The way buyers purchase high-value logistics products and services has changed dramatically in the last 10 years, but too many logistics businesses haven’t adapted their marketing and sales efforts to reflect how today’s logistics decision makers buy.
Marketing has become a game of Hide-and-Seek – but in reverse.
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.
What matters more to your logistics company’s marketing efforts: more eyeballs or more leads? This question is at the center of ongoing debate about “gating” premium content such as white papers and eBooks. In this article, we’ll take a closer look at your content gating strategy options and detail why the best choice is likely more personal than absolute.
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.
I was talking recently to my colleague Joe Lynch, who produces the Logistics of Logistics podcast. We got on the subject of marketing being a logistics company’s best sales person and Joe suggested “Let’s do a podcast on that.” So we did. Check out this recent episode of the Logistics of Logistics podcast.
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.
You think your logistics business has a compelling value proposition and you try to get prospects to pay attention, but it’s hard.
Very few care.
You could try and get more people to care. Think UPS. For years, they told the world “we love logistics,” which artfully begged the question, “Shouldn’t you, too?”
One popular and important marketing exercise is defining a logistics value proposition – your company's “promise” to the market. You want it to be BOTH accurate and memorable, certainly. But too many companies focus on the accurate part. They look in the mirror and describe what they see. The result is a stultifying barrage ofsameness designed to avoid, not attract, attention.
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