How Netguru, a software consulting agency in Poland wants to prove that there’s nothing fabulous about Silicon Valley?
With the right moves, skills and company culture you can get 3 times awarded by Deloitte in its Tech Fast 50 in CEE. Ranking as we speak for one of the best software consulting agencies in Poland.
That's how they increased their revenue by 644% in the last 3 years.
Today's blog post is about a company that never ceased to amaze Deloitte, Fortune500, Clutch, Financial Times.
I mean, really?
3 times awarded by Deloitte in its Tech Fast 50 in CEE?
We definitely have to find out what triggered this growth.
So, we'll be telling you employer branding and marketing stories.
Stories like this one:
So, amazing organic growth. But is that all?
Follow me in my quest to see how Netguru is fulfilling its own prophecy of becoming the “Internet guru”.
TABLE OF CONTENT
- Netguru Poznan Software Consulting Agency - Short Overview
- Netguru's Marketing Strategies Reversed Engineered
- Netguru's Brand Awareness
- Netguru's Website and Conversion Rate Optimization
- Netguru's Traffic Acquisition
- Marketing Automation
- Summing Up
Netguru has a big mission: building software for world changers. How is Netguru living by its mission? Just follow me.
Netguru Poznan Software Consulting Agency - Short Overview
Founded in 2008, Netguru went from 3 to 500 employees in 10 years, making it all the way to Fortune500 companies and Financial Times 1000 list.
Netguru’s clients include major corporations and early stage startups from Western Europe, Asia, North America and across the Middle East.
In 2018 Netguru acquired Bitcraft, a software house in Białystok, Poland, that has completed around 40 projects in 9 different time zones, including projects for more than 40 hospitals in Poland.
Former clients say Netguru's main strengths are:
- professional environment and high-quality deliverables
- smooth project management, delivery ahead of estimates, ability to stay on budget
- in-depth technical knowledge, up-to-date technology and coding
- trustworthiness, transparency and commitment, proactivity
- creative problem-solving
Thumbs up, guys!
Next on Baywatch: how does Netguru grow? Did it manage to find the Holy Grail of Marketing and that’s why they deliver projects to clients on all continents?
In the following section we’ll dig deeper intro Netguru’s marketing approach. I will make you understand:
- How building a great website with stunning visual hierarchy can show off your product design skills and increase your conversion rates
- How a strategic approach for content writing can make you lovable by Google...and potential clients
- How building a community around you, you’ll get access to a pool of talent and future clients
- How using tools, marketing automation and conversion rate optimization can get you good qualified leads and customers
But we don’t want to spoil it all for you, just read and learn.
Netguru’s Marketing Strategies Reverse Engineered
Eat or be eaten. That's how things work in the IT business. Companies rise, others fall, meanwhile, Netguru keeps growing.
If you want to know the secrets behind these numbers:
you'll have to come with me and peep into Netguru's strategic marketing approach and branding.
Brand Awareness at Netguru
“It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you'll do things differently”: Warren Buffet
For Netguru it's been 10 years of building.
Do you want to find out why Netguru keeps popping up on Deloitte's Tech Fast 50 list?
Let's dissect how Netguru is designing a great brand.
Netguru’s Awards
Netguru seems to be a constant presence in Clutch’s tops.
Netguru ranks first in the Top NodeJS Development companies in the World (2018).
Also, Netguru holds an honorable 5 rank in the Top Polish App Developers.
Netguru was featured in Deloitte’s Technology Fast 50 Central Europe, three times already, ranking 46 in 2017.
Netguru’s Website and Conversion Rate Optimization
I am not a designer, not even near to the field. Nevertheless one can spot beauty. With a friendly UI and smart UX, Netguru’s website is simple and sending the right message to the user.
What does Netguru do?
Web and mobile development, product design.
How can I get a quote? - Call to Action with Estimate Project.
As Unbounce Co-Founder Oli Gardner puts it "Have a F***** CTA" .
Need more info about web development?
There you go:
With a clear menu, navigation, whitespace used cleverly, the Netguru website really shows off good design and UX.
Good readability, no clutter, balanced contrast, everything used to highlight what’s important and not to overwhelm the user with too much data.
Social proof is everywhere, from testimonials, PR featuring to awards.
They designed ebooks that tackle programming languages, project management and UX, they are downloadable via form.
Case studies are considered really powerful pieces content and Netguru really understands that and puts this to practice.
They feature lots of case studies per different verticals on their website.
They also have some open source Git projects for sharing and some freebie resources:
Netguru boarded the machine learning hype train so they’re even having a by-weekly newsletter on it, there’s a pop-up that invites you in signing up.
Also they use the chat bot for newsletter signup:
In December they rolled over an IoT only newsletter:
Conversion Rate Optimization
Netguru is going to the next level. According to Similartech, they’ve just made a big move for CRO, with Visual Website Optimizer. Big thumbs up.
On the other hand, they’ve been using Hotjar for a while.
In a few months of using Hotjar and analyzing the users’ path (both leads and potential employees), Netguru managed to:
- Decrease the bounce rate by more than 50%
- Drive up the “services” page traffic by 30%
- Drive up the “career” page traffic by more than 50%
- Increase the number of users going further in the services marketing funnel by 17%
I haven’t found any evidence for A/B testing, but they seem to know the theory, as they prove it in this blog post.
Personalization is another strategy that leads to increasing conversion rates.
What stroke my eyes is that on the blog they have customized sticky CTAs. From the inbound consultant’s point of view, they nailed it!
Another thing that stroke me is that the homepage above the fold slider differs from country to country!
For example, in Poland, the purpose of the homepage is around employer branding and hiring. That makes sense, because the Polish market is not their focus in terms of customers.
When not in Poland, well, the story changes and it looks like this:
Lead generation and client focus all the way.
Smart.
Next, also for the purpose of improving the website conversion rate, and for starting conversation with possible leads, a Drift chat bot is active on the website.
Netguru’s Traffic Acquisition
Direct traffic and links account for more than 90% of Netguru's website traffic.
Just like in the case of Poznan software house STX Next, I'm suspecting direct traffic might be due to:
- branding efforts within offline events
- referral traffic not tagged
- sales reps activities (7+ sales reps found on Linkedin)
So, the sales team is on the move! Make way! Emailing, outreaching, they know the drill.
70%+ search traffic? That requires some investigation.
The growth is phenomenal.
From an estimated 6K organic search visitors per month in January 2017 to 57K/month in January 2019 ( as per Ahrefs )
That is approx 850% increase in 2 years. That is pretty impressive for a software consulting agency in Poland.
Ahrefs might not be 100% accurate, as they explain here, but still, the percentage increase is impressive.
What I can see is that they rank on a bunch of technical keywords.
In the next chapter, I'll go more in-depth on how they achieved this growth with content marketing.
Content Marketing
The main topics on Netguru's blog are about:
- Guides, strategies and tips for designers and developers
- Best practices in software development, hacks for different technologies and programming languages
- Advice on technology for product owners, startups
- Project management content
- Trends and predictions in the tech scene
Also, Netguru accepts guest posts and has clear guidelines for this.
Now, let’s make a blog posts top 5:
Seems that Python related posts are making a statement here, just like in the case of STX Next.
Many blog posts are technical, making comparisons between different technologies and frameworks.
My “aha moment”: the developers are involved in content creation.
This shouldn’t be in fact surprising, a content writer does not have the knowledge a developer has.
Time to go more granular now, let's analyse some first page ranking keywords.
Seems that keywords relating to technologies/frameworks comparisons are making a statement here. Lots of traffic, great ranking.
Aaand, gotcha: featured snippets! Good work, Netguru.
Looking at Netguru's top pages, there's one lonely page that's not a blog post and it's not the homepage either.
Overlog, who the f**k is overlog? Well, as Netguru puts it: the simplest app debugger for iOS. Here is the overlog story.
Overlog is an open source tool built by the mobile dev team at Netguru and it seems it gets lots of traction.
Revenons à nos moutons, without the blog traffic, there would be almost no traffic on Netguru's website.
So, definitely content marketing is what makes Netguru stand out. And they're really good at it.
Backlinks to Support Content Marketing
What do Neil Patel, Wordpress, The Next Web, Stackoverflow have in common?
They all link to Netguru's blog or website. And we're talking about high domain rating do-follow links!
Looking at the organic traffic Netguru has right now, SEO and content marketing are at the core of Netguru's marketing strategy.
This means they combine efficiently original content creation with quality link building.
Netguru Paid Traffic Acquisition
In terms of Adwords search ads, they focus on pushing forward the mobile app development and Python outsourcing.
The estimated budget for PPC advertising is $4k+.
This is one landing page example, it’s filled with social proof, project examples, industries.
There are more CTA’s on the page, one for those who are ready to move on in the funnel and get an estimation, others for those who are more in the research mode.
Beside Google search ads, Netguru is experimenting also with Facebook ads.
Netguru Facebook Ads Example
Three topics arise from Netguru’s Facebook ads:
- Product promotion
- Hiring
- Events promotion
The copy tries to be engaging, it often includes social proof.
They are doing also brilliant work with remarketing using Lead Ads to subscribe to their newsletter or direct us to more brand awareness content.
From my assumptions they are having the following remarketing funnel:
On Twitter they promote similar content, even though I didn't see any Twitter Ads ( maybe because they don't advertise on Twitter in Poland as it is not very popular here ).
Social Selling
Meet Radek, he’s Netguru’s Head of Growth and he’s active on Quora. He has a total of 53 answers with topics ranging from React Native (a lot of focus here), startup advice, to comparing different programming languages, SaaS talks and more.
Also, their Senior Content Marketing Specialist, Natalia, has a very active presence on Quora, covering topics like: web development, startups, business, marketing, project management and more.
Netguru’s Social Presence
Would you say this is a B2B business?
- 16k+ Facebook followers
- 8k+ Linkedin followers
- 65k+ Dribble followers
- 20k+ Behance followers
Yeah, me neither.
But these are the numbers behind Netguru's social media presence.
These numbers are not the result of only having the right social media strategy.
All of the other marketing efforts are mirrored by the social media accounts.
From offline events, to content marketing, from clients to employees, or employees wanna be, Netguru can acquire followers.
Next we'll take a peek at Netguru's profile on various social media channels.
Netguru's Facebook page
Around 16.000 Facebook followers are updated on a daily basis about the latest events Netguru participated in, their latest blog content, their team members.
The number of engagements varies (with an average of 16), but there are some really popular posts, most of which relate to team members.
This makes me conclude that Facebook is merely used for employer branding, a strategy used also by STX Next.
Main events promoted on Facebook refer to one-day workshops for college students in the Netguru College series. The main topics feature programming languages and project management.
The Instagram profile is all about the team spirit, Netguru’s culture, events. Clearly the messages are directed to employer branding.
The Linkedin posts relate to the latest events Netguru participated in, their latest blog posts, they’re introducing team members and products and projects they’ve designed.
The profile has reached 8k+ followers. Usually this number correlates with the number of employees on Linkedin.
We can see the content is very strategic and posting enterprise, B2B type of content rather than technical,( i.e. digital transformation)
The bigger the company or the brand, the bigger the number of followers, unless you’re some startup unicorn.
Besides sharing almost the same content that’s being posted on Facebook, on the Twitter profile Netguru also shares news and interesting facts from the industry.
So, the Twitter feed is merely used as a broadcasting platform, where they push out company messages and promote products.
They have some very good copywriters, as their tweets are top-notch. Here are some of the posts promoting mainly content and not services ( an Inbound approach, rather than Outreach ).
Youtube
The Youtube channel features 21 videos, some of them are part of a webinar series called Digital Forum, some of them are recordings from the events they hosted or participated in.
They publish their videos rarely and the video views range from about 50 to 660.
Dribbble
The Netguru Dribbble profile rocks. 65k+ followers? Hard to beat that. They feature 48 projects: apps they’ve worked on, websites and other designs and concepts.
They are the industry’s benchmarks because they found the way to create an engaging profile, with 50+ members onboard.
Behance
And their Behance profile is top-notch too: 94k+ appreciations. They are really managing to inspire their worldwide followers with their product designs.
Compared to the competition, Netguru clearly has the most engaging Behance account.
Netguru Is Building Communities
Netguru has been coaching Ruby on Rails around Poland for 5 years now. Netguru also offers Level Up workshops for more advanced developers.
Since 2015, Netguru has been hosting hackathons at their Poznan HQ and managers have been organizing regular free project management workshops.
Netguru has also cooperated with universities, through delivering workshops and presentations, involving in academic life and during monthly webinars for technology enthusiasts.
Together with Brinc Accelerator and Indiegogo, they partner with the Poznan Hardware Hub, a hardware house specialized in designing for mass production (industrial design, prototyping), so, innovation all the way for these guys.
Netguru also has a thing for meetups, from regular Dribble Meetups for designers, to meetups for Ruby and Swift developers.
In 2017 Netguru hosted in Poznan the Disruption Forum. Speakers from around the world had talks ranging from strategy and management, to emerging trends in developers’ community.
2018 was a year of celebration for Netguru. Turning 10, they remembered how they grew from a small software shop to an international software consulting agency:
The birthday party was held at Lisbon Web Summit, where they also hosted a panel, named “Building Growth: Industry Leaders on Lessons They Learned”.
A big Happy Birthday from us too!
Employer Branding
Now let’s peep a bit at what former employees have to say about Netguru.
Glassdoor comments reveal that the atmosphere is great, everything is transparent, keeping employees happy is a priority, remote working is definitely a plus, there are lots of career opportunities, experienced teams.
Some reviewers argue that the perks and salaries aren’t good enough, that some projects are really stressful and not handled well by the team leaders, that transparency and feedback are just some buzzwords, because they’re not happening.
For almost all the negative reviews Netguru tries to answer and explain what improvements have been made.
Netguru is looking to expand its developer, QA and product design teams.
On their website they’re really transparent about the employee perks, the correlation between expertise and salary level.
Marketing and Process Automation at Netguru
It seems that implementing Salesforce was the right choice at the right time for Netguru, according to the case study they did and published on Salesforce’s own website.
They're also explaining how Salesforce helped them with project management in this video:
Using Salesforce, Netguru managed to improve customer satisfaction (with a Net Promoter Score averaging above 9) and to increase predictability, meaning being able to accurately estimate how long it will take to complete a project and the risk involved.
From the marketing automation side, Netguru also uses Hubspot.
So, Netguru doesn't stay away from tools that may increase productivity, planning, projects delivery. They're stubborn about efficiency.
This stubbornness helped Netguru become a benchmark in CEE’s IT Outsourcing market.
Summing Up
Now, what seem to be Netguru’s golden nuggets?
My top 5 would be the following:
- Designing a dream team and a great company culture
- Seamless client delivery through smooth project management
- Building a community, forging partnerships and building awareness around the brand for two main purposes: landing quality projects and hiring the right talent
- Becoming the “guru” of content strategy, being SEO focused and involving developers in content writing
On the other hand, a big picture of the industry wouldn’t hurt also. Care to find out how three ex-soviet union countries are making a statement in IT outsourcing? Check out our Ultimate Guide To IT Outsourcing Companies in Central Eastern Europe.
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