Getting Ahead of the Competition

In recent years, Livelink has been especially renowned for its sophisticated software engineering and its technical know-how. We also do the bells and whistles and have been commended by clients for our design work and social media strategies, but it’s been the intelligent software solutions above all that get people talking… Until now, that is.

Every so often a project comes along that allows you to demonstrate that you can, in fact, do it all – and do it pretty well at that too. At the end of last month, modular building specialist, Elliott asked us to build a website for the national schools competition the company sponsors, Refurb or Rebuild LIVE ! and take care of the multi-channel marketing strategy in the process.

The prize is a new classroom for the two winning schools – including furniture and fittings – worth £100,000. The final part of the competition, which is run in conjunction with the Building Future Education (BFE) Conference and Exhibition, takes place at the Business Design Centre in London on 9th and 10th May 2012 so, with those dates in place and school holidays fast approaching, we had to deliver fast.

And we did. As fast turnarounds go, this was up there with the best. We were briefed on the Monday and, by the Friday, we had delivered to Elliott an ‘all singing, all dancing’ website. It’s been designed to engage with various forms of social media, with a twitter presence and a facebook app, to please its audience of children, parents, teachers and governors. All the most prominent ‘mum’ bloggers and sites such as mumsnet have been harnessed and we’ve also incorporated the marketing automation system KeepinTouch into the website to ensure that audiences receive relevant emails about the competition at the right times. 

What gave me the buzz was the team effort involved. We’re growing quite quickly at the moment and working hard to manage that growth so there are a significant amount of new faces bolstering up the Livelink old-timers. This was a great way to test the strengths of the new team and see if we all work as one when up we’re against it – and the good news is, we do.

It was also great to see Livelink flex that creative muscle. With Suzanne, our new creative director on board, we’ve catapulted ourselves right into the midst of the serious design competition.  Looking good!