Impactiv8 has spent over 15 years at the sharp end of digital marketing. Not watching from the sidelines, but doing the work, running the campaigns, and building the systems that generate real results for real businesses. What we teach, we live. What we recommend, we use.

When Loren Bartley founded Impactiv8 in 2011, small business owners were drowning. Social media was proving itself as a legitimate business tool, but the landscape was noisy, changing fast, and deeply confusing for time-poor entrepreneurs already wearing too many hats. The expertise they needed existed, it just lived inside agencies that charged prices most small businesses could never justify.

Loren saw that gap and built a business around closing it. She started Impactiv8 as a social media education agency with a simple founding belief: that small business owners deserved access to agency-grade marketing knowledge without the agency price tag. She set out to create a tangible impact, multiplied across every dimension of a client’s digital presence. 

Over the following decade, Impactiv8 grew from social media training into a full-service digital marketing agency. The team expanded to 20 people, delivering Facebook Ads, Google Ads, email marketing, website optimisation, and content creation for clients across Australia. Client results stacked up, with over $50 million in client revenue generated across the portfolio. Meta Marketing Partner status and Google Partner certification followed, rare third-party validations that placed Impactiv8 in a different tier from most small business marketing educators.

But the work was never just about campaigns. From the beginning, Loren believed that community and education were as important as strategy. She hosted the Business Addicts podcast from 2015 to 2020, diving deep into the realities of building and growing a business in Australia.

The Click Engage Convert brand was born from the same belief: that there was a better way to connect small business owners with the knowledge and community they needed to grow. Impactiv8 ran the Click Engage Convert Conference in Melbourne in 2018 and 2019, bringing together business owners, marketers, and experts for an immersive annual event focused on practical digital marketing education.

When COVID ended the in-person event in 2020, rather than walk away from the community that had gathered around it, Loren transformed it into The Click Engage Convert Academy, an online digital marketing membership that gave members something a single annual conference never could, consistent access to expertise, community, and accountability across the full year. That membership community is still thriving today.

In the years that followed, Impactiv8’s reach expanded significantly. As part of the Victorian Chamber of Commerce and Industry’s Business Recovery and Resilience Mentoring Program, the Impactiv8 team delivered 7,312 hours of digital marketing mentoring to 1,122 small businesses navigating the pandemic. An extraordinary commitment to Australian small business that reflected not just capability, but genuine care for the people and businesses supported.

Those thousands of hours of mentoring deepened something that was already at the core of Impactiv8’s work: an understanding of what small business owners actually struggle with, what they genuinely need, and what kinds of support make a lasting difference versus what sounds good in theory but falls apart in practice.

At the end of 2022, when ChatGPT burst onto the scene, AI suddenly became accessible for small businesses, changing overnight what was possible. Loren immediately saw the potential and jumped on the opportunity to help small business owners leverage this new technology before the noise and overwhelm set in.

She quickly noticed something important. Most people using AI in their marketing were creating more work, not less. Generic outputs. Endless editing. Tools that promised the world and delivered noise. The problem was not the tools, it was the absence of structure. Without proper foundations, AI simply made people faster at producing average results.

The AI Marketing MegaClass was born from that observation. A hands-on AI workshop series designed to help you use AI to simplify your marketing, save time, and get better results, with practical, step-by-step guidance, ready-to-use tools, and AI skills you can put into action straight away.

In 2022, Impactiv8 launched Lead Activator, giving small businesses access to an all-in-one AI-powered sales and marketing platform designed to replace the disconnected collection of tools most small businesses were duct-taping together. But she didn’t just hand over a tool. She built a complete training and support system around it. Because a platform is only as powerful as the person using it, and empowering business owners to get real results from their software has always been at the heart of what Impactiv8 does.

Today, Impactiv8 sits at the intersection of AI, digital marketing, and small business profitability. Through the AI Marketing MegaClass, the Click Engage Convert Academy, Lead Activator, and personalised coaching, workshops, and speaking, we help service-based small business owners build structured marketing systems that compound and deliver returns over time.

More than 15 years in, the founding belief has never changed: that small business owners deserve access to the same quality of marketing knowledge, strategy, and support as the largest businesses in the country, delivered in a way that is practical, accessible, and built around their actual reality.