A B2B wholesale distributor needed to transform from traditional sales methods into a digital-first organization to compete in modern markets. The company had never measured marketing performance, lacked marketing automation, had no CRM to support 150k customers, and e-commerce was underperforming.
After three straight years of declining e-commerce sales, Kara Lineal launched a marketing strategy that grew web store revenue 96% and total digital commerce 57% (+$37M) within 3 years. E-commerce grew by +$37 million, 54 percent of the company's total revenue growth. Offline sales grew 20 percent over the same period, so digital added to the business instead of shifting it.
B2B Distributor | VP of Marketing | 2023 to 2025
RESULTS
$102M
digital commerce
54%
of company growth through e-commerce
+96%
web store growth after three years of decline
Challenge
A distributor to the food industry with more than 80,000 products had a web store that was losing ground. Revenue fell from $21 million to $19 million in two years due in part to the lack of a search engine optimization strategy during a large re-platforming project.
Customers named two top complaints: not every product was available online, and products were hard to find in search. A small team of merchandising staff could create or update about 3,400 product records a year, against more than 10,000 new product requests.
Online competitors had much larger audiences. Grainger and Uline each drew about 3.5 million visits a month, while the B2B distributor drew 23,000, even though a third of core customers started shopping with a Google search.
What she did
Start with customer feedback.
A customer survey found that 7% of people preferred print for industry news, 74% read it online, and 80% preferred news by email. The marketing budget for trade print advertising was immediately cut from $205,000 budgeted to $22,000 (maintained for the purpose of supporting the industry). Digital advertising spend doubled, and a full-time demand generation position was hired to focus on email marketing.Build a high-performance team.
She grew a 16-person marketing, content and web development group. New roles included a director of digital marketing, a product data (PIM) specialist, web developers, a content marketing manager, a demand generation manager and a media buyer.Rebuild the web store.
Redesigned the site's theme and user experience.
Added better site search (Algolia) and faster, more secure page delivery (Cloudflare).
Upgraded the e-commerce platform (Magento) and the product data system (Akeneo).
Added marketing automation (HubSpot) and CRM.
Increased the number of products sold online.
Added online returns and post-purchase ratings.
Launched the company's first mobile commerce app.
Build search visibility.
Ran SEO training for the whole company.
Added structured data (schema) to the site.
Published content written by in-house experts.
Enriched 5,654 product pages in FY2025.
Bring AI into product data.
She chartered an AI product-data project at a cost of $0.98 per product to clear a backlog of more than 40,000 products waiting for updates.See the shift to AI search early.
In April 2025 she flagged that Google's AI Overviews were cutting organic clicks. That was before ranking keywords fell from a peak of 39,100 to 28,300.
The results
BY CHANNEL
+96%
Website revenue
+20%
Offline revenue
+31%
Company revenue overall
OTHER RESULTS
672,000 website users in FY2025, up 98% from FY2024.
Search engine traffic up 74%.
34,000 web orders, up 25%.
Brand searches up from 3,800 to 8,000 a month.
Customer Net Promoter Score (NPS) of +67.
Why it worked
Kara checked where customers were active before spending marketing budget, moved the money there, and then fixed what stood between a searching buyer and a finished order: product data, site search, speed and self-service.
The same question now applies to AI assistants, and the keyword decline in 2025 shows the shift has already started.
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