Can a team of hard-core backend developers do marketing?

One of the main marketing challenges I faced over and over again was how to do effective marketing with a minimal or nonexistent budget. I always relied on the people I worked with, getting them to write, design and help me build creative campaigns. This didn’t prepare me for my next marketing challenge, though: no marketing budget and 5 out of 6 team members being developers––everyone but me. I decided to build our marketing strategy around the thing my team does the best: coding.

Here are some of the techniques we used in order to get from a few hundreds to 100K unique visitors in three months (to our website, blog and mini sites). It’s a proof the new marketer is techier than ever.

Coding content

You don’t need great writing skills (or any at all) if you have exclusive, fascinating data.…

Getting a peek at successful companies’ Google Analytics is probably a secret wish of most entrepreneurs and marketers. Where does most of their traffic come from? How much is paid traffic? What type of content works best for them?

After co-founding Takipi, one of the very first steps I made was to research (like crazy) how other companies, which target the same audience as we do, get their customers. This is not to say that you shouldn’t do new and creative stuff, but if other successful companies are doing something right you should definitely learn from it.

The main question I asked was - what works for them? Which are their most read blog posts, their best campaigns, the most tweeted and liked content? When we started working on our blog we ran a script on 100 different blogs (particularly of other companies that build products for developers). The script sorted all the posts by the number of likes/Tweets/G+ and LinkedIn shares.…

This post was originally published on TheNextWeb

Autocad WS has over 10M users. For 8.5M of these English is not a first language.

Getting localization right that led to a huge growth in our download rate - from about 1500 per day to almost 5000, in less than 6 months.Translating the app is a significant part of localization, but that’s not what drives downloads. Localizing the marketing does - it’s not about the text on the button, but about the way users discover the app, decide whether to download it and most of all – how they experience it. Localization is not translation - It’s about providing the same marketing and product experience to a user from Mexico, Korea, Italy or the US. Translating the app itself is an important step but there are several other steps you should take whether you actually translate the app, or not.

Start by localizing the product page in the App Store/ Google play.

In this great TED talk - “The art of asking”, Amanda Palmer shares how she built a successful music career, untied herself from a record label, and even managed to enjoy the process by asking - and mastering it. When building a startup asking is your default mode - you need to ask for money, to ask users to try out your half-baked product, or to ask others to share their relevant experiences. Asking might seem like a huge burden but I find it is a powerful tool and try to use it as much as possible. Asking is not about looking for help, it’s a way of interaction. It’s an incredible way to get to know people better, to create a better connection with people and by doing so - to build a better company.

I’ve noticed for quite a while now that my best meetings, those which yield the best results, are the ones that have the most balance of conversation between me and the person I’m meeting with.…