With an audience base and group of journalists that rely heavily on face-to-face contact, Stone Junction looked for ways to replicate these in-person interactions.

For journalists, Stone Junction decided to emulate to site visit experience by producing a series of customer stories, released to the media on the day that the customer received their new machine. Each piece was distributed with several images of the machine during production, giving the journalist everything they needed to produce a similar piece of content to one they would get from visiting a site.

Stone Junction and Finning also replaced the widely attended open day at Caterpillar’s demonstration site in Malaga with a series of virtual events, showcasing new product launches.

On social media, Stone Junction adopted a similar approach, focusing on customer stories and resharing photos of machines on-site on most days.

Stone Junction spoke to Finning’s closest media contacts to find out what type of content they would like to receive from Finning during the time when site visits were prohibited. Taking this feedback on board, Stone Junction worked with Finning to secure a pipeline of customer stories, which were organised and released in a timely manner, all within one week of the customer’s new machine being delivered.

This took careful planning, as there were often times where the marketing team weren’t aware of a delivery until a week before. In this time, Stone Junction spoke to a representative from Finning, their customer, secured images of the machine and got each story approved by all parties. Releasing the stories at the time of the delivery replicated the site visit process as best possible for the editors.

Stone Junction also produced one piece of thought-leading content per month, often focussed on aftermarket hints and tips, such as maintaining a machine’s undercarriage or getting the best fuel efficiency out of a machine.

Finally, Stone Junction worked with Finning and Caterpillar to organise four virtual media events during the year, all focussed around new machine launches. Stone Junction invited the core journalists to the event and handled any follow ups required to secure the coverage, such as distributing virtual press packs. These events resulted in some of the most impressive multi-page clippings over the year.

With Finning, Stone Junction identified five areas that would benefit from an increased number of leads during the pandemic. These were:

• Aftermarket parts
• A new machine, the 315 GC, which was launched during lockdown and therefore not introduced to customers in the same way
• Small machines, typically sold to sole operators or small construction companies
• Excavators, one of Finning’s most commonly requested machines

For each campaign, Stone Junction used eye-catching graphics that were aligned with the underlying message of each campaign. For example, for the campaign targeting Scottish customers, we themed the posts and accompanying graphics around the Loch Ness Monster and other Scottish traditions.

Stone Junction assigned small budgets to each campaign, based on projected audience size, which ranged from £125 to £1,000. With each post, viewers were instructed to make an enquiry via Facebook messenger, which were then passed to Finning within 24 hours to follow up.

Alongside the lead generating activities, Stone Junction overhauled Finning’s social media presence by increasing the amount of posts per week to five on each channel and changing the nature of the posts from primarily sales-led to customer showcases, hints and tips and links to coverage generated for Finning by Stone Junction.

Stone Junction obtained a bank of legacy images from Finning to use as part of an ongoing #ThrowbackThursday series, while encouraging customers to send in their own photos — something that is now a regular occurrence across all platforms.

Generated 173 pieces of coverage in 39 different outlets (objective exceeded by 33%)

• 27 full- or multiple-page print clippings (exceeded by 42 per cent)
• Average DA of online coverage websites was 35 (objective met)
• 72 backlinks from coverage to the Finning website (exceeded by 44 per cent)
• 250,000 estimated coverage views, 1,850 social shares according to Coverage Book

101 leads generated on Facebook (objective exceeded by 236%). Leads had a combined value of £3.5 million — that’s £1,865 generated for every £1 spent on campaigns

Increased social media followers by 8,388 (objective exceeded by 67%)

• Instagram – 67.85% increase
• LinkedIn – 39.73% increase
• Twitter – 14.12% increase
• Facebook – 9.44% increase

Engagement increased from 8,462 in June 2020 to 40,500 in 17,284 by May 2021 (objective exceeded by 134%)

• 764,836 impressions generated from June 2020 to May 2021