“Our product is so unique that people don’t even know what to search for.”
A prospect said that on a call, and to be fair, the prospect wasn’t exactly wrong.The logistics industry has its own vernacular (seriously, have you ever seen the Kuehne & Nagel dictionary? It’s heavier than the bible!), which can make search engine optimization hard to begin with, because there are so many terms.
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But the inclusion of AI into logistics over the last few years has made it even more challenging, since startups can create platforms, tooling or solutions that quite literally, have never existed before. At a pace the (typically) slow moving industry has never experienced.
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And, it’s one of the most fun challenges a marketer gets to tackle, because it implies a true early-mover advantage.
Own the Trades
For many executives, the “feature profile” in Forbes or the Wall Street Journal might be the holy grail. But in terms of educating the market on what types of questions they should be asking, well, it might be the wrong quest.
Earning media in industry trade publications (those read by the people who are searching for your solution) is among the best ways to begin “overcoming the early-mover advantage.” The journalists at sites like Freightwaves, JOC, TransportTopics, CleanTechnica, Supply Chain Dive, etc. (there is a HUGE list of publications that belong in the discussion here) are generally experienced reporters who understand the inner workings of the market better than most.
Earning coverage (and sharing it to your prospects/customers) is an amazing way to:
Eliminate FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt)- There’s an inherent 3rd party credibility that comes with being mentioned in premier trade publications.
Move the conversation your prospects are having in your direction- For many startups, they’re an “unkown unknown.” That is, people won’t have a clue how to find them because they don’t know the product or service exists. Reading about it in a trade journal helps to crystalize their needs into terms they can use.
Learn your competitors
There is a HUGE difference between “people don’t know we exist” and “we have no competitors,” the latter of which is nearly always false. An incumbent technology that lacks your functionality is a competitor. A broken process is a competitor (even if you’re solving the process). Industry inertia is a competitor.
This means there is data you can leverage.
Whether it’s higher end tools to scout out competitors actions online (social listening tools, search histories, etc), or basics like entering a website’s URL into a free word cloud generator to see which terms they’re focused on, it is critical to understand what other companies in the space are doing to gain traction.
You might not agree with their approach, but at the very least, it will help you to understand where they see web traffic coming from.
Ask
Lots of folks dislike being surveyed about how they found a product or service. But if they’re using it, they found it. There’s no harm in asking a client (or better, a prospect) about their journey to finding your product or service.
But the information you gain from these conversations will help immensely.
Search Engine Optimization is a balancing act, identifying high traffic keywords and weighing them against the amount of competition for those keywords. The weighting process can include localization (it’s easier to be found under ‘drayage in LA’ than ‘drayage’), industry segmentation (‘trucking for furniture’ vs ‘trucking’), and many more techniques.
But if a prospect doesn’t necessarily know what to search for, it’s important for you to help educate them through the press, while gaining as much information as possible, from competitors and customers alike.
