DuctSox Case Study: How a Fabric Ductwork Manufacturer Grew Leads with a Digital Overhaul.

DuctSox needed a digital presence that could sell a product most buyers had never specified, to five distinct audiences, without adding friction for the internal team managing it.

• The legacy site had too much content, making a technical product intimidating to research, and specs were buried.
• Five audiences (architects, engineers, sales reps, contractors, end users) arrived with different goals, and the site served none of them well.
• After contacting DuctSox, prospects were not routed to an expert in their industry, and the team had no good way to track leads or their last point of contact.
• Paid search lacked structure: one campaign, one bidding strategy, budget concentrated on branded terms.
• Competitors ranged from polished sites with gated content and lead capture (KE Fibertec, Prihoda) to weak ones, and DuctSox needed to lead the category, not just keep pace.
• Gathering resources to send to prospects was manual work for sales reps.
• Fabric ductwork itself needed explaining. Buyers were comfortable with metal, and some metal suppliers were publishing content that overstated fabric's disadvantages.

The business stakes were direct: more qualified leads, shorter sales cycles, and a site that sales could use as a tool rather than a liability.

Ascedia started with research rather than design. A 2018 strategic planning engagement combined stakeholder interviews, a year of Google Analytics data, keyword and heat map analysis, content readability review and a competitive analysis of six fabric duct manufacturers. That work produced five personas, user journeys, a KPI framework tied to trackable site actions (clicks to call and email, content downloads, Find a Rep requests, form submissions) and a feature matrix mapping each recommended feature to the personas it served. Three guiding principles came out of it: showcase fabric's advantages over metal, let users self-educate, and make the site a working sales tool for reps.

The same discipline carried into marketing. Rather than jump straight to campaigns, Ascedia built ideal customer profiles across four verticals, ideal buyer profiles for each role in the purchase decision, and a set of messaging pillars (Why Fabric, Performance and Reliability, Customer Experience, Customization, Value). Every content piece, email workflow and ad campaign since has traced back to that framework. Goals were set as S.M.A.R.T. targets and reviewed in monthly reporting, with each report pairing the numbers with the reasoning behind them and the next month's action items.

Ascedia's work with DuctSox falls into six areas, delivered in phases from 2018 through the present.

Strategic planning and research

The 2018 strategic plan established the baseline: 80,242 users and 105,697 sessions annually, with roughly 60% of organic queries non-branded and strong rankings for terms like "fabric duct" and "fabric ductwork." Ascedia audited the paid search account, documented the competitive landscape on design, content, UX and SEO, and defined the personas, journeys and KPIs that shaped the redesign. Competitive analysis has been refreshed periodically since, most recently tracking FabricAir, DurkeeSox and Excel Air Systems.

Website redesign on Kentico

Ascedia designed and built a new ductsox.com on Kentico 12 MVC, organized around industries and applications so each audience could find relevant products, case studies and documentation. Key features included a filterable resource library (brochures, case studies, white papers, specs, BIM objects, drawings and installation guides), Cludo site search with document indexing, a Find a Rep tool with contact capture, an interactive cost calculator converted from a PDF, filterable case study and webinar sections, a blog, FAQs, and geo-targeted product content for international visitors. Ascedia integrated Widen, DuctSox's digital asset management platform, so documents and images tagged in Widen flow automatically to the right product and application pages. The site was built with widget-based page templates so the DuctSox team can build pages without a developer, and Ascedia delivered a Kentico training guide and ongoing support agreement at launch.

Paid media restructure and management

Ascedia rebuilt the Google and Microsoft Ads accounts from a single campaign into separate campaigns by application (traditional, critical environments, underfloor, customer personas) with independent budgets and bidding strategies, shifted spend away from branded terms DuctSox already owned organically, and added display and video remarketing. Application-specific campaigns and a LinkedIn program targeting engineers followed. When DuctSox acquired ZOO Fans, Ascedia launched a separate campaign set for destratification and JetVent products.

Account-based marketing and content

In 2020 Ascedia developed an ABM strategy built on ideal customer profiles for four verticals (Industrial, Critical Environments, Grow/Eat/Drink, Community Spaces) and ideal buyer profiles for end users, consulting engineers, architects, mechanical consultants and general contractors. Ascedia audited existing site content against the messaging pillars, built a content plan to fill gaps, mapped the purchase journey to ABM plays, and produced tactical recommendations for identifying, attracting and nurturing target accounts. Application-specific content followed for data centers, schools and universities, grow facilities and other verticals, feeding both organic search and email nurturing.

Marketing automation, personas and lead scoring

Ascedia built persona identification and email automation inside Kentico, starting with a data center workflow and expanding to other verticals, with reusable email widget templates so the DuctSox team can assemble campaigns. Source tracking was added to forms, spam filtering tightened lead quality, and lead scoring was introduced so engaged visitors are surfaced to sales. Heat mapping and A/B testing on high-traffic pages (homepage, Why Fabric, Design, application pages) informed layout changes such as moving case studies higher and reducing banner size where users were scrolling past forms.

ZOO Fans and ongoing optimization

After DuctSox acquired ZOO Fans in 2021, Ascedia first integrated the brand's content into ductsox.com, then built a standalone zoofans.com as a second site within the same Kentico instance. That approach let both sites share widgets, the Widen connector and Salesforce integration while keeping content and navigation separate, and legacy domains were redirected to preserve authority. Ascedia continues to provide annual planning for both sites, including 2026 recommendations centered on content depth, schema markup and structured data to maintain visibility in Google AI Overviews and large language model results.

DuctSox has tracked measurable gains at each phase of the engagement.

Website redesign (first year post-launch, year over year)

• Find a Rep usage up 244%
• Email inquiries up 328%
• Total sessions on ductsox.com up 78%

Digital marketing program (March through September 2021 vs. prior year, GA and Google Ads)

• Contact form submissions up 32.1% (687 vs. 520)
• Organic traffic up 9.8% (23,100 vs. 21,037 sessions)
• Paid search click-through rate up 31.6% (5.0% vs. 3.8%)
• Paid search cost per lead down 25.5% ($20.25 vs. $27.19)

Organic search (January 2022 vs. January 2021, Google Search Console)

• Organic impressions up 107%
• Organic conversions up 9.4%

ZOO Fans (January through August 2025 vs. prior year, GA4)

• Organic sessions up 59% (8,130 vs. 5,119)
• Product page organic sessions up 257%
• Organic contact form submissions up 13%

Beyond the numbers, the DuctSox marketing team gained a site it can manage without developer involvement, a documented persona and messaging framework that keeps content and campaigns consistent, automated nurturing that carries prospects from first visit to sales conversation, and a second brand launched on shared infrastructure rather than a second platform. DuctSox has continued to reinvest in the program each year since 2018.