What we Achieved
We delivered a reliable stream of leads, driving up hires and solidifying GLHs pipeline, all in just three months.
How we got there
GLH is a London-based one-stop shop ground transport solution offering both car and courier services. They provide a range of transportation options including minicabs, electric vehicles, airport transfers, and executive cars. Additionally, they offer courier services such as same-day delivery, UK overnight, and international shipping. Their drivers are known for their reliability and professionalism, ensuring timely and efficient service for both passengers and packages.
With over 57 years in the private hire industry, GLH is a well-known brand around the London boroughs. However, due to a nationwide shortage of drivers after Covid-19 and the impact of drivers switching to ride-hailing apps, GLH was in the market for new drivers to grow their supply resource and team of expert drivers.
Dot Social created a native lead generation campaign on Meta – a tried and tested strategy. However, there was a large obstacle for those fleets looking for high-quality, qualified leads: the Discrimination Policy.
META CHALLENGES
Meta’s advertising policies strictly prohibit discrimination, especially in ads related to employment, credit, housing, social issues, elections, and politics. This is enforced through the “Special Ad Category,” which limits targeting options to prevent discriminatory practices. For employment ads, including lead generation for hiring, advertisers cannot use detailed targeting options based on age, gender, or other protected characteristics. Instead, they can only target users based on broad interests and behaviours that Meta pre-defines.
Whilst created for inclusivity, the Discrimination Policy means that you have very limited detailed targeting options and are essentially targeting any person of any age in your chosen geographical area.
Clear and Direct Copy and Creatives
When you cannot target a niche audience with your ads, you need to make sure your ads are super clear, specific, and direct so they capture the attention of your intended audience. Unfortunately, in an employment lead generation campaign, you will have a lot of waste and there is nothing you can do about that. However, what you can do is make sure that you’re capturing high-quality leads with clear and direct written copy and creatives.
To drive with GLH, you need to have a PCO licence issued by Transport for London (TfL). We could have generated 3,000 leads in 3 months if we also generated unlicensed leads, but 1,800 of these leads would have been unqualified and of no use to the client. Therefore, the Dot Social team made sure it was extremely clear that successful applicants needed a PCO licence. ‘Do you have a PCO licence’ and ‘PCO Licenced Drivers Wanted’ were prominent throughout these campaigns – from the written copy in the ads, to the copy in the creatives, and all over the native lead generation form.
A Tailored Lead Generation Form
You can optimise your ad and creative copy as much as possible but there will always be some who still want to apply despite not having a PCO licence. This is unavoidable but it doesn’t mean that you have to have hundreds of unlicensed leads flooding your client’s inbox. With GLH, we utilised conditional formatting in our native lead generation form which gave two routes for applicants. If an applicant said yes to having a PCO licence, they completed the form, and the lead was automated straight to the Driver Recruitment team. If an applicant said no to having a PCO licence, the form ended and did not allow the applicant to submit their contact details. However, it did direct them to the TfL website and explained how to acquire a PCO licence – ultimately helping more drivers get into the industry and expanding the job pool.
A-B Testing Creatives
So, we knew how to get qualified leads, but how did we get so many of them? Marketing for the private hire industry is no different from any other industry; you need to undergo A-B testing to find out what your audience likes and doesn’t like. The Dot Social team tested still photography imagery against highly designed graphic imagery to see which our audience resonated with.
We also tested imagery against long and short-form video to see which had the highest conversion rate. All these tests informed our next creative choices and acted as a research project for future campaigns. An in-depth analysis of which ad placements performed better also informed what size creatives we needed from our expert in-house design team – as well as which placements to turn off to conserve budget and channel all our resources into the highest converting placements.
THE RESULT
Ultimately, after three months of lead generation campaigns, we generated 1,209 qualified driver leads for GLH at a very low cost per lead (CPL) of £0.50. If only 10% of those drivers joined the fleet, that would still be 120 new drivers in three months – now that’s a lot of revenue!
For those drivers who didn’t join GLH but accepted being contacted about future marketing (the vast majority did), it meant that we had started to build a healthy database of licensed drivers in London for future email and social media campaigns – meaning no lead was wasted.
