How pay.com.au built trust and fueled massive growth with a social-first strategy

pay.com.au is the undisputed leader in the nascent category of B2B payments and rewards. By allowing businesses to earn flexible rewards on essential expenses like taxes, payroll and superannuation (Australia’s required retirement savings system), the platform quickly experienced rapid growth, with more than 50,000+ businesses using the pay.com.au for payments and rewards. The product value was obvious, but earning the trust of their target customers proved to be the bigger challenge.

“Some of our early feedback from the market was, ‘This is too good to be true!’ Potential customers were naturally skeptical,” according to David Walsh, Head of Digital, CX & Marketing at pay.com.au.

As a result, traditional marketing channels like paid search struggled to gain traction. The team needed a better way to educate audiences about the validity and credibility of their products, and social gave them a meaningful path forward.

Turning social intelligence into action

The team created a series of authentic customer success stories for social media, brought to life through structured video content. pay.com.au identified customers across various industries that represented its broad customer base. Each story was captured in a two-minute video highlighting how customers overcame inefficient payment processes using pay.com.au to achieve tangible travel and cost savings, as well as capturing rewards for required business expenses. To maximize reach, these videos were repurposed into 30, 15 and 6-second clips for distribution across Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn and TikTok.

pay.com.au supported these channels with platform-optimized paid media, to directly address customer doubt with specific messages and approaches per channel. To do this with precision, the team leveraged Sprout Social for rich, granular insights that helped them go beyond basic engagement data. By analyzing content themes, audience sentiment and emerging customer questions, the team gained a deep understanding of how business owners and advisors responded to their messaging, and used those insights to inform and iterate their paid media strategy.

These social insights do more than just refine content; they inform the entire business. Key takeaways regarding audience motivation and confusion were shared across pay.com.au’s Product, Customer Support, Partnerships and Growth teams. Through regular summaries and campaign readouts, social intelligence now directly shapes the company’s FAQs, onboarding processes and product decisions.

This agile, data-driven approach led to an impressive 529% compound annual growth rate (CAGR) between 2022 and 2025.

With the help of Sprout’s Publishing, Listening and Reporting, we were able to quickly test, learn and optimise our content format across a range of social channels

David Walsh
Head of Digital, CX & Marketing

This iterative approach enabled the team to find content that broke through skepticism and built a lasting foundation of trust.

Optimizing conversions through care

Social media offered business owners a direct line to the company for quick eligibility checks and to ask detailed questions about how rewards work.

The team quickly recognized that their ability to capture, classify and respond to these inquiries would be critical to scaling their growth. They began measuring and benchmarking their response rate as a key service metric to improve the speed and quality of support. Before implementing Sprout, their response rate was just 20%. After using Sprout for just one week, their response rate dramatically improved to 98%.

“Using Sprout Social’s Smart Inbox monitoring and response handling, we were able to improve our response rate all the way up to 98%,” Walsh explained. “We see this as an essential part of how we support and guide businesses through their initial contact.”

This proactive monitoring and response using the Smart Inbox not only improves customer experience, but also delivers substantial business impact by reducing the immediate load on the sales team and dramatically increasing the overall conversion rate to sign-up. A proactive, Smart Inbox-driven workflow cut down the noise and manual load on the sales team and increased the overall conversion rate of new customers progressing through to sign up.

Scaling content for global ambition

As pay.com.au’s social strategy scaled up, the end-to-end process of scheduling and publishing content across channels became a major workflow bottleneck. By activating the Sprout Social and Canva integration, the team streamlined their creative production by pulling final assets directly from Canva into Sprout for scheduling and publishing. This eliminated manual steps like saving and re-uploading files, and enabled faster, more efficient content delivery.

Off the back of its Australian success, pay.com.au launched a new brand, PayRewards, to embark on an ambitious mission to become the number one business rewards platform in North America. The team used Sprout Social Groups to clearly separate the Australian and US social accounts, allowing them to manage region-specific content, workflows and reporting so each market receives locally relevant messaging without cross-posting or operational overlap.

Scaling trust into a global blueprint

By unifying their social presence within Sprout Social, pay.com.au has transformed social media from a simple communication channel into a high-velocity growth engine. What began as a mission to dismantle market skepticism has evolved into a data-driven culture where real-time audience sentiment guides everything from product roadmaps to their ambitious North American expansion.

For Walsh and his team, Sprout is more than a management tool—it’s a strategic partner that proves social intelligence is a core driver for decision-making across the entire enterprise. As they scale PayRewards globally, they’re leveraging a proven blueprint of customer trust, fueled by the insights that only social can provide.

Unlock the benefits of social intelligence for your business. Request a demo with Sprout Social today.