Global Yacht Manufacturer: Intent-Based Gating & HubSpot Growth
A luxury motor yacht manufacturer was sending nearly every form fill straight to sales, so a contact database past 41,000 records filled with unqualified enthusiasts instead of buyers. We rebuilt lead capture around intent-based gating, kept awareness content open so organic traffic held, and localized the WordPress front end by region. Sales stopped chasing browsers and started working contacts that showed real buying intent.
Executive Summary
Context
A high-volume CRM had filled with low-quality inquiries, which made real high-net-worth buyers hard to find inside the database. Intent-based gating and segmented content management separated serious prospects from casual traffic without cutting the awareness content that brings people in.
What We Built
A modular WordPress/ACF product architecture integrated with a HubSpot-driven engine for lead qualification.
Tech Stack
- HubSpot Marketing & Sales Hub
- WordPress (Modular/ACF)
- JSON-LD components for SEO
Manufacturers without high-volume CRM systems or those not targeting high-net-worth individuals.
The Challenge
A bloated database held over 41,000 contacts, and most of those inquiries never turned into qualified leads. Marketing spend followed the volume rather than the buyers, and CRM costs rose right along with the contact count.
Our Approach
Content shifted from ungated distribution to a value-exchange model, and the split was deliberate: high-value content moved behind intent-based gating, while awareness content stayed ungated to sustain traffic.
Localization got the same discipline. Rather than redesign each static model page across the two regional domains, we built one flagship master template in WordPress with Advanced Custom Fields: each section (hero, specifications, gallery, testimonials) is a configured block, and a design-variant toggle lets a marketer choose a default, lightweight or bold treatment without touching CSS. The Australian site is the source of truth. A finished model page is cloned to the Americas domain, where regional calls to action, dealer addresses and currency assets are swapped through pre-configured fields. Every new page variation soft-launches noindex until a QA pass, including PDF download tracking and tag-manager event checks, clears it.
This engagement is part of our implementation + onboarding work for manufacturing & industrial organisations.
Impact
Intent-Based Content Gating
High-value content moved behind intent-based gating while awareness content stayed ungated to sustain organic traffic.
A Clearer Quality Signal for Sales
Gated access gave sales a clearer quality signal to work from.
CRM Cost Management
Ninety-day inactivity workflows retire dormant contacts automatically, which keeps the database from creeping into a higher CRM pricing tier.
Regional Targeting Efficiency
Regional targeting across the AU and Americas sites produced steadier month-to-month SQL counts, so pipeline stopped swinging with wherever traffic happened to land.
HubSpot Marketing Hub runs as the central engine, connected to a WordPress site that uses Advanced Custom Fields to drive the gated and ungated content.
Contacts and Deals use custom taxonomy properties that sharpen lead scoring accuracy.
Automation moves a contact from Subscriber to SQL based on defined interactions across content types, so the lifecycle stage reflects real engagement rather than a manual guess.
Each lead is routed by the region captured at submission.
Nearly every form fill used to go straight to sales. A database of more than 41,000 contacts filled with enthusiasts instead of buyers. Now high-value content sits behind intent-based gating, and awareness content stays ungated to keep organic traffic. Ninety-day inactivity workflows retire dormant contacts, which keeps the database out of a higher CRM pricing tier.
FAQ
Qualification happens after the download, not at the gate. The HubSpot scoring engine rates each contact on engagement across the WordPress product pages and gated assets, so a record created from an unusable address never accumulates engagement and never reaches the sales queue. That's how the database narrows 41,000 contacts down to the inquiries worth marketing spend.
No measurable drop. High-intent content stays gated while awareness content stays open, so overall traffic holds steady.
