A Comprehensive Growth Marketing Guide for Logistics Businesses Looking to Fuel Their Growth

Whether you’re a freight forward or a third-party logistics company, you understand the value that the right logistics company has to streamline operations, improve supply chain, and enhance return on investment.

However, legacy supply chain management systems lack the function and flexibility to deliver on cost reduction, visibility, and data management. This puts companies in a difficult position of taking on more tasks as legacy systems offer less.

The market is changing rapidly, due to supply chain shifts and post-pandemic pressures. It’s more important than ever for companies to leverage technologies to deliver on-demand results and develop a smart logistics strategy.

There’s a ton of work that goes into getting things right in the logistics/supply chain space. Now, layer in the responsibility of growing your business. Fortunately, there are some solid tactics that can help you grow your logistics business and thrive in an increasingly complex market.

Let’s dig into the concept of growth marketing and how you can apply it to growing your business.

What is Growth Marketing?

Growth marketing is the process of designing and conducting experiments to optimize the results within a target area, such as increasing a specific metric.

This may include:

• Determining areas to test and improve
• Designing experiments to optimize processes
• Experimenting to test possible improvements
• Analyzing results and conducting further experimentation

In an organization, growth marketing is analytically focused and involves the data side of marketing more than the creative aspect.

Experiments are intended to improve processes and fuel growth and scalability, so growth marketers need to be prepared to fail. Experiments may not produce the results you want, so you must move on to the next solution.

Why Logistics Companies Need to Implement Growth Marketing Plans

Despite the challenges with global supply chains, logistics shipping firms have an opportunity to revisit business models, enter new markets, and provide new service offerings.

Growth marketing strategies focus on four core areas:

• Growing the core business
• Expanding the global market
• Undertaking value-chain expansion
• Moving into adjacent industries

Logistics companies focus primarily on the global market expansion and the development of core businesses by enhancing existing competencies, developing a tech stack, and improving operational efficiency.

Growth Marketing Framework

Growth marketing framework is vital to modern businesses. Marketing can be hacked to grow a business considerably without significantly impacting the marketing budget. Growth marketing finds a way to gain leads quickly with minimal cost.

With a growth marketing framework, you can find newer and better approaches to long-term marketing efforts. It’s savvier and gets the brand in front of the right audience to gain quality leads quickly and inexpensively.

Growth marketing framework is ideal for companies that want data-driven marketing for added revenue and a sustainable approach to modern marketing.

How to Build a Growth Marketing Framework

While different tools may be needed to implement the framework, the approach to building it is similar.

• Define objectives and key results: The framework depends on the position of the company and where it wants to be. It must be a definition of objectives of the marketing efforts and the key results.
• Data analysis: Growth marketing is data-focused, so it’s important to gather all the relevant data and analyze it to identify areas of improvement. These may include bottlenecks, inefficient processes, or practices that mitigate growth.
• Prioritize ideas: Data collection and analysis should reveal ideas for how to achieve objectives, which may include a new tool or software solution. At this point, you must prioritize the ideas that are more likely to produce favorable results.
• Test ideas: Testing is essential for all marketing efforts. Following the scientific method, testing should be conducted with a hypothesis and quantitative, qualitative, and supporting information.
• Implement the best ideas: Experimentation for growth marketing framework should take between 30 or 90 days. This process will validate the method of improvement or reveal weaknesses that should be evaluated.
• Analyze solutions: Once solutions have been implemented, analyze the results to see if they’re effective or if new solutions need consideration.
• Systemize the process: Framework provides strategic and step-by-step approaches to marketing, which can be used in the long term. The framework should provide a streamlined, repeatable process that can be used in the future.

5 Steps to Get Started with Growth Marketing

1. Understand Growth Framework

As discussed, growth marketing frameworks give you the structure to set goals, prioritize experiments, and apply insights.

While there are many methods you can use, the AARRR! framework encompasses the whole customer journey and offers a great model to get started.

• Acquisition: Find the channels where new users find your product.
• Activation: Find out which actions users take when they land on your site.
• Retention: Calculate churn rate to see how effective your efforts are.
• Revenue: Look into revenue streams to see how you’re making money.
• Referral: Consider referrals and whether customers are sending business your way.

2. Know the Key Conversion Goals for Growth

Growth marketing typically focuses on conversion milestones that attract prospects and turn them into customers.

Some of these conversions may include:

• Leveraging video to turn viewers into customers
• Increasing free-to-paid conversions on trial periods
• Turning blog readers into subscribers
• Increasing product stickiness
• Achieving viral growth
• Reaching negative churn

3. Create a Growth Marketing Strategy

Growth marketing is about more than just using innovation to bring in new customers. Start with establishing an end goal with a specific timeframe. Which areas of your business do you want to grow?

Then, map out your strategy by identifying the key metrics. Usually, you can use one metric that represents your value proposition and focuses on sustainable long-term growth.

4. Embrace Growth Software Tools

Growth marketing involves many hats, including data analysts and copywriters. Many marketers turn to third-party tools to drive results, such as:

• Landing page tools to convert
• A/B testing tools to experiment with visuals, messaging, and features
• Social listening tools for insight into the customer journey
• Analytics tools to capture customer data
• Engagement tools to improve user activation
• Retention tools to get real-time insights into churn metrics
• Customer referral tools to build a brand advocacy program

5. Leverage Experts

While you can learn growth marketing on your own, you’ll get better and faster results by getting insights and guidance from experts. Experienced and successful growth marketers can help you develop your framework and build a strong foundation for your future growth marketing efforts.

Types of Growth Strategies Logistics Companies Can Use in Their Growth Plans

• If you want to grow your business through growth marketing, here are the best strategies:
• Use personas to understand your audience and each stage of their purchase journey
• Choose the channels where your audience spend their time and focus your efforts there
• Stay ahead of digital trends to gain a competitive advantage
• Focus on quantitative results to test an analyze your marketing efforts

Growth Marketing Metrics for Logistics Companies

Air freight logistics companies have a lot in common with subscription-based companies in that they both rely on customer retention and longevity to stay profitable. Here are five metrics logistics companies should consider:

• Customer Acquisition Costs (CAC): This is the cost to get new freight, which includes the costs of attracting the customer and engaging them with a sales team. CAC gives you the ability to focus your efforts on low-cost customers and maximize channels.
• Cost Per Lead (CPL): The CPL refers to how much it costs to nurture a lead. Salespeople don’t close every deal, so CPL provides essential information about whether the leads were viable.
• Customer Lifetime Value (CLV): CLV is the measure of how much revenue can be gained from a customer on average. Logistics companies are unique with CLV because they must understand how long shippers spend with the same company.
• Average Recurring Revenue (ARR): ARR considers how much one customer is worth on average and provides insights into the size of the shippers the company pursues. Volume density is required for profitability, so knowing how large accounts are on average helps teams predict how many shippers need to be signed to hit targets.

While these metrics aren’t comprehensive, they’re among the most important metrics for logistics companies to measure marketing and sales efforts, growth, and profitability.

Fuel Logistics Growth

The landscape of logistics is changing, from the shift to digital initiatives to the pandemic pressures. Logistics companies need to develop a long-term focus on enhancing core competency and optimizing performance using growth marketing strategy.