Digital marketing for freight forwarders

The digital marketing industry has grown a lot in the last few years in the most diverse markets, and in 2021 this landscape is more competitive than ever. For the freight forwarding industry, this is no different – digital marketing for freight forwarders is becoming one of the priorities of the companies, and day by day forwarders are starting to invest more and more in freight marketing.

However, most forwarders don’t know where to begin their freight forwarder digital marketing journey, and the benefits it can bring to the company. So keep reading to understand where to start and how your freight business can grow on that.

After all, what is digital marketing?

Digital marketing is the promotion of products or brands through digital media. To summarize digital marketing are all your company’s marketing efforts in the online environment aiming to attract new customers, build a relationship with your audience and increase brand awareness. 

So, to build digital marketing strategies for your freight forwarding company you can use channels like websites, email, social media, search engines, blogs, and much more. 

The benefits digital marketing brings to your freight forwarder

Building a consolidated marketing strategy for your freight forwarding company can bring many benefits, such as:

1. Attracting new clients and partners

Usually, this is the main focus of most digital marketing strategies, acquiring new customers and partners, and there are many ways to achieve this goal, for example, through emails, ads, social media, blogs, and much more. 

2. Receiving feedback from your customers and audience

Once you start working with digital marketing in your freight forwarding company you have to be prepared to receive feedback, either positive or negative. Regardless, feedback is always a good exit to start working on touchpoints of improvement inside your forwarding company.

3. Improving the relationship with your customers

Digital marketing means online presence, and directly dealing with your customers and partners in all of the touchpoints. Therefore, once you get closer to your freight forwarder clients and partners, you start to build and improve the relationship you have with them. Through your forwarding digital marketing, you show them how much you pay attention to them, and that they are your priority. 

4. Strengthen customer retention

The more you establish a presence for your freight forwarding company in the online environment through digital marketing and show your clients how much they are essential to your business, that they can trust you, count on you every step of the way, and of course by offering a good service and customer support the more you will see them coming back to close shipments with your forwarder company. 

5. Become a reference in the market

Working with digital marketing strategies inside your freight forwarder helps your company to become a reference in the industry, and that is because, once you have a good presence on your website, you are active on social media, you show your forwarder customers and partners their importance to your freight company they will start to indicate you to others, along with that other freight forwarders will see your presence online as a way of inspiration.

6. Increase your forwarder company’s brand awareness

The digital marketing strategies you do inside your freight forwarder company will directly impact your brand awareness. Again, once you make yourself present in the online environment by having a good website, by posting on social media, by making good blog posts, by working with ads, doing webinars, and lives you will for sure increase your brand awareness, you will be acknowledged by your forwarder customers, partners and competitors. 

7. Become part of a digital logistics network

Joining a logistics network can bring more visibility to your forwarding company, and that is a great opportunity for your freight marketing strategies. Parnity digital logistics network is an amazing network to gain more visibility, with more than 1.200 members and over 3.000 free forwarders users inside Parnity making over 11.000 quotations per month, can you imagine being part of something this big? If you got interested in knowing more about Parnity here is the link to the website.

8. Reinforce competitive differentials

Make sure to show to your forwarder clients and potential ones what makes your freight forwarding company different from the other forwarders out there. Show the benefits that your freight customers and partners will have by closing business with you, make sure to show the industry your differentials.

9. Increase the company’s profitability

By investing in digital marketing for your freight forwarding company and achieving the benefits mentioned above: generating more leads, more sales opportunities, increasing your brand awareness, by improving your relationship with your partners and clients – you will for sure improve your freight company’s profitability.

How to start building a digital marketing strategy for your forwarder

1. Build your personas

The first step is to create your personas.

• Personas are fictional characters, created to represent the different types of customers you have in your company. 

You will want to build them by their demographics and psychographics side.

• Demographics:

• matrimonial status;
• female or male;
• their age;
• where they live.

• Psychographics :

• what they like to do;
• how are their routine;
• what are their beliefs;
• what are their goals;
• what they do on weekends;
• what kind of music they listen to, etc.

You should build around 2 or 3 personas max, it will depend on the types of clients you have inside your forwarding company. 

2. Market analysis

The second step is to take a deep look at the forwarding industry and check out what your competitors have been doing. Go to their website, their social media, visualize the kinds of content they have been producing, see what you like, what you don’t like to understand the kind of path you will want to follow.

Map around 4 to 7 competitors to have a good overview of what they have been working on.

3. Choose your digital marketing channels

Now it’s time to choose which channels you will begin your digital marketing strategies. To start it’s always better to go through the most common ones, such as:

• Email
• Social Media
• Facebook and Linkedin Groups
• Blog
• Google and Social Media Ads

These channels will give you a lot of ground to cover, so if you want to start slowly go one by one, and then start mixing all of them together.

4. Begin your forwarder digital marketing planning

After you choose the channels you will work on you need to start planning and organizing what you will produce, and for each channel, you have to build a different plan. 

• Email:

When we think about email marketing strategies there are two types of content you should deliver to your audience, and that is: commercial and institutional.

Commercial emails are the ones you will try to sell your forwarding business and maybe add a special condition. 

As for the institutional emails, you should let your clients know what your forwarding company can offer them, and how they can benefit from it. 

The difference between them is that the commercial email needs to create a sense of urgency, while the institutional email doesn’t.

Think about sending 1 email every 15 days. 

• Social media:

As for social media, you can cover many kinds of content, here you will find a list of content suggestions. It’s important to build a monthly plan with 2 or 3 posts per week to keep in touch with your audience.

• Blog:

Writing a blog post can take a lot of your time, so the best choice for you to start is to make one every two weeks. As for the types of content, in one week you can write about the news and insights of the forwarding industry and on the other, you can write tips and guides to help your customers during the operation. 

• Google and Social Media Ads:

To wrap it up, when we think about Google and social media Ads is better to build a bi-weekly, or monthly plan, one that focuses on selling your freight forwarding company and its services, and an institutional one for you to increase your brand awareness. Or even a seasonal campaign that focuses on a specific date, or promotion.

In the beginning, you can get lost in creating your digital marketing planning, that is why we prepared a spreadsheet that will help you plan your strategies the best way possible, here is the link for you to access the sheet.

Start working on it

Now that you have a complete guide on how to start building digital marketing for freight forwarders it’s time to work on it! Take a step further on your freight forwarding company and invest a little time to enjoy all the benefits digital marketing can bring to your forwarder. 

To have an overview of the content above, watch the video below.