by Fronetics | Feb 6, 2017 | Blog, Content Marketing, Marketing, Social Media, Supply Chain
Instagram Stories offer an on-trend platform for delivering targeted content to B2B buyers and building brand awareness with potential customers.
If you haven’t considered using Instagram as part of your social media marketing program, it might be time to change your mind.
As of December 2016, Instagram had over 600 million monthly active users, about half of whom are between the ages of 18 and 29. Why should supply chain and other B2B marketers pay attention to the social networking preferences and behaviors of millennials? Because 73% of millennial workers are involved in decisions to purchase products or services for their companies. Welcome to the new generation of B2B buyers.
What’s more, Instagram’s recently launched feature, Instagram Stories, offers marketers a new platform for content delivery that is wildly popular with this generation. But unlike other networks with short-term video-sharing opportunities (ahem, Snapchat), Stories can have a polished, professional feel that well suits B2B brands.
What are Instagram Stories?
Instagram Stories are sequences of content that a user posts to his/her Instagram account over a 24-hour period. Besides photos, Stories can include videos, live and prerecorded, as well as Boomerangs, seconds-long motion clips that play forwards and backwards. The content plays as a continuous feed, creating a narrative about the user’s day — hence the term “Stories.”
Users may also customize their Stories with various design tools. Swipe to explore different filters, or add customizable stickers with time, weather, location, or even holiday greetings. You can also use a drawing tool to create your own masterpiece on your photos or videos.
Audiences can view the Stories of the users they follow within the 24-hour window after they are posted. They can find users with active Stories by scrolling the user icons at the top of the app. Or users can tell their followers that they’ve posted a story by tagging them, which notifies them through a direct message.
How you can supply chain and B2B marketers use Stories?
Instagram Stories aren’t just for friends showing friends what they’ve been up to. They’re a creative content-delivery platform that helps build rapport with followers, grow brand awareness, and educate potential buyers.
Here are 5 ways marketers might use Instagram Stories to engage their target audiences.
1. Deliver special offers and limited sales
Take advantage of this channel of communication to give special offers to followers tuning into your Stories. The time sensitivity of the 24-hour period will urge your buyers to engage with your Story and act quickly before the offer expires.
Direct followers to a special landing page or include a code right in the Story. As Social Media Examiner puts it, “The scarcity of Instagram Stories gives them power.”
JCrew’s promotion of the new Jane in Pink sunglasses offers an example of the clever use of Instagram Stories. The brand posted a combination of GIFs and photos teasing the pink sunglasses before announcing that there were a mere 50 pairs available for purchase through a link in its bio. This caused half of the merchandise to sell out in two hours.
2. Sign in for a takeover
Arrange to take over the Instagram account of a partner company or customer. It’s a fun way to draw attention from an existing, built-in audience. And it provides a mutually beneficial exchange of value for both parties.
As explained by media executive Gary Vaynerchuk, account takeovers offer a “backdoor approach to accessing new demographics.” The strategy is about “deepening relationships, gaining exposure, hacking distribution, and raising awareness.”
What’s more, account takeovers don’t require partners to hand over sensitive login information. Simply send your content to your partner to upload. It’s win-win situation that allows both parties to reach a new audience and share new content with ease.
3. Go behind the scenes
This is a great way to humanize your company and let you customers see and experience your brand personality. Capture candid photos of meetings. Take your followers on an adventure or an offsite task. Have a new product? Share a picture of the early designs or the production process. It’s a way to get followers excited and intrigued as to what happens behind the doors of your company.
Happy Socks, a Swedish sock and underwear retailer and manufacturer, does this well. It features videos of what’s going on in the office, birthday celebrations, and other candid moments.
4. Q&As
Get really personal with your customers by answering their questions via 10-second videos. One of Instagram’s community managers, Jeffrey Gerson, did this and found it to be a great success. This allows your viewers to feel as though they are really being heard since they are watching you talk about their questions as opposed to just reading typed answers online. It’s also a great opportunity to showcase the personalities of your employees and social media team while directly interacting with your audience.
4. At a loss? Ask your followers!
Give the people what they want — They may have some great ideas that you’d never considered. Survey your followers by posting a graphic of some options while leaving it open-ended as well. Have them respond in direct messages or comments with what they want to see from your social media. For example, Red Bull had their audience send the thumbs-up emoji in direct messages through Instagram Chat for the Story topic they most wanted to see published.
These five options provide your team with a starting point to begin exploring Instagram Stories. It’s an exciting tool to add some creativity and have some fun with your social media strategy.
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by Jennifer Hart Yim | Jan 31, 2017 | Blog, Content Marketing, Marketing, Social Media, Strategy
Rival IQ’s Danica Benson discusses the importance of social benchmarking and offers three steps for getting started.
This guest post comes to us from Danica Benson, marketing communications manager at Rival IQ.
Imagine you’re on a little league baseball team. You’re up to bat. You swing and hit, sending the ball far over the second baseman’s head. You take off to first, see the outfielders running to the fences, fly past second base and onto third. The center fielder overthrows the ball as you sprint toward home, kicking dirt into sky behind you. Everyone is screaming, clapping and shouting! A home run! You feel on top of the world!
No matter which league you play in, be it little league or the MLB, a home run is successful. But, what if the pitcher walked you? In little league nobody claps, screams, or cheers. The next batter comes up, and you feel bummed out. But, not necessarily in the MLB. A walk is a strategic move. You’re on base. It’s only one base hit away from scoring position. A walk has the potential to be a game-changer and is considered a success. How is this so?
The benchmark determining success is different in the MLB than in little league. It’s the same performance in both cases, but a different interpretation of success. The same idea applies when measuring your social media activity — what is considered a successful engagement rate, number of followers, or content in one industry isn’t the same as the next.
Benchmarks require context
Benchmarks are key when interpreting data. Organizations of all kinds — large corporations, small privately owned business, nonprofits, and even sports teams — need to measure their performance to see if they’re efforts are leading to success.
Key performance indicators (KPIs) like Net Promoter Score (NPS) at a company, number of clicks on a social post, or a player’s batting average tells someone a lot about what is happening as a result of their activities. But it tells them nothing in terms of whether their efforts are successful, failing, or where to focus to close up those gaps. Why? Because benchmarks are relative.
3 steps to successful social benchmarking
Establishing benchmarks relative to your top competitors, like audience size and engagement rate, are meaningful because you are comparing to others like you who are fighting for the attention of the same audience. Without context, your metrics are what we call a “so what?” metric. We have 1,500 followers on Facebook… so what? Do we need more? Is that a good amount? These numbers only mean something if you have a benchmark for comparison.
At Rival IQ, measuring digital marketing performance begins with setting competitive benchmarks. To develop an effective social media strategy, you need contextual data. Analytics are great, but not if you don’t have context to compare your data. There are a couple of ways to do this: by comparing your organization’s metrics to itself, or by keeping tabs on your competitors. Using these methods, you can compare apples to apples and see growth in your organization, as well as how well you’re doing compared to your competitors.
Step #1: Know YOUR organization’s internal benchmarks
First and foremost, get to know your numbers. Identify your metrics and compare them to how you did last month (MoM) or last year (YoY). You always want to outperform yourself, so these benchmarks give you a base to start from and allow you to see if your activities are resulting in growth. Benchmarks can help you understand where your performance has been in the past, and help you create realistic expectations for the future.
But, what do you do if you don’t have any historical data to work with because you’re just starting up your analytics? I recommend looking at industry benchmarks, which you can find on websites such as Kissmetrics and MailChimp.
Step #2: Know your competitive benchmarks
Measuring your performance against your competitors gives you business intelligence you can use to make better decisions — especially if you’re struggling to earn social media attention. It’s too easy to think that we can just type, “What’s a good engagement rate for Instagram?” in a Google search to find a benchmark that means anything. What you will find are general figures calculated using everyone who uses the platform, which is great if your target audience is everyone who uses Instagram (not likely).
Go deeper than your industry by building your social benchmarks from scratch. Hand-select your direct competitors and look at metrics, such as:
- Which social channels do they use?
- How does the content differ between channels?
- When and how often are they posting on social media?
- What type of content are they sharing? Are they posting updates, photos, videos, live video, .gifs?
- What do their engagement rates look like?
- How many followers do they have?
Setting your social marketing strategy using your own landscape of competitors will give you a realistic, attainable goal. Accurate, relevant benchmarks are the first step in paving the way toward gaining a competitive advantage.
Step #3: Track, test & tweak
Now that you’ve reviewed your organization’s performance and can measure if it’s trending upward (or not), and you have established your benchmarks relative to your competitors, you track, test and tweak.
Track performance
By tracking your performance over time, you will be able to see if your audience is getting bored with your usual posts and may need to change your tactics. By monitoring your competitors, you can learn what content works well and take advantage of opportunities they may be missing.
Never stop testing
Social media is a great place to test things out, like new ads, campaigns, copy, contests, surveys, images, etc. Secondly, they give you feedback, fast! Find out what your audience likes on social first, then learn from your wins and failures. Take what you learn about your audience on social media and apply it to other marketing activities.
Tweak for optimization
This goes hand-in-hand with testing. Once you’ve tested a few things and have identified what’s working, tweak it and test it again to optimize it. Find the sweet spot. Social media is always changing, so there will always be more work to do.
Just as with all good strategies, you have to continually measure success and adjust based on real-world results. Competitive analytics is a great way to set social media benchmarks by basing them on companies you aspire to beat. If you aren’t beating the competition, it might be time to go back to the drawing board.
Originally from the Portland Metro Area, Danica Benson migrated north to work as a marketer in the startup arena. As the marketing communications manager at Rival IQ, she’s bringing her passion to the tech world. Outside of the office, Danica spends her free time on outdoor adventures and exploring the great city of Seattle.
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by Fronetics | Jan 31, 2017 | Blog, Content Marketing, Marketing, Social Media, Strategy
Sales teams can use social media to cultivate relationships with potential buyers, a process called social selling.
With the dawn of the social media age and the exponential increase in choices and information available to buyers, we’ve seen a massive shift in the way B2B sales occur. According to the Harvard Business Review, a striking 84% of B2B sales start not with a salesperson, but with a referral.
As outbound sales become decreasingly effective, peer recommendations are influencing more than 90% of all B2B buying decisions. So how do we make the shift from outbound sales to this new reality? One of the more popular answers is social media.
It’s likely that your organization has some sort of social media marketing strategy in place. But making full use of these platforms requires a more nuanced, well-rounded strategy than blanket social media marketing. It’s time to introduce the idea of “social selling.”
Social media as a sales tool
In a basic sense, social selling is the strategy of adding social media to the sales professional’s toolbox. This means using social platforms to research, prospect, and network by sharing curated educational content and answering questions. The key is building relationships until prospects are ready to buy.
So what’s the difference between social media marketing and social selling, and why is it important? While both are necessary to an integrated marketing and sales strategy, the former is about engaging many — with the goal of increasing brand awareness or promoting a specific product — by producing content that users will ideally share with their networks.
Meanwhile, social selling means producing focused content, and providing personal communication between the salesperson and the buyer. Again, the key is building and cultivating a relationship using social media platforms.
How to start social selling
The benefits of social selling are numerous and significant. For example, according to a LinkedIn survey, B2B buyers are five times more likely to engage with a sales rep who provides new insights about their business or industry. Social media is a powerful engagement tool, giving sales people a platform for sharing these insights.
Here are some steps your sales team can take to implement social selling.
1) Put it in your calendar.
Allot a small portion of your day for social media. It doesn’t take a big time investment to reap the benefits of regular interaction with your prospects.
2) Integrate sales and marketing.
Encourage collaboration between sales and social marketing departments, to make the most of both efforts. HBR suggests that “marketing can train salespeople in social media systems, processes, and best practices.” In addition, sales and marketing should be regularly sharing information to make sure their goals are aligned, and efforts are dovetailing. According to a study by Data Room and Marketo, “sales and marketing alignment can improve sales efforts at closing deals by 67% and help marketing generate 209% more value from their efforts.”
3) Prioritize relationship-building.
Focus your business’ ongoing efforts to building and cultivating quality relationships with prospects. This means building in time every day for personal communication. Make your prospects’ needs your priority.
The bottom line here is building and maintaining relationships. Social media — and social selling — are powerful tools for doing just that.
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![The State of Supply Chains: The Supply Chain Has Gone Digital [Infographic]](https://www.fronetics.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/virtual-reality.jpg)
by Jennifer Hart Yim | Jan 23, 2017 | Big Data, Blog, Data/Analytics, Logistics, Strategy, Supply Chain
2016 was the year of the digital supply chain — here’s a look at how things changed.
This guest post comes to us from Adam Robinson, director of marketing for Cerasis, a top freight logistics company and truckload freight broker.
2016 marched onward with a drive to improve the use of digital technology throughout the supply chain. In our first supply chain trends post, we surmised the previous year’s trends would continue. However, this prediction proved to only touch on how important the digital supply chain would become.
Within four months, the digital transformation had already reached most supply chain organizations. Per GT Nexus, 75% of executives surveyed recognized the digital supply chain as an important factor for the next five years. Meanwhile, 70% have also started processes to implement digital supply chain technologies throughout their companies.
Unfortunately, many supply chain entities continue to hope for a better tomorrow. In other words, the digital supply chain transformation has only been rated as very satisfying for 5% of respondents. In addition, just less than half (48%) of respondents report continued use of traditional technologies exclusively, which include the following:
- Fax machines
- Manual order entry and review
- Land-line phones, not voice over internet protocol (VoIP), which reduces overall costs and downtime
- Email, although beneficial, is susceptible to internet connectivity issues, security breaches and other problems
- Chaotic picking protocols
This infographic, created by GT Nexus, also shows other ways the digital supply chain evolved in 2016.
(Made with Canva)
Essentially, the digital supply chain is essential to gaining and maintaining competitive advantage. Digital technologies, reports Richard Howells of Forbes, including Big Data, analytics, the Internet of Things, social media, and point-of-sale reporting, enable business to know more about consumer needs and wants than ever before. Consequently, they can more accurately respond to changes in product demand across large distances and within infinitesimally small time frames.
Supply chain execs retained fundamentals throughout change.
Innovation is the driving force behind change and improvement in the modern world. Supply chains must evolve to meet an increasing number of omnichannel sales, and technologies must be integrated within existing systems to reach maximum efficiency and productive value.
As explained by Grant Marshbank of VSC Solutions, “The rate of change is not going to slow down. Technology will only delivery […] if it’s implemented with strategy and operations that adhere to best practices.”
Marshbank’s words highlighted the need to focus on fundamental concepts while responding to changes and improvements in the supply chain. For example, an optimized supply chain is good, but it opens more opportunities for errors. Simply putting all an organization’s proverbial eggs into one basket may be risky if appropriate auditing and review measures are not undertaken to ensure continued compliance and accuracy in all orders.
Change is a necessity for businesses, including the supply chain, to grow and expand. Yet many destructive forces can severely undermine a company’s progress. Bad weather, poor hiring practices or inefficient maintenance of consumers’ financial data can decimate a company. However, the response to hindrances in 2016 continued to showcase the importance of fundamental concepts, asserts Ryder, which include the following:
- Continually seeking the fastest, most cost-effective means of transporting products to consumers, including enhanced delivery optins.
- Expansion of global footprint while adhering to local, state, federal and international requirements
- Keeping companies accountable and focused on giving back to their domestic partners through reshoring or nearshoring
- Working with more outside agencies, also highlighted by Samantha Carr of Business 2 Community, including crowd-sourced logistics, warehouse optimization and outsourcing, and greater use of cloud-computing
Augmented reality found its place among consumers.
Augmented reality sounded amazing and far-fetched early in 2016, but the year has shown it to be one of the most successful product in existence. There tends to be more acceptance of technologies in the workplace once consumers can identify how they work.
For example, new hires are likely to pick up tablet-based systems more easily since they have been using them recreationally for some time. Essentially, the virtual-reality (VR), which is the precursor to augmented reality, hype of the 2016 Christmas shopping season is making more people excited about this new way to “see the world.”
While the VR hype may seem like it only emerged for Christmas, think about one of the hottest games of 2016, Pokémon Go! This app was built on augmented reality, combining the digital and physical worlds into one interactive environment. This technology, reports JOC.com, will be a key to practically eliminate extensive training courses and repair time requirements throughout the supply chain.
Ultimately, it translates into greater use of augmented reality in supply chains, which is growing by 100% annually, reports Barcoding Incorporated.
What’s next?
Clearly, technology dominated the conversation for 2016, but there are also changes in how supply chains operate that require a more in-depth discussion as well. In the next post of this series, we discuss the impact of artificial intelligence, agile processes and procurement expansion on the supply chain of 2016.
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by Fronetics | Jan 4, 2017 | Blog, Content Marketing, Logistics, Marketing, Supply Chain
Supply chain professionals should be following these eight blogs to keep up with the latest industry news and happenings in the coming year.
Fronetics is currently conducting a survey to determine which supply chain blogs you think are the best of 2017. (You can vote for that here.) But we also wanted to weigh in with some of the blogs we’re following.
These eight supply chain blogs are great resources for industry news and trends. They cover a range of topics, from technology to strategy, and feature thought leadership by some of the brightest minds in the field.
8 must-follow supply chain blogs
Here is our selection of blogs with timely content that supply chain executives need to read, in no particular order:
1) Supply Chain Management Review
This vast website includes trending articles on supply chain and logistics strategies developments, many written by university-level professors. Read this blog.
2) Logistics Viewpoints
This blog features think pieces from three leading supply chain and logistics analysts with the mission to provide clear and concise analyses of logistics trends, technologies and services. Read this blog.
3) Supply Chain Nation Blog
Interesting news bits from “around the supply chain horn,” this is JDA Software’s blog, a powerhouse in supply chain solutions. Read this blog.
4) Supply Chain Matters
The blog of Bob Ferrari offers his expertise on all aspects of supply chain business processes and supporting information technology. Read this blog.
5) Supply Chain Brain
A portal aimed at supply chain executives featuring original and aggregated content touching on multiple industries. Read this blog.
6) Supply Chain Shaman
Lora Cecere’s blog focuses on “the use of enterprise applications to drive supply chain excellence.” Read this blog.
7) Argentus Blog
Argentus is a boutique recruitment firm specializing in supply chain management and procurement. The blog offers insight into pressing issues in supply chain talent acquisition, career management, and more. Read this blog.
8) Cerasis Blog
The Cerasis blog covers industry trends, educates, explains rules and regulations, busts myths, and has awesome infographics. Read this blog.
Bonus/shameless plug: Fronetics Blog
Our blog covers topics of interest to the supply chain industry from marketing and social media to lead generation and strategy. Read our blog.
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