Innovatr
Helped rebrand a research business and build its marketing engine: website, content, paid media and a CRM-backed system. Costs beat the industry benchmarks, and an annual software licence became a product the company could sell.
Innovatr is a consumer research and growth consultancy. As Brand & Marketing Manager I worked with the team to sharpen the brand, start the paid engine, build the marketing system and ship a product. This is what changed in seven months.
The starting point
The product was genuinely different. The presentation was not: the site led with “Stop Guessing. Launch Better Innovation.”, a line that could have belonged to any research agency.
No paid programme, effectively no inbound traffic, and no way to turn the research already being produced into demand for more of it.
Brand and website
The repositioning turned a generic promise into an argument. “Old research is dead. Stop being told. Start asking why.” gives a reader something to disagree with, and the proof sits right under it.
Turning research into content
Every study produced findings nobody outside the client ever saw. These put them in public, doing what the product does: state a claim, then put the evidence under it.
Ad creative
The same argument, in a format built to be scrolled past. “The Innovatr Way” took on the legacy research model directly: unchanged in decades, six-week turnarounds, six-figure studies.
Building the marketing system
A business selling research to decision-makers has to know who they are, and there was no list. We built one into a CRM, then wired the system around it: email automation, LinkedIn ads, remarketing. The CRM feeds the ad audiences, so ads aim at named companies rather than the platform's guesses.
- 0 → live
- CRM built in six monthsEvery source de-duplicated by email, so nobody is counted twice. A working, segmented system where none existed.
- Account-based
- Targeting on named organisationsThe addressable market mapped company by company, which is what account-based targeting needs to exist. Volumes stay with the client.
Sourced audience, not inbound enquiries. The proof is under Results: LinkedIn's delivery demographics show the ads landing on the seniorities and companies these lists were built from.
The ads landed in the right rooms
Spending on ads is easy. The question is whether they reached people who can sign off a study, and the first test is not clicks. It is LinkedIn's own delivery demographics.
- 61%
- Of delivery reached decision-makersSenior, Director, VP, C-suite, Owner and Partner. Entry-level: under 3%.
- 14 of 22
- Top companies by delivery were targetsThe country's major banks, insurers and consultancies. The names stay with the client.
- 56%
- In the three target metrosJohannesburg, Pretoria and Durban, the geography Innovatr sells into.
LinkedIn's delivery demographics for the account, April–July 2026. Nearly two-thirds of every rand landed on someone senior enough to sign off a study.
Leads got better every flight
Short creative flights, each tightening who saw the forms. The measure that matters is not the count, which stays with the client, but who filled them in: the share arriving on a work email.
| Month | Work-email share of leads | What changed |
|---|---|---|
| Launch flight | ~27% | Broad targeting, forms accepting personal emails. Volume without quality. Forms then rebuilt to require a work email and phone. |
| Refined flight | 91% | Vertical targeting on the mapped accounts. Most of the newest cohort squarely in the ICP. |
91% work-email share is the lead quality the programme was built toward, up from ~27% at launch. Lead counts and budget stay with the client.
Every cost beat the market
Most of the budget was never pointed at leads: video bought attention, carousels bought conversions. Each is scored on its own job, against LinkedIn's published B2B norms.
- ~3×
- Better cost per lead than the B2B medianA third of LinkedIn's published gated-lead median for B2B services; further still below the EMEA norm. The absolute figure stays with the client.
- 52%
- Cheaper per click than the normAgainst LinkedIn's published B2B click costs; cheaper still blended account-wide.
- 61%
- Cheaper per thousand impressionsAgainst the published CPM norm, sustained across more than a million impressions.
- 44–48%
- Video view rate vs 29.5%15–19 points over the platform norm.
Form completion ran 46–57% against a 10–13% benchmark. One miss: carousel click-through sat under the band, so carousels stayed on the conversion job they were winning. No flight ran past five weeks against LinkedIn's six-to-eight-week optimisation runway, so these are pre-optimisation figures.
The product: Social Sweep
Innovatr was about to licence a social listening platform on an annual enterprise contract. I proposed building the capability in-house instead: platform APIs feeding an AI reasoning layer, prototyped in Replit and built out with Claude.
Ask it a plain-language question and it picks the platforms worth reading, then returns a report where every claim resolves to a real comment. A line of annual cost became a line of product, positioned as a billable study.
The saving is the small part. The tool Innovatr nearly licensed was acquired by a research group months later, after four years and outside investment. Not parity, but the capability that used to justify an acquisition is now something one person can build in a quarter.
What building it instead of buying it was worth
- In-house
- Built instead of licensedReplaced the annual enterprise licence the team had been quoted for a third-party tool.
- Billable
- Positioned as a productPackaged as a sellable Innovatr study, not internal tooling.
- 49
- Platforms reachableThrough the research API it runs on: social, search, commerce, reviews and the open web. Each study queries the subset the question needs, not all of them.
Positioned as a billable product; revenue is not claimed. The licence quote and the study price stay with the client.
