Project Overview

Solaris Energy Solutions had everything a B2B company needs to win new business — a strong product, a credible track record, a clear value proposition, and a sales team with the skills to close deals once they were in front of the right people. What they did not have was a digital marketing operation capable of reliably putting them in front of those people.

They were spending a meaningful five-figure monthly budget across paid search and paid social channels. The return on that spending was, by any honest assessment, poor. Leads were coming in sporadically rather than consistently, the quality of those leads was unpredictable, and the sales team had developed a deep skepticism about marketing's ability to contribute meaningfully to pipeline — a sentiment that was creating organizational tension and making it increasingly difficult for the marketing team to justify the budget they were working with.

The problem was not the budget and it was not the market. The problem was the strategy — or more precisely, the absence of one. The campaigns that existed had been built incrementally over time without a coherent architecture, refined through intuition rather than data, and connected to business outcomes in ways that were too loose to drive real optimization decisions.

The Challenge

The seven-week timeline created a specific challenge that shaped everything about how our company approached this engagement: we needed to produce results fast enough to rebuild internal confidence in digital marketing while simultaneously doing the foundational strategic work that would make those results sustainable over the long term. Quick wins that did not build toward something durable would not serve Solaris well. Solid long-term foundations that took too long to show results would not rebuild the organizational trust that the team needed.

Balancing those two imperatives required a precise prioritization of what to fix first, a ruthless focus on the changes most likely to move performance metrics quickly, and a clear communication plan to keep Solaris's leadership informed and appropriately expectant throughout the engagement.

Our Approach

Our company dedicated the entire first week to audit and diagnosis — a comprehensive review of every active campaign, every audience segment, every ad creative, every landing page, and the complete conversion tracking setup. We approached this audit with no assumptions and no attachment to preserving anything that was not demonstrably working.

The findings were extensive and specific. The paid search campaigns were bidding on broad match keywords without negative keyword lists, which meant that a significant portion of the monthly search budget was being spent serving ads against queries that had no reasonable relationship to Solaris's offering. Average click quality was far below what a well-structured search campaign should produce. The paid social campaigns were running on interest-based targeting with no lookalike audiences built from existing customer data — meaning they were reaching large, diffuse audiences based on assumed interests rather than demonstrated behavioral similarity to people who had already bought from Solaris. Ad creative had not been refreshed in months and was showing significant performance fatigue. And perhaps most significantly, every paid campaign was sending traffic directly to the Solaris homepage — a page designed to serve every kind of visitor and therefore optimized for none of them.

Conversion tracking was the final and perhaps most consequential problem. The existing setup tracked form submissions as conversions — but not every form submission was a genuine qualified lead, and there was no connection between campaign data and the CRM where actual pipeline and revenue lived. The campaigns were optimizing toward an activity metric rather than a business outcome, which meant that even the optimization decisions that had been made with good intentions were being made with fundamentally misleading information.

Our company rebuilt the entire digital marketing operation from the ground up across a structured six-week program following the audit. The paid search account was restructured with tightly themed ad groups, comprehensive negative keyword lists, and exact and phrase match strategies that ensured every dollar was being spent against queries with genuine commercial intent. The paid social strategy was rebuilt around three distinct audience tiers — a prospecting tier using lookalike audiences built from Solaris's best existing customers, a retargeting tier for engaged website visitors, and a nurture tier for leads already in the sales pipeline — each with distinct creative and messaging tailored to where the audience sat in the decision journey.

Dedicated landing pages were designed and built for each primary campaign — each one built around the specific offer or message in the ad that drove traffic to it, with a clear, friction-free conversion path and a single focused call to action. Conversion tracking was rebuilt end-to-end — connecting every form submission through to the CRM, allowing us to track not just leads generated but qualified leads, opportunities created, and revenue influenced from digital channels, giving the campaigns access to the business outcome data they needed to optimize effectively.

Ad creative was refreshed completely with new messaging built around the specific pain points and decision drivers of Solaris's target audience — informed by interviews with three members of the sales team who spoke with prospects every day and had an unfiltered understanding of what those prospects actually cared about.

What We Delivered

Our company delivered a fully restructured paid search account, a rebuilt paid social strategy with complete audience segmentation and creative frameworks, six dedicated campaign landing pages, a rebuilt conversion tracking and attribution setup, a comprehensive campaign performance dashboard giving Solaris's team real-time visibility into every metric that mattered, and a campaign management playbook documenting every decision made during the rebuild so that Solaris's team understood the system they had inherited and could make informed decisions about it going forward.

Monthly performance reporting was restructured entirely — moving away from platform vanity metrics toward a reporting format built around the business outcomes Solaris's leadership cared about: qualified leads generated, cost per qualified lead, opportunities created, pipeline value influenced, and return on ad spend calculated against actual revenue rather than modeled estimates.

The Outcome

By the end of the seven-week engagement, the results were significant and measurable across every metric that mattered. Cost per qualified lead dropped by 48% compared to the pre-engagement baseline. Total qualified leads generated from digital channels more than doubled compared to the equivalent period in the previous quarter, despite no increase in the monthly media budget. The sales team — who had entered the engagement skeptical and, in at least one case, openly dismissive of marketing's contribution — became the most vocal internal advocates for increasing the digital investment.

Pipeline attributed to digital marketing channels grew by over 130% in the two months following the completion of our engagement, as the rebuilt system continued to optimize and the leads generated during the engagement moved through the sales process. Solaris's leadership approved a 40% increase to the digital marketing budget at their next quarterly planning session — the first budget increase the marketing team had been granted in over two years.