Fantastic Services Group is a home services franchise group who offer expertise across a range of industries including pest control, gardening and cleaning. These essential home service offerings are rolled out and managed through their network of franchisees who operate in various locations across Australia as well as internationally.
The Objective
Fantastic Services Groups engaged MediaCast to deliver ongoing PR services with a focus on Melbourne, Brisbane and Sydney, to build brand awareness of their cleaning and maintenance services to Australian households and businesses. They wanted to position their brand as the voice of authority in home services and ensure that Fantastic Services Group was front of mind when Aussies were looking to engage services for their home or business. On the flip side, as a franchisor, we also delivered targeted campaign activities designed to promote the benefits of franchising and help drive leads and sales to the brand.
The Campaign
As part of their expansion, Fantastic Services Group were keen to grow their brand recognition in the Australian market. Our stories and campaigns focused largely on educating Australian consumers on the wide range of services provided by FSG and communicate the brand’s messaging, aligning this with the news agenda. In addition to the consumer side of things, Fantastic Services Group also wanted to highlight the benefits of becoming a franchisee with them to encourage more Australians to view this as a realistic and flexible career option.
The ongoing retainer allowed us to build momentum making the most of reactive opportunities where we felt they could add an expert opinion to current new stories, for example we offered pest control experts to comment on the rodent infestations in NSW and we offered cleaning experts to comment on COVID deep cleaning practises. We also conducted two rounds of consumer research to give us new insights and data to offer journalists and outlets and give our stories cut through.
Engaging external talent to speak to the research also gave our campaigns extra depth alongside using franchisees as well as the CEO of the brand.
Outcomes
Across a six month period, MediaCast secured an amazing 540 items of coverage with a reach of over 58 million Aussies nationwide! This totalled a campaign advertising equivalent (AVE) of over $1.5 million across print, digital, TV and radio.
Print highlights include items in major Australian mastheads such as the Daily Telegraph, Herald Sun,
Courier Mail, Daily Mail and the Sunday Mail. Digital highlights include Realestate.com.au,
Domain, Kidspot and Finder.
The campaign also secured an opinion editorial by Neel Patel that ran across the Australian Community Media network made up of national print publications and their network of over 116 print and digital outlets.
TV and radio highlights include multiple segments on Sunrise, ABC Radio Sydney, 2GB and 6PR to name a few.
A campaign highlight was securing the front cover of NewsCorps' 'SmartDAILY' supplement with an interview with Fantastic Services Group CEO, Rune Sovndahl. It syndicated across the entire NewsCorp network including The Australian with an estimated reach of over five million Aussies!
