by Fronetics | Nov 29, 2017 | Blog, Content Marketing, Current Events, Marketing, Social Media
Also in social media news November 2017: Snapchat opens conversation tracking “Snap Pixels,” Facebook links Messenger to your News Feed Ads, and Instagram Stories hits 300 million daily active users.
The holidays have everyone thinking about shopping and meal planning, but social media is staying focused on expanding and improving. There’s been a big push by the most popular sites to introduce users to new content. And businesses are seeing increased options for getting in front of potential customers.
Here’s your social media news for November 2017.
Facebook Rolls Out Its Self-Discovery “Explore Feed”
Facebook has officially rolled out its new Explore Feed, which will help users discover more content across the social media network. Explore will recommend content that it thinks you might find interesting, including posts, articles, photos and videos from users and Pages that you don’t currently follow.
“We’ve heard from people that they want an easy way to explore relevant content from Pages they haven’t connected with yet,” says Facebook in a statement on their website. Businesses should be optimistic about the potential for users interested in content like theirs to find their pages through the new Explore Feed.
On mobile, the Explore Feed is accessible via the “More” menu in the bottom navigation section, while it’s housed along the left sidebar within the “Explore” section on desktop.
Instagram Stories Expands to Your Camera Roll
Instagram Stories now allows users to upload any photos and videos from their cameras. In the past, Instagram limited Stories to photos and videos taken in real time to give viewers “glimpses” into a user’s day. The social media network felt this update offers more flexibility and creative choices to its users.
Twitter Launches Self-Serve Advertising
Twitter has officially rolled out its self-serve advertising subscription to the public. Twitter’s Promote Mode will automatically amplify a business’s tweets to reach the best audience and grow followers. Promote Mode was designed with the goal of letting small businesses and personal brands more easily run ad campaigns on Twitter’s platform by automating them, for the price of $99 per month.
Facebook Messenger Makes Sponsored Messages Available to Businesses
Facebook announced that in the next few months advertisers will be able to send promotions to customers who have previously communicated with the brand directly through Messenger. “When it comes to communicating with a brand, 54.4% of U.S. social media users said they preferred messaging channels, including Messenger, over email, phone and online chat,” writes Facebook on its website. Facebook’s goal is to create a more personalized experience for customers by having promotions come through Messenger, instead of on a generic post.
Facebook Rolls Out News Feed Ads that Link to Messenger
With Facebook’s new messaging platform, businesses and developers can take the customer experience to a new level by creating news feed ads that directly open to Messenger conversations. According to Facebook, this new ad format “combines the powerful audience targeting and selection capabilities of ads on News Feed” with “the identity and canonical nature of Messenger conversations” and is available to all Facebook advertisers.
Instagram Stories and WhatsApp Status Hit 300 Million Daily Active Users
Up over 50 million daily active users since June, Facebook reports that Instagram Stories and WhatsApp Status have reached 300 million daily active users. These numbers are almost double SnapChat’s daily active users, once again showing the increasing popularity of Facebook and its counterparts.
Facebook Rolls Out Facebook Polls with Photos
Always wanted to know what people think about your brand and your competitors? Now creating polls to get the answers is easier than ever. Facebook officially launched Facebook Polls with the option to add pictures or GIFs. Businesses will be able to track polls about their products or services, as well as the feedback. “Facebook Polls will provide an easy way to spur conversation, gather opinions or organize plans.”
SnapChat Opens Conversation Tracking “Snap Pixel” to Marketers
SnapChat recently introduced Snap Pixel, a conversation tracking tool that allows brands to measure the effectiveness of video snap ads on their site traffic. Marketing Land reports that the new Snap Pixel will soon be available to all advertisers as a measurement tool and for retargeting purposes by the end of the year.
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by Fronetics | Nov 28, 2017 | Blog, Manufacturing & Distribution, Marketing, Social Media, Supply Chain
Manufacturers who are active and engaged on Facebook are more likely to introduce product innovation than those who are not.
If you’re killing time during business hours on Facebook, you may actually be onto something valuable. Well, no, — scrolling through your sister-in-law’s vacation album is unlikely to help your business. But recent studies show that staying attuned to user feedback on Facebook may actually help manufacturers create better products.
The practice in question, social listening, is the process of monitoring social media to identify and assess what users are saying about a company, individual, brand, product, or service. We’ve written about how social listening can help your business — you can gain market intelligence and learn how your company, products, and services are being perceived.
But two researchers from the Centre for European Economic Research (ZEW) have taken things a step farther. They studied data from nearly 3,000 German manufacturing and service firms to analyze the role that Facebook plays in the innovation process. What they found was that the probability that a company introduced a product innovation was significantly determined by firms’ adoption of a Facebook page and by the activity by users, measured by both quantity and quality.
The researchers, Irene Bertschek and Reinhold Kesler, discuss their findings in detail in this article published in the Harvard Business Review. So you can skip to the bottom line, we’ve pulled out a few key takeaways for manufacturers:
Negative comments are your friend…
…if you take them seriously.
While you might cringe when you seed a negative customer comment on Facebook, what the researchers found was encouraging: “Surprisingly, only the share of negative user comments was significantly predictive of innovation, perhaps suggesting that customers were helping to steer companies away from bad ideas.”
To make this work for you, it’s important that you pay attention to negative reviews, actively engage with them, and pass along relevant information to the people within your company who can address the issues. For more ideas, check out this post for tips on dealing with negative customer comments.
Simply being on social media isn’t enough — you need to be actively and intelligently engaging.
The study found that companies who were “using keywords in their posts that encourage users to leave feedback were significantly more likely to release a new or improved product.”
In other words, to gain the kind of valuable feedback that allows your products and services to improve, you need to be intelligent about soliciting it. “When developing social media strategies,” suggest Bertschek and Kesler, “companies should not only focus on marketing aspects, but also consider the potential for the firm’s innovation success.”
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by Fronetics | Nov 27, 2017 | Blog, Current Events, Marketing
It’s time for retailers to cut their dependence on holiday season shopping, and take advantage of opportunities to generate demand over a more sustained period of time.
When was the last time you stood in a pre-dawn line at a Black Friday doorbuster sale? If it was within the past years, you’re actually part of a dwindling minority of shoppers. Increasingly, customers are in shopping mode all the time, and deals that are restricted to a limited timeframe or buying mode are only a source of frustration.
In a recent Harvard Business Review article, brand-building expert Denise Lee Yohn makes the argument that retailers are over-dependent on the holiday shopping season, as the retail landscape has shifted seismically in the past decade. “It no longer makes sense to rely on disproportionate revenue from the holiday season to make up for the softness in sales during the rest of the year,” she argues.
Accommodate the way people shop today
So what does this mean for marketers? Yohn suggests that it’s time for brands to rethink how they promote themselves during the holidays and beyond, with marketing dollars better spent accommodating the ways people shop now.
“Customers don’t want retailers to dictate their shopping schedule,” says Yohn. Shoppers at every price point are becoming more accustomed to buying whenever the interest strikes them. They often shop from their mobile devices or in the stores during post-season sales, rather than at times traditionally associated with peak retail activity.
In their book Absolute Value, Itamar Simonsen and Emanuel Rosen posit the idea that people are now engaging in what they call “couch tracking,” or “keeping track of what they learn about products from reviews, friends, and news items on an ongoing basis.” This means that customers are likely to have well-formed preferences long before they have a specific plan to purchase. “Therefore,” concludes Yohn, “it doesn’t make sense for retailers to try to influence product or brand decisions only during discrete windows of time.”
In case you need further convincing, Yohn also points out that a disproportionate emphasis on the holiday season isn’t to a retailer’s best advantage even from a logistic perspective. “The large fluctuations in demand wreak havoc on supply chain, labor management, and accounting.”
It’s time for retailers to cut their dependence on holiday season shopping, and take advantage of opportunities to generate demand over a more sustained period of time. Millennials and other shoppers are increasingly choosing to spend discretionary dollars on experiences like recreation, travel, and eating out, rather than on products like clothing and shoes. To keep pace, Yohn suggests that “a year-round approach would likely help retailers compete with restaurants and other experiences which people seek out throughout the year.”
How to better distribute your marketing dollars
Here are three key takeaways for retailers looking to put marketing dollars to better use:
1) Encourage year-round “self-gifting”
Millennials are nearly as likely to buy something for themselves as someone else during the holiday season. Encouraging this tendency year-round could lead to more consistent purchasing rather than waiting for a holiday occasion.
2) Delay holiday-specific messaging
This one may seem counter-intuitive, but not having a holiday-specific message during fall months will actually help you capture wider demand. You also buck the trend of creating deal-fatigue, as shoppers quickly get weary of holiday promotions that start in October.
3) Make technology your friend
Says Yohn, “The technology and analytics now exist for retailers to better predict what people want and when they want it, so they should use these capabilities to move away from the traditional seasonal approach.”
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by Fronetics | Nov 22, 2017 | Blog, Leadership, Strategy
Employees are much more than people you employ — they can be your best brand ambassadors.
There are many benefits to having employee brand ambassadors, and one of the biggest is the rise in peer influence in B2B buying. But the benefits don’t stop there. There are the increased social media reach, growth in brand engagement, and elevated employee performances.
But companies can’t force their employees to become brand ambassadors. To be truly effective, the shift from employee to brand ambassador must happen organically. But there are ways to help. Here are 3 ways to use your employees as your greatest marketing tool.
3 ways to cultivate brand ambassadors
1. Create a work environment people enjoy coming to.
One of the best ways to get employees to speak honestly and positively about your brand is to have employees that enjoy coming to work. Make sure that your office is an environment that promotes a positive culture. Being flexible, recognizing a job well done, and offering opportunities for professional growth are ways to cultivate satisfied, productive employees.
When an employee feels valued, s/he is more likely to promote your brand. Opportunities for professional development and recognition for hard work may seem like small gestures, but they contribute to happy employees. This breeds the most effective brand ambassadors.
2. Improve employee engagement.
The more excited your employees are about their jobs, the more engaged they will be. And what’s more, companies with highly engaged employees see a 20% increase in sales and a 10% in customer ratings.
Improve engagement by encouraging open lines of communication with your employees. Make sure they are in-the-know with company happenings. Encourage their feedback. Work to implement suggestions employees make to improve processes. If you want employees to invest in your brand, you must build the bridge between being an employee and feeling like a part of the team. When employees feel like an insider, they are engaged with your brand and will naturally want to promote it.
3. Provide incentives.
When you have employees that are passionate about your brand, it’s important to find ways to recognize the work they’re doing as brand ambassadors. The obvious incentive is money, but that’s not always the best way to encourage your employees.
Ever heard of motivation crowding theory? This theory states that extrinsic motivators, such as monetary incentives, can undermine intrinsic motivation. If you have happy, productive employees that want to rave about your company, don’t squash their excitement by throwing money at them. This could turn their passion into more work.
There are lots of other incentives that will keep your employees dedicated to being brand ambassadors. One of the easiest to implement is recognition. A shout out on your social media pages or recognition in a staff meeting can go a long way. Other options include product giveaways or discounts with your vendors. Get creative! The incentives don’t have to be expensive, but a little motivation can go a long way.
Don’t miss out on one of your brand’s greatest marketing opportunities — your own employees! Help your team make the leap from employee to brand ambassador, and watch how the shift benefits everyone in your office, including you.
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by Fronetics | Nov 21, 2017 | Blog, Current Events, Marketing
These 10 podcasts for marketers discuss the latest news and trends in the marketing world relevant to the supply chain and logistics industries.
Podcasts have surged in popularity over the past few years. At least 112 million Americans have listened to podcasts, a figure up 11% from last year, with 67 million listening at least monthly. So why are they so popular?
Podcasts are a series of digital audio files that listeners can subscribe to. With the flexibility to listen at their convenience, followers are drawn to the ease and mobility of podcasts. And the available topics are endless.
For supply chain and logistics marketers, podcasts provide the latest digital marketing news, as well as innovative trends that are new to your industry. Here are 10 podcasts that deliver the most up-to-date news in marketing for supply chain and logistics companies.
10 supply chain and logistics marketing podcasts
Millions of dollars are being left on the table right now by supply chain companies because of poor marketing! Supply Chain Gold delivers actionable marketing strategies and information to logistics and 3PL companies, distribution centers, and fulfillment centers to help bring in more sales and increase profit margins. The Supply Chain Gold podcast warehouses internet marketing secrets that your company can leverage to lower customer acquisition costs, grow revenue, increase net profits, drive brand recognition, and dominate your industry.
- #AskGaryVee
Gary Vaynerchuk — author, speaker, and owner of multi-million dollar marketing company VaynerMedia — uses his podcast to answer questions about marketing, social media, and general entrepreneurial topics that his followers ask on social media. If you’re looking for a high-intensity host whose responses are no-fluff, honest, and a tad explicit from time to time, Gary might be just the straight-talking expert you need.
The Marketing Book podcast helps business owners and marketers keep up with the smartest thinking in the quickly changing field of modern marketing. Each episode interviews authors and marketers to give you actionable marketing insights, tips, tactics and resources to help grow your business.
Social Media Examiner’s weekly podcast is hosted by Michael Stelzner and other members of SME’s team. Each podcast focuses on new social media features and strategies, providing listeners with actionable tips they can use to improve their social media results.
Copyblogger FM is a weekly, short-form broadcast hosted by Sonia Simone. Each week she and a team of rotating experts discuss the week’s news and updates in the field of content marketing, email marketing, copywriting, conversion optimization, and more.
John J. Wall and Christopher S. Penn host a 20-minute, weekly show recorded in a local coffee shop. The podcast is designed to be casual and conversational. They share tips on social marketing, SEO, search marketing, copywriting, affiliate marketing, and more. They also take listener questions.
Industry experts Eric Siu and Neil Patel offer users unconventional marketing wisdom that will make you want to kick some of your traditional strategies to the curb. Their goal is to bring valuable, actionable marketing tips in just 10 minutes.
Buffer’s blog is highly successful, so no wonder its podcast is equally informative. The content will appeal to anyone who practices social media marketing, whether you’re brand new to marketing or you’re a social media practitioner. They regularly have industry leaders on the show, including Mari Smith and Neil Patel.
Know Your Audience is a weekly podcast that interviews journalists, bloggers, data scientists, and analytics/audience development professionals. The goal is to start a meaningful conversation about what it takes to create engaging content and learn from the people who are shaping the future of media.
Listen and learn from interviews with social business leaders representing top brands and agencies. Host Bernie Borges leads an educational format as guests share their experiences and insights on social business topics including marketing, selling, customer service, employee advocacy, recruiting and commerce to fuel your social business journey.
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by Fronetics | Nov 20, 2017 | Blog, Content Marketing, Marketing, Social Media
Measuring brand awareness has been notoriously difficult. But these 4 metrics can help you evaluate if potential customers are encountering your content.
Companies work hard to get their products and services out into the world. It’s a key step in gaining exposure among potential customers and earning new business. This process is called brand awareness, the extent to which consumers are familiar with your brand.
Heightening the public’s knowledge of your business will generate leads, some of which will turn into sales. But this knowledge, or brand awareness, has proven difficult to measure. Do potential customers know your name, what you sell, and where to contact you? Creating ways to measure how recognizable your business is will show you what people think of your company, as well as where you should be focusing your time and money to help grow your exposure.
Here are 4 metrics to measure your brand awareness.
1. Social media reach
The larger your social media reach, the larger the potential audience. The reach of your social media content has a big impact on your brand awareness. Tracking engagements on each network will help you measure progress, build a greater following, and, ultimately, generate more site visits.
Use tools like Sharedcount, a free online tool that tracks the number of times a piece of content has been shared on the most popular social media sites — including Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn — to easily keep track of your social reach.
2. Blog shares
Your blog content is the perfect fodder for organic brand awareness, especially if sharing your posts is easy. Create a share bar on your blog to allow your readers to quickly share your content through social media networks. Measure your number of shares to track your most popular blogs, monitor your growing brand awareness, and help guide the topics of your future blog posts.
3. Brand mentions
Are customers talking about your brand online? There’s a great deal of value in knowing what they’re saying. Monitoring brand mentions online can provide honest feedback and objective insight from current and potential customers.
There are several tools to help you track brand mentions online. Here at Fronetics, we prefer the ease of Google Alerts, which allows you to set up custom alerts when your brand is mentioned online. We also use Hootsuite, where you can track brand mentions, as well as keywords and phrases across all of your social media platforms.
4. Website traffic
Every visit to your website represents someone who is familiar with your brand. The question is: How are people finding your website? Think of web traffic in terms of sources:
- Organic traffic – users come across your website from search engines
- Direct traffic – users type in the name of your website or brand directly
- Referral traffic – users find your website from links on other websites
- Social traffic – users come across your website from social media content
- Paid search/social – users click on one of your paid digital ads, which drives them to your site
- Email traffic – users click through one of your marketing emails
You’ll want a healthy balance of each source to ensure your brand awareness campaign is diversified. Measure each of these metrics using a platform like Google Analytics or HubSpot. As each grows, you’ll know your brand awareness is growing alongside.
Use these 4 metrics to measure your brand awareness and track your progress as you work to grow your exposure. See where you’re having the most success and where you need improvement, and adjust your strategy accordingly.
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