Gaining subscribers and building a community

[wazzenmafadden]

Hi Guys,

I have started a website to help connect people who want to take driving lessons to driving instructors in their local area.

I have a monetisation strategy which will be implemented later on if I see that it is feasible.

I have had a few sign ups via the website but the main thing holding me back is how to engage with driving instructors to get them to sign up to the website.

I run another business and received some free text messages as part of my card machine terminal rental so used these to interact with some instructors and get the sign ups I have so far. However, conversion rate hasn't been fantastic.

So, does anyone have any ideas as to how I can get service providers to sign up to my website and build a solid user base in terms of numbers so I can start marketing it to the end users?

Ideas I have come up with so far are:
- Scale up the text messaging campaign?
- Cold calling service providers/driving instructors?
- Twitter/FaceBook DM's?
- PPC campaign aimed at driving instructors?
- Combination of all these?

All and any suggestions would be helpful.

 

[lisa benner]

surely cold calling will work in this case? freely available numbers and they should be interested as extra business

 

[aManHasNoName]

Just approach the driving instructors, that is the most effective way.

 

[fisicx]

If I want a local driving instructor Google gives me enough choice. Unless your website comes top of the results list I'm not even going to know you exist. You have created a solution for a problem that doesn't exist.

 

[AdKingo]

Create a good offer for the driver instructors to join your website.

 

[Nochexman]

I have had a few sign ups via the website but the main thing holding me back is how to engage with driving instructors to get them to sign up to the website.

Sorry, the main thing holding you back is the few sign ups you have. If you get hundreds of people signing up for your website, you will be able to pick and choose which driving instructors you let join and how much they pay. Focus on the learners and instructors will follow.

Best of luck and welcome to the forum!

 

[Rob Herron]

Driving instructors, like most local businesses, will be getting bombarded with cold calls telling them why they should advertise in X magazine, on X screens in doctor surgeries, at X amount of local events.

You need to take the decision out of their hands and make it a necessity to be on your website. Therefore this comes down to one simple thing.

You need to dominate the search results.

And by dominate I mean you need to appear for any possible search term which is related to learning to drive in your city. Even the search terms which are specifically related to each driving instructor.

Luckily most instructors won't have performed much SEO so therefore it won't be much of a challenge.

So to start with......

I would add every local driving instructor that I can find onto my website. I would write a unique description about them by re-writing something which is already online.

I would ensure that each instructor had their own dedicated page and it was fully optimised for the search engines. Also, I'd write a blog/latest news post on your website talking about the latest instructor to be added and point to that page. Do likewise with social media.

Create an image/identity for your website that shows you "connect local independent driving instructors to the local residents".

This will show that you are working with and supporting local business against the big national chains/franchises.

I would NOT try and sell or even cold-call anyone.


Once your website is fully established and is appearing in the search results, try emailing the instructors and asking them to verify or double check the details which you have for them. If they didn't know about you then they will now.

Get yourself on Social once your website is fully up and running.

So to summarise I would to these key things....

[1] Establish an identity which shows you support local independent driving instructors.
[2] Populate your website completely free of charge and without letting anyone know it actually exists. Don't put any pressure on yourself to deliver..... just see how it plays out.
[3] SEO, SEO, SEO. Keep identifying the keywords which you need to target and go for it.
[4] The only social platform I'd use for your business is Facebook as you can target local residents easily. Wait until your website is completed through.
[5] Once you are appearing at the top of Google for your keywords, including the independent driving instructors names, then ask them to double check the details you have on file.
[6] Let things play out and keep it free for a while longer, and then potentially look at introducing a listing fee etc. But not until it's a necessity for the instructors to be on there i.e your brand name is now bigger than theirs, plus all of their competitors are on there.


Hope that makes sense and gives you some ideas.

 

[Colin Forrest]

I agree with Nochexman, you want to focus on the learners. If you can build up enough of a presence to attract learners, instructors will be more taken to collaboration. Approaching instructors with a newly formed business idea is not likely to turn heads as much as showing them the potential for increasing their customer base with an already established database of potential clients. Once you have grounded this, start local and cold call them. Independent instructors would be the best place to start- again, once many independent instructors are featured, companies such as Red will want to get involved in order to have fair gain in the venture. Then you can start selling advertising space!

 

[fisicx]

...once many independent instructors are featured, companies such as Red will want to get involved in order to have fair gain in the venture. Then you can start selling advertising space!

Nope, not going to happen. Red won't be interested at all in a local little directory. In any case, the OP has never returned so I suspect the venture never happened.

 

[Peter Bowen]

Hi @wazzenmafadden

Can I share some experience on using PPC (Google AdWords specifically) for this kind of business?

I built and ran a Google AdWords campaign for this exact business model a few years ago. My client was doing as you do, connecting people wanting driving instruction with driving instructors.

He had quite deep pockets so he ran the AdWords campaign for several months after I advised that he stop because it was never going to be a good advertising medium for this business.

In any two-sided business - the market place business model - you have to have a big enough supply of buyers and sellers before it works. Get a load of students signed up and nobody to teach them and they'll go elsewhere. Get a load of instructors signed up and nobody to hire them and it doesn't work. That means you have twice the problem faced by a normal start up business who just has to grow a customer base.

Very few instructors were searching Google for sources of new customers so we didn't even try to use AdWords to recruit instructors.

There were (and still are) plenty of learners using Google to find a driving instructor. It's pretty easy to put an ad on those searches and get them to fill in an enquiry form. AdWords worked really well for this.

The problem is making it pay.

• When an individual driving instructor advertises they get to keep all of the profit from the sale.
• When the middle man (you in this case) advertises they only keeps a small percentage of the profit from the sale. If I remember right my client was making 10-15% off the bookings he sent to the instructors.

Thus the individual advertiser can afford to pay a lot more to acquire a new student than the middle man can. Maybe 10x as much.

That means his cost of acquiring a new client via AdWords had to be less than a tenth of what the individual instructors were paying. Even the best AdWords guys would find that a tough call.