The minimum marketing setup for a new Australian company, and the three searches that come before the first payment

Eight items, and six of them cost time rather than money. Get those six in place before spending a dollar on advertising, because each one makes the advertising work harder and none expires. The two that cost money come last on purpose, and a new Australian company that reverses the order usually pays twice.

The eight, in order

1. One page per thing you sell, with the price position, the service area and the buyer named. Not a services page listing six things. One page each, specific enough that somebody could quote a sentence from it.
2. The service area published in plain words. States, cities, suburbs, travel radius. In a country this size this is the single most valuable sentence on your site, because no machine can infer a radius you have not stated.
3. A Google Business Profile at the address customers visit, complete. Right category, right hours, right phone, real photographs.
4. Analytics and Search Console installed and verified, on day one. Not later. Data you did not collect in month one does not exist in month six.
5. The GST line decided and stated wherever you show a price. Inclusive or exclusive, said plainly. Ambiguity here produces a conversation on every enquiry.
6. A dated baseline reading of what search and AI assistants say about your category. The cheapest item on the list and the only one that tells you whether the next two are necessary.
7. One switchable paid channel. Paid search first, because it answers inside a fortnight and tells you which terms are worth organic effort.
8. Content against the questions that produced enquiries in step seven. Not a content calendar. The specific questions real buyers asked.

The free check that belongs before the first invoice

Before you pay an agency, a contractor or a consultant, check the people. ASIC's Banned and Disqualified search is free and, read on asic.gov.au on 22 October 2026, ASIC states in its own words that it keeps registers of people and organisations that are disqualified or banned from roles in corporations, financial services or the credit industry, and advises that it is a good idea to check people and organisations before you deal with them.

In ASIC's description you can search 6 ASIC registers at once, covering people and organisations not allowed to be a company director, audit self managed superannuation funds, or work in the Australian financial services or credit industry. There is also a list of banned and disqualified organisations which ASIC says is short enough to scroll through. And the gap matters: ASIC keeps a separate court enforceable undertakings register, describing it as a legal agreement between a person or organisation and ASIC containing one or more commitments accepted to address breaches of the law, and states that people who give one will not always appear on the banned and disqualified registers. The Office of the Registrar of Indigenous Corporations keeps its own list, and ASIC says those people will not appear in its search.

So a complete check is three free searches and about ten minutes, which makes it the best value item in any first year plan.

Why item six goes before the money

On 22 October 2026 we put 33 batches of buying questions to ChatGPT and Gemini with Australia written into the text of each one, because the search interface we use accepts a country parameter, a language parameter and a location parameter, returns HTTP 200 for each, and ignores all three. The snapshot taken that evening holds 64 blind readings, 32 per engine.

In 28 of those 64 readings the engines named no business at all. 16 of ChatGPT's 32 and 12 of Gemini's 32. When they named somebody it concentrated: Online Marketing Gurus in 12 readings, Rocket Agency in 8, StudioHawk in 8, Prosperity Media in 8.

For a new company those two facts point in opposite directions and both are useful. You will not displace a firm named 12 times out of 64 in your first year. You very plausibly can take one of the 28 answers that currently contain nobody, because nobody defends them and the entry price is a page rather than a bid.

The Australian costs to plan for

Item	What it is	When it applies
Supplier verification	Free, via ASIC's Banned and Disqualified search plus the court enforceable undertakings register	Before every supplier payment
GST on quoted figures	Every price stated both ways, and every supplier quote requested both ways	Always
Visibility measurement	Outside the United States and the United Kingdom, Growth is $199 a month for 100 buyer questions across all five engines and SEO Start at $99 reads zero engines	From month one, and the free scan runs without a sign up
Paid search	Media budget separate from any management fee	Once items one to six exist

Those figures were read on asic.gov.au and aiknowsus.com on 22 October 2026 and carry that date for the reason every price should.

The four things to leave out

• A rebrand. Before there is demand it is a cost with no measurable return that delays everything behind it.
• A twelve month retainer signed in month one. Buy a fixed scope audit, read it, then decide. Our page on what is inside Australian packages and how to compare two quotes turns a vague first proposal into something comparable.
• Paid directory listings bought as a channel. Across 597 readings in an earlier three market audit, review directories were 0.8 per cent of all citations recorded.
• A national campaign in year one. Win the city or state you can service, then expand from a position that already converts.

Questions about setting up marketing for a new Australian company

What should month one actually contain

Items one to six, plus the ASIC checks on any supplier. All of them are a founder's own time plus one afternoon of configuration.

Should the first marketing hire be in house or an agency

One in house person who owns the brief and buys execution usually beats either extreme. A founder with no marketing owner buys the wrong things from good agencies.

How long before any of this shows

Paid search answers in a fortnight. Local search and reviews move in weeks. Content and the way assistants describe you move over months, and the early measure is impressions and position in Search Console rather than revenue.

Is national or local the right start

Local unless the service genuinely travels. Our page on buying national or local search work in a country this size sets out which of the two you are actually purchasing.

What is the most common omission

Search Console, unverified or installed late. It is free, it takes ten minutes, and it is the only record of what search actually showed your pages.

Why the service area line is the most valuable sentence on an Australian site

Of the eight items, one is particular to this country and it is routinely missing. A published service area, naming the states, the cities, the suburbs and the travel radius, is the sentence that stops an engine inferring a geography you do not serve and stops a buyer in a town you cannot reach from phoning you. No machine can infer a radius nobody stated, and in a country where a two hour drive crosses a service boundary that omission costs more than any tagging error. Write it, publish it, and keep it current. Then take the reading that tells you whether the other seven items are working: in 28 of 64 blind Australian readings on 22 October 2026 the engines named no business at all, and in the 36 where they did, six firms carried almost all of it. For a company in month one the empty 28 are the only winnable ground and the entry price is a page. AI Knows Us produces that list across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude and Google AI Overviews, and the first reading costs nothing, which is the right price for a company that has not yet earned anything.