Milpitas SMART, the Smart Way for Milpitas Residents to Travel Around Town

Target Audience: Milpitas SMART is a new on-demand rideshare in Milpitas; a suburban city located in California with a daytime population of approximately 118,000. The convenient and affordable service offers rides to the city's commuters, including those who were not conveniently served by transit and transit-dependent population by supporting the Milpitas BART Station and VTA's existing bus and rail services. To increase awareness and ridership of the microtransit program, we built a marketing campaign that kept the city's residents and local stakeholders in mind. We strategized messaging and materials for seniors by featuring those they can identify with, built in-language assets for immigrants, placed ads at locations that transit users frequent, and targeted partnerships that can reach student riders.

Strategy Objective:Keeping in mind our marketing goal of increasing ridership to an average of 120 passengers per day, we developed an integrated marketing campaign by leveraging multiple platforms. With consistent branding and relevant assets, such as a website, brochure, photos, videos, and vehicles, we began communicating to the audience. The team used digital channels such as social media, email, in-app message, but also sought partnership with local organizations, conducted community outreach efforts, and invested in advertising options. For example, we implemented staffing outreach at transit stations to drive first mile/last mile usage, along with paid ad campaigns that featured an animation video and photos of the vehicle, since a picture is worth a thousand words.

Situation Challenge: Milpitas SMART was introduced due to the ~$1M in grant funding through the Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority (VTA) 2016 Measure B Program. The vision of the program is to support new innovative transit service for residents and visitors, allowing them to travel to work, school, shopping, and daily trips around town. When the service was initially launched, the challenge was a lack of awareness and understanding of the service model in the community, so we went to work developing a marketing campaign that helped the community understand what the service is, where they can go with the service, and how to book rides.

Results Impact: All the marketing efforts implemented have significantly increased awareness and ridership for the Milpitas SMART microtransit service. As of the end of October 2023, the program is delivering an average of 170+ passengers per day with an average ride rating of 4.8 out of 5, which exceeds our initial goals. Some of the most effective strategies that we executed were the paid social ad campaigns and out-of-home flyers. After launching paid social ads in March, the service saw an incredible 245% growth in ridership and the growth continued month after month. We also executed out-of-home flyers by putting up about 250 flyers around high-traffic areas and bus stop poles. This strategy led to a 60% ridership growth in July.

Why Submit: In the first year of this new transit program, we were able to build a strong ridership and service that not only provides connection for the first mile/last mile but also divert riders from single-occupancy vehicles to decrease carbon footprint. It is also attracting new riders to the public transit network, such as giving seniors more flexibility and transit-dependent students more mobility options. The marketing campaign has been critical to the success of this on-demand transit service and helped exceed the initial goals. We have begun sharing the best practices with the industry through a webinar. However, we hope to continue sharing the best practices to help agencies innovate not only transit solutions, but also marketing best practices for their communities.