Blythe Brumleve:
0:05
Welcome into another episode of everything is logistics a podcast for the thinkers in a freight. I am your host, Blythe Brumleve. And we are doing something a little bit new on today's episode, we have some user submitted questions, and I'm super pumped to share this with you all. Because if you don't know, you can go right on the digital dispatch.io website under the podcast tab. And you can submit a question in order to have it answered by me. So if it's related to freight marketing, the attention economy AI, you know, yes, that we've had on the past and things like that you can also submit or suggest a guest over on the digital dispatch website. But we have a question that was submitted by a freight broker who is becoming a freight agent. And he has two different websites. And he wants to know how he can put it all together when it comes to his marketing plan. So we are going to dive into this conversation. And we're going to answer those questions for you and the thought process behind it. So if you are in any of these kinds of experiences, or maybe you're just a little curious than it keep on listening to your freight marketing questions, how to put it all together, when it comes to your marketing plan. This question comes from Marco, and his one freight marketing or sales challenge that he's currently dealing with. And he says, putting it all together, I have no social media presence. Currently, my two websites were put together by Fiverr, freelancers, and myself, no marketing integrations, but I do cold email marketing very heavily. So with this question, in particular, the way that I would handle this is I'm curious as to why there are two websites. Anytime you have more than one website, it should really, you know, be centered focused in on, you know, one specific niche that you might cover. So there's a couple of reasons why, you know, maybe, maybe a freight company would have two different websites, one could be just for the brokerage. Another could be just for the asset side of things, that's probably the most common thing that I see in freight is that if you do have more than one website, that's probably why the argument behind that is one four PL that I had worked with, in particular, they have their own trucks, their asset base, but they also have a very strong brokerage. And the response that they were getting from customers was, well, what does it matter that you have assets, because those assets are going to be going to your own freight, they're not going to be essentially promised to me. So those aren't my trucks, those are your trucks that you are marketing as an asset based three PL or an asset based four PL and those trucks are going to be going to your products, not to mine. So the benefit of having two different websites is to essentially market your company in two different ways. Not necessarily to be deceptive, but to let customers know that hey, you do have your own trucks. But then on the flip side, have you have a greater understanding of what those shipper pain points are? Because you are a four PL. So there's a couple of different reasons of why that could be happening. I'm not saying that this is actually happening in this particular situation. But it is a very common question of how do I put it all together. cold emailing is one of those, you know, sort of I don't want to say spray and pray techniques, because there is a right way and a wrong way to do cold emailing. And it is you know, I don't want to say sad to say but it is sales is a volume game as much as you think it's quality over quantity. It's also very much a volume game. So how many people can you get in touch with on a regular basis to explain your capabilities, and that's probably where the marketing of two websites are put together or put into those different marketing campaigns that you are cold emailing out to the database of where you get those emails. So a few things come to mind is those cold emails where you getting those lists? Are they purchase lists, are they ones they're likely purchase lists, are they ones that you can get from an advertising campaign that users fill in that their email address and now you are sending them quote unquote cold emails even though they gave you permission to email you in the first place or they gave you your their email in exchange for some information. You know, maybe it's a white paper download or a case study download or whatever kind of information they requested they gave you have their email address. So the first thing you want to do is if you have an email marketing list that you plan to send cold emails out to, as you want to make sure that that email is that email list is scrubbed. And that these are legitimate emails, the overwhelming majority of email marketing software, they will charge you per Contact. So the way that I have been tasked with handling this in the past, when we come across an email list that was probably obtained by questionable means is you take that email, you take that email address list, and you go to Fiverr, you go to one of these freelance sites, and you're going to take that email list and you're going to send it to them, and they're going to scrub it. So essentially, they're going to take that email list. And they're going to put it through all of their different scrubbing tools, which essentially verifies the validity of that email address. So once you have that list, because I once did this for a list that was purchase of like 500,000 email lists in the transportation space, obviously, a lot of those email addresses are not going to be valid, especially because it was years later that this it was questionable to obtain this email list in and of itself, but the fact that it was also a couple years old, was also questionable. I didn't want the company to have to suffer through you know, an insane bill of email marketing contacts, you know, 30,000 contacts trying to send it in a platform like MailChimp will cost you 1000s of dollars. Same can be said for HubSpot, you you likely have to commit to a very long term plan with HubSpot, if you have that many email addresses. And they're all cold and they've never heard from you before. So sending it to an email scrubber that can filter through all of the noise and try to get the most valid email addresses out as possible. That would be my step number one is just to make sure that you're actually emailing real people. And then after you have that list scrubbed, then you can upload it to your email marketing software in order to send more sales drip campaigns. You can also have them trigger based HubSpot is another great example of this that if you do have a website, you can speaking of marketing integrations, because this gentleman has mentioned that he has no marketing integrations, you can integrate your HubSpot CRM, which is free up to a certain tier up to a certain amount of contacts. So you can integrate still, that contact list with a simple plugin with a simple code integration, add it to your website. And then that way, whenever you are sending out these email, emails, or these cold emails out to these folks, then you can see if they're actually paying attention, if they clicked on something within the email, if they arrived on your website, and they're scoping it out, you know, nine times out of 10. If you can reach that if you can set up there's a trigger within HubSpot, that if you can set up that email marketing flow, where you're reaching the person that you're trying to reach, they do the thing that you want them to do, they click on the link in your to go to your website. They're they're browsing through your website. So they're doing the things that you want them to do. And then you can get an alert from HubSpot, if you have that connection set up to where you could get alerted immediately that hey, so and so that you just sent that email to is now on your website, checking it out. And that's a signal to you to pick up the phone and call them immediately because they are checking you out. Maybe they're in a dire need. Maybe they need some load shipped. Maybe they need some something, some kind of help that they're looking for on your website right now. Now, of course, I have to say it with a caveat that there's no guarantee that that's actually going to be taking place. They could just be like, well, who the hell is this company? And how do they have my email address? And maybe they could be of use for me, but maybe it's not the right time those use cases exist as well. For someone who's just trying to figure out how the hell did you get my contact information, which should also be built into your cold email outreach as who the hell are you and why should I care? This episode is brought to you by SPI logistics the premier freight agent and logistics network in North America. Are you currently building your freight brokerages book a business and feel that your capabilities are being limited due to lack of support and access to adequate technology? At SPI logistics we have the technology, the systems and the back office support to help you succeed. If you're looking to take control of your financial future and build your own business, with the backing up one of the most successful logistics firms in North America, visit SPI three pl.com to learn more. Our email inboxes are just inundated with met with cold outreach with marketing email notifications, God forbid you buy something from an e commerce Store online and then all of a sudden you're getting all of these email notifications. I just bought something for Victoria's Secret, you know, a couple of weeks ago it's Valentine's day in the month of February obviously bought something from them and immediately I am getting an onslaught of emails from that company and it just goes to show that it's just too much it treated email as almost treated as a to do list so you have to figure out what your cold email strategies of how to get to the point and get to it quickly and why Should I care. And I also I don't want to feel like I'm just one person in your database that you are just sending the same message out to over and over and over again, which is why if you do get that email list, you get it cleaned up by a freelancer on Fiverr. And then from that next step, then you can start to really, and you could probably hire another Fiverr, freelancer to then take those emails and classify them into different groups, maybe what commodities that they're manufacturing, or what goods do, they commonly ship and you can put them in different categories. So then that way, when you do start cold emailing them, you can have some kind of an insight into what that company does, you can make that email feel a little bit more personalized. Now, as far as other marketing integrations here, if you have no social media presence, I wouldn't say that's a huge concern. But it is something that you want to think about investing in the future, the overwhelming majority of leads where I get my, you know, good business traction from is from LinkedIn, I do see it dwindling a little bit because sort of the cats out of the bag ever since COVID, is now you know, people are aware of the value of LinkedIn, and they're getting back on the platform. And they're posting a lot of, you know, just some of its junk. Some of its really valuable some of its really insightful, but I would say a good 50% of the plot of the contents platform is junk. So with LinkedIn in particular, it's uh, you can look at it as an easy way to stand out, because as long as you're not posting junk, that's, you know, sort of not necessarily self serving, but it's more going back to the customer, what should they care about? What should they be on the lookout for, this is what you're seeing in the industry, you know, be that curator of knowledge within your space of expertise. And then you can share that knowledge over on social media, whether it's LinkedIn, whether it's Twitter, whether it's you know, different community groups, on Facebook, or you know, subreddits, anywhere online, where your audience is likely hanging out, you can be that trusted source, that trusted advisor of what's going on in the space so they can continue to come to you, and then to build up that familiarity with you. So then that way, when one day, you do send them an email, or they do pop up on your radar, or they reach out better yet they reach out to you because now they're in need, and they're already well aware of your expertise. So they reach out to you, then that's sort of the holy grail of marketing. So if you have no social media presence, I would suggest getting started. But I would suggest getting started on one platform at a time, you don't want to overwhelm yourself, and you want to continuously drive people as far as like brand awareness, you want to drive that brand awareness factor, but you don't want to lead with it, you want it to, it's almost like, like I would attribute to like cologne or perfume, you don't want to announce it, you want it to be discovered, if that makes sense. And so that's kind of how I treat my social media strategy is I just give everything away for free, I give all of my insight away for free. And then those folks will hopefully develop that level of trust. And then they come to my website, and then they book a meeting with me, or they follow me on another social media platform, or they sign up for my email newsletter, which is another bonus. So you could instead of getting not necessarily saying that Marco did this and Marco, you know, went out and purchased an email list. But I know a lot of folks within the three PL space. Absolutely do that. And so just knowing all of those caveats, there are ways to set up a communication plan, and an outreach plan and a brand awareness plan, if you can keep it minimal. And if you can put your put yourself in the shoes of your potential customer, and what news do you like to see on your timeline? What emails do you like to receive in your inbox, and then try to reverse engineer it for your own customers, if that makes sense. Now, other marketing integrations that I would think of as well, especially if you're doing cold email marketing, is I would add some way to book a meeting immediately on your site, I would also add an overview video. Both of these things will allow that person to enter the discovery phase of who you are and what you do and the services that you provide without them getting on the phone with you without them risking booking a meeting and you know it being a giant waste of their time. So that's something that I would think about is having a general overview video so that way they are opening your email and they are coming to your website, then that way you can set up that familiarity very easily with them so that that way they can watch an overview video and then if it makes sense for them, then They can take that next step of booking a meeting and not having to reply to your email and try to go back and forth with what day's work what days don't. Another tip that I have heard recently from a sales executive within three PL space, if they they have just started sending over calendar invites. And they send over a calendar invite with a suggested day and time. And that way, you're making it easier on the prospect to make one less decision for that day, they're probably making a million different decisions all throughout the day. And anytime you can make something easier on someone else, then I think that that's a huge win. Now on the flip side, you could be adding more to their plate because you're sending that calendar invite not knowing what their schedule looks like. But if you have a general idea of you know, Thursday's are best for this person, then you could send that Thursday invite for a week in advance maybe two weeks in advance and take that decision, or that decision fatigue that that person is probably experiencing and alleviate it for them. So that's another I guess marketing integration that I would think about for my website. Do you wish there was a central place to pull in all of your social media posts, recruit employees, and give potential customers a glimpse into how you operate your business? Well, all of this should already be on your website. But too often, we hand that responsibility of building our online home off to a cousin, a neighbor's kid down the street, or a stranger across the world. Digital dispatch believes in building a better website at a fraction of the costs that those big time marketing agencies would charge. Because we've spent years on those digital front lines, our experienced team focuses on the modern web technologies to bring in all of the places you're already active online, show off those customer success stories, and measure the ROI of it all in one place. With manage website plans starting at $90 a month, head on over to digital dispatch.io to see how we can build your digital ecosystem on a strong foundation. We've got explainer videos right on the website and the ability to book a demo immediately find it all over at Digital dispatch.io. There's not really many others that come to mind, I would say integrating your CRM is top priority, adding a way to book a meeting right on your website. And then if you're doing cold email marketing, I would try to find a way to make that email as beneficial as possible to the end user spraying and praying does not work, it's easily you can sniff those out pretty easily and they get dismissed, they get deleted, you probably are getting reported as spam. And then if you get too many spam complaints, then that could affect the overall deliverable rate for your future email. So that's also something you want to keep in mind because you don't want to be known as a spam type email, because then you're just going to be automatically filtered into that group within Outlook within Gmail within any other you know, email marketing tool or email tool out there. If you get too many spam complaints on your domain name, you will start to end up in that spam folder, which is bad for everyone involved. And and just overall, like it's just not a good thing. You want to be useful to somebody's inbox, you don't want to be a nuisance. I think that about does it for answering this topic in particular, but I'm going to be doing more of these q&a. So if you're struggling with some something related to marketing you're struggling with, with something that you you want to get done that, that you're not exactly sure of how to fit it into your work day. And putting it all together as Marco says in this comment, that's a good way to think about you know, just building your marketing plan and then adding little pieces on to it as sort of that content snowball effect is what will what we've talked about in previous episodes. So hopefully that helps. If you're struggling with something in particular head on over to the digital dispatch.io backslash podcast URL and then that way you'll have there's a little box right there on the podcast tab that you can submit your question and we will get it answered on a future show. So hopefully that helps out Marco and anybody else who may be dealing with something similar so that about does it I think I've said that like five times already but for real this time that about does it and we will see you the next time I hope you enjoy this episode of everything is logistics, a podcast for the thinkers in freight telling the stories behind how your favorite stuff and people get from point A to B. If you liked this episode, do me a favor and sign up for our newsletter. I know what you're probably thinking, oh God, another newsletter, but it's the easiest way to stay updated when new episodes are released. Plus we drop a lot of gems in that email to help the one person marketing team and folks like yourself who are probably wearing a lot of hats at work in order to help you navigate this digital world a little bit easier. You could find that email signup link along with our socials and past episodes. Over at everything is logistics.com And until next time, I'm Blythe and go Jags
