by Fronetics | Aug 17, 2016 | Blog, Strategy, Talent
If your job has left you to feeling stuck in a rut, try these steps to improve your professional life.
Summer vacations are over, and the year is more than half gone. Perhaps all those best-laid plans for boosting your career this year have yet to come to fruition. You may be feeling as burnt out as those last colorful leaves before they surrender to the fall.
If this frustration sounds familiar, it may be time to shake things up and move your career in a new direction. Carpe autumn!
Here are 9 tips to propel your career forward:
Make the move
Unhappy at your present job? Identify the reasons. If you are frustrated with your current role but you like your company, inquire about other positions within the organization. If none are a good fit or there are no growth opportunities, consider looking elsewhere. Use every job-search tool available — network, use a recruiter, and/or work with an executive search firm.
Network
There is tremendous opportunity in networking. Studies have found that the majority of jobs (between 49% and 80%) come about through networking. But networking offers more, like professional development and sage advice. You will make important connections that could bring you career success.
Create your own brand
A quick search on the internet or on LinkedIn and you will see: You are a brand. First impressions are now inclusive of your Facebook page, personal blog, your Instagram page, and Twitter account. Even your pins on Pinterest say something about you. Keep that in mind as you are posting personal content.
Work for someone intelligent
Working for someone smart brings you more knowledge and critical thinking skills simply through observation and example. You will grow professionally and personally.
Plan for the 12-24 months
Don’t get hung up on making a 10-year career plan. Look for the right opportunities, be flexible, and know the direction you are headed in, but don’t lock into a long-term direction.
Use your muscles
Research has found that a regular exercise routine can make you happier, smarter, and more energetic. Being fit can also brand you — giving a perception of health and stamina that signifies effectiveness, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Explore something new
Is there something your colleagues are doing or using that you aren’t? LinkedIn or Twitter for example. Take the leap!
Find your balance
Research by the Families and Work Institute found that 55% of respondents reported feeling overwhelmed by everything that is on their plate. A different survey found that 80% of people are unhappy with their work-life balance. Look at your priorities and keep only what matters.
Take a vacation
Have leftover vacation days? About 57% of Americans don’t use their vacation time. Taking time off is important to both your mental and physical health — and it has a positive impact on work performance and productivity.
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by Elizabeth Hines | Aug 16, 2016 | Blog, Data/Analytics, Logistics, Strategy, Supply Chain
Look at your financial metrics on a granular level, beyond the basic snapshot, to identify opportunities for growth.
Big data can show homogeneous revenue opportunities and cost inputs. But that overview is inadequate for determining how different aspects of your business are performing and where opportunity for growth may lie.
Essentially, you need to analyze your financial metrics at a granular level rather than in aggregate. For example, your business probably offers several products or services and feeds off of more than one revenue stream. Each must be evaluated separately in terms of value and profitability to determine how each is performing, rather than just examining your entire portfolio as a whole.
The key to increasing profits is not always blazingly obvious, but rather it is hidden in the minutia. There you will identify what is growing the business and what is not.
How to get down to the granular level of your financial metrics:
Consider your sales figures.
What is your profit — broken down by product, brand, region, etc.? Note any similarities and differences. Can you identify outliers? Can you identify what works and what your barriers are? If not, you must drill down further. For example, if a specific product is successful, why is this so? Is its success the result of a team or an individual? Can this knowledge or skill be applied to other products or services?
Identify products, brands, or services that don’t make financial sense.
You know they exist already. They are the ones that eat up your resources or simply no longer fit well with your brand. It may be time to eliminate ill-fitting clients, products, or services that don’t benefit the company. You then can pour the freed-up resources into higher-profit activities.
Know what the critical numbers are.
What is important to your business can be very specific to your industry. Inc. magazine’s guide to tracking critical numbers offers a great example: “A software consultant may focus on billable time, for instance, while a food retailer should be looking at sales per labor hour.”
Repeat this review process often.
This is not a one-time exercise. Typically, financials should be reviewed monthly, but each business will vary. Things that ebb and flow, like inventory or manufacturing output, should be reviewed each day, and the sales pipeline should be examined once per week.
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by Fronetics | Aug 15, 2016 | Blog, Content Marketing, Marketing, Social Media, Strategy
If your social media strategy doesn’t align with your business objectives and target audience, your marketing budget is probably better spent elsewhere.
Almost half of CMOs report they do not feel prepared to manage the challenges that accompany the rise of social media. Regardless marketers report that they plan to double social media spending in the next five years.
Pouring money into increasingly complex and expansive social marketing campaigns will not guarantee success, however. Instead, Keith Quesenberry, author of Social Media Strategy: Marketing and Advertising in the Consumer Revolution, suggests that marketers need to boil their social strategies down to the basics to improve results.
“They must use fundamental marketing concepts and modify them for this new two-way, consumer-empowered medium of social media,” says Quesenberry in a Harvard Business Review article. He offers these four steps for developing a basic social strategy.
1) Identify your business objectives.
Any strategy your business adopts should carefully align with your goals. Are you hoping to grow brand awareness? Generate more leads? Rebrand your business? Your social strategy should serve those objectives.
2) Listen to your target audience.
Yyou should have a thorough understanding of who your target audience is and how they use social media. After all, millennials use different platforms at different times than, say, Fortune 500 CEOs. Quesenberry suggests using analytics tools within social networks and secondary research, such as the Pew Research Internet Project, Nielsen, or Edison Research, to identify larger trends in social media use.
3) Produce engaging content.
Create 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. Use the social channels that best suit your brand message, type of content, and target audience.
4) Link marketing goals to social media KPIs.
Measure key performance indicators such as social media click-throughs to purchase (if the goal is online sales), social impressions (for brand awareness), or number of campaign-specific forms completed (for lead generation).
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by Fronetics | Aug 11, 2016 | Blog, Content Marketing, Marketing
HubSpot and WordPress rank at the top of G2 Crowd’s list comparing platforms to create, edit, and publish digital content.
Businesses and marketers who do not have coding skills rely on web content management systems to publish their digital content. There are a number of different products available, so how do you choose which one is best for your business?
G2 Crowd is a popular business software review site that allows users to rate their experiences with different products to help others make better purchasing decisions. It has leveraged hundreds of user reviews and analyzed market-share data to create a rankings grid for web content management systems. Products with 10 or more reviews are ranked and placed into one of four categories:
- Leaders offer web content management products that are rated highly by G2 Crowd users and have substantial scale, market share, and global support and service resources.
- High Performers provide products that are highly rated by their users, but have not yet achieved the market share and scale of the vendors in the Leader category.
- Contenders have significant Market Presence and resources, but their products have received below average user Satisfaction ratings or have not yet received a sufficient number of reviews to validate their products.
- Niche products do not have the Market Presence of the Leaders. They may have been rated positively on customer Satisfaction, but have not yet received enough reviews to validate their success.
The top 10 web content management systems, with their score and category, are as follows:
1) HubSpot (89, Leader)
HubSpot is an inbound marketing software company that helps businesses transform their marketing from outbound (cold calls, email spam, trade shows, TV ads, etc) lead generation to inbound lead generation enabling them to “get found” by more potential customers in the natural course of the way they shop and learn.
2) WordPress (86, Leader)
WordPress.org is web software you can use to create a beautiful website or blog. They like to say that WordPress is both free and priceless at the same time.
3) Drupal (67, Leader)
Drupal is an open source content management platform powering millions of websites and applications.
4) Kenitco (61, High Performer)
Delivering more out-of-the-box functionality than other systems, Kentico makes enterprise-grade, integrated marketing manageable and affordable for businesses of all sizes.
5) Joomla (59, High Performer)
Joomla is a content management system (CMS), which enables you to build websites and powerful online applications.
6) Ingeniux CMS (50, High Performer)
Ingeniux CMS is an enterprise content management platform designed to manage the persuasive web. Easy one-click editing, personalized content, software-as-a-service delivery options, and 100% ASP.NET MVC.
7) Crownpeak (48, Higher Performer)
Crownpeak is the only cloud-first Digital Experience Management (DXM) platform with native Digital Quality Management (DQM). The result is easier, faster and more cost-efficient digital experiences for Marketing and IT teams and their customers.
8) Clickability (46, High Performer)
Clickability helps businesses succeed in a dynamic and competitive environment through internet-scale solutions integrated into a global platform.
9) Evoq Content (46, High Performer)
Evoq Content is DNN’s commercially licensed Content Management System (CMS).
10) idev CMS (44, High Performer)
idev CMS is here to make your life easier. Period. Gone are the days of looking at source code and trying to figure out how to format your website content. With the idev CMS, which is at the core of nearly every Americaneagle.com-built website, your website maintenance headaches will dissolve.
To learn more about the rankings grid, methodology, and the programs, visit G2 Crowd’s website.
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by Fronetics | Aug 10, 2016 | Blog, Content Marketing, Data/Analytics, Marketing, Strategy
Examine these stats when you analyze your content to improve your content strategy and the effectiveness of future content.
A critical (but often overlooked) element of an effective inbound marketing strategy follows the actual production and distribution of content: analyzing your content. It sounds obvious, but many businesses who are producing content do not take the time — or are unsure how — to evaluate how it has performed over time.
Regularly studying how your blog posts, videos, high-value resources (e.g., case studies), and other content resonates with your audience helps inform your strategy. It tells you what kinds of content succeeds in driving traffic and converting leads, as well as which distribution platforms and patterns are optimal.
While you may have had a good feel for this when you initially developed your strategy — p.s. you should always have a strategy and you should always document it — an audit can confirm it. If it doesn’t, you can make adjustments.
Also, keep in mind that digital and social media is constantly evolving. Regular content analysis will dictate where and how you need to accommodate changing user patterns, interests, behaviors, and technologies.
Here are four things that are important to evaluate when you analyze your content.
1) Views
How many times your content has been read, watched, or downloaded is a good indicator of how well it resonates with your audience. It’s important to evaluate individual pieces of content (rather than total website views) so you’ll know exactly what is driving web traffic.
Run such reports on a regular basis, examining how your content has performed over that short interval of time. You’ll want to consider how certain subjects play during the time of publication. You should also keep an eye out for how things have changed over time — for example, a topic that normally drives a lot of traffic that is no longer getting the same attention. Has audience interest changed or been satiated? Is the distribution platform no longer appropriate for that topic?
For blog posts or web pages, make sure to check both pageviews and unique pageviews, as well as bounce rate and time on page. That way, you can rule out any spam traffic or pages that draw a large audience but do not end up keeping them once they start reading. An eye-catching title or well-optimized post can bring the horse to water, but if it’s not drinking, your content isn’t doing its job.
2) Performance over time
It’s equally important to check how individual content has performed over its lifetime.
You may have a blog post that gets an extraordinary number of views the week it is posted but then fails to draw traffic thereafter. If that’s the case, examine what circumstances were in place at the time of the post and how the post fit in that context, then try to replicate that pattern in the future.
On the other hand, if you have a post that continues to draw traffic long after it has been posted, take note. Is content involving similar topics popular as well? Your audience is hungry for information about that subject. Consider other factors: Was it authored by a particular company leader? Is it formatted in a certain way, or did you use certain keywords?
3) Social impact
What kind of content gets the most engagement on social media? Examining the number of likes, shares, comments, and click-throughs on individual posts offers insight into what your followers are interested in. It can also help you evaluate your distribution strategy. Do certain subjects perform better at different times of the day? Get more engagement on one platform? Use individual channel’s analytics features as well as tools like Google Analytics to evaluate the impact of your content on social media.
4) Lead conversion
The reason we create and publish content is to attract new business, so knowing what drives lead generation and conversion is incredibly valuable. If you use marketing software, like HubSpot, this is easier to do. If not, it can be difficult, though not impossible, to understand what content was critical in winning over your customers.
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by Fronetics | Aug 9, 2016 | Blog, Content Marketing, Marketing, Supply Chain
As buyers spend more time researching vendors online, your business’ digital content should anticipate the questions, problems and needs of your target buyer so that you can make their short list.
Want to appeal to — and close sales with — more customers? Your content must speak directly to your target audience’s needs and wants.
According to Demand Gen’s 2016 B2B Buyer’s Survey Report, nearly half of buyers (48%) report that their purchase cycle has increased since last year. One of the main reasons: they are spending more time conducting research and using more sources to investigate purchases.
That means potential customers are scrutinizing vendors more than ever before. As a vendor, your business should be examining your digital content to ensure it meets the expectations of B2B buyers seeking products and services like yours.
And what, exactly, are buyers looking for?
When researching a vendor on its website, Demand Gen survey respondents reported overwhelmingly that “content that speaks directly to [my] company” is the single-most influential aspect of the website. In fact, 96% rank that somewhat important or very important.
Therefore, your business should be creating content that answers questions, solves problems, and makes life easier for your target buyer. When they are reading your website, blog, or social media posts, they should feel like you understand their pain points and concerns and that you have the exact solution their specific business requires.
What else is important to buyers?
When it comes to conducting research on a vendor website, buyers ranked the following factors, in order, behind content speaking directly to their companies.
1. Easy access to pricing and competitive information
Can anyone navigating your website quickly and easily find what your products or services cost? Or have you hidden or excluded that information?
2. Vendor-focused content
Buyers want to understand not just who they are buying from but, more importantly, what you can offer them. Case studies detailing successes of your other customers, product data sheets illustrating technical characteristics and performance metrics — buyers crave this kind of information.
3. Search and navigation tools
Buyers want to be able to quickly find exactly what they are looking for. Your website should be easy to navigate and very user-friendly.
4. Easy access to content
Are you hoarding high-value resources behind lengthy registration forms in order to extract as much information as possible from your leads? You may be losing prospects because of it. Keep your forms short and sweet.
5. Relevancy of website speaking directly to the industry/company
You understand the business environment in which your customers operate. Your website should convey this knowledge so that prospects can recognize your expertise and trust your business and its solutions.
6. Thought leadership content
Expert content like whitepapers, reports, and infographics elevate your brand image and establish you as a leading voice in the industry.
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