Category Archive for ‘logistics marketing’

As logistics marketers, the greatest gift we can bring to our work is empathy – a genuine understanding of the buyer’s needs, wants and feelings. This empathy informs our strategy and messaging work like nothing else.

The best way to build empathy is to talk directly with these buyers. But, unlike salespeople, the day-to-day job of marketing doesn’t require regular interaction with our customers and prospects. One of the things we must guard against is reliance on second-hand sources as the pathway to empathy.

Wouldn’t it be great if our prospects – the buyers of logistics products and services – told us the very best way to get and keep their attention?

Well, they kind of have.

Every two years, our firm has been asking these very questions and publishing the results in a report entitled, aptly, Marketing Logistics Services: How to Get, and Keep, the Attention of Buyers of Logistics Products & Services.

On the morning of September 11, 2001, I was coordinating a marketing planning session at a Chicago hotel with most of the management team for the 3PL that I then ran marketing for.

When the news about the World Trade Center attack hit, the rest of that morning was spent absorbing the devastating news and communicating with loved ones. But it was clear no one was traveling home, even if they wanted to, since all flights were cancelled.

Every couple of years, Logistics Marketing Advisors does a survey of professionals who make or influence purchasing decisions on logistics products or services.  This year, we surveyed 100 buyers online and then followed up with direct interviews with 10 of these respondents to dig a little deeper.

“GDPR.” You’ve likely seen those four letters pop up in your news feed and inbox quite a bit recently. Those letters are short for General Data Protection Regulation – a law created by the European Union (EU) to give its citizens the ability to protect their personal data and online privacy. It went into effecton May 25, 2018.

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.

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.

To measure marketing effectiveness, there are gobs of metrics you can, and should, use – leads, website traffic and conversions, social connections and engagement… the list goes on.

Content has become the centerpiece of many logistics marketing programs. The downside of that for logistics marketers is that creating good content takes a whole lot of time.

3PL businesses are not marketing driven and the role of marketing in logistics is not well defined. At least that’s been my experience having worked with close to 75 3PLs large and small.