In many cases, automation in manufacturing creates leaner, more efficient operations. Efficiency facilitates new opportunities and business growth, which in turn allow for job creation.
The rise of artificial intelligence (AI) and its applications in manufacturing have driven a palpable fear that mass job loss is on the horizon. We have to wonder: is the threat as real and as imminent as many think? Like many things, the answer is more nuanced than a simple yes or no.
A McKinsey Global Institute report predicts that automation could cause the loss of between 39 and 73 million jobs by 2030 in the U.S. alone. Clearly, the AI genie will not be put back into its bottle. However, this doesn’t mean that all jobs across all sectors will be affected evenly.
Generally, low-skill jobs are more susceptible to replacement by AI. This is especially true in industries like retail, which has worked to automate many aspects along the purchase journey, including processes designed to get packages into consumers’ hands faster.
Not the end of the world
Oddly enough, 73 million lost jobs doesn’t spell all doom and gloom. Yes, people will lose jobs — that is inevitable. Automation, however, will create many more.
Think about it: In many cases, automation creates leaner, more efficient operations. Efficiency facilitates new market opportunities and business growth, which in turn allow for expansion and job creation. And these new jobs aren’t the low-skill positions of their pre-automation predecessors. They’re operating new technology, supervising automated processes, and other higher-paying opportunities.
Amazon: Case in point
Consider the retail industry’s brick-and-mortar boom and bust and the rise of e-commerce. As stores shuttered, companies had to downsize the number of individuals they employed. Then, as e-commerce boomed, e-retailing companies were able to bring on more employees — often at higher salaries than in traditional retail.
Amazon’s expansion to the “once-thriving factory town” of Fall River, Mass., offers a prime example. The city, which boasted nearly 20,000 manufacturing jobs in 1991, saw that number dip below 4,000 by 2015 — in large part due to automation. The 2016 arrival of an Amazon fulfillment center was the single largest job-creation event in recent memory.
Employment at the Fall River center has crept above 2,000 in just over a year. And it’s apparent that number will keep rising and that humans won’t be phased out anytime soon. In fact, rather than replace human workers, Amazon’s technology helps each become more efficient. That stimulates Amazon’s growth and the need for more fulfillment centers and more talent to fill those jobs.
While the majority of the Fall River center’s jobs are not skilled and pay reflects that, other benefits such as overtime, tuition aid, and company shares make annual compensation comparable to or better than what local textile mills once paid. Fulfillment center jobs certainly pay above traditional retail and offer employees the opportunity to work withartificial intelligence — rather than in competition with it.
A double-edged sword
AI in the warehouse may stimulate job growth. But those most likely to lose their jobs to automation — low-skill workers — may not possess the transferable skills to be successful in the new wave of jobs created by technology. For example, would a former factory worker who put together boxes for fulfillment be hirable for a position operating custom box-cutting machinery?
Amazon, again, exemplifies a solution. The company offers its workers significant training and education to breach any skill gaps. Those who have never had experience in a warehouse or operating technology will need companies to invest in their training to ensure those who have lost their jobs to automation will have a place in the new economy.
History repeating
This isn’t the first time we’ve encountered such an issue. Before ATMs were the ubiquitous cash-dispensing machines, many thought them the great disruptor of the banking industry. The bank teller’s role was sure to become obsolete.
What actually happened is that ATMs led to more efficiently run banks. While some jobs were lost, banks were actually able to open up more branch locations, which led to the creation of more jobs.
Will automation in the warehouse cause the same scenario to happen? Will organizations become more efficient, allowing them to grow and hire more workers at better, higher paying jobs? In many cases, it looks like it already has.
If you’re looking to increase your brand awareness, and quickly, here are 10 tricks to accelerate your efforts.
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.
Particularly if your business is new, you’re trying to change an existing market perception, or you have to make your marketing dollars work fast to meet a boss’ deadline, you need to grow brand awareness quickly. We’ve got some ideas to accelerate your efforts.
10 tricks to grow brand awareness quickly
1) Instagram Stories
Instagram Stories is an on-trend platform that delivers targeted content to B2B buyers and builds brand awareness with potential customers. This feature consists of sequences of content that a user posts over a 24-hour period. Besides photos, Stories can include video and Boomerangs, seconds-long motion clips that play forwards and backwards.
2) Partner with other brands
Creating a promotional partnership with a brand that is ancillary to your role in the supply chain can be a huge boost to your brand awareness, if you choose wisely in your partnership. You benefit from its image and reputation and build collegiality.
3) Start content partnerships
Again, this is all about leveraging other people’s audiences to spread the word about your brand. Reach out to the blogs or media sites your target buyers frequent to see if you can author a post for them. Invite them to guest author on your blog. Basically, create two-way content partnerships where you will ensure that your brand’s name will come across the screens of target buyers.
4) Make sharing easy
This is a great way to let your successes go to work for you. Make it easy for your audience and followers to share your content with their networks. Give them sharing options for email, social media — heck, put share links on anything and everything. Social media is a powerful tool in building your brand. Don’t underuse it.
5) Hold social media contests
Everybody loves to win a contest. Use your social media platforms to create contests in which followers submit a photo or video, and let other users vote for their favorites. Contestants will share the link with their networks, and your brand awareness grows exponentially.
6) Try paid social advertising
Facebook and Twitter ads are relatively cheap, and both platforms do a great job of making sure your content gets to your target audience. You can set metrics and customize your preferences for a targeted audience in a variety of ways. It’s one of the most effective ways to grow brand awareness quickly with a very particular audience, though you have to pay to play.
7) Infographics
These are eye-catching and colorful ways to display interesting data and statistics, and are often overlooked for the content powerhouses they are. They’re prime candidates to be shared far and wide on social media.
8) Personality
Having a memorable personality for your brand isn’t just for B2C companies. While you don’t need to hire the Old Spice Guy, letting your content have a voice and perspective is important. Buyers want to know they’re dealing with a human being.
9) Podcasts
Starting your own industry podcast, perhaps interviewing your own executives and other industry experts, is a great way to build your brand and simultaneously develop relationships with your supply chain peers.
10) Become a resource
We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again: Your most important asset is your knowledge and expertise, not your products and services. Content marketing is all about being a trusted resource for your audience. Ditch the blatant sales pitch in your content and think about how you can help your target buyers instead.
Here are four metrics to benchmark how your brand stacks up against your competitors and to evaluate the success of your content marketing strategy.
Competitive benchmarking is the process of comparing your company’s performance against that of your competitors. You can use various metrics to benchmark what these businesses are doing better than you are and where you have the edge. Benchmarking marketing performance is an important step in the process of evaluating the success of your content marketing strategy.
Organizations of all kinds — large corporations, privately owned businesses, nonprofits, and even sports teams — need to measure their performance to see if their efforts are leading to success. It’s one thing to examine webpage visits, number of clicks on a social post, or how many times a piece of content has been shared to understand what is happening as a result of your activities. But it’s key to take this information and see how it compares to other industry leaders.
Measuring digital marketing performance begins with setting competitive benchmarks. And to do this, you need contextual data. Analytics are great, but not if you don’t have context for your data.
There are several ways to measure your activity against your competitors. At Fronetics, we use these four metrics to benchmark marketing performance against competition and industry leaders.
Video: 4 metrics to benchmark marketing performance against your competition
As with all good strategies, you must continually measure success of your content marketing and adjust based on real-world results. These four metrics to benchmark marketing performance against your competitors are a great way to get started. If you aren’t keeping pace with — or beating — the competition, it might be time to go back to the drawing board.
Here’s how to quantify the impact of content marketing on brand awareness, a notoriously difficult benefit to measure.
A successful content marketing strategy strengthens the relationship between brands and their target audiences. And brand awareness is a key component to any successful content marketing strategy. Ultimately, the more aware audiences are of your brand, the more likely they are to buy your products or services.
To properly measure the impact of your content marketing, you must start at the beginning, with the overall goals for your content marketing strategy. What kind of content are you creating? Why are you creating this content? How will this increase sales or grow your business?
A lot of our customers include increasing brand awareness among their content strategy goals. But this is a very difficult objective to quantify. How can you measure how familiar people are with your brand?
Here are four metrics we recommend for tracking the impact of content marketing on brand awareness.
4 metrics to measure the impact of content marketing on brand awareness.
1. Social media reach
Tracking the reach of your social media content is a good gauge of the impact it’s having on your brand awareness. Companies can waste a lot of time trying to track down information on various social media accounts; don’t fall into this trap.
Use tools, like Shared Count, that show how many times a piece of content has been shared on social media. Shared Count accurately tracks the social reach of your content on the most popular social media sites — including Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn — to easily keep track of your social reach. In turn, you can discover the impact your social reach is having on your brand awareness.
2. Brand mentions
Not to state the obvious, but if people are talking about your brand online, it’s safe to assume they are aware of you. There’s a great deal of value in knowing what customers are saying about your company and your products/services. Monitoring brand mentions online can provide honest feedback and objective insight from current and potential customers.
There are several tools to help you track brand mentions online. Here at Fronetics, we prefer the ease of Google Alerts, which allows you to set up custom alerts when your brand is mentioned online. We also use Hootsuite, where you can track brand mentions, as well as keywords and phrases, across all of your social media platforms.
3. Media mentions
Media mentions differ from brand mentions in their origin. Media mentions come directly from publishers, instead of customers. These mentions include any media coverage — TV, print, social media, interviews — that include your brand. Remember, if publishers are talking about your brand online as a result of the content you’re creating, it’s impacting your brand awareness.
And let’s not forget about linkless mentions. As Google and other search engines continue to update their algorithms, it’s crucial to update your monitoring practices. Linkless backlinks are becoming increasingly popular and can have a huge impact on your brand awareness (and SEO!).
4. Branded searches
Knowing how many people are searching for your specific brand tells you a lot about how well known your brand is. Using online tools, such as Google Adwords or Moz, you can track the searches for your products, blogs, social media platforms, and any other variation that you find useful. These tools are free, easy to use, and perfect for determining if your company is popping up when customers are searching.
Using these tools to measure brand awareness offers clues that customers are finding your company in their search efforts. If the needle is not moving in a positive direction, always adjust your strategy to until you find what works for your business.
Drawing the public’s attention to — and heightening their knowledge of — your business ultimately generates leads. And some of those leads will turn into sales. But, let’s be honest: this doesn’t happen overnight. And it’s often difficult to quantify.
That’s not a reason to throw in the towel. There are ways to measure the work that you’re putting into your content marketing program. Using these metrics, you can start tracking the impact of content marketing on brand awareness.
Linkless backlinks, or mentions of your business without a hyperlink to your webpage, are now a more effective way to improve your ranking with search engines.
For years Google has used backlinks to rank webpages. Backlinks are any link on another website that points (or links) back to your website. Unfortunately, search engines began to use backlinks as a bit of a popularity contest: The more you had, the more popular your website became.
Businesses quickly understood the loophole in search engines’ algorithms. They could buy, influence or even create relationships with other industry businesses for the sole benefit of getting links to their websites. It didn’t take long for search engines to catch on.
Google has spent years reworking the way it ranks backlinks and trying to penalize brands that pay for or create free links through unethical relationships. But where does that leave the rest of us that are working to create high-quality content in hopes of increasing our SEO rankings?
Linkless backlinks are the future of SEO rankings
You might be asking yourself what is a linkless backlink? Good question.
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.”
It all comes down to mentions of your brand on reputable websites. And I don’t just mean backlinks to your webpage. Other sites’ tweeting about your products or mentioning you on their Facebook News Feed can all lead to increased rankings on Google and other search engines. Sounds easy, right?
How to make linkless backlinks work for you
The principles that help you gain backlinks are still true for gaining linkless backlinks. You want to focus on creating the most accurate, high-quality content you can. Create videos and infographics for your website to add visual appeal. And collaborate with other industry leaders to reach new audiences.
But there are a few other tips you can use to help boost your SEO ranking with linkless backlinks.
3 tips for building a strategy for linkless backlinks
1. Work to increase brand awareness and reputation
The foundation of linkless mentions is reputation building. Search engines are looking for authentic mentions of products and brands in content that helps build authority around an industry topic.
Increase your brand awareness by growing your social media presence, by encouraging followers and loyal customers to write online reviews of your products and services, and by participating in collaborative content marketing.
2. Track brand awareness and mentions
You’re working hard to create content that has a far reach across many platforms. It’s a key step in gaining exposure among potential customers and earning new business. This process is called brand awareness, the extent to which consumers are familiar with your brand. And for linkless backlinks, it’s imperative that you’re tracking all of your brand mentions, not just links.
There are several tools to help you track brand mentions online. Here at Fronetics, we prefer the ease of Google Alerts, which sends you a message when someone mentions your brand online. We also use Hootsuite, with which you can track brand mentions, as well as keywords and phrases, across all of your social media platforms.
3. Stay on top of negative mentions
Blog comment sections and social media channels offer an open avenue for customers to discuss their thoughts about your company for all the world to see. And, unfortunately, one negative comment can be infinitely louder than one hundred positive ones. The potential impact it could have on business is scary.
But that doesn’t mean you should delete or ignore every unfavorable brand mention. In fact, companies can use negative online comments as an opportunity to exhibit top-notch customer service and much-appreciated transparency in the way they do business.
Be diligent in monitoring brand mentions and respond quickly to resolve any issues that arise. Responding promptly and effectively to negative feedback online shows your commitment to customer service and transparency.
The art of SEO building is a tough craft to master. As algorithms evolve, it’s important for brands to stay aware of these changes and focus on what they can do to help boost their rankings.
The more buzz around your brand, the better your ranking will be. So make sure you’re utilizing all the different ways to help boost your SEO ranking, including linkless backlinks.
Need more help with SEO? We’ve done the research, so you don’t have to. Have a look.
