by Fronetics | Mar 12, 2018 | Blog, Content Marketing, Logistics, Marketing, Social Media, Supply Chain
Here’s how to quantify the impact of content marketing on brand awareness, a notoriously difficult benefit to measure.
A successful content marketing strategy strengthens the relationship between brands and their target audiences. And brand awareness is a key component to any successful content marketing strategy. Ultimately, the more aware audiences are of your brand, the more likely they are to buy your products or services.
To properly measure the impact of your content marketing, you must start at the beginning, with the overall goals for your content marketing strategy. What kind of content are you creating? Why are you creating this content? How will this increase sales or grow your business?
A lot of our customers include increasing brand awareness among their content strategy goals. But this is a very difficult objective to quantify. How can you measure how familiar people are with your brand?
Here are four metrics we recommend for tracking the impact of content marketing on brand awareness.
4 metrics to measure the impact of content marketing on brand awareness.
1. Social media reach
Tracking the reach of your social media content is a good gauge of the impact it’s having on your brand awareness. Companies can waste a lot of time trying to track down information on various social media accounts; don’t fall into this trap.
Use tools, like Shared Count, that show how many times a piece of content has been shared on social media. Shared Count accurately tracks the social reach of your content on the most popular social media sites — including Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn — to easily keep track of your social reach. In turn, you can discover the impact your social reach is having on your brand awareness.
2. Brand mentions
Not to state the obvious, but if people are talking about your brand online, it’s safe to assume they are aware of you. There’s a great deal of value in knowing what customers are saying about your company and your products/services. 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.
3. Media mentions
Media mentions differ from brand mentions in their origin. Media mentions come directly from publishers, instead of customers. These mentions include any media coverage — TV, print, social media, interviews — that include your brand. Remember, if publishers are talking about your brand online as a result of the content you’re creating, it’s impacting your brand awareness.
And let’s not forget about linkless mentions. As Google and other search engines continue to update their algorithms, it’s crucial to update your monitoring practices. Linkless backlinks are becoming increasingly popular and can have a huge impact on your brand awareness (and SEO!).
4. Branded searches
Knowing how many people are searching for your specific brand tells you a lot about how well known your brand is. Using online tools, such as Google Adwords or Moz, you can track the searches for your products, blogs, social media platforms, and any other variation that you find useful. These tools are free, easy to use, and perfect for determining if your company is popping up when customers are searching.
Using these tools to measure brand awareness offers clues that customers are finding your company in their search efforts. If the needle is not moving in a positive direction, always adjust your strategy to until you find what works for your business.
Drawing the public’s attention to — and heightening their knowledge of — your business ultimately generates leads. And some of those leads will turn into sales. But, let’s be honest: this doesn’t happen overnight. And it’s often difficult to quantify.
That’s not a reason to throw in the towel. There are ways to measure the work that you’re putting into your content marketing program. Using these metrics, you can start tracking the impact of content marketing on brand awareness.
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by Fronetics | Mar 8, 2018 | Blog, Content Marketing, Logistics, Marketing, Strategy, Supply Chain
Use these 4 steps to determine the topic clusters that will be best for driving organic traffic to your business’ website.
You’ve determined your pillar content and written your pillar pages. Now what? It’s time to develop topics clusters.
Topic clusters show search engines that your website contains breadth and depth on a particular subject, which will help them decide to show your page over others in a user’s search for that subject.
Determining what topic clusters to use can be overwhelming — as can figuring out how to optimize blog posts that contain cluster content. Let’s take a step back and think a little about what a topic cluster is.
HubSpot Academy has a great succinct summary: “Topic clusters are comprised of a pillar page and subtopic content that you’ve compiled for each of your core topics.”
So how do you go about developing topic clusters? We’ve put together a four-step guide to get you started.
4 steps to developing topic clusters
1) Choose your topic.
This is all about determining where you can or strive to be a thought leader. Pick topics that are fundamental to your business, places where you can be a resource for potential buyers and industry peers. Define these topics with a name that summarizes the content it will address.
Chances are, you’ll have some supporting content already. Conducting a content audit will help you determine how much you have in place already.
2) Compile subtopics.
HubSpot recommends having “6-8 subtopics that address specific questions your customers may be exploring related to the core topic of your pillar page.” Other sources recommend between 10-20 subtopics. It depends on how broad your main topic is. (But if you can come up with more than 20 subtopics, your topic is definitely too broad!)
Conduct a brainstorming session with your team to think about relevant content that your target buyers would seek out when researching products and solutions.
Simple Marketing Now blogger Christine B. Whittemore suggests starting with identifying the problems your buyer persona faces. “Map out 5-10 core problems that your core persona has. Use research… to truly understand your buyer persona problems, including the world used to describe them.”
3) Develop pillar pages.
Now that you have a list of topics and subtopics, you need to develop your pillar pages. These pages will extensively — and broadly — cover each main topic, and they will include links to each subtopic.
Inbound Marketing Specialist Sarah Seward suggests using “relevant pictures, high-quality and interesting content, compelling headers, and any additional, related resources, such as a custom graphic visually demonstrating your expertise on a topic.”
4) Create!
Now it’s time to create your content (or brush up existing content you discovered in your audit). Be sure to link pages covering your subtopics to your pillar pages, using the correct anchor text. That means hyperlinking words that are relevant to the topic and subtopics.
Additionally, you can link subtopics together where appropriate. The more often you can create relevant links, the better.
Now repeat this process until you’ve created several topic clusters that best define your business. This SEO strategy will help ensure that prospective customers that are searching for products or services like yours will be more likely to visit your website and patronize your business.
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by Fronetics | Mar 7, 2018 | Blog, Content Marketing, Logistics, Marketing, Social Media, Strategy, Supply Chain
Linkless backlinks, or mentions of your business without a hyperlink to your webpage, are now a more effective way to improve your ranking with search engines.
For years Google has used backlinks to rank webpages. Backlinks are any link on another website that points (or links) back to your website. Unfortunately, search engines began to use backlinks as a bit of a popularity contest: The more you had, the more popular your website became.
Businesses quickly understood the loophole in search engines’ algorithms. They could buy, influence or even create relationships with other industry businesses for the sole benefit of getting links to their websites. It didn’t take long for search engines to catch on.
Google has spent years reworking the way it ranks backlinks and trying to penalize brands that pay for or create free links through unethical relationships. But where does that leave the rest of us that are working to create high-quality content in hopes of increasing our SEO rankings?
Linkless backlinks are the future of SEO rankings
You might be asking yourself what is a linkless backlink? Good question.
Linkless backlinks are mentions of your business or brand without a hyperlink to your webpage. In a keynote speech in September 2017, Gary Illyes, a webmaster trend analyst for Google, said:
“Basically, if you publish high-quality content that is highly cited on the internet — and I’m not talking about just links, but also mentions on social networks and people talking about your branding — then you are doing great.”
It all comes down to mentions of your brand on reputable websites. And I don’t just mean backlinks to your webpage. Other sites’ tweeting about your products or mentioning you on their Facebook News Feed can all lead to increased rankings on Google and other search engines. Sounds easy, right?
How to make linkless backlinks work for you
The principles that help you gain backlinks are still true for gaining linkless backlinks. You want to focus on creating the most accurate, high-quality content you can. Create videos and infographics for your website to add visual appeal. And collaborate with other industry leaders to reach new audiences.
But there are a few other tips you can use to help boost your SEO ranking with linkless backlinks.
3 tips for building a strategy for linkless backlinks
1. Work to increase brand awareness and reputation
The foundation of linkless mentions is reputation building. Search engines are looking for authentic mentions of products and brands in content that helps build authority around an industry topic.
Increase your brand awareness by growing your social media presence, by encouraging followers and loyal customers to write online reviews of your products and services, and by participating in collaborative content marketing.
2. Track brand awareness and mentions
You’re working hard to create content that has a far reach across many platforms. 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. And for linkless backlinks, it’s imperative that you’re tracking all of your brand mentions, not just links.
There are several tools to help you track brand mentions online. Here at Fronetics, we prefer the ease of Google Alerts, which sends you a message when someone mentions your brand online. We also use Hootsuite, with which you can track brand mentions, as well as keywords and phrases, across all of your social media platforms.
3. Stay on top of negative mentions
Blog comment sections and social media channels offer an open avenue for customers to discuss their thoughts about your company for all the world to see. And, unfortunately, one negative comment can be infinitely louder than one hundred positive ones. The potential impact it could have on business is scary.
But that doesn’t mean you should delete or ignore every unfavorable brand mention. In fact, companies can use negative online comments as an opportunity to exhibit top-notch customer service and much-appreciated transparency in the way they do business.
Be diligent in monitoring brand mentions and respond quickly to resolve any issues that arise. Responding promptly and effectively to negative feedback online shows your commitment to customer service and transparency.
The art of SEO building is a tough craft to master. As algorithms evolve, it’s important for brands to stay aware of these changes and focus on what they can do to help boost their rankings.
The more buzz around your brand, the better your ranking will be. So make sure you’re utilizing all the different ways to help boost your SEO ranking, including linkless backlinks.
Need more help with SEO? We’ve done the research, so you don’t have to. Have a look.
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by Fronetics | Mar 6, 2018 | Blog, Content Marketing, Logistics, Marketing, Social Media, Supply Chain
Facebook is making a lot of changes that will affect businesses’ organic reach. This video discusses these changes and what your business needs to do to stay ahead of them.
We have talked a lot about Facebook’s updates on our blog. Users are already seeing less content from businesses, brands, and media, so you need to be paying attention. Adjusting your strategy to appear on your followers’ Facebook News Feed should be a top priority.
Facebook updates
On January 11, Mark Zuckerberg announced Facebook’s new algorithm will favor posts from friends and family (over public posts) and posts that “spark conversations and meaningful interactions between people.” But the changes didn’t stop there. Less than a month after Zuckerberg’s original announcement, Facebook reported that News Feed will now prioritize local news stories and events, along with posts from family and friends. “Starting today, we’re going to show more stories from news sources in your local town or city. If you follow a local publisher or if someone shares a local story, it may show up higher in News Feed,” writes Zuckerberg.
The social media platform claims it is trying to create the best possible user experience and encourage civic involvement. But will it come at a high cost to businesses trying to reach new audiences? Could this be the end of organic reach for businesses on Facebook? Here’s what we think.
Video: How Facebook’s changes are affecting your business and what your business can do to stay on top of them
Have there been a lot of changes from Facebook? Yes. Have they impacted your business’ reach? For sure. These changes have created challenges for businesses, but not ones that are impossible to overcome.
Remember, that Facebook is working to improve user engagement, so the posts users see are informative, trustworthy and relevant. Seek to understand what your target audience is spending their time reading, and produce high-quality, original content that focuses around those topics.
If you are producing content that engages with your target audience (and hopefully some new readers), you’ll start working your way back up to the top of the News Feed.
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by Fronetics | Mar 5, 2018 | Blog, Current Events, Logistics, Supply Chain
Companies looking to promote their supply chain transparency should consider joining the Green Supply Chain Map to reach environmentally conscious buyers.
Earlier this year, the U.S. Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) and the Institute of Public & Environmental Affairs (IPE) created the world’s first map publicly linking multinational corporations to their suppliers’ environmental performance. This Green Supply Chain Map shows companies’ commitment to supply chain transparency and environmental management. It will allow customers to make buying choices based on commitment to environmental sustainability.
The IPE calls the map “a leadership initiative dedicated to showcasing brands’ commitment to supply chain transparency and environmental management. It openly links brands’ supplier lists to publicly available environmental data, including real-time data for air emissions and wastewater discharge.”
Supply chain transparency, mapped
Publication of the Green Supply Chain Map is a breakthrough in transparency in the supply chain.
“The map has the potential to become a true game-changer for public environmental oversight and improvement efforts for industrial manufacturing in China,” says Ma Jun, environmentalist and director at IPE. “We hope to see more brands step up their game and join the map to connect the missing dots of accountability in the vast network of global supply chains.”
Six brands have so far joined and disclosed supplier data: Esprit, Gap, Inditex, New Balance, Puma, and Target.
The map allows users to filter by brand and to view the supply chains for individual companies. It displays water, air, and weather conditions in a factory’s location, as well as the air and wastewater pollutants each factory releases.
How brands can leverage this map
Interested brands can join the map voluntarily, demonstrating their leadership in supply chain transparency and environmental sustainability. The map’s interface allows businesses to verify and advertise their environmental compliance. It’s a potential way to attract business, as more and more savvy and environmentally conscious buyers will use this tool to make purchasing decisions.
“Until now, customers have lacked effective tools to assess the environmental impact of their favorite brands’ global operations,” says Linda Greer, senior health scientist for NRDC and founder of its Clean by Design green supply chain program. “These companies that have stepped up to put their names first on the inaugural map are showing new levels of transparency on their manufacturing abroad and are demonstrating real leadership in supply chain responsibility.”
Other companies hoping to demonstrate their supply chain transparency should consider adding their brands to the map as part of a holistic strategy to attract environmentally conscious buyers.
The future
The Green Supply Chain Map may be the first of its kind. But with the increasing availability of such data, we anticipate like organizations — or even brands themselves — will soon have similar tools for illustrating supply chain transparency.
“We hope our map can serve as a reference for other countries and regions facing similar concerns about environmental impacts of rapid industrialization within their own borders,” says Kate Logan, the IPE’s green choice outreach director.
How does your organization demonstrate supply chain transparency?
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by Fronetics | Mar 1, 2018 | Blog, Content Marketing, Logistics, Marketing, Strategy, Supply Chain
Brand awareness is key in optimizing your content marketing efforts but can be challenging to quantify. Here are four metrics to help you measure brand awareness.
Brand awareness is the extent to which potential customers recognize a brand and associate it with specific products and services. Making the public aware of your company is a long-term goal of content marketing. Through social media, blogs, and other platforms, content marketing works to create brand awareness and strengthen trust with target customers. Drawing the public’s attention to — and heightening their knowledge of — your business ultimately generates leads that turn into sales, after all, which is the end marketing objective.
But it has been notoriously difficult to quantify how effective your content marketing strategy is (and, more specifically, how far your brand awareness reaches). Unlike vanity metrics, which are easy to quantify, measuring brand awareness takes more than just a simple calculation. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t take the time to measure brand awareness.
Understanding the value of brand awareness gives companies insight into how well their content marketing strategy is working to generate leads and drive sales. As marketing ROI guru Jim Lenskold writes:
“The value of brand awareness is the equivalent of half of a $100 bill. Unless you know where to find the other half, there really is no value. Brand awareness does not have a financial value on its own but is part of the collective effort necessary for marketing to drive incremental sales.”
Brand awareness is key to reaching and influencing potential customers. Here are some metrics to help your measure your brand awareness.
4 ways to measure brand awareness
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Ultimately, the more aware audiences are about your brand, the more likely they are to buy your products or services. From familiarity grows trust, which only helps to strengthen your brand and create new relationships with potential customers.
Taking the time to measure brand awareness will help to maximize the success of your content marketing strategy and increase leads. These four metrics will give you a good indication of how familiar your target audiences are becoming with your company.
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