Marketing is no more for the customers to know you; it is instead for you to know the customers well.
This is exactly what GoodFirms learned with situational changes. Right from the day of the company’s inception to where we stand today as one of the top B2B research, review, and rating companies in the World, GoodFirms has come a long way.
Until 2018, like every business, we at GoodFirms went by the trending marketing strategies and operations and followed all that can drive growth for us. Things were going well. Our users started understanding our mission and purpose.
But, with the hit of the Covid-19 pandemic, all rules about building brand position, maintaining customer relationships, etc., saw an epic change. Our marketing strategies had to be reworked to give a new dimension and to add new values to the experiences for our customers. Like any other business, we were forced to adopt a much more refined approach to survive and sustain safely.
We started tailoring our services beyond a specific dimension.
For example, contrary to what our PR looked like, we started delivering insights to customers through our PRs that created a personal, human connection.
Instead of competing with our competitors by merely copying their activities, we started competing with the best customer experience that we delivered to our clients.
How Did GoodFirms Reinvent to Sustain and Grow?
1. Content Marketing
As we became more value-driven, we ensured that we did not lose that creative spark. Each of the content marketing strategies that we followed had more clarity. Our blogs started reaching out to bigger audiences and wider demographics.
We made five changes to our content marketing strategy:
- We focussed more on visual storytelling in our blogs with professionally designed images by our in-house designers to support our content. “Creativity with relevancy” was our prime focus.
- We clearly classified our content into general blogs, technical blogs, news stories, infographics, review articles, primary research articles, secondary research articles, case studies, ebooks, product comparison articles, buyer’s guides, and pricing guides.
- We focused more on delivering valuable content that our users will be interested to read..
- We repurposed our existing content to better fit the current context and enhance its relevance.
- We brought authenticity, uniqueness, and honesty in every content that we generated.
Our efforts brought results, and not only did our traffic increase, but our research and blog articles also started getting quoted by eminent organizations like Forbes, Business2Community, Yahoo Finance, Hubspot, TechCrunch, and more.
2. Social Media Marketing
Without question, one major marketing activity that will shift a brand closer to success is Social media marketing. But, standing out among the competition is a huge effort. GoodFirms has been successfully navigating this transformation. By becoming more agile, we kept every action accountable for driving our brand growth. We increased our social media engagement by making the below transitions and following the best practices:
- We collaborated with tech influencers to create engaging videos that reflect the brand voice and brand story.
- We personalized our messages to bond with our social media followers. We ensured we replied to each comment and feedback and engaged in meaningful interaction with our social base.
- GoodFirms social media team closely followed current trending social media content and emerging trends and made sure our social media content calendar accommodates them all.
- We maintained consistency in posting and avoided content that can be distasteful and demeaning and may hurt any individual or community. We are known as a sensitive brand among our followers that respects all communities.
- Our content also caters to the most active generation on social media-Gen Z. We specifically curated content for Generation Z users.
- We kept our social media conversation authentic, and meaningful, with utmost transparency focusing on solving issues pertaining to startups, small businesses, and entrepreneurs.
- From short-form videos to audience engagement, we ensured that all our content scored a “hand raise.”
Our Twitter followers have been increasing at a CAGR of 19.1% since 2019. Our Facebook followers have been increasing at a CAGR of 13.6% since 2020. Our LinkedIn follower base has increased by 11.8% since February last year and has been growing at a consistent CAGR of 10.2% since 2020.
3. Research & Surveys:
Communicating regularly with partners or clients is never easy for any brand. GoodFirms cracked this easily. Our efforts in generating valuable surveys proved to be the right solution for this. We started creating exceptional customer journeys involving customers, making them the heart of our strategy. Keeping customer-centricity in mind, for all our surveys and research, we started involving our own clients, thus delivering hyper-personalized content, insights, and value additions.
Our approach to actively involving clients increased the engagement that we used to get with our survey forms. As a review and listing platform, we already had lists of companies working in a particular IT niche. We used this to increase interest in our surveys by targeting the right audience. For instance, we sent survey forms to our listed restaurant management software providers, cloud kitchen providers, and hotel management software providers for research articles related to the hospitality industry.
Our participatory research initiatives brought better results as we could easily segregate our survey participants and send relevant surveys to respondents who are familiar with the subject. This also improved the quality of our research article as we got insights from industry experts.
4. Customer Relations
Recognition is critical – be it customers or the brand. GoodFirms has been making every effort when it comes to recognizing our top performers. To make it more authentic and trustable, GoodFirms came up with its flagship Leaders matrix methodology that ranks organizations in the IT and software industries based on their 360-degree performance and core competencies. The performance algorithm decides the ranking companies get on our listing pages. The transparent, authentic, and impartial listing methodology was a big hit for us, and thousands of companies started beelining to get themselves listed on our platform. This increased our traffic and also improved our credibility among our customer base.
Building relationships with our customers is the base for strong trust, a brand promise. Keeping this in mind, we identified the top performers based on the original user reviews the companies got on our platform. Once we identified, we generated PRs, and we involved these top performers in our podcast activities; we recognized them as “Best Company to Work With,” and so on.
How GoodFirms Generated and Increased its Traffic?
GoodFirms has been witnessing a consistent increase in its traffic since 2019.
Our overall monthly website traffic (desktop, mobile, tablet) in 2019 was around 30K, which increased to 400K in 2023. We have been successful in growing our traffic at a consistent CAGR of 67.8% for the last 5 years.
The overall active listing in 2018 was 5056; since then, we have been growing at a CAGR of 67.3% taking its total listing base to 110000+ companies and software products in 2023. In 2018, the total verified reviews of software products and services on site were 2712, and currently, we have 40000+ verified reviews from users. Our growth has been phenomenal and is a testimony to our right, foresighted, and inclusive marketing strategy.
In 2019, GoodFirms received 3749 release hits for its PR articles. Even when the pandemic struck the next year, our release hits suffered only a marginal dip. But later, due to changes in our marketing strategy, we regained the growth and have since been growing at a CAGR of 22.71% year-on-year basis, reaching 7555 in 2023. While our engagement has increased from 1170 in 2020 to 17241 in 2023, that translates to a whopping CAGR of 95.9% for the last four years.
With the combined efforts of our team (content creators, digital marketers, research analysts, SEO experts, and customer service experts) and the positive guidance of our management, we could beat most odds to consistently increase our traffic and engagement.
For instance, when the pandemic struck and forced office shutdown, we not only transitioned to remote work, but we made the right effort with the launch of GFiT, one of the biggest Informational Technology Virtual Expo in 2020.
GFiT, the premiere IT virtual event, brought together IT service providers, software vendors, and technical communities to network together and showcased their products and innovations. The single event boosted our traffic further, and we saw a 100% increase in our traffic the following year. We have been producing valuable client articles, review articles, research papers, ebooks, videos, and infographics. Today our insights are sought after by professionals in the IT industry.
So, what exactly is marketing according to GoodFirms?
Marketing is the art of simplifying the core purpose of a brand and building a strong strategy around the vision. While practicing this, it is very easy to get lost, but it is not difficult to refine and update to tap success. Adapt to the changing world, but never change your core purpose; this is the mantra of GoodFirms.
Right from setting up our landing pages as per the search engine algorithms, to booting up our campaigns, we tried focusing on deeper metrics to attain sustainability and to live up to our customers. We are continuing to improve and will do so in the future days to come.
Summing Up:
To succeed in this challenging business environment, every business needs to give back to the community, customers, employees, and stakeholders. Right from the company policies to the marketing strategies, whatever is planned should empower the customers, and it is the key differentiating factor for high-performance organizations. Our marketing strategies in SEO, content marketing, research, or social media, everything that we did, not only brought great results for us but delivered huge value to our clients too. That’s the secret recipe for our marketing success.
