As a marketer in the trucking industry, there are a lot of things you have to consider when building a marketing campaign. You have to establish your objective, select your audience, tailor your messaging to your audience, and consider the most effective means of engaging your audience. It’s a lot of work and an ongoing process.
For many marketers, ensuring your messaging is getting in front of your audience is one of the most difficult parts of building the campaign. But it’s also critical. Otherwise, you are handicapping your marketing campaigns before they ever get out of the gate.
One solution is to utilize digital marketing platforms and the options available to target your audience online.
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1. Partner with Trade Publications
Trade publications have highly targeted audiences, and many companies advertise in them for this reason. For instance, CCJ, Overdrive, Truck Parts and Service, and Successful Dealer are all trade publications with well-defined, segmented audiences within the trucking industry.
However, many trade publications (like each of the ones listed above) also have digital components that can provide you with digital advertising displayed to these audiences online.
While these publications are known for print, their digital components can be a powerful addition to your campaign. Like most digital advertising, you can geo-target your banner and newsletter ads to better target the audience segment most likely to benefit from your products and services.
Partnering with multi-channel brands with highly targeted audiences allows you to create comprehensive online advertising campaigns.
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2. Display Network
The Google Display Network is a great platform for digital advertising. With over 2 million websites included in the network, your advertisements can be served to your audience across the web, including popular sites such as Fox News and CNN.
Your display network advertising allows you to target your audience through a number of both basic and advanced targeting options. You can even serve banners to tagged audiences, such as ours, to ensure you are connecting with those most likely to convert.
The banner ads on the display network can be served in a number of different types and sizes. They can be created as simple text and image banners or as video and rich media banners with interactive components. Here is an example of a content-based image banner ad:
The display network is a great opportunity for you to target your audience and convert them with creative advertising.
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3. Paid Search
Search engines have become an intrinsic part of daily life in our connected society. If you don’t know the answer to something, you can find the answer as quickly as you can type in the question and hit done. It’s that simple.
Google Adwords allows you to bid on the keywords and then serve text ads in relevant search results. These text ads show up both above and to the right of search results.
It’s important to target keywords where you lack organic search rankings. That way your SEM and SEO aren’t overlapping. You should also remember that your ads can be seen across all devices and can use click-to-call functionality for display on mobile.
Search ads are displayed based on the keywords searched and can be paired with other targeting options to ensure you are getting the most highly qualified leads.
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4. Paid Social
To say social media is popular would be a bit of an understatement. What was once seen as a teenage fad has completely crossed generational boundaries. It can now be a powerful form of communication for businesses in almost every industry.
Social media can fulfill a number of functions for your advertising. You can grow your social media following (where you can have unique conversations directly with your audience) or build brand awareness and generate leads.
There are a number of opportunities to target your audience on social media. Facebook, for instance, provides a number of basic targeting options that will allow you to target audiences based on criteria such as location, age, gender, language, interests, behaviors, and other categories. You can even create custom audiences based on emails and tagged audiences.
Because social media campaigns can be created to accomplish a number of different objectives, it’s important to understand exactly what your greater marketing win is.
Ensuring your marketing campaigns are getting in front of the right audience can be difficult, especially when you are using more traditional forms of advertising. However, by incorporating digital targeting into your campaigns, you can ensure you are connecting with the audience most likely to convert.
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