ABOUT SCOTT FRANKLAND
Scott Frankland is Head of Content at Sengerio. His spirit of inquiry leads him to the world of transportation and mobility to connect with the industry’s leading experts and shine a light on the hot topics.
3 Essential Marketing Strategy Features Your Transport Company Needs
Unleash the potential of your transport company and reel in the success while you’re at it.
You’re not alone if you’ve ever heard a professional mutter ‘that’s the way we’ve always done it’.
But why are these words so harmful to a business and its marketing strategy?
Because in a world that is progressing everyday, you can’t afford to get left behind.
Consumers love simplicity, efficiency, and improvement. This is especially true in the world of passenger transportation.
Sticking to your good ol’ fashioned ways is fine if you feel they are working, but be aware that your competitors are constantly adapting their marketing strategies to attract more of your audience.
In this article, we look at 3 essential components of a marketing strategy that every passenger transportation company needs to know. These include how to encompass the use of technology both in your services and on the web, and how to automate your marketing activities to ensure your transport company runs as smoothly as possible.
What is a marketing strategy and why your transport company needs it
A marketing strategy is a comprehensive layout that provides the important blueprint in order achieve your company’s objectives. These objectives provide the building block for the strategy and ultimately help a company in maximizing and concentrating its limited resources to create the best possible opportunities.
In the passenger transportation industry, having a powerful marketing strategy helps transport companies in developing their services and give them the competitive advantage. Moreover, having a sound strategy allows a company to have meticulous organization, particularly when it comes to understanding their customers requirements and identify new potential markets.
Now let’s look at the powerful features you can incorporate into your marketing strategy to soar your way to the top.
Focus heavily on your online presence
Since the birth of the internet, how we behave when it comes to acquiring a service or product has changed completely.
How so? Well if we rewind back a couple of decades and take a look at how the average person became a paying customer, marketing experts had a pretty clear structure to represent this process known as the traditional 3-step mental model that can be shown as such:
- Stimulus – when a consumer is stimulated to buy a product/service. That is, when the consumer experiences a form of advertising.
- First Moment of Truth – when a consumer is at the point of purchase
- Second Moment of Truth – when a consumer tries the acquired product/service and establishes whether it is a positive or negative experience.
To put this into some context, let’s say that typically a person would receive some form of advertisement telling them to buy something (stimulus), so this person went to acquire this product. At the point of purchase, the person has multiple factors to consider; such as which brand to buy (first moment of truth). Once the person acquires the product, they will go home and use it (second moment of truth).
So where does the internet come into this?
Thanks to the internet, today we are swimming in information. Everything we could possibly want to know is at our fingertips. Consequently, this has altered the traditional 3-step mental model by adding an additional step to the process.
Google’s Jim Lecinski introduced a new concept called the Zero moment of truth (ZMOT). ZMOT occurs in the exact moment following the initial stimulus where a consumer accesses the internet for more information on the product and check out its alternatives, see the social proof that this product is of value, and finally, to see the product in action.
What does this mean for the passenger transportation industry? Given that potential clients’ decisions are influenced by several factors such as online reviews, case studies, and detailed service information, this means that a transportation company’s online presence is more important than ever.
The internet is as competitive as the real world so settling only for a website for your business is not enough. That is why formulating a digital marketing strategy is just as important as your general marketing strategy.
One fundamental element to a solid digital marketing strategy is investing in Search Engine Optimization (SEO) so your potential customers can find your transportation services online, especially local SEO to attract not only your intended traffic but also increase your business’ sacred conversion rate.
In order to create or improve your digital marketing strategy I would highly recommend this article that explains the necessary digital marketing tools specifically for the charter bus industry.
Embrace Technology
Let’s be truthful here, the average client probably assumes that a bus is just a ‘bus’ and that it does only what it says on the tin; take you from point A to point B. Maybe even clients aren’t sure what the deciding factors are that convince them to choose one transport company over another.
But in reality this couldn’t be further from the truth.
We all know how great your services are at transporting passengers from point A to point B, but so are all the other transportation companies. Then why should passengers choose you? What does your transport company offer that the others don’t?
The answers to these questions are the rocket fuel for your advertisement campaign.
Let the people know that you are the bee’s knees. Paint them a beautifully elaborate picture of a carefully engineered travel experience with the passengers’ best interests at the heart of it! Distinguish yourself from your competitors by grounding your marketing campaign on your innovation and growth, all things people love to see.
From immaculate hygiene standards to the professionality of your drivers, these are the fundamental characteristics your company needs. But put yourself in the shoes of the modern-day passenger for a second and ask yourself what will really make this transport service a memorable experience.
Keep in mind that passengers are essentially captive during the journey, therefore they may want to pass the time watching one of their favorite television series, film, or simply connect to a Wi-Fi source without consuming all their data.
In fact, today Wi-Fi is one of the key features passengers look for when it comes to organizing their journey. Whether it is simply to passively browse and pass the time or crack on with some important work, having WiFi is a great way to smoothen out the subjective judgement of the passengers’ in-vehicle time. Consequently resulting in a more pleasurable experience.
There’s a lot more important things to consider when a transport company chooses to include Wi-Fi in their services. For example, in order to connect to the internet a passenger has insert their email address, not only are you able to grow your email list but also adapt your marketing strategy to re-target previous customers by notifying them of upcoming discounts/ offers.
The more passengers who choose your services, the larger your customer database grows. As a result, you will have a better understanding of your customer demographics and ultimately shape your marketing strategy to a more suitable audience.
In general, when it comes to sharpening the features of your services for your passengers that incorporate marketing tactics as with the example I have just given, you will find that it is a win-win situation for both the passengers and transport company.
Use Software To Automate Marketing Activities And More
Once you have established your marketing strategy, you want to free yourself as much as possible of the repetitive tasks so you can focus on other aspects of your company. While at the same time, you want to improve your client’s experience.
This is all possible thanks to software tailored specifically for the niche of passenger transportation that automates the marketing activities for you.
Whereas many companies today either handle their marketing activities manually or using third-party software, the problem is that even with third-party software you are still going out your way to complete certain tasks. This is both time consuming and can limit the efficiency of your business potential.
Instead, the dedicated transportation software Sengerio provides a centralized platform that automates your marketing activities but all the transportation management processes.
1. Automated Quotation Follow-Ups
Quotation follow-ups are a vital component to your marketing strategy. A simple follow-up to a quotation can set you apart from your competitors. Not to mention that it is surely more likely to secure a booking than doing nothing!
Let’s take a closer look at how Sengerio can help this process.
In addition to automatically generating a quotation document using the service information that’s already in the system, prior to sending the quotation document you can configure up to four follow-up emails that will be sent automatically.
Schedule when the follow-ups are to be sent either using the calendar of selecting a predefined time and even create your own template messages for your potential clients in several languages.
This is the moment to show your creative flair and create powerful follow-up quotation templates to convert that quotation into a booking. There are plenty of follow-up templates available on the internet if you need some inspiration, I would recommend having a read of this article.
You’ll know exactly where you’re at with each quotation because with transportation software, you can track all the follow-ups that have been sent or are yet to be sent.
Moreover, you don’t need to worry about your clients receiving obsolete emails if you have to edit a quotation or resend it. If at any point the quotation is terminated, the follow-ups are automatically interrupted.
An overview of all your quotations are neatly presented on an exclusive page, therefore you can see which have had success and which didn’t. If there’s one piece of advice here it is not to get too down-hearted over terminated quotations but see them as the perfect opportunity to do some market research.
Connect with your audience and ask why they chose another transportation company and use their feedback to only make your company better.
If you would like to learn more about how passenger transportation software can improve how you manage your quotation system, check out this interesting article.
2. Automated Payment Reminders
A comprehensive marketing strategy needs to span the entirety of your sales funnel, incorporating not only your target market but also your lower-funnel clients too.
Calculating business profitability and ROI can be challenging when customers don’t pay on time. But we’re all human, and sometimes we need a little reminder.
But chasing after the clients of those expired invoices takes your attention away from more important work.
That’s why for any high-functioning marketing strategy, this step needs automating.
Thankfully, this is another fantastic feature provided by Sengerio to allow transport companies to automatically remind their clients of their payments.
Once the reminders are automated, clients receive an email one day prior to their invoice expiring. After the invoice expires, they receive a continual reminder after ten days, fifteen days, thirty days, and then every following thirty days for the next year.
Late payments no longer need to keep you up at night, the software does everything for you.
To read more about the invoicing system offered by transportation software, take a look at this article.
3. Make Time for Strategic Thinking With Automated Emails
Time is money, and when your days are maxed out the last thing you need is to throw away your precious time on a manual and repetitive task.
You need to build your own creative thinking space to focus on the marketing aspects of your business.
But when could have anywhere from a few up to a hundred transportation services in one day, it is important when communicating all this information with your team that there are no errors. Consequently, this can be a demanding and time consuming task when done manually.
With the right software, this entire job can be automated.
That is, you can communicate all your daily services with their information directly to your team with just a few clicks.
From your daily agenda you can select a specific day to send to either a selected member of your team or all of them. To take this a step further, it is even possible to automate this process so that your select recipients receive a daily email of the service information for that day.
If you are also interested in delegating daily tasks to your team members from a centralized platform tailored specifically for the transportation industry, you would definitely like this article.
Conclusion
Now that you know 3 profit-boosting features to add to your marketing strategy, it’s time to put them into action and become one of the leading, innovative, and successful transport companies out there.
Remember that the detail of marketing is in the fabric of who you are. Be different, be fearless, and stand out above the rest. Good marketing requires all aspects of your company, from drivers to operations, to reflect high-quality professionalism in everything you do.
In the end, your clients will become your marketers.