by Elizabeth Hines | Sep 19, 2018 | Blog, Content Marketing, Data/Analytics, Logistics, Marketing, Supply Chain
Automation has two major benefits for supply chain marketers: it drives efficiencies and improves success rates in earning and converting leads.
When you think about automation in the supply chain, you probably don’t immediately consider marketing and sales. Perhaps you envision robots scooting around warehouse floors, or maybe you think of applications in billing, compliance reports, or order auditing. However, advances in automation have impressive implications for marketing and sales in the supply chain as well.
Automation has two major benefits for supply chain marketers. Like all automation, it drives efficiencies, allowing your team to devote more time to other core competencies. What you may not know, however, is that it also improves success rates in earning and converting leads. In fact, HubSpot reports that businesses using marketing automation to nurture leads receive a whopping 451% increase in qualified leads.
New trends in marketing automation – particularly those which function more like artificial intelligence – can streamline and improve your marketing and sales efforts. Here’s how.
Integrate marketing automation into your CRM strategy
Integrating marketing automation into your customer relationship management (CRM) strategy may not be the first thing that came to mind, but the two work beautifully in tandem.
An integrated approach will take all three of the following areas to the next level:
- Track behavior. Automation lets you go far beyond basic demographic data, seeing things like what pages your prospects are visiting, what types of content they’re interested in, and where they are in the buying cycle.
- Send targeted messages. You can use the behavioral information collected by your marketing automation tool to create and send targeted messages that are customized to your prospects’ interests and stage in the buying cycle. This means your prospects will find your messages more relevant and engaging.
- Establish clear ROI. Establishing a clear link between marketing efforts and sales is a constant thorn in the side of most marketers, but new advances in automation make measuring ROI a little clearer. Creating a campaign in your marketing automation system maps it back to your CRM, so you can correlate closed deals directly with the campaigns that created them.
Basically, combining CRM with marketing automation can give you more organizational bandwidth, more precision in your messaging and lead nurturing, and more measurable value in your campaigns.
Create targeted messages with email workflows
There’s no area in which marketing automation is more helpful than in the creation of automated but extremely pertinent email workflows to your sales leads.
Based on the information you have about your leads and/or their engagement with your website, email workflows trigger a series of pre-determined highly-relevant emails at designated intervals, inviting them to take action and helping them to move down the sales funnel.
Email workflows do require considerable work upfront as you consider individual buyer profiles, their place within the buyer’s journey, and what timely and relevant information will advance them. But thoughtful well-designed email workflows can translate to substantial time savings and increases in lead conversion later.
More marketing automation: Social media scheduling tools & chatbots
Two other areas in which automation is making a big splash in marketing and sales are social media scheduling tools and chatbots.
The targeted approach of email workflows increases their chances of being read, but I don’t need to point out that – no matter how perfect your email might be – people are still buried in emails. On average, office employees receive 121 emails per day. Only around 20% are opened, and click-through rates are even lower.
So, in addition to email workflows, the newest trends in automation are social media scheduling tools and chatbots. Both of them can make your job much easier — and improve your bottom line.
Social media scheduling tools
Social media scheduling tools, like those offered by HubSpot and Hootsuite, let you plan and schedule content across your social networks.
For example, HubSpot’s comprehensive CRM and marketing platform includes the ability to automatically post to social media when you publish content, as well as in-depth analytical tools for determining the best time to post to social media platforms. You can also monitor social mentions and link your social media activity with larger marketing campaigns to determine ROI.
Hootsuite lets you keep track of various social media channels at once. It also helps you perform brand monitoring, letting you know when you brand is mentioned, and what your customers are saying.
As you can imagine, using a social media monitoring tool can greatly improve efficiency, cutting into the sometimes-seemingly-endless manual hours spent on social media monitoring and posting.
Chatbots
A chatbot is s a computer program that simulates human conversation using auditory or textual methods. It communicates with your customer inside a messaging app, like Facebook Messenger, and is similar to email marketing without landing in an inbox.
Chatbots are the latest trend in marketing, and their increasing popularity is making it harder to ignore how artificial intelligence is helping shape the content marketing landscape. It’s certainly timely. Business Insider recently reported that the number of people on messaging apps surpassed the number of users on social networks!
Messaging automation is the new email automation, and it can work for supply chain and logistics industries too. Chatbots currently allow for increased customer engagement through messaging app technology that isn’t yet saturated with marketing, and your brand will also appreciate the ease of tracking and segmenting your customers through chatbots.
Marketing automation is for the supply chain
Automation isn’t just for the warehouse or the finance and billing department. It’s also for this crazy constantly-changing world of marketing in supply chain and logistics industries. Marketing automation can make a big difference in your marketing and sales efforts.
Integrating automation with your CRM strategy, creating targeted email workflows, and the newest advances like social media scheduling tools and chatbots can all add up to major time savings and substantial increases in lead conversion rates.
This post originally appeared on EBN Online.
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by Elizabeth Hines | Sep 18, 2018 | Blog, Content Marketing, Current Events, Logistics, Marketing, Social Media, Strategy, Supply Chain
Ask yourself these five questions before you dive headfirst into an influencer marketing campaign to set you on the right path.
We’ve been writing a lot lately about influencer marketing and how it can work for the supply chain. These campaigns can be extremely effective — but getting the most bang for your buck requires a strategic approach from the outset.
Before you start an influencer marketing campaign, ask yourself these 5 questions.
5 questions to ask before starting an influencer marketing campaign
1. Why do I want to use influencers?
According to Natasha Lekwa, influencer marketing and social media editor at Snapchat, it’s important to “make sure you have a clear idea why you want to use influencers.” Answers might include boosting brand awareness, gaining followers, or increasing sales, to name a few. But each of these answers will lead you to a different strategy.
Being fully and deliberately aware of why you’re embarking on a campaign will help you set key performance indicators, determine your audience, and “envision what success will look like at the end of the campaign.” You’ll also be able to choose strategically the best platform to use, based on your content and target demographic.
2. Who are my influencers?
It may seem obvious, but you’d be surprised how often businesses dive into an influencer marketing campaign without having fully identified key influencers in their sector.
Lekwa suggest using hashtags to search Instagram for appropriate influencers and advises not just focusing on the obvious influencers in your industry. In fact, exploring influencers in other related industries can help expand your reach.
3. Who are my micro-influencers?
So you’ve identified your major influencers. Now you can start thinking about your “micro-influencers,” those with 10K to 100K followers. “Micro-influencers can give you a much higher ROI than big stars, and audience engagement tends to get higher as social niches get narrower,” Lekwa says. And since engagement is the name of the game when it comes to any kind of social media marketing, micro-influencers can be enormously valuable.
4. What are your terms?
Since influencers tend to be content creators at heart, they often have plenty of great ideas. But it’s important that your goals are transparent and aligned.
“It’s important to be on the same page,” says Lekwa. “Having a clear contract that spells out what each side will execute will help manage expectations for both your team and for the influencer.” In fact, Lekwa points out that influencers generally appreciate having guidelines and “the big conceptual themes of a campaign handed to them.”
5. What is my own value?
Approaching influencers can be intimidating. As Forbes writer Andrey Slivka points out, “As you might expect from people who get deluged with free stuff, influencers can be hard to impress.” This means you need to be clear and specific when you approach them about what you have to offer.
“Especially with micro-influencers, who are building their brands, what you offer doesn’t always have to be monetary,” Lekwa says. Often, brands can offer influencers exposure, the prestige of having their own brand associated with a larger business, or the resources to improve their content production.
Influencer marketing can be daunting at first, but it’s a powerful tool of the supply chain. If you lay the right foundation, an influencer marketing campaign has the potential to expand your brand’s reach exponentially.
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by Elizabeth Hines | Sep 17, 2018 | Blog, Content Marketing, Logistics, Marketing, Social Media, Strategy, Supply Chain
Today’s B2B buyers are mostly digital natives who get the majority of their purchasing information from online searches, vendor websites, and peer recommendations.
From a content marketing perspective, knowing where your buyers get their information is critical to an effective strategy. So what are most important sources of information for today’s B2B buyers? 20 years ago, you might have named things like product info sheets or sales reps. But not anymore.
B2B buying has completely evolved, thanks in large part to the increasing percentage of digital natives who now make up the B2B purchasing landscape.
Is your content marketing strategy meeting buyers where they are? Here are the three most important sources of information for B2B buyers.
3 top sources of information for B2B buyers
1. Online search
Not only is an online search the first move for 62% of B2B buyers, 94% of buyers report using online research at some point during the purchasing process. And this isn’t a surprise, when you consider that, 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.”
So what does this mean for your business? Gone are the days when a simply thinking about keyword rankings was enough to boost your SEO. In our four-part series on writing for SEO, we address how search engines and the search landscape have changed over the past several years. Improving your search ranking can seem like a complex process, but in the end it all boils down to one thing: quality content, presented in a clear and compelling manner.
2. Vendor websites
So buyers conduct their online search. And if you’ve done your content marketing homework, they find your business. How does your website stack up?
According to Bain’s global customer insights chief Eric Almquist, by the time they reach your website, buyers “will have already formed a strong opinion about many aspects of the value expected from a vendor.” For this reason, your website should “provide a wealth of information on these types of value, with details on where… products have been successful.”
Your website should be one of your primary assets. If you don’t give visitors plenty of easy, attractive opportunities to convert on your website, content marketing won’t generate leads for you. Your content should be organized and clear, presented with the goal of helping your potential customers. And opportunities for conversion should be everywhere.
3. Peers and colleagues
As digital natives step into purchasing roles in the supply chain, they’ve “brought their consumer habits to the B2B world,” says Almquist. This means that a big part of the purchasing process involves review sites, where purchasers seek the opinion of their peers and colleagues. “Reviews will tell the buyer how a vendor performs on many ease-of-doing-business elements long before the buyer has actual experience with that vendor.”
This aspect of content marketing can seem daunting for many businesses because of the perception that what’s on these sites is completely out of your control. But with the right strategy in place, review sites are actually a big opportunity for your business.
For a start, vendors “should encourage customers who are advocates of the company to provide reviews on relevant sites.” It’s also important to take an active role on these sites, responding to customer reviews — even the occasionally inevitable bad ones.
Says Almquist, “First impressions matter as much as ever in B2B markets. Today though, that first look comes through websites, user forums, and quick case studies, not flesh-and-blood sales pitches.”
With a well-thought-out, data driven content marketing strategy, you’ll be ready to meet digital natives where they are.
What sources of information for B2B buyers do you focus on?
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by Elizabeth Hines | Sep 13, 2018 | Blog, Content Marketing, Logistics, Marketing, Supply Chain
When sales and marketing misalignment plagues your organization, it can have motivational and financial consequences.
Imagine your business spending millions of dollars trying to fix one perceived problem — and it wasn’t even the problem, after all.
Too often, B2B companies fall victim to the dangers of sales and marketing misalignment, often without even being aware that it’s an issue. In fact, a recent study by HubSpot found that only 22% of companies report that their sales and marketing relationship is tightly aligned.
That’s a big problem. And, recently, four business and marketing professors set out to explore just how bad it is for companies when sales and marketing don’t line up. In a recent article in the Harvard Business Review, Wendy Ritz, Michelle D. Stewart, Felicia N. Morgan, and Joseph F. Hair, Jr., described their findings from an experiment and interviews, designed to tackle the issue of sales and marketing misalignment, specifically in regard to the pricing of products and sales initiatives.
What’s wrong with sales and marketing misalignment?
The researchers identified three major dangers for businesses when sales and marketing don’t share goals.
Danger 1: Demotivation
A key part of motivation is the belief that a team can achieve its goal. When goals are misaligned, “it reduces the sales force’s perception that they can achieve either goal.”
In turn, the researchers point out that this demoralizing effect can reduce commitment to the organization, in addition to specific goals. In their experiment, they found that “the effect of misaligned goals reduced hope of the salespeople and created a defeatist climate.”
Danger 2: Goals seem insurmountable
Again, the perception that goals can be achieved is crucial. When sales and marketing are misaligned, people are much more likely to view goals as more difficult or even impossible to achieve.
The researchers point out that “while difficult goals are not necessarily problematic, the challenge is when the sales force believes that the misalignment of goals is simply unnecessary, or that the goal combination makes it impossible to be successful.” In other words, if goals don’t line up, you wind up with a sales force who feels defeated immediately.
Danger 3: It’s going to cost you
Remember the old adage, “Be careful what you wish for?” When it comes to sales and marketing misalignment, the highest cost often comes when goals are met.
“To compensate for the mismatch between pricing and sales force compensation goals,” the researchers found, “salespeople may offer additional resources such as free training, free freight, and customized products.” When goals seem insurmountable or counterproductive, sales teams find themselves resorting to desperate measures to get the job done — which can unnecessarily erode profits.
When things go right
According to a recent study by Data Room and Marketo, “Sales and marketing alignment can improve sales efforts at closing deals by 67% and help marketing generate 209% more value from their efforts.”
The survey found that 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. The bottom line: sales and marketing teams that are aligned perform better.
Thinking about getting your sales and marketing on the same page? Consider these six ways to boost sales and marketing alignment.
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by Elizabeth Hines | Sep 12, 2018 | Blog, Content Marketing, Logistics, Marketing, Strategy, Supply Chain
Here are the top three resources digital natives are using to research solutions and how your B2B business can prepare to meet them online.
Knowing where your buyers do research when making purchasing decisions is crucial to any marketing strategy. Digital natives, a new generation of younger buyers, have completely revolutionized the purchasing landscape for B2B vendors. Their biggest resource? The world wide web.
A study of millennial buyers by Merit found that 73% of employees ages 20-35 years old are involved in product or service purchase decision-making at their company. In fact, one-third reported they are the sole decision maker for their department.
What does this mean for B2B marketers?
These younger, and typically more technologically advanced, buyers expect they can find the information they need about your brand online through an organic search. Your company needs to have any and all content available at the push of a button.
But the work doesn’t stop there. Once a buyer finds your brand, you hope they make the leap to visit your website, meaning your site needs to be one of your most appealing assets. If you don’t give visitors plenty of easy, attractive opportunities to convert on your website, content marketing won’t generate leads for you.
But online searches and vendor website aren’t the only resources digital natives are using to make purchasing decisions. This younger generation also relies heavily on recommendations from peers and colleagues.
Like recommendations from friends and family in their personal lives, the opinion of other buyers becomes very important. A big part of the purchasing process involves B2B review sites, where purchasers seek the opinion of their peers and colleagues.
Here’s Elizabeth Hines, creative/editorial director at Fronetics, to discuss the top resources for B2B buyers and how you can be prepared to meet them online.
Video: top 3 resources for B2B buyers
Final thoughts
Though the purchasing landscape has changed over the past decade, B2B marketers have the tools to get in front of the right buyers. These tools including knowing what resources buyers are using and how to use these assets to your advantage. With a documented strategy and high-quality, informative content, you’ll be ready to meet digital natives where they are.
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by Elizabeth Hines | Sep 11, 2018 | Blog, Content Marketing, Logistics, Marketing, Social Media, Strategy, Supply Chain
Daunted by the idea of proving social media ROI? These 3 steps will give you the structured framework you need to show the results of your efforts.
We all know social media is effective — but do we really know it?
Social Media Examiner’s 2018 Social Media Marketing Industry Report found that only 44% of marketers agree that they know how to measure social media ROI. That means two-thirds of you don’t know whether or not, or how much, your marketing efforts are paying off when it comes to the use of social media.
Managing your business’ social media is no small task. It can be a time-consuming and laborious process, so you want to make sure you’re doing it right. That means having a systematic framework in place to prove social media ROI. These three steps will get you started.
3 steps to prove social media ROI
1) Set goals
It may seem obvious, but too many businesses approach social media marketing with vague goals or none at all. Deciding that you want to “grow your business” through social media is great — but it does little to set you up for success.
As you think about goals, keep the SMART principle in mind: Your objectives should be specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and timed. So for example, instead of shooting to “generate more leads,” set a goal to “generate 10% more leads over 30 days.”
2) Track and measure
Once you’ve set your goals and identified your key metrics, it’s time to implement a system that will track and measure your metrics. At the very least, you should be tracking your metrics on a monthly basis.
We’ve created this monthly marketing reporting template just for supply chain and logistics businesses. It can help you measure social media ROI, as well as track your content marketing efforts, all in one place.
3) React
This is your endgame. While proving your ROI is a great outcome of tracking and measuring your metrics, the real object of your efforts should be reacting to what you discover. Look at your metrics in the context of your goals and objectives. Which efforts are moving you forward? What’s not working?
Trying to prove social media ROI is far from impossible when it’s supported by a solid framework. With a data-driven approach, you can prove ROI and use concrete tools to take steps to improve it.
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