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The transportation and logistics business landscape has undergone tremendous changes in the past decade or so. All these changes, as with any business, have been aimed to drive profitability and growth. The transport and logistics businesses are among the most profitable business ventures currently. Progresive changes and improvements are being made in the sector to improve its profitability. One notable improvement being done in the sector is the adoption of various marketing methods to drive up leads and sales.

Two factors are vital for any business to increase business leads and sales. These factors are demand generation and lead generation. Demand generation is the process of creating awareness about a business’s products or services. This is done to get potential clients interested in the company’s products or services.

Lead generation, on the other hand, is the conversion of a potential client to a lead. This happens when a potential shows interest in a product and makes an inquisition about it. In this article, we highlight how transport and logistics businesses can drive up their leads and sales. The article focuses on the use of demand generation for this.

1. Identifying Your Client Base

When a business states that it is in the transport and logistics business, one would not know exactly what they do. This is because the transport and logistics business is quite versatile and diverse. Different transports and logistics brands offer freight services for various services or products.

The best way for a transport and logistics business to drive up sales and leads is to identify the needs of its market. In the transport and logistics business, different clients can be those shipping:

Cars
Furniture
Construction materials
Foods

For different client types, the requirements vary. Let us consider the example of a client shipping cars. Such clients would focus on the tie-down locks on the freight trucks. Clients shipping food would be concerned about the external covers on the trucks that ensure the food items are preserved.

Once a business has identified its specific target client base, it can focus on ramping up demand generation. This can be done using targeted marketing. The transport and logistics businesses can also use cold calls. Cold calls are handy to approach clients and offer them special deals. This easily creates demand for a brand’s services.

Identifying your client base also helps optimize the freight services to suit clients better. This helps a business get higher client satisfaction rates.

2. Mapping the Client Journey

The client journey denotes the steps a client has taken since they were a potential, to when they become a client. Similar to all other processes, learning the steps in the process is essential to optimizing the process and improving its results.

Transport and logistics businesses must highlight a rough outline of their client journey. This is done by analyzing previous potentials who converted to clients. It is also important to analyze the potentials or leads who never had a conversion.

Studying the journey of leads who never made a conversion will help the brand identify weak points in its buyer journey. Identifying the weakness will help the business work on that weakness to increase its sales.

Analyzing the client journey is an easy way to identify strengths and weaknesses. Analyzing the journey of leads who turned to clients helps the business denote their sales strong points. Once the business identifies the strength in its client journey, the corporation should improve it. However, in some cases, identifying the strength of a brand’s client journey is done to ensure they do not alter it. This helps maintain the journey’s current success rate.

When identifying the client journey, the business will note that its clients may have different personas. The persona of a client or lead is what identifies different clients to their journeys. Different personas have varying steps in the client journey that impacts their final decision to seek the brand’s services.

For some leads, how a brand contacts them and markets their services is what matters. This might be contrary to other leads, who are most impacted by what the business stands for. It is vital for transport and logistics businesses to recognize the personas of their clients. By identifying different personas, the brand can use different sales strategies based on lead personas. This is an easy tactic that increases lead conversion rates and increases business revenue.

3. Influencer Marketing

In the past, large-scale media platforms were the most popular and widely used by brands for marketing. However, business analysts noted that the returns from this marketing type were not as expected .

The rise of internet technologies and social media platforms has led to the rise of influencer marketing. Influencer marketing entails paying a person, organization, business, etc., to endorse your services to their followers.

Globally, many transport and logistics businesses do not embrace the use of marketing to create leads and improve sales. To drive up sales and leads, transport and logistics businesses can hire influencers. Influencers will improve the brand recognition in the market.

Influencer marketing drives up the demand for a business’s services or products. This is done by exposing the potential clients and leads to the brand’s good services and products. This helps create a need for the brand’s services in the minds of the target audience.

For transport and logistics businesses, getting other businesses to endorse them is better. The businesses endorsing the transport and logistics business must be related to the transport business in some way. They can be long-standing clients of the transport and logistics business. A good example of this is a car dealership endorsing the transport and logistics. A dealership can endorse a business they use to ship out their cars to respective clients.

Influencer marketing is an effective marketing method. It is used to drive up leads and sales for a business. Influencers offer many businesses impeccable results. The advantage of using influencers is that people tend to trust things told by their favorite person as compared to conventional methods of marketing. This, therefore, likely means that the net profits from new sales can be higher.

4. Search Engine Optimization

In this era, having a business website is vital for the success of any business. The business website should be developed strategically to ensure that it brings in the most leads and sales for the business. However, the structure and development style of the business website contributes partly to its overall success.

The content posted on the website is what defines the visibility of the brand’s website on the internet. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) entails improving the quality of content posted on the website. When a website offers high-quality content, search engines recognize and raise its visibility.

The first step when optimizing your brand’s website is to first analyze its current SEO score. There are numerous tools available on the internet that a business can use to analyze its web pages. The SEO analytics tools check various features on web pages such as the article keywords, response time, etc.

Once you have your site’s current SEO ranking, you can now implement an SEO optimization target. When optimizing your website content, the implementation of relevant article keywords will improve the site’s overall visibility. Other factors considered in SEO are content structure, content relevance, etc.

5. Brand Differentiation

Similar to most industries, the transport and logistics business is also saturated in terms of other available service providers. Industry saturation offers an advantage to potential clients since they have more brands to choose from. However, saturation is a significant drawback for businesses in that industry. It becomes that much tougher to get clients and retain them.

In saturated markets, a business has to stand out and differentiate itself from the rest to dominate the market. Transport and logistics businesses ought to differentiate themselves from the rest to increase their demand from leads or clients.

For logistics businesses, brand differentiation can include features such as faster freight times, better insurance options, etc. When looking for a way to distinguish your business from the rest, often, the differentiation impacts your business revenues. This means that you have to strategize and implement an additional business strategy that will neutralize the revenue impact of the differentiation factor.

Once you have set up a differentiation factor for your business, you can opt to use influencer marketing to notify potential clients about it. This demand-generation method will drive up brand sales and leads.

Conclusion

For transport and logistic businesses that are looking for ways to drive up their sales and leads, they must ensure that the methods are feasible for their industry. This is because not all conventional methods used to drive up sales and leads are universal for any business.

It is also important to keep in mind that some methods will definitely work better than others. This means that logistics businesses will have to use various methods and success metrics to test which method works best for them. Once a brand identifies a method that works best for them, they must embrace it fully and incorporate it into their overall business strategies.

The third-party logistics (3PL) industry did more than $200 billion in revenue in the U.S. in 2018, according to Armstrong & Associates. That figure is double what it was just a decade ago. Rising labor costs, tight shipping capacity and a general need for companies to cut distribution costs are all fueling the growth.

Here are 10 3PLs that are making noteworthy advancements in the world of distribution logistics.

C.H. Robinson

Already one of the largest 3PLs in the world, C. H. Robinson is in the process of acquiring Prime Distribution Services, one of the nation’s leaders in retail consolidation services. “Prime Distribution Services is a high-quality growth company that brings scale and value-added warehouse capabilities to our retail consolidation platform, adding to our global suite of services,” said Bob Biesterfeld, C.H. Robinson CEO, in January. Prime currently operates five distribution centers throughout the U.S., totaling about 2.6 million square feet. With nearly $20 billion in freight under management and 18 million annual shipments, C. H. Robinson earned the top slot in Armstrong & Associates’ Top 50 U.S. 3PLs for 2018.

Holman Logistics

Headquartered in Kent, Washington, Holman opened in Portland back in 1864. Today, it’s one of the leading logistics firms in the Pacific Northwest, though it also manages facilities throughout the nation. The company offers public and contract warehousing (with 7 million square feet of warehousing space), manufacturing logistics, plant support, transportation, collaborative logistics and order-fulfillment services. In terms of distribution, Holman handles both truckload and LTL deliveries, as well as spotting and shuttle services. Some of Holman’s biggest customers are Hill’s Pet Nutrition, Kimberly-Clark, General Electric appliances, Dr. Pepper/Snapple Group, Dole Pineapple, Kerry Foods, Cargill and Morton Salt.

Anchor 3PL

For customers that deal with hazardous materials, logistics can be a tricky, even dangerous proposition. If it’s going the 3PL route for distribution, it’s imperative that it find a company that thoroughly understands the demands of hazmat logistics. While not a large firm, Anchor 3PL operates a 140,000-square-foot warehouse that has 40,000 square feet dedicated to hazmat. Based in Salt Lake City, Anchor regularly deals with chemical and hazmat storage and distribution, works with fire and safety departments, stays on top of the thousands of legal requirements for storing and transporting hazardous materials and maintains relationships with all the regulating authorities.

Kanban

Even with the Trump Administration’s 2018 tariffs on imported photovoltaic panels, the solar industry is booming. Located in eastern North Carolina, in the heart of domestic solar energy production, Kanban is using its thorough knowledge of the industry and logistics to help customers with warehousing and distribution of solar panels. With a million feet of warehouse space, Kanban was able to both assist customers with high-volume warehousing before the tariffs took effect, and then offer solutions for companies that had to change course once the tariffs started. The company also offers logistics assistance for aerospace, food processing and automotive industries.

Cardinal Health Specialty Solutions

Moving pharmaceuticals around the country requires more than simply a cold chain distributor. In 2011, Cardinal began using a special non-toxic, environmentally friendly insulated tote to keep products between 2°C – 8°C (36°F – 46°F) during shipment. The result keeps the supply chain safe as well as prevents possible spoiled or adulterated products from re-entering the supply chain. For vaccine storage and shipment, Cardinal’s commercial refrigeration units are only calibrated using devices from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). It’s no surprise that Cardinal Health moves one out of every six pharmaceutical products in the country.

Cerasis

Since 1997, Cerasis has specialized in less than truckload (LTL) freight management. In fact, close to 95 percent of the company’s business has been in the LTL realm. Not only does this make sense for those wishing to move smaller volumes of freight, but it’s also perfect for e-commerce shipping. Cerasis is based in Minnesota but maintains offices in Oklahoma and Texas. GlobalTranz acquired Cerasis in January 2020. “Combining with GlobalTranz allows us to continue this history while providing our customers with increased service offerings and access to capacity,” said Cerasis President Steve Ludvigson shortly after the acquisition.

Expeditors

Based in Seattle, Expeditors operates 322 locations in more than 100 nations. Though it handles logistics for a variety of industries, Expeditors has considerable experience and expertise in the automotive world. Its customers include both original equipment manufacturers and tier suppliers, and it uses its sprawling global network—which includes more than 25 million square feet of warehouse space—to track items at the part or vehicle identification number level. Expeditors’ distribution services even include light manufacturing, labeling, product localization, inspection and product rework and compliance.

BDP International

Moving oil and gas around the world is complex, even in the realm of international logistics. No shipment is the same, and regulations are often changing. But BDP has long specialized in moving fuel, so it understands pricing, procurement, heavy lift and turn-key rig mobilization. In terms of distribution, the company operates facilities all around the world (including Dallas, Houston, Los Angeles and Philadelphia), and uses extensive barcode scanning technology to keep track of everything. The company even offers its own BDP Smart Tower application, which allows customers to monitor asset locations, maximize asset utilization and coordinate maintenance and repairs to keep equipment downtime at a minimum.

Qualex

In 1990, Qualex opened as a dock-to-dock delivery company for Southern California furniture makers. Since then, it’s evolved into a full 3PL firm with tightly integrated warehouse and transportation services, though it still specializes in the furniture industry. For each customer, Qualex sets up an Electronic Data Exchange (EDI), which channels replenishment orders directly into its own Warehouse Management System (WMS), making logistics practically invisible. Full distribution services include confirmation receipts, the automatic emailing of proof of delivery, inventory status reports, installation job status and even emailed photos of product condition upon delivery.

United Natural Foods, Inc.

Since grocery profit industry margins hover around just 2 percent, outsourcing logistics is practically mandatory. With its 2018 acquisition of Supervalu Advantage Logistics, United Natural Foods Inc. (UNFI) became a leader in grocery industry logistics. In fact, it’s the largest publicly traded grocery distributor in the nation. And its warehouse facilities are cutting edge—some have radiofrequency devices that guide selectors to stock, while others are completely automated, ready to deliver aisle-ready pallets to retail stores. SuperValu also ran all the logistics for four regional warehouses belonging to Krogers, the second-largest grocery chain in the country.

The Best Ways to Drive Leads and Sales for Transport and Logistic Business with Demand Generation