3 Ways to Use Marketing to Grow Your Brokerage

Contributed by Sworkz

As freight brokers continue to deal with the down cycle of 2023, it’s time to look forward to some key insights that can help drive business growth in the new year. Truckstop spoke with Sworkz about the importance of marketing for freight brokers, and how outsourcing talent acquisition can boost your revenue in 2024.

Watch the webinar for more ways marketing helps your brokerage.

How to Get Started With Business Growth Goals

The first step in growing your freight business is determining your company’s needs.

• Are you a new broker struggling with recognition?
• Is your brand already established, but you’re having trouble getting leads?
• Are you a big company with numerous customers, but you’re losing them to the competition?

What you ultimately want to achieve will be based on your answers to these questions. But targeting marketing efforts can help make brand awareness, lead generation, and customer retention a reality.

What Can Marketing Do For a Brokerage?

Even if your brokerage has all the right tools to succeed, sometimes you still need a little push from positive online messaging and positioning.

Some brokerages focus all of their energy on business development and sales, and don’t leave room for marketing strategies. While both approaches can be helpful, marketing comes with a much larger reach. Rather than relying on dozens of daily cold calls, a marketing team can work on targeted ads, organic growth, and reputation management.

Marketing efforts focus on creating content, building your social media presence, and driving traffic to your website in order to establish your authority and credibility in the industry.

1. Create valuable content

One of the main goals of marketing is to increase the amount of content you’re putting out into the world. The more active you are online, the more likely you will get noticed. Marketing team members can focus on creating blog posts for your brokerage website, social media posts, advertisements, videos, and more. Providing educational content about the state of the market or how to run a successful brokerage consistently on your website and on social media positions you as a leader in the space. This will help attract and retain quality carriers.

2. Manage your social media

If your brokerage isn’t active on social media, now is the time to start. While posting regularly to platforms like Instagram, Facebook, and even TikTok is valuable, make a concerted effort to get active on LinkedIn for those valuable business connections.

People appreciate authenticity. The more time you take to connect with real people in the industry to share ideas and discuss relevant topics, the more relatable—and trustworthy—you become. Having a consistent social media brand presence results in lead generation, even if it’s a slower burn sometimes. Even if carriers or shippers aren’t ready for your services right now, exposing them to your brokerage on social media will make them more likely to remember you later when they need business.

3. Improve website SEO

Another staple of a good marketing strategy is search engine optimization (SEO). Brokerages should implement SEO to make it easier for prospective clients to find them online and to drive more traffic to their websites. Increasing your organic search rankings also shows your company above the competition.

Some key factors to consider include:

• Keyword research: Place relevant keywords in your website copy, metadata, alt text, and subheadings. Include location-specific keywords if you’re targeting clients in your area.
• Mobile-friendly website: Websites that are not adaptive to mobile devices do not rank well on search engine results pages (SERPs). Make sure your website is up-to-date and mobile-friendly.
• Internal and external linking: Make sure different pages of your website link back to one another, and repair any broken links. You can also try to gain more external links or backlinks by guest blogging.

Along with boosting your online presence and search engine ranking, a solid marketing plan will also support freight brokers by creating a consistent image. When clients become familiar with a brokerage’s professional tone brought forth from marketing efforts, they’re more likely to trust individual brokers working for this firm.

How to Hire Marketing Personnel for a Brokerage

Another barrier brokerages face when implementing a marketing strategy is finding the right people for the job. There are a few different ways to approach client acquisition:

Direct hiring

You can keep all the marketing work in-house by doing it yourself or bringing a marketing specialist on staff. This strategy can be very time-consuming both in learning and execution.

Outsourcing through an agency

Some companies opt to outsource their marketing hires through an agency. This saves time, but brokerages aren’t guaranteed the agency will have experience hiring for logistics. Agencies also have several clients, so your brokerage won’t be the only priority.

Nearshoring

A growing trend in outsourcing client acquisition is nearshoring. This is the practice of hiring someone in another country (one that is close to your country or in the same time zone) to find personnel. Companies like Sworks, source, vet, and interview in order to provide brokerages with a preferred select few candidates. Once you decide on a candidate(s), they then complete the hiring process, initial setup (including tax information), training, and act as a main point of contact.

Boosting Your Brokerage in 2024

Marketing is a huge piece of the puzzle when it comes to finding more clients and beating out the competition in the logistics industry. Rather than relying on cold calls and sales representatives, a solid marketing strategy can bring your brokerage organic growth, increased visibility, and an authoritative online reputation.

Invest in marketing personnel in 2024, and your brokerage will begin to reap the benefits in no time.

By working with a nearshore company like Sworkz and hiring vetted, qualified marketing personnel, you can say goodbye to the down cycle, and enjoy more business than ever before.

Sworkz provides tailored nearshoring solutions designed to empower businesses. They specialize in connecting US and Canadian businesses with high-performing nearshoring talent customized to scale with your business.