Missing Link Social Media is a social media marketing agency based on the Central Coast of NSW, Australia. Perry Henderson founded the agency in 2012 after completing a Bachelor of Business, Majoring in Marketing, at the University of Newcastle. In his final year, Perry also studied New Media and Digital Marketing at Michigan State University in the USA. This course focussed heavily on the use of social media, teaching Perry timeliness social media marketing principles that enabled Perry to apply cutting edge social media marketing tactics from where it all started. Missing Link is positioned well within the industry, recently being nominated as a finalist in the Social Media Marketing Awards for Best Small Social Media Agency. A fantastic result considering the award had entries from social media agencies and marketing agencies across Australia and New Zealand, of which there were just seven finalists. Missing Link’s main product offering is Paid Advertising on Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn, where clients pay for media spend directly to each platform through their own ad account, plus an additional service fee to Missing Link for Strategy, Campaign Setup and Campaign Management.

The marketing initiative for this award is an ongoing successful campaign built by Perry. It has taken Perry seven years of ongoing testing and iteration to create such a successful campaign. This campaign cuts through the noise of competitors using unapologetic transparency while providing unheard of value to prospective customers without asking for anything in return. The initiative was a reaction to the ‘bait-and-switch’ tactics used by many other social media marketers out there today. The goal of this marketing initiative was to help restore the integrity of the social media marketing industry whilst increasing qualified leads that would turn into loyal long-term clients for Missing Link. This dishonest style of advertising has cannibalised the integrity of the social media marketing industry, causing high market cynicism. Perry’s marketing initiative pioneers a new wave of advertising for social media marketers, focused on addressing the (justified) cynicism that business owners now have. Perry’s marketing initiative is based on adding enormous value upfront, then his sales process qualifies prospects to assure their hard-earned resources are being invested wisely. Whilst this may initially appear detrimental to Missing Link’s business growth, it has led to higher client retention. The initiative also backs Missing Link’s values and helps to restore integrity to the industry.

The plan for the initiative included the development of a fully-optimised customer journey, considering both technology and customer experience. After finalising the full customer journey, the marketing initiative went live. The Campaign was launched with a primary focus on split-testing two initial key variables: (website) Traffic objective vs (website) Conversions objective. Essentially, one campaign is optimised to drive website traffic as cheaply as possible, the other campaign objective collects website conversion data overtime to educate the campaign algorithm towards more conversions. Both have their benefits and each is a valid hypothesis for driving website enquiries. Within the first 5 days, the results were astounding. From its launch on 11/02/20 to 01/03/20, the Conversions campaign has generated 17 bookings. As a result, Missing Link had its 2nd highest month of revenue ever. Missing Link converted approximately ¼ of these bookings into qualified leads and ½ of qualified leads into new clients, with 2 of these bookings turning into clients. After more than 7 years of succeeding for their own clients, yet unable to build their own marketing machine, Missing Link Social Media now has a sustainable marketing system built on strong foundations of authenticity and marketing integrity.