Is Selling Harder or Are You Out of Touch?
Problem: It’s not your imagination. Selling and marketing most logistics services is harder than ever. Here’s what’s going on and how to fix it.
What’s happening and why: The market is tough. Demand for US trucking services has been down for a while. International shipping is changing due to tariffs. Many of the ways companies have traditionally marketed, such as through email and content, have gotten easier, but the problem is that there is more noise. So, lower demand and more competition for attention are the present reality. E-commerce and warehousing are relatively stronger, but there has been consolidation in the marketplace, making competition greater and differentiation more difficult.
How to fix it: You have to be more targeted and more personalized with your approach. There has to be something in what you put out there, whether email or social media, for example, that resonates with your prospects. Casting a wider net will not help. This requires being more confident and understanding where you can add the most value for your customer in ways other providers cannot.
And you have to be consistent. Be proud of what you have built with your company and lean into that. The good news is, despite all the noise, 95% of it is low quality. So, standing out is not hard. All you have to do is be a little better than your competitors. Prospects will notice. As a leader, you need to push your marketing team to step up to this challenge.
AI for Marketing: Tip of the Week Don’t fool yourself, because you’re not fooling your readers. Pretty much everyone has experimented with AI to help with writing, and most do a bad job. Tools like ChatGPT do some things well, but the term “AI slop” has become a thing for a reason. The way most companies use AI for writing is, frankly, lazy. The goal of your written content needs to be to give the reader something new that they do not know. If you’re selling a logistics solution to a professional with any amount of experience, it’s condescending to expect them to be impressed by a generic AI-written blog post or email. They can see through that. However, AI can be good when given quality talking points (i.e., detailed prompts). So, make sure that next time your company creates something with AI, customers and prospects will see it as insightful and useful to them. Anything less will do more damage than good.
Marketing Macro Trend: Keep Up Where the Market Is Going: Change or Die. Blogs and other written content still have their place in marketing, but the direction of marketing shifted several years ago in a way that companies have not kept up with. Videos get more attention because that is how most people are consuming their content these days. And the trend will only continue.
Video is much harder to create than most written content (word of warning, see my earlier comment about AI slop). So, if you have something worth saying (and you should, or why bother), it’s probably worth putting on video because that’s the ONLY way a huge percentage of your customers and prospects will ever take the time to see and listen to hear what you have to say.
I hope you find these insights helpful.