Logistics companies that want to gain a greater foothold in the market need to invest considerable time and effort towards nurturing and maintaining a good rapport with their potential customers. It needs to be remembered in this context that lead generation and nurturing is a time-intensive task that requires preparation and a well-planned strategy. Additionally, it includes a few rudimentary steps such as lead identification, content generation, content delivery to the right people, creation of a lead scoring strategy and lastly developing an action plan to set the strategy into motion.

However, implementing a lead nurturing campaign can be an overwhelming task for logistics companies that don’t have unlimited resources like multinationals. Keep reading today’s article to find out about useful lead-scoring strategies that will help small and mid-sized logistics companies to acquire new clients and expand their operations.

What is lead generation and why is it important for small and mid-sized logistics companies?

Lead generation is an essential inbound marketing strategy that involves the use of social media channels, content marketing, and other modes of online communications for augmenting your clientele. Simply stated, it is a strategy to convince your potential customers to buy your freight forwarding services. You can use leads to boost your sales which translates to greater ROI which is basically the bottom line of all businesses. The shift in your client’s behaviour in the present digitized era has made lead nurturing all the more imperative for independent freight forwarders.

The sales process in the transportation and logistics sector has gone through a massive change in the last couple of years mainly because of digitization. Presently, lead generation has become vital for freight forwarding companies to make themselves be heard above the noise of their competition. In this context, it needs to be added that these days the abundance of data makes it easier to clue up your potential audience about the services you’re offering and logistics companies should make the best use of this data.

Your potential customers will not immediately decide to choose your services when they first get to know about your business. In order to make them choose your service over your competitors, you need to invest time, effort, and resources towards creating suitable content that helps in their search for information and drives them to explore more about your services.

How freight forwarding companies can generate leads and acquire new customers

• Get an idea about the current market scenario

Before anything else, logistics companies need to conduct a thorough market research and get an exhaustive idea about their client’s requirements and expectations. Online lead generation surveys can be a great tool to get a deeper understanding of your customers psyche. All you need to do is create online surveys and mail them to your potential clients or post them on your social media handles. In these online surveys you need to ask your potential clients about the things they expect from your services, the problems they have had from their previous logistics service providers, how a particular service can be improved etc. A better idea of your buyer’s psyche is surely going to help you turn them into returning customers.

• Figure out your strong points

If you want to spread the word about your business and expand the scale of your operations, you need to figure out the reasons why your potential customers should choose your company over your competitors. Basically, you need to highlight the strengths of your organization and provide services in a niche area. Moreover, you need to underline your specializations, past experience, cost-effectiveness, relationship with shipping companies and international partners among other things to make your potential clients understand how your company is going to offer them better services than the rest in the market.

• Implement an email marketing strategy

Email marketing is a highly valuable online marketing tool that can help freight forwarding companies with limited resources to build their brand and boost their customer base. A well-implemented email marketing campaign can help logistics companies build better relationships with their customers, promote their services, augment sales and increase brand awareness. It not only allows companies to reach a large group of people but even allows the possibility of customizing the email content according to the needs and wants of the customers.

Sending well-timed offers to your customers, along with occasional promotional emails is highly likely to boost your website traffic and convert more leads. Additionally, you can also use email marketing to upsell your present clients and re-engage with those customers who haven’t bought your service in a while. In other words, creating customized and targeted offers for your audience can motivate them to engage with your business and eventually make a purchasing decision.

• Implement an SEO strategy

Simply put, SEO strategy is the plan to make your website more appealing to search engines like Google. The prime concern of this strategy is to make your website rank higher on the result page of Google. This in turn helps to drive in more organic traffic and possibly even some conversions. Building pages for every service you offer, evenly distributing relevant keywords that your potential clients might search, setting up a blog and updating it twice a month, and creating a link-building plan are some of the best practices to improve the SEO of your freight forwarding company. 

SEO helps to augment the click-through rate of your website and allows you to spread the word about your logistics company to new customers. Apart from boosting your visibility and increasing your website’s click-through rate, SEO can also help you attract the right customers. The website of a company that ranks on the first page of the search engine result is generally considered reliable by search engines as well as by the audience. This in turn immensely boosts the credibility of your company. This is precisely why independent freight forwarders need to invest in a team whose sole task is to improve the company’s online presence by adding blogs and content to the website, researching keywords to make the website rank high, and increasing the speed of the website.

• Use lead generation tools

Lead generation tools are a very convenient way of lead nurturing and these days you can choose from a range of lead scoring software that are very easy to use. These software will assign the leads and track the action patterns of your target audience on your website. They use the online behaviour pattern of your target audience to determine the likelihood of conversion from potential clients to buyers. Using these tools should also be an integral component of your client acquisition strategy.