Blending Sales & Marketing to Create a LeadGen Machine in the Transportation & Logistics Industry

In order to build a healthy pipeline of online leads, the Power Digital team built a comprehensive online marketing funnel through content marketing, CRO, SEO, PR, paid advertising, email marketing, and customer insights.

The first 3 months (Feb – May) of our partnership were focused on learning more about the brand, it’s offering, the competitive landscape, and our target audience as well as using the insights gained from our research to build the actual funnel. This included updating the website to be more conversion-oriented, creating the messaging in collaboration with the sales & leadership teams at Shipware, building out the ad accounts and strategies within, and creating content and email messages tailored to our outlined buyer personas.

One of the most important parts of this phase was mapping out what role each channel plays in the funnel from the Awareness stage to Lead Submission for each of our customer profiles.

After 3 months of researching and building, we turned on this “machine” that we had spent so much time building and began to generate leads through SEO, Paid Media, and Email Marketing initiatives and began to optimize accordingly.

The bulk of the leads and opportunities that came through in the first few months of the “Lead Gen” phase were through ads, as Shipware had little-to-no SEO presence at the start of our work. As the months progressed, our SEO-focused content plus on- and off-page optimizations did their work. By October, the majority of our qualified leads were coming through Organic Search.

Organic really started taking off around December 2018/January 2019, as you can see by the rankings below:

During all of this, our team was deep in Salesforce and Pardot working to understand where the most qualified leads were coming from and what content/ad messaging/journey produced the highest volume of qualified leads. We were in close communication with the sales team, understanding what signals leads can give early on to indicate future success or failure.

We outlined conversion rates from Lead Submission > Marketing Qualified Lead > Sales Accepted > Sales Qualified >  Close. We also identified the stage(s) in the sales funnel that, if reached, indicates a HIGH chance of closing the business.

Through this, we were able to drive 70 highly qualified conversations for the Shipware sales team that amounted to over $1million closed revenue (and rising).

Before

After