100,000 Page views in 3 days
How we got 100,000+ page views over a 3 day weekend, for our outsourcing marketplace — ContractIQ!
It was on the 4th of April (Saturday) night and our article on Techcrunch had just gone live. It was Sunday, 7 30 AM in the morning in India, where I live.
Just as habitually I do these days, I woke up and limped into the bathroom with my android tab, hoping to catch notifications. There were about 70 email notifications. That was unusual for a Sunday morning. They were all notifications for downloads of our mobile app development report — The one that took us a couple of months of outreach and a month of effort to produce after that.
From Sunday till the next saturday, we scrambled hard to count the downloads and reach out to all those who downloaded our report. We stopped everything we did, so that we can capitalize on the extended windfall of traffic.
When it all ended we had grabbed over a 100,000 page views and 10000 downloads of our report (and counting).
So here’s the backstory on how we nailed content marketing in this case.
There is no shortcut.
If you are going to create great content of value for the users, there is no shortcut. It’s hard to evoke emotions of shock, humor or even hate, when you are a B2B company.
There in lies the reason why most B2B companies give up before they write content.
However if you have unique perspectives to share about the domain you operate in, there is an audience that’s waiting to hear your perspectives.
We publish an annual report on ‘Mobile Development Trends’ — It’s not any report that focuses on the industry, its trajectory or any of that sort. That’s available in plenty. We chose a micro-niche. We chose to write about ‘app development prices’ in every important market in the world. We broke it down to how really good, average and rookie companies price themselves — It was the kind of information that every company that outsourced app development, needed but could not find!
We made it easy for them to consume this information in one single view!
To get this ‘easy view’ we had to spend about 3 months, reaching out to 1000s of app development shops from our marketplace and outside. We are a bootstrapped company with no money spend on sweepstakes and free iPads to encourage these respondents.
We took turns to email, call, beg and everything in between, so that we get a few hundred responses.
In a nutshell, pick the information that’s needed and go all in to get it!
Making good content, beautiful
We are dazzled by high production quality everywhere. The audience is merciless when it comes to discarding sub-par efforts. We learnt this the hard way in 2014, when we did the same report.
TheNextWeb, TechCrunch, GigaOM and all other outlets rejected our report. Some of them were kind enough to say that our visuals sucked. But then, we did not have money to buy the services of a top-notch design studio.
The entire infographic was put together based on inspirations from visual.ly. We hired a designer in Paris to do it for us and 3 weeks later, the outcome was disastrous. We had to take the matter on our hands.
We designed the entire infographic in two days on PowerPoint and hired a local design agency to execute in PhotoShop. We did not pay them anything (and instead gave them credit, right on that infographic — A good move for them, in retrospective).
In a nutshell, there is plenty of design inspiration and frugal ways to execute them, if you don’t hesitate to get your hands dirty.
Making good and beautifully presented content, accessible!
Based on our previous year’s experience, we knew we would meet with limited success if we go to the news outlets all by ourselves. Besides, the delay in getting responses and the false start with design, set us back by two months and it was already end of February 2015. We had just a month to hit it or miss it.
We approached a DIY PR firm (PressFriendly) and took their one month subscription. They coached us on how to email the press and who all to approach. The biggest value add for us was the workflow and not the coaching itself. In a single day, we could automail 100s of journalists and keep track of their responses (or mostly, the lack of it!).
By now though, I had personally written a couple of posts myself on Techcrunch and so, the peeps there already knew my name. Besides, in the last year, they said they'd never publish infographics.
So, I put together an article on mobile development trends, whipped up stats from outside our report on how Asia is going to make it difficult for US based mobile developers. That’s as close to emotional content as we could get to, when writing about app development outsourcing trends.
We then made variants of the stories, each targeting a niche vertical press outlet. In just one month, we got covered by Techcrunch, Fierce Wireless, Mobile Industry Review, Outsourcing Magazine, YourStory, TechinAsia and a few other outlets picked up these stories (like Yahoo! News). We even got invited to a Radio Show in Los Angeles.
In a nutshell, your distribution effort is going to be bigger than your content creation & packaging effort. The outcome is disproportionate to the effort you put. So don't hesitate spending here.
Monetize your content!
When you put a lot of effort in creating unique content, you need to monetize it. It does not mean that you’ve to put a price tag to it, but at least keep the options open, to either sell or at least have the readers on your nurture list to retain their attention through subsequent interactions.
In our case, we gave away the pricing trends for free while we put a whole lot of interesting information behind a form. SDK trends, Enterprise Adoption of Mobile Development Platforms, Market Outlook etc. were placed behind the wall.
If your content has a good reach, you may even get sponsors for your content.
Brand your content!
If your content comes out of your primary research and it’s unique, create a brand for it. Ours is ‘Makers Speak — 20xx’. Ours also happens to be the only industry report on outsourced mobile app development pricing trend.
If you’d like to keep a tab on our content efforts in action, subscribe to our newsletter (3 essays everyday ; handpicked) on our homepage.
If you’ve come this far and I’ve given your something worth thinking, let me also ask for a favor! Tell your friends and peers about ContractIQ. We are a high-touch, curated marketplace for outsourcing companies that build enterprise and consumer software for mobile, web and analytics. We’ve helped portfolio companies of several SandHill Road VC firms and a handful of really big companies get outsourcing right.
