How Did a Warsaw Development Studio Build Digital Products for Philips and HP?

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

Delivering digital products to 100+ clients, Polidea should nail down web design, right?

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 mobile, web, IoT and Cloud. 

• 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 divided their design and engineering activities and built a separate brand. Meet Utilo!

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.

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.

On the design side of things, Utilo pushes a free 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.

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 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 
• 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.