In just seven years, Mesh Direct have made themselves Australia’s trusted provider of large-scale outdoor signage. A key part of their success was Lucy Bingle’s LinkedIn campaign.
Mesh Direct provide signage to some of the biggest construction companies in Australia: think Multiplex and Transport for NSW for a start. Chances are you see one or more of their vinyl mesh hoardings every day. One reason Mesh Direct’s signs are so ubiquitous is the success of their LinkedIn campaign.
“About four years ago we decided to move into social media in the B2B space,” says Marketing manager Kerri-Anne Davoodi,” and LinkedIn was clearly the place to do that.”
Land and expand
With a customer base that already included some of Australia’s Tier-1 construction firms, Kerri-Anne was looking to expand into other areas.
“Having Tier-1 clients was a good start, but we wanted to become the trusted brand so that Tier-2 companies would come to us first. To us, ‘trusted’ means we have good quality, long-lasting products, printed here in Australia and provided to the biggest brand names out there.”
Mesh Direct work mostly with project managers, marketing managers, site managers and contract administrators, all the kinds of professionals who have a presence on LinkedIn.
“We wanted to start offering value to these customers in a different way,” says Kerri-Anne,” and as a platform offering direct contact with our target markets, LinkedIn was ideal.”
We need a strategy
Having identified the targets and the channel, Mesh Direct started posting, but soon realised that they needed a strategy to enable them to reach their customers. That’s when a Google search for ‘LinkedIn agency’ revealed Lucy Bingle.
“Lucy came in and did an onboarding presentation to the company (all ten of us),” says Kerri-Anne. “She got everyone to understand that a LinkedIn strategy isn’t just something Marketing handle, everyone in the business needs to be involved.
“Lucy’s team got to know the business, our market and our messaging and put together some initial content ideas. Very quickly they started putting out material that was on-brand every time.”
Rapid results
The effectiveness of the Lucy Bingle strategy soon became evident in numerous ways.
“We saw a steady increase in followers and engagement levels,” says Kerri-Anne, “and in the last two years we’ve had a 480% increase in followers of our company page. That’s a number that speaks for itself.”
At 7%, Mesh Direct’s LinkedIn engagement rate is nearly twice the industry average, but importantly, the company saw some direct sales come in through LinkedIn.
“Three of our Tier-2 customers contacted us after reading one of our posts on LinkedIn. Those are direct sales that we know we can chalk up to this campaign, and the ROI has a ratio in the order of at least 200-to-1. Any marketer will tell you that’s a pretty sound return on investment.”
Taking the reins
Mesh Direct recently brought on a marketing co-ordinator and have taken over the running of the LinkedIn campaign internally, but Kerri-Anne is quick to point out that they couldn’t have done this a year ago.
“Working with Lucy Bingle taught us a tremendous amount about how to run a LinkedIn strategy. We now produce our own material and find third-party content we know will be of value to our customers. Critically, all of our people are involved – we post three times a week and it’s company policy now that every employee likes and comments on every post. This takes about 30 seconds, and our sales team re-use the content in their own materials anyway, so it’s not hard.”
A high-value approach
Kerri-Anne’s confident that their LinkedIn strategy makes a significant contribution to sales, and delivers superb value for money.
“Lucy Bingle’s team got to know our people and our brand inside out,” says Kerri-Anne, “they were easy to work with and super-fast communicators, and the results we’ve seen clearly demonstrate the success of their approach. As we expand our presence on LinkedIn, we expect that successful trend to continue, and we’ve got Lucy Bingle to thank for showing us how to do it well.”