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How to market your vessels with the right digital marketing tools?

As a shipping company, you want to optimize the cargoes on board of your vessels. Being transparent about the position of your ships helps (potential) customers to align their cargo flows with your sailing schedules, resulting in more effective supply chains for all parties involved.

What is a position list?

A position list (sometimes referred as sailing or liner schedules) is a detailed overview about the current and future positions of your vessels. If updated often, it gives a certain insight if a vessel can carry additional cargoes to a certain destination that might be of interest to you.

In addition, it also frequently shows the specifications of vessels such as DWT, crane capacity and much more. As a marketing communication professional, introducing a position list is a nice opportunity to boost the online visibility of your fleet powered by digital tools. The great thing of online marketing is that you can measure the success instantly.

At Getting the Market, we often speak to shipping lines that share their positions in a rather ‘oldschool’ fashion. Excel, PDFs and even Word documents are distributed via email without even knowing the success of your efforts. Important metrics, such as open rates, click-through-rates and bounces are not measured. More importantly, we believe that your website should play an essential role in sharing the current and future positions of your vessels.

But how do you do this? No worries! In this blog, our colleague Laurens will explain how shipping lines can reap the benefits of sharing their positions using the right digital marketing techniques and tools. The blog will also include also some pro-tips making sure you market the positions of your fleet smarter and more efficiently. Come on, let’s have a look!

How to start? Let me explain it below in 7 steps

1. Try to think from your client’s perspective. What type of information would they need? Think of port of loading, port of discharge, vessel name, cargo window, or cargo space, emissions and specs sheets. If you are a heavy lift carrier, you might think of LOA, crane capacity and cargo space information.
2. Simply showing your vessels is not enough. You need to define your objectives. Would you like to generate leads, build brand awareness or streamline operations for your customers? Having your goals clear from the beginning in combination with the information required from a customer is double winning!
3. Choose the right technology. Have a close look at your website’s Content Management System (CMS) and review the possibilities of adding such a page.Make sure that it is not too much hidden for website visitors, and search engines. Find a good place in your top menu, and make sure it is always visible for users that scroll on your homepage or different pages. If needed, you can make a division per cargo flow and create separate pages or segment it in regions.For our client Mann Lines we separated the sailing schedules into several regions and different type of cargo flows. This enables their website visitors to understand that they offer multimodal solutions for containerized, and RoRo cargoes.See also the image below.
4. Make sure that your position page is user friendly. Design the position list feature for both desktop and mobile devices. This is called a responsive design. Even though we see that website visitors active in the maritime industry are generally using desktop computers, you might want to think of a different look & feel for mobile devices. Do not forget to customizations options such as filters for different ship types, specs, or regions. Again, try to think from a customer’s perspective.
5. After you’re happy with the design, you can start the development in your CMS. It might also be interest to see if there is an API available of a system you’re using internally for your vessels. All data shown on your website needs to be accurate, so make sure you work with at least recent data. Perform some tests on different devices and make the necessary changes if applicable.
6. Consider a soft launch to a small group within your company or with a few key clients. Identify potential issues, fix these and do some cross-browser tests. It might be that your position list looks a bit different in Safari, Google Chrome or Internet Explorer.
7. Once confident enough you can move forward with publishing the page. Well done and congratulations, you launched your very own position list page on your website!

Pro tip #1: Make sure to add a subscribe option to your website where website visitors can opt in for the next distribution via email. Try to ask not too many details, just focus on their first and last name plus email address. By doing this, you will understand even better how visitors are converting or (potentially). Next, I will also explain a bit how you can start promoting the position list. Just continue reading. 

Pro tip #2: Have a look at real-time platforms such as MarineTraffic and FleetMon. There might be cool ways to integrate their data on your website.

What’s next?

Now that your position list is available on your website, it is time for online promotion.

It is important to get noticed in the market. You might already have a distribution list that you would like to address via personal email, social media or newsletters. Here it is important that you push qualitative and relevant website visitors to your website.

One way of doing this is via email newsletters. The importance here is frequency and the level of personalization. Think of subject lines where you already include the person’s or company’s name. Based upon our experience, we see that the more you personalize your email marketing the higher open rates are shown. EXAMPLE?

Try to distribute it at least every week, since shipping data can change rapidly. Do not forget to post the position list on social media once it is ready to be shared. This can be done with an attractive visual, and a link towards your website. It is as simple as that.

There are plenty of email marketing tools out there that can make your life easier. A template can be easily made, as long as it is fitting your overall corporate identity, and it includes the necessary call-to-actions (CTA’s) to your website.

Just make sure you select a provider that you can also contact by phone in case you want to reach out to them for questions.

Pro tip #3: Make sure to install lead identification software to identify companies visiting your website. 90% of your website visitors will not convert into clients nor leave their details behind on your website. Identifying these companies can help your sales and business development colleagues chase new opportunities and understand their needs even better. At Getting the Market, we have great experiences with Dealfront.

Pro tip #4: Include UTM links in all your communications. In this other blog post, I explain the importance of using UTMs to measure all your online marketing efforts.

Pro tip #5: In need of a position that requires extra attention? Think of a special position list in which you highlight one vessel, and its sailing schedule.

In short

To wrap it up, a position list on your website provides real-time vessel locations and specifications, enhancing transparency and efficiency.