The Freight Guru

Podcast Episode 10 Digital Marketing Strategy for B2B Transportation

Victoria Farrell

Intro

Today we are talking about a topic that I have found very frustrating, digital marketing strategies for transportation. Specifically, the focus will be B2B marketing. Over the past 15 years, I have gone through 3rd party vendors, spoken to consultants, and built 15 websites. Every time I make a website, I have improved my marketing strategy using the steps I will lay out for you. You may not think that websites and SEO are closely related to the procurement of providers, but I believe that vendors are procuring online these days. I will give you steps and resources to grow your website organically. While PPC is immediate, it is expensive, SEO takes time and discipline.

5 Steps to Make a Good UI On Your Website

After creating 15 websites, we have learned five key steps to ensure a good user interface.

  1. A low friction payment system
  2. Conversion & transition pages: be specific on your homepage and get your audience to a subpage that is directly pertinent to their needs.
  3. Set up a 1-2-3 sales funnel: People want an easy way to get what they want.
  4. Schedule meetings online Via Calendy.
  5. Make sure your website is mobile-friendly.

Improving SEO With SpyFu

When building a website, you must use the right keywords to improve SEO. Our preferred tool to help with this is SpyFu. It allows you to do a lot of different things. On top of finding keywords, it enables you to look at your existing SEO rankings. That facilitates a better understanding of what is happening with your website. It also shows you your competitors and how they are doing. If we pull up my website GoFreightHub.io we can look at many different metrics. Among these are different time views, keywords, related words, backlinks, and search volumes. That is a powerful way to capture keywords, and it is only about $33/mo. You can make an excel spreadsheet with those keywords and strategically insert them into your website while branding them into backlinks.

How to Organically Reach Your Audience With Quora

Quora is a website that allows you to ask and answer questions. That is a great way to build an authentic relationship with your customers. By answering questions and asking intriguing ones, you can form a reputation as a reliable source of helpful information. That builds search validation and SEO.

Yoast

Yoast is SEO for everyone. They allow you to figure out where website errors are. It is very user-friendly and designed to be scalable. It also assists with training, copywriting, and site structure for beginners. Every mistake you have on your website hurts your validity with Google and brings you down in the search results. The main goal of any SEO strategy is to be on the first page of google.

Automation

To allow customers to log in and get a good bang for their buck, you need a simple Customer Relation Management system (CRM). That will facilitate giving the user an immediate notification that their request was received. You can, and should, also send 7day & 14day notifications. When a user goes on your website, they should get a prompt to give basic information like their name, email, and phone number. From that point, you can redirect them to a sales funnel and turn it into a monthly blast. You can also use this info to send out discount codes and engage in other customer interactions. If your customer does not get a confirmation email, they may believe their request has not been processed and thus go elsewhere.

Using Mailchimp As Your CRM

Our recommendation for a CRM is Mailchimp. It is very cost-effective. While their Premium plan is $299/mo, their other offerings offer plenty of features, and you can switch between them as needed. Their Standard tier is very powerful and only $14.99/mo. Focusing on retention is very important. It does not make sense to put all of this effort into building an audience if you cannot retain people. By retaining their data and putting it into a CRM, you can retain them.

Setting Goals

It is my opinion that you need to set weekly, monthly and annual goals. For an achievable goal, we recommend 2x growth on a specific platform. Pick a website you enjoy working with, like LinkedIn and if you have 100 users today, make your goal to get to 200 in a month. The way to go about achieving that goal is to engage with your audience. This engagement comes from what we talked about before, like getting on Quora and setting up CRM. Building an audience with authority and empathy is a solid long-term strategy. It is also essential to ensure minimal sales resistance to be successful, especially in B2B markets. Pushing selling hard is not always the best strategy. If you provide empathy and value, customers will come. Providing value and knowledge, widgets, and value-added services will lead you to the top and differentiate your website from your competition.

My Goals

Here are the goals I have set for myself, for how to engage with you, the freight guru audience. What I am looking to do is educate for this, my goals are

Interaction on Social Media

A great way to interact with your audience on social media is via YouTube. I have been doing a lot of research on influencers in trucking. There are many videos about a day in the life of a trucker and a dispatcher. Reach out to these people and try to get an interview or a five-minute call. Get those questions on Quora and have them link back to the video. That is a different way to look at the trucking community. Those people have intriguing insights and frustrations that one can miss. Moreover, those people are down in the trenches. That gives them a good sense of where the industry is heading.

How to Get Validation and Authority On Google

There are five pillars you need to follow to climb the Google results page.

  1. Content like a YouTube channel or blog posts
  2. Brand awareness via social media
  3. Landing pages
  4. Ensuring authority
  5. Building a sales funnel with a CRM

SEO vs. PPC

The other way to climb to the top of the search results is to pay your way there, with Google Ads. If you are new to transport and want instant gratification, spending money on PPC can make sense. However, it is not very sustainable in the long run. SEO will grow your business organically. Customers who are procuring like Wayfair, Amazon, Costco, and Walmart are looking for companies with a sizable web presence and are natively on the first page of Google. All In all, ads can be beneficial in the short term but should be avoided as part of a long-term strategy.

My Weekly Goals

Sunday: Research online and use resources | Come up with new ideas to innovate.

Monday: Production day | Create Content

Tuesday: Edit Day | Edit and build your content

Wednesday: Post Day | Publish your content

Thursday: Interaction day | Interact with your audience

Friday: Post small clips (clip bait) on social media | Get your audience engaged

Saturday: Engage if the audience is active if not research | Use of CRM & sales funnel

To-Do List For SEO Improvement

If you stay consistent and do the following, you will move much faster in web validation authority.

Define Your Company and Build Your Website

Defining what your company is doing is the most vital part of this whole operation. If you struggle with digital content, or animation, or web design, you have Fiverr. For less than $1k, you can do everything we have outlined for you today. On there, you can find people to manage your PPC and build your website. Today is the beginning of your journey towards making your website and SEO content. I’m challenging you to start building to become an authority on the first page of google.

Thank you for reading, and make sure to check out the full podcast available on our website! Or listen to the audio only version here.

 The Freight Guru

ll@thefreightguru.io

 

Download the PDFs mentioned

https://thefreightguru.io/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/Freight-Guru-Digital-Marketing-Q1-2021-.pdf

Recommended Logistics and Trucking companies:

FTL Services – http://teamdgd.com – https://goftl.io –  https://gologistics.io

LTL Services – https://goltl.io

Hazmat Services – https://gohazmat.io

TMS – https://mytruckhub.com

Logistics Services – https://go-freight.io

Fulfillment – https://gosunship.io

Warehousing – https://gowarehouse.io

 

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