// Case study

DEMAND GEN + CONTENT CREATION

CareerCircle

Two audiences that wanted opposite things, and a system that could not tell them apart.

27%
revenue growth
after rebuilding lead scoring before a single campaign
Role
Senior Digital Marketing Specialist
Dates
2023 to August 2025, remote
Industry
Workforce tech, B2B and B2C
What I owned
Both funnels, end to end

// Context

Lead volume was the symptom, not the problem.

CareerCircle sells to two audiences that want opposite things. Employers want qualified candidates fast. Jobseekers, many of them veterans, people with disabilities, or candidates without traditional degrees, want to be taken seriously by companies that have historically overlooked them. Two funnels, two buying motions, one marketer on both.

The system underneath them did not work. No lead scoring. No lifecycle logic. No reliable way to tell whether anything was working. Nothing in the data distinguished a jobseeker browsing at midnight from a VP of Talent with budget and an open req, so sales treated every lead the same, most of those calls went nowhere, and marketing lost the right to call anything qualified.

That was the actual problem. Volume was downstream of it.

// The work

What I did

  • Conversion rate optimization

    Landing pages rebuilt for assets that had traffic and no engagement, so the content we had already paid for started converting. Direct traffic rose 38% in 2024 on the back of it.

  • Demand generation

    Paid, SEO content, lifecycle nurture and lead scoring connected into one system instead of four programs that did not talk. Inbound leads grew 9,000% from a standing start and paid delivered close to 300 SQLs.

  • SEO and keyword strategy

    Technical cleanup first with the dev team in SEMrush and Search Console, then keyword-led content on a site that could finally rank. Site health up 3% in sixty days.

  • Thought leadership

    Long-form pieces for employers on veteran hiring, skills-based hiring and HR disruption, written to be worth reading. Several ranked within two months of publishing.

  • Content creation

    Research-informed content planned across events, social, long-form and short-form, so every piece had a place in the funnel instead of filling a calendar.

  • Email marketing

    Nurture rebuilt around observed behavior for two audiences that wanted opposite things. Email health score went from 6 to 8 out of 10, with better deliverability and engagement behind it.

// Process

How I did it

  1. 01

    Fix the instrument before reading it

    I spent my first stretch rebuilding HubSpot instead of running campaigns. Lead scoring tied to behavior rather than hunches, automation rewired, segmentation cleaned, and reporting rebuilt so a number could survive a follow up question. It is the least visible work I did there and the reason everything after it holds.

  2. 02

    Score on behavior, because titles lie in a marketplace

    On a two sided marketplace the same job title means two different things, so firmographic scoring was never going to work. I built the MQL model on what people actually did: pages visited, emails opened, depth of engagement. Sales got a queue they could trust. MQL to SQL conversion improved 16%, revenue followed at 27%, and paid went on to deliver close to 300 SQLs.

  3. 03

    Give both audiences a reason to come back

    Everyone was converting once and disappearing. I built an event program from nothing and scaled it past twenty a year, webinars for employer partners and career fairs and workshops for jobseekers. Return visits rose 30% and events became a dependable pipeline source rather than a list we collected.

  4. 04

    Earn the traffic before asking for it

    Technical SEO first, with dev, in SEMrush and Search Console. Site health up 3% in sixty days. Then content and landing pages on a site that could finally rank, which is where 38% direct traffic growth in 2024 came from. Email health moved from 6 out of 10 to 8 across the same window, with nurture rebuilt around observed behavior instead of assumed intent. GA4 and HubSpot wired together so the full path was visible end to end.

Good marketing is not loud. It is focused. It is repeatable. That is what I built at CareerCircle: a system where the strategy, the content and the outcomes were aligned, and nothing got lost in translation.

// What I would do differently

The honest part

The growth percentages here are real and they are also a story about a very low baseline. If I ran this again I would publish absolute counts from day one. A percentage in the thousands makes people suspicious rather than impressed, and the underlying work is more interesting than the multiplier.

I would also fix attribution before scaling events rather than after. We ran most of a year of events before tracking could cleanly tie a registration to pipeline, which means the earliest sessions are undercounted in every report I have. The program worked. I cannot prove exactly how well for the first two quarters.

// Writing

Published work from this role

// Outcomes

The results

9,000%
increase in inbound leads
27%
revenue growth
38%
organic traffic growth in 2024
6 to 8
email health score

About the 9,000%: there was no lead scoring model when I arrived, the automation was misfiring, and segmentation was dirty enough that nobody trusted the reporting, so that number is measured from a standing start.

  • 16% improvement in MQL-to-SQL conversion
  • 20+ virtual events a year from a standing start
  • 30% increase in return visits
  • 3% site health improvement in 60 days

The full results

Inbound leads
standing start +9,000%
Revenue
baseline +27%
MQL to SQL conversion
baseline +16%
SQLs from paid
0 close to 300
Virtual events per year
0 20+
Return site visits
baseline +30%
Direct traffic, 2024
baseline +38%
Email health score
6 of 10 8 of 10
Site health, 60 days
baseline +3%

// The stack

The tools

  • HubSpot
  • Semrush
  • Monday.com
  • Search Console
  • Canva
  • GA4
  • SE Ranking
  • LinkedIn Ads
  • Google Ads
  • Butter
  • Bitly
  • Brazen

// Proof

Proof

  • Traffic by source. Direct up 38%, referrals up 53%, email up 47%.

// Keep going

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