Building a Connected Marketing Ecosystem for an Education Executive Search Firm

Stronger Consulting had the substance. Thirty-two years of Mike Montoya's experience in education, 500 senior leaders placed across 38 states, 94 percent retention at year two, and a podcast approaching forty episodes. What it did not have was a single place where all of that added up to one story.

So the work was never really a website project. It was building an ecosystem where the search practice, the advisory practice, the podcast, and Mike's own voice all point back at each other.

The Opportunity

Executive search is a trust business with a long decision cycle. A board hiring a CEO is not converting off a paid ad. They are asking colleagues, listening to a podcast on a commute, reading a case study at eleven at night, and slowly deciding whether a firm understands their world.

That means credibility has to be visible in more than one place, and every one of those places has to lead somewhere. The proof already existed. It was just scattered. Two decades of placements with no portfolio to point to. A podcast living entirely on third-party platforms. Conference presence that ended the moment the team flew home.

What We Built

At Stronger's request, we built the new site using Claude, which let a small team ship more than thirty pages of custom architecture in a fraction of a traditional timeline. Just as importantly, it left Mike with a site the team can extend rather than a template they have to fight.

Together, the team created:

• A full site rebuild across thirty-plus pages, with distinct paths for search, advisory, membership, and resources

• A case study portfolio of more than twenty engagements, filterable by service, each one headlined by the outcome rather than the process

• An Opportunities board bringing active searches and the evergreen candidate network into one place

• A dedicated podcast section surfacing every episode with subscribe links across all five platforms

• A conferences hub with photo galleries from ASU+GSV, DCSC, NewSchools, and SXSW EDU

• A Substack publication that pulls every podcast episode into a readable, searchable archive people can subscribe to

• Weekly emails designed in HubSpot, produced alongside Stronger's podcast team at Podcasts That Matter

• GTM and HubSpot tracking across every page, so inbound activity is attributable instead of anecdotal

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The case study portfolio is the piece that changed the most. Twenty-plus engagements, sortable by service, each leading with what actually happened. A CEO search that unified more than 90 community partners. Two regional superintendent seats closed in the same month out of 2,000 applicants. Pay bands benchmarked across 64 data points. Work that was previously described in conversation now sits on a page a board chair can forward.

The podcast section did something similar in reverse. The Stronger Podcast lived on Spotify and Apple, which is where listeners are but not where clients convert. Bringing it onto the site, and then into Substack and the weekly email, turned an off-platform asset into the front door of the whole ecosystem.

The Outcome

Every channel now has a job. Substack and the weekly email carry Mike's voice and keep the podcast working long after an episode drops. LinkedIn and conferences create first contact. The website closes the loop, because it is the only place that holds the proof. Podcast guests become case study subjects. Conference galleries become email content. Episodes become newsletter issues. Nothing gets made only once.

Plus, we do not hand this off and walk away. Hadley Clover operates as Stronger's fractional marketing team, running conference communications, email production, demand generation, and the ongoing content calendar. Mike gets to be the practitioner and the host. Somebody else keeps the ecosystem turning.

Services Website Design and Build • Information Architecture • Content Strategy • Email Marketing • Newsletter and Substack Strategy • Podcast Amplification • Conference Communications • Demand Generation • Fractional Marketing Leadership