How We Refurbished Elm Workspace's Marketing To Gain £1.4M In Leads (In Just 12 Months)

Here's a pleasing tale. A fit-out and refurbishment company, Elm Workspace, had seen long-term diminishing results from traditional advertising methods (who hasn't?), but had had terrible experiences with digital marketing agencies in the past.

They approached us here at Digital 22 and got a 24 times return on marketing spend and gained £1.4M in warm leads, thanks to our inbound marketing. Find out how by reading on.

The Client

Elm Workspace were looking to grow their company, but had failed to see any results come from various marketing agencies' efforts in the past. Outbound, traditional advertising wasn't helping and they had previously had their fingers burnt with other onling advertising agencies.

The field they operate in is commercial fit-outs and refurbishments, primarily office space across the South West of England. This means that their client numbers may be lower than, say, an eCommerce client, but the lifetime value of clients certainly isn't.

They wanted more clients so that the business would grow, but previous marketing efforts were not delivering a consistent flow of leads for who they could tender.

The Issue

The service Elm Workspace offer is great. They've worked with a range of high-profile clients and produced modern, impressive interiors for big companies and well-known public sector facilities.

But it wasn't visible to grow the business on reputation alone with the only way clients would see just what Elm Workspace could offer them was first hand or by word-of-mouth.

We needed to put a plan together which would put Elm Workspace in front of prospects, at the right time during their respective buyer's journey, a lot more often.

From our point of view, the key problem was that they didn't really trust marketing - especially digital marketing - and were skeptical about what results another digital agency could bring them.

Another challenge was that Elm Workspace had never heard of inbound marketing. For example, they didn't have a blog or any existing content.

The Plan

We advised that they partake in a wholesale inbound marketing strategy.

We pitched to them using the whole inbound package: SEO, PPC, social media management, blogging, premium download content, professional landing pages and email nurturing.

But to gain their trust, we could offer them close and transparent tracking of everything we would be providing. Everything from call tracking to sales revenue from the different channels and visible for both sides of the partnership to monitor and analyse.

This brought them their first ever flow of regular leads from marketing.

The Results

In just one year, Elm Workspace saw 24x return on their marketing spend, plus another £660k of work in the pipeline being priced, after their first inbound marketing project with Digital 22.

24x Return On Investment & £1.4M of Leads Thanks To Inbound Marketing

This was down to an effective and holistic inbound campaign which included well-planned and executed SEO and PPC.

The Newsroom, Elm Workspace's blog, was launched and we wrote about office culture, furniture, management and design.

We lead readers to download Elm's premium content, such as: Office Move Checklists and Refurbishment Planning Sheets for Awareness and Consideration stage prospects. We also put together a Project Portfolio for those prospects which were closer to the Decision stage of the journey.

The SEO team conducted a site wide audit too - and the Keyword research shaped blog content and titles - and the visitor numbers were brilliant. Plus, the improvements carried on YoY in 2016.

Visits are up by over 1,100% compared to this time last year and contacts gained are equally as impressive.

Search engine ranking has been a success for this client. We targeted a range of Elm Workspace's applicable longtail keywords and have managed to rank well for a number of search queries in their key target personas: office fit-out and school/classroom refurbishment or redesigns...

And here are some examples...

Daren Spencer, Elm Workspace Director, has since said, "We have been very impressed with the returns on our digital marketing spend. They [Digital 22] have consistently delivered us over 20 times our investment in revenue, which says everything you need to now."

And that's quite a fitting point to end on, we think.

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