Step-by-Step Guide to Creating a Marketing Plan for Logistics Companies
Logistics companies are leading innovators in improving supply chain management, maximizing efficiency, and streamlining business operations. Strategies used by logistics companies maximize their operation but aren't helping them to thrive and grow.
Driving growth for third-party logistics companies may be challenging, especially when the day-to-day operations and development of a growth strategy take so much time.
So, how does a logistics company quickly and easily develop growth strategies while maintaining efficiency?
Enter: Growth marketing.
Growth Marketing
Growth marketing is a business growth strategy that utilizes experiments and data in marketing to create the most sustainable growth models.
This form of marketing uses a variety of strategies and channels to optimize growth. Using experiments and constant analyses can maximize a company's efforts and can increase the number of customers at a lower cost and with more efficiency.
Growth marketing can take many forms, but three of the most common are:
- - Content marketing: Using content, like social media posts, to boost brand awareness
- - Advertising: Using paid promotions, like ads, to spread the word about your brand
- - Product marketing: Promoting individual products to increase awareness of your brand and boost sales
Growth marketing uses the AARRR funnel: Acquisition, Activation, Retention, Revenue, Referral, otherwise known as "pirate metrics," to grow a company. Whether you are using content marketing, product marketing, or advertising, the AARRR funnel will be applicable. What does the AARRR funnel look like practically? Let's break it down:
- Acquisition: Finding a cost-effective channel to connect with the ideal audience. For example, using social media platforms to connect with a younger target audience.
- Activation: This is where you attract and persuade potential customers to try your product or service.
- Retention: This step involves engaging with your audience and developing a long-term relationship; you want to keep your customers coming back.
- Revenue: Here, you create incentives to encourage your customers to refer you to others. One example of this is the use of promotional codes by social media influencers.
- Referral: When your customers refer you to others, you continue to gain customers and develop a continuous revenue stream and maintain sustainable growth.
Logistics companies are the perfect candidates for the growth marketing model, as they rely on long-term relationships with customers and customer lifetime value for growth and success.
Growth marketing is focused on attracting, engaging, and retaining customers, as well as creating a growth cycle where dedicated customers can then promote and market to a new target audience. The focus on the customer that is inherent to the growth marketing experiments is ideal for a logistics company that is looking to expand its marketing efforts.
Implementing Growth Marketing Plans for Logistics Companies
Growth marketing is used to grow a business quickly and cost-effectively by limiting ad spending as much as possible. In order to reduce ad-spend, a growth marketing framework is needed to base marketing efforts on.
Creating a framework that works for your business is the first step, and each business's framework may look a little different, but when starting out, you can utilize a basic structure.
Creating a Growth Marketing Framework
When developing your framework, you first need to get an idea of your marketing objectives and desired results. Your framework is based on the current position of your company, and your goals and objectives should be tailored to where you'd like to grow. This provides guidance for your marketing strategy and informs what you aim for and measure against.
After identifying your goals, you can start coming up with ideas for how to meet them. When brainstorming strategies for growth, it's vital to prioritize ideas to keep spending at a minimum. Only implement beneficial ideas that are likely to produce desired outcomes, that way, you can maintain focus without additional expenditures.
As you develop strategies and ideas, you have to begin testing them. When testing marketing strategies, using scientific data analytic methods of hypothesis, methods, supporting information, and qualitative and quantitative data. Using specific metrics can help you measure how effective your ideas really are. Here are a few metrics that may be helpful for logistics companies using growth marketing:
Customer Acquisition Costs
This refers to the cost of attracting and bringing on a new customer, which may include sales interactions and lead generation efforts. This metric shows you how to attract high-value customers for the lowest cost.
Customer Lifetime Value
This refers to the average revenue gained from each customer. Because logistics relies on long-term partnerships and repeat business from the same customer, this is a vital metric.
Average Recurring Revenue
This metric evaluates the worth of a customer in terms of recurring revenue. Volume density is tied to profits for logistics companies, so this metric can give you an idea of how much volume accounts should have and how many customers you need to reach your goals.
Once you've tested your ideas, you want to utilize data analytics to evaluate how your growth strategies are working. As you market your brand and test your strategies, you want to collect and analyze data to determine what areas should be targeted for development, any areas of inefficiency, for example. The metrics mentioned in the previous section can help you measure your progress. You can also identify areas of growth and success using data metrics, which help you determine what strategies are most effective.
Once you test your ideas and gather your data, you can filter out which ideas are the most efficient and move those ideas onto the next stage: implementation. After your ideas are implemented, you can make any adjustments necessary and continue to monitor the effectiveness of the strategy. This part of the process may take 30-90 days.
Once you've implemented different strategies, you can go back for another round of analysis to determine the results of the strategy. In some cases, you may need to start the process with a new strategy. The growth marketing method is designed to be repeatable in order to get the best results and most optimized marketing strategies for your business. If you need to run through the model a few times before finding success, that's ok! It's all part of the experimentation aspect of the model.
Implementing Growth Marketing
Now that you've found a strategy that works for your company, you're ready to grow! Logistics companies have maintained incredible efficiency and streamlined operation, despite supply chain disruptions and industry obstacles over the course of the pandemic.
Even with leading innovations in efficient operation, logistics companies can benefit from a growth marketing strategy to connect them to long-term customers for more sustainable revenue and growth.
Sidney Karanja
Sidney is the founder of Savo Store, a parcel to Kenya and logistics and procurement services provider that works with corporations, start-ups, and non-profits, to help them acquire and transport goods to their offices in Africa. Savo Store also operates a platform that allows individuals in Africa to shop hassle free at any U.S. retailer. Sidney founded Savo Store with the goal of eliminating some of the hurdles that plague cross-border transactions between Africa and the rest of the world
