Building the Audience a Manufacturer
Didn't Know It Had
How a major international building products manufacturer solved its biggest blind spot—the professional installer who drives purchase decisions but sits two steps removed from the brand—through data infrastructure, direct pro engagement, and an industry-first digital experience.
This engagement was led by METIS founder Stephanie Miller and members of the METIS specialist team prior to the founding of METIS. It represents the thinking and methodology that METIS was built to deliver at scale. Client name withheld at request.
Built & Activated
Conversion Rate
Portal Sign-Ups
Engagement Rate
Through Rate
Two Steps Away from the Person Who Matters Most
A major international building products manufacturer knew how much product it was selling into distributors. What it couldn't see was what happened next—which dealers were moving product, which professional contractors were specifying and installing it, and whether those pros were choosing the brand or the competition on the next job.
The pro—the builder, remodeler, or general contractor actually making the product decision on site—sat two steps removed from the manufacturer. The brand had no direct relationship, no data, and no voice with the most influential person in the purchase chain.
Four Goals. One Blind Spot to Fix.
Build a trusted, national pro audience—cleaning existing data and expanding with net new contractor records
Establish a direct brand voice with the professional installer—bypassing the dealer filter
Educate pros on the product range, driving specification preference and dealer purchase intent
Feed qualified pro leads back to dealer network to close the loop between brand activation and local sales
Data First. Then a Destination Worth Driving To.
Before any campaign launched, the team built the audience infrastructure from the ground up—because without a clean, trusted, activation-ready pro data asset, nothing else would work. Once the data foundation was in place, omnichannel campaigns drove that audience to a purpose-built pro engagement portal that had never existed before.
Data Cleanse & Augmentation
Took in the manufacturer's existing pro data—builders, remodelers, and general contractors—and ran it through full ELT processing: deduplication, validation, and record repair. Then augmented every record with additional attributes from leading industry data sources, dramatically increasing the depth and usability of the file.
Audience Expansion
The existing data was a starting point, not the ceiling. The team sourced and added 20,000 net new contractor records—professionals not previously in the client's database—creating a national pro audience of 100,000 activation-ready contacts across the full contractor spectrum.
Pro Engagement Portal
Designed and built a dedicated pro education destination from the ground up—architected around the way building professionals actually learn and evaluate products. The portal became the activation hub for all campaign traffic and the primary lead generation engine for the dealer network.
Omnichannel Campaign Architecture
Ran coordinated campaigns against the pro audience across social, programmatic display, and email—all driving to portal sign-up and engagement. Journey sequencing moved pros from awareness through registration, ongoing education, and re-engagement, with every conversion fed back to the data layer.
Dealer Lead Integration
Portal sign-ups weren't held—they were actioned. Qualified pro leads were fed to the dealer network multiple times per week, giving local sales teams warm, engaged prospects with known product interest. The manufacturer created direct pro value while the dealer closed the sale.
Measurement & Optimization
Built attribution tracking across digital, email, and portal engagement—connecting campaign activity to portal sign-ups, content interactions, and dealer lead conversions. Continuous optimization reallocated spend toward the audiences and channels generating the highest-quality contractor leads.
An Industry-First Pro Experience
The portal wasn't a microsite. It was a fully custom-built, architecturally accurate 3D environment—designed with deep knowledge of how building professionals evaluate and specify products in the real world. Built using architectural rendering software, it featured a full residential structure that pros could explore inside and out—rotating, zooming, and navigating to see every product installed in context. This wasn't generic digital content. It was a tool built for the way pros think.
3D Architectural Model
Full residential structure built with architectural software—navigable inside and out, with realistic product installations visible in context. Pros could rotate the entire house, go inside or outside, and zoom into any area.
Pulsating Product Hotspots
Interactive pulsating points placed throughout the structure marked every installed product. Click any hotspot to zoom in, rotate the view, and inspect the product up close—seeing exactly how it performs in a real installation.
Product Resource Library
Each hotspot opened a dedicated resource panel with training videos, written product content, and direct links to webinar sign-ups—education delivered at the exact point of interest, not buried in a separate menu.
Live Pro Chat
A dedicated live chat feature gave pros direct access to product experts—questions answered in real time, building the kind of trust and credibility that a brochure or spec sheet never can.
Pro Registration & Data Capture
Portal sign-up captured and enriched each pro's record—adding behavioral and product preference data back to the audience file, making every subsequent communication more targeted and relevant.
Dealer Lead Feed
Qualified sign-ups weren't held—they were fed directly to the local dealer network multiple times per week, converting brand engagement into sales-ready pipeline at the point of purchase.
Four Journeys. One Destination.
All campaign activity pointed to one place: the portal. Each journey was sequenced to move a different audience segment—from cold prospect to registered pro to re-engaged loyalist—with the portal sign-up as the conversion event that triggered dealer lead delivery.
Acquire Net New Pros
Drove cold outreach to the full 100K pro audience—targeting contractors with no prior brand relationship and converting them to portal sign-ups and first-time product engagement.
Engage Portal Sign-Ups
Nurtured registered pros through ongoing product education—driving deeper portal engagement, content consumption, webinar attendance, and repeat visits across current customers and newly acquired contacts.
Re-Engage Active Users
Brought engaged pros back to the portal with new content, product updates, and webinar invitations—building habitual engagement and ensuring the brand stayed top-of-mind across the project lifecycle.
Reactivate Lapsed Users
Identified pros who had signed up but gone quiet—and re-engaged them with targeted campaigns highlighting new portal content, product launches, and upcoming training to bring them back into active engagement.
12 Months. A Pro Audience Built from the Ground Up.
In 12 months the manufacturer went from having no direct pro relationship to actively reaching a national audience of 100,000 contractors—with 3,400 qualified pros opting into the portal, a dealer lead pipeline converting at nearly double the B2B average, and a program renewed repeatedly because it worked.
Starting from poorly maintained data, the team cleansed, augmented, and expanded the manufacturer's pro file into a national, activation-ready audience of 100,000 building trade professionals.
Programmatic display and social campaigns drove sustained awareness and portal traffic across the national pro audience throughout the 12-month window.
Email journeys drove qualified contractor traffic to the portal—with a 6.7% CTR significantly outperforming B2B email benchmarks for the building products category.
3,400 pros registered for the portal; 33% returned repeatedly. Qualified leads fed to dealers multiple times per week converted at 5%—nearly double the 2.9% B2B average.
The manufacturer went from fragmented, untrusted pro records to a clean national audience of 100K—with every record enriched and every sign-up feeding new behavioral data back in.
The 3D portal gave pros something genuinely useful—a place to learn, explore, and engage with products in the context of actual installations. It earned attention rather than demanding it.
Omnichannel campaigns drove the right pros to the portal. The portal converted them. The data fed dealers. Every layer compounded the next—a connected system, not a set of campaigns.
"The best marketing doesn't interrupt professionals—it gives them something genuinely worth their time. When you combine the right data with an experience built for how pros actually work, engagement follows naturally."
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