by Fronetics | Nov 28, 2016 | Blog, Content Marketing, Marketing, Social Media
Supply chain companies can use influencers in their prospects’ network as a strategic tool to gain new business.
The term “influencer marketing” often brings to mind celebrities endorsing their favorite brand of bottled water or jeans — not an image that is particularly useful for B2B businesses. However, B2B marketers should be taking this powerful trend in content marketing seriously.
While your supply chain may not benefit from an endorsement by Jennifer Aniston, you likely have brand influencers at your fingertips, which you may not even realize. Effectively leveraging these endorsements is a strategic tool for gaining new business.
Developing an influencer marketing strategy
Once you’ve identified your natural influencers, here are three important steps for building an influencer marketing strategy for your company.
1) Know your target buyer.
Rather than a scatter-shot approach, making the effort on the front end to identify your target buyer personas allows you to strategically target your customers. Understanding their needs, challenges, and purchasing structures is the key foundation to any content marketing effort, and influencer marketing is no exception.
2) Identify your industry influencers.
Industry influencers aren’t just the big names, though those people are certainly influential. It comes down to how your buyers make their purchasing decisions. The 2016 B2B Buyer’s Survey Report found that nearly half of B2B buyers use peers and colleagues as a major information resource when choosing a vendor.
Who are those peers and colleagues whom your target buyers turn to? Use every resource at your disposal to determine how they get their information. Connecting on LinkedIn, Twitter, and other social networks is a great way to do this.
3) Use the right tools for your business.
Any effective content marketing strategy depends on using the most effective tools. In a post for CMS Connected, Leah Kinthaert makes a strong pitch for Twitter. She cites the ease of plugging in a hashtag or keyword in giving you “volumes of information — from who the influencers are in that industry to what today’s breaking news is on the topic.” Furthermore, clicking on a hashtag shows you what your competition is doing as well.
The bottom line is that influencer marketing can be an extremely effective aspect of a B2B business’ content marketing strategy. Knowing your buyers, finding your influencers, and effectively leveraging this information will help boost your social credibility, as well as generating new business.
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by Fronetics | Sep 28, 2016 | Blog, Content Marketing, Logistics, Marketing, Strategy, Supply Chain
Companies in the logistics and supply chain industries should take a look at this content marketing infographic.
Content marketing is a form of inbound marketing in which vendors publish digital content to attract customers who are searching for products and services like theirs. If done right, it is highly effective in growing brand awareness, generating and converting leads, and driving sales and repeat business.
If your organization is exclusively using traditional outbound marketing techniques, like advertisements in print publications, you’re missing out on growth opportunities. We rounded up some of the most telling facts about the role of content marketing in today’s B2B purchasing environment for you to consider.
Here are 12 facts about content marketing that your business should keep in mind.
by Fronetics | Aug 3, 2016 | Blog, Content Marketing, Marketing
Here are some guidelines on what content marketing might cost your business and why you need each element to be successful.
Content marketing can be a game-changing strategy for companies looking to increase brand awareness, improve lead-generation efforts, and grow their business. But sticker shock can prevent some from pulling the trigger — especially when an organization is unsure how to measure ROI.
Content marketing will require an investment in services that are not cheap (writing, design, social media management, etc.) or a major time commitment from your own human resources. That being said, the more dollars or resources you throw at it will not necessarily ensure greater success.
To find the right pricing for your content marketing, it’s important to understand what you are paying for. Here are some guidelines for how much content marketing should cost (if you’re doing it right).
A pricing breakdown
The right content, published at the right time, reaches buyers who are looking for products or services like yours and informs them about your business. That, in turn, entices them to become customers.
Here’s the rub: You cannot just throw any old content out there and expect it to work. Here is what you need:
1) A data-driven inbound marketing strategy
This initially may cost around $20k. That sounds like a lot, but here’s why it is so important.
Research proves that content marketing is drastically more effective when it is 1) backed by a strategy, 2) the strategy is documented, and 3) a designated person is leading the strategy. Whether created by an in-house team or an outsource partner, your strategy should be driven by data, and should include these vital components:
- Buyer personas and journey: Who your potential customer is and what steps they take to research, evaluate, and decide to buy
- Content mapping and demand generation: What topics appeal to your customers? How and when should you deliver content? What channels reach customers best?
- Conversion and scoring leads: How to optimize lead-conversion rates and evaluate leads throughout the buyer journey; identifying optimal timing for sales calls
- Goals and KPIs: Define what success looks like and how to measure progress
2) Content marketing talent
Human resources may cost $5K-$10K per month. You need a team of skilled writers, graphic designers, and social media managers who can produce quality content, on a regular basis, and distribute it effectively.
Why can’t you just have the intern do it and save some cash, you ask? When it comes to content, you get what you pay for. Consider that 27 million pieces of content are shared every day. That means consumers can afford to be picky about the media they consume. If they find your content lacking in quality, substance, or appearance, they simply won’t read it. You might as well not have written it.
For your content to be effective — meaning your content attracts your target audience and drives profitable customer action — it must stand out, really stand out, among the masses. For that, you need a professional hand.
3) Lead management, marketing software and analytics
This may cost about $10k per month. It includes marketing automation software, like HubSpot, as well as a skilled manager(s) to provide insight and reports on content performance. This way your organization can effectively track leads, evaluate what is working, and adjust your strategy as necessary to ensure optimal performance.
Return on investment
If you’re still uncomfortable with these numbers, keep these in mind: Content marketing costs 62% less than traditional marketing and generates about 3 times as many leads.
Content marketing is valuable in growing any business. But remember that getting your return really does require making that investment.
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by Fronetics | Jul 13, 2016 | Blog, Content Marketing, Marketing
Using search marketing as part of your content strategy can increase web traffic and, thus, visibility for your business.
Search marketing, formerly “search engine marketing,” uses both paid (SEM) and unpaid strategies (SEO) to increase traffic to your business’ website. These two efforts work together to improve the likelihood that potential customers searching the internet will find your content.
Let me explain. When an individual searches for something on a search engine like Bing, Google, or Yahoo, the query brings him/her to a Search Engine Results Page, or “SERP.” Since we read from top to bottom, the person first sees the results that fall at the top of the SERP. Studies overwhelmingly show that the further down on the page that a link falls, the less likely someone will click it. What’s more, people rarely click on results beyond the first page. Thus, it is critical to rank as highly as possible on SERPs to entice potential customers to click through to your site.
So, how do you rise to the top? This is where search marketing fits into your content strategy.
SEO (Unpaid)
SEO (search engine optimization) is optimizing your content to improve how it ranks in search engine listings. This requires gaining a basic understanding of how and why search engines classify webpages and then catering to those factors where possible.
The search engine’s goal is to bring the most relevant results to someone who enters a search query. They use complex algorithms to determine how relevant a website is based on the query. So, if you type “best restaurant in Boston,” the search engine will scan the entirety of the internet to bring you a list of websites, in order, that are most likely give you an idea of the best Boston restaurants.
Each engine’s algorithm is slightly different, highly sensitive, and a closely held secret to keep websites from maliciously optimizing their content. Google, for instance, uses about 200 factors in its search algorithm, some of which are public knowledge, and most of which are not. This makes SEO somewhat of an art.
The best bet for optimizing your content is to consider those known factors while remaining true to your content. You want the people who are looking for you to find you. Here are some tips.
1) Use keywords throughout your content.
Algorithms crawl the internet to scan text of all kinds (websites, PDFs, documents, etc.) to find content that matches search queries. Identify several keywords that someone who is looking for products or services like yours might use in a search query, and use them throughout your content. It is likely even more effective when you use keywords in URL titles, headings and subheads, and paragraphs near the beginning of the page.
2) Use keywords in meta tags.
Webpages contain data, called meta tags, that search engines read to understand the main idea of the page. These are invisible to the average reader (unless you know where to look). Most important for SEO are the title tag and the meta description.
3) Distribute content through social media.
Social media is increasingly important to search algorithms because these platforms help determine what content people are using and engaging with organically. Post on your social media channels with links back to your website to improve your social media referral traffic metric and, thus, your SEO.
4) Encourage inbound links.
To understand how trustworthy and authoritative a particular website is on a certain subject, algorithms consider inbound links, or other sites linking to the website. HubSpot has some excellent advice on how to grow inbound links.
5) Make your site mobile-friendly.
As web traffic increasingly derives from mobile devices, search engines are rewarding websites that are mobile-friendly. If your website is not responsive or, at least, optimized for mobile, your search ranking will suffer.
6) Create frequent, quality content.
When you regularly publish content that is valuable to your target audience, search engines will “learn” that you are a trustworthy publisher with up-to-date information. Also, the more your content resonates with your target audience, the more they will post and share it, which means more referral traffic and inbound links, which likewise increase SEO.
SEM (Paid)
Search marketing through paid methods like pay-per-click (PPC) or paid advertising helps get your content in front of your target audience, regardless of how it would rank organically. Google AdWords is the most popular paid search platform used by marketers, followed by Bing Ads.
Google AdWords will show your advertisement to people who search with predetermined keywords. You pay per click, meaning you pay a fee for every person who clicks on your advertisement, regardless of how many people Google shows your ad to.
You can imagine that a number of advertisers vie for the same keywords. Google actually auctions off ad space with each search, ranking ads by bid (how much you are willing to pay per click) and quality score (does your content answer the searcher’s need?). To increase the success of your PPC you should:
- Identify relevant keywords that potential customers might use when searching for your products or services.
- Conduct comprehensive research of keywords with tools like Keyword Planner.
- Speak your audience’s language with dynamic keyword insertion.
- Determine which words you wish to bid on, and create groupings of these words to pair with ads.
- Identify and eliminate irrelevant words unlikely to appear in keyword searches.
Remember, search engines cater to the searcher. So, the more relevant your content is to someone who is searching for you, the more likely they will find you and want to do business with you.
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by Fronetics | Jul 12, 2016 | Blog, Marketing, Strategy
Editor’s note: Sarah Collins is a summer intern at Fronetics Strategic Advisors. She is a rising sophomore at James Madison University, College of Business studying Marketing. You can find her on LinkedIn.
Aligning Sales and Marketing helps companies achieve 20% higher annual growth rates and improves deal closings by 67%.
“What do you think you’ll do with that?” is the question that, more often than not, succeeds me stating that I’m a marketing major. Uh, market? I guess? I’m the kind of student that usually has it all figured out. There’s always a game plan, so to speak, but this time around I had some figuring out to do.
That’s where Fronetics came into play for me. I went into my first intern experience looking at it as a giant learning opportunity. As I began, one of the first things that surprised me was that there were sales people in a marketing office. Little did I know, this is the ideal situation in the industry. Finally, the advice that a mentor gave me — “Take sales classes. You’ll thank me later.” — made sense. Marketing and Sales are like the Batman and Robin of the business world: Results are best when they’re working together.
What’s the reasoning behind aligning Sales and Marketing?
Through my research, I’ve learned that aligning Sales and Marketing goes back to a basic business concept, the buyer process: awareness, consideration, decision. The ultimate goal in business is essentially the same across the board. Sell and provide your product or service to your target audience. In order to achieve this, it’s best to focus on what the buyers’ immediate needs are at each individual stage of the buying process, and Marketing and Sales excel at different stages of this process.
It relates back to my economics class. Countries will always specialize in what they have the comparative advantage in because, when those two countries trade, they both end up with more than what they would have produced on their own. So Marketing and Sales specialize in their own stages of the buying process, and, in the end, they’re both better off.
HubSpot gives a great example. It wouldn’t make any sense for Sales to try to sell the product to a lead that has entered the awareness stage. At that point, the lead is only looking for specific information. It’s a strength to know where the customer is at and who is best fit to assist.
Why should you believe me?
According to ZoomInfo, only 8% of companies have strong alignment between their sales and marketing departments. Those that are aligned correctly statistically achieve a 20% higher annual growth rate and are 67% better at closing deals. As Articulate Marketing puts it, people are too informed in this day and age to tolerate even the slightest gap in what different departments tell them. The sales process has changed because the internet has given people access to so much information, and companies need to adapt accordingly.
Marketing and Sales are still two different entities.
While the two departments desperately need to be aligned well, there is no denying that they are, in fact, different. Sales generally has short term, tangible goals — such as new-client generation — while marketers are looking farther ahead at goals that aren’t quite as easy to measure.
The movie The Wolf of Wall Street offers a fantastic demonstration of how Sales works. Jordan Belfort (Leonardo Dicaprio) asks his friend Brad to sell him a pen. Brad simply says, “Write this down.” Mr. Belfort now has an immediate need for the pen. Salespeople have the ability to create this need for the buyer.
In an article by the Tronvig Group titled The Difference Between Sales and Marketing, James Heaton states that, in contrast to Sales, “Marketing should put forth an offer that meets the buyer’s needs right at the place and time of the sales opportunity. The most effective marketing is therefore about communication, not manipulation.” It’s when these differences between Sales and Marketing finally begin to work together that all the bases are covered, and the magic begins to happen.
How should companies align Sales and Marketing?
There are two main ways: strategically and physically.
Strategic Alignment
You can ask Sales and Marketing to collaborate in defining a lead generation strategy. This way the two departments aren’t getting frustrated with each other. Marketo highlighted three ways to do so.
- Lead Scoring can be incredibly helpful in understanding which leads are most interested and how good of a fit their company is for your business. These scores are only helpful if Sales and Marketing have worked together to create mutual understanding of the system.
- Lead Generation Metrics need to be understood by both. It won’t work if marketing doesn’t understand what is qualified as a SAL (Sales Accepted Lead) and SQL (Sales Qualified Lead), or if Sales doesn’t understand what makes up an MQL (Marketing Qualified Lead). A mutual understanding will increase efficiency because each department knows exactly what the other is looking for.
- Service Level Agreements can ease the process by outlining each phase of the cycle. For example, when an MQL is handed off to the Sales team, how long does the Sales team have to get in contact? What if they don’t at all? If the system becomes automated enough, you can expect a higher level of performance because the system will provide documentation on how someone became an MQL, and sales will have a record off their contact.
Physical Alignment, aka the Office
The physical layout of the office is also crucial. A study done in 2015 by CEB found that when employees are satisfied with their physical work space, they are 16% more productive and 18% more likely not to quit. Harvard Business Review found the open-concept office, having Sales and Marketing in the same space, resulted in more successful communications. One pharmaceutical company even found that the sales jump was more than 20%, $200 million in revenue.
The statistics are all there showing how detrimental or incredibly helpful aligning Sales and Marketing teams can be.
So have I exactly figured out the answer to my question? Not completely, but there’s still time. What I have learned is that the only choice to make regarding Marketing and Sales is that there is no room for competition between them, and I should definitely be mixing a sales class into a semester or two. Learning early that Sales and Marketing are both essential to each other and gaining experience in both skillsets could be just the competitive edge I need for my future. Lucky for me, there’s three more years of learning to be had.
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