Courier Magazine recently interviewed Drivv about the company’s marketing strategy. June Hayford, COO, Drivv, gave us insightful and educational information.

Courier Magazine: Tell us how your company’s marketing strategy has changed over the years.

June Hayford: We are a website company. So, we primarily focus on trying to increase traffic through search engine optimization and combine that with old school marketing; we go to trade shows, advertise in magazines and try various ways to create an image for ourselves in various areas.

With Courierboard, we started out trying to create a website that would look attractive and would be our face online. Over the years, we’ve done various things, such as search engine optimization – working with various tools to improve where we rank.

Courierboard, for instance – we decided instead of just being one website, we wanted to have an individual page for every city that we’re in. So, we have 18,000 homepages. If you go to Courierboard and find us through Atlanta courier, you’ll see us on the Atlanta courier page, which has all the different companies in our system in Atlanta. Our goal is to promote the courier companies through our inner network. By promoting these courier companies, we hope to get them more business.

Courier Magazine: What type of strategies are you currently using to bring in more clients?

June Hayford: We just did a rebranding. We spent a lot of money and time redoing our whole website. We changed the way it looks, tried to make it more user-friendly and we’ve added online chat, which is a good online strategy – you want to reach out and grab visitors when they are on your site. And we’ve come up with a new logo, new colors, and new name.

When we first started, Courierboard was a good name for getting courier companies into our system. But now that we want to go outside to the bigger world, we want to have a name that’s easier to remember and spell. So, we decided to go with Drivv because that’s what couriers do! They drive. We also thought we could use that in a positive way. You know, you drive your business, drive your deliveries. So, we did a whole rebranding.

And one of the ways we did that and how we saved money-is we used 99designs.(99designs is a crowdsource site where you can find people to perform most any task.) All of our work is website design and development. So, when redoing a website, you can pay a lot or a little- someone will say “I can redo your website for $50,000”-it’s so indeterminable what the real value of that work is. But we decided that we would try using 99designs, which is an online site for logos and web design. We wound up enlisting three or four people in different parts of the world who did fantastic work for us that was very high quality for a substantially lower rate. We had them do our marketing brochures, standup banners, regular brochure, corporate collateral – it was all high caliber work for a fraction of the cost.

We also go to every trade shows [and bring those materials]. We really believe in this market. Going to these shows is key. The courier companies are there, the vendors are there and the ability to meet someone one-on-one is so important. People say, “I don’t want to spend the money for the hotel and all of that,” but you get a better bang for your buck by going to the ECA, the CLDA and the state meetings… We’ve always done that, and we continue to go to every single one. That’s how we built our clientele and shippers.

Courier Magazine: Have you received any client feedback about how your company brands itself? Where do you think your strategy will go from here?

June Hayford: I think people are very interested because we are a website and we are competing against other online platforms. There’s UberRUSH, Cargomatic, Roadie – you have all these different systems that are networked. They all have one thing in common – these companies are trying to connect the person who needs a shipment with a driver and a vehicle. I think there’s a lot of concern within the courier industry that these companies could make us obsolete. We, on the other hand, think that Drivv is different. We call it the “Drivv Difference” because we believe shippers need to have a courier company because you can’t rely on just a tech platform to be able to supervise drivers, background check, etc. So, one of the things we are interested in is this. We promote ourselves and in doing so we promote the courier industry and make shippers come to Drivv, which then sends business to these courier companies.

So everyone agrees that yes, we want you to stay in business and we definitely want to stay in business. So, our goal is to promote Drivv. We plan to start increasing our visibility – we’re looking into billboards, radio advertisements, we are going to do YouTube videos all to get that Drivv name out there so people start thinking, “Oh, I need a courier. I better go to Drivv.”

This article was written by Abbie Stutzer and appears in the September/October 2016 edition of Courier Magazine. www.CourierMagazine.com