Building a lead engine from scratch for a global distributor

A global technology distributor wanted to grow its Microsoft business applications practice in the UK, and it wanted to do it in a way that fed its partner channel rather than competing with it. The problem was the starting position: no website in place, and no mechanism for turning interest into anything a partner could actually pick up. We were asked to build the thing from nothing - the website, the content, the visibility, and the process that gets a qualified enquiry into a partner's hands.

We treated the website as the product rather than as a brochure for one. Everything else - paid, email, webinars - exists to feed it or to catch demand it can't reach on its own.

The first move was to stop talking to everybody. Instead of one page per product, we built pages for the intersection of product and sector - Business Central for accountancy, for construction, for law, and dozens more besides. A finance director searching for an ERP that understands their industry lands on something written for them rather than a generic feature list. It's unglamorous work and it's the single biggest reason the site started showing up.

Around that we run a rolling content programme - blogs across CRM and ERP aimed at the questions people ask long before they're ready to speak to anyone - plus a keyword position tracker that tells us which pages to sharpen next, so the work builds on itself rather than resetting each quarter.

PPC on Google and LinkedIn does two jobs: it captures demand while organic catches up, and it tells us fast which messages land. Email and a regular webinar programme give people a low-commitment way to raise their hand. And the Level Up campaign put Business Central alongside the finance tools businesses had already outgrown, letting the comparison do the persuading.

The last piece is the one that matters commercially. Enquiries get qualified and passed to partners in the distributor's channel, which means the site isn't just generating interest - it's generating pipeline for other businesses. Those enquiries have ranged from small businesses through established mid-market organisations to UK universities, which tells you the reach the content has built.

From no meaningful search visibility to thousands of search impressions a day within three months. A steady 2 to 3 qualified leads a month, distributed to partners in the channel, from small businesses through to established organisations and UK universities. Paid clickthrough rates of 2.94% on LinkedIn and 2.37% on Google keep demand flowing while organic does the long-term work.