The Marketing Secrets Behind the 1st Polish App Development Company

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

The App Development Company, Droids On Roids

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.

Deloitte feauring

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 Contents 

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
Clutch reviews

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.

Growing marketing team

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.

Organic keywords

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.

Top app development company on 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.

Featured in 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.

Deloitte award

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.

The website
Testimonials

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.

Estimate project - CTA

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.

Pop up

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.

Exit intent pop-up

Regarding the conversion rate optimization, they have just installed Hotjar, so they intend to do usability testing for a better understanding of their website user behavior, and probably optimize around that.

Hotjar

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

Hubspot

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)
Website traffic sources

Content Marketing

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

The technical themes are mainly covered by devs.

Developers write content

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

Top 5 pages

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:

Top 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.

Case studies

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

Lead magnet for Flutter ebook

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

Flutter Ebook promotion

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:

Low entry point offer

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.

Workshop as low entry point offer

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.

backlinks

The Droids on Roids Paid Traffic Acquisition

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

PPC keywords
Google search ad - promoting mobile app development

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

ads promoting IoT mobile app development

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.

display ads

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

Facebook sponsored posts

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.

Employer branding on Facebook

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

Facebook interactions

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.

Facebook engagement

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
Promoting events on Instagram
  • creative people
Blog articles on Instagram
  • having fun at the job
  • the amazing office and cozy environment
  • celebrating success
celebrating on Instagram
  • hiring opportunities
Job opportunities on Instagram
  • company culture
Company culture promoted on Instagram

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.

LinkedIn profile

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.

Blog articles on LinkedIn

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.

Twitter profile

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

Events 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.

Dribbble profile

Open Source Libraries as a Marketing Channel

Remember this screenshot?

Open source

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.

Events by The Droids

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
Bootcamp organizing
  • Lectures around iOS and Android development
Teaching mobile app 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.

Job openings

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

The Droids office

No sacrifice is enough to get the right dude/dudette for the job, they’re willing to cover relocation fees.

Relocation budget

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.

Wrap Up

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 app development companies in Poznan, Wroclaw, Warsaw and Krakow are fighting for supremacy, where Netguru, Monterail, Droids on Roids and other knocking down barriers. 

Enter: The Growth Marketing Secrets of Top European Software Houses - Poland Edition 2019, our ebook on 2 months research on growth strategies for successful Polish software houses.

CTA ebook download

about the author
Romeo Mann - The Founder and Head Of Delivery at MAN Digital, responsible for all things top of the funnel, button of the funnel, and customer experience. Having worked in both B2B marketing and sales execution for over a decade. He has experience in both Enterprise and Mid-Size sales. Before founding MAN Digital, he worked at Electrolux and DHL in learning and development and Farnell Element 14 in sales. A whiz when it comes to sales engagement tools and a HubSpot revenue architect. At the moment also pursuing an Executive MBA at Quantic Washington University.