No matter what kind of business you own, there will always be the need for some form of marketing to ensure success.

Not all kinds of marketing suit every business, so you need to make sure you choose what is best for your transport company. For instance, aim your marketing at companies that are likely to need the kind of freight services you provide.

Here are 16 creative tips for marketing your freighting company: –

1. Make sure your business is located in or near a busy town or city, or right on a highway. Few people will want to hire a truck based in the outback or a sleepy country town with little industry.
2. Choose a name that is easy to remember, but distinctive for your trucking company
3. Choose colours that stand out for your logo and truck sides. Make sure the logo does not blend into the colour of your trucks by choosing opposite colours.
4. Have the logo and name embroidered or printed onto all work clothes.
5. Make sure your drivers have good people skills. A rude driver can cost you a great deal of work.
6. Have lots of business cards and brochures printed and hand them out often.
7. Consider what kind of freight you want to pick up and move, then make a list of all those companies in your area that have those kinds of goods to move. Send them an introductory letter along with your brochure. Offer a good deal such as a discount for the third time they use you.
8. Advertise in trucking magazines, on radio and even TV as soon as you can afford it.
9. Use social media for free advertising – for instance, you can set up a Facebook fan page and link it to Twitter. Use them to advertise a special discount every so often.
10. Make sure you are listed in the Yellow Pages and local directories.
11. If you regularly do deliveries to a specific city, aim some advertising at companies there who may require back-loading to your home area.
12. Always have signage on your trucks to proclaim who you are and if possible add a phone number.
13. Have a website done in your colours and displaying your logo. On it, be specific about what you do and where. Offer several ways of contacting you such as a phone number, email address and website form.
14. Advertise your business on other relevant, high traffic websites.
15. Join the Chamber of Commerce in your district to network with people who are likely to need your services.
16. Make sure you offer prompt and efficient services so your customers will be satisfied and want to use you again.

Do You Have What it Takes to Run a Transport Company?

When you decide to go into business, whether it is a transport business taking freight all over the country or something different, it is good to take a hard look at the kind of person you are to ensure success.

For instance, if you hate sitting at a desk, you wouldn’t want to have an accountancy business and if you dislike trucks, there is not much point in starting any kind of business that involves driving them.

So what sort of person do you need to be to start transporting goods as a business? Here are some pointers:-

• You need to be good at communicating, both in person and by phone. Much of your work will come in by phone, but if you are abrupt or unclear in speech over the phone you’ll lose many jobs because people will find it hard to communicate with you.
• You need to be a people person. That means you get on with people and don’t easily take offence if they are irritable with you. No one is perfect and sometimes people get annoyed or irritable through no fault of yours. If you are going to take offence and snap back, you’ll make the job more stressful for everyone – and may lose customers.
• You need to be patient. Driving a truck in heavy traffic can be stressful; you also have to back into tight corners and sometimes find places to park and unload that are not ideal. Again, stress can make the job unpleasant if your patience continually wears thin.
• It you are going to drive your own truck, you need to like everything to do with them, from doing minor repairs on the road, to driving through torrential rain and even driving for long hours when you are tired.
• You need to be good at details and organising when you run your own business. If you have several trucks to work out schedules for, you should be able to schedule for delivery in different areas for each. Truck A should deliver all the goods for Area A and other areas nearby. There is no point in sending truck B into that area, when they should be delivering in area F or Z.
• You need to be able to handle money. Some people take all the profits and give themselves an overseas holiday, instead of using that money for more equipment, maintenance or just for cash flow. Their business is then short of money to pay bills or pay for unexpected repairs.
• Can you delegate, or do you think the only way to get things done is do it yourself? It’s impossible to do everything and you’ll soon suffer from burnout not to mention employee dissatisfaction if you don’t learn to delegate.

The Advantages of Making Your Transport Company Paperless

Years ago there was no option to using paper for your business whether you had a transport company or some other business. Freight and goods of all kinds and everything to do with them had to be documented with a pen and paper so there could be records kept of each transaction and everything to do with it.

While many people consider that those days were simpler, it was only because there were fewer goods needed and so less need to transport goods around the country. Nowadays the way to achieve simplicity is to go paperless.

That means using a computer and the right kind of software to keep records, work out payroll and do your accounts and tax.

While you may thing it is impossible to be completely paperless because not everyone else is, you can certainly scan those receipts and invoices and keep the copies in a digital format until they are needed in a paper one. Often, they’ll never need to be printed out again.

You can even have people sign for their parcels digitally at the door, if you have to right device to do it on. That way it can all be transferred to the software at the end of the day and with just one click of the button. And it takes only a fraction of the time it used to, to work out payments, schedules, taxes, profit and loss and all the other many aspects of running a business.

You might be wondering what would happen if a fire or flood destroyed your computers. The same fire or flood would also destroy paper copies and records, but if yours were digital you’d only need to grab your hard drive to ensure they were safe, not boxes or filing cabinets.

That said, you wouldn’t even need to have an external hard drive for safety if you used cloud based storage. Whatever you save on your computer will also be saved on your cloud servers and all you’d need to access every single detail would be a new computer and the log-in details, which are very simple to remember.

In most cases, you can get a new password if you forget the original one.

Having cloud-based storage may cost you, but it can also save you all the inconvenience of not having easy access to the details you want.

When you work to make your business so much more efficient it usually means more work can be done in the same amount of time, so that is a significant cost savings. It even saves worrying about virus attacks or hackers because cloud based storage applies encryption, often several levels of it, so the details of your business are always safe and confidential.