The exponential rise of eCommerce has spurred the growth of the logistics and supply chain industry. The sector is expected to grow at a CAGR of 6.5% through 2027 as new players continue to enter the market.
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However, the priority for most new logistics companies is to increase operational efficiency by streamlining internal processes and reducing expenses. Not many companies focus on marketing, which can prove to be a critical factor in business success and failure.
Today, we’ll discuss the top ten easy and effective ways to market your logistics business, reach more customers, and increase revenue and profitability.
Offer Competitive Pricing
Though not essentially a marketing strategy, offering competitive pricing can go a long way in growing your business. The logistics marketplace is competitive, and companies need to slash down their pricing and launch campaigns with attractive offers.
Here’s where technology comes into play. By implementing the latest logistics technology and tools, you can drastically cut down your direct logistics costs. Thus, you can offer best-in-class solutions and competitive prices without compromising quality.
Offer Stellar Service and Support
Since logistics is essentially a B2B-type business, word-of-mouth advertising can play an instrumental role in driving business goals. When you offer stellar service quality and support to your clients, they share their experience with others. They tell other business owners, and they give you positive reviews.
This way, you can enjoy free promotion and get new clients without putting effort into acquiring them. In fact, 92% of B2B decision-makers are more likely to make a purchase after reading a positive review.
Nail Your Website
Having a website isn’t enough. When people are looking for a business or service, they go online. If your potential consumers search for your business online, they’re likely to land on your website. And if your website fails to build a good first impression, they won’t engage with your business any further.
Your website is one of the most crucial assets of your business, and hence, it needs to be spot on. Work with an expert web developer to ensure that your website looks professional, loads quickly, and provides a great user experience. Most importantly, make your website mobile-friendly, as mobile users five times more likely to stop using a website that’s not optimized for mobile.
Also, be sure to include all the essential information about your business on the website. This includes company location, services offered, pricing details (if fixed), contact details, and other important details.
Focus on Blogging
Blogging is quite underrated when in the logistics sector. But blogging has many benefits for logistics businesses. For starters, it’s one of the cheapest marketing strategies out there. If you’re a decent writer, you can write and publish blog posts yourself. If not, you can outsource content creation to professional writers available at affordable costs.
Blogging can help you develop thought leadership. You can publish informational content, tutorials, how-to guides, white papers, eBooks, etc., to demonstrate your expertise and attract potential customers.
When it comes to the logistics and supply chain sector, there’s hardly a blog better than Xeneta’s blog. Xeneta’s content team publishes new blog posts at least once a week. In addition to consistency, here are two traits of Xeneta’s blog that makes it better than any other blog in the industry.
- Their blog posts are timely, focusing on the current trends. For instance, nowadays, every second or third blog post they publish is about the relationship between COVID-19 and logistics.
- They readily invite subject matter experts (SMEs) to publish content on their blog, which has helped Xeneta build credibility and thought leadership in its niche.
Optimize for Search Engines
More than 70% of customers research a company online before doing business or purchasing from them. By optimizing your website for search engines, you can rank it higher on search engine results and increase its visibility. When your site ranks higher, it attracts more high-quality traffic to your site, which results in more leads and sales.
Search engine optimization is a cost-effective marketing strategy. Moreover, it’s highly sustainable. Once your website reaches the top spot in search results, it can sit there for years and continue to generate leads and sales.
Utilize Content Marketing
Do you know what’s more important than creating content? It’s making sure that the content reaches the right audience. If you’re publishing copious amounts of content every month but no one’s engaging with it, your efforts are going into vain. Content marketing focuses on promoting and distributing the content so that it reaches your target audience.
Logistics companies can deploy various techniques to increase their outreach and reach a wider audience. In addition to blogging, you can leverage guest blogging, social media, video content, paid content promotion, and more.
Also, don’t forget about engaging your offline audiences. With QR codes, you can share amazing content with your offline consumers. For instance, you can create a customized QR code using a QR Code Generator and put it up on your offline marketing materials, such as brochures and newspaper ads. Link those QR codes to engaging content, such as blog posts, videos, and more to increase customer engagement.
By implementing content marketing, 3PL companies can increase brand awareness, establish thought leadership, and reach a broader customer base.
Flexport, a digital freight forwarder company, is a great example of content marketing in action. They have a vast resources section on their website where they publish a wide range of content, from blog posts to research reports to videos. They’re also fairly active on social media, with 12k followers on Twitter and close to 3k followers on Instagram. The company is worth more than $3 billion.
Leverage Social Media Marketing
Social media is playing a pivotal role in B2B decision-making, and the logistics industry is no different. Social platforms, particularly Twitter and LinkedIn, have become the hub for industry discussions and building relationships.
GIG Logistics, an Africa-based cargo and freight company, has leveraged social media for years. They have over 55k followers and 1,150 posts on Instagram. Furthermore, they have close to 300k followers on Facebook. In 2019, GIG Logistics delivered over a million shipments.
Build Your Brand
The competition in the global logistics space is fierce. If providers want to be noticed, they need to stand out. Here’s where branding comes into play. Branding is all about giving a unique identity to your business and setting it apart from the crowd.
There are several ways to make your logistics branding stand out. You can start developing a logo, tagline, and graphic standards guides. Developing a clear value proposition and expression of core values can also help boost your branding efforts.
Optimize Your Conversion Rates
Just because people are visiting your website, it doesn’t mean they’ll take action. Consumers are reluctant when it comes to making a purchase or spending money. You’ll need to put in extra effort to convince your website visitors to take action.
Here’s where conversion rate optimization (CRO) strategies come into play. In a nutshell, CRO is a marketing strategy aimed at creating new conversion opportunities or improving the existing ones.
For example, if your website doesn’t have a call to action (CTA), your website visitor won’t know what to do. By adding a basic CTA like “Contact Us” or “Subscribe to the Email List,” you can extract more value out of your visitors.
Leverage Email Marketing
Let’s conclude the list with one of the most effective marketing tactics for logistics companies – email marketing. You must’ve heard that email marketing can generate up to $44 per every $1 spent. It’s because it costs almost nothing and can act as a sustainable source of brand awareness, lead nurturing, and sales for your logistics business.
In order to leverage email marketing, you’ll need to build an email list. You can do that by including an email sign-up form on your website. Once a visit turns into a subscriber, you can nurture that lead by regularly sending newsletters and helpful, informative, and value-adding content.
Wrapping Up
The marketing for logistics companies is different from other product and service-based businesses out there. This makes it increasingly challenging for marketers to devise a robust marketing strategy that drives business growth and profitability.
If you’re looking for a blueprint to get started, the strategies mentioned above can be helpful. In addition to being highly effective, these strategies can work in sync with each other, enabling you to streamline your marketing efforts.
Author: Tanishq Agarwal
Email: tanishq.a@mobstac.com
Bio: Tanishq Agarwal is a marketing analyst at MobStac. Extremely inquisitive about the contemporary developments in marketing tech, he aspires to bring the most pragmatic ones to the forefront. When he is not exploring the marketing realm, you’ll probably find him indulged in bing-fests of The Office and Brooklyn Nine Nine.