Grow Your 3PL Business with These 6 Ideas
What are you doing to grow your 3PL business? If it doesn’t involve content marketing, then you are behind the times. Don’t assume that content marketing means “start a blog”; it is so much more than that. Think of content marketing as a way of selling your business without actually saying “give me the money”.
This new way of marketing to your potential customers the way they want to be spoken to. Your customers want to learn and understand. So by becoming a thought leader, you can give your customers what they want. When you do this, they are more likely to buy from you because they trust you. Try one of these six content marketing ideas to help boost your marketing strategy.
1. Branding Your 3PL Business
With so many logistics and supply chain companies in the industry, it’s vital that you make your company stand out. Potential customers head online to search for a logistics provider. You need to establish your company as one that they should work with. The first step in branding is to have a clean and simple name and logo. Choose something unique and not already in use. It helps to work with an intellectual property attorney for this phase.
Once you have your name and logo trademarked, it’s time to start using it. Keep all of your marketing and company material consistent. This includes both your tangible and intangible items. One important part of branding is establishing your online presence. With so many potential customers using the internet, you need to have a clean and easy to navigate website. Pay attention to how your visitors spend their time on your website. Then you can tailor your website towards your customer’s needs and desires.
2. Social Media
Social media today is about more than posting pictures of cats and what you had for lunch. It’s a way to connect with your customers on a personal level. Remember how business experts will tell you to go where the customers are, well your customers are on social media. So it’s time you went there too. You don’t have to be on all of the social media platforms. In fact, that’s a terrible idea that will end badly. If you want to protect your brand, you can make a profile on each site so that you can claim your name. But then focus your efforts on posting and engaging on a select one or two.
It’s better to post consistently and engaging fully on one or two sites than to do a half-assed job on all of them. Use your social media to see how your customers use your service. Or use it to comment with potential customers that have a problem that your service can solve. You could use it as a place to post information and announcements. For 3PL businesses, you could connect with someone who posts about struggling to get their stuff shipped or delivered. You could post about industry events or weather that will delay shipments. Or you could post about unique shipments that you help organize.
3. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Your website is useless if no one ever finds it. Search engine optimization (SEO) is what you need to do for your website to rank. When someone heads to a search engine and puts in a query, you want that search engine to show your website as a relevant search result. To do this, you need to show the search engine that you’re talking about the same thing the searcher is. Targeting search terms by using them on your website is one way to do that.
Another is to have relevant industry websites link to and from your website. Think of these connections as a highway system. The more relevant connections you have, the stronger your network. This is where blogging becomes so important. It gives you a chance to target a wide range of keywords in each blog post. It also shows Google that your website is active by producing new content regularly.
4. Email Marketing
Depending on the size of your email list, email marketing can cost nothing to very little to execute. It won’t start to be a sizable investment until your email list is huge. This is an efficient way to stay in front of your customers without being too obtrusive. One way to maintain contact with your customers is to have a monthly newsletter. You can include highlights from your blog posts, company events, industry happenings that will affect your customers, and anything that will cater to the specific needs of your customers.
As your email campaign experience grows, you can start to develop customer valuation funnels. This is a way of directing your customer down the sales funnel in a non-sales-aggressive way. You’ll narrow down your efforts to those most likely to ship with you. Then once they ship, you direct them back to the beginning of the funnel to go through it again and book another shipment with you.
5. Content Marketing
Build on the first tip of branding by creating high-quality content for your website. This builds credibility and engages your visitors. The more engaged a visitor is, the more likely they will return in the future. All too often, businesses create content only for search engines. This isn’t enough. You need to create content that your target audience wants to see. The best strategy is to combine your efforts.
Focus on creating blog topics that answer the questions your customers have. Then use the keywords that will help you rank in your blogs. This lets you write for both people and search engines. Don’t limit your content marketing to only blogs. You could also create an eBook, downloadable PDFs, infographics, slideshares, or anything else that can educate and inform your audience.
6. Conversion Rate Optimization
Do you know what to do with the traffic once you’ve gotten it to your site? It isn’t enough to get people visiting your website; you want them to complete a sale. This is where conversion rate optimization comes in. CRO turns passive browsers into valuable conversions. To do this, you need to take a look at your website. Do you have the right design elements in place to get people to buy? Maybe you need to place more call to action (CTA) buttons on your pages. Or you could have more motivators in your blog posts to convince people to contact you. Remember, there is a fine line between a well-placed button and being overly aggressive and in your face.
Let’s Grow Your 3PL Business Today
So what are you doing to grow your 3PL business? Have you already tried one of these six ideas? If so, I’d love to hear about how your experience went. If you haven’t tried any of them, I’m happy to help you get started. We can figure out which one is the best solution for your business and the easiest for you to integrate into your business. Contact me today, and let’s take your 3PL business to the next level.
