The Woodsmiths: Digital marketing for long-term growth.

Opportunity

The Woodsmiths is a multi-generation family business based in Maungaturoto in Northland. Specialising in top quality wood products, they supply kitchen joiners, builders, and fabricators with bespoke timber solutions. Sourcing sustainable timber from across the globe, they work with design specialists to create timber benchtops, bathroom vanities, and custom creations like butcher's blocks.

This expertise has led to them becoming one of the most trusted suppliers to the industry. The expertise and proven track record existed. What didn't exist was a website that was easy to find, or a digital footprint that matched this exceptional record.

Senior management at The Woodsmiths reached out to Vanguard 86 to grow traffic, awareness, and leads through digital marketing.

Strategy

A deep dive into the marketing opportunity, and current gaps led to several foundational changes before launching into a sales-led marketing strategy. The current CRM and sales platform were disconnected. Email marketing was being managed by Mailchimp, while sales was living in Pipedrive. Website enquiries were sent to a shared Outlook inbox, and manually moved to the relevant supporting platform. This lack of visibility across platforms reduced the team's insights into a contact's history and activity, and increased the manual handling of data which increased the risk of incorrect or incomplete information being shared.

Before any marketing began, a platform upgrade was required. The Woodsmiths were migrated to the HubSpot CRM, with Sales Professional and Marketing + to bring sales and marketing together. Greater website analytics was added, and HubSpot forms were added to the website to enable all enquiries to auto-create in the CRM. This enabled us to trigger task creation, and automation based on the enquiry type.

Once the platform was in place, we developed a marketing strategy to increase visibility among active buyers. The team at Vanguard 86 focused on this group to deliver the earliest results. By honing in on people actively looking for what The Woodsmiths sells, we could increase enquiries with the greatest speed. This included creating SEO-focused website pages, articles that answer the questions buyers need answered, and Meta and Google ads for immediate visibility. We added new conversion points to the website, including a cost calculator to create qualified sales leads.

To surface opportunities from the existing database, we continued their monthly email marketing but from HubSpot. Directly pulling live data from the CRM ensured more accurate segmentation and engagement data. Social media was managed from HubSpot and supported blog articles and project promotion. Consistent posting on these 'owned' channels ensured The Woodsmiths stayed front-of-mind with the audience they'd built, and educated new contacts.

Our approach was systematic. Create the assets that would take time to deliver the results alongside those that gave immediate returns to create long-term business success.

Results

All valuable long-term growth takes time. In Q3, we transferred the business to HubSpot, connected their accounts, and created their first piece of premium content (a sample request box). This provided a solid foundation for Q4, where Meta ads directed leads to the sample box, and Google ads drove high-intent traffic to product-focused pages. As page authority built on the pages created in Q3 and Q4, organic visitors grew as we approached Q1 and Q2 of 2026. The consistency in organic traffic growth enabled the company to pause Meta advertising in months where the budget needed to be reallocated, safe in the knowledge that visitors would find the site and convert into leads.

As a result of this activity, we've impacted the 4 key areas of marketing: visibility, lead creation, opportunity creation, and revenue.

Visibility

With no GA4 installed, the website performance was an unknown before working with Vanguard 86. We installed tracking to create visibility on performance. In our first month-on-month view, we saw a 31% increase in website traffic. In their first month of working with us, Direct Traffic was The Woodsmiths' primary source of visitors, indicating a high level of visits from previous clients and those with a direct relationship. Organic Search was a close second, trailing by 5%. Fast forward to June 2026, and the Direct Traffic volume is similar to a year ago, but Organic Search traffic is 46% higher than Direct. 

Lead creation

An increase in traffic is nothing more than proof of brand awareness if you cannot convert it into new leads. While not every new contact in the CRM is a potential sale, we have the opportunity to split them into groups; manage passively, and actively manage. Those added to the passive management bucket would be nurtured by our monthly EDM, or through automation triggered by their action. Often these are contacts in the early stage of research, or 'tyre kickers'. We want them to have a positive brand experience, but not take up resources. The contacts acquired requiring active management are created as Leads in HubSpot, with some having Deals auto-created depending on the action they take. This enables the sales team to focus on high-value contacts.

Opportunity creation

With new lead magnets created that signalled high buyer intent (the costing tool), we were able to trigger the creation of Deals for users that met specific business criteria. This created consistency in opportunity identification, and reduced business admin for the sales team. Contacts with a Deal in the pipeline could be segmented into receiving different marketing, and repeat customers could be segmented further. With HubSpot's deep analytics, we can track the sales opportunities back to the exact social post, advertising campaign, and channel source. This provides real-time assessment on what's working, and peace of mind on each investment in marketing. As the Deals progress through the pipeline, we can identify patterns in the opportunities that are consistently lost, and those that are won more frequently so we can relay this back into the marketing strategy.

Revenue creation

Everything comes down to this. If all of the previous activity creates nothing but vanity metrics, then it's wasted money and time. We need to be sure that marketing impacts the only thing that matters: revenue. Having started marketing in June of 2025, we saw our first tracked sale in December of 2025, later than typical. There was a combination of factors, including platform uptake, contributing to this delay, but once ironed out, we saw the true face of this investment. Since February 2026, every month has seen consistent revenue from Organic Search, Paid Search, and also Direct Traffic. There's been an 87% increase in revenue from marketing channels in the past 5 months.