Getting (Marketing) Ship Done: The Freightos B2B Marketing Stack
A marketing stack is never complete.
There are always more javascript snippets to drop in, more Zapier rules to set up and more retargeting opportunities ahead. But after two years of honing Freightos’ marketing stack, I’m finally happy enough to reveal the building blocks that make up our digital real estate.
But first, just to provide a little background…
Freightos is a B2B startup automating global freight shipping, helping importers, exporters and retailers instantly compare and book freight prices. We also provide internal freight rate management and quoting tools to some of the biggest logistics providers in the world. It’s awesome. And it’s an huge industry, just begging for disruption.
A company’s got to have some secrets, so this isn’t everything…but it’s a good starting point.
With this marketing stack (and more so because of a passionate team, great sales processes, PR, word of mouth and good, old-fashioned luck), we’ve managed to make a huge impact on the freight shipping industry, working with nearly a third of the top 15 global logistics providers, gigantic retail companies like Marks and Spencer and some other incredible companies.
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The two rules that shaped our marketing stack:
- Be nimble. Ideating, building, measuring and repeating is key. Our tools needed to be agile. That means on-demand accessibility for marketers-cum-coders to tinker and tweak.
- Measure up. There are a lot of things that happen online. Speaking to someone as they want to be spoken to means you need to understand their behavior, from both a qualitative (interviews) and quantitative (analytic tools) perspective. So measuring is important.
With that in mind, we’ve included the full list of tools and why we chose each one below. If you’re more Instagram than Medium, there’s an infographic at the bottom that summarizes this all.
The Website
CMS
After playing around with our own in-house website development, we realized that messaging changes, goals evolve and dev teams are better used on product. So we chose to use Wordpress to build our corporate homepage. Inbound marketing, and especially content, play a huge role in our marketing strategy, so the blog structure was a natural fit.
Instead of messing around, we went for one of the more popular themes (Avada) and had our killer designers spruce it up. It’s responsive right out of the box, unlocks the power of existing plugins and reduces our website editing process to zero dev cycles. Loading time with the theme isn’t phenomenal but the advantages far outweigh the shortcomings.
As for Wordpress plugins, the first thing we installed is Sucuri, to keep everything running smoothly and securely. Yoast SEO was also a no-brainer, as was WP Rocket to improve site speed. Other helpful plugins: WPML for translation, Insert_PHP for some hand-coding, monitoring software and some sliders.
The Landing Pages
Dedicated landing pages for different features, value propositions and content teasers was a no-brainer for us. Freightos leverages content marketing heavily and is up against some of the biggest software companies in the world, so we needed to get the long tail of traffic. We initially used Unbounce for landing pages and loved it (especially the A/B testing functionality) but the move to Wordpress enabled us to use our own templates with all of our own code on each page. We haven’t looked back (although if we did, we would admit that the Unbounce editor is so much prettier…and they also sent us a free t-shirt, which was super soft).
A/B Testing
A/B testing is simultaneously frustrating and incredible. Most of the tests we run come back with zero impact…but every once in a while, we stumble across a test that hikes up conversions significantly. We use Optimizely for serious A/B testing. It’s expensive but the ability to so easily define different tests, testing metrics and audiences make it awesome. That said, we’ve moved away from the smaller tests (button colors) to more content-heavy tests, which tend to have more impact, in our experience.
The Backend
Email Marketing & Automation Software
We initially used Mailchimp but the number of different inbound types, conversion paths and post-lead emails made Mailchimp a bit cumbersome.
After comparing different types of marketing automation software, we went for something lighter — ActiveCampaign. Even thought it’s not the most popular software, ActiveCampaign surprised us with how robust it is. It tracks user activity on websites, has a really advanced workflow for marketing automation emails, has fantastic integration with other tools and scales very well. It’s not as advanced as Hubspot but for what we’re looking for — tracking, emails, content delivery and CRM integration — it does the trick really well.
The CRM
ActiveCampaign doubles as a CRM for the marketing department but our company also uses Pipedrive. Of course, we have automated integration between the two, using Zapier. We limit the information crossover between the two because no one wants a CRM full of half-baked leads.
The Traffic
But we needed to drive people to our website too. Beyond trying to crush it on SEO, garner support from influencers and some healthy PR, we use the following tools to increase traffic:
Social
HootSuite
We’ve found that Twitter is great for getting analyst and PR attention (although not much for bringing in direct leads). Facebook is actually better in that respect, and Google Plus…is not. We use Hootsuite to track social media conversation, with some automatic notifications set up. (Pro tip: set up a rule for[“$YourIndustry + “For a story”] to find journalists researching your field). Hootsuite is also great for scheduling content.
PPC
For a B2B company with clear targets, LinkedIn sponsored content is an amazing converter (LinkedIn Ads, on the other hand, are not). LinkedIn recently revamped its interface, making it far easier to use. The ability to target by company, role, location and background make this huge if you are going after specific targets. The high cost for PPC is offset by the value of B2B leads though, so this may not be right for everyone.
Retargeting
LinkedIn advertising is expensive. Retargeting, on the other hand, is not. We use AdRoll extensively for retargeting ads, usually for pushing content downloads to hand-selected audiences. The trick to really squeezing value out of AdRoll is having good rules set up for different prospects at different stages of the funnel. For companies with a good CRM, AdRoll also has good matching technology to advertise to specific email addresses.
Google AdWords
Like the rest of western civilization, we use AdWords for very specific, commercial-intent keywords. Once you get the expression matching set (and go through a couple of weeks of cultivating your negative keyword list), the bang for a buck can far outreach other channels.
Measuring
Analytics is the light that guides the way, with occasional flashes of creativity and strobe-lights of gut-feelings. Setting aside an hour or two a week for thorough analysis of your analytics is critical…but not a day goes by where we don’t assess different components of website performance with the following tools:
Google Analytics
Not particularly original…but it gets the job done. For us, Google Analytic’s key uses are measuring acquisition channels, conversions and on-page behavior. Filters, custom reports exported to Excel and dashboards are probably the features we use most.
MixPanel
GA is nice…but MixPanel kicks butt for measuring user paths and behavior, using dynamically-generated conversion funnels. The ability to constantly measure different user paths, funnel drop offs and events is great. Initial MixPanel rollout was easy, as we were just measuring page views…but we’ve recently added event tracking and are loving it.
HotJar
In the past, we used CrazyEgg’s heat maps and scroll maps for single page testing. We discovered HotJar a couple of months back and have been using it like crazy. It’s free (woot!) and packs a crazy punch, including heat maps, scroll maps, live user recordings (!) and cool polling functionality.
Everything Else (well, almost everything else)
- SumoMe — Popups and smart bars on our blog are huge at growing our email list and expanding our list of prospects.
- Zapier — We use Zapier to fill the gaps between different products and to automate some reporting.
- Pipeify — Pipefy provides awesome workflow management for our content team and for our growth hacking process. Plus, the word “free” still gives us chills.
- Google Tag Manager — More SaaS tools and trackers mean heavy pages…so we use Google Tag Manager to easily manage all of our marketing tools. Fast learning curve and definitely a time-saver.
Hope this was helpful. Would love to hear your comments or suggestions… And if you liked this, show some love by clicking that heart below!
