We cannot imagine a life without social media, can we? Now that we understand how to leverage this channel to improve conversions and optimize the business solutions, it has become imperative to align it with your business and marketing strategy. Considering ridesharing is big business, you cannot ignore the need for well channelized and defined marketing strategy.
Before we move onto the potential of social media marketing in increasing the business for ride-sharing, let’s get a complete understanding of how ride-sharing works, and why they need a marketing strategy.
Ridesharing business is competitive, and there are several players in this segment now that it is growing. Some of them offer localized services while, there are a few others who offer certain differentiated prices, which helps them attain the edge. The taxi business is growing, and it is important for the customer to be able to differentiate one from the other so that they can easily choose the one that fits their preferences.
Social media plays an important role here. Let’s understand the benefits of social media for the ride-sharing business.
Benefits of Social Media
Better Communication:
Whether it is the company trying to serve the customers with a new offer or the customer wanting to share their experience, social media is quicker and faster. The communication through this channel reaches everyone and helps resolve the situation quickly. You are able to get to the right people at the right time with the right message through this medium.
Boosts Organic Visibility:
The first and most important goal of marketing happens to be an increase in the brand’s reach and visibility. With social media, you have better chances of increasing your organic visibility with the help of shareable content. In fact, social media helps improve the goals you set to accomplish with SEO.
Web Traffic Increase:
If you want to increase traffic to your website, then you should use social media. With the right content linked to your social media pages, you can get people to visit your website and stay there for a long while. You will need to strategize your social media marketing, which will enable people to visit your website and convert. The ultimate goal is to get more people to visit, and this is entirely possible with the right social media channels.
Immediate Feedback & Response:
If your customer wants to share their feedback with you or want you to know what they expect from your brand, then social media is the ideal channel. Not only can they communicate with you, but they are also able to get an immediate response. You can even connect, understand their issues, resolve them in real-time, and improve your brand’s image.
Competition Tracking:
When you have a solid presence on social media channels, you are aware of what is happening, and how people are using social media channels around you. It is important that you know and understand social media and track your competition. That is one of the strongest benefits of being active on social media. You know well enough how your competition works, and what you need to do to improve your activities and gain the competitive edge.
Brand Image:
We all spend a good amount of our time understanding the brand image we need, and how we can deliver it. Social media helps understand this need for a good image, understands what the user wants, and interacts accordingly. The social presence also guarantees that the people who will see your brand will also understand how your brand operates. This channel allows you to tell people your brand story, communicate with them about what you are and how you work, and tell them how to connect and communicate with you
Now that you are aware of the benefits associated with social media for your business, let’s try and understand how a simple yet effective strategy can help you improve your ridesharing business.
Guide to Using Social Media for Ridesharing Business
When it comes to the ridesharing industry, there is a diverse group of audiences that you cater to. It is important to understand what kind of ridesharing services are available and promote your business accordingly.
Here’s a solid social media strategy for your business, which will help you gain conversions, or at the very least, the necessary traffic to your application. It may not happen overnight, however, with a solid testimonial supporting your brand you might be able to win over the consumer.
#1 Choose your Goals
There are infinite goals that you can achieve with social media. However, the first thing to consider is the goal that you believe needs to be accomplished immediately– if you are new to ridesharing services, then the first goal ought to be visibility. You want people to know of your existence, and tell them more about yourself.
You also want to tell them how you have differentiated yourself from the competition. The goal can be accomplished through articles, advertisements, and display banners. The idea is to understand how much of it would be social media. You also will be able to define whether you would be using a paid version of social media or the free one once you know your goals.
Let’s take an example of Lyft and Uber. Both are successful yet, they need social media to keep upping their game, and ensuring they are in touch with their audiences, respond to their complaints, resolve their issues and keep communicating with them. Their goal is to retain its customers and improve customer loyalty.
#2 Segment the Audience
As we have already mentioned, the audience for a ridesharing service is diverse. You may find that they have different ideas when they pick and choose a particular ridesharing service. Moreover, they choose a ridesharing service depending on the type of service they need, the budget, and other factors.
You will need to segment the audience in accordance with the factors dominating their choices. For instance, if the audience often commutes to work using the pool services, then you ought to communicate with them based on their choice, location, and other factors affecting this choice. You can offer them a corporate discount for instance, if they are into a pool for a daily commute. If you believe they pick a different service occasionally, you can offer them something that works for both the services.
This kind of promotion is possible only when you segment the audience, and divide them into different clusters.
#3 Pick the Social Media Channels
Once the audience is segmented, and you know what they want, it is time to understand the social media channels they are likely to use. Not all people in your target market will be present on the same social media channels. If you believe that most of the people use Twitter, and a few use LinkedIn, then you ought to establish your presence on both. In the case of ridesharing services, LinkedIn is a must as you will have a lot of people from the corporate world using these services.
You will have to rule out the social media channel that you believe is the least important for your target market. The reason being you cannot do justice to all channels, and it is nearly impossible to maintain communication for all these channels.
The choice will make it easier for you to command your presence, and improve the brand’s image.
#4 Use Content to Communicate
When you use social media channels to connect and communicate with your audience, the right type of content and the method of generating the content is important. You will need to work on the content that resonates with the audience so that you get to receive the response you are interested in.
The content should be defined keeping in mind what the audience is looking for, how they connect with particular content, and what response they generate after looking at the content. Once you are in sync and have answers to these questions, you will generate content that will gain traction.
Always remember to generate content in sync with the platform you are using. You cannot use the content meant for Twitter on Facebook.
#5 Monitor & Measure the Traction
You will know if the content worked or not when you monitor the content, the response it receives, and understand how people are using the content. Always remember to measure the goals and see if you have been able to accomplish it with the help of the content you have generated. You need to have the KPIs defined early on, during the strategy session to know if you made it to the goals or not.
Summing up
There are various ways in which you can get to use social media to generate traffic and improve word of mouth for your business. Sharing codes or referring the ridesharing business and earning a few points is one of the ways to gain more people onboard.
You need to make sure you understand how social media works, and what platform the audience is most receptive to, before making the claims.
Monitoring and measuring the responses is a must if you want to achieve up your endgame.
