From catalog to thought leader

Context

A global freight forwarder sold through account managers, RFQs and long sales conversations. Its website reflected that: a catalog of products and solutions built for someone who already knew what they wanted, not for someone trying to work out what “customs clearance” or “Incoterms” even meant and whether they needed someone to deal with it for them. The ocean freight organization in particular wasn’t chasing search traffic, because nobody had yet shown there was traffic worth chasing.

The insight

Two things, discovered in that order. First: an open audience. Benchmarking against Flexport, then the clear best-in-class in freight forwarding content, showed a traditional forwarder had something Flexport didn’t: the operational backbone to absorb the demand if it ever converted. Flexport had the audience. We had the capacity. Whoever built the content first stood to own the search results before the other side caught up on its missing half.

Second: a branding problem specific to ocean freight. The brand read as courier and express, even though its ocean freight business, including niches like LCL, was strong. Content built around the questions shippers were already typing was a way to fix that perception from the outside in.

What I did

The idea started outside marketing entirely, from a personal habit: searching for Excel tips and landing on pages that answered the question, then tried to sell something. Global trade was at least as complicated as a spreadsheet formula. If that model worked for software, it could work here too.

Before writing anything, I tested the claim with paid search on landing pages not quite built for conversion. They still converted at double the forecast: 10 percent of clicks reached the quoting tool, against 5 expected. The quoting funnel was too long to turn that into new business on its own, but it proved there was a market. That bought me a few hours a week for organic content, a pet project alongside my job in ocean freight operations.

Topics came from keyword research and conversations with ocean freight colleagues; the flagship piece, from sitting with the company’s customs specialists. The traffic that article still gets suggests the specialists knew exactly what they were talking about. I wrote each piece, placed it on the site with its technical owners, and made visuals for social. One, on Incoterms, was among the account’s first LinkedIn posts past 1,000 likes.

I wasn’t in marketing. Getting this built meant convincing a marketing team to take on a kind of work the division hadn’t done before, then getting access to the people who owned the website, then convincing them separately. It asked the website to work differently: content built to answer a question, in a place built to present a catalog. That argument stayed with me. When the site’s information architecture came up for a full rebuild years later, in Simplifying a global product portfolio, a dedicated content section wasn’t up for debate.

The outcome

• 1stSEO content program at the division
• 2×the expected click-through in the paid-search test
• 4–8articles per series written to the blueprint

Once the customs clearance article had been translated and rolled out to more markets, it accounted on its own for close to half of the division’s unique visitors to thought-leadership content in a single quarter.

The program outlasted my time on it. I left a blueprint behind, and entire series, four to eight articles at a time, on subjects like LCL and air freight, kept getting written to it after I moved to other projects.

Skills and tools

Strategy

• SEO and SEA strategy
• Paid search to test demand
• Buy-in across marketing and web teams

Content

• Keyword research
• Interviews with subject experts
• Editorial planning and writing

Design

• Page design and web publishing
• Infographics
• Social media assets