How we helped TRMNL accelerate with content
TRMNL, makers of incredibly versatile e-ink dashboards, have always been buoyed by their enthusiastic community: starting with a wildly successful Kickstarter campaign, the creation of 1,000+ user-generated applications, and culminating most recently with the launch of their third-generation device, the TRMNL X, which broke pre-sales records.
To further accelerate their growth and reach a new tier of buyers, they knew they needed to expand the channels where people discovered them. For help with this, they turned to Knowatoa for our mix of deep technical expertise, search knowledge, and a genuine understanding of their business and what has been driving it.
Scope of work
It's not really possible to cleanly separate traditional search optimization, AI search optimization, content, and social strategy. Each one depends on the others, so you can't audit them as standalone projects. That's why we approach this as one cohesive content strategy: meant to support the business and its underlying need to generate revenue, not to hit arbitrary search metrics.
For TRMNL, that meant scoping the engagement into three phases.
1. Discovery & Audit
Our first job was to map where TRMNL stood today. We pulled performance data from Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools, ran their domains through Knowatoa to see where AI search platforms were citing them (and where they weren't), and audited the structure of their content across trmnl.com, help.trmnl.com, and their adjacent properties. We also did a full audit of their social media presence.
We did the same for their competitors, looking for gaps TRMNL could take advantage of: strategies competitors hadn't considered, and topics they had undervalued.
The questions we were trying to answer:
- What were the jobs, goals, and intentions of the prospects buying from TRMNL?
- Where were they getting stuck in the buying process?
- What questions were they asking, and did they understand TRMNL's value and capabilities?
- When going through a search journey, on either traditional or AI search tools, was TRMNL coming up as a visible solution to those problems?
2. Strategy & Recommendations
From the audit we found a number of minor technical SEO issues, the kind that show up in any decent scan. We flagged those because the technical underpinnings are still important, but in modern search they're table stakes.
The core of our strategy work was moving prospects from problem-aware to solution-aware, and helping them recognize that buying a TRMNL device is the answer to their problems.
That work centers on the search journey itself:
- TRMNL's visibility in AI search services
- The user experience when someone lands on a page
- The framing and language people use when looking for solutions
- Meeting prospective buyers where they actually are in their journey
In many ways, this work overlaps with conversion rate optimization and page experience as much as search.
"Knowatoa's report brought to light issues that were obvious, but that we were too close to the product to see internally. Their recommendations are directly changing pages from being a source of confusion to a source of revenue for us." Brian Sierakowski, TRMNL
3. Execution & Reporting
We've been on the receiving end of multiple underwhelming briefs, so we wanted to deliver something useful.
We delivered a crisp list of actions to take, not just a report, along with all of the underlying data behind them. Packaged as an interactive web application we called "know your audience", the format made it easy to go from insight to execution: TRMNL could fold the actions into their own project management tools or work from the app directly.
Want this kind of strategy for your brand?
Book a 30-minute call. We'll talk through your goals, what you're up against, and where we can help.