The client
Epassi is a leading European employee benefits technology provider, helping organisations make benefits easier to access, manage and use.
Founded in 2007, Epassi has grown across Europe through its digital, mobile-first approach to employee benefits and payments. In the UK, its offering includes employee wellbeing and lifestyle benefits alongside the broader benefits technology and administration capabilities of Zest, which Epassi acquired in 2025.
The challenge
Epassi asked us to help generate demand and pipeline for both the Epassi and Zest brands across LinkedIn and Google.
The challenge wasn't a lack of advertising activity.
Before working with us, Epassi had already invested significantly in LinkedIn advertising, but had generated relatively few new-business leads. Cost per lead had exceeded £10,000.
Simply generating more clicks wasn't going to solve the problem.
Most of Epassi's target market isn't actively searching for a new employee benefits provider at any given moment. We therefore needed an approach that could create demand among companies not yet in-market while capturing that demand when buying intent emerged.
The approach
We built the campaign around a combination of demand generation and demand capture.
Demand generation activity was used to build familiarity and consideration among the right organisations before they entered a buying cycle.
Demand capture activity across LinkedIn and Google then ensured that when those companies started exploring the market, Epassi and Zest were visible and able to convert that interest into identifiable leads for the sales team.
But rather than trying to reach the largest possible audience, we kept targeting deliberately tight.
Alongside ICP criteria, we prioritised accounts where our proprietary data indicated a higher likelihood that the company would review the market, concentrating budget on the organisations we believed were most likely to become future opportunities.
The results
Within just six weeks of launch, the campaign had directly generated:
- 48 new ICP leads
- Cost per lead below £50
- A 215x improvement in CPL compared with previous campaigns
- 4 pipeline opportunities
- 2 new customers
- 400%+ return on advertising investment
And those figures only capture the opportunities that could be directly attributed to someone responding to the campaign.
We wanted to know whether the advertising was influencing the wider market too.
Proving what the advertising actually caused
One of the biggest problems with B2B advertising measurement is attribution.
If someone sees an advert and later becomes a customer, that doesn't necessarily mean the advertising caused the sale. They may have bought anyway.
So we measure advertising differently.
For Epassi, we created a control group of target accounts that was deliberately prevented from seeing our advertising.
We could then compare the behaviour of companies exposed to the campaign against otherwise comparable companies that weren't.
The difference was measurable.
0.21% of accounts exposed to the advertising converted into a pipeline opportunity during the test period, compared with 0.16% of accounts in the control group.
That's a 29% higher opportunity conversion rate among accounts exposed to the campaign.
In other words, we weren't simply claiming credit for opportunities that happened to see an advert.
We could see evidence that advertising exposure itself was increasing the likelihood of an account entering the pipeline.
More exposure. More opportunities.
The relationship became even clearer when we looked at advertising frequency.
Accounts receiving greater exposure to the campaign were considerably more likely to become pipeline opportunities:
- 4+ impressions — 0.36% conversion into opportunity
- 5+ impressions — 0.38%
- 6+ impressions — 0.45%
- 7+ impressions — 0.54%
- 8+ impressions — 0.53%
- 9+ impressions — 0.62%
- 10+ impressions — 0.63%
Accounts receiving 10 or more impressions converted into opportunities at 0.63% — almost four times the 0.16% conversion rate seen in the unexposed control group.
That matters because it demonstrates something that click-based reporting often misses:
B2B advertising doesn't only work when someone clicks an advert and immediately fills in a form. Repeated exposure can increase the probability that an account eventually enters the pipeline.
The outcome
Epassi's previous LinkedIn activity had produced a cost per lead of more than £10,000.
Within six weeks, the new approach had reduced that to less than £50, generated 48 ICP leads, created four pipeline opportunities, converted two customers and delivered an ROI of more than 400%.
More importantly, through control-group measurement, we could demonstrate that the impact extended beyond directly attributed leads.
The campaign wasn't just generating activity.
It was creating measurable incremental pipeline.