by Fronetics | Apr 12, 2018 | Blog, Content Marketing, Leadership, Marketing, Social Media, Supply Chain
Make the most of your supply chain leaders’ social media accounts by following these steps.
I’ve written many times before about the importance of supply chain leaders being on social media as the face of their brands. Social media presents a huge opportunity for executives to use their relative industry celebrity to be an extension of their organizations.
So you are ready to commit to a more active social media presence (or you’re going to be ghost-posting for your executive). Where do you begin?
We’ve come up with 4 tips for supply chain leaders to making the most of their presence on social media.
4 tips for supply chain leaders on social media
1) Find the right platform (or platforms) for you.
The first thing to consider is your target audience. If you’re looking to reach a young demographic, for example, Snapchat is probably the way to go, as 45% of its users are under the age of 24. Likewise, if your brand would be well-served by live video (hint: it probably will!), Facebook Live and Instagram Stories offer great possibilities.
Next, think about your personal voice, and what type of content you are likely to be posting. Thought leadership can often best be established on LinkedIn. But that doesn’t mean that Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube aren’t also good avenues to present your voice to the world. Pick the platforms that you feel speak most to your audience and best serve your brand.
2) Use your creative side.
Supply chain and logistics leadership requires a tremendous amount of creativity and innovation. Let these qualities shine through in your social media presence! You have the tools to spark more engagement, increase follower count, and make your posts go viral.
This means using your unique voice to be a storyteller, engage your audience, and create a face for your brand. If you need some inspiration, check out these 7 Twitter accounts.
3) Create space for conversation.
Too many would-be social media mavens fall into the trap of posting the kind of content that doesn’t invite interaction. Instead, be a conversation-starter.
First, take a look at your audience and what kind of interactions they have online. You can scan the pages of other leaders in your niche as a reference point.
You can generate interaction and engagement by showing gratitude, listening to your audience, handling queries, posting thought-provoking content, and posing questions in your posts.
4) Avoid controversy.
This might seem obvious, but there’s a fine line to walk between posting or re-posting thought-provoking content and becoming an inadvertently controversial figure.
Keep in mind that, in the public platforms that are social media, all your moves will be under constant scrutiny from your fans, followers, and people in their networks. This means that while cultivating a personal voice, it’s important to maintain a level of professionalism. And stay away from posting anything that can make you a lightning rod for controversy!
Where do you go to follow supply chain leaders on social media?
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by Fronetics | Apr 2, 2018 | Blog, Content Marketing, Logistics, Marketing, Social Media, Supply Chain
If you’re looking to increase your brand awareness, and quickly, here are 10 tricks to accelerate your efforts.
If you took Psychology 101 in school (or even if you didn’t), you know that people are more likely to buy from brand names they’re familiar with than those they don’t know. This goes for purchasing things like medicine, and for procuring components or parts as part of the supply chain.
That’s why so many of our clients come to us looking to build brand awareness as one of their main goals. They want to customers to know about them — and sooner rather than later.
Particularly if your business is new, you’re trying to change an existing market perception, or you have to make your marketing dollars work fast to meet a boss’ deadline, you need to grow brand awareness quickly. We’ve got some ideas to accelerate your efforts.
10 tricks to grow brand awareness quickly
1) Instagram Stories
Instagram Stories is an on-trend platform that delivers targeted content to B2B buyers and builds brand awareness with potential customers. This feature consists of sequences of content that a user posts over a 24-hour period. Besides photos, Stories can include video and Boomerangs, seconds-long motion clips that play forwards and backwards.
2) Partner with other brands
Creating a promotional partnership with a brand that is ancillary to your role in the supply chain can be a huge boost to your brand awareness, if you choose wisely in your partnership. You benefit from its image and reputation and build collegiality.
3) Start content partnerships
Again, this is all about leveraging other people’s audiences to spread the word about your brand. Reach out to the blogs or media sites your target buyers frequent to see if you can author a post for them. Invite them to guest author on your blog. Basically, create two-way content partnerships where you will ensure that your brand’s name will come across the screens of target buyers.
4) Make sharing easy
This is a great way to let your successes go to work for you. Make it easy for your audience and followers to share your content with their networks. Give them sharing options for email, social media — heck, put share links on anything and everything. Social media is a powerful tool in building your brand. Don’t underuse it.
5) Hold social media contests
Everybody loves to win a contest. Use your social media platforms to create contests in which followers submit a photo or video, and let other users vote for their favorites. Contestants will share the link with their networks, and your brand awareness grows exponentially.
6) Try paid social advertising
Facebook and Twitter ads are relatively cheap, and both platforms do a great job of making sure your content gets to your target audience. You can set metrics and customize your preferences for a targeted audience in a variety of ways. It’s one of the most effective ways to grow brand awareness quickly with a very particular audience, though you have to pay to play.
7) Infographics
These are eye-catching and colorful ways to display interesting data and statistics, and are often overlooked for the content powerhouses they are. They’re prime candidates to be shared far and wide on social media.
8) Personality
Having a memorable personality for your brand isn’t just for B2C companies. While you don’t need to hire the Old Spice Guy, letting your content have a voice and perspective is important. Buyers want to know they’re dealing with a human being.
9) Podcasts
Starting your own industry podcast, perhaps interviewing your own executives and other industry experts, is a great way to build your brand and simultaneously develop relationships with your supply chain peers.
10) Become a resource
We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again: Your most important asset is your knowledge and expertise, not your products and services. Content marketing is all about being a trusted resource for your audience. Ditch the blatant sales pitch in your content and think about how you can help your target buyers instead.
How do you grow brand awareness quickly?
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by Fronetics | Mar 21, 2018 | Blog, Content Marketing, Logistics, Marketing, Social Media, Strategy, Supply Chain
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.
What social media analytics tools do you use?
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by Fronetics | Jan 16, 2018 | Blog, Content Marketing, Marketing
Using topic clusters and pillar content instead of trying to rank for a short list of keywords will boost your search engine rankings and improve user experience.
This week, in our ongoing Writing for SEO series, we’re looking at topic clusters and pillar content. Our previous two posts explored how search engines are changing, and how people are changing the ways they search.
I’ve been hinting — more like, emphasizing — in our recent Writing for SEO series that trying to rank for certain keywords in each blog post you publish is a practice on the way out. You may have been wondering what you’re supposed to do instead. Today’s post on topic clusters and pillar content is your answer.
Before we dive too far in, it’s important to understand the key terms at work here.
- Core topics are the several ideas/phrases/value propositions that most closely align with your brand. These are the categories that define your business and the knowledge you have to share with internet users. You want users searching the for these phrases to find your business. For Fronetics, content marketing and social media marketing for the supply chain are two obvious examples.
- Pillar content is your evergreen content that covers those topics at a high level. For Fronetics, an example would be: Why Supply Chain and Logistics Businesses Need Content Marketing. Pages with pillar content are typically longer, offering a broad overview of the subject and linking to other webpages (cluster pages) that offer more in-depth information about related subtopics.
- Topic clusters are the subtopics that cover a particular aspect of a core topic. For example, writing for SEO, blogging, and content strategy are a topic cluster that falls under the core topic of content marketing.
- Cluster pages are webpages that contain content covering topics from your cluster. Each topic cluster page focuses on providing more detail for a specific keyword relating to the core topic. For example, Instagram Stories: How the Supply Chain Can Use Them to Engage Prospects and Customers (core topic: social media marketing) was one of our most popular topic cluster pages last year.
How to structure your pages
Your pillar content page should contain links to each related topic cluster page, and each cluster page should link back to the pillar content, with the same hyperlinked keyword. This allows visitors to move seamlessly between the pages to find information that is most relevant to them. It also helps search engines better understand the content of your website so it can drive appropriate traffic to your content.
Topic cluster pages should focus on driving traffic from specific queries (e.g., “How do I use Instagram Stories?”). Pillar content pages should include broad information about the core topics, as well as opportunities for website visitors to convert to leads. This sets up your website so that traffic comes in through your cluster pages and converts on your pillar content pages.
As HubSpot puts it, “The beauty of this model is that you can spend a lot more time optimizing your pillar content for conversions and your cluster content for traffic. This saves a lot of time compared to the traditional model of optimizing each individual post.”
Why topic clusters and pillar content
Using topic clusters and pillar content lets you organize your internal linking more efficiently, boost your search ranking, and provide a better user experience.
Because search engines are getting better at understanding semantically related concepts, this structure allows them to recognize your authority on a certain topic — rather than assigning you a ranking based on an exact word or phrase. It shows you have real depth and breadth on a topic, which is important to users searching for information about it.
As I say all the time, search engines are constantly evolving to bring the most relevant content to people who are searching. So if you can show search engines that you have breadth and depth on a topic, they will assign more authority and higher search placement to your website pages.
What’s more, one high performing cluster page can elevate search rankings for all the other pages linked to the same pillar. That means more users will find your content. That means more effective content marketing for you.
So, rather than writing around a short list of keywords for which you’d like to rank, you should focus on developing topic clusters and pillar content that align with your brand to drive organic traffic.
Want to learn more about writing for SEO? Make sure to read the other parts of our series: part 1, Writing for SEO: Search Engines are Changing, part 2, Writing for SEO: People Are Changing How They Search, and part 4, Writing for SEO: Measuring the Success of Your Content.
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by Fronetics | Dec 13, 2017 | Blog, Marketing, Social Media
Here are our 10 most-read social media posts of 2017.
Today, more than ever, companies are turning to social media to engage with customers and reach new audiences. Brands are using newer technologies to push content marketing to new levels. And it’s working.
Looking at this list, I notice the popularity of posts about how to utilize social media to grow leads and close deals. Knowing when and where to post isn’t enough; with constantly changing platforms, companies need to stay on the pulse of social media to stay ahead of their competitors.
At Fronetics, we hope to serve as an educational resource for companies within the logistics and supply chain industry. Always feel free to reach out and ask us a question or request a blog post if there is a topic about which you need more information. In the meantime, here are the 10 most-read posts about social media from our blog in 2017.
Top 10 social media posts in 2017
1. This is How Often B2B Businesses Should Post on Social Media
Keep these best practices in mind when determining how often to post to social media. It’s not enough to just create interesting and pertinent content; you have to put it out there to reach your target audience. Moreover, the content needs to be delivered consistently over time, at the right time, and in the right place. Read more.
2. 4 Tools to Determine the Best Time to Post on Social Media for Your Business
Find out when your target audience is most active on different social media platforms by using these 4 online tools. It’s not enough to curate content for your social media platforms. Today’s social media users expect fresh, innovative ideas around the clock. And when this content is being shared is just as valuable as what is being shared. Read more.
3. Social Benchmarking: How You Know You’re Killing it on Social Media
Rival IQ’s Danica Benson discusses the importance of social benchmarking and offers three steps for getting started. Benchmarks are key when interpreting data. Organizations of all kinds — large corporations, small privately-owned business, nonprofits, and even sports teams — need to measure their performance to see if they’re efforts are leading to success. Read more.
4. The Best Time to Post on Social Media: A Comprehensive Study
When you are posting on social media could be as important as what you’re posting, and this CoSchedule study attempts to determine the best time to post. Timing is everything. And that statement especially holds true when it comes to posting content to social media. There’s no point in putting in the time and effort to create informative blog posts, inspirational tweets, or captivating Facebook posts if you’re not getting the most exposure you can out of your social media outlets. Read more.
5. Instagram Stories: How the Supply Chain Can Use Them to Engage Prospects and Customers
Instagram Stories offer an on-trend platform for delivering targeted content to B2B buyers and building brand awareness with potential customers. If you haven’t considered using Instagram as part of your social media marketing program, it might be time to change your mind. Read more.
6. 7 Must Follow Twitter Accounts for the Supply Chain Professional in 2017
Turn to these 7 Twitter accounts for news, insights, and thought leadership in the supply chain space. Twitter is a platform for socializing, entertainment, breaking news, lead prospecting, and much more. But Twitter is only as useful as the people you follow. So how do you choose between the 317 million monthly active users? Read more.
7. Leveraging Social Media in the Consumer Electronics Industry
Here are two examples of consumer electronics companies leveraging social media to reach their target audiences, build brand awareness, and drive sales. Supply chain businesses understand that social media is an important marketing tool in today’s marketplace. The consumer electronics industry is no different: Participating in social media has never been more necessary. Read more.
8. #LeggingsGate: The Importance of Emotional Intelligence in Social Media Management
United Airlines failed to apply emotional intelligence to its social media management and will continue to suffer the consequences. The recent #LeggingsGate controversy — in which a United Airlines gate agent refused to allow two young girls flying on friends-and-family tickets to board a flight because they were wearing leggings, which violated company dress code — really got our office talking. The incident is a great example for all businesses on the importance of emotional intelligence in social media management. Read more.
9. Where on Social Media Will Competitors Be Next? Trends in Content Distribution Channels
Recent surveys show video platforms are the next big focus for marketers in terms of content distribution channels. We’re big advocates of social benchmarking against your competitors. But, just as much, we are always thinking ahead, trying to figure out where the industry is going next. It’s important to get ahead of the trends so that you can be right there leading the pack. Read more.
10. Facebook Breaks 2 Billion Users, Instagram Crushes Snapchat, and more Social Media News
In July’s social media news, platforms saw a rise in daily active users and broke records in more than one category. Once thought to be a passing trend, social media is nowhere near slowing down in terms of growth. Next Web reported that India has taken over as the largest audience of Facebook, beating out the U.S. with over 241 million active users. Active users in India are up 27% in the past six months, twice the rate of U.S. users. Read more.
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