Helping a Transportation Startup Find Its Place in a Hypercompetitive Market: Zavezu.ua Offers Opportunities for Small Carriers

In the rapidly evolving cargo transportation sector, both individuals and businesses are continually looking for trustworthy transport solutions. At the same time, the market is dominated by giants like OLX, Lardi, and Della. This dominance makes it particularly difficult for marketplace services like Zavezu to promote and sell themselves. However, we took up the challenge and found ourselves proposing a marketing strategy for the Zavezu service.

The client

Zavezu.ua aims to revolutionize the transportation service aggregation industry in Ukraine by offering users a platform that allows them to quickly and conveniently find a carrier for their cargo. It caters to both individual and business clients, as well as small and medium-sized carriers.

This is a specialized marketplace. Along with its advanced functionality, Zavezu has the following unique selling proposition (USP):

• Transparent (free) information about carriers.
• Transportation of both small and large loads — from up to 1.5 tons to 25 tons.
• No dispatchers.
• Free order placement and convenient carrier search for customers.
• Free order reviews for carriers.

Campaign objectives

Our goal was to expand on Zavezu’s unique selling proposition (USP) and build a strategy based on it. The USP had to meet the current needs of the market, differentiate it from competitors, and establish Zavezu as a reliable and efficient platform for transportation services.

Team strategy

At Netpeak Ukraine, we work on creating strategies based on the DSA (Discovery, Strategy, Action) framework. It allows us to clearly understand brand positioning, formulate business goals, and set a clear action plan to achieve them — all before any money is spent.

When it comes to small businesses, startups, or testing a new direction without a large budget, the Discovery Light framework is more appropriate. It requires fewer resources but results in a clear and realistic marketing strategy. Here is how it worked for Zavezu.

Research: Understanding the brand and the marketplace

The first step was to perform in-depth research. We sought answers to the following questions: What is our client’s starting point, and where do they want to go?

After conducting market research, we identified a number of factors that affected the effectiveness of service advertising.

• Dominance of large players in attracting customers and carriers.
• High advertising costs for small carriers.
• Lack of an alternative platform that could effectively connect individual and business customers with transportation service providers.

A typical B2C customer, according to our target audience research, is most likely to search for a carrier on OLX and doesn’t place orders often. Carriers themselves also promote themselves on OLX and only occasionally engage in SEO or PPC.

Working with these factors posed an interesting challenge for us.

Helping Zavezu find its place in the market

Using the brandformance methodology, the Netpeak Discovery team developed a marketing strategy for the MVP. It was based on the following tasks:

• Defining the USP of the service
• Segmentation of the target audience
• Creating user stories from different user groups

Based on the results of the strategic session and the target audience survey, we concluded that Zavezu needed to:

1. Niche itself by defining a key service that will engage the audience and attract early customers.
2. Expand the audience to include business owners who need transportation services.
3. Optimize the website by focusing the UX/UI on the main benefit of the service.
4. Find their own story, i.e., build a brand.

These tasks involve both marketing and product design and are designed to produce an MVP (minimum viable product).

Testing the MVP using only advertising tools

Next, we implemented a test PPC campaign. Search and display advertising tools allowed us to evaluate all of our hypotheses. Then, based on the feedback, we made changes to the product and its marketing.

Our key steps

1. Approval of the communication idea.
   We proposed three concepts: the benefit of the service (1), the simplicity of the service (2), and a wide choice of carriers (3). The client supported the idea of choice, as it perfectly conveys a variety of transportation and carriers.

2. Testing the visual style — photographic and graphic.
   The realistic visual style worked best. This can probably be explained by the fact that people want to feel represented in advertisements.

3. Testing of services: garbage collection (1), transportation of furniture and appliances (2), removal of any objects (3).
   According to the test results, the most popular service was "transportation of furniture and equipment". It was significantly ahead of "removal of construction debris" and "removal of anything".

Zavezu then focused on building its B2C communication around this core.

Interestingly, among GDN (Google Display Network) ads, the content about "trusted carriers" showed the best results. It outperformed ads with an emphasis on "choice" and "economy". This could be because many carriers are realizing the importance of being reliable.

The next step was to optimize the UX/UI of the platform: the main page, the furniture transport page, the B2B page, and the driver registration page. This allowed us to make the resource more convenient for customers and highlight the USP of this business. 

Read more about how Netpeak Ukraine’s UX/UI team redesigned the interface of zavezu.ua.

Promotion results

Although the specific results of the marketing strategy are not available for public disclosure, the company has experienced several benefits:

• Improved the interaction of the zavezu.ua brand with both carriers and their customers.
• Optimized advertising costs.
• Adjusted some product features, in particular, prioritized the pages of the main transport categories.

All of these will help increase market share and strengthen the brand’s position in the transportation services market in the future.