From one campaign to a B2B growth engine From one campaign to a B2B growth engine

Introduction

Equans is a technical services group that designs, installs and maintains the energy, building and industrial systems companies run on. In 2025 it brought those services together under Carbon Shift: one offer to help businesses lower their CO2 emissions, from relighting and heat pumps to solar panels, storage and EV charging.

The challenge was clear. Carbon Shift was a new name in a crowded market, aimed at people who do not buy on impulse: CEOs and sustainability leads weighing ESG and ROI, and facility and plant managers focused on uptime, safety and energy costs. On top of that, Equans needed two things at once: a brand that decision-makers in both Flanders and Wallonia would recognise, and qualified leads for its sales team within months, not years.

Our approach

One proposition, two languages, every channel accountable

We built a full funnel in Dutch and French, from awareness through acquisition to activation. At the top, Performance Max, Meta and LinkedIn ran alongside display on Belgian business media, targeted on job titles, sectors and lookalike audiences. In the middle, branded and intent search caught people who were actively looking. At the bottom, retargeting pushed warm visitors towards a contact request. Every channel got its own KPIs, and Equans' team could follow every campaign per funnel stage in one shared overview.

Content that earns the contact

Our first lead magnet was an interactive decarbonisation quiz. Plenty of people started it, but too many dropped out halfway. So we changed course. A practical decarbonisation guide and Equans customer cases became gated downloads, promoted through Meta lead forms. They quickly became the most efficient lead source of the campaign, at a fraction of the cost we had planned per lead.

Spotting interested companies before they fill in a form

Most B2B buyers do their research without ever converting. To make that invisible interest visible, we connected Leadinfo to the Equans website. It recognised thousands of companies browsing the Carbon Shift pages. When a company came back several times in a month, it was flagged as a hot account. Clay then found the people at that company who matched Equans' ideal customer profile and drafted a first message, ready for sales or for an automated LinkedIn outreach flow. The first outreach test got almost a third of connected prospects to reply.

Test, measure, reallocate

We treated the media plan as a hypothesis, not a fixed schedule. Meta and Performance Max delivered the most affordable quality traffic, and Meta proved the most efficient channel for leads. LinkedIn reached the right job titles, but leads there were too expensive, so budget moved. Generic search turned out costly and crowded with consumers, so we cut the weakest ad groups and leaned on branded search instead, which beat its lead targets several times over. Belgian publishers did what they do best: build awareness among business audiences.

Results

• 500,000+ B2B decision-makers reached
• Impressions goal exceeded by more than 3x, with every channel delivering on its awareness targets.
• Lead goal beaten, with branded search alone delivering several times its target.
• Branded search volume for "Equans Carbon Shift" doubled year on year.
• Website engagement above 50% in both Dutch and French, a sign the traffic was the right audience.

What came next

Carbon Shift gave us more than results. It gave Equans and MakeWaves a tested playbook: which channels to use for which goal, which content converts, and how to follow up on interest that never fills in a form.

In autumn 2025 we applied that playbook to Equans Digital, the business line for data, digital solutions and OT cybersecurity. With the learnings in place from day one, the campaign generated more than 100 leads on a fraction of the planned media budget and grew branded search for "Equans Digital" by 150%.

In 2026 the focus shifted from volume to quality. The E-Mobility campaign beat its forecast for qualified leads, with a qualification rate of 48% at a cost per lead well below our benchmark. That is almost five times the rate of our first campaigns together.

Today MakeWaves is Equans' fixed partner for performance and growth marketing, with campaigns for Energy Transition, Lighting, Solar & Storage, the VLAIO green scan, Cybersecurity, Robotics and more. Together, those campaigns have generated more than 400 leads, and counting.