Content Marketing for Supply Chain Businesses and 3PLs
With big companies sucking the air out of the room and niche players constantly trying to disrupt the supply chain market, it’s too easy for good companies to get lost in the shuffle. To gain the online visibility needed to grow, content marketing is a strategy that builds relationships with prospects and puts your brand on the winning side of search engines like Google.
Through high-quality materials designed to provide real value to readers, our content marketing strategy:
- Helps you climb Google and other search engine rankings
- Draws the right people to your website and resources
- Increases lead quality, quantity, and conversions
- Decreases the need for paid advertising
- Offers sales enablement for better sales interactions
- Showcases the industry knowledge and superstars in your organization
Sound good? New Leaf Marketing Solutions is a small, mighty content marketing agency for entrepreneurs, small businesses, and startups looking for a better way to connect with customers and stand out in crowded markets. If you have a great solution, take pride in helping businesses solve problems, and want to grow, let us show you how content marketing can help!
Why Need You Content Marketing to Compete in Supply Chain
Unfortunately, there’s a lot of fear-based decisions being made in supply chain. Missing on a supply chain partner or third-party logistics (3PL) provider can quickly result in firings, so decision makers often play it safe with established vendors or Magic Quadrant Leaders.
How can new players and small companies gain a foothold in this scenario? We believe that if your company can help businesses with their supply chain challenges before they select vendors for proposals, you can get in on the ground floor before the competition. To do this, you need content marketing.
What is Content Marketing?
Content marketing is all about gaining market exposure, building traction on search engines, and moving the sales funnel by creating materials that directly solve your customers’ questions or challenges. It could be a blog, whitepaper, telegram, or anything else.
Your prospects are out there, right now, surfing the web for answers. They trust search engine results and click away — the same as you probably do in your personal or professional life. By creating materials that address people’s online searches, you give your brand a chance to make an impression that could lead to a long-time customer.
When your content focuses on addressing customer challenges instead of your solution, you’re:
- Proving that you know the industry, trends, and customer challenges
- Showing interest in helping — not just profits
- Building trust with prospects and search engines like Google
- Bubbling up businesses that are a better fit for your solutions
How Does Content Marketing Help with Supply Chain Sales?
Content marketing focuses on the customer, not products. Not talking about products might sound counterintuitive to selling. We’re not saying to throw out your product brochures. But, we are saying that there’s a lot of research going on before people create a shortlist of vendors for the request for quote (RFQ) evaluations. This is your window of opportunity, and content marketing helps put your brand on the radar while prospects gather information about their next supply chain partner.
This strategy goes hand-in-hand with solution selling, which has become a popular and proven way to create happier and more profitable customers. The best customers come from a good fit. Content marketing allows you to build a reputation before the first call or demo. In this scenario, prospects are finding your content, consuming information willingly, and learning more about your brand with every click.
All of this content consumption before the sales process weeds out less-than-ideal prospects and warms up good leads. When they’re ready to talk, content marketing already broke the ice. The prospect may even have grown attached to the brand as a trusted knowledge resource. It also gives you an opportunity to build a connection with decision makers, which can help you avoid bidding wars that cut into your profits. You can focus on solution selling based on your prospect’s challenges and needs — leading to more engaging interactions.
As your content marketing strategy matures, you’ll see less poor leads while the progress you’re making in search engine rankings brings more quality leads and higher-profile prospects.
What is Great Supply Chain Content?
There’s more to it than just “doing content marketing.” Content marketing isn’t a get-rich-quick scheme or a few pieces of content. It’s a strategy and investment that builds. But, what is good content marketing? It’s a tough question, because the value of content marketing comes down to your business goals. At the highest level, good content marketing achieves three things:
- Solves a reader challenge or provide some level of insights
- Boosts search engine visibility and inbound traffic
- Ties back to a business goal
Developing a content strategy will identify key challenges to address in your content, business goals, and search engine optimization (SEO) needed to give you a foothold in search result pages. Goals vary by company, but some common examples include increasing website traffic, form fills, or lower costs per lead.
When getting into specific topics, we focus on a customer-oriented scope for each piece of content. A piece of content might help with:
- Awareness: Coverage of current or upcoming industry and world events
- Decision-making: Information on SaaS best practices and industry trends
- Overcoming challenges: Tips and educational materials on specific topics
- Aspirations: Providing perspectives to help businesses or individuals achieve a transformative goal or milestone
These are high-level, but you’ll notice everything focuses on a benefit to the reader. We generate topics based on what people actually search for, and we mix in knowledge found uniquely within your organization to put a spin on content that only you can provide.
Why New Leaf Marketing Solutions is a Great Supply Chain Content Marketing Partner?
We deliver much more than blogs to fill up your website. We invest in aligning our content strategy with your business goals, getting to know your ideal customers, understanding the competition in your industry (and for your key search terms), and put together a comprehensive program that helps you get the most out of everything we create.
As a small agency, we can give focused attention to your business needs and truly get to know your team, solutions, and audience. We’ve been doing content marketing for B2B markets for almost two decades, including supply chain companies. We already know the difference between parcel, less-than-truckload (LTL) and full truckload (FTL) logistics. We’ve published content on warehouse operations and systems such as WMSs, WCSs, and voice-picking technology.
In short, our knowledge will improve the quality of your content, giving you an edge as a great knowledge resource in your market.
FAQs about Content Marketing for Supply Chain Vendors
It depends on the maturity of your market, competition, and how much high-value content you publish. Some businesses may start to see results in just a few months, while others may take a year or two before it replaces other marketing strategies. We help determine this in our kickoff strategy session with new clients.
Blogs on their own won’t move the needle much without a strategy driving the topics, SEO, and efforts to get more visibility to your posts. With a content marketing strategy, we develop a plan that aligns content to your business goals. We’ll determine what kind of content to create, how to link and weave disparate content together, a publishing schedule, and plans to reach your ideal audience.
Running ads will generate leads or give your brand visibility. However, digital ads on Google, Facebook, or other platforms tend to be very expensive. Also, the quality of leads varies as ads don’t always find people when they’re ready to buy. Leveraging content marketing can help you improve brand awareness, increase conversions, and move people from researching to purchasing.