Table of Contents
The Trucking Industry Introduction to Social Media Industry Issues Why Online Marketing For Trucking? Brand Recognition Targeted Reach Where People (Truckers) Spend their time Build Relationships Social Media Attract Content Engage Promote Customer Service Reporting The Networks Facebook Twitter Google+ Youtube SEO How to Make Your Business More Social Tools to do it yourself Hootsuite Simply Measured Hire an in-house staff Outsource to a professional team About KJ Media
Social Media for the Transportation Industry KJ Media ¡ http://www.kjtransmedia.com/ ¡ 800-620-9967
The Trucking Industry Introduction to Social Media This guide was created to help transportation and logistics companies create effective online marketing campaigns via popular social media channels such as Facebook and Twitter. We will describe best practices that Trucking companies should adhere to in order to build a thriving online community around their brand, which in turn will help increase visibility, recruiting, and sales.
Industry Issues The importance of Trucking is communicated by the industry adage: "If you bought it, a truck brought it." Retail stores, hospitals, gas stations, garbage disposal, construction sites, banks, and even a clean water supply depends entirely upon trucks to distribute vital cargo. Even before a product reaches store shelves, the raw materials and other stages of production materials that go into manufacturing any given product are moved by trucks. However, the Trucking Industry has been one of the slowest major industries to make a smooth transition into the new online age. This had led to several industry-wide issues that Trucking companies are starting to solve with new age marketing techniques.
Trucker Shortage It’s quite clear that truckers are in high demand, and filling these positions for a trucking company is a top priority. Traditional advertising methods have lost their effectiveness. In this guide we will discuss the new methods that Trucking companies are using to successfully recruit new truckers.
New Customers With over 72% of companies claiming to have acquired new customers via social media, it is clear why many industries are developing large online footprints. With the advent of social media and two-way content marketing, it is now possible to build an online community around your brand and hold Social Media for the Transportation Industry KJ Media ¡ http://www.kjtransmedia.com/ ¡ 800-620-9967
conversations with potential customers, drivers, and prospects before they even walk through your door or pick up the phone.
Social Media for the Transportation Industry KJ Media ¡ http://www.kjtransmedia.com/ ¡ 800-620-9967
Why Online Marketing For Trucking? Brand Recognition
With the average social media user checking 5-8 times a day, it has become one of America’s most popular pastimes. Once just a way for the young and tech savvy to communicate, it has now become one of the primary means for the entire world to connect. For the first time in history, a person has direct access to millions of people right in their pocket or on their desk. Since 2010 brands have ramped up social media marketing, for the simple fact that they can integrate their brand name amongst millions of personal conversations. This focus on social media is expected to increase significantly in the coming years. Once a user followers your business or brand on one of the major social media networks, they never have to go directly to your brand’s page again. Just a simple glance at their phone or computer to check out what their friends and family are up to, and your own brand’s marketing posts can be found in between. Over a sustained period of time,
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assuming your content is fresh and engaging, businesses can build brand loyalty and awareness amongst a specifically targeted audience. This allows brands to become part of a follower’s every day life. One study has shown each Facebook fan to add on average over $170 dollars to a company’s annual bottom line. Although the exact number is debatable, it is clear that having your brand name and message integrated between users’ personal messages creates a level of recognition that increases brand equity.
Targeted Reach Some businesses have tried social media and online marketing and have failed to achieve any meaningful results. One of the primary reasons is that their messages and content are not getting in front of their desired target audience. However one thing's for certain, with over one billion people on Facebook alone, it is clear that the people who you want to get your message to are already there. Later in this guide we will discuss how to reach your desired audience on the major social networks.
Social Media for the Transportation Industry KJ Media · http://www.kjtransmedia.com/ · 800-620-9967
Social Media for the Transportation Industry KJ Media ¡ http://www.kjtransmedia.com/ ¡ 800-620-9967
Where People (Truckers) Spend their Time The average person in America visits Facebook over 150 times a month and spends over 15 hours a month on the website. Truckers, perhaps, could be spending even more time on social media as they are usually alone on the road and it’s their only outlet to connect with family and friends.
Build Relationships Social media gives businesses the ability to build lasting relationships with their audience. Unlike impersonal TV or Billboard ads, social media allows for a two-way conversation between the audience and the brand. In addition, with frequent content, your audience always has something new and fresh to look forward to from your brand. In the following section we will describe, in detail, how to effectively manage and create a social media presence.
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Traditionally advertising has been a one way platform where companies “push” their messages out to their audience, hoping that it resonates strongly enough with the consumer and leads to a buying a decision (or leads to a particular action, such as a driver filling out a job application). Social media, however, allows businesses to build communities around their brand. Past, present, and potential customers (and other target audiences) are able to interact with your business. A steady stream of content from your brand ensures that the users will see your content regularly, keeping you fresh-in-mind when the need for your products or services arise.
Attract The first step in utilizing social media to meet your recruiting and marketing goals is to attract the correct audience to follow your pages. This is much more important in social media than with traditional advertising because these people will see your messages on a regular basis. Being able to convince the right people to “follow” your online pages is the ground level to building a successful social presence. There are different methods depending on which network you wish to utilize. We will describe the networks in individual sections later in this guide.
Content This is another category that many businesses don’t quite “get.” The key with social media is building trust with the followers that you have attracted to your page. Many businesses fail because they only post marketing messages and events that will benefit their company directly if people take action upon them. However, your “followers” do not follow your page to simply get spammed by your marketing and recruiting posts. They follow you because they find your
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content interesting. It’s important to keep them interested! The best way to do this is to mix in fun, informational messages to build trust and a sense of community. A good way to gauge the quality of your content is to put yourself in your audience’s shoes. Simply ask yourself, would you smile if you read this? Or more importantly, would you smile if a friend sent this to you? Has the post taught you something new, or made you say “Aha!?” Does the message stick with you and linger in your mind after reading it? If the answer is yes, your message will aid in building a bond between your company and your followers.
Once a level of trust and personal connection is established between your brand and your followers, you will notice that your marketing and recruiting message are acted upon more frequently. The audience knows that the content you post is not just in your best interest but also theirs, because of the trust you have earned entertaining and educating them in the past.
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Engage Here’s where the “social” comes in. Creating content about your brand is not enough. The most successful social media campaigns create engagement amongst their audience members. Creating a sense of community, with activity conversations between your brand and your followers is key to increasing brand awareness. It is important to put yourself in the followers’ shoes when creating content. Would the post be something you are willing to reply to or comment about? If so, then it is probably an “engaging” post. Engagement is key for two reasons. The first is followers are much more likely to remember your brand if they interact with it. Secondly, comments left by your followers can be seen by their friends, which helps spread your brand to people that might not have been familiar with it. When a friend of your follower sees them commenting and engaging in conversation with your company, there is a chance that they take a look at your page and follow you too! This is called going viral and is the quickest way to penetrate a target audience.
Social Media for the Transportation Industry KJ Media · http://www.kjtransmedia.com/ · 800-620-9967
Promote Obviously, your primary purpose for social media marketing is to promote your brands products, services, or offerings. For Trucking companies that wish to hire more qualified drivers, it could be directing your audience to your recruiting page on your website. Once you build rapport with your followers, posting messages about the benefits of driving for your company along with a link to an application would be a great call-to-action. Many businesses skip the prior steps to building an online community and go straight to promoting their offers. This is a big mistake and is a reason for people to instantly ignore your page. However, well written promotions (or call-to-actions) are creative enough to drive people to take an action while also building on engagement and brand loyalty.
Social Media for the Transportation Industry KJ Media ¡ http://www.kjtransmedia.com/ ¡ 800-620-9967
Customer Service With the world moving at a faster pace day by day, social media is becoming a major platform for customer service. Being active on social media helps create transparent customer service and you can manage many interactions at the same time. Many people prefer to ask questions and leave inquiries on social media because it is often much quicker to leave a message from their mobile device rather than to search for your number and call (or even send an email).
Reporting It is important to track your social media progress so you can track what’s working and what’s not. Businesses need to find their voice and determine what works for their following. Every following, even within the same industry, will respond differently to different voices. Is your reporting data showing you have a younger crowd? Speak in terms that would resonate with them. Did your page engagement spike when you wrote about a certain topic? You can create similar content to keep your audience paying attention to your page.
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Is your reporting showing a following in a certain region? Tie in local stories into your posts.
These reporting features help personalize your page and further develop brand trust.
Social Media for the Transportation Industry KJ Media ¡ http://www.kjtransmedia.com/ ¡ 800-620-9967
The Networks
The 800 pound gorilla when it comes to social networking. With over 1.2 billion active users, it is by far the most popular and active network.
Many businesses have tried Facebook marketing in the past, however a large amount see no benefit due to not being able to build new followers (Page Likes) and not having their content seen. It is important to note that not every page follower will see your posts. In fact, only a small percentage (10-20%) will. Facebook will display certain posts that they deem to be “quality content” (engaging,
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visually pleasing, etc.) to a higher percentage of your audience. This is a preventative measure to make sure people are only seeing messages that are interesting to them and not a wall of spam.
People who have shown interest in your posts by engaging with prior content are more likely to see your future content. You can also use Facebook’s Ad system to promote certain page posts so a higher percentage of your audience sees them. New Followers The most efficient way to gain new followers is through Facebook’s advertising platform. Using precise targeting, we can display Ads that show up throughout Facebook displaying your page and offering potential followers a chance to like your page. Once they “like” your page they will start to see your posts and messages show up in between the messages of their friends and family members. The benefits are a more precise, targeted audience based on their likes, interests, and conversations. A quick scan for people interested in “Trucking” related topics returned over 1 million users. Facebook tracks almost everything about everyone and helps us serve ads to the exact audience we are trying to reach. See below for a quick example of an Ad aimed toward building a following of Truckers for a Facebook page.
Social Media for the Transportation Industry KJ Media · http://www.kjtransmedia.com/ · 800-620-9967
Facebook’s Ad Targeting System
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Twitter is a text-based social network where users can send out 140-or-less character based messages called “Tweets”. It is the 2nd most actively used network behind Facebook, with over 550 million users and differs in general content style. Unlike Facebook that only shows your messages to a certain percentage of your followers, Twitter shows it to all. This causes your feed of messages to show very recent messages instead of ones they deem to be “important.” It is because of this, that businesses should post several times a day, as tweets have a very short visibility or life span. New Followers Other than making great, entertaining, informative posts that get retweeted (shared) by your followers, one of the quickest ways to build a targeted audience is to go out and find them. Using Twitter’s search tool (http://search.twitter.com) can help you search for people who have tweeted recently about a certain term (such as “Trucker”) or people who have it in their profile description.
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Twitter’s Search Tool
Once you have identified these people, you can tweet a message to them or follow their page. Often times if you follow a user with interests similar to your page or the products you sell, they will follow you back if they like what they see on your page. Developing a list of potential followers and following them in order to noticed is a viable marketing strategy to build an audience. However, it is advised that you only follow a couple select people at a time, as Twitter is known to crack down on those who are flagged for “aggressively following.” Again, once these people follow your page your messages will show up on their Twitter feed even if they never directly go to your Twitter profile page again.
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Google+ is the social network of internet giant Google. Once a struggling network, it has become one of the largest with over 500 million active users. Using Google’s premier search functionality you can easily find people who are talking about a particular term or topic. To look for people talking about Trucking, simply type “trucking” in the Google+ search bar and it will show you relevant results. One of the largest benefits of having an active page for your business on Google+ is that it could help you increase your position in Google’s search rankings. Ranking higher on Google’s search results is very beneficial, as most people rarely look past the second page when searching for a business. It has been shown that Google indexes posts on their social network to show up in their widely used Google.com search engine. Hangouts are another popular Google+ exclusive feature. It allows video conferencing between many different parties and is great for hosting virtual events, meetings, or conferences for your business and its followers.
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YouTube streams over 6 billion hours of video to more than 1 billion unique users per month across the globe. In the U.S., YouTube now reaches a bigger audience of adults 18-34 than any single TV network. YouTube, in a sense, is an active social network where the content is 100% video. Your profile is called a “channel” and subscribers will see your video content show up on their home screen. As with all Google products, search is done very well and it is very easy for people who are searching for videos about your industry (and competitors) to come across yours in their search results. If you plan on creating your own YouTube videos and channel, it is important you produce high quality video content. If you don’t have the resources or wherewithal to do so, contacting a video marketing company, such as KJ Media (www.kjtransmedia.com) can help you make professional videos for online display.
Social Media for the Transportation Industry KJ Media · http://www.kjtransmedia.com/ · 800-620-9967
Although social media is a buzzing new(er) marketing tool, a traditional website is still important. Think of social media as an ongoing customer/client meeting and your website as your storefront or office. SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is the process to increase your website in organic search results on Google and other search engines. This way, your website is more likely to be found by people looking for the goods and services you provide. With social media you can gain a targeted audience that continually sees your messages but might be ready to take action right away. However with proper SEO, you can attract people who are actively searching for you right now! Often times, SEO is overlooked in exposure and advertising campaigns but when done correctly (and in tandem with active social media), SEO can bring a massive influx of qualified prospects.
Social Media for the Transportation Industry KJ Media ¡ http://www.kjtransmedia.com/ ¡ 800-620-9967
How to Make Your Business More Social Tools to do it yourself Hootsuite www.hootsuite.com
Hootsuite allows you to manage all your social media pages on one convenient platform. It makes monitoring conversations on several different pages much easier and saves a significant amount of time. Another key feature is the ability to schedule messages in advance. This way you (or your marketing team) can plan out your content in advance and schedule them to be posted.
Simply Measured www.simplymeasured.com Simply Measured is a great subscription-based service to monitor the analytics of your social media campaigns. Using this data is invaluable in helping to strategize on future content and marketing posts as it shows which posts are most effective and which are largely ignored.
Social Media for the Transportation Industry KJ Media ¡ http://www.kjtransmedia.com/ ¡ 800-620-9967
Hire an in-house staff
. Allowing an office assistant or intern to handle your social media marketing is often a big mistake. With the combined duties of marketing, public relations, and customer service this is a job that requires a qualified candidate(s) to represent your business. Colleges and Universities are now offering courses on social media management and one route you can go to establish your social media presence is to hire a qualified employee (or several employees for larger organizations) whose sole duty is to create, manage, implement, and track your social media campaign. With the average social media manager demanding a salary of $80,000+ it can also be a wise decision to go the alternative route, outsourcing to a professional social media marketing firm.
Outsource to a professional team An outside marketing firm can often provide you with fresh ideas to help create buzz amongst your target audience. Often times, when you hire an in-house social media manager there is a delay in getting your campaign off the ground in order to set up the creative team and process flows for pushing out marketing content. A full service marketing agency already has their teams and processes in place and can help you get started quickly and efficiently. In addition, most high end online marketing firms will have many agency quality tools to assist in targeting, content creation, scheduling, and monitoring that would normally cost a business several thousand dollars a month if they were to subscribe to these services on their own. Lastly, outsourcing to an online marketing firm is usually more cost effective than hiring an in house social media employee. And they already have proven tried and tested strategies that can be implemented right away to help propel your social media efforts.
Social Media for the Transportation Industry KJ Media ¡ http://www.kjtransmedia.com/ ¡ 800-620-9967
The KJ Media Team is a team of professionals that specialize in marketing specifically in the transportation industry. We are the most effective way to increase your overall sales and marketing campaign, your customer retention, as well as your driver applications and your driver retention.
Building an efficient and effective marketing strategy for customers and drivers is crucial in today’s market. Social media and marketing is about building and sharing information within our industry. Whether your goal is to increase brand recognition, ignite your driver community, or increase website traffic through social sharing, we will customize a marketing strategy that’s right for you. We can assist in developing content that is alluring for both your drivers & customers based on your specific industry within transportation.
With one of the largest driver and operator followings in the nation, they rely on our team to deliver today’s most trusted transportation companies. We pride ourselves on building our customers’ brand and we treat our customers as if we were their direct employee.
In addition to helping trucking companies build effective online marketing solutions, we are strong advocates of trucker safety. We work with companies to help educate their workforce on important safety issues and best practices, especially with modern mobile technology (smart phones, tablets) becoming part of everyday life.
Contact us today for a free consultation on using social media and online marketing to help reach your business goals.
KJ MEDIA http://www.kjtransmedia.com 800-620-9967 info@kjtransmedia.com
Social Media for the Transportation Industry KJ Media · http://www.kjtransmedia.com/ · 800-620-9967