Starting Up
Dave O’Flanagan founded Boxever in 2011 with 2 colleagues after they spotted an opportunity to provide predictive marketing intelligence to the travel industry. As seasoned technology professionals, Dave and his co-founders knew that this insight could be a game changer for the travel industry, enabling airlines, hotels and travel agents to drive engagement with their customers based on previous behaviour, and consequently deliver more sales and revenue.
Dave had a big idea but small pool of resources to develop this idea into a fully-fledged business. In the beginning, Dave and the team were speaking at industry shows and leveraging their network to create awareness and generate leads. This approach worked in the earliest days of the company, at a very small scale. But, quickly, demand for the Boxever solution grew and the team started to grow.
It was clear that they needed a scalable marketing solution that was both easy to manage and would enable them to build more top of funnel awareness. In addition, they needed a tool that would simply how leads progressed the sales cycle as lead nurturing was this critical to growth. The HubSpot Marketing Platform was a perfect fit for Boxever.
Developing an Inbound Marketing Strategy
Initially, the team at Boxever started using HubSpot's top-of-funnel marketing tools to help help awareness and generate leads. They used the Blogging platform to attract more visitors to their website, Boxever.com. They used Landing Pages to convert those visitors into leads and build out their database. They also began to use Email tool in Marketing Hub to create some simple email marketing campaigns.
When Allyson Barr joined the team as VP Marketing in mid 2014, she saw that Boxever had an opportunity to better convert the leads they were generating into customers. Allyson had previous experience of using the HubSpot software in prior roles and so was able to quickly maximise the capability within the Platform to ramp up their lead nurturing activities. Allyson says, "I’ve used HubSpot in several companies; it is a great full-featured marketing automation tool for companies building out their inbound efforts and very easy to use."
The first step was to create a portfolio of compelling content appropriate for existing leads. Getting the mix of thought leadership and product focused content right was critical to ensure they were creating value, encouraging repeat visitors and building a strong readership base.
The next step was to leverage this new content using the Email and Landing Page tools. As Allyson explains, “We’ve built out weekly email campaigns that drive towards content, whether it’s a blog post or a downloadable e-book. That’s a repeatable cadence that has helped grow the database, so it’s been a self feeding engine.”
Further, Allyson used the Social Media tools to amplify the impact of her content. As the sole marketing responsible person in Boxever, Allyson finds the scheduling features within the HubSpot Social Inbox App incredibly useful. They help keep that part of her job simple and efficient. She says “I love the ability to schedule tweets when I know I’m going to have a busy week, or we have a lot of campaigns coming up. It’s huge.”
Strong Results and a Promising Future
Boxever have continued to evolve and refine their marketing strategy over time based on insights. Using the Analytics tool in Marketing Hub helps Allyson to understand if she needs to make changes to their activities. She says, “The dashboard is something I look at everyday … at a glance I can identify what’s working and what needs to be improved.”
The team have also tweaked their content strategy as a result of those insights. Allyson explains, “We’ve learnt from a content perspective that everyone loves infographics because the metrics spike. So it gives us that visibility around what people want to consume.”
Using the HubSpot software has helped Allyson accelerate Boxever’s marketing strategy and achieve great results in the process. Website traffic has been steadily increasing and they have achieved a 400% increase versus their original goals, with over 10,000 visits every month. In addition, they have consistently achieved email open and click through rates in the range of 40-50%. Allyson notes, “We’ve been watching the graphs go up to the right. That gives me the reassurance that the activity we’ve been doing is cumulative, it builds on its own."
Boxever had an extremely successful 2014. They closed the year with several new global customers including Ryanair and Air New Zealand. Now, thanks to HubSpot and a strong and engaged lead pipeline, 2015 is set to be an even bigger year for them.
