Content and social media are integral to business growth

Editor’s Note: This is a guest blog written by Kecia Gray, Vice President, Corporate Marketing & Communications, Transplace. Transplace is a premier provider of transportation management services, intermodal, truck brokerage, and SaaS TMS solutions.  Transplace successfully leverages social media and content to expand the company’s brand awareness and thought leadership.  The company’s LinkedIn page, Facebook page, and blog were named as “favorites” in a survey conducted by Fronetics.

At Transplace, social media has become an integral part of our marketing and communications strategy and key to expanding our brand awareness and thought leadership in the logistics and transportation space.  Our marketing and communication team has had the opportunity to utilize multiple social channels, including:

• Facebook
• Twitter
• LinkedIn
• Instagram
• YouTube
• Transplace blog “Logistically Speaking”

While we consistently post content to all of these channels, what has been and continues to be important to our social strategy is creating our own original content and utilizing it within a more aggressive approach on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.  Sharing content on these channels has allowed our newest blog to achieve fast success in under a year’s time.

Content Is King…

Within any industry, there is always significant opportunity to create original thought leadership content that is informative and insightful.  When developing a social media strategy, our foremost goal was to establish a thought leadership blog resource for the market, in addition to providing engaging and personalized content across social channels that was easily sharable. Our main objectives focus on connecting with customers, and creating content that resonates with the members of our industry and provides value to their businesses. By distributing this content across our social channels to foster sharing, conversation and engagement, we’ve continued to gain influence with our targeted audiences.

…And Metrics Are Key

Because of the rapid pace of developing content, it’s important to track and report on levels of engagement to optimize and repurpose information. We created a social plan that included a comprehensive calendar to capture the topics and content items we’d be working on throughout the year. For maximum integration, we purposely aligned new pieces to marketing campaigns and corporate objectives such as events, transportation services and current industry issues. In addition, we established benchmarks and metrics that were important for us to track, such as followers and level of engagement. Analyzing the data allowed us to regularly monitor and evaluate our program, maximize what worked and adjust areas that did not meet expectations.

Incorporating Talent for Quality Thought Leadership

We have also taken advantage of the significant opportunity for Transplace employees at all levels to contribute quality thought-leadership posts across a number of channels. We’ve learned that the best place to utilize this content is on the company’s logisticallyspeakingblog.com. Some of the posts we’re most proud of turned out to be the most popular of 2014, including:

• A motivating guest blog post highlighting our dedication to our customers – from George Abernathy, our president and CCO.
• An insightful commentary on the growth of Transplace in light of a recent acquisition – from Frank McGuigan, president of transportation management at Transplace.
• An informative infographic recap of our signature event, the annual Transplace Shipper Symposium, highlighting some amazing speakers.

To ensure we always stay up-to-date and focused, our team holds quarterly meetings in which we share key highlights, metrics and snapshots of the program quarter by quarter. The time is used to plan for what’s coming up in the future, brainstorm new ideas and make changes as needed.  We always make the utmost effort to continually update our program and assess our short and long term goals – an important aspect to any social program!

How is your organization utilizing social media and thought leadership content?