Many traditional freight forwarders haven’t realized how much help they could get from using digital marketing strategies to get leads. They are still focusing on offline methods and are not aware of online sales benefits. It is now time for them to join the digital era, and we are willing to help. Therefore, we decided to share with you seven lead generation tips for freight forwarders.
Over the years, it has been proven that online sales can bring a lot more benefits than offline ones. The traditional cold selling requires many resources and it wears salespeople down faster. On the other hand, inbound marketing has excelled in hot leads generation, which makes conversion rates higher. Sales become much easier!
The same principle applies to freight forwarders. It is way more profitable to get prospects that have already consumed educational content because they are more likely to buy. By the time they get to you, they will have probably already studied their options and they will already know what they want.
So whenever you are ready, you should work on your lead generation and boost your freight forwarder’s sales. We are here to help you start your digital transformation, so we want to share with you some advice on how to get more qualified leads.
Here are seven lead generation tips for freight forwarders:
1. Study your competition and make a difference:
In the business world, you have to be constantly studying your competition and your position regarding the market. Take a look at what your competitors are doing on the digital channel and decide which will be your added value to differentiate your freight forwarder from the others. For instance, by now you should already be aware of the types of companies that are threatening traditional freight forwarders, such as the startups and digital forwarders. Then, based on your capacity, choose the differentiation strategy that best suits your business and start working on it: service quality, price, speed, distribution (suppliers), etc.
2. Deliver a functional website:
It is not enough to just have a website. It must satisfy at least the basic and main necessities of your potential customers. Make sure all the displayed content loads fast, try to plan the journey of your visitors and adapt all the content to take them through it. It is very important to deliver your message clearly by pointing out your differentiation strategy and having specific calls to action. Keep in mind that your website is the main tool to convert leads into sales. So, you should ensure they can easily find everything they need and do whatever you want them to, like filling in a contact form to ask for a quote, for example.
3. Offer your audience good content:
Content creation is one of the most efficient ways to get your target’s attention since people don’t even realize they are going through a sales funnel. You can start by having a blog section on your website to increase the sessions and improve your brand positioning among shippers. To succeed it is very important to choose topics that really grab your audience’s attention, such as explaining the difference between demurrage and detention for instance, as well as working on SEO optimization.
4. Lean on visual content to deliver your message:
The clearest your message is, the better. Visual content helps you explain everything that you want to say to your potential customers faster and easier. In fact, using video file format is now more and more common because it facilitates a full understanding of the service it’s being offered. Even 76% of marketers say it helped them increase sales, according to a research. So, take more advantage of visual content to communicate your message in a more efficient way.
5. Choose one social media channel to focus on:
As you are entering the digital marketing world, it is really important to focus on one main channel to have better outcomes. But, how do you know which one to choose? Well, it must be the one where your customers are the most active. Since your freight forwarder’s target is other companies (shippers), we highly recommend LinkedIn. Start working on your business page, share good visual content, get recommendations, connect with people in the freight forwarding industry, improve your salespeople profiles, and you will surely see the results very soon.
6. Start developing email marketing campaigns:
One of the most popular digital strategies at the moment is email marketing. If you manage to have a good email database, you can share with your potential customers good content that will lead them to your website and then to buying your freight forwarder’s service. There are many platforms that make it really easy to create and design email marketing campaigns, such as MailChimp.
7. Use ads campaigns:
Reaching out to a large number of people in an organic way, to begin with, is really hard. It is better to work on some ads campaigns, even if you start with a small investment. For instance, have you ever thought about what happens with that 90% of leads that visit your website but don’t contact you? If you would like to improve the conversion rate and sales, we recommend you to lean on the remarketing technique. Take advantage of those leads that have already shown some interest in your service, offer them additional information and remind them of what they were looking for. This kind of online pursue will take many of the leads back to your freight forwarder’s website so you can convert them into sales.
As you can see, getting into the digital marketing world is actually easier than you would think. Nowadays, you can find many online tools to catch up with digital business and platforms that can help you work on the lead generation. We already gave you some tips for freight forwarders we think you would appreciate and that you can start using right now, the rest is up to you!
