Marketing Secrets Behind 30% YoY Growth📈 Of Ecommerce Software House

How To Run Account Based Selling For Your B2B Company [GUIDE]

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?

The Ecommerce Software House, Divante

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

Deloitte Fast 500- E-commerce software house Divante gets awarded

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 Contents 

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

Divante in numbers
Divante is building products
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:

Vue Storefront reviews

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.

New office in Berlin for Divante

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
Clutch reviews

“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.

Divante's Facebook profile

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
Facebook post on new advisory board members
  • Company culture and employer branding
The tribe model is being implemented at Divante
  • Events they organize or attend to
Facebook hackathon post

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.

Most popular Facebook posts
FB engagement

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
Divante's services promoted on LinkedIn
  • posts that refer to the company culture (internal events, celebrations) and employer branding
  • hiring opportunities
LinkedIn jobs posted by Divante

Twitter

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

Twitter profile

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

Twitter - promoting events

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.

Conferencing

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

Event roadmap

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

Meetups organized by Divante
Divante hackathons

But these are just a drop in the ocean.

Take a look at the community built around Vue Storefront!

Vue storefront community

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.

Careers at Divante

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

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.

building best Vue team

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.

Tribes model
Spotify's Tribe Model

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...

Main technologies

What services do you offer?

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

Divante's Services

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

products by Divante

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.

Social proof on website
Case studies and social proof

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.

Divante's infopack

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.

Hotjar and Hubspot

Divante’s Traffic Acquisition

The main website traffic sources for June 2019 were:

Traffic sources

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.

RACE framework

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.

Blog categories

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:

Top organic pages

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.

Organic traffic trend

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

Top organic keywords

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

  • Case studies with famous brands: Reserved, ING, Intersport etc
Divante's case studies
  • Slideshare content: 100+ slideshares and thousands of views
Divante on Slideshare
100+ slideshares
  • audio content: podcast "E-Commerce Talks"
Podcast
Divante's podcast on Youtube
  • 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
Newsletter by Divante
  • gated case studies
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's ebooks

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

LEad magnet - ecommerce trends
Lead magnet by Divante
Share to download strategy

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

Pay with a Tweet
  • product demos
Magento 4 Fashion Demo

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.

Backlinks for Divante

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:

Guest blogging

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.

Paid keywords
Magento development ads

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

Ad no. 2

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

Spyfu estimates a budget below $1k.

Google ads budget

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

Facebook sponsored posts

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.

Advertising platforms

Social Selling

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

Medium content
Piotr Karwatka writes on Medium

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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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.