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.

Website templates for driving schools

Do you have a website? Is it professional enough to work for your business? This is the first question that you should ask yourself before diving in the online marketing pool. Simply put, having a professional looking website is the first step of having a digital life. This is the place where your customers land after searching about you on different search engines.

So, it needs to be user friendly and at the same time functional for your business. You need attractive and useful website templates for your driving school. Browse through the gallery. Let us introduce you to some of the most popular website templates.

You can choose any one of them or consult us to know which one would work best for your requirement.

Growth School: It’s a responsive website template with a large header image that would surely hook your audience up. Right under the header image, you can set three different widgets to add three functionalities of your business.

Road Rules: Road Rules theme has a similar header like Growth School, but it has an online form on the right. It makes it easy for your students to book a session without going anywhere. Under the header, it gives you an option to add a Call-to-Action button. You can see the space to announce new offers and discounts.

The Professional: Like the first two, this driving school website theme also flaunts a bigger header image. However, the best part of the template is, you can create a Call-to-Action button right on the header image.

Good Traffic: This driving school website template is quite different from others. You can set a slider on the header with different images to make it look more professional. It also gives you an option to add a Call-to-Action button on the header.

These are some of the most popular website templates we offer to driving schools. Now you must be thinking why you should choose us. Here are the reasons

They are search engine friendly: Our website templates are created on WordPress technology, which is considered the best CRM for getting Google’s attention. Millions of people search for driving schools in their respective locality. In this scenario, if your website and web pages are not optimized properly for such searches, you may lose hundreds of queries everyday. WordPress built websites definitely have an edge over others.

Logo design? Now easy: Logo is the brand identity of a business. Your business website too needs a logo to look complete and professional. With any of our template, you don’t need to worry about your logo. Our professional graphic artist team will design it for you. You can use it as your brand signature on business cards, deal coupons, brochures, or anywhere you want.

Easy coupon marketing: As a business, you must have plenty of coupons to distribute to your potential students. Our website template can help you create and promote your deal coupons on the website with a proper Call-to-Action button. You can give us the content, or we can do it for you. If you need any creative input to design your new coupon, we are ready with ideas to fit your website needs.

Dynamic image library: We have a large dynamic image library, so you can choose the most suitable ones for your business website. All the images are licensed. So, you don’t need to worry about any copyright issues. You can also add your own pictures, if you want. We will edit them to make them look professional and glue to your website.

Best industry standards: Our website templates are created based on the best industry standards. Be it the color scheme, or the placements of Call-to-Action buttons; the location of contact details or the size of the buttons, every element of the templates is built while keeping your business in mind.

Responsive design: Responsive web design is the need of the other, because hundreds of your target audience access internet from their smart phones and tablets as well as laptops. Your business website must be ready for each one of your audience group; be it a teen or a parent.

Easy social media integration: All these templates come with easy social media integration, where you can add your social media buttons easily on your website. No need to install a separate plugin. Out best package includes content automation. It means that it will publish your website content to your social media pages on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and others. .

Non-stop technical support: Our technical team is ready for your queries, be it an issue or some small changes. Not only we will technically help you, but also will show you how to do it, if you wish.

Get More Driving School Students From Social Media

Do you get enough calls and emails from potential students for your driving school?
Have you considered social media marketing to help with that?

As a driving school, you want to grow a profitable, healthy business that creates safe drivers. Social networks can help you in multiple ways. It’s the easiest way to connect with your target audience, answer their questions and confusions, and build brand awareness.

In this article, we’ll show you how to get more leads and students from social media.

Research your audience

The center of your social media marketing is your audience, the right people for your business. If you own a driving school, you must be looking for new students in your locality.

To target them the right way, you need to identify them correctly. From the chart below, you can see how your target audience use social networks.

Age matters a lot here. For example, your target audience largely belongs to the teenage group. Consider those social networks, where these people are more frequent. Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram may be of great help, depending on your locality.

Run social media ads

Facebook has an amazing way to do it. The minimum age requirement for getting a driving license in the US varies from 14 to 17, depending on your state law. Teens interested in learning to drive could be interested in learning to drive with you. So they are your target audience.

You must have heard of Facebook age targeting. You can apply it for your business page as well.

We also have “interest” targeting on Facebook. People who have an interest in driving, cars, long drives, and traveling might also be interested to take your classes.

Don’t do push-selling: Social media is a wrong place to be over-sales-y. Your business is not an exception. If you talk too much about your business and why people should buy something, it may ruin your user experience to a great extent. For this reason, there should be a right balance between entertainment content, educational content and promotional content.

The 4-1-1 rule, invented by Tippingpoint Labs and Joe Pulizzi states that for every self-serving tweet, there should one RT and 4 tweets by others. Follow the rule.

Showcase success stories: Social media allows you to share your success stories with the world with ease. You too have many students who have passed the driving test successful. The more you share such stories, the more people get to know about your institute.

Sharing these stories will give your audience a push to shoot queries. And sharing real people’s stories always creates more impact on the people, who are viewing it from the other side.

Ask students to refer you: Social media references plays a vital role in the buying behavior of online audiences. And it can spread like wildfire on social media. The moment your students refer your school on social networks, their peers can see it. According to one statistic, 79% people trust online reviews to buy something online.

More shares, more visibility – the rule is simple. Moreover, references from known people will help you get new students.

Offer suggestions and tips

One of the most effective ways to get the attention of your audience is, offer help. Be it information on how to get a driving license easily or driving trivia, you must engage with your audience regularly on social media. It builds trust with your audience and credibility on your part. Moreover, this is another way to establish yourself as an industry thought leader.

However, this should be a regular practice. You can’t expect huge engagement in the first few months. Results may take a longer time than that, but consistent efforts will surely be paid back by your social media community.

Explain the need for your driving lessons

Sometimes, people cannot feel the necessity of signing up for a service or product, until they are made to understand the need. Social media marketing works wonderfully to fill in the gap. Sometimes, you need to make your audience believe that they need the service and very urgently.

Offering a discount for a limited period of time is a good idea as well. Our advice would be, be consistent with such offers. It creates a lot of brand awareness within a very short span of time. Yes, social media can increase sharing of your specials, increasing your sales.

Add CTAs (Call-To-Actions)

You want your audience to take a desired action from your social media activities. Help them take the action by providing them with a CTA (Call-to-Action). There are a number of ways that you can add a CTA to your social media posts. Sometimes you may need to write it in text with your update or sometimes you may need to add CTA buttons.

No matter how you do it, make sure to offer a CTA for your audience. And create a proper landing page for the audience as well – new leads from your social media campaign should land on proper pages of your website.

Conclusion

Now it’s your turn. Start your social media marketing now and stand out in the crowd.

Driving Schools, You Have Competition

Do you know about your competitors? Do you know searching online is the easiest way to find out about them?

You may be thinking that having and running a driving school is an offline affair and you know all of them by name. What’s the need to track your competition online in the first place? How can tracking them online help your business? Well, believe it or not, there may be many driving schools in your location that you’re completely unaware of.

Let’s dig deeper.

When we searched for “driving schools in Austin Texas”, we got these results on the first page.

The results marked in dark red signify driving schools’ paid ads. And the ones marked in light red are the organic results of the search phrase. Run a similar search for your locality. The results might amaze you.

If you just tried to search in your location, did you know about each and every driving school listed on the first and second page of search results? No.

Now let’s take a look at how to track your competitors online.

Click on any result that you ran for your location to analyze the website and social media presence. Ideally you should get all the links to their social media accounts from their website. Note them to compare with your own website and social media presence. This process would be beneficial for you in three ways:

You might come across some new competitors.
You will find out who is doing really well on social media
You can analyze what they are doing so you can get better results yourself

This is the first step toward learning about your competitors online. And the story continues on social media as well. Let’s make a similar search on Facebook.

You can get hundreds of results available from the Facebook search listing. And that’s not it. Many driving schools are active on Twitter as well.

These are the easiest two ways to know about your competitors that are already active and have invested a good deal of time and money on their Internet marketing. You can follow the same process to analyze your competitors on Facebook and Twitter. It will help you have a closer look at their social media activities.

Taking a cue from these data, we can safely say that if you are not committed to digital yet, you’re missing out on a lot.

Here are three factors to consider:

Your audience searches online for driving schools: According to marketingprofs.com, 91% of adults use search engines to find information about a business on the web. And 91% of them successfully find the desired information online. The driving school industry is not an exception.
Your competitors are online: As shown above, your competitors are already present on the Internet. As your audience searches online, chances are that they would choose one among them without trying any other business that operates only offline or has a weaker online presence relative to the competition. Food for thought?
Digital brings more attention and generates sales: So, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to understand that an online presence is needed to compete, and a stronger online presence yields more competitive results. That means more website traffic and sales. Moreover, if you’re present online, you can see how your competitors are in your area. It’s an open forum.

But tracking your competition will not suffice if you don’t use the insights for the betterment of your own business. We’ll show you how to use your competitors’ data to steal their customers in a future article. Now, let’s focus on what you need to do to surpass other driving schools in your location.

How to overshadow your driving school’s competitors with digital marketing

Get a properly designed website: Any online identity starts with a website. If you don’t have one, get one first.

A professional looking website defines your brand online. It should integrate all other marketing channels, contact details, and FAQs to offer your audience a complete user experience. A better website is more trustworthy, and if there is one attribute that parents/adults and teens care about for their driving school, it’s trustworthiness.

Search Engine Optimization and PPC

Look at the first image of this article. We have some paid results as well as some organic results. Paid advertisements are essential to get the fastest results, whereas organic search results take awhile to trigger, but once present, are valuable and long-lasting.

You can try both to start with. Paid ads will spread awareness of your business like a wildfire. And SEO will do its bit to support your organic activities and can eventually take over in effectiveness.

There are local listings as well.

Results marked in red are local listings. And as you can see, these results are equally helpful for influencing your target audience’s decision. If your business is not listed on these sites, you’re missing a lot of opportunities.

Content Marketing and Social Media

It’s perhaps the most important aspect of digital marketing. And there are a hundred ways to do it successfully. Let’s take a look at some of them.

Twitter is a great platform to connect with your target audience. And some driving schools are using the tool to strengthen their relationship with their customers and potential customers by offering useful tips and suggestions.

Many people must have passed the driving test after taking your classes. Why not show pictures of your and your students’ success on your social media pages? This is an effective way to generate awareness of your brand and at the same time evokes a lot of positive buzz around your driving school.

Ratings and reviews

According to a BrightLocal survey, 79% of all online searchers trust online ratings and reviews before choosing a service. So, if you have one hundred happy customers, their ratings would help you get another hundred students, to say the least. Wondering how would that help? Let’s see!

These are Google Ratings. Whenever your target audience searches with a related keyword, he sees such ratings on the search engine results page. The more and better ratings you have, the more likely you are to get potential customers to click on links to your website and ultimately contact you. It also works similarly on Facebook.

Facebook has an option enabling business page visitors to rate any business on its business page. And these ratings show on the graph search. As your customers grow in numbers, you must encourage them to rate you online, so you can show them off and get more students.

Now it’s your turn!

Did you know that you had so many competitors? Many driving schools don’t. Start searching today and let us know about your experience.

Six Must-Haves For Your Driving School Website

Your potential student needs to enroll in a driving school. There are several in town, including yours. How do you make sure they choose yours?

These days, people find their driving school on the Internet. When they land on your website, give them everything they need to choose you.

These six simple changes can make a huge difference for your business.

Homepage

Your homepage will either start or stall the conversation between you and your student. Clean web design will connect you and your customer in a simple, intuitive manner.

Most people will spend 15 seconds on a website before moving on. That means you have 15 seconds to communicate everything they need to know.

Step back and see it through their eyes.Can they navigate the home page or is it challenging for them to find the information they need? Is there an attractive balance of content and imagery, or is the page jumbled? If you were looking for a driving school, would you stay on the page?

A professional home page makes potential students confident in you and brings them to your driving school.

Contact Information

A student needs to know where your school is and they need to be able to reach you.Make it easy for them. Place your address and phone number in an obvious location, such as the top, right-hand side of the page.

If they have any questions, they can reach out to you on the spot, giving you an opportunity to build rapport. If they prefer to communicate through email, make sure your contact forms work. The easiest way to lose a customer is by playing hard to get.

State Validation

Potential students want to make sure your driving school will help them earn their license. They need to know that your driving school is accredited.Make sure you explicitly tell them that you are approved by your state’s DMV. Have a picture of the DMV’s logo on the page to establish your credibility instantly. Doing soallays their fears and allows them to move forward with the enrollment.

Pricing

Students need to know the price of your driving instruction. If they don’t know how much your driving lessons cost, they won’t enroll in your classes. If they can’t find your pricing information, they become suspicious and look for another school.

You don’t want to have the home page plastered with your pricing, but you do want to encourage your customers to sign up for a lesson. Draw them to your pricing page. Make them want to take your classes and urge them to act. Nobody likes to be told what to do, but most people need to be pointed in the right direction.

Content

To stand out, give your customers more than any other school. Show them that you care about them and about what you do by providing content that is purely educational. It proves that you are an expert.

To ensure your customers to have a smooth experience on your website, edit everything twice. Typos drive potential customers to your competitors.

Differentiate

Find the things that make your driving school different. If some of your instructors have law enforcement experience, advertise that. If one of your instructors was a professional athlete, talk about it. If you’ve helped ten thousand students gain their driver’s license, share that fact.

Find the unique truths about your driving school and bring them to life. Doing so gives your driving school personality. It makes your school memorable. When your potential student is thinking about the schools they researched, we want them to think of you.

We know these six tips are obvious, but we’ve seen dozens of driving schools miss out on students because of their web design. We want to ensure students enroll with you instead of your competitors.

These days, your website is more important for your driving school than it’s ever been. A clean, intuitive design can give you a decided edge over your competitors. Just remember to see your site through the eyes of your customers. Make it easy for them to choose you.

How to Write a Driving School Business Plan

When you open a driving school, you must consider a number of things before the rubber meets the road. A well-crafted business plan helps plot your course, secure funding, and ultimately succeed.

In this article, we discuss components of most business plans, according to the U.S. Small Business Administration, tailored to your driving school’s needs.

Executive Summary

Your readers, creditors and investors, want to know why your driving school will succeed. Your goal is to show that you are a good investment. For this reason, the Executive Summary may be the most important section in your business plan.

Here, you give your reader a snapshot of where your company is and where you want to take it. Show them why your driving school will thrive. Typically, entrepreneurs write this after they’ve written the rest of their business plan.

If your driving school is established, include such information as a Mission Statement, Growth Highlights, and a Summary of Future Plans.

If you are just starting out on this business adventure, focus on your background and why you decided to open your school. Show your reader you’ve studied the market and that you’re bringing a unique approach.

Company Description

After the Executive Summary, give your readers a more grounded view of your business. In the Company Description, you can quickly communicate how your driving school stand out.

This section is essentially an extended elevator pitch for readers and potential investors. Tell them who your customers are as specifically as you can, and explain your competitive advantages. For example, offering behind-the-wheel training, classroom training, and road tests may make you more competitive than many other driving schools in your area.

Market Analysis

After your pitch, your reader will want to see proof to back it up. The Market Analysis section is where you can describe the local market to explain your insights. Here, you have an opportunity to show your reader why your business matters.

Give them an overview of the market. They want to know how big it is and how fast it has historically grown. They want to hear about emerging trends in driving school education. Being knowledgeable will show them how you will win over your target consumers and how much market share you can gain.

Give them this information and breakdown your pricing structure. Tell them about your competition and tell them about how the government regulates driving schools. Demonstrating expertise will make your readers confident in you.

Organization & Management

After you’ve shown them you have a driving school that’s right for the market, you must show them how you’ll bring it to life and keep it moving.

Great people make a great driving school. This section should show your readers how your company is organized, and who owns it. They want to know about you and your team because that will help them see where your driving school is headed.

A simple organizational chart will show them the basic structure of your business. Provide as much information as you can about the owners and the management team. Show the reader why your driving school is unique and why it will succeed.

Service or Product Line

Once they see the expertise and experience behind your driving school, you can jump into the strategic nuances of your product. Explain the benefits your students, and potential students, gain from your school. Describe the scope of your services.

When you make these considerations, you must decide whether or not you will buy cars for your school, or whether your instructors will provide their own vehicles for instruction. There are positives and negatives to each decision.

If you buy cars, you have complete quality control over the vehicles. You can install a secondary brake system, instructor perspective mirrors, and even a steering wheel for instructors to keep your students as safe as possible. You can be sure your vehicles have the proper insurance for student drivers.

While these safety perks have huge marketing value, they are also a large upfront investment. Allowing your instructors to use their own vehicles can reduce your school’s initial costs. You may not have the same credibility that you have when you own your own fleet of cars. You will have to make sure your team is properly insured, which is more administrative work. But you can still provide your students with the best instruction around.

You must also decide the scope of your services. Some driving schools offer behind-the-wheel training, and nothing else. Others specialize in classroom training. And some offer behind-the-wheel training, classroom training, and road tests. What does your school offer? Explain the reasoning behind your choice.

Marketing & Sales

Once your reader understands your product, they’ll want to know how you’re going to generate customers. You need to explain how you’re going to penetrate the market and build a customer base. Sales forecasts will be heavily influenced by the quality of the driving school’s marketing.

Great marketing brings people to you. It is a mirror that helps people see themselves as they want to be. It is simply helpful. It educates your consumer and begins the sales conversation. You want to show your reader how you will make it easy for your customer to choose you by sharing your integrated marketing plan.

Funding Request

Based on the scope of your driving school, you may need funding. Tell investors and creditors how much you need now and how much you’ll need over the next five years. Let them know how you will use the funds. De-risk their investment by providing financial situational plans for the future. For instance, you can offer a debt repayment plan, or you may plan to be acquired.

Financial Projections

With the information above, you should be able to project how much money your driving school will make over the next five years. If you are already in business, tell your reader how your company performs.

How much money you make depends on the size of your market, the scope of your services, and your marketing strategy. Make sure you explain how these factors play into your projections.

Make sure your projections match financial requests. If you make an assumption in your projections, explain it.

Ultimately, you have to show creditors and investors why your business matters. By knowing your market, building a solid team, and investing in marketing, they see you as a safer bet.

Why do you need keyword focused marketing

Do you focus on keywords in your online marketing efforts?
Do you know a keyword focused marketing can give you more conversions?

You might have heard that keyword focused marketing is now dead. We don’t say that. Keywords will be alive till people search on the web, be it Google or Facebook; Bing or LinkedIn. However, search engines started looking at keywords with a different angle. Initially, there was keyword stuffing. Search engine optimizers used to stuff their content with keywords without considering the user experience. But now it’s all about how smoothly you add a keyword and how enhanced your reader experience turns out to be.

Wondering how it’s different from yesteryears?

CoSchedule sorted the puzzle with the easiest way possible.

We will take you through the complete journey step by step.

How people search on search engines like Google: Your potential customers search about your business on Google, Bing, Yahoo. If your marketing strategy does not consider the related queries that your users might search with, you would lose plenty of leads, eventually customers.

This screen shot from Google Keyword Planner shows that more than 4 million people searched for “Driving school in Brooklyn, New York” in the month of May. And this is not the end. If you dig deeper, you will find that there are hundreds of related keywords that your future customers search with.

To sustain in the competition against other driving schools, you need to focus on all the related keywords. This is Google, now let’s see how your customers search on social media. There are two factors to consider: Social media readiness and Social media reviews.

For example, when your customers search on Facebook with your business keyword, they look at the top results and ratings.

If your social media profiles are not optimized for these searches, chances are very less that your driving school would appear on the search page, let alone the top positions.

How to run keyword focused campaigns online:

Identify keywords: First of all, you need to identify the most important keywords for your business. If you successfully do it, half the job is done. Google Adwords is the best tool to do it.

Start with each keyword that comes into your mind while thinking of your business and search with each one of them to get an idea of the search terms.

In each category, you will find sub-groups.

Click each one of them to know more. Finally jot down all the keywords. They are your main keywords that you need to work on and include in your content pieces.

Create calendar with focused keywords: Once you are aware of the keywords that you have to focus on your marketing, you need to create a calendar, to make sure every keyword is covered.

Content calendar includes website content, blog posts and social media updates. When you will decide a blog post title on the calendar, you can mention the focused keywords as a reminder. Similarly mention the focused keywords for each website content and social media updates.

Incorporate keywords: Now you are all set to create content with those keywords. Since you have the content calendar ready with you, it will help you remind of the associated keyword with each content piece.

However, according to the latest Google guidelines, you must not overdo with the keywords in your content. So, always try incorporating them naturally without interrupting the natural cadence. Long tail keywords is a better idea to go about.

Optimize for SEO: Once you are done with content creation, it’s time to make them ready for search engines. There are a number of elements that you need to take care of in this category. Look at the image below.

The first highlighted area indicated the Title Tag of your content. This is the area that appears in bold, when your audience search on Google. You must include the focused keyword in this section. Take reference from the calendar.

The second highlighted area is the description part. It includes the summary of the content. If a searcher wants to know what the page is all about, he would look at this part. So, incorporating the main keywords is also a must here.

Distribute content with keywords: You have taken care of the search engine part, now let’s move on to social media. Yes, keywords are important for social media marketing as well. In most of the sites, you can include the keywords in descriptions. However, hashtags also play a crucial role here.

While posting on Facebook, make sure you have all the keywords in the heading and description parts. Sometimes, it’s seen that Facebook does not fetch the required details from a link. You can edit or include the keywords manually, if it happens with you. Here is how to do it.

All the highlighted area are editable. Once you click on these areas, Facebook will let you edit these portions with your own words. Include your keywords carefully here.

Conclusion: Hope we have made you understand the importance of having a keyword focused approach in digital marketing. Are you doing it right? Let us know.

Driving School Advertising Basics – Part Two

All businesses, driving schools included, must advertise to receive business, and the problems with advertising are always the same: (1) Which advertising is the best for driving schools? (2) What should my advertising budget be? In this series of articles, we will answer these questions in sequence. When you are done, you will know the basics of driving school advertising. (For “Part One – Choosing The Best Driving School Advertising” – click here.)

Part Two – Determining Your Driving School Advertising Budget

Getting your driving school advertising budget right will forever be a work in progress; however, if you stick to these principles, you are likely to turn a profit on your advertising and not overspend. As many driving school owners know, one tricky part of the business is pure cash management, because you are paid for services in advance of providing them. That means your bank account can sometimes look much bigger than it is. Getting control of your advertising budget will help you create predictable revenue for your business.

So let’s get to it!

1. Focus on Return-On-Investment (ROI).

When it comes to advertising the single, most important goal is to find a return-on-investment in your advertising. Return-On-Investment is a straightforward business concept: You want to profit from your investment. If you don’t your ROI is bad. If you do, it is good and could maybe be better.

2. Find Your Magic Number.

Spending more or less money is simply a measure of determining how much business you want or don’t want once you find your “magic number”.

Sure, it gets a bit more complicated than that, but fundamentally, you want to know that if you spend $1 on advertising, you are earning more than $1 back. That also means before determining your budget, you should always ask your advertising provider how they will demonstrate to you that you are earning money from your investment.

You may try out Internet marketing or school uniform sponsorships and learn that for every $100 you spend, you are making $300 in new student bookings. From there you may do additional work to optimize your advertising so that maybe you can spend $75 to get the same result.

The most important part is that you’ve found that, more often than not, if you spend $100 a certain way, you will make a profit for your business.

3. Determine Your Marketing Mix.

Another rule of thumb is that you want to try different forms of advertising. We call this your “marketing mix”, which refers to the mixture of different approaches you take to your advertising. By testing different approaches, you will find what works and refine your budget. Over time, you will get better at advertising and make more money.

Generally, it is significantly easier to measure the effectiveness of Internet advertising than traditional advertising, because you can track all of the activities a new driving school student takes. This includes whether they visited your website, contacted you by email, or even picked up the phone to call you. By tracking this information you can learn exactly how much money you are making (or losing) from your advertising!

Now let’s look at an example – in one year, here is one way you might break down your budget:

James plans to split his advertising budget between ONLINE advertising and OFFLINE advertising. That means 50% will be spent in one area and 50% will be spent in the other.

Online advertising:

35% of my budget will be spent on my website and and showing up on Google.

15% of my budget will be spent on Facebook ads.

Offline advertising:

20% of my budget will be spent on coupons run in local flyers.

15% of my budget will be spent on local, branded sponsorships (i.e. kids’ sports team snacks and uniforms)

15% of my budget will be spent on branded signs for my cars.

Altogether, that totals 100% of my budget.

In this example, James has determined his marketing mix and has a goal for how to spend his budget.

4. Commit Revenue To Your Budget.

Finally, once you have these other principles in mind, the last and equally important one is to make sure you are spending on advertising. Of course this may sound obvious, but it’s really not.

When it’s the middle of winter, and you’re sure that business is going to be slow, should you turn off all advertising? Of course not!

You spent all that time figuring out what advertising works for you, and you need to stick to it. You might decrease your budget slightly, but you shouldn’t stop advertising altogether.

If you do not advertise in the winter, then your spring revenue will be smaller! This is why it is important to commit revenue to advertising. If you do not, you could be sacrificing significant future profits.

5. Experiment With Your Budget.

Experimenting with your budget is the only way you can learn exactly how much money to dedicated to advertising. Driving schools of different ages, locations, and sizes will have different marketing budgets. If you are in a city with a ton of competition from other driving schools, your advertising budget may very well be bigger and more complicated than another well-established driving school that serves a single suburban community.

For this reason, you need to experiment with your budget to see how different forms of advertising perform.

Whether you want to spend $100 or $1000 dollars per month on your driving school advertising, as long as you stick to the rules described above, you should turn a profit. And, yes, we love adding more safe drivers to the road, but really – your driving school business is just that – a business! So let’s make money!

Driving School Advertising Basics – Part One

Driving schools should advertise to get a consistent, growing business, but the problems with advertising are always the same: (1) Which advertising is the best for driving schools? (2) What should my advertising budget be? In this series of articles, we will answer these questions in sequence. When you are done, you will know the basics of driving school advertising.

Part One – Choosing The Best Driving School Advertising

You can basically break driving school advertising down into 2 categories: ONLINE Advertising and OFFLINE Advertising. Online advertising refers primarily to Internet marketing. Offline advertising refers to everything else. In the past, offline advertising was the only option; however, since teens and adults alike use their phones and computers regularly to search online (you do too, right?), online advertising is the faster growing category today.

1. ONLINE Advertising.

Online advertising includes various types of Internet marketing. This includes,

Website design and development
Mobile optimization for phones and tablets
(Free) Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for Google and Bing
(Free) Social media marketing on Facebook, Yelp, and elsewhere
(Paid) Social media marketing on Facebook and elsewhere.
(Paid) Advertising on Google
Email marketing
Coupon marketing

Those are the main classes of online advertising used by driving schools.

A. Advantages Of Online Advertising.

There are two very good reasons to pursue online advertising: (1) Everyone uses the Internet, and you want to be found wherever your customers spend their time; (2) Internet marketing is completely trackable, so you always know if you are making or wasting money.

As you can see in our article about creating your advertising budget, the ability to track Internet marketing allows you to get to the “Magic Number”, which is the ability to say, if I spend $1 on advertising I will earn $2 (or some other exact number) back in revenue. That is a big advantage of Online Advertising that supports the long-term health of your business.

B. Disadvantages Of Online Advertising.

The primary disadvantage of online marketing is it can be quite expensive if not tracked or managed properly. For example, Google Ad Words is a powerful tool for getting found online for terms used by your customers to find driving schools; however, it is very easy to spend more money than you should on terms that customers in your area rarely use to find driving schools online.

2. OFFLINE Advertising

Offline driving school advertising includes the traditional basket of advertising methods. This includes,

Sponsorship of high-school activities
Postcards and coupon mailers
Radio advertising
Newspaper advertising
Partnerships with schools, lawyers, and courts
Community event participation
Signs on cars
Referral incentives
Word-of-mouth

A. Advantages Of Offline Advertising.

Offline advertising methods are extremely important, and no driving school should go completely without them. No matter what anyone says, people will buy from people they trust. Sponsorship of community or athletic events by providing snacks or uniforms, for example, provide a great opportunity to win the hearts and minds of parents and their teens. Being a trusted resource at your local DMV, with nearby traffic attorneys, and/or with the local high-school teachers is also helpful.

As they say, “90% of success is just showing up”, and offline advertising allows you to show up in a very personal way (by literally being somewhere!).

B. Disadvantages Of Offline Advertising.

There are two primary disadvantages for offline advertising: (1) It is difficult to measure the effectiveness of any one form of advertising, which means you usually don’t know exactly where to spend your budget and how much to spend, (2) Some forms of offline advertising are just, well, bad – such as radio and newspaper advertising.

The Bottom Line

Advertising is a very practical part of business – if one form of advertising is better than another, then try to do more of what works and less of what doesn’t. If radio advertising is bad, don’t do it. If Internet marketing is good, do more of it. If Facebook ads are bad, don’t do them. If partnering with local schools and courts is working for you, then develop more partnerships.

In general, you will want a mix of methods to get the maximum effectiveness out of your budget. Diversification allows you to play the odds that some forms of advertising will work even when others don’t. The key is learning from your efforts so that you can create a driving school advertising budget that will make you more and more money.

Let’s emphasize this last point for a second – the goal of our driving school is to make more money. Yes, we want to keep our kids safe and get better drivers on the roads, but this is our business. A business needs to make money. So, let’s make money! Making money requires that you can manage your driving school advertising and its budget.

So, jump to Part Two whenever you’re ready – let’s discuss how you create your advertising budget.

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