Boolba is the brainchild of local Brisbane electrician and entrepreneur Jock Gemmell. After years of running his own businesses and being on both sides of the hiring process, Jock knew there had to be a better way for tradies to find projects, and for projects to find tradies. So he built Boolba to be just that. They aim to cut down on needless hours spent job searching on bulletin boards, pull back the bloated costs of job advertising, and make sure that employees and employers are a great match before a resume is ever sent. Boolba represents a pivot in the way hiring happens in traditionally “offline” businesses like the trades and labouring: as we see younger, more tech-savvy people moving into leadership positions in these industries, they’re going to start pushing the boundaries of what’s accepted as normal in their spaces – and we’re excited to see where it goes.

The Problem:

Boolba came to Fractal with one problem: as a brand-new service, they didn’t have a database of users, and needed one before they could do any business. For us, this was Marketing 101: take a product, and find an audience for it. A return to the fundamentals to see if our skills were up to snuff. We knew that we could put the ads out there, that we could get them in front of the right demographics, but in order to get “permission to market”-level access to quality leads we knew we’d need something more. An angle. Jock didn’t have a  particular brand voice in mind, but as a tradie himself and a member of our ideal audience, just chatting with him gave us a bold idea…

The Solution:

If our problem was straight out of a first year university Marketing 101 course, so was our solution: free beer. To market a service directly targeting tradespeople, we had to put ourselves into the mindset of a tradesperson and figure out what it would take to grab their engagement. “One of the best things about working with other tradies is grabbing a beer after a long day on site,” Jock told us. “It’s a great way to unwind, sure, but it’s also the best place for a bit of banter. You hear some real beauties and have a laugh with your mates.” That banter idea was the key that really opened up the concept. Here’s what we landed on:

First off, we needed to get prospective Boolba users to opt-in, which meant offering them an incentive. That’s where the free beer came in, and we decided a raffle was the simplest way of offering that prize. Particular ways of engaging with the posts would give users additional entries into the raffle, with signing up to Boolba giving the most.

Next, we needed to spread the word about the raffle to get as many sign-ups as possible – that meant getting tradies to tag their mates. The banter we’d gotten from Jock, as well as our own tradie family and friends, was the perfect solution. If we could get the audience to tag each other under the competition along with some friendly ribbing, word would spread faster, we’d get the opt-ins that we needed, and we’d build solid brand resonance with our audience. You’ll see the solution we landed on in the ad copy above: height. Taking the old “how’s the weather up there, Stretch?” and turning it into sign ups was an easy win.

The Results:

We ran a few iterations of the Win Your Height In Beer promo over the second half of 2022, but we finally nailed the combo of targeting and ad copy with the October campaign. This campaign was set to a budget of $27 per day, and resulted in 957 conversions on the Boolba website from 3903 clicks. That came out to a total of $1.23 per lead – a pretty fantastic start to an up-and-coming business, and a great base of high quality users to grow from. 

Jock also decided to go above and beyond with the winner of the raffle by hand-delivering his beer to him. This was a great little bonus to build brand loyalty, as well as a great chance for a photo op for future reruns of the competition.

Boolba has been a great client to watch grow since they came on board in the middle of 2022, and also a great test of our fundamentals as marketing professionals. If we couldn’t sell free beer to tradies, could we really sell anything at all? Taking the opportunity to go back to basics is important in any profession, and we are glad we got to reinforce our skills while building a new business from the ground up.