Building the paid media and web infrastructure for Lotus Belle's B2B and DTC expansion into North America

Client Lotus Belle

Project Summary

Lotus Belle Tents were at a turning point. An established UK brand with a loyal global following, they were stepping away from a distributor-led model and building something new: a centrally owned, brand-led approach spanning B2B and direct-to-consumer, with North America as the next major growth market.

Uprated came in as their strategic guide for that transition, designing and building an MVP US website, and launching the paid media infrastructure to match. Web, paid social, paid search, and SEO. One team. One direction.

Highlights

Lead Generation

200+ B2B Leads

In the first two months

Using on-Facebook lead gen ads, we generated over 200 leads from in-market B2B audiences – campsites, glampsites, and event operators actively looking to upgrade their offering.

Optimised Campaigns for Budget Efficiency

$6 Cost per Lead

Within 2 Months

Precise geo-targeting, scroll-stopping creative, and sharp audience segmentation kept lead quality high and acquisition cost low — from day one

CRO

3.3x Conversions

Within 3 months

New Homepage, PDP focus and combining products into variants, we increased conversion from 0.6% to 2% within 3 Months exceeding industry standards in their sector.

Who is Lotus Belle?

Lotus Belle Tents design and manufacture premium bell tents from the UK, built around quality materials, considered craftsmanship, and shapes that have become genuinely iconic in the camping and glamping market.

Originally a UK brand, they now supply tents across the US, Canada, Australia, and Europe, to individual buyers, boutique campsites, and event operators alike.

The Challenge

Lotus Belle wasn’t a startup. But in many of the ways that matter, they were starting again.

Having grown internationally through a distributor model, they were making a deliberate move toward central, brand-led control with the US as the key battleground and a dual B2B and DTC model to build for simultaneously. That meant no existing US digital infrastructure, no paid media history, and no room to waste time or money figuring things out slowly. Every decision had to count.

They also needed a US website before they could meaningfully sell. Not a finished, fully optimised property, but a rigorous MVP that would collect real data, surface real user behaviour, and give the brand the evidence it needed to make smarter decisions about what to build next. The brief wasn’t just “launch campaigns.” It was: help us build the right foundations for a new chapter.

The Solution

We started with a question most agencies skip: what does Lotus Belle actually need to learn right now, and what’s the most capital-efficient way to learn it?

That shaped everything. Instead of building a full website before a single US dollar had been spent, we designed an MVP site – brand-faithful, built to convert, and instrumented to collect the data that would inform what came next. On the paid side, we built separate strategies for two distinct audiences: B2B operators reached through hyper-local lead gen on Facebook, and B2C buyers moved through a full-funnel paid social structure. Paid search captured in-market intent. SEO began building the longer-term foundation.

Because web, paid social, paid search, and SEO sat inside one connected team, the strategies compounded. Audience insights shaped creative. Website data informed targeting. No handoffs. No briefing agencies on what the other agencies were doing. The results in the first two months weren’t a lucky campaign. They were architecture built to perform.

The Obstacles

The dual-audience brief was genuinely complex. A campsite owner evaluating a bulk order needs commercial proof. A consumer planning a family trip needs inspiration and trust. Collapsing those into one strategy would have served neither, so we built two distinct tracks with shared infrastructure, held by one team.

Entering a new market with no performance history also meant no baseline to learn from. We prioritised data collection and cost-efficient sequencing over volume early on, which kept spend disciplined while the picture became clearer.

A Look To The Future

Lotus Belle now has a functioning US digital presence, a live B2B pipeline, and real data to make decisions with. The MVP site has done its job.

What’s next: scaling paid media into new US geographies, refining the DTC funnel as purchase data builds, and developing the website from MVP to a property that carries the full weight of the brand’s ambition. One team. Already knows the architecture. Already building.

“ What our team said…

“Launching Lotus Belle’s first digital campaigns has been incredibly exciting for the team. The product has allowed for an exciting combination of advanced strategy and impactful creative that has powered strong results from day 1.”

Katy Dore-Smith – Paid Team Lead