my business - can you help?

nickb_2581

Hello

Hope im ok to pick peoples brains on a facet of my business im trying to develop. The basic story is ive set up a sister company to my dad’s private hire coach firm. Its call goldstar self drive (self explanatory but it’s a vehicle hire company).

Initially im planning on specializing in people moving vehicles from 7-17 seats, currently I have a fleet of 2 vehicles (15 seat mini buses) one of which is out on a 1yr contract and the other the start of our base fleet. Im expecting a 9 seat Renault traffic next week and a 7 seat MPV shortly after. Not a huge range I no but I do have in place accounts with various suppliers for vehicles as and when I feel we need them. I made the decision not to start with a huge fleet and no business but as I get a feel for the vehicles that are required by customers I can add these appropriately. Anyway that’s a little about the business.

My main problem now im up and running is advertising I need to raise awareness within the local community about my service.

Things ive implemented so far are

· Yellow Pages Ad
· Yell.com listing
· Various free listing sites on the net
· Web site (not hosted on my domain yet) http://assets.flexyshop.co.uk/goldstar/site/selfdrive/
· Sign writing on the 2 mini buses
· Business cards
· Embroided t-shirts


Things im planning on implementing

· a sticker campaign for the web site. Just purely with the web site address on as that is my shop window. Planning on sticking them around the local area in places people will look i.e bus shelters, other local businesses (with permission) but am still looking for ideas on places to stick them.

· Write an article on digital tachgrapghs and speed limiters and there impact for the self drive customer as ive found not a great deal u can actually understand on this in layman’s terms anyway. Submit that to wikipedia with a link to my web site. Hopefully boosting me up the google rankings
· Myspace and facebook accounts again for google
· Listing on more online business listing sites

• Making a spreadsheet of potential contacts in terms of local social clubs, sports clubs, religious groups, corporate and so on. Then create a HTML type email advertising my service with a discount code attached as an incentive

• Contacting the council as they are known to hire mini buses when needed.

• Providing a quality service to encourage word of mouth

If anyone can add to or expand any of the above id really appreciate it. Thanks in advance

Steel_2

Hi nickb_2581

Congratulations on setting up your new business! As your Dad already has a business you know what delights await you I run my own business and boy, do I wish I knew what lay in store for me...I'm having fun now but I spent most of my first year in a state of shock :rotfl:

I've had a look through your post and a few questions spring to mind.

You've mentioned you're going to make a list of potential places to find business, but didn't mention who is most likely to use your service.

Can I ask, who exactly is your target market?

Who would use a vehicle hire service? Why would they use you in preference to one of your competitors? Where do they live? What sort of house do they have? Where do they shop, eat, socialise....? And the big ones: what problems are you solving for them? How are you making their lives easier? What, to them, constitutes a Gold Service?

A common problem with marketing a business is many owners start by doing the scattergun approach - they try and be all things to all people. What ends up happening is your main message gets diluted in an effort to try and appeal to everyone and you end up disappearing into the crowd of other owners in the same market.

Start by pinning down all the different groups of people who would use your service and then logically and methodically design a marketing campaign for each of them which targets their wants and needs. You'll probably have a long list but it's a very worthwhile exercise. After that, if you decide to do an email campaign you will have a very good idea of which are the most profitable markets to go for and exactly what message you want to appeal to them with.

For example, I run a B2B business and I could offer my services to every single other business that's out there, no matter what industry. But for the next six months I have restricted myself to marketing to businesses of a particular size that turnover a particular amount of money in a particular industry. I go to the same events they do, the same networking meetings they do and write articles for free to get into the magazines they read. Once I've built up a strong presence and am well known in that area I move onto begin marketing to another target audience on my list. I may be B2B and you're B2C but the principles are the same and would work for you.

Things I've learnt from being in business
1) Keep a close eye on your Yellow Pages spend and don't allow yourself to be talked into increasing the size of your ad by them. Ask everyone who phones you where they got your details from and don't be afraid to cancel your ad after a year if your find the amount of business it brings in is paltry. I know far too many business owners who continue paying a vast amount of money to Yellow Pages without ever testing the amount of business they get back.

2) Once you've written your articles, put them on your website. The more often you update the content on your website with keyword rich info the more often Google will visit to scan and put you up the rankings.

3) The most interesting sticker campaign I've seen was for an American TV channel whose logo was yellow. They went round designing stickers for anything that was yellow. At one point they put stickers on bananas with the words "another great use for the colour yellow!" You could do something around the colour gold or star shapes??

Anyway, just a few thoughts. Hope this helps.

justpaper

nothing much to say,. but love the site,. nice and neat, str8 to the point, if your after a good uk host, drop me a pm and ill pass on the details,

Note to everyone,. i dont work for the host etc etc, all of my sites are hosted with them, its hard to find good UK hosters these days!!

fguk

Nick

If your old man is ok with it, steal his customer list and market to them for a quick business boost. They already know the other company, and some of them may have a requirement for smaller vehicles. Its a foot in the door of lots of companies hopefully.

Good luck with it.

nickb_2581

thanks for all the contributions, really has helped to hear peoples thoughts.

ive come up with a list of new strategies id like to implement after hearing peoples ideas, again if you have the time please feel free to critique



A direct email campaign at target groups such as Sports Teams, Religious Groups, Social Groups, Corporate and Students

Postcard size flyer drop at places target groups frequent

Measure results and target high response groups with direct snail mail literature

Devise competition for school kids i.e. create a logo/flyer for my company with some sort of prize related to the business or sponsor the a school sports team by providing a mini bus free of charge for away games. Id use this as a potential route into the local paper to raise awareness of the company and a good way to portray the company in a positive light

Publicise safety features of vehicles in literature

Publicise eco friendly company aims and responsibilities

Itemise all aspets ive identified and focus on only 3 at a time to ensure quality over quantity once profile is raised in these areas ill move onto the next

Always ask the question “why should people do business with me rather than anyone else?”

Fight on value not price

Sponsor boards up at local teams or sponser kit

Advertise on local taxis

Get family to spead word and market at there work/meeting places

Target the pink pound by droping flyers in the gay quarter of notts

Identify private halls of residence where mature students are likely to be

Adding the BSc to end of my name may enhance perceived image (educated, trust worthy etc). Not 100% sure on this one would be interested to hear views on this as im not completly sure it represents trust and alot of ppl dislke students for some reason or another.

Offer free ½ tank of fuel for 24hr hire and full tank for 48hrs+ for local sports teams

Always have some sort of offer on

Price match competitors like for like (if possible)

Quote prices per head as well as vehicle alone

Ask all phone inquirys where they heard about us so I can measure my various advertising strategies

Devise a sticker campgain that is thought provoking and image associative (goldstar) rather than promoting using words

Advertise on my dad buses

Use his contacts to create trade

honeypop

Regarding this: Adding the BSc to end of my name may enhance perceived image (educated, trust worthy etc). Not 100% sure on this one would be interested to hear views on this as im not completly sure it represents trust and alot of ppl dislke students for some reason or another.

Personally this is unlikely to make me want to use you any more than someone else. If anything it will make me think 'pretentious' and put me off. I don't mean this to be harsh, just giving my opinion.

You have some excellent other ideas though, good luck!

fguk

Agree with honeypop on that one.

If you were a surveyor, accountant, lawyer, management guru, IT specialist, then I would probably be interested in your BSc, but as it is you are running a self drive company.

Now thats not intended to belittle your degree qualification, or your business, I just dont think its appropriate use. You can of course, and appear to have already, use your degree experience to plan, implement and monitor ideas for your business.

Your other ideas seem good to me. Remember, over anything, people like to buy from people. Keep at it and eventually, with everything you are planning, it will happen for you. Good luck.

MercilessKiller

Just a point, spelling is an issue:

"

What you need to NO!"


Sorry to be picky nice website though! Not sure if I like all the javascript from a technical point of view. I guess its fine for the average user mind...

barrymung

Have a look at: www.supply2.gov.uk and www.schoolquote.co.uk

both enable you to register your details and tender for jobs.

There is money to be made in taxi'ing vulnerable people back and forth to various places (Courts, Government offices, schools etc) although your vehicles will need blacked out windows and your drivers CRB checks etc...

Edit: Just re-read and you are offering private hire! D'Oh!

However, is it worth getting in some drivers on a casual basis who could use the vehicles for eg: School runs when they are not being hired out? It'd bring in some extra income in those all-so-important early days.

sagalout99

Just a point on the website.

Firstly, its nice to see someone actually get a nicely designed site done - it looks pretty decent for a small business. The fonts dont really fit in with your logo. but to be honest your logo is pretty weak and the site would look worse if it took a design key from it.

However whilst the design and build (to a point) is good, theres been little thought to SEO, which in your case is pretty essential if you want people to actually search for and find your site..

Just a few quick wins:

Title tag - get some more descriptive text in there. Take out the phone number - no one will google for that - and replace it with your town/area, which is much more likely to be searched for and the title tag has a lot of weight with search engines. Eg I'd be much more likely to search for Nottingham self drive which at the moment isnt mentioned anywhere on you homepage as a title or in the content.

Meta Tags - not as important as they were but the description tag is what appears in the search results so get something concise and descriptive in there to encourage people to click though.

Fleet page / Content - The web designer has used litebox for the popups, which is a nice enough standards compliant technique, but is designed more for images than text. You've got some useful content hidden in those images that a search engine just cant pick up and spider. If you want to stick with a similar feel, ask your designer to check out lytebox - its a derivative of litebox which allows for whole chunks of html to be brought through and displayed rather than just images. eg. At the moment the only content on your fleet page being picked up by the search engines is:

'feel free to contact us for more detailed specification on any vehicle option'

Other minor things are the primary nav being made up of image tags - image replacement techniques are more SEO friendly and would look identical

Oh, just spotted a more major one - header tags. ie, your pages should always have a <h1> tag as a minimum an dthen <h2> for less important headings etc. In simple terms, google will search for users requests by first trying to match title text, the h1 text, the h2,h3,h4,h5,h6 and then paragraph text. Its therefore important that you have appropriately though out content in your header text thats likely to match potential search terms.

Hope some of that helps. As I say, the site is generally good - a lot better than you usually see on here anyway, but it just needs a bit of final polish to get it really working for you.

Moneymaker

I agree with all the above and would add:

The "Home" link on the home page is redundant and only serves to confuse visitors. Clicking on it simply reloads the page. What's the point of that?

On your "Contact Us" page you've exposed your email address. Even worse, you've used "info@". This is one of the most-spammed email addresses so get rid of it.

Use only the email form and make sure it sends messages to a secret "receive-only" address that you never divulge or use for sending emails. That will reduce the potential for spam enormously.

The message box is too small. People hate to type in a postage-stamp size window. Give them room!

When someone DOES use your email form to send a message, it redirects to flexyweb.co.uk !!
And it fails to send an automatic acknowledgement email - not very friendly at all.

You have almost no "content". You'll attract more search engine interest if you devote a few pages to local information. For example, how about:
Places to visit.
How to look after your vehicle.
What do do in the event of an accident/breakdown.
What happens if you get a parking ticket (i.e, who pays).
What criteria must I meet in order to hire? (i.e. clean driving licence, minimum age etc.)

There are lots of subjects you could write about which would be both helpful and interesting to prospective hirers. And, if you mention local places on each page (H1 headers, remember) it will improve your search engine results.