really good. SoftwareMill and 10Clouds really understand the power of Medium.

Medium’s readers skew a lot towards topic categories such as tech, design, marketing, startups, business.

So, it’s an audience these software houses need. And let’s not forget that Medium gets an estimate of 110M+ monthly visits (as per Sermrush). Also, through having a 94 domain authority, Medium content can show up in SERP, on really competitive keywords. The same post on a lower-authority domain would probably get buried.

So, take a look at these interactions:

And take a look at that! They managed to rank one of their articles in the “Popular on Medium” list. Good job! This got them a do-follow backlink (on the short term) from Medium.

One of the most important Medium contributors for SoftwareMill is Adam Warski, one of SoftwareMill's co-founders. He's also really involved in the community they are building around the company. A personal brand is shaping nicely.

Check this out: social media traction for the Medium blog articles: Reddit, Facebook or Twitter, the average engagement being 62/article (higher than what we’ve analyzed so far). It’s all because of the new audiences they got access to.

Regarding the top pages, the blog pages get most of the traffic, as expected.

Organic Traffic Data

The keywords that rank organically on the first page are technical: cassandra, elastic search, scala…

The number of organic keywords began ramping up since spring 2018.

But in order to land on the first page of organic results good original content ain’t enough. Good quality links are one of the most important ranking factors. A combination of the two would create authority in the eyes of Google.

SoftwareMill is receiving some strong do-follow backlinks. They link both to the website and the blog.

Other Types of Content

Moving on from the blog, we have case studies of their IT projects and presentations. All with a mindset of proving knowledge and educating the audience.

People can discover SoftwareMill also on Slideshare, a lot of content gets repurposed there.

• ACT

At the act (interact) level, we look at content that drives action from the audience, from ebook downloads to newsletter signups and more.

Let’s see what is SoftwareMill up to in order to get leads.

As blockchain is one of their core services and area of expertise and especially in this field there is a need for raising awareness, so the right problem is addressed with the right technology, they published the “Blockchain Adoption Kit eBook” addressed to businesses looking for answers on blockchain adoption. The ebook includes a perspective on a Blockchain future from 8 Blockchain and Crypto experts.

They also curate content in newsletters:

Ok, now I’m considering SoftwareMill as a potential partner, what now? I am not ready yet for a full purchase. There you go: a free trial. Just take us for a 2 weeks ride!

This means we’ve got three touchpoints with a purpose of lead generation: ebook, newsletter, free trial.

Summing Up

So, which are today’s takeaways?

It seems that for SoftwareMill the ingredients of success are about:

• Having excellent software development and project management know-how and sharing it openly
• Innovating with the organizational structure – don’t be afraid to experiment, from 100% remote to bottom-up organizational structure
• Building its own products – this is the new and natural step for IT outsourcing companies. When you build your own product you also achieve a monthly recurring revenue, which can make a company more financially stable
• Building a community around the company: events, events, events, make your voice heard! Pick your weapon: participate, sponsor, organize, speak.
• Be where your audience is, Medium is an opportunity to take advantage of
• Creating content that’s valuable in the community, that comes up with solutions for the pains of your stakeholders (buyer persona, employees, partners…)

Our growth journey took us to Poznan, Wroclaw, and now, Warsaw.

Man, so many stories to learn from!

Stories of growth, of opening up to opportunities, of breaking down barriers and stereotypes.

The show must go on in the Central and Eastern European IT outsourcing playgrounds.

And we’re here to watch and learn.

Each month we go live on our blog with a new growth story. But, for those of you who are very eager to spy on the successful tech companies in Poland, then, this is for you: The Growth Marketing Secrets of Top European Software Houses – Poland Edition 2019.

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B2B Marketing Strategies in Tech. A Study of Top Software House in Warsaw

Having designed software for more than 100 businesses worldwide, mainly in the United States, Western Europe, and Australia, 10Clouds is turning 10 this year.

Growth is what defined its 10 years.

Getting the team from 2 to 110+, opening 3 more offices besides the Warsaw HQ (Poznan, Wroclaw, Atlanta), a 316% revenue increase during 2013-2016 – we definitely had to know their story.

The future looks even brighter now for this software house in Warsaw, 10Clouds. Planning to increase its income by as much as 50 percent in 2019, which is the marketing trump card of 10Clouds?

It’s time to find out.

TABLE OF CONTENT

• 10Clouds – Software House Warsaw Short Overview
• 10Clouds’s Marketing Strategies Reverse Engineered
• Brand Awareness at 10Clouds
• 10Clouds' Social Media Presence
• Traffic Acquisition at 10Clouds
• Wrap Up

From web development to product design, machine learning and blockchain, 10Clouds ain’t afraid of saying “yes” to challenges. This proves it: 10Clouds handles over 20 blockchain projects a year, as per a Facebook statement.

But having the right product means nothing if you can’t tell it to the world. So, what are the marketing strategies behind 10Clouds’ growth?

We’ll find out soon.

10Clouds – Software House Warsaw Short Overview

Asmodee, Baidu, Pinterest – these are just a few of the world-famous companies that worked with 10Clouds.

Now, let’s see what former clients have to say about working with 10Clouds. It seems their main assets are:

• Being highly collaborative, flexible
• Being highly tech skilled
• Seamless project management
• Delivering quality results at reasonable costs
• Meeting/exceeding expectations

On their website and Youtube account, 10Clouds features also lots of video testimonials.

So, the team seems in place, the services are reliable, the process is seamless. But what about the marketing behind it? How about branding? Are they top-notch too?

It’s time to pull down the curtain and uncover the system behind 10Clouds’s growth.

Here’s a short spoiler about what’s cooking in this study case.

These seem to be 3 of 10Clouds’ marketing superpowers:

• Community focus
• Building the right brand
• The client always comes first

Stay tuned for more.

10Clouds’ Marketing Strategies Reverse Engineered

When you initially think about B2B marketing strategies, your mind might go straight to outbound techniques. While this approach can still work, we’ve now entered an era of inbound and conversational marketing.

The B2B buying process is no longer cold or painful for the buyer. The fix lays in making interactions feel personal again.

Is 10Clouds going with the flow?

This is what we’re trying to find out in our analysis. We’ll dive into content marketing, we’ll analyze the branding efforts and how 10CLouds is building its social media presence…

Then we’ll give you hands-on takeaways to implement ASAP.

So, on your mark, get ready, set, go!

Brand Awareness at 10Clouds

Smart technology, robots, artificial intelligence, machine learning: sci-fi is here. And it has dramatically changed marketing.

But with great opportunity comes great responsibility in the B2B world. Brand loyalty is less and less common, competition is fierce, and brand awareness is more important than ever. And if you do get to the top, can you stay there long?

So, where does 10Clouds stand in the brand awareness game?

10Clouds’s Awards

Advertising is everywhere around us, offline, online, there’s a flood out there. Every business has a difficult time getting a signal through the noise. So, when everyone says that its product is best in class, how can you effectively differentiate your brand?

Awards – still effective today. While anyone can send email, engage in social media or pay per click campaigns, awards are limited.

In the software development industry, the Clutch nominations still have some power.

So, which are the 10Clouds awards so far?

• 4th place in Top Polish Web Developers – septemrber 2019 (Clutch)

• 13th place in Top Worldwide IT Outsourcing Companies – 2017 (Clutch)

• Ranking 48 in Deloitte’s Tech Fast 50 CEE – 2017

• Ranking 480 in Financial Times’ Fast 1000 Europe 2018, with revenue growth of 333% during 2013-2016.

• 8th place in Top 50 Blockchain Companies by The Manifest

10Clouds’ Social Media Presence

As I’ve mentioned above, social media can be a really powerful tool in employer branding.

On the other hand, it can also be leveraged for nurturing relationships with clients and prospects.

Let’s see how 10Clouds is approaching the matter.

Facebook

5600+ Facebook followers are updated about the latest articles on the 10Clouds blog, about the latest additions to the Behance and Dribbble portfolio, latest products they’ve built.

The content posted on Facebook is mostly aimed at gaining more customers.

But the employer branding is not left out. Photo albums posted on Facebook try to paint a cool picture of the company’s culture.

The Facebook interaction is way above the average (which is around 13-15).

There is no pattern for the posts that get highest engagement. The trend we’ve noticed so far is that usually people related posts are more appealing, but this is not the case.

Instagram

Unlike the case of other players in the industry, the Instagram account is the channel where 10Clouds is trying to showcase the apps and other products they’ve built.

Also, whenever it’s time to celebrate something, the Instagram followers are immediately updated: getting to 125 employees, reaching 30k Dribbble followers etc.

Job opportunities are also promoted.

Older posts were more employer branding – oriented.

Twitter

The Twitter profile promotes mostly events they attend or organize.

The focus here is mostly about getting noticed by potential clients and proving that they are an important member of the community.

Blog posts and Medium content are also promoted.

Next, why not celebrate with your Twitter followers important moments of your business?

See this tweet, where 10Clouds is proud of winning a bronze medal in an AI contest.

LinkedIn

The LinkedIn account is all about building brand awareness among future clients, through:

• showcasing the latest apps they’ve built and partnerships they've forged

• Promoting events they attend

• Career opportunities are also listed.

Behance

10Clouds is using Behance to showcase its portfolio. And the feedback it gets is looking really good. Lots of followers and appreciations, way above we’ve analyzed so far.

They have tens of comments, views can go up to 50k. Impressive!

Dribbble

Good design is a make it or break it decision-making factor if you are in the product design niche.

So, gathering feedback from the community, showcasing your portfolio is essential.

Dribbble is the channel allowing you to do just that.

And 10Clouds seems to understand this and built a great Dribbble profile, where engagement looks amazing.

Community Building at 10Clouds

10Clouds organizes a popular meetup for developers under the Acodemy brand.

For design lovers they organize Louds meetup.

Let’s not forget also conferences, like the Blockchain Fiesta in Krakow, where the 10Clouds Blockchain Lead had a presentation.

10Clouds also sponsors meetups, Warsaw.JS and Python meetups around Warsaw.

Pretty busy guys, I’d say.

Employer Branding and Hiring

Today, company culture and branding have a higher value than ever. Especially when you compete in hiring the right tech talent.

In the digital age, where the border between work and life is really thin, where social media can lift a brand up or knock it out, building an employer brand is vital.

When you hire the talent you need, you manage to retain it, then you can focus more on delivering quality products/services to clients and grow. Else, if employees come and go, it’s gonna be really tough and it’s gonna cost you a lot.

Communication, feedback, relationship with management, learning initiatives, employee perks, recognition – these are elementary when hiring and retaining the proper talent.

So, how does the process look like for 10Clouds?

Here’s an article they wrote in order to explain the 10Clouds developers hiring process.

Employees are asked about how the hiring process worked, what attracted them to 10Clouds in the first place, and how does 10Clouds look like a year after. They praise the learning environment, career opportunities.

Social media, video content are tools used in building employer branding.

Take this video for example, about how it feels being a 10Clouds developer.

Being a developer at 10Clouds

10Clouds is looking to expand the developer and designer teams in all cities or remote.

10Clouds is looking to expand the developer and designer teams in all cities or remote.

10Clouds’s Website and Conversion Rate Optimization

According to Krug’s first law of usability “Don’t make me think”, the 10Clouds homepage is self-explanatory. The structure is clear, the visual clues are moderate, the links are easily recognizable and help users to find their path to their aim.

The layout is scannable: content is categorized, visual elements are guiding the visitor to the Call to Action, content blocks are flowing nicely. The phrases and wording are concise.

But is this enough to turn a visitor into a customer? These days, potential buyers are looking for one more thing before making a commitment to spend money on you – social proof.

Social proof refers to people’s reliance on the feedback and actions of others so that they can make an informed choice.

Testimonials, awards, case studies, reviews, the number of followers/likes/fans in social media, all of these should be leveraged in order to build trust in the eyes of stakeholders.

In the case of 10Clouds’ website we’ve got:

• Growth KPIs

• Case studies

• Testimonials

• List of clients

• PR mentions

• Awards

In order to further move a visitor down the funnel, forms and chat are used.

In terms of conversion rate tools, according to Similartech, 10Clouds is using Hotjar for heatmaps and session recordings, and Autopilot, for marketing automation.

So 10Clouds wants to empower its sales team with better-qualified leads, it wants to improve the users’ path on the website and provide a better experience across the buyer journey, hence increasing ROI.

Traffic Acquisition at 10Clouds

More than 95% of the desktop website traffic comes from direct and search sources (according to Semrush).

In terms of direct traffic, I’m assuming the 15% is due to:

• Community events (meetups, conferences) where they promote their website
• No UTM tracking added to their links
• Sales activities: cold sales emails, events networking

The search traffic began ramping up this summer. We’ll get into more detail below.

Content Marketing

As you already know by now, we like the RACE framework when it comes to digital marketing planning.

• REACH

At this step we’ll focus on which are the touchpoints where people first become aware of 10Clouds. We’ve already talked about building brand awareness and social media above, but now we’ll go deeper and analyze the blog strategy and other types of content.

The blog is updated about monthly, and the topics covered relate to company news, software development, business development.

The technical content is written by developers, which is no news for us. It’s a common practice in the industry.

According to Buzzsumo the most shared content on Facebook is the technical blog content and career-opportunities announcements.

As we already know by now, good quality content is not enough for organic ranking. So, let’s take a look at the backlinks a bit.

We’ve got backlinks from relevant tech websites (Clutch, The Manifest, python.org) with high authority, as well as links from hiring & freelancing platforms (millo.co, workable.com, startupjpbs.pl).

From the SEO perspective, the most valuable backlinks are do-follow, topic relevant as well as from a high authority website.

For 10Clouds, 66% of the backlinks are do-follow.

Now, let’s move on from the website blog, to the Medium blog.

On Medium, 10Clouds develops content around design, development, UI & UX topics.

One of the biggest benefits of blogging on Medium is the fact that Medium has a built-in distribution channel reaching 60M+ unique monthly visitors (2017, Medium data).

And if you’re analyzing the most popular Medium content you’ll see that tech is by far the one with the most traction.

So, for a tech company it’s only natural to be where its audience is: Medium.

For 10Clouds, it seems that the Medium strategy is paying off in terms of engagement.

Now, let’s move to a bit more advanced types of content, that bring more added value: case studies.

In a B2B world, where the value of the product is measured in tens of thousands of dollars, case studies are a must.

A pro tip we always give our clients is to include data in their case studies, what were the practical achievements, some KPIs?

10Clouds knows how to prove they do a good job:

• ACT

Ok, we’ve got traffic, what now? How do we make them move further down in the funnel? How can we turn them into leads?

For the lead generation part, 10Clouds uses an Ebook as lead magnet.

Also, they provide a free consultation together with a bold promise: “We’ll build your MVP in 40 days”.

I’m really curious if this is having traction.

The content marketing strategy is still in its infancy at 10Clouds, but it's showing results.

Wrap Up

Now that we’ve come so far, let ’s do the shortlist of takeaways. So, 10Clouds is really good at:

• Mastering technical knowledge and project management
• Building a brand – using the power of video testimonials, community, awards
• Building a community around the company, be it offline (through meetups and other events they organize or sponsor), be it online (Dribbble, Behance)

So, another one busts the dust.

But, more companies are waiting in line to be analyzed.

To get the full picture of how software houses in Poland grow with the help of inbound marketing, get our ebook: The Growth Marketing Secrets of Top European Software Houses – Poland Edition 2019.

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from Digital Marketing Automation Consulting | MAN Digital https://mandigitalblog.blogspot.com/2019/10/b2b-marketing-strategies-in-tech-study.html
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The Ingredients of Successful B2B Marketing. The Case of Warsaw’s Software Houses

Poland is growing to be an IT hub, moving past the “outsourcer” stereotype and designing its own success story. Warsaw is leading the way.

10Clouds, SoftwareMill, Polidea are Warsaw's software houses that sit at the core of its vibrant IT development.

These companies are only the tip of the iceberg, an iceberg that wants to disrupt the outsourcing world.

While we are based in Krakow, the eternal Warsaw sibling rival, we can’t help admiring the intense competition between the two IT hubs. So far, there are no losers in this competition. It’s a hard-fought battle where the whole ecosystem goes stronger, innovation by innovation.

So, what are the forces that fuel up this environment? What makes Warsaw a magnet for IT investors? How did the aforementioned companies grow so fierce?

We shall answer all of these questions in our 4 blog posts series, beginning with this one.

We’ll tell inspiring stories about digital marketing, employer branding, social media strategies and more.

TABLE OF CONTENT

• Warsaw’s IT Environment
• Warsaw's Software Houses
• 10Clouds – From Stunning Product Design to Flawless Code
• Polidea – We Create Business Stories Through Technology
• SoftwareMill – Your Software Team
• Wrap up

Warsaw wants to challenge the IT Outsourcing status quo.

Let bygones be bygones.

It’s time for new ways of doing business, where the humane mingles with the technologies of the future.

So, let’s follow the footsteps of 3 Warsaw software houses on their way to growth.

Warsaw’s IT Environment

Now, let’s see what makes Warsaw so appealing in the IT outsourcing market:

• Income tax exemptions: the amount of tax exemption granted depends on the value of the investment, its location and the size of the company
• Warsaw is Poland’s main economic and business hub, pretty obvious for a capital
• The largest office market in CEE: everyone wants to open an office here. More than 60% of the demand for office space in Warsaw, Lodz, Krakow, and Sofia – during the first half of 2017 came from the outsourcing sector.
• Highest R&D index in Poland: the index calculates the number of new entities registered in the REGON list per 10 k inhabitants. The Warsaw average for 2009-2015 was 169, followed by Poznan (158) and Wroclaw (144).
• Second largest Polish market for BPO, R&D and IT, considering players employing at least 1000 persons

• Business friendliness: Warsaw ranks 3rd in FDI’s report European Cities and Regions of the Future 2018/19. FDI is a service developed by the Financial Times, providing industry-leading insight and analysis, mostly investment related.

• Local talent pool: the highest in Poland according to McKinsey's report "Poland 2025: Europe’s new growth engine"
• 30 Fortune Global 500 investors have business services centers (BPO, SSC, IT, R&D) in Warsaw, employing 18,500 people.

• The largest academic center in Poland: In the QS EECA University Rankings 2018, the University of Warsaw (the country’s largest) came in 6th among 200 of the best universities in the Emerging Europe and Central Asia region.

• Warsaw is the second most attractive Polish city for relocation, according to PWC report

• Acceleration programs and accelerators that pave the way for startups to contracts and VC investments: Founder Institute, StartUp Hub, Huge Thing, Warsaw Accelerator, ReaktorX, Google Campus, MIT Enterprise Forum CEE, Fab Poland by Orange
• 60+ tech meetup groups, with members ranging from 100 to 4000+

Warsaw's Software Houses

In 2017 15,000+ new businesses were established in Warsaw. According to Startup Poland Foundation, every fourth Polish startup is created in Warsaw.

Innovation lays just around the corner: from cloud computing, VR, AI, blockchain to IoT, every company wants a bite.

Next, in our story, we’ll try to unbox the marketing and branding strategies of 3 pillar companies of IT outsourcing in Warsaw.

10Clouds – From Stunning Product Design to Flawless Code

Website: https://10clouds.com/

No. employees: 100+

Revenue: EUR 3M+ (2016, Financial Times)

Technologies: AngularJS, React, Python, Javascript, Django, Vue, Node, Elixir

Services: web development, mobile development, product design, blockchain

Verticals: business, healthcare, entertainment, education

Key clients: Baidu, Asmodee, StepStone, TrustStamp, Skedulo, ZappRideShare, Coinquista

Offices: Warsaw (HQ), Poznan, Wroclaw, Atlanta

Reviews: 4.9 – Clutch (30 reviews), 3.4 – Glassdoor (7 reviews)

CEO: Maciej Cielecki

Featured in Deloitte’s CEE Tech Fast 50 in 2017, 10Clouds has increased its revenue by 316% during 2013-2016.

The criteria Deloitte uses for its CEE top is a strict one:

• Annual revenues of at least €50,000 in each year between 2013 and 2016.
• Develop proprietary technologies/spend a significant amount of capital on R&D
• Have an ownership structure that excludes majority-owned subsidiaries of strategic entities.

Financial Times is making its own top of the fastest growing companies in Europe. 10Clouds ranks 480, with a 4-year revenue increase of 333%.

In our next blog post, we’ll look at the marketing strategies that power up such a growth: we’ll dive into content strategies, branding efforts, and community engagement.

But, until then, you can understand the 10Clouds way of doing business by listening to one of their happy customers, now an evangelist:

Client testimonial – working with 10Clouds

Polidea – We Create Business Stories Through Technology

Website: https://www.polidea.com/

No. employees: 60+

Technologies: Node, Django, React, AWS,

Services: mobile development, web development, UX design, IoT, cloud computing, VR, augmented reality

Verticals: healthcare, finance, consumer goods

Key clients: Philips, Dolby, HP, StepStone, Estimote, Genentech, Applause, DaWanda

Offices: Warsaw (HQ)

Reviews: 4.9 – Clutch (8 reviews)

CEO: Grzegorz Kapusta

A Clutch awarded company, as a top app development company in Poland, Polidea is turning 10 this year.

Learning and sharing are in the Polidea DNA, as its CEO proudly states. This is why they organized the MCE Conference, one of the largest tech conferences in Europe, for 5 editions.

The Polidea involvement with Open Source, meetups, and local initiatives simply reinforces their passion for community.

So, when you mix knowledge and the power of sharing, you might end up working with top players such as Philips, Dolby or HP?

We’ll see about that in our next blog post.

Until then, watch Grzegorz Kapusta speak about Polidea here:

Video about Polidea

SoftwareMill – Your Software Team

Website: https://www.softwaremill.com/

No. employees: 40+

Technologies: React, Java, Javascript, Angular, Heroku, Scala, AWS,

Services: big data, machine learning, blockchain, web applications

Verticals: messaging, finance & banking, energy, e-commerce, logistics

Key clients: Tipser, Knip, Zerigo, IP Integrated, Vocado, Attikis, Intellii

Offices: Warsaw (HQ)

Reviews: 4.9 – Clutch (9 reviews)

CEO: Tomasz Szymanski

SoftwareMill ranks 10 in Top Custom Software development companies in Poland, by Clutch. It’s closely followed by Infopulse, also Warsaw-based.

What’s striking from the marketer’s point of view, is the abrupt expansion of website organic traffic during 2018. This means that SoftwareMill is going inbound.

It couldn’t be a coincidence, that the organic traffic is booming since Maria Wachal joined the SoftwareMill team as a Growth Manager.

So, this was just a spoiler alert for what’s following in our next blog posts in the Warsaw IT Outsourcing series.

So, stay tuned.

Wrap up

It’s been almost 15 years since Poland has joined the EU. European funding has flown in all these years, empowering businesses all over the country. This led to huge economic and social transformations across Poland.

Warsaw was at the heart of all this.

In the last years, a new chapter is unfolding in Warsaw’s development.

A chapter wrapped in innovation and shared knowledge. It’s like a new “golden age”.

Companies like 10Clouds, Polidea and SoftwareMill are making a statement in IT outsourcing by rising to Deloitte and Clutch tops.

What statement, you say? Well, let me spoil this a bit for you. To make it a bit easier for you I’m gonna lay out here some of my learnings after so much research:

1. Don’t be afraid to experiment with your organization’s structure: remote teams, flat organizational structures could work for you, as it does for SoftwareMill. This might help your employer brand too.
2. Get your team members involved in content writing, who else would fit better to promote your company culture, products you’ve designed, or speak of your expertise with a certain framework? This is the case for all analyzed software development companies: SoftwareMill, Polidea, and 10Clouds.
3. Try hosting your blog on Medium, this way you can open up to a whole new audience – see SoftwareMill and 10Clouds. In their case, the strategy had another advantage: the social media traction went through the roof.
4. Slideshare – put here some amazing decks, it’s all about reaching out to new audiences. This is what’s getting SoftwareMill thousands of views.
5. Go offline. In a digital world, human interactions are deeply valued. Organize meetups (10Clouds), conferences (Scalar Conference by SoftwareMill, MCE by Polidea), make people speak about you (potential clients or employees).
6. Video content is the future! Use it for your client testimonials, for promoting your company’s culture. 10Clouds are really nailing this. Also, you can repurpose some of your content for Youtube, as Polidea does with some of its case studies.
7. Case studies are essential to prove your expertise. Combine them with testimonials and numbers that speak of the success of the product you’ve built (like in the case of 10Clouds).
8. Build open-source solutions: this is a new way of getting traction from a whole new audience. Take RxAndroidBLE from Polidea for example, a powerful tool for Bluetooth Low Energy coding, that has received 2000+ stars on GitHub.

So, did I make your curious or not?

Now, competition is fierce in Warsaw and outside of it. Poznan, Wroclaw and Krakow are also getting the hang of success. Their stories are included in our ebook "The Growth Marketing Secrets of Top European Software Houses – Poland Edition 2019".

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The Marketing Chronicles Behind 30% Annual Revenue Growth at Top E-commerce Software House

The Internet was opened to the public back in 1991, after the invention of the World Wide Web. This opened the Pandora box: online shopping! By 1999 global e-commerce reaches $150 billion.

But behind great e-commerce lays great e-commerce software.

Divante is aiming to be just that: great e-commerce software house, by providing top-notch e-commerce solutions and products for both B2B and B2C segments.

And with a revenue that increases annually by 30%, we think they’re kinda there, what do you think?

And take a look at that: a Deloitte Technology Fast 500 nomination in 2017, with a 4-year revenue growth of 259%.

So, what’s the recipe behind the growth?

Definitely the product should be top notch. But without the right sales and marketing strategies, a great product just ain’t enough.

So, in this blog post we’ll decipher Divante’s marketing strategies, from the inbound perspective, social media, but also we’ll sneak inside their team and employer branding

TABLE OF CONTENT

• Divante E-commerce Software House – Short Overview
• Brand Awareness at Divante
• Divante’s Social Presence
• Employer branding and hiring
• Divante’s Website and Conversion Rate Optimization
• Divante’s Traffic Acquisition
• Content Marketing
• Wrap Up

From banking, telekom, fashion, Divante knows it all. Just look at their clients.

Impressive, right?

But how? That is the question.

Let’s find out.

Divante E-commerce Software House- Short Overview

Some Divante facts: 10 years on the market, 150+ global clients, 200+ team members, 1000+ projects delivered, own products developed for the e-commerce market and 2 e-commerce open-source solutions (Open Loyalty and Vue Storefront).

The feedback on Github, Capterra and g2crowd looks really good for Vue Storefront, which is acclaimed as No. 1 open source progressive web app for e-Commerce:

So, 10 years of steady growth and business expansion.

And let's not forget they've recently opened an office in Amsterdam and Berlin, and they're expanding to Singapore as well.

The purpose of this new office was being closer to their clients from the DACH countries.

Next, let's look a bit at what the Divante clients have to say about them:

• Deep knowledge, commitment and full support
• Managed to increase traffic and income
• Go the extra-mile
• Delivery with tight deadlines
• Expertise and professionalism

“Our income has doubled”, “reduced our time to market”, “increase website traffic” – that’s what I call results oriented.

But how did Divante get here: a top player in the e-commerce software industry?

Follow me to find out:

• How developing open source products can pave your way to success
• How the proper branding efforts can get you first-rate clients
• How inbound marketing can portrait you as an expert in the field and build trust around you

Divante’s Marketing Strategies Reverse Engineered

After so much pain and struggle for a former communist country, it’s time for a rebirth.

Poland is reinventing itself and reshaping the IT outsourcing environment.

“When life gives you lemons, make lemonade” – this came to life in Wroclaw.

Divante, the e-commerce software house is leading the way.

T-Mobile, Ringier Axel, Continental, Tchibo, Intersport are just a few of Divante’s global clients.

But what lays behind the lemonade?

Strategic marketing.

And we’ll reverse engineer it.

Brand Awareness at Divante

A brand vision should attempt to go beyond functional benefits to consider organizational values; a higher purpose; brand personality; and emotional, social, and self-expressive benefits. ― David Aaker (the father of modern branding)

Every step a business makes, in relationship with each and every stakeholder, will translate itself in branding.

A satisfied customer, an unhappy employee, an empowered student at a hackathon, a comment on social media, everything will generate word-of-mouth and brand awareness.

So, what does the market have to say about Divante?

First of all, we’ve mentioned the Deloitte Technology Fast 500 nomination in 2017 and the Clutch reviews.

Further on, in our article, we’ll see how community and social media engagements are handled.

Because, in the end, with all the tech development, the human touch will get you fans, employees and customers.

Divante’s Social Presence

Social media is a great channel for a business to include the community in the communication, help build trust and develop long-lasting relationships.

Divante clearly understands this, just look at these numbers:

• 7500+ Facebook followers
• 1700+ Twitter followers
• 2700+ Linkedin followers

Looking good for an e-commerce software house.

Divante’s Facebook Page

Divante’s Facebook profile has a client approach. Through consistently publishing posts, Divante wants to prove expertise in the field, hence build trust around the brand.

The posts are merely about:

• Promoting long form content – ebooks, guides, reports
• Successful integrations of their Vue Storefront product or PWA
• New strategies and partnerships for Divante

• Company culture and employer branding

• Events they organize or attend to

The interactions are a bit scarce.

But this isn’t a surprise. From what we’ve analyzed so far, the most popular posts for software houses posting on Facebook, are people related, such as team events, introducing team members etc.

LinkedIn

The LinkedIn profile content is also client-aimed. The posts refer to:

• latest articles they've published
• news from the e-commerce world
• their latest ebooks
• events they've attended
• their latest knowledge project: interviews with influencers in the field, in a series called "E-commerce Talks by Divante", hosted on Youtube, Soundcloud and other podcast apps.
• their services

• posts that refer to the company culture (internal events, celebrations) and employer branding
• hiring opportunities

Twitter

Divante almost replicates the Facebook and LinkedIn content within its tweets.

Events are in the spotlight here: speaking gigs, attending conferences and summits, but also sharing content they build.

Curiously, this is the first software house I’ve encountered that does not rely much on social media to build employer branding.

The communication is mostly oriented towards gaining new clients.

Divante’s Community Involvement

Whenever you would see a Magento event, for sure Divante is there.

They don’t usually miss making an appearance, as attendees or speakers.

Now, take a look at their roadmap, pretty busy!

On the employer branding side, they're busy as well: meetups, hackathons you name it.

But these are just a drop in the ocean.

Take a look at the community built around Vue Storefront!

Employer branding and hiring

One single Glassdoor review for Divante, a positive one, but, statistically speaking, not significant.

As we’ve mentioned before, through community networking, Divante is opening communication doors to future employees.

Speaking of, they have 15 ONGOING open positions, mostly for developers. The head of content position is standing out from the busy crowd of developers and engineers.

The “ongoing” status of the jobs explains a lot, especially when you look at this data: 600+ developers wanted in Wroclaw.

Divante has growth plans: opening new offices and hiring people.

But this thing goes even bigger: they want to build the Vue A-team, the best in Europe.

Another thing that struck me is the company's structure.

By now we've already heard about flat structures and holacracy, Divante is experimenting with something else: the Tribe Model inspired by Spotify.

This model is trying to split the organization into smaller organizations. We've got squads, guilds, and other types of teams. These teams are autonomous, self-organizing and self-managing.

So far so good, or so it seems for Divante's new structure.

Divante’s Website and Conversion Rate Optimization

The website has a intuitive and user friendly interface. It’s easy for the buyer persona to find an answer to its questions:

What does Divante do?

"We’re experts in providing top-notch eCommerce solutions and products for both B2B and B2C segments."

What technologies do you use?

Vue, Pimcore, Magento, SAP…

What services do you offer?

The menu is well organized, with clearly stated submenus in terms of products and services.

Besides services, Divante has built its own products for e-commerce:

This only comes natural for a software house, after gaining so much knowledge, moving towards a SaaS approach has long term benefits.

How can I trust you?

Case studies backed by data, testimonials, client listing, awards.

How can I contact you?

• “Contact us” button
• “Estimate a project” button in the homepage, above the fold
• Contact form

If you want more data, Divante has prepared a top-notch info pack.

In terms of conversion rate optimization, they seem to be using Hotjar (according to SimilarTech). Also they are using Hubspot chat and forms for marketing automation purposes. In the end, it's all for the sake of improving the sales cycle and conversion rates.

Divante’s Traffic Acquisition

The main website traffic sources for June 2019 were:

What could account as direct website traffic?

• offline events: conferences, meetups and hackathons
• referral traffic not tagged
• sales reps activities

Content Marketing

Like for our Netguru growth story, the approach for the content marketing analysis is based on the RACE framework.

I'm gonna look at the content strategy from the reach and act stages, where you build awareness around the brand and design the first touchpoints with the contacts.

The convert phase of the RACE framework revolves around paying customers, so this is a task for the sales team. The marketing team is responsible for generating high quality leads in the first two phases.

The engage part of the framework y the sales team in B2B, while the engage part can have different responsibles (account managers, support team, CEO…).

• REACH

Brand awareness at Divance is built mainly through offline events, social media postings, blog and website content.

Now, let's move a bit to the blog. The blog is updated about bi-weekly. Lots of categories are used.

The majority of the posts are not very technical, and, besides Agata Młodawska, the Marketing Manager and Aleksandra Kwiecien, the Content Manager, other non-marketing team members are writing content.

From time to time, some pieces of content are signed by Tom and Piotr Karwatka, the CEO and CTO of Divante.

But let’s see which are the most valuable pages on the Divante website:

It seems that the most traffic is brought to the blog pages. In the top 10 pages, there are only two pages that are not blog related: the homepage and contact page.

But let’s take a look at the keywords. The trend looks nice, slowly but surely upward.

Only one keyword cluster is standing out in terms of traffic and position: banking loyalty programs/rewards.

Moving away from the blog, Divante has created really powerful non-gated pieces of content:

• Case studies with famous brands: Reserved, ING, Intersport etc

• Slideshare content: 100+ slideshares and thousands of views

• audio content: podcast "E-Commerce Talks"

• ACT

It's time to move further down in the funnel. During the act phase users engage with Divante's gated content. In exchange for contact data they get access to original, valuable information.

The tools used here are:

• newsletter

• gated case studies

• eBooks and their lead magnets. There is a large collection of eBooks designed by Divante, the topics vary from trends and insights, various tops, market reports, "state of" type of analysis to vertical related issues (fashion, pharma…).

Divante seems to be testing various lead magnet designs, positioning the CTA and form above or below the fold.

It seems that they employ virality tools, shares in exchange for download via Pay with a Tweet.

• product demos

Backlinks to Support Content Marketing

Good original content needs backlinks in order to get some Google love. So, let's peep at Divante's backlinks a bit.

The links come from relevant e-commerce or SaaS related websites.

Guest blogging seems to be a backlink and traffic source as well, gotcha Agata:

Divante’s Paid Traffic Acquisition

In terms of paid Google search ads, Divante is promoting the Magento development service, bidding on “magento web development” related keywords, which are really bottom of the funnel keywords. They go straight for high intent keywords.

On the other hand, they also push ads that promote their reports.

The landing page is really compelling, with its clear CTA and above the fold social proof.

Spyfu estimates a budget below $1k.

While the Google search ads are Magento focused, on the sponsored Facebook posts side we see a progressive web apps approach.

Using Similar Tech I've noticed that they have the Quora, AdRoll retargeting pixels installed as well, also the Twitter and Bing pixels.

So, there's more than meets the eye with these guys when it comes to paid advertising. They don't shy away from challenges.

Social Selling

Regarding the Medium positioning, it seems that Piotr Krawatka, CTO of Divante, and other Divante colleagues are editing The Vue Storefront Journal.

Beginning with June 2018, there is an increasing Medium focus. And the engagement seems rewarding.

Wrap Up

From the B2B marketing point of view, it seems that a consistent content strategy, seasoned with some events and marketing automation, is the recipe of success for this e-commerce software house, Divante.

But let’s make a more comprehensive list of takeaways:

• Release valuable open source projects
• Don't shy away from taking a SaaS approach
• Go the extra mile in the relationship with your clients
• Have a content strategy across the entire buyer’s journey and test various format: text, imagery, audio, video
• Letting your community in on your plans for the future is great for business, it builds trust and increases brand awareness

So, this was our Divante pit stop.

But the race ain’t over yet.

And it’s not only about Wroclaw, but Poland's success story.

So, check out our Growth Marketing Secrets of Top European Software Houses – Poland Edition 2019 ebook to see below the tip of the iceberg.

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The Polish Software House that Wants to Forge the Future [Marketing Study]

With an employee growth of 67% in the last 2 years and a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 212%, this Polish software house is on a roll.

We're the witnesses of a spectacular growth for Tooploox.

Tooploox is the place where innovation happens.

Hiring scientists from universities across Europe and even Stanford, Tooploox has chosen its weapon: Artificial Intelligence.

They are moving beyond the outsourcing stereotype and they are embracing the future.

Next, we’ll dig into its marketing secrets and see how the company manages to position itself in a very noisy market.

TABLE OF CONTENT

• Tooploox Polish Software House – Short Overview
• Tooploox Marketing Strategies Reverse Engineered
• Tooploox Traffic Acquisition
• Content Marketing
• Tooploox Community Involvement
• Employer branding and hiring
• Wrap Up

In almost six years and Tooploox has grown from three people to 110 (by april 2018).

Its business development team was created beginning with 2016. Quite impressive so far, but what followed, see below.

Tooploox Polish Software House – Short Overview

From Deloitte, to Financial Times, to Clutch, everyone has heard of Tooploox.

Big players in tourism, healthcare, consumer goods or education have shaken hands with Tooploox: Lufthansa, ING Bank, Royal Carribean, homebook.pl.

The projects varied from app design to experimenting with beacons.

What do their clients say about them? See next:

• High-level project management skills
• Flexibility
• Open to feedback
• Customer-focus
• Results-oriented

Next in our blog post, we’ll find out how:

• Content marketing should go hand in hand with outbound sales
• Employer branding is a must in a crowded market
• Community involvement is a always a go-to

Tooploox Marketing Strategies Reverse Engineered

Less than 7 years on the market, 4 offices (one in Berlin) and a revenue of EUR 3M+ in 2016: Tooploox is growing steadily with the help of sales, marketing, and a good product-market fit.

Since we’re a digital marketing agency, we’ll focus on the strategies that Tooploox employs to market themselves.

Brand Awareness at Tooploox

One of the youngest companies we’ve analyzed so far (founded in 2012), Tooploox has amazed CEE with its phenomenal revenue growth during 2013-2016. Thus, it ranked 4th in Deloitte’s Tech Fast 50 CEE 2017.

And let’s not forget the Financial Times award aforementioned.

Tooploox is among the selected SMEs to participate in the Future Unicorn Award, an award with the purpose to highlight innovative SMEs that have the potential to become Europe’s next unicorns. The award is compiled by asking all the national trade associations affiliated with Digital Europe to nominate a single SME from their country.

Another recognition worth mentioning: Tooploox became a member of the Fast Growth Icons Network 2019. This community works as invitation-only, the selected companies have to show considerable traction in terms of revenue, users & funding. The typical member is growing by 50% per annum.

Now, Tooploox wants to position itself as a fast growing tech company as well as an innovative one. Just take a look at its advisory board: scientists, professors, PhDs.

The Tooploox Website

The Tooploox website is clean and breathable, and it's brand new, they've redesigned it recently.

Does it answer the questions of a potential client? Let’s check it out.

What do you do?

It’s not quite clear from the above the fold copy, which says “We build digital products for your success".

When scrolling down, you get this:

Why should I trust you?

Here are some of our clients:

And they’ve built a team of scientists that have graduated from big universities such as Stanford, this should enforce some trust.

How can I contact you?

Via phone or website form.

In terms of conversion rate optimization, Tooploox is using Hotjar, so they intend to map out the user behavior on their website, and probably optimize around it.

Tooploox Traffic Acquisition

Direct and search traffic account for more than 90% of the website traffic.

In terms of direct traffic, it's above 15%.

Like in the case of Poznan's software houses, we can assume that this high percentage could be the effect of:

• branding efforts within offline events
• referral traffic not tagged
• sales reps activities (they have 2 team members involved in business development), and are looking to hire 2 new ones.

Content Marketing

The main blog categories are Artificial Intelligence, Blockchain, Culture, Design, Mobile, Technology, Web. The Culture topic is aiming to build employer branding.

All the blog posts get shared to Medium too.

The most popular pages on the website are blog pages:

Further on, if we look at their most important keywords, we see that there isn’t yet a clear cluster of keywords trying to rank high.

We see that tech content is written by tech-skilled people, just like Jeremy here, who is an AI engineer.

But not everything revolves around blogging in content marketing.

Tooploox also features short case studies that show off their expertise.

Now, let’s take a look at some long-form content examples from Tooploox.

What we’ve got here is…research papers. Computer vision, neural networks…heavy stuff. This content is not gated, no leads are being collected, you just download it freely.

Backlinks to Support Content Marketing

Next, in order to rank organically, having good original content ain't good enough. Backlinks are a must.

For Tooploox, the backlinks are looking good. We’ve got website and blogs with a domain-rating above 70 that link back to the Tooploox hompepage, mainly, or blog.

So, we’ve got meetup.com linking back, techstars.com, designrush.com, they all have tech-related content, which is good for Tooploox.

Another good link comes from jobs.lever.co.

So, intended or not, listing meetups on meetups.com or jobs on lever.co, means high-quality do-follow-links.

Tooploox Paid Traffic Acquisition

While content strategy pushes forward AI, machine learning related content, the paid marketing strategies have a different approach.

With its Google search ads, Tooploox is promoting the web and custom software development services.

Tooploox also uses Facebook in its promotional efforts: they’ve boosted posts for job hiring promotion.

Tooploox Social Presence

With more than three billion people around the world using social media every month, this is not a passing trend.

Be it for employer branding, for getting new leads and customers, or for connecting with stakeholders, all of the software houses we’ve analyzed so far are active on most popular of the social media channels out there.

For Tooploox, the social media strategies are mostly about employer branding and building brand awareness.

Tooploox Facebook Page

Facebook’s posts are headed mostly around building employer branding. Job opportunities, blog content – it’s all on Facebook.

Events and celebrations are not forgotten either, like the announcement for their AI residency program or other speaking gigs they attend to.

The average engagement/post is 14, which comes close to the data we found for the rest of the software houses.

Instagram

It’s no news that the Instagram account is employer branding focused. It’s very usual in the market.

In the Tooploox case, the employer branding purpose is obvious from the profile bio that links to a blog article. This article is a bit special, it talks about a new management system implemented at Tooploox: the holacracy.

This system doesn’t develop specific hierarchical levels in a company but empowers each and every team member. Everyone is aligned with the company’s mission and goals and can get involved in the decision making process.

Pretty neat I’d say, I’m curious if this hook is really working when dealing with hiring.

Next in the line, what else do we see on the Instagram page?

There is also some client-oriented content like illustrations and designs did by Tooploox

or awards they’ve won:

Aaaand, check this one: proving their AI skills on a trending topic – Game of Thrones.

LinkedIn

On its LinkedIn profile Tooploox shares blog posts they’ve created, info on products they've built, news from the industry and a lot of hiring opportunities.

Also, events are not neglected.

The focus is split between employee oriented and client oriented.

Twitter

On Twitter, the Tooploox messaging goes two ways:

• building employer-branding: through promoting employee-related events, job opportunities, meetups they organize.

• is mostly speaking of hiring opportunities and events they go to or host.
• customer acquisition: through building awareness around the brand, proving they are experts in the field and that they deserve their partners' trust.

See this tweet, for example. It establishes Tooploox as a true machine learning connoisseur:

And there’s another tweet that shows that Tooploox is really involved in the community and where the idea of expertise in machine learning is reinforced:

Dribbble

The Dribbble profile could make a lot of software houses feel envy, because of the high engagement.

They are showing off their product design skills through showcasing animations, illustrations, apps they’ve designed.

They are also promoting their blog posts, whenever they have the chance so that they show their blog content to a whole new audience.

Also, whenever possible, Tooploox is also promoting job offers. And where should you go when you want to hire someone in the product team? On Dribbble, of course. Good product designers should be showcasing their designs here and might even be a fan of yours.

Tooploox Community Involvement

The community involvement for Tooploox goes two ways:

• Organizing events: meetups, workshops, open office
• Attending conferences and speaking gigs

In an ever-crowded market, with fierce competition both for clients and employees, you just can’t sit still in a corner and wait for a miracle.

You have to go out there and make a name for yourself.

And Tooploox definitely understands this: they speak at gigs, sponsor events, hold hackathons and workshops.

Employer branding and hiring

Former employees speak very favorably about Tooploox on Glassdoor, praising:

• The startup atmosphere
• Opportunities to learn and develop
• Good benefits

Some argue that because of the rapid growth some, the atmosphere has been ruined, and there is not a lot of room for promotion. This is the answer he got on Glassdoor from the management team.

Tooploox wants is looking to expand its team of engineers.

but has also developed a fellowship called the “AI Residency Program”.

Most of the software houses we’ve analyzed so far use images or text in their social media posting with employer branding purposes. Tooploox wanted to twist things a little bit. Hiring a bunch of professionals, they’ve designed a really appealing hiring video.

Tooploox Employer branding video, starring Leon the Cat

Another interesting fact, during a hackathon back in 2017 an idea came to light, Thanksy. Lately they brought it to light: an app that integrates with Slack that works as an engaging and unique way to say thank you. The purpose: strengthening the company's values. It's story, here.

Wrap Up

Employer branding and AI expansion, this is the Tooploox focus.

While other software houses are entirely advocating for mobile, other for web development, others for e-commerce software, Tooploox bets on machine learning and AI.

From the marketing point of view, Tooploox teaches us that:

• Find your niche, from web development, design, blockchain, AI, there's room for everyone, as long as you do a good job
• Employer branding is essential when you want to build the scientist team you dream of
• Outbound sales are no longer enough, a content strategy should go hand in hand with it
• Community involvement, if done well, can open the doors for you to clients and employees

Hope you enjoyed our case study. There are more to come. So, don't go anywhere.

We've got software houses stories made in Poznan, Wroclaw. Krakow's and Warsaw's success stories are on their way.

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from Digital Marketing Automation Consulting | MAN Digital https://mandigitalblog.blogspot.com/2019/07/the-polish-software-house-that-wants-to.html
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The Marketing Secrets Behind the 1st Polish App Development Company

Walt Disney, Nestle, Unilever, Giphy seem to have something in common, besides being world famous.

They worked with Droids On Roids.

A Wroclaw app development company.

Pretty amazing I would say.

Featured in Forbes’ “30 under 30” or Deloitte’s Fast Tech CEE 2017, the Droids on Roids are in very good shape.

So, what lays behind 4-year revenue growth of 761%?

We’ll try to find you the answers.

We’ll dwell into employer branding and marketing strategies to see what led Droids On Roids to build applications for world known brands.

TABLE OF CONTENT

• Droids On Roids – Short Overview of the App Development Company
• Droids On Roids Marketing Strategies Reverse Engineered
• Brand Awareness at the Droids on Roids
• The Droids on Roids Website and Conversion Rate Optimization
• The Droids on Roids Traffic Acquisition
• Content Marketing
• The Droids on Roids Social Presence
• The Droids On Roids Community Involvement
• Employer branding and hiring
• Marketing and Process Automation at the Droids On Roids
• Wrap Up

Younger than most of the companies we’ve analyzed, the Droids On Roids managed to outsmart competitors and climb to Clutch tops.

What kind of energy fueled this evolution?

Watch and learn.

Droids On Roids – Short Overview of the App Development Company

We call ourselves "Droids" because we enjoy being down to earth and straightforward with people. In this case, “Roids” is our passion for creating the best possible products for our Clients and that is why we might be the Droids On Roids you are looking for. – Wojciech Szwajkiewicz, CEO at Droids On Roids

But what do their clients say about the Droids on Roids? See next:

• high-level programming talent, attention to detail
• attentive customer service, proactive and responsive
• amazing project management skills and overcoming challenges
• top notch communication
• creativity in developing applications

So, you wanna hang out with Nestle or Disney, or have lunch with Unilever?

Let’s see how these guys do it.

Follow me to find out how:

• Content marketing plays out for the Droids on Roids
• Employer branding is at the core of the business
• Community involvement is a must to get your name heard
• You can benefit from open source as a marketing channel

Droids On Roids Marketing Strategies Reverse Engineered

Back in 2017, there was only one person behind Droids on Roids marketing. By the end of the year, the team reached 4.

So, it seems that Kasia Ubysz, their Marketing Manager is really an inbound fan. This explains the search traffic representing almost 70% of the website’s overall monthly traffic (according to Semrush). And that’s really something.

We’ll go deeper in the topic in the following minutes, when we’ll reverse engineer the Droids on Roids marketing strategies.

Brand Awareness at the Droids on Roids

Since 95 percent of the people are imitators and only 5 percent initiators, people are persuaded more by the actions of others than by any proof we can offer ― Robert B. Cialdini, Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion

So, every company should make some buzz around it, via networking, events, in social media, awards. Anything that might enable positive word-of-mouth.

It’s no easy job, this one.

The Droids on Roids Awards

The company is the first mobile app developer in Poland as per Clutch.

Wojciech Szwajkiewicz and Tomasz Muter – CEO & Vice-President of Droids On Roids – are included on the prestigious “30 under 30” list announced in October 2017, in the Polish Forbes magazine.

Only two weeks later, the Droids On Roids were awarded by Deloitte: a proud 17 rank in the Technology Fast 50 Central Europe 2017.

The Droids on Roids Website and Conversion Rate Optimization

Services, technologies, case studies, portfolio, social proof – everything is there, surrounded by an eye-catching design.

But is the website answering potential clients’ basic questions?

What do you do?

Mobile & web app development. Building apps for the US and UK.

How can I trust you?

Here are my most important clients, their testimonials, the open source libraries we created and the awards received so far.

How can I contact you?

Via chat or asking for an estimation. In order to be more convincing, and increase their chances of conversion they are making a promise to the potential client: free estimation within 3 days.

They use pop-ups when the homepage visitor shows exit intent. The pop up leads the visitor to the blog, so they try to move the visitor down in the funnel, educate him.

Next, when trying to exit the blog, there’s another pop-up, trying to move the user from the awareness stage of the journey to the consideration one.

Regarding the conversion rate optimization, they have just installed Hotjar, so they intend to better understand their website user behavior, and probably optimize around that.

It seems that Droids on Roids has experimented with marketing automation, first with Hubspot, and more recently with user.com

The Droids on Roids Traffic Acquisition

Direct and search traffic account for almost 90% of the website traffic.

Just like the case of most of the B2B software companies, I'm suspecting direct traffic might be due to:

• branding efforts within offline events
• referral traffic not tagged (Clutch included)
• sales reps activities (they have two new business developers in the team)

Content Marketing

The main blog categories are business, scrum, UI, UX, Android, iOS, news, java, kotlin.

The technical themes are mainly covered by devs.

If we take a look at their top pages, we get this:

Earlier we just said that they are into mobile & web app development. Well, their most traffic comes via blog posts tackling android development.

The homepage also gets an important amount of traffic. That correlates with the 30%+ of direct website traffic.

And if we peek at their most important keywords:

we see “app development”, “android” related keywords.

So, they are really focused on their content strategy and it’s working well.

Now, let’s move on to case studies.

Case studies are also part of their content strategy.

The latest thing for Droids on Roids is the ebook on Flutter. Here's the lead magned they did:

It seems the ebook was a hit, as per this post:

So, they've got 1200 downloads, great reviews from Flutter responsibles inside Google and 1st global position for "Flutter pros and cons" and "apps made with Flutter". Great job, guys!

Moving on, the thing that caught my eye, as I haven’t seen it done by other software houses is a product design workshop:

When potential clients aren’t “warm” enough to sign the contract, the workshop might be the perfect way to introduce yourself to the client and let him taste a bit from the experience of working with you.

So…a potential funnel for the Droids could be: organic traffic to blog post -> ebook download -> workshop enrolment->sale.

Backlinks to Support Content Marketing

Looking good: do-follow backlinks from websites with domain rating above 70. The websites are technical or promoting jobs and events.

One could recognize here: Reddit, Behance, Medium, Stackoverflow, Meetup.com.

The Droids on Roids Paid Traffic Acquisition

Keywords they bid on relate to mobile app development, which is consistent with their content strategy also.

But they seem they’ve taken on a new challenge: IoT.

As per the display ads, the positioning is original: a 4-person development team at the cost of max $15.6k. Or Mobiles Developers, Tester and Scrum Master: 3 for 1 price.

At this very moment, the company uses Facebook sponsored posts for job hiring promotion.

The Droids on Roids Social Media Presence

As we've already been used to, Facebook is mostly used for employer branding, and LinkedIn messaging is addressing mainly potential clients.

The Droids on Roids Facebook Page

2900+ Facebook followers get regular updates from Droids on Roids regarding events they’re hosting, blog posts they’ve created, team events, jobs available.

Facebook’s posts are headed mostly towards posing as a great employer, with a great team and office.

Because most of the posts are people-oriented, this might explain the engagement rate that is higher than for other software houses we’ve analyzed.

Instagram

The Instagram account is clearly employer branding focused. This is the case for all the software houses we’ve analyzed so far.

It’s all about the:

• events they organize, attend to

• creative people

• having fun at the job
• the amazing office and cozy environment
• celebrating success

• hiring opportunities

• company culture

Linkedin

On their Linkedin profile the Droids share jobs available, awards they’ve received, events they’ve been to or organized. So the focus goes both the client and the employee way.

The posts are happening around twice a month.

The blog articles are being promoted. A business should never miss a chance to discover new audiences for the blog content: be it social media, Medium, Dribbble, there’s nothing to lose.

Twitter

The stories on Linkedin or Facebook are encountered on Twitter also, the messaging is being adapted to the specifics on each platform.

Unlike Monterail, the messaging here is not really client-oriented, it is mostly about employer branding.

Events, jobs, blog articles, it’s all on Twitter.

Dribbble

The engaging on Dribbble is simply fantastic. They’re getting close to Netguru’s Dribbble stats.

They really know how to show off their design skills, be it android, iOS, front-end or product design.

Open Source Libraries as a Marketing Channel

Remember this screenshot?

I hope it didn’t go unnoticed.

This is one of my favorite Droids on Roids initiatives on the marketing side.

They’ve put a lot of work in developing open source libraries but it finally paid out.

I mean, who gets to say that they’ve impressed Facebook or Whatsapp?

This really brought value to the user and managed to exhibit a lot of development skills.

So, if you're doing this, make it stand out!

The Droids On Roids Community Involvement

These guys are really into networking, from organizing to hosting and sponsoring, they’re everywhere.

The droids are coming! They are pretty much everywhere, educating developers and designers during events such as:

• Meetups for iOS developers or designers (Dribbbble meetups)
• Meetups for Androids developers
• iOS and Androids bootcamps

• Lectures around iOS and Android development

• Sponsoring tech meetups

Employer branding and hiring

No Glassdoor profile found, yet. There are some statements in one of their blog posts, but too biased to be reliable.

They’re looking to expand the team and they’re being open in terms of salary and perks.

It’s interesting that they’re making a Golang turn, the Google-backed programming language.

They really love their office cool look and are using this as a magnet for future employees.

No sacrifice is enough to get the right dude/dudette for the job, they’re willing to cover relocation fees.

There is so much focus on employer branding because the right talent is hard to find, competition is fierce, the average tenure being around 2 years.

Conclusions

Now, what seems to be the success recipe for the Droids on Roids?

• Building the right team – of developers, marketers, management
• Build a strong company culture
• Excel at project management skills
• Have a strategic approach to content marketing
• Meetups, conferences, you gotta be there!

“Work hard, play hard” seems to be the secret of Droids On Roids.

But the story doesn’t end here, in Wroclaw.

We are aiming for a bigger picture. A picture where software houses in Poznan, Wroclaw, Warsaw and Krakow are fighting for supremacy, where Netguru, Monterail, Droids on Roids and other knocking down barriers.

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