Sr. Manager Digital Marketing @ Unbounce, Insightly CRM, and LeadsRx
Running a paid media strategy for one brand is tough. Running it for three—with entirely different go-to-market motions—is a whole new level of complexity.
In this special internal spotlight episode of Closing Time, Val Riley sits down with Unbounce’s Senior Manager of Digital Marketing, Alexa Tsongranis, to unpack how her team of one built a unified playbook for scaling paid media across Unbounce, Insightly, and LeadsRx.
From shared infrastructure and flexible frameworks to unified measurement and data-driven decision-making, Alexa shares how operational clarity and focus help her run three distinct paid programs—without reinventing the wheel each time.
When Unbounce, LeadsRx, and Insightly came together under one umbrella, their paid media programs came along for the ride—and none of them looked alike. Each brand had its own legacy systems, its own playbooks, and its own interpretation of what “good” performance meant. What they didn’t have was cohesion.
Alexa, Unbounce’s senior manager of digital marketing, stepped into this fragmented world with an eye for structure and a background that positioned her perfectly for the challenge. She saw three brands, three go-to-market motions, and three separate advertising ecosystems, but she also saw the potential to unify everything into a single, scalable system.
Alexa’s years in agency life taught her the value of speed, consistency, and data-backed decisions. Agencies operate under constant pressure—they test rapidly, they optimize relentlessly, and they standardize everything because they have to.
So when she moved in-house, she brought that same approach. Instead of viewing Unbounce, LeadsRx, and Insightly as separate entities, she treated them like a small portfolio of clients, each needing structure, consistency, and performance. To support this, she helped shape the internal content, design, and web teams into a unified, mini-agency designed to serve all three brands with shared workflows and predictable quality.
This shift didn’t just make the team faster. It gave Alexa the foundation she needed to build repeatable systems across brands and motions.
The most transformative step Alexa took was standardizing the entire paid media infrastructure. She started with the basics, replacing a patchwork of account setups with shared conventions and clearer logic.
She aligned:
✅ Campaign naming structures that made every ad easy to understand
✅ Conversion goals and tracking across all platforms
✅ Analytics configurations for cleaner reporting
✅ Creative templates and modular formats for faster iterations
✅ Landing page frameworks built in Unbounce
✅ Attribution using LeadsRx to remove guesswork
This unified foundation also created scalability. As the brands evolved and their strategies expanded, the structure stayed strong, allowing Alexa to layer on new ideas without rebuilding the system each time.
Even with shared infrastructure, Alexa still needed a system flexible enough to reflect the realities of each brand. Unbounce benefits from strong brand recognition, making brand search an efficient starting point. LeadsRx requires more education-driven non-brand campaigns. Insightly competes against well-known CRM providers, making competitive search critical.
Alexa solved this by designing a modular three-tier search framework—brand, non-brand, and competitive—that applied consistently across all brands. The structure remained the same, but the targeting and messaging adjusted based on the brand’s needs, ICP, and customer journey.
This approach allowed her to scale paid search quickly and reduce time spent reinventing campaigns. It also made performance more predictable across brands because everyone was optimizing from the same strategic foundation.
One of the biggest challenges in the merger was that each brand had its own version of an MQL, its own hand-off processes, and its own inbound expectations. These discrepancies made reporting confusing and made collaboration between marketing and sales more difficult.
Alexa led a cross-functional effort to unify these definitions. Marketing, sales, and operations all participated, ensuring that every team had a voice and that the new funnel reflected the needs of the entire go-to-market organization.
Once the teams aligned on terms like “hand-raiser,” “marketing qualified,” and “sales qualified,” routing became more efficient, reporting became clearer, and performance comparisons finally made sense. Campaign optimization improved because Alexa could trust that an MQL meant the same thing everywhere.
This alignment became a foundational pillar for scaling campaigns across the portfolio.
Managing three brands—and multiple GTM motions inside each one—can easily lead to burnout. Alexa addressed this by rethinking her workflow. Instead of jumping between brands throughout the day, she grouped work by theme or motion. Some days focused solely on Unbounce’s PLG programs, while others were dedicated to sales-led efforts or Insightly’s competitive search.
This reduced mental fatigue and helped her stay more strategic instead of reactive.
As the portfolio expanded, she also learned to protect her bandwidth. She stopped saying yes to everything and relied more on data to guide decisions. If a campaign wasn’t showing early promise, she cut it. If a request didn’t align with goals or ICP, she pushed back.
Her guiding principle stayed the same: focus on what drives impact and eliminate unnecessary noise.
Because Unbounce uses its own landing page builder, Insightly uses its CRM internally, and LeadsRx powers its attribution reporting, Alexa experiences the products the same way customers do. That gives her an unusual advantage.
She spots friction points early.
She uncovers opportunities from firsthand experience.
She can quickly relay feedback to product teams because she’s using the tools daily.
This loop between user experience and campaign execution strengthens the overall marketing strategy and enables more authentic messaging.
When asked for advice for other in-house marketers, Alexa’s answer was simple but powerful: clarity scales. Complexity doesn’t.
Clarity around ICP.
Clarity around GTM motion.
Clarity in campaign structure, reporting, and expectations.
Clarity in how teams communicate.
Paid media becomes easier, faster, and more successful when the fundamentals are clear and repeatable. Alexa’s work across Unbounce, LeadsRx, and Insightly proves that simplicity—paired with strong systems—can transform a fragmented set of programs into a scalable growth engine.
What Alexa created wasn’t just a unified paid media strategy. It was a fully formed operational system—a modular, flexible, and deeply structured approach that supports three brands, multiple motions, and constant growth.
Three brands.
Multiple audiences.
One scalable playbook.
Her work shows that great paid media programs aren’t just about great ads. They’re about clarity, systems, alignment, and the willingness to rebuild foundations when needed.
Three brands.
Three go to market motions.
One paid media playbook?
We’re pulling back the curtain of Unbounce’s digital marketing strategy
on today’s episode of Closing Time.
Thanks for tuning in to Closing Time, the show for go to market Leaders.
I’m Val Riley, head of marketing for LeadsRx, Insightly and Unbounce.
And today. I am joined by a super special guest,
someone who I am lucky enough to work with every day.
She is our senior manager of Digital. Marketing right here at Unbounce.
Please welcome Alexa Tsongranis.
Thanks, Val.
So great to be here.. It feels very full circle.
It does.
Well, as I mentioned, we’re going to pull back the curtain a little bit today.
So it’s going to be really exciting
to share some of what goes on here every day at Unbounce.
As I mentioned, we do have three brands total.
So we’re going to talk about each one.
But before we go there, let’s start with a little bit of your background, Alexa.
So you came from the agency world and then moved in-house.
So just start there.
Like what was that shift like for you
and what lessons did you bring from the agency side?
Yeah.
So I think the thing about
working in an agency world is that you’re always juggling multiple clients.
Multiple different go to market motions.
Maybe none. If it’s a B2C in B2B clients.
And the learning has to move a lot faster,
you iterate faster and you have to prove performance.
There’s really no time to say, oh,
let’s just test this creative and see if it works.
You are on the hook for those clients.
So moving in-house.
Obviously, that is very different.
With one brand or than multiple brands.
In the case of, the insightly,. Unbounce, and LeadsRx family.
So really pretty unique position now that I’m kind of back
in an agency world, even though it’s very much in-house.
Yeah. So let’s talk about that.
So if anybody is new to Closing Time or not familiar with the story,
Unbounce landing page builder has been in business for a very long time.
Back in 2021, Unbounce acquired LeadsRx marketing attribution software
and then in 2024 merged with Insightly CRM.
So, as Alexa mentioned, three brands kind of coming together.
So Alexa, you in that merger came from the Insightly business
and have since taken on Unbounce and LeadsRx paid media programs.
How would you describe the before
and after of paid media across those three brands?
Yeah, absolutely.
So interestingly enough,
all three brands, when I was coming in,. I actually had an agency managing them.
So that was originally my role and title was to manage the agencies,
make sure that the strategy was sound and that everything was working.
Obviously, again, having that experience coming,
from agency to in-house, everything’s done a little bit differently.
And three different agencies managing three accounts
means that the strategy does look a lot different.
So in the beginning, for all three brands,
things were a little bit more hodgepodge.
There wasn’t a clear strategy of exactly, what was working for anything.
So knew that I had to kind of take those
back under my, my role and be able to actually execute
and unify the strategy just in terms that even as small as campaign
naming structures to actually conversion goal setups,
those things are pretty different depending
on where you maybe, learned how to do those things.
So that was the first probably before.
The after, now we have very, unified structure.
So everything is name the same.
We know where our conversion goals we have the setups for analytics
and tracking the same across all three brands.
So we’re in a lot
better of a spot, knowing that it kind of runs in-house, like an agency.
But consolidating all of those other things.
Every time I’ve worked with a paid media manager, they always come
in, look at the accounts and think, and then they say, hey, is it okay
if I start from scratch?
So I feel like there’s every paid media manager has the setup or the
infrastructure, the way that they like it, the way it makes sense to them.
But let’s talk about the foundation like that infrastructure.
In SaaS,
we’re always talking about the importance of a strong tech stack and sharing tools.
What does that look like at Unbounce?
Yeah.
So amazingly enough, we are very lucky to actually be able
to drink our own champagne.
We use Unbounce to build all of our campaign landing pages and insightly
to track our sales marketing activities and just kind of full funnel.
And then for LeadsRx,
we actually are able to understand attribution much better than just using
any of the other tools like a GA, or even, Google ads
in their native platforms.
So using our own tools really gives us, kind of an edge, I would say,
because not only are we selling the thing that we’re using,
but we’re also able to kind of see exactly how someone would use
it, those pain points that are happening.
And so across that whole funnel, when we’re building the campaigns, really
from start to finish, I’m able to know exactly what needs to change
because I’m using a day to day.
Yeah.
I’d say, being your own customer, there’s a certain power in that
that not all marketing teams get to experience.
And it really is nice, even even when we’re asked to give feedback
to the product team.
Or we can see a customer success ticket come in and think, oh, yeah.
Yeah, I’ve had that issue, or I know how to solve that issue
because I’m a user as well.
It’s puts us in a unique perspective.
So I like to say that
our team runs like a mini agency
in our organization, partially because we have three quote
unquote clients, but we have a very capable content team.
We have a very capable design team, and we have a very capable, website team.
And so everybody kind of works for the three quote unquote clients that we have.
I really like that mindset.
I think it forces us to stay nimble.
Can you share maybe in the paid from the paid media lens,
what that kind of framework does for you and how it helps you approach paid media?
Yeah.
So although we’re able to kind of work in that agency, kind of template,
I would say,
we are using that from the paid media side as well, because again, things
have to be flexible, but there needs to be a framework that we’re working off of.
So campaign templates again using Unbounce there are pretty standard.
So we’re able to kind of use them as like a, a modular kind of, plug and play
to know that the same structure is going to be happening across all three brands,
but the messaging is going to be different based on offer based on the brand,
based on ICP.
And again, we know that those lifecycles are a little bit different as well.
We’ve been able to build those creative systems again,
playing off of our creative team or our content team to know that we have
just these brand docks and decks.
But I can kind of plug and play like what messaging works where,
and makes it a lot easier, actually, to be able to kind of work through,
A, new campaigns or, actually being able to refresh
anything evergreen or anything that was older on the account.
So really, those working off of the templates, the brand guides,
having a content structure in place that again, we can plug and play
a lot faster, makes that iterative testing so much easier.
On the paid media side. For sure.
I’d like to pull back the curtain a little bit more because I think,
I think. I think our story is super interesting.
And I think a lot of folks who have been through merger and acquisition,
activity can really relate to is the fact that when organizations joined together,
they may not have, aligned
set of definitions for their go to market.
And one of the ones that we face during this most recent merger was,
for instance, and it sounds super basic, but just the definition of an Mql.
So talk us through the process of kind of aligning definitions
within the organization post-merger.
And then how did that maybe change the way
we approach campaigns and optimization?
Yeah.
So this is actually something
I could probably talk about, for 30 minutes on its own.
So something that was super exciting for me,
and this was really
one of the biggest unlocks for our team when we after that, that post merge.
So sharing, definitions across brands again sounds really easy.
But it was pretty difficult in practice.
We knew that every brand had its own definition of a marketing qualified lead.
And then that that meant that the hand-off process
actually was pretty different, for each brand as well.
So what we wanted to do was just optimize that, first, again, actually
getting the definition down.
Who’s a hand raiser?. What’s marketing qualified?
What’s the maybe sales qualified?
What’s the follow up process there as well?
And we brought everyone to the table.
It was not just marketing.
It was not just sales, ops was in there.
Anyone really on the go to market side had to say, because this is going to
change again, not just for one, but three different clients, essentially.
And so once we were able to set what that truly meant
for all three brands, then our processes slightly changed as well.
A lot around reporting.
And actually, again,
building those systems in place to make sure that everything was set up
from routing to handoff and then actually reporting, and again on my end as well.
I needed to know exactly what we were looking for.
Just to be, to be a really good partner for sales as well,
because at the end of the day, if the leads aren’t flowing in correctly
or we don’t have enough of them, it makes their job a lot harder.
So the alignment really did give us the clarity build campaigns
that map to our expectations across the organization.
And it meant that our dashboards actually finally spoke the same language.
It wasn’t an MQL for one brand is actually an SQL for another.
We knew exactly when we said this many mql per brand.
It was the exact same definition.
So totally a game changer.
Wish we would have done that a little bit sooner,
but you never know what you don’t know when you get started.
Yeah.
And I would like to emphasize too that we say you lead three brands,
but within those brands we have multiple motions.
So for instance, there’s an Unbounce product
So for instance, there’s an Unbounce product
led growth motion where we want people to come to the website and check out
and buy the plan that they want.
And then there’s, a sales led motion where we want them to talk to a sales rep
if they’re, for instance,
a marketing agency, and we can offer them additional services.
Similarly, for the CRM product, there is a, you know, swipe
your credit card and go, motion.
And then we have a much more involved motion for those mid-market and larger
companies who might want services or additional modules.
So it it really is multiple motions within those brands.
And so when you think about all of that,
like what you’re really managing is it feels almost like a portfolio.
A little bit.
Again, it’s very exciting work, but, it does sometimes get a little taxing
because you do have to be able to segment that out in your brain.
And, even just in these conversations, it’s very easy to be like, oh, well, this
this is, you know, what we do every day, but you kind of have to remove yourself
from the larger picture and say, oh right, this is a lot.
And if, when you’re explaining it to outside,
people outside of the organization, it does, kind of add up.
Yeah.. Well like it’s context switching right.
Like, you know, mid day maybe you’re looking at campaigns
and that are optimized for, a hand raised for a demo.
And then
sometimes you’re looking at campaigns that are optimized for that free trial.
So how do you keep alignment between sales,
marketing and ops with all of that context switching throughout the day?
Yeah. So a lot of it
really is just understanding that it will happen at some point.
There’s never a perfect day that. I only get to work on one exact thing.
Because again, when when something comes up,
that’s the thing you need to take care of.
But I found that building and focus really does help.
So not essentially time blocking, per brand or promotion,
but understanding that maybe a full day goes to one brand and then you can do
those separate motions because at least it’s a more easier,
easier, quicker context, switch than per brand promotion.
So that’s one of the first things. I kind of know is
if I can block out
a little bit of time or a day specifically where I’m working on that,
that does really help,
because at the end of the day, context switching really kills the strategy.
So grouping the work by type, and then minimizing bouncing between brands day
to day, that shift is really just help me stay a little bit more focused.
And think a little bit more strategically instead of just reacting to,
oh, we need more ads for the plg motion versus the sales led growth,
or we’re switching back and forth between, Unbounce and insightly
within the same hour.
Might be a little bit too complex.
Yeah.
And your cheat code is we work in different time zones.
So, you know,. I don’t bother you in your afternoon.
I think that bears mentioning,. That does help.
The time zone differences do give me a little bit more focused time.
Post 2 p.m. Pacific.
That’s right.
So let’s just get a little bit into work life balance
because I think, all the digital marketers. I’ve ever worked with
really are people who can go heads down into a data project
and come up like eight hours later
and just not even realize that it’s gotten dark and it’s, bedtime.
So, you know, I want to make sure that you have, you know, work
life balance, that you have set priorities that you’re comfortable with.
But this is a high pressure role for anyone,
especially someone with as many brands as you’re managing.
So just talk about like, balancing workload and pressure while
still really feeling the weight of the the company in terms of ad performance.
Yeah.
So, I mean, it took me a really long time in my career
to actually feel comfortable with actually saying no, to requests.
Not just to say no, to say no, but saying no with actually data or actually
backing up those decisions to understand where my time is better spent.
So understanding that, you know,. I am a people pleaser,
and I do love to just say yes to tasks.
I’m usually the first person to respond, to someone on slack,
which is a badge of honor that I wear quite proudly.
But I do realize as we scaled, as I added more brands and more motions
under the belt, it wasn’t so easy just to say yes to everything
and actually work through all those things.
So protecting bandwidth is just as important is chasing growth,
especially when we do have such a large portfolio and
and so many different complex things that we were working on day to day.
But I really do rely heavily on the data to help me make those calls.
If if something’s not showing early signs of success or growth,
I know that maybe needs to be cut back.
I share that information with the team to say this was a good test.
Maybe let’s not do another one until something else dynamically changes.
Or if we have an additional budget that we just need to test more things.
It’s not being about.
It’s not about being risk averse.
It’s really about staying focused on what moves the needle.
At the end of the day,. I know that revenue is the last thing
that we’re looking at, but it starts at the top of the funnel.
So if something’s not showing
even an mql success, we’re not getting leads in the door.
It’s definitely not going to turn into revenue.
I need to be able to say no to that and back, back up with the data.
So I found that that kind of mindset just coming in knowing that
you can say no, as long as there’s some data to back it up.
You’ve tried it in the past. Why?. It doesn’t work.
Helps us scale a lot smarter.
And kind of cut out the noise, All right.
Let’s bring things to life with an example.
How does our paid search strategy adapt across different go to market motions?
so what we were able to do, when we were first kind of figuring out
how to unify these strategies and make it, again, just repeatable
and scalable, was really looking at our Google, search strategy.
We knew that we had basically three buckets, how we classify those campaigns.
So for the entire organization,
it’s brand, non-brand, and then competitive campaigns.
And luckily for each of those market motions,
we’re actually able to distinctly show exactly what campaigns
need to be within there.
So for Unbounce we are a category leader with strong brand recognition.
Brand search is our most efficient.
So we set that up first and again kind of waterfall down to the other two brands.
For LeadsRx, the priority, for that kind of campaign
structure is around education.
So we’re really focusing more on that non brand that the terms around that
that’s that second kind of waterfall stage.
And then for Insightly we know that we’re kind of more in a competitive market.
There’s more direct
competitors with brand names that are a little bit more recognizable.
So our ICPs are already comparing those CRM solutions.
So that’s that third kind of waterfall stage in that competitive bucket.
Structurally, the campaigns actually look identical.
Their name the same.
They have the same intent layers and keyword structure.
But it’s really is kind of fine tuned to that go to market motion.
And really why we are able to do this is this
is the example of why one playbook has to be modular.
It’s the same tool, different applications and different keywords
at the end of the day, but exact same, structure and setup again,
makes it so much easier to scale across brands.
And hopefully if someone else were to look into the account
who maybe doesn’t do paid media day to day, can see exactly what’s going on
and actually be able
to make those changes or make, any assumptions about the data.
I will attest to that.
It is very clear to see everything that’s going on in our accounts,
even for someone who’s not in there every day.
So I’ll validate that.
Let’s do one more question.
I feel like we could talk for hours, but,
if there’s if you’re talking to the in-house, in-house
marketers out there and they’re trying to scale their paid programs,
what would be your best piece of advice?
Yeah.
So there’s a couple things that come to mind.
First of really what kind of helps.
But I think if I had to put it into a very small sound bite, it’s
that clarity scales.
If you have clarity in what you’re doing, around ICP, around the
go to market
promotion that you’re kind of focused on, that makes your job so much easier
and honestly makes the jobs of the team and organization around you a lot easier.
Complexity doesn’t.
So when you’re working in complex kind of pattern strategies, motions,
the more noise and things that you’re adding to those accounts,
it’s going to make it really hard,. I think, to be successful.
So I think you get very super focused on your ICP, you know, exactly
kind of what you’re targeting.
You can build everything around it, but kind of keep it a little bit
more niche to start and then build up as you get the data around it.
All right.
So I’m hearing clarity scales. Complexity doesn’t.
And I think that’s a great way to end our episode.
This was so good.
Thank you for letting us peek behind the curtain a little bit.
Amazing. Thank you so much for having me.
I love when the podcasts I listen to give us a sneak peek behind the curtain.
So this was wonderful.
You know how to reach Alexa.
You can reach out to Unbounce, Insightly, or LeadsRx on any of our social channels.
And remember, you can get this episode and every episode of Closing Time
delivered right to your inbox.
Just click the link in the show notes.
We’ll see you next week.
