This client is a Silicon Valley-based software company founded in 1991, building research compliance and administration software for research-intensive institutions. ISO 27001:2022 certified and trusted across academia and regulated life sciences, the client serves R1 and R2 universities, academic medical centers, pharmaceutical companies, contract research organizations, and government agencies.
Client came to this engagement with several compounding challenges across digital presence, technical health, and market visibility.
The existing website had outdated technology, weak technical foundations, poor UI/UX, and no clear branding system or design language. Navigation was confusing. The messaging hierarchy was unclear. The visual experience did not match the maturity, expertise, or market position of a company with 30 years of institutional relationships. Competitors were presenting themselves more credibly online, creating a gap in perceived authority that affected both discoverability and buyer trust.
The pre-engagement audit found 72 pages returning 404 errors, 30 pages with 500 server errors, 237 pages carrying broken internal links, 33 toxic backlinks, 297 duplicate H1 and title issues, and 306 unminified JavaScript and CSS files. Referring domains had fallen 40 percent, from 1,824 to 751. Desktop speed scored 67 and mobile speed scored 58. AI bots had no structured access to the site. No content or campaign work would perform reliably on this foundation.
At engagement start, client ranked for just one tracked keyword at Position 1. Google Search Console average position across all tracked queries was 29.1 - page 3. No AI Overview presence existed for any commercially valuable research compliance term. Competitors like Cayuse had years of content investment and backlink profiles that represented a significant gap to close.
Google Ads were being launched from scratch with no historical conversion data. Ad copy went live with Quality Scores of 1 to 3 against an industry benchmark of 6 or higher, causing Google to charge 3 to 5 times the market CPC rate. Budget continuity constraints further limited the early learning window.
Client competes against Cayuse (5,700 monthly organic visitors, 1,900 referring domains), Advarra (36,400 monthly visitors, 3,400 referring domains), InfoEd Global, and a growing field including WCG IRBNet, Huron Research, and Kuali Research. Cayuse and Advarra had published named institutional case studies, third-party directory presence, and buyer guide content that AI engines were surfacing as top recommendations. The client had none of these assets in place.
The client had approximately 194 LinkedIn followers at engagement start, compared to Advarra's 39,280. No structured account-based outreach sequences existed. Secondary stakeholder profile access was granted several weeks into the engagement, which affected the timeline for full multi-profile ABM activation.
The Smarketers structured the engagement in a clear sequence. The website rebuild came first - because no SEO, paid search, or outreach program performs well when the underlying digital foundation is broken. Once the new site was live, full-funnel demand generation activated across organic, paid, and outbound channels.
The engagement opened with a thorough discovery process: reviewing the existing site for content structure, navigation, UX, messaging hierarchy, and technical readiness, then studying user journeys by intent type - how research administrators, IACUC directors, grants managers, and clinical trial teams would navigate a site built for their needs. Competitor benchmarking covered how Cayuse, Advarra, and InfoEd structured their positioning, product pages, navigation, and trust signals.
Stakeholder interviews established leadership expectations, design preferences, brand personality, and long-term positioning goals. The client is a mature, traditional company with deep institutional credibility - the visual direction had to feel modern without abandoning the tone that senior research compliance buyers expect. From this process, The Smarketers developed mood boards, color directions, refined typography, a design system, and a full UI component library for the Webflow build.
The website was rebuilt end-to-end in 60 working days - core page structure, navigation architecture, page hierarchy, layouts, templates, mobile responsiveness, conversion points, and content presentation. Webflow was selected for flexible page management, responsive implementation, cleaner structure, and easier long-term maintainability. The rebuild included GA4, Google Tag Manager, HubSpot CRM integration, form submission and CTA click tracking, UTM framework, Search Console integration, and lead source attribution setup.
Technical SEO was embedded into the build rather than applied after launch: SEO-friendly URL structure, metadata optimization, heading hierarchy, internal linking architecture, schema markup, XML sitemap, robots.txt, and crawlability improvements. AI search readiness was addressed explicitly - llms.txt recommendations, AI bot accessibility, and structured data to support indexing by emerging AI search tools. The content structure was designed to serve both human readers and search systems.
With the new website live, demand generation activated across five channels simultaneously. Keyword targeting focused on terms with clear commercial intent for the research compliance buyer. Paid search campaigns launched across Google Search and Discovery. LinkedIn outreach ran structured sequences across 230 named accounts. Email campaigns targeted compliance and IACUC personas. Content production ran on rolling cycles across blogs, an eBook, a whitepaper, and landing page copy - all built to drive the right audience to a site now capable of converting them.
The website rebuild was the foundation everything else was built on. Below is a side-by-side view of where the client started and where the new Webflow site landed.
How a focused 6-week engagement gave Botsync a unified HubSpot Enterprise hub — clean data, full marketing visibility, and a sales pipeline built around how their team actually works.
Botsync is a growing organisation that relies on HubSpot as the backbone of its marketing and sales operations. As the business scaled, the team recognised that their existing HubSpot setup — running on a Standard account — could no longer support the volume, complexity, and reporting needs of a growing revenue engine.
Botsync partnered with us, a HubSpot implementation and onboarding specialist, to migrate their entire portal to HubSpot Enterprise and to rebuild their Marketing Hub and Sales Hub from the ground up around their real-world workflows.
Before this engagement, Botsync’s HubSpot instance was functional but underutilised.
Botsync needed a partner who could not just “lift and shift” their data, but use the migration as an opportunity to redesign their HubSpot environment for visibility, adoption, and sales efficiency — without disrupting day-to-day operations.
We structured the engagement as a 6-week, end-to-end programme covering data migration, Marketing Hub setup, and Sales Hub configuration. The work was sequenced so that clean, well-structured data formed the foundation for every workflow, property, and report built on top of it.
Before any data moved, we focused on getting it into shape:
With clean data in place, we rebuilt the marketing engine to give Botsync visibility and control over every stage of the funnel:
In parallel, we rebuilt the Sales Hub to match Botsync’s actual sales motion:
Results cover the engagement period: October 2025 to May 2026. First-party data sources are identified throughout. SEMrush figures are labeled as tool-tracked estimates with live US-IP validation commentary where relevant.
