How to grow freight forwarding business on LinkedIn

According to Corey Quinn’s article for Forbes, LinkedIn is one of the most powerful social media platforms on the Internet. With over 700 million users, LinkedIn represents the largest online professional network in the world. So knowing how to grow freight forwarding business on LinkedIn, can be a major game-changer for your company.

Especially for the freight forwarding industry, Linkedin is one of the most promising social media to target your marketing strategies. The wide range of professionals, interests, and functions, that the members of this social media embrace, provides a perfect environment for establishing professional relationships and generating business.

Why should I include LinkedIn in my marketing strategies?

First things first. To know how to use Linkedin in an efficient and beneficial way for your business, you first need to know why you should do it.

Although social media continues to prove more and more its importance as one of the most promising and effective communication channels for companies in all industries. For business-related social media content, LinkedIn is undoubtedly the ideal social platform, mainly because the focus and structure of the platform are focused on the exchange of professional ideas and interests. Data published by the Linkedin team revealed that professionals are signing up to join the network at a rate of almost 3 new members per second. For freight forwarders, taking advantage of this increase in social media to attract the right clients at the right time is extremely important to growing their business.

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The importance of using Linkedin as a marketing tool for freight forwarders to increase their business visibility and attract new customers and partners is evident, but if you are unfamiliar with it, you may find it difficult to determine which practices to follow in order to know how to grow freight forwarding business on LinkedIn.

How to use Linkedin to grow my forwarding business?

According to SEO training company, Backlinko, 40% of all Internet users worldwide use social media for work purposes. For the forwarding industry, as freight marketing continues to evolve in the digital space, it is increasingly crucial to meet the audience where they are, creating meaningful connections and building fruitful relationships. 

These 6 tips will help your freight company do just that, taking advantage of the main tools and techniques Linkedin offers.

1. Take a look at your profile

Does your LinkedIn profile speak to your ideal clients and potential partners or is it all about you?

With over 500 million members on Linkedin, there is a good chance that a potential partner will never find your profile if you don’t start understanding it as a business growth tool.

Having an attractive personal profile on Linkedin can make people want to know more about you and more importantly about your company. You can, through your profile, get people interested in your business.

To stand out and attract potential partners to your freight business, you can produce and share logistics content. You can, for example, answer some of the most common questions people have about the industry or share experiences your company has had. 

Besides that, since only a few people do this in the logistics market, this is a possibility to generate great results.

2. Create your freight forwarder’s Linkedin page

If you want to know how to grow freight forwarding business on LinkedIn, you first need to have a page on this social media. So if you haven’t created one yet, now is the time to do it.

When creating your forwarder’s page, keep in mind that pages with complete information get 30% more weekly views. So make sure you provide the visitors’ information about your company. For example, share your business vision, mission, and values, offer a brief description of your services and add the location of your office as well as the regions in which you operate.

You can also add images and videos of your company to your profile. And if you want to give your page an even more special touch, you can add a background photo.

Bear in mind that it is through your Linkedin page that potential freight partners can have the first contact with your company and get in touch with you. So make sure you add clear and up-to-date information about your business.

3. Share content relevant to your target audience

Just as a freight forwarding sales strategy should be directed to the company’s goals and objectives, marketing strategies need to be aligned with the interests of the target market for freight forwarders.

The more you post, the more people you can reach and increase your company’s visibility. Posting consistently shows Company Page visitors that your company is active on LinkedIn. However, to get started, try to post at least once a week. 

It is important to understand that there is no magic formula for building a relevant post. This means that not necessarily a post that has this information or is constructed that way will work for your Linkedin page.

Relevant content is one that reaches and talks to the target audience planned for it. So, if you want to produce Linkedin content focused on the freight forwarding and logistics industry, you can for example create posts about your company and its services. Besides that, you can also publish business tips, your impressions about market trends, and even comment on the latest news.

Click here to access more content ideas that can be included in the marketing plan of freight forwarder. 

You can use LinkedIn’s Company Page analytics to understand what works best for your forwarding company and continue to plan your content based on this analysis. LinkedIn also offers the possibility to post articles and blogs allowing you to further diversify the content you post other than images and videos. 

4. Invite people to follow your page

This is one of the many resources Linkedin offers, which allows you to invite your first-degree connections to check out and follow your page. To do this simply click on “Invite Connections” in the page administration tools and select the people you want to invite.

Let people know that your LinkedIn Page is updated and operating. This way you can expand your community and reach a wider audience. Moreover, turning to your own connections to expand your page’s followers is extremely beneficial because, once a page gains 150 followers, its opportunity for growth increases exponentially. 

5. Expand your network through groups

Linkedin groups offer another place where significant engagement happens regularly. With a large number of groups focused exclusively on logistics and forwarding, joining one of them and actively engaging in its posts is one of the best ways to ensure that your company gets noticed by other members.

You can find them by using industry-related keywords. For example, you can search for groups using the terms “freight forwarding”, “logistics”, “freight forwarders in [place of interest]” and so on.

Besides being a great way to ‘hear’ what your target audience is saying, there may be opportunities to start discussions about some industry-relevant topic with other members and perhaps make new connections, and partnerships. 

Many freight forwarders use Parnity‘s Linkedin group to share insights and news about the forwarding and logistics industry – if you are interested, click here to join.

6. Find potential partners

Sales and marketing simply cannot operate separately today. For consistent results, it is necessary to build stronger collaboration between the sales strategy for logistics company and marketing strategies. A smart strategy is one that connects your freight forwarder’s goals with lead generation and sales processes. 

There are many ways in which marketing and sales can complement each other through LinkedIn tactics. You can, for example, find freight forwarders using the search feature, visit their profiles to check recent activity, and discover a potential freight forwarder partner that can be engaged by your sales team.

Besides a large number of freight forwarders on Linkedin, its use is becoming more and more common to expand the network of forwarders, connect them with new potential partners and offer the opportunity to make new business. 

Linkedin emerges as a reliable and functional alternative that can even become one of the major logistics trends in a couple of years, especially when it comes to marketing strategy for freight forwarding company.

So let’s grow

It’s no longer a question of whether you should be on LinkedIn but rather, how you can stand out and gain an advantage within social media. So if you haven’t caught the wave yet, there’s still time to jump on board…

Now that you know how to grow freight forwarding business on LinkedIn, you can use the tips mentioned to maintain your freight company’s reputation and increase its visibility, while making new partnerships and deals.

Oh… and if you need some inspiration, Parnity’s Linkedin page produces and shares a lot of interesting content about the freight forwarding and logistics industry that can help you.