Eleven Hundred Agency

Livingstone supercharges content development with Eleven Hundred

UK-headquartered Livingstone Group specialises in helping large enterprises and public sector organisations optimise their software and cloud deployments, so they are never paying for more than they need or use.

With operations in the US and across Europe, Livingstone’s experts help its globally-renowned clients navigate complex contract negotiations, renewals and audits with the ‘mega vendors’, including Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, IBM, Salesforce and more. It also enables its clients to accurately track and forecast what software and cloud services they actually need, helping them right-size their operations to ultimately save money – critical in these times of economic uncertainty.

The last two years have been a period of rapid growth for the Livingstone Group, largely thanks to its aggressive acquisition strategy. During much of this period, the Group’s marketing activities focused on traditional industry events, smaller face-to-face events and email marketing. However, in the Spring of 2020, when Livingstone’s markets began to lock down and all in-person meetings and conferences were suddenly off the table, Livingstone’s marketing strategy needed to change tack, and fast.

It was then that the Group’s newly appointed marketing leader embarked on an ambitious plan to transform marketing operations from the ground up. The organisation decided to pivot to highly-targeted account-based marketing activities, using in-depth market intelligence and creating compelling content to pique the interest of potential customers.   

It was at this point that Eleven Hundred Agency stepped into the fold. Within a matter of days, our team of B2B tech writers was helping Livingstone reinvent its marketing strategy to focus on developing original content that would help it boost brand awareness and attract new visitors to its website and social channels.

Since April 2020, we’ve delivered a regular stream of blogs, e-books, case studies and podcasts that illustrate Livingstone’s deep expertise, unrivalled experience and thought-leadership position. We’ve tackled topical subjects, such as whether the rapid adoption of free cloud services to enable home working will come with a hidden cost at some point in the future, as well as provided evergreen advice on how to optimize spend, handle contract negotiations and defend audits. We’ve also overseen the company’s social media strategy, helping Livingstone reach new audiences.

The results speak for themselves.

By switching resources from relatively expensive events and conferences to a content-first strategy, Livingstone reduced its marketing spend by around 30 percent in 2020, yet grew its leads by the same percentage. Indeed, the proportion of these leads that converted to sales grew by over 50 percent. Furthermore, visits to the Group’s social media pages grew seven-fold, while website visits, form fills and downloads also rose sharply. 

“The Eleven Hundred team hit the ground running when we needed help to reinvent our marketing strategy. Since day one, they’ve been producing content that’s interesting and fresh, and it’s really resonating with large, complex organisations who need to know they’re not spending over the odds,” said Chris Lewis, head of group marketing at Livingstone Group. “Our new strategy is definitely reaping rewards – we’re seeing more interest in what we do and that’s converting to more sales. Eleven Hundred has played a key role in this success.”