PJM Lorry Park recognised it was missing out on a great chunk of its market as it didn’t have the resources to manage social media programmes in-house.
Commercial drivers need services
Some of PJM's competitors—lorry parks and services up and down the UK—were using social with great effect. Managers were referred to BuzzedUp by business partners who knew we were delivering marketing results in the auto sector.
“Before Mick came on board with us, we had very little social media presence, and what we did have was a little out of date and wasn’t fully engaging our followers and customers.”
Sam Moore, PJM Finance Director
The challenge
PJM’s Managing Director Paul Moore gave me a clear challenge:
- Get more new wagons through the gate
- Generate loyalty. We want more drivers returning.
The work
I stepped in to build a social community amongst commercial drivers. PJM is a great business and had some great stories to tell, not least its award-winning canteen that drivers absolutely loved. So we concentrated on good news stories, judiciously highlighted services and their benefits to drivers.
Focusing on Facebook, and using purely organic methods, I creating a huge amount of relevant, shareable content. I monitored and jumped in on comments, mentions and indeed any opportunities to engage with drivers, partners or influencers in the truck-driving community (which turned out to be massive). The work included developing:
- A very large library of original images
- Many hundreds of social-friendly graphics and short videos
- Lots of evidence showing top service from PJM via online surveys, interviews with drivers and driver feedback.
Results
Using a modest budget we grew the Facebook following from 400 to almost 3,000 in a year, nurturing it to become active and supportive in the process. Director Sam Moore:
“Definitely more drivers have stayed here — and we’ve seen increased loyalty, too. Mick produced proactive posts, updated imagery, and responding to any customer/follower questions in a timely manner. This enabled our followers to understand what we were about. This is turn meant that our customer visitors also increased and generated lots of positive feedback and comments.”
