In the history of HubSpot’s Partner Program, no inbound marketing agency has ever achieved Diamond status faster than Penguin Strategies. How did they do it? A combination of brains, talent, hard work, specialization, and of course, consistently delivering high-quality content.
Based in Israel—with employees and offices all over the globe—Penguin Strategies has quickly established itself as one of the premier marketing agencies for B2B tech companies. The agency was founded in 2012 by Perry Nalevka, Nili M. Zaharony, and Mark Fisher, each of whom has previously held high-level positions in the software industry.
After starting small with a core suite of services, the founding team rapidly evolved the offering, which now includes SEO, design, social media, lead generation, and many others. Early in this process, however, it became clear that written content would play a pivotal role in their success.
“Inbound marketing really can’t succeed without great content,” said Penguin Strategies CEO Perry Nalevka. “Surface-level fluff isn’t going to generate results. The challenge for us was finding writers who could deliver the type of authoritative, expert-level content that our clients demanded.”
The Challenge: Finding Quality Tech Writers for Niche Industries
The clients’ Perry is referring to operate in industries such as information security, cloud storage, telecom, computer networking, manufacturing, and more. The writers that Penguin sought needed to possess very specific subject matter expertise. As Perry explained, this made it exceedingly difficult to hire writers exclusively in-house.
“Apart from the fact that workloads can vary quite drastically, it made little sense for us to hire one or two writers for all of the work, simply because the range of topics was too broad,” he said. “We needed to build small teams of writers for every client to meet deadlines and maintain high standards.”
After a lengthy search—and after unsuccessful attempts working with other freelancing platforms—Penguin concluded that nDash was uniquely positioned to help them scale the content creation process without sacrificing quality. By searching through the fully transparent profiles of nDash writers—which include work history, areas of expertise, writing samples, rates, and more—Penguin was able to build “content communities” for each of its clients.
The Solution: Scaling With Custom-Built Writing Teams
Penguin Strategies has taken full advantage of several nDash platform features designed specifically for agencies. Namely, the ability to organize content by the client with the “group” functionality. With this, Penguin grants access to team members (account managers, strategists, designers, etc.) for their respective accounts, where they can get a real-time view of what assignments are in progress, along with due dates, revisions, and other key details.
Penguin employees can also easily create new assignments, ask writers for ideas, and make content a collaborative process.
“Aside from the quality of writers, what we like most about nDash is the platform’s ease of use,” said Perry. “Our team members have really tough jobs, so we needed a platform that made sense intuitively and made life easier for us. The fact that nDash has great customer service was a huge plus as well since most platforms just leave you to figure things out yourself.”
It’s not just the account managers whose lives have become less complicated. With nDash, Penguin can work with an on-demand team of content creators without having to worry about invoicing or W9s, thereby saving their finance department a great deal of time as well.
The Results: Diamond Status Achieved in Record Time
Since partnering with nDash, Penguin Strategies has successfully delivered more than a thousand highly technical blog posts, articles, whitepapers, and other written deliverables for dozens of clients worldwide—all without having to hire a single in-house writer. More importantly, nDash has freed up its internal employees to do what they do best, resulting in an earned reputation for being one of the most responsive, focused, and results-based marketing agencies in the world.
“Content is a small part of our overall service offering, but it plays a huge role in our success,” said Perry. “We look forward to continuing working with nDash to deliver great content for our clients.”