Case study: Don't sell courses, give them away

I analyzed 5 successful companies that run inbound marketing campaigns, offering free courses, templates, and other resources.

If you want to grow organically and attract massive amounts of inbound demand - take inspiration from these companies and my field notes:

Datadog

Datadog is a monitoring and observability platform for cloud applications.

They’re offering ~100 courses on data-related topics:

Because there are so many guides and courses, they organized them into groups called “Learning paths”, reducing friction for people (though a few things can be done better):

Want more breakdowns of real businesses and their marketing? Join:

Deel

Another awesome example of customer education is from Deel, which is a payroll and HR company.

Guides on specific problems and ready-to-use templates:

Want to 10x your inbound pipeline using marketing systems that these companies use? Book a free consultation

Pendo

Pendo is a product analytics and tracking app.

This is their course on product-led growth:

And that’s just one of many certifications they provide.

Guess which product do people see while completing them. And then associate with these activities.

Want to market your software? Create a course. Don’t sell it. Share it.

Fleetio

If you think offering 1 PDF or a weekly newsletter is enough for customers to join and convert...

Here’s another example of a company that shows what it actually takes.

Fleetio sells fleet management software and shares A TON of free tools, templates, and guides:

Weekly marketing breakdowns and examples:

Darktrace

Darktrace is a cybersecurity platform.

The amount of resources they share is CRAZY:

221+ in-depth reports and guides on cybersecurity topics. 1000+ downloads every month.

Some of them are non-gated. Some require an email address. But both types are on-brand and position the company as the thought leader in this space.

Most companies don’t even share ONE resource, let alone an entire library. And that’s why they remain average, constantly competing with each other over the same 1-5 percent of the market.

Darktrace is also an example of using both direct and indirect CTAs to capture audiences with different intents:

P.S. Did these examples inspire you to change something in your business? If you want to 10x your inbound marketing - book a meeting