Most carriers understand the importance of brand awareness with drivers. Most do a pretty good job with it. While brand awareness is extremely important, impressions alone are not enough to capture every driver you need.
Many drivers will need multiple touch points before they will commit to driving for a company. This is where lead nurturing comes in. It is not enough to simply shout your message with a megaphone and wait for the perfect application to drop from the heavens. The targeting techniques available allow you to provide drivers with unique information based on how they have engaged with your brand.
1. Define Your Ideal Lead
In my experience, carriers want different types of leads. Some only want phone calls, some want short form applications, and others need longer form applications that include things like employee history. If you want phone calls, your recruiting efforts should be very strong on the mobile and print front. On the flipside, if you are looking for applications with a larger format, most of your emphasis should be on laptops and desktops. But keep in mind that drivers stay on the move.
2. Segment Your Engagement
Good advertising encourages drivers to take action. This action will tell you how to continue to reach this driver and how they should be reached. We are not talking about bombarding with the same ad or banner over and over. As drivers engage, how they engaged should be monitored and segmented. Once leads are segmented, drivers can be given the information they need to make career decisions.
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Tips for Tracking Engagement:
- Print ads should include a phone number (that allows you to track calls coming from that ad), a website url (that takes drivers to landing pages not the corporate site), and a qr code for good measure.
- Use landing pages or microsites for specific campaigns and promotions. If drivers are taken to the corporate site, your risk of bouncing the traffic increases greatly.
- You need to enable all websites, landing pages, and microsites for cookies. These cookies should be able to be segmented based on pages viewed and inbound links.
- As the demographic of drivers becomes younger, the need for mobile optimization increases. Banner and search campaigns should be mobile-friendly and use a a click-to-call feature.
- Owned content, such as infographics and white papers should be form-gated. This will provide contact information when you receive downloads.
- Use a platform like Google Analytics to track your website traffic. You need to know where the traffic is coming from and what content a driver viewed while on your website.
- Make signposts on your microsite through owned content. Make the content specific enough to give you clues on who would want to consume it.
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3. Retarget Based on Engagement
Once you have enabled your recruiting campaigns to be tracked and have segmented all your engagement, it is time to do some lead nurturing. Banner, email, and content campaigns need to be more specific at this point.
Marketing Automation is your best friend when it comes to lead nurturing. Through software like Hubspot, drivers are retargeted with the correct banner, email, or piece of content without the chance of human error.
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Ways to Retarget:
- If a driver comes to your website organically and reads content about a certain type of haul, driver etc.,then he/she should be retargeted with banners to that effect.
- Drivers that come to landing pages or your website but bounce should be retargeted with more general banners.
- When white papers are downloaded setup an autoresponder email to encourage the driver to fill out a form or call a recruiter.
- Phone calls that don’t convert can be entered into a group for a future call campaign.
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To properly re engage drivers it is imperative that you have a goal and plan in place. Flooding drivers with generic information won’t cut it in today’s job market. The more you filter the process and deliver relevant information to drivers the higher your conversion rate.
