by Fronetics | Mar 21, 2018 | Blog, Content Marketing, Logistics, Marketing, Social Media, Strategy, Supply Chain
Use these 10 social media analytics tools to measure the success of your social media efforts.
Analyzing your social media performance is critical to a successful marketing effort, especially in light of recent changes to Facebook’s News Feed. You need the tools to determine what’s working and what isn’t, as well as the best time to post your content for your target audience.
At Fronetics, we use a variety of tools to measure social media success. Here are our 10 favorite social media analytics tools.
Our 10 favorite social media analytics tools
1) Hootsuite
Hootsuite is a social media management tool that can do everything from scheduling social media posts to measuring your social media ROI. The AutoSchedule feature lets Hootsuite determine the best time to publish a post or tweet based on when similar content performed well in the past. It also considers the platform and can publish the same message at different times based on audience engagement on each particular network.
2) Google Analytics
Google Analytics is a robust analytical tool for determining how web users are interacting with your digital assets, including social media. Three custom reports (Best Days to Post on Social Media, Best Time to Post on Social Network by Hour, and the Social Media Traffic by Date and Hour) offer real-time, in-depth insight. Also, Google Analytics is free!
3) Tweriod
Tweriod, a free Twitter tool that helps you know the best time to tweet, is changing the way companies approach their marketing tweets. It will evaluate up to 1,000 of your followers and their tweeting patterns, including schedule, interests, and retweets. You then receive an analysis of when your tweets will receive the most exposure based on that data.
4) Snaplytics
If you’ve jumped on the Snapchat bandwagon, you probably know that Snapchat gives brands relatively little data on performance. Snaplytics gives you data on the performance of your snaps, audience growth, and more.
5) Iconosquare
This tool is specifically for Instagram. It stands out because, in addition to analysis of your normal photos and videos, it gives you insights into Instagram Stories. With higher level plans, you can also get influencer analytics as well.
6) Buzzsumo
Instead of analyzing your brand’s individual social media performance, Buzzsumo takes a different approach: It looks at how content from your website performs on social media.
7) Tailwind
Tailwind lets you track your performance on Pinterest. Although Instagram and Snapchat are getting a lot of buzz these days, users remain extremely active on Pinterest. With Tailwind, you can track trends in followers and engagement and analyze your audience.
8) SproutSocial
SproutSocial offers a customized dashboard with a quick overview of how your social media channels are performing. You also can gain deeper insight into your followers — like gender and age demographics. And you can assess your customer reach and what will work in your favor.
9) ShortStack
This social media contest app provides performance analytics, so you can determine if your efforts are working, or if you’re simply giving away free merchandise.
10) TapInfluence
Influencer marketing is becoming one of the most commonly used social media tactics. TapInfluence is a complete influencer marketing platform that researches potential influencers you want to work with, as well as tracks campaign performance.
What social media analytics tools do you use?
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by Fronetics | Mar 20, 2018 | Blog, Content Marketing, Logistics, Marketing, Strategy, Supply Chain
Email workflows will automatically deliver content to leads at designated intervals, inviting them to take action and helping them to move down the sales funnel.
We’ve written before about marketing automation, and what it can do for the supply chain in term of cost- and time-savings. It’s time to get specific about how you can put marketing automation technology to work for you.
There are quite a few highly effective automation tools (including chatbots). Today we’re going to talk about email workflows.
What are email workflows?
These resource-saving tools consist of a series of emails that automatically send to a user at designated intervals. Based on actions a user has taken on your website, they receive emails relating to their interests — or where they are in the sales process — automatically.
Take this example: If someone downloads a resource from your website, an automated email workflow can be triggered to send a thank-you email within 24 hours. After the initial email comes a series of lead-nurturing emails over the next few weeks, continuing to educate the lead about a subject they are interested in, based on the resource they downloaded.
Why use email workflows
HubSpot reports that businesses using this kind of marketing automation to nurture leads receive a 451% increase in qualified leads. Email workflows work, period.
At Fronetics, we recommend clients create email workflows all the time. It allows them to deliver relevant, timely content to leads through automation. That means a sales person doesn’t have to keep track of when a download occurred and remember to send follow-up emails with lead-nurturing content.
Email workflows let you trigger emails based on any information you have about your leads, so you can send the ideal message at the ideal time. Here are some ideas of email workflows you can try:
- Topic workflows, triggered by page views or content offer downloads
- Lead-nurturing workflow, triggered by top-of-the-funnel conversions
- Re-engagment workflow, triggered when a contact has been inactive for a while
- Upsell workflow, triggered by past purchases
- Blog subscriber welcome workflow, triggered when someone subscribes to your blog
By taking the time to create thoughtful email workflows on the front end, you will save your team a lot of time and effort during the sales process. It’s this kind of marketing automation that will streamline your sales and marketing efforts, freeing you up to complete other important tasks.
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by Jennifer Hart Yim | Mar 19, 2018 | Blog, Current Events, Logistics, Strategy, Supply Chain
More than half of the UK’s Kentucky Fried Chicken stores recently closed because they ran out of chicken. Here’s a look at what caused the issues and what supply chain lessons can be learned.
This guest post comes to us from Argentus Supply Chain Recruiting, a boutique recruitment firm specializing in Supply Chain Management and Procurement.
There’s another unfortunate entry in the annals of Supply Chain failures that burst into the wider world of business and pop culture: More than half of the UK’s Kentucky Fried Chicken stores recently closed because they ran out of chicken. We’ve written on the Argentus’ blog many times about Supply Chain misadventures, and how they can harm a brand’s reputation as well as profits – for example, maybe most memorably, in the case of Target, which had to retreat from the Canadian market after Supply Chain snafus led to empty shelves and disappointed customers.
Although Supply Chain Management is taking off in terms of recognition within business, it still doesn’t get a lot of attention from the wider world – until it fails, at which point the stresses and pressure of beleaguered Supply Chain teams become an object of fascination as the organization races to play catch up and get things back online.
KFC’s UK operations are the latest such story. On February 19th, outlets began reporting about the closure of about half of the chain’s 900 stores in the country, due to delivery failures after changing their 3rd Party Logistics (3PL) provider from Bidvest Logistics to DHL. A few weeks later, reports are that a number of stores are still closed, with front-line workers being encouraged to take holidays as the company sorts out its deliveries and tries to account for the failures. It’s no wonder that the closures have been met with derision across the internet: delivering chicken to the people is pretty much KFC’s #1 job.
So what has caused the issues, and what lessons are there to be learned?
According to the BBC, KFC recently switched its 3PL operations from food specialist Bidvest Logistics to international heavyweight DHL – the latter being a company with operations in a number of different industries, now navigating a country-wide Supply Chain out of one distribution centre location. In short, DHL took over the contract on Valentine’s Day, and delivery failures started to happen on February 16th – an extraordinarily short time table for Supply Chain issues to get so dire that customers see disruptions.
While there’s some disagreement among experts about the exact cause of the failed deliveries, speculation is that many of the problems can be attributed to the fact that DHL has one distribution centre location serving the entire country – a bottleneck that wasn’t seen with the previous 3PL provider, who had six distribution centre locations.
While Supply Chains gain a lot of their competitive advantage from offering lower costs and greater efficiencies, it seems that the shift in providers was a cost-cutting maneuver that’s ended up costing the company’s brand — with some analysts predicting something on the order of 20% of a hit to the company’s share prices once the disruption finishes shaking its way through the system. It underscores the importance of sound planning and reliability in Supply Chain Management in an era where companies are looking to gain an edge with margins wherever they can. It’s also great evidence for what many of us know: an approach that puts cost-cutting first can cause more problems than it solves.
John Boulter, the Managing Director of DHL’s operations for retail in the UK and Ireland issued a statement saying, “The reasons for this unforeseen interruption of this complex service are being worked on with a goal to return to normal service levels as soon as possible. With the help of our partner QSL, we are committed to step by step improvements to allow KFC to reopen its stores over the coming days. Whilst we are not the only party responsible for the supply chain to KFC, we do apologize for the inconvenience and disappointment caused to KFC and their customers by this incident.”
Ouch. Boulter’s statement has two issues that, from our perspective, show a lack of the accountability necessary to restore credibility both with DHL’s immediate customer (KFC) and the wider base of customers disappointed that they can’t buy KFC’s fried chicken:
- The statement attempts to shift blame onto DHL’s other partners in the deliveries (particularly QSL) in a way that looks passive aggressive. Admitting responsibility is the first step to restoring credibility when responding to Supply Chain failures, and while DHL accepts some blame for the issues, the statement doesn’t go far enough.
- Going out of their way to describe the service as “complex” doesn’t do any favours for DHL in this situation. Of course modern Supply Chains are complex. Understanding that complexity, and being able to deliver anyway, should be considered table stakes for providers in 2018. To implicitly chalk delivery failures up to a complexity that your predecessor – in this case Bidvest Logistics – handled without issue for years, casts even more doubt on DHL’s competency. At the same time, the fact that analysts are having such agreeing on an explanation for these issues – despite the fact that KFC only has a few poultry suppliers in the UK – says a lot about just how complex modern-day Supply Chains have become.
Logistics failures leading to the closure of stores is pretty much the worst case scenario for Supply Chain teams everywhere, so all of us across the community are probably watching this story with bemused shock and sympathy for those involved.
Hopefully DHL – which is, after all, the biggest logistics provider in the world – can get these issues solved soon, but in the meantime, let us know in the comments: are there any further lessons you think that Supply Chain professionals can draw from KFC’s recent woes?
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by Fronetics | Mar 15, 2018 | Blog, Content Marketing, Logistics, Marketing, Strategy, Supply Chain
Here are four simple steps to help you measure your company’s content marketing ROI and the success of your strategy.
Lean-startup pioneer Eric Ries said, “The only metrics that entrepreneurs should invest energy in collecting are those that help them make decisions.” In other words, measure the things that will tell you if an effort was profitable so you know where to put your time and money.
But most companies aren’t using the right metrics to track their content marketing ROI. For example, 83% of B2B enterprise companies (over 1,000 employees) use web traffic as their main metric for measuring content marketing ROI. A spike in homepage hits could be the result of your hard work, but it could also be ghost spam, or even both! So clearly, web traffic isn’t the most reliable metric.
Content marketing ROI is harder to quantify than checking a few quick numbers. But don’t give up hope. In the article How to Measure Content Marketing ROI: A Simple 4 Step Process, marketing consultant Bill Widmer breaks down a simple, four-step process that will quickly and effectively measure your content marketing ROI.
What is content marketing ROI?
Content marketing ROI is how much revenue you gain from content marketing in comparison with what you spend on creating and distributing content. It’s an actual percentage that shows how much revenue you gained vs. how much money you spent. And for a lot of businesses (and bosses), this percentage is very important. They want you to be able to prove that the marketing dollars that are going into your content marketing strategy are actually pulling in new business.
Every company has specific key performance indicators (KPIs) that help shape their marketing strategies. Here at Fronetics, we believe that your content marketing strategy should take these KPIs into consideration when thinking about your ROI:
- Website traffic
- Leads generated
- Conversion rate
- Direct sales
Obviously content marketing has more benefits than these four KPIs demonstrate — including better customer retention, brand awareness, and improved SEO — but to begin to measure your ROI, let’s focus on these four main points.
Measure content marketing ROI in 4 simple steps
1. Download your reverse goal path data.
Andy Crestodina, co-founder and CMO of Orbit Media, suggests:
- Go to your analytics dashboard. Set the date range for at least a year.
- Go to Conversions > Goals > Reverse Goal Path.
- Add a filter like “/blog” so only blog posts show up.
- Sort by Goal Completions.
After this step, you’ll be able see which of your posts have driven the most conversions. But you can’t stop there. These are simply conversion numbers. We want those numbers to become conversion rates, so let’s keep going.
2. Download your pageview data.
In order to calculate a conversion rate, you need to know pageviews. Here’s how to get that information:
- Go to Content > Site Content > All Pages.
- Filter with “/blog” to get only blog posts.
Download this data into the spreadsheet from step one.
3. Get your conversion rate.
Now here’s a little math for you. Divide the data in the “conversions” column by the number in the “unique pageviews” column. This will give you your conversion rate per blog post.
This will show you what your best-performing pieces of content are, and what posts need to be updated to gain more views and shares.
This information will give you valuable insight into the topics that your target audience are reading about and how you can better plan for high-ranking content in the future.
If you have posts or pages that are older — like over a year — and they haven’t gotten any views or conversions, it’s time to think about reworking them to have more appeal to your target audience.
For your actual percentage, you’ll need to calculate how many of these leads have converted to sales.
4. Calculate content marketing ROI based on lead conversions.
Here’s where things get a little more complicated, but still very manageable. You need to start putting tags on your leads according to the content they came from.
You can use programs like WordPress or Blogger to help you automatically tag any leads that came from a specific form. Assuming the form correlates to a single blog post, you will know that any leads with that tag came from that post.
You can also connect your leads with a CRM, such as HubSpot or SalesForce, and track which leads came from specific emails. These programs easily integrate with your analytics and email marketing platforms for up-to-date numbers and data.
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by Fronetics | Mar 14, 2018 | Blog, Content Marketing, Logistics, Marketing, Supply Chain, Talent
Logistics and supply chain careers are increasingly high paying, diverse, and in demand.
With the talent gap growing wider every day, ambitious current and future supply chain professionals have many interesting opportunities. And not only that — Logistics and supply chain careers are increasingly high paying, according to LinkedIn’s State of Salary Report 2017.
According to Rob Byrne of Logistics Bureau, “Through its extensive span of activities, the supply chain sector offers wide-ranging possibilities for employment and career progression. The variety of functions involved — product design, procurement, warehousing, production, transport, distribution, sales, for instance — encourage demand for new employees.”
Here’s a look at five of the top logistics and supply chain careers available to today’s professionals.
Top 5 logistics and supply chain careers
1) Customer Satisfaction Director
Automation and analytics are taking over in fulfillment centers, and the options for building a load, planning a route, and confirming shipments are extending. Forbes contributor Kevin O’Marah writes, “Customer contact at the point of delivery may be your best chance to make a great impression and renew the business.”
The industry once thought of the customer satisfaction director as a “logistics manager.” But as technology revolutionizes the sector, this role has — and will continue to — evolve.
2) Distribution Center Supervisor
These are professionals who administer all the daily activities of a distribution center. They manage expenses, minimize losses, and are responsible for ensuring that goods are sent to buyers at the right time. This role requires juggling complicated tasks to keep processes running smoothly.
3) Procurement Manager
Procurement managers are responsible for finding the most competitive prices to buy goods for their company. If you have excellent communication and negotiation skills, love working with numbers, and are adept at establishing professional networks, this could be a great career option for you.
4) Demand Planning Analyst
As a demand planning analyst, you would be responsible for analyzing your company’s inventory and billing processes, managing stock levels, and purchasing goods. If you’re someone who enjoys quantitative analysis, this is a fulfilling option.
5) Supply Chain Consultant
Supply chain consultants provide a third-party perspective to companies regarding vendor and inventory management, or any aspects of their supply chain and logistics activities. This is a great option for seasoned supply chain professionals looking for a career shift, as experience is a plus when it comes to consulting.
These logistics and supply chain careers represent just five of the many exciting options available to professionals these days. What career paths do you find most exciting/fulfilling/promising?
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by Fronetics | Mar 13, 2018 | Blog, Content Marketing, Leadership, Logistics, Marketing, Supply Chain
Here are five books for supply chain leaders to stay on top of industry trends and management practices.
“Leadership is the capacity to translate vision into reality.” — Warren Bennis
All executives and managers bring different skills to the table. They have different experiences and approaches that set them apart. So what makes an executive a great leader? Great leaders embody the ability to inspire and empower their teams to succeed.
But great leaders don’t stay great, unless they continue to adapt to new environments, approaches and, ultimately, challenges. One of the best ways to sharpen your leadership skills is by learning from other leaders’ experiences. Leadership books, especially those focused on the supply chain and logistics industries, give valuable insight into the trials and triumphs of your industry peers’ encounters.
Here are five books that we recommend reading to keep getting the job done: empowering your team, learning about industry trends, updating your management practices, and other key insights.
5 must-read books for supply chain leaders
1. The Supply Chain Revolution: Innovative Sourcing and Logistics for a Fiercely Competitive World
The smartest leaders see supply chain and sourcing for what they can be: hidden tools for outperforming the competition. Steve Jobs, upon returning to Apple in 1997, focused on transforming the supply chain. He hired Tim Cook, and the company sped up the development of new products, getting them into consumers’ hands faster. The rest is history.
Across a range of industries, once-leading companies are in trouble. While competitors were shuttering stores, Zara’s highly responsive supply chain made it the most valued company in the retail space and its founder, the richest man in Europe. The success of TJX, Amazon, Starbucks, and Airbus is fueled by supply chain and sourcing. Showcasing real solutions, The Supply Chain Revolution aims to educate leaders to improve customer satisfaction and increase revenue.
2. The Forklifts Have Nothing To Do! Lessons in Supply Chain Leadership
The Forklifts Have Nothing To Do! by Colonel Joe Walden provides practical methods for improving supply chain operations. Walden has spent more than 25 years leading supply chain operations and believes that improving your supply chain will improve your bottom line, regardless of your industry.
His recommendations draw on examples in civilian industry and military operations, including his recent experiences in Operation Iraqi Freedom. Supply chain operations in the military are very similar to supply chain operations in commercial industry. Both have the ability to improve operations for the customer.
3. Managing Supply Chain Operations
Managing Supply Chain Operations by Lei Lei, Leonardo DeCandia, Rosa Oppenheim, and Yao Zhao shows leaders the key drivers of supply chain performance. These include demand forecasting, sales and operations planning, inventory control, capacity analysis, transportation models, supply chain integration, and project management and risk analysis.
The book is enhanced by real-life examples and case studies, as well as strategies from best practices and a focus on social and economic impact. The content reaches beyond traditional operations management and draws on the extensive experience of the authors conducting industry projects through the Rutgers Center for Supply Chain Management. The input of senior business executives has been an invaluable asset in presenting a balanced knowledge of both quantitative models and qualitative insights.
4. Avoiding a Supply Chain Apocalypse: The Best of Dr. Tom’s Advice
In his creative guide Avoiding a Supply Chain Apocalypse, Dr. Tom DePaoli offers practical strategies and tactics, learned and tested from his purchasing and supply chain career.
DePaoli recommends a multi-faceted, diverse approach to avoiding supply chain meltdowns. He challenges readers to survey his best writings and to select what fits their particular organizational cultures. There is no one-size-fits all in the supply chain. As the importance of supply chain management grows leaps and bounds, the supply chain professional must develop multiple options and proficient tactics to ensure the continuity of the supply chain.
5. Supply Chain Metrics that Matter
One cannot snap their fingers and deliver supply chain success. It happens over the course of many years and is measured in inches not miles.
In this book, Lora M. Cecere evaluates the progress of over a hundred companies over the period of 2006-2013. The effective supply chain makes a difference in winning a war, saving a patient, and driving commerce. But it also makes a difference in a community having clean air, potable water, and a higher standard of living. Mistakes are hard to overcome. Supply Chain Metrics that Matter tells this story. The book links corporate financials to supply chain maturity, and what metrics matter most.
What books for supply chain leaders do you recommend?
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