Going up against the big boys as a small driving school
The driving school industry is a classic industry with a lot of competition, mostly dominated by big players. As a small business owner, it can be difficult to find your niche in the market, so when we were approached by Houssin, owner of Driving School Snelle, we faced a great challenge. The goal was simple: to find as many customers as possible for as little money as possible.
Establishing the right strategy
The operating area of Rijschool Snelle is in the Hoofddorp and Haarlem region. But it had not been established for too long, and there was little to no activity on the website. So it remained to be seen whether students would want to take lessons with Houssin, and not prefer to take lessons with another or larger driving school. The budget was not infinite, so it was very important to have a good strategy where every euro was spent in the right way. Therefore a good strategy had to be put in place.
Cialdini’s sixth persuasion principle: Sympathy
The first thing we noticed during our conversations was that Houssin was a very sympathetic guy, who really enjoys his lessons and can convey this to students in a very enthusiastic way. With him you can learn to drive seriously, but with a lot of fun. This sympathy had to be conveyed to the website visitors, because we could imagine that the target group, mainly young people, would find this very appealing.
If we go back in human psychology for a moment, we know from research by the world-renowned Robert Cialdini that there are six principles of persuasion that can make people more likely to make a purchase, or in this case, request a free trial. These are authority, reciprocity, consistency, scarcity, social proof power, and last, indeed, sympathy. If we could figure out a way to show this in the Web site, this could start to be a success. But how could we convey that to the visitor?
There were two ways we planned to accomplish this: by creating a playful/fun video and adding it to the website, and by making the Instagram account look good.
Once that was in place, we still had to start bringing the right people to the website….
Local Google Ads campaigns: instant results and only relevant clicks
As mentioned, the working area was region Hoofddorp and Haarlem. And the budget was not infinite, so we wanted quick results. So we decided together that we wanted to start with Google Ads. With Google Ads you can achieve results in the short term and you can see immediately whether your website is catching on or not, something that still needed to be figured out. In addition, we only wanted to reach people in the working area, so we set up ads that could only be seen when someone was actually in Hoofddorp or Haarlem. In this way, the chances of success were to be maximized, and we could start the test.
Result
New customers for less than €42 each
Soon the sympathy for Houssin combined with the targeted local ads proved to catch on. The first test drives were requested, and after a few months, free test drives were requested for less than €34 each. On average, 8 out of 10 people who did a free test drive became customers of Houssin, meaning that for a new, actual customer, less than €42 was paid. Partly because of this, Houssin has been able to grow quickly, and now has to turn down customers because his schedule is too full. As soon as the first staff member is found, we can take the next step in further growth, and we can make it even hotter for the big boys. So, to be continued…
Are you also a local player in this, or any other industry? Are you also struggling to compete with large competitors? Send us a message, we can look at how to improve your website from a psychological and scientific perspective, and then we can make sure that the right people come to you. So you can focus on growing your business. Maybe you can start looking for staff soon after that ;)….
