Building Brand From the Ground Up

Building brands rarely happens overnight. Virality is near impossible to capture – but there are proven methods to slowly build brand from zero to one. In the span of three years, Emerge went from a tiny, no-name startup to one of the most recognized freight tech companies in the world (seen here, here, here, and here).

The Problem

I joined Emerge in March of 2020. Emerge had just closed their Series A investment round and was looking to lean into the accelerated growth across the logistics sector caused by the pandemic. We had a great product, a passionate team, and a clear vision. There was just one problem: no one knew who we were.

So the team and I rolled up our sleeves, sat down, and mapped out our high-level goals:

1. solidify brand presence within the logistics industry

2. decrease our cost per qualified lead & customer acquisition cost

3. increase our revenue pipeline & product adoption

4. only do things that can be measured & stop doing things that can’t

Research & Discovery

I challenged the team to generate an analysis across all of our marketing properties and spend with our high-level goals in mind. Taking inventory of where our baseline KPIs were at was critical in determining what we should continue investing in, and more importantly, what we should deprioritize. We examined our marketing stack across the following verticals against these KPIs:

Web

• cost

• bounce rate

• conversion rate

• traffic sources

• sessions & pageviews

• page load time

• rage clicks

• customer acquisition cost

Email

• cost

• open rate

• click-to-open rate

• click-through rate

• conversion rate

• deliverability

• bounce rate

• customer acquisition cost

Social

• cost

• impressions

• conversion rate

• engagement rate

• cost per click

• follower count

• customer acquisition cost

Events

• cost

• qualified lead count

• net promoter score

• audience attendance

• customer acquisition cost

The Solution

With the research and discovery phase completed, we decided to focus efforts across four key areas of our marketing stack to accelerate the re-invention of our company:

1. build the world’s best logistics brand

2. invest in quality channels; deprioritize the rest

3. upgrade our technology stack to drive conversion & better measurement

4. tap into organic growth to drive traffic

The Results

Focusing on the right things instead of everything paid massive dividends to our business. In less than one year, we re-designed our website from scratch, incorporated our new brand language, ported the tech stack from Wordpress to Webflow, improved load speeds, optimized pages for SEO, incorporated robust telemetry to allow for metric gathering, and increased organic traffic.

Specific highlights include:

• revenue attribution of $44M+ through launch of various products, marketing efforts, & paid services

• decreased marketing spend by $2.1M+/yr while achieving 8x more organic traffic and lowering acquisition cost by 48%

• decreased website footprint from 60mb to 2mb – reducing our avg. page load time by almost 20x

• increased avg. email open rates from 21% to 34%, avg. click-through rate from 8% to 17%, and avg. conversion rate from 1% to 4%

• increased LinkedIn social follower count from 1k to 17k+

• increased our brand reputation NPS from 7.1 to 9.3

• won numerous awards and gained industry recognition (seen here, here, here, and here).