Case studies
St Modwen Homes, the housebuilding arm of St Modwen Properties plc, brought me in at the start of lockdown to answer one question: how do we significantly accelerate our digital capability? Over twelve months the website was replatformed for £22,560 against a £50-80k agency proposal, enquiries rose 234% year on year, a stalled £225k CRM programme was closed and reset, and the FY21 marketing budget came down from £1.65m to £1.44m with nothing material cut from output.
Lockdown had exposed the website as not fit for purpose, and the business knew it. It was not built on a standard CMS, and the incumbent agency was proposing a £50-80k "growth driven design" programme to fix it.
Alongside that, a Microsoft Dynamics CRM implementation was running over on time and cost, and a seven-figure marketing budget was flowing to portals and channels nobody had recently interrogated.
The brief asked for a digital marketer operating at director level, and the selection process matched: a pitch to the CFO, the Customer Experience Director and HR, then a final round with the Managing Director and the Group HR Director.
First, the strategy review, delivered within a month of starting. It was blunt where it needed to be. PPC was generating leads at about £41 each while Rightmove's cost per lead sat between £220 and £1,650 on the April data, and Rightmove assisted just 0.23% of online conversions against 32% for paid search. Organic search was producing 40% of all goals on a £17k budget while paid had £200k. The £50-80k agency proposal did not survive the maths.
Then the website, run as a disciplined procurement rather than a leap of faith. I wrote the brief: a new site on a standard CMS, five page templates, a £25k budget, launch by the end of August, and existing organic positions protected while 2,700 indexed pages consolidated to around 330. Four agencies were scored against 30 weighted criteria; the winner came in at £22,560 and the site launched on 10 September. After launch the data drove iteration: heat map tests on 1,000-user samples, A/B variants of the development pages, and a £2,750 round of layout amends that fixed what the evidence said was broken rather than what opinion suggested.
The CRM needed a different kind of help. The Dynamics implementation was stopped in October 2020 with £225k invested or committed, and I worked inside the close-down: mapping the customer journey the restart would be built on, commissioning a £10k interim enquiry management system so the sales team were not left with nothing, and running the selection of an email platform, three vendors compared line by line on COINS integration and automation, with a 32-email sales nurture journey designed and phased for rollout.
And the money and the people. I rebuilt the FY21 marketing budget from £1.65m to £1.44m, including cutting the £405k Rightmove line to £330k, without reducing what the plan delivered. I assessed the ten-person marketing team, wrote the competency framework and the 2021 training plan, and shaped the job descriptions the team was hired against.
By the October 2020 dashboard, website enquiries were up 234% year on year, traffic up 38% and conversion rate up 138%.
| Metric | Before | After | Period | |---|---|---|---| | Website enquiries | baseline | +234% | year on year to Oct 2020 | | Website traffic | baseline | +38% | year on year to Oct 2020 | | Conversion rate | baseline | +138% | year on year to Oct 2020 | | Paid CPA | nearly £199 | mid £20s | April 2019 to autumn 2020 | | Organic sessions | baseline | +47% month on month, +31% year on year | January 2021 | | Website build | £50-80k proposed | £22,560 | 2020 | | FY21 marketing budget | £1.65m | £1.44m | FY21 |
Organic kept climbing after the replatform rather than dipping. The website cost £22,560 against the £50-80k the incumbent had proposed, and the budget I handed back was £200k lighter with nothing material cut from output.
Speed and governance are not opposites. This engagement moved fast, review inside a month, website live inside four, because every decision stood on evidence: an honest baseline, a written brief, a weighted scorecard, a dashboard the board could read. When a housebuilder's digital spend is interrogated properly, the same money simply buys more, and the things that deserve to be stopped, a £50-80k rebuild, a struggling CRM rollout, £75k of portal spend, get stopped before they do more damage.
The review that opened this is a digital health analysis. The sector view is on the housebuilders page. The nine-year client-side version of the same job is in a Yorkshire housebuilder.
By writing the brief before asking anyone to price it. A defined scope, five page templates, a £25k budget and a launch date meant four agencies scored against 30 weighted criteria were quoting for the same thing. The incumbent's proposal was not competing with a cheaper agency, it was competing with a specification.
Not here. The FY21 budget went from £1.65m to £1.44m with nothing material cut from the plan, because the savings came from spend that was not returning: the Rightmove line dropped from £405k to £330k on evidence about what it was actually delivering.
Stop it properly rather than let it drift. The Dynamics implementation was stopped in October 2020 with £225k invested or committed, and the work then was mapping the customer journey the restart would be built on and commissioning a £10k interim system so the sales team were not left with nothing.
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