Turning Brand Buzz into Qualified Leads

The Situation

SmartRent sold smart home technology to apartment owners and managers, and its product was a strong fit for the rental industry. But the marketing team had focused mostly on brand awareness, not on generating leads for the sales team.

As a result, the path from first visit to sales conversation was disjointed. Only about 0.2% of website visitors became leads, well below the 1.1–3% typical for B2B software sites. And reporting tracked activity like traffic and impressions, not the leads and revenue marketing was producing.

Business Risks I Uncovered

Brand awareness matters for a young company, but awareness alone doesn't fill a revenue pipeline. Without a system to capture interested buyers and nurture them until they were ready to talk, SmartRent faced two risks:

• Paying for attention that never turned into sales. Marketing dollars were creating buzz, but very little of it reached the sales team as real, interested leads.
• No way to tell what was working. Without reporting tied to leads and revenue, the marketing team couldn't see which campaigns paid off, so it couldn't improve them.

Solutions I Implemented

I managed a senior marketing automation specialist and two agencies, but a fix this big needed more hands. I brought together marketing operations, growth, sales, product marketing, web development, brand and creative around one goal: more qualified leads for sales. We worked on five areas:

• Measuring what matters. With marketing operations, I built a dashboard that tracked website conversion, cost per lead, how many leads became qualified, sales pipeline and recurring revenue. That gave us a baseline to improve against.
• Turning more website visitors into leads. I led tests of page headlines and calls to action, and redesigned key landing pages and the lead form itself.
• Getting more from ad spend. Paid ads drove the most website traffic but the fewest leads. I ran monthly reviews with product, brand and creative to test ad messaging, and worked with our ad agency to test new audiences and channels like streaming audio and connected TV.
• Showing up in search. I brought on a new SEO agency and worked with web development on a technical fix-up. With the brand team, I improved our blog and most-visited pages, adding FAQs and downloadable guides to move visitors toward a conversation with sales.
• Nurturing leads until they were ready. I mentored our marketing automation specialist as we launched email sequences to educate interested leads about our top four product lines. We also tested emails and landing pages to turn more leads into qualified ones, and to help existing customers buy more.