August 4, 2025

What Are the Top Marketing Trends in Logistics for 2025?

The Women in Logistics Marketing Alliance (WILMA) recently held its monthly virtual meeting, bringing together marketing professionals from across the logistics and supply chain industry. The discussion revealed valuable insights on critical marketing challenges and innovations that are shaping the industry today. Here's a deep dive into the five most significant topics discussed.

Which Marketing Channels Are Losing Effectiveness in B2B Logistics?

Publication Advertising Falls Short on ROI

Marketing professionals expressed significant frustration with publications reporting metrics that don’t align with their own tracking data:

“Publications often report inflated numbers for website ads or social ads,” noted one participant.

“When I use tracking URLs and give them to publications, they’ll claim 500 clicks when my analytics show only a fraction of that.”

The consensus was that while industry magazine advertising might have once been valuable, the ROI has diminished:

“Back in the day, getting the back cover of an industry magazine was coveted, but it’s never really been an ROI type of investment.”

Traditional SEO Blogs Need a Strategic Shift

One marketer emphasized:

“Traditional SEO blogging is overrated now. We need to optimize our content for AI, not for Google.”

Data showed that AI search features are reducing clicks on paid ads, and AI tools rely more on contextual understanding than keyword matching.

Bing Is an Underrated Channel

“Bing has been an underrated channel for us, with cost per lead about $200 less than Google.”

Bing’s integration with Outlook and MSN makes it a valuable but overlooked platform.

How Should Marketers Optimize Content for AI and Answer Engines?

From SEO to AEO (Answer Engine Optimization)

“We need to optimize our content so it gets picked up by AI systems like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini.”

Practical AEO Strategies

Question-based content structure: “Write blogs as if they’re questions.”
Expanded Q&A sections: “More Q&A helps AI understand your content.”
Natural language optimization: “Optimize for how people speak, not just how they type.”

Balancing AI Optimization with Human Connection

Participants shared concerns about over-relying on AI:

“Eventually, people are going to value intimate and personal relationships over digital interactions.”

What emerged from this conversation wasn’t just enthusiasm for new technology, but practical, tested strategies that are already delivering measurable results. These marketing leaders are moving beyond AI experimentation into full implementation, and their experiences offer valuable lessons for any marketing team looking to leverage artificial intelligence effectively.

How Can B2B Marketers Measure Brand Awareness Effectively?

Metrics That Matter

Impressions and CPM: Basic but useful visibility measures.
Lifecycle conversions: Custom CRM stages track unknown to known user journeys.
Brand surveys: Measure year-over-year awareness with soft Net Promoter Scores.

Connecting Brand Awareness to Revenue

Conversion funnel tracking from unverified to customer.
Look-alike analysis to estimate potential revenue.
Focus on quality over quantity at trade shows and events.

Tools for Website Engagement

RB2B: Real-time alerts and LinkedIn info.
Breeze Intelligence: HubSpot insights on company visits.
Avena: CRM integration to track historic context and keyword engagement.

The Ongoing PR Measurement Challenge

“PR metrics are often fluffy. Even when tech helps, you still need instinct.”

What Cold Outreach Tactics Are Working in B2B Today?

Segmenting by Company Size

For SMBs:

Multi-touch sequences: 18–20 touches including email, LinkedIn, and calls.
Dedicated outbound SDRs.

For Enterprises:

Deep research and personalized messaging.

Timing and Personalization

Use visit behavior to initiate drip sequences, but avoid being too quick:

“Wait before reaching out, so it feels natural.”

AI Tools for Outreach

AI can scrape LinkedIn, extract interests, and write highly personalized outreach emails:

“It wrote an email so tailored I was shocked how much it knew.”

Mistakes to Avoid

Mixing SDR responsibilities reduces outbound focus.
Creepy outreach tactics can damage brand perception.

How Is AI Transforming B2B Marketing in Logistics?

Custom GPTs for Content Creation

Train on your brand voice using collateral and messaging.
Use AI to write commentary on news articles.
Create internal GPTs as knowledge bases.

AI-Powered Project Management

Link GPTs to Excel and task deadlines.
Ask AI what priorities to focus on daily.

Content Optimization for AI Discoverability

Tools like AEO-specific GPTs enhance AI-readability.
Structured content, question formats, and clear answers help AI systems surface your content.

AI for Outreach Automation

“It scrapes LinkedIn, analyzes behavior, and generates custom emails.”

Looking Forward: Balancing AI with Authentic Human Connection

“There was a time when we had traditional marketing. Then we went digital. Now AI and automation are the next phase.”

But a return to human-centric messaging is expected as audiences grow weary of generic AI content.

Real-World AI Applications: From Theory to Practice

The conversation revealed that these marketing teams aren’t just experimenting with AI—they’re implementing sophisticated solutions that deliver measurable time savings and improved content quality.

Employee Communications: Turning Minimal Input into Comprehensive Content

Teams are successfully using AI to transform minimal input into comprehensive employee newsletter content. One marketing manager shared a particularly compelling example: when tasked with creating an employee profile, a developer provided only “I love meatloaf” as his personal information.

“AI helped me expand that based on his LinkedIn profile. We were able to work the meatloaf anecdote in there, just a little bit funny. But it took something that five years ago would probably have taken me two to three hours into an hour and a half,” the marketing manager explained.

This example illustrates AI’s ability to take sparse information and create engaging, human-sounding content while maintaining authenticity and personality—a crucial capability for internal communications that need to feel genuine rather than robotic.

Executive Communications Translation: Making Leadership Accessible

Perhaps the most impressive AI application shared involved translating executive vision into actionable messaging. One marketing leader described receiving inadequate input from a CEO about a major business acquisition—content she described as “rubbish” that was “hard to understand” and lacking elaboration.

“I plugged that into the system and said, I need to translate this CEO very bare bone talk and ideas into something that makes sense,” she explained. “The outcome was incredible. It became the core messaging pillars, and that drove every piece of communication that we built.”

This use case demonstrates AI’s potential to bridge the gap between high-level executive thinking and practical marketing execution, transforming abstract strategic concepts into concrete messaging frameworks that can guide entire communication campaigns.

Content Style and Tone Consistency: Creating Virtual Team Members

Multiple teams reported success in training AI systems on their brand voice, communication style, and tone preferences, effectively creating virtual team members that understand company-specific nuances and can generate content that feels authentic to the organization.

“We now have it fully trained on our style, our tone, the way that we communicate. It’s nice because it now literally operates as an extension of the team. It understands how we write, the tone, all of the nuances around the way that we generate content,” noted one marketing leader.

This level of AI training represents a significant evolution from basic prompt engineering to creating sophisticated, context-aware content generation systems that maintain brand consistency across all communications.

Advanced AI Training Techniques: Beyond Basic Prompts

The marketing professionals shared sophisticated approaches to AI training that go far beyond simple prompt engineering, revealing strategies that any marketing team can implement to achieve similar results.

Voice and Tone Capture: The Multi-Platform Approach

One of the most effective techniques involves combining multiple AI platforms to capture and replicate executive or brand voice:

Background Research: Using Perplexity to research executive backgrounds, gathering context about their experience, industry knowledge, and public statements
Writing Analysis: Uploading preferred content samples to ChatGPT and requesting detailed writing analysis covering style, tone, sentence structure, and linguistic patterns
Custom GPT Creation: Building specific GPTs that combine background research with writing style analysis to create virtual ghostwriters that maintain authentic voice

“You can go to Perplexity and say, give me a background on my CEO, and it’ll give you a background. Then you upload a piece of content that they like and ask Perplexity to do a writing analysis,” explained one marketing expert. “Then you can take that, go into ChatGPT, create a GPT of that person and say, here’s their background, here’s the writing style. Now you can leverage that GPT to write content in that style and tone.”

Real-Time Data Integration

The combination of Perplexity’s real-time data capabilities with ChatGPT’s advanced content generation represents a powerful approach that many teams are finding effective. Perplexity provides current, cited information while ChatGPT handles the creative and stylistic elements of content creation.

Training AI as Team Extensions

Rather than treating AI as external tools, successful teams are training their AI systems to function as true team extensions. This involves feeding the AI comprehensive information about:

Company communication standards
Industry-specific terminology and concepts
Brand personality and voice guidelines
Historical content that represents the desired style
Specific nuances that make communications feel authentically “on-brand”

“It’s becoming really proficient at operating as an extension of the team. It understands how we write, the tone, all of the nuances around the way that we generate content,” noted one marketing leader.

The Strategic Technology Stack: Focused, Not Fragmented

Contrary to what might be expected, the conversation revealed that successful AI implementation doesn’t require extensive tool proliferation. The most effective teams are finding success with focused technology stacks that emphasize depth over breadth.

Core Platforms That Deliver Results

ChatGPT (Paid Versions): Teams consistently mentioned the importance of investing in paid ChatGPT subscriptions, particularly for accessing custom GPTs, projects functionality, and higher usage limits. The paid version’s ability to maintain context and training makes it significantly more valuable for ongoing marketing operations.

Perplexity: Emerging as the go-to platform for research and real-time data integration. Marketing teams appreciate its citation capabilities and current information access, making it ideal for background research and fact-checking.

SEMrush: While not AI-native, teams are using SEMrush data to inform AI content strategies, particularly for keyword research and competitive analysis. Some teams report seeing 3x improvements in keyword rankings after implementing AI-informed content strategies based on SEMrush insights.

Canva: Representing the democratization of design, Canva has largely replaced Adobe Creative Suite needs for many marketing teams, allowing AI-generated content to be quickly turned into professional visual materials.

Emerging Specialized Tools

Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) Platforms: Tools like Profound are emerging to help marketers optimize for AI-powered search engines rather than traditional search. These platforms analyze how content performs across multiple AI systems and provide optimization recommendations.

Custom AI Marketing Platforms: Several teams mentioned experimenting with specialized AI marketing platforms, though adoption rates vary significantly based on specific use cases and budget constraints.

The AEO Revolution: Optimizing for AI-Powered Search

A significant trend emerging from the conversation is the shift from traditional SEO to Answer Engine Optimization (AEO). As users increasingly turn to AI-powered search through ChatGPT, Perplexity, and voice assistants rather than traditional search engines, marketing teams are adapting their content strategies accordingly.

“People are changing how they do search. They’re moving off of Google and Amazon and Yahoo. They’re asking Alexa, they’re asking ChatGPT, they’re asking Perplexity,” explained one marketing expert. “That space hasn’t been inundated with advertising yet, so they’re getting more websites that actually answer the question.”

This shift represents a fundamental change in how content needs to be structured and optimized. Rather than focusing on keyword density and traditional SEO metrics, AEO requires content that directly answers questions in formats that AI systems can easily parse and recommend.

The implications for logistics marketing teams are significant. Industry-specific queries about transportation management, supply chain optimization, and logistics technology are increasingly being answered by AI systems rather than traditional search results. Teams that adapt their content strategy to perform well in AI-powered search will have a significant advantage in reaching prospects who are researching solutions.

Innovative Applications: Beyond Content Creation

Beyond the obvious applications in content creation and internal communications, marketing teams are exploring AI applications in several innovative areas that demonstrate the technology’s versatility and potential for solving complex marketing challenges.

Customer Segmentation and Look-Alike Audiences

Teams are successfully using AI to analyze existing high-value customer profiles and identify look-alike audiences, particularly effective for markets where traditional industry databases may be limited. “We have used it to put in some of the profiles of customers that are currently high value accounts for us, and asked it to find look-alike audiences,” explained one marketing leader.

This application proves particularly valuable for:

International market expansion where local industry data is scarce
Niche market segments not well-covered by traditional databases
Complex B2B scenarios where ideal customer profiles involve multiple variable

Technical Problem-Solving and Code Management

Marketing teams, particularly those in smaller organizations where marketers wear multiple hats, are leveraging AI for technical challenges:

HTML and Code Formatting: Using AI to troubleshoot website issues, clean up code, and identify problems with plugins or third-party tools Content Analysis: Employing AI to identify inconsistencies, flag potential technical issues, and verify information accuracy across multiple sources Platform Integration: Utilizing AI to help integrate various marketing tools and platforms more effectively.

Advanced Market Research and Competitive Intelligence

Teams are combining AI capabilities with specialized platforms for comprehensive market analysis. This includes using AI to:

Analyze total addressable market (TAM) calculations
Conduct competitive intelligence gathering
Identify market trends and opportunities
Validate market research findings across multiple sources

“We combine AI capabilities with platforms like Ocean.io for comprehensive market analysis, competitive intelligence, and total addressable market calculations,” noted one marketing professional.

Data Validation and Quality Assurance

AI is proving valuable for maintaining data quality and identifying inconsistencies across marketing operations:

Flagging potential issues with third-party marketing tools
Verifying contact information and company data
Identifying outdated or incorrect information in marketing databases
Cross-referencing data across multiple platforms for accuracy

FAQs

What is AEO in marketing?
AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) is the process of structuring content so that AI systems like ChatGPT or Google Gemini can easily extract and surface it as answers to user questions.

Are traditional SEO blogs still effective?
No, traditional SEO blogs that rely heavily on keywords are declining in effectiveness. Modern AI systems prioritize contextual and conversational relevance.

How can I measure brand awareness in logistics marketing?
Use a combination of impressions, surveys, CRM lifecycle stages, and conversion path tracking to link visibility to actual leads and revenue.

How does cold outreach work best in B2B?
Cold outreach works best with multi-touch sequences tailored to company size, and when informed by behavioral and firmographic data.

How is AI changing B2B marketing?
AI is now used for content generation, outreach personalization, project management, and internal knowledge-sharing—helping marketers scale without sacrificing quality.

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