by Elizabeth Hines | Jan 16, 2019 | Blog, Content Marketing, Logistics, Marketing, Supply Chain
Updated February 4, 2025
Digital marketing for the supply chain has become necessary to position your company to not only be found online, but also to be researched and to be compared to your competition.
Highlights:
- Digital marketing uses your website, related social media, and other online industry channels to showcase your industry knowledge and experience.
- Thought leaders are the informed trusted sources in their field of expertise.
- Supply chain and logistics industries need content marketing to achieve confidence and relationship-building with buyers.
Today’s B2B buyers are researching, evaluating, and coming to conclusions about companies without a single contact with a team member or salesperson.
This kind of B2B buying landscape requires cutting edge marketing strategies to showcase nut-and-bolt industries that have survived without them for many years.
Digital marketing for the supply chain
Digital marketing for the supply chain uses your website, related social media, and other online industry channels to showcase your industry knowledge and experience (rather than trying to convince people of it with a marketing message).
With inbound digital marketing, you publish relevant, informative information to adds value to every stage of a potential customer’s buying journey.
It is the content that you publish that walks them through the initial stages of the sales process.
What should you publish? A good content marketing strategy is about understanding the questions and concerns that are particular to your customer base, and offering quality information and analysis that answers those needs.
Showcasing thought leadership through digital marketing
Discovering and meeting the needs of your customers that go beyond your products and services will catapult you in their minds as a knowledgeable, helpful “thought leader” in your industry.
Thought leaders are the informed trusted sources in their field of expertise. They have innovative ideas, can showcase their thinking, and can replicate their successes again and again.
Consider it: Your business has so much more to offer than its primary product or service. You have a team of people with a tremendous aggregate of experience, expertise, and perspectives.
Allowing your customers this sort of access to your team’s experience and knowledge provides them with tremendous value outside the sales funnel, which builds trust and cultivates lasting, fruitful relationships.
Why digital marketing?
In this B2B buying landscape, supply chain and logistics industries need content marketing to achieve a level of confidence and relationship-building with buyers that used to come from face-to-face meetings. Potential and current customers will view your company as a valuable resource for everything related to not only your products and services but to the industry as a whole.
No time to execute?
The downside? Content marketing requires significant time, labor, and resources, and it can take quite some time to start reaping benefits. Feeling overwhelmed and like you and your team can’t possibly add on more marketing? Outsourcing certain key marketing tasks allows insourcing your core competencies while delegating specialized tasks to external experts.
This post originally appeared on EBN Online.
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by Fronetics | Jan 8, 2019 | Blog, Content Marketing, Logistics, Marketing, Strategy, Supply Chain
Before you make your marketing resolutions for this year, take a moment to look at last year’s digital content marketing successes and failures.
As the new year begins, take the opportunity to look at past marketing choices, see what worked and what didn’t, and shape goals for the future. The year ahead is a blank canvas, but evaluating past successes and missteps is key to making sure the big picture works.
Writing for Forbes Communication Council, Senior Digital Marketing Manager at Caring People Inc. Karina Tama-Rutigliano offers these four tips for successfully moving forward with digital marketing.
1) Don’t go anywhere without clear, specific goals — and a plan for measuring results.
Assuming you’ve been tracking useful metrics along the way, the end of the year means you’re armed with a fresh crop of data. Take time to study and evaluate your data, and use it to develop incremental goals, as well as projections for next year. If you haven’t already, now is a good time to implement a documentation strategy, like our Monthly Marketing Report Template.
Furthermore, take a moment to consider how the metrics you’re currently tracking are serving you. Is your data giving you the insights you need? Are you left with questions about where your efforts are successful, or where another approach is needed? The beginning of the year is a good time to tweak your plan for tracking and measuring the results of your digital marketing efforts.
2) Don’t forget the “social” in social media.
[bctt tweet=”Social media platforms are viable places to engage with your customers,” writes Tama-Rutigliano. This means encouraging interaction with your posts, replying to comments, and engaging with posts from your community.” username=”Fronetics”]
You’re so busy creating and curating content to be fresh, relevant, and engaging for your social media audience, you forget that one crucial part of social media marketing: the social. “Social media platforms are viable places to engage with your customers,” writes Tama-Rutigliano. This means encouraging interaction with your posts, replying to comments, and engaging with posts from your community — be part of the conversation, and build relationships.
3) Don’t put all your eggs in one basket.
With so many options for digital marketing, all of them full of possibilities, it can be tempting to choose one or two and put all your dollars and efforts there. But a successful digital content marketing strategy is robust and well-rounded. Use your year-end data to evaluate where your efforts are thriving, and where you need to devote some cash and ideas.
4) Don’t post without a purpose.
We’ve all felt the push to create content, just for the sake of getting something new up on the blog or social media platforms. But content without a clear purpose in mind is never going to get you the best results.
It’s easy to get cynical, and think that content creation is just about feeding the search engine beast. But the heart and soul of content marketing is about sharing your knowledge and expertise with your customer-base, building trust, and creating lasting relationships.
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by Fronetics | Dec 18, 2018 | Blog, Content Marketing, Logistics, Marketing, Supply Chain
Aligning sales and marketing can help achieve big-picture goals. Here are the top five sales and marketing posts of 2018 that highlight how these two teams can work together.
The sales process is often a complicated journey that includes uphill climbs and unexpected roadblocks. Sales teams are all too familiar with these obstacles, but they don’t have to fight these battles alone.
Arm a sales rep with targeted content to share with prospects during specific moments in the purchasing process, and it will build his or her reputation as a knowledgeable resource. That can be the key to getting a foot in the door, advancing through the final stages of a purchasers’ decision, or closing the deal.
[bctt tweet=”Arm a sales rep with targeted content to share with prospects during specific moments in the purchasing process, and it will build his or her reputation as a knowledgeable resource. ” username=”Fronetics”]
Strong communication between sales and marketing can help create better content and nurture leads. Here are our top five sales and marketing posts of 2018.
Top 5 sales and marketing posts 2018
1. Infographic: the B2B Buyer’s Journey
Technology has completely changed the B2B buyer’s journey. The vast amount of information available on the internet has afforded buyers a level of self-sufficiency that renders traditional sales models ineffective. Marketers must leverage the latest trends and technologies to boost their content marketing efforts and turn leads into sales. Here are nine factors affecting today’s B2B buying journey. Read full post
2. Infographic: How Digital Natives are Changing B2B Purchasing
Long gone are the days of men and women sitting around a conference table listening to a sales pitch over a free lunch. Today’s B2B buyers are younger, more technologically savvy, and more independent — they’re a generation of digital natives. And they’re making waves across the B2B buying landscape and changing how marketers must work to reach new customers. Here’s what you need to know about the new B2B buyer. Read full post
3. The 3 Most Important Sources of Information for B2B Buyers
From a content marketing perspective, knowing where your buyers get their information is critical to an effective strategy. So what are most important sources of information for today’s B2B buyers? 20 years ago, you might have named things like product info sheets or sales reps. But not anymore. Read full post
4. 3 Dangers of Sales and Marketing Misalignment
Too often, B2B companies fall victim to the dangers of sales and marketing misalignment, often without even being aware that it’s an issue. Such misalignment can have serious motivational and financial consequences. These are the major dangers of sales and marketing misalignment compared to what can happen when things go right. Read full post
5. Infographic: Delivering Content Throughout the Buyer’s Journey to Help Your Sales Team Close Deals
If you’re a supply chain marketing professional, it’s likely that you spend a tremendous portion of your day researching, creating, packaging, and disseminating content. It’s time to start leveraging your it throughout the buyer’s journey by arming your sales force with content. Before you panic at the idea of creating reams of new content, take a breath. It’s more than likely that you can repurpose your existing content, optimized to give your sales force the tools they need to close deals.Read full post
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by Fronetics | Dec 11, 2018 | Blog, Content Marketing, Logistics, Marketing, Supply Chain
Our most-viewed content marketing posts indicate that marketers are seeking solutions to improve their content marketing programs.
Supply chain and logistics marketers have seen the benefits (and successes) of content marketing. It is the most cost-effective method to earn leads and sales. Why? Because content marketing focuses on the way B2B byers are making purchases, finding and evaluating content through online searches.
[bctt tweet=”Content marketing focuses on the way B2B byers are making purchases, finding and evaluating content through online searches.” username=”Fronetics”]
There is a trend with our most-viewed content marketing posts this year: innovative ways to improve content marketing strategies. From increasing brand awareness to improving SEO, marketers are looking to get their content in front of the right audiences.
Here’s a look at our top content marketing posts from this past year, all focused on industry trends and ways to improve your content marketing strategy.
Top 10 content marketing posts in 2018
1. B2B Marketing Trend 2018: Influencer Marketing
You’ve probably heard the buzzword by now: Influencer marketing seems to be on the tip of every marketer’s tongue these days. But the reality is that B2B marketers have been slow to adopt this new marketing trend. Influence 2.0 – The Future of Influencer Marketing Research Report 2017 showed that only 11% of B2B marketers have an ongoing influencer program. Read full post
2. Writing for SEO: Topic Clusters and Pillar Content (NOT Keywords)
I’ve been hinting — more like, emphasizing — in our recent Writing for SEO series that trying to rank for certain keywords in each blog post you publish is a practice on the way out. You may have been wondering what you’re supposed to do instead. This post on topic clusters and pillar content is your answer. Read full post
3. 10 Ways to Grow Brand Awareness Quickly
If you took Psychology 101 in school (or even if you didn’t), you know that people are more likely to buy from brand names they’re familiar with than those they don’t know. This goes for purchasing things like medicine, and for procuring components or parts as part of the supply chain. That’s why so many of our clients come to us looking to build brand awareness as one of their main goals. They want to customers to know about them — and sooner rather than later. Read full post
4. Should Your Business Be Using Linkless Backlinks to Increase SEO?
Linkless backlinks are mentions of your business or brand without a hyperlink to your webpage. In a keynote speech in September 2017, Gary Illyes, a webmaster trend analyst for Google, said:
“Basically, if you publish high-quality content that is highly cited on the internet — and I’m not talking about just links, but also mentions on social networks and people talking about your branding — then you are doing great.” Here’s how to make linkless backlinks work for you. Read full post
5. Writing for SEO: People Are Changing How They Search
Last week, we kicked off our Writing for SEO series by taking a look at how search engines are changing. As we delve further into updated strategies for effective SEO writing for supply chain marketers, this post explores the ways in which people are changing their search behaviors, and what that means for your content. Read full post
6. 3 Questions to Ensure your Content Marketing Strategy Is Sales-Focused
I recently read an article on the Harvard Business Review that discussed pairing your sales goals with your marketing goals. This strikes at the heart of what we do at Fronetics: build a client’s content marketing strategy that will help advance their short- and long-term business goals. It sounds simple, but you have no idea how many organizations’ marketing goals are misaligned with what the larger organization is trying to accomplish. Read full post
7. Infographic: 8 Ways to Grow Brand Awareness Fast
Have you ever noticed how some brands seem to have crept into popularity overnight? You’ve never heard of them, and then, all of sudden, they’re everywhere. Their brand awareness has sky rocketed, and they’re achieving every company’s ultimate goal: Customers know about them. So what’s their secret? Read full post
8. The More Often You Publish Blog Content, the More Leads You’ll Get
Here are Fronetics, most of our clients are sales-driven. If a client’s business goals include earning leads, we are sure to align the client’s content strategy with that objective. One of the most effective ways to increase the number of leads your website attracts is to increase the frequency with which you publish content. Read full post
9. How to Identify Topic Clusters for Your Business
One of the best ways to strategically structure your content is with the topic cluster model, in which broad cornerstone content is contained on pillar pages, and related subtopics are contained in cluster content. Each grouping of subtopics and corresponding pillar page is called a topic cluster. This structure is intended to build authority and influence for your business in the eyes of search engines and visitors. Effectively using a topic cluster structure is the best way to drive relevant traffic to your website. Read full post
10. Video: Why Does Content Marketing Take So Dang Long to Show Results?
You are committed to your content marketing program. You’ve created blog posts, uploaded videos, and collaborated with industry leaders. You may have started noticing an increase in web traffic, social reach, and other engagement metrics like time on page. You’re on the right track! The problem is your lack of leads or sales. Your boss is pressuring you for results, and you’re starting to question your efforts. Are you doing something wrong? Read full post
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by Elizabeth Hines | Dec 6, 2018 | Blog, Content Marketing, Current Events, Logistics, Marketing, Social Media, Strategy, Supply Chain
As content marketing continues to increase in popularity, here are six trends to consider when planning your 2019 strategy.
A recent article by Forbes on content marketing notes: “As recently as a few years ago, marketers handled content mostly as a side project. It was more of a bonus than an essential role — something you did when you had time because it took a backseat to more traditional marketing projects and responsibilities. That’s changed.”
Boy, has that changed. The content marketing industry is expected to be worth more than $400 billion by 2021.
The 2018 report from the Content Marketing Institute shows just how prevalent content marketing is, and how essential it has become to creating brand awareness, educating your audience, and building credibility and trust with your customers.
Supply chain & logistics marketers: Trends to watch
So, where is content marketing headed in 2019? Content marketing budgets are still on the rise, and supply chain and logistics companies are increasingly seeing the value in moving to an inbound marketing strategy driven by original content.
These are the six notable trends to consider when planning your 2019 content marketing strategy.
1. Video
Video is currently the most popular form of content being consumed online today, and video marketing will continue to have substantial value in 2019.
Smart supply chain marketers should start the new year by developing a visual storytelling strategy that offers consistent delivery of valuable content.
What’s your best bet? Be helpful and teach your audience something worthwhile to them.
2. Chatbots
The rise of chatbots – automated computer programs that simulate human conversation in messaging apps – is expected to continue in 2019. Business Insider recently reported that the number of people on messaging apps surpassed the number of users on social networks!
[bctt tweet=”Business Insider recently reported that the number of people on messaging apps surpassed the number of users on social networks!” username=”Fronetics”]
Chatbots are just one of the ways artificial intelligence will shape the content marketing landscape in 2019, but their ability to drastically increase customer engagement puts them on the short list for a major trend to watch in the coming year.
3. Voice search
Voice search is becoming an increasingly prevalent means of attaining information. Statistics vary, but it’s expected that anywhere between 30-50% of all searches will be voice searches by 2020. A recent report by NPR and Edison Research found that the rise of smart speakers is substantially changing consumer routines and purchasing behavior.
A good content marketing strategy for 2019 should consider how your customers might use voice search in your industry, and what you can do to maximize your content’s ability to respond.
4. Long-form content
I love this one, because it harkens back to humble beginnings of content marketing and the desire to put informative, quality content in front of a targeted interested audience.
Long form content – white papers, case studies, and lengthier blog posts e.g. – will have a resurgence of renewed appreciation in 2019. Why? Because many industries, including supply chain and logistics industries, are saturated with tons of mediocre short form content. People are increasingly looking to weed through it all for substantial quality posts from trusted sources. In addition, search engines will favor longer posts in results rankings.
Cheers to 2019 being the year of quality over quantity!
5. Brand ambassadors
We wrote about brand ambassadors as we headed into 2018, but they are worth mentioning again as we look forward to 2019. Brand ambassadors are employees that influence the B2B buying decisions of others, and they are an often-overlooked resource with more traditional marketing tactics.
Peers and colleagues are the third most influential source of information for business to business (B2B) purchasing, right behind online searches and your website! And there’s nothing more credible than a friend who speaks highly of their company’s product or service.
Definitely consider how you can help make brand ambassadors out of your employees in 2019.
6. Market Influencers
The final trend to watch in 2019 is influencer marketing, a form of marketing which focuses on influential people rather than the market as a whole.
Basically, marketers identify individuals who might have influence over potential buyers and create marketing campaigns and activities around these influencers. In many ways, this works similarly to a brand ambassador, where a single person influences their network of friends; in this case, however, the market influencer has a large network and a lot of “friends” who listen.
Influencer marketing will be a huge trend in marketing for 2019, and it would be worth considering who might be an influencer in your industry in the coming year and what your company might do reach them.
So, there you have it. As we head into 2019, these are the trends to watch and plan for in content marketing space.
The B2B buying climate is growing longer and more complex, and content marketing is so effective throughout the entire sales cycle if it’s done well. The end of the year is a great time to revisit your marketing strategy and make any necessary changes for the coming year.
Best wishes in the year ahead!
This post originally appeared on EBN Online.
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