How Reachdesk grew demand while its category shrank

The challenge

Reachdesk is a corporate gifting and swag platform, founded in a London cafe in 2019 by a group of marketers who wanted to move beyond impersonal mass marketing. Go-to-market teams use it to source, store, ship, track and measure physical gifts, from a cookie box that opens a conversation to swag that lands on a new hire's desk.

Its customers are marketing, sales and customer success teams at software and technology companies across the US, UK, Canada and Europe. Average contract value sits around $27,000 a year. We joined in April 2025 to cover a maternity leave in the digital marketing role, picking up paid media, SEO, the website project and the reporting underneath all three.

Marketing was five people covering brand, content, design, demand generation and events. Paid media was carrying more of the load than anyone wanted it to. More than 90% of paid conversions came from branded search terms, which meant the channel was harvesting demand the brand had already created and building almost none of its own. That would have been a manageable dependency in a growing market. Corporate gifting was not a growing market in 2025: search volume for gifting, swag and ABM gifting fell 20% to 35% year on year, and non-brand demand in the category dropped around 30%.

Underneath the paid problem sat a measurement one, and it was the more expensive of the two. HubSpot held the marketing data, Salesforce held the pipeline, and the one sales operations resource sat under Finance with limited time for marketing. Deal sources were entered by hand, lifecycle stages went unused, and top-of-funnel data cleanliness was the standing problem. That left budget decisions running on partial views of which channel had created which opportunity.

The website was the third thread, and it had been running for four months before we arrived. Reachdesk had signed Klimb in January 2025 to design and build a new reachdesk.com in Webflow, moving off HubSpot pages, and the designs were already signed off. Then the person who had scoped the project, selected the agency and owned it internally went on leave, three weeks before we picked it up.

Our approach

We ran five workstreams in parallel, with weekly calls and a shared Slack channel.

• Paid media across six channels. Google and LinkedIn carried the budget, with Meta, Reddit, Bing and G2 running as supporting and remarketing channels. Budget split 60% cross-channel demand generation, 30% ABM, 10% paid inbound demand capture, against the H2 targets we set with Ben in July: under £400 CPA and 1:15 spend to pipeline.
• Going beyond gifting on search. Reachdesk owned "corporate gifting" and little else. We opened non-brand campaigns into solution-aware and ABM-adjacent terms, kept competitor coverage live, and rebuilt keyword segmentation so enterprise search stopped absorbing budget at the wrong CPA. Where a campaign did not earn its place, we said so and switched it off. Performance Max spent over £300 in a single day and returned two fake signups, so it went.
• A rolling creative programme. We briefed a continuous run of LinkedIn and cross-channel creative with Reachdesk's designer Daniela Ferreira and content manager Kinga Kusak: typography-led persona ads, customer quote ads, seasonal campaigns, ABM sets and product-marketing frames. Every format was measured, and monthly refresh cycles became a rule once we saw engagement drop after four weeks on the same asset.
• Running the website rebuild. Klimb designed and built the site. We ran the project on Reachdesk's side: daily calls with the build team, a page-review board, consolidated feedback, the homepage and conversion restructure, SEO and metadata, redirects, and the tracking migration across Google Tag Manager, GA4, HubSpot and Chili Piper.
• One reporting spine. We built a master marketing dashboard in HubSpot alongside a Looker Studio report joining GA4, Search Console and Google Ads, plus Microsoft Clarity for session recordings and heatmaps. Paid media was reported through more than one attribution model, so a first-touch view and a multi-touch view sat side by side instead of arguing.

The creative

The product is physical, so the ads had to make the gift feel real and the outcome feel measurable. We ran creative as its own test programme across LinkedIn, Google Demand Gen, Meta and Reddit, in five recurring formats: typography-led persona ads, seasonal campaigns, customer quote ads, ABM sets, and before-and-after frames. Dark backgrounds beat light purple and white. Naming the ICP in the copy or the visual lifted click-through by around 3%. Putting the gift or the outcome in shot beat lifestyle and abstract imagery. Demo-first ads had the lowest engagement of anything we ran, so they moved to remarketing only.

Creative fatigue set in fast, with engagement dropping after about four weeks on the same asset, so the wall below is a rolling programme rather than a campaign.

Live ad creative from the Reachdesk account. Select any ad to read it full size.

Rebuilding reachdesk.com

We were nine weeks from launch when we picked the project up, and the date on the plan was not going to happen, so we reset it first. From there our job was to run the build while Klimb did it: daily calls with their team, consolidating feedback from four Reachdesk stakeholders into one reviewable board, pushing back where scope had drifted, and owning everything downstream of the design. The new reachdesk.com went live on the morning of 11 June 2025.

• The conversion architecture. Funnel design from homepage through solution pages to pricing and demo, reusable page components so campaign pages stopped needing developer time, and contextual pop-ups.
• The pricing page build. Ben had wanted one since December 2024, when high disqualification rates suggested buyers were arriving without knowing whether Reachdesk was in their budget. Alex Olley set the packages, Kinga wrote the copy, and we structured the page and put a demo form on it.
• The tracking migration. Google Tag Manager, GA4, HubSpot and Chili Piper routing all had to survive the move, and the Chili Piper firing took the longest to settle.
• SEO, redirects and the indexing checks afterwards. Those checks earned their keep: Webflow was silently failing to index new CMS pages, and a report that had been live for over a month had never been crawled.

Six months after launch, the pricing page had become a conversion point in its own right, with 120 demo requests through the embedded form at a 2.2% on-page conversion rate. Average session duration was up 17.8%, to 2 minutes 50 seconds, and bounce rate improved from 41.4% to 37.3%. The demo page saw 820% more sessions. Direct and organic became the majority of traffic, reversing the old site's dependence on paid for volume. Pricing also became the second most-linked page in ChatGPT, behind only the homepage.

Two things moved the other way, and both were flagged to the client at the time. Total sessions fell year on year, because paid spend was deliberately reduced. Conversion rate dipped after launch, and GA4 event tracking needed further work.

The impact

Ten weeks in, the numbers moved before any of the slower channels had time to compound.

Pipeline pacing is improving and marketing is over 100% right now! Well done team

Ben Smith, Marketing Director, Reachdesk, June 2025

A month later the quarter closed on target, with twelve marketing meetings already booked into Q3.

Well done ToJupiter! We have just hit the inbound pipeline target for Q2!

Ben Smith, Marketing Director, Reachdesk, July 2025

Across 2025, paid media put $3.77m of pipeline into the funnel and 126 discovery demos on the calendar, at 1:13 spend to pipeline. Google carried the volume at 1,037 contacts and $204 a lead, the cheapest of any channel Reachdesk ran. LinkedIn ran the other way, $1,771 a lead and 54 contacts, but produced $203k of discovery demo pipeline and six new deals, and proved out its real job, creating demand and warming Tier 1 and Tier 2 accounts so that search had something to capture.

Visibility was where the compounding happened, and none of it came from spending more. Impression and click share on Google climbed from 15% to 60% between May and January, a fourfold improvement built on ad copy testing and bidding work. Brand impressions across paid reached 3.9m for the year. Non-brand share of the mix rose as the beyond-gifting campaigns matured, so Reachdesk stopped being findable only by people who already knew the name.

Organic more than doubled on every measure we tracked. Unique ranking keywords rose 113% to 24,400, impressions rose 215%, clicks rose 229%, and average position improved 32%. High-intent visibility moved fastest, with top-three keywords up 619% and top-ten up 239%, led by the US and UK. The character of the search terms changed too, which mattered more than the volume. Reachdesk had ranked for B2B gifting; by the end of the year it ranked across GTM topics that sat further up the buying conversation.

Then a channel appeared that had not existed in the plan. LLM referral traffic grew more than 1,800% across 2025. ChatGPT alone drove 1,531 sessions and 31 demos and finished the year as the twelfth largest traffic source on the site, ahead of channels Reachdesk had been paying for. Pricing was the second most-linked page, which suggests buyers were asking what Reachdesk costs before they asked what it does.

Revenue followed, though not in a straight line, and the two attribution models disagree about how much. Direct first-touch attribution shows revenue closed from paid doubling year on year. The multi-touch view puts influenced revenue at $1.98m, roughly four times the direct figure. That gap is the argument for judging paid on more than last click, and it is why we built both views and reported them side by side.

All of this happened in a category that shrank. Search demand for gifting, swag and ABM gifting fell 20% to 35% year on year, brand search stagnated, and 2024 had been a stronger year for Reachdesk on raw deal volume. Pipeline efficiency held at 1:13 through all of it, while search visibility quadrupled and organic doubled.

By the handover, Reachdesk had a website its marketing team could update without a developer, a reporting spine that could answer where pipeline came from, a creative library with test results attached, and a documented handover covering every channel, audience and workflow.

How it ended

The engagement ended the way it was always meant to. Sara Sa came back from maternity leave in February 2026 and took the work back in-house, with a written handover document, a walkthrough recording, a live session on the reporting stack, and a list of what to keep running untouched. What follows is how the team said goodbye, in their own words.

#tojupiter-reachdesk

Alex OlleyJanuary 23rd at 3:58 PM

Thanks for all your support this year. You guys have been awesome

💜1

Sara SaFebruary 2nd at 9:56 AM

Hi all, I'm back today from maternity leave and wanted to say a big thank you to the team here for covering and supporting so brilliantly over the past few months. I'm really grateful and looking forward to catching up!

💜3

Ben SmithFebruary 13th at 4:07 PM

Hello team, want to say once more a massive thank you for all the support over the past 9 months. Scary how quickly that went. It's been a true pleasure getting to know you all better and learn from you.

💜1

About Reachdesk