by Fronetics | Sep 12, 2018 | Blog, Content Marketing, Logistics, Marketing, Strategy, Supply Chain
Here are the top three resources digital natives are using to research solutions and how your B2B business can prepare to meet them online.
Knowing where your buyers do research when making purchasing decisions is crucial to any marketing strategy. Digital natives, a new generation of younger buyers, have completely revolutionized the purchasing landscape for B2B vendors. Their biggest resource? The world wide web.
[bctt tweet=”73% of employees ages 20-35 years old are involved in product or service purchase decision-making at their company. In fact, one-third reported they are the sole decision maker for their department.” username=”Fronetics”]
A study of millennial buyers by Merit found that 73% of employees ages 20-35 years old are involved in product or service purchase decision-making at their company. In fact, one-third reported they are the sole decision maker for their department.
What does this mean for B2B marketers?
These younger, and typically more technologically advanced, buyers expect they can find the information they need about your brand online through an organic search. Your company needs to have any and all content available at the push of a button.
But the work doesn’t stop there. Once a buyer finds your brand, you hope they make the leap to visit your website, meaning your site needs to be one of your most appealing assets. If you don’t give visitors plenty of easy, attractive opportunities to convert on your website, content marketing won’t generate leads for you.
But online searches and vendor website aren’t the only resources digital natives are using to make purchasing decisions. This younger generation also relies heavily on recommendations from peers and colleagues.
Like recommendations from friends and family in their personal lives, the opinion of other buyers becomes very important. A big part of the purchasing process involves B2B review sites, where purchasers seek the opinion of their peers and colleagues.
Here’s Elizabeth Hines, creative/editorial director at Fronetics, to discuss the top resources for B2B buyers and how you can be prepared to meet them online.
Video: top 3 resources for B2B buyers
Final thoughts
Though the purchasing landscape has changed over the past decade, B2B marketers have the tools to get in front of the right buyers. These tools including knowing what resources buyers are using and how to use these assets to your advantage. With a documented strategy and high-quality, informative content, you’ll be ready to meet digital natives where they are.
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by Fronetics | Jul 10, 2018 | Blog, Content Marketing, Logistics, Marketing, Social Media, Strategy, Supply Chain
As with many things, blogs improve with age — drawing more traffic, generating more leads, and building more credibility with search engines.
The average lifespan of a tweet is around 15 minutes. And a Facebook post’s lifespan is about 6 hours. But the lifespan of a blog post averages two years. TWO YEARS.
[bctt tweet=”80% of our website traffic comes from blog posts that are over six months old. HubSpot discovered a similar trend: 76% of its monthly views came from old posts, as well as 92% of the company’s monthly leads!” username=”Fronetics”]
In fact, we find that 80% of our website traffic comes from blog posts that are over six months old. HubSpot discovered a similar trend: 76% of its monthly views came from old posts, as well as 92% of the company’s monthly leads!
Why is that? Because, as with many things, blog posts improve with age. Search engines give value to older content that has had more time to accumulate social shares, likes, and referrals from other web pages. The more relevant a blog post proves itself to be to readers over time, the higher it will rank in search engine results.
Optimizing older content
Blog posts also give marketers an opportunity to dust off older content and rework it to be relevant and up-to-date to target audiences. Using analytics tools, marketers can track posts that had high traffic and conversion rates and work on optimizing the content. Updating older posts with new statistics, relevant keywords, and spruced-up calls-to-action will breathe new life into your older content.
Lead-generation tool: your blog
A blog is an excellent lead-generation tool. But, as I’ve written before, it takes time to generate leads and sales. Patience is a virtue, but it’s a particularly difficult one to keep in mind when you’re trying to grow business and keep your boss happy.
Your posts need time to start drawing traffic — and then, from traffic comes leads. Here’s why blog posts, like a fine wine, will continue to improve with age and why you shouldn’t give up on your efforts.
Video: Why blogs improve with age
Takeaway
With high-quality, relevant content, your blog will pay off. You should keep tending to your already published content, particularly those posts that prove to be a consistent source of traffic.
Update information; add links to new related posts or other relevant resources; and seek opportunities to insert or update calls-to-action to current offers and campaigns. Making sure those older, consistently popular posts continue to serve and engage your readers will increase your chances of conversion.
And, don’t forget: Something that doesn’t get a lot of views in the first week may be a huge traffic source and lead converter in a little time. Many content management systems, like HubSpot, can generate attribution reports, which tell you which web pages users most often visit before converting to a lead. Compare these pages with your high-traffic pages that don’t make the list to see how you can create more opportunities for lead conversion on the pages earning the most traffic.
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by Jennifer Hart Yim | Jun 27, 2018 | Blog, Content Marketing, Logistics, Marketing, Supply Chain, Talent
Millennials are breaking stereotypes across the industry. This new generation is bringing youth, better education, and lots of diversity to supply chain management.
This guest post comes to us from Argentus Supply Chain Recruiting, a boutique recruitment firm specializing in Supply Chain Management and Procurement.
Everyone knows that the demographics of the Supply Chain industry are changing. They have to. Within a few years, demographers estimate that 400,000 baby boomers will be retiring in Canada every year. Within the Supply Chain industry, the looming – and in fact, already-started – retirement of baby boomers and shifting job responsibilities brought about by technology are creating a talent crisis.
It’s something that we’ve covered extensively at Argentus. We’ve written about how the industry can fill the burgeoning gap in talent: by increasing educational opportunity, doing more outreach to young people, and improving communication about the vast career potential in the field – a field that until recently was stereotyped as transactional, hidebound and, in a word, boring.
Today’s Supply Chain professionals know that – especially at the highest levels – the field is anything but. And it looks like some of these efforts to avert the talent crisis have begun to bear fruit: a major new survey shows that millennials are moving into the workforce in a big way, changing its Supply Chain’s demographics and disrupting the industry.
The survey, conducted by Peerless Research Group, Supply Chain Management Review, APICS and APQC surveyed 676 millennials (between the ages of 22 and 37) in April 2017 to find out about their demographics, expectations, goals and current career status within the Supply Chain industry. It’s a far-reaching report with a lot of results busting down stereotypes both about Supply Chain and millennials themselves.
As a recruitment company specializing in Supply Chain and Procurement, Argentus sits at the nexus of a lot of these demographic changes. Needless to say, we read the report with great interest. Here were some of our biggest, and most surprising, takeaways.
Takeaways from Apix survey on millennials in supply chain.
Careers are becoming more intentional:
- When we speak with SCM professionals from the baby boomer and Gen X generations, it’s really common for us to hear, “I didn’t plan on going into Supply Chain, but I fell into it.” But this tendency is changing. The report found that 75% of millennials in Supply Chain jobs intentionally began their careers within the field.
- Planning and Procurement are taking on a bigger role in the field: 22% of millennials surveyed are working in Planning and 21% in Procurement, compared to 15% in Logistics, 11% in Inventory Management, and 9% in Manufacturing.
Supposed “Job Hoppers” are actually staying put:
- We’re maybe a ways past the 2008-2014 heyday of stereotyping millennials in the workforce. Companies are realizing millennials’ huge value as employees. With that in mind, the report still dispels some classic stereotypes about millennials in the workforce. There’s a perception that millennials are “job hoppers” who don’t have loyalty to their employers, but the survey found that 38% of millennial respondents have worked for just one employer their entire career. 65% had worked for their current employer for more than 5 years.
Educational opportunities are taking off:
- One of the biggest growth areas in the field is the increasing prevalence of educational opportunities as more universities and colleges bring SCM programs online. 66% of the millennials surveyed have either undergraduate or graduate degrees in Supply Chain or Logistics. APICS conducted a similar survey in 2016 – this time of senior leaders in the field – and found that only 19% of the leaders surveyed had degrees in the field, which suggests that millennials are taking advantage of these increased educational opportunities.
- 59% of the millennial supply chain employees surveyed have a bachelor’s degree of some kind, even if it’s not in Supply Chain or Logistics. The 2016 leadership survey found that only 45% of Supply Chain leaders had degrees. It’s worth mentioning that more companies are requiring degrees these days for sole contributor roles, so this might be a response to that market pressure.
- Millennials are interested in continuing education in the field, suggesting it’s not just a fly-by-night career for them. 65% of the survey respondents indicated that they were planning on pursuing further education in the next 12 months.
The gender gap is chainging, but persistent:
- More women are entering the Supply Chain field. 61% of the survey respondents were men, whereas 39% were women. It’s still not as close to even as it should be, but the breakdown was more evenly split than APICS 2016 leadership survey mentioned above: in that survey of Supply Chain leadership, 76% of respondents were male and only 24% were female. This indicates that more millennial women are entering the field than their Gen X and baby boomer counterparts. It also indicates that, as we’ve written about before, more needs to be done to bring women into Supply Chain leadership
- There’s still a stubborn gender pay gap in the field, even for millennial employees. The average compensation for male respondents was $92,920, while it was only $78,840 for women in the cohort. The survey found that men and women generally start off with equitable compensation, but the gap grows – as it does in many other fields – as they move up into more senior roles.
Millennials expressing a high degree of career satisfaction:
- On the job satisfaction front, there were some absolutely massive numbers that speak to the way the field is becoming more flexible and dynamic: 85% of millennials surveyed said that they were likely to be still working in Supply Chain in 5 years. 81% said they felt as if they could make a difference in the Supply Chain field. 85% said they agreed that the field was a diverse workforce, and 87% said that they thought working in the field would help with personal growth and development.
[bctt tweet=”87% of millennials surveyed thought working in supply chain management would help with personal growth and development.” username=”Fronetics”]
It’s exciting to see the way the field is growing and adapting to change, and the way that millennials are stepping up and reaping some of this career’s rewards. We encourage you to check out the full report. There’s a lot to dig into beyond the takeaways we’ve identified here – lots of insights that will be interesting to anyone who’s interested in the way Supply Chain careers are taking off in the 21st century.
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by Fronetics | May 21, 2018 | Blog, Logistics, Strategy, Supply Chain, Talent
Millennial talent seeks employment opportunities with companies that promote transparency, technology, excellence, and social change.
We write often about the supply chain talent gap and how supply chain companies should be proactively recruiting millennials to join their companies. So a recent Harvard Business Review article, which talks about how companies that “young people find dull” (like electrical distributors and manufacturers) can make their businesses seem “cool,” seemed particularly relevant.
While we adamantly disagree that the supply chain isn’t cool, we do think it’s important that logistics and supply chain companies think strategically about recruiting millennial talent.
Millennial talent and the vision thing
According to a new study by strategy firm Department26, “Transparency is the millennial standard operating procedure in the workplace.” Honesty and security are top of mind for this generation that came of age just as the country plunged into The Great Recession.
[bctt tweet=”Beer kegs and ping pong are nice, but millennials are more impressed with leadership that sets goals and delivers on them. ” username=”Fronetics”]
Beer kegs and ping pong are nice, but millennials are more impressed with leadership that sets goals and delivers on them. They want to know how their role contributes to the organization’s success, and they want to know the effort they’re putting into a job is worth it.
“Setting them up for success means regular check-ins, both positive and constructive feedback as a rule, and structured mentorship,” write the authors of the Department26 study.
People say millennial talent doesn’t work for money, and it’s true that they’re not motivated by salary alone. Younger employees want meaningful work that enhances their personal growth.
They also want flexible work rules that show an employer respects and trusts them. Sharing details of your strategic plan or examples of how your HR policies reward personal initiative can help millennial talent see your “boring” business in a new way.
“The thought of not being granted flexibility in exchange for hitting performance metrics is absurd to millennials, and it’s a concept that’s diametrically opposed to the freedom they crave,” the study concludes.
Talk tech
Logistics or trucking can sound dull to the iPhone generation — until you paint a picture of forward momentum and innovation that might surprise them.
Automation, robotics, autonomous vehicles, blockchain, drones and the Internet of Things (IoT) are reshaping the industry. Companies like Amazon, Pfizer and Wal-Mart are experimenting with new technologies to reduce costs, boost productivity, and improve handling performance.
“Wearable technology could soon become a standard must-have in the logistics industry,” according to a recent story in The Business Journals. “As these technologies continue to carve out their role in the global logistics industry, we’re likely to see previously unimagined levels of optimization — from manufacturing to warehousing to delivery.”
Find ways to change hearts and minds by exposing young people to the realities of today’s supply chain. If they think it’s boring, it’s because they really don’t know what it is.
Be the best damn supply chain company anywhere
People want to work for “the best” — the most innovative, the most profitable, or the most admired brand — in every industry. Workers are proud to say they work for a company recognized as being the best at what it does because it says they’re the best, too.
Even millennial talent that has never thought about a career in logistics might reconsider if they’re being recruited by an industry leader.
Celebrate excellence at your company. Promote the awards you’ve won. Share customer testimonials, positive media coverage, and community recognition with prospective recruits.
It also helps to do well by doing good. This is a generation that trusts business, not government, to create positive social change. “Millennials are hungry for a work culture that inspires them. At a macro level, companies should communicate clear plans that reflect their core values,” says Department26.
HBR author Bill Taylor summarizes these sentiments well: “What [millennials] value is the chance to join companies that make a difference and where the work brings out the best in them.”
How is your company recruiting millennial talent?
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by Jennifer Hart Yim | Apr 26, 2018 | Blog, Current Events, Logistics, Strategy, Supply Chain, Talent
With the rising demand for professionals in Supply Chain Management and Procurement, there’s a lot of employment activity, especially in short-term contracts.
This guest post comes to us from Argentus Supply Chain Recruiting, a boutique recruitment firm specializing in Supply Chain Management and Procurement.
As a boutique recruitment agency, we at Argentus are on the front-lines of the churn in the job market. We speak with potential job candidates every day. Some of them are passive, interested in moving into new opportunities when we reach out to them. Some of them are active, reaching out to us because they want to make a move. With the economy experiencing a prolonged growth spurt, and demand for professionals in Supply Chain Management and Procurement – our area of specialty – going up, there’s a lot of activity, especially in short-term contracts where companies are onboarding talent for their change management and business transformation expertise.
There are so many reasons why people seek out a new job. Sometimes it’s based on major life changes: a geographical move, say, or someone getting back into the workforce after a maternity leave. But why do passive candidates seek out new jobs, particularly in Supply Chain and Procurement?
We speak to a lot of candidates, so we have our ears to the ground in terms of the subtler reasons that star performers in these functions get the desire to make a move. It’s not out of a desire for more money as often as you might think. More often than not, it’s the more intangible factors.
Because employee retention is so important from a cost-saving and culture standpoint, we thought it would be useful to lay out some of the most common reasons why Supply Chain and Procurement professionals become passive candidates:
1. They’re siloed
We hear this reason a lot from candidates, but it still isn’t considered by companies as much as it should be. We know that one of the best ways to grow your Supply Chain career is to gain exposure to diverse parts of the function – from Logistics and Distribution, to Procurement, to Inventory Management, to Planning.
In too many organizations, these functions are siloed off from each-other, and that stops candidates from getting the experience they want to move up into more senior roles. It also stops the Supply Chain from being as effective as it would be if it was fully integrated. Next thing you know, your top performers are taking calls because they don’t want to be pigeonholed.
2. They’re tired of working with outdated technology
Supply Chain and Procurement technology is becoming more digital, just like the rest of the economy. And updating your technological profile can be a massive undertaking, with lots of risks. But the most forward-looking and high-potential candidates want to be working with the latest Supply Chain technology, keeping their skills relevant for the future. If you’re still working only with Excel, you might risk losing candidates to companies that have taken the plunge and invested in continuing technological improvement.
3. They’re not getting support from senior leadership
As we wrote about recently – and we received a ton of feedback on that piece – ineffective leadership in Procurement and Supply Chain can have huge ramifications all the way down a business. If leadership doesn’t have the people skills to help build buy-in for the function across the business, if they micromanage instead of letting managers and sole contributors shine, those people are going to start picking up the phone when a recruiter calls. But it goes upward too: effective leaders in Procurement and Supply Chain will get the itch to move if they don’t have support from C-level executives in a business.
4. Work/life balance isn’t up to snuff
Work/life balance is a hot topic in the talent world, to the point of being a cliché, but it’s worth mentioning: people who don’t have support from a work/life balance perspective will start to seek companies that have work from home policies, flexible schedules, educational opportunities, and other benefits. In 2018, companies can no longer see these programs as “perks” or “throw-ins.” Having solid, articulated work/life balance policies is vital to winning the war for talent.
5. They’re uninspired in the workplace
While Supply Chain and Procurement have historically been seen as “dry” functions, this reputation is changing fast. With the rise of digitization and globalization, they’re becoming more fast-paced, with more strategic potential and impact on a business’ long-term structure and profitability. But some companies still treat their Supply Chain and Procurement employees as purely transactional workers whose jobs are only to fill out orders and put out day-to-day fires. If you’re not being strategic, or not offering opportunities for advancement into more strategic positions, your best Supply Chain employees will, quite frankly, get bored and leave.
6. They’re realizing how indemand they are
As we’ve written about a lot, the retirement of the baby boomer generation as well as greater expectations placed on Procurement and Supply Chain are creating a deficit of talent in the marketplace. With the economy approaching full employment in 2018, this is even truer than it was before. But many companies still aren’t realizing the huge demand for Supply Chain and Procurement talent in this marketplace. Too many companies still have assume their employees are “just happy to have a job,” but take it from us as a company that speaks with dozens of candidates in the field every day: they’re realizing their worth, and fielding opportunities to meet their full potential. If your company isn’t providing those opportunities, they’ll go somewhere that does.
Sometimes it’s a combination of the above factors that causes a top performer to want to leave, and sometimes it’s even other factors we haven’t mentioned. So what does your organization do to retain star performers? As a candidate, have you ever left a role for one of the above reasons, or another that we missed? Let us know in the comments!
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