Case study: Educational marketing in the B2B sector

I had the pleasure today of talking with Samuli Tursas from Koodiviidakko (“code jungle” in Finnish) about their marketing strategy. For those who are not familiar with the company, Koodiviidakko specializes in online marketing and offers a wide range of web products. One of their main products is an email marketing solution called Postiviidakko (“email jungle” in Finnish).

In order to promote their product and raise awareness about email marketing, they created a free guide to email marketing that can be downloaded at www.sahkopostimarkkinointi.info (available in Finnish language only). The only thing they ask in return is your email address.

I asked Samuli about the guide’s impact on the company. According to Samuli, their guide has proven very popular. It has been downloaded 2,622 times since its publication in December 2009, and people still download the guide to this day. The email guide contains valuable information for people who want to learn how to utilize email marketing, and offers practical advice ranging from designing email templates to analyzing results. It’s a 42-page guide loaded with knowledge that Koodiviidakko decided to offer free of charge to anyone willing to read it.

Please note that their guide is not a glorified ad for their service, and mentions Postviidakko only once on the last page. It’s written from a tool agnostic perspective, so it’s useful no matter what tools you use.

Samuli was kind enough to share some additional information with me. Creating the guide took about two weeks, using two writers who tapped into the vast amount of knowledge accumulated by the company over 3 years of working on Postviidakko. Before releasing it to the public, they gathered feedback from clients and partners.

One of the reasons for creating the guide was the desire to reach their target customers: people in charge of marketing in organizations. Their target customers are used to receiving lots of offers, so getting though was no easy task.

They chose to go with a PDF format, because it seemed like the the easiest way to get it out there. They even created a separate domain for the guide in order to further ensure its separation from Koodiviidakko, and probably in order to rank higher for the term sähköposti markkinointi (“email marketing” in Finnish).

There are a few things that could be improved, and one of them is allowing search engines to access the guide without the need for registration. This way their content would be indexed by search engines, and the domain would have a better chance of ranking higher for desired keywords. Samuli agreed with me when I said it would probably be better to have the guide in a wiki-style format, because it would definitely rank better in search engines. You would still be required to provide your contact details, since Koodiviidakko uses them to approach potential customers. It’s a small price to pay for free, quality content.

So what kind of return did the company receive on its investment? Because of this guide, the company has been asked to speak at professional events, and they have also collected a large opt-in database of contacts they can approach to offer their services. Most importantly, it boosted their brand noticeably — and brought in new clients who wanted to do business with somebody who really knows what they’re doing. To this day, their email marketing guide works tirelessly to promote the company at no additional cost.

Samuli mentioned that a second edition is in development, which will be even bigger than the current one. My advice is to translate the guide into English, in order to raise awareness amongst an international audience, if Koodiviidakko is planning to expand beyond Finland at some point.

What can we learn from Koodiviidakko and their email marketing guide? Valuable content that is tailor made for a specific target audience yields an amazing amount of direct and indirect results in the form of new clients and brand awareness.

What can you do in your business that is similar? Maybe you can publish a case study and market it on LinkedIn to your potential clients, or host a webinar that you can later offer as a download to visitors to your website?

When crafting your content, make sure it’s useful to your target audience and offers real value. It will pay dividends for months and help establish your position as an expert in your field.

Please leave a comment and let me know what you think.