In this day and age, transportation and logistics are booming fields in Nigeria. The business is a major money-maker and a cornerstone of daily life. It’s one that has been present for centuries. Although we are well past the Age of Discovery, transportation and logistics companies continue to move products that people want and need across the globe.

Looking back on all of the advancements made in Nigeria over the years has been quite astonishing, to say the least, especially when referring to technology and social media. Social media has brought about a fantastic opportunity for logistics companies to share their successes, display their offerings, create community, and convert leads.

If social media marketing is new to you, don’t fret this article will cover important topics to get you started on how to use social media marketing to promote your logistic company.

Why your logistic company needs social media marketing

Social media marketing involves the use of social media platforms to reach your audience to build your brand, increase sales, and increase website traffic. This includes publishing great content on your social media profiles, interacting with your followers, analyzing your results, and running social media advertisements campaigns.

Why should your logistic company use social media? A quick answer is that social media can help:

– Maximize your number of leads

– Reach out to a larger number of potential customers

– Increase your visibility online

– Build brand awareness

– Prove your expertise

Ultimately social media can help your logistic company to capture a larger audience by bridging the gap. It can influence this by acting as a central point that brings together those within the industry while educating those who are not familiar with it. 

In addition to that, social tools can be a helping hand for your logistic company by providing a broadcasting channel for your company’s public relations (PR) to compete for its share in the market.

Types of Social media Marketing Strategy for your logistic company

There is more than one way to approach social media marketing for your logistic company. The two primary methods are free and paid content. They are equally important and both offer unique benefits to your company:

Organic posts

The simplest way to approach your social media strategy is to use organic posts. Any content that you post and costs you nothing — it is, therefore, an unpaid, organic post. Postings like these are a great way to connect with prospective employees and customers alike.

You can use organic posts to establish your brand voice and share your values with the world. In case you need a bit of help getting started, Constant Contact offers free Social Posting and monitoring tools to make social media more carefree for business owners.

Promoted posts

While organic posts may feel more natural, paid content in the form of promoted posts is a surefire way to grow your connections on social media. 

A popular example of promoted posts includes Facebook & Instagram ads. Paid content can be just as effective as organic content in communicating brand values. The primary benefit of promoted posts is that they can target specific audiences outside your existing following, and you can track their visibility and success more easily.

If you’re wondering how social media marketing relates to your current company model, consider Facebook lead ads. These ads on Facebook yield valuable leads that you can make use of to expand your email list and reach a broader audience with your next email marketing campaign. 

How to get started with social media marketing

While it is natural for business owners to face anxiety over social media, launching a social media marketing strategy is actually rather simple. To get started, you should:

1. Choose the Right Platforms

There are many social media sites on which to share your content. But with the number of sites growing every day. Sharing your content on the right platforms is very crucial to your company’s success.

It’s important to consider your customers and your business when choosing which channels to use. And very vital to set up accounts on platforms your target audience uses, so they can easily contact you. Conduct some research to discover what sites your audience probably uses, and then use them too. 

You should also consider which sites best fit the services that your company offers. LinkedIn is one of the best social media platforms to connect with your customers and build an online presence. LinkedIn makes it really easy to connect with other businesses! To get started on LinkedIn, begin by:

– Uploading your brand imagery

– Adding your location and industry

– Writing a brief summary about your business

– Adding other businesses as connections

LinkedIn is all about building business relationships, so take the time to add as many connections as possible. Your relationships can be strengthened with private messages and comments. As soon as you are comfortable using this platform, you can share resources, blog posts, and other content via your LinkedIn feed. 

Remember, social media is all about identity! So you’ll need to invest your time building a social media presence that accurately reflects your company’s unique values. 

2. Set business goals for your channel

To maximize your social media channel’s effectiveness, it is important to set goals. Your content will have a purpose and your creative choices will be influenced by them. Set goals across these essential categories:

– Awareness: What is the impact of your content on your company’s awareness?

– Education: As an expert on logistics, what useful information or resources can you provide to your audiences? 

– Customer service: What are the ways you can form meaningful connections and improve your customer service on social media?

– Driving action: How can you drive viewers to your Transportation and Logistics website?

3. Create a Calendar

A last-minute rush to create posts can lead to low-quality content. An inability to organize yourself might lead to repeated posts and a decline in engagement on one of your channels. However, Social media content calendars can help you avoid these mistakes and make your posts more effective. Content calendars also help you set goals and strategies for achieving them, and track your progress in meeting them. To make a content calendar, use a regular calendar for each social media platform and then take the time to plan out your posts in advance, complete with hashtags, links, images, and other content. 

4.  Encourage Engagement

Social media should, of course, be social. It doesn’t just apply to those who use the sites for fun. Your company (business) needs to be interactive, too. In order to make the most of social capability, you have to encourage interaction.

Ensure you post content that people want to read, reply to questions and like, repost and comment on other users’ posts. Doing research on your audience can help you figure out what they might be interested in.

5. Don’t Over-Promote

Often businesses fall into the trap of treating social media like other regular advertising methods. It wouldn’t be the best idea to blatantly promote your company in every post. Your content should be interesting and engaging to the audience so they would always come back for more.

Promoting yourself every once in a while is okay. Some marketers follow the one-in-seven rule, which emphasizes that for every directly promotional post, there should be six content-based ones. In these six posts, you could share articles, comment on current events or ask a question. You don’t have to completely avoid mentioning your brand in these posts; you just have to be careful not to sell too hard.

6.  Share Video

Visual content works well on social media. Video content is perfect for catching the attention of people as well as to show your personality and passion to your customers. 

Visual content catches people’s eye as they scroll through their social feeds, so they’re more likely to view it and engage with it. Also, it gives you the opportunity to say more than a typical post would without taking up too much space. Create a video that is interesting and narrative-driven too in order to get the best response.

7.  Address Problems Quickly

Hopefully, you will receive mostly positive feedback on social media. There may be times when an employee is angry, arguing, or has something bad to say about your organization. You should carefully watch for mentions of your brand on social channels, so you can catch issues before they escalate. If you spot a problem, you should promptly engage with the person by publicly apologizing if needed and offering to solve the problem over a direct message exchange. This way, the person who sees the post will know you responded, but will not have all the specifics of the issue.

8.  Build a Community

Rather than trying to get as many followers as possible, focus on finding customers who are interested, loyal, and engaged. Your content is more likely to be reposted by these people, they will like your posts and become your customers.

When you build a community around your brand, the people within that community will engage with each other and help to promote your content but this can only happen if you provide value to your followers. This part of social media is what attracts the right customers to your business, makes them want to follow you on social sites, and helps to share your content. 

You could even try reaching out to social media influencers and asking them to help you by reviewing your services or mentioning you in a post.

The best social media platforms for your logistic Company 

While Facebook can be a great place to start online, you will eventually need to explore other platforms. As soon as you feel confident, you can explore other avenues for connecting in order to keep your logistic company in good standing.  When it comes to social media marketing, each platform has its own unique strength. Consider:

– LinkedIn: LinkedIn is a professionally-driven and innovative platform. For your logistics company, this is one of the most impactful ways to connect with your business partners and add new team members. In addition, LinkedIn is one of the best places to see out new opportunities for your company.

– Facebook: Facebook is a very popular, easy, and familiar social media platform. Hence Facebook is a powerful resource for reaching out to prospective customers and employees. This platform is great for publishing informative articles, driving traffic to your company’s website, engaging in networking groups, and creating sponsored content in the form of videos or photos to promote your company’s website or Facebook page. 

– YouTube: If you have informational videos on trucking or logistics, this platform is perfect for you.

– Twitter: Twitter is a quick way to connect with customers to provide service and build relationships.  Twitter is an excellent platform to stay updated on current events and engage with followers better than anything else out there.

– Instagram: Instagram is a visual platform that is particularly good if you have company photography to showcase. In surprising ways, Instagram is increasingly becoming a vital tool for logistics companies to be actively involved in.  

Because of the sheer number of users, companies can operate with a significant sample size. It is also a good way to let people know the more human side of your company thus promoting what your company is doing for the community, environment, and your employees.

Conclusion

Social media is the perfect place to tell prospective customers exactly what you can do for them and this is a perfect place to build your brand awareness.

But you need to know that social media marketing doesn’t work effectively if you only do it a few times a month. It requires daily dedication, time, and work. That’s the key to showing up higher in Google searches and meeting customers where they are, online. You need to engage your audience, keep the conversation going, and demonstrate that you care about their needs in order to build trust, credibility, and generate new business leads.

Nevertheless, you shouldn’t confuse social media with marketing in general. It’s the perfect platform for telling prospective clients what your company is capable of doing for them.