How a Global Staffing Firm With Five Fragmented Business Units Increased Website Conversions 60% After Unifying Its Marketing Platform
The Challenge
Kelly Services — a global staffing and workforce solutions firm — had reorganised into five newly created business units, each with its own marketing team operating independently. The central marketing function was overwhelmed by the resulting fragmentation: legacy marketing automation systems were cumbersome, incompatible across units, and required multiple team members to execute routine tasks like sending an email campaign. Marketing communications had become transactional rather than relational — personalisation was technically difficult, audience segmentation was inconsistent across units, and customer journey tracking was impossible without a common content platform. The structure had created a marketing operation where five units competed for coordination rather than executing a coherent strategy.
The Solution
Kelly Services migrated from its legacy marketing automation platform to HubSpot Marketing Hub, integrating with Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM and onboarding 300+ Sales Hub users across 15 teams. All websites were migrated to HubSpot Content Hub, providing a unified platform for customer journey tracking across business units. Audience segmentation and content personalisation capabilities were enabled across all five units from a single platform. Marketing automation — including Content Remix for asset repurposing and blog narration — reduced the per-task headcount requirement that had burdened the central function under the legacy system.
The Outcome
Following the platform migration, Kelly Services achieved a 60% increase in website conversions, a 32% increase in website users, and a 26% increase in sessions. The marketing team was able to execute content-based marketing effectively for the first time across all five business units — with personalisation and audience segmentation available to all 15 teams through a single integrated platform. The central marketing function was relieved of the coordination overhead that had previously required multiple team members for basic campaign tasks, enabling it to focus on strategic marketing rather than operational management of fragmented tools.
Strategic Takeaway
Kelly Services' 60% conversion increase is the commercial signal, but the operational story is the more transferable lesson for large professional services firms: when business units operate marketing independently, the result is not diversity of approach — it is fragmentation of data, loss of personalisation capability, and a central function overwhelmed by coordination rather than strategy. The migration to a unified platform did not just improve metrics; it restored the central marketing team's ability to do content-based marketing at all. In staffing and workforce solutions, where the audience is both employers and candidates with different needs and journeys, the ability to segment and personalise is not a competitive advantage — it is table stakes for effective marketing in a market where candidates and clients have many alternatives.
- Business unit fragmentation in marketing creates a coordination tax on the central function: when five units each run their own marketing, the central team manages tools and permissions rather than strategy.
- Legacy marketing automation platforms create compounding inefficiency: systems requiring multiple team members for basic email sends become an increasingly severe operational constraint as marketing complexity grows.
- A unified content platform is a prerequisite for customer journey tracking: without a single platform for all websites and campaigns, attribution and personalisation are structurally impossible regardless of analyst capability.
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