How to promote a transport business

Promoting your transport business is vital if you’re trying to find new customers and increase your income. Standing out amongst the competition can be challenging, though, if you don’t have a few good marketing tactics up your sleeve. 

This article will provide a guide on how to promote a transport business. We’ll look at various marketing strategies, such as social media and creating a website. The topics we’ll cover include:

• Creating a marketing plan
• Building a website
• Advertising on social media

Planning is a vital first step in achieving your business goals. Promotion is no different from any other task in that having a plan makes the job much easier and generally more effective.

When it comes to promoting your transport business, your plan will usually be a combination of a schedule and a budget. The goal of this type of plan is to figure out how much time you’re going to spend on promoting your business and how much money it will cost you to promote the business effectively.

As a small business owner, it might be that your time is in a shorter supply than money — especially if you still work as a driver for your transport business. Not having a lot of time to waste means you may be unwilling to try a ton of different marketing strategies in case they turn out to be ineffective. 

Though good time management is crucial, it’s also important to know how to promote your transport company as best you can. So it’s smart to test out a few strategies, if only for a short time. If you don’t do this, you may never find the most appropriate one to suit your needs.

The first step in building an online presence for your business is to create a business website. As well as being an incredible promotional tool, a website provides an online platform for receiving orders from clients. If you rely on taking orders over the phone or via text, a website may help you increase your number of clients. 

A website also provides a hub where you can store all of your contact information, like social media links, phone numbers, and email addresses. This means that customers can easily get in touch with you after finding your website.

Building a website does require you to be reasonably good with computers, so you might consider hiring a professional if you don’t have a particular interest in technology. There are also a lot of easy-to-use website builders out there that you can try if you cannot afford to hire a professional website designer. While their services can be expensive, the website you’ll end up with is likely to be very high quality, so it might be worth the cost.

As handy as a website is, it’s not much good if no one can find it. This is where SEO comes in. SEO stands for search engine optimisation: it refers to the process of improving your website so that it ranks higher on search engine results pages. 

Common ways of improving your SEO include adding menus and category pages to your website to make it easier to navigate. You can also improve SEO by making your website load faster, though this can be difficult if you don’t have computer skills.

One of the best ways to improve your website SEO is the use of keywords. Keywords are the terms people search for in Google or other search engines when they’re looking for websites. To ensure people find your site, try using keywords relevant to your company in the content you post on the website. 

Because of the complexity of search engine technology, thousands of things can affect your SEO, so make sure you look into a few SEO tips while building your website.

In this modern digital era, it’s essential to use social media for business, especially when promoting your company. Creating a social media profile on any platform is free and relatively easy. Creating engaging content is a little trickier, but it’s the key to a good social media presence.

Engaging content can take many forms, but videos promoting your business or social media competitions are two good content ideas for a transport business. Videos showing the daily life of your drivers, for instance, can help advertise the driving ability of you and your employees. It can also emphasise how good care you take of the people pr items you’re transporting. 

Competitions can greatly increase your number of orders and social media followers, but make sure you offer an attractive prize so that people take an interest. This is an excellent content idea if you’re a taxi service, as you can easily offer a few free or discounted rides as a prize. 

Good-quality promotion will hopefully cause an increase in the number of customers you get. More customers mean more income, which in turn means you might need to put more time into your financial management. 

If you sometimes struggle with this task, consider using accounting software to make the job easier. The Countingup app is an excellent example, as it’s a two in one product: a business current account with built-in accounting software.

Countingup allows you to manage all your financial data in one place. With features like invoicing on the go, receipt capture tools, tax estimates, and cash flow insights, you can confidently keep on top of your business finances wherever you are. 

In particular, its automatic expense categorisation can help with keeping track of any money you spend on your different promotion strategies. As soon as you make a transaction using the account, it goes into an HMRC-approved category that you can view at your leisure. This keeps your finances organised with almost no effort.

You can also instantly share your bookkeeping with your accountant without worrying about duplication errors, data lags, or inaccuracies. 

Find out more here.