There are many tools we can use to advertise our services as a driving school or a driving instructor.
Let’s have a look at the most important ways we can market locally and discuss what is useful about each of these techniques.
Reading time: 9 minutes
- 1. Website
- 2. Branding
- 3. Driving school blog and SEO
- 4. Leaflet distribution
- 5. Social Media
- 6. Local partnerships
Website
You might find it surprising that as a company that specialises in flyer delivery we would start a blog like this by discussing your website.
In the current advertising landscape driving instructors and other companies tend to focus a lot of their attention on social media.
Social media can be fantastic when used correctly. It can be difficult however to deliver important information about your company in a structured way.
Having the ability to direct potential customers from all of your advertising channels into one hub is very valuable. Your website should be just that kind of a hub.
Your website can include more information than any advertising medium your customers are realistically going to interact with.
You can include anything from your personal history, customer testimonials, pricing and information about specific driving evaluation services you offer.
And most importantly you can do it in a structured way.
A serious potential customer who is doing their research and is comparing multiple driving schools and instructors will appreciate this.
Your social media profiles can link to various parts of your website to elaborate on the points you are making.
The same is true for your leaflet campaigns. Your flyers should include your URL or even a QR code that takes people directly to your site.
This way you can drive traffic to your website, inform people in more depth about what you can offer and elaborate on the points you make in your leaflets and social media posts.
A good website is a very important part of a driving instructor’s online identity and is indispensable in the current climate.
Branding
As a driving instructor it is important that you make conscious decisions about the way you brand yourself.
There is no need to get too creative with this process or spend a lot of money getting some form of a corporate branding identity worked up by an expensive professional studio.
You ultimately need to make sure that you are distinguishable from other driving instructors and that you are consistent.
Making sure that you are using the same unique colour combinations, fonts and logos across all of your promotional materials is crucial.
This includes leaflets, your website, social media and any other printed material you have.
Calling your business “London driving school” and using red, white and black colours is not a good move at this point. There are dozens of companies with this name and branding in London already.
You want to make sure that you don’t look exactly the same as everyone else in your industry.
Doing research on the 10-20 most prominent driving instructors in your area is a good first step. What do they have in common and what is unique about some of them?
Write these things down together with what you like and don’t like about each of your prominent competitor’s branding.
You can then present this in the form of a simple word document with URL links to your designer.
You will save a great amount of time and money by doing research like this yourself ahead of time.
A competent graphic designer
should be able to create a basic branding identity for you based on a document like this for a very reasonable cost.
Don’t underestimate the power of branding yourself properly but at the same time don’t make it a complicated process.
Do some research, find out what you like and don’t like and have a decent graphic designer create your branding based on this information.
Driving school blog and SEO
At a first glance you might find the idea of keeping a blog somewhat quaint. Especially as a driving instructor.
Blogs were a big thing some 10-20 years ago. Since then most of people’s online attention has moved to video and social media.
However, providing long form written answers to questions your potential customers might be searching for has many benefits.
Having good quality, relevant written content on your site will elevate your standing in the eyes of search engines like Google.
This means that when someone searches for “driving instructors in my area” your website is likely to come up higher on the list.
When people search for questions relating to driving lessons your blogs might come up.
If you can achieve even moderate success in this domain you might find new customers contacting you regularly because they are finding you on their own. Without you having to actively spend money on advertising.
There are many ways to approach SEO (Search engine optimisation) but keeping a blog is a first step every driving instructor should keep.
– Make sure to write about things that are relevant to people searching for questions about driving lessons.
– Keep your blogs between 500-2000 words
– Don’t make multiple blogs discussing the same topic
– Add new blogs regularly
– Research what your competitors are writing about
If you stick to these principles you are on your way to creating a good foundation for your website being discovered on search engines by the right people.
Leaflet distribution
Leafleting campaigns are what we specialise in at The Private Postman.
The ability to reach every single household with a crafted piece of advertising in a carefully selected area of London is unique to leafleting campaigns.
No other form of advertising can do such a thing.
The physical nature of flyers has been proven to be effective over long periods of time. You can find out specific statistics in this blog.
Leaflets allow you to sidestep some of the more crowded channels like industry specific apps, social media and google ads and approach your clients directly.
Door to Door for driving instructors:
Driving instructors should be looking only at door to door flyer delivery services. This means that your distributor will deliver your flyers only to privately owned residential households.
Your leaflets will simply be put through all the letterboxes of private homes in pre-selected areas.
The alternative would be Hand to hand delivery. Hand to hand tends to be expensive as it requires a team of people handing out your flyers on the street. We don’t recommend this method to our clients. Most of the time it is slow, expensive and ineffective.
You want your flyers going directly to the homes of your potential clients. Door to door flyer delivery is the way to achieve this.
Shared deliveries:
Your distributor can deliver your flyers as a part of shared delivery or Solus delivery.
Shared delivery simply means that your flyers are being delivered together with one or two other clients. Solus delivery means that only your flyers are making their way through each letterbox at a time.
Shared delivery is considerably cheaper and gives exactly the same results as Solus. There is no benefit to using Solus deliveries. Use shared delivery whenever possible.
Targeting:
Flyer delivery campaigns are generally targeted geographically. We analyse your target demographics and select the best areas for you from our proprietary mapping system.
We can target areas as small as 5,000 households. Larger campaigns go into the hundreds of thousands of leaflets being delivered.
No matter who you are using for your flyer delivery you want to make sure that all non-deliverable addresses are excluded from the mapping system being used.
This includes businesses, industrial areas, local authority gated housing and more.
Design and Print:
There are some logistical challenges that come with flyer deliveries. Design, print and storage of flyers all bring their own logistical requirements.
At The Private Postman we run an all-inclusive service. We can take care of your flyer design, print, storage and distribution all under one roof.
You want to make sure that your distribution company can do the same. Having 50,000 flyers showing up to your business address from a printer can be a difficult thing to handle.
Your distributor should have a warehouse capability that can take care of all of these logistics for you.
Over the last few years flyer designs have been simplified.
You generally want to use a very high quality image or a photo on one side of the leaflet and a short copy on the other.
Keep your designs and your message simple. You want your flyer to be focused on a single massage or service.
Please use a professional designer for your flyers. Your designs need to be the best they can be as the success of your campaigns relies on this. At TPP we have designers working with us internally and can help you get a high quality design at a very reasonable cost.
Combine flyers with other methods:
One of the great things about flyer delivery is that it combines so well with other methods of advertising.
You can target the same areas of London with leaflets and social media ads at the same time.
You can include a QR code on your flyers to send people directly to your website with a discount code.
Social Media
Using social media in the current climate is a must for most B2C businesses.
Deciding on which platforms you use and to what end will depend on your situation.
If you are focusing on younger demographics you want to investigate places like Snapchat, TikTok and to some extent even Instagram.
For 30+ demographics Facebook is where your attention should be focused.
Sharing helpful tips and basic updates on these platforms is a good move. If you manage to be entertaining while doing this that’s even better but it is not necessary.
You are a driving instructor not a comedian so don’t feel like you have to make your posts funny or incredibly entertaining.
Activity on social media acts as a signal of activity in the real world.
People might find your driving school through your leaflet campaigns, check your website for more information and your social media to see if you are active.
Advertising on social media is also a large and important topic. Each platform has unique elements to the way advertising works within it.
The one overarching thing that can be said about all of them is that you want to carefully target the right people. Don’t just blow your budget on large scale campaigns all across London.
Pick smaller demographics and make the kinds of ads they want to see. Plan small campaigns and assess which ones were successful and why. Rinse and repeat.
Local partnerships
Partnering up with local organisations is a great way to stay engaged in your local community and find people within it you can serve.
Schools are probably the first and most obvious type of local organisations you’ll be looking at as a driving instructor.
Some schools like to have their own driving instructor or form partnerships with external instructors.
If you are willing to specialise further you can look at driver evaluation for hospitals or even defensive driving courses.
