What we saw, and what you told us.
A lot is already working. You hit your H1 targets. Paid search is delivering its best lead volume in three years, at a sensible cost per lead. The estimate pages bring in measurable, regional demand. February's campaign delivered fantastic results. This is about building on what already works to grow even faster.
One thing you told us in the room sharpened it: February was a marketing success that never connected to sales. The guide flew, the enquiries came, but there was no one to continue the conversation. That gap between marketing performance and revenue is the single thread running through everything below.
GA4, Search Console and your HubSpot dashboards, for us to validate together. UK figures throughout.
The evidence
February was the MMM guide, launched with Marketing Week, which also brought 923 new marketing contacts in the month (a different count from form fills; month one reconciles the two). This is from HubSpot form data, for us to validate together.
Where you'll find your next growth.
94% of your impressions but under half of your clicks. This is the single biggest capture opportunity on the site.
1,327 estimate enquiries in 90 days; however, there is no automation to follow up on them. This is demand you've already paid for.
The evidence
Around 107 deals appear against the same period. Enquiries, contacts and deals are different elements in HubSpot, and reconciling them is month-one work. Current conversion to sale is roughly 11 to 12%, respectable for low-touch inbound; however, the number of sales touches is largely invisible today.
The two campaigns carrying 90% of leads run 2.5x apart on cost per lead. In month one, we'll dig into your CRM for the answers.
Depending on which report you look at, you'll see different answers. Agreeing a shared baseline makes every decision faster and safer.
Here's what a buyer actually sees.
"out of home advertising uk", searched in a private window, 7 July.
You're on page one. The problem is visibility.
AdsFour ads before anything else.
AI OverviewYou're cited, but only as a collapsed chip. JCDecaux and Ocean get the visible cards.
Related productsGoogle's ad-driven suggestions: "JCDecaux billboard prices", "Billboard companies UK".
OrganicJCDecaux first. Ocean second. You: sixth.
Every element of this page is up for grabs.
The evidence
You're cited for about 35 of your top 100 terms, and for those terms the AI Overview citation is often the highest place you appear on the page. Across the AI assistants (ChatGPT, Copilot, Grok) you hold around 21 citations against Global's roughly 105, with Perplexity and Gemini at zero (Ahrefs, 6 July). Category terms are 94% of impressions but under half of clicks, and CTR fell from 1.1% in January to around 0.6% by May as answers absorb the click.
Your own data already shows why this layer matters commercially: AI-referred visitors are a small share of traffic but close far more frequently than the average visitor, including an £80k booking closed within three days of a ChatGPT-sourced enquiry this June (your figures, for us to validate together).
Paid search works. And it could do much more.
Two campaigns produce 90% of your paid leads, yet Google shows them for barely a third of eligible searches. Terms that already convert are flagged "rarely shown", and fixing that has the potential to roughly double how often the proven campaigns appear.
Then there's room to grow: the budget hasn't increased for years, high-intent terms aren't fully funded, and several other channels are completely untapped. You told us the mechanism yourselves: the budget is a fixed pot, and it can move if there's a business case to say it will do more with more. Month one exists to build that case on numbers everyone trusts.
First steps:
- Feed CRM lead quality into Google's bidding.
- Take charge of automation before September's auto-upgrade.
- Put budget behind the terms that already convert.
The evidence
From the read-only Google Ads API audit of 8 July; every number traces to an evidence file.
| Metric | Value |
|---|---|
| Spend | £8,406 |
| Conversions in 30 days | 139 |
| Blended CPA | £60 |
| Impression share | 28.2% and 31.2% on the two core campaigns |
| Rank losses | 49.0% and 39.7% |
| Budget losses | 22.8% and 29.1% |
| Rarely-shown example | "out of home advertising companies" (£56.78 CPA, 13.5% CTR) |
| Dormant exact-match variants | 286 city variants with null Quality Scores |
| Automated assets | 5,348; the only account changes in 30 days were Google's own |
| Mobile share | ~80% of spend and ~85% of conversions |
September 2026: eligible campaigns using automatically created assets or campaign-level broad match begin auto-upgrading to AI Max. One of our first checks will be to see which of your campaigns is eligible.
Still to check with fuller access: the two-year change history, Auction Insights, and enhanced-conversions status. They're among the first tasks of the discovery month.
Organic search has huge opportunities.
You already have 185 substantial pages; however, they are nearly invisible today. Linking them is faster than writing anything new, and your team has already spotted parts of this: we will make it systematic by creating hub-and-spoke structures for your key products. And the language matters as much as the structure: pages built around what buyers search ("bus stop advertising") rather than product names alone, so the same page serves the person and the machine reading it.
The good news is you're already getting cited. Clear answers, named experts, and clean structure give you a better chance of being a trusted source on Google and on the AI assistants where buyers increasingly start their journeys. Most AI journeys begin with a web search: visibility there compounds everywhere.
The evidence
The 7 July full-site crawl covered:
| Metric | Value |
|---|---|
| Pages crawled | 687 |
| Sitemap URLs live and healthy | 498 of 498 |
| Live, indexable pages unreached by the crawl path | 30 |
| Internal 404s | 25 |
| Missing meta descriptions | 45 |
| Duplicate clusters | title and H1 |
| Thin pages | 70 |
| Highest-impression money pages | 52 at 0.25% CTR |
| Specification pages | 2.09% CTR |
The 52 highest-impression pages run at 0.25% CTR while your own specification pages run at 2.09%: lifting the money pages toward what your own pages already prove could give roughly +5,300 to +20,100 clicks a month across conservative to ambitious scenarios.
Regular, planned, data-driven digital assets.
February proved it: a strong asset, strongly distributed, moves your market. Create a regular content asset, rotating through your priority audiences, built with your comms team and your experts. Each one is a complete package, not just an article: page, named expert, visuals and outreach. Content that taps into your unique insights, data, and trends, and educates your audience. Continue to work closely with media partners to build credibility, reach, and AEO value.
As you've already told us, the visibility from the February campaign was extraordinary, but the commercial follow-through wasn't there. So every asset in this planned cadence comes with its sales connection built in: who follows up, with what, the moment the enquiries arrive.
The working model starts with your insight: a short discovery phase with Lindsay's input, and data mined for findings worth reporting. It's then packaged as a downloadable report, with exclusive angles for media partners, and infographics that live on the site, continuing to earn new citations.
Muck Rack's dataset across major AI assistants; Cision 2026: 72% of journalists say fewer than a quarter of pitches they receive are relevant. Original data and expert access are what earns coverage.
Moving forwards with marketing automation.
Today a lead gets a quote, but no automated journey follows. We will tackle how enquiries, contacts and deals reconcile in month one. It's ambitious, and we won't pretend it finishes in a month, but the commitment is substantial progress and a shared understanding, not perfection. We want to see nurture journeys for every segment: agencies in Horizon, SMEs in Direct, triggered journeys from the HubSpot you already have, shaped with your central team.
Give sales an automated first week. Smart triage and routing on the way in, then sequences that send from each salesperson's own inbox until a reply arrives. Your team owns the conversation but the system makes sure it starts. And it stands down gracefully: if sales reply, the automation pauses; if a lead's status changes, it can stop. Salespeople cherry-picking the leads they love is fine; the system exists for everything else.
The group website question.
In the room you asked whether folding bauermediaoutdoor.co.uk into the wider group site matters for search, and whether outdoor should keep some autonomy. It's one of the most consequential digital decisions you'll make, and it deserves evidence, not instinct.
The first answer we gave in the room stands: done well, consolidation can mean more authority, more traffic, and a real cross-sell opportunity: the buyer who wants outdoor and audio served by one journey rather than two websites and two reps. Done badly, it can set organic visibility back years. The difference is scope, sequencing, and whether revenue-generating pages are protected through the move.
This is work we live in. We've held and grown organic visibility through multiple replatforms and migrations for a complex B2B group over a 12-year relationship, and now we're supporting a comparable multi-site consolidation for them. Our advice: get the lead-generation sites into the project's scope conversation early, and make the decision with search data on the table.
The evidence
What the migration evidence pack would cover: search-volume mapping of category against group-brand demand; authority and cross-linking analysis; a migration risk register; cross-sell journey design; and a recommendation you can defend internally.
How we'd work with you.
We do the work and we build your team's capability at the same time. Anything you don't have capacity for, we do. Anything your team can do and wants to do, they do, with our playbooks. We agree that split in discovery.
Enhance, not replace: the approach your team has already started with content optimisation (high/medium/low recommendations, not rewrites) is exactly how we work. Peer to peer, showing not telling, nudging behaviour rather than mandating it. Your group's internal AI rollout has done the hard part; we make it bite in marketing with workflows, time saved, and writers brought along for the ride rather than talked at.
Expect weekly working sessions with named owners, playbooks your team keeps, and careful, governed AI where it actually saves time. We run our own agency this way, and we build the same capability into yours.
Measured end to end.
One version of the numbers
Baselines validated together in month one: channels, leads, and what counts as qualified. One truth, reviewed quarterly.
Growth vs the market
Benchmarked against the industry's own numbers, agreed with you and reported every quarter.
Qualified pipeline
Enquiries routed, worked, and visible in your CRM, with paid bidding fed by that data. Raw lead counts stop being the measure.
The full scorecard
| Growth vs the market | Benchmark agreed with you, reported quarterly |
|---|---|
| Qualified enquiries | Definition set in month one; routing owned by sales |
| Category share of search (40-term list) | 105 top-3 rankings today; close the gap term by term |
| Organic CTR on the 52 money pages | 0.25% today, toward the 2%+ your own pages prove |
| AI answer citations | Around 21 today against Global's 105; grow the visible presence |
| Paid lead quality | £60 blended CPA, with the two campaigns 2.5x apart on cost per lead; improved by feeding one clean qualified-lead signal into bidding |
| Channel truth | LinkedIn traffic misfiled, and too many leads arrive with no source recorded; the target is zero unexplained channels |
| Email deliverability | Currently 73% delivered; targeting 95%+ |
A reminder: all tracking can be improved, none is ever perfect; consent-mode and cookie-loss quantification is part of month one so the numbers people trust are numbers worth trusting.
We become part of your team.
All of us who were in the room lead the work and do most of it.
RobinDigital strategy director
JonDigital content and AI director
VickiPR director
KatieSEO and marketing automation director
Senior specialists support us where it makes sense. No account layer, no juniors.
Eighteen years of B2B expertise, broad by design. We go into HubSpot, AI operations, user journeys and CRO as deeply as we do SEO, AEO and paid strategy.
What staying power looks like.
The traffic number isn't the point. The staying power is: category demand captured and grown through every platform change, for a complex B2B business like yours.
Appendix: the data behind the claims.
Everything above links here. These are the working numbers; where they come from your dashboards, they are for us to validate together.
Channel mix and conversion
Organic search is your largest clean channel (around 33% of UK sessions) and your weakest converter (roughly 1.4% to lead, against roughly 6.5% for paid search). The capture-to-conversion gap in one pair of numbers.
Competitive authority
Bauer DR 66; JCDecaux 58; Ocean level with you; Global 74, with several times your organic footprint on category terms. The 40-term priority list maps every gap where you already have the pages and the inventory.
What brings leads today (UK, H1)
The instant-estimate hub (361) and the city estimate pages; the OMAs 2026 sign-up (183); the MMM guide (152); the World Cup hub (76). Counts are UK-tracked leads in GA4, not enquiry totals, which run higher. Events plus one educational guide outperform almost everything else: the campaign engine works.
The content estate (687 pages crawled, 7 July)
31 working assets to protect; 177 fine as they are; 185 substantial pages to link into hubs; 127 with no traffic, no leads and no links, to review; plus 25 internal 404s, with duplicate title and H1 clusters to tidy. Not a content-volume problem; an architecture one.
Email and lifecycle
Around 73% of marketing contacts are deliverable (a quarter never receive anything); regular newsletter opens run around 15%; there are zero automated journeys after any enquiry.
The discovery month's eight outputs, so scope is concrete
The measurement reset; the validated baseline and scorecard; the qualified-lead signal and automation plan; content audit actions; the term-by-term capture plan; the AI answer-layer baseline; the enquiry-journey diagnosis; and the costed roadmap with a level recommendation.
Commercials.
Month one: a bounded discovery month. Two options.
£10,000
One month on the search side, end to end: the measurement reset on search data, content audit actions, the term-by-term capture plan, the AI answer-layer baseline, and a costed roadmap. £2,500 credited into the ongoing programme if we continue.
£15,000
All eight outputs: everything in the search discovery, plus the qualified-lead signal and automation plan, the enquiry-journey diagnosis, and the AI-operations readiness read, with a level recommendation. £3,600 credited.
From the programme start: three levels of activity. These are caps, not quotes: the discovery's costed roadmap confirms the exact figure at or under the level you choose, based on the evidence.
£9,500/month
10 days
Demand capture, answers, and regular story packages with your comms team. No paid strategy, no HubSpot lifecycle build-out.
£14,900/month
16 days
Paid strategy, the HubSpot lifecycle build-out, and more strategy time. The full connected system.
£22,200/month
24 days
Adds AI operations capability inside your team, RevOps depth, and the category programme at full tilt.
Quarterly rolling. Media spend passes through without a fee.
In terms of timing, we can be flexible around procurement. If paperwork allows, discovery runs in September and the ongoing programme starts in October with the roadmap already in hand. If procurement needs longer, discovery runs in October and the programme follows. Either way, two quick wins are worth doing the moment anything is signed: the enquiry nurture flow, and the automation check on the ads account ahead of Google's September auto-upgrades.