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Logistics marketing is an important step to popularise your logistics company among businesses which are looking for logistics outsourcing. An efficient marketing strategy is required for any logistics company to gain more customers. The strategy should also ensure that your logistics brand becomes a trusted label in your target market.
Logistics marketing is not to be confused with marketing logistics. Marketing logistics is planning and executing production and delivery in accordance with consumer demand. The primary goal of marketing logistics is timely and high-quality satisfaction of customer demand with minimal logistical costs.
Why is logistics marketing important?
Logistics marketing carves a clear path to improving your brand presence and generating leads through brand awareness for your logistics business. Here is why marketing your logistics firm is important:
- Allows you to test and identify what services resonate more with your target audience.
- Helps you measure your efforts against business objectives
- Assign employees to contribute to marketing goals
- Gives you an opportunity to capitalise on emerging trends
How to prepare a logistics marketing strategy?
A logistics marketing strategy includes market research, strategies that achieve business objectives, and marketing tactics to be deployed for attracting customers online. It sets long-term goals and the overall approach. A logistics marketing plan covers the specific actions taken to achieve these goals.
While carving out your strategy you must remember that most businesses with transport needs research, evaluate, and choose companies for their logistics operations without a single contact with a team member or salesperson.
Here are steps to follow to develop a strong logistics marketing strategy:
Step 1: Define logistics services you seek to provide
The main goal of a marketing strategy is to popularise your services among your potential customers. Improving the visibility of the services you offer involves creating an effective strategy that helps the marketing initiative focus on how your portfolio of offerings stands out from your competitors in the market. This helps to create an edge over the competitors.
These are the questions you must answer to bring out the unique selling points of your services before creating a marketing strategy:
- What is your service specialty?
- What problem does it solve?
- Who is the primary target market?
- Who is the secondary target market
All your marketing communication must enunciate these points so your customers can easily identify who you are and what you offer. Don’t forget to do a SWOT analysis as a part of this step where you list your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats.
Step 2: Analyse competition
A quick search online can get you a list of competitors in your area. You can use websites like IndiaMart, and JustDial for narrowing down search results by area, services offered, etc. Going through competitor websites can give you an idea of their clientele.
Thoroughly read the services your competition is offering and compare your own offerings. Note the shortcomings of your service and points where your services are better than your competitors. Are you selling your offerings at a lower price, is your transport network wider, does the competitor’s service offer faster delivery time than you, are some of the conclusions to be derived when competition is being evaluated.
Step 3: Set marketing objectives
When you build a marketing strategy you should set certain goals either short-term or long-term. Here are some logistics marketing goals:
- Generate brand awareness
- Build customer interaction with your business
- Convert brand trust into sales
- Generate leads from social media marketing
- Publish blogs on the website to improve traffic to the website
To achieve each of these objectives you should have a marketing plan. For example, as a startup logistics business you want to create brand awareness among your target group. You would need to create a logistics marketing plan to achieve this. The steps would include creating social media pages and publishing attractive content in the form of videos, posters, etc., and then checking analytic websites like Google Analytics to see how your content is performing.
Step 4: Identify your first plan of the strategy
Now that you have created a marketing strategy you should prioritise these goals according to their importance. Identify the first goal and create an action plan to achieve this goal. Set a target for the goal.
For example, you want to start a logistics advertising campaign to get more leads. This will need an action plan with steps including identifying people to be involved, developing content for the advertisement, selecting advertising channels, etc. Your targets can be to generate 50 leads from the campaign.
Step 5: Marketing budget
Once you prioritise your goals you should approximately calculate how much the marketing plans to fulfill the strategy will cost. Figure out expenses for employing the right software, advertising on the right channels, creating the right content and other marketing activities planned. Your budget should also involve social media subscriptions that you will have to invest in for engaging in digital marketing on a larger scale.
To make logistics marketing effective your logistics operations should be smooth. When you promise the clients that you will transport their products from Point A to Point B in two days your supply chain should be able to fulfil that promise. On-time delivery improves customer satisfaction, which leads to more word-of-mouth referrals and ultimately increased brand awareness.
Also read: Top 5 big challenges for businesses when going online
Priyanka is a seasoned content marketing professional with more than 6 years of experience crafting various forms of business and technology sector content. Her insightful writing tackles critical issues faced by small-scale manufacturing businesses. Priyanka's clear and concise communication empowers businesses to make informed decisions and thrive in today's dynamic business environment.