Author Archives: Josh Meah

About Josh Meah

Josh is the CEO of DrivingSchool.Marketing. His goal is to be the marketing and business development partner of driving schools around the world, helping them become thriving businesses while also expanding general awareness for the importance of traffic safety standards and education.

5 Truck Driving School Advertising Mistakes

Truck driving schools are among our best clients, because from a marketing standpoint, most of the industry is backwards. Now, that didn’t used to be the case, back when YellowPages and other standard marketing and advertising channels were the norm. Today though, most truck driving schools advertise themselves poorly, because they make one or all 5 of these key mistakes.

These are either sins of bad judgment in advertising or sins of omission just because the school’s marketing program is behind the times.

Here are the mistakes:

1. Selling the steak and not the sizzle!

Why do people go to truck driving schools? They want great-paying jobs and long-term job stability! This is one of the few industries left that can offer such an opportunity!

Meanwhile, if you look at most truck driving school websites, you find an outdated picture of a truck, fuzzy images, incomplete information, or just a wall of text that isn’t that exciting.

But you know what is exciting? BIG trucks! BIG money! And a BIG career opportunity! By focusing more on the possibilities and likelihoods that come with attending a truck driving school (more on that in a second), our truck driving school clients close more business than their competitors.

2. Your truck driving school looks risky.

Now what exactly do we mean by that? Plain and simple: you’re selling classes that cost thousands and thousands of dollars to customers who for the most part don’t really have that kind of money to throw around. So, if you want a potential new customer’s trust – to part with their hard-earned cash – you need to give them reasons to trust you. Here are reasons to trust your truck driving school:

High job-placement rates (and job-placement support)
High CDL achievement rate
Options for financial assistance, loans, or other financing options (if available)
Testimonials and pictures from satisfied graduates
…and I can’t stress this enough – a professional website! If you want someone to drop thousands they don’t have at your school, then look the part of a high-quality business.

We can help you here with everything from the website to the messaging, and so much more, but whatever you do, just pay attention to this stuff.

3. You’re invisible on Google.

Thousands of potential CDL careerists are looking for you or your competitors every single month. If you’re not easily found on Google by folks who are typing in “truck driving school + your location” or areas nearby, then you’re missing out on business. Other terms would include “get a CDL license,” “truck driving school near me,” “truck driving school + your state,” and many other combinations of terms. Get found where your customers are searching, and you’ll get more business.

4. You’re not on social media.

Here is a big one. Look – the economy is tough, and there aren’t enough good paying jobs to go around. Meanwhile, you have what everybody wants – access to good paying jobs! So go on social media and create a page and get active and start getting your information advertised in communities near you and in front of men and women of an age appropriate for taking your classes.

That’s the bottom-line, and it’s another big thing that truck driving schools just aren’t doing. You’ll most likely be way ahead of the competition.

5. You live on an island (figuratively, but it would be awesome as well if it were true!)

Truck driving is one of those highly American professions. It’s open to almost anyone willing to work hard, has a limited number of educational requirements, and comes with job-security in most cases for the right employee. Partner with VA (Veterans’ Affairs) offices, local job-placement agencies, and other organizations dedicated to getting Americans good paying jobs. Not only will you be improving your business, but you’ll be introducing opportunities to people who really need them.

Finally – and I know I’ve been a little blunt here – I want to congratulate you sincerely for having a kickass business. You help people find great jobs that feed families and help our economy function. You add value to our society in a very tangible way. Now, I just hope you take these tips to continue growing your business, which not only benefits you, but benefits the country of which you’re a part.

How to Start a Successful Driving School Business

Everyone drives and needs to learn how to drive before they do so. This creates the business opportunity for opening up a driving school. You’ll just need to be aware of some of your state’s requirements, who is currently providing driver education services in your area, and then – finally – how to get the word out about your driving school. Once you get up and running and position your business properly for your area, you’re success is almost inevitable.

Of course, it takes work, but these 10 tips for starting your driving school will help. This is based on a proven formula of watching driving schools across North America and Europe succeed.

10 steps for starting your driving school:

1. Research the driving school licensing requirements in your state.

Each state has its own requirements, usually at the website of the state’s Department of Motor Vehicles (here is New York, for example). Other states may call this the Department of Licensing or other names. Ultimately, you want to figure out if (a) you need to declare a place of business, (b) take a separate exam for becoming an instructor, and © need your vehicle(s) to meet a certain form of inspection.

Because state requirements vary greatly (for example, some do not require a physical location to represent your business status – some do), you will want to know this in advance. It will affect your costs for starting the business.

2. Create a driving school start-up budget.

Now that you know the state requirements, you’ll need to build a budget. If you have a working vehicle for your business, then your budget should include money for rent (if you need a location), advertising, vehicle maintenance, and gas. If you plan to hire an instructor or administrative help to start (most new driving schools do not do this), budget for that as well.

3. Research the driving school competition.

Since everyone needs to learn to drive, most locations already have some way to provide driver education to the local community – which is a good thing! Assessing the competition will give you a path to business victory.

You want to know (1) who are the other driving schools in the area, (2) what services do they offer and what are the prices for those services, and (3) do local high-schools, churches or other community organizations provide free driver education services to the community.

4. Create your driving school services and pricing list.

You already know what the competition provides, since you completed Step 3. You may find, for example, that offering behind-the-wheel driving lessons is a better opportunity for you than offering classroom-based defensive driving classes, especially if there are more defensive driving schools in your area.

Regardless, for your new driving school, try to pick a price that you think is competitive and that you can afford. You want to start getting customers, but you should also be making money from Day 1. Don’t just give the business lessons away too cheaply.

5. Get your driving instructor license.

At this point, you should know all the basics regarding your driving school – the services offered, the location if you need one, the area where your customers located, and the budget you plan to start with. When you finally get your driving instructor license, you’ll be ready to hit the ground running!

6. Develop a curriculum and lesson plan.

Whether you offer only behind-the-wheel lessons or a full suite or classroom and behind-the-wheel services, you’ll want to know what you plan to teach your students.

For classroom services, you can purchase pre-packaged lesson materials from your DMV’s approved list of providers. Some national providers, like AAA, provide a nice-cobranding opportunity for your school. Imagine telling parents that you driving school uses lessons direct from AAA – sounds pretty good, right? You can learn more about them here.

Your behind-the-wheel lesson plan should include routes that are safe for the student and over time allow them to experience different road and traffic conditions. If you can, try and learn the road test route provided by the local DMV – training to the test will help you and your students know the fundamentals are being covered.

7. Advertise your driving school!

Exciting! You’re an entrepreneur and the sky is the limit for your new business, and now it’s time to get you your first customer. DrivingSchool.Marketing is the leading provider in the world for Internet advertising services for driving schools – also we’ve written on driving school advertising as a two-part series. In short: website, Google, local high school connections, social media, and additional partnerships, such as hospitals and court systems. Call us if you want help figuring this stuff out.

8. Improve your driving school’s Internet presence.

Teens are on their phones constantly, and so are their parents. In the past, word-of-mouth was sufficient for growing a business, but now people stop at Google on their way to finding a local business. Make sure that your driving school can be found online when someone tries to find you by name and when some is just looking for “driving school + your location” on Google and related combinations of words. That is guaranteed business opportunity.

9. Ask your customers for testimonials and reviews.

As you’re building your brand, keep in mind that online reviews will help you. Ask parents, teens, seniors, defensive driving students, and any other customer you have to leave you a positive review online. Improving your online reputation will help you persuade more and more customers to choose you over the competition. Also, as your online reviews improve, you’ll be able to raise your prices – after all, you’re the premium driving school in town!

10. Organize your administrative systems – then grow your driving school!

Once you get to this point, you are well on your way to success. Different states have different requirements for record-keeping related to students meeting classroom and driving requirements. Know your state’s requirements and keep clean records from the get-go. There are software solutions to help you with this. This will also help you around tax time when clean records will help you save a ton of money.

And that’s it! We work with driving schools with 1 employee (the business owner!) and others that are multi-million dollar businesses. Starting a driving school may not be easy, but the rewards are incredible once you get the business right. For example, unsafe driving practices are the leading causes of teen deaths in the United States. If you can simultaneously help keep our families safe and make an honest and financially rewarding living for yourself and your family…well, that’s awesome!

How to run successful email campaigns for your driving school

Emails are important to start any business, and driving schools are not an exception.

It’s the most effective way to send your message to your students and at the same time increase your conversions. We’ll discuss the importance of email marketing with case studies in one of our future posts. But for now, let’s focus on how to create successful email campaigns for your driving school.

Ask email ids from your students: The first step of running email campaigns is, getting the mail ids from your existing students. Ask them to submit their email ids right on the contact form. Once you get the ids, make sure you collate them in a dedicated list.

Run social media campaigns to potential students: Apart from your existing students, there are plenty of others who would be interested to learn how to drive, especially teenagers in your locality. For them, you can run an email gating social media campaigns. Let us explain it a bit.

There are campaigns where you need to submit your email ids to enter and win. Trigger on one such campaign. Target only the potential customers for it. Also remember your neighborhood while setting the target. This is the best way to get email ids from your future customers.

Segment them into groups: So, you must be ready with all the email ids from your existing as well as potential customers. Now it’s time to segment them into different categories. Email segmentation is necessary to make your emails more personalized. Let’s take a look at why you must segment your email list.

To start with, segment the email list into two broad groups: One dedicated to your existing students and another to your potential students. Remember, one email cannot serve both. Strategize separately for each segment. Let’s elaborate with an example.

Planning for your existing students is a bit tricky, as they’re already your customers. But you always can use these contacts to flesh out your sales funnel. Wondering how? Strategize something on the existing deal with an incentive to them. For example, ask them to refer you to their peers to get one extra class free.

When it comes to the list of potential students, you can experiment with all kinds of deals and coupons. You can build a holiday season discount for them or can offer a 20% off valid for one week. The opportunities are huge. The rule of thumb remains, you need to offer value in exchange of their mail ids.

Strategize for long term: Email marketing is not a one-day job. You need to be serious enough to make it work for your driving school. So, you must look after a few points before investing on emails.
First comes mobile. Don’t ignore them. A recent ExactTarget study proved that 91% of email users check their messages at least once a day on their smartphone device. So, you must ensure that your emails are mobile responsive.

Maintain a consistency with emails, even if you don’t have anything to sell or promote. It’s a nice gesture for a business to touch base with their customers. And emails are the most important weapon to do this.

Are you thinking about the content of those non-promotional emails? Well, they can be anything from a success story to a case study to a recently released data on driving to a fun driving trivia. Once you create a brand awareness with these emails, you can except more open rates and more queries. Right!

Always ask your email subscriber to take an action: Call to action (CTA) is pretty important in email marketing and it can increase your conversion rate to a great extent. So, you need to make sure each of your email goes with a suitable CTA button.

Your can experiment with different CTA buttons like “Call us”, “Sign up”, “Avail the deal”, “Share with your friends”, “Learn more” in your emails, based on the purpose and marketing goal. Suppose, you’re sending an email to your existing students asking to share the email to get a discount, CTA buttons like “Share with your friends” and “Get the deal” would work for you.

Over to you:

So, this is it. Emails can be a definite answer to your marketing queries. And it will surely work for your driving school. If you want to know about some suitable emails templates for your promotional and non-promotional email campaigns, exclusively for driving schools, feel free to contact us.

Importance of mobile responsiveness for driving school websites

Is your site mobile responsive?
Do you still feel mobile responsiveness is a luxury for a small business like you?

It’s time to change your vision. In this article, you will find out why your driving school website needs to be converted into a mobile responsive site immediately.

A small note: We will only talk data over here. So there is no room for assumptions and speculations. Let’s dig deeper.

Mobile searchers are more dedicated:

That’s right. If your site is mobile-friendly, your students are more likely to contact you. And this will eventually increase your leads, and in turn, conversions. Again, we’re not assuming it. We have data to back us up. A recent finding proved that 55% conversions that initiate from a mobile search take place within an hour of the first encounter.

Mobile friendly site is user friendly too:

If you’re thinking about how your audience would react to your new site, don’t worry about that. It’s proven that mobile users rely those businesses more that are compatible with mobile devices as well.

It’s proved that 67% of mobile users are more comfortable to buy from a business that is compatible with their mobile device. So, if you don’t want to lose new leads and more sales for your driving school, you must not ignore mobile for your business.

Moreover, 74% people confirmed that once a site opens perfectly on their mobile phone, they are more likely to visit the site again.

Mobile responsive site equals to more sales:

Sales is important to you. Right? Then you must go for mobile responsiveness immediately. As reported, 62% of businesses have witnessed more sales once they graduated their website to mobile. While 64% of them saw the similar results after they optimized their website for tablet users.

But you need to find the optimal solution for your driving school. Analyze your potential searchers and how they browse your site. If you find that mobile users are more in number than that of tablet, go for a mobile friendly website only. The main reason is, we don’t want you to spend on the areas, where you don’t need to.

Mobile users are growing in number:

Mobile users are growing in number so fast that they are about to surpass their desktop counterpart. A ComScore study found that the count for global mobile users is keeping the desktop users behind.

Your audience is not an exception:

Are you still wondering if your business too needs a face-lift to match up the mobile revolution? We would say ‘yes’. As your main target audiences are teens, here is a piece of breaking news for you. 92% of teen mobile users remain connected almost all the time.

It’s seen that 92% of teenagers aging 13 to 17 use mobile phone constantly to access the internet. Only 12% said that they log in once a day and 6% said that they go online once a week.

The starting points of mobile searcher:

So, it’s established that you need a mobile responsive site that perfectly caters to your audience. But to do that effectively, you need to have a right mobile strategy. You need to find out how your audience searches on mobile. You need to explore how to attract them with your mobile properties.

A Google study shows that 48% of mobile users start their search journey with search engines. And 33% of them start searching for a business right from the website. So, in both these cases, you need to ready with a mobile-ready site.

Google started rewarding mobile-friendly sites:

Moreover, last year Google launched their mobile-friendly label, where they upvote mobile responsive sites in search results pages. Let’s take an example.

You can run similar search for your driving school too. But make sure you search them locally. The drill is, Google prioritizes sites with mobile-ready feature, which essentially down votes those without mobile friendliness. If your driving school site is not mobile responsive, you are going to lose plenty of queries and customers.

Final thought:

There are plenty of other reasons to cite if we go on talking about the importance of mobile responsiveness for a driving school business. If you want a quick analysis of your website and how we could help you in a cost-effective way, feel free to write to us.

We’re happy to help, always!

Best SEO Website Design Practices for Driving Schools

You create a website, so your future students can find and know about your business easily. But to ensure it works the way you want it, you need to create a website keeping all SEO measures in mind.

In this article, we have jotted down 9 design and development tips to make your driving school website SEO-friendly.

Choose an SEO-friendly CMS: The CMS plays a big role in SEO friendliness of a website. However, choose according to your requirement. For starting a driving school business, the utmost importance is to ensure that your future students find you whenever they run a local search. So, you need to make sure your website delivers it. WordPress websites do it great.

Start researching keywords at the first phase: Many driving school site owners plan it wrong. They start doing SEO after the site development process ends. However, the ideal practice is, start doing SEO right in the development phase. Start with keywords and word tracker tool. You can create relevant keyword databases with the help of the tool. Apart from that, also consider spell check and competition analysis.

Place keywords strategically: Once you get the keyword database for the site, you need to put them at the right places. Here are some tips:

URL is a good place to add keywords. If you have more than one keyword in the URL, you can separate them with hyphens.
Create a list of places where search engines crawl first, such as headings, header, and footer.
You can include keywords in the anchor texts for describing links, title, meta tags, and domain name.
Put the keywords closely within a content.
Make strategic use of keywords to create a theme for your site. Search engines give priority to the sites that manage to establish a clear theme with the content.

Place Meta and title tags properly: Create a separate identity for each element of your website with meta data and title tags, as search engines consider these factors for ranking web pages. Ensure to keep the title tag at the top for each page. Write your driving school name in the title and ALT tag of your logo image everywhere.

Use of right technology: Use the right technology to ensure the SEO friendliness of your website. For example, flash is not at all SEO friendly. Most of the developers don’t want to use this technology now for building websites. However, use it sparingly, if at all you need to. On the other hand, Javascript lovers make this mistake to build the entire site with it. However, the fact remains if you do it, search engines find it pretty difficult to read your site. Moreover, Javascript doesn’t particularly work effectively on mobile devices.

Keep a provision for content uploading regularly: Search engines prefer the websites that keep uploading fresh content on the site regularly. You also must keep a separate URL or page to update your site content. It will also help your audience to come across the latest information about your website. Moreover, make sure you add quality and long content, as a latest Buzzsumo study showed the longer the content, the higher the Google ranking.

Upload images carefully: Search engines don’t consider images as a ranking factor. Instead they only consider the the title and ALT tags, you use for an image. So, whenever you use an image on your site, make sure you add proper keywords in the image ATL tag and title. The content around the images also play a vital role in indexing a webpage, as search engines also check relevance.

Don’t use frames: Some web designers still use frames. This technique splits a page into several parts to reduce downloading time. But it may create navigation issues, which in turn, may cause trouble for search engines to access all the pages of a site.

Build a useful link structure: Search engines take link structure into account while indexing web pages. Keep a clear and meaningful link format for your web pages. This would help your audience have an idea about your content, which would give up-votes by your users for your site to the search engines.

For example, yourdrivingschool.com/classes/?=682153 is not SEO friendly, but yourdrivingschool.com/classes/ is. If you need to add two words within an element, use a hyphen (-) instead of an underscore (_). Also try to limit category entries in an URL.

Website design and development for search engine is as necessary as optimizing it for users. These nine SEO factors would help you make your business website strong for SEO.

Have you followed these steps for your site? No? Maybe that’s the reason that you are not getting the desired attention from search engines. Watch this space to know more about website design and development best practices for driving school.

How to offer diversity on your Driving School Facebook page

Does owning a driving school make you feel restricted, when it comes to Facebook marketing? Do you often feel that there is so less options to give your audience a real variety?

Fret not! In this article, we’ll discuss about 9 different types of content that you can post and engage your audience on Facebook. We’re sure that the layers are enough to create an entire week’s content for your driving school’s Facebook page. Let’s start then.

Social media marketing has two major purposes: Branding and lead generation.

We’ll divide the content types based on these two categories.

Branding for Driving School:

Tips and suggestions: You always can share tips and suggestions for your potential students on Facebook. This would not only educate them about the rules of driving, but also would build trust for your business. Many businesses are already doing this to create a brand. Moreover, these posts are also great conversation starter.

Fun facts about driving: Who doesn’t want entertainment when he logs into Facebook? And since you’re catering to the young people, chances are that your audience would like these posts more. You can share fun facts about cars, celebs, and new drivers. One of the most trending content layer could be memes, where you can create amazing images with catchy content.

Fact and information about cars/mechanism: Information is also necessary to attract more and more audience to your page. You can share interesting facts about different cars and their mechanism. Apart from that, you also can post about quick solutions to problems that a new driver might face on the road.

Success stories: Success stories would create a lot of buzz around your business. For example, when you talk about one student on Facebook, he/she would willingly share the story with his/her peers. This would attract more leads for you and would also prove your credential as a business.

Introduction with instructors: Your students want to be aware of your inside stories, provided you present them well. One of the most interesting ways to do it is, introduce your driving instructors on Facebook. You also can share the images during the classes. Apart from that, you can highlight the cars, with which you’re organizing the classes.

Information about the locality: New drivers would need a lot of information about the city, especially where to go and where not to go. You can make them aware of the city route, safe localities, unsafe neighborhood, what to do when in crisis etc to make them ready for driving in real life.

Contest for your students: There is nothing to think that you cannot run contests on Facebook. It can be anything from asking your audience for their opinion on an issue to organizing a user-generated campaign. The more creative you think, the more viral your contest goes.

Lead generation for business:

Posts about the service: Now let’s come to your driving school services. You can post about your courses, their fees, advantages etc on Facebook. But make sure, these posts are interesting with excellent text and graphics, else they would not hook your audience up effectively. If you want to drive them to your website, Facebook would also help there.

Posts about latest offers and discounts: You must have given many offers and discounts to your students. It’s time to promote them on Facebook. For this and the above, you can always run ads, so they reach the right audience, even if they’re out of your network.

OVER TO YOU

You might be thinking what would be your ROI by putting so much effort on branding. Branding is all about how many eyeballs you attract with these posts and how you engage with your Facebook community.

If you succeed with this, you can easily draw ROI from the posts, dedicated to lead generation. Remember, people need to trust you if you expect them to buy from you.

Why driving schools need local SEO

Is your driving school optimized for local searches?
Do you know you might lose hundreds of new students if you keep on ignoring local optimization?

You must be thinking what local SEO is and how it’s different from SEO. It’s still unknown to many small business owners. Local SEO is a search engine marketing method that helps you optimize your business for local searches. Let’s take a look at an example first for your better understanding.

When we searched with “driving schools in Ohio” on Google, we got these results.

The results marked with 1 are ads. Those tagged with 2 are organic results and those with number 3 are Google map listing. All these three types of results exemplify local SEO for these driving schools.

Why you need local SEO: Any business that has a physical location, must get local SEO. For small businesses, it’s a must as they can only outplay the big brothers with these local SEO tactics. Today’s internet population starts their online journey with local search and if they don’t find you there, they would eventually end up signing up with your competitors.

Benefits of Local SEO in search marketing:

It improves your position in SERPs. Web pages that appear with business venue details are more likely to get more visits from searches. It eventually grows your conversion rate. Moreover having a local SEO in place would give you a brand visibility and recognition from Google and other search engines as well.

Look at the graph below to understand how the volume of local searches are increasing over the years.

Now the question remains, what you can do to ensure your business is local SEO proof. There are measures to do it. Here are some pointers for your assistance.

How to Local SEO your driving school:

Optimize your site for local SEO: Start with your logo. Logo optimization is very important in local search, as search engines consider the logo first while crawling a site. Make a prominent file name for your logo. For example, instead of logo.png, use a more meaningful title tag like xyz-driving-school.logo. This would give your logo a unique identity. Also make sure the ALT text is appropriate.

Secondly, titles and description of every individual content on your site is important. Here is a local SEO tip for driving schools. Generally a title tag has 70 characters but a local business like driving school must include the name into the title tag to make it more search friendly.

Provide your location details on website: Your website along with every single webpage must be prepared for local searches. Make sure that you include your detailed business address and contact information on every page of your site apart from the ‘Contact’ page. The best way to do it is, add your address and contact either on header or the footer.

Add a map of your business venue on your site. It’s now very easy to add and embed a Google map on your contact page. Moreover, it gives a very strong local signal to search engines.

Focus on local keywords: Don’t go with general keywords. They are broad keywords and would not show you any result on SERP. Instead try narrow local keywords so that your web pages appear when your audience searches with these keywords.

For example, instead of ‘driving school in New York’, you should focus on ‘driving school in Manhattan’. One of the reasons is, the competition is pretty low with local and niche keywords compared to broad ones. And your content reaches to the exact people, who are living in the area and looking for a local solution to their query.

Register to directories: Register your driving school with search engine business directories such as Google Places, Yahoo! Localworks, and Bing Places for Business. Apart from that, there are local directories. There are hundreds of local directories that would let you add your driving school address, but we would recommend you to go slow and choose only the ones that are worth your time.

Go for a G+ business page: Get a Google Plus business page now, if you don’t have one already. Being a member of Google family, it always gets an added advantage on search engine results. But make sure you provide the detailed contact information on your G+ page.

Apart from that, Google prioritizes business with reviews and Google Plus is an ideal platform to get these reviews and ratings from your students. You can always ask your students, who have gotten their driving license successfully to rate your school on your G+ page. This would also enhance your Google Plus authority.

Use structured data markup: This is a bit technical but every driving school must implement it for local search improvement. Once you login to the webmasters tools, trace ‘Additional Tools’. You can find ‘Structured Data Markup helper’ tool under it.

Use the ‘Local Business’ option to tell Google more about your business there. Once you do it, the tool saves your information in a file at schema.org. All you need to do is, download the file and add to your site.

Be sure of social media listings: Social networks like Google Plus, Facebook, FourSquare, Yelp send strong signals to search engines. Be sure to provide your full address and contact details with these social networks. Google considers social networks as any other web pages. Ask for ratings and reviews from your students on these pages, so they get more exposure on SERP.

Over to you: It’s your turn now. Start optimizing your driving school for local searches to get maximum queries from your target audience today.

Digital marketing trends every driving school much know

Digital marketing is going through its dawn. And trust us, there are a lot of opportunities for your driving schools in this era, provided you have already made your mind about going digital.

We’re half way through 2015 and this is the time when you must be prepared for 2016. Here are some digital marketing trends and predictions that every driving school must know to get ready for 2016 with a big bang.

Paid would overcome organic: Organic is good but it’s suitable for getting a steady result in the long run. For immediate and short-term goal achievement, paid methods is more effective. Small businesses like driving schools which are a bit hesitant to invest in paid ads, have understood the fact. And they are ready to increase their digital ad budget to get better results.

Moreover, a study shows that paid results get more clicks than their organic counterparts in a search.

Data would be more important than any other component: So far small businesses did not give ‘data’ its due credit. The common thinking was, digital marketing channels would not contribute much to the business, so there is no need to spend time on monitoring and analyzing the data. However, it’s now proved that data is an essential component of content marketing.

Without data, one cannot simply strategize his activities on the web. Moreover, data gives us insights about our business.

Social media ad spending would grow: Social media has come a long way as a digital marketing channel with Facebook and Twitter playing the protagonist. However, modern age driving schools were more concentrating on increasing organic reach of their social media content so far.

But Facebook, the largest social network has recently decreased their organic reach. And this is the main reason that small and medium companies are compelled to push their content with a little bit of investment.

Content marketing would play a key role: Content marketing is an essential part of digital marketing but driving schools like other small businesses really were not using it to its utmost potential, be in on their website or on the social media channels. The main reason is, business owners have failed the see content marketing as a potential lead generator. Earlier, it was more like a luxury that was used to establish thought leadership.

According to a latest stat, content marketing plays a key role in lead generation. Look at the stat below to understand the importance of content marketing for a small business.

Mobile marketing would not be an option: Having a mobile strategy in place is no more an option now for small businesses. The main reason is, according to a latest finding, two-thirds of USA residents have smartphones and it’s the key device that they use to access the internet.

However, the first thing for going mobile is, check if at all your website is mobile-friendly. There is a mobile friendly test by Google. Run a search with your website. If your website fails the test, you need to go responsive immediately. Moreover, imagine your students accessing your site on the go! This would surely boost your online presence.

Visual story-telling would surpass other content types: Storytelling is definability the future of content marketing, but the latest trend suggests that video is over-performing the rest of content forms to a great extent. And there are many-fold reasons for that. Videos grab our attention easily and the attention-span it creates is much longer than other content types like blog or a social media update.

A recent study found that videos are more shared compared to other types of storytelling methods. On YouTube alone, more than 60 hours of content are uploaded in one minute. Being a driving school, you also have plenty of stories to share with the world. Isn’t it?

Emails would grow: Emails are not dead, neither can social media overtake it from the digital space. A latest study proved that email is still one of the two most popular activities that people do online, apart from search. Moreover, if you compare conversation rates by traffic source, you would find that email conversations are more in number than search and social media.

The main reason is, emails have come a long way. And companies are using emails as a lead generation tool. Static and boring emails have been replaced by interactive and clickable emails, which enable the viewer to land on any webpage from the email.

Over to you: Have you drawn some insights for your driving school from these digital marketing trends? Study them closely and make a better strategy for getting more and more students.

What are the best times to post on social media for driving schools

Have you tried your hand at social media marketing yet?
Have you got the expected results?

Social media is an inevitable digital marketing tool for small businesses and even for driving schools. This is the reason, small to medium business easily jump into the social media wagon without being aware of the basics. Are you one of them? Do you know who your audiences are? What types of content you should post on different social networks? What are the best time slots to post on social media?

Believe us or not, social media success largely depends on the timing. A rightly timed average post can give you better return than a great post, timed at a not-so-good slot. In this article, we will show you some measures on how to know the best times to post on social media and also will educate you about some effective tools.

Know your audience: They are your potential users who would buy from you or at least would send queries. In case of your business, your main target audience is people aged between 14 and 18. So, you need to think of the channels that these people are regular on. Facebook would be an obvious choice. However, you must look for other networks as well in order to ensure the optimum exposure of your content.

According to a latest stat by Statista, 74% US teens and young adults are more inclined to Facebook, followed by Instagram (59%), SnapChat (57%), Twitter (32%), and Vine (30%). You must consider these networks to start with, if not others listed in the graph.

Tools to know when your audience is online: We will show you 4 tools to make you understand how to post on the best time on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

Facebook Insights: Facebook Insights is the built-in analytics tool for business pages on Facebook. This tool has several tabs. You can find insights about your audience’s logged in time under Posts tab.

The graph presents a detailed break-up for every hour and every day of the week. You can easily decide when to post and when not to post with this tool.

Generally it’s seen that your students login to Facebook in the morning and in the evening. However, with the penetration of smartphones, they can access the internet anytime and from anywhere. So, check the data before posting your content.

Followerwonk: Followerwonk is a Moz tool that would analyze your Twitter followers in details; from their geo-location to the time they tweet. Once you enter your Twitter username in the Analyze search box, it would let you access your follower insights.

The app will redirect you to a dashboard, where you can find out the most active hours for your Twitter followers.

As you can see the first few hours and the last few hours of a day are most active for the followers of this driving school. Right below this graph, you will find another graph that will show you the most active hours for the driving school. You can easily compare your time slots of tweeting with your followers’ preferred time.

Now look closely at both these graphs and compare them to find out if you are tweeting when your followers are online. Change the strategy if necessary.

Tweriod: Tweriod is a dedicated tool for Twitter that would show you the insights about your followers and their time on the platform with your Twitter profile. First of all, once you sign up with the tool, it would show you a brief summary of your Tweets’ performance, based on the time posted.

If you click on the Hourly Graphs, it would show you when your followers log in to the site on different days of a week. The graph below shows that the followers of the driving school are mostly active during weekdays, followed by weekends and Mondays on an average.

If you click on the Replies tab, you would notice how tweeps engage and reply your tweets on different days of a week.

Takeoff: Instagram is a must-have tool for businesses like driving schools that deal with teens and young adults. A latest ComScore stat confirmed that 23% of Instagram users are aged between 18 and 24.

Instagram scheduling is not a new concept in the digital era. And there are many tools that would help you doing it. But TakeOff stands out in the list for the simple reason that they offer an option to schedule according to the right time. They do it by simply analyzing your Instagram followers and their online behavior.

Conclusion: So, time to revise your posting strategy, right? Being a driving school, your target audience is very niche and specific. And this is the reason that, a rightly-timed post would show you great results.

Use these tools for your school and do tell us how they help you post your messages on different platforms at the right time at the right audience.

How to do effective Facebook marketing for driving schools

How effectively do you promote your driving school on Facebook? Is it at all working for you?

Facebook marketing apparently seems pretty easy but believe us or not, it’s probably the trickiest of all. The main reason behind it is, Facebook is the most crowded social network, where targeting anyone is pretty easy. But the tricky part is, according to the latest Facebook algorithmic change, Facebook only shows top organic stories to a user. So, it’s very competitive space for marketers.

In this article, we’ll show you how to use Facebook effectively, so it works for your driving school.

Decide your goal: First of all, you need to set your goal for Facebook promotion. Ask yourself. What do you want to achieve from Facebook? Is it brand awareness? Content promotion? Thought leadership? Or sales? This is very important because it is the parameter that sets your primary metrics.

See how cleverly this driving school promotes their passed students to their Facebook audience, so they can get more eyeballs towards their business.

It’s very important to set your goal according to your business type and needs for the time being. Think about your business first and think practically. Set a short-term and a long-term goal but always focus on the short-term goal first to touch the long-term one successfully.

For example, if you want more students from your Facebook marketing, you need to focus more on the effectiveness of your posts. You need to figure out a content bucket that would attract your potential customers. But how to gauge the efforts? Choose the right metrics first. For you, getting more queries on Facebook might be the right action.

Make a strategy: Once you know your goal and set the right metrics, it’s time to create a strategy that cannot fail. Facebook strategy involves two major factors to ponder on, Audience and Messaging, in the exact order.

First consider audience. Ask yourself who all would be interested to consume your content on Facebook. Are they students? Young adults? Millennials? Women? After you figure it out, you need to think of the right messages for them. If you are catering to students, your message would be different than that if you target moms. Strategize accordingly.

Consider the demographics: Your audience is the pillar of your success. You need to understand your audience to do a more efficient Facebook marketing. Pointers like when they log on to the network and what content they like more, would help you create effective content.

Facebook Insights, an built-in analytics tool, would show you a detailed analysis on this. (LINK BACK TO FACEBOOK ARTICLE)

Set the right voice and tone: Facebook is an interactive platform, where your audience can directly talk to you. It can be a query or a general conversation, but you always should make them feel at home. A pre-determined voice and tone would help you a lot to interact with your audience effectively.

Your future students are the deciding factor to set the right tone. Consider their preference and ageto end up with a unique brand tone. As you can see from the image, voice and tone are two separate aspects. Voice is the general idea of branding while tone is a more direct approach. Strategize carefully.

Create a content calender: After you fix these two factors, you need to decide how and when to post on Facebook. Always think ahead. Posting random ideas now and then will not work. First decide what would be the frequency of posting on your Facebook page. Keep the number between 1 and 3 for a day. If you have a small community, posting once a day would do. If you have a larger fan base, you can post 3 times a day at most.

Second step to be more organized is, create a content calendar one month ahead. For example, if this is July 28, start preparing the content calendar for August. This would save a lot of time for you. Moreover, you can concentrate on Facebook campaigns and contests, if you don’t need to worry about your Facebook posts everyday.

Create content and boost: Now it’s time to create content for your future students. As mentioned in the beginning of the article, Facebook has dropped the organic reach for non-promoted posts. This means that you need to spend some bucks to make your posts appear on your fans’ newsfeed.

You must be thinking that spending on Facebook ads would not be feasible for you as a small business. But with a planned ad budget, you could surely overcome the issue.

Let’s do a simple math. You spent 4 to 5 hours a week in creating your Facebook content and posts. Organically it would reach to 1 to 2 percent of your audience. If you spend 1 to 2 dollar per post, it would increase your reach to at least 20 to 30 percent of your audience. Your content does deserve it, isn’t it?

Your turn: Start with your Facebook marketing today. It can give your driving school the desired exposure in your neighborhood quickly and cost-effectively.

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