by Elizabeth Hines | Aug 27, 2019 | Blog, Content Marketing, Current Events, Marketing, Social Media
Social media growth slowed for the first time, but marketers are still set to increase budgets in 2020. Here are three reason why they’re sticking with social.
Highlights:
- Social media promotes engagement, and can be used to reinforce ads and boost their performance.
- Brands can continually test campaigns on their platform, get immediate results, and scale successful outcomes.
- As followers like posts and engage with them, they help marketers build customer profiles and increase organic reach through shares and comments.
Video transcript:
Hi, I’m Elizabeth Hines, Creative Director at Fronetics, and today’s topic is 3 reasons why digital marketers are sticking with social.
Digital marketers have been using social media to deepen customer relationships and drive measurable business value. And social media investment remains high. If fact experts predict spending on social media marketing will increase over the next five years. But social media is not delivering on the goods. In fact, social media growth slowed for the first time this year since it started.
So why are digital marketers sticking with social?
1. Engagement
Traditional marketing methods have inundated the market. Consumers are exposed to 4,000 to 10,000 ads a day, most of which flash on a screen as an inherently passive activity. Social media, however, promotes engagement, and can be used to reinforce ads and boost their performance. Consistently publishing to your social media channels results in your brand remaining top of mind when a potential buyer is looking for your product or services and gives you accessibility to engage with audiences that are interacting with your social posts.
2. Cost
Marketers’ goal is always to capture leads and connect directly with prospects. Social media is a platform that companies can control at a relatively low-cost to operate. Brands can continually test campaigns on their platform, get immediate results, and scale successful outcomes. Whether it’s to network with industry professionals, provide customer service, or influence potential customers, social media provides a free, easily accessible way to do so. And more and more customers are expecting to be able to communicate on social media.
3. Mobile
The future of customer engagement is mobile. Social media, with its visual content and short text, is ideally suited for mobile engagement. Prospects engage with social media throughout the day due to its short-form nature, making it more likely you can connect with them. As they like posts and engage with them, they help marketers build customer profiles and increase organic reach through shares and comments.
For more information, please visit our website at fronetics.com.
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by Elizabeth Hines | Aug 7, 2019 | Blog, Content Marketing, Logistics, Marketing, Supply Chain
As digital natives flood the purchasing landscape, visual presentation is critical. Our infographic offers tips to improve your visual content to resonate with today’s buyers.
Highlights:
- Visual content can be more easily digestible and compelling than purely text-based content.
- Optimize your visual content for search engines by accompanying it with searchable text and tags.
- Keep branding consistent with a unified color scheme and fonts.
The internet is becoming an increasingly visual space, and brands are feeling the pressure to stand out from the masses. But making an effort to improve your visual content doesn’t have to be an arduous chore. In fact, the type of complex information that supply chain marketers often need to present can be far more easily digestible in graphic format.
Strategically created and distributed content that is design-minded and visually appealing is your brand’s best friend. Our infographic offers 5 ideas to improve your visual content efforts, with a focus on broadening your brand’s reach, engaging your audience, and generating leads.
5 tips to improve your visual content
(Made with Canva)
1) Make your content search-engine friendly.
In the same way that social media analytics are struggling to keep up in an increasingly visual climate, search engines have yet to be effective at searching visual content. No matter how compelling your visual content, you won’t be getting the most out of your efforts unless you optimize your content for search engines.
There’s a simple solution to make sure your visual content makes it to the top of relevant search queries: post a text transcript with video or accompanying explanatory text with infographics and images. You can also make sure your visual content is easily searchable by categorizing and organizing it. Label visual assets like logos and images with relevant keywords, and tag them when publishing.
2) Make data come alive.
When it comes to presenting the kind of turgid data that’s often inherent in supply chain purchasing, visual formats are a marketer’s best friend. Supply chain marketers are ideally positioned to make use of attractive data presentation, including charts, graphs, and animated images. Organizing data into a visually appealing graphic, video, or animation makes it far more engaging and digestible for your audience.
3) Create reusable graphics.
Whether you’re creating visual content in house or outsourcing visual content creation, it behooves you to consider how it can be reused. When designing an infographic, for example, think about how it can be broken up into multiple graphics, each with a set of statistics or other information. You can combine these smaller graphics to other pieces of text content, adding visual appeal and boosting engagement.
These visual snippets are also ideal for posting on social media as teasers to link to fuller visual assets.
4) Consistency is key.
One of the most important things you can do to improve your visual content is make sure it’s consistent. Your brand’s visual presentation includes fonts, font sizes, colors, image styles, and any other graphic elements that are visual indicators of your brand’s identity.
Make sure all content creators in your organization receive clearly documented visual guidelines, along with samples for their use. Every time you publish visual content, include checking these guidelines as part of your editorial process.
5) Tell a story with your content.
The difference between good visual content and great visual content ultimately boils down to one thing: emotional resonance. The most significant way you can improve your visual content is to start with the idea of telling a story.
Ideally, you’re presenting data in a way that communicates a feeling and elicits an emotional response from the viewer. If your data is impactful, your viewers will forge an emotional connection with your brand.
What tips do you have to improve your visual content?
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by Elizabeth Hines | Aug 6, 2019 | Blog, Content Marketing, Marketing, Supply Chain
Integrating marketing and innovation early in development paves the way for new products to succeed.
Highlights:
- In many organizations, marketing is declining and moving downstream.
- Innovation needs marketing to be successful, and the earlier marketers are involved, the greater the chances of success.
- Marketers can help innovations succeed by identifying buyer needs, understanding what makes a product attractive, generating buyer engagement, and more.
With the emergence of automation and artificial intelligence (AI) technologies, some companies are putting marketing on the back burner when it comes to allocating resources. While these technologies are invaluable tools for marketers, they should not be supplanting a robust marketing presence. Marketing matters now more than ever, and integrating marketing and innovation is perhaps the best thing businesses can do to create competitive advantage.
Brand-building expert and author Denise Lee Yohn writes that despite the recent decline of marketing and its consequent move downstream, “the full, business-growing power of the marketing function comes way upstream – from creating markets.” This is particularly true when it comes to innovation development. Simply put, innovation needs marketing.
When marketers are involved upstream in development discussions in the innovation process, businesses integrate the power of marketing and innovation. As Yohn puts it, “Strategic, upstream marketing that is incorporated into the innovation development process can clearly define who to sell the new offering to and how to sell it.”
5 ways integrating marketing and innovation leads to greater success
1) Identifying buyer needs
When an innovative design or process hits the market, its success can hinge on whether it meets (or is perceived to meet) an existing unmet buyer need. When marketers are involved early in the development stages of an innovation, they can offer valuable contributions about the needs of the target buyer persona. These contributions can help shape product development, and marketers are in turn able to preemptively drive interest and start generating leads before a new product even hits the market.
2) Understanding what makes a product attractive
Marketers have the knowledge and expertise to analyze buyer trends and address what Yohn describes as “the cultural, social, and psychological dynamics that should be addressed in the development of and communication about an innovative product.” In other words, involving marketers upstream helps shape product development toward marketability.
3) Generating buyer engagement
When engineers or designer talk about a product, they tend to focus on what it can do. When marketers talk about a product, they focus on what it can do for a target buyer persona. Particularly when it comes to marketing breakthrough innovations, buyers need to be educated about why they’re necessary. Marketing and innovation can work hand-in-hand to engage a target buyer segment by emphasizing the aspects of an innovation that make it directly beneficial.
4) Providing context
To illustrate how marketing can help “develop the entire customer experience ecosystem,” Yohn uses the example of the failure of the Sony e-reader as opposed to the success of the Amazon Kindle. Because Amazon integrated marketing and innovation early in the process, when the product launched, “it offered an integrated experience of hardware, software, service, and content.” In other words, marketers can provide necessary context for the launch of a new product to ensure that it launches into a market that’s ready to recognize its value.
5) Shaping go-to-market strategy
When marketers are involved from the development stage of a product, they can begin to develop an optimal go-to-market strategy. Marketers can identify the right channels to ensure that the product gets to the target buyer segment, as well as begin promotional efforts early in the process.
When combined strategically, marketing and innovation share a symbiotic relationship. As Yohn puts it, “Marketing needs to be less about what happens after an innovation is ready to launch, and more about getting it to be ready in the first place.”
Businesses that recognize the value of integrating and embracing marketing organization-wide stand at a significant competitive advantage.
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by Elizabeth Hines | Aug 1, 2019 | Blog, Current Events, Supply Chain
Its disruptive data-recording and -securing technology begs the question: Could blockchain change the supply chain fundamentally and for the better?
Highlights:
- Blockchain offers the ability to record, track, and verify any transaction.
- Potential benefits include greater transparency and security.
- Supply chain operations could record, track, and share information more accurately and easily.
Ever since blockchain technology emerged, experts and industry analysts have been making various predictions for how it will impact their sectors. The supply chain, in particular, has been popularly theorized to be impacted by the technology.
It’s becoming increasingly clear that blockchain has transformative potential when it comes to the future of the supply chain. Here is a summary of what we’re seeing so far.
What is blockchain?
First conceptualized in 2008 by a programmer or group of programmers operating under the name Satoshi Nakamoto, blockchain was originally part of the implementation process of the cryptocurrency bitcoin. Essentially, it’s a distributed database — and it’s special because it keeps records of digital data or events in a way that makes them resistant to being altered or tampered with.
Blockchain allows data to be accessible to many users, even allowing them to add to it. But the original information is immutable, and it leaves a permanent and public chain of transactions. SupplyChain247 uses the following helpful analogy:
If the entire blockchain were the history of banking transactions, an individual bank statement would be a single “block” in the chain. Unlike most banking systems, however, there is no single organization that controls these transactions. It can only be updated through the consensus of a majority of participants in the system.
Writing for Forbes, early-adopter researcher Dan Woods describes blockchain as “key for creating an unalterable, trusted record of certain types of transactions.”
Experts are starting to see the potential for blockchain’s use in other arenas, particularly the supply chain. The blockchain ledger “can be used to record, track, and verify trades of virtually anything that holds value,” says Jon-Amerin Vorabutra, VP of Process and Technology at Nova Molecular Technologies.
How will blockchain change the supply chain?
The ability to track any type of transaction securely and transparently is huge for supply chain applications. “Every time a product changes hands, the transaction could be documented, creating a permanent history of a product, from manufacture to sale,” writes Vorabutra. Imagine the reduction in time delays, wasted costs, and errors.
Syncsort, a company building the infrastructure necessary to support the modern data supply chain, has detailed predictions about how blockchain will impact the supply chain, reported by Woods. The company’s CTO, Dr. Tendü Yoğurtçu, identifies blockchain as falling under one of four larger “megatrends” that Syncsort is monitoring: data governance.
“We have some products that we will announce that are blockchain-ready, and data governance will continue to be the umbrella theme for us with blockchain because it’s an evolving data platform and data architecture,” says Yoğurtçu.
Experts and analysts across the industry believe that blockchain can improve the supply chain in the following ways:
- Recording the quantity and transfer of assets — like pallets, trailers, containers, etc. — as they move between supply chain nodes (Talking Logistics)
- Tracking purchase orders, change orders, receipts, shipment notifications, or other trade-related documents (SupplyChain247)
- Assigning or verifying certifications or certain properties of physical products; for example determining if a food product is organic or fair trade (Provenance)
- Linking physical goods to serial numbers, bar codes, digital tags like RFID, etc. (SupplyChain247)
- Sharing information about manufacturing process, assembly, delivery, and maintenance of products with suppliers and vendors (SupplyChain247)
The benefits of blockchain for the supply chain
Blockchain technology is ideal for supply chain management. Supply chain companies frequently struggle with lack of transparency, particularly those with complex supply chains. This makes it difficult to isolate errors. This is where blockchain comes into play.
“Because of the way transactions are recorded and tracked using blockchain technology, it makes it much easier to see everything happening in real time,” says Miranda Marquit, of Investopedia.
Additionally, blockchain will allow for increased scalability in the supply chain. Since data cannot be changed or added to, essentially any number of participants can access data from any number of touchpoints. The technology also allows for greater security, since a shared, immutable ledger keeps data from being tampered with.
Finally, blockchain can open the doors for greater innovation in the supply chain. According to Vorabutra, “Opportunities abound to create new, specialized uses for the technology as a result of the decentralized architecture.”
What ways are you predicting blockchain will change the supply chain?
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by Elizabeth Hines | Jul 31, 2019 | Blog, Current Events, Marketing, Social Media
Also this month in social media news: Facebook strives to attract content creators, and Pinterest debuts new video tools for brands.
Highlights:
- Less than a month after Facebook released details of its new cryptocurrency, the project has met a stumbling block from Fed Chairman Jerome Powell.
- Newly released statistics highlight key growth metrics and lay out expectations for digital marketing in the second half of 2019.
- Pinterest’s new video tools as well as updates from Facebook are geared to content creators and brands.
It’s hard to believe it’s already July and 2019 is at its halfway point. It’s a time when organizations are evaluating their performance thus far, and setting goals for the second half of the calendar year. To that end, both Mobile Marketer and Marketing Dive published key digital marketing growth statistics, and we’ve got the highlights for you below.
Last month, Facebook made news by releasing details of its new cryptocurrency, Libra. Now the social media giant has hit a roadblock, in the form of Fed Chairman Jerome Powell calling for a halt until serious concerns are addressed. Facebook is also making news this month by taking a page out if its competitors’ books in its attempt to attract more online content creators. Read on for details on these social media news items from July 2019.
Fed Chief Calls for Facebook to Halt Libra Project Until Concerns Are Addressed
Following closely on the heels of Facebook’s releasing details of its planned Libra cryptocurrency, U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell said that the project “cannot go forward” until serious concerns are addressed. “Libra raises many serious concerns regarding privacy, money laundering, consumer protection, and financial stability,” Powell said before the U.S. House of Representatives Financial Services Committee.
The Fed chief’s tough comments not only underscore the regulatory hurdles facing Libra, but put pressure on the project, and dented the price of Libra’s forebear, bitcoin. The price of bitcoin fell by around 7% during his 3-hour testimony. Powell also called for regulatory review of the project to be “patient and careful,” while pointing to the fact that existing rules don’t adequately fit digital currencies.
“It’s something that doesn’t fit neatly or easily within our regulatory scheme, but it does have potentially systemic scale,” said Powell. “It needs a careful look, so I strongly believe we all need to be taking our time with this.”
Facebook spokeswoman Elka Looks responded to the testimony in an email to Reuters: “We are very much aligned with the Chairman around the need for public discourse on this,” wrote Looks. “This is why we along with the 27 other Founding Members of the Libra Association made this announcement so far in advance, so that we could engage in constructive discourse on this and get feedback.”
2019 Key Digital Marketing Growth Statistics Released
The midyear release of statistics from Marketing Dive and Mobile Marketer are important for brands and marketers to pay attention to. In the ever-shifting world of digital marketing, these statistics and trends offer valuable insight into where resources and time are best devoted.
Highlights from the reports include:
- Global online advertising spend is on track to grow 7% this year. That’s up from the 4% forecast in December 2018.
- Location-based marketing will likely grow 14%, reaching $24.4 billion in advertising spending by the end of 2019.
- 43% of all advertisers plan to increase spending on influencer marketing by April of 2020.
- Social referral traffic to retail ecommerce sites has grown by 110% in two years.
Facebook Strives to Attract More Content Creators
In an effort to attract more content creators to its platform, Facebook is giving videos more ways to make money. Observers have noted that the reigning social media giant is “pulling inspiration from other platforms to let you throw cash at your favorite video creators in the form of subscriptions or tokenized ‘stars’ that pay them a penny.”
Facebook’s announcement of its new video developments comes just ahead of VidCon, the world’s biggest conference for online video creators. It follows on the heels of three years of investments in the network’s video services and is in line with consumer trends toward video consumption.
Pinterest Debuts New Video Tools for Brands
Image-curating platform Pinterest is ramping up its video capabilities, in line with a larger consumer shift in viewing habits and a boost from advertisers in spending on social video. New video features include an improved uploader, video tab, lifetime analytics, and Pin scheduling.
The updated video uploader “enables businesses and creators to seamlessly upload video directly to Pinterest to engage with new and existing audiences, and access latest metrics,” according to the announcement.
Pinterest’s announcement points out that unlike on other platforms, videos don’t disappear (as they do on Instagram and Facebook Stories after 24 hours). To that end, their video analytics tool will allow businesses to gain insight into a video’s performance over its lifetime.
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