Uptech's Case Study
Bogdan Ianatiev
Marketing Strategist
SEO Content Manager
Ahrefs
SEO
Uptech
Uptech is an award-winning product development studio. Their clients include Dollar Shave Club, Dronebase, and many other great businesses. I was hired as a consultant and worked with Olga Galik, Uptech’s Head of Marketing. The time commitment for this job was ~80 hours/month.
outcomes
https://www.uptech.team/
the challenge
Client feedback:
“Everything Content successfully improved our content creation process, and search rankings. Bogdan understood the business and always strove for more progress. The improvements were constant and still growing. “
Olga Galik, Head of Marketing, Uptech
Quick numbers:
🎯 From 3,000 to 17,100 users/month from organic traffic in 9 month
💸 299,92% ROI just from Content Marketing and SEO activities
🏃🏻♂️ 473.1% growth of organic traffic just to blog
How We Did It
The Goal:
Decrease the cost/lead by making content marketing a fully functional marketing channel.
The Challenge
As many of you may know IT outsourcing, outstaffing and product development are pretty saturated niches from the marketers’ perspective.
We needed a cost-effective, scalable, and relatively fast way to make the content marketing channel a fully operational one.
The Solution
We’ve needed a custom solution, tailored for Uptech, their core expertise, and ICP’s:
Map ICP’s (ideal client persona’s) to the content we were planning to produce;
Define the “best” topics;
Design the guidelines for the future blog;
Level up writing and depth of content produced;
The Process
Migrating the blog from Medium to Webflow
I started consulting Uptech when they’ve already chosen the platform for their new blog. The old blog was on Medium and was looking like this:
After a few iterations and a ton of work done by marketing, design, engineering, and me, it looked like this:
Why Did Uptech Decide to move from Medium to Webflow:
Medium (as a platform) does not only give you full control over the content, but it limits you as a professional marketer in every way possible.
When they realised that Medium was no longer an option, they chose between WordPress, Ghost, and Webflow.
The latter won due to a number of reasons:
It’s lightweight and relatively easy to customise if you get along with all tutorials;
It’s SEO and Google Lighthouse friendly;
It’s easy to design the layout exactly how you want it to be as the backend interface looks like Photoshop;
After we knew it’s going to be Webflow, we’ve started the design of the future blog, which included:
Blog’s main page;
Blog post page;
Blog post structure
Inline CTA’s
Social sharing buttons
Layout’s for lead magnets (guides&ebooks)
Involving teams in making content
Our special sauce was to create a process of inviting designers, founders, project managers, and engineers into the content creation process. A clear checklist of how the content production looked like helped us to remove the friction from the process.
It’s usually hard to involve your teammates in content creation. The main reason – they don’t understand what value they’re getting from this, By explaining the values and designing the process, you remove this frustration.
We’ve decided on which services were most popular/profitable and concentrated our activities on them.
On the other hand, Uptech wanted to acquire more Golang development clients, so we nailed down becoming in TOP positions on Google when you’re googling Golang related terms:
Note: content marketing can be directed to solve different challenges, not only bringing cheaper leads but increase HR and recruiting rates.
Personas
It’s great that the client already knew the personas they were targeting with their marketing activities. My job here was to create top of the mind topics and then sync these topics with SEO competition.
These topics then evolved into a 3-Months content plan. But we were missing one key element – writers. I mean, yes, the client was working with some writers from Upwork. After getting familiar with their work, I proposed to 2 things:
We need to pay writers more (no less than $40 for 1500 words);
We need native or close to native writers. And by close to native I mean – the Philippines, their mother tongue is English, and then Phillipino.
And then we had the basic setup ready:
Blog of Webflow;
Good writers;
The process of incorporating niche experts in our content;
Content plan, that is aligned with SEO competition and client’s buyer personas;
The Funnel
We’ve decided not to design a wheel, and used a simple TOFU, MOFU, and BOFU content marketing funnel.
Increasing the amount of relevant traffic.
In July 2020 we’ve discovered a large growth of users from India to our blog. This happened after releasing “How To Create The Next TikTok” blog post. That was no bueno, as most request from India were below Uptech’s minimum budget they can work with.
The article was released before I joined forces with Uptech, so I’ve analyzed for which keywords the blog post was ranking and helped to rewrite the article so it started ranking for much more relevant keywords like “create tiktok”.
🎯 Results: 300% less users from India landing on the TikTik blog post. (July 2020 VS. August 2020)
For that purpose, we’ve monitored the blog posts that were getting the most traffic from India. In our case, it was the post about making TikTok.
Then we’ve rewritten the article by minimizing keywords with non-relevant intent and lifting up the keywords with “making the next TikTok” like intent.
Targeted linkbuilding
Usually, with the content marketing and SEO-game, you’re spending relatively big amounts of money on link building, but it wasn’t our case.
We went in two parallel tracks:
Create GREAT content that organically receives links;
MASTER the community websites like Reddit and DesignerNews;
ACCELERATE blog posts that are performing best in search.
If a blog post was performing great from day 2, so we’ve accelerated them with quality links and content distribution.
Due to NDA, I can’t disclose the $ for the linkbuilding.
Creating a unique visual style for Blog Posts
Before:
After:
When I started consulting Uptech they’ve used stock images which were OK for a while, but I’ve had a great idea in my mind how we could differentiate the visual branding for blog posts.
After some research, I came up with the idea of a glitch effect for the blog posts where you put some filters on the image and it gets slightly distorted.
After that Uptech’s designers put some magic on this and created layout and templates we could use to create a beautiful grid of blog posts when a user lands on the blog:
Example of an in-line CTA:
In-line CTA’s are the crucial element of your blog posts. And the more creative you’re getting with them the more results they’ll give.
I came up with an idea to make CTA’s less text'ish and more visual, Olga (Head of Marketing) supported my idea and created these beautiful CTA’s. You can meet different (and maybe even animated) variations across Uptech’s blog.
Content Distribution
This is the part where 99% of content marketers fail. Because most think that creating great content and buying links to it will solve the equation.
In my experience, every company that chooses content marketing as one of its priority of marketing activities should seriously consider all three elements:
Strategy;
Quality and Quantity;
Seeding and Distribution;
If all three done well, you’ll see great and consistent results.
In our case, our seeding and distribution varied from one post to another. For some, we’ve tried to leverage huge subreddits on Reddit and hit the “top” section on Reddit. For a long time, our infographic was in the “Top” results for /golang subreddit.
But it doesn’t end there. When we felt that some specific content (like design sprint piece) might pop on some other medium, we’ve specifically researched placements for that niche content.
DesignerNews campaign:
Olga, Uptech’s Head of Marketing, told me that they were working on creating UX Case Study and asked me for distribution ideas. I immediately recommended focusing on DesignerNews as one of the main sources for distributing the UX Case Study.
Uptech’s Head of Marketing then compiled a list of sources for the distribution so they could track the progress for each source. By covering different design resources we brought the attention of a few professionals, like Holly from GitLab, for example.
🎯 Results: 250+ visits from DesignersNews and 2000+ visits of the article from all sources (Nov 2020 - Feb 2020).
These kinds of insights on the distribution sources only come with either well research media platforms or experience, when you’re starting to “feel” what will be the best medium to maximize the result.
Ebooks and #7 Product of the day on Product Hunt
📢 800+ visits from ProductHunt alone
🧲 430+ ebook downloads from a 4-step drip campaign
It all started with idea that there are not many ebooks/guides on this topic overall on the internet, so the competition would be super low. We’ve chosen ProductHunt as a launch playground.
While designing the Product Hunt campaign for the ebook, I and Olga split the tasks so we could be more productive. Our cumulative workflow looked smth like this:
Step 1. Made a landing page with a download form:
Step 2. Prepare the PH visuals and descriptions, emails (when people will submit their contact data)
Step 3. Submit for PH and apply some marketing “magic” and community engagement.
🎯 Results: #7 Product of The Day on Product Hunt and 430+ ebook downloads.
Summary
Working with Uptech was a pure pleasure, and I'm especially thankful to work with Olga, their Head of Marketing. Both management and Olga were supportive when it came to my crazy ideas and ambitious experiments.
As for this case study, I'm planning to slightly expand it over the next weeks. I'd like to add our hypothesis→ experiment decision making process.
This case study is my first try to make a case study of my own work, so I'm open to feedback if you have smth to say.
-Bogdan
-------------
If you'd like to work with me, please drop a line to bogdan[at]yanatiev.com
