Building the brand of a market leader

efm is the largest fourth party logistics provider (4PL) in Australia and New Zealand. Integrated with 3PLs like TOLL and Startrack, efm draws on its relationships with a suite of carriers to curate and implement the optimal logistics solutions for its customers, thereby, improving visibility of the supply chain and reducing waste and providing commercial gains for its customers.

efm commands the most significant share of the 4PL market, however, without their own trucks on the road, and without a marketing and communications function, they lacked brand recognition. The challenge was to stake their claim as market leader to accelerate further growth.

Echomakers developed an integrated and strategic external marketing and communications program (in addition to an internal marketing program) to build the brand in the market.

Insights & Strategy

The first part was to develop the fundamentals of the marketing strategy. We developed:

• Customer segmentation: reviewing customer data and identifying homogenous groups to understand how best to relate to the customers in each segment.
• Customer Personas: Based on customer data, developed an archetypal representation of the different segments of the audience to help identify and prioritise its offering and shape the messaging of communications.
• Competitor Analysis: We needed to understand the points of parity and points of difference of efm’s offering – and the importance of each to customers – to understand how to communicate to the market.

Website

Next, we worked closely with efm’s Technology team to lead an overhaul of their website. Several years old, replete with stock imagery and simply not reflective of a company at the forefront of digitisation their industry, it needed to be revamped to emphasise the unique combination of technology and highly-trained people. We supported with:

• Design and development: Providing strategic guidance during the procurement and briefing process with the website supplier.
• Copywriting: With a deep understanding of the business given our Insights & Strategy work, we developed all copy for the website.
• SEO: We optimised the website pages for search engines, adding relevant meta description tags, image alt tags, Heading tags and keywords through copy.
• Creative assets: We provided strategic and messaging direction on the development of the company’s image library and brand and case study videos – critical components of the website to bring the human element to life.

Building the brand

efm solves a problem for its customers: simplifying complex logistics. We have developed a content marketing program that leverages efm’s expertise to provide value to their audience and educate them through the problem as they begin to identify and address it. Our activity includes:

• Developing monthly thought leadership articles for their blog
• Planning, producing and posting weekly content for LinkedIn (customer-facing) and Instagram (candidate-attraction).

With a strong foundation achieved during the Insights & Strategy phase, we gained a good understanding of our audience, the messages that would resonate, and how to reach them.

In the three months since launching the website and launching a consistent content marketing strategy we have seen 182% growth in new website users and a doubling in the number of return users. Engagement with content shared via LinkedIn is excellent at 7% compared to the general benchmark for the channel of 2%, and far surpasses that of industry peers.