Case study · Automotive & transport

Best Ride: a digital campaign for ride-sharing customers.

Best Ride is a start-up right here in Australia that takes the guesswork out of getting the best rideshare deal. The app compares prices to find you the lowest price. They have their sights set on something big, going global.

Sector: Automotive & transport
Service: Social media advertising
Channels: LinkedIn · Google Ads

Digital marketingCampaign delivery

The challenge

What needed to change.

We compare, you save. Best Ride had a brilliant idea: an app that compares the prices from every rideshare app available to find the cheapest ride. It is an Australian start-up with global ambitions, and it came to us at the very beginning, before anyone outside the founding team knew the name.

The task was to take a brand new app to market in a category that was already crowded and getting noisier, and to do it fast enough to matter.

Launching a completely new brand is always a challenge, and the rideshare space had rapidly become more crowded. We knew the key to success would be demonstrating Best Ride’s point of difference, helping users find the best value, and getting that message across quickly without adding to the noise in an already busy market.

That meant identifying the prime demographic and the best channels to reach them, and creating a friendly yet informative tone of voice with matching visuals across social media, so that every touchpoint told the same simple story.

Approach

How the work took shape.

Best Ride had real potential, but we needed to start small to be sure we were targeting the right people. We began with a moderate social media spend to identify the central audience. Once we had found the ideal demographic we scaled up both search and social advertising, backed by strong social media feeds.

The digital advertising was built to lead customers directly to the app store, shortening the user journey and driving downloads. We saw strong results on both iOS and Android across the two pilot states, NSW and QLD, then expanded across Australia. Starting small is what made scaling up work.

As with any start-up, Best Ride needed two streams for brand awareness: search and social. Search engine advertising made sure that anyone searching for cheap rideshares saw Best Ride, and the volume of those searches was a testament to the original idea. Plenty of people were already looking for an easy way to find the cheapest ride.

Getting the brand seen was crucial, and as the campaign grew we found new opportunities along the way. One was the corporate rideshare market, which we reached through LinkedIn advertising with strong results.

Underneath the advertising sat an organic social presence. Bright, informative feeds told Best Ride’s story, engaged the target market and explained the service to potential users, and showed that Best Ride was a vibrant and growing brand with a place in the market.

Best Ride app with realtime maps integration.

The shift

We spent small until the data told us who was listening, then spent properly on them.

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The work

The work, up close.

The campaign ran across paid social, Google Ads search advertising and LinkedIn, with the organic feeds keeping the brand active between paid bursts. Every ad pointed at the same destination, the app store listing, so the distance from first impression to installed app was as short as we could make it. The pilot in NSW and QLD proved the model before the national rollout.

Facebook advertising was where the audience work began. The early, moderate spend on social told us who responded to the price comparison message, and that audience became the foundation for the search and social campaigns that followed. The results as we brought this new app company to market speak for themselves.

10,000.

App downloads over a six month period.

7.15%.

Conversion rate from Google Ads.

Search engine advertising caught people at the moment they were already looking for a cheaper ride, and the app store placements on Google Play turned that intent into an install in a single step. The same creative and tone of voice ran across every placement, so a person who saw Best Ride in a search result and again in a social feed recognised the same brand each time.

We have seen Best Ride go from strength to strength. The business now has a clear brand complemented by engaging social media marketing and advertising, and it has carved out a distinct niche in a crowded market. Best Ride has solidified its brand and has its sights set on a new goal: going global, with our help.