Marketing agency in Geelong

Pako, the waterfront, and a year with a shape to it

Geelong's independent trade is concentrated in a way that suits marketing. Pakington Street runs for kilometres of owner operated cafes, salons, bottle shops, restaurants and specialty retail. The waterfront and Little Malop Street carry the visitor and after work trade. Then the coast, where Torquay and Ocean Grove fill from December to Easter and go quiet enough in July that some venues drop days.

That seasonality is the thing most marketing plans here ignore. A venue on the Surf Coast makes a large share of its year in about fourteen weeks, so a flat monthly spend across twelve months is the wrong instrument. Meanwhile a Pako cafe trades on locals and repeat visits, where reviews and Business Profile photos matter more than any ad will.

The other local factor is who's deciding. A Geelong Friday night is often chosen by someone on the footpath with a phone, while a Melbourne family booking a Bellarine weekend decides six days ahead on a laptop. Same business, two different behaviours, and they need different pages and different ads.

What actually moves bookings and enquiries

Reviews first, because they arrive constantly and decay if you stop asking. A venue with 400 reviews at 4.6 and one from last week beats a venue with 90 at 4.9 from two years ago, and the gap shows in the map pack.

Then the Business Profile, which is the storefront most people actually see. Current photos, correct hours over summer and public holidays, the booking link, the menu, and someone answering questions in it.

Then speed on a phone, because if the page takes six seconds and the booking widget loads after it you've lost the person on the footpath. Ads come once those three are right, not before. Google Ads catches people already looking, Instagram creates the want, and hospitality has its own industry page.

One team, one account manager, one number to ring

The usual arrangement in a city this size is four suppliers. A cousin built the website. A freelancer posts to social. Someone sold you a booking system. An ads person you've met once runs the account. Each does their part, nobody owns the result, and when bookings drop in March no single person can tell you why.

We take the lot: the site, search, ads, social and managed support, with one account manager who knows your trading calendar and doesn't need re briefing every quarter. When the ads team changes a headline, the person who wrote the landing page hears about it the same day, because they sit in the same office.

You get one report, not four. It leads with bookings, calls and form enquiries by channel, so the argument about which supplier deserves credit stops being an argument.

Spending money in the right months

For a seasonal Geelong business we plan the year backwards. Build the site and fix the search foundations in the quiet middle of the year, when your time is free and the work has months to take effect. Ramp paid spend from spring so you're visible before people book, push through the summer trade, then pull back in the off months and put the saved budget into content and reviews.

Spend evenly all year and you usually underspend in December and waste money in June.

We're in Brisbane, and here's what that means

One office, at Pallara in southern Brisbane. No Victorian branch, no serviced address in Geelong, and we won't invent one.

For a regional city the honest answer holds up well. You aren't choosing between us and a Geelong agency on driving distance, since nobody's ad account gets managed in person anyway. You're choosing on whether the team has done this work before, whether one person owns your account, and whether they answer on a long weekend. Ask us for a client to ring, and ask the Geelong shortlist the same thing.

Where else we work

Around the city: Newtown, Belmont, Corio, Highton and Waurn Ponds. Down the coast: Torquay, Ocean Grove and Drysdale. Up the highway we run the same pattern for Manor Lakes and Mickleham, with the full list on our service areas page.

How an account runs

1. A look at the whole picture

   Site, rankings, ad accounts, reviews and your last twelve months of trade, including the months that went badly.

2. A ninety day plan with numbers on it

   What we do first, what it costs, and what we expect it to return.

3. The work, in one place

   Site fixes, search, ads and social run by teams who talk daily.

4. A monthly call, not a monthly PDF

   Your account manager walks you through it and tells you what didn't work as well as what did.

What you get that four suppliers can't give you