Are you looking for better ways of marketing your business and getting more taxi leads? Online promotion is not the only way to get those clients for your company. Offline marketing is just as important, so you should pay attention to what tactics this offers you.
Before you can attract potential customers and make your business a success, you must ensure that your drivers and fleet are covered. Taxi fleet insurance can be a cost-effective option to cover this aspect and ensure that you’re going in the right direction.
It also saves you the time and hassle of renewing multiple policies. It will allow you to focus on the essential marketing activities that will help win business and grow your customer base.
But going back to lead generation, we want you to know that this doesn’t have to be as hard as many people believe. Instead, generating leads for this niche in specific can prove to be easier compared to others like constructions, hot tubs, and more.
Why? Because taxis are required everywhere, there seems never to be enough of them. Thus, you have a chance to get your business out there and get new clients that will request special services while you still deliver regular ones.
Now, let’s get started with the lead generation strategies we know work and will be more than helpful for your task.
How Can You Promote Your Taxi Company?
Marketing efforts can be divided into two types: digital (e.g., use an app or the internet) and offline (traditional marketing activities that do not involve the internet), which is what we mentioned earlier for a bit.
This means that no single marketing strategy is better than others or will produce substantial results. Each business has different customers, so what works for one company might not work for another. You can try various ideas to see which one works best for you.
This means that you need to put a lot of effort into different strategies at once and determine which ones work better for your company over time.
Although many will prove to deliver results, others will show how much of a waste of time they are. Thus, focus on each one we have for share and pay attention to how they perform in the short and long-term.
Make Branded Leaflets/Booklets and Distribute Them
What are the most common times people require taxi services? Probably after they have had a few drinks or in the mornings when they are going for their cups of coffee and trying to arrive on time.
Talking to bar owners and working with them is the best way to let them know about your service; the same applies to coffee shops or places where people love getting their breakfasts. If clients require a cab, you can ask the staff to place your brochures on tables.
Hotels, railway stations, and airports are all excellent places to partner as individuals need a taxi 90% of the time.
Consider the people who might have an interest in your services. Address them with your message on paper, taking into consideration their needs.
After creating your leaflets, it is time to hire a sales team to distribute them, or take your time to work around this as well.
Keep in mind that it is not enough to leave a few flyers with the clerk or shopkeeper and hope for the best. It is vital to formulate a relationship with employees and business owners. This will make them keep your leaflet on their face, rather than tossing it in the drawer with all other flyers.
A strong relationship can influence customers to recommend your business to others. That is pure gold.
Flyers with Promo Codes/Discounts
How about flyers with promo codes? Flyers are a top lead generation strategy to use when marketing your company but only when it is more local. People will actually take those pieces of paper because they find them relevant to their needs.
To give users a free or discounted trip, you can add promo codes and encourage them to take the flyers even when they were reluctant in the beginning.
You can leave flyers in public areas such as stadiums, cinemas, and exhibitions. Include your contact information such as company name, email address, website URL, and QR codes to download your apps or send them to a section to call you so they can connect with your taxis right away.
Although this tactic may seem less sophisticated and “old-fashioned” than other online efforts, it can still be very effective.
Get In Touch with Your Radio Station and Formulate QR Code Stickers
Radio is another option. This channel is not to be underestimated. Talk to your local radio station for any ads and options available to put your company out there. Depending on your budget, they can offer you different ads options, and the reach will usually be worth it.
Radio is still listened to by many people, which means you can reach a lot of new listeners and put your company in front of them.
Another excellent advertising platform is your vehicles.
Promo stickers that include QR codes could be a great way to offer discounts to your passengers. But if you want your taxi service to be memorable after they have used the code, it is essential to have a logo on the stickers connected to your brand.
The message on the stickers must be clear and easily understood. You will realize up to thirty percent of quality leads from vehicle advertising at the end of your lead generation campaign.
Create a Website
Even if your company is a local one that has built up trade through word of mouth, people will still type ‘local taxi service’ into their search engine when looking for their next ride.
This is true for existing and new customers. Your business should rank high in search results so you can get the most out of your online efforts.
However, it doesn’t matter if they’re trying to find you. If you don’t have a website that can support your efforts and provide all the information people are trying to find by looking for taxi services, you won’t get your leads.
The reasons for websites are so important are, first, because an online presence can make you appear professional. You can use it to communicate your brand and your taxi business’s values.
Second, you get the chance to improve lead capture to more areas than the regular neighborhoods in your city, and even people from nearby towns or locations can contact you to get a ride.
Do you want your customers to know that you hold specific values? These values can be listed here. Your online presence will grow if you post content online and optimize your site to be found based on how SEO works.
You Can Invest in Pay Per Click (PPC)
We can go back to someone entering the keywords “local taxi business” or “taxi business” into Google on their phone or computer and getting tons of results. Google’s algorithms arrange these results based on keywords, location, and other factors that make them relevant according to the user’s needs and queries.
Most searchers will not make it past the first page, let alone the two to three paid ads at the top. Businesses bid for these keywords to get their website to rank high for them. The highest bidder will be on top or appear more often than others who have bid for the same keywords.
You do not want to be among the hundreds of results if you are going to spend the time to create a website for your business.
Your target audience or customer will want you to appear at the top of search results, or more like; you want to appear there to get qualified leads.
Thus, this is where pay-per-click (or PPC) comes in handy. Although you will pay a small fee for each click on your ad (a few pence), you will be the first result for local taxi customers searching in your area. This audience can be further refined using other metrics, such as gender and age.
Create A Social Media Presence
Social media is among the best lead generation tools to increase your brand’s visibility and build a loyal customer base. These platforms will benefit from you being more authentic and accurate, so you want to be consistent and build a good image.
Telling your story and featuring your customers, drivers and staff are one of the best ways to leverage social media. You should promote content that resonates with your audience.
It is important to remain consistent and on-brand and refrain from saying anything that might be considered disrespectful or doesn’t fit what your brand is usually sharing and going for.
You do not have to be active on every platform—Facebook and Twitter, Instagram, even YouTube—. However, you might find that some of them resonate more with your audience.
Customers from older age groups tend to be more active on Facebook, while younger customers are more likely to use Instagram and Twitter.
Develop a Taxi Services App
Apps for taxis are a great way to generate high-quality leads and make your online taxi business grow.
Compared to an online website or a Facebook page, apps happen to be more user-friendly and comfortable to connect you with your customers since they will allow you to provide assistance easier and get their reviews right after a taxi driver left the client in the right place.
With the right tech company, you can have an easy-to-use, customized app that suits your clients’ needs and fits your budget at the same time.
Here are some steps to get your app up and running:
- Make a business model: A plan is the key to success. Before you start building your business, make sure to have a solid foundation. For example, be familiar with the taxi problems in your area. These solutions might be a competitive advantage over your competitors.
- You can start looking for mobile app developers: You can find many taxi app developers online. A quick Google search and extensive background research should suffice. You should also determine your budget based on their app development costs.
- You should test your app: You can test your app by running a dry run. This will allow you to identify any flaws or strengths and make improvements before releasing them to the public. Spread the word. Use social media platforms for advertising your newly launched taxi app.
- Be open to thinking outside of the box: Think of unique features you could add to your application. Your passengers and drivers will be more loyal to your company if you give them reasons to stay motivated.
Although it takes money to build an app, it can be a profitable marketing channel. You will display your app on every screen that your customer uses, whether they turn on their phone or not. This will prompt them to make a booking.
Hiring the Best Drivers
You do not need to be a pro driver or have won any driving contests. You only need to have a passionate and well-mannered driving license to join a team, and this is what you need to tell to those you’re going to hire, but without giving them as much freedom as if you were the one driving.
It would be best if you had them be able to take care of passengers and appreciate customers’ satisfaction. Hire people who can be responsible on and off the roads.
If you do not have the right team, your marketing efforts could go to waste. You can find the top qualities every taxi driver should possess for your reference.
Establish Partnerships with Local Businesses
It is possible to form partnerships with local businesses that can help you market yours to their customers. You can build trust with these business owners, and they will likely refer you to their customers.
Make a list of companies that could benefit from your assistance (in terms of having customers who need rides). You can start by looking at hotels, hospitals, and pubs. Talk to the owners of your nearest pubs to see if they are open to a deal for you as their first taxi service.
It is also essential to assess whether you and your drivers are ready to handle this type of customer. You may find some customers who want a warm ride home after a cold night. However, some patrons have had too many pints. They can serve as high-quality leads for your business.
B&BS, hotels, and hostels are great options for finding ideal customers. You can make arrangements with hotel owners to give your customers special offers or allow the hotel to earn a commission each time you call them.
You could make a high income by offering rides to patients in hospitals. This could also be a way to provide specialized services. You should ensure that you are confident in delivering this type of service and that your drivers have been trained to offer support and empathy.
Start a Reward or Referral Program
Your customers are one of the best ways to advertise your taxi business and enrich your lead generation process.
Although word of mouth may seem slow, it can be a powerful marketing tool. This is because people are becoming more skeptical of traditional advertising techniques that seem disingenuous. People trust their family’s opinions about service more than a flashy advertisement.
You can further energize these efforts in many ways. One way is to create a referral program that rewards customers for recommending you to others. It will help you keep your customers coming back to you since they benefit from this.
Your vehicles’ sides should be branded. You have free advertising space under your nose! Wrapping your vehicle is relatively inexpensive, but there will be a small cost.
You can improve lead quality by having your taxi number, branding, and taxi name displayed on the vehicle’s side.
A marketing campaign that provides massive exposure at a low cost will also be undertaken by you (given that there will not be any royalties or a fee per use of this space like you would with other services).
How is this possible? An article about van design reveals that impressions (sightings) can reach as high as thirty thousand per hour! Whether moving or parked in an urban area, it will help if you get noticed wherever your taxi goes.
Take a Look at Your Location
Next, consider where your taxi business is located. Your local environment and business practices will significantly impact how well you are marketing your company.
If you live in a significant locality where taxis are commonplace, you may not need to improve your lead generation strategies.
Simply driving around the busy streets looking for taxis could get you more customers than you can handle. If you live in a minute community where everyone has a car, this changes.
Depending on your location, especially in a small town, marketing your business will require you to consider how, when, and where taxis are used.
You can focus your advertising efforts on attracting this customer base once you have identified your most likely customers.
Everything will change and depend on how easy it is to get those clients attracted to your service and why they should choose you over others.
Think outside the box when you think about who might use taxis. Senior citizens who can no longer drive may need one—for example. Some of these individuals may require special transportation as well.
However, some others can use regular taxis but cannot drive for various reasons. Ask senior citizens in your community if they are interested in forming a taxi service relationship.
Get Your Name Out
Once you have an idea of who the target audience is, it is time to promote your business. You might consider making magnets or business cards that you can hand out to people, so they have your number when calling a taxi.
You will be able to build relationships with repeat customers, with taxi drivers who frequently call taxis (like hotel managers or bar owners) and keep those relationships going. Any of the tips that you choose from our list will help you to get taxi leads for your company.
The Local Lead Generation Process for Your Taxi Business
All right! So, everything is about building properties and generating leads. But how does the process actually take place? Are there other steps I need to know?
The steps I mention below are what students from our local lead generation program follow to generate leads for businesses like yourself. So I’ll help you see what we do. And how if you join our program, you can simply generate leads for your own business (unless you want to start a side hustle and build a laptop lifestyle business).
Essentially, our lead generation can be divided into four steps:
The first is prospecting. You need to take the time to do market research on a niche (industry) and determine how many phone-driven businesses are there.
Keep in mind that this is local research as you need to know how many companies need leads. For example, you may search for “plumbing services Youngstown OH.”
You will find dozens or even hundreds of businesses trying to get themselves in front of the customers by ranking on Map Listings, organic results, and even Ad.
The second step, building. When you find a niche (plumbing, tree services, a software company, real estate…), you will need to start building your digital properties. You don’t need to be an expert in HTML or coding. It can be easy with the right tools.
The third step is now taking time to rank your lead gen website. With the site done, you need to work on SEO strategies and start dominating those Google search results. If you’re new to SEO, it stands for Search Engine Optimization.
To keep it simple, it consists of the entire process of growing a company’s visibility on search engines like Google and generating organic traffic. And remember this, local lead generation is part of the strategies.
Moving on to step four, once you rank the site, you will start getting your ROI and profits. You only need to rent it out to a local business interested in the leads the site generates. You can offer a couple of free leads to their move on with the actual pay per lead.
To review steps 1-4 above, I described it to a normal student who is building a lead gen business to help local service providers generate more calls. But replace the student with you as the business owner. And replace sending the leads to a business to simply siphoning the leads to your personal business.
By the way, fun fact, about 20% of our students in our local lead gen program are actually business owners who went through the program. And they use the skillsets we teach to generate leads for their own business.
An Example of Lead Generation: Home Advisor
You must be thinking, “if lead generation sounds so good so far, how come I haven’t seen any company?” That’s the thing; there are many out there. You just don’t know they are dedicated to it.
HomeAdvisor is one of the best examples you can find on the Internet as it is a top lead generation company that has spent millions building its brand but also earned even more zeros for this same reason.
They started small as everyone else but invested in building their brand awareness to make people who are looking for home services go to their website and find what they need. They are over 75% of people’s first choice when they need those services.
If you don’t get HomeAdvisor that much or need a refresh, users need to submit their information to request a service and get a professional or expert who can provide it.
HomeAdvisor’s job is to share your information, which makes you a lead, with local companies so they can contact you and offer the service you’re requesting. For sharing this lead information, HomeAdvisor gets paid by the companies. This happens for every single lead they send to multiple businesses.
Business owners who don’t have marketing skills or don’t even know how to have any online presence will always rely on those pages to list their services. They will save time and effort, but companies like HomeAdvisor can make them spend lots of money as leads aren’t exclusive (one lead is sent to multiple companies after all).
Using Facebook Ads aka Paid Ad Platforms: Do They Generate Leads?
They DO generate leads. If not, no one would use them.
However, you need to remember two facts:
- Paid ads or platforms can be expensive.
- They don’t generate “natural” leads.
Whenever someone sees or clicks in one of those ads, over 80% of them did it by accident or are trying to close/report it.
Why? Because they aren’t looking for those services. At least not at the moment.
What those ads do instead is interrupt their time on the platforms. Users aren’t there to find companies or businesses unless they are searching for a specific company’s user, and for that, there’s a search bar. This is why it is hard to convert them to actual customers who will show interest in the companies’ services. Also, you’re limited by a budget.
When using lead generation, everything is organic. You aren’t forcing others to pay attention to your business but rather being there when they need you. This is why Google’s organic traffic will always beat paid ads, and the reason companies continue investing in it, which is a lot cheaper as well.
What Is Local SEO?
Don’t worry… I didn’t get it at first either. Following the short explanation, local SEO focuses on scaling businesses’ visibility on search engines. However, this is only for those who serve their communities face-to-face.
What does this mean?
Experts and professionals like painters, plumbers, and dentists (but not only them) offer their services to their local customers. Why? Because they can’t deliver them unless they are located in the same area of their customers.
To make sure those businesses get more leads, you need to rank them locally by claiming the business listing on Google to place them on Map Listings. Local SEO also involves online reviews, citation management, and how you manage your entire online presence in the local area.
If you are going to bet on lead gen, you need to adapt yourself to today’s world: The Internet.
Keep in mind that although traditional channels and methods like billboards, warm calls, and pamphlets still work, they aren’t part of your tools. Whenever someone needs a service, they go to Google and search for it.
“Dentist in Miami” or “plumbing services in Orlando,” etc. And you can keep coming up with services or professionals people need and look for. Thus, you need to make sure you’re using Google to get the companies in front of their clients.
Users will always click on the first search results (those near the top), and many of them will be either Ad links (people paid to place their websites there), Map Listing, and then you get websites. Almost all of them are your goal and where you should always aim to place yourself.
Can My Taxi Business Utilize a Local Lead Generation Strategy?
If you want customers, you better know you need it. Following the previous explanation, lead gen is all about placing businesses in front of their customers, choosing them over their competitors.
Put it simply – it’s all about closing deals and having clients for those companies to make money. The main difference with the usual methods companies use for this is how lead generation approaches different channels to get them in the right place of the market to get customers.
Those channels are all focused on the Internet as most people are searching for products but also services across the net. The issue is that the Internet is way too broad, and businesses don’t know how to place themselves. They usually try, but they get one common result: losing money and time.
How Powerful Are Organic Taxi Leads from Google?
For companies looking for customers, it’s everything. For you? Pretty much the same. When you build a business with digital properties, you get to make thousands of dollars a month.
This isn’t a “get started today and get rich tomorrow” thing, but it is HIGHLY scalable, and ROI + positive results are guaranteed. Learning a fairly decent and very needed set of skills to create your digital properties and start ranking them on Google is required.
I have invested in several online businesses over the years, and if there’s something uncertain, whether you will get your ROI or not, even more than the actual profit.
However, this business moved my earnings from five figures a year to a month in ONLY passive income while sitting comfortably at home.
On my laptop. Anywhere. Anytime.
You can look at one of the first sites I built back in 2016, and it continues making me over $1.000+ every month. The best part is that I don’t need to touch it or the rest I’ve built over the years, just like this digital property.
What Makes Lead Generation SO Alluring?
Here it goes: you can work from home.
The main issue with regular business opportunities is how much you need to invest in staff, equipment, or rent to have a place to sell your products or offer your services.
We all know the hassles of traditional businesses that involve regular expenses, which are extremely high. Can you afford it? I don’t think so, and even if you can, is it worth it? Now, it isn’t only about the money. You also need to put in a lot of work, and it isn’t only during the first couple of months or years. Usually, it is as long as you continue running it.
You can save yourself those headaches and bone-breaking tasks and expenses with lead gen since it is more about generating leads with digital channels—mainly websites.
Websites can be VERY cheap to build, and with many tools online, you get to do it in a couple of hours instead of days. Any virtual or digital business is scalable and won’t need constant maintenance.
So, let’s summarize this:
- You save money in regular expenses with traditional and most online businesses as what you need is yourself and digital properties (websites).
- You can bet on passive income.
- There’s no need to hire more people to get started.
- You can generate leads in multiple industries, which allows you to work on any niche you want.
How Can I Get Started in the Local Lead Generation Program?
Anyone can start and learn. That’s the beauty of this business model. I knew nothing about SEO, Map Listing, and everything I’ve mentioned so far. It is all about learning the skills, gaining experience, and deciding to take the step.
Remember that this business model will never get old as business owners are always looking for leads. They need to do business and scale their companies. Why not do the same while helping others and still making money?
You can start with this local lead generation course highly recommended for anyone wanting to grow in the business. It is a close training that will take you through each step and make sure you are able to get your ROI, profits and take control of your life.
You will be added to an incredible lead generation family ready to help you 24/7 when asking questions on the group. Anyone is welcome who’s willing to put in the work. Click here to watch the lead gen webinar.