As we mentioned in the first phase of the project, creating a seed carpoolers community in target pilot areas and improving UX/UI by integrating innovative approaches into the app was our initial goal. In the next step, optimizing route matching, providing a better payment medium, and understanding user behaviour to offer better and customized ride alternatives are some of the major technical subjects in the second phase of the project. Thus, we can say that we have fulfilled almost all of these goals by i) creating a total journey planner, ii) building detection and triggering mechanisms for passive users, iii) developing gamification based user engagement tools, and iv) providing enhanced feedback mechanisms for riders and drivers.
During the pilots, the aim of using social media was mainly due to its excellent profile targeting. Our goal is not to reach a large number of people during pilots. Our main goal is to reduce coverage geographically and demographically while creating a potentially dense user pool with homogeneous characteristics in order to test the features we have developed.
Therefore, the pilots were supported with direct marketing activities and outdoor ads when necessary. Furthermore, we have used e-mailing, notifications, and retargeting on the net and social media to retain pilot users and test the engaging abilities of our gamification components and product features. As for launching, we are extending the coverage of outdoor ads for the new districts we are targeting and support it with media purchasing in radio, mobile, social and digital.
TAG’s communication audience consists of three different groups of potential users and its stakeholders: i),University Students, ii) Daily Commuters, iii) Occasional users (Travel, events, trend followers). In the field, our primary aim was to educate the audience about ride-sharing facts and economy. This allowed us to build a society around the term “crowd sourced ride-sharing”. Now, these people are our spokes-people (seeds) in social media when we argue with the authorities in order to attain socio-economic benefits for the users of TAG and/or other similar apps.
During this surge period, the messages given to the audiences aims to ignite action for user journey planning: Hearing about TAG, downloading TAG, registration, building up for a line, setting up an actual ride, sending a request / accepting a request, sharing the ride, paying for the ride > saving money, inviting friends, repeating the cycle. On the other hand, our communication mix is covering all pilot cities during the launch period, targeting the first two target audience groups (universities and daily commuters).
