Addland: SEO blogging
How we helped Addland generate acquisitions to fuel fast business growth
Industry: Tech, SaaS
Goals
To attract paying subscribers to Addland’s platform
To establish Addland as a valuable resource hub
Results
Over 150,000 impressions in Google and 7,000 clicks to the website within six months of launch
Addland – the destination for land
Addland is a platform that makes it easy to find, research, buy or sell land. Any land. It’s the destination for anything from farms to smallholdings, building plots and woodland.
The team behind the platform hit the ground running with Addland’s beta launch in 2021. They had already secured the portfolios of some of the UK’s leading land agents, including Savills, and the platform was primed for new users.
Over the course of the next 12 months hundreds more agents joined, the team exploded in size, and more than 2,000 users signed up to a paid Addland membership.
Much of this success is down to the power of the platform and the strength of the team, propelled by an effective digital marketing strategy. Here’s how Rin Hamburgh & Co played a part.
“Some of the articles are doing very, very well. Some of them are ranking top of Google.”
– Berian Reed, Head of Digital Marketing
The challenge
A premium platform awaiting users
Just before the beta launch, the Addland team knew they had an enticing offering and some great partners on board, but they still needed to be able to drive users to their site. The platform was filled with sellers – now they needed buyers.
To do this they worked with Growth Division to identify which marketing channels could bring users in fast and build demand. SEO-optimised blog content, delivered by RH&Co, would be a key part of this.
Making Addland a destination for land
Addland also wanted to establish the brand as a resource hub. A central value for Addland is to make it easy to research land. The team was already achieving this through the platform’s functions, but they wanted to reinforce this by offering a number of helpful, high quality resources and guides.
“Without quality resources, Addland would just be a transactional platform,” says Berian. “We want to be more than that. We want to be a destination.”
Resources to support the whole marketing funnel
“At the start we had no in-house resource for content at all,” says Berian, Addland’s Head of Digital Marketing. “So we needed to find people that we could trust to do a great job, and who could work with SEO tech.”
These guides would be primarily designed to drive traffic to the Addland site but it was important for them to be great resources in their own right.
“The objective was to grow our audience and also to support that audience throughout the marketing funnel we were creating,” says Berian. “So whether you’re looking to buy a farm today, or you’re just considering it, we can speak to you.
The solution
A slick, SEO content machine
Resource
Addland already had the expertise to devise an effective SEO strategy. Now they needed resources that executed on it.
“There are endless agencies that offer copywriting services but we didn’t need copy for copy’s sake,” says Berian. “For us it’s an acquisition channel, so we needed people who had that digital marketing understanding.”
SEO
To create SEO targeted briefs, we used Frase, an SEO technology that looks after the keywords so writers can get on with the business of writing great copy. By doing so, we were able to create original guides to all kinds of land issues from smallholdings to stamp duty land tax and planting a forest.
Adaptable
“The RH&Co team was really adaptable in the way they worked with us,” says Berian. “After we gave feedback on the first two or three articles they created, everything was hands off. We could just deliver each brief and get an article back without issue. We published 20 resources like this, and the majority of them had no kind of overhead. It was slick.”
The outcome
Ranking high for click throughs
“You never know exact results with SEO but some of the articles are doing very, very well,” says Berian. “Some of them are ranking top of Google, and the others have just need some technical SEO woven in from our side, there’s nothing that needs changing with the copy.”
Six months after launch, the content we produced delivered over 150,000 impressions in Google and 7,000 clicks to the website.
Set up to fly
Like many early stage startups, Addland took their content creation in-house once their product had taken off and achieved a high enough altitude.
“The idea was to grow very quickly and eventually get the budget to hire in-house,” says Berian. “RH&Co helped us at the start to establish a really good site section that could help anyone in our market.”
More case studies
Actual Experience: white paper, blogging
How we cut through the complexity to help Actual Experience equip their enterprise partners to sell on their behalf
Actual Experience is a B2B tech business providing human experience management services for service providers and their enterprise clients. Actual Experience’s unique analytics capabilities pinpoint where within the digital ecosystem the causes of variability and poor experience are, enabling prioritised and evidence-based investment for digital leaders.
The challenge
Although their offering is distinct, because the concept of human experience isn’t always well defined or understood, distinguishing themselves from their competitors is a key challenge in all of Actual Experience’s marketing activity. Earlier this year they decided to refresh their content strategy and came to us to help them strengthen their position as experts within the human experience space.
The white paper
After submitting a proposal with a number of possible content options, we agreed to create a white paper based on interviews with their technical experts as well as further secondary research. The project also involved repurposing some of the white paper content into a series of blog posts designed to attract readers to download the full report.
“We’re in a complex and technical industry. With no prior experience of our expertise, Rin and her team quickly took on board what we do”
– Vaq Hussain, Marketing Manager, Actual Experience
The result
After the brief creation and interview stages, we were able to quickly deliver a white paper and associated blog post for Actual Experience, including updating the narrative in response to the COVID19 crisis, which kicked off just as the project was starting.
“The process of developing a white paper with Rin and her team was simple and painless,” says Vaq. “They delivered a really fast turnaround following interviews and research, and the final piece required minimal amends.
“I would say Rin Hamburgh & Co’s strengths are not just in their writing. Rin and her team are excellent listeners. Finding the important details in what we were telling them, understanding the relevance to our audience and converting it to a usable content piece is what impressed me the most.”
More case studies
Morrow: sales blogging, thought leadership
How we helped Morrow stamp their authority on the app development space
Industry: Tech, App development
Goals
To generate organic leads
To showcase Morrow’s expertise
Results
Increase in quality and quantity of leads
Better brand awareness
Clearer focus on who prospects are
Morrow – an app development agency of increasing fame
Morrow is a React Native app development company that works with pioneering businesses and entrepreneurs.
Longtime collaborators and best friends Tom Riglar and Charles Killer started Morrow in May 2019 out of Charles’ spare bedroom. They have since grown to be a 15-strong team, winning App Dev Agency of the Year at the 2022 UK Dev Awards.
That growth was possible because Morrow’s expertise isn’t just limited to producing innovative digital products. Part of their prowess lies in creating a space that developers love to be in, where they can collaborate to create their best work.
Since we began working with Morrow in 2021, their blog has played a key part of generating leads and attracting the right people to their team. Here’s how we helped them do it.
“Rin and her team have transformed the way we tell our story.”
– Tom Riglar, CEO & Co-founder
The problem
Technical expertise vs. audience
Before coming to Rin Hamburgh & Co, Morrow had written the occasional blog post but they found it difficult to prioritise this in a busy agency. And they were aware that the blog needed consistency in order to achieve results.
The Morrow team had some idea of what they wanted to write. They also had a vague idea of their client personas. But CEO Tom knew that the messaging connecting these two components was missing.
“As experts, we really know our stuff,” he says, “but we struggle to communicate that expertise to the outside world.”
The solution
Creating a steady pulse of content
Strategy
Morrow were looking for a consistent voice and message, so the blogs would feel like a collection, not disparate pieces. And they needed a killer strategy behind them. So we began by delving into their client personas and mapping out ideas for content that would hook both code-fluent and non-technical founders.
Briefing
Then, from our first briefing session, we started asking Tom questions that would tease out his expertise. Each month we dove into strategically chosen topics – from app frameworks to funding advice and the latest developments in Apple and e-commerce – and crafted blog posts from our conversations. Over time, it also became clear that we needed to place Morrow’s developer-first culture in the spotlight too.
Review
After six months, we reviewed our progress and adjusted the audience that we were targeting. And after 12 months we booked in another strategy session to ensure that the blog kept pace with the growing agency.
“The consistency and steady pulse is really useful,” says Tom. “Working with Rin Hamburgh & Co has provided stability in what could otherwise be a fairly chaotic agency life.”
The outcomes
Leads
When we began blogging for them in 2021, Morrow was approaching a tipping point in terms of fame. Their LinkedIn page used to get one organic follower a month, but after just six months of blogging and other efforts, they were seeing 6-7 new followers a week.
“Content marketing is a long term strategy,” says Tom, “but we’re already benefiting from an increase in the quantity and quality of leads, better brand awareness and a clearer focus on who our prospects are.”
Recruitment
Morrow found that the blog posts have actually been most effective in their recruitment process as they’ve grown to a team of 15.
“The posts attract candidates, and the right kind, who are attracted to the ideas we are expressing on the blog,” says Tom. “We’ve found that junior developers are asking questions about topics from the blogs in interviews, showing great promise.”
A stamp of authority
Published blog posts have also worked well as valuable sales and comms tools for various stages of the buyer’s journey. “Being able to say ‘I’ve actually written a blog about that recently’ has proved very helpful,” says Tom, “particularly in acquiring new business.
“Rin and her team have transformed the way we tell our story to prospective clients and partners,” says Tom. “Through a series of workshops and briefing sessions, they have created a range of written content for us that stamps our authority in the app development space.”