CASE STUDY · SEARCH AND DEMAND

When the strategy and the search signal pull in opposite directions

What happens when a sensible positioning decision quietly dismantles your pipeline engine, and 8,000 target accounts have never seen your brand?

3 markets Three channels unified 4x Japan conversion Learning Management

0 x

Lift in paid conversion rate, Japan

After the bid and creative reset

0 %

Brand share of voice, France

Up from 51%

+ 0 %

Rise in Contact Us form submissions

Globally

Siloed channels unified

Paid, SEO, and CRO — one revenue view

THE SITUATION

A category leader, out-marketed and pulling in three different directions.

By the time Cornerstone OnDemand brought Somebody Digital in, the cracks had been showing for over a year. After the business was acquired, innovation slowed, and AI-first competitors reframed the category around intelligence, personalization, and embedded learning. A platform with one of the deepest enterprise feature sets in the market was being out-marketed by products with a fraction of its capabilities.

The internal picture did not help. Paid budget ran against landing pages the team knew were broken, with diluted value propositions and internal product names that meant nothing to buyers. Daily spend swung wildly with no clear logic, and the SEO and CRO teams were making changes without telling each other.

The board was asking pointed questions about marketing’s contribution to pipeline. There were no clear answers.

3 channels optimizing in isolation, each one breaking the others’ work

0 shared performance view across the operation

A Category Reframed

AI-first

Competitors reframed the LMS category around intelligence and personalization while innovation slowed after the acquisition. The deepest platform in the market was being out-marketed by a fraction of its capabilities.

Meaningless to Buyers

Galaxy? Elevate?

Budget ran against broken landing pages with internal product names that meant nothing outside the company. Quality scores were penalized by poor landing-page relevance.

Channels in the Dark

3 silos

Paid, SEO, and CRO changed things without telling each other. Daily spend swung with no clear logic, and the board had no answer on marketing’s contribution to pipeline.

WHAT WE DID

Start where the bleeding was worst. Earn the right to expand.

Somebody Digital did not pitch a transformation program. We started with paid media, stabilized it, and expanded channel by channel until the three worked as one.

Paid media · three markets

Bidding rebuilt · DE / FR / JPDone

Campaigns by buyer intentRestructured

Creative, variant-pinnedRewritten

SEO · buyer-intent rewrite

Learning Management System

cornerstoneondemand.com › lms

Rewritten in the language buyers searchIntent-led copy · EN / DE / FR — not "Galaxy" or "Elevate"

CRO · structured testing

Demo page+10.7%

Learning Management + PlatformIn test

Intelligence and Optimization · one view

Paid media SEO CRO

One Performance
ViewSINGLE OPERATION

Paid Media

Stop the budget burn first

Somebody Digital started where the bleeding was worst. The team rebuilt bidding strategies across Germany, France, and Japan, then restructured campaign architecture around buyer intent rather than internal product names. Ad creative was rewritten around tested variant pinning and message-market fit. Quality scores recovered while CPCs dropped and conversion rates climbed.

SEO

Fix the foundation the traffic lands on

With paid media stabilized, SEO went in to fix the foundation. The team rebuilt the LMS pillar page, restructured keyword targeting across English, German, and French, and cleared the technical issues that had quietly suppressed rankings for years. The Creative Studio rewrote core pages in the language buyers were searching in, replacing internal product names with intent-led copy.

CRO

Close the loop on the traffic

With organic and paid both feeding qualified traffic to the site, CRO closed the loop. The team ran a structured testing program across the Demo, Contact Us, Learning Management, and Platform pages, with every test grounded in the intent and quality-score data already surfaced by paid and SEO.

Intelligence and Optimization

Make the three channels finally talk

The Intelligence and Optimization team connected paid, SEO, and CRO into a single performance view, so a change in one channel stopped breaking the others. Three teams that had been optimizing in isolation started making coordinated bets from the same data.

THE RESULTS

Three channels that were working against each other, finally working together.

PAID MEDIA

Efficiency across markets

Japan conversion rate4x

↑ After the bid and creative reset

Germany cost per click-35.7%

↓ Lower is better

France creative CTR+41.5%

↑ Ad-variant testing, +20% CTR overall

FRANCE · BRAND SHARE OF VOICE

From half the conversation to nearly all of it

51%

Before

92%

After

Average time from cold account to engaged fell from 59 days to 17, three times faster than baseline.

ORGANIC SEARCH

Rebuilt in three languages

English organic visibility13.27%

Rebuilt in English, German, and French

Keywords ranking in the top 320

↑ For the category’s core terms

CONVERSION OPTIMIZATION

The loop, closed

Demo page conversion+10.7%

↑ +458 demo sessions per month

↑ Globally

WHAT THIS PROVES

Not a traffic problem. A coordination problem.

Cornerstone had one of the deepest platforms in the category and the traffic to match. What it lacked was three channels that worked as one. Once paid, SEO, and CRO shared a single view, the operation started compounding instead of colliding.

FROM THREE SILOED CHANNELS

One performance view

Paid, SEO, and CRO stopped guessing in isolation and started reading from the same data, making coordinated bets instead of conflicting ones.

FROM INTERNAL PRODUCT NAMES

The language buyers use

Galaxy and Elevate meant nothing to the market. Intent-led copy matched the queries actually driving the category.

FROM A BOARD ASKING QUESTIONS

Pipeline they can explain

For the first time in years, marketing could show exactly where pipeline came from, and why.

Somebody Digital’s work with Cornerstone OnDemand shows what happens when paid media, SEO, and CRO read from the same data, make coordinated bets, and can finally explain to the board exactly where the pipeline is coming from.

LET'S TALK

Could your commercial engine work like this?

Most clients are operating against a distorted picture and don’t know it yet. The first step is mapping what yours is hiding.