Manufacturers: How to Increase Your Growth Rate

Manufacturers: How to Increase Your Growth Rate

manufacturing growth ratesThe US manufacturing index is at its lowest level since 2009. This is sobering news for the industry and for the economy.  Within the industry, it is clear that the road ahead is not flat, straight, or even smooth.  For companies to not just survive, but to also succeed, action needs to be taken.

In August 2015 Bruce McDuffee, Principal at Knowledge Marketing for Industry, released the second edition of the Manufacturer’s Growth Manifesto. If you haven’t read this, you need to do so – today.  In the Manifesto, McDuffee spells out how manufacturers can achieve growth rates of 10%, 20%, and even 30%.

The key to attaining a double digit growth rate is changing your marketing strategy and adapting to buyers’ new habits.   Specifically:

  1. Stop pitching products and start helping people.
  2. Start educating your audience utilizing your particular experts and expertise for FREE.
  3. Stop advertising product features and benefits of a product.
  4. Start promoting your useful, helpful papers, webinars, seminars, videos, etc. (not product information) to foster meaningful engagement.
  5. Admit to yourself and your team that your products are perceived as a commodity and it will take more than product revisions, releases and enhancements to gain the attention of your target audience.

McDuffee concedes that for those who have not previously embraced and engaged in this approach to marketing, “You may be thinking, WTF?”

It may seem counterintuitive, but the results are real. Your company will be able to achieve those double digit growth rates and realize these benefits:

  1. Reciprocity, credibility and trust in the minds of the people in your target audience.
  2. Top-of-Mind Awareness (T.O.M.A.) in the minds of your prospective customers so they remember your firm first when the day comes around and they need to buy.
  3. Higher prices, more sales, more market share, and higher growth rates.

Success, however, depends on believing in this approach and incorporating it into your overall business strategy.

Research conducted by the Content Marketing Institute (CMI) found that while 82% of manufacturers use content marketing, only 26% say that their efforts are successful. A lack of buy-in/vision from higher ups is one of the key challenges identified by CMI.  Another challenge that was reported was creating and executing a strategy; only 20% of respondents reported that they had a documented strategy.  Notable though, is that 58% of the most effective companies reported that they have a documented strategy.

This approach is not relevant only to manufacturing. Companies across industries and verticals should take notice.  Cerasis, a top North American third party logistics company offering logistics solutions with a strong focus on LTL freight management, shifted their marketing strategy and realized positive results. Within 25 months Cerasis realized a 14% increase in revenue.  This increase was directly attributable to inbound marketing.  In addition to this stream of revenue, the company’s sales team was able to generate revenue totaling $20 million during this period – more than double the previous two years combined.

Those numbers are not small potatoes. If you haven’t checked out the Manufacturer’s Growth Manifesto, make the time.

You may also like:

This was originally published on Electronics Purchasing Strategies.

 

Lead Nurturing through Special Offers

Lead Nurturing through Special Offers

special-offer

Enticing potential customers with exclusive, high-value offers is an important component of lead nurturing and lead generation.

Your strategic marketing objectives boil down to one basic mission: to generate a high volume of quality leads. This will drive tomorrow’s revenue and an increase in sales and profits. Yet, only one in 10 marketing professionals feel they have an effective lead-generation strategy in place.

Since a productive lead-generation campaign consists of many interconnecting layers, it can be hard to pinpoint what is limiting your success. But, if you are seeking more leads for your business (and who isn’t?), consider these proven tactics for achieving successful lead generation.

First, for tactical reasons, your overall campaign must contain these components:

  • Something To Offer. An offer is content that is perceived to be high in value. Offers include ebooks, whitepapers, free consultations, product demonstrations, or discounts.
  • A Call to Action. This is either a small paragraph of text, an image, or a button that links the potential customer to a landing page to download what you have to offer.
  • An Awesome Landing Page. This is a specific page designed to allow the potential client to download your offer.
  • Forms to Gather the Lead Info. Essentially, they get the download; you get their contact information.

These four valuable components set the stage for capturing exponentially more lead information than ever before to grow your business.

Creating the Most Inspiring Offers

Just because you have identified leads does not mean they will convert to customers. Lead nurturing helps build a relationship with your potential customers, gain their trust, and raise their awareness about your business and products. The four steps above are critical to the lead nurturing process. But, unless you offer something that your potential customers want, you will not get past the first one.

So, what entices people to click “yes” to an offer?

The majority of us want anything that is considered exclusive, scarce, or in high demand. Suddenly, something becomes more desirable if it appears like we are getting the scoop on a special deal or valuable information.

The higher the perceived value of your offer, the more irresistible it becomes. So, whether your offer is whitepapers, downloads, free trials, memberships, or sales promotions, these irresistible elements can overcome a lead’s typical friction, doubt, or concern.

The elements to creating a feeling of exclusivity and special value in your offer include:

  • Limited-time offers. This creates scarcity to your offer.
  • Limited quantities. What you are offering is unique and has exclusive value, and procrastination may mean missing out.
  • “X number of people have seized this offer.” Human nature is to follow what others do. State how many people have downloaded your offer or benefited from your information to encourage others to do the same.
  • Content that matches current news trends. Content tailored to whatever is trending in the news (or to whatever is in high demand at the moment) is more relevant and relatable to potential customers, who are likely engaged with those trends in other ways as well.
  • A title that hooks interest. People actually do judge a book by its cover and will not want to see more if you bore them.
  • Several Call to Actions, offered at different stages. Pursue buyers at different levels of readiness with different CTAs. People often do their own research before even engaging with a sales rep, and every prospect is at a different stage of exploration. Develop different offers at different stages in the buying cycle, and include a primary and secondary CTA to these offers on various pages throughout your site.
  • Avoid professional jargon. Terms and phrases that have been over-used and abused are meaningless and won’t hook potential buyers. They include: groundbreaking, cutting-edge, scalable, flexible, and robust, just to name a few.

To further ensure enticing more leads, your offer should provide something that is considered of high-value. Not all offers are created equal. Some “formats” perform better than others at converting leads. Here are a few of the top-ranked offers, in order of performance, when it comes to generating leads:

  • E-books or guides
  • Templates or presentations
  • Research and reports (e.g., State of Inbound Marketing)
  • Whitepapers
  • Kits (multiple offers packaged together)
  • Live webinars
  • On-demand videos
  • Blogs (including offers in the nav or sidebar)
  • Blog posts (if there is a CTA in the post)

There are many more ways you can capture successful leads and fine-tune your marketing plans in a way that turns leads into customers. For more proven tips, download The 30 Greatest Tips & Tricks That Will Change The Way You Nurture Leads, which offers dozens of other techniques marketers should follow to increase leads and revenue.

Download guide

Related articles:

 

Top Logistics and Supply Chain Blogs 2016

Top Logistics and Supply Chain Blogs 2016

Fronetics names the best of the best blogs in the logistics and supply chain industries.

The logistics and supply chain industries are catching on to how successful a blog can be as part of an inbound marketing strategy. Companies are creating content that not only fuels conversation about industry best practices, trends, and issues, but also helps drive business to their websites.

Fronetics Strategic Advisors conducted a survey in January 2016 to determine the top logistics and supply chain blogs in the industry. Here are the results:

#1 Logistically Speaking

logistically-speaking

Dallas, TX-based Transplace is a 3PL and technology provider serving manufacturers, retailers, and consumer and chemical packaged goods companies. Logistically Speaking is the company’s thought leadership blog. It tells “the latest and the greatest supply chain and transportation stories” through Infographics, interviews with logistics executives, and informative articles offering information and advice.

Readers love: the weekly “TIP list,” or Transportation Industry’s Progression, which curates a short list of articles concerning trending topics and advancements in the industry

#2 Transplace

transplace-ceo-blogTransplace’s CEO Tom Sanderson shares information, opinions, and analysis of factors affecting the supply chain — including company economic data, freight transportation regulation and legislation, and carrier and 3PL financial performance. The blog is rich with charts and graphs that offer big-picture insight on what’s going within the industry.

Readers love: Sanderson’s no-nonsense breakdown of the most pressing issues facing the supply chain

Jennifer Cortez, Director, Marketing Communications, is thrilled with Transplace being recognized by Fronetics and the industry:

“We are thrilled to be recognized as the top logistics and supply chain blogs in 2015. At Transplace, we pride ourselves on providing timely and relevant content to our customers and the industry. Our goal this year is to further connect Transplace and our thought leaders with emerging industry trends.”

procurious#3 Procurious

Procurious is a UK-based online business network with news, education, discussion forums, and events for procurement and supply chain professionals. The blog goes beyond industry insights — it’s a savvy guide to career advancement and skill development. Articles are written for the modern-day professional, in sync with Procurious’s forward-thinking brand.

Readers love: original series like Life & Style and #firstmovers, which cover interesting, relevant topics in the procurement world.

Thank you to all who took our survey to find the top logistics and supply chain blogs!

 


Fronetics Strategic Advisors is a management consulting firm with a focus on inbound marketing.  We create and execute successful strategies for growth and value creation.  Unlike other firms, our approach is data driven.  We know ROI is important, so we track and measure results to drive success.  Read about our approach to inbound marketing, or get in touch.

 

Top 4 big data articles of 2015

Top 4 big data articles of 2015

big dataFronetics Strategic Advisors is a leading management consulting firm. We advise and work with companies on their most critical issues and opportunities: strategy, marketingorganization, talent acquisition, performance management, and M&A support.

We’ve gathered our most-read big data articles of 2015:

Big Data and Supply Chain Management

With current technologies, there are increasing amounts of information to be gathered and exchanged in the world, creating more opportunities for businesses to harness that information and chart a course, or to tweak processes based on that information. According to an Accenture study, “97% of executives report having an understanding of how Big Data analytics can benefit their supply chain, but only 17% said that they have implemented it in at least one supply chain function.”  Read the full article.

Drowning in Big Data, Parched for Information

KPMG recently conducted a survey of 144 CFOs and CIOs with the objective of gaining a more concrete understanding of the opportunities and challenges that big data and analytics present.  The survey found that 99% of respondents believe that data and analytics are at least somewhat important to their business strategies; and 69% consider them to be crucially or very important.  Despite the perceived value of big data, 85% of respondents reported that they don’t know to analyze and interpret the data they already have in hand (much less what to do with forthcoming data). Read the full article.

Using Big Data to Solve Problems

Forget for a moment the potential of adopting big data analytics throughout the entire supply chain, and consider instead how big data can untangle and integrate seemingly unrelated masses of data to solve small problems in a warehouse or distribution center. That’s exactly what this company did. Read the full article.

The Pitfalls of Predictive Analytics

Executives are eager to jump on the bandwagon, too. Although only 13% of 250 executives surveyed by Accenture said they use big data primarily for predictive purposes, as many as 88% indicated big data analytics is a top priority for their company. With an increasing number of companies learning to master the precursors to developing predictive models — namely, connecting, monitoring, and analyzing — we can safely assume the art of gleaning business intelligence from foresight will continue to grow. Read the full article.

 

 

LinkedIn Groups are Now Private – What Does This Mean for You?

LinkedIn Groups are Now Private – What Does This Mean for You?

LinkedIn Groups

In mid-October, LinkedIn made some big changes: LinkedIn Groups are private and there’s a new, standalone LinkedIn Groups app for iOS users. Many LinkedIn Groups were used for the purpose of networking, research, and prospecting, however many people were misusing, and even abusing, the Group option. Rather than using groups properly, to form relationships, engage with industries that could supplement yours, and keep up with hot topics, the group option was often used for self-promotion.

The Changes

According to LinkedIn, these changes were spurred by consumer feedback.  “Our research has shown that professional conversations are most effective in a private trusted space, so conversations in groups won’t be visible until you’ve joined the group. Joining a LinkedIn group now requires either an invitation or approval of your request. Our data has shown that open groups have historically attracted a larger percentage of low-quality conversations. Members-only groups have created significantly more participation and conversations than others (up to five times more), indicating that members feel more confident contributing in these types of groups.”

Some additional, prominent changes:

  • Moderation: Conversations will be posted without the need for approval from a moderator, manager, or group owner, however those people can still remove off-topic conversations.
  • Standard and Unlisted Groups: In an effort to simplify things for the consumer, groups will be either unlisted, meaning that they don’t show up in search results and only a manager/moderator can invite people members, or standard, meaning that groups do show up in search results and members can invite anyone with a 1st degree connection.
  • Content Filtering: Filtering of spam and low-quality content to keep promotional material out of conversations.
  • Subgroups: Subgroups will no longer exist to help clear up confusion. Any current subgroups will become their own, standalone groups.
  • Mentions in Conversations: Like other forms of social media, the @ symbol will now be used before a name in order to reference someone and bring them into the conversation.

Other changes can be found at LinkedIn’s Help Center page.

Group Etiquette

If you’re already using groups in smart way, you’ll only see improvement from LinkedIn’s changes. Say goodbye to spam and relentless self-promotion. Groups may become more meaningful with a more exclusive approach. The people who are genuinely interested in having specific, topical conversations will. Here are some tips on how to navigate the new Groups:

  1. Engage Don’t Enrage:

Keeping in mind that there’s a difference between narcissism and seeking feedback, wait a bit before you post your own blogs, articles, or other branded content. You may want a group of talented, knowledge people to review your writing, but you need to establish yourself as a valued member of the group first. Comment on and like others’ posts. Put in your time and build rapport.

  1. Prudence in Posting:

When there’s a discussing going about a topic that speaks to you, you might feel anxious to jump in with a relevant article you’ve written, but consider your timing. Only after posting third-party articles and blogs, to show your support of others and breadth of knowledge, consider posting your own. When you do post your first article, it might be helpful to connect it to the groups’ influence. For example, Based on the recent, rich conversation about the engagement of Boomers and Millennials in the workplace, I gather my recent years of experience with this and wrote an article I though I’d share with you. I appreciate the fruitful conversations here that helped spur this article.

  1. Connect Cautiously:

As with all etiquette, the idea isn’t to approach people with fear, but with respect. Sometimes, early on, respect can be established by being cautious in order to better understand individual and community needs and norms. Once you’re in a group, don’t be unknowingly creepy. Engage with people who might have similar interests or who you feel might be attracted to your brand. First comment on their posts, like an article, show that you’re engaged and have something to offer intellectually. Give them your thoughts before your products. Once some sort of engagement is established, then send a connection request.

The new changes to LinkedIn’s Group option is going to serve everyone well, whether you’re in marketing in or any other field. It means more meaningful engagement and less bothersome noise and chatter.


Fronetics Strategic Advisors is a leading management consulting firm. Our firm works with companies to identify and execute strategies for growth and value creation.

Whether it is a wholesale food distributor seeking guidance on how to define and execute corporate strategy; a telematics firm needing high quality content on a consistent basis; a real estate firm looking for a marketing partner; or a supply chain firm in need of interim management, our clients rely on Fronetics to help them navigate through critical junctures, meet their toughest challenges, and take advantage of opportunities. We deliver high-impact results.

We advise and work with companies on their most critical issues and opportunities: strategy, marketingorganization, talent acquisition, performance management, and M&A support.