Startup from scratch with a great brand
hipages.com.au is the largest trade service-finding business in Australia specialising in home improvements with over one million visitors to the site each month. With a network of over 19,000 suppliers, hipages.com.au offers home dwellers streamlined access to the best services and tradesmen in the industry.
A project to start with
In 2013, hipages partnered with IKEA to provide a value-add service to help IKEA customers purchase and install kitchens with greater ease and speed. At all IKEA in-store kiosks, kitchen customers have direct access through the kiosk interface to get in touch with a hipages tradie to help with their kitchen installation.
hipages approached Taurus to communicate their partnership with leading global brand IKEA in Australia and to introduce hipages to the media as the place to go for all home improvement needs.
The first project built trust
Taurus developed a phased and segmented strategy to communicate with hipages varied target audience: media, tradespeople, present, and potential IKEA & hipages customers and influencers.
In the first stage of the campaign, a media release on the partnership and the benefits to consumers was issued. The press release created a basic level of awareness in the media. It was key to raise hipages brand visibility and awareness around being recognised by global brand IKEA while communicating the new service offering to the market.
Taurus also recommended the announcement be published across all hipages social media platforms and website. This maximized the spread of the announcement through all available online communication channels.
Today, social media is the number one purchasing and service reference decision maker
In stage two, Taurus devised creative pitches to target home improvement consumer publications, business broadcast and technology media to achieve coverage in a diverse range of media outlets.
Taurus successfully leveraged hipages tradies (expert tradesmen, designers, and builders) as spokespeople and ambassadors to talk about the hipages platform as THE avenue to increase their volume of business. hipages CEO David Vitek was featured on the SKY News tech Report talking about hipages.com.au’s amazing growth story and ability to provide up to 60% of business for some SME tradies.
What Taurus did for hipages:
- Partnership announced to media
- Key messages
- PR Strategy
- PR execution
- Coverage in mainstream media, print, online, and broadcast
- Social media TaurusEngage™
- TaurusProfile™
“I am extremely pleased with the results Taurus delivered. They are professional, committed and quickly identify how to communicate the value of the IKEA partnership with our target audience. Being on Sky News was a real high for me but quite nerve racking at the same time. Taurus was with me every step of the way and the interview gave me an opportunity about hipages complete offerings”
David Vitek, CEO hipages Group
Delivery was a success - exceeding KPI’s
Taurus exceeded set deliverables by achieving coverage in a variety of key target media that talked to all audiences. Coverage was achieved on Sky News Tech Report, CNet, Better Homes & Gardens online, Retail Biz, Central Magazine, Proactive Investor Magazine.
Media coverage achieved in this successfully communicated the news of hipages partnership with IKEA and met the challenge of increasing visibility of the hipages brand. Messaging focused on the benefits to consumers and the impact hipages has had in the building and construction sector.
“We chose to partner with hipages.com.au because of the infrastructure they have built to make the difficult process of finding a good tradesperson easy,” said IKEA Australia PR manager Angela McCann.”
CNET