In the 3PL world, trust and operational excellence is the foundation of every partnership. If you don’t invest in demonstrating your capabilities, shippers may never consider you.
That’s why you need to do content marketing for your 3PL providers. A well-organized piece of evergreen content can pull in qualified leads for years.
At Perceptric, we’re a content marketing agency that helps 3PL providers like yours build content that demonstrates reliability and operational excellence. Our work is designed to help you win shippers and position your services as trusted and efficient.
Based on my experience working for a wide variety of companies in the industry, I will share:
- What’s unique about content marketing for 3PL providers
- Our Knowledge-Narrative approach to content marketing
- How to do SEO content for 3PL providers
- How to do thought leadership content marketing for 3PL providers
Alright, let’s dive in!
What are 3PL providers?
A 3PL provider (Third-Party Logistics provider) is a company that helps businesses handle the “behind-the-scenes” work of getting products to customers. Instead of running your own warehouse or packing orders yourself, you hire a 3PL to do it for you.
A 3PL is a great fit for growing e-commerce brands, subscription products, or any business that’s tired of packing orders in their living room. Using a 3PL helps brands:
- Focus on marketing, sales, and product instead of logistics headaches
- Save money on warehousing and labor
- Scale faster without hiring bigger teams
- Ship orders faster
Why does 3PL providers need content marketing?
Content marketing is the practice of informing and engaging potential customers through valuable digital content. The core idea is simple: teach, be open, build trust, and customers will naturally come to you when they’re ready to make a decision.
Online behavior has shifted, and today’s buyers prefer to research on their own before choosing a product or service. That’s why content marketing plays such a crucial role in digital customer acquisition: it supports people as they learn, compare, and build confidence, which gives them the knowledge they need to make informed decisions.
But do you really need content marketing? The answer is yes, very much so:
- More than any other industries, it’s incredibly important for content in 3PL providers to showcase expertise: Shippers choosing a 3PL provider want dependable operations, so your content should help them understand your capabilities and trust your network. Strong content also helps your visibility on Google.
- Your content should either solve problems or be memorable: Content should address the routing, fulfillment, or capacity issues 3PL providers experience, building trust in your logistics capabilities. It can also express the operational philosophy your brand follows in a way that helps you stand out.
- Good content is the only thing that ranks on Google: If you don’t create exceptional content, it’s hard to compete with the big fish. AI-generated content may sound like a good solution to create content at scale, but over a long enough period of time, people notice that you’re using AI, and they’ll lose trust in you. Besides, AI can’t write original content. Only humans can.
Most effective content marketing types for 3PL providers
Content marketing for 3PL providers works best when it’s built on a strong story: a real belief, a real point of view, or a real problem you’re trying to solve.
When that foundation is solid, every content format becomes effective, because they’re all expressing the same core idea in different ways.
With that said, here is my opinion on the types of content that you can use:
| Content Type | Ease of Getting Started | Time to ROI | Best Fit For |
|---|---|---|---|
| Short-form Blog Posts | Easy to write and publish. Great for quick wins and early traction. | Medium. Builds traffic over time, but can rank fast for long-tail keywords. | Brands needing fast educational content and SEO momentum. |
| Long-form Blog Posts | Harder to create. Requires depth, clarity, and expertise. | High long-term ROI. Ranks well, attracts high-intent traffic, builds authority. | Brands wanting strong SEO positioning and deep trust from readers. |
| Ebooks / PDFs | Medium difficulty. Requires structure and design, but highly doable. | High. Great for list-building and lead magnets with ongoing value. | Brands that need leads, gated content, or a strong reasons to subscribe. |
| Whitepapers | Hard. Requires expertise, research, and strong reasoning. | Very high for technical or regulated industries. Converts educated buyers. | B2B, technical markets, and companies selling high-ticket or complex products. |
| Short-form Videos | Easy to create today. Low production requirements. | Fast. Great reach with strong storytelling and consistency. | Brands with personality, compelling visuals, or educational angles. |
| Long-form Videos | Medium to hard. Requires planning, scripting, and editing. | Strong long-term ROI. Great for trust-building, demos, and depth. | Educators, experts, product-led companies, and brands needing explanation. |
| Case Studies | Medium. Requires customer coordination and storytelling. | Immediate to medium. High trust and high conversion impact. | Brands selling services, B2B tools, or anything high-ticket or relationship-based. |
| Infographics | Easy to medium. Requires design but delivers clarity fast. | Medium. Highly shareable and great for top-of-funnel visibility. | Brands with complex data, technical topics, or visual stories. |
| Thought Leadership Articles | Harder. Requires a strong point of view and real expertise. | High. Builds authority, recognition, and trust over time. | Executives, industry leaders, and brands shaping the direction of their category. |
Remember: all content types have potential, but you must be careful to not spread yourself too thin!
If your budget is in the nine figures, it’s a lot easier to run 2 podcasts, a video channel, a blog, and a magazine. But when you’re just starting out, focus on ONE channel that you believe to be able to deliver the best result, and double down when it starts gaining traction.
How to plan for content marketing in 3PL providers?
Most 3PL providers believe content marketing is just putting articles on their website. However, these are often built from high-level supply chain summaries rather than real logistics experience.
So before you launch your content marketing campaign for 3PL providers, here’s what I recomend:
- Laser-focus into one content marketing channel and do it very well. Trying to spread your efforts across too many channels drains time and resources, and usually leads to average results. You’ll get far better outcomes by choosing one or two channels and executing them exceptionally well.
- Start your content marketing strategy by targeting potential customers who are close to buying. Don’t waste effort on intro-level keywords like “What is [XYZ]?”. They draw in beginners, not the people who are actively researching vendors. Create content that speaks to real problems and decision-stage needs.
- Have a distribution strategy for every piece of content. Many 3PL providers share useful insights and hope shippers will notice. For content to work, you need a real plan to reach them — through LinkedIn, email, or search.
1. Do audience research
Before you write content, make sure to conduct a good audience research. Audience research is simply the process of gathering and analyzing information about the people you want to reach with your marketing. It’s understanding your target audience’s motivations, pain points, and behaviors.
There are a lot of ways that you can do audience research to inform your content marketing activities:
- Talk to your Sales team — Yes, Sales people are literally in the trenches, so they know A LOT about your customers and what audience you attract. If you don’t talk to Sales to extract insights, you’re probably missing out.
- Social media discovery — Go to the social media channels and check out the posts and creators your audience follows to understand what they care about.
- Competitor analysis — Analyze competitors’ content, SEO, reviews, and digital presence to learn what resonates with your shared audience.
- Communities & forums — Lurk in Subreddits and online groups to hear unfiltered discussions and real pain points that people in your niche has. Reddit is especially useful because it has every communities imaginable on the planet, so you’ll probably find some subreddits talking about your field.
- Surveys & polls — Run short surveys or social polls to gather direct feedback at scale.
- Customer & prospect interviews — Talk directly with customers and ICPs to understand motivations and how they describe their problems.
- Search intent analysis — Study keywords, SERPs, and “People Also Ask” results to map what people are actually trying to solve.
- Website & content analytics — Use analytics and heatmaps to see how users behave on your site and what content truly performs.
2. Do keyword research
Once you have insights, it’s time to start keyword research. This should inform your content creation activities later.
A lot of content marketers in 3PL providers start their content strategies by starting off at the “top” of the marketing funnel. In other words, they target people who are only looking for definition of a concept, not people actively looking for a solution. This often means creating broad, brand-awareness pieces on basics like “what is third-party logistics (3PL)” or “how do fulfillment centers operate.”
Anyone could be doing research on those generic terms. A grandma, a 10-year-old kid, a random college guy. it doesn’t necessarily guarantee they could become your customer.
Instead, you need to create content at the Bottom-of-the-funnel. That’s where the money lies. People searching for those terms usually know they are having a problem and are actively looking for a solution.
I categorize BOFU keywords into 3 major groups:
- Listicle Keywords – These are roundup-style searches like “Top 10 companies for [niche].” These attract users actively comparing options and help introduce your product/services as one of the contenders.
- Pain Point Keywords – These keywords are the real problems your audience is trying to solve, like “how to fix X” or “why Y happens.” Write a stellar article showing how to solve it, positioning you subtly as the ultimate choice to solve those problems. You can mine those keywords in forums and niche industry communities.
- Lead Magnet Keywords – Target people looking for resources with phrases like “free template for X” or “downloadable guide to Y.” These are great for capturing leads in exchange for helpful content. Build assets that directly match these needs.
Let’s say I am doing content marketing for a 3PL provider called WriteMeContent, who provides eCommerce fulfillment, here are the keywords I’m targeting for them:
- Listicle Keywords: best 3PL fulfillment companies, top logistics providers, best warehouse outsourcing firms
- Pain Point Keywords: how to fix fulfillment delays, why inventory goes missing, how to improve accuracy
- Lead Magnet Keywords: fulfillment SOP, inventory template, 3PL onboarding checklist
Once you’ve tapped out the pain-point and bottom-of-funnel keywords, you can move upward in the funnel and begin producing MOFU and TOFU content.
Further reading: B2B content marketing strategy checklist
How to write SEO content for 3PL providers?
SEO content is amazing because it brings in consistent, evergreen traffic (and conversion) as long as you write content that genuinely resonates. Although it’s a relatively long-term game, the compound rewards are totally worth it!
My advice when choosing SEO as one of the content marketing channels for 3PL providers is that you should develop the most logistics-informed, operationally grounded content piece available online.
When people hit Google with a question, they want answers from someone who’s dealt with the situation themselves. That’s why content backed by real human experience tends to resonate most.
But it might just as well be an AI-generated draft that’s factually sound and double-checked by a human. Google has openly said it isn’t concerned about whether a human or an AI wrote the content (at least for now). And if you bring real experience to the table, readers with expertise can always tell.
And when you actually write good content:
- Readers stay on your page for longer (which boosts SEO)
- Readers share your content to their coworkers and make discussions (which affects final buying decision)
- Readers remember your brand, and will return to consume more content from you (more traffic!)
- Readers are interested enough to check your products and services (which also affects their buying decision)
Here are the steps I would do to write the best piece of content:
- Open an incognito window and Google the keyword to figure out the search intent. In other words, what types of pages are showing up in the top three results? Deep-dive into that page. I usually check the depth of those top articles (and where I can beat them).
- Next, build an outline with clear H1, H2, H3, and H4 headings. The H1 is your main title, the H2s are your primary sections, and everything below that becomes supporting subheadings.
- Use keyword research tools like Ahrefs to research additional keywords to work into your article and guide your on-page SEO.
- Then write your content. If your outline is solid, all you need to do is fill in each section. And make sure your intro pulls people in.
Here are some best practices I apply for writing SEO content:
- Keep your H1 title tag under 60 characters, ideally in the 56–58 range to avoid truncation and keep the headline tight.
- Write a meta description under 155 characters and include your exact target keyword somewhere in the copy for clarity and relevance.
- Set your URL slug to the exact keyword. Most CMSs auto-generate the slug from your full title, which is rarely ideal. Always edit it so the slug is clean, short, and keyword-only. I still can’t believe how often this has to be repeated to content teams.
- Use JPGs for images that don’t need transparency, and keep them under ~100 KB. Compress them or convert PNGs to JPGs using online tools. If they’re still too large, resize them. On Mac you go to Preview → Tools → Adjust Size → set width to ~1280 or ~1080 and let the height scale automatically.
- Add ALT tags to every image. This is essential for accessibility and helps screen readers describe visual elements to users with impaired vision.
- Save your thumbnail image as a JPG and name the file using your exact target keyword. This boosts your chances of appearing in Google Image Search. The same applies to every image you upload: use descriptive filenames, not random strings. File naming plays a bigger role in image search than most people realize.
For 3PL providers in particular, here are some of my recommendations:
- When you show real-world delivery optimizations, logistics teams treat your content like training material.
- Warehouse workflow explainers get linked because they’re rare and highly sought after.
How to write thought leadership content for 3PL providers
You establish thought leadership through the content you create and the delivery behind it: your articles, your presentations, your lessons. When executed properly, it puts distance between you and your competitors and builds confidence in your insight.
It’s worth noting that thought leadership doesn’t require groundbreaking revelations. You don’t have to chase hot takes. A well-researched exploration of a specific niche can surface “hidden gems” that earn you just as much authority.
For example, here’s a thought leadership post from Noah Greenberg, CEO at Stacker. He’s just expressing his ideas in a very simple, even casual fashion, and yes, I would say that it is a piece of LinkedIn thought leadership content:
The problem is that in most companies the founders and senior leaders are sitting on a goldmine of sharp opinions, but almost none of it ever gets written down. These ideas stay locked in their head. Without a system to extract that knowledge and turn it into clear, compelling content, the company never actually produces real thought leadership.
Your in-house marketing team, unfortunately, are just executors, not subject matter experts. They can package the ideas, polish the writing, and publish the content. But they’re not the ones shaping the industry. They didn’t found the company. They aren’t defining the strategy. They didn’t build the product.
When creating thought leadership content for 3PL providers, you have several options:
- Ideas rooted in your company’s origin story and the problem you set out to solve
- Ideas shaped by your strategic positioning and worldview
- Insights drawn from the actual nuance of what you build or deliver
- Strong opinions informed by years in the industry
- Proprietary data and patterns no one else sees
- Case studies that reveal details only insiders would know
So here’s how I’ll do thought leadership content marketing for 3PL providers:
- Find your story: Almost every 3PL provider is built because founders saw supply chain delays, bad visibility, or unreliable carriers up close. They built logistics infrastructure people could trust. That’s their disruption story. Interview the founders and tell that story. Lay out the pain points that led them to start their company, and explain the unique solution they developed to solve those problems.
- Find smart people with unique insights: Sometimes it’s just the reality is that most companies don’t have that “groundbreaking” story. However, they usually have smart people in the company. In 3PL providers, logistics leads understand capacity constraints, warehouse nuances, and carrier variability in a way that only hands-on experience allows. Engage with them, and interview them to write an insightful piece of content. You’ll be surprised at how much content can be produced simply by talking to experts in the team.
- Produce proprietary data: In 3PL providers, shippers want visibility data, carrier performance metrics, and fulfillment trends — information most 3PLs never formalize. They reference whoever publishes it. Sharing your own insights builds credibility fast.
How to distribute your 3PL content?
After you produce content, you can’t expect people to find it by themselves. SEO naturally brings in traffic, of course, but you must be proactive about content distribution too.
Here are some of my favorite content distribution channels for 3PL providers:
- Your company blog: Always start here. Link your articles together to take visitors from one page to another. For example, in a generic How-to article, try linking it to your thought leadership content. That helps siphoning some traffic from an high-discoverability page (thanks to SEO) to a low-discoverability page (thought leadership).
- Newsletters: A newsletter is the BEST way to distribute content. In the beginning, building an email list can take a lot of time and effort, but over time, it becomes a powerful owned channel for promotional content. Some of the good newsletter platforms I recommend are beehiiv, MailerLite, Kit, and Substack.
- Social media: LinkedIn is usually the best platforms for 3PL providers content distribution. Simply break your articles into smaller snippets and share it on social media. However, you need to share it on personal accounts rather than company pages (people don’t really read information from a Company page).
3PL content marketing examples
1. ShipBob
ShipBob is a fulfillment provider built for modern DTC brands. They provide warehousing, pick/pack, global shipping, and inventory management across a distributed network. Their entire brand is about making enterprise-level logistics accessible to smaller ecommerce teams. What sets them apart is the combination of tech-first operations and nationwide 2-day coverage without requiring brands to manage multiple 3PL relationships.
Their content marketing revolves around SEO-rich educational content, especially blogs and guides that help founders understand shipping costs, packaging decisions, and inventory planning. They publish a lot of case studies that spotlight growth stories from emerging DTC brands. This works because they meet founders right at the discovery stage, so people searching “how to reduce fulfillment costs” or “best 3PL for Shopify” naturally land on ShipBob.
2. Flowspace
Flowspace leans into being the go-to logistics partner for brands that started in DTC but suddenly needed to move product into retail and wholesale. Instead of acting like a generic warehouse operator, they position themselves as the smart, flexible solution that helps brands scale without the usual chaos. Their whole pitch is: “We’ll handle the messy logistics stuff so you can focus on growth.” With their network tools, analytics, and access to the right fulfillment nodes, they make the jump into retail feel way less intimidating.
Content-wise, Flowspace invests in industry reports, retail-readiness guides, and explainers for brands transitioning from pure ecommerce into wholesale. They also create webinars and co-marketing content with retail platforms and commerce tools. This strategy works because the audience are brands moving into wholesale distribution, and they are hungry for authoritative, reliable information. By owning that educational space, Flowspace becomes the “trusted advisor” for brands navigating complex retail logistics.
My approach to doing content marketing for 3PL providers
I use a very simple approach to content marketing for 3PL providers (and for virtually any other industry that my clients are in). It is called the Knowledge – Narrative approach.
Put simply, it’s about creating two types of content:
- Knowledge content, which answers questions and solves problems that your potential clients have. This type of content is usually optimized for SEO.
- Narrative content, which is basically just thought leadership content that showcases the philosophy and unique insights/POV that your brand believes in thanks to your experience in the industry. This type of content is meant to establish your brand as the expert.
A combination of both approach gives you the best of both worlds.
- Knowledge content brings in new audiences through SEO. Publication content keeps that audience engaged by showing thought leadership and perspective.
- Knowledge content is algorithm-friendly because it satisfies Google’s need for structure, clarity, and depth. Publication content is audience-friendly because it satisfies the reader’s need for voice and authenticity.
For 3PL providers, my Knowledge-style content can be topics like how freight workflows operate and how tracking systems work, while my Publication content can be thought leadership on logistics strategy and insights on transportation and supply chain trends.
3PL Content Marketing: Should you DIY or Outsource?
3PL content marketing always starts with the same tension: you know content is essential to educate your values and build trust, but producing it consistently takes more time than you expected. So the real question isn’t just “DIY or outsource?” but “Which pieces should you handle internally, and which should you hand off so the whole content engine actually moves?”
Doing content yourself has some real advantages because you operate in a deeply operational, highly specialized industry:
- No one understands the fulfillment challenges your shippers run into, or the nuances of logistics contracts better than you do.
- When you create your own content, the operational experience shows. Prospects can instantly tell when the writer has actually worked inside a warehouse or managed logistics workflows, not just researched them from the outside. That’s what makes DIY 3PL content feel more grounded and believable.
- You also keep full control over your tone, positioning, and how you communicate your differentiators, which matters when every 3PL claims “fast shipping” and “great support.”
- And in the short term, writing a handful of pieces yourself is usually cheaper, and you can turn them around quickly based on the conversations you’re already having with prospects and customers.
But the downsides of DIY show up fast. High-quality content requires research, writing, editing, visuals, formatting, SEO, and distribution, which is a lot for a team already buried in operations. Most 3PL leaders start strong, then disappear into peak season, onboarding, or warehouse escalations, leaving months-long gaps between posts. That inconsistency kills momentum and makes it impossible to get the compounding SEO and demand-gen benefits content is supposed to deliver.
On top of that, operational expertise doesn’t automatically translate into clear, effective marketing. Many 3PLs create content that explains logistics accurately but doesn’t actually drive leads or help prospects make buying decisions. You know how it goes: logistics pros aren’t always natural marketers. And as you grow, DIY becomes nearly impossible to scale.
This is where outsourcing becomes a real advantage:
- A good 3PL-focused content agency can keep a steady cadence — something that’s nearly impossible to maintain internally when ops get busy. They make sure your blog, LinkedIn, newsletters, and landing pages stay active even when you’re putting out fires on the warehouse floor.
- You also get people who think about content structure, messaging, and revenue every day — experts who can translate your operational knowledge into content prospects actually want to read (and search engines want to rank).
- On top of writing, an agency typically brings strategy, SEO, keyword research, and buyer-journey planning — all the pieces that make content actually convert, not just exist.
At scale, this kind of structured, strategic output almost always generates more pipeline, better visibility, and more consistent inbound interest than the ad-hoc DIY approach.
Choosing the content marketing agency for 3PL providers
Okay, since I’m writing this article, this is going to be quite a self-promo. But Perceptric is born out of my deep understanding of what’s lacking in the way content marketing is done in many 3PL providers. I saw how:
- Pain point 1: Content team is too disconnected from the Sales team to effectively collaborate and create content that really drives Sales.
- Pain point 2: Content team doesn’t focus enough on Bottom-of-the-funnel queries and topics that drive revenue. They chase entry-level keywords that may bring in tons of traffic (but none of them have the pain point that your products/services are solving).
- Pain point 3: Content writers tend to have not enough subject matter knowledge to write content for such a highly technical field.
That’s why I create Perceptric to solve those pain points for content teams in 3PL providers. We’re committed to crafting exceptional content that rises above the noise.
Here’s how I do content marketing differently:
- I use the Knowledge – Narrative approach to balance between SEO and thought leadership content
- I focus on creating content for the bottom-of-the-funnel that answers very specific pain points that your customers are having.
- I also help you build thought-leader/opinion content pieces (sourced from experts in your field) that reflects what your brand believes in. Content marketing, at the highest level, becomes brand building itself.
- Finally, I help you distribute those content pieces by repurposing them into formats suitable for social media
If you’re looking for a content marketing partner who genuinely gets what it means to do marketing for 3PL providers, I’d love to help! Let’s have a chat to discuss your content needs.
3PL provider marketing Frequently Asked Question
1. Why is content marketing important for 3PL providers?
Content marketing helps 3PL providers break down routing, fulfillment, and carrier performance—key topics shippers research heavily. Strong insights drive more RFQs.
2. What’s the biggest mistake 3PL providers make with content?
Many 3PL providers chase broad logistics content but ignore high-intent topics like rates, SLAs, and lane reliability that shippers actually search. Start with decision-driving content first.
3. How should 3PL providers measure content marketing?
Beyond traffic and engagement, {Industry keywords} should track sales-related outcomes rather than vanity metrics like traffic. This includes:
- Number of leads generated
- Deals/conversions attributed to content
- Deals/conversions influenced by articles
4. What type of content works best for 3PL providers?
For 3PL providers, BOFU queries like “e-commerce fulfillment pricing” convert fastest. Then expand into logistics strategy content.
