![12 Steps to an Effective Content Strategy for the Supply Chain [Slideshow]](https://www.fronetics.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/12-steps-to-an-effective-content-strategy-1.jpg)
by Fronetics | Jun 26, 2017 | Blog, Content Marketing, Marketing, Strategy, Supply Chain
Learn how to stand out from the crowd with a content strategy that drives profitable customer action.
According to a survey of supply chain and logistics marketers by Fronetics, 86% are using content as a marketing tool. Respondents report using content marketing primarily in order to:
- Increase brand awareness (96%)
- Generate leads (83%)
- Establish the company as an industry leader (74%)
- Engage customers (74%)
By consistently creating and distributing valuable, relevant content, you can attract a clearly defined audience — and, ultimately, drive profitable customer action. But how do you know what your audience will find valuable and relevant?
Throwing spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks certainly won’t get your desired results. Since 3 billion pieces of content are shared online everyday, you have to be strategic and thoughtful about your content in order to stand out from the noise (and your competitors). It takes time, careful research, and strategy to build a content marketing program that helps achieve your business goals.
At Fronetics, we specialize in helping supply chain and logistics companies create and execute digital and content marketing strategies. So we’ve learned a few tricks of the trade over the years. For example, did you know that explicitly designating a specific person to lead your content strategy can improve its effectiveness by 40%? Or that documenting your strategy can make it three times as effective?
We’ve put together a quick slideshow specifically for supply chain and logistics businesses who are looking to learn about content marketing and build a content strategy that will be effective in growing brand awareness, generating leads, engaging customers, and establishing their brands as industry leaders.
12 Steps to an Effective Content Strategy will help your business identify the key steps to getting the most out of your content marketing efforts. Download the slideshow to get started growing your business with content!
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by Fronetics | Jun 15, 2017 | Blog, Content Marketing, Logistics, Marketing, Social Media, Supply Chain
A global marketing survey finds that many businesses are focusing on these initiatives and challenges.
As more supply chain and logistics companies understand the benefits of content marketing, more are turning to this type of marketing strategy to build brand awareness and grow business. One of the functions of this blog is to update you on various marketing trends to help you keep pace with the rapidly evolving digital marketing landscape.
The State of Inbound has been tracking global marketing and sales trends for the last eight years, with a particular focus on inbound marketing. (Content marketing is a form of inbound marketing.) The 2017 survey included more than 6,300 professionals at from 141 countries — so it’s very comprehensive.
There’s a lot to look through in the full report, but I’ve pulled out a few of the most important takeaways that speak to trends we’re finding most relevant to our supply chain clients.
5 takeaways from the State of Inbound 2017
1) Inbound marketing results in higher ROI.
The vast majority of respondents (46%) agree that inbound marketing helps them achieve higher ROI, as opposed to 12% who say outbound marketing achieves a higher return. (For the record, 23% can’t or don’t calculate ROI, and 18% don’t know.)
If you’re not convinced about the benefits of an inbound strategy like content marketing, here are 5 reasons supply chain and logistics businesses need to use content marketing.
2) There is a growing chasm between leadership and employees’ perception of success.
Executives who set the strategy and vision for their companies perceive things differently than the employees executing that vision. For example, while 69% of C-suite executives believe their organization’s marketing strategy is effective, only 55% of individual contributors do.
Are executives seeing benefits of marketing they’re not sharing with the team? Or, do they have misconceptions about how things are working? Either way, there seems to be room for improvement regarding transparency and communication from the top down and bottom up.
3) Gaining customers is a top challenge.
When asked about their top marketing challenges, 63% of respondents agree generating traffic and leads was their biggest concern. (Proving ROI of marketing activities was second with 40%.)
We hear this all the time. Our first response is usually, if you want more leads, focus on brand awareness. Secondly, it’s important to make sure your content strategy closely aligns with your business goals and that you’re creating content that suits your target audience at various stages of the buyer’s journey.
4) Video marketing is the next big investment.
When asked about expansion to new content distribution channels in the next 12 months, respondents most often said they plan to add YouTube (48%) and Facebook video (46%). This reflects the growing popularity of video as a content medium — and YES, it can work for the supply chain and logistics industries.
We’ve written extensively about this topic. Here are a few posts that may interest you if you’re curious how video might fit in your content strategy.
5) Companies need to focus on sales and marketing alignment.
Only 22% of respondents say their sales and marketing relationship is tightly aligned. That’s a big problem.
Sales and marketing teams that are aligned perform better. In this survey, for example, sales teams closely aligned with their marketing counterparts ranked the quality of marketing-sourced leads much higher than those that were rarely aligned or misaligned. That shows that when marketing and sales work together, everyone gets more of what they’re looking for — namely, leads!
Looking at these 5 trends, how does your company line up? Do these challenges resonate, or are you focused on other initiatives and problems?
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by Fronetics | Jun 8, 2017 | Blog, Content Marketing, Marketing, Social Media
Word of mouth happens organically, but these three tips will help your business get the most out of this kind of recommendation.
For as long as I can remember, I’ve been relying on friends and family for recommendations on everything from cars to coffee makers. The oldest — and perhaps the most effective — form of marketing is word of mouth (WOM). Today it’s easier than ever to research opinions on products and services through social media and review sites.
Buyers are no different. They value the opinions of peers and colleagues. In fact, B2B buyers rank it among their top three resources for information. And, in general, 82% of Americans seek recommendations when making a purchase of any kind.
It makes sense: User reviews offer an unbiased, credible experience regarding a company’s products or services. So potential customers do not have to rely exclusively on information the organization provides. What’s more, reviewers often share more than just opinions; they frequently include related tips or good-to-knows, which offer extra value for the reader.
You know buyers are out there talking about your company, so make their chatter work for you. Here are three tips to turn word-of-mouth marketing into leads.
3 ways to make word of mouth work for you
1. Identify target influencers
More and more consumers are turning to third-party reviews over brand messaging. In fact, data from MuseFind shows that 92% of consumers trust an influencer more than an advertisement or traditional celebrity endorsement.
Influencers have established credibility with their followers and the ability to sway opinions. By identifying key influencers in your sector or industry, you can begin to foster a partnership and help drive the messaging about your brand and products. Influencer marketing drives brand awareness and builds relationships with your target audience.
2. Talk about the exceptional
Social media has allowed word-of-mouth referrals to go one step further. With digital reviews, companies have a new responsibility to respond to customer comments, both good and bad. This creates an opportunity to demonstrate exceptional customer service.
Be available, be responsive, and be attentive to customers who leave comments on social media and third-party review sites. This will create a loyalty that translates into customers that care deeply about your product and are much more likely to share with their peers and coworkers. It also allows users checking your social media or third-party review sites to witness your exceptional customer service firsthand.
3. Make reviews easy
The easiest way to get people talking about your company is to give them the opportunity to do so. Seek out customer reviews on specific products or processes and share them far and wide.
One unique way of capturing this information is using a platform like Yotpo. By directly sending customers an email with a built-in review form, this company is able to collect quality feedback in the form of customer reviews or user-uploaded images. These credible experiences can be shared as a marketing tool on your website, social media platforms, and elsewhere.
B2B marketers need to be thinking about the power of word-of-mouth recommendations. There is no shortage of thoughts and opinions being shared online, so use these opportunities to your advantage.
Have some good ideas on how to utilize word-of-mouth recommendations and customer reviews? We’d love to hear them!
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by Fronetics | May 24, 2017 | Blog, Content Marketing, Marketing
Ready to give up on content marketing? Chances are, you haven’t given it a fair shot.
You’re three or maybe even six months into your new content marketing program. Congratulations! You’re probably noticing an uptick in web traffic, social reach, and other engagement metrics like time on page. You’re right on track! But you have no leads or sales to speak of. And whether that’s got you nervous that you’re doing something wrong, or just has your boss breathing down your neck to get some results FAST, I’m here to tell you: Now is NOT the time to give up on content marketing.
In fact, giving up now is just about the worst thing you can do. You’ve already made the majority of the investment without giving your program time to deliver your return.
Why does content marketing take so dang long to work?
Content marketing is a long-term solution that helps businesses build brand awareness, grow their audience, and generate new leads and sales. But it takes time and effort to achieve results. You shouldn’t give up on content marketing before the seeds you sow have time to bear fruit.
Just how long will it take for your content marketing strategy to yield results? Well, that really depends on your business and your goals, but you can count on at least six months. (Joe Pulizzi, founder of the Content Marketing Institute, says more like 18.) The point is, content marketing is not a magic, overnight solution. The reason reflects why content marketing is effective in the first place.
4 reasons why it’s NOT time to give up on content marketing
1) Developing your strategy takes time.
Only 11% of companies without a documented content marketing strategy find their efforts to be successful, compared to 60% of companies with a strategy in place. (That number rises to 86% when the company designates someone to lead the strategy.) The significant increase in effectiveness can be attributed to the careful thought and research that goes into building a strategy.
You will need several months to build the foundation of your content marketing plan if it is to be effective. You need time to research the kind of content that resonates most with your audience and to truly understand the (very specific) demographic that finds value in what your company offers. Then you need time to determine and test which distribution channels will most effectively reach your target audience, to discern a plan for content production, and to build out an editorial calendar reflective of your strategy.
Without getting all of these pieces precisely right, you’ll waste an enormous amount of energy and resources working on an ineffective strategy. Take the time to evaluate the market for your business and its content marketing strategy, and you’ll realize results in time.
2) Becoming an authority takes time.
The goal of your content marketing efforts should be to be a consistent source of information and value to your audience, who gradually will come to trust your authority and reward you with their business when they are ready to make a purchase. And establishing yourself as an expert doesn’t happen overnight.
Consistency is key for two reasons. For one, the average B2B buyer consumes between two to five pieces of content before making a purchase decision. If your content is old, arbitrary, contradictory, or otherwise unreliable, buyers will chose a different vendor whose content is more trustworthy. Consistent and consistently good content keeps your target audience engaged and builds your credibility with them.
Secondly, search engines rank websites based on several factors, and one of the most important is consistency. If your company blogs every other month, compared to companies that post several days a week, your posts will be penalized in search results. And since very few readers click beyond the top five search results, you’re drastically reducing your organic search potential.
As a SumAll article put it, “Whether getting traffic to your blog or your content ranked in the search engines, it doesn’t happen overnight, but instead by repeatedly creating and distributing quality content on a frequent basis for the long-term.”
3) Building your audience takes time.
The B2B buying process is becoming longer and more complex because the majority of buyers (82%) are using more sources to research and evaluate products and services, and they are spending more time in the research phase itself. In fact, 71% of B2B researchers start with a generic search — rather than searching for a particular company — and do an average of 12 searches before even engaging with a specific brand’s site. They are 57% of the way down the sales path by this point, meaning they have already spent a fair amount of time educating themselves with the enormous amount of information available to them on the internet.
This means you need to allow your target audience time to find you and complete thorough research about you and your competitors before you even realize that the lead exists. And likely there will be more time before a sale takes place.
Content marketing is much more about lead nurturing than producing instant results. As you build your reputation as a valuable source of information, you will simultaneously build a loyal following of readers and content consumers who continue to return to you for knowledge and, ultimately, purchases. Relationship-building is not a streamlined process, but it does foster the ever-valuable repeat business that will have a greater impact on your bottom line than a one-and-done sale.
4) Your sales cycle takes time.
Unfortunately, content marketing cannot decrease the length of your sales cycle. Thus, you can’t expect to see the fruits of your labors (in terms of dollars) until at least one cycle is complete.
There should be, however, hints along the way that your efforts are working. Metrics like increased website traffic, email registrations, and social reach offer clues that more potential customers are finding your business in their research. You should take these signs and continually evolve your strategy to accommodate what is working for your business.
Also keep in mind that while content marketing can have an enormous impact on generating and nurturing leads, it does not deliver sales on a silver platter. Sales teams still play a major role in building on those relationships and closing deals.
Please don’t give up on content marketing before it’s had time to play out. You’ll not only lose out on your initial investment, but also all the leads and sales that will eventually come your way once your program has had time to develop fully.
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by Fronetics | May 22, 2017 | Blog, Content Marketing, Marketing, Social Media
B2B enterprises with 1000+ employees face unique content marketing challenges that can hinder a program’s overall success.
Bigger isn’t always better. Or, maybe I should say, bigger companies don’t always have it easy.
Big marketing budgets and a big marketing staff have their perks — but they also have their share of challenges. The Content Marketing Institute’s 2017 B2B Enterprise Content Marketing Report, which surveys B2B companies with over 1,000 employees (enterprise marketers), brings many of these issues to light.
The challenges these enterprises face, of course, are quite different from those of their small- and mid-sized counterparts. Here are some of the top differences:
- 72% of B2B marketers agree that their organization is focused more on building long-term relationships than getting quick results. Only 58% of B2B enterprise marketers agree with that statement.
- 52% of B2B marketers agree that their leadership team gives ample time to produce content marketing results (which typically take longer than other marketing approaches). Only 38% of B2B enterprise employees agree that leadership supports their longer efforts.
- 69% of B2B marketers agree that their organization is almost always or frequently focused on creating content for an audience, instead of their brand. 47% of B2B enterprise marketers feel their focus on the brand.
Pressure to produce results quickly is a death sentence for content marketing. And being forced to create content for a brand, rather than a specific audience, can be detrimental to content marketing results. Yes, challenges facing these enterprise marketers are often as large as the companies for which they work.
Let’s take a look at some of the reasons why that is, and a few solutions for solving them.
3 enterprise-level content marketing challenges
1) Organization
While the CMI Report found that 88% of B2B enterprise companies are using content marketing, a mere 2% felt their content marketing strategy was “sophisticated.” Organization might have something to do with that.
Most enterprise organizations have staff that are responsible for multiple brands and product lines throughout the company. Their time is split developing strategies for different marketing programs. Smaller operations, on the other hand, can focus on a single brand, devoting time to developing and implementing a comprehensive strategy that the team can live and breathe — instead of toggling back and forth between programs all day long.
Solution: Outsourcing can be an enterprise’s best friend. A third-party vendor can dedicate itself fully to creating a content marketing strategy that best fits individual products or brands. And the vendor can even drive the strategy, if the enterprise’s resources are so taxed. Check out these 13 stats about outsourcing content marketing to learn more.
2) Clarity
It’s difficult to deem a program effective if there is no clear vision of success looks like. Yet, almost half (45%) of B2B enterprise companies feel their organizations lack clarity for benchmarking success. You can see the problem there.
Oftentimes, especially in larger organizations, the C-suite has a very different idea about what makes a content marketing program successful (i.e., leads and sales), whereas the marketers developing the strategy know that other benefits (e.g., increased brand awareness, social reach) have long-term value.
Solution: Education is key here. For one, set realistic expectations about the length of time it will take to generate tangible results from your content marketing program. Further, marketers need to learn to speak their bosses’ language when it comes to winning support for content marketing. They should regularly report on all progress to show how, over time, “smaller” victories (like growing social media engagement) translates to leads and sales. Check out our Monthly Marketing Reporting Template for some ideas.
3) Content Distribution
As more organizations recognize the benefits of content marketing, they’re ramping up production of content. In fact, 63% of survey enterprise-level respondents reported increasing the amount of content they produce from 2016. That’s great, but — the question is — does more content definitely equal better results?
The answer is not necessarily. Content distribution plays a huge role in getting the most out of what you’re producing. And here’s where the enterprise-level marketing problem lies: 94% of B2B enterprises are using email as their main distribution channel.
I’ve written before about how organizations spend too much time creating marketing emails. I believe organizations tend to stick with this content distribution channel because they see immediate results in the form of open rates and click-throughs. But the reality is that these companies are trying to squeeze water from the same well over and over again. At some point, they’re going to run out.
Solution: Don’t get me wrong: Email marketing is an important component of a well-rounded content distribution strategy. But so are publishing on social media and blogging (on your website and others!). These distribution channels help you reach new prospects who are searching for products and services like yours. Make sure your content distribution strategy includes a variety of platforms instead of just relying on one (like email) or just a few.
It is important to note that there are many B2B enterprise organizations that have highly successful content marketing strategies. Companies like Cisco and Boeing, who are committed to content marketing, have created ways to define what a successful content marketing program looks like and to effectively measure content marketing ROI.
The differences between B2B enterprise content marketing and B2B content marketing overall are tangible but not defining. These larger organizations have the ability to make changes that can redefine their content marketing programs and open the door to endless opportunities.
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