5 Steps to Creating Driver Personas for Your Trucking Company

If you’re still building truck driver recruitment campaigns with generic messaging and blasting them to your entire database, you’re losing time and money. Marketing has entered an age of personalization, and prospective drivers expect the same from your team. Defining truck driver personas is a great way to help your company and your recruitment team better understand candidates and even existing drives within your fleet. It also makes it easier to build ads, develop marketing messaging, and determine channels to reach each driver. If you have no idea where to start, we’ve outlined 5 steps you can take today to define driver personas for your trucking company. 

1. Leverage your existing driver pool.

Building a persona starts by asking the right questions. To start, you’ll want to gather data on a mix of current drivers, prospective drivers, and driver profiles within your existing database. When gathering information to develop personas, a great resource is your recruitment team, who talk to drivers daily. You’ll want to look at the characteristics of your best-performing drivers and start to find commonalities or generalizations. You can ask questions like: Are they prompt? What is their safety record? What stage are they in their career? Are they tech-savvy? What social platforms are they on? 

2. Identify key characteristics and set demographics.

After gathering data from your recruitment team and other resources, you can start to segment the audience into different driver personas. When looking at the drivers at your company or prospective drivers, you’ll want to see if any groups rise to the top that share common characteristics, goals, or behaviors.  This is where you’ll look at things like age, marital status, location, stage in career, and so on. You’ll also want to explore personality traits like their demeanor and how they prefer to communicate. For example, if you know that a position within your fleet requires someone who is engaging and friendly — it will be incredible helpful to be able to quickly identify drivers that may have more personable character traits. 

3. Highlight your top personas.

Now that we’ve gathered the data and identified common characteristics within our audience, you’ll want to identify the top personas from your unique pool. Your “personas” represent a shared set of characteristics that you’ve identified amongst your drivers. It’s okay to start small! Defining one or two driver personas is a great place to start when you’re using this marketing tactic for the first time. For example: You discover that 35% of your current driver pool are between the ages of 44-54, they are empty-nesters and happy with driving regional versus being home daily. You call this driver persona “The Empty Nester” and can start building campaigns targeted to this audience. Or, alternatively, perhaps you discover that 29% of your current driver pool is between the ages of 29-35, are young parents, and desire more home time so they can attend their children’s events. Consider calling this persona “The Young Parent”. All of these characteristics help define which marketing tactics will be most effective on your drivers.

4. Describe their frustrations and challenges.

It’s likely that your driver is going to be facing challenges if they’re looking for a new job. Try to define primary and secondary challenges. Once you’ve defined the greatest challenges for each persona, you can address the concerns they might have in your campaign messaging. For example, if the recruiter is engaging with a young family-oriented driver who is currently driving OTR — a role that involves local home routes will definitely pique their interest.  

5. Show them the path to success with your company.

In addition to identifying the driver’s challenges, it’s also important to define their goals and what motivates them. A useful persona goes well beyond their fears and challenges to truly understand the motivations of the driver. For example, a younger driver might express that they want to provide for their family and purchase a home. If this is the case, the recruiter can build a campaign that highlights a roadmap to building your career within their company. Not only will this differentiate your messaging, it will make the driver feel as if you are speaking directly to them.

One final tip for your recruitment team is to keep the driver personas top-of-mind throughout the whole process. If a qualified driver isn’t a right fit for the position they applied for, your recruiter should be able to easily identify a better fit based on their profile. Having recruiters who can act quickly on re-routing the talent will help you stand out from the competition and ensure your quality leads don’t go to waste.

Ready to take the next step? Check out our follow-up blog on Using Your Personas to Build a Campaign Strategy. If you’re looking for guidance on building your driver personas, KJ Media has 15+ years of driver recruiting experience. Reach out today.