The freight and logistics industry is more competitive than ever. While many found themselves facing uncertainty in recent years, there’s been an all-out war in pursuit of more leads. Lead generation and marketing are often seen as synonymous, and part of that is true. Effective marketing does ultimately end in lead generation, but the traditional standards for lead generation are at odds with modern marketing and its role in supporting your growth goals.
Today, businesses, i.e., shippers, have options for what freight company gets their loads. That means they’re actively looking to learn more about other brands, and the best way to turn those potential prospects into leads is through education. Unfortunately, educational content comes across as stale, cold and uncaring to many freight business owners and marketing professionals. There must be a blending of both truly brand-worthy content and content that aligns with expectations for search engine optimization.
Trucking companies can significantly increase their online presence through SEO, social media distribution, and additional content. In turn, that presence will drive revenue growth, and it should align with your freight marketing strategy. But where and when does freight business development and marketing start to work together to create these data-driven multichannel marketing tactics? Let’s take a deeper look at what’s happening and why freight business development and marketing teams should prioritize a well-rounded approach to content marketing to get and convert leads.
There’s an adage that you don’t know what you don’t know, and that’s especially true when looking at optimizing content for search engines. Yet, SEO optimization is also incredibly simple from a production standpoint. Past studies have found that 75% of users never scroll past the first page of search results, highlighting the importance of a strong online presence in organic search. However, that doesn’t mean your SEO-optimized content will appear automatically when someone searches for “trucking companies with the best rates.”
That may not even be a search term with any volume or intent. Optimizing your website with targeted keywords, such as “freight marketing” and “logistics marketing,” is key, but before you can even unlock those opportunities, you need to get the data.
So the next question is naturally, what’s the data all about?
It’s about the facts around individual keywords. SEO keyword data is typically broken into the following portions that influence rankability:
Only once you know what to target will you be ready to take the next step, creating and reoptimizing your existing content.
Creating high-quality, informative content will improve your website’s SEO and help you position your trucking company as an industry leader. But your content needs to be organized into both pillar and cluster pages. Pillar pages are most often your core services page, and in many cases, these are extensive pages in your site. However, length doesn’t necessarily equal a pillar page and vice versa. Short pages can become pillar pages with an effective linking strategy.
For example, if you have a page on “business intelligence” as a services page, you may want to create cluster topics, i.e., individual blogs, to cover smaller bits of the overarching business intelligence discussion. This can be as varied or broad as you choose. However, the number of pages you create should also pull together keywords that are related to the original keyword for the pillar page.
You also are not limited to a single length of post, and you can create multiple formats for your content. The trick is to ensure that search engines can crawl it. So if you created a blog on the “Top Reasons to Hire a Freight Broker,” you need all that content accessible, but if you created that blog and put it into a PDF file, it’s as if you didn’t create anything.
Remember that search engines evaluate your content rank based on what’s actually in the text of the material. Focus on creating engaging blog posts, whitepapers, and case studies. These showcase your company’s expertise and innovative solutions. This content can be used as a valuable lead generation tool, with 67% of marketers saying generating leads is their top content marketing goal, reports Ahrefs. And in fact, if you turn some of those assets into additional PDF formats, such as combining multiple blogs into a longer-form whitepaper, you could actually use it as a gated lead magnet. There is some debate about whether to gate or ungate your content, but ultimately, it’s the sum of content that’s visible to search engines that will make the most difference.
Getting attention via SEO for trucking companies is only part of the battle and takes time to work. Effective SEO can take a minimum of six months to even make it to the top three pages on search engines, and that only applies if the content is properly optimized, relevant, and helpful. Plus, if you were to target individual keyword phrases with a very high difficulty, it will take even longer. Terms with a difficulty rating above 60 require backlinks to rank, and you don’t want to make the mistake of trying to increase backlinks through a paid backlink building.
Why?
Backlink building is essentially most often a spammy process that uses potentially toxic domains to artificially inflate your website. And over time, these lower-quality backlinks result in a more toxic profile and greater distrust from search engines. Instead, it’s better to create the content, wait, get attention, and let the backlinks come naturally.
That’s where you can begin to see the material gain traction for portions of keywords, more short-tail keywords, such as “trucking company” versus “trucking company with a TMS SaaS platform.” But again, it’s all a game of time and energy, and the best strategies may take 18 to 24 months to create a truly sustainable lead generation engine.
The next most obvious question is “what can we do to support SEO during this time?” The answer lies in how you distribute your content.
Let’s be honest. Distribution is getting your content out in front of people, and in the last few years, a plethora of lead generation organizations and companies have popped up on LinkedIn. These lead generation experts often position themselves as companies that conduct email marketing campaigns, message your prospects, and effectively create a near stalkerish means of connecting with potential customers.
There’s also another truth in distributing content and information. Despite the growth of inbound marketing as the go-to strategy in today’s age, many, many, many companies still rely on outbound marketing contacts to drive sales. This is especially true in industries experiencing stress and setbacks. The freight market has certainly set such setbacks since the pandemic-era level rates, and yes, sending information about your brand through cold calls or emails is perfectly legal, provided you adhere to a few basic requirements, you have to get creative in distribution. This is where you can actually tap social media.
Social media platforms, like LinkedIn and Twitter, can increase brand awareness, connect with potential clients, and share valuable content. Survey data shared by Sprout Social found that 40% of B2B marketers rated LinkedIn as the most effective platform for lead generation.
Why?
LinkedIn allows you to basically fine tune your messaging to your audience in a way that you cannot possibly achieve on other platforms. You can search for people at individual companies, giving rise to a plan for account-based marketing, and you can even learn what they find interesting. That right there is precisely why you can influence the conversation through distributing your content on social media.
Building a strong social media presence allows your trucking company to expand its reach. In turn, you can create valuable business connections, and you’re not necessarily limited to your existing connections.
Consider this example. If you share your content to social media, your connections may repost that content. Reposts on LinkedIn can even be completed into a group, allowing you to effectively reach an even wider audience. However, you have to be cautious about individual group rules, and of course, some groups may moderate or limit your ability to post. So you have the SEO and the basics of social media distribution, so now let’s go back to the conversation on cold outreach and email marketing.
Not all email marketing is cold emailing! That’s the most basic thing that every freight business development representative or logistics marketer must know. But you can still do a few things to expand your distribution to your known contacts.
At its core, email marketing remains one of the most effective integrated marketing channels for B2B companies. You have to turn those leads, the people that follow your company and who’ve given consent to receive marketing communications from your brand a reason to convert.
With email marketing you can turn them into paying customers by sending targeted, personalized emails to your prospects. But your marketing emails mustn’t be vague and a catch-all. After all, not every shipper will care about the same things. And don’t even go into the price argument. You need to look beyond some “The Price Is Right” plan for marketing. You need to tailor your message to get them to become true customers and move further around the marketing flywheel.
You need to segment your marketing lists. A survey shared by Mortgage Innovators, found more than a 700% growth in revenue by simply segmenting your email marketing strategy. Implementing a segmented email marketing strategy means tweaking your messaging to appeal more to your targets, and it can significantly drive your trucking company’s growth. This can be as simple as expanding your emails to discuss regional market news or simply sharing something that you think a specific subset of your audience will appreciate.
For instance, shippers on the west coast may be more intrigued by information about what’s happening with the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach. Meanwhile, shippers on the east coast may be more concerned about the state of drayage with impending tropical storms. Obviously, there are more factors at play than just two coasts and two broad plans, but the overall idea is the same. Group them together based on what they have in common!
There are many great ways to get started with marketing your brand, whether you’re a new and upcoming freight broker, a freight management consultant, a trucking company, or some third party. Regardless of what you hope to accomplish, there’s another motto that comes from Gino Wickman’s EOS methodology, “It’s less important what you decide than it is that you decide.” That principle must be at the heart of your marketing strategy because indecision will lead to a marketing paralysis that you cannot overcome.
Of course, you can start by applying the above information to kickstart your SEO keyword research, planning your social media distribution channels, and even defining how segmented you want to make your contact lists. But it’s much easier when you have an advocate that really gets the freight industry, and that’s JCI Marketing. You don’t have to explain the basics of drayage, detention and demurrage to us. We get what you do, and that’s why we do this: you deserve an expert in logistics marketing. With our advanced and professional SEO skills and industry knowledge, we can help your trucking company reach new heights. Connect with a JCI Marketing team member to get started.