The most effective taxi marketing. Taxi marketing and personnel management. Get closer to your audience

Companies spend millions to grab the attention of shoppers, but they often don't want to take the last step - driving to the office or store. CallToVisit solved this problem by turning a taxi order into marketing tool

“Thank God, online has not yet completely replaced real world... We still get the strongest consumer emotions offline: we buy an apartment or a car, go to a massage and go to a restaurant. But in order to get off the couch and get this living experience, people often do not have enough time or willpower, - says Nikolay Shestakov, co-owner and investor of the CallToVisit service. "We've built a bridge between online desire and offline action."

The founders of CallToVisit, 28-year-old Sergey Alumov and 27-year-old Dmitry Egorov, offered the business to bring customers to points of sale by taxi at their own expense. More than 100 companies took advantage of the idea; in February 2018, the service's turnover amounted to 3 million rubles. In addition, he was able to attract 20 million rubles. investment.

How it works

CallToVisit service is an intermediary between business and taxi aggregators. When a potential buyer visits the website of a CallToVisit client (developer, car dealer, bank, etc.), he sees a button “order a free taxi”. By clicking on it, you get to a page where you can enter your phone number, a convenient time and the address where the Yandex.Taxi car will arrive and take it to the point of sale (some companies pay for the return trip as well). The company pays for the trip from its personal account in CallToVisit, to which it pre-transfers a certain amount (usually about 50 thousand rubles). The average bill for one trip is 400 rubles. The CallToVisit service itself earns from the sale of licenses to use software (15 thousand rubles per month) or commission from the cost of the trips (now 30%).

The road to the bot

The idea of a free taxi for business came to the head of the marketer Sergey Alumov during the January holidays in 2017. “The thought was simple, but then it was like an electric shock to me,” he recalls. - There is a callback function, a call center, there is an online chat and a million more tools that, in theory, should convince the client to come and buy. But it’s much more efficient to just pay him the way to the store. ”

Sergey Alumov got into advertising by accident: he graduated from MADI and worked for three years in a department of the Ministry of Transport. I decided to change the field of activity in 2015. “I was always attracted by the IT world, but I didn’t understand anything at all about technologies,” Alumov admits. For help, he turned to his school friend Dmitry Egorov, data director of the international advertising company Weborama: “Dima and I lingered after work, he taught me the basics. The head was cracking from volume new information". In August 2015, Alumov got a job as a purchasing manager for online advertising at Weborama, and a year later he already held the position of a project manager.

But gradually the work turned into a routine. Alumov was prompted to the idea of a free taxi by the case of one of Weborama's clients, the PIK development group. “They had no problems attracting clients to the site, but not everyone got to the objects - it is usually a long walk from the metro,” says the entrepreneur. - I thought: since it is so important for them to attract people to objects, why not say - come to us for free?

Alumov studied the market and realized that you can become a pioneer. Some companies have already organized a transfer for clients, but he did not find a special service that would automate this process either in Russia or abroad. For example, Anna Polyakova, owner of the Bikini House swimwear showroom, offered free taxi rides to owners of her store's premium cards. “I used the services of Yandex.Taxi and Uber, on average the trip cost 400-1000 rubles. with an average check of 14 thousand rubles, eight out of ten customers made a purchase, - says Polyakova. “The taxi costs paid off, but the process itself was inconvenient. We did everything in manual mode: first called up with the client, then called a taxi, and then told the number of the car to the client. It happened that the driver and the client could not find each other. " As a result, Polyakova refused this service.

After new year holidays Alumov began to communicate with taxi aggregators. Wheely and Gett were the first to respond, but failed to find common ground. The entrepreneur hoped that the aggregators would share the travel profits with him, but this did not suit them. Alumov came to the meeting at Yandex.Taxi with a new business plan: the aggregator only needed access to its IT system, and the entrepreneur decided to make money on client companies. This scheme was approved by Yandex.Taxi. “In April 2016, we launched a b2b product for the corporate segment of transportation, Yandex.Taxi for Business. Now the service has 8 thousand clients: someone uses it for employee trips and business trips across Russia, and someone uses it to build own business, for example, CallToVisit, ”comments Evgeny Sinelnikov, head of Yandex.Taxi for Business.

Having agreed with the aggregator, Sergey Alumov connected Dmitry Egorov to the work. “Thanks to a free taxi, you can easily identify the advertising channel through which customers come and optimize marketing costs,” Egorov explains his interest in the project.

The entrepreneurs hired a programmer who wrote a pilot software for the service in three months - a total of 600 thousand rubles were spent on development. The first CallToVisit clients in May 2017 were the Virgins and Burlesque nightclub chains. “Technically, the product was still raw, and each order had to be driven in by hand,” recalls Sergei Alumov. - People go to clubs at night, so Dima and I gathered at my place, took a beer and began to wait. We sat there until the morning, but did not receive a single order. "

Then the entrepreneurs decided to call customers who started, but did not complete the trip. It turned out that people were annoyed by the interface of the service. The partners changed the appearance of the window and placed their first order next weekend. “It was in the middle of the night, and when I received an SMS notification, I was so glad that I almost fell out of bed,” Alumov laughs.

In June, Sergei Alumov rented the first office from a relative - 15 sq. m for 15 thousand rubles. on Kalanchevskaya street in Moscow. As a sales manager, he hired his younger brother, Maxim Evstafiev. As a result, eight companies joined CallToVisit: PIK, Sovcombank, Elena Malysheva's Medical Center, and others. By the end of July, the project received its first profit - about 100 thousand rubles.

“During the entire period of using CallToVisit, 1,600 people came to us by free taxi, more than 30% of them signed contracts for the purchase of apartments. The average cost of buying an apartment in PIK is 3.4 million rubles, ”says Roman Abdullin, advertising director at PIK Group. According to general director construction company"Concern Rusich" by Boris Leskov, in the segment of economy class real estate during advertising campaigns one call from a client (lead) costs developers 7-8 thousand rubles, so a potential client can be paid a taxi for 700-800 rubles. they can quite afford it.

The road to the investor

The founders of the project understood from the very beginning that their service was affordable for companies with high average check. The scheme was suitable for developers, large banks and private clinics, but its convenience required improvement. “To come for an MRI in medical Center For example, the client still had to call the call center first, make an appointment and only then call a taxi. The chain was too long, and we wanted to achieve maximum automation, ”Alumov explains. To reduce the number of actions performed, it was necessary to integrate with the CRM systems of their customers, and this required new serious investments in the development of the program.

The friends introduced the partners to the investors: Nikolai Shestakov, a former Yandex top manager and founder of the Adventum performance agency, Vitaly Groznov, co-owner of the Air marketing group, and Vladimir Margolin, ex-head of the Gazprom-Media Internet division and co-owner of an advertising agency Brainrus. “I immediately believed in the idea: it lay on the surface and was easy to implement,” says Groznov. - A free taxi is an effective factor for narrowing the sales funnel (a marketing term describing the process of selling a product or service, at each stage of which a part of potential customers is eliminated. - RBK), over which all marketers are fighting ”. In August 2017, the founders agreed that new partners would invest about 20 million rubles in the project. within a year, having received 44% in the legal entity CallToVisit KTV LLC.

Sergey Alumov and Nikolay Shestakov (Photo: Vladislav Shatilo / RBC)

We agreed to spend investments in three areas: technical improvement of the platform, marketing and going outside Russia. Partners withdrew new office and hired 15 employees to interact with clients, began advertising in Yandex, Google and social networks. Outsourced programmers took over the development - their services cost 700 thousand rubles. per month.

In February 2018, entrepreneurs launched a service that allows companies to integrate a free taxi option on their website on their own. “You don't need to call managers, issue invoices and wait for instructions on how to connect the widget - the whole process is automated,” Shestakov explains. "This step was necessary for scaling: otherwise, each new ten clients would require us to hire two new employees, and growing the staff indefinitely was not part of our plans."

Thanks to the partnership with Yandex.Taxi, CallToVisit immediately entered the regions: now the service operates in ten cities of Russia, although 80% of trips are in Moscow. Now the entrepreneurs are planning to cover all the cities with a population of over one million in Russia, where Yandex.Taxi is present, and to enter the Dubai market. The company received the status of a resident of the Dubai Internet City startup cluster, which is completely tax-exempt, and then plans to move to Europe and the United States.

The road to small business

For ten months of operation CallToVisit connected about 100 clients, the number of trips reached 3 thousand per month. Most of the clients are large businesses with an average purchase check of hundreds of thousands and millions of rubles. “But we understand that there are hundreds of such large players, and hundreds of thousands of small companies, and it is on them that you need to stake,” says Sergei Alumov.

To attract small businesses, the partners developed an alternative payment model: they began to charge not a flat fee for a license, but 30% of the cost of a trip. One of the first "small" CallToVisit clients may be, for example, the Barberia barbershop, located next to business center"Moscow City". “300 rubles. taking a taxi for an establishment with a check of 1,500 is a lot. But the guys are sitting 1.5 km from the "City", and in bad weather no one will go to them from the office on foot. Therefore, it is more profitable for them to bring a person at their own expense, bind them with good service and recapture these investments for the second or third time, "Shestakov argues.

Another way of expansion is cooperation with advertising agencies... CallToVisit plans to place a "free taxi" button not only on customer sites, but also on advertising banners. “So that it was like this: a person sees an advertisement on the Internet, immediately jumps into a taxi and goes to buy,” Shestakov says. "This way we eliminate company websites as an unnecessary link."

In the meantime, the company is developing on investment money. Of 3 million rubles. turnover in February 2018 RUB 2 million makes up a payment for the trip, which CallToVisit transfers to the taxi aggregator (this money is in the accounts in the clients' personal accounts), 1 million rubles. - proceeds from sales of services of the service itself. At the same time, the net loss reaches 1-1.6 million rubles. per month. “Now we are not chasing operating profit and are investing in development everything that we earn. For a startup, speed is the most important thing. It's like with an airplane: if it flies too slowly, it will fall, even if there is enough fuel in the tanks, ”says Nikolai Shestakov.

Alexei Popov, director of corporate programs at the Stockholm School of Economics in Russia, believes that the key risk of a startup is that its business model is easy to copy. “CallToVisit needs to capture a significant market share as quickly as possible. The most logical thing is to build a network of representative offices in large cities, ”he says. According to Anastasia Komarova, the founder of marketing agency Cleverra.ru, the worst of all the project will have if aggregators themselves want to enter the free taxi market - Yandex.Taxi, Gett or Uber.

Sergey Alumov and Nikolay Shestakov (Photo: Vladislav Shatilo / RBC)

However, Yandex.Taxi assured RBC that they do not plan to create a similar service yet. “From the point of view of the business model, it is more interesting for us to globally develop the Yandex.Taxi for Business platform and establish partnerships with small projects of the CallToVisit format than to occupy this niche ourselves,” says Evgeny Sinelnikov.

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How to advertise a taxi: an action plan

Prepare the service if you're a beginner

1. Analyze your competitors' market. Reveal strong and weaknesses other services in the city, state your own advantages and disadvantages. Determine which niches in transportation services are not yet filled with offers and what you can do to fill them.

2. Formulate a unique trade offer(USP). It should reflect the main benefit for the client: why he should order from you. For example, "the first kilometer of the way is free" or "air conditioning in every car."

3. If you open a dispatch service, make sure that the phone number of the service is memorable and easy to pronounce. Buy a "nice" city phone number.

Advertising of a taxi with "nice" numbers

4. Think about the name of the service. It should be concise, easy to remember, sound beautiful and contain the message that you want to convey to the audience. For example, the name of the service "Drive" is consonant with the idea of movement, it is short and sonorous, from this name clients will be able to compose an image of a fast, modern and professional service... However, this name is no longer unique, much faster people will remember the slightly shocking name "Fly".

Define the goal of the campaign

You need to establish what specific result you want to achieve with the help of advertising. Various materials within one advertising campaign can work for different purposes.

For one advertising material, such a formulation of the goal as "to attract more orders" is not suitable. Such wording as “increase the number of orders from the application”, “attract a new segment of customers to the service”, “receive more orders by phone” or “increase the number of long-distance trips in the service” will be successful.

Define target audience

For example, if you place an advertisement on pizza boxes, many people will see it, but only a few of them will order a car, because the target audience of this advertisement is people who decided to stay at home and have a bite to eat. You will spend money on advertising that will not attract customers. But if you place an advertisement in a shopping center or on a hotel website, it will be seen by people who need to get from one place to another - this is the target audience of the service. Such advertising will attract new orders.

Advertising of a taxi in a shopping center

Each service has its own target audience, and it can still be divided into narrower groups. To reveal them, swipe marketing research... In a simplified way, you have to answer a few basic questions about your customers.

Who is my client: how old is he, how much does he earn, how he works, what status does he have in society, does he have children?

What interests my clients, what do they strive for, how do they behave in society?

What does the client expect from the trip and the ordering process?

How, in what situations do customers place an order?

How do customers find out about my service, where do they see information more often?

Select distribution channels

Advertisements can be placed on billboards and banners on the street or indoors, on leaflets and business cards, on TV and radio, on the Internet, on product packaging, in newspapers, in SMS-mailing. Place specific advertisements only in those sources that are used by your target audience and that meet the advertising goals.

Create a promotional message

The ad message should be different for each distribution channel. The text written for the leaflet will not be suitable for radio advertising, the picture prepared for the newspaper will not fit in the format of the social media feed.

But in any case, remember about several principles of perception of the text of the advertisement.

Don't use a lot of text - people are ready to spend no more than 10 seconds reading ads.

Always make sure the viewer / listener understands exactly what they need to do. It should be clear to the audience from the very beginning what kind of action you expect from them.

Always indicate the phone number or QR code of the application - it should be clear where to apply for the service.

It is already more difficult to create an image for advertising yourself. You need to have design skills or have an artistic taste, be able to work in different graphic editors... It's easier to order the creation of images from a professional, but you yourself can decide which ad you want to see - remember a few tips.

The background should be in contrast to the text.

In most cases, it is best to use a sans-serif font for text in a picture.

When creating a picture or video sequence, focus on the emotions that you want to evoke in the viewer. Create an image that your client wants to approach.

It's good to use images where people are doing the kind of action you want their customers to do. For example, they order a car, drive, pay with a card, go to the airport.

Place an advertisment

You can independently distribute advertising on flyers, business cards and on the Internet - in social networks and search engines. Print flyers and business cards in any printing house and put them in mailboxes, hand out on the street or put them in stores and malls as agreed. To place advertisements on the Internet, create advertising accounts on VKontakte, Facebook, myTarget, Yandex and Google. Customize ads to your target audience using keywords and characteristics, while narrowing their number as much as possible, select the frequency of ad display. (Below we will tell you more about the benefits and features of online advertising).

If you run ads long enough and often, there will be a better chance that your target audience will see the ad, remember it, and take the action you need. The main thing is to prepare the service for the increase in the number of orders and provide customers with quality service. If a customer attracted by advertising is disappointed with the service, he will lose confidence in your service and tell 9 more friends about it. Word of mouth is much more effective than advertising, so because of one mistake you can lose 10 clients at once. However, if the customer likes the service, the same word of mouth will work in your favor, and you will be able to attract even more customers than you planned.

Evaluate the results

It is impossible to find out if an advertisement worked only by increasing or decreasing orders in the service - this may be due to completely different factors. Also, if you track indicators on orders during an advertising campaign, you can quickly adjust some ads and increase their effectiveness. It is necessary to analyze how many customers were attracted by the ad on each placement site.

Advertising on the Internet is the easiest to analyze and allows you to get the most accurate performance indicators - advertising offices automatically count the number of unique user contacts with advertising.

To analyze ads on other sites, you need to use markers, for example, code words or coupons, which customers will present when ordering. By their number, you can estimate how many customers came from a particular ad, but in this case, you will have to calculate the indicators manually. If you place print ads with different markers in different districts and neighborhoods of the city, you can also determine the effectiveness of the campaign by territory.

A coupon by which the service will be able to determine exactly where the passenger who presented it saw the advertisement

You can also see an increase in orders from anywhere in the city, if your service uses software package Taxi Master. , a web service for analyzing the work of the service, you can see on the map how many orders were received from a particular area before and after advertising there.

If you are unhappy with the result, it is worthwhile to analyze again how correctly you acted at all the previous stages, and most importantly, to check the quality of the work of operators and drivers in your own service.

Taxi advertising on the Internet: why advertising on the Internet is profitable

1. Concentration of the target audience

Audience Russian Internet is 90 million people. This is 73% of the population of our country. Half of them use mobile internet... All communication goes online, because people like to communicate in social networks, it is convenient to search and buy goods and services on the Internet, to have fun and learn. Active Internet users are people aged 22 to 35, that is, the solvent part of the population and potential clients... If you want to get their attention, it is more effective to show them online ads. Advertising on leaflets, TV and radio will not work - this audience simply will not see it.

2. Exact result

For advertising on radio, TV, billboards, leaflets and in print, it is difficult to predict exactly who will see it. You can customize the display of advertising on the Internet for specific users and reach exclusively your target audience.

The effectiveness of advertising on the Internet is also easier to assess. Special services such as AppMetrica, Google Analytics and Yandex.Metrica will count the number of unique user contacts with ads. As soon as the user clicks on a button, link or banner, the services will automatically record this.

3. Saving on the cost of each attracted client

In online advertising, you can only pay for clicks and clicks on links in your ad. Then you only spend your budget on ads that work. And due to the fact that the most interested users will see the advertisement, the quality of the attracted customers will be maximum, and the costs for the service will be minimal.

4. Momentality of targeted action

When a person sees an advertisement on the street, on TV, in a newspaper or hears it on the radio, there are still many actions separating him from creating an order. He needs to get a phone, dial a number or enter the name of a service in the search for applications. But if a person sees an advertisement on the Internet, and more often through a mobile device, then all he has to do is click on the ad, and he will be taken to the page for downloading the application, or the phone number of the service will be dialed on his device.

Where and how to advertise on the Internet

Set the city where your service operates.

Write different versions of your ad copy.

List the keywords by which users are looking for a service in the city. Try to narrow down the list of these words as much as possible, this will affect the cost of advertising.

Specify the rates - for what price you are willing to place this ad. The fewer your competitors have set up showing their ads for the same keywords, the lower the cost per display of your ad will be. For example, many services have tuned their ads to the words "order a taxi Omsk" - such an advertisement would be expensive. To reduce the cost of advertising, you can focus on separate species services and set up advertisements for words, for example, "taxi to the airport."

Taxi advertising in Google mobile search

Create pages for your service on all popular social networks. Attract subscribers with contests and prizes, so you gain an audience interested in your services, and you can show them ads for free.

One of the conditions of the contests, in addition to subscribing to the page, be sure to do some targeted action: confirmation that the client is ordering the car from you. For example, let users attach an SMS alert screen with the cost of the trip to the repost. This will cut off users who just love prize draws.

After you attract followers, keep the page active to keep them. Publish not only advertising posts several times a week, but also entertaining and informational ones, arrange polls, respond to comments.

Sponsored posts on the taxi service Instagram profile

You can also use the retargeting mechanism to advertise on social networks for current customers. You can upload phone numbers of the entire customer base to any advertising account. The system will find users who are registered with these numbers in the social network and will show them ads. You won't have to customize advertising for them according to their characteristics. It is only necessary that the database contains more than 1000 numbers.

Advertising of a taxi service on VKontakte, created by the Taxi-Master promotion team

You can post videos on all social networks and on Youtube. Ads will be automatically played in the social media feed or before the start of the video on Youtube. You can set the settings for displaying them according to the same scheme in advertising accounts of social networks and in advertising cabinet Google for Youtube.

Video ads on the Internet should be short - no more than 30 seconds. Make it dynamic and interesting so that the user wants to watch it to the end. Be sure to add subtitles - many are muted for ads.

In general, video content is becoming more and more popular: in social networks, the format of short videos - stories - receives the most responses. You can customize the display of your ad for this format as well.

Post your image videos on your social media pages. For example, shoot customer reviews, interviews with drivers, show your service from the inside. The video does not have to be filmed on good camera- shooting on a smartphone is also suitable, but it is better that the video lasts no more than a minute, the image does not shake, it was shot horizontally, the sound is legible. These videos will not be shown as advertisements, but will play a positive role in promoting the service.

You can agree on the placement of your advertisement with partners.

With popular pages and groups of urban publics in social networks.

With famous bloggers and public figures in the city.

With websites of hotels, restaurants, bars, clinics, airports, shopping centers- and all websites of companies where there are users who may need a transfer.

How to do it right

To understand which ad attracts more customers, which settings allow you to display ads at the lowest price, you need to conduct tests. Run several ads at once on different sites on the Internet, monitor their effectiveness in the analytics service, compare and disable less effective ads.

Setting up advertising on the Internet yourself, so that it costs you inexpensively, and brings a lot of customers, is almost impossible the first time, but this skill will come with experience. You can always turn to professionals.

Taxi advertising: examples and methods

A slogan is a short affirmative expression that contains the whole essence of an advertising message. It should be emotional, easy to remember, and can be rhymed. You can include your USP in there.

Taxi advertising slogan

2. Focus on one feature

The audience will quickly perceive and understand the advertisement if there is only one simple thought in it - one feature of the service will be revealed. You can create several options for an advertising message, where each will focus on only one of your advantages, and extend it to different groups target audience. This will increase the effectiveness of your ads.

Advertising of the transfer service in the service

3. Refer to the opinion of the "winners"

Use phrases like: “All our clients have already been convinced - the Strizh taxi is the fastest”, “Our clients are practical people. They value us for our good quality and affordable prices. "

Collaborate with celebrities, public figures of the city - use their positive image.

Advertising in Yekaterinburg with a well-known TV and radio presenter in the city

4. Show the benefits in contrast

Use the principle of "before" and "after", especially clearly it can be demonstrated on video, for example: at first the character of the video is late for the party and gets upset, but after that he orders a car and happily arrives at the party.

Show your customers how your service is better than others. For example, if your USP is clean cars, use this: “Waiting for a taxi, not a piece of dirt? Our cars are always clean! Service "Crew" ".

Contrast method in advertising

5. Get closer to the audience

The image of “ours” inspires more confidence in the audience. Show that you are playing on their side.

Use images of people as similar as possible to your target audience.

Use words and phrases that are used within the target audience groups.

Answer tricky questions. For example, “Are the prices swelling from the rain? Not in Fast and Furious. We have fixed rates for the city. Always".

6. Remind you of kindness

Use images and words that have an unambiguous positive meaning or are associated with universal values.

Advertising with an emphasis on the value of family, motherhood and children

Funny situations and characters that do not cause hostility are always liked by people and are remembered faster.

Oftentimes, little attention is paid to taxi marketing, which is an integral and important part of the business. Start improving your business right now - this will attract additional customers to your company and give you special competitive advantages. In order to tie clients to your company as much as possible, the SeDi system already has interesting and extraordinary opportunities.

Services that can already be used for your clients:

Client's personal account on the group's website, personal personal account, personal card with information about the client, his personal discounts, the history of his orders.
The ability to maintain a white and black list of drivers up to the choice of a specific driver for each client.
More than 5 options for discounts and bonuses for clients - individuals and corporate clients.
Automatic notifications about the status of the order, about the location and arrival of the car, etc. in personal account on the website or by SMS.
The possibility for the client in various ways (by phone, via SMS, on the website in the personal account, etc.) to assess the quality of the services rendered following the trip.
Preliminary calculation of the cost of the trip as a standard feature of the system.
Possibility of advance orders to other cities.
The ability to generate detailed travel reports.
...and much more.

Our partners have the opportunity to create their services based on our technologies, and we are always ready to help them with this. By using and creating modern marketing tools in the taxi business, you not only develop your business, but also improve the entire transportation industry as a whole, increase the quality and attractiveness of taxi rides for end users.

Employee management is a work that requires a special approach. SeDi provides you necessary tools to control the quality of work of employees. All actions of drivers, dispatchers, managers of the company for the head - at a glance. A manager can at any time from any place where there is an Internet, control the functioning of his company and have the most reliable information in real time. If necessary, directly in the program there is the possibility of communicating with any employee via internal telephony or using the built-in messenger.

The system stores the following information:

About drivers:

The track traveled by the car with all data on speed, parking, work breaks, route changes, etc.
The real location of the driver in each this moment, distance from the order, status, etc.
Information about orders (completed, failed, current, etc.).
Financial performance driver and a complete history of payment transactions on his personal account.
Claims for work, assessments of the quality of services provided, etc.

about dispatchers:

The number of registered orders (completed, failed, current, etc.)
The number of processed calls (how many are accepted, how many of them are with orders, how many are missed, etc.)
Record all telephone conversations with the ability to listen and analyze.
At present, technologies of motivation of dispatchers are being introduced.

for all employees:

The System Event tool allows you to find out what actions were performed by this or that employee over a particular period of time.