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Social media and online advertising don’t always feel like natural fits for supply chain and logistics companies. But they can be powerful tools for building brand awareness, increasing your audience size, and driving engagement toward your products or services.
That’s why I’m covering them in this final article of our three-part blog series covering modern supply chain PR and digital marketing. Below, you’ll learn how to use social media in addition to online advertising to achieve your business goals.
Social Media Marketing for Logistics Companies
Billions of people use social media daily, which is why every company should have a presence on it. However, the specific social media sites you post on should be based on your target audience. In the supply chain, transportation, and logistics industries, that typically means posting on LinkedIn.
Creating a Social Media Marketing Strategy
The first step in using social media to help your business is coming up with a strategy. You can begin by asking yourself what you want your posts to achieve. Some sample goals include:
- Building brand awareness
- Demonstrating expertise
- Recruiting new employees
- Delivering value to members of your target audience
- Driving traffic to another form of content, such as your website or blog
Once you know your goal, you can start thinking about the kinds of posts that will help you reach it. Schedule these in a content calendar to ensure you’re posting regularly. Then, watch your post analytics over time to get the feedback you need to fine-tune your approach and continue reaching more potential clients.
This covers how to create an organic social media strategy, but you may also want to pay to promote some posts on LinkedIn. This can get your best posts in front of more people and help to expand your audience faster. You’ll need to weigh the costs of promoting your posts against the benefits that doing so can provide.
Tips For Executing Your Social Media Strategy
Developing a social media marketing strategy is the beginning of this aspect of your logistics PR efforts. You’ll still need to make compelling posts consistently to grow your audience. Some tips to do that include:
- Using visual and video content
- Engaging with your audience in the comments section
- Networking and cross-promoting with relevant businesses and users
- Sharing user-generated content on your page
- Using hashtags to connect your posts to larger trends
Online Advertising in the Supply Chain Industry
Paid online advertising is also a critical part of supply chain PR campaigns. This involves paying platforms like Google Ads and LinkedIn to show your content to more users than it would reach organically.
Paid online advertising can help you generate leads and increase brand awareness faster than purely organic campaigns. In this section, I’ll cover some of the different ways you can use it to achieve your digital marketing goals.
Creating a strategy
The first step is creating a strategy that’s specific to your company and its needs. Part of this is choosing where to advertise. Options include Google search results, banner ads, and promoted posts on social media websites. Each can be effective depending on your goals.
Google AdSense and other paid ad sellers give you a lot of control over who they show your paid ads to. You can create highly specific groups of potential buyers by narrowing the scope of your paid ad based on factors like demographics, locations, and previous online history.
The more effective you can be at curating the right audience for your paid ads, the better your campaign results are likely to be.
Executing Your Strategy
Your success rate with paid ads will depend on how well your audience connects with them. That’s why it’s important to have a clear understanding of who your target audience is and what they care about before proceeding.
It’s also essential to track the performance of your paid ads over time. Doing so will help you identify opportunities for improvement so future ads get better and better at driving new clients to your business.
It may be helpful to use a strategy called A/B testing. This involves paying to show two ads that are the same in every way except for one key difference, such as their headline or image. You can track the performance of both ads to see which does better and continue using the features of the successful one. This can help you refine your advertising strategy tremendously over time.
How Social Media and Paid Advertising Fit Into Your Broader Marketing Strategy
Throughout this three-part blog series, I’ve shown how supply chain businesses can use public relations and digital marketing strategies to generate leads, showcase capabilities, and build trust with potential clients. How do all of these pieces we’ve covered fit together?
The answer depends on your business, its goals, and how its digital marketing performance evolves over time.
For example, if your target audience skews younger, social media marketing may take on a more prominent role in your strategy. If you want to position your brand as a thought leader, it may be smarter to spend resources on creating valuable industry studies and sharing advertisements in major trade publications.
You might also find that a tactic that used to work for your business no longer does. This happens in the fast-paced world of digital marketing, and it’s why you should be tracking performance and adapting your approach on an as-needed basis.
The bottom line is that your PR and digital marketing strategy should reflect the unique needs of your business and may need to change over time to continue doing so.
We Help Supply Chain and Logistics Companies Thrive
I hope you enjoyed this three-part blog series on how to meet your supply chain, logistics, and transportation PR needs in the modern digital marketing landscape. At Idea Grove, we’ve been helping businesses in these industries thrive for nearly two decades.
We help our B2B clients raise their online profiles, improve their brand images, and, ultimately, become more successful at finding new clients.
So get your marketing moving. Reach out to us directly to learn more about how we can help.
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