by Fronetics | Apr 10, 2018 | Blog, Content Marketing, Logistics, Marketing, Strategy, Supply Chain
Check out these marketing automation tools for email workflows, social media scheduling, and customer relationship management.
Lately it seems like everyone is talking about marketing automation. As B2B buyers increasingly demand personalized experiences through the buyer’s journey, marketers’ jobs are getting tougher, as they need to provide custom lead-nurturing content to all prospects in their databases.
And that’s where automating marketing tasks can help.
The term “marketing automation” refers to a variety of tools used to automate the process of personalizing leads’ interactions with your business. The sheer variety of these tools can sometimes be overwhelming — so we’ve pulled a few of our favorites in the categories of email workflows, social media scheduling tools, and customer relationship management.
6 marketing automation tools for supply chain and logistics marketers
1. Customer.io
This tool lets you send targeted messages to your customers, crafting them based on how they interact with your business, and making personalized messages simple. You can also keep track of conversions and create customer profiles. Our favorite part? It integrates with your mobile app or website, letting you see data in real time and trigger actions by adding in predefined rules.
2. Constant Contact
This powerful tool has some features that are unique — and can take your marketing capabilities beyond the basics. Beyond setting up and managing an automated database, Constant Contact offers Facebook fan promotion, coupons and deals, and event management.
3. AdRoll
This is an extremely effective tool for retargeting customers through re-engagement on Facebook, Twitter, and elsewhere on the web. It offers cross-device and cross-platform retargeting capabilities, as well as flexible segmentation, letting you provide customized experiences that dramatically improve your marketing efficiency. It also offers customized budgeting and full control over ad spend.
4. Pardot
Pardot is an all-inclusive marketing automation suite, but it’s particularly strong for amping up your engagement with CRM integration. It’s a great tool for helping your sales team shorten the sales cycle. And, in addition to CRM integration, it offers email marketing, lead nurturing, lead scoring, and ROI reporting.
5. Marketo
This cloud-based marketing software lets you drive revenue with lead management and mobile marketing. It not only helps build customer relationships, but it helps you sustain them as well. Best of all, you can try it out for free until you’re sure it’s right for your business.
Bonus all-in-one tool: HubSpot
HubSpot is an inbound-marketing tool that lets you generate leads, close deals, and manage your sales pipeline from start to finish. It integrates beautifully with a content marketing strategy, with the goal of turning outbound leads into inbound ones. It includes revenue reporting, custom-event reporting, custom-event automation triggers, predictive-lead scoring, contacts and company reporting, and event-based segmentation.
What marketing automation tools does your business use?
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by Fronetics | Jul 27, 2017 | Blog, Content Marketing, Current Events, Marketing, Social Media
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.
But the social media news doesn’t stop there. Facebook and Instagram are topping charts with their active users. LinkedIn and Google are boosting job opportunities through new features and search capabilities. And social media monitoring platforms are adding video to their repertoire.
Here’s a look at this month’s social media news.
Facebook reaches over 2 billion monthly active users around the world
India isn’t the only country boosting Facebook user numbers. The social media giant just celebrated having “2 billion people connecting and building communities on Facebook every month.” The company thanked its users with a personalized video and Mark Zuckerberg’s promise to take the global connection and use it to create a “more open and connected” world.
Instagram Stories reaches 250 million daily active users and adds live video replay
Instagram Stories continues to take over the ‘stories’ arena with 250 million active daily users. Snapchat, which founded the stories format, is falling far behind with only 161 million active daily users. Instagram Stories was unveiled last August and has experienced remarkable growth and success thanks to support from its sister company, Facebook. The social media platform has also introduced its newest feature, a share button with the ability to replay live videos for up to 24 hours.
Facebook tests custom audiences based on engagement with Instagram Business Profiles
Adweek reports that “Facebook is testing the ability for brands to create custom audiences based on engagement with Instagram business profiles.” This new type of filtering could allow brands to create engagement audiences, people who have previously engaged with your content on Instagram. Filters could include all interactions, users that have commented on a post, or any activity within a certain time frame. Though only in the testing stages, these custom audiences could help brands create specific messaging for targeted audiences based on their interactions with a brand’s Instagram page.
CrowdTangle adds video views to metrics
CrowdTangle, a social media monitoring platform for brands, has just added video views to its metrics for Facebook and Instagram. With video’s increasing popularity, the company felt it was important to offer its clients a way to measure how their videos are performing. “Publishers can now easily track emerging new trends and best practices on Facebook and Instagram, as well as discover great videos and video creators, see overall video views across their industry, and benchmark themselves against competitors,” CrowdTangle says.
LinkedIn creates new search to boost job opportunities
LinkedIn has created new search capabilities that make it easier for users to uncover new jobs and other professional opportunities. The new search also allows users to see the companies and job titles of the people who found them in a search, identifying opportunities that align with the user’s resume. Available on your phone or desktop computer, these new features make searching jobs and hiring managers that much more accessible.
Google launches Google for Jobs
Partnering with the biggest job searching sites — like LinkedIn, Monster and CareerBuilder — Google just introduced a new initiative to allow users to find job opportunities directly through a Google search. The new search update also allows users to receive email alerts of new employment postings in real time. “When Google for Jobs launches, it will act as kind of a mega job-search engine that will let you sort through multiple career sites in one go,” says Google CEO Sundar Pichai.
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by Fronetics | Jan 16, 2017 | Blog, Content Marketing, Logistics, Marketing, Supply Chain
Keep these four trends in mind when planning out your marketing efforts in 2017.
Marketo recently revealed its predictions for upcoming marketing trends for 2017. It’s a list of technologies, strategies, and tactics that the marketing software automation company believes will be important to focus on over the next year.
We culled through these predictions to highlight what the supply chain industry needs to know. Below are four trends marketers should have on their radars.
4 marketing predictions to watch out for
1. Customer-Centric Marketing
For B2B companies, customer-centric marketing means buyer-centric marketing. Because the cost of switching vendors is increasingly low, and the buyer is faced with endless choices, it’s likely that 2017 will see “an aggressive shift in attention toward increasing customer spend.”
This means increasing your focus on building and cultivating relationships. Marketo suggests that companies balance their marketing spend to “invest in building engagement, brand loyalty, and advocacy with current customers rather than just finding new ones.”
It’s likely that technology will play a big role in this 2017 trend. Your company needs marketing team members who are tech-savvy and who know how to analyze and respond to customers’ digital signals.
Focusing on the customer also means building authentic connections and a move toward “giving as much as you get, if not more.” We’ll see more and more customer advocacy, which means that marketers need to focus on taking relationships beyond the transactional. Marketo recommends “providing them with opportunities to showcase their expertise and be recognized by their peers as leaders and innovators.”
The key takeaway: 2017 is the year of building quality relationships.
2. A New Generation of Marketers
We used to live in a marketing climate where specialization was the key to success — no longer is that the case. Your business needs leaders who are “full-brain marketers,” multi-talented generalists who are comfortable handling challenges from the creative design to demand generation — and beyond.
It’s time to abandon thinking in silos. Marketo recommends that your marketing team be in constant connection with other teams within the company. “B2B marketers can now use technology to ensure their sales team have visibility and participation in programs — versus being isolated from critical activities.”
This kind of structural shift requires openness and humility. Marketers need to be willing to take questions and ask them, and to be open to making changes based on increased intra-business collaboration.
Marketo predicts that 2017 will see the perfect storm hit the marketing world, bringing an intersection between fulfilling customer needs, storytelling, and digital interactions. Your company needs to look at its organization and build deep expertise across these three functions. “Any marketing organization that’s missing one of these three functions is destined for failure,” warns Marketo.
This new generation of marketers means that top-performing B2B companies will be making optimal use of technology and data. You need to be investing in resources and technology to drive data enrichment and data governance activities to set a good foundation for your account-based marketing strategy. This also means working closely with sales to understand their thought process for lead prioritization and acceptance.
Here, the key to success is open communication within your organization.
3. Techniques
Marketo has laid out a new equation for how marketers will incorporate techniques to engage buyers at every stage of the cycle:
Inbound + Broad-based lead generation + Account-based marketing + Paid media personalization + Direct marketing = Successful customer engagement
What does this mean for the supply chain? Your company can use a combination of these strategies to engage prospects. For example, combining account-based marketing (ABM) strategies with broad-based strategies will allow marketers to build long-term customer relationships, while bridging their advertising and marketing technologies to demonstrate ROI.
All this focus on ABM solutions will allow marketers to become more efficient, taking advantage of cutting-edge technologies. Marketo suggests creating a detailed ABM plan for all departments, which includes creative marketing ideas to test, as well as new technologies.
It’s time to harness the technology at your fingertips.
4. Content & Channels
2017 is likely to usher in a return to value over volume, both in content assets and in content distribution channels. It’s time to stop creating content for the sake of creating content and to shift toward “deeply listening to and understanding the customer.” This will allow you to cull some of the content and channels that aren’t benefitting your business.
It’s easier than you might think to put this trend into practice. Marketo suggests starting by “deeply understanding the content you already have, and taking the time to evaluate what resonates and what doesn’t.” Next, you can create a plan to keep your content strategy going forward in a meaningful way.
As far as channels go, user experience, particularly for mobile, is going to be increasingly important. You can prepare for this by adding structured data to your site, and by providing valuable content. It’s important to keep a watch on the changing user behavior and expectations, as it will be the biggest driver of change in SEO.
As algorithms continually change, and chronological timeline updates increasingly being phased out, social media channels will put more focus on individuals over brands — this means an absence in brands showing up in feeds organically. You can rise to this challenge by making real-time engagement a priority.
We’ll also see ad inventory becoming tighter and more expensive across social platforms. This means you’ll need to become more specific about the audiences you target, and make your offers increasingly personalized and relevant. Marketo adds the hopeful prediction that “advertisers will benefit from more ways to track offline conversions and non-immediate revenue.”
As email technology advances, email campaigns will begin to predict the content you want and really need. The end result here is “targeted, personalized communications optimized for each person, based on their online and email behaviors.”
The takeaway for content in 2017 is: quality over quantity.
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by Fronetics | Oct 26, 2016 | Big Data, Blog, Content Marketing, Data/Analytics, Marketing
Big-data insights can help you segment your email database to better target prospects based on where they are in the buyers’ journey.
Most companies these days are swimming in a sea of big data, the great swaths of information they’ve amassed from sales records, social media connections, website leads and contacts, and online analytics.
At first glance it’s a tangle of information that is hard to organize and even harder to learn anything from. That’s a stumbling block that forward-looking businesses need to overcome. Big data can help breathe new life into one of the most reliable yet shopworn tools of the trade: email campaigns.
Embrace Big Data
A study by the executive head-hunting firm Spencer Stuart surveyed 171 companies regarding big-data usage. Just a little over half of the companies used their big data to help guide email, SEO, and SMS marketing campaigns. That’s a fairly low rate, given the potential leg-up that big data can provide.
Consider what Walmart is doing. The company has big-data information on about 60% of all Americans, with which it micro-targets customers based on their individual interests and habits. It’s a powerful strategy that is spreading quickly to businesses of all sizes.
How can you use big data to freshen up your email campaigns?
Be a Collector, Not a Hoarder
Chances are, you are obtaining a lot of data, especially if you have an active content marketing plan in place. Not all of the data you get is equally important. Your focus should be on data that can lead to an actionable and quick response — for example, are you gathering information on your customers’ buying habits? Do you know who they are, where they are, what their interests are, what their email address is, and how your business connects with them?
Collect that relevant data and study it. Much of it will come from the buyer’s journey — the breadcrumbs that potential buyers leave for you in your big data. These pieces of information are keys to your personalized email responses.
Respond In Kind
Most experts agree that a quick and targeted email response is a good strategy for encouraging a new customer to make a purchase. The email needs to respond directly to the buyer’s interests — using information you’ve (hopefully) logged with your big data.
From this point on, it’s crucial to make sure that every email that is sent to that buyer is built around a backbone of big data. Nurture your customers with personalized emails that offer content and deals that line up with their specific interests.
Don’t Mess with the Masses
Mass emails — the generic sales pitch email — used to be the cost-effective and simple way of reaching and converting customers. Now, it’s more than likely they’ll get sent to the trash, or worse, the spam filter. The mass email is your one-way ticket to spam purgatory.
“Traditional methods of mass marketing doesn’t resonate anymore and they’re being ignored by the audience,” said Volker Hildebrand, Global Vice President of Strategy at SAP Hybris, in a recent interview with Forbes. “Data is the fuel for customer engagement, and being able to pull together all the relevant information about in real-time.”
You can do better than the mass email approach. If you’ve collected relevant data and you’ve studied your buyers’ journeys, you have the tools in place to build a smart email campaign. Tailor your campaign to personalize your approach to your customers, and more than likely they’ll open that email.
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by Fronetics | Jul 19, 2016 | Blog, Content Marketing, Data/Analytics, Marketing, Social Media
This is part three of a three-part series on Twitter for B2B. See part one, Twitter for B2B, and part two, Tweet This: 20 Ideas for Twitter Content for the Supply Chain.
Leverage insights from Twitter’s analytics dashboard to improve audience engagement, reach, and content development.
Twitter is among the most popular social media platforms for companies in the logistics and supply chain industries. In fact, 95% report that Twitter is somewhat or very impactful on business. Yet 81% say that information on tracking and measuring ROI would be helpful to their business’ use of social media.
Fortunately, Twitter offers users a free tool that details how your tweets are performing and what your audience is interested in. In fact, Twitter Analytics can help you better understand your followers and refine your Twitter strategy to increase your engagement.
Here are the basic features of Twitter Analytics that you need to know.
Account home
Your account homepage offers a high-level overview of your Twitter activity in the last 28 days as compared to the previous period. This dashboard also provides information about your activity in the current month, including:
- Total tweets, impressions, profile visits, new followers, and mentions
- Your top follower, who has the most reach in your network each month
- Which tweet mentioning your name (“mention”) had the most engagement
Scroll down to see the same details for previous months.
Tweet activity
This dashboard provides metrics for each tweet in the last 28 days. You can see impressions, engagement, and engagement rate by tweet. Click on an individual tweet to get the details on engagement broken down by likes, link clicks, retweets, or replies. You can also see the day-by-day breakdown of total lkes, link clicks, retweets, and replies.
Audience insights
This is one of the most useful dashboards for insight on your followers, their behaviors, and interests. Smart marketers can use this information to better understand the kinds of content that resonates best with their audience.
The dashboard is broken down into 5 tabs:
1) Overview
See how your audience has grown over time, as well as gender breakdown, household income and net worth. Other features include:
- Interests (e.g., technology, politics, financial news, etc.)
- Consumer buying style (e.g., premium brands, gluten-free, healthy living, etc.)
- Wireless carrier
2) Audience demographics
This tab tell you about:
- Gender
- Country and region
- Language
- Household income, net worth, and home value
3) Lifestyle
Get insight into your followers regarding:
4) Consumer behavior
Learn about your followers’ buying styles:
- Aftermarket auto buyer type (including the last time they purchased a vehicle)
- Consumer buying style
- Consumer goods purchases
5) Mobile footprint
Discover information about your followers’ mobile behaviors:
- Wireless carrier
- Device categories (device type) and mobile/desktop breakdown
In addition to seeing this information for your followers, you can also filter by organic audience and the entire Twitter community to compare.
Events
Events gives you insights into how the Twitter community is discussing certain events or trends, like the Republican National Convention, Tour de France, Independence Day: Resurgence, or Throwback Thursday. Click on an event to learn about the audience that’s engaging in conversation about that topic.
Videos
The videos dashboard collects metrics on your video content. In addition to views, learn how long users are watching your videos and where users stop watching.
Twitter cards
Twitter cards allow you to include rich media in your tweets, and this dashboard helps you track how that content is being shared. You can view the following features:
- Snapshot: An overview of how your content is performing on Twitter
- Change over time
- Sources: The most popular platforms from which users send tweets linking to your content (e.g., TweetDeck, Twitter for iPhone)
- Best practices: Personalized tips for improving your content’s performance
Campaign dashboard
If you are using Twitter Ads, the campaign dashboard allows you to track the results of your ad campaigns. Check how your ads are performing in terms of:
- Impressions: This is how many times your ads have been seen by Twitter users.
- Results: These are the actions that are tied to your objectives. For example, if your goal is website visits, the results tracked will be link clicks.
- Engagement rate: This is the number of impressions for your ads, divided by the number of results.
- Cost per result: This is how much you’re paying, on average, for each relevant action people are taking from your ads.
You can see these results across all campaigns, or segmented by:
- Your different objectives: See the average results for your website clicks campaigns, or the average results for your followers’ campaigns.
- Individual campaigns: See how specific campaigns are performing against your goals.
- Individual tweets: See which combinations of copy and creative are contributing the most to your campaigns.
- Targeting criteria: See which of your targeted audiences are responding the most to your ads.
Other features
Conversion tracking
Set up conversion tracking to follow what happens after users view your ads. This way, when users click on one of your links, retweet, like, or simply see your tweet and then go to your site, you’ll know where they came from.
Get high-performing tweets in front of a larger audience with Quick promote. Choose your tweet; click “Promote;” target a location (worldwide, country, state/province/region or metro area); and select your budget.
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