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.
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.
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.
- 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
