Creating A Public Relations Strategy for Supply Chain Success | Navigating the Modern Marketplace, Part 1

Growing a supply chain business can be challenging. Even if you do good work, it’s not always easy to get the word out about your company. This can create a situation in which you’re ready for more business but can never seem to find it.

The solution may lie in revamping your public relations (PR) and digital marketing strategies. Doing so can help you appeal to a broader audience, build trust with existing clients, and take your transportation or logistics business to the next stage of its growth journey.

This three-part blog series is designed to help you do this. This first part guides you through the process of crafting a public relations strategy in the supply chain industry. Two additional follow-up articles will help you learn how to best execute the strategy you create.

Why Supply Chain PR Matters

The first question many logistics companies have is whether it’s worth their time to focus on public relations. The answer is a resounding yes. PR plays a direct role in shaping how others view your brand. An effective strategy can help you achieve all of the following goals:

• Building awareness of your company so that more potential customers engage with it
• Creating stronger relationships with customers, suppliers, and other stakeholders
• Standing out from competitors
• Boosting search engine results
• Keeping your company relevant to the next generation of buyers

How to Create Your Public Relations Strategy

Creating an overarching public relations strategy is the first step toward enjoying the benefits highlighted in the last section. Supply chain PR, like PR in any industry, is key. Four repeatable steps will help you develop solid campaigns.

1. Define Your Objectives

First, consider what you hope to achieve with your transportation PR or logistics PR strategy. Some sample objectives include:

• Getting more people to learn about your business through Google
• Positioning your company as a thought leader in the industry
• Revamping your messaging for the next generation of buyers
• Increasing sales
• Creating a more recognizable brand

Whatever your goals are, try to be specific while listing them. They should be measurable, achievable, and designed to be met within a particular time frame. An example would be setting a goal to increase website traffic by 20% over the next 12 months.

2. Do Research

Next, you should conduct research based on the goals you establish. That will often mean learning more about your target audience and their interests and needs. You may also need to research competitors to learn how to set your company apart from them.

The goal here is to start getting an idea of the kind of strategies you may need to use to achieve your objectives. Once you have that information, you can start putting your plan into action.

3. Choose Tactics

Now it’s time to choose the tactics you’ll use to achieve your PR goals. These should be informed by the research you did in step two.

For example, you might write blogs to drive more new customers to your website from Google. If your primary focus is instead on solidifying your relationship with existing customers, you might try to provide value to them in the form of free guides to common problems.

The next two articles in this series will focus primarily on tactics, so be sure to read them if you’d like more detailed guidance.

4. Measure Results and Adapt

At this point, you’ve developed a well-informed PR strategy with specific goals you can measure. Now, deploy the tactics you came up with in step three and track how they impact your objective.

For instance, if you want to bring more people to your website, look at your site analytics before and after launching a new PR campaign. This will help inform you whether the strategy is working or not, and which parts of it have been most successful. If it doesn’t work, then adapt, try something new, and measure again. Continue doing this until you reach your objective.

How Your Public Relations Strategy Can Drive Success

Now that you know how to create a public relations strategy, let’s wrap up part one of this series by reviewing three objectives you may wish to pursue with it.

Showcasing Your Company’s Expertise

First, you might use PR to highlight your company’s unique areas of expertise. You can do that by starting a company blog, getting more active on social media sites like LinkedIn, and even organizing events and webinars.

Even if your area of expertise is highly niche, you want to become an authority on it. You can do that by sharing content related to it across your social channels. That way, when B2B clients have a need in your area of knowledge, they think of your business first.

Building Trust With Stakeholders

You can also use a PR campaign to build trust with stakeholders. You can do that by creating a thoughtful brand narrative, sharing your values, and highlighting the good work you do on a daily basis.

Case studies can be especially powerful for this objective. They let you highlight how you’ve helped companies in the past so that it’s easy for potential clients to see how you might help them in the future.

Leveraging Industry Awards and Thought Leadership Opportunities

In some ways, public relations is the process of putting your business into a better position to succeed than it is today. One way to do that by is leveraging opportunities to stand out within your industry. 

Winning industry awards can help you stand out from the competition and will give you something to highlight on your website, in email newsletters, and through other channels like social media.

You might also pursue thought leadership opportunities to improve your brand’s positioning. That can mean hosting or presenting at industry conferences, agreeing to interviews with the press, and any leveraging other opportunities you have to show your knowledge in public forums.

You Don’t Have to Do Logistics PR Alone

Whether you need help with setting objectives or executing PR campaigns, Idea Grove has helping businesses like yours achieve their supply chain, logistics, and transportation PR goals for nearly two decades.

Get in touch to learn more about how we can help, and don’t forget to return to read the second and third parts of this series on public relations in the supply chain industry.