LOGISTICS MARKETING BLOG

Don’t rely on marketing shortcuts to grow your business. Instead, build a logistics marketing system for the long term.
If you are the P&L owner of a logistics business, the absolute wrong question to be asking about marketing is “How do we get leads fast?”
Instead, ask yourself: “How do we become known for those things we do best among the prospects most likely to buy our service?”

Marketing is viewed by executives at logistics business as an expense, not an investment. To change this perception, marketing measurement must focus on sales results, not activities. Keep C-level reporting focused on sales with these four reports. Do that and you’ll be seen as buttoned-up, results-oriented, and personally accountable.

In marketing, we need to do a better job of establishing standards – marketing objectives against which we measure our performance. Luckily, we have high-tech tools that make it easier to measure marketing.

Recently I had a chance to do a Q&A with my colleague, Brian Carroll, consultant and author of Lead Generation for the Complex Sale. I have followed Brian’s B2B Lead Blog for years and was interested in his latest focus area, empathetic marketing. Here are the highlights of our discussion.

The world is small, and getting smaller. When clients are looking for specialty services, their search can go world-wide. What are you doing to attract them, stand out, and avoid the crowded middle?

It’s smart business to be aware of what your competition is doing. But be careful that the effort does not become a primary focus. If you have plans for a large-scale competitive analysis, here are some reasons to re-think how much time and resources you expend on the effort.

Marketers can gather tons of data, but CEOs want to know whether their investment in marketing is contributing to top-line growth and whether the results justify the marketing budget expense. Giving them these answers requires metrics that link marketing efforts with actual sales results.
Here are some of my favorite ways to demonstrate marketing’s bottom line return.

Data indicates that the best marketing ROI for your logistics marketing business comes from investing time to get other people to tell your story for you.

You need to weigh the costs of marketing automation software like HubSpot against the value of time – and how that time can contribute to meeting your ultimate sales and marketing objectives.

Too few logistics businesses practice “outside-in marketing.” Instead, they focus their marketing on the services and key features they (and 500 other companies) offer. That’s a great strategy if your marketing goal is to blend in and go unnoticed…