Drivers licence Academies in South Africa is a very common business because there is no formal training needed to become a driving instructor, and application for a driving instructor is simple and cheap. The majority of driving schools in South Africa operate their business from home because it is cheaper and many of the driving academies don’t have proper business plans and they also do not fully utilize digital marketing tools. The most popular digital marketing tools they use are social media such as Facebook and Instagram.
Facebook is the most popular platform that Driving Academies use in South Africa. They will create a Facebook page for their academy and upload photos of clients (students) passing their license but they don’t use Facebook analytics to increase their competitiveness or business efficiency. The reason for this is that they are not aware of these services and they also do not fully understand digital marketing tools and strategies.
This blog will focus on digital marketing strategies for Driving School Academies in South Africa. Digital Marketing Strategy is crucial for a business’s success, please see below some benefits of Digital Marketing Strategy:
· Win new customers
· Increase sales
· Encourage your existing customers to spend more
· Support the launch of new products and services
· Better establish your brand on the market and increase market share
· Confirm your tone of voice and brand identity
· Reduce churn and strengthen customer loyalty
· Support the launch of advertising, PR, PPC campaigns
· Guarantee your business stays focused and current
Clutch in, brake, stop and create your goals
Creating goals for your strategic marketing plan is a crucial step for your business. Goals are powerful—they can focus attention on achieving desirable outcomes. Whether business goals are to set company direction or provide motivation, they should be specific, measurable, achievable, and timely. Your goals should include the following:
· Boost sales
· Increase brand awareness
· Enter new markets
· Raise more revenue
· Reach new audiences
· Get funding
· Increase profits
When planning goals, remember to be SMART: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Timely. After you make a realistic goal in the Driving School Academy business, the second step is to research your target group.
Target Audience / Target Market
Go beyond the basic knowledge covered by SWOT and PESTEL analysis to truly understand your market and target audience. Perhaps, at this point, you know the general view of the main target market: their age range, their likes, and dislikes, or the types of pages and brands they follow on social media. However, by going beyond this point and understanding the market in-depth, you will be better able to choose the digital marketing mix and budget for the most relevant marketing channels.
Deeper market analysis can be a cumulative process, but it can be worth it if you develop a deeper understanding and knowledge of your target group.
Audience persona
The audience persona allows you to tailor messages for key audiences by primarily considering your marketing communications, making you more strategic in digital marketing strategy and execution.
Competitor benchmark and analysis
The benefits of conducting a comparative competitor analysis are obvious. You don’t want to miss out on what your competitor is doing that could threaten your business and steal your traffic and conversions.
Your first step in any competitor analysis is to treat you as a potential customer and then do some test searches using popular or common keywords (not including brand terms). How is the approach different from the industry/market leader? Who appears at the top of search engine rankings and who appears at the top of paying jobs? Also, take the time to browse competitor websites; after leaving your websites, will you re-target through ads? What is useful is that this event is completely free and allows you to know who spending money on paid channels is.
Remember, benchmarking should be an ongoing process, not a one-time task. Similarly, when you complete the analysis, ensure that your time and energy will not be put on hold. Link your insights to action, and review progress and performance through your KPI and data analysis.
Analyze your digital assets
In analyzing your own digital assets, it is useful to group them into the Paid, Earned, and Owned categories. Focus on creating an overall strategy that covers all three categories by creating useful, engaging, and customer-centric content. Host this content on your own channel, promote your best problem-solving solutions through paid media, and gain the trust and loyalty of your target audience in the long run.
When analyzing your own assets, you first need to understand the performance of “success” in your industry. From your own perspective, check your web analytics to understand how users use your own content: use Google Analytics (or other web analytics platform) for your website or mobile application, or Facebook Insights used for the performance of social posts.
Reach, act, convert and engage with your customers
The purpose of the digital strategy plan is to make you think about how to improve your marketing strategy by considering more activities, channels, and platforms to take your strategy to a higher level. The number of options available to you seems a bit high and usually requires clear or simplified elements. Smart Insights RACE planning framework is a useful and simplified model that can help you focus on some applicable marketing activities at all stages of the traditional marketing funnel, which will make your digital marketing strategy successful and achieve its goals
Conclusion
Developing a Digital Marketing plan for Driving schools in South Africa will increase the success of the Business.
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