01 / SYSTEM
The rebuild that quadrupled conversion - and the system behind it
Senior Digital Marketing Manager, April 2017 to April 2025, across 14 brand websites, a budget of over £1M and a team of up to seven across nine business units.
The problem
phs Group serves more than 120,000 B2B customers across the UK and employs 3,294 people. In 2017 its websites and digital marketing ran as separate projects. Spend went in one end and leads came out the other; nobody could show what happened in between.
The role
I ran digital marketing for the group from 2017 to April 2025. The team I led built or rebuilt every brand website on phs.co.uk bar two, working alongside IT, field sales, designers and Spindogs. I reported to the CEO quarterly and co-authored the group’s five-year digital transformation roadmap.
The work
It started with a group-wide digital audit: nine business units, six working groups and more than 40 people. Over 40 people took part in stakeholder discovery, and three rounds of customer testing involved 26 participants. Six websites shipped from one platform and one set of 35 components.
The outcomes
- The rebuilt phs.co.uk converted at four times its old rate within 90 days.
- Organic leads grew 38.5% year on year.
- PPC return on ad spend reached 4:1 within six months, on 45% less spend.
- Bounce rate fell 15.5%; time on page rose by 1 minute 45 seconds.
- By early 2025, phs.co.uk peaked at about 28,000 organic keywords (SpyFu).
The lead-response story
Website leads were waiting three to four hours for an answer and converting at 10%. I put a dedicated person on digital leads. Answered within 15 minutes, the same leads converted at 45%.
The system around it
Customer portal adoption moved from under 20% to over 60%; service cancellations fell by more than 60%. A digital sales app served 315 field reps and 443 assets, saved £400K, and website visitor tracking added £200K in outbound sales. These are company results; the digital work behind them sat with the team I led.
The stack
Umbraco CMS. Salesforce and Pardot. GA4 and Search Console. Figma for prototyping. The team also put a custom GPT in front of the sales document library - a working use of AI inside a live sales operation.
