by Fronetics | Oct 11, 2017 | Blog, Content Marketing, Current Events, Marketing
As peer recommendation becomes increasingly important to B2B buying decisions, user review sites can make or break a business.
How often do you consider going to a much-hyped summer movie but change your mind when a friend shares the terrible Rotten Tomatoes reviews? According to Quartz Media, many a summer movie has proven more “bust” than “blockbuster” after negative feedback on the movie review site.
Just as Rotten Tomatoes can sink a would-be summer blockbuster, user-review websites can have a toxic effect on your business.
B2B buyers are increasingly relying on peer recommendations in the purchase process. In fact, 67% of those surveyed in Demand Gen’s 2017 B2B Buyers Survey reported that peer reviews are an important part of evaluating a list of solution providers.
Third-party user review sites as peer recommendations
Third-party user review sites function like peer reviews, particularly in the B2B space, where a buyer can’t always get a good vendor recommendation at a neighborhood dinner party. They need industry peers that have experience with these vendors to provide honest feedback.
So when someone leaves positive feedback about your business on one of these third-party sites, it’s a huge win for you. Potential buyers will see your customer’s kind words and form a positive association with your brand name. It can be the difference in winning a new customer’s business.
Dealing with negative user reviews
While your business will benefit greatly from positive reviews, it’s important to acknowledge that not all reviews will be favorable. You need a strategy for dealing with negative reviews. Here are a few tips:
1) Ignoring a bad review won’t make it go away.
Take the time to respond to criticism online, publicly if possible. Acknowledge the concerns of the reviewer, offer solutions, and invite them to contact you directly to resolve the issue. Negative reviews don’t have to be disaster — they can even be an opportunity for growth.
2) Learn from your mistakes.
This one may seem obvious, but you’d be surprised how often business don’t take negative reviews seriously, only to make the same damaging mistakes over and over again. If the reviewer has a valid concern about your product or service, take the time to address it internally.
3) Encourage more reviews.
Reviews are a way to empower your customers, and they represent vast opportunities for your business. Seek them out!
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by Fronetics | Oct 9, 2017 | Blog, Content Marketing, Marketing, Social Media, Talent
As peer influence becomes increasingly important in B2B buying decisions, empowering employee brand ambassadors will benefit your bottom line.
I recently attended a dinner party where I met a new acquaintance. We talked about our families, our hobbies and, of course, our jobs. She recently started working for a small business about which she was tangibly passionate. After listening to her talk, I went home, immediately started following the company on social media, and purchased some products.
Some companies are overlooking their greatest marketing tool: their employees. That woman made a big impression on me and actually influenced a sale. The experience reflects a trend that’s also growing in the B2B space: the impact of peer influence on buying decisions. In fact, 68% of B2B buyers say they give credence to peer reviews in the purchase process.
Imagine the number of people you could reach through each employee’s peer network. It’s a massive opportunity.
I’ve written lately about the rise of influencer marketing. It’s a strategy B2B businesses are starting to understand and use to their advantage. But you don’t need a Kardashian or even an important industry professional to get started. Employees are your most natural, ready-made influencers.
Here are 3 reasons to invest in making your employees brand ambassadors.
3 benefits of employee brand ambassadors
1. Increased social media reach
According to a study conducted by the MSL Group, employee advocates are connected to 10X as many people as their brand on social media, and can increase the reach of brand content by 561%. If your employees are posting about your company on social media, they’re reaching a much wider audience than your company page is.
While 57% of companies have a LinkedIn company page, 94% of B2B buyers use LinkedIn to distribute content. If your employees are posting company content to their personal LinkedIn accounts, imagine the potential range your brand has to reach new audiences. And these people aren’t hearing it from your corporate page. They’re hearing it from a peer connection. That’s definitely more powerful.
2. Increased brand engagement
When it comes to increasing brand engagement, there is no better place to start than with your own employees. Peer influence is a natural extension of employees who believe in your company and its mission.
While only 3% of employees share company-relevant content on social media, they actually drive a 32% increase in engagement. And their advocacy has a greater impact their peers’ buying decisions than you might imagine. Studies show that leads gathered as a result of employee advocacy convert 7X more often than other leads.
3. Elevated employee (and company) performance
While your employees are advocating for your company, they will also benefit from their new role as brand ambassadors. They will be more engaged and invested in their jobs. And the additional responsibility will foster a sense of pride and professional growth.
That pride translates to greater productivity. Companies with engaged employees outperform those without by up to 202%. But that’s not all! Companies with highly engaged employees saw a 20% increase in sales and a 10% in customer ratings.
Empowering your employees
Successfully reframing your employees as brand ambassadors requires creating a culture that empowers and incentivizes employee participation. Offer them the appropriate training or knowledge. Ask them to complete specific tasks (e.g., sharing company content), and give them room to be creative in their ambassadorship as well. Make sure you regularly engage them and thank them for their help.
Keep in mind: Employees are much more likely to participate if what you’re asking them to do is seen as complementary, not supplementary, to their workload. Make sure you are appropriately compensating them for any activity outside of normal working hours to avoid resentment. And, most importantly, keep the dialogue open. You never know how impactful your employee brand ambassadors can be.
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by Fronetics | Oct 3, 2017 | Blog, Content Marketing, Marketing, Social Media, Strategy
Learn how a mobile advertising network and an inbound marketing agency tried Quora as a marketing tool.
Last month, I gave you some tips on how supply chain and logistics marketers can use Quora to build their brands. If you’ve forgotten why you should be incorporating Quora into your marketing strategy, here’s a quick recap:
- Research: Quora offers amazing insight into what thought leaders in the supply chain and logistics industries are focused on. Just by tuning into the conversation, you can gain extremely valuable knowledge.
- Connections: This social media platform gives you a perfect space to connect with peers in your industry and with potential buyers, as well.
- Reputation building: Quora is one of the best tools out there for reputation building. It allows you to participate in and contribute to conversations that can shape the future of your industry. Using this platform effectively gives you the opportunity to become a resource for others in your industry and for your target buyers — and there’s no better reputation builder than that.
Plenty of business are already using Quora extremely effectively, seeing ROI and more. But supply chain and logistics companies have yet to jump on this untapped opportunity. Let’s take a look at a few success stories.
2 B2B companies successfully using Quora
Kiip
This mobile advertising network has a unique business model that “redefines how brands connect with consumers.” Back in 2014, the marketing team did a series of experiments — one of which was answering questions on Quora — to figure out which growth strategies would be most beneficial for the business model. Read about Kiip’s Quora experiment here.
Kevin Fishner, Kiip’s director of growth, said that his goal in answering Quora questions was to “build our brand presence in the mobile advertising space while driving quality leads to our site.” He offers the important insight that there is a fine line between offering valuable answers and blatantly pitching your product.
“If the question directly pertained to Kiip,” Fishner says, “I’d drop a link at the bottom of my answer. If it was a more generic mobile advertising question, I’d use insights from our campaigns at Kiip and leave it at that.”
Fishner points out that answering questions thoughtfully takes a significant time investment. But in the end, this investment is worth it for your business in all kinds of ways.
As you join the Quora conversation, keep Fishner’s insights in mind. Promoting your brand isn’t always about pitching your product. Becoming a thought leader can be just beneficial, if not more so, for your brand and, ultimately, for your bottom line.
IMPACT
Impact is an inbound marketing agency based out of Connecticut. Earlier this year, IMPACT blogger Carolyn Edgecomb wrote about how the company used Quora marketing to build brand awareness. Like Fishner, she points to following core advice for using this platform: “Hustling or selling is exactly what you shouldn’t be doing on Quora. Instead, aim to spread knowledge.”
Based on IMPACT’s experience on the site, she suggest that “by regularly engaging with other members, you’re able to gain key insights from leading experts, target your audience, and even repurpose your content while answering and asking questions.”
For IMPACT, Quora was less about generating ROI and more about “increasing brand awareness and establishing thought leadership.”
Supply chain and logistics companies can take inspiration and insight from these two Quora marketing success stories. The field is largely open. Start looking for questions you can answer, become a part of the conversation, and aim to become a thought leader.
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by Fronetics | Sep 18, 2017 | Blog, Content Marketing, Marketing
Use these 6 tips for more mobile-friendly emails to improve recipient engagement rates and to promote profitable customer action.
I feel like my mornings probably mimic most of your mornings: My alarm goes off. I reach for my cell phone and check my email. I will check my email again while I’m eating breakfast — and possibly a third time while I’m in the drive-through waiting for my coffee.
With the explosion of smartphones, more and more people are taking to their phones over their computers to check email. It’s not hard to understand why; our phones are with us all day long. In fact, 54% of emails are now being read on a mobile device, a 40% increase in the last five years.
When a majority of your audience is reading your marketing emails on their mobile devices, it’s imperative that you’re creating emails that are optimized for mobile viewing.
Here are 6 essential tips for creating mobile-friendly email campaigns.
6 tips for creating mobile-friendly emails
1) Short and sweet
When writing copy for email, your content should be to the point. But this is especially true for mobile-friendly emails. Small screen size and increased likelihood the user is multi-tasking are just two reasons why efficiency is key.
Create messages that are easy for the eye to scan. Use bullet points or short paragraphs to keep the reader engaged. Strip out anything that’s not totally necessary, and drive recipients to landing pages for more information.
2) Less is more
Not all mobile devices include your images. Andriod users will find their email images are off by default unless they change their settings. It’s also important to remember that large image files take longer to download. And nothing drives people away like slow load times.
What does this mean for mobile-friendly emails? Your content needs to be front and center, with less reliance on images.
3) Get to the point
A typical desktop inbox displays about 60 characters of a subject line, while mobile devices show just 25-30 characters. Mobile-friendly emails place the offer or call-to-action at the beginning of the subject line where it’s more likely to be seen.
4) Get responsive
We’ve all opened an email or webpage on a mobile device and had to squint to read it. Web content designed for desktop screens are barely legible when shrunk down to this size.
Try using a responsive template to ensure that readers are viewing your email the way you intended. Responsive emails use fluid tables and images to make content flow across different screen sizes.
5) Button it up
I know it’s not just me and my fat fingers: Links are difficult to click on mobile devices! Instead try using buttons for your call-to-action.
Make sure any CTA buttons are toward the top of your email, so readers know what you want them to do right away. Also, buttons should be large in size and surrounded by plenty of white space so readers don’t accidentally click on something else.
6) Pop-up quiz
After making your email as mobile-friendly as possible, don’t forget the most important step: testing. Send out test emails to your coworkers that use different devices to ensure that your emails look exactly like you want. With 98.4% of users reading email on Andriod and iOS, those operating systems should be your main focus.
Don’t lose readers before they’ve had a chance to open, read, and engage with your emails. Use these 6 tips for more mobile-friendly emails to help improve engagement rates and profitable customer action.
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by Fronetics | Sep 11, 2017 | Blog, Content Marketing, Marketing, Social Media, Strategy
Social prospecting can help logistics and supply chain companies identify and engage with leads on social media in a genuine — and highly effective — way.
Social media should be an integral part of your marketing strategy. You know it helps build brand awareness, gather market intelligence, discover customer problems, and influence purchasing decisions. But your lead generation efforts should also include the use of social platforms. It’s a practice called social prospecting, which can be highly effective in identifying new prospects.
What is social prospecting?
With more than 2 billion monthly active users on Facebook and over 328 million monthly active users on Twitter, smart marketers know there’s more potential than ever to use social platforms to get their name out there, spread their content, and draw more people to their site. Hey, it’s your job to make people aware of what your company can offer, right? Right.
That’s where social prospecting comes in. It involves scouring the social web, identifying potential prospects for your business, engaging them with content, and getting those potential prospects to your sales team. “Social prospecting is the art of listening to people, not mentions or keywords,” writes Maggie Hibma for HubSpot.
Social media isn’t just for recreational purposes anymore. More than half (53%) of B2B buyers report using social media to research purchases, in fact. Social prospecting allows you to be proactive in finding all of the considerable number of social-media-using prospects who are looking for you, too.
But as with any initiative, social prospecting requires commitment. In order to find new leads, social prospecting needs to become a part of your daily routine. The end results will be quality leads that are already committed to your brand because of the connection you have created through social channels.
Creating positive impressions
The secret behind successful social prospecting is creating and distributing content that shows that you and your company genuinely care about your clients and prospects. It’s about ditching the ‘sales’ game and working to establish your brand as an industry leader that has a connection to your community and a lot of valuable insight to share.
Make your content about your target consumers: What do they need to know, struggle with, or want to learn more about? By distributing this content across social channels to foster sharing, conversation and engagement, you’ll gain influence with your audience (and their networks) and make a positive impression.
Prospecting vs. spamming
The definition of spam is “indiscriminately.” It means “in a random manner” or “in a way that does not show care or judgment.” This is the opposite of how social prospecting should work. The connection that you create with your prospects should be anything but random.
Think about the number of possible prospects on social media right now. Facebook just topped 2 billion active users monthly, and Instagram is pulling in over 250 million daily active users. These massive numbers scream opportunity — but only if you are putting your time and effort into the right people, on the right channels, at the right time.
Sounds complicated? It doesn’t have to be. If you already have a social media presence, that’s step one.
Fronetics’ recently updated Social Prospecting Workbook guides you through using social listening to generate new leads for your business. We’ve identified the quickest way to find potential customers on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and Google+. Every worksheet includes:
- Short preparatory work to make the actual prospecting easy
- Visual instructions on how and where to find prospects
- Pro tips that will help you get the best results
- Prescriptions (Marketing Rx) for success
- Take-home exercises for follow-up prospecting
Download it now, and let us know what you think!
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