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.
Social media scheduling tools can make social media management much easier while improving your bottom line.
Managing your business’ social media accounts might sound like a simple task — a fun one, even. But once it falls on your plate, it won’t take you long to realize: it’s a lot of work. That’s not to say that the work can’t be enjoyable. But the sheer volume can be overwhelming.
For example, Fronetics recommends posting to Twitter 40 times a day. Imagine your productivity levels if you needed to stop what you’re doing 40 times a day to craft and post a tweet. You get the picture.
Essentially, social media scheduling tools let you plan and schedule content across your social networks. There are plenty of free and paid options for you to explore, though two of our favorites are HubSpot and Hootsuite.
HubSpot’s comprehensive CRM and marketing platform includes the ability to automatically post to social media when you publish content, as well as in-depth analytical tools for determining the best time to post to social media platforms. Monitor social mentions and link your social media activity with larger marketing campaigns to determine ROI.
One of the most widely used automation tools on the market, Hootsuite lets you keep track of various social media channels at once. It also helps you perform brand monitoring, letting you know when you brand is mentioned, and what your customers are saying.
3 tips for using social media scheduling tools
Hopefully, you’re starting to get excited about the possibilities of automating your social media marketing tasks. Here are a few tips to keep in mind as you move forward.
1) Timing is everything
Good social media scheduling tools will also let you monitor the times of day when people read your content and interact with your brand on social media. Make use of these important metrics and schedule your content strategically for days and times of maximum exposure.
2) Diversify
Keep in mind that someone who follows you on Facebook is likely to also follow you on Instagram and Twitter. For the savvy social media marketer, this means that content should be optimized for each platform, rather than just repeated across multiple platforms, at the risk of boring your followers.
This doesn’t mean you have to reinvent the wheel each time you schedule content, but play to the strengths of each network. For example, Facebook allows more text, while Instagram is great for eye-catching images or stories.
3) You’re not off the hook
Automation is a highly effective tool for social media management — but it’s just part of the picture. Used properly, it should act as a supplement to your social media activities, like reading and replying to audience comments and interacting with your community.
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?
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.
