Small town, small pocket books

We live in a small town with a population of 14,000. We've drastically reduced our prices just to get a warm body in the car. I'm having to create a market from scratch, inventing new reasons for these folks to get out and enjoy their time out. Without much business I don't have the overhead for this continous aggressive marketing. We have an ad in the paper every week and highly graphic flyers all over town. Still no one seems to know about it.
Today the local paper did a nice big front page article on us which inspired only 5 people to call. At $50. an hour they still seem hesitant! Our car is beautiful and completely decked out for the holidays, I even have gifts for the children. I work in the hospitality business and know what it takes to sell a customer on the phone. Do you have any marketing advice for these people to want to put away their yard rakes and go out and enjoy themselves?? Should we try a billboard in the middle of town, an ad on the back of the local grocery store receipt, movie theatre ads?
I've even thought about just a plain flourscent pink flyer with big black lettering, posted all over town, as tacky as it sounds but it's cheap, this busines needs to start supporting itself. Thanks for any advice!

In general, newspaper is not a good choice of media for limousines. Another thing to consider is we have a specialty product. In most cases, a wedding, a funeral, a 50th birthday etc. are REASONS to rent limos. With this in mind, go visit bridal stores, tux shops, funeral homes, hotels in your area. If you want to spend money on print, instead of newspaper, create some nice brochures you can leave with these places. Another good "exposure" method is to go to the number one radio station in your market and offer them a win-win deal. Find a restaurant that people like to go to. As the restaurant if they would consider "donating" eight meals a week for daily radio exposure. The program is called "Lunch on Us". The radio station then asks people to fax in their "entry" on letterhead for Lunch on Us", a limousine ride from "ABC Limousines" and lunch for you and seven of your closest co-workers at "Blah Blah Restaurant". The Deejays talk about this all day long, people in offices talk about it and your name is mentioned at least 100 times a day on the radio as well as the restaurant. It's win-win for everyone. The radio station looks like a hero giving away lunch every week. Before long, your company name will be a household word. Good luck to you.

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> We live in a small town with a
> population of 14,000.
I would say that is not much of a market to sell such a highly discretionary service like a limousine. Also is your town the high income town in the area, you know the town with the highest price homes and most exclusive shops. These are factors you have to consider and target the town with a very high median income. After all in the Midwest it is not uncommon to have people who pay a monthly mortgage of 300.00. So it’s kind of hard to convince them to spend 400.00 for a night out on the town. In LA or New York where people commonly pay 2000.00 a month for mortgage the 400.00 is a relative value to them. SO my advise is to target a larger and more affluent market, it can only help. Even if this means you have to travel 30 minutes for each job it’s still worth it as long as you are keeping your equipment utilized.

> We've drastically reduced our prices
> just to get a warm body in the car.
I do not think price is your problem as much as the problems you mention below. Of course if you went to $10.00 an hour your limo would always be full but that is out of the question. I think your more fundamental problem is the culture of your community toward lavish spending and having fun in general.

> I'm having to create a market from
> scratch, inventing new reasons for these
> folks to get out and enjoy their time out.
> Do you have any marketing advice for these
> people to want to put away their yard rakes
> and go out and enjoy themselves??

Correct me if I am wrong but could your town and surrounding area be categorized as very conservative? My aunt lives in a very affluent and conservative part of Ohio but if someone were to hire a limousine and go bar hopping I can imagine what would be all over town for the next month:
Joe Smith got a limo to go out on the town, what a big spender, throws money out the window like it’s growing on trees, etc…
And it is especially true that in small towns everyone knows everyone else’s business. So my guess is the only time it will be acceptable to hire a limo in a community like this is for special occasions. And my guess would be this is where you get a bulk of your work, Weddings, Birthdays etc. I do not imagine you have much corporate airport work and the like?

So my advise to you is to stop marketing your prices and concentrate more on marketing ideas to this community on how they can use a limo to have fun. In large markets we do not have to do this as people come up with these types of ideas all the time for us. Some examples:

We participate in elementary school fundraising events where the top sellers get to invite a friend out to lunch and be taken in a limo. We do this for a rate that is about 40% of our regular rate for that size car. At the end we give them a card with a picture of the car on it (souvenir) and on the back some info about a package deal for kids birthdays parties. If there is a favorite spot (arcade type place) for kids to have birthdays and it is some ways away try to strike a deal with them where each kids gets 5.00 in tokens if the parents book the limo for two transfers, one to the place and another 4 hours later back home. Come up with a package pricing for this that is just enough so the parents would say “well for 200.00 for the limo and 50.00 for food at this joint we could have a party that the kids would have fun at with the added benefit that I would not have to clean up my house after the party, and I would not have to make anything". This is the kind of feedback we get from our client when we put something like this together. But even this is not our main goal, we really do not want these type of low dollar transfer type jobs. Our hope is that these kids will go to school and tell other kids “we got a limo for my party”, then other kids go home and say to their parents “we want a limo for our birthday party”. But instead of two transfers out to the arcade/pizza joint now these folks want to do a movie and dinner for the kids, so now this just turned into a 5 hour as directed as opposed to two 1 hour transfers.

The point of all this is that you hopefully create another special event when a limo is appropriate. And this should be your goal. To increase the number of occasions when people think about getting a limo.

I see you are near St. Paul, do they have a symphony, or occasional Broadway shows come to town? This is another opportunity to create an occasion for a limo. 50th wedding anniversaries were mentioned before but why only 50th, why not every year. Send a letter to customers that used your service for a wedding a year ago, address it to the man of the house and explain to him why he should not get his wife a blender for their first anniversary, why he should start a tradition of showing his wife just how much she means to him by taking her out for a night of music or the theatre for their anniversary. My point here is do not forget about customers that already have used you for one special event, they just need to be given an idea of how to use you again.

I am assuming you do proms there as well so this is another little trick that many of our clients are picking up on when their kids rent limos for proms. We go over to the house at 7:00pm take the kids to the prom then come back and get the parents and they go out for dinner until 10:30pm drop them back at the house at 11:00pm then back to pick up the kids at midnight and drive them around until 2:00am The parents usually kick in $100.00 to lower the limo bill for the kids. While this is a tremendous pain for the driver, it does expose parents who ordinarily would not rent a limo to go out to dinner in a world of luxury and convenience that we hope they grow to like. So when you get the call from the kids “Like how much is like a limo to go to like the prom?” Try and sell them on this idea by letting them know your company is different because we may charge 50.00 more than the other guy but we will offer to drive your parents out to dinner that night and they can contribute to lower your total bill. This also means that the parents can get dressed up (for dinner) also and take a nice picture with their children.

My point here is if you want consumers to be friendly towards your limo company you have to be a consumer friendly company. Meaning you do not pull the old 8 hour minimum, we wait outside for you the entire time, no extra stops, no nothing. Companies can get away with that stuff in the larger markets but we have enough demand to justify it, you may not, be flexible.

Have any tourist destinations around your area? Market a package to go see them during the summer months when you know that people may have relatives in from out of town. This my also be a two transfer type of deal, take them down in the morning and pick them up later in the day. If people back there are as price sensitive as you say they most likely could not handle a 6 hour run just to show their family around, have to break them in easy. So maybe it would be a 1 hour transfer n the morning for 3 hours of shopping them a 3 hour run for the trip back and take them out to lunch and wait for them. Something like that people would go for as long as you have everything planned out for them and you can give them a set price for the package. And hopefully the next time they have relatives in they will also use you to pick them up at the airport.

For an excellent example of packages take a look at Limo Scenes page on his site, it’s just the sort of thing to get people thinking about how to use a limo, it’s the best most comprehensive I have seen to date:
http://www.bakersfield.net/limousinescene/packages.html


> Without much business I don't have the
> overhead for continuos aggressive marketing.
All the marketing in the world will not make someone purchase something they think they have no need for.

> We have an ad in the paper every week and
> highly graphic flyers all over town. Still
> no one seems to know about it.
They probably know about it they just cannot see a reason to use it. If you have an ad in the yellow pages and you are the only company around chances are people will find you with no problem. Your marketing has to get them thinking about getting a limo.

> Today the local paper did a nice big
> front page article on us which inspired
> only 5 people to call.
Thats some good free publicity, cannot beat that.
What type of events were the callers inquiring about?

Good Luck!!
You got a tough challenge ahead of you, It’s hard enough to get good regular customers in large cities, It must be double difficult to do it in small towns.

Steve Walker
Azusa, CA
steve@capriceshop.com
http://www.capriceshop.com

Thank you for the excellent advice and reassurance! The website was really inspirational too. The radio station actually got ahold of us first and will be doing a drawing at the local stores to win one of our packages to the casino in exchange for airtime.
Promotional work seems to be paying itself off pretty well. It's getting folks familiar with us and the service, they have so much fun, word is getting around quite quickly. For the first time the limo is finally able to cover it's own payments this month. Hopefully I'll be able to continue coming up with enough specialized service ideas to maintain our current customers and inspire people to get out and try it.
Thanks again!