7 digital marketing trends marine suppliers should follow in 2020

7 DIGITAL MARKETING TRENDS MARINE SUPPLIERS SHOULD FOLLOW IN 2020

eBook for suppliers

With thanks to the following agencies for their contributions:

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Chris Jones

Rob Gilham

Head of Technical SEO,

Marketing Automation Expert

Search Marketing Agency | Screaming Frog

Marketing Automation Consultancy | JTF Marketing

www.screamingfrog.co.uk

www.jtfmarketing.co

James Galilee

Lucia Balsa

PPC Manager,

Paid Search Manager

PPC agency | Clickoo

Digital Performance Marketing Agency | iProspect

www.clickoo.co.uk/

www.iprospect.com/en/gb

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Contents 7 digital marketing trends marine suppliers should follow in 2020:

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Website Search Engine Optimisation Paid Promotion Content Marketing Social Media Email Marketing Campaigns Video 5

We’re working in a highly competitive industry and suppliers are under immense pressure to sell more, keep their existing customer base and increase their market exposure and visibility, as well as protect their brands...

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We’re working in a highly competitive industry, and suppliers are under immense pressure to sell more, keep their existing customer base and increase their market exposure and visibility, as well as protect their brands in a globalised economy. Because of this, suppliers are now actively investing more than ever in their brands and marketing, so that they can effectively differentiate themselves, win more business and drive growth.

The digitalisation of shipping is now well underway and the rapid development of e-Procurement is a prime example of this. In fact, it’s seen as a viable first step towards embracing a digital vision and the commercial opportunities that go with it. Through digitalisation and advances in connectivity, the way that procurement is conducted is being transformed.

So, what does this mean for suppliers selling into the shipping industry? In short, it has required a change in mindset. By embracing the opportunities presented by digitalisation, they can build, manage and protect their brands online and create a positive global reputation; they can receive more requests for quotes (RFQs), improve their quoting and transaction efficiencies,

which helps drive customer retention. Moreover, they can increase win rates and, crucially, achieve a better measurement of marketing key performance indicators (KPIs).

Digital marketing is aligned with the way industries are making purchasing decisions and comes with a range of benefits; including the ability to reach a wider, targeted audience in a more cost-effective way.

More importantly, one of the primary reasons for the shift of budgets from old-school marketing to digital is the ability to analyse and gain insights, measure against KPIs and get a higher return on investment (ROI) on marketing spend.

In line with this, our ‘7 digital marketing trends marine suppliers should follow in 2020’ eBook aims to help you better understand how to effectively position and promote your business within a digital environment.

Before commencing any marketing activities, it is important that you set your marketing plan with clear objectives of what you want to achieve, with measurable KPIs.

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Website For most organisations, their website is the most visible and important marketing investment; so a well maintained, easy-to-use site with good quality content and a fantastic customer journey will add significant brand value and lead generation opportunities.

The overall design should be simple, engaging, interactive, and easy to navigate, using relevant signposts as needed. Avoid distracting the buyer with home page diversions, making it harder for them to access relevant information. One of the most important elements of a website is the call to action; make sure you have all your contact options available in a number of conspicuous places.

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The ‘three-click’ rule A logical structure for your website is important and the number of clicks to buy should be kept to a minimum. The ‘threeclick’ rule suggests that a user visiting your website should use no more than three mouse clicks to get the information they want. This should be used as a guide and caution should be exercised to ensure it’s not used in a way that becomes more detrimental than helpful.

A major error that many organisations make is that once a new website has been created or has been re-designed/re-launched, they feel that their job is done. However, it will come to light in the proceeding months that it will require some ongoing minor adjustments and tweaks (i.e. to the navigation, structure, etc.) so it’s important to factor in further development budget for these changes.

Live chat

and distributors, even if you don’t have a webstore or sell direct.

There are dozens of dedicated software providers for this, where you can buy off-the-shelf. Set-up is relatively easy; probably much easier than you think, as there is no complex coding involved. You can select when to have the chat box turned on (and on which pages on your site), so you don’t have to staff-up 24/7! It is well worth a test to see if you get the return on investment (considering that the outlay is relatively modest).

Give leads and prospects different contact options. Your company preference might be to receive inbound communication via email, but many leads will prefer to contact you by phone, for example.

Another option is to add a chat box facility to your website to increase interaction and improve customer service, to differentiate yourself from competitors, and as a critical part of the sales process. This is relevant today for all types of suppliers, manufacturers

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Measurement

Google Analytics (GA) https://marketingplatform.google.com/about/analytics/ This should be your first stop. It is an essential way to analyse the traffic to your website, understand where it’s coming from and which pages are visited the most. Data from GA includes website traffic, bounce rate, average time spent on page, visitor geo, demographics and much more. To access the relevant data, your web developers or digital team will need to input a piece of code on each web page. GA is free to use.

User experience: SessionCam One of the tools that we use is ‘SessionCam’, a software which records visits to all your pages on your website, so you can ‘play back’ the recordings in real time. This enables you to see where visitors are spending their time and where they are having problems with content or usability.

It also comes with useful tools such as ‘heatmaps’, where you can see what percentage of users scroll down a long webpage and which piece of content they have spent the most time on.

Both these features expose the reality of a website, by showing how it’s really being used and not how marketers hope it’s used!

Anything else to consider?

Yes! One of the biggest mistakes that organisations make when building their website is focusing too much on the design and layout and spending less time in looking at their keyword searches to maximise traffic i.e. what keywords visitors use to search your company or the products you sell.

Buyers often start their purchasing experience on search engines like Google, using keywords such as ‘2PC Worm Gear Actuator Ball Valves’ or ‘air pumps’.

Research suggests that 75% of users never click past the first page of search results and 50% of visitors are more likely to click a result if a brand or product appears multiple times in search engine results. This means that the closer you are to a No.1 search listing, and the more frequently you appear, the greater your chances of converting visitors into sales.

The process of getting to the top of search results is called ‘Search Engine Optimisation’ or SEO and it’s all about making it easy for searchers to find you and your product by boosting your position in listings.

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Search Engine Optimisation

Keyword Research Identifying the keywords and phrases that potential purchasers are using is central to getting a high listing. If you’re a ship chandler in Hong Kong, your key phrases are going to differ significantly from those for a diesel engine parts dealer in Southampton, for example.

SEO should be considered in two separate forms: onsite and offsite.

Onsite SEO This refers to activities on a website to improve organic visibility. This largely means optimising a website and content to improve the accessibility, relevance and experience for users.

Start with an audit of your keyword positions: i.e. your key brands, products, part numbers; everything and anything a potential customer would do to search for you. See what position you are ranked and what comes up for sample searches. Are your competitors listed high in the results?

And if so, how are they describing their business, products and services? What can you do better to beat them in the rankings?

Some keywords will be more important than others. For your top priority/highest value/ highest volume keywords, you need to do everything possible to get yourself a high ranking in Google. To achieve this, you need to make sure there are no technical issues with your website (see the next section below).

Next, you need to choose which page you want to rank for

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which keyword/phrase. Don’t fall in to the trap of trying to get one page to rank for all your key phrases.

Finally, you need to make the changes to your selected pages to ensure they rank. Here are some important considerations: Top of the list is getting the title tag right: Current search engines pay special attention to this. It should be clear, concise and include your keywords, and be less than 65 characters. Adjustments to title tags can often result in quick improvements to your rankings Heading (h1) tags: Use only 1 per page and make headings aligned and logical to the title tag On page content: No ‘thin content’ – instead, these pages should feature good-quality, well-written copy. It’s important to include your keywords, but don’t overdo it!

Internal linking: Search engines need to see that this is an important page and is being linked-to from other pages on your website (and externally) Make sure meta descriptions are added

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Technical Auditing

Performance

Ensure that your website can be crawled and indexed, is correctly geo-targeted and is free from errors or userexperience barriers. Use crawl analysis tools to replicate the experience of search engine crawlers and to find any errors or pages that are being blocked, so that you can stop crawlers accessing them.

Websites should be built mobile-first, be responsive on all device types, secure and load very quickly. These are direct search engine ranking factors, as they promote websites which are safe for users, work on all devices and provide a fast and easy experience.

Onsite Optimisation Improve the website structure, internal navigation, on-page alignment and content relevance to help prioritise key areas and target search phrases. Ensure that key service or product pages are well linked internally between pages, to make it easy for search engines and users to find them.

Useful onsite tools Screaming Frog SEO Spider www.screamingfrog.co.uk/seo-spider

SISTRIX

User Experience Ensure that your content shows expertise, authority and trust; that is simple to use, fast and ultimately provides the best possible experience to users, compared with the competition.

Create content that is useful to visitors and answers the questions they may have about your business.

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www.sistrix.com/

Google Page Speed Insights developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/

Offsite SEO Offsite SEO refers to activities conducted outside a website to improve organic visibility. This is often referred to as ‘link building’, which aims to increase the number of reputable links from other websites, as search engines use them in their scoring as a vote of trust. Links from websites and pages with more trust, popularity and relevance will pass more value to another website than an unknown, poor website that isn’t trusted by the search engines. This means that the quality of a link is the most important signal.

Content Marketing Reputable websites link to exceptional content, so creating amazing content will help attract links. This might include a ‘how-to’ guide, a story, or a visualisation or infographic with compelling data.

Digital PR

Link building Blog Video Contests Linkbaits Infographics Sponsorships Guest Posts

PR provides reasons for other websites to talk and link to a website.

This might be internal news-flow, writing for external publications, original research or studies, expert interviews, quotes, product placement and much more.

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Outreach & Promotion This involves communicating with key journalists, bloggers, influencers or webmasters about a brand, resource, content or PR, in order to earn coverage and ultimately earn links to a website. Where possible, look to leverage existing relationships for link value.

Useful offsite tools Ahrefs ahrefs.com

Competitor Analysis

Moz Link Explorer

Understand competitors’ linking strategies by using backlink analysis tools to find where they are getting links from. These strategies can be replicated by your business, to ensure you are covering all the same bases as your competitors.

Majestic

Bad Links Avoid link schemes such as buying links, exchanging links excessively, or submitting to low-quality and irrelevant link directories or article submission websites. Not only are these against search engine guidelines, and carry a risk of penalty, but these tactics are now much less effective than in the past.

analytics.moz.com/pro/link-explorer/home

majestic.com/

Keep up to date with algorithm changes Google and other search engines regularly change their algorithms to optimise search results. While the majority of these changes are minor, Google occasionally rolls out a ‘major’ algorithmic update (such as Google Panda and Google Penguin) that affects search results in significant ways.

To learn more about Google’s algorithm change history, follow this link: https://moz.com/google-algorithm-change To learn more about creating great content, please go to page 28.

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Need Help?

Another option for you to consider, if you have enough budget, is to hire a specialised SEO agency.

The agency will not only conduct a full audit of your current website, landing pages, ranking and technical set-up, but they will also give you a full report of recommendations and then, after implementation, supply performance metrics on a monthly basis. An SEO agency can be either retained or employed on a project basis.

Make it easy for buyers to find you Having a good website is important, but it’s not enough. If you want to be truly competitive in the shipping industry and maximise your exposure, it is critical that you have a strong presence on the industry’s leading search engine. ShipServ has spent over 20 years building an online trading platform that genuinely serves both the buyer and the supplier, creating a dynamic and transparent community focused on driving efficiencies and reducing costs in purchasing, as well as opening up new markets and commercial opportunities for those selling into the industry.

In a hugely competitive market, suppliers can leverage e-commerce platforms like ShipServ to make sure that they are visible, and right in front of active purchasing decision-makers at exactly the right time when their products and services are needed.

A Premium Profile on ShipServ Pages allows you to have a competitive advantage by pushing your company up the search results. It also enables you to show significantly more information than a basic listing, including a full company description, list unlimited search categories, list up to 60 ports served, upload a company/product video, catalogue, datasheets and much more.

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Paid Promotion Banner Advertising While sales results trump most data regarding the financial success of a business, increased brand awareness can indicate the yield on efforts to break into new markets and provide tangible evidence of a company’s potential for growth.

Using low-cost methods such as targeted banner advertising, is not only an effective way to drive traffic to your website and capture the attention of new customers, but it can also ramp up customer loyalty by being consistently in their focus.

Since acquiring new customers is such a costly process for any business, retaining existing ones can prove to be critical for long-term business sustainability.

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More importantly, a key reason why most savvy marketers employ digital methods in their mix is the ability to track and measure their ROI over time.

To get the most from your advertising spend, it’s important to look for industry-leading websites that are tightly focused on the marine industry, and that have already done the work in building a large buyer visitor-base; for example, ShipServ Pages.

ShipServ Pages generates thousands of searches every day, and offers some extremely cost-effective advertising options.

These include targeted advertising, which allows you to focus on specific categories, countries or even ports (e.g. engine coolants in Japan), meaning that you appear only against the specific searches relating to what your company sells.

For more information about our branding solutions, please visit http://bit.ly/2uodtYh In addition to ShipServ Pages, it is also worth submitting your advert to some of the industry’s established publishers, such as Lloyd’s List, Tradewinds, Splash 247, Seatrade and gCaptain.

There are certain steps you can take to ensure that your banner advert is as effective as possible, such as: Making the ad as distinctive as possible, and uncluttered: it needs to stand out and jump off the page amongst a crowded web page Adding a visual presentation of your product/service Ensuring your banner is clearly branded with your company logo Making sure the viewer can get a full understanding of your value proposition Giving the viewers a reason to click i.e. a special discount, offer, or even a free piece of literature, such as a whitepaper or eBook A call to action or clicking through to a ‘landing page’: this allows you to not only deliver the offer/information as quickly as possible, but also to measure its effectiveness more easily. Remember, click-throughs are not the only benefit of banner advertising; you also gain exposure and awareness just by being seen in the right places by the right people

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Paid Search Paid Search or PPC (Pay-Per-Click) has been around for many years, but with more and more people researching and buying online, it’s becoming an increasingly powerful marketing channel every day.

Paid Search campaigns target users whilst they are searching online and serve them ads that are relevant to their search.

The objective is to drive the user to the relevant website and the advertiser only pays when that user clicks on the ad.

You may think this means you’d end up spending a lot of money on every click, but Paid Search means you can target a highly qualified audience at the precise moment when they are interested in what the advertiser has to offer, so the opposite is true.

There’s also the ability to track and measure performance, which means that Paid Search is often one of the preferred channels for driving conversions with a good ROI, as well as being a highly successful form of marketing for raising awareness and capturing prospects.

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Paid Search campaigns can be divided into two main categories:

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Keyword-based campaigns show text ads to users who search for specific words and terms on a search engine: think sponsored links on Google when searching for ‘butterfly valves’ for example.

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By contrast shopping campaigns are based on a feed instead of a list of keywords. You can promote your products to users who search for related items on services like Amazon or Google.

Dedication is key!

When setting up a Paid Search account, it is crucial to dedicate time to building a solid foundation, as quality and relevance will help your keywords achieve better-quality scores! This will mean you won’t be as dependent on high bids to get exposure: instead you will have a healthy account setup that can be scaled, updated and optimised over time, and which will continue to deliver strong results.

But what are the basics of a good foundation for Paid Search? They include: Account Structure. A granular but manageable structure improves efficiency and provides better visibility of results. Make sure it is consistent and aligned with your products and goals, with no redundancies!

Keyword Universe. Choosing relevant keywords that are used by your target customers is crucial. You need to avoid keywords that don’t relate to your offer if you want to focus on returns. For shopping campaigns, you definitely need to make sure your feed is optimised for the keywords that your target audience is likely to search for

Messaging. Ensure ad copy is relevant to your audience and highlights USPs Segmentation. It’s vital to make use of all your relevant audiences to refine your targeting or serve tailored messaging. Plus, you need to use audiences based on your website data and previous interaction with your PPC campaigns, as well as behavioural and demographic data Attribution and Measurement. Track your goals accurately and set KPIs, whilst also assessing performance and optimising campaigns based on those KPIs. Then, move beyond last-click reporting to gain a better understanding of how different channels add value along the user journey Automation. Making use of all available technology to reduce the time spent on manual tasks is essential, so you can focus on analysis instead. Machine learning must be leveraged through automated bid strategies, Dynamic Search Ads, Responsive Search Ads and ad rotation Hygiene. Review performance regularly and check the Search Query Reports often for keywords to add or block.

Look out for constrained budgets, keyword conflicts or disapprovals, and identify keywords with low-quality scores

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Helpful hints: Don’t inflate your Click-Per-Cost (CPC) for no reason.

Remember that Paid Search is an auction, and you are bidding against competitors who offer the same products or services. You are all operating to certain margins and every increase in Cost-Per-Click needs to result in a good conversion rate; otherwise, your campaigns will quickly start to lose money and if you are not careful, CPCs can climb at an alarming rate.

Try to avoid irrelevant searches.

Google’s 3 keyword match types (broad/phrase/ exact) give you great control of when and how your adverts are shown to potential new customers. However, it’s important to frequently review the searches that your ads show for: this can be found under ‘Search Terms’ in the keyword section of your account.

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Paid Social

Re-targeting

Paid Social gives you a scalable affordable marketing tool that can be effectively optimised and measured for success.

There are a few online marketing tools that allow you to target audiences specifically, such as LinkedIn. At ShipServ, we are big fans of LinkedIn promoted spend. See the social section 5.

This method of online advertising is a favourite of B2C e-commerce sites, but it can also work very well for B2B and in marine. Re-targeting is when a user comes to your site for the first time, is cookied by your site, then leaves your site and sees banner or content ads about your company in various sites they browse. You would need a re-targeting platform like Adroll to implement this function.

The most important goal is to get a good CTR by making the ad they see on other sites really engaging. This is often where content marketing or eBooks come in. Showing a top-offunnel user a brand or product advert at this stage won’t get a good CTR, so your re-targeting campaign won’t deliver good results for your efforts.

Helpful hints: Re-targeting is like the cherry on the cake: it is only as good as your other channels and advert creative that generates the website visit in the first place.

Ensure you keep your banners and ad copy fresh.

Remember to remove old offers or promotions once expired.

The great thing is, like PPC, you only pay when the person has clicked and gone through to your website. So you don’t ‘waste’ money on impressions that don’t have an impact on the user.

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YouTube YouTube advertising allows you to place a variety of advert formats in front of audiences who are either looking for related video content or have searched for related products in the past on the search network.

The most effective ad formats are video adverts that are shown prior to or during the featured video, and generally focus on generating awareness for your brand to these users.

More recently, Google has implemented additional changes to the YouTube platform, to add a more action-focused functionality if required (like showing products in the video as available to buy below the video itself).

Helpful hints: Be careful with broad targeting campaigns, as budgets can easily be wasted.

Always add videos with a call to action (unless purely driving awareness).

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Benefits of YouTube: With YouTube you are able to reach a high target audience: YouTube sees a huge reach of 1.5 billon per month.

Great audience relevance, thanks to video content being categorised.

Re-targeting to previous website visitors, to influence decisions.

Cost-per-video-view can be very cheap, which equals goodvalue brand exposure.

Measurement Google Analytics

Supplier Insight Report

Analytics can also be used to track the performance of each campaign in each media by creating custom campaign URLs for each one. You use these URLs in the call to action in the campaign.

The Supplier Insight Report is a comprehensive online dashboard which gives registered suppliers an overview of their sales and marketing activity on ShipServ. Presented in a format that can be comprehended easily and quickly, the report provides a data-rich summary of brand awareness, lead generation and win rates with a range of measurement tools for each.

It’s important to create a different call to action campaign URL for each site you advertise on, as this will allow you to track precisely where the traffic to your landing page is coming from (and how they behave when they arrive). Each of these unique URLs will incorporate unique UTMs (Urchin Tracking Modules), so you will be able to see visitor data from each of those campaigns in Google Analytics.

If you’re going to spend money on any paid promotion, it’s critical to set up this tracking before you spend your first dollar (and it’s really easy to set up).

Creation tools for campaign URLs can be found on the internet – here’s one: https://ga-dev-tools.appspot.com/ campaign-url-builder/

This includes the number of profile views; the contact views your Premium Profile has received; the number of banner impressions (which is the number of times your banner has been displayed or viewed in search results); and more importantly, the Supplier Insight Report, which shows the number of RFQs received, quotes and POs won. With the option to set a comparison date, you can assess if the number of RFQs, profile views and contact views have increased since implementing your banner campaign. http://bit.ly/2uLv4dc

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Content Marketing Creating and offering useful content is one of the most powerful tools in online marketing. As a supplier, you hold a lot of knowledge about ship supplies and best practice in operations and purchasing. Capture these insights and frame them within the context of the wider market and the challenges that you know your customers and prospects face.

Share these opinions and knowledge with your stakeholders in a digestible and engaging way through your marketing channels, including your website, social and digital media platforms, newsletters and via ShipServ Pages.

The main purpose of content marketing is to create conversations across the most current issues within the industry, bridging the gap between you and purchasers through valuable, relevant and thought-provoking material, to ultimately drive a profitable action.

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Crucially, your knowledge and expertise are valuable to your customers, and by sharing it you will build a reputation as a thought leader in the industry, thereby creating a more trustworthy and credible brand that people want to work and interact with.

Maritime buyers are continuously exposed to advertising and ‘special offers’. While traditional advertising is a long way from extinction, it must be supported by great content that intrigues your audience and builds trust for your brand.

The shipping industry is experiencing real change and transformation, with significant social, environmental and commercial pressures, stringent regulations, tight freight rates and increased competition, as well as demands for more sustainability and improvements in operational efficiency.

Shipowners and operators don’t just want to be ‘sold’ to; they want solutions to the many issues that they face.

So, if you want to break through the clutter of advertising, your brand must be trusted and your content appealing and relevant to the challenges of today. There are several ways to build trust around your brand other than simply delivering great products and services (which is ultimately the most important, as if these fail, then so does your brand and reputation).

Blogging Blogging has become a popular and powerful way to engage with customers. Not only is it a good way of keeping in regular contact with your existing clients to improve customer retention, but consistent good-quality content can also improve lead conversions.

To influence conversions, it is important that you provide informative and interesting content that resonates with your target audience at every step of the marketing/sales-funnel journey. This means that different types of blog content will be needed for those at the awareness stage than for those at the decision stage.

In addition, to ensure your prospects are kept ‘warm’, it’s important that you are

consistent with your blogging efforts by updating and posting regularly.

More importantly, each time you write a new blog with good copy, you are not only driving more traffic to your website but also adding more ‘indexable’ pages for search engines to scan and index. This creates more opportunities for your brand to show up and rank higher in search results.

Whitepapers Whitepapers are another excellent way of creating conversation with your target audience but they also drive qualified traffic and leads to your website.

These are typically more time-consuming and can be more expensive to produce than a blog, but a wellresearched, informative whitepaper can be a great lead nurturing content marketing piece that can be downloaded or shared to collect targeted customer information.

Write or commission a piece that goes into detail on a particular market issue or challenge that you

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know your customers face; show knowledge, empathy and understanding and use this as the foundation to create context for your products and services, positioning them as a solution.

faced, the solution you provided, and the tangible return on investment that you delivered. Make it graphically appealing and include a short quote or testimonial from your customer where they explain how your company has helped them.

(Tip: Interview customers and other stakeholders and influencers in the market to gain real insights in conjunction with wider market research. This will create an asset of real substance and credibility, which supports the position you take within the whitepaper.)

Content marketing is also not necessarily a task for the marketing department. Good, valuable content will come from many different sources within your company. Basically, ask the question: Who has an expert opinion on this?

Post the whitepaper on your blog and your social media platforms, as well as through other media channels, such as pitching it for publication in key trade publications or hosting a webinar.

Infographics These are great for explaining complicated information in a clear and concise way. Do you possess in-depth data and insights that can be useful to your customers? Create an infographic that explains and illustrates a key story or insight that can be told from the data.

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Case Studies These are real examples and evidence of proven delivery from your business. Pick one of the greatest successes you’ve had with a customer and tell the story in a page or two. Lay it out clearly and succinctly, highlighting the challenge that they

For example, IT and digital teams often possess real expertise and insights on how buyers can optimise their software to integrate with an e-market. Similarly, R&D departments may be helpful in providing knowledge of how to protect and maintain certain ship supplies, like vaults or engines. It takes time to collect and transform this knowledge into appealing content but the positive impact it will have on your existing customers, and as a platform to engage and build relationships with future prospects, will make it worth your while.

Host a Webinar If you have established your company as a thought leader in the industry, it’s time for you to consider hosting an online seminar or webinar.

Webinars are a great place to share experiences on various topics and they offer ideal content for your stakeholders by talking about themes that are relevant to them. Webinars are effective ways of engaging with a worldwide audience, which is invaluable in a global industry such as shipping.

Set up a webinar in minutes with: gotomeeting.com/online/webinar

Please note: content marketing should not be a oneoff exercise but an on-going process, and should be actively integrated into your existing marketing strategy.

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Social Media Companies in marine are increasingly using social media platforms such as LinkedIn and Twitter to communicate and engage with their key stakeholders; it is something that you should also consider.

LinkedIn LinkedIn is a social media platform with a clear focus on professional networking. With nearly 500 million users acquired from more than 200 countries, it’s definitely a must for any shipping-related company to have a presence.

Your LinkedIn profile is your social selling business card, and if you want to create a good online reputation for your business, it’s important that you use it as a key channel through which to engage with your stakeholders and build your network.

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The advantages of a strong LinkedIn profile are not to be underestimated. Your business will rank higher in search engines, which will increase traffic to your corporate website.

Make the most of your company, and showcase pages that display the services you provide, as well as specific content and news you want to share with your stakeholders. Be sure to pin your most important product/information to the top.

Generate leads Unless you’re a mega-brand, your current network (those that follow you today) only represents a small fraction of those you are trying to target.

LinkedIn sponsored posts are a great way of generating leads by targeting companies outside your network.

You sponsor your posts, choose a target audience, and then your post appears in their news feed. It’s a very cost-effective way of extending your reach.

There are two ways of doing this: First, you can choose a set of variables (including location, specific job titles and seniority levels; e.g. ship manager, head of procurement).

Second, you can upload a list of emails and/or companies, and LinkedIn will use this to target your post. This would fit very well so with an account based marketing strategy (ABM).

Set a budget After targeting your message, you’ll need to decide how much money to invest. You can select between cost-per-click (CPC) or cost-per-impression (CPM). Cost-per-impression is ideal for brand-oriented campaigns, while cost-per-click suits performance-based campaigns. You’ll also need to set your budget and the duration of your campaign. Set a daily budget, so it’s easy to keep a check/control on your spend.

A very strong advantage of LinkedIn sponsored posts - and one of the reasons why we at ShipServ like it so much – is the ability to target in a very precise way.

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Our Top Tips

The hottest lead on LinkedIn If one of your contacts from a customer shifts job to a new buyer company in shipping that is not already a customer, this is the hottest lead you can get. Your contact has dealt with you before, and will be easier to pursue in order to encourage the new company do business with you. Monitoring your leads on LinkedIn can be time-consuming but it might be your shortcut to picking low-hanging fruit.

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Enter the conversation

If you haven’t done any sponsored posts before, try. You are likely to be surprised by the ROI vs your other paid promotion spend.

Join groups on LinkedIn that are relevant to your business.

Enter the discussions, ask questions and network with other maritime professionals and companies.

Carefully pick what you sponsor – only your most interesting and important posts.

Join these maritime groups:

Link from your post to your website (and think carefully where on your website), so the click goes to your sales pages.

Put the link in the first sentence so it appears prominently in the news feed.

Maritime Network

Advantages of a strong LinkedIn profile Generate leads Boost your SEO Build brand awareness

(more than 130,000 members)

Build brand reputation

Maritime Professionals

Engage meaningfully with your stakeholders on industry trends

(more than 36,000 members)

Follow us on LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/company/shipserv/

Create a UTM tracked link, then use a URL shortener to display the link in a tidier way. This link will then be tracked in the campaign section of Google Analytics once visitors have clicked – this is essential! You don’t want to pay for clicks that you can get for free, so only sponsor a few days after you have posted (so your existing community can click at no cost to you).

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Twitter Tweet your business into the buyer’s consciousness.

In 2017, Twitter increased its character limit from 140 characters to 280, giving you further scope to engage with your followers using targeted messaging.

If you want to benefit from Twitter, you have to attract a sufficient and relevant base of followers. To get followers, you have to consistently deliver tweets that inform, educate, or – appropriately - amuse.

Not sure what to say? If you don’t have anything interesting to say, then don’t. However, the chances are that you’ll have something insightful to say that your followers will find fascinating.

Use hashtags # when you tweet. This makes it easier for users to stumble upon your tweet when they do searches on twitter.

For example: ‘Latest research shows that steel products have a 10 times longer life cycle than iron products. #shipsupplies #shipping #maritime’

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Make your profile look good and consistent with your brand.

Design your profile to include your company logo, and a nice background image that represents your corporate values and what you do.

Remember, Twitter is also a great platform to highlight your brand’s personality to your stakeholders. Interact with your followers by asking questions and sharing images, video content or GIFs. Critically, don’t start tweeting and then suddenly stop 2 months down the line. It needs to be a continuum, and integrated into your whole marketing strategy.

To learn more about how to use twitter for business go to: business.twitter.com

Create a widget and put it on your corporate website. A Twitter widget is a feed of your tweets shown on a site that you manage. The widget on your website helps to create awareness about your twitter profile, get more followers and promote your message to a broader audience.

SlideShare SlideShare is a free online software that allows you to build and upload online presentations. You can embed the presentations and place them on your corporate website.

It’s also a great way to share your presentations on other social media platforms. The great thing about SlideShare presentations is that you can track the success of your presentation and see how many views, comments and downloads it has gained. Get started on those slides: www.slideshare.com

Facebook Facebook is the most well-known social media platform globally, with over 2.2 billion monthly active users worldwide.

It’s not just for personal or business-to-consumer use, it is also being utilised significantly in the business-to-business environment to build relationships with key stakeholders.

The key to a successful Facebook page is user engagement.

For example, you can develop useful and educational content and post it on your page, increase awareness about events you’re attending and post photos and videos from the event.

You can even create and run ad campaigns using Facebook’s self-service tools by selecting age, location and other

demographics. In addition, you can choose where you want the ad to run, such as on Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, or across them all.

Instagram Instagram is used primarily for smartphones and other mobile devices. Upload photos of new products and videos, and share them with your followers. Make it interesting and appealing – this is not a catalogue, but an opportunity to showcase and visually bring your brand to life, and engage with stakeholders in a creative and impactful way.

Don’t forget to listen Nobody wants to engage with someone who is only interested in one-way communication. So, remember to follow, like and circle with others from your industry. Comment on their posts and tweets. You will find that the more active you are on social media, the more activity will be generated to your own profile, and to your corporate website and other online channels.

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Measurement On LinkedIn, you can see the percentage split between organic traffic generated and paid traffic generated.

If you add a campaign code, on GA you will see the traffic coming to your site; and, with metrics such as ‘average session duration vs non-paid traffic’ be able to make a judgement about the traffic quality from LinkedIn. LinkedIn’s very useful tracking shows some demographic data too.

They won’t show you exactly who clicked but they will display all the other demographic metrics, including geography, job title, seniority, sector. This latter analysis is far superior to the data that other paid promo publishers will provide: for instance banner ad info, which relies on aggregated data, providing strong reassurance to LinkedIn advertisers that the budget is well spent.

LinkedIn’s very useful tracking shows some demographic data

Social media monitoring tools like Hootsuite: www.hootsuite.com can show you what kind of footprints you’re leaving on all your social media sites.

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Email Marketing Campaigns

It’s important to note that good content is key in email marketing. You have to invest in creating engaging and targeted messages that will resonate with the people you are trying to communicate with and influence. In order for your emails to be truly effective, your content must be: Trusted Relevant Conversational

You’ll have all heard about the introduction of new EU GDPR legislation (General Data Protection Legislation): it’s been hard to avoid! In a nutshell, it is designed to give people more control over how their data is used, shared and stored by businesses, ensuring that companies are more accountable and transparent.

Put simply, you can no longer assume that you can hold records of people on a database and blanket email them with direct marketing, so it’s essential that you are GDPR-compliant before mailing.

To find out more about GDPR, click here: http://bit.ly/2RZMpZ3

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Once you have this in place, email marketing can be proven to be a very effective medium, because of its ability to reach a wider audience at very little cost and with a higher return on investment. In addition, you are able to target specific audiences, and segment your customer/prospect database by various data points including lead status, demographics, job titles, location and much more.

More importantly, with email marketing you are able to measure the results of your campaigns through open rates and click-through rates, which also give you an insight into which content works and what doesn’t. On that basis you can further nurture your leads through more customised, interesting content and messaging.

Coordinated and aligned with other channels Strategic

It all begins with making clear what’s in it for your customers and what type of content they’ll receive. Meet their needs, not yours.

By linking your content to social media platforms like Twitter and LinkedIn, you’ll get the conversation started. If you can persuade your Twitter followers to sign up for your email newsletter and make your email subscribers follow you on LinkedIn, you can deliver an integrated marketing experience that leaves your stakeholders more engaged and intrigued.

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Marketing Automation Marketing automation is software that helps you, as a marketer, to automate marketing actions. The software can tell you whether your lead opened, clicked through, or never received your email. The software also enables you to set up the campaign in such a way that it automatically resends the email to anyone who didn’t open it and those who didn’t click the email. You can set up a lead-nurturing campaign based on the leads you get from content marketing. A software platform like Marketo is also great for lead scoring, and you can pull and integrate data from your CRM system.

If you are thinking of using marketing automation, you need to do some work in advance, in order to be prepared when you buy and implement the software, and to ensure that the benefits are realised right across the business.

Map out the lead management flow

Build your lead scoring

If your Marketing Automation Platform allows for it, build your lead-flow model into the platform, to show how leads are progressing through the cycle and where leads are getting stuck. This will enable you to build the relevant content and campaigns that will oil the wheels.

Build your lead-scoring model using both demographic and behavioural scoring. Make sure that you review it with the sales team on a quarterly basis to ensure that it is delivering the right quantity and quality of leads to them.

Segment your market Build segmentation into your marketing automation software, and use dynamic content to enable a single email or nurture stream to talk to each segment in the right language about the things they care about.

Keep your forms short, but use progressive profiling. This means you gain additional information each time a lead completes a form on your website, helping you build up an increasingly detailed picture of your actively engaged prospects.

Understand your buyers

Work with sales

Work with your sales teams to understand who it is that influences and makes buying decisions. This means you can not only develop targeted content, but also build your leadscoring model to match.

Train the sales team to ensure they understand the information provided to them for each lead gained from the marketing automation platform. There should be an SLA (Service-Level Agreement) in place that requires them to contact sales-ready leads within 48 hours of receipt. Keep a close eye on this, to ensure it is adhered to.

Build great content Create a content matrix. This will allow you to understand where you have content gaps. Remember, this is not only classified by business and buyer type, but also the stage of the buying journey: most simply put, either early, mid or late.

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Use progressive profiling

Report, analyse, optimise The great thing about marketing automation is that you have a real-time 24/7 insight into what’s working and what isn’t.

Build reports and dashboards and run A/B testing on pilot campaigns, then roll them out when they are optimised. Then keep reviewing and optimising them once they are live.

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E-Newsletters E-newsletters are bulletins sent out on a regular basis to a list of subscribers and are a great way to communicate with new and existing customers about industry issues that are relevant to them and the challenges they face, particularly in a market like shipping, which is experiencing real change and unique pressures. Use this thought-leadership approach as the platform to talk about your products and services and position them as solutions. You can also use the newsletter to tell a success story, with a case study on how you’ve helped a customer solve an issue.

Another way of benefiting from e-newsletters, without creating them yourself, is to promote your company on industry e-newsletters.

If you want to get straight into the inboxes of purchasers and suppliers, then ShipServ’s quarterly e-newsletters, ‘News for Purchasers’ and ‘News for Suppliers’, are for you.

Distributed to approximately 5,000 shipping and ship management executives and 20,000 industry suppliers, respectively, these e-newsletters are a guaranteed way to ensure that your products are seen by the people that really matter – the decision-makers.

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You can also sponsor the newsletter with a banner advert which can click-through to your website or a dedicated landing page, giving you prime real estate to be seen by global marine purchasers and suppliers.

Video

As the newsletters are sent to a targeted audience, with content that is relevant to their everyday business activities, our e-newsletters achieve high open and click-through rates.

Measurement Good email copy, whether by e-mail or as content in a newsletter, is only as good as the revenue it generates. Open rates and clicks are one thing but when you have marketing automation software that allows you to track the website behaviour of your leads and the de-anonymisation it gives, you can measure the financial return on investment from your email campaign.

Video content is invaluable and should be seen as an investment. Although they can cost a lot of money to produce, compelling videos are a great way of educating your viewers on your company and your brand, and take minimal effort to fully engage your audience. The challenge however, is to create content that entertains and captures the interest of the viewer right from the beginning.

It takes a lot of resources and creativity to produce good videos but when done well, they can prove to be invaluable in building your brand and communicating with your customers and prospects with real meaning and impact. In addition, an interesting and informative explainer video can build trust.

There are different types of video that you should consider: The classic 90-second video about your company, its toplevel services and USPs Product explainers of your main product lines. This may require more than one video if you have distinct product segments.

Sales presentations and webinars. Record your webinars and post them online, both for existing customers and prospects. You might not want to put this on your homepage but on a product page or a help section. These can be very effective areas to host these types of videos.

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Help videos, for set-up and for existing users. In addition to how-to-sheets and demos, create a video demo. We have many of these for several of our products, showing how to make the most of all the features.

Seminars. Record your big set-piece seminars: it really broadens their reach. ShipServ does this – we may have 100 people in our seminar at a trade show, but videoing it and putting the recording on our website increases the reach to tens of thousands. If you go to the expense of putting a presentation together, make sure you extend its usefulness.

Interviews. Take the opportunity to shoot some content.

Do some interviews with C-level team members, or get a customer or partner to have a chat on video. You can then edit and use it online. This is a great example of contentled marketing (see section 4), delivered in a different format.

Video promotion

Measurement By uploading your video to YouTube or Vimeo and then sharing on your website, you can take advantage of the key metrics that are available to measure its effectiveness. These include view count, play rate, engagement, click-through rate, and much more.

Our takeaways are: Don’t dismiss the power of video content Not all video needs to be a (relatively expensive) 90 second formal explainer made by an agency Equally, the 90 second explainer, if produced perfectly, is an essential

Once you’ve gone to all that trouble, make sure you promote it everywhere, including on your website, on social media, Vimeo, YouTube, and on your Premium Profile on ShipServ Pages.

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Maximise Exposure with ShipServ Since joining ShipServ we have gained 7 new clients in 18 months. It has helped our company to be seen in the international shipping market as both ShipServ Pages and TradeNet are used by many different shipping companies and it also speeds up the process between buyer and supplier.

Valeria Assandri Machinery & Replacement Parts S.r.l

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1

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Premium Profile on ShipServ Pages

Premium Profile with Spotlight

With the ability to add full company/product information, upload catalogue, datasheets etc, a Premium Profile on ShipServ Pages, allows you to gain instant visibility in front of maritime buyers.

This GUARANTEES you top position in search results where you can target categories, location and/or brands.

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4

Banner Advertising

Brand Zone

Select from a general, highlight or targeted banner to get your brand seen by the purchasers looking to buy real products, at the right time on ShipServ Pages.

This provides a single location where purchasers can find you, your branches, and authorised distributors and agents. 100% customisable, Brand Zone only contains your suppliers and not competitors.

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ShipServ today

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260

10,000

$4bn

7.9m

73,000

Shipowners / managers

Trading vessels

Total trade per year

Total transactions per year

Connected suppliers

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Contact us Founded in 1999, ShipServ is the leading e-Procurement platform for the marine industry. ShipServ’s current annual value of trade is US$4bn from over 260 buying companies, managing 10,000 vessels and trading with over 73,000 suppliers in over 100 countries around the world.

For further information please: Visit:

www.shipserv.com Email:

marketing@shipserv.com Call our sales offices:

US suppliers: +1 732 738 6500 Rest of the world: +44 1395 888 998