Software provider Tradify went from one user to 30,000 in just a few years – and its online content wasn’t keeping up. Thanks to WFB, it now has a strong brand voice, a trove of relevant content and some significant gains in organic traffic.
Kiwi company Tradify started in 2010 with a single tradie on the books. Now, they have 30,000 tradies in New Zealand, Australia and the UK using its job management software.
When Sarah Berkowski took over the sales and marketing team in 2019, she wanted to develop a core of authoritative content to build trust with the tradie audience. The goal was a stronger brand voice to grow Tradify’s organic traffic and customer base. WFB was more than happy to help.
Here’s how that went:
Pre-WFB, Tradify had experienced incredible growth, and it was eyeing up content to boost those numbers even further. It had a blog that it knew could be working harder.
Content Marketing Manager Andrew Wassenaar explains: “There was a lot of content, not focused, with ancient references that no one would get, like footy scores from the weekend before an article was written ... 5 years ago.”
The goal was to build a base of relevant, informative content that would add value for the audience. By delivering helpful information for free, Tradify hoped to build trust and brand loyalty with tradies, making the brand top-of-mind when they started looking for job management software.
The good news? There was plenty for the WFB team to work with. Heaps of happy customers worldwide made never-ending case study subjects, and all those old blog posts could be fleshed out, combined or expanded.
No wonder we’re still producing regular content for them almost four years later.
One of WFB’s earliest jobs was establishing a strong brand voice. Working with the marketing team, we developed a set of guidelines for writers working on the brand, ensuring that future content would be cohesive.
Because it's aimed at busy tradies, the brand voice is straight-up and easy to read, with no fluff or pretension. Articles are usually short and broken into clear sub-sections, with bullet lists and links to content as needed.
With a voice in place, WFB started writing case studies, articles, guides and whitepapers. We manage the case studies from start to finish. Tradify hands over the contact details of happy customers; we set up a time to chat, interview them about their experience and deliver the work (complete with glowing quotes). For other content, it's just as simple. The Tradify team picks a topic, gives us some keywords, and we're off.
For Tradify, it’s a hands-off process that it trusts to deliver outstanding results.
After frustrating experiences with freelancers, working with WFB has been completely different. Our agency structure means we manage all the editing and revisions in-house, delivering quality content with minimal back and forth.
“The management of it, one point of contact, has been really valuable. You're open to setting up and managing the Trello, making it easy to brief, and you come back with a high-quality article that barely needs editing. I can literally find a long-tail keyword I want to rank for and let you run with that and get something back that’ll work,” Andrew explains.
Scaling is simpler, too. Because WFB has a team of writers available, the Tradify team can brief more work as needed, and it gets done – no fuss, no muss. And on Tradify’s end, the long-standing relationship has made it simpler to get new staff up to speed on content creation.
Andrew adds: “Relationships and processes were established with WFB, so when we brought on another content specialist, it was already easy to manage. They can build a brief, chuck it in Trello, and away we go.”
That’s Andrew’s take on working with WFB – it doesn’t get much more positive than that.
He’s a big fan of not just our streamlined approach but the results he’s seen coming from our content. The content team at Tradify has some “really ambitious” targets, and WFB has helped them take some significant steps in the right direction.
“There’s been massive growth in the blog this year, based on last year’s work. It’s executing on my strategy, but you have to have the content, and it has to be quality,” Andrew says.
Here’s a snapshot of the year-on-year results:
• 75% increase in blog impressions
• 66% increase in blog traffic
• 90% increase in non-brand traffic
• 53% increase for non-brand keywords
Content is a key part of Tradify’s marketing strategy, so it’s crucial to get it right. With WFB on board, producing relevant, readable case studies and articles has become a smooth, stress-free process. Even better, as its year-on-year results show, the content is doing its job – boosting traffic and building trust in the brand.
"Words for Breakfast has become an important extension of our content team. It’s helped us produce a far greater volume of quality articles, and the value to the company is clear in our high-level results." – Sarah Berkowski, Chief Revenue Officer.
The lead copywriter and creative director at Words for Breakfast. She spends much of her time working with the copy writing team across a variety of projects.
