What Can a Software Company in Poznan Teach You About Marketing?

Merixstudio wants to position itself as being a creative software development house.

As David Ogilvy once said: “If it doesn’t sell; it isn’t creative”, Merixstudio does sell, making around $15M+, as Owler estimates. So, are they living by their slogan?

Let’s figure it out together.

Merixstudio: Top Software Development Company - Short Overview

49 awards in 19 years of doing business? Oh my…

With 150+ clients spread worldwide, it seems that nearshoring works as well as offshoring for Merixstudio.

Merixstudio seems to be diversifying its investments. They seem to want to live by this rule: “Don’t put all your eggs in the same basket”. Pretty wise I might say.

According to this principle, Merixstudio owns two more brands:

• Digital Signage by Merixstudio is focused on creating interactive applications and games for digital signage. Digital signage is a sub-segment of electronic signage.

Digital displays use technologies such as LCD, LED, projection and e-paper to display digital images, video, web pages, weather data and more.

• GoDealla is a leading digital coupon marketplace in Poland

Moving on, let’s see what former clients say the main strengths of Merixstudio are:

• Cost-effective development services
• Consistent delivery beyond expectations, good communication and ethics
• Customer focus, thoroughness and attention to detail
• Smooth project management, flexibility
• In-depth technical knowledge, up-to-date technology and coding

So, what should a top software development company do to shake hands with companies such as Toshiba, HSBC, The Independent, Homes.com, Virgin or Volkswagen?

It’s time to find the sweet spots in Merixstudio’s marketing efforts. Let all secrets aside.

We will learn that:

• An engaged community can strengthen a brand
• The proper content strategy can bring the right quality traffic and leads
• Employer branding is key to developing the right team

This is just a glimpse of what’s coming up next, so stay tuned.

Merixstudio’s Marketing Strategies Reverse Engineered

In the past, differentiation was achieved through a superior product, a fast supply chain, or great customer service.

Nowadays, everybody does it and it’s getting so darn hard to move the needle.

How can you win this game?

Well, it’s time to learn from one of the best, one that almost never misses being ranked as a top software development company by Clutch: Merixstudio.

We’ll put under the microscope Merixstudio’s marketing strategies and study their growth story, so follow me.

Brand Awareness at Merixstudio

One can create the best software solution but if no one knows it exists, you are pitching the idea to an empty room.

For Merixstudio, the 40+ awards are doing just that: filing the room.

Merixstudio’s Awards

Merixstudio always finds its way to Clutch tops:

• Ranks 4 in Top World Angular JS Developers (2018)

• Ranks 1 in Top World Custom Software Developers (2018)

• Ranks 2 Top World Python & Django Developers (2018)

The Manifest made its own top 100 web development companies, and Merixstudio is ranked sixth.

So, Poznan is feeling lucky: make way! STX Next, Merixstudio and Netguru are leading the game.

Merixstudio’s Website and Conversion Rate Optimization

Being ranked 6th best web development company, Merixstudio should have a world-class website, right?

First, let’s ask some questions and see if the answer is close-by:

• What does Merixstudio do?

“We build functional & super-awesome-looking web applications, websites and HTML5 games. We love open source”.

• Can you give me some examples of your work?

There you go: portfolio and case studies by category and technology.

• How can I reach out to you?

See “contact” in the website menu.

With a clear menu and submenus, easy navigation, a chatbot implemented, Merixstudio is providing a good user experience.

Social proof is visible: testimonials, clients, awards.

In the ”Ideas” section of the website features the company’s personal projects, such as games which can be played right away.

Kinda creative I might say?

Speaking of, their weekly digest wants to be a creative wrap up of tech and design insights.

They’ve designed a micro-website where they speak about what they do, how they do it, successful projects, why outsource with them and PR mentions.

Here visitors can also subscribe to a newsletter, an original one. This is new for me: promoting exclusive previews of their software solutions.

Conversion Rate Optimization

So far, I haven’t noticed any personalization while navigating the website.

They seem to be using Hotjar, according to Similartech, so they want to get the hang of conversion rate optimization and A/B testing.

Because Merix is a Hubspot user, they could take advantage of the personalization features it provides.

There are so many other opportunities out there up for grabs, such as:

• Making personalized case studies recommendations depending on the blog post the user is reading
• Landing pages that differ per vertical, country
• Customized drip email campaigns (perhaps they are already doing this, cos it’s easily done within Hubspot)
• Leveraging the chat bot and pop-ups for moving the lead down in the funnel

Speaking of chat bot, Merix is using Hubspot’s chatbot. In the age of artificial intelligence, considering a chatbot is just a small piece of the pie when it comes to conversion rate optimization.

If you want to get in touch with a team member you can schedule a call. Else, you can leave an email and they’ll contact you back.

Going for automation, and having most of the business in the cloud makes you kinda vulnerable. Make sure you take all the measures to be on the safe side, think of data backups, so that you won't lose any contacts, workflows or worse.

Merixstudio’s Traffic Acquisition

Direct and search traffic are responsible for more than 85% of Merixstudio’s website traffic.

In terms of direct traffic, I’m assuming it’s accounted for:

• Community events - Meaning that they do all sort of events and promote their website there
• Untagged links - no UTM tracking added to their link,
• Business development reps activities ( at least 4 according to Linkedin ) - This could be email outreach and sales emails mainly

But let’s see some absolute numbers, because percentages can be deceiving:

My guess is, the organic traffic increased 15 times since the beginning of 2017! The data might not be 100% accurate, but still, the results are there.

Further on, our analysis will go even deeper than this. So, blink twice if you’re still with me.

Content Marketing

The design of the blog is not quite as what you’ve been used with. They’re challenging a bit the design.

It takes some time to get used to it, because we’ve been educated by other blogs to have a different kind of listing, but Merixstudio is giving a shot to a different approach.

The main categories are: business & agile, product design, code & tools, people and events, and case studies.

According to Spyfu, Merixstudio has 74 keywords that show up on the first page, and 91 ambitious ones that rank 11 to 16.

Below you can find the keywords that bring in the most traffic.

And here are the top 5 blog post pages:

Do you see a pattern there? Most popular blog posts and keywords talk about different technologies, comparisons.

And the technical blog posts are created by developers.

Take a look at these ones:

It’s great when developers are involved in content creation because tech subjects seem to have lots of traction in this industry and can be the proof of expertise.

Backlinks to Support Content Marketing

I’ve dug a bit through Merixstudio’s backlinks. They’ve got some really good quality stuff linking back to mostly to their homepage (quite unusual for the business, usually the blog posts are getting the backlinks).

I’m talking about do-follow links from domains with a domain rating above 70!

The content linking back comes from tech and design websites and blogs.

So, it’s starting to make sense, right?

Original content + quality backlinks = a lot of Google love.

Social Selling

Hi Michał, nice to meet you. Michał Lisewski is a researcher and business developer at Merixstudio. He deals with editing answers on Quora, he mainly mingles with outsourcing topics.

Quora is a great place to demonstrate expertise on your subject. When done properly, a business can showcase knowledge in its niche, can get new traffic from brand new audiences on the blog and other types of content. As long as you provide real value you can get more followers or subscribers.

Merixstudio’s Social Presence

Building a social media presence is not a stand-alone marketing strategy.

From community engagement, events networking, client and employees interactions everything will end up there: in social media.

It’s not all about some vanity metrics like impressions or likes. It’s more than that: it’s brand awareness and employee branding altogether.

Facebook

The Facebook profile seems to be a tool to build employer branding for Merix.

Regarding Facebook, it seems that images and posts about team members get the most interactions, according to Buzzsumo.

The average engagements rises to 13/post:

Merixstudio is publishing on Facebook consistently, promoting their blog posts, speaking about their team members, events they’ve participated in, awards they’ve received. Just like the neighbor next-door, the software consulting company,Netguru.

Instagram

Same as with Facebook, the Instagram account seems to be a channel where Merixstudio is trying to build employer branding:

Through the content posted on Instagram Merix wants potential employees to have a taste of the company’s culture and see how day-to-day life goes on at the office...and around it.

They also promote events they organize or go to.

The main message is: it’s all about the people.

Twitter

On Twitter the messaging goes two ways: improving employer branding and getting more clients.

At the beginning of 2019 video content seems to be taking over the Twitter account.

Whether it’s about talking about the latest blog post, or events they’ve been to, Merix knows that video content will take over social media.

And because Merix is all over the place: from conferences, meetups to workshops, tweets speaking of their community involvement are everywhere.

LinkedIn

The LinkedIn account is merely about building brand awareness among future clients.

Blog posts, events they organize or attend to, all is there.

Being more client oriented, the focus for the moment seems to be promoting their Django Trench release. It’s their open source application that deals with two-factor authentication for Django REST Framework.

Also, they are building a Hate Speech Detector using machine learning (this sounds awesome!). Not only that machine learning is the new hype, but also “hate speech” is an important issue in media and on the internet in the latest years. And they seem to have the solution for that. This could get a lot of traction if promoted properly!

Dribbble and Behance

The Dribbble account has 115 followers by now, not quite in focus, but it’s pretty darn hard to handle a lot of channels and one needs to prioritize.

Their Behance account is a bit in its infancy, but there’s plenty of room to grow.

These two online communities are helping businesses to showcase designer/web-designer work and more. But it’s not enough to display your art there.

You have to take the bull by the horns and get yourself noticed. Besides engaging in interactions (leaving constructive feedback and questions on other designs, start following other UX designers, web-designer etc), the portfolio should be actively promoted on social media.

Community Building at Merixstudio

As a top software development company, Merixstudio is clearly all-in for building its branding offline though getting involved in the community.

DevCollege is a Merixstudio Project that delivers web and game development workshops, since 2017.

These are whole-day events, held at their office, that combines practical workshops and technical presentations.

Django Hotspot is another community event that’s grown since 2016, gathering Django/Python fans at dedicated meetups.

Another initiative is called front.radar and focuses on the frontend development community.

Employer Branding and Hiring

Peeking at what former employees have to say about Merixstudio on Glassdoor, we’ve found only 3 results, not quite statistically relevant.

They praise the great people working there, the motivation & support, the financial & non-financial perks and the good learning & development environment.

Currently, they are looking to expand their developer, QA, design and project management teams. They are very transparent about the salary and career path, same as Netguru.

Summing Up

So, what is Merixstudio really good at?

• Exceeding clients’ expectations through stunning coding and project management skills
• Showcasing their front-end and coding skills by building interactive games and apps
• Designing a good content strategy that managed to propel them on the first page of search results
• Mastering events and community engagement
• Employer branding

So, yeah, they should be on your follow list, next to the software consulting company, Netguru and Poznan's software house, STX Next.

We’ve covered their success stories early on.

Here we’re closing our series about the 3 magnificent software houses in Poznan.

It was a journey full of revelations on how inbound marketing is contributing to the business growth, how employer branding is crucial in a very noisy market hungry for the right talent, where a strong social media presence is vital for getting your voice heard.

But, the picture we’re painting goes further than Poznan. This top software development company is facing serious competitors in Kraków, Wroclaw and Warsaw with their superstar companies.

Wanna check their stories? Get our ebook: The Growth Marketing Secrets of Top European Software Houses - Poland Edition 2019.