Schenker of Canada Limited: Marketing and Social Media for Logistics

DB Schenker supports industry and trade in the global exchange of goods: in land transport, worldwide air and ocean freight, contract logistics and supply chain management.1 Globally they employ over 66,000 employees at over 2000 locations.  Their Canadian operations account for over 1600 employees at over 40 locations.  Roughly 3 years ago, DB Schenker started to utilize social media as part of their marketing strategy.

 

Social media marketing refers to the process of gaining traffic or attention through social media sites.2  DB Schenker is using Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, and their blog, in order to drive traffic and engage their customers.

“We have found that Twitter and our blog drive the most traffic.  Since we are a B2B company, we found that the biggest traffic drivers are industry updates.  For example, what is happening with airfreight, regulation changes, port strikes, Customs Canada updates and so on.” says Fabiana Varela, Manager, Marketing and Communications.

 

Organizations looking for a competitive edge can use social media monitoring and analytics tools to find, sort and analyze that data. Among other potential benefits, social media analytics offers businesses the ability to identify patterns in customer sentiment and gauge their marketing effectiveness.3 DB Schenker uses Google Analytics to monitor their blog.  Realizing the importance of staying relevant and up to date, they hired a third party company to monitor and write the content for each of their platforms.

“Social media is a full time job.  Our marketing team provides all of the content for our social media posts, however we use a third party to write and monitor the sites.” says Fabiana Varela.

Social media binds together communities that once were geographically isolated, greatly increasing the pace and intensity of collaboration. 4  DB Schenker in Canada was transporting the Tyrannosaurus Rex named “Sue”.  The exhibit “A T.Rex Named Sue” created a lot of traffic for the various museums and in an attempt to connect with today’s crowdculture savvy customer, DB Schenker posted about “Sue’s” journey.  Unfortunately, this campaign was not as successful for them as they had hoped, however their blog post does provide a great read!

Lessons for Others

Knowing who your audience is and what information they are looking for will help to engage your customer base.  Social media and content marketing have a symbiotic relationship. They work together to enhance the content creation process and expand distribution, both on social media as well as online and offline.5

DB Schenker is not only an industry leader for logistics, but they are paving the way for the logistics industry and social media initiatives.

If you have concerns as to the accuracy of anything posted on this site, please send your concerns to Peter Carr, Program Director, Social Media for Business Performance.

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