Content marketing for IT outsource e-commerce company: Case Study

With my client Magecloud, we decided to create content not only as a part of the inbound marketing strategy but also as a part of the lead nurturing. We also intended to use the content as supporting material for the sales team.

I started with a simple content funnel: awareness - consideration - decision.

Competitor’s research and content plan

MageCloud provides e-commerce development services. This niche is highly competitive, so first of all, I did a short competitor's research to understand which keywords they use to promote themselves and understand which content is popular.
First, I went to Clutch categories “e-commerce development”, and with SEOQuake, I grouped all competitors' websites by Alexa Rank. 
Magecloud operates in the US, Denmark and UK, so besides general competitors, I also took local providers.
Then I got the competitors list and came to SemRush to analyse how their websites are ranked and by which queries they are shown in the search results.

The example of competitors' research via SemRush

In my analysis, I considered traffic volume, keyword difficulty and area of expertise. Additionally, I talked to the sales team to get feedback about what potential clients are asking for and what is crucial for them. As a result, I got the shortlisted topics that I guessed make sense to cover.

Then with the sales team brainstorming, it transformed into the content plan, dividing topics by different funnel stages.

Content funnel

In awareness, we had popular search terms. For consideration, I took topics that were covered during the conversation with the potential clients. For decision, we partly used the feedback from the sales team and case studies.

To write these articles, I found and hired a copywriting agency; we agreed on a plan, symbols, and keywords and then started working.
The same I did for the Denmark location. Magecloud has a separate danish website, built for danish traffic, so all competitors and keywords were a bit different. Eventually, some of the topics were added in both locations, so I found and hired a Danish freelance copywriter to translate English versions of them.
Magecloud already had blog posts, but some of them were obsolete. They have never created content with strategy, so we just decided to refresh articles which had the most visitors and add them to the Danish version.

Case Studies

Even if you think that your company does the job that is also done by many other companies, and you have nothing to specify or emphasise, I have good news for you. Each project with your client is unique and can be described. The same was with my client, saying they mostly do the same work and there is nothing to tell.

Disclaimer: I used to own IT services company provider, and I know how much team effort needed to create portfolio. A lot of the companies, doing excellent job, never even started doing case studies. If you're that company, I can help you start.

So my plan was the following:

1. To pick the most prominent projects
2. To interview the project manager of each project
3. To jump on a call with the client to ask for feedback
4. To write the case study and make it reviewed by a copywriter
5. To create a task for the designer to make a page in Figma
6. Send the approved design to the customer to double-check if everything is cool
7. Send this page to developers for production

Surprisingly, most of the clients applied for the invitation, and we had excellent conversations.

Mark's feedback on working with MageCloud

I selected the typical case study framework:
1. Name of the project (We did name intentionally along with the service that was provided).2. Client, team, technologies, duration (since most of the clients has big size of traffic, I decided to also put traffic size here).3. Problem, task description, why client came to us.4. Solution, what has been delivered. Also, during that description, try to accurately describe how you work with clients, your principles, framework. It's better to have them in context.5. Client's testimonial (text or video)6. Contact us form (Need help in {similar_project} - let's talk!)
Basically, the case study should be an interesting text to read. However, projects are different, clients are different, NDA terms are also different. The minimum here is to show how we solve the client's problem, so that that client who has similar problem, can consider you as a potential provider.
P.S. I think that not everything need to be shown, there should be a place for intriguing details that could make clients ask questions.

Case studies templates

As a result, we created 5 first case studies and created templates for the future. Now all future cases are done by these templates.
To summarise, this is where the content marketing journey of Magecloud began. I helped them start this journey and create principles of how to work with content marketing daily. 
Need help with content marketing? Let's talk.