Digital Marketing for the Supply Chain and Logistics Industries

Digital marketing for the supply chain has become necessary to position your company to not only be found online, but also to be researched, to be compared, and to be concluded upon.

Highlights:

Digital marketing uses your website, related social media, and other online industry channels to showcase your industry knowledge and experience.
Thought leaders are the informed trusted sources in their field of expertise.
Supply chain and logistics industries need content marketing to achieve confidence and relationship-building with buyers.

Today’s B2B buyers are researching, evaluating, and coming to conclusions about companies without a single contact with a team member or salesperson.

This kind of B2B buying landscape requires cutting edge marketing strategies to showcase nut-and-bolt industries that have survived without them for many years.

Digital marketing for the supply chain

Digital marketing for the supply chain uses your website, related social media, and other online industry channels to showcase your industry knowledge and experience (rather than trying to convince people of it with a marketing message).

With inbound digital marketing, you publish relevant, informative information to adds value to every stage of a potential customer’s buying journey.

It is the content that you publish that walks them through the initial stages of the sales process.

What should you publish? A good content marketing strategy is about understanding the questions and concerns that are particular to your customer base, and offering quality information and analysis that answers those needs.

A good content marketing strategy is about understanding the questions and concerns that are particular to your customer base, and offering quality information and analysis that answers those needs. Click To Tweet

Showcasing thought leadership through digital marketing

Discovering and meeting the needs of your customers that go beyond your products and services will catapult you in their minds as a knowledgeable, helpful “thought leader” in your industry.

Thought leaders are the informed trusted sources in their field of expertise. They have innovative ideas, can showcase their thinking, and can replicate their successes again and again.

Consider it: Your business has so much more to offer than its primary product or service. You have a team of people with a tremendous aggregate of experience, expertise, and perspectives.

Allowing your customers this sort of access to your team’s experience and knowledge provides them with tremendous value outside the sales funnel, which builds trust and cultivates lasting, fruitful relationships.

Why digital marketing?

In this B2B buying landscape, supply chain and logistics industries need content marketing to achieve a level of confidence and relationship-building with buyers that used to come from face-to-face meetings. Potential and current customers will view your company as a valuable resource for everything related to not only your products and services but to the industry as a whole.

No time to execute?

The downside? Content marketing requires significant time, labor, and resources, and it can take quite some time to start reaping benefits. Feeling overwhelmed and like you and your team can’t possibly add on more marketing? Outsourcing certain key marketing tasks allows insourcing your core competencies while delegating specialized tasks to external experts.

This post originally appeared on EBN Online.

About author Frank Cavallaro

Frank has over 25 years of experience in the global technology distribution, supply chain, reverse logistics, after-market services and electronic asset disposal (EAD)industries. He has a proven track record of successful growth, restructuring, and turnaround performance, resulting in superior organizational and shareholder results.

Prior to Fronetics, Frank held various leadership positions within public and privately held corporate environments as well as private equity sponsored organizations. His experience includes CEO of Converge, President at Arrow Electronics, as well as COO and General Manager of NECX.

With domain expertise in international management, selling strategies, sales organizations, and global operations, Frank is recognized as an industry leader with the experience, vision, and capability to motivate all levels of your organization to deliver shareholder value, customer satisfaction, and cost control in the competitive marketplaces of international technology, supply chain and logistics.