Building an Effective Marketing Plan for a Logistics Business
Logistics companies move goods on behalf of their clients; it could be a removals company, a security service, or an order fulfilment business. Many of the businesses within the sector will have been established when newspaper ads, leaflets, and cold calling were the norm. Their challenge over the past couple of decades has been to switch from advertising alone, into a digital marketing strategy that incorporates ads in order to grow their customer base.
Outsource Your Marketing is currently creating digital marketing strategies for logistics companies working in removals and order fulfilment. In both cases, the pandemic has changed the way they operate and transformed the way they sell their services to customers. Our task is to create the right strategy for each client, based on their size, sector positioning, and business goals.
What is Logistics Marketing?
Much of the work of digital marketing in this sector is about reaching out to target demographics in order to make them aware of the services a business is offering:
- Removals. This highly competitive industry is constantly streamlining the range of services on offer in order to attract new clients. Companies need powerful differentiators, excellent reviews & unique/helpful content.
- Order Fulfilment. The growth of eCommerce means that order fulfilment is changing fast as a service. With Amazon as the standard, every company needs to provide a comprehensive range of services, which are clearly articulated to highly targeted customers.
5 Steps to an Effective Digital Marketing Strategy
Whilst every logistics company is unique, the creation of a logistics digital marketing strategy follows the same basic steps:
Step 1 – SEO Awareness
The battleground for customers is currently Google. It’s a massive online market and the starting point for 5.6 billion searches each day. If your logistics company isn’t ranking well (on page 1 or 2 of Google), it’s going to find it difficult to grow its customer base.
In order to participate in the battle for top ranking spots on Google, you need to recognise the importance of Search Engine Optimisation. If your website is not search engine optimised, Google won’t know you exist. And if Google doesn’t know, nobody knows.
Step 2 – Technical SEO
Technical SEO is all about ensuring that your website loads fast for searchers and can be crawled by Google ‘spiders’. The latter are used to gather information about your business, in order to present it accurately in response to Google Search queries.
Speed is a key criteria for Google as searchers dislike waiting for pages are open. At present a reasonable time for page loading is ‘under 2 seconds’. Other technical ranking factors that come under technical SEO are:
- User-friendly navigation
- Simple url structure
- Alt tags for images
- Sitemap
- Dead links/redirects
Step 3 – Content SEO
Whilst technical SEO is all about the performance of your site, content SEO concentrates on the value of your content for visitors. For example, if I want to ship a parcel to Australia, I don’t want to my search to turn up removal companies. Content SEO is about sending the right signals to Google about what it is you do as a business.
Keywords are the way to do this. Keywords are the words searchers use the find the goods or services they’re looking for. If your business isn’t using the right keywords, Google won’t be able to match you up accurately. Careful keyword research is at the heart of all digital marketing strategies for logistics companies.
Step 4 – Choosing the Right Platform for Marketing
Social media can be a powerful tool for logistics companies, but only if you find the right platform. There’s no point in allocating resources to Facebook if the customers you want to target are all on LinkedIn.
If you’re a B2B business, LinkedIn is most likely the platform that will suit you best. For B2C Instagram is a top choice (you will need a constant supply of high-quality photos), or Facebook. Many logistics companies also use email marketing (newsletters) if they have up-to-date email lists.
Step 5 – Know When to Advertise
Digital marketing is a slow burn. It creates the right conditions for finding leads (SEO), uses Google organic search to deliver those leads (ranking), and converts those leads using high-quality, carefully targeted content on your website and social media platforms.
If you’re looking for quick sales, a Pay-Per-Click campaign will deliver customers fast for a short period of time. It’s ideal for promotions, or new services. Outsource Your Marketing always uses the two kinds of marketing strategically and concurrently.
