Differentiation comes with its challenges in any industry, but for transport and logistics, it comes down to three important factors:
- The ability to communicate their unique value proposition
- The ability to highlight their investments in safety technologies and practices
- The ability to showcase strong customer service and reliability
With all three of these factors dependent on the ability to communicate clearly and effectively, developing a comprehensive and effective transportation marketing strategy is paramount. So how do you go about it?
Understanding your audience
Arguably the most important aspect of developing a strong transportation marketing strategy is understanding your audience on a complex level. Understanding and being able to address common customer problems or challenges throughout the buyer journey, and in relation to your service offerings is crucial to ensuring you are speaking to the right people at the right time in their customer journey.
Collecting and analysing past and current customer information is an important part of understanding who your audience is and what it is they value about their services. Whether you reach out to them for this information or use pre-existing data to collate insights, the data you collect will allow you to better target future customers.
Creating a list of dream clients can also help you to target better. Define a list of the top ten companies you’d like to work with and break them down into industry, pain point, solution, and communication channels, this will inform the rest of your strategy.
Content marketing
This is the tactic that most people think of when they think of when they start thinking about marketing, but it’s more than putting words on a page or a nice design on Instagram.
To remain competitive for transportation marketing in particular, your content should be informed by your audience. The best way to ensure you are hitting your audience’s pain points and providing them with information of value is to develop a content strategy as part of your marketing plan. This includes breaking down your brand into key values and goals and aligning them with your audience’s pain points. Define three to four key pillars that summarise your business’s value proposition and mission, and use those to inform your content.
If you’re struggling to identify topics that are of interest to your audience, try using tools like Google Analytics, and work them into your content strategy. Keep in mind the kinds of topics and formats that work best for your audience and use them to inform how you then present your content. Leveraging keyword research and SEO insights can also help to optimise your content for search engines.
SEO
A crucial part of your transportation marketing strategy should be SEO. SEO helps you further target your identified audience through content, and can be instrumental in driving growth and attracting people to your service offerings. Whether it’s on your website, through keyword topic research to identify email topics of interest, or even on social media - keeping in mind that many people now use social media as a search engine.
Establishing a strong foundation starting at your website with SEO means you can use it as a jumping-off point for your content and marketing efforts. Whether you’re looking at creating an SEO strategy yourself or partnering with an agency, search engine optimisation is one aspect of your strategy that is not to be overlooked.
Leveraging social media
Social media is the tactic most businesses look at as crucial, but often without using it to its fullest potential. Building an online community through social media isn’t as simple as creating an Instagram account or Facebook page and calling it a day. For some businesses, these platforms won’t provide much - or any - value. In short, it comes back to understanding your audience, and where they are.
For transportation marketing, LinkedIn will likely be the best social media platform to employ in your transportation marketing strategy. Businesses use this platform to create networks and build communities, so by being present on LinkedIn, both in paid and organic forms, you’re more likely to be meeting your audience where they are, removing the need to be ‘found’.
Targeted email marketing
Email marketing, newsletters, notifications, automation, it all may seem over (or under) whelming at first, but by employing account-based marketing strategies in your email marketing, you can ensure that you’re only putting effort in where effort will be rewarded.
With your established content strategy, strong understanding of your audience, and SEO topic research on hand, identifying key accounts and industries to target will be a breeze. By focusing your email marketing on specific targets, you increase the likelihood of conversions by providing clear value and demonstrating expertise directly to your audience.
Customer service
For service-based industries, having good customer service is paramount. Word of mouth is still one of the strongest tools in building a trusted, reputable business and lasting customer relationships. It’s also one of the hardest things to control.
What you can control, is your customer service. The traditional aspects are all incredibly important, such as having a good team, responding quickly and empathetically to customers, and so on. But there are things you can do to support your customer success team, and help them to optimise their time and provide better customer service on a higher level.
AI is everywhere, and one of the places it has proven valuable is in supporting B2B businesses with customer service. AI can be incredibly effective in identifying and solving customer pain points more effectively, prioritising efforts around customer satisfaction and loyalty, and preemptively implementing solutions to address customer needs. AI’s predictive and analytical capabilities can be of great value for B2B businesses, streamlining and enhancing customer support and experiences while essentially acting as an assistant for your customer success team.
Trade shows and networking
Going back to the importance of networks and word of mouth for building a trusted relationship with your customers, we cannot forget the impact of trade shows and industry events. Fantastic for showcasing your successes and innovations and growing your networks, it’s important to make events and event marketing a part of your strategy to make sure you’re getting the most from these events.
We have already addressed the highly competitive nature of the transportation industry, so it’s important to make sure that your activations and digital promotions are on point when it comes to transportation marketing, particularly when attending trade shows and industry events. By establishing a plan early on, you can be sure you’re setting your team up for success with good KPIs backed by research and targeted marketing plans focused on the event’s attendees.
Aligning sales and marketing
Companies that align their sales and marketing efforts see significantly more growth than those that don’t. Misalignments lead to missed opportunities, leaving your teams frustrated and feeling their efforts are going to waste.
By aligning your sales and marketing efforts, you can ensure that your pipeline is properly nurtured. Establishing a clear customer journey and incorporating sales and marketing tactics into this journey allows you to create a clear picture with identifiable conversion points for both teams, leading to greater overall success for both sides of the business, and more closed deals.
Looking to develop a transportation marketing strategy that wins? Contact us today to build a better marketing strategy for your business.
