Research: Quora offers amazing insight into what thought leaders in the supply chain and logistics industries are focused on. Just by tuning into the conversation, you can gain extremely valuable knowledge.
Connections: This social media platform gives you a perfect space to connect with peers in your industry and with potential buyers, as well.
Reputation building: Quora is one of the best tools out there for reputation building. It allows you to participate in and contribute to conversations that can shape the future of your industry. Using this platform effectively gives you the opportunity to become a resource for others in your industry and for your target buyers — and there’s no better reputation builder than that.
Plenty of business are already using Quora extremely effectively, seeing ROI and more. But supply chain and logistics companies have yet to jump on this untapped opportunity. Let’s take a look at a few success stories.
2 B2B companies successfully using Quora
Kiip
This mobile advertising network has a unique business model that “redefines how brands connect with consumers.” Back in 2014, the marketing team did a series of experiments — one of which was answering questions on Quora — to figure out which growth strategies would be most beneficial for the business model. Read about Kiip’s Quora experiment here.
Kevin Fishner, Kiip’s director of growth, said that his goal in answering Quora questions was to “build our brand presence in the mobile advertising space while driving quality leads to our site.” He offers the important insight that there is a fine line between offering valuable answers and blatantly pitching your product.
“If the question directly pertained to Kiip,” Fishner says, “I’d drop a link at the bottom of my answer. If it was a more generic mobile advertising question, I’d use insights from our campaigns at Kiip and leave it at that.”
Fishner points out that answering questions thoughtfully takes a significant time investment. But in the end, this investment is worth it for your business in all kinds of ways.
As you join the Quora conversation, keep Fishner’s insights in mind. Promoting your brand isn’t always about pitching your product. Becoming a thought leader can be just beneficial, if not more so, for your brand and, ultimately, for your bottom line.
IMPACT
Impact is an inbound marketing agency based out of Connecticut. Earlier this year, IMPACT blogger Carolyn Edgecomb wrote about how the company used Quora marketing to build brand awareness. Like Fishner, she points to following core advice for using this platform: “Hustling or selling is exactly what you shouldn’t be doing on Quora. Instead, aim to spread knowledge.”
Based on IMPACT’s experience on the site, she suggest that “by regularly engaging with other members, you’re able to gain key insights from leading experts, target your audience, and even repurpose your content while answering and asking questions.”
For IMPACT, Quora was less about generating ROI and more about “increasing brand awareness and establishing thought leadership.”
Supply chain and logistics companies can take inspiration and insight from these two Quora marketing success stories. The field is largely open. Start looking for questions you can answer, become a part of the conversation, and aim to become a thought leader.
I repurposed some of our popular content into a video using Lumen 5, a video automation tool.
Have you heard of Lumen 5? It’s a cool website that turns your blog posts into videos in a matter of minutes. You simply enter a URL of an existing post, and it automatically selects text and creates slides with relevant photos. You can edit the text as necessary and swap out photos from a vast library, then select music to go along with the slideshow. And you can even swap colors and add your logo for a little bit of branding.
Super user friendly. Really quick. Did I mention that the most basic functionalities are free?
Video and automation: Two of my favorite words!
I’m always looking for ways to repurpose some of our best content or just present it in a new way. So when my colleague came across Lumen 5 the other day (true story, they are not paying me for this plug), it seemed like an easy tool for doing so.
If you read this blog regularly, you know that I believe all businesses — even supply chain and logistics businesses — should be considering video as a part of their content marketing strategies. Most don’t have the time or budget to do something professional. So automation tools like Lumen 5 offer an interesting opportunity to delve into video without a big investment.
Something else we’re big on at Fronetics? Automation. It’s tricky with marketing because marketing requires a lot of strategic thinking, analysis, and creativity, which really can’t be automated. So any tools that do help automate any part of your creative or editorial processes are a good find.
All this being said, I did do quite a bit of editing and perfecting of the video below. But I was pretty impressed with the original video that Lumen 5 created from my post before I started working on it, too. Features like the text select and image suggestions speed up the editing process, so all in all, I probably spent 20-30 minutes making a video. Not bad!
Video: How Often to Post on Social Media
For our inaugural Lumen 5 video, I decided to use one of our most popular posts, This Is How Often B2B Companies Should Post on Social Media. It’s a question that we get all the time, and I felt the content worked in both the more robust blog post format and the hyper-shortened (about 1 minute) Lumen 5 video format.
Here it is:
What do you think? Do you use any video tools that are free/cheap and fast?
Terrorism is a reality that, unfortunately, requires our growing attention in the supply chain world.
The British Standards Institution Supply Chain Services and Solutions publishes an annual report that analyzes global trouble spots for supply chain operations. This year’s report focused on the continual rise in terrorist attacks and how it will continue to affect the supply chain.
In 2016, there were 346 attacks in just one year — that’s an 8.5% rise on the previous year, averaging 6.7 attacks every week.
Terrorism, in its broadest sense, describes the use of intentionally indiscriminate violence as a means to create terror or fear to achieve a political, religious, or ideological aim. This violence can take on many forms, including cyberterrorism, and can have dire consequences to the supply chain.
“The direct impact from acts of terrorism and the indirect effects from terrorist organizations’ exploitation of the supply chain have been, and will continue to be, critically felt across Europe,” said David Fairnie, principal consultant in supply chain security at BSI.
In 2016, supply chain terrorism attacks were more widely distributed than in any previous year, with 38% more countries suffering attacks. The top 10 countries for supply-chain-terrorism incidents accounted for $664 billion worth of global exports. That includes $96 billion of exports to the United States. Clearly, a significant volume of international trade is at risk for disruption by terrorist groups.
I recently spoke with Randy Russell of the Russell Group, an agricultural lobbying firm that works with farmers and manufacturers from the supply chain, to ask about his thoughts on terrorism and the impact it can have on the supply chain, especially related to our food and water supplies.
“Terrorism is a global problem that strikes locally. The net result of the horrible tragedy of 9/11 was a wake-up call to all Americans about the threat of terrorists groups. We have invested billions in intelligence and homeland security to ensure that a large-scale attack doesn’t affect two major areas in the U.S., our water supply and an outbreak amongst our food supply, especially our cattle industry.
“No country is completely safe, but we are exponentially better prepared to stop such attempts because of a well-coordinated effort. Remember at the heart of of terrorism is the hatred of democracy and the freedoms it is built upon. Their whole approach is to create fear and doubt within the boundaries of those who embrace freedom.”
We know the nation is doing its part to keep us safe, but how are we keeping our businesses and brands safe as well? The need for brand safety has never been higher. Sarah Golding, president of IPA and chief executive at CHI & Partners, called for the industry to do more to protective itself, stating that an estimated 20% of the $32 billion spent on digital video and display advertising is fraudulently billed.
So How Can You Prepare Your Supply Chain for terrorism?
Munters Lean Manager Marcelo Simiao weighed in on how he believes businesses can prepare themselves in the event of an attack:
“From the point of view of the supply chain, the consequences of a terrorist act on places such as airports, ports, and railroads are not much different from the ones caused by natural disasters. Therefore the preparations should be similar.
“The difference is that some of these areas don’t have contingency or emergency plans for natural disasters because risk varies according to regions. So, these areas should make a thorough risk analysis similar to other areas’ natural disaster plans, and also put it in place in the case of terror threats.
“Corporations should include in their risk analysis not only areas subject to natural disasters, but also the ones with high risk of terror attacks. They must include actions such as diverse footprint, secondary suppliers for the same components, emergency changes on factories set up. These actions are used to compensate losses/disruption of the supply chain flow.
“Furthermore, real-time data acquisition, big-data analysis, and effective planning are the key to fast reaction times for corporations once an attack/disaster happens. The sooner the corporation takes action in order to mitigate disruption, the less its flow will be affected. If an airport is closed, it is important to be the first one to know and the first one trying to move the cargo through alternate routes/intermodal.”
Also in September 2017’s social media news: YouTube gets a new look, and LinkedIn adds a native advertising network.
With fall officially in swing, social media platforms have turned up the heat. During the month of September, Facebook has launched its original video content tab and begged music executives for the ability to download songs. YouTube reworked its mobile app and came out with a fresh, new design. LinkedIn introduced us to its new Audience Network. And Instagram just got easier to troll at work. Here’s this month’s social media news.
Facebook Watch Makes Its Appearance on Profiles
Facebook has officially rolled out its new Watch tab, which allows users to subscribe to original video content. The tab was available to a test audience in August, but is now open to all users in the U.S. on mobile, desktop and Facebook’s TV apps. Facebook is hoping to boost ad sales through the new content and create one more reason for people to continually check back in on their newsfeeds for content they can’t get anywhere else.
YouTube Unveils New Logo and Features on Mobile App
YouTube continues to evolve with its growing popularity. Recently, the video site came out with a sleek new design. The new logo and icon are cleaner, more flexible, and better designed for a multiscreen world. YouTube has also added speed up and slow down features to playback and the ability to browse new videos while viewing video content. YouTube is hoping these changes will continue to increase user engagement and usability.
LinkedIn has launched its new LinkedIn Audience Network, “a native advertising network that enables you to reach even more professionals with your ads by placing your Sponsored Content on high-quality, third-party publishers across mobile and desktop.” The new network was created to help businesses increase their marketing footprint, cut budgets, and expand their content’s reach. LinkedIn assures marketers that it has “taken measures to ensure brand safety within [its] recently launched LinkedIn Audience Network,” such as vetting partner publishers to verify that they meet its advertising guidelines and regularly monitoring campaign activity on the network.
Twitter Adds Team Managements Feature
Now your colleagues can keep their Twitter passwords to themselves. The social media app just launched a new team management feature, called TweetDeck Teams, which allows multiple people to login to the same account without sharing passwords. The new feature divides users into three categories: owner, administrator, and contributor, and gives various levels of functionality to each category.
Facebook Artificial Intelligence Training Bots to Mimic Emotions
Facebook’s AI researchers are working to introduce the first robots that can replicate human emotion through subtle facial expressions. In newly released papers, the researchers discuss their overall success with their efforts and the affects this could have on videos in the future. These researchers are hoping the bots will one day improve the avatars in virtual reality.
Facebook Offers Hundreds of Millions for Music Rights
Use the first months to lay a solid foundation for your content marketing program so it can begin generating leads and sales.
So you decided it was time to jump into the content marketing game. You’ve been crafting the perfect content. You’re posting on a regular basis. You’ve identified your target audience and have been researching keywords. You’ve even learned a thing or two about SEO.
But you have no leads or sales to speak of. And your boss is breathing down your neck for results, FAST. Is it time to throw in the towel? Absolutely not!
Content marketing is a long-term solution that helps businesses build brand awareness, grow their audience, and generate new leads and sales. But, like any good relationship, it takes time and effort to achieve results. You shouldn’t give up before the seeds you sow have time to bear fruit.
To understand the time table for content marketing, let’s look at some markers for the first six months.
Month one
Learn about your target audience and understand their needs.
In order to get the ball rolling in content marketing, you have to understand who you are trying to reach. It’s important to think holistically when considering who you are trying to reach at a potential prospects’ company. Typically, your target audience falls into two categories: Primary (decision makers) and Secondary (influencers of the decision maker). Going one step further, you need to identify your target audience’s needs and pain points so that you can direct your content marketing strategy at creating awareness around those needs.
Document a content marketing strategy.
You would never operate your business without 1) creating a strategy, 2) documenting it, and 3) following the strategy. A content marketing strategy outlines the methods by which you will target, reach, and engage your audience. Research and execution of these tasks can be quite complex. Writing out a plan and assigning appropriate resources can offer clarity and guidance to your organization throughout the course of your program.
When you are creating and curating content for your business, focus on original content that stands out to current and prospective customers. Valuable and relevant content is not a sales pitch. Rather, it is content that communicates valuable information to customers and prospects so that they have the knowledge to make more informed decisions. Moreover, it is content that establishes your business as a reliable source of knowledge — as the thought leader within the industry.
Promote content on multiple channels.
Understanding your target audience and which social media platforms they’re using is invaluable information. If you want to reach potential and current customers, you need to be where they are. You need to make it easy for them to find you and to engage with your business. And if your competitors are already active on social media, start by finding out where. If these platforms align with your ideal customer, don’t be afraid to kick start your social media presence alongside them.
Month six
Analyze your performance.
Track and analyze your metrics on a daily, weekly, monthly, and annual basis. Take a look at what is working and what is not. By tracking and analyzing your metrics you can see, for example, what type of content is most effective and which distribution channels are helping you achieve your goals. You’ll also be able to find opportunities for improvement. Look at the feedback you are getting through your engagement with customers and prospects, and make adjustments to your strategy as needed.
Expand your content creation.
If you’re focused on growing your business or creating awareness through the creation of engaging content, then you need to be ready to try new things. Have you been successful with blogging and Facebook posts? Then it’s time to try making videos and joining Twitter. And don’t be afraid to pull from other worthy sources. Content curation will serve to establish your business as a trusted resource and increase your brand visibility, all without over-promoting yourself.
Remember that when it comes to content marketing, it is important to think: marathon not sprint. An effective content strategy requires patience and determination. Many companies make the mistake of giving up on a content strategy too early. Give your relationship with content marketing time to play out, and don’t be afraid to adjust your strategy along the way if you find some things are working better than others.
