430 leads and 50% cost per lead reduction in 9 months for retail & hospitality tech

The client

Startle provides curated background music, digital signage, and centralised platform management for multi-site retail and hospitality operators across the UK and Ireland. Their clients include some of the country’s most recognisable brands, such as BMW, Domino’s, Greene King and England Rugby.

Buying decisions are typically committee-led, sales cycles run to months or years, and the value of each contract makes lead quality as important as lead volume.

Startle came to Rocket SaaS with a clear brief: sharpen enterprise positioning, take ownership of paid search and paid social, and improve conversion performance across the funnel.

The challenge

Before working with Rocket SaaS, Startle had a strong product and an established client base, but its marketing wasn’t keeping pace with its ambitions. The website and messaging were not positioned clearly enough for enterprise buyers, making it harder to attract and convert the multi-site operators that represent their highest-value accounts. Paid search and paid social lacked the structure and oversight needed to generate consistent, quality enquiries. With long sales cycles, Startle also needed a way to stay visible and relevant across a market where deals can take months or years to close.

Our solution

Enterprise messaging and website

We began with a full audit of Startle’s marketing, ads, and audience targeting. From there, we developed a refined messaging playbook built around its enterprise ICP, updated landing pages to better reflect the platform’s value for multi-site operators, and introduced new product visuals to communicate the breadth of its offering. A recurring programme of thought leadership and blog content ran alongside this to build authority in-market. New users grew by 92.38%, returning visitors by 55.1%, and conversions by 52.26%.

“I’m really impressed with what you guys have done. The whole brand positioning of where we are now compared to where we were for the enterprise market is in such a better place.”
– Adam Smith, Founder, Startle

Google Ads restructure

The Google Ads account had become unwieldy over time and needed a structural overhaul. We audited historic data, rebuilt conversion tracking to focus on genuine enquiries rather than proxy metrics, and restructured campaigns around Startle’s two core verticals: retail and hospitality.

We paused underperforming keywords and assets, refined match types in line with current best practice, and ran weekly optimisations tied to new site content and live search term data. We also tested out new features such as AI Max on campaigns that had struggled with search volume and saw an immediate lift in lead volume as a result. Quote leads increased by 172.5%, call leads by 123.33%, and cost per quote lead fell by 57.66%.

Paid social campaigns

We built out Startle’s paid social presence across both LinkedIn and Meta, developing full-funnel campaigns targeting retail and hospitality decision-makers with creative built around their specific pain points. We set up retargeting audiences, revised conversion tracking, and tested multiple formats across both channels.

We focused on volume, running direct conversion image ads and scorecard ads to drive discovery calls and completions at scale. On LinkedIn specifically, we ran thought leader content to build credibility with enterprise buyers over a longer consideration cycle.

Webinar programme

To generate higher-intent leads suited to Startle’s longer sales cycle, we kicked off a webinar programme as a mid-funnel content channel. The first webinar, ‘Songs That Sell’, was built around Startle’s original research with charity DEBRA into the measurable commercial impact of music in retail environments, hosted by Startle’s Creative Director, James Picken. We handled Livestorm setup, Pipedrive integration, landing page build, email flows, and supporting ad campaigns.

Lost deal re-engagement

With over 1,300 closed/lost deals in Pipedrive, Startle had a significant re-engagement opportunity. We segmented the database by loss reason and built targeted outreach sequences for each: price and budget objections, competitor losses, and timing-based losses. The sequences produced early signals of renewed pipeline activity with several replies and requests for updated proposals within weeks of going live.