A B2C-first tech talent marketplace pivoting to structured B2B employer acquisition — carried straight through the rebrand from Otta to Welcome To The Jungle.
Otta had the consumer side of the talent marketplace figured out. Candidates knew the platform. Sign-ups compounded. The B2C engine ran on its own. What didn't exist yet was the other half of the marketplace — a structured system for acquiring the employers who post the jobs those candidates apply to.
The B2B side was the growth ceiling. Without a repeatable pipeline of tech employers subscribing to hire on the platform, marketplace liquidity capped where the sales team could hand-source it. Employer acquisition had been running lean and opportunistic — no dedicated audience layer, no defined multi-channel motion, no reporting spine that leadership could trust to make the next investment decision on.
iExcel came in as the B2B demand-gen partner. The mandate was tactical: build the audit, build the audience infrastructure, build the paid-media motion, and build the measurement layer that lets a CMO know what's actually working. Then carry all of it through the rebrand to Welcome To The Jungle.
Before any spend moved, the audit ran. Not a paid-media review — a full digital audit across the entire measurable surface. GA4, GTM, Google Search Console, HubSpot, Google Ads, Bing Ads, Display, YouTube, Meta, LinkedIn. Every property inspected. Every conversion tag verified. Every audience source reconciled.
A parallel SEO audit ran alongside it: crawl and indexation, duplicate titles and metas, soft 404 patterns, JobPosting schema coverage across the listing footprint, and the paywall and gated-content signals that quietly break search visibility on a marketplace at scale. The output was a Digital Marketing Recommendations deck — competitor mapping, job-title targeting priorities, LinkedIn audience sizing, keyword clusters, B2B directory shortlist, HubSpot marketing-automation gap analysis, SEO fixes, funnel and channel allocation, and a phased execution timeline the leadership team could actually approve against.
The audit did what every good audit does: it made the go-forward plan defensible. Nothing shipped that couldn't be traced back to a specific gap the audit named.
The B2B side had never been segmented for paid at scale. iExcel built the audience layer from the ground up — internal company and contact lists, ZoomInfo enrichment, HubSpot filters, LinkedIn matched audiences, and social-channel first-party data combined into one coherent segmentation model.
Then it was cut into the motion that actually mattered: TOFU, MOFU, BOFU audiences with named entry and exit criteria. Trial customers held out. Existing customers suppressed. Disqualified accounts excluded. UK-only filters enforced so the paid spend went where the sales team could actually close. Campaign-specific B2B audiences carved out on top — a Rocket List audience, a DEI ebook audience, a remarketing audience against every high-intent touchpoint.
The audience layer became the thing the whole paid motion fired against — and the thing the reporting spine referenced when it went to say where a pipeline touch came from.
"Marketplace liquidity capped where the sales team could hand-source. The B2B engine had to become the growth surface — not the sidecar."
— Engagement Brief · Otta × iExcelThe channel stack was deliberately compact. Not a scatter-shot ten-platform sprawl — a three-channel triangle where each side did work the others couldn't. LinkedIn carried the ABM audience against tech decision-makers and hiring leaders. Facebook and Meta carried remarketing, TOFU social proof, and website-conversion campaigns to the same accounts. Google Search caught the demand — competitor terms, non-branded "job posting" and hiring-intent queries, split across a tech-specific structure and a broader employer-brand structure.
Every channel wired to the audience layer built in Chapter 03. Every conversion event routed through GTM to GA4 and back into HubSpot on the contact record. No channel operating in isolation. No campaign firing against a fuzzy definition of "the B2B audience" the way most employer-brand programs quietly do.
TOFU case studies and press. BOFU remarketing against site visitors. Rocket List campaigns. DEI ebook. Lead-gen forms wired to HubSpot lifecycle stages.
TOFU case studies and press-mention amplification. BOFU remarketing across site and CRM audiences. ABM awareness against the target-employer list. Website-conversion campaigns.
Competitor terms plus non-branded "job posting" and hiring-intent queries. Split-structure — tech-vertical campaigns against broader employer-brand queries — for readable channel signal.
The DEI ebook campaign is the concrete example of how the whole system snapped together. A single offer — a downloadable guide on building diverse tech teams — became the reason to stand up every piece of B2B infrastructure end-to-end.
The play: HubSpot form + landing page + confirmation page + LinkedIn campaign infrastructure, wired to a UK-filtered, exclusion-cleaned B2B audience. Form submissions dropped into a lifecycle-stage transition inside HubSpot, tagged with campaign source, routed through nurture, and made visible in the Databox dashboard the next morning.
The point wasn't the ebook. The point was that one contained campaign proved the whole motion — audience layer, landing page, form, thank-you page, nurture, reporting spine, and channel activation — worked end-to-end for a company that hadn't had a repeatable B2B engine six months prior.
Otta was acquired and rebranded to Welcome To The Jungle — the publicly announced move that gave the platform new brand equity and a global footprint. The risk of a rebrand at this scale is straightforward: the B2B growth work that had been standing up quietly underneath the surface either survives the transition or gets rebuilt from scratch.
It survived. The audience layer, the paid motion, the HubSpot infrastructure, and the reporting spine were built to be brand-portable — no assumption baked in that the domain, the name, or the visual system would stay constant. When the rebrand went live, the engine kept running.
ZoomInfo + HubSpot + LinkedIn matched audiences, UK filters, and exclusion lists — the segmentation model built pre-rebrand and rewired one-to-one against the new brand's naming.
LinkedIn, Meta, and Google Search campaigns migrated with structure and reporting intact. New creative, same targeting logic, same measurement spine — no motion lost.
Landing pages, forms, lifecycle stages, nurture workflows, and lead-scoring rewired to the new domain. Sample-request and demo flows preserved on the new brand.
Databox and HubSpot dashboards migrated with attribution logic intact. Every campaign source, every UTM, every conversion event reconciled against the rebrand.
Every employer touchpoint — paid, organic, remarketing — tied back to a source, medium, and campaign inside HubSpot. Reporting-scope: the leadership view didn't have this before. It did after.
None of the campaign work above holds up without a reporting stack the leadership team can actually rely on. The truth layer sat on HubSpot and Databox — HubSpot as the CRM source of truth on lifecycle stage, source, and pipeline; Databox as the visibility dashboard that consolidated paid channel performance, campaign funnel motion, and B2B pipeline signal into one weekly-readable view.
Underneath that, a full conversion-tracking QA pass ran continuously. Every LinkedIn, Meta, and Google conversion event verified. Every GTM tag audited against a naming convention. Every form submission traced from click to CRM record to dashboard tile — so when a channel started performing, the report reflected it in the same week, not the following quarter.
The Databox layer put the B2B motion on a schedule leadership could plan against. The HubSpot layer put every touchpoint on a defensible attribution line. Together they made the growth engine a system the CFO could ask questions of — instead of a spreadsheet the marketing team had to rebuild every month.
"Turn opportunistic employer acquisition into a repeatable, multi-channel B2B engine — brand-portable enough to survive the rebrand and keep running."
— Engagement Recap · Otta × iExcelIf you're running a two-sided marketplace, a talent platform, or any B2C-first business whose growth ceiling is a B2B pipeline you haven't yet systematized — the Otta engagement is the shape of what to do about it.
Audit first. Instrument what's measurable before you spend against it. Build the audience layer against the actual sales motion — ZoomInfo, HubSpot, LinkedIn matched, UK filters, exclusion lists. Compact three-channel stack — LinkedIn, Meta, Google Search — each doing work the others can't. Prove the motion with one contained campaign end-to-end. Wire the reporting spine so leadership can plan against it.
And build it brand-portable — because the rebrand is coming whether the growth engine is ready or not. The rebrand didn't reset the engine. It inherited it.
Audit, audience layer, three-channel paid motion, HubSpot infrastructure, Databox reporting spine — brand-portable enough to survive the rebrand. Book a 15-minute sanity check on your B2B engine.
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