A sustainable-materials brand making eco-friendly wall panels from plant fibers. This is how iExcel built the RevOps foundation — and carried it through a rebrand from Lingrove to Ekoa.
The sustainable-materials market doesn't move on impulse. Architects pull samples, weigh them against sustainability targets, and specify by product code. Interior designers file swatches next to client mood boards. Hospitality and commercial contractors need lead times, spec sheets, and installation certainty. Every deal is a specification decision — with a paper trail — before a purchase order is ever cut.
Ekoa builds into that world. Plant-fiber wall panels and interior surfaces, engineered as an eco-friendly alternative to petroleum-based composites, sold into the AEC channel — architects, engineers, contractors — plus interior designers and specifiers working directly with clients.
When iExcel picked up the engagement, the marketing surface area was broad but scattered. A working CRM that didn't match how the team actually sold. Ad accounts firing without a clean audience layer. A website analytics stack half-wired. A sample-request flow that leaked at the seams. What the business needed wasn't a campaign. It was a foundation.
The first meaningful lever was the CRM itself. Ekoa had grown up on a legacy contact tool that behaved more like a shared address book than a revenue system. Contacts drifted. Company parent/child relationships were guesswork. Lifecycle stages didn't reflect how architects, designers, and contractors actually moved through evaluation. Reporting had to be rebuilt from scratch every quarter.
iExcel scoped and executed the migration into HubSpot. That meant more than an import job — it meant defining the lifecycle-stage model from the buyer side out. Subscriber. Lead. Marketing-qualified. Sales-qualified. Opportunity. Customer. Each stage tied to a property, a source, a segment, and a next-action rule the sales team could actually run against.
Once lifecycle logic was in, we normalized the database. De-duplicated contacts. Standardized company records. Wired parent/child relationships. Set default probabilities on deal stages against actual close behavior. The dashboards stopped disagreeing with the spreadsheets — because there were no more spreadsheets to disagree with.
What started as a CRM cleanup expanded into a multi-year partnership. Every phase compounded on the last — and every phase was calibrated to what the business needed next, not what an agency wanted to sell.
CRM migration off a legacy contact tool into HubSpot. Website analytics wired end-to-end through GA4, GTM, and Search Console. Ads and email foundations set. Reporting rebuilt so leadership had one place to look.
Audience research against architect, designer, and contractor personas. List building. ZeroBounce verification. Lead-scoring model tied to HubSpot lifecycle stages. Sales sequences built. Paid-media testing scoped.
Cold outreach. CEU campaigns for architect credit-hours. Post-conference follow-up. Sales rep intro sequences. Paid search and paid social running against role-segmented lists. Sample-request workflow tied to HubSpot deals.
Domain transition support from Lingrove to ekoa.design. Search Console verification. Metadata implementation. Developer checklists. WordPress + WooCommerce + HubSpot integration planning. Renewed SEO and content strategy on the new domain.
Once HubSpot was standing on its own, the demand-gen work needed a clean audience layer to fire against. That meant a rigorous list-building and verification pass — architects sourced from firm directories, designers from industry associations, contractors from specification databases — then every record run through ZeroBounce to strip invalid, catch-all, and role-based addresses before a single send.
Segmentation followed the same discipline. Contacts weren't a single blob — they were architects, interior designers, and hospitality / commercial contractors, each with a distinct evaluation motion and a distinct next-best asset. The lead-scoring model tracked those signals against HubSpot lifecycle stages so the sales team could pick up the ones that were actually ready.
The result was quiet but structural: a role-segmented, deliverability-verified audience layer that made every downstream campaign more accurate — and made forecasting something leadership could rely on instead of reconstruct.
With the foundation and audience layer in place, we turned on the campaign engine. Each play was named, scoped, and tied back to a lifecycle-stage transition — no vanity motion, no "let's try email" without a segment behind it.
The onboarding drip did its own quiet work. Once a new contact opened it, 22.2% clicked through — a click-to-open rate ahead of MailerLite's highest-performing industry benchmark, manufacturing, at 14.82 percent.
Paid media started with an audit. Before we spent, we mapped where Ekoa was already competing — and where the paid ecosystem was rewarding competitors instead. The Ekoa Paid Audit zeroed in on the wall-protection segment, benchmarked competitors' keyword footprint, and surfaced non-branded queries where sustainable materials had a defensible click-share advantage.
The build-out followed: Google Ads on the highest-intent segments, Meta and LinkedIn against the architect and designer personas we'd already role-segmented, YouTube for the top-of-funnel product-education footprint. Every channel wired into HubSpot via GA4 and GTM so sources landed correctly on the contact record — not on a spreadsheet the sales team would never open. Bottom-of-funnel search ran at a 5.41% click-through rate — more than double the published WordStream B2B search benchmark of 2.41 percent.
SEO ran alongside it. Semrush weekly visibility reports. An AgencyAnalytics dashboard the marketing team actually opened. On-page work against the specifier queries — durability, spec sheet, sustainability rating, installation — that architects were actually typing into search. Technical health climbed to 90% on the latest audit, up from an 84 percent baseline measured before the rebrand.
Domain transitions are where growth stories go to lose search equity. The move from Lingrove and "ekoa by Lingrove" toward the standalone Ekoa brand on ekoa.design needed to happen without dropping the visibility, contact base, or e-commerce plumbing that had been built underneath it.
iExcel supported the transition end-to-end. Google Search Console verification on the new property. 301 redirect maps drafted against every high-value URL. Metadata implementation across the new domain's page architecture. On-page SEO for the specifier queries — this time on the domain that would carry the brand forward. Developer checklists, staged against launch, so nothing shipped without a working analytics tag.
The stack for the new site: WordPress + WooCommerce + HubSpot, with sample-request, lead-scoring, and lifecycle logic wired to survive the migration intact. Renewed SEO and content strategy sits on top — the growth-reset the rebrand was always going to require. Branded search held its position through the cutover, and organic search now accounts for 27% of all sessions on the new domain.
None of the campaign work above holds up without a measurement stack that leadership can trust. This is the layer that stayed on — from the first HubSpot import to the domain relaunch.
Migrated from a legacy contact tool. Lifecycle stages, deal probabilities, custom properties, and dashboards rebuilt against the actual sales motion.
Standing GA4 property wired to source attribution on the contact record. Nothing lands in HubSpot without a source, medium, and campaign tag intact.
Every conversion event fires through GTM. Every developer handoff includes the tag map. Nothing ships without a working measurement footprint.
Verified on both the legacy domain and ekoa.design. Weekly monitoring on impressions, click-through, and index coverage across the rebrand.
Weekly visibility reporting against the wall-protection and sustainable-materials clusters. Competitor keyword footprint benchmarked and re-run each cycle.
Recurring visibility dashboard the marketing team actually opens. Consolidates paid, organic, and email into one weekly view leadership can read in under five minutes.
Every outbound list — every audience import — verified before it fires. Invalid, catch-all, and role-based addresses stripped so cold-outreach infrastructure stays clean.
Full paid stack against the architect, designer, and contractor personas. Non-branded search on high-intent specifier queries. Social against the persona-segmented lists.
New-domain stack for ekoa.design — sample-request, e-commerce, and content on WordPress + WooCommerce, wired to HubSpot for lifecycle continuity.
If you're running a sustainable-materials, industrial, or specification-driven B2B business — and you're staring at a CRM that doesn't match how your team actually sells, ad accounts firing against a fuzzy audience, and a rebrand or domain move on the horizon that terrifies your SEO instincts — the Ekoa engagement is the shape of what to do about it.
Foundation first. Audience second. Campaigns after. Rebrand only when the stack underneath it can survive the move.
Most agencies sell the campaign. iExcel sells the operational layer underneath it — and stays through the phases that make the campaigns work when they finally run.
A CRM you can trust. A clean audience layer. Campaigns wired to lifecycle stages. Rebrand support that doesn't drop your search equity. Book a 15-minute sanity check on your setup — we'll tell you what's under-built and what to do about it.
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