Freight Broker Marketing

Freight Broker Marketing

Behind every successful business lies a good marketing strategy, freight brokerages included. After all, how else do you expect to bring in new leads and shippers to your brokerage? It’s not like you can indefinitely spend all of your time picking up the phone and making cold calls once you start to grow!

Sure, these cold calls and actively going after potential clients is essential for your success, especially in the beginning, but having to depend on that and do it constantly, all while managing and booking loads for your current shippers and carriers, is just not sustainable in the long run.

This is exactly where a solid marketing strategy comes into play, and that’s what we’re going to talk about in this week’s post.

Once you and your team implement some of these strategies that we’re about to break down, you’ll soon find yourself generating quality inquiries, leads, and new clients on autopilot, allowing you to spend the majority of your time delivering value and focusing on getting loads moved from A to B!

Let’s start by talking about your website. In the past, I’ve talked about all of the essential information you need in order to put a website together for your brokerage, but now let’s talk about how to really leverage it to boost your visibility.

As a general rule of thumb, the more QUALITY content and information you have on your website, the better it’s going to perform when it comes to appearing in search results. It’s a fairly straightforward principle; the more content you have that matches up with searches (searches in Google for example), the more search results your brokerage is going to appear in.

So what kind of content can you include on your site? Well, anything that delivers value really!

You can have a blog section (like we have here) to break down a lot of current events in the industry to help keep shippers and carriers informed.

You can draw up a section of your site dedicated to explaining the niches and areas that you serve, and how your operations differ from one to the other.

Or, you can have a whole section for quality testimonials and reviews from your clients, which would serve to both add credibility and create some additional content!

The possibilities here really are limitless, just as long as whatever you’re putting up on your website delivers some sort of value to someone. The LAST thing you want to do is include pages of worthless ‘fluff’ just for the sake of having something there…your viewers won’t like it, and it won’t do you any favors in search engines.

Speaking of search engines though, if you’re able to afford it, hiring someone to manage the search engine optimization (SEO) work for your website can help give you an edge over competitors, but this should only be considered once you’re established and looking to scale up.

It’s a complicated process and skill to learn, but by optimizing your website through various means, both on the surface  and behind the scenes, you can boost up your visibility in search results! Again, just hire an expert though if you want to go down this route and implement it, you have enough on your plate as it is when running a brokerage!

Another technique I like to use is especially helpful if you want to build a presence in a specific city or area, and it involves ‘hacking’ google a little bit.

Let’s start by saying that you want to be the go-to hazmat broker for the Dallas area. To do this, you should start by renting an office space in Dallas (or even a co-working space as a cheaper option). Once you have this space, a physical address for your business in that city, you then go to Google My Business and register the address. Now, for verification purposes, Google will send a verification to that business address, which you then need to collect and confirm.

Once you do confirm it and get the verification though, you are all set, and you now have a permanent physical address and presence in that city! At this point, when someone in the Dallas area is searching for a hazmat broker, you’ll pop up as a local result, adding instant credibility and visibility to your brokerage.

Better yet, once you are verified, you can just cancel the membership to the coworking space or office space, maintaining that physical address with Google without actually being there. And as you can imagine, you can repeat this process with as many cities as you’d like, setting up these branches and ‘local locations’ everywhere!

If you want to take it a step further and enhance your credibility even more, you can always opt for a virtual phone system like Tresta to get phone numbers that match up with the local area.

Pretty neat, right? It’s amazing what you can do with just a little bit of creativity and some tools!

Now last but not least, I want to briefly touch on social media, as it’s also a great way to market yourself and gain some additional visibility, especially with platforms like LinkedIn and even Facebook. As a rule of thumb, similar to the case with your website, the more value you deliver, the better the results you can expect.

Start by finding relevant groups or communities in the transportation industry (especially on Facebook), connect with potential shippers and carriers, follow popular posts and forums within the industry, deliver valuable insights and help to solve problems and answer questions, and do whatever you can to show people just how professional and knowledgeable you and your brokerage really are. It really is that simple!

Just be sure NOT to go around soliciting others and offering your services…that’s an immediate turn off to others and comes across as spammy or even desperate. Remember, focus on delivering value wherever you can and the inquiries and leads will naturally follow.

Well, there you have it! Implement any or all of these strategies into your brokerage, and before you know it, shippers (and carriers too!) will be reaching out to try and do business with you on a regular basis.

And remember, if all of this marketing work is too much for you to handle yourself (after all, running a brokerage is incredibly demanding in itself), feel free to bring a marketer onto your team. Even having a part time employee to manage these aspects can make a big difference, allowing your brokerage to grow while you yourself focus on the main tasks of the industry!