by Fronetics | Feb 20, 2018 | Blog, Content Marketing, Current Events, Logistics, Marketing, Social Media, Supply Chain
One of 2018’s fastest growing marketing trends is influencer marketing. Companies will increase their influencer marketing budget to keep up with the competition.
You’ve probably heard the buzzword by now: Influencer marketing seems to be on the tip of every marketer’s tongue these days. Linqia’s latest report, The State of Influencer Marketing 2018, shows that B2C companies are already taking full advantage of this marketing trend. Their report shows that 86% of B2C marketers used influencer marketing in 2017, and 92% of marketers that tried it found it to be effective.
B2B marketers, on the other hand, have been slower to adopt this new marketing trend. Influence 2.0 – The Future of Influencer Marketing Research Report 2017 showed that only 11% of B2B marketers have an ongoing influencer program.
To understand why influencer marketing is becoming so popular and why B2B companies need to jump on the trend, let’s start with the basics.
What is influencer marketing?
Influencer marketing is a form of marketing in which focus is placed on influential people, rather than the target market as a whole. Marketers identify individuals that have influence over potential buyers and create marketing campaigns and activities around these influencers.
For example, Microsoft teamed up with National Geographic last year to launch an influencer marketing campaign, called “Make What’s Next.” The technology giant leveraged some of the most famous adventure photographer influencers on Nat Geo’s Instagram for the campaign. The objective was to bring awareness to young women with interest in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM). By utilizing Nat Geo’s most heavily followed female photographers, Microsoft was able to access a built-in following.
Why influencer marketing works.
Influencer marketing is extremely effective because of three key components:
- Social reach: Influencers can reach millions of followers (and consumers) through their social media channels, websites, and blogs.
- Original content: Influencers work with marketers to produce original content for your brand.
- Consumer trust: Through their existing, strong relationships with their audiences, influencers have a built-in level of trust and can influence consumer opinions.
Content marketers are working overtime to update their content marketing strategies to include influencer marketing campaigns. Consumers no longer want to hear from brands about their products; they want someone they trust to recommend products and services. This is where influencer marketing comes in to play.
Marketers across industries found influencer marketing to be so effective in 2017, that 52% of are planning programs that leverage multiple types of influencers (celebrities, top-tier bloggers, micro-influencers) in 2018.
Where do you begin?
Instagram should be your starting point. According to new research, influencer marketing on Instagram will have generated over $1 billion by the end of 2017, with significant annual growth going forward. With more than 700 million users, Instagram’s platform allows influencers to easily share photos and videos with their followers. Product promotion has never been easier.
Boxed Water turned to Instagram influencer marketing to market its philanthropic campaign, The ReTree Project. The company paired with social influencers, like actors Aidan Alexander and Jaime King, and YouTube star Megan De Angelis, to spread the word about their new campaign. These popular Instagram users asked consumers to post a photo with the hashtag #ReTree and, in turn, Boxed Water would plant two trees for every photo posted. Just one month after launching the campaign, Boxed Water generated more than 2,600 posts with the hashtag.
With 39% of marketers planning to increase influencer marketing budget this year, B2B companies are quickly seeing the leverage that influencers can have over their target audiences. By pairing your products or services with the right influencer, marketers can easily tap into thousands of potential consumers, increasing website traffic and leads.
Have you tried influencer marketing? How was your experience?
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by Fronetics | Jun 15, 2017 | Blog, Content Marketing, Logistics, Marketing, Social Media, Supply Chain
A global marketing survey finds that many businesses are focusing on these initiatives and challenges.
As more supply chain and logistics companies understand the benefits of content marketing, more are turning to this type of marketing strategy to build brand awareness and grow business. One of the functions of this blog is to update you on various marketing trends to help you keep pace with the rapidly evolving digital marketing landscape.
The State of Inbound has been tracking global marketing and sales trends for the last eight years, with a particular focus on inbound marketing. (Content marketing is a form of inbound marketing.) The 2017 survey included more than 6,300 professionals at from 141 countries — so it’s very comprehensive.
There’s a lot to look through in the full report, but I’ve pulled out a few of the most important takeaways that speak to trends we’re finding most relevant to our supply chain clients.
5 takeaways from the State of Inbound 2017
1) Inbound marketing results in higher ROI.
The vast majority of respondents (46%) agree that inbound marketing helps them achieve higher ROI, as opposed to 12% who say outbound marketing achieves a higher return. (For the record, 23% can’t or don’t calculate ROI, and 18% don’t know.)
If you’re not convinced about the benefits of an inbound strategy like content marketing, here are 5 reasons supply chain and logistics businesses need to use content marketing.
2) There is a growing chasm between leadership and employees’ perception of success.
Executives who set the strategy and vision for their companies perceive things differently than the employees executing that vision. For example, while 69% of C-suite executives believe their organization’s marketing strategy is effective, only 55% of individual contributors do.
Are executives seeing benefits of marketing they’re not sharing with the team? Or, do they have misconceptions about how things are working? Either way, there seems to be room for improvement regarding transparency and communication from the top down and bottom up.
3) Gaining customers is a top challenge.
When asked about their top marketing challenges, 63% of respondents agree generating traffic and leads was their biggest concern. (Proving ROI of marketing activities was second with 40%.)
We hear this all the time. Our first response is usually, if you want more leads, focus on brand awareness. Secondly, it’s important to make sure your content strategy closely aligns with your business goals and that you’re creating content that suits your target audience at various stages of the buyer’s journey.
4) Video marketing is the next big investment.
When asked about expansion to new content distribution channels in the next 12 months, respondents most often said they plan to add YouTube (48%) and Facebook video (46%). This reflects the growing popularity of video as a content medium — and YES, it can work for the supply chain and logistics industries.
We’ve written extensively about this topic. Here are a few posts that may interest you if you’re curious how video might fit in your content strategy.
5) Companies need to focus on sales and marketing alignment.
Only 22% of respondents say their sales and marketing relationship is tightly aligned. That’s a big problem.
Sales and marketing teams that are aligned perform better. In this survey, for example, sales teams closely aligned with their marketing counterparts ranked the quality of marketing-sourced leads much higher than those that were rarely aligned or misaligned. That shows that when marketing and sales work together, everyone gets more of what they’re looking for — namely, leads!
Looking at these 5 trends, how does your company line up? Do these challenges resonate, or are you focused on other initiatives and problems?
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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 | Sep 22, 2016 | Blog, Content Marketing, Logistics, Marketing, Supply Chain
Companies in the supply chain and logistics industries should take note of these 19 content marketing trends.
Joe Pulizzi of the Content Marketing Institute recently revealed his predictions for the biggest trends in content marketing for 2017. As the leader of CMI, Pulizzi dedicates much of his time discussing where content marketing is heading with enterprise marketers around the world.
Since 88% of B2B marketers use content marketing as a part of their marketing programs, you’ll likely see some of these trends and issues arising among your competitors, your clients, and, ideally, your company in the near future. As you start to strategize for next year and beyond, be sure to consider these ideas in your supply chain marketing plans.
Creation of a real content marketing strategy
We can’t say it enough: Organizations that have a documented content marketing strategy are more likely to be successful than those that don’t. You would never operate a business without 1) creating a strategy, 2) documenting it, 3) following the strategy, and you should feel the same way about your marketing plan. Here are a few resources to get you started:
Native advertising
Native advertising is a paid, content-based promotion delivered in stream, within the same format as the channel the reader (or viewer) is using. Think of sponsored updates on LinkedIn, which look just like regular posts, or when a radio DJ promotes a product within the regular broadcast. I’ll be writing more about native advertising in the coming months and how the supply chain might use this opportunity as part of their content marketing efforts.
Influencer marketing
Forbes describes influencer marketing as, “A nonpromotional approach to marketing in which brands focus their efforts on opinion leaders, as opposed to direct target market touchpoints.” Basically, highly visible people become brand advocates by employing your products or services in their everyday lives. There are earned influencers, influential people who use your product regularly because they like it. And there are paid influencers, who receive compensation for using certain brands. More to come on this topic as well.
Purpose-driven marketing
Companies can appeal to a target audience by promoting their shared interest in a worthy cause through content. Examples from the supply chain include these six companies that are doing well by doing good.
Video and Visual
Video is not just for funny cats and cover artists anymore — it’s the most popular form of content being consumed online. Smart marketers are developing a visual storytelling strategy that offers consistent delivery of valuable content. Consider how your business might utilize features like Facebook Live or channels like YouTube.
Snapchat
Yes — Snapchat. Before you roll your eyes, check out this convincing article, Why Snapchat Will Be Great for B2B Companies, by Gary Vaynerchuk of Vayner Media. Keep your eyes on this social media platform in the coming year.
Facebook
One thing about Facebook you can count on is that it will always be evolving and adding features to keep up with user preferences. Also, Pulizzi is convinced businesses can do better when it comes to promoting content on this platform. Companies should keep a close eye on what’s to come with Facebook in the near future and how organizations are using it to distribute content and generate leads.
Teams and workflow
Take a good look at content production in your organization. Do blog posts go unedited? Are projects frequently late? Is your team clear about who needs to approve what? A strategic, consistent way to track and complete content-based projects can help streamline production and improve efficiency — not to mention quality.
Content strategy (pipes and process)
Developing a strategy that helps your organization scale its content-production efforts, re-purpose existing content across multiple channels, and properly leverage user experience and technology is key to content marketing success.
Mobile
Google announced in May 2015 that the number of searches on mobile devices has now surpassed those conducted on desktops in the U.S. And we know that reality isn’t limited to personal internet use. Evidence suggests B2B buyers are increasingly using mobile devices to do research, make inquiries, and purchase products. If your website and marketing emails aren’t mobile-friendly, your company is missing out the significant share of customers who demand mobile-optimized content. Try these tips:
Content technology
The marketing software market is expected to grow to more than $32.3 billion by 2018. The number of options companies have is almost blinding. Count on content technology to continue to demand a lot of attention — and, potentially, financial resources — in the next few years.
Writing
Josh Bernoff’s recent article in the Harvard Business Review hits the nail on the head: Bad Writing is Destroying Your Company’s Productivity. In a vast sea of crappy content, superior writing and storytelling can make your business stand out, win customer’s trust, and earn new business. Here are some resources:
Integration with sales
Integrating your sales and marketing teams is one of the most impactful ways to leverage content to gain new customers. For example, merging one of our clients’ sales and marketing databases to improve team communications played an important role in helping the company increase new business by 30%.
ROI and measurement
Making a business case for content marketing is one of the top priorities for the majority of B2B marketers year after year. Check out these resources:
Email and marketing automation
Marketing automation can expand your content’s impact, improve conversion rates, generate leads, and drive repeat purchases. Additionally, it can remove cumbersome manual tasks from your content workflow, freeing up your resources to add value to other, more meaningful tasks. Pulizzi says an expert recently revealed to him that companies are utilizing approximately only 10% of the functionality behind marketing automation — meaning, there’s much room for improvement in this area.
Content distribution and promotion
Even the best, most valuable content is worthless if it fails to reach your target audience. Companies are now focusing on the strategic distribution of their content assets to ensure their success.
Executive buy-in
Earning C-suite support for content marketing is a challenge for many marketers in the supply chain and logistics industries. See “ROI and measurement” above for some resources to support your efforts to win executive buy-in.
Global integration
Organizations and their supply chains continue to become more complex and global in scale. This can put a strain on communication, processes, meeting customer needs and expectations, etc. Content marketing strategies should account for the challenges of global operations.
Construction of a media organization
Pay attention to the recent flux of organizations purchasing media companies or properties to become media enterprises. Microsoft’s purchase of LinkedIn comes to mind, as well as Arrow Electronics’ acquisition of a number of technical and media properties from UBM.
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