Dev marketer boosts website traffic 10x overnight with a single TLDR campaign, rethinks growth strategy
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Should you invest in organic or paid growth?
Every marketing leader has grappled with this age-old question. While the answer is often nuanced and situation-dependent, most marketers tend to lean one way or another. For Flo Merian, a trusted marketing advisor to several dev-first companies and co-maintainer of the largest Developer Marketing Community on Slack, organic was always his first option—or at least, it used to be.
Flo worked with Streambased as their founding marketer and fourth overall employee. Tasked with developing a GTM strategy for their new A.S.K. product, a serverless platform that allows businesses to analyze real-time streaming data, Flo started with channels that had worked for him at past tech startups. However, limited success led him to explore alternative options. Within his Developer Marketing Community, he discovered TLDR.
Date published: September 16, 2024
Read time: Less than 10 minutes
🎯 Results
10x daily average website traffic
Leads interested in Streambased’s A.S.K. product
TLDR AI
📢 Newsletters Sponsored
Reach a niche, highly technical audience that could benefit from their SQL-based analytics service for Kafka-compatible data streaming platforms
Leverage TLDR’s marketing expertise to develop messaging and positioning
⭐ Goals
"My experience working with the TLDR team was fantastic. We basically had a team dedicated to help us build and polish our messaging. [And] the team was very responsive. I really felt like TLDR wanted to make sure we really nailed our ad placement. It felt like we were partners rather than just a relationship between vendor and client. It was such a fantastic experience that the moment I have the opportunity to advertise with you guys again I’ll jump on it 100%.”
Streambased
ad examples
"My experience working with the TLDR team was fantastic. We basically had a team dedicated to help us build and polish our messaging. [And] the team was very responsive. I really felt like TLDR wanted to make sure we really nailed our ad placement. It felt like we were partners rather than just a relationship between vendor and client. It was such a fantastic experience that the moment I have the opportunity to advertise with you guys again I’ll jump on it 100%.”
Streambased ad examples
“We explored multiple channels before coming to TLDR: PR, public directories, organic social, and LinkedIn Ads. For PR, we spent weeks reaching out to journalists, but only a few responded positively, and the effort-to-reward ratio just wasn’t there. It was very time-consuming and frustrating. Our organic social push wasn’t working. Running ads on LinkedIn was expensive and yielded low results.
Honestly, TLDR was 10x better than any of the other channels we explored.”
I remembered seeing threads in the community about TLDR’s results. And like many marketers, I was initially skeptical that a newsletter sponsorship would be the solution we needed for rapid growth. However, the more I looked into it, the clearer it became: this was a direct line to our ideal customers.”
– Flo Merian, Developer Marketing Expert and co-maintainer of the Developer Marketing Community
“We explored multiple channels before coming to TLDR: PR, public directories, organic social, and LinkedIn Ads. For PR, we spent weeks reaching out to journalists, but only a few responded positively, and the effort-to-reward ratio just wasn’t there. It was very time-consuming and frustrating. Our organic social push wasn’t working. Running ads on LinkedIn was expensive and yielded low results.
Honestly, TLDR was 10x better than any of the other channels we explored.”
I remembered seeing threads in the community about TLDR’s results. And like many marketers, I was initially skeptical that a newsletter sponsorship would be the solution we needed for rapid growth. However, the more I looked into it, the clearer it became: this was a direct line to our ideal customers.”
– Flo Merian, Developer Marketing Expert and co-maintainer of the Developer Marketing Community
Crafting a message that would resonate with developers and engineering leaders
With a limited budget, Flo couldn’t afford the luxury of testing messaging and seeing what resonates with TLDR’s developer audience. He had to get it right the first time. But, unlike the other channels he had tried previously, this time he had some support. TLDR offered to share their experience writing ad copy for hundreds of tech companies and write Flo’s copy for him—a free service they provide to all of their customers. After giving the TLDR team a landing page link and a few value propositions, they crafted an ad so compelling it would be irresponsible for developers not to click to learn more about Streambased’s A.S.K., all while matching TLDR’s editorial voice.
“Seeing the surge in traffic was amazing, but what really blew me away was the quality of the leads. We had found our audience,”
“Seeing the surge in traffic was amazing, but what really blew me away was the quality of the leads. We had found our audience,”
Skyrocketing traffic by 10x overnight
Streambased’s ad struck gold. Within minutes of their ad being launched, they eclipsed their daily average visitors. Finally, Flo had found a channel that performed.
Running ads with TLDR also marked a turning point for Flo.
“I used to believe that early startups should focus on long-term, organic growth and that you shouldn’t run paid acquisition until you knew what messaging would resonate with your target audience. Frankly, advertising with TLDR changed my mind. The output we got from this experience is so much more valuable than the price we paid. More than just the traffic and the leads, we gained so much knowledge in terms of messaging. It was worth 3 months of work for the startup. I wish I had run TLDR ads in my past jobs. I highly recommend advertising with TLDR. It was worth every single penny.”
“I used to believe that early startups should focus on long-term, organic growth and that you shouldn’t run paid acquisition until you knew what messaging would resonate with your target audience. Frankly, advertising with TLDR changed my mind. The output we got from this experience is so much more valuable than the price we paid. More than just the traffic and the leads, we gained so much knowledge in terms of messaging. It was worth 3 months of work for the startup. I wish I had run TLDR ads in my past jobs. I highly recommend advertising with TLDR. It was worth every single penny.”
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