by Fronetics | Jul 2, 2019 | Blog, Content Marketing, Marketing, Packaging, Supply Chain
Looking for ways to make your morning commute more productive? These 4 podcasts for packaging and supply chain professionals are on our must-listen list.
Highlights:
- Download podcast episodes for on-the-go access to innovations, insights, and analysis from leading industry figures.
- Talking Logistics with Adrian Gonzalez is both highly approachable and insightful.
- SupplyChainBrain’s episode on Trends in Packaging is a must-listen for packaging industry professionals.
It wasn’t all that long ago when the options for the morning commute were limited by what CDs you had in your car (or Walkman) or what was playing on the radio. With the rise of podcasts, we’re no longer stuck choosing between rowdy drive-time radio hosts or NPR. We’ve chosen 4 podcasts for packaging and supply chain professionals that offer top-notch industry analysis, insights, and conversations.
Podcasts are a series of digital audio files that enable users to subscribe and download, so listening on the go doesn’t mean using up your data plan. There are all kinds of podcasts out there on essentially every topic you can imagine. These 4 podcasts for packaging and supply chain professionals will feed your mind, expand your insights, and some might even make you crack a smile!
4 podcasts for packaging and supply chain professionals
1) Talking Logistics with Adrian Gonzalez
We love supply chain and logistics analyst Adrian Gonzalez’s conversational podcast. Listen to a few episodes, and you’ll feel like you’re in on a conversation with your brightest professional contacts. Gonzalez’s easy-to-follow format on Talking Logistics gives it a friendly, casual feel, but it’s bristling with keen insights. The podcast features interviews with industry thought leaders and newsmakers, including supply chain and packaging executives from leading retail companies, academics, authors, and executives from 3PLs.
Recent must-download episodes:
2) SupplyChainBrain
SupplyChainBrain is a series of in-depth conversations with industry leaders, consultants, academics, and experts from every aspect of supply chain management, including packaging. Always current, the podcast has been producing weekly episodes since its launch in 2013. It covers topics like retail shifts, blockchain innovations, labor shortages, and the Internet of Things, and its excellent overview episode “Trends in Packaging: The State of the Art” is a must-listen.
Recent must-download episodes:
3) LogicalLogistics
Though the episodes are older, Bellair Expediting’s podcast is worth listening to, particularly for the packaging industry. It features interviews with executives and experts in transportation, logistics, packaging, and more.
Must-download episodes:
4) Straight Talk with Supply Chain Insights
Research and advisory firm Supply Chain Insights hosts its weekly podcast, Straight Talk, which covers topics from global thinking to trends in data and packaging. Most episodes take the form of conversations and interviews with executives and experts, sharing supply chain and logistics insights.
Recent must-download episodes:
What podcasts for packaging and supply chain professionals have you been listening to lately?
Recent posts:
by Jennifer Hart Yim | Jun 26, 2019 | Blog, Content Marketing, Manufacturing & Distribution, Marketing, Supply Chain, Talent
The global Supply chain provides goods faster and more efficiently than ever before. Here are the top supply chain skills for one of the most important industries: manufacturing.
Highlights:
- Sitting at the intersection of raw materials acquisition and distribution of finished goods, manufacturing is one of the most crucial functions within the global Supply Chain.
- If you’re in Manufacturing purchasing, think closely about what sort of buying you’re doing, how to diversify that experience, and deepen your understanding of the market you’re buying in – there are big dividends for those who do.
- Boosting your skills with continuous improvement, just-in-time manufacturing, and Six Sigma are some of the best ways to distinguish yourself in the field.
This guest post comes to us from Argentus Supply Chain Recruiting, a boutique recruitment firm specializing in Supply Chain Management and Procurement.
The global Supply Chain provides goods to consumers faster and more efficiently than ever before, and there’s a staggering diversity of Supply Chain professionals making that happen. Today, we want to take a moment to highlight the skills profile for one of Supply Chain’s most important industries – which also happens to contain one of its hottest job markets: Manufacturing.
Sitting at the intersection of raw materials acquisition and distribution of finished goods, manufacturing is one of the most crucial functions within the global Supply Chain. Despite perennial political statements around the “demise of manufacturing,” the sector is quite strong in Canada, especially in the Supply Chain, Purchasing and Logistics functions.
At Argentus, we’ve always worked in manufacturing recruitment, but we’ve been making a big push into this area recently, including in the areas of Aerospace, Consumer Electronics, Automotive, Electrical Manufacturing, Manufacturing Automation, and Food Production. We’ve seen what’s happening in the industry firsthand: dynamic companies are redefining the space, using a strong Supply Chain to scale up quickly while controlling costs.
In the past few months, we’ve helped a Food Production company with an innovative approach to product development scale up their Procurement and Plant bench strength. We’ve bolstered a fast-growing Aerospace company looking for highly-technical technical buyers to boost their new product introductions. We’ve helped a startup manufacturer seeking their first Supply Chain Manager to implement a sourcing, distribution and logistics strategy for the first time.
And these are just a few. These experiences, combined with our intelligence in the marketplace, have given us a good understanding of the hottest skills in Manufacturing Supply Chain jobs in the market as of right now.
A couple caveats: this reflects manufacturing positions at the corporate Supply Chain Management level and not the shop floor / distribution centre level. It also isn’t exhaustive of all required skills, just those that we’ve noticed being in high demand recently.
So without further ado, here are some of the hottest skills:
“Direct” Purchasing: Raw Materials, Packaging, Food
Buying raw materials has always been a vital part of manufacturing – after all, what can you produce without raw materials? – but clients’ demand for specific raw materials purchasing experience is rising. Whether it’s food ingredients or building materials, companies are looking for individuals who can think strategically about raw materials to find better suppliers and processes. For certain raw materials, they want individuals who have a deep understanding of particular commodities markets. If you’re in Manufacturing purchasing, think closely about what sort of buying you’re doing, how to diversify that experience, and deepen your understanding of the market you’re buying in – there are big dividends for those who do.
ERP Skills:
It probably goes without saying at this point, but a high degree of competency with ERP systems is a must-have in today’s manufacturing Supply Chain. Many of the vital Supply Chain planning functions for most manufacturing processes (production planning, supply network planning, etc.) run through ERP systems like SAP, Oracle or Microsoft NAV, so it’s no wonder that most front line workers distinguish themselves with excellent command of these systems.
Buying “build to spec” for highly engineered components:
If you’re working in a highly technical subsection of manufacturing (electrical, aerospace, etc.), more companies are seeking Procurement people with the technical background to source components at a very early stage of new product development. We’ve worked on a number of searches recently where our client is looking for new product buyers who can source based on technical specs, as opposed to drawings. People with mechanical engineering backgrounds are excellent for these roles. But even if you don’t have that background, an understanding of detailed technical specifications can give your career a boost over more transactional buyers.
Continuous improvement:
Lean manufacturing, Kaizen and continuous improvement are decades old at this point, but manufacturers who fail to implement these models are still falling behind in the marketplace. The ability to constantly improve manufacturing processes is still one of the chief differentiators for Supply Chains, and companies are constantly on the lookout for people who can help transform and improve their operations. Boosting your skills with continuous improvement, just-in-time manufacturing, and Six Sigma are some of the best ways to distinguish yourself in the field.
So that’s some perspective from the front lines of Supply Chain recruitment in manufacturing. But what are you seeing in the marketplace, either as a Supply Chain professional or hiring manager?
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by Fronetics | Jun 20, 2019 | Blog, Content Marketing, Logistics, Marketing, Social Media, Supply Chain
Participating in social media is increasingly important for businesses in the supply chain. Here are the 3 steps to proving social media ROI.
Highlights:
- It may seem obvious, but too many businesses approach social media marketing with vague goals or none at all.
- 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.
- Once you’ve calculated ROI for your social media platforms, it’s time to think strategically about optimizing your content marketing resources in terms of allocation and timing.
Video transcript:
I’m Elizabeth Hines, Creative Director at Fronetics, and today we’re talking about three steps to prove social media ROI.
Participating in social media is increasingly important for businesses in the supply chain. But many clients tell us they have a hard time getting approval for the expense because it’s notoriously difficult to measure the return on investment.
Well it’s true that many of the benefits of social media — like greater brand awareness and improved communication with customers — are difficult to quantify, there are some ways to prove the ROI of your participation in social media.
Here are the 3 steps to proving social media ROI:
1. Set goals
I’m not talking “grow your business” or other vague benchmarks like that. I mean “increase web traffic from social by 10% over the next 90 days.” Really specific benchmarks and goals are important in measuring success.
2. Track and measure
Make sure you have means to accurately measure how you’re doing against your goals. All the social platforms have excellent analytics tools to help with this. We also use tools like Google Analytics and HubSpot.
3. React
Look at your metrics in the context of your goals. Once you figure out what’s helping you meet those objectives and where you’re falling short, you can tweak your efforts to be more successful and to make sure that you’re actually achieving your ROI.
For more information on social media and all things digital marketing, visit our website at Fronetics.com
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by Fronetics | Jun 19, 2019 | Blog, Content Marketing, Current Events, Logistics, Marketing, Supply Chain
As the internet is increasingly dominated by visual content, social media analytics are failing to keep up.
Highlights:
- Most social media analytics tools are purely text-based.
- Even tools that analyze images are costly and offer limited insights.
- We predict that machine learning capabilities will improve and the gap between analytics capability and brands’ needs will close.
Here’s an interesting conundrum: social media, and the web at large, is becoming increasingly visual, and social media marketing relies on increasingly sophisticated analytics. However, most of the analytics tools out there are woefully unable to make sense of the visual content that is dominating social media. The alarming truth is that social media analytics are failing to capture invaluable data on visual content.
How social media analytics are failing to keep up
Big data and artificial intelligence expert Kalev Leetaru describes the shortfalls of social media analytics by detailing what they can — and can’t — do. While the capabilities of visual analytics have grown in the past several years, as Leetaru points out, most analytics tools that claim to analyze visual images are in fact based on textual or structural aspects of the image, not the visual content itself.
“The overwhelming majority of production social media analytics research relies primarily on hashtags and associated caption text, rather than the actual contents of the images themselves,” writes Leetaru. Instead, “from simplistic bag of words counting algorithms through advanced deep learning approaches, it is text that forms the lens through which we see social media.”
It’s important to note that this text-based approach is true not only for social media analytics, but for search engine algorithms. At Fronetics, we are constantly advising our clients to make use of visual content, from images to infographics to video, in their digital marketing efforts. But we always advise that marketers optimize their images for search engines, both by tagging all visual assets and publishing transcripts to go along with video or infographics.
[bctt tweet=”We always advise that marketers optimize their images for search engines, both by tagging all visual assets and publishing transcripts to go along with video or infographics.” username=”Fronetics”]
In essence, we’re advising our clients to take advantage of the increasingly visual nature of the internet, while also hedging against the ways in which algorithms and social media analytics are failing to assess visual content. As Leetaru points out, even in the rare cases when an analytics tool offers image analysis, it “typically offers only a few basic lenses through which to analyze that content, such as logos and a small number of topics.”
Of course, analyzing visual content is no easy task, and it’s also not cheap. “Images don’t capture reality, they construct it,” observes Leetaru. Not only are there all kinds of variables, like framing or lighting, that come into play, but there is a tremendous amount of non-visual context that determines how an image will be received. And the fact is that “current deep learning approaches are largely unable to incorporate such external world knowledge into their assessments.”
The problem with analytical failure
It’s important for marketers to recognize that, at the current moment, there is a gap between the capabilities of analytics tools and the analytics needs for modern digital marketing. As we as a society “increasingly express ourselves exclusively through visual forms,” brands desperately need insights about this visual expression.
Leetaru sums up the problem with sobering simplicity: “As social media becomes more visual, it becomes less accessible to our data-mining algorithms. In turn, as social media is less and less data minable, we are less and less able to understand it.”
Perhaps even more alarmingly, he cautions that “given that visual expression skews towards the younger and influencer demographics of greatest interest to many brands, this transition is especially damaging to their ability to extract useful insights from social media.”
Essentially, what Leetaru is recognizing is that we’re at a perilous moment for digital marketing. Just when the possibilities for content creation and dissemination seem endless, social media analytics are failing to offer up the insights needed to shape these processes in an increasingly visual climate.
“In the end, as social platforms rush towards a visual-first world, the vast landscape of social analytics is getting less and less representative of what we’re really talking about,” concludes Leetaru.
What does the future hold for analyzing visual data?
While you may be thinking that the future looks pretty bleak in light of how social media analytics are failing us, there’s a silver lining. If there’s one constant when it comes to social media marketing, it’s that when there’s a demand, sooner or later, supply will catch up.
It’s true that the current visual analytics capabilities of most platforms are far behind what’s needed. But at Fronetics, we predict that deep machine-learning capacities will start to catch up, and increasingly sophisticated analytical capabilities will become available to a wider segment of the market.
Currently, social media analytics can recognize text, faces, and brand logos within images. While these capabilities are, at present, too costly for most companies to take advantage of, we’re keeping our eye on some emerging technologies. For example, analytics provider Scraawl has recently released a tool called Scraawl PixL, which will allow users to run object and face detection, as well as Optimal Character Recognition, which extracts text from images.
Expect to see more tools like PixL on the market, offering increasing sophistication. While social media analytics are failing to keep up with the onslaught of visual data at the moment, we predict that they won’t be behind for long.
Related posts:
by Fronetics | Jun 18, 2019 | Blog, Content Marketing, Logistics, Marketing, Strategy, Supply Chain, Website Development
The percentage of visitors that stay on your site is key to lead conversion and search engine rankings. Here are our top tips to reduce your website bounce rate.
Highlights:
- A high bounce rate will compromise your site’s search engine rankings.
- Slow website load times are a major cause of bounces.
- Publish high-quality, visually appealing content with relevant keywords and meta data.
When it comes to evaluating the performance of your website, bounce rate is a key indicator. But what does this term really mean for supply chain marketing? After we take a deeper dive into what a bounce rate is and why it’s important to track, we’ll offer 10 ideas to reduce your website bounce rate.
Bounce rate defined
Simply put, your website’s bounce rate is the percentage of users who enter your website and immediately leave, or “bounce,” without visiting any additional pages on your site. Bounces happen when visitors click the back button, navigate to a different URL, close their browser, or leave a page open without taking action.
Having a high bounce rate can be an indication that your site failed to convince the visitor to explore further or act on your call-to-action (CTA). Of course, no website, no matter how effective, has a 0% bounce rate. Some users are bound to leave your website without taking any action. But a healthy bounce rate is a key indicator of website success.
While bounce rate ranges vary based on industry and page type, the general ranges are:
- 80% or higher: bad
- 70%-80%: poor
- 50%-70%: average
- 30%-50%: excellent
- 20% or lower: likely a tracking error
However, the truth about good versus bad bounce rates is more nuanced than these ranges. Bounce rates can vary widely based on website type, channel, and the device visitors are using.
For example, blog posts typically have a high bounce rate (between 60% and 90%), simply because an effective post will give a user what he or she came for, and there’s no further need to explore your site. This doesn’t mean your blog is performing poorly, as bounce rate is just one in a list of metrics needed to assess the overall performance of a site.
Why does bounce rate matter?
Aside from the fairly obvious fact that a high bounce rate means that visitors aren’t being converted into customers on your site, there’s another serious ramification to your bounce numbers: search engine results. According to a recent study from SEMRush, “Bounce rate is the fourth most important ranking factor on search engine results pages.”
Every time a visitor bounces from your page, it signals to search engine algorithms that your site isn’t what the searcher was looking for, and your ranking will suffer. Having a handle on your bounce rate will help you form a clear picture of how your website is performing, as well as give you understanding of one of the key factors in determining your search engine ranking.
10 ways to reduce your website bounce rate
1) Keep an eye on your page load times.
A major cause of bounces is long loading times, particularly on mobile devices. If your page load time is slow, consider switching to HTTP/2.
2) Make sure navigation is easy.
For your website to entice visitors to stick around, it needs to be clearly labeled and easy for prospects to find and get to what they’re looking for.
3) Evaluate your first impression.
You only get one first impression. When it comes to your website, this means clear navigation menus, engaging headlines, easy-to-read text, subheadings and bullets, and minimal pop-ups or auto-play videos.
4) Publish high-quality content.
Perhaps this goes without saying, but there’s no substitute for high-quality content when it comes to keeping visitors engaged on your site.
5) Optimize your meta data.
A meta description is the text that appears below your website’s URL in search engine results. This text should accurately represent what the page contains, which helps ensure that visitors find what they’re looking for when they click.
6) Create a quality design.
Clean, compelling design is important for keeping users on your page. Ideally, your site’s design should not only be functional and intuitive, but aesthetically pleasing.
7) Optimize mobile experience.
Bearing in mind that mobile users typically have even less patience than desktop users, your site’s mobile version should have a quick load speed, clean design elements, and easy navigability.
8) Use relevant keywords.
The keywords you choose should not only be relevant to your audience’s search queries, but they should reflect what visitors will actually find on your site. If your site ranks high for a keyword that doesn’t relate to the majority of your content, then users searching for that keyword will quickly leave.
9) Write good calls-to-action (CTAs).
A good CTA is key not only to converting leads but also to reducing your website bounce rate. Ideally, your CTA should be clearly visible within the first few seconds of being on a page, and it should be compelling.
10) Use images and videos.
We live in a visual world, so naturally, this type of content connects best with users. Statistic after statistic supports the idea that visual content is dominating the internet. To reduce your website bounce rate, include visuals that keep your audience interested.
What tricks are you using to reduce your website bounce rate?
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by Fronetics | Jun 13, 2019 | Blog, Content Marketing, Leadership, Logistics, Marketing, Supply Chain, Talent
A new LinkedIn post takes a refreshing look at achieving a work-life balance for working parents. The article has been shared all over social media begging the question: does your office need to know?
The New York Times reported that more and more couples are choosing to have smaller families due to economic factors. Let’s face it: kids are expensive. Most families have to balance wages with the exorbitant cost of childcare.
And that doesn’t even begin to look at finding harmony between your career and your family. In a recent post on LinkedIn, Ian Sohn, a single father and president of Wunderman Chicago, takes a clever and honest look at creating a work-life balance, a juggling act many of us know all too well.
“You should never apologize for having a life.”
The post was a list of things this Chicago-based boss ‘never needs to know’ about his employees, including:
- I never need to know you’ll be back online after dinner.
- I never need to know that you’re working from home today because you simply need the silence.
- I never need to know why you chose to watch season 1 of “Arrested Development” (for the 4th time) on your flight to LA instead of answering emails.
- I never need to know you’ll be in late because of a dentist appointment. Or that you’re leaving early for your kid’s soccer game.
- I never need to know why you can’t travel on a Sunday.
- I never need to know why you don’t want to have dinner with me when I’m in your town on a Tuesday night.
The sentiments of Sohn’s post hit home with a lot of working parents — the post has almost 2,000 comments to date. So why does this list ring true for so many working mothers and fathers?
“Like any modern business … there’s an additional need to respect other people’s lives and environment you work in, and everyone is accountable for getting their job done,” says Sohn in USA Today.
As businesses have become more digital, the ability to do you work remotely has increased. Ask any employee who works remotely, and they’re very likely to tell you that working from home makes them happier and more productive. And they aren’t necessarily wrong. There’s certainly evidence to suggest that with today’s technology, there’s essentially no downside to working from home, and it does often enhance productivity.
Here at Fronetics, we believe, much like Sohn, in the balance between work and home life. As individuals, we strive to excel at our jobs through accountability. Have a doctor’s appointment? Need to attend a school performance? We don’t need to know.
Has your office implemented policies to encourage flexibility? Has it been successful?
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