As a host and marketing guy, here’s some easy, quick and (mostly) free social marketing ideas to drive bookings for these school holidays and upcoming long weekend…
Everything below is (very much) in addition to Drive mate’s ongoing (digital) advertising campaigns. Our new brand campaign has already been seen by 4.3m Australians (and counting), while our (solely) guest-focussed tactical ads are driving hundreds of new borrower sign-ups per week.
Easiest and fastest win is using your own social media networks (today) – here’s a sample Facebook post of mine to tailor:
Hey friends – did you know I share my cars on @drivemate20?
You can see my profile and book my cars here: www.bit.ly/BGSandSonDrivemate
New Drive mate users can use my referral link for $25 off: www.drivemate.au/signup?code=BENGOTTO
Include the location most relevant to your car(s) and set visibility to Public. Add a short sentence or two about the cars you have, and the daily ‘from $xx’ price, including Drive mate’s $12/day fee.
I use www.bit.ly to make this long-form link to my Drive mate host profile page (with all my cars) look neater. It's also a great tool to make and track personal QR codes.
Once you’ve posted, you can choose to Boost to your local areas, say 25kms radius, for extra views. I usually do $12/day x 3 days.
Here’s the good bit… now share your post to local groups – FB will suggest groups around you to join. Also consider owner groups for your cars' brands - they often like to rent the same brand when they travel, and even use car share for extended test drives!
Then copy, paste and tailor your post into a new Facebook Marketplace listing – choose ‘Item for sale’ (not Vehicle) then Classifieds / Miscellaneous as the Category – there’s nothing close to car sharing, and you’re not allowed to offer services per se. Again, you can choose paid Boost for (many) extra eyeballs.
All this will (or should) generate web traffic to your Drive mate listings, but also likely to spark FB Messenger contacts. Your call to just paste a standard reply and link sending them to Drive mate, or banter with them before you send them on, based on how much time you have spare!
Some other easy wins are using same-ish text for (free) Gumtree ads, and posting to www.nextdoor.com, a hyper-local community portal. Oh and similar to Instagram…
Next week, Drive mate’s Vistaprint landing page goes live, with customisable and printable templates for car stickers and flyers, with a corporate discount off their (already cheap) rates.
If you have any questions or other ideas, please email ben@drivemate.au – above’s just a start and by no means exhaustive.
Happy motoring,
Ben and the Drive mate team.
PS Apologies to any pro-marketers who found this basic, but that’s the whole idea. I’ll be diving deeper into host marketing over the coming weeks.
