Marketing design
7
min read
For tech companies, Medium is a low-lift, complementary channel for awareness, credibility, and founder-led storytelling — use it to test topics and gain distribution, not as your primary SEO/lead engine; submit to publications, engage in comments, answer workflow queries, use its newsletter, republish with canonicals to protect site SEO, and track reads→referrals/signups.
When tech companies decide to bet on content marketing, they often face challenges posed by the competitive standards of social media. You have to create tons of content regularly, make it engaging, and stick to certain formats. On social media, apart from other tech companies, you have to compete with cute kittens and pandas. And no business can win over kitties.
Social media marketing requires lots of resources, especially now, when video marketing is becoming more popular. For example, to run a YouTube channel for your company, you need a presenter, scriptwriter, and video editor on the team, buy some pricey devices or even rent a space for recording. Quite a lot for a marketing budget of a small business and who knows if those thousands of views will bring you any leads…
And what about Medium marketing? Should you be put Medium in your list of media to create content for? In this article, we're breaking down Medium as a marketing channel and listing different ways of using it for a tech company (spoiler: it's not only for better blogging!).
If you've had a hard time fitting your content marketing into the most popular social media that favor videos and visual content, joining Medium would be like a breath of fresh air. You can post very serious, attention- and time-consuming materials as long as people are willing to read them. And overall, Medium is less demanding from authors than most social media out there. Because Medium’s readers opt in to long-form ideas, it’s a perfect place to practice audience advocacy: lead with insight, not interruption.
Still, it doesn't make it the top marketing channel for tech products. There are some other details that you need to know before starting with this platform.
As a marketer, you probably know when evaluating a new marketing channel, you first must analyze its audience and how it interferes with your target client.
There are 100 million monthly visitors on Medium, and 1,38 million articles are uploaded monthly. In comparison, if you decide to create a blog on your website, you will compete with all the websites who write on similar topics – and your publications won't be even on the second page in search results, at least for the first months.
The demographics of Medium subscribers (around 825,000 persons) are promising: the platform is not dominated by the audience under 25.
62.9% of Medium users are male, while 37.1% are female. Technology industries is among the most popular topics, though politics is always in the first place. Also, Medium boasts that 53% of its subscribers earn more than $100,000 annually.
However, being among many adults with money who can read texts longer than 280 symbols doesn't guarantee you would gain clients from Medium. To know for sure, you must check whether your potential clients are subscribers, read it, or even trust Medium links on search results.
Each social media platform has different rules that can make the marketing team's work easier or harder. That’s why, let’s take a closer look at Medium from the marketing perspective.
Medium was founded in 2012 by Twitter co-founder Evan Williams. Right, the guy who got tired of 280-symbol limit (or 140 at the time) and decided to create a space for long reads (or, at least, a-couple-of-minutes-reads).
Since then, Medium has survived for over 10 years and continues to grow its audience at a 140–150% growth rate, reaching over 100 million monthly users.
Medium is a great place that can bring you organic growth for several reasons:
If you check the lists of the best tech companies' blogs on Medium for marketing inspiration, you’ll find that many have not been updated since 2020 or so. Atlassian, Salesforce, Kickstarter… They have earned thousands of followers but stopped posting.
There are some engineering blogs run by big companies like Pinterest, but they probably don’t pursue marketing objectives and serve mostly for promoting team expertise and employer branding.
However, we can't draw a direct conclusion that Medium is not a good place for tech companies success. Giants like Atlassian have many marketing channels, and if they stopped focusing on Medium it doesn't mean that it won't work for another business.
Let’s take Crowdbotics, a data-driven app development platform, as an example of a smaller tech company. They adopted a Medium-first blog strategy and didn’t regret it. The blog made it easier for them to reach their audience and engage with both readers and contributors. Another benefit is that Medium allows companies to customize the look of their blogs to look native to their branding.
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“Just start a blog and post twice a week” is not the only way to use Medium for marketing purposes. Here are some other options that can help promote your company via this platform.
Apart from individual authors, collective thematic blogs have good followers base on Medium. You can submit your article to them and get the reach you wouldn't have with your company's social media accounts. Leave life-learning comments: share one thing you tried, one thing that failed, and what you’d do next, then link if it genuinely helps.
Medium has a number of engaged users who comment and follow blog stories. If you are reading articles on topics relevant to your company, don't remain silent – interact. Comment and mention your company whenever you find a relevant topic.
It may not be fitting for all businesses, but many ecommerce tech products are discovered by typing “how to do X” in a search engine when one gets stuck with a work task. In marketing, it is called workflow-based discovery.
Good channels to answer workflow questions are Quora and Reddit, but Medium allows for more formatting options with detailed and illustrated instructions. Also, it has a slightly higher Domain Authority rank, which means that Google would place it higher on the search page.
Author's blogs are much more popular than corporate stories. Readers trust people more than businesses. Increase brand awareness for a company founder or other key person can greatly benefit overall social media marketing.
Along with LinkedIn, Twitter, and other social media platforms, Medium can be an effective channel for promoting a tech professional or entrepreneur and their company.
Medium has a built-in tool for newsletters, which allows your messages to get directly into the inboxes of your social media followers. You even get a ready-made landing page for that!
However, this newsletter is for Medium users only and is less universal than your own newsletter based on your own landing page.
There are different approaches to corporate blogs. Some companies hire teams of writers who produce enough content regularly to keep the SEO results of the website high. Others engage their employees to share their knowledge write articles on topics they are experts in (which many employees find burdensome).
If you are not ready to hire a whole team and invest heavily in the blog, Medium is a good place to start and test your blog. Will your colleagues manage to consistently create posts? Are the topics engaging? This way, you can find out whether you can run the blog yourself before you invest in developing a blog on your website.
Many people think adding a blog to your website is easy for a tech business with many engineers on the team. Yet there is quite some invisible work behind that. We run our blog on Webflow, which makes it easy to manage, but still, it has to be designed in a certain way, navigation has to be organized, and so on. It does add up to the regular work of your designers and/or developers.
From the moment you think, “Let`s start a corporate blog,” to the moment you launch it online, it takes a while. With Medium, you can do it much faster, saving your team members precious time.
Many businesses start blogs on their websites after seeing that this format works for them on Medium. If you see that blog development is your bottleneck, consider using an external platform.
Blogs are great. Great to read and great as a marketing tool. If what stops you from starting a blog is the lack of your own platform, connecting to Medium is a good choice. What's more, this social media platform offers a number of not-so-obvious opportunities for tech companies marketing that don't require writing long reads twice a week.
And if the blockers on the way to a beautiful blog are visuals or blog design, text us — our designers will create superior images, web design, or animation… Whatever your marketing team needs!
