The short answer
Digital marketing on the Sunshine Coast means picking channels for a region with a dozen separate town centres rather than one CBD. We run search, Google Ads, Meta and email, targeted town by town, and report on calls and forms. AR Digital Solutions has 32 staff and no lock in contracts.
Almost nobody here works in the town they sleep in
The Sunshine Coast is a commuting region that looks like a set of small towns. Someone lives at Caloundra and works a shift at the hospital in Birtinya. A tradesperson sleeps at Nambour and spends the week on sites at Palmview. A bookkeeper in Buderim drives to an office in Maroochydore three days a week, and a fair number of people get on the Bruce Highway before six and do the run to Brisbane and back.
That movement is the thing to design around. Your customer might live in one town, work in a second and shop wherever the car happens to be pointed at five o'clock. A business at Kawana can win someone who lives in Coolum, but only while that person is nearby or searching without a town name attached.
On top of it sits the visitor economy. Noosa, Mooloolaba and Coolum fill in the school holidays and empty afterwards. Behind them is the hinterland, where the population is thinner, the drives are longer and the competition is much lighter.
Six or seven town centres with real commercial weight, no dominant CBD, and customers moving between all of them daily. That is the marketing problem here, and it is nothing like marketing a city with a centre.
What each channel is actually good for up here
Search, for anything with urgency behind it.
Blocked drain, dead air conditioner, car that will not start. The map result decides it, and local SEO work on your profile and reviews earns more per dollar than anything else while taking the longest to arrive. Because each town here is its own bubble, the ranking fight is smaller than the population suggests.
Google Ads, when you need to be in more than one town at once.
Search advertising is the only fast way to appear in Noosa when your workshop is in Warana, and it tells you inside a month whether the demand you assumed exists in a town actually does. Worth knowing before you sign a second lease.
Meta and Instagram, for things people did not wake up wanting.
Home services after an estate is handed over, restaurants, gyms, events, anything visual. Instagram pulls more weight here than it does inland, because half the region photographs well and the audience browses it that way.
Email and SMS, for customers you already paid to get.
Most Coast businesses have a list they have never used, and it is usually the fastest revenue available to anyone trading five years or more.
What we would not do is run a regional awareness campaign while nobody is answering the phone. If your existing enquiries are not being converted, that is the first fix.
Where Sunshine Coast ad budgets leak
Set a 25 kilometre radius around Maroochydore and a good share of it is ocean and national park. Set 40 kilometres and you are paying for clicks from Gympie and Caboolture. Radius targeting was built for cities, and this region is not shaped like one.
What works better is a campaign or ad group per town cluster, each with its own budget and its own landing page naming that town. Caloundra with Little Mountain. Kawana, Birtinya and Buderim. Maroochydore with Mooloolaba. Coolum with Peregian. Noosa on its own, because the customer there often is not a resident. The hinterland last, since the volume is lower and the cost per click usually is too.
Split that way, the report tells you which towns produce enquiries you can service and which produce the ones you keep declining because the drive is 50 minutes. Call tracking by campaign makes that visible. Without it the exercise is guesswork with a chart on top.
Where else we run campaigns
Caloundra, Little Mountain, Kawana, Birtinya, Buderim, Sippy Downs, Coolum, Peregian, Noosaville, Noosa Heads, Nambour, Yandina and the Blackall Range towns.
Also see digital marketing in Maroochydore for the commercial centre, and digital marketing in Brisbane if you sell at both ends of the highway. Our general marketing page covers the services outside a regional context.
How we run it
Work out what a customer is worth
Average job value, how often they come back, and what you can afford to pay to get one. Everything downstream depends on that number.
Two channels to start, not five
We say what we expect each to return and what we will do if it does not.
Set up tracking before spending
Calls, forms and bookings, attributed by town and by channel, checked before the first dollar goes out.
Review monthly, in plain numbers
Enquiries, cost per enquiry, and what changes next month.
Why businesses here keep us
A dedicated account manager.
One named person who knows your business, your towns and your last three months of campaigns, rather than a ticket queue.
Most of our growth comes from existing clients.
Second projects and referrals, which is the number we watch internally.
No lock in contracts.
Month to month on retainers, fixed scope and fixed price on projects. The work has to keep earning its place.
"We've been burned by an agency before."
Most people we talk to have. The usual version is attentive during the sale and silent after launch. That is why there is no contract to trap you in and why you get one person rather than an inbox.