by Fronetics | Jun 9, 2020 | Blog, Content Marketing, Covid-19, Marketing, Strategy, Supply Chain
Too busy? Don’t want to invest in-house? Here are 4 prime reasons organizations opt to outsource content marketing.
No other lead generation tactic is more important to technology marketers than content assets. The new Gartner research — trade shows come in second place — shows the importance of paying heavy attention to how your organization positions itself online. If the Covid-19 repercussions left you no choice but to cut back on marketing or if you have been juggling more than ever, consider the case for outsourcing content marketing to stay competitive and excel.
At a time when some of the biggest supply chain trade shows have been either canceled or postponed, count on content assets to grow in significance. Is your organization up to the task?
In our work with both supply chain startups and multi-national corporations, we have noted a few returning reasons for outsourcing content marketing.
Do you recognize yourself or your organization in any of the following?
Outsourcing content marketing: 4 reasons organizations decide to seek outside help
Too much to do
When content marketing is the umpteenth task on an endless to-do list, the results will suffer. This scenario is particularly common among startups where everyone is wearing as many hats as possible in anticipation of the next round of funding. The haphazard approach to what is being published on social channels and on the blog does the company no favors and leaves the person in charge — frequently with limited marketing experience — feeling frustrated. Instead of letting keyword-optimized content carve out a brand niche and build website SEO, the effort goes nowhere although the will to succeed is strong.
The alternative: Partner with a content marketing agency and turn the focus on your core expertise.
No consistency
The effectiveness of content marketing relies on consistency. But being consistent is a major challenge for supply chain companies, especially when trying to recover from months of unprecedented disruption. As we explained in this post, consistency feeds SEO. Let it slip, and you lose in the online search race. In this case, sudden trade show cancelations may have forced the in-house marketing team to a quick pivot, from executing the company marketing strategy to pouring all efforts into making trade show contingency plans. Add a product launch to the mix and chances are content production will come to a standstill.
The alternative: Keep SEO humming and your online presence strong with an outsourced marketing team invested in your success.
Desire to scale but costs are too high
Needs can arise quickly. There may be a trend that a company wants to jump on or a sudden change in the business environment that warrants the need to scale up content marketing quickly. Several of our clients have sought out Fronetics because they lacked certain marketing capabilities and did not necessarily want or have the resources to make the investment in-house. That is particularly true under current circumstances when some organizations are battling budget constraints and disruption. If an organization wants to capitalize on video marketing, for instance, it can be both time-consuming and costly to train team members or go through a rigorous hiring process.
The alternative: Leverage a team out outsourced content experts to fill the gap without adding fixed costs.
Lack of analysis
The motions of content marketing are repetitive — researching, strategizing, executing, analyzing, revising — but they are so for a reason. Even the most well-intentioned content strategy can fail when an organization does not act on analytics. But for busy organizations, it is not uncommon for those last pieces of the puzzle — analyzing and revising — to be left undone.
What types of content worked well this quarter? How did the email messaging fare? What was the click-through-rate? During the past few months, when disruption ruled, it is hardly surprising if not every step was optimally performed. Yet, it can all the same be damaging to the overall success of the marketing effort if the metrics are allowed to go unnoticed for too long.
The alternative: Let content count with an outsourced marketing team that constantly needs to prove ROI.
Considering the significance of content assets, it pays to do it well. Is outsourcing content marketing right for you?
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by Fronetics | May 6, 2020 | Blog, Content Marketing, Covid-19, Current Events, Marketing, SEO, Strategy, Supply Chain
So much to say, so little time. Supply chain marketing during Covid-19 — leaning in is better than backing out.
Turmoil does not quite begin to describe the situation that supply chain companies have experienced lately. The Covid-19 pandemic threw in just a few weeks the finely calibrated, just-in-time supply chains into a state of disarray. In the midst of the struggle to get product from Point A to Point B — while also ensuring the health and safety of employees — many companies had little choice but to adopt an all-hands-on-deck approach.
We saw it ourselves as our clients were suddenly buried in challenges that only weeks earlier had posed no issues at all — securing electronic parts overseas, locating warehouse space, finding freight forwarders, moving product out of port, and more.
If supply chain marketing during Covid-19 had to take a backseat during the initial phase of the crisis, beware of staying quiet for too long. Letting your marketing channels sit idle for an extended period, or drastically scaling back at a time when communication matters more than ever, is not a risk-free strategy.
Let us explain why:
Covid-19 supply chain marketing: Lean in or risk losing ground
Go silent — or stay strong
In the wake of the first shockwaves of the Covid-19 pandemic, supply chain companies understandably had to devote extensive resources to regain their footing. Few industries felt the impact as deeply as the supply chain. For some, the disruption opened up a flood of new business, sending the entire organization scrambling to keep up. For others, it meant every budget line item had to be scrutinized.
At the same time, we noted another challenge brewing for busy organizations: Maintaining a strong online presence during a tumultuous time. How do instill confidence in current customers and gain new leads if you say little or nothing at all?
After the first flurry of crisis-related marketing emails that many of us received (“We are here to help”), some companies — overwhelmed by the scope of work — let their social media accounts go silent and blog pages seized being updated.
The risk? Taking a break or withdrawing altogether could put your organization in a worse position later.
A McKinsey study underscores this point — conventional downturn strategies can actually hamper recovery. The performance analysis of 700 high–tech companies during two decades of market contractions showed “making obvious moves (for instance, cutting costs) as well as counterintuitive ones (such as increasing sales and marketing expenditures) quickly can improve a company’s position when the recovery begins.”
Interestingly, the best-performing companies increased their marketing and advertising spend relative to their competitors, but also compared to their own spending when times were better. However, from our perspective, the issue is far from just spend but identifying the most effective marketing channels and tactics at a time when resources may be scarce.
Weaken SEO — or make it soar
The risk of cutting back on supply chain marketing during Covid-19 also extends to search engine optimization (SEO). Rather than a one-time project, SEO needs constant attention to hum. It is the foundation of your effort to improve the quality and quantity of unpaid website traffic by increasing the visibility of your site or page to search engine users.
SEO and content go together
The completion of a well-designed website is only the beginning. If there is anything SEO demands more than anything else, it is content. You simply cannot ace one without the other. New, key-word optimized content is what makes SEO tick. Google Search has for years used a freshness algorithm to index pages. This means fresh content gets rapidly indexed and lands higher in search rankings than older content.
Backlinks — other reputable sites linking to your content — are also crucial to building SEO. When you provide up-to-date, insightful content, chances increase others will notice and link back to your site, especially during a time when so many are online searching for information. The same goes for backlinks and traffic to your site generated by social media.
So, what is the risk of going quiet?
The short of it: SEO can suffer. If content was the backbone of your marketing strategy before the pandemic hit, your organization has likely established a history of domain authority and is, as a result, in a better position to weather the storm. But not even the best of sites can escape the reality of what matters to search engines. Although you can still squeeze juice out of old keywords, lack of new content puts your organization at a disadvantage when search engines evaluate your pages in competition with countless others.
So much to say — can you find the time?
In many respects, supply chain marketing during Covid-19 comes down to this: Who would you want to do business with during a time of great uncertainty? What signals do you want to send to your audience? What do you want to tell them? As challenging as it may be, leaning in is better than backing out.
by Fronetics | Jan 2, 2020 | Blog, Current Events, Logistics, Marketing, Social Media, Supply Chain
Knowing how and when to respond to a social media crisis is crucial for reputation management and preventing future issues.
News travels at lightning speed thanks, in large part, to social media. With the ability to amplify news – both good and bad – you hear, almost daily, about brands battling a social media crisis. Look at Facebook, who is still managing the aftermath of the Cambridge Analytica scandal almost two years after the news broke.
When your company suffers from negative reviews on social media, it hurts. A single post can have a direct impact on your bottom line. That’s why it’s crucial for B2B brands to know how and when to respond to online reviews and comments. Here are four ways to help your company manage a social media crisis.
4 steps to managing a social media crisis
1. Establish policy
We recently wrote about the importance of a social media policy, and there’s never a better time to implement one than during a social media crisis (except for maybe before it happens). When you provide employees with guidelines on how to respond to negative feedback online, you minimize the risk of employees guessing the appropriate response. Because speed is critical in these situations, a social media policy allows your team to respond quickly and confidently.
2. Listen
You know customers are talking about your company, but is the tone a positive one? And if it’s not, how are you responding? Social listening gives you the opportunity to take a negative customer-service situation and not only correct the problem, but deescalate a situation from turning into a crisis.
Through consistent social listening, you’ll understand the difference between grumblings and a significant change in sentiment toward your brand. Though no company is perfect, a personalized response to negative comments on social media shows a genuine concern for your customers and an investment in customer satisfaction.
3. Engage
As we’ve said, time is of the essence. A short, initial response on social media is a must, but your brand needs to follow up with more in-depth messaging. Social media thrives on engagement, and responding to a crisis is no different.
Lauren Teague suggests, “Avoid getting pulled into a long discussion of what went wrong. Instead, try to move the conversation to a more personal channel, like private messaging. You could also offer a phone number, email address, or other means of communicating outside of social media.”
4. Learn
Deep breaths. Once you’ve survived a social media crisis, the experience isn’t over. Take the time to meet with your employees and examine what happened, what worked well, and what needs to change in the event another crisis occurs. Learning how to minimize the damage of a social media crisis will only benefit you when future issues arise.
Give your staff the opportunity to share their experience during the crisis. Insight from your different departments can help determine areas in your social media policy that need updating, including how to prevent similar crises in the future.
Has your company experienced a social media crisis? How did you put out the fire?
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by Fronetics | Nov 7, 2019 | Blog, Logistics, Marketing, Paid Advertising, Supply Chain
Strategically integrating paid advertising in the buyer’s journey can help influence purchases and repeat sales.
Highlights:
- We advocate a primarily inbound strategy, you can boost the reach of your posts by investing in paid digital advertising.
- Your goal is to continue to engage with prospects and educate buyers as to why your product/service is better than your competitors’.
- 60% of consumers believed customer reviews were either trustworthy or very trustworthy — meaning that businesses that can accumulate positive reviews had a good chance of helping a customer make a purchase decision.
Let’s face it: the internet has completely changed the way B2B buyers are researching and making purchases. It’s becoming more crucial than ever to customize content for a potential customer’s journey through your funnel to help convert leads to sales.
The internet has given buyers the ability to research products and services, as well as compare competitors, without ever leaving the house. To keep up, B2B marketers need to align digital marketing efforts with the buyer’s journey to create and distribute content at the right moment.
While we advocate a primarily inbound strategy, you can boost the reach of your posts, ads, and videos by investing in paid digital advertising. And increased reach isn’t the only benefit. New statistics show that PPC visitors are 50% more likely to purchase something than organic visitors.
The key is to create interesting and informative ads and serve it to potential buyers at the right point in their research. Let’s look at how to integrate paid advertising in the buyer’s journey.
3 stages of the buyer’s journey
To stand out from your competitors, marketers need to know what types of paid ads to create and where to distribute them throughout the buyer’s journey. According to Brandon Stauffer, the typical buyer’s journey breaks into three stages:
- Awareness:A buyer figures out they have a problem and begin researching more about that problem. They are looking for resources to validate or better explain what their problem is.
- Consideration:Now the buyer knows the details of their problem. They begin more research to find a solution to their problem.
- Decision:The buyer has done research into solutions and is now comparing those solutions to make a final decision.
Now that you have the three key stages of the buyer’s journey, digital marketers need to pair specific paid ad campaigns with the right stages.
How to use paid advertising in the buyer’s journey by stage
Awareness stage
This is the very top of the sales funnel. All ads at this stage should focus on educating and engaging with prospects. There are two trains of thought when it comes to the awareness stage of paid ad campaigns:
- Create a campaign for prospects who might not know about your brand, products, or services
- Create an ad campaign that focuses on brand awareness and keeping your company at the top of the mind for those prospects that have heard of your brand
For each of these options, creating ads that appeal to your buyer personas will help get them in front of your targeted audiences.
Recommendation: Google search ads, Facebook and Instagram ads, highly visual content including video
Consideration stage
The second stage, consideration, is just that … Buyers are aware of your brand and are considering your products and services. Your goal is to continue to engage with prospects and educate buyers as to why your product/service is better than your competitors’. Remember, this isn’t the time for a hard sale. You want to bring buyers to the table by demonstrating what you can do for them.
Recommendation: Google Display ads, remarketing through Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and Twitter
Decision stage
Your prospect is almost ready to commit to a “conversion” but may need that extra push. Ads in this phase should communicate an incentive to get them to complete the conversion.
And don’t forget: people trust people. Customer testimonials can be a powerful tool in the decision stage of the buyer’s journey. HubSpot research found that 60% of consumers believed customer reviews were either trustworthy or very trustworthy — meaning that businesses that can accumulate positive reviews had a good chance of helping a customer make a purchase decision.
Recommendation: Remarketing on Google and social platforms, create visual customer testimonials
Have you tried integrating paid advertising in the buyer’s journey?
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by Fronetics | Oct 8, 2019 | Blog, Content Marketing, Logistics, Marketing, Supply Chain
Digital marketing helps increase brand awareness, convert leads, and drive measurable business value. But that doesn’t mean it’s always easy to execute. Here are 4 digital marketing failures and how to get back on track.
Highlights:
- While digital marketing is extremely effective, proving ROI is often the top challenge for marketers.
- If your content isn’t SEO-friendly, readers may not even have the chance to see what you’re writing because it is so far down in their search results.
- Though it’s often more time consuming than written content, visual content, including infographics and video, are the most popular form of content right now.
B2B buyers want information, and they’re inundated with it. Are you ready for this? There are 2.5 quintillion bytes of data created each day, and that number is only accelerating with the growth of the Internet of Things (IoT). Over the last two years alone, 90% of the data in the world was generated.
Because of at its core it leverages data to target audiences, digital marketing has been a successful solution for marketers. But it’s not that easy.
Here at Fronetics, we’re big believers in analytics. And while digital marketing is extremely effective, proving ROI is often the top challenge for marketers. Without data to back up your efforts, how do you prove your digital marketing strategy is working? And with all those quintillion bytes of data being created every day, how do you stand out from competitors?
The simple answer is using analytics to evaluate your efforts and to determine what is working and what needs to be tweaked. Digital marketing strategies have to be fluid and easily adaptive to change. Companies have to grow and shift with the times, which means that marketing plans have to evolve.
Here are four digital marketing failures, which you can easily identify through analytics, and how to fix them.
4 digital marketing failures (and how to make them right)
1.Lack of strategy
Many marketers understand the power of digital marketing but think they can jump in without a strategy. And not just a strategy that you thought of over coffee, but an actual documented strategy. Why? Because a documented digital marketing strategy will help you work smarter and more effectively.
In fact, according to the Content Marketing Institute, those with a documented content marketing strategy:
- Are far more likely to consider themselves effective at digital marketing
- Feel significantly less challenged with every aspect of digital marketing
- Generally, consider themselves more effective in their use of all digital marketing tactics and social media channels
- Were able to justify spending a higher percentage of their marketing budget on content marketing
Having a fundamental understating of your digital marketing plan and a strategy for executing that plan is crucial for success.
2. No search engine optimization
Google is responsible for 94% of total organic traffic. That’s almost ALL organic traffic. SEO means creating content for your digital assets so they will be prioritized by Google in search queries related to your brand or products. It’s time for digital marketers to learn the basics of Google’s algorithms and understand how the content they’re creating can rank better against the competition.
61% of marketers say improving SEO and growing their organic presence is their top inbound marketing priority. If your content isn’t SEO-friendly, readers may not even have the chance to see what you’re writing because it is so far down in their search results.
3. Quality is lacking
While this seems obvious, it’s worth repeating. If the quality of your content is bad, no one will read it, regardless of what value it offers. The same goes for content about which you find yourself saying, “it works,” or “it’s fine!” If there are 27 million options, who would choose “fine?”
Do an honest evaluation of your digital assets, or have a neutral outside party do so for you. Is it original, informative, and well-written? Make sure that your copy is edited, and that it is free from grammatical errors, spelling mistakes, and awkward phrasing. If you want people to read your content, you should make sure that it’s worth reading.
And don’t shy away from visual content. Though it’s often more time consuming than written content, visual content, including infographics and video, are the most popular form of content right now.
4. Lack of posting consistency
Inconsistently publishing content is one of the primary reasons readers become disengaged with a particular brand. Having consistent, high-quality content helps establish your company as a thought leader in your industry. Even publishing one more blog post a week can significantly boost your readership.
Try experimenting with the amount of content you publish per week. For example, if you currently publish two times a week, try bumping it up to three times for one month. The following month, maybe you try bumping it to four. You’ll find your sweet spot when you’re increasing engagement but are still able to handle the production schedule and it’s not impacting the quality of your content.
What other digital marketing failures have you encountered?
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