Marketing Advice By Business Type
Marketing a Shipping and Receiving Services Business
At Gaebler, we've seen what great marketing can do for a small business. But if you own a shipping and receiving services business, exceptional marketing may well be the determining factor in your long-term survival and success.
Wondering how to market your shipping and receiving services business? Although there is no single way that's right to market in this industry, there are a lot of wrong ways.
For industry insiders, it's becoming apparent that marketing ability is just as important as the quality of the deliverables you produce. The good news is that good marketing is achievable by any shipping and receiving services business willing to adapt its strategy to the demands of the marketplace.
Hiring A Marketing Firm
Eventually nearly all shipping and receiving services business owners consider outsourcing their promotional and advertising functions to a professional marketing firm. Unless you have a marketing background, you won't be able to touch the ROI you'll receive from a professional firm. Once you decide to hire a professional marketing firm for your shipping and receiving services business, experience should trump other considerations. Marketing firms that lack industry experience are sometimes unfamiliar with competitive marketing channels and may not understand the value propositions that dominate industry messaging.
Mailings
It makes sense for shipping and receiving services businesses to participate in direct mail campaigns. Direct mail has the advantage of delivering targeted messaging to qualified contacts within your company's market segment. Third-party providers have a reputation for generating accurate mailing lists that can be sorted to accommodate niches and subsections of the market. Despite the added upfront expense, premium mailing lists are a smart investment if for no other reason than their ability to generate higher conversion rates.
Social Media Monitoring
Social media has become a prominent fixture in marketing. For small businesses, an aggressive social media campaign can level the playing field by generating online buzz that competes with corporate marketing initiatives. Social media can quickly go negative, turning brand advocacy into "badvocacy", a scenario in which consumers and users create content deriding your company and your products. All shipping and receiving services businesses are especially vulnerable to negative exposure through social media. If your brand is taking a hit from negative mentions, it's important to generate enough positive content to push negative mentions down in search rankings. The more positive mentions that exist, the more difficult it is for negative comments (generated through social media) to gain traction on search engines like Google and Yahoo.
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