How to Create Driver Personas For Your Trucking Company

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When it comes to truck driver recruitment, one aspect is easily forgotten: driver personas. If you’re wondering what driver personas are, and how to create and use them, you’ve come to the right place. We’ll give you all the good details so you can begin–or enhance–your driver personas within your recruiting advertising strategy.

What are driver personas?

Personas are fictional, generalized representations of your ideal truck drivers. They help you understand your prospective drivers (and current drivers), and make it easier for you to tailor content to the specific needs, behaviors, and concerns of different groups.

There’s even such thing as negative personas, which portrays who you don’t want as drivers. This could include those who aren’t a part of your target audience. For example, if you hold a lead-generated promotion to give away an iPad and a female kindergarten teacher in her early 20’s signs up, that’s great — but most likely she’s not considered your typical “hot lead.” Your company shouldn’t spend time or money targeting negative personas because they won’t convert to drivers.

How can I use driver personas?

At the most basic level, personas allow you to personalize or target your marketing for different segments of your audience. For example, instead of sending the same lead nurturing emails to everyone in your database, you can segment by driver persona and tailor your messaging according to what you know about those different personas. When combined with lifecycle stage (i.e. how far along someone is in your hiring cycle), driver personas allow you to map out and create highly targeted content. This is a great recruiting technique because your leads are all at different stages. It’s important to use personas so you can personalize your advertising efforts and send the right message to the right leads.

If you decide to create those negative personas we talked about, you’ll have the added advantage of being able to segment out the “bad apples” from the rest of your contacts, which can help you achieve a lower cost-per-lead and cost-per-hire.

How can I create driver personas?

Personas are created through research, surveys, and interviews of your target audience. That includes a mix of current drivers, prospective drivers, and those outside of your contact databse who might align with your target audience.

Here are some practical methods for gathering the information you need to develop personas:

  • Interview current drivers either in person, online, or over the phone to discover what they like about driving for your trucking company.
  • Look through your contact database to uncover trends about how certain leads or drivers find and consume your content.
  • When creating forms to use on your website, use form fields that capture important persona information. (Example: Ask a question about the use of social media. This gives you more insight into which social media networks you should have a presence.)
  • Take into consideration your recruiters’ feedback on the leads they’re interacting with the most. (Example: What generalizations can they make about the different types of drivers that are most loyal?)

Here’s an overall walkthrough you may find helpful when creating a template to organize your persona data:

Persona Name: _____________

Section 1- Who?

  • Background – Job? Career path? Family?
  • Demographics – Male or female? Age? Income? Location?
  • Identifiers – Demeanor? Communication preferences?

Section 2- What?

  • Goals – Primary goal? Secondary goal?
  • Challenges – Primary challenge? Secondary challenge?
  • What can we do… to help our persona achieve their goals?…. to help our persona overcome their challenges?

Section 3- Why?

  • Real quotes – About their goals, challenges, etc…
  • Common objections – Why wouldn’t they fill out a driver application?

Section 4- How?

  • Marketing message – How should you describe your solution to your persona?
  • Elevator pitch – Sell your persona on your solution!

By following this template/guide, you can find out a lot about your target audience and create driver personas. The first step to any effective recruitment strategy is truly understanding your audience. When you understand these factors, you’re able to market to potential truck drivers and create highly targeted content.


Need help with your driver recruitment advertising? Get in touch with The Hightower Agency. With over 25 years in the industry, we offer a variety of affordable recruitment advertising solutions. Contact us today!


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