Soil Food Web School

We nearly said no.

It was late December 2019. The Soil Food Web School was days into launching its Foundation Courses, the programme that certifies consultants to help farmers and landowners rebuild their soil. The launch was in disarray: broken tech, badly built sales pages, a messy CRM. Our winter break started the following week.

We took it anyway, sensing a well-meaning organisation doing important work that would use our full range, not treat us as a vendor. It became one of the best decisions in our eighteen years.

We steadied that launch in days, then stayed four years.

With the fire out, we wrote a growth plan for the structural problems underneath:

• Revenue arriving in launch-to-launch spikes and troughs: the “roller coaster.”
• Incomplete customer journeys and an underused CRM.
• Almost no use of paid or organic social.
• Under-leveraged SEO and technical website issues limiting organic visibility.

The mandate: a predictable engine that attracts, nurtures, and converts high-intent students into certified consultants without burning out the internal team. That meant quarterly launches, always-on lead generation, evergreen high-ticket funnels, and fixing the tracking and segmentation underneath.

Everything downstream depended on cheap, useful leads at the top.

• Three quizzes (Compost IQ, Soil Biology IQ, and the Soil Health Assessment) built in Typeform with scoring logic and dynamic reports, so prospects got real feedback on their own soil, not a disguised opt-in form. They became the business’s most profitable acquisition route.
• Paid media across Meta, Google, YouTube, and LinkedIn, with structured creative and audience testing rather than broad spend.
• Rigorous split testing on ads, ad sets, landing pages, and sales pages, long enough to learn which audiences produced not just the cheapest leads but the highest-value ones over 12–24 month windows.
• SegMetrics wired in to trace lifetime value back to the campaign and asset that produced it, making iteration fast and accurate instead of anecdotal.
• YouTube SEO as a compounding organic channel, taking videos from a couple of thousand views to tens of thousands, plus technical and on-page SEO across 30+ high-opportunity pages.

The list grew from under 3,000 subscribers to more than 400,000.

The summit was our idea.

We proposed and built an online summit that brought Dr. Elaine Ingham together with leading voices in soil health and ecosystem restoration (Dr. Vandana Shiva, John D. Liu, Dr. David Johnson, Gabe Brown, Nicole Masters, David Montgomery, Ray Archuleta, and others) around a free pass and 60+ sessions.

It worked on every measure we cared about:

• Registrations came in at roughly a dollar each, at a scale that reset the top of the funnel.
• It raised six figures for non-profit partners, building real goodwill in a movement where that matters.
• It established the school’s authority alongside the most credible names in the field.
• And it left an evergreen asset: the recorded collection kept generating leads and sales long after the live event.

We ran it as an annual flagship, split-testing ad creative across farmer, ecological, and general audiences.

Between summits, the work was launch craft and the unglamorous machinery that makes launches repeatable.

Launches

• 17+ quarterly launch cycles, each with a post-campaign analysis and a hypothesis carried into the next.
• Annual launch calendars so the business could plan against revenue instead of hoping for it.
• Webinar scripts, video scripts, sales pages, registration pages, and order flows, written and built.
• New offers when the moment called for them, like Launch Your Lab, which gave certified consultants a route to paid work during the pandemic.

Conversion and messaging

• Deep customer and non-customer surveys, turned into messaging that addressed what people said was stopping them.
• Hotjar session analysis feeding continuous conversion-rate optimisation.
• Klarna and Afterpay, so people could spread the cost of a $3,000+ programme.

The plumbing

• The CRM (Ontraport) repaired and re-architected so the team could segment by interest, temperature, and lifecycle stage.
• Behaviour-based automation replacing ad hoc email blasts.
• Strict UTM conventions and detailed email campaign outlines, so every result could be attributed and every send improved.

Over four years:

• 10× annual revenue, with 17+ major launches averaging over 700% ROI after ad spend and our fees.
• The email list grew from under 3,000 to more than 400,000, and the quiz funnels alone returned about 3.7× on ad spend over their lifetime.
• Marketing ROI held in the double digits for quarters at a stretch, with the strongest single month exceeding 30×.
• Summit registrations at roughly a dollar each, plus six figures raised for non-profit partners.

The numbers are the visible part. The durable part was an organisation that stopped riding the launch roller coaster and started running a system.

On this engagement we worked across: Ontraport, WordPress (Salient), WP Fusion, LeadPages, Kajabi, SegMetrics, Hotjar, Meta Ads, Google Ads, YouTube Ads, LinkedIn Ads, Google Search Console, Google Optimize, TubeBuddy, Typeform, Proof, Klarna, Afterpay, AddEvent, and Canva.

This was never a single campaign. We embedded as a near in-house marketing team and helped turn an early-stage academy into a global education platform for a real movement in regenerative agriculture.

For mission-driven education brands, pairing a powerful purpose with disciplined, data-driven marketing brings a far larger audience, steadier revenue, and the freedom to focus on the work.

For us, the lesson was simpler: the project we almost turned down over timing became one of the most rewarding partnerships in the studio’s history.