- Original Poster
- #1
We have recently expanded our 3PL business by renting a second site. Up until now we have grown the business without doing any marketing to speak of. Sure, we have a website and all that but growth has come through word of mouth, which is wonderful. But now we need to start filling up our new warehouse with customers and so need to get serious about marketing.
My other businesses are in very different sectors (industrial components) I have the marketing methods for those businesses well established. We make lots of technical content that is useful to our engineering customers and promote that via LinkedIn and SEO and hey presto we get lots of traffic and customers. Due to the multi-niche nature of those products, there is almost an endless amount of genuinely useful content we can create. This is tried, tested, and works very well.
But 3PL is a different beast. The message is relatively simple and non-technical but and the audience is very broad, basically, anyone who sells physical goods in the UK could be a potential punter. That's pretty broad! So, this is a very different marketing challenge to what I am used to! We are very good at creating lots of interesting technical content and we know how to target that to the specific niches that will be interested in it. But, as I said, 3PL is far less technical, so there is less scope for content, and far broader in audience scope.
One thought is to write some more general business articles as brand awareness pieces, they won't be talking so much about the wonders of third-party logistics but instead give general business advice on people development (something we are pretty good at I think). That type of content might have broad appeal as it will, hopefully, offer some pearls of wisdom to the general SME community. That might overcome the issue of what content to create but then I need to get people to read or watch it!
I'm experimenting with LinkedIn as this works well for our industrial business but I am not sure if our potential customers use LinkedIn much or whether its the right approach. With our niche industrial components I can use Sales Navigator to get some very specific niche lists for our sales guys to target but getting any manageable list of "people that sell physical goods in the UK" does not seem possible even with sales nav.
So, any suggestions as to good places to promote content? I guess here would be a good place!
My other businesses are in very different sectors (industrial components) I have the marketing methods for those businesses well established. We make lots of technical content that is useful to our engineering customers and promote that via LinkedIn and SEO and hey presto we get lots of traffic and customers. Due to the multi-niche nature of those products, there is almost an endless amount of genuinely useful content we can create. This is tried, tested, and works very well.
But 3PL is a different beast. The message is relatively simple and non-technical but and the audience is very broad, basically, anyone who sells physical goods in the UK could be a potential punter. That's pretty broad! So, this is a very different marketing challenge to what I am used to! We are very good at creating lots of interesting technical content and we know how to target that to the specific niches that will be interested in it. But, as I said, 3PL is far less technical, so there is less scope for content, and far broader in audience scope.
One thought is to write some more general business articles as brand awareness pieces, they won't be talking so much about the wonders of third-party logistics but instead give general business advice on people development (something we are pretty good at I think). That type of content might have broad appeal as it will, hopefully, offer some pearls of wisdom to the general SME community. That might overcome the issue of what content to create but then I need to get people to read or watch it!
I'm experimenting with LinkedIn as this works well for our industrial business but I am not sure if our potential customers use LinkedIn much or whether its the right approach. With our niche industrial components I can use Sales Navigator to get some very specific niche lists for our sales guys to target but getting any manageable list of "people that sell physical goods in the UK" does not seem possible even with sales nav.
So, any suggestions as to good places to promote content? I guess here would be a good place!
