Supply chain marketers can use marketing automation to drive efficiency and be more successful in earning and converting leads.
Marketing automation is the process of using software to complete repetitive marketing tasks designed to nurture sales leads, personalize marketing messages and content, and — in the process — save marketers’ time and effort. Supply chain marketers are using marketing automation to streamline processes and increase qualified leads.
Marketers can scale their processes so they can reach more people, with less effort.
Buyers are increasingly demanding a more personalized experience along the buyer’s journey, which means marketers are working overtime to produce more targeted content. That’s where marketing automation comes in. By using automated messaging, marketers are able to nurture prospects with highly personalized, useful content that helps convert prospects into customers and customers into loyal customers.
Jumping into marketing automation can be overwhelming. Utilizing the right software and knowing where to implement automation into your marketing processes will help nurture leads and get you back to more pressing tasks.
Here are five ways to get started using marketing automation for the supply chain.
Video: marketing automation for supply chain marketers
Don’t worry about being redundant.
We are all too familiar with the batch-and-blast approach many companies use in their email marketing efforts. And, oftentimes, those emails end up in someone’s spam folder.
We also have so many clients that worry they will become redundant by implementing marketing automation. But that’s not true.
Instead, marketing automation can help you provide a more personalized experience for your leads (no batch-and-blast). This will increase the chances that they’ll buy. But it won’t take up more of your time. In fact, it will give you more time to focus on tasks that can’t be automated, like content creation.
Here are four metrics to benchmark how your brand stacks up against your competitors and to evaluate the success of your content marketing strategy.
Competitive benchmarking is the process of comparing your company’s performance against that of your competitors. You can use various metrics to benchmark what these businesses are doing better than you are and where you have the edge. Benchmarking marketing performance is an important step in the process of evaluating the success of your content marketing strategy.
Organizations of all kinds — large corporations, privately owned businesses, nonprofits, and even sports teams — need to measure their performance to see if their efforts are leading to success. It’s one thing to examine webpage visits, number of clicks on a social post, or how many times a piece of content has been shared to understand what is happening as a result of your activities. But it’s key to take this information and see how it compares to other industry leaders.
Measuring digital marketing performance begins with setting competitive benchmarks. And to do this, you need contextual data. Analytics are great, but not if you don’t have context for your data.
There are several ways to measure your activity against your competitors. At Fronetics, we use these four metrics to benchmark marketing performance against competition and industry leaders.
Video: 4 metrics to benchmark marketing performance against your competition
As with all good strategies, you must continually measure success of your content marketing and adjust based on real-world results. These four metrics to benchmark marketing performance against your competitors are a great way to get started. If you aren’t keeping pace with — or beating — the competition, it might be time to go back to the drawing board.
Your blogging ROI isn’t as easy to calculate as click-to-conversion, but these four metrics can help you measure whether you’re getting your money’s worth.
“Exposure and engagement is key when it comes to measuring ROI. Simply publishing a blog post isn’t enough of a success. You have to go deeper and pay attention to things like social share metrics, engagement metrics, and actual conversions that can be tied to the content you’re producing.” — Colin Mathews, Co-Founder, Content Marketer
Why do you blog? It seems like a simple question, but the answer has a huge impact on the content you produce and the outcome of your efforts.
As with all aspects of your business, you should give the return on investment of your content marketing efforts ample attention. That is especially true for blogging ROI, if generating new business is indeed one of the reasons you blog in the first place.
With 53% of marketers saying blog content creation is their top inbound marketing priority, it’s crucial that you’re making sure your hard work is worth the time and money you’re spending on it.
Let’s face it, blogging isn’t free. Creating relevant and interesting content for your blog is highly demanding. The people working to sustain your blog and engage with new audiences through your content are spending valuable time and money. If you want to ensure that these efforts are producing results, it’s imperative to calculate the impact of your blogging on your bottom line.
Calculating blogging ROI isn’t as straightforward as other ROI analysis. You simply can’t rely on click-to-conversion data to give you the full picture. But your blog achievements can be measured in other ways. Here are four categories to measure the effectiveness of your blog.
While it can feel a little unwieldy to measure blogging ROI, keeping a strong focus on your goals and objectives will help to lend weight to metrics that ultimately matter the most to you and your business.
Whether you’re looking to generate leads or attract first-time site visitors, your blog is a great place to boost engagement and expand your reach. Focus on making your blog as valuable as possible for your target audience, and you’ll be able to measure the fruits of your labor.
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.
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.
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?
