Role: Digital Marketing Specialist
Hyper Lane is a Texas-based company that has been growing rapidly, thanks to word of mouth from our amazing associates.
I joined Hyper Lane in 2019, right in the middle of the trucking shortage crisis in the U.S., a critical time for the industry and the company.
Challenges:
- Main Target Audience: At the time, the U.S. was facing a severe trucker shortage. The market was flooded with brokers offering similar benefits and packages, making it difficult to stand out. Additionally, many truckers distrusted brokers and the industry as a whole, preferring to work independently.
- Paid Campaigns: Due to category restrictions on Meta, Hyper Lane was unable to effectively target truckers through paid ads. As a result, much of the marketing budget was wasted on audiences outside of our niche.
- Google Ranking: Hyper Lane primarily relied on job posting websites for driver acquisition and had neglected its own website. Consequently, the website was not ranking on Google, and we were losing visibility to competitors.
Actions:
-
Targeting Audience:
- After conducting our market research, my first move was to build trust in the local community.
- I started a word-of-mouth campaign that included attractive referral packages for existing owner-operators to encourage them to bring along others, followed by an attractive sign-on bonus for newcomers that increasing referred drivers by 23% monthly.
- To further distribute that campaign, we designed stickers for the trucks with our benefits and sign-on bonuses.
- I started to integrate myself into online communities, especially Reddit, learning about the truckers’ needs, lifestyles, and goals. I conducted organic social media campaigns, with memes, questions, polls, and videos to build an online community.
-
Paid Campaign:
- Due to category restrictions as discussed before, I had to start with TOF campaigns to attract potential audiences with 60000 budget a month.
- I ran brand awareness campaigns on Google and social media through HubSpot, and then backed them with nurturing campaigns through email marketing to move them down the funnel.
-
Google Ranking:
- I managed HyperLane’s website through WordPress, and implemented online and offline SEO resulting in a 25% increase in website traffic in Q1.
- I created weekly blogs with tips on living as a trucker, news reports, stories from the community, and stories about our teams.
-
Visual Representation:
- I created all of the images and videos for HyperLane’s social media and website.
“Learning about the trucking industry, and communicating with truckers first hand helped me understand them and their needs more. it also made me see this job not just as a marketer but as somone who can help raise their voice and help with their problems”
Achievements:
The word-off-mouth campaign.
This was our strongest tool, and also my proudest achievement. through this campaign and the TOF campaign, we were able to tripple our owner operator numbers at the end of the year and establish our name as a trusted company with in Texas.