ReliaRide Medical Transportation

Strong positioning yields strong branding when implemented with discipline and care

The leaders at Scenic View Transportation showed an unusual degree of candor. They came to us acknowledging that their name was a hindrance. Coming across more like a nice tour through Amish Country rather than a medical transportation provider, the client knew it was time to make a change.

A family-oriented nonprofit, Scenic View Transportation started with the goal to be the best, most reliable, most professional, and friendliest ambulette service provider in Ohio (and perhaps beyond). The company established an excellent reputation by carefully screening its drivers and office staff, insisting that customers get the best service.

The company provides what’s called non-emergency medical transportation (NEMT) to hospitals, rehab and skilled nursing facilities, outpatient surgery, local clinics, doctors’ offices, physical therapy, sleep studies, pharmacy trips, legal consultations, eye exams, and X-rays. The company experienced amazing growth, even despite the name handicap and almost no marketing. Leadership decided to accelerate growth by beginning a marketing program and expanding geographically.

Scenic View Transportation enlisted America’s #1 Positioning Ad Agency, Innis Maggiore, for a complete rebranding due to name confusion. We recommended a leadership position and coined the new name ReliaRide™ Medical Transportation. Employing a catchy alliteration with the double Rs served to make the name more memorable. It’s simple word math: Reliable + Ride = ReliaRide.

We next designed a new logo featuring a stylized heart shape formed with a dotted line to represent a blessed path from point A to point B and back again. Innis Maggiore also created everything from an identity package and vehicle graphics to a TV spot, video, collateral, direct marketing, and displays.

A new website was to act as a lead source, unlike the then-existing website that was virtually invisible to Google due to bad and insufficient SEO. We created a bright and cheerful experience along with the comforting theme, “You’re riding with friends.” Before any of the marketing was deployed to the public, an internal launch took place to impress internal audiences and avoid grumbling. A gathering brought all employees together to reveal the new brand and distribute swag such as shirts and hats — and everyone was thrilled with the rebranding.

Innis Maggiore public relations experts communicated the new identity to prospective customers, riders, community partners, and media. The company’s owner was interviewed on leading radio stations in two area markets; several newspapers published feature articles; and the region’s major business news publication, Crain’s Cleveland Business, profiled the company and the rebranding. To date, Innis Maggiore’s PR efforts showed a Critical Mention publicity value of nearly $250,000 and a PR Newswire potential audience of 154.3 million. Driver applicants grew by four times, and ride requests increased 22%.

In addition, the agency created a postcard to explain the name change and its rationale to riders, which also featured a promotional overlay to encourage them to write Google Reviews. Each participant gained a sweepstakes entry for the chance to win a gift card. In the three-month effort, 208 riders wrote a review — and every one but one gave a 5-star review!

SARTA

Together, so much is possible

Saying thanks can make all the difference. Since 2012, Innis Maggiore has conducted many campaigns and projects for the Stark Area Regional Transit Authority (SARTA) to thank riders, drivers, corporations, and organizations. After a successful and award-winning campaign commemorating its 25th year — which we themed, “Happy SARTAversary!” — Innis Maggiore worked with the SARTA team to devote the following year to spotlighting how its services help real people to demonstrate the many aspects of how SARTA positively impacts the community in so many ways.

We named it “We Ride Together,” which was intended to communicate the double meaning of SARTA’s literal service of driving Stark County residents where they need to go, together with the more inspirational message that we’re all in this together and SARTA is always here to help our community.

The campaign was entirely devoted to riders, letting them tell their own stories in their own words — many whom could not otherwise get to their workplace, school, doctor’s appointments, or stores without SARTA’s valuable service. As SARTA’s transportation marketing agency, Innis Maggiore was proud to record and deploy heartwarming proof of the value SARTA brings to the community through video, audio, and written storytelling.

The core of this effort was social marketing, in concert with digital marketing, print, bus signage, and station posters — all showing riders. The goal was to increase awareness of SARTA’s service benefits by emphasizing the SARTA/rider/community relationship. We actually interviewed riders on the bus type they frequent (which necessitated turning off the engine and thus the air conditioner on hot summer days in order to best hear our rider subjects!) to create video and audio content for our social marketing implementation.

We helped the client monitor metrics such as social media engagement and click rates, which experienced healthy enhancements. It was also interesting to see the relative difference between each person’s stories, since our social media strategy was built around having each rider get their due one at a time in weekly sequence. The entire campaign resulted in a total of 451,855 impressions, 282 link clicks, and 410 reactions on Facebook.

Akron-Canton Airport

Northeast Ohio’s preferred airport

Akron-Canton Airport is “a better way to go^®" made even better with extensive redesigned and updated facilities for the best travel experience possible. CAK takes pride in offering a relaxing customer experience and affordable fares to popular vacation destinations, both in the US and abroad.

As their transportation marketing agency, Innis Maggiore created a sleek, elegant, and functional web experience that uses a combination of native content with third-party widgets to help the traveler find everything they need to in order to plan, buy, and track with ease. Users save time instead of wasting it getting to arrivals, departures, and booking flights since these CTAs are conveniently and prominently available in the hero panel.

• features 4 airlines, 18 nonstop flights, over 150 one-stop flights, and nearly 100 international destinations
• a regional airport with amenities and convenience greater than the competing larger market airports
• named Northeast Ohio’s preferred airport
  
  

The Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company

A lot of tenacity goes a long way

A lot of tenacity goes a long way.

An industry study showed that Goodyear Aviation, the category inventor, had fallen behind rival Michelin in awareness, perception, and preference in the general aviation market. Michelin was outspending the Goodyear brand by more than 10:1, creating confusion as to which was the real leader in the market. What’s more, the gap between it and lower-quality-price of brands was narrowing.

As America’s #1 Positioning Ad Agency and a leading transportation marketing agency, Innis Maggiore noted that Goodyear’s advertising was focused on aerobatic sponsorships and air shows rather than Goodyear’s brand position.

The marketing challenge was to reclaim dominance and strengthen Goodyear’s position as owning “technology innovation leader” and to do it within Goodyear’s customary modest budget.

Leadership is a two-edged sword. On one hand, not claiming it is the best thing you can do for the competition. On the other, claiming it as an entitlement can quickly devolve into irrelevance and eventual extinction.

To substantiate leadership as vibrant and active, the agency dug deep into the Goodyear product line. Here we discovered technological advancements that had been under-promoted or overlooked that quite clearly and dramatically substantiated Goodyear’s legacy in leadership through technology innovation.

One was being the first and only tire made with DuPont™ Kevlar^® brand fiber, which is pound-for-pound five times stronger than steel. The second was a proprietary blend of antioxidant materials that resists cracking and chafing. And the third was a dual polymer tread design for over 50% more tread than the leading competitor, for 20% more landings than its predecessor with enhanced traction. A focused creative strategy based on specifics dramatically increased credibility for the technology innovation leadership position to boost the Goodyear Aviation brand.

Realizing the importance of being strong somewhere instead of weak everywhere, Innis Maggiore also took a focused approach to the media strategy. Media proposals were requested from more than 20 consumer publications serving the aviation pilot/aircraft owner target market. The given to make the first cut in the consideration process was that space pricing had to be lower than what was negotiated by the prior agency the year before.

That whittled down the list of publications. Final negotiations were based on which publications could sweeten the deal by delivering the best and most desirable value-added packages. In the end, we chose to focus all media spending on one magazine, AOPA Pilot.

A post-campaign awareness/perception study conducted by AOPA Pilot showed that during the time Goodyear worked with Innis Maggiore as its transportation marketing agency:

• Brand awareness increased 50%, from 49% to 74% over a three-year period.
• Goodyear achieved a 20-point advantage over Michelin in brand awareness (74% vs. 54%).
• Related to brand awareness, in the period between studies, Goodyear realized a 50% increase in advertising awareness.

The Goodyear brand perception as associated with leadership superiority in technology innovations made a drastic jump upward, with awareness doubling for messages such as “Top quality line,” “Quality company,” “Longest tread life,” and “Best in tire technology.”

GOJO®

Learning a trade is well within reach

Today, most people know GOJO^® as the inventor of PURELL^® Hand Sanitizer. However, the company started by creating, manufacturing, and selling a heavy-duty but safe hand-cleaning product specifically for auto mechanics. Innis Maggiore has been both consultant and marketing partner to multiple divisions within the company — from PURELL and long-term care facility product line PROVON^® to sustainability efforts and a lead generation process. It only made sense that they rely on us as a leading transportation marketing agency to help with the business unit built around that initial product — GOJO^® Hand Cleaner, a one-step, rinse-off cream hand cleaner developed in 1946 — along with all its subsequent line extensions.

The Tough Soils division of GOJO wanted a way to reach the next generation of workers who will use their hand cleaning and hand hygiene products to keep transportation moving safely and efficiently. This included students in vocations such as auto mechanics (as well as construction and manufacturing), along with those pursuing a high level of technical education, with specialized branches like robotics, computer networking, environmental technology, and the like.

Our knowledge and experience in serving as a transportation marketing agency helped us find resources and create concepts that balanced performance with affordability. Rather than incur the costs of building a promotion from the ground up, GOJO Tough Soils was able to take advantage of an existing entity Innis Maggiore found for them.

We recommended that the company become a sponsor of an organization called SkillsUSA and participate in its annual National Leadership and Skills Conference (NLSC), a showcase of career and technical education students. We contacted the organization on GOJO’s behalf and struck an entry-level sponsorship deal, which subsequently grew and grew as the company saw the relevance and reach of this opportunity. 

More than 16,000 people — including students, teachers, and business partners — participated in the annual weeklong event, giving GOJO a ready-made audience of potential product users and influencers. The Tough Soils division had a presence at the event, with a booth that combined visibility with an ability to give out product samples. Representatives gave talks, while the company was a corporate supporter of the culminating event in which students aiming for a future in industries such as auto repair competed against one another. As a result of a positive first year, GOJO went on to become an enthusiastic sponsor of SkillsUSA for several years, with the first three years showing an escalating company involvement.

Nick Strimbu

Staying power keeps on trucking

Nick Strimbu Inc. prides itself on being the family-friendly trucking company, getting drivers home at night and on the weekends. They have a reputation for respecting their truckers, who earn good pay and good benefits. With the pandemic, all companies of all sorts were desperately seeking employees of all types with incentives of all sorts. A formerly easy-to-fill fast food job suddenly demanded high pay and signing bonuses. Transportation companies felt the squeeze, too.

As a leading transportation marketing agency, Innis Maggiore was approached by Nick Strimbu to recruit drivers. However, as America’s #1 Positioning Ad Agency, we knew it would take more than dollars and cents to compete with all of the other trucking companies doing the same. Outbidding wasn’t going to help anyone. We searched for the difference that could make the difference. The notion of respect rang powerfully as having potential, but it was also something one had to experience, and that couldn’t be quantified. Until we saw a statistic courtesy of an industry third party (perfect for credibility). 

Strimbu had a low turnover rate, especially when compared to all transportation companies. A turnover rate of only 30% was a dramatic differentiator compared with an industry average ranging from 70 to 90%. That became the proof of the theme of respect for their drivers. And that’s what made the narrative natural for a seasoned transportation marketing agency like Innis Maggiore.

We provided the background that Nick Strimbu has been a family company since 1926, treating drivers like family by respecting their time and not letting them sit idle. We pointed out that Strimbu paid experienced drivers more than the industry average and that “we don't just pay our employees, we invest in them.”

The culmination was about the retention differentiator, explaining it with the campaign hook, “truckers who drive with us stay with us.” We used actual driver testimonials to describe in their own words why, creating an inventory of several stories by several drivers to be used over a range of media.

The first phase was based on a media strategy to reach truck drivers when they are most likely considering a job change: on the road. We targeted the most qualified candidates by optimizing parameters, specifically geography, by geo-framing and -fencing, starting narrow in as many ways as possible and then expanding as results provided a positive ROI.

Innis Maggiore deployed an initial plan that engaged truck drivers when they were listening to audio content, including platforms such as Spotify, Soundcloud, iHeart, and Pandora.

Programmatic audio advertising helped us target our demo and do so geographically, using primary 15- and 30-second spots augmented by a secondary 60-second unit. We created a dedicated landing page based around the high-retention messaging and testimonial highlights.

Our second phase expanded to Facebook, Google, and a video campaign. In three months, the campaign generated 56 leads, of which 7 were hired. 

Our programmatic video campaign resulted in more than 342k impressions, with 52% watching the video to completion, generating 2,509 clicks to the landing page (a 0.73% click-through rate that far exceeded the 0.3% benchmark). The video brought the most traffic to the landing page, over 4,700 visits, with Facebook adding 3,300 and Google accounting for just over 1,800.

Google Search Ads were served more than 45,000 times and generated 2,200 clicks, resulting in a 4.6% click-through rate (exceeding our benchmark of 2.6%). YouTube got 616,000 impressions for 205 clicks to the landing page.

Over the span of 3 months, we reached more than 250,000 users and generated 5,916 clicks to the landing page. The truck stop audience generated the most engagement and clicks (2,233) to the landing page. The contrast in turnover message resonated with more users, resulting in more engagement as measured with comments, shares, and clicks. This proved that our strategy of providing proof of drivers choosing to stay with Nick Strimbu was a strong one — and that Innis Maggiore’s status as a leading transportation marketing agency was just as strong.