Taxi marketing ideas: 8 tips for beginners

Growth hacks

Julia Alexeenko

It’s a challenge to start your own business as you cannot be a professional in every domain. You will need to learn a lot to grow from a startup to a mature brand. To ease your way, Onde team shares marketing insights for beginners. Read these tips and apply them to your taxi app to survive in this competitive business world.

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Starting your own company means being an all-in-one: accountant, business developer, designer, sales specialist, and visionary. It’s easy to get lost in this complicated business universe.

What is the first thing to do? Building the right growth plan is a challenge as you develop different segments of your company. When it comes to marketing, there are some proved and tested marketing rules to start with: – Choose the right market segment; – Focus and try to profit from available technologies; – Develop an effective business marketing strategy.

Let’s begin with the marketing tactics you can implement right now.

Get your own ambassadors

Every small app-based taxi company focuses on increasing the number of reliable drivers as fast as possible. Ambassadors! It’s not a random word, it’s your key to strong positive brand image. Your most active and experienced drivers enthusiastically will become company advocates.

Word of mouth is one of the tried-and-true channels to share the information. Everyone likes to hear stories of real people. And your drivers are the ideal candidates for it. Company potential employees are more likely to believe their colleagues. Personal experience works like an individual testimony of why the product is worthy. Emotions influence people’s choice greatly. Therefore your happy employees can bring more drivers and passengers. Happiness is the key to a positive brand image and becoming viral.

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How to encourage workers to be your company voice? Offer a monthly bonus, an extra fee for every hired “good driver”, or a higher salary. It will work out!

Work with local specialists

To dominate the local market, you need to know all the regional insights. If you don’t have an in-house marketing team, choose an agency carefully. A wise and high-skilled marketing team will advise you such activities making your business bloom.

A top player in the taxi app market needs to be active in the digital world. Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat accounts are the must-haves for increasing brand awareness among the locals. Update your accounts regularly, at least once a week. Having a media plan is essential. It is basically a plan for activities and posts on social media. It saves a lot of time and helps in tracking that you always have content to publish.

Every brand needs to stand out. Try creating your hashtags for social media to raise brand recognition. Hashtags can become your friends: set up a marketing campaign using your invented hashtag. We all know Uber #BeyondFiveStars, right?:) Make it viral, so people are dying to share it on social media. Voilà, now your brand is easy to identify in the digital world!

Opinion makers are your best friends

Social media influencers have the talent to captivate large audiences and, as a result, increase your company profit. Today according to by Tapinfluence.com, influencer marketing has 11 times the ROI of traditional digital strategy.

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Even though the number of followers tells a lot, keep your eyes on micro-influencers with a smaller audience. Usually, they are active players in a particular domain or local market with a more responsive and relevant audience. No need to collaborate with a million-follower influencer for a local business. Choose a blogger popular with the locals to engage people potentially interested in your app. Remember, you don’t need global coverage for a local brand.

Money is not the only hook for influencers: grant them bonuses, small gifts, or free usage of your app for a certain period of time. They will love it!

However, don’t grant bloggers the complete freedom: review every ad before posting. Inappropriate promotion can harm your brand image: influencer image affects yours directly.

Being generous pays you back

What goes around comes around. Yeah, you can call it karma. But the idea is simple: the more you give away, the more you get back. So, tons of welcoming campaigns and promotions exist to involve new people. Here they are:

Discount campaigns;
Referral programs;
Benefits of referrals;
Affiliate programs;
Sponsoring local events;
Investing in social initiatives.

Business should spread a positive word about the brand. Various referral programs is a very effective method: people are likely to listen to their nearest and dearest as they usually won’t trick you!

Don’t know what to start with? We can give a small hitch. Try out one of the most popular campaign models: play games and give presents to the clients. Offer your passengers a gift and a flyer with the information about a game. People love getting presents! They will eagerly share their positive experience – either in social media or in real life. Positive emotion is what works in marketing!

Find the right balance

The primary challenge is to keep everyone satisfied – both passengers and drivers.

There is no place for a huge disproportion between the number of drivers and passengers. Say, if you have only 50 daily orders for 1,000 drivers, business is obviously unprofitable. But too many orders and your driver will get nuts quickly. While trying to find the ideal working balance for your company, the nice round numbers can play as a promotion. Choose passenger #100 or #1000 and give them a gift or a bonus. It will work for drivers as well: reward them for completing a certain number of trips or achieving a particular rating level.

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And don’t forget to share the news about these awards in the social media – it will attract new clients, or drivers, and retain your old ones.

Motivation is a must

Sometimes it’s difficult to find inner motivation to progress and work harder. Extrinsic boost is needed in such cases. Create your own company motivation and rewarding system. It doesn’t matter whether it’s an award for the best driver of the month, the driver who completed the biggest number of orders, or the driver who helped to hire ten new drivers. Just make it a challenge and see how drivers get more result oriented.

Support and care about people

You want people to use your app properly, don’t you? Show them how to do it, both drivers and passengers. Set up an onboarding to explain the main features and the entire app functionality for your employees. For passengers, make clear screenshots with step-by-step guide showing app main features.

People will have questions, so you need to have a support team – even two teams – for passenger and driver apps. Don’t forget: everyone wants to be heard.

And let us give you a small, but a very handy business insight. Never create a common chat for drivers, it can drastically decrease their productivity.

Offline presence still matters

Even if your business is an online platform, going offline can make it even more popular. Take part in industry events, conferences and meetups to share business experience and listen to others. Networking is not the only reason to do it. Come offline to spread a word about your taxi brand among potential partners, investors, and users.

A well-functioning and effective marketing strategy is not a piece of cake. You can’t take someone else’s marketing plan and use it without any changes. But our guide can help you to make the very first steps in figuring out what works personally for you. Remember, there is no universal way to success. Every strategy needs to be adjusted to a particular company with its unique business model.

Summing up

Absolutely lost in the marketing world? Just grab these marketing tactics to grow your business fast:

Start with ambassador — ask your drivers to become the company voice.
Hire a marketing team — in-house or a local marketing agency
Get viral with local influencers
Create referral programs, bonuses, and discounts
Make sure you have enough drivers to cover your passenger base
Be active in social media accounts
Make up a media plan to drive your digital marketing strategy
Go offline whenever possible
Set up a rewards system
Support and care about your clients
Experiment and innovate constantly

Good luck! You’ll make it!

Any time you have a taxi app marketing question, we’re here to help you find the right answer. Go to Onde Learn to read more growth and business hacks:)