by Fronetics | May 17, 2016 | Blog, Content Marketing, Marketing, Strategy
Producing engaging content is the number one challenge for content marketers.
Is content marketing working well for your business? If not, you are not alone. Though it is one of the most effective ways to grow your business, content marketing has been challenging B2B and B2C organizations since its inception.
You may think it should be simple: Write, post, get more customers. But content marketing is much more complex, demanding more time, thought, and careful strategy than churning out a few blog posts. First and foremost, what you produce must engage readers. This is, however, the biggest content marketing challenge facing both B2B and B2C marketers.
2016 reports produced by Content Marketing Institute and MarketingProfs, and sponsored by Brightcove, found that the number one challenge for B2B and B2C marketers is producing engaging content.
Dull content and the domino effect
Unfortunately, if you lack engaging content, it works like a domino, knocking down all your other marketing efforts.
For one, it is much easier to gain the support of the C-suite, and be granted a reasonable budget, for your content marketing plan if you can show that your strategy is attracting more customers, helping with conversions, and driving sales. But if your content is not producing results, you won’t get the support and resources you need to produce the content, which, in turn, fuels results. It is a vicious cycle.
That being said, lack of engaging, quality content may be indicative of other challenges you may be facing, like the resources to produce content.
Creating engaging content
There are a few basics you must address if you are going to produce engaging content:
- Research your customer demographic. You must know who your audience is, what they want to know, how they want to learn it, and where to find them. Use web analytics to learn how your audience interacts with your website, what kinds of posts and emails they are reading, and where improvements can be made.
- Do your due diligence and learn how to reach those potential customers with topical information they want and will read. This means conducting a solid analysis of trends in your industry and producing content that offers expert information on these subjects or answers pressing questions potential customers may have about them. You, thus, will establish your organization as a trusted voice for your industry. This leads to dialogue with prospects and customers that want to learn more from you about industry news — or, even better, who are interested in your products or services.
- Research your distribution channels. This can affect not only what you post, but where and when you post it. Know your target’s social media habits, when they read emails, and what they are looking for. Research your competition and learn which channels they focus their attention on and why. Read the latest industry publications and influential blogs to uncover what topics work to engage their readers. Look for trends and answer to them.
- Look at SEO evaluations and site audits to help identify new middle- and bottom-of-the-funnel opportunities for content.
- Tell a story.
If creating engaging content has proven to be challenging for your business, consider outsourcing your content creation, or your marketing program all together. According to Social Media Today, lack of marketing staff can make it difficult for organizations to produce enough content to keep up with their competition.
Quality research and consistent creation of engaging, relevant content is time-consuming and requires keen writing skills. Promoting your posts on social media also takes time and requires consistent effort. Some of the most successful organizations put this task in the hands of an expert that can create and leverage content to provide the greatest impact to your brand, lead generation, and new customer conversion rate.
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by Fronetics | May 5, 2016 | Blog, Content Marketing, Marketing, Strategy
Speak your boss’ language with metrics, statistics, and facts that articulate content marketing’s impact on customer acquisition and sales.
Garnering C-suite support for your content marketing program can be a challenge. Your team knows that your strategy is working by evaluating a series of metrics (e.g., shares, website traffic, email click-through rates), but executives do not always understand the value of such measures. It is almost like marketers speak another language.
So, how do you articulate the value of content marketing in a way that your executives will understand and support? Think of it this way: It is like that scene in the movie Jerry Maguire, only it is your boss demanding, “Show me the money!” The C-suite wants to know the cost to the company and the dollar amount of the return for any marketing initiative you undertake. Basically, you need to quantify success in terms of customer acquisitions and new sales.
Don’t focus on the secondary results, or “soft” metrics like per-post Facebook engagement. Talk the C-suite’s language, and demonstrate how your content marketing efforts led to new customers and what those customers are worth to the company’s growth and success.
Report these six metrics to win C-suite support
- Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC): This is the total average cost your company spends to acquire a new customer. Basically, what your company spends in marketing costs, divided by the number of new customers it produced.
- Marketing Percentage of the CAC: This is the marketing department costs divided the costs of the sales and marketing costs to get the marketing percentage of overall cost per new customer. The figure demonstrates if more is going into the sales team or the marketing team to produce the current result, and the lower the percentage the better.
- Ratio of Customer Lifetime Value to CAC: This figure estimates the total value that your company derives from each customer versus what you spend to acquire them.
- Time to Payback CAC: This estimate demonstrates how many months it takes for your company to earn back the CAC it spent acquiring your new customers.
- Marketing-Originated Customer Percentage: This is where you look at all of the new customers from a set time period and determine what percentage of them started with a lead generated by your marketing team.
- Marketing-Influenced Customer Percentage: This figure highlights all of the new customers that marketing interacted with at the time they were still just leads.
Additional selling points for content marketing
Content marketing can make a big impact on your company in terms of spreading brand awareness, growing your audience, and helping form business relationships. Though these benefits are difficult to quantify, try using the following statistics and facts to articulate the value your program could have in a way your executives will understand.
- As any business knows, it is essential to be where you customers are, and they are online. Your competitors know this, too. In fact, a recent study indicated that that 77% of companies surveyed, across industries, had plans to increase their digital marketing budgets in the coming year.
- The B2B buying process has evolved, and now content is an essential tool for generating and nurturing leads. Reportedly, 88% of B2B marketers use content marketing as part of their programs, with lead generation (85%) and sales (84%) being the most important goals.
- Blog content has long-term value, as what you post today may continue attracting traffic months (or years) from now. Your posts last indefinitely, outliving more traditional marketing methods, such as a print advertisement in a magazine.
- Consistently publishing quality content can earn your company a reputation as a thought leader in your industry. The public will come to trust your company as a respected source of knowledge, and you’ll begin forming relationships with readers who want to know more about your products and services. People buy from companies that they trust and feel connected to.
- Content marketing will get you more bang for your buck. Results are not instant, but, with time, you can actually reduce your marketing expenses while increasing your reach and growing your business.
- Content marketing is a valuable business intelligence tool. By distributing content through social media platforms, you not only engage potential customers, but you get their feedback and learn more about their needs and wants.
For more on marketing metrics that will articulate success to your boss, download Fronetics Strategic Advisors’ tip sheet.
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by Fronetics | Apr 28, 2016 | Blog, Marketing, Social Media, Strategy
In today’s digital world, it is amazing that many businesses, particularly those in the supply chain and logistic industries, are still questioning whether they should be on social media. The simple answer is yes — social media channels are the ideal place to brand, market, and grow your business.
Here are five reasons why your company should be on social media.
1. Lead generation.
Sales teams can also use social media as a lead-generation tool. Social media takes the old marketing billboard and makes it a conversation, which is a huge benefit to businesses who use it well.
2. Trust and thought leadership.
Though the results are not instant, the amount of time and marketing dollars you spend on social media pays off. How long will it take? That varies depending on your business and your sales cycle. But by distributing quality content and engaging customers through these channels, you eventually will establish your company as a knowledgeable, thought-leader in your industry. This creates a level of trust with potential customers, which is invaluable to securing the sale down the road.
3. Brand awareness.
Social media not only builds your brand but can expand your content’s reach. Those who follow you and enjoy your content will “like” and share it, meaning their followers will see it, thus expanding your audience. This makes your reach virtually limitless, providing that your content is compelling, engaging, and worthy of sharing.
4. Business intelligence.
Being on social media keeps you on top of the latest trends; it is a valuable business tool. You not only engage potential customers, but you can learn what they are looking for, what your competition is doing. It can also provide data that serves as a strategic compass to generate ideas and guide the direction of your business in the future.
5. Talent acquisition.
You can find new talent for your company through social media, which gets you connected with qualified job-seekers and streamlines the search process.
Harvard Business Review surveyed 2,100 companies and found that 79% use or plan to use social media. But, only 12% of those organizations felt that they were using social media effectively. The fact is unless you are using social media correctly, you will probably not see the results that you desire.
Content needs to be fresh, engaging, informative and sometimes entertaining. You need to post consistently and respond to questions that are posted by your readers. (You are creating a relationship, after all.) All of this may seem daunting, but the reward is a highly visible, respected, presence within the social media community. Your business can strategically reach a myriad of potential customers online, which as you know, can be a game-changer in its potential for growth.
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by Fronetics | Mar 24, 2016 | Blog, Marketing, Social Media, Supply Chain
These four supply chain companies constantly post fresh, quality content to their social media accounts.
When it excels at social media, a company’s opportunity for growth is as vast as the web itself. Today, even small businesses can compete shoulder to shoulder with their biggest competitors if leveraging social media properly.
It is estimated that for every 5 minutes people spend online, 1 minute of that is spent on some kind of social media network. And most of your customers are on social media — statistics indicate that more than 79% of adults in the U.S. use social media each day. As the popularity of sites like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and company blogs continues to grow, it is vital to utilize these tools to your own marketing advantage.
When you think of social media masters, you may not think of companies in the supply chain industry. But there are a few excellent examples, and much can be learned from what they do. Here are four supply chain companies that excel at social media and the reasons why they stand out above the crowd:
1) Cerasis
Cerasis, a top freight logistics company and truckload freight broker, excels at social media because their content is fresh, posted daily, and of high quality. Simply put, they create engaging, informative content and are consistently active across all of the major social networks.
2) Kinaxis
Kinaxis, a global company offering advanced supply chain management systems to customers in a variety of discrete manufacturing industries, offers in-depth blog posts and is consistently active in social media channels such as Twitter, Google+, and LinkedIn.
3) Transplace
Transplace, a provider of transportation management services, posts informative articles and incites topics of conversation on Twitter several times per day. The company is active across all social media platforms, including their own YouTube channel.
4) UPS Longitudes
Longitudes is a blog with insights on the trends reshaping the global economy by United Parcel Service, a global leader in shipping. The blog also engages true thought leaders on topics ranging from trade to transportation and ecommerce to emerging markets. Posts are consistently new, innovative, and informative. Longitudes also has its own social media accounts, separate from UPS’s primary accounts, which distribute the blog’s content and engage in related discussions.
Why do these four supply chain companies excel at social media? Here are three commonalities that help these businesses rise above the rest:
Consistent daily posts and content
Having consistent, reliable, fresh social media posts is essential. The more active you are, the greater your outreach to potential new customers.
Think of it this way: search engines pick up on social media activities — like when someone shares content from your website on Twitter or Facebook, for example. Search engines use this to weigh the relevancy and validity of your website and your company. So, fresh daily or weekly content gives people a chance to read and share every time you publish a blog post, ebook, buying guide, case study, testimonial, and other interesting content to your social media accounts. Your marketing efforts reap the benefits of better search engine rankings as a result.
Engaging readers
You want readers to connect and engage with your social media posts. Every time they leave a comment or share or like a post, your social media presence — and your digital footprint — grows.
Quality content
Posting anything just for the sake of posting is not a good social media strategy. Content that is boring and basic will not help your business grow. Content needs to capture the interest of readers and engage them to read, share, and follow your business. Posts should be timely and relevant. This is what builds your following and your brand and generates new customers.
With social media you can find new customers and fans, connect with existing customers who can help spread the word about how great your product or service is, and drive more traffic to your website, which creates new avenues into the digital realm of marketing, company branding, and lead generation. The most successful companies today work daily to improve their social media content and reap the benefits of consistent, quality content marketing.
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by Fronetics | Mar 3, 2016 | Blog, Content Marketing, Marketing, Social Media, Strategy
Source: Rosaura Ochoa | Flickr
Here’s how marketers can launch a B2B social media program that grows business.
A recent Harvard Business Review article discloses that a number of B2B CEOs still believe social media isn’t right for them, that it’s a tool for the B2C segment. In reality, many B2B marketers successfully leverage social media to engage potential customers, gather market intelligence, build brand awareness and reputation, discover and intercept customer problems, and influence purchasing decisions before sales calls are ever made.
In short, if you are not in the B2B social media game, you are missing out on enormous business opportunities.
Getting started with social media can seem like an intimidating task, especially if your C-suite is skeptical of the benefits. Here are six steps to launching a B2B social media program that will grow your business to its full potential.
1) Speak in the right terms.
Convincing management that you want your team to spend more time on social media to gain “followers” or get “shares” might be a hard sell. To win support, focus your argument around the factors that are most important to them. Lead generation, lead nurturing, conversions, sales, ROI, profits: this should be the vocabulary with which you approach this conversation.
2) Create a strategy — and put someone in charge.
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. And that number rises to 86% when the company designates someone to lead the strategy. Working with an experienced marketing consulting firm, like Fronetics, you can develop an inbound marketing strategy that aligns with your business objectives. And whether someone on your team heads up execution or you outsource that responsibility, the leader should continually monitor analytics and tweak the strategy accordingly. Which brings us to…
3) Determine which analytics to track.
In the B2B world, it’s not about shares, likes, or impressions, though those numbers speak to your brand exposure. (Read more about so-called “vanity metrics” here.) Leads generated, conversion rates, sales, and ROI are going to be the things you’ll want to track. If you have a good, flexible strategy in place, these metrics will help you adjust your efforts to ensure you’re achieving your business objectives.
See: The Six Marketing Metrics Your Boss Actually Cares About.
4) Develop quality content.
Twenty-seven million pieces of content are shared every day — and a large portion of it is crap. A social media presence could be pretty pointless unless you’re using it to push content that is original, high quality, and representative of your brand. One of the biggest mistakes B2B companies make is using social channels to push a sales pitch. You’ll quickly lose your audience, who is turned off by a strong sales pitch. Social media is about engaging your audience, building brand awareness, and offering valuable information.
See: Three Elements of Good Content.
5) Decide which channels are right for your business.
Who are you trying to reach, and what are you trying to tell them? These are good questions to ask when trying to determine which platforms will comprise your social media program. There’s a wealth of information out there about which channels are used by whom and when. You’ll also want to choose channels that you’ll be able to maintain regularly and which play to your strengths. As an obvious example, if you don’t have the capability to make videos, YouTube probably isn’t for you. Remember, you’ll likely want to work through several different channels to reach a maximum number of potential customers.
See: Which Social Media Channels Should Your B2B Business Use?
6) Follow your competitors.
Following your competitors is a great way to stay up to date on what they’re doing, especially if you don’t have a ton of time or money for competitive research. And when I say “follow,” I don’t mean “copy or imitate.” I mean subscribe to their blogs, engage with them on social media, and like and share their content that you find meaningful for your audience. This way, you become part of the industry conversation happening online, and you know exactly what your potential customers are seeing from (and how they’re reacting to) your competitors.
See: The Role of Social Media in Supply Chain Intelligence.
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