How did Australia’s fastest-growing brands get to where they are? In this article, we look at some of today’s rising stars and the marketing strategy that helped drive them to the top.
Insight: The right marketing campaign for your business can mean all the difference in a winning strategy.
Data: Australian businesses have increased their digital marketing spend over the last few years. Digital spend is set to increase to 56% this year, rising up to 61% by 2021. (MMC)
Key Action Point: Learn from these fast-growing brands and take inspiration from their creative marketing strategies.
Although Australia is known for its laid-back lifestyle, its ultra-progressive start-up and SMB business sectors are in a league of their own. The country’s fastest growing brands are using creative marketing strategies that are as extensive or as ingenious as the industries they dominate.
Here are some of Australia’s fastest-growing brands and their inspiring marketing strategies.
Evolution Health is a new player in Australia’s health and complementary medicine industry. It grew organically out of its sister manufacturing company Ultra Mix.
Although the business is family owned, it still puts up gross revenues in the range of $100 million or so per year. Its growing range of nutritional health products and supplements continue to find an expanded audience beyond Australia and into the global market.
One might think that Evolution Health had a head start because of its association with Ultra Mix, but this wasn’t the case in the beginning. Ultra Mix had 20+ years in the manufacturing industry. However, just because you can build something doesn’t mean that you can sell it. Evolution Health had to separate itself from Ultra Mix using strategic paid media promotions through channels that Ultra Mix never had to touch.
The result? An evolution for both companies — brand building for Ultra Mix and year over year growth of 129.1% for Evolution Health.
Explore further: 10 PPC Trends to Guide Your Digital Strategy in 2019
Octopus Deploy is an automated deployment and release management tool offering software services that are used by teams to deploy .NET, Java, Node, and database applications to thousands of servers in the cloud and on-premises.
They’ve landed the third spot in Australia’s fastest growing companies and landed #3 in the BRW Fast 100 the past three years.
With revenues of around $10 million since it started building brand awareness using B2B social media outlets, more than 20,000 companies around the world use Octopus and it has done more than 12 million total deployments.
The company became the #1 automation server on the planet seemingly overnight, and it happened in large part through YouTube, Twitter, and Github. Looking at the Octopus Deploy subscriber count compared to social influencers tells the wrong story — B2B social media marketing doesn’t need millions of subscribers or likes in order to work. It is connecting with and engaging the right target audience through social media — the decision-makers and company automation specialists — that makes all of the difference for this brand.
Explore further: B2B Social Media Strategy Best Practices, Case Studies, and Examples
Reliance Real Estate grew from four employees in 2011 to 60 people and counting in 2016. Operating primarily out of the Wyndham area, the company now has busy satellite offices in Point Book, Tarneit, Werribee, and Melton. Reliance pulls down annual revenues in the range of $5 million, and it continues to be a proud independently owned and operated business.
It’s important for real estate businesses to know the local area, from the people to the zoning ordinances, to the nuances of the housing market.
Reliance began its growth spurt when it began to take localisation seriously, creating a real connection with its Wyndham-base audience through social media. The company focused on adding value in all communications, not selling homes.
You will be hard pressed to find a negative review of Reliance services online because they have built such a reputation as an expert in the local area. From there, the company was able to expand with satellite offices and increase revenues by duplicating the same strategy.
The National Travel Industry voted TripADeal the #1 most popular travel company in online Australia. Based in Byron Bay, the company continues to grow its dedicated troupe of travel experts across the country. TripADeal has been making around $90 million per year for its efforts, and the trend still seems to be going up.
TripADeal was never doing badly, but it wasn’t exactly one of Australia’s fastest-growing companies until recently. What became the difference? The company began to take its “offering bucket list adventures” literally.
Instead of focusing on gap year kids, the company switched its promos to older, more established couples and lifelong travellers. These people had more money and more time to soak up advertisements.
However, the true breakthrough was remarketing. TripADeal decided not to let up on prospects who visited the site without buying. It was one of the first travel companies to truly implement an automated remarketing strategy that legally stalked site visitors around the internet until they converted.
Explore further: 5 Effective Remarketing Segments Worth Implementing
JV Recruitment is not a business that you would think needs marketing. Its recruitment focuses on logistics and construction, which are fairly insulated industries. With all of the growth going on around Australia lately, however, construction has become a much more competitive space all of a sudden.
The company now reports around $15 million per year in revenues, having been founded under a decade ago. It also boasts an extraordinary rate of productivity, with up to 80 labour assignments daily and a 96% success rate on its staff placements.
B2B gives a company the often overlooked advantage of being able to personalise to its prospects. Clients in construction and logistics tend to be few and far between, but they buy big. They are also loyal once they find a recruiter that they trust.
Creating a one-on-one relationship leads to many transactions, and JV Recruitment learned this as they began to focus on their best clients with personalised efforts. From the direct mail lead gen campaign to the conversion sales call, JV Recruitment used CRM overlapped with marketing to call people by name and nurture leads by talking about problems that were company-specific.
Explore further: B2B Personalisation: What Do Customers Really Want?
With headquarters in the highly competitive landscape of Sydney, Hunter Mason has found a way to differentiate itself among a growing contingent of rivals. The company reports revenues in the range of $30 million, and its client base is becoming more impressive with each passing quarter.
Starting in the real estate industry, Hunter Mason has expanded into serving a number of white-hot Australian industries including transportation, accounting, finance, and retail with a staff of just over 20 people.
Adding value is worth big money if you catch the ear of the right people. Once the in-house expert views your consultancy as the real expert, you have a great chance at doing some big business in the near future. This is exactly what Hunter Mason did to earn partnerships from companies like Qantas, booking.com, Uber, Jacobs, Vodafone, and Accenture.
The difference came when the company started blogging with an eye to solving problems for big clients in under 1,000 words. When those clients saw the expertise, they were happy to turn over the work. One might think that giving away solutions in blogs and over phone calls is cannibalising your own business. Not really. Companies don’t really have time to do their own fit out and refurbishment. They just want to know that you are a true expert before they let you do it.
Explore further: Top 10 Business Blogging Statistics to Guide Your Blog Strategy
Your company may be considering video, traditional marketing, artificial intelligence, or a mix of solutions to come to that revenue-building marketing breakthrough. The examples above should show you that the method is less important than the execution. All marketing strategies have a chance to work, especially a truly data-driven strategy with a vetted precedent.
Here are some questions you need to answer:
Take the case studies above as examples and test many strategies until you find the one that resonates with your audience.