by Elizabeth Hines | Oct 1, 2018 | Blog, Content Marketing, Current Events, Logistics, Marketing, Strategy, Supply Chain, Talent
Considering instituting a work from home policy for your business? Ask yourself these three questions first.
As the supply chain becomes increasingly digital, many employers may be considering implementing a work from home policy. After all, we know one way to attract millennial talent is to allow for this kind of flexibility.
But before you make the decision to open the door to a work from home arrangement, consider these three questions.
3 questions to ask before implementing a work from home policy
1. Are your employees organized and self-motivated?
Ask any employee who works remotely, and they’re very likely to tell you that working from home makes them happier and more productive. And they aren’t necessarily wrong. There’s certainly evidence to suggest that with today’s technology, there’s essentially no downside to working from home, and it does often enhance productivity.
But working from home isn’t for everyone. Writing for the Harvard Business Review, marketing strategist and Duke University Professor Dorrie Clark suggests that workers considering a work-from-home arrangement first take a moment to introspect and understand how they work best.
According to author Natalie Sisson, “If you’re good at managing your own time, and you’re productive and have discipline, you’ll be able to do work from anywhere. But if you need to be in one place, and you need to go into an office, or need to be surrounded by the same people all the time, it probably won’t work for you.”
2. Is there a wealth of local talent?
One of the less-often-considered factors when businesses consider remote work arrangements is actually an important potential benefit for employers. Not every location has a tremendous amount of local talent, but that doesn’t have to limit your business. If you’re in an area where finding qualified employees is a challenge, making remote options available can be a big resource — essentially, the world is your oyster!
Consider having remote hires come onsite for training, team-building, or orientation, and make sure they’re equipped to meet the requirements of their positions. Once that initial foundation is laid, and expectations are clear, they can work from anywhere in the world — and save you the office space.
3. How much collaboration is required?
Are you considering remote work options for positions that require extensive collaboration with other employees? If so, it’s not necessarily a deal-breaker, but it does require some additional forethought.
With the technology available today, remote collaboration should theoretically be a piece of cake. But it’s important that everyone be on the same page about expectations. If remote workers are needed in a scheduled daily meeting, for example, it’s important that that expectation be made clear from the outset.
It’s also crucial to make sure that remote workers are given the resources they need to collaborate with their colleagues, and that they have a good understanding of the technology they’ll be using.
Work from home arrangements can be beneficial for employees and employers alike. But it’s important to consider all the variables to ensure that it’s the right thing for your business.
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by Elizabeth Hines | Sep 27, 2018 | Blog, Content Marketing, Current Events, Marketing, Social Media
Also in social media news, September 2018: Twitter launches audio-only live streaming, and Facebook Creator Studio is going global.
The kids are back to school, football is back on tv, and the leaves are starting to change colors. This can only mean one thing: fall is officially upon us. What does this mean for our most popular social media platforms? Similar to battling dropping temperatures, it’s time to heat things up to keep users engaged and active.
Especially for Facebook. In a new survey by the Pew Research Center, users revealed how their engagement with the social media platform has changed in the wake of privacy and security concerns. Most notably, 44% of Facebook users ages 18 to 29 reported deleting the Facebook app from their phone in the past year. Despite the fall chill, Zuckerberg and his crew need to continue heating up their security updates and find new ways to gain user trust and ensure user privacy.
Here’s what else has been happening in September with the hottest social media platforms and how the latest updates help businesses gain exposure and target new audiences.
Here’s your social media news for September 2018.
Facebook Expands Ad Pixels to Group
Facebook will now allow pixels to be added to a brand’s Facebook Group. This expanded feature will enable marketers to track user growth, activity, and engagement with their websites. Facebook is hoping the new update will boost attention for Groups as an advertising avenue. “Facebook Groups are the new email for brands. They get push notifications. The engagement rate of Groups is extremely high. It makes sense they’re going to put a pixel in there, just like you would with email, because now through groups you can track conversions,” says Nik Sharma, Director at Hint Inc.
Snap Inc. Announces New Webinars for Ad Tools
Snap Inc. announced two upcoming webinars that provide more insight into how Snapchat can boost marketing campaigns for advertisers. These webinars are “for advertisers who want to learn more about the Snap Pixel. From how it differs from other pixels, the optimizations and attribution it enables, to implementation and troubleshooting, we’ll cover everything you need to know to power your eCommerce campaigns.” Though Snap’s niche is young adults, the app is working overtime to provide more advertising options, including performance tracking and user engagement.
Twitter Rolls Out Audio-Only Live-Streams on Twitter and Periscope
Twitter launched a new audio-only option on its app and Periscope. The popular feature, available on Facebook since 2015, has been heavily requested by users for years. “Broadcasting with audio only in Periscope is something the community has been asking for, and have been doing already by covering the camera lens. Sometimes people are not comfortable being on camera, but they still want to broadcast and interact with others via Periscope’s powerful chatroom feature.” writes Periscope engineer, Richard Plom. The new feature allows users to hear content without being locked to a screen. This will help businesses tap into the podcasting trend (streaming without video), creating new ways for users to tap into a brand’s content.
Facebook’s Creator Studio Launches Globally
Facebook officially launched Creator Studio globally, “providing one central place for Pages to manage their entire content library and business.” Publishers and account managers can now manage content, interactions, insights, video publishing, and much more in one central location.
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by Jennifer Hart Yim | Sep 26, 2018 | Blog, Content Marketing, Leadership, Logistics, Marketing, Supply Chain, Talent
In today’s job market, candidates are in such high demand, companies are posting positions with little or no experience requirements.
This guest post comes to us from Argentus Supply Chain Recruiting, a boutique recruitment firm specializing in Supply Chain Management and Procurement.
On the Argentus blog, we’ve spent the past few months charting the strong job market and its effects on hiring. My, how things have changed. A few short years ago, publications were writing about how employers weren’t bothering to hire for their open positions. Now, candidates are in such high demand, companies are more and more doing something that would be considered radical in the previous economy: posting positions with no experience requirements.
Kelsey Gee at the Wall Street Journal gave some frontline reporting about the talent picture in the U.S. economy, which is beginning to see strong wage growth follow historically low unemployment rates. She charts how more companies are becoming flexible in their hiring process, to the point of doing away with experience requirements for some positions completely. We’ve written before to argue that companies should hire people for their potential – especially junior employees – and in this market it seems that more companies are putting this into practice. Companies like Microsoft, Bank of America and Github, are in particular relaxing education requirements and looking at candidates who don’t have degrees for positions that would have required a degree during the recession.
Alicia Modestino, an economist at Northeastern University, has argued that in times of recession companies tend to raise job requirements, like in 2008. In times of expansion – like we’re seeing now – companies become more flexible in their requirements to compete for talent, a practice Modestino calls “Down-skilling.”
At first, it might be easy to assume that companies are only doing this for transactional or administrative positions, but the Wall Street Journal interviewed the President of SCM talent group – a Supply Chain Recruitment firm in the U.S. – who said that companies are re-evaluating their requirements for Supply Chain Managers and other strategic positions. He said that his recruitment firm has been turning away clients who want to fish for underpaid or unaware applicants instead of bolstering education, experience and compensation levels in order to compete.
At Argentus, we’re working in the same vertical in Canada. Candidates in our market are in such high demand that we’ve been doing the same.
Anecdotally, we’ve seen a small uptick in roles for high-potential entry level grads in Supply Chain Management – (though still not as many as we’d like to see, with the high number of new grads that come to us!) Companies are becoming slightly more willing to relax requirements on the junior end to hire quickly; in a hiring market as strong as this one, “entry level” can actually mean entry level instead of, paradoxically, requiring at least 3 years of experience. But companies should be more flexible, at least if they want to actually hire instead of kicking tires.
In strong job markets, companies can’t afford to hire the same way they did during a recession. More employees in Procurement and Supply Chain are waking up to their own value, and the strong job market is compounding an already-considerable talent crunch. Hiring managers can’t afford to practice magical thinking in their hiring in this economy – the type of thinking that says, “if we post it, they will come,” or that treats employees like they have no leverage in the process.
The WSJ outlined three options that companies have to keep down hiring costs and secure talent in this market:
- Offer more money up front
- Retrain current staff to upskill them for changing requirements, or:
- Become more flexible in their job requirements.
All three are valuable options, but for some reason the third one has always been a bit of a third rail. Hiring is a risk, and companies don’t want to hire someone who can’t do the job. But just because someone hasn’t done the exact same thing before, or just because they don’t have a degree, or just because they’ve done it before, but in another country, doesn’t mean they can’t do it.
There will always be lots of positions with considerable requirements that can’t be flexed away: a Director of Vendor management who’s conducting a business transformation obviously needs to have done that in the past. A Senior Manager tasked with setting up a totally new Supply Chain needs the deep base of knowledge and connections that certain experience provides. The necessity of strong experience and education requirements makes sense for some positions.
But for a Supply Chain Analyst, or a Buyer role, companies are well-served to relax hard-and-fast requirements and treat applicants on a case by case basis. Assess skills, assess technical and analytical capability, without requiring that candidates fit a specific experiential profile.
In our interviews with senior Supply Chain and Procurement leadership, one thing we hear again and again is that strong business acumen and soft skills – in other words, potential – is more important for junior employees than specific education requirements. So if the Wall Street Journal report is accurate, and more companies are waking up to this line of thinking, you know what?
Bring it on.
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by Elizabeth Hines | Sep 25, 2018 | Blog, Content Marketing, Logistics, Marketing, Strategy, Supply Chain
Armed with high-quality, substantive content, sales teams can use inbound marketing to close deals and boost sales. Here’s the content they need to advance purchasing decisions.
Aligning sales and marketing teams is not a new concept, but one that many companies don’t follow. Think about it: the ultimate goal in business is increased revenue from sales growth! In order to achieve this goal, it’s best to focus on what the buyers’ needs are at the individual stages of the buying process and to provide content to help them move along the sales funnel.
You’re asking yourself, “How do I do that?” Easy, start combining your sales and marketing efforts to maximize what each department does best. When done correctly, content marketing can support sales goals, making it easier to generate leads and helping the sales team close business.
Valuable and relevant content is not a sales pitch but can help the sales process. Arm your sales team with content that communicates valuable information to prospects so that they have the knowledge to make more informed decisions.
Moreover, concentrate on creating the kinds of content your target audience seeks, and distribute it through the platforms on which they seek it. How-to videos on YouTube? Thought leadership on LinkedIn? Optimize the material you distribute for each channel and use your sales team to further distribute your content.
But what kinds of content does your sales team need in order to close deals? Here to discuss our top suggestions is Frank Cavallaro, CEO and Founder of Fronetics.
Video: what content sales needs in order to close deals
Takeaway: teamwork is key
Sales and marketing teams that are aligned perform better. According to State of Inbound 2018’s latest survey, sales teams closely aligned with their marketing counterparts ranked the quality of marketing-sourced leads much higher than those that were rarely aligned or misaligned. That shows that when marketing and sales work together, everyone gets more of what they’re looking for — namely, leads and sales!
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by Elizabeth Hines | Sep 24, 2018 | Blog, Content Marketing, Current Events, Logistics, Marketing, Social Media, Strategy, Supply Chain
A new generation of buyers, digital natives, is shaking up the B2B purchasing landscape. Is your business ready to meet them online?
Digital natives, who now make up the majority of the B2B purchasing landscape, have completely changed how vendors need to market and sell to buyers.
In fact, according to a study of millennial buyers by Merit, some 73% of 20 to 35 year olds are involved in product or service purchase decision-making at their companies. Not only that, about half of all B2B product researchers are digital natives — and the number is rising by the year, according to a Google/Millward Brown digital survey of buyers.
It goes without saying that the B2B purchasing landscape is going through a radical shift. Here are 6 ways that digital natives have changed B2B purchasing — and how companies have to respond.
6 ways digital natives are changing B2B purchasing
1. Product searches begin with a generic web search.
This means that companies now have to focus on SEO and producing informative content. First impressions are everything in B2B markets, and when it comes to digital natives, your first impression is conveyed through every piece of content you produce and distribute online.
2. They bypass sales people.
So companies should aim to switch from primarily outbound marketing to inbound marketing. This doesn’t mean that salespeople are going to be out of jobs. But it does mean that sales and marketing need to work together in new ways.
3. Online search, vendors’ websites, and peer/colleague reviews are their most important sources of information.
It’s time to place focus on SEO, website development, social media, influencer marketing, and B2B review sites. Again, your reputation depends on your online content. Are you establishing your brand as a trusted source of information?
4. They prefer short bursts of information, often in visual formats.
Not only that, they find phone calls tedious and disruptive. Companies need to be strategic about the type and format of any content they distribute. Emails and websites should be mobile-friendly, and visual formats like infographics are a highly effective way to present dense information.
5. Social media is a preferred source.
These digital natives are relying on social media for information on brands, products, and services. How does your social media presence stack up?
6. They know what they want by the time a salesperson enters the process.
This new generation of buyers already has a clear idea of the value they expect from a vendor by the time they’re ready to move down the sales funnel. So vendors need to deliver on the promises made by their content.
How is your company accommodating the research and purchasing habits of digital natives?
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by Elizabeth Hines | Sep 20, 2018 | Blog, Content Marketing, Logistics, Marketing, Social Media, Supply Chain
Online searches, vendor websites, and peer recommendations are the top 3 resources for B2B buyers.
As a marketer, it’s not enough to just know about the B2B buyer’s process. Your success rides on your ability to understand how your buyers are getting their information — and, more specifically, where they’re getting the information they need to make a purchasing decision.
So where are they getting most of their information? I can tell you, it’s no longer from sales reps.
In our digital era, buyers are heading straight to the internet to gain valuable insight before making purchases. Thanks in large part to social media, mobile technologies, and the world wide web, buyers are becoming increasingly self-sufficient. In fact, 70% of the buyer’s journey is complete before a buyer even reaches out to sales. This means they have already spent a fair amount of time educating themselves with the enormous amount of information available to them on the internet.
Is your content marketing meeting buyers where they are? Here are the three most important sources of information for B2B buyers.
Infographic: 3 top resources for B2B buyers
(Made with Canva)
Takeaway: Get in early
Listen, your prospects are forming their opinions about your business and your products based on what they find on the web, and early on.
This new reality may seem daunting, given how much of the purchase decision-making process occurs before you have the opportunity to engage with a potential client. But in reality, this changing climate offers serious opportunities for businesses to demonstrate their expertise, without turning buyers off with overt sales pitches.
To make the most of the potential purchaser’s experience with your business, content is key.
A robust content marketing program builds brand awareness, establishes trust and rapport with prospects, and generates traffic to your website. Thoughtfully generated and curated content catches the attention of buyers and keeps them interested in your business through the time of purchase.
With a well-thought-out, data-driven content marketing strategy, you’ll be ready to meet digital natives where they are.
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