How 2 new developments have changed the world of marketing
The year 2017 is about to dawn, and with it marks a decade anniversary of the birth of two seismic changes in how people view the world around them. No doubt you’ve incorporated both of these changes into your daily life, but have you fully absorbed them into the way you conduct your business?
In supply chain and logistics businesses, the general answer is “no.” That’s a significant problem for a company’s long-term success, but it can be remedied.
Let’s look at the two world-changing phenomena, how rapidly they’ve reshaped the world, why they are crucial to your company, and steps you can take to fuse them into your business.
A new website is launched
It was just 10 years ago that a new website poked its head up on the internet, offering to the general public an online social network so people could keep in contact with friends and family. Originally designed as a private forum for college and high school students to connect online, but its founders thought perhaps it might catch on with the public, too.
In late 2006, when Facebook opened its website to anyone who wanted to sign on, it saw its users soar by 33%, to 8 million. But that was barely a blip compared to the social and business marketing revolution it has created worldwide. Now over 1.8 billion people use Facebook, and hundreds of millions more use other social media channels that have sprung up in its wake — Twitter, LinkedIn, Snap, Instagram, and many others.
For businesses, social media has opened up an entirely new way to find and interact with customers. It’s changed the traditional ground rules of marketing and advertising. And it’s created a completely new and sophisticated tool — big data — that provides unprecedented amounts of information about customers and potential customers. That information is valuable.
A new phone dials in
The second revolution is now literally in the hands of one quarter of the world’s population.
Around the time Facebook launched, Apple came out with its first foray into the emerging field of cellular phones. The iPhone was an instant hit, selling a little over 1 million phones in its debut year, 2007. It combined the functions of a smart cellphone with intuitive ways to connect to the internet. Rival technologies quickly followed suit. Today, an estimated 2.6 billion people worldwide use a smartphone.
Mobile communication, via smartphones, is now the dominant way that people access the internet. About 55% of people use their phones to surf the web. And while a decade ago they spent less than 30 minutes per day using their phone’s functions, now it’s around 3 hours per day. Here’s another thing to consider — most people have their cellphones on their person during all their waking hours, and they check it over 100 times a day.
For businesses, having a mobile phone strategy and a well-managed mobile presence is absolutely essential. When it’s working at full throttle, it’s populating the social media apps that people are checking dozens of times per day. It’s providing compelling content that they want to read; it’s building up name-brand recognition; and it’s growing brand loyalty.
Looking toward 2017
Every year the boundaries of social media and internet marketing get pushed. It is hard to find a consensus on what the dominant trend will be. Will Twitter dwindle and other social media platforms take its place? Some think that companies will need to be faster and smarter about creating content linked to whatever the hot topic of the day is. Others don’t see a dominate change on the horizon; instead incremental changes to what’s already online.
For supply chain and logistics companies that want to establish a foothold or build on an existing beachhead, the solutions lie in the new evolution of customer interaction, called content marketing.
The landscape changes ahead are hard to predict, but there are some reliable existing strategies to follow. Fronetics has put together a guide on how supply chain and logistics companies can formulate tactics to take advantage of the opportunities that a content marketing plan and a robust social media presence can create. Click below to download the guide.
Who knows what social innovations the next decade will spawn. If the past decade is any guide, another revolution is coming. Are you keeping pace?
By repurposing and thoughtfully packaging the content you have already published, you can assist your sales force in closing deals.
How many of your sales force’s calls turn into appointments? Probably very few. More and more of today’s buyers don’t want to speak with sales reps about products.
But, then, who will buyers speak to? A LinkedIn survey of 1,500 purchasers and influencers found that 86% of buyers will listen if sales professionals provide insights about their business. What’s more, 92% of buyers engage with a professional if that person is a known industry thought leader.
So, what if your sales force approached prospects not as a sales representative, but as a source of information, insight, and thought leadership? What if you already had the tools to help your sales staff achieve this reputation? If you are publishing original content, then you do.
Let them have content
Arm a sales rep with targeted content to share with prospects during specific moments in the purchase process, and it will advance his or her reputation as a source of knowledge. 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.
Here are four easy ideas for repurposing the content you have already created to assist your sales force.
1. Simply share.
Encourage sales representatives to follow your company and its content producers on social media and to share relevant articles with their networks. They can repost both your original content and curated articles as well.
2. Get visual.
Turn your evergreen content into easy-to-read infographics or another visual format. Send with the sales representatives to meetings with prospects, or encourage them to email the content to certain contacts as a lead-nurturing exercise.
3. Gather news.
In planning your content, you likely consider industry news, trends, and happenings. Keep a list of these points and supporting articles, and have the sales team distribute to their contacts on a regular basis, like a newsletter, to demonstrate knowledge of the business landscape.
4. Build case studies.
Develop several case studies from your company’s success stories. Organize them around specific pain points that your buyer personas face. Provide these to the sales team with a list of key points from each study to use as either talking points or to send as follow-up emails to prospects facing the same challenges.
These are a great starting point for bridging the gap between the marketing department and sales force with content. But don’t let it stop there.
Set up a role-playing exercise with your sales team, where you are the customer. Analyze their pitch and see how content can fill the holes. It’s likely you have built a lot of content around many of the reps’ talking points, which they can use to further inform their pitches and to use as lead-nurturing collateral.
A look at the world’s top business leaders show they possess both financial savvy and personal acumen.
We measure today’s top business leaders on a variety of scales, including personal acumen and their company’s financial performance. Regardless of how a leader is gauged, one thing is clear: 21st century leaders must have strong engagement and stellar interpersonal skills on multiple fronts — from the numbers to corporate responsibility to how to best motivate employees.
The Harvard Business Review suggests the world’s best-performing CEOs share three crucial traits: long-term thinking, short-term savvy, and a relentless focus on employees. HBR’s annual data-driven annual survey of top CEOS in the world weighs companies with an 80/20 formula — 80% based on financial performance, and 20% based on ESG (environment, social, and corporate governance performance).
The top leaders, by the numbers
The tension between short- and long-term decision-making affects top leaders’ financial performance, since overall strength is not based on a single positive financial quarter, HBR reports, but rather the cumulative effect of consecutive strong quarters.
“They really are running today’s business while trying to create tomorrow’s business,” Dan McGinn, senior editor at Harvard Business Review, said in a recent podcast about how CEOs manage the challenges of focusing on long- and short-term growth of business. “They’re dealing with a very fast-changing global landscape.”
The top three business leaders in HBR’s survey — Lars Rebien Sorenson of Novo Nordisk, Martin Sorrell of WPP, and Pablo Isla of Inditex — all had different paths to the top, although 84% of CEOs are promoted from within. Only 24% of HBR’s top leaders have an MBA, signaling that the coveted business degree is not integral to becoming a top leader. Of note is that only one of the top 10 HBR leaders is from the United States — Jen-Hsun Huang of Nvidia — because of the generally lower ESG numbers for U.S.-based companies, McGinn said in the podcast. None of the top 10 are women.
The metric commonly referred to as “Corporate Responsibility,” ESG importance is rising in the United States, but is still outpaced by European companies. This is only the second year that the HBR survey included ESG, which resulted in Amazon CEP Jeff Bezos dropping from the top 10 to number 76 on HBR’s list.
In addition to being on top of the ever-changing socio-political world, top business leaders may have to consider a shift in their corporate culture because of the rising number of millennials in the workforce.
Forbes estimates that by 2020, millennials will comprise nearly 50% of the workforce. Successful business leaders need to know how to best motivate and manage this workforce segment who, according to HBR’s McGinn, have different sets of values and different ways of thinking about their careers. Companies today have to adapt their culture to this growing part of the workforce, he says.
Leadership traits that stand the test of time
Industrialist Andrew Carnegie, often credited with being one of the world’s most successful business leaders, met with journalist Napoleon Hill early in the 20th century to relay what would become his “31 Traits That All Business Leaders Have,” a guidepost for those looking to follow in Carnegie’s footsteps.
The personality traits, although more than 100 years old, are still relevant in today’s business world.
Hill published two books that included Carnegie’s traits: Think and Grow Rich (1937), and Think Your Way to Wealth from 1948. He posited that top traits of great leaders include:
Having a company purpose and a plan for attaining it
Being motivated
Coordinating efforts with talented workers
Being disciplined, persistent, creative and decisive
Being diplomatic and tactful, enthusiastic and likable
And treating others with respect
The top traits have stood the test of time and, mixed with the significance of today’s financial and corporate responsibility, create the ideal 21st century business leader.
The shortage of drivers paired with the continued growth of the trucking industry paves the way for driverless trucks.
This guest post comes to us from Rachel Everly, a writer for Cerasis, a top freight logistics company and truckload freight broker.
The trucking industry has been serving America for many decades, and even today it is the main method by which freight is transferred all over the country. Anyone who says the trucking industry is facing a decline or a reduced demand is way off the numbers. More large trucks are coming on U.S. roads, traveling more miles, and transporting more good than ever before.
We have seen more than 3% increases in the number of trucks, which translates to almost 11 million trucks. Also, trucks are still transporting 73% of almost all cargo weight moved in one year. With all these impressive numbers, surprisingly there is a shortage of drivers. That spells both trouble and opportunity for this industry.
Where is there a shortage of drivers?
The U.S trucking industry is facing a severe driver shortage. One estimate shows that around 48,000 drivers are required to move about 70% of freight.
To improve safety, in December 2015, the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) announced that driver hours will be recorded via Electronic Logging Devices by 2017. This becomes mandatory by December 18, 2017. This was introduced because the existing systems of time-logging are purposely made very complicated, thus not allowing one to check how many hours is a driver on the road.
This is being introduced to ensure that driver safety is not compromised, keeping fatigued drivers off the road. According to calculations, this will save 26 lives a year and prevent 562 injuries every year. Not just this, the ELD will save companies the hassle of paperwork, eventually leading the trucking industry to save somewhere around $1 billion due to reduced paperwork and time-savings.
However, this means reduced hours per driver, thus increasing the need for more drivers. Small trucking companies will be hit the hardest, but overall the industry will be in a better position thanks to this rule. It is estimated that this new rule would cost the industry $1.8 billion, but cost savings from reduced accidents and paperwork amount in excess of $3 billion.
The way to driverless trucks
Humans are amazing creatures, but we are prone to human errors. Human errors account for the majority of the road accidents. Plus with the new rule in, companies will need more drivers, adding to costs. Uber has been actively working on getting driverless trucks on the roads, with a project already started in Singapore, and now has turned its eyes on the trucking industry.
Uber has recently acquired the start-up Otto. Otto has made great inroads into driverless trucks. Otto currently has 6 working self-driving trucks, with plans to expand to 15. This year Otto is continuously running tests; trucks are hauling random items from the company’s garage to test how the vehicles respond to hauling weight.
The company is confident that soon they will be moving all kinds of goods for shippers. They have already started forging relationships with big names in the trucking industry. The self-driving trucks have shown that they can easily operate on highways, maneuvering off the open interstate is still a work in progress.
The following infographic outlines some of the benefits of driverless trucks:
Just as purchases are becoming more automatic, generating marketing content also needs to keep up with the times.
Automated purchasing systems are more and more in vogue, opening another avenue for strong content marketing to reign.
Did you know with the simple touch of a button, consumers are able to receive boxes of cereal, bags of coffee, and jugs of laundry detergent with hardly a thought? Amazon’s latest offering — the Dash Button — is a branded wireless device that allows consumers to efficiently order products right when they think of it. Customers can strategically place the button in their pantry, for example, so they can easily reorder supplies when reaching for the last bottle of water or opening the last bar of bath soap.
“Subscribe and save” programs available through retail giants such as Amazon and Target are another way to keep consumers stocked with the supplies they need. These items arrive on a pre-set schedule without the buyer even having to think about it. And subscription-based sales models offered by Dollar Shave Club, Starbucks, and Blue Apron keep consumers clicking through, adding big bucks to corporate coffers.
Influencing the preprogrammed bots
The robotization of consumer spending is changing the current model of marketing, advertising and shopping, according to a recent Harvard Business Review article, and marketers need to be prepared for the next level of automation in order to keep revenues streaming.
If this automation crosses into the B2B marketplace, suppliers will face new challenges — including finding ways to affect choices of preprogrammed “bots,” such as Amazon’s Dash Button. In this possible and increasingly likely world, HBR posits that advertising dollars will be diverted from traditional models to building relationships, challenging incumbents, increasing rates of consumption, and influencing marketing algorithms.
One such algorithm analyzes products that are pre-selected as the default brand in the item’s software (think: the scurry to become Apple’s default map program). Fresh and tailored content that even bots can process will be paramount to targeting content to buyers.
Content that educates the people behind the bots
In this future scenario, what can brands do to win business from competitors?
Certainly, it will take a significant effort to persuade a customer to change the algorithm’s default settings to another product or service. Vendors will have to produce highly targeted, personalized content that demonstrates a deep understanding of the customer’s business and how their product or service will better suit their needs.
Interestingly enough, that’s a preference that we’re already seeing among B2B buyers.
In the 2016 B2B Buyer’s Survey Report, 69% of buyers said relevant content that speaks directly to the company is very important, signaling that personalized content packages equate to satisfied customers and potential customers.
Using content to build relationships will continue to be of utmost importance, even in the age of bot-to-bot purchases. Optimize content to include buzz phrases and recognized keywords, and even bots will get the message.
