Recruiting qualified truck drivers can be difficult and extremely competitive. Trucking fleets and their recruiting partners must find a way to capture a prospective driver’s attention.
Everyday people are flooded with ads across all forms of media. The drivers that fleets are looking for are no different. The average prospect sees between 300 and 3,000 marketing messages per day. To be effective, fleets need to be more creative with the methods they use to reach prospective drivers and try to establish an emotional connection.
Content marketing can be the tool to cut through the noise and reach their audience.
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What is Content Marketing?
Before fleets and recruiters can utilize content marketing, they have to know what it is. So, what exactly is content marketing? According to Amanda Maksymiw, “Content marketing is a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience – and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.”
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What Does Content Marketing Look Like in Action?
Essentially content marketing is a way of marketing or advertising to your target audience without beating them over the head with your message. By providing genuinely useful and valuable information to a prospective recruit, you will, over time, establish your brand as a trustworthy source of information.
Even if the prospect is not initially ready to make a decision, or maybe not even ready to look for a new fleet, your company will have a significant advantage over others if you’ve use quality content marketing. When the time comes for a search or decisions, because of the perceived value your content has created and provided for the prospect, your fleet will be top of mind.
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The 3 Pillars of Effective Content Marketing
To be truly effective and reach maximum potential, the content distributed needs to rely on what we call the three pillars of content marketing.
- Value
- Relevance
- Frequency
Now let’s dive into each of these pillars in more detail.
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1. Value
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The content provided needs to enrich in some way or make the prospect or potential driver’s life better. It is a mistake to make the company or job the focus of attention. The driver and their needs should always be at the core of the content.
To be effective, the content must provide something valuable to the prospective driver. This could be anything from a list of the best truck stops, articles on staying in shape on the road, or how to best utilize the space in their truck cab for everyday cooking. Whatever the subject, it must be valuable to the prospect. Without value, the prospect will become uninterested or disengaged regardless of the general relevance to their field or how frequently new content is distributed.
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2. Relevance
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To be useful, the content must be relevant to the specifically targeted audience or market segment you are pursuing.
Simply put, content must be relevant to the industry or areas of interest of their target audience. Content that attempts to target drivers needs to relate to their job or other subjects and activities that drivers relate to. Content could have insightful information and be kept up to date, but if drivers don’t find it relevant to them, the content marketing tactic will ultimately fail.
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3. Frequency
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The flow and distribution of content should be updated regularly to remain current, relevant, and engaging on an ongoing basis.
Providing valuable content that’s relevant to your target audience will only take you so far. The final step is making sure that content is produced regularly and kept fresh so that the drivers do not lose interest. Valuable, relevant content will grab a prospect’s attention, but holding their attention and keeping them engaged requires feeding their appetite for new content.
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Content Marketing as a Part of Your Recruiting Strategy
Producing and distributing content can help drive interest, awareness, and ultimately the success of your company. It is an effective way to gain and keep the attention of potential drivers.
By creating your content around the three pillars of content marketing and continuously providing quality and value for potential recruits, companies will gain a competitive edge over their competition while simultaneously feeding prospects the information and content they crave.
