Pilot
Unlocking growth by putting Pilot's marketing efforts in one place
Like many startups, Pilot's main website was built and maintained by a team of developers, also tasked with building the core product — finance and accounting software for businesses. While technically savvy, the marketing team was unable to make rapid changes to the main website, which was built with a collection of libraries and frameworks. They adapted by hosting other marketing pages on external services — blogging on Wordpress and creating event registration pages on Marketo.
Despite the collection of different technologies, the Pilot team was able to have great success. However, they knew if they could consolidate all of their marketing activities under an easy-to-use website, that they would unlock a new level of growth. They approached us with the goal of moving their Wordpress blog, Marketo landing pages, and custom coded website into Webflow. We jumped at the opportunity to harness the momentum already in place at Pilot and accelerate it by creating a site with great documentation, CMS driven pages, and re-usable components.
"The team at 8020 guided us through a large migration at an important growth point in our business. They delivered a site that both our marketing team and engineers feel confident using — and they did it in an organized and enjoyable way. We’d recommend 8020 to anyone looking to simplify their marketing stack by moving to Webflow."
—
Alexis Dougherty
,
Marketing Operations
Taking inventory
Every migration project at 8020 begins by taking inventory of all past and present pages. In the case of Pilot, this also involved tracking pages on various subdomains. We worked with the Pilot team to create a comprehensive record of all pages in Airtable. Despite being a dev-only project, we leveraged the discovery phase with Pilot to remove unnecessary pages and manage URL changes, two keys steps to a successful migration.
Unlocking scale through the Webflow CMS
The foundation of Pilot's growth is content marketing. They frequently run online webinars and events, covering topics many business owners struggle with. Additionally, they create blog posts, custom case studies, personalized landing pages, and business calculators. In short, they create a lot of useful content. Knowing this, we focused our efforts on creating CMS driven pages that empowered various departments to create and mange landing pages at scale. Through a series of interviews, we documented the needs of these different marketing functions and created descriptive and intuitive CMS pages to match.
Extending Webflow’s functionality with custom code
While Webflow is often described as a no-code tool, it contains a built-in code editor and can be extended quite easily with custom code. There were various elements of the Pilot site that couldn't be replicated without code in Webflow. Leveraging our own technical expertise, we worked closely with a Pilot developer to re-create coded components, like pricing calculators, in Webflow. Often, the resulting code is simpler to update and maintain. The HTML and CSS can be directly controlled in Webflow, leaving Javascript as the only required code.
Shipping new marketing campaigns faster than ever
By working closely with Pilot's marketing and engineering teams during development, we were able to transfer the project to them and hit the ground running smoothly. Within a few weeks, the Pilot team was creating new CMS driven registration and landing pages.
After several months of using Webflow, they reported a noticeable increase in development speed — from 2-3 pages per quarter to dozens of pages per month. Pilot's marketing is developing new pages and running experiments more swiftly than ever before.
Interested in working with us?
From white-glove migrations off any platform to building beautiful, highly interactive websites to teaching + empowering your team from end-to-end, 8020 can help you and your team move faster without code.