by Fronetics | May 17, 2016 | Blog, Content Marketing, Marketing, Strategy
Producing engaging content is the number one challenge for content marketers.
Is content marketing working well for your business? If not, you are not alone. Though it is one of the most effective ways to grow your business, content marketing has been challenging B2B and B2C organizations since its inception.
You may think it should be simple: Write, post, get more customers. But content marketing is much more complex, demanding more time, thought, and careful strategy than churning out a few blog posts. First and foremost, what you produce must engage readers. This is, however, the biggest content marketing challenge facing both B2B and B2C marketers.
2016 reports produced by Content Marketing Institute and MarketingProfs, and sponsored by Brightcove, found that the number one challenge for B2B and B2C marketers is producing engaging content.
Dull content and the domino effect
Unfortunately, if you lack engaging content, it works like a domino, knocking down all your other marketing efforts.
For one, it is much easier to gain the support of the C-suite, and be granted a reasonable budget, for your content marketing plan if you can show that your strategy is attracting more customers, helping with conversions, and driving sales. But if your content is not producing results, you won’t get the support and resources you need to produce the content, which, in turn, fuels results. It is a vicious cycle.
That being said, lack of engaging, quality content may be indicative of other challenges you may be facing, like the resources to produce content.
Creating engaging content
There are a few basics you must address if you are going to produce engaging content:
- Research your customer demographic. You must know who your audience is, what they want to know, how they want to learn it, and where to find them. Use web analytics to learn how your audience interacts with your website, what kinds of posts and emails they are reading, and where improvements can be made.
- Do your due diligence and learn how to reach those potential customers with topical information they want and will read. This means conducting a solid analysis of trends in your industry and producing content that offers expert information on these subjects or answers pressing questions potential customers may have about them. You, thus, will establish your organization as a trusted voice for your industry. This leads to dialogue with prospects and customers that want to learn more from you about industry news — or, even better, who are interested in your products or services.
- Research your distribution channels. This can affect not only what you post, but where and when you post it. Know your target’s social media habits, when they read emails, and what they are looking for. Research your competition and learn which channels they focus their attention on and why. Read the latest industry publications and influential blogs to uncover what topics work to engage their readers. Look for trends and answer to them.
- Look at SEO evaluations and site audits to help identify new middle- and bottom-of-the-funnel opportunities for content.
- Tell a story.
If creating engaging content has proven to be challenging for your business, consider outsourcing your content creation, or your marketing program all together. According to Social Media Today, lack of marketing staff can make it difficult for organizations to produce enough content to keep up with their competition.
Quality research and consistent creation of engaging, relevant content is time-consuming and requires keen writing skills. Promoting your posts on social media also takes time and requires consistent effort. Some of the most successful organizations put this task in the hands of an expert that can create and leverage content to provide the greatest impact to your brand, lead generation, and new customer conversion rate.
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by Fronetics | May 12, 2016 | Blog, Content Marketing, Marketing, Social Media, Strategy
Facebook Live offers businesses a new, creative platform for engaging customers — here’s how to use it.
You may have noticed a sudden flurry of notifications on your Facebook account, alerting you to a new feature called Facebook Live. Facebook has slowly been rolling out Live since August 2015, making it available to all pages and profiles in December. And while it may be reminiscent of platforms like Snapchat and Periscope, which are popular social tools among America’s youngest users, this feature offers invaluable opportunities for businesses to reach customers in new and exciting ways.
Here is what B2B marketers need to know about Facebook Live.
What is Facebook Live?
Facebook Live lets you broadcast in real time for up to 90 minutes at a time. People who have recently engaged (or who frequently engage) with your page will receive a notification that you are streaming live, and they can go to your page to view the video. Viewers can comment and react during the course of your broadcast, allowing you to read their remarks and respond immediately.
After the broadcast ends, the video will post on your timeline so those who missed it can watch it in full at a later time. You can edit or remove it, just like any other post, at any time.
Why is this good for business?
Video content is wildly popular. The number of videos uploaded to Facebook has increased by 94% over the last year, with more than 50% of Americans who use Facebook daily viewing at least one video per day. B2B businesses have caught on to this trend and have leveraged video quite successfully in their marketing efforts in the last year or two.
Facebook is an excellent forum for businesses to engage with customers, and Live can enhance this experience — or, at least, provide another avenue for doing so. There is something about being on air and uncensored that promotes transparency and offers the opportunity to connect with people in a very real way. Your business can showcase its brand personality, as well as its products and services, and offer high-value content to a wide audience through this channel.
Additionally, Live gets higher organic reach than non-live video, giving you a prominent spot in your followers’ feeds (without having to pay for it).
How does it work?
- Tap “What’s on your mind” at the top of your News Feed.
- Select “Live Video” from the drop-down menu.
- Add a description and choose your audience before hitting “Go Live.” You’ll see a three-second countdown before your broadcast begins.
Facebook offers these tips and best practices for using Live.
Note: Live is only available for iOS, Android, and Facebook Mentions.
Cool features
- Target a very specific audience by choosing location, language, gender or age.
- Choose where you broadcast live (other than your timeline) by posting to event pages and Facebook groups.
- A very prominent “Follow” button at the bottom of your broadcast allows your viewers to opt in to receive notifications when you go live in the future. Viewers can also invite friends to watch live videos with them.
- Edit your video after it posts to your timeline. You can select a thumbnail, select a category, include a URL, and add a call to action (such as Shop Now, Learn More, or Sign Up).
- Filters allow you to adjust the quality and color of your video, and soon a drawing tool will allow you to doodle over it.
- During your broadcast, you’ll see the number of live viewers, which friends are tuning in, and their comments in real time.
- Increase your reach by boosting the post after you’ve concluded your broadcast, or by creating a video ad from your broadcast by using the Ads Manager.
- The Live Map shows you where people are broadcasting around the world.
What kinds of content could B2B companies stream live?
Businesses have an incredible opportunity to engage with customers and partners with Facebook Live. Here are some ideas for the kinds of content your company could broadcast using this tool.
1) Behind-the-scenes glances
Show your audience your eco-friendly facilities, your impressive tradeshow set-up, your whiteboard after a strategic planning meeting, the inside of a fully packed delivery truck, a community service event, etc. There are a million creative ways to say something substantial about your business by offering a small glimpse into your day-to-day operations.
2) Q&As and Interviews
Live is an ideal platform for a Q&A-style broadcast. Invite customers to bring their questions or requests to a Live stream with one of your executives. Or, have a top-of-their-field expert offer insight on a particular topic or event.
3) Customer testimonials
Do you have any particularly happy customers who would be willing to speak about their experience working with your business? Or could someone on your team interview them? Not only is this great advertising for your company, it offers exposure for theirs as well.
4) How-tos, product demos, and sneak peeks
Build excitement for a product launch with previews, or demonstrate how to best use your product or service. Share your knowledge on best practices, tutorials, and processes related to your business.
5) Presentations, annual reports, celebrations, special events
Facebook Live offers a fresh way to present information or to share a special occasion with your online audience. Imagine announcing quarterly results this way, or honoring milestone employee anniversaries. This platform gives you a new format for marking such moments.
How does your company use Facebook Live?
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by Elizabeth Hines | May 11, 2016 | Blog, Strategy, Supply Chain
If Seneca the Elder could have peered into the future, shock is likely too weak of a word to describe his reaction. The Roman rhetorician is credited for being among the first to complain about the overload of information when he, in the 1st century AD, lamented that the abundance of books had become a “distraction.”
Around 1440 AD, another round of complaints erupted with the invention of the printing press. Overwhelmed by the sheer amount of new information, scholars of the Gutenberg era found the proliferation of printed materials too difficult to manage.
Fast-forward a few centuries and you find articles titled “Death by Information Overload.” Published in 2009 by Harvard Business Review, the article makes a case that we’ve heard countless times over the past few years: We are drowning in a flood of data.
However, the writer, Paul Hemp, also makes a point that I want to focus on:
There’s hope, though. Innovative tools and techniques promise relief for those of us struggling with information inundation. Some are technological solutions—software that automatically sorts and prioritizes incoming e-mail, for instance—designed to regulate or divert the deluge. Others prevent people from drowning by getting them to change the way they behave and think. Who knows: Maybe someday even I will enjoy swimming in the powerful currents of information that now threaten to pull me under.
Nearly two years ago, I argued in this space that vendors would be wise to spend less time on their sales pitch and more time presenting data in a digestible format, ensuring compatibility with the end-user’s legacy systems, and aligning the solution with the end-user’s key performance indicators (KPIs).
Few people actually object to the value of data, and most are well informed of its potential impact, according to several surveys. Collected in a warehouse environment, data can profoundly boost productivity, safety, and inventory accuracy.
The issue that many still need to address is that all too often the step from collecting data to letting it drive decisions is more than the average organization can handle. Surveys show a surprising number of companies report they are either wary of advanced analytics tools or have failed to leverage the technology. Data generated by sensor-enabled technology, for example, does little good unless the end-user knows how to interpret and act on it.
But there are signs vendors are responding to the demand for user-friendly data. Just as you do not expect to sort through masses of data to find out how fast you are driving, leading vendors are eliminating and simplifying steps to help end users get the information that they are looking for without time-consuming analysis. New widgets or apps designed to consolidate data coming off multiple sensors will make data collection in the warehouse more accessible, and, as a result, more likely to lead to operational improvements.
Then talk of data overload may quiet down — until the next wave of disruptive innovation hits, that is.
What signs, if any, have you seen of more user-friendly data?
This article originally appeared in EBN Online.
by Elizabeth Hines | May 10, 2016 | Blog, Strategy, Supply Chain
Increasing operational expenses to avoid capital expenditures that would boost warehouse capacity and functionality might end up costing you more in the long run.
Consider this scenario: Demand is up and projected to grow for your products. But you are running out of space in your distribution center. Although you realize modernizing your distribution center to increase productivity would make sense, you resort to the seemingly more affordable solution — hiring more workers.
While many companies may balk at the upfront cost of investing in, for example, warehouse automation technology, holding off on upgrading in the name of saving money can become a costly long-term strategy.
Don’t get me wrong. Automation is not always the answer to tackling issues that stem from rapid growth, but companies need to be aware that doing nothing also comes at a cost. Increasing operational expenses to avoid capital expenditures that would boost warehouse capacity and functionality is generally not a good idea. More workers on the floor mean more congestion and delays, in addition to increasing the risk of higher turnover rates, as new employees are more likely to move on than longer-term associates.
In the end, if your productivity and order fulfillment suffer as a result of your inaction, so will your customer relationships.
FORTE, a Swisslog Company, made the following observation in SupplyChain 24/7:
Businesses routinely choose to not invest in distribution without giving careful consideration to the impact on operational costs and missed business opportunities. They thoroughly evaluate whether to purchase material handling equipment, warehouse software and distribution buildings. The same scrutiny should be applied to real and often hidden expenses and the opportunity costs of the option to do nothing.
In FORTE’s case, the company came to the “rescue” of a retailer who had planned to respond to a significant increase in demand and SKUs by hiring more workers to the tune of $900,000 to $3 million per year. Although labor costs would more than double, the retailer would still struggle to fulfill and deliver new orders on time. After much debate, senior management decided to spend $5 million on new material handling equipment and software to meet current and future demand.
So what issues can arise from the do-nothing strategy?
Well, take your pick among unwanted scenarios: Bottlenecks in pick zones; safety concerns as a result of increased congestion; double-handling due to an inability to confirm picks; discrepancies in putaway, replenishment, and picking stemming from the lack of automatic data capture and real-time tracking; and dropping productivity as employees, among other things, have to travel further to retrieve items.
If you have reached a point where you miss or ship incorrect orders, and adding labor seems to only compound the challenges, it is time to take a serious look at your priorities. Perhaps, investing in automation is finally justified?
This post originally appeared in EBN Online.
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by Fronetics | May 9, 2016 | Blog, Marketing, Social Media, Strategy
A cross-departmental social media team will improve your company’s social presence.
At a former job, I was part of a team pushing for expanding access to our company’s social media pages. The accounts were administered by a handful of marketing managers, who did not want to relinquish control. After all, weren’t we using social media for marketing purposes? Why would the content or sales teams need access? Wouldn’t that cause chaos and anarchy?
No. In fact, giving access to key people in various departments could actually help your company get more out of social media.
The truth is, social media is too integral to too many different aspects of a business to control it in a silo. The title of a recent Harvard Business Review article says it all: “Social Media Is Too Important to Be Left to the Marketing Department.”
Businesses can use social media for everything from generating leads to gaining market intelligence. And today’s customers expect a brand’s social media accounts to answer all sorts of different needs, from product inquiries to problems with their orders. If only one team is responsible for operating your pages, they need to be able to perform multiple functions, to liaise effectively between customers and internal stakeholders, or to forego some of the valuable benefits of social media.
For example, say your customer does not receive part of a shipment and posts on your Facebook feed to say as much. The marketing person managing your social media either has to 1) also be trained in customer service, 2) reach out to someone on your customer service team (or someone who can locate the shipment) and act as a go-between with the customer, 3) ask the customer to contact someone else in your company, or 4) ignore the post. Any way you slice it, it’s not efficient or a good use of anyone’s time.
That scenario is more common than you might think. Research shows that the number of customers who expect a response through social media has doubled in the last three years, and that seven of eight messages to companies go unanswered for 72 hours. Imagine if your customer service department didn’t respond to emails or pick up the phone for three days!
My former company suffered enormously from problems like these. The marketing managers administering our social accounts were spending hours each week tracking down various employees in other departments to help them problem-solve. They didn’t have time to strategize about content distribution. And even the best communicators were so overloaded with other tasks that leads were going cold before being handed to the sales teams.
If each department identified an employee responsible for overseeing social media, we could have functioned so much more efficiently and effectively. The marketing manager would be responsible for marketing messaging; the content person for generating and distributing content; the sales team for identifying leads and building relationships; and customer service for handling customer inquiries and problems.
Of course, having that many cooks in the kitchen is not without its problems. Keith Quesenberry, the author of the aforementioned HBR article, offers this advice for building a cross-functional social media team from his book Social Media Strategy, Marketing, and Advertising in the Consumer Revolution:
- Develop a social care team that can address all areas of social information efficiently and effectively. Identify policies and software systems needed for implementation.
- Organize departmental responsibilities in the social care team. Clearly define roles and responsibilities among marketing, customer service, public relations, sales, corporate communication, human resources, etc.
- Assign specific employees from each department to social media tasks. Set up social media accounts and give employees access to social media systems.
- Create brand guidelines for standards, tone, and style of social media communication. Ask legal and human resources to provide a list of do’s and don’ts for real-time consumer engagement.
- Define specific goals based on key performance indicators such as response time, sentiment analysis, engagement, views and shares, and other important metrics.
With the right planning and people in place, a cross-departmental social media team is better suited to interact with customers and business partners on these platforms, and it can help your business get the most out of its social media accounts.
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by Fronetics | May 5, 2016 | Blog, Content Marketing, Marketing, Strategy
Speak your boss’ language with metrics, statistics, and facts that articulate content marketing’s impact on customer acquisition and sales.
Garnering C-suite support for your content marketing program can be a challenge. Your team knows that your strategy is working by evaluating a series of metrics (e.g., shares, website traffic, email click-through rates), but executives do not always understand the value of such measures. It is almost like marketers speak another language.
So, how do you articulate the value of content marketing in a way that your executives will understand and support? Think of it this way: It is like that scene in the movie Jerry Maguire, only it is your boss demanding, “Show me the money!” The C-suite wants to know the cost to the company and the dollar amount of the return for any marketing initiative you undertake. Basically, you need to quantify success in terms of customer acquisitions and new sales.
Don’t focus on the secondary results, or “soft” metrics like per-post Facebook engagement. Talk the C-suite’s language, and demonstrate how your content marketing efforts led to new customers and what those customers are worth to the company’s growth and success.
Report these six metrics to win C-suite support
- Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC): This is the total average cost your company spends to acquire a new customer. Basically, what your company spends in marketing costs, divided by the number of new customers it produced.
- Marketing Percentage of the CAC: This is the marketing department costs divided the costs of the sales and marketing costs to get the marketing percentage of overall cost per new customer. The figure demonstrates if more is going into the sales team or the marketing team to produce the current result, and the lower the percentage the better.
- Ratio of Customer Lifetime Value to CAC: This figure estimates the total value that your company derives from each customer versus what you spend to acquire them.
- Time to Payback CAC: This estimate demonstrates how many months it takes for your company to earn back the CAC it spent acquiring your new customers.
- Marketing-Originated Customer Percentage: This is where you look at all of the new customers from a set time period and determine what percentage of them started with a lead generated by your marketing team.
- Marketing-Influenced Customer Percentage: This figure highlights all of the new customers that marketing interacted with at the time they were still just leads.
Additional selling points for content marketing
Content marketing can make a big impact on your company in terms of spreading brand awareness, growing your audience, and helping form business relationships. Though these benefits are difficult to quantify, try using the following statistics and facts to articulate the value your program could have in a way your executives will understand.
- As any business knows, it is essential to be where you customers are, and they are online. Your competitors know this, too. In fact, a recent study indicated that that 77% of companies surveyed, across industries, had plans to increase their digital marketing budgets in the coming year.
- The B2B buying process has evolved, and now content is an essential tool for generating and nurturing leads. Reportedly, 88% of B2B marketers use content marketing as part of their programs, with lead generation (85%) and sales (84%) being the most important goals.
- Blog content has long-term value, as what you post today may continue attracting traffic months (or years) from now. Your posts last indefinitely, outliving more traditional marketing methods, such as a print advertisement in a magazine.
- Consistently publishing quality content can earn your company a reputation as a thought leader in your industry. The public will come to trust your company as a respected source of knowledge, and you’ll begin forming relationships with readers who want to know more about your products and services. People buy from companies that they trust and feel connected to.
- Content marketing will get you more bang for your buck. Results are not instant, but, with time, you can actually reduce your marketing expenses while increasing your reach and growing your business.
- Content marketing is a valuable business intelligence tool. By distributing content through social media platforms, you not only engage potential customers, but you get their feedback and learn more about their needs and wants.
For more on marketing metrics that will articulate success to your boss, download Fronetics Strategic Advisors’ tip sheet.
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