by Fronetics | Mar 21, 2019 | Blog, Content Marketing, Logistics, Manufacturing & Distribution, Marketing, Supply Chain
When it comes to growing your material handling business, digital marketing can set your company apart, capture quality leads, and keep your sales pipeline full.
Highlights:
- Material handling is extremely competitive and faces challenges like rising interest rates, trade policies that are increasingly inhospitable, and a scarcity of skilled labor, among others.
- Blog posts, e-books, tip sheets, guides, case studies, videos, and other forms of content go a long way toward attracting prospects to your digital assets.
- Arming your sales rep with targeted content to share with prospects during specific moments of the purchasing process advances their reputation as a knowledge source.
Last year, the MAPI Foundation predicted an average of 2.8% growth in manufacturing over the next three years, as well as an increase in capital equipment expenditure by over twice that. For makers of material handling equipment like conveyers, lift-trucks, and handling structures, MAPI’s forecast is good news.
As with all aspects of the supply chain industry, material handling is extremely competitive and faces challenges like rising interest rates, trade policies that are increasingly inhospitable, and a scarcity of skilled labor, among others.
For your business to participate in the forecasted global growth, your best bet is a sales funnel that’s consistently filled with quality prospects. But how do you make that happen?
Here’s where content marketing can help.
Digital marketing keeps you visible to your highest quality prospects
In the fiercely competitive material handling landscape, in which potential customers have a wide array of options, marketers face the challenge of visibility within the industry. Setting your business apart from your competition is obviously crucial to cultivating and captivating leads.
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Perhaps your best strategy for achieving this kind of visibility is content. Blog posts, e-books, tip sheets, guides, case studies, videos — all these forms of content go a long way toward attracting prospects to your digital assets, building trust, growing your reputation, and, ultimately, converting leads.
Generating leads with content
A content-rich site has great advantages in terms of SEO (for more on this, check out our four-part series on writing for SEO), which is key to visibility. Creating quality content and structuring your site effectively will help capture leads. As developing and sharing content attracts prospects to your site, effective calls-to-action (CTAs) drive prospects to share their contact information in exchange for information that has value for them.
Keep in mind when planning and creating your content that your goal is not to push your products — a mistake many material handling marketers make. Instead, use your content to demonstrate to prospects that you have a deep understanding of their business and the unique needs and challenges they face. Offer useful information for each stage of the buyer’s journey. Remember, the most valuable asset you have to offer is your knowledge and expertise.
Align content with sales
Keeping your sales pipeline full is your goal when it comes to competing in the material handling marketplace. Arming your sales rep with targeted content to share with prospects during specific moments of the purchasing process advances their reputation as a knowledge source. That can be the key to getting a foot in the door, advancing through the final stages of a purchasers’ decision, or closing the deal.
When digital marketing and sales work together, you’ll see the results hit your bottom line. Curating and creating great content will generate quality leads for your company. And it also empowers your sales force to build relationships with potential customers — and close the sale.
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by Fronetics | Sep 11, 2017 | Blog, Content Marketing, Marketing, Social Media, Strategy
Social prospecting can help logistics and supply chain companies identify and engage with leads on social media in a genuine — and highly effective — way.
Social media should be an integral part of your marketing strategy. You know it helps build brand awareness, gather market intelligence, discover customer problems, and influence purchasing decisions. But your lead generation efforts should also include the use of social platforms. It’s a practice called social prospecting, which can be highly effective in identifying new prospects.
What is social prospecting?
With more than 2 billion monthly active users on Facebook and over 328 million monthly active users on Twitter, smart marketers know there’s more potential than ever to use social platforms to get their name out there, spread their content, and draw more people to their site. Hey, it’s your job to make people aware of what your company can offer, right? Right.
That’s where social prospecting comes in. It involves scouring the social web, identifying potential prospects for your business, engaging them with content, and getting those potential prospects to your sales team. “Social prospecting is the art of listening to people, not mentions or keywords,” writes Maggie Hibma for HubSpot.
Social media isn’t just for recreational purposes anymore. More than half (53%) of B2B buyers report using social media to research purchases, in fact. Social prospecting allows you to be proactive in finding all of the considerable number of social-media-using prospects who are looking for you, too.
But as with any initiative, social prospecting requires commitment. In order to find new leads, social prospecting needs to become a part of your daily routine. The end results will be quality leads that are already committed to your brand because of the connection you have created through social channels.
Creating positive impressions
The secret behind successful social prospecting is creating and distributing content that shows that you and your company genuinely care about your clients and prospects. It’s about ditching the ‘sales’ game and working to establish your brand as an industry leader that has a connection to your community and a lot of valuable insight to share.
Make your content about your target consumers: What do they need to know, struggle with, or want to learn more about? By distributing this content across social channels to foster sharing, conversation and engagement, you’ll gain influence with your audience (and their networks) and make a positive impression.
Prospecting vs. spamming
The definition of spam is “indiscriminately.” It means “in a random manner” or “in a way that does not show care or judgment.” This is the opposite of how social prospecting should work. The connection that you create with your prospects should be anything but random.
Think about the number of possible prospects on social media right now. Facebook just topped 2 billion active users monthly, and Instagram is pulling in over 250 million daily active users. These massive numbers scream opportunity — but only if you are putting your time and effort into the right people, on the right channels, at the right time.
Sounds complicated? It doesn’t have to be. If you already have a social media presence, that’s step one.
Fronetics’ recently updated Social Prospecting Workbook guides you through using social listening to generate new leads for your business. We’ve identified the quickest way to find potential customers on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and Google+. Every worksheet includes:
- Short preparatory work to make the actual prospecting easy
- Visual instructions on how and where to find prospects
- Pro tips that will help you get the best results
- Prescriptions (Marketing Rx) for success
- Take-home exercises for follow-up prospecting
Download it now, and let us know what you think!
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by Fronetics | Jul 26, 2016 | Blog, Content Marketing, Marketing, Social Media, Strategy
Your business should be on social media showing buyers that you know what they want and that your business can provide it.
Once again B2B buyers reported that their purchase cycle has increased since last year. That’s in part because they are scrutinizing potential vendors more closely than ever before. Buyers overwhelmingly reported spending more time conducting research (80%) and using more sources to investigate purchases (73%).
You may be surprised to learn that one of those sources is social media, more often than not. More than half (53%) of B2B buyers report turning to social media to make buying decisions. What’s more, more than a third (34%) say they are spending more time this year than last using social media to research vendors and solutions.
Social media should be a critical component of your lead generation and nurturing strategy. Your business should use these platforms to prove that you understand what buyers are expecting from your brand. The 2016 B2B Buyer’s Survey Report found that today’s B2B buyers expect:
- Timely responses to messaging: Demonstrating a timely response to questions helped make the sale 98% of the time.
- Strong knowledge of the company and its needs: Personalization ranked as the second most influential reason a buyer chooses a specific vendor. When researching potential products, 64% gravitated toward companies that demonstrated “a stronger knowledge of our company and its needs.” A whopping 84% chose a vendor that could solve one of their pain points.
- Clear demonstration of ROI: Buyers reported conducting a more detailed ROI analysis before making a purchase. Vendors who can demonstrate how customers will receive their return on investment have a clear advantage. In fact, 90% of businesses that do this make the sale, according to the study.
- Speedy and easy delivery: “Deployment time/ease of use” skyrocketed from 49% in 2015 to 83% this year, leading the ranks as one of the most important variables that can set you apart from your competition. Buyers not only want it quickly, but they want a simple and easy buying process.
Which social media platforms do B2B buyers use most in their research?
The B2B Buyer’s Survey found that buyers primarily are using three social tools to conduct their research.
- LinkedIn is reportedly the most impactful to the research process. (81% said it was very important or somewhat important.)
- Blogs came in second, with more than a third of buyers (37%) ranking it very important.
- Video sites like YouTube and Vimeo are third, with 60% of respondents ranking them very important or somewhat important.
Want your business to connect with the 2.3 billion worldwide social media users? Get Fronetics’ free social prospecting workbook to learn how to use these platforms to generate new leads and sales for your business.
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by Fronetics | Mar 8, 2016 | Blog, Marketing, Social Media, Strategy
Social prospecting helps you identify potential customers outside your established audience using social platforms.
Social media should be an integral part of your marketing strategy — we know it helps build brand reputation, gather market intelligence, discover customer problems, and influence purchasing decisions. But your lead generation efforts should also include the use of social platforms. It’s a practice called social prospecting that can be highly effective in identifying new prospects.
You’ll use your existing social handles to identify and pursue potential customers that may be interested in your business but that don’t yet know about it. HubSpot describes social prospecting: “It’s about scouring the social web, identifying potential prospects, and engaging them through content to get them to your site and move them through your funnel.”
Why does it work?
Think about the size of your established audience. Now think about the total number of active users on social media: As of the fourth quarter of 2015, Facebook had 1.59 billion active monthly users, Twitter averaged at 305 million, LinkedIn had 414 million, Google+ had 111 million, and Pinterest had more than 100 million. Those enormous numbers equal enormous potential for your business.
That’s because social media isn’t just for recreational purposes anymore. More than half (53%) of B2B buyers report using social media to research purchases, in fact. Social prospecting allows you to be proactive in finding all of the considerable number of social-media-using prospects who are looking for you, too.
How do you get started?
If you already have a social media presence, that’s step one. It gets a little more complicated from there.
Fronetics has developed a free social prospecting workbook to learn how to use social listening to generate new leads for your business. We’ve identified the quickest way to find potential customers on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and Google+. Every worksheet includes:
- Short preparatory work to make the actual prospecting easy
- Visual instructions on how and where to find prospects
- Pro tips that will help you get the best results
- Prescriptions (Marketing Rx) for success
- Take-home exercises for follow-up prospecting
Happy prospecting!
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by Fronetics | Aug 13, 2014 | Blog, Marketing, Social Media, Strategy, Supply Chain
Leads are essential to the growth of your business. Social media is an effective way to find new leads.
Social media allows you to find new leads by doing something called social prospecting. Social prospecting is the art of searching the social web, identifying potential prospects for your business, and engaging them in a manner that draws them to your company’s website and through your funnel.
Social prospecting
At the core, social prospecting is about listening. It is about listening to social media conversations in order to generate leads for your business. It’s beyond monitoring keywords. It’s about engaging people that may or may not know what your business can do for them.
Workbook
We’ve identified the quickest way to find potential prospects on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and Google+ and compiled them in a workbook. Every worksheet includes: a short preparatory work to make the actual prospecting easy; visual instructions on how and where to find prospects; pro tips that will help you get the best results; prescriptions (Marketing Rx) for success; and take-home exercises for follow-up prospecting
Get started
Want to get started? Simply download the workbook.
