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.

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