From 0 to 450,000+ DeskTime users with the help of content marketing and PR
Long-term collaboration + comprehensive approach = magic. We've been working with DeskTime from day one and the results speak for themselves – a fantastic illustration of the power of content marketing and PR.
DeskTime is a time-tracking app that helps teams and individuals track, manage, and enhance their productivity levels. Used by over 18,000 companies and hundreds of thousands of people from every corner of the world, DeskTime is a hot favorite in its category thanks to a comprehensive set of features that include automatic invoicing, project time tracking, absence calendars, and so much more.
DeskTime is also our longest-standing client – we've been working with them since before Truesix came into existence, and at twice the speed once it did. As such, we've witnessed the company go from its first users to a worldwide time-tracking leader, and Truesix's PR and content marketing efforts were instrumental in making it happen.
Challenge
Over our 8+ years of collaboration, challenges have come in all shapes and sizes yet have always been underpinned by the overarching goal of getting more users, leads, and visitors for DeskTime's app and website. Together, we have explored virtually every content marketing and PR avenue, and, in the process, found what methods work best for this complex niche.
What exactly makes it complex? The public's inherent distrust of time-tracking tools – most workers see them as spying software. And, unfortunately, some managers use them as such, too.
But time-tracking apps can be an incredible tool for productivity, personal accountability, and work-life balance. Accordingly, most marketing activities took place with the backdrop of getting this message across and educating managers and employees on the proper use – both technically and ethically – of DeskTime.
Solution
From SEO blogging and newsletter marketing to creating YouTube content and attracting attention in international media, we worked across all vectors to get DeskTime noticed.
Content marketing
In 2017, Truesix essentially took over the DeskTime blog, first pruning low-quality content and then ensuring everything that followed would live up to the highest standards. Our efforts were further enhanced by the involvement of the ToastIT team, who assisted with SEO and helped articles become loved not only by our readers, but by Google, too.
Since then, we've been blogging consistently and a new article or two are published every week on a wide array of topics, all of which relate to productivity and management best practices.
The blogging efforts were supported by newsletter marketing and guest blog management, creating a veritable content machine that established DeskTime's blog as the place to go for all things productivity.
Truesix also helped revive DeskTime's YouTube channel by repurposing existing content and filming original pieces such as productivity experiments.
Public relations
Back in 2014, DeskTime earned massive publicity with a data-driven article for The Muse where the productivity principle 52:17 was coined. Since then, PR has been a core part of DeskTime's strategy.
As with content marketing, PR is happening on all fronts – distributing press releases, writing opinion pieces, thought leadership, guest blogging, responding to journalist requests, creating original research, backlink outreach campaigns, and more.
Some of the greatest success has been found with data-driven articles. DeskTime has access to hordes of fascinating productivity data, and given the media's fascination with the topic, we frequently publish original research that makes it into top publications. Or we publish it in DeskTime's blog, knowing it will be a goldmine for backlinks.
More recently, we've focused on thought leadership, getting DeskTime's CEO into the Forbes Business Council, and CMO into dozens of industry podcasts.
Results
We believe that PR and content marketing should always work in synergy as this produces the best possible results. DeskTime is a perfect example of this.
With the compounding effects of regular blogging, the monthly blog visitor count has nearly quadrupled over the past year after steady growth in previous years.
Moreover, out of 25 DeskTime domain pages with the highest number of backlinks, 17 are blog pages. This chart shows the consistent growth in backlinks over the past few years:
When Truesix started DeskTime's blog newsletter in 2017, we attracted 556 opt-ins in the first year. In 2020, 7,750 people subscribed to receive the DeskTime blog newsletter, which is almost 14 times more than in 2017.
More than that, at any point in time, people are talking about DeskTime. The original 52:17 study that appeared in The Muse was covered by multiple elite media outlets including:
Today, the 52:17 principle even has its own Wikipedia page.
Countless other media mentions have been earned over the years on a variety of other topics, with DeskTime featured on:
DeskTime's team frequently appears on top industry podcasts talking all things productivity:
And make sure you follow Artis' Forbes profile to learn all about the latest in productivity trends.
All these thought-leadership efforts are bearing massive fruit. Today, journalists from prominent media such as Washington Post and CNN are reaching out to DeskTime for comments and interviews when covering time-tracking-related topics.
In numbers
- 300+ total blog posts published
- 77.6% YoY blog visitor growth
- 25+ top media publications in 2022 alone
- 100+ YouTube videos with 500,000+ total views
- 8 years of amazing collaboration
Over several years of our cooperation with Truesix, we’ve always been satisfied with the results they deliver and impressed by the amount of fresh ideas they seem to be having in every situation. Blog posts, newsletters, publicity pieces, landing pages – Truesix has been delivering all types of quality content and never disappointing. Our long-term turnover from content marketing and our growing reputation are the best evidence for their work.
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