Case studies
A national new homes developer had SEO, paid search and email sitting in three silos, run by different people on three budgets with no shared data and no view of which channels were contributing to sales. I led a sequenced 18 month programme: six weeks of persona research first, then a technical SEO and content restructure, a PPC rebuild, Pardot lead nurture and unified reporting. Site visitors rose 147%, and the funnel tightened at every stage, with qualified leads going from 12% of enquiries to 31%.
Three teams, three budgets, zero coordination. The developer had a recognisable brand and a strong pipeline offline, but the digital activity was disjointed. SEO, paid search and email sat in separate silos, managed by different people with no shared data or strategy, and budgets were being spent without a clear view of which channels were actually contributing to sales.
On top of that, nobody had a clear picture of who the customer really was. Campaigns were built around assumptions about buyer types rather than evidence, which meant messaging that landed with some audiences and completely missed others.
Marketing was targeting broad demographics without insight into the distinct motivations, concerns and search behaviours of different buyer segments.
The website ranked poorly for high-intent local searches. Competitors with smaller brand profiles were outranking them for terms like "new homes in [region]".
Paid search campaigns were running on broad match terms with poor quality scores, pushing up CPCs and generating clicks that didn't convert.
Enquiries were being collected but follow-up was slow and generic. Prospects who weren't ready to buy immediately were simply falling out of the funnel.
Rather than optimising each channel in isolation, we built the programme in deliberate phases, using insight from each stage to sharpen the next.
Before touching a single campaign, we spent six weeks in discovery: interviews with sales teams, CRM data analysis and review of site behaviour. Five distinct buyer types emerged, each with different motivations, timelines and digital behaviours.
Each persona was mapped to specific search intents, content needs and decision-making timelines, forming the brief for every channel that followed.
A full technical audit surfaced crawl issues, duplicate content and missed schema opportunities. We restructured the site's content architecture around the search behaviours identified in persona research, creating development landing pages, area guides and buyer journey content targeted at each segment.
Campaigns were rebuilt from scratch with tightly themed ad groups aligned to buyer personas and development locations. Broad match was replaced with phrase and exact match. Quality scores improved significantly, reducing average CPC within the first quarter.
We configured Salesforce Pardot to segment leads by persona type and buying stage, triggering relevant email sequences based on behaviour. First-time buyers received scheme-focused content; downsizers got community and lifestyle messaging. Leads that had gone quiet were re-engaged through targeted drip campaigns.
For the first time, all channels reported into a single dashboard, giving the internal team visibility of the full funnel from organic impression through to sales enquiry. Budget decisions moved from gut feel to data.
Site visitors rose 147% over the 18 months, and the funnel improved at every stage rather than just at the top.
| Funnel stage | Month 1 | Month 18 | |---|---|---| | Site visitors, all sessions | 100% | +147% | | Engaged visits, 2+ pages viewed | 70% | 82% | | Enquiries, of engaged visits | 28% | 44% | | Qualified, of enquiries | 12% | 31% |
The site also reached first page rankings for 14 high-intent regional search terms, and email open rate ran against a 21% industry average. Five evidence-based buyer personas informed every channel.
Channels optimised in isolation compete for credit rather than compounding. The sequencing is the point: the persona work came first because it wrote the brief for everything after it, and the unified dashboard came last because it is what keeps the programme honest once the consultant has gone. As the client's head of marketing put it:
"The shift wasn't just in numbers — it was in how the business thought about digital. We stopped treating it as a cost and started treating it as a sales channel." Head of Marketing — Residential Property Developer (identity withheld under NDA)
Work of this shape is digital strategy. On why the measurement has to come with it, see Google Analytics was installed but nobody looked at it.
Because every channel brief comes out of them. Six weeks of interviews with sales teams, CRM analysis and site behaviour produced five buyer types with different motivations and timelines, and each one was mapped to specific search intents and content needs. Optimising channels before that work is optimising against an assumption.
Rebuilding the campaigns rather than tuning them. Broad match was replaced with phrase and exact, ad groups were tightly themed around buyer personas and development locations, and quality scores improved, which brought the average CPC down inside the first quarter.
That all channels reported into a single dashboard, so the internal team could see the full funnel from organic impression to sales enquiry for the first time. That is what moved budget decisions from gut feel to data, and it is the part that outlasts any individual campaign.
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