by Fronetics | Jan 28, 2020 | Blog, Logistics, Marketing, Social Media, Supply Chain
Digital marketing over social media is a trend that continues to grow, but it’s only effective if you’re doing it right. Here are social media mistakes supply chain brands are still making.
Highlights:
- When it’s done right, there’s no greater tool for your company to increase brand awareness and generate leads than an engaged presence on social media platforms.
- Knowing what content hits home with your followers and potential followers is crucial.
- The most successful companies on social media are the ones that find innovative and creative ways to engage with users.
It’s no mystery why approximately 81 percent of small and medium businesses maintain a social media presence. With 3.5 billion users worldwide, social media is a dream come true for businesses looking to reach a ton of potential customers.
Digital marketing over social media is a trend that continues to grow, as more businesses jump on the social media bandwagon. When it’s done right, there’s no greater tool for your company to increase brand awareness and generate leads than an engaged presence on social media platforms. But it can be virtually useless if your company isn’t doing it right.
Traditional marketing strategies may be misleading for companies hoping to connect with customers over social media. And familiar ways of using social media for personal use can also lead marketers astray. The most effective use of social media for your business centers on knowing your audience and positioning your brand within the right conversations, rather than promoting your product or service.
Are you making social media mistakes? Check out our list of the most common blunders we see companies making to find out.
Mistake #1: Not knowing the audience
Everyone understands how a billboard works. It advertises something for sale where it can be seen by as many people as possible. But for companies looking to increase their effectiveness, that’s a big social media mistake. The most important thing a brand can do on social media is to engage dynamically with other users. And to do that, companies first have to figure out who their audience really is.
It’s surprising how often brands don’t have a clear idea of who they’re trying to connect with on social media. Knowing what content hits home with your followers and potential followers is crucial. And collecting followers and promoting your brand visibility with the right audience means figuring out what other interests your target demographics might have.
So, how do you develop a profile of who your audience is? The first step is to put together a detailed description of your target buyer persona. It’s important to consider details such as the location, education level, and role in the industry of the buyers you’re hoping to reach. Based on this profile, marketers can more precisely pinpoint the needs and concerns of their target audience. This is vital for being able to anticipate the groups to join where potential buyers are most likely to be found.
Bottom line: engage with your audience! Once you have figured out who that audience is, join groups, encourage and leave comments, and pay attention to what your followers care about.
Mistake #2: Using objectives instead of strategy
The best way to use social media for digital marketing involves developing a clear strategy for attracting followers, delivering content, and achieving an ROI. Unlike personal use of social media, effective digital marketing depends on maintaining a regular schedule of generating content. Knowing how often to post content or update profiles can make a huge difference for staying on the top of newsfeeds at key times of day.
Generating new content is crucial for keeping followers engaged and attracting the attention of potential new followers. A variety of different kinds of content prevents followers from tuning out or skimming past your company’s posts. Partnering with brand ambassadors and market influencers boosts the organic visibility of your brand: by working with prominent social media users, your company can benefit from dynamic interactions with brand ambassadors who your target audience follows and views as authentic.
Following a strategy can also help achieve and measure your ROI. It can be particularly difficult to prove the ROI of a company’s participation in social media, so it’s especially important to use analytics tools for tracking how your social media presence is doing. Social Media Examiner’s 2018 Social Media Marketing Industry Report found that only 44 percent of marketers agree that they know how to measure social media ROI, leaving two-thirds of marketers aren’t sure whether their efforts online are paying off. Measuring defined goals against analytics data can help your company identify and react to effective techniques, and improve your social media standing.
Mistake #3: Using the most popular social media platforms
Although the social media platforms with the most users may seem like the most effective platforms for digital marketing, platforms that allow you to engage with your audience can carry more weight than more popular platforms.
All social media channels have a differentiating quality that makes them appealing to specific audiences. So, start by identifying where your target audience is spending their time. For instance, if you are interested in reaching millennial buyers, then your social media efforts should definitely include platforms such as Twitter that millennials tend to use on at least a daily basis.
Once you’ve determined the most effective platforms for your company to concentrate on, be sure to tailor your content to those platforms. Although it’s easy to post the same content across all your accounts simultaneously, the foundation of social engagement is authenticity. Especially with automation tools, many companies post copied-and-pasted content on multiple platforms all at once. But this strategy risks undermining the authenticity of your brand. Work to create content—including video and images—that caters to specific platforms to build brand awareness and loyalty.
Mistake #4: Promoting instead of connecting
This is the big one! Social media platforms are all about fostering engagement among users. Users don’t want to engage with brands that push their products and services through standard marketing techniques. Instead, users will be drawn to companies that appear engaged with the same interests and objectives that they are. Users want informative, interesting, and, yes, even fun content.
The most successful companies on social media are the ones that find innovative and creative ways to engage with users. Brand loyalty arises from emotional bonds and trust that can form through social media interactions.
Greg Hadden, executive director of Motive Made Studios, sums up the power of connecting with users: “What often gets lost is the fact that good storytelling is potent stuff. It has the power to make people want to believe and to belong, which is the goal of all storytellers. We’re all selling something, be it an idea, an exploration of the human condition, or say, a vacuum cleaner. It’s no mistake perhaps that good stories often create products.”
What social media mistakes do you try to avoid?
This post originally appeared on EPS News.
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by Fronetics | Jun 5, 2019 | Blog, Content Marketing, Logistics, Marketing, Robotics & Automation, Social Media, Supply Chain
When it comes to digital marketing, social media is here to stay. Here’s our four-step guide to leveraging social media for the robotics industry.
Highlights:
- Having a documented strategy is key to reap the benefits of social media marketing.
- Define your audience and establish concrete goals for social media campaigns.
- Set metrics and use data to adjust your strategy consistently over the long term.
The demand for high-performance robotic systems is growing steadily and showing no signs of slowing down. In fact, New Equipment Digest predicts that the robotics vertical within the materials-handling-equipment sector will grow by over 8%, reaching $20 billion by the year 2024. To capture the benefits of the sector’s growth, robotics companies need to invest in digital marketing. Social media for the robotics industry holds tremendous potential — if it’s leveraged properly.
In our work with clients across various verticals in the supply chain, including robotics, we frequently hear that they have been skeptical about the potential of B2B social media use. While social media management does require time and resources, robotics companies should absolutely be reaping the benefits of social media marketing.
Read on for tips on how to create a strategy and leverage social media for the robotics industry.
4 steps to developing a strategy for social media for the robotics industry
1) Define your audience.
For supply chain companies, one of the biggest predictors of success in a social media marketing campaign is a clearly documented strategy. A big part of that is defining your target audience. Chances are, you have some target buyer personas already. Keep these top of mind as you create your social media strategy.
What are the unique needs and challenges faced by your audience? Where do they go online for information? What are their goals? What do they value from you? The more you ask and answer questions about your audience, the better positioned you are to create a strong and effective social media strategy.
2) Determine your goals.
Next, consider what your goals are on social media. You’d be surprised how often this step gets skipped. Marketers are often pressed for time or resources and think of social media marketing itself as a goal, rather than defining specific, measurable objectives for their social media campaigns.
[bctt tweet=”When it comes to social media for the robotics industry, common goals often include increasing brand awareness and authority, generating leads, or establishing thought leadership.” username=”Fronetics”]
When it comes to social media for the robotics industry, common goals often include increasing brand awareness and authority, generating leads, or establishing thought leadership. But before you embark on a social media strategy, consider what your company specifically needs to achieve.
3) Define your metrics.
One of the best things about having documented goals for your social media strategy is that it helps you define what metrics you should be using to track your progress toward those goals. Measuring social media ROI is no easy task, but there are plenty of tools and strategies that can help. While your full list of metrics will be determined by the goals you set, robotics companies should be tracking at least these four metrics:
- Where traffic is coming from
- Revenue derived from posts
- Visitor behavior on your site
- Social media conversions
In addition to the analytics tools offered by social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn, Google Analytics can give you a bird’s eye view of your social media efforts, as well as delving into detail on the metrics that matter most to you. For more, be sure to check out our guide to getting the most out of Google Analytics.
4) Choose your platforms.
Not all social media platforms are created equal. When it comes time to choose your social media platforms and create a strategy for each, it’s important for robotics companies to consider where their audience spends their time online (see step 1).
As you identify what social media channels are the best fit for your company, keep in mind that the characteristics of each platform should inform what content and how often you should be posting. Twitter, for example, lends itself to short-form, pithy content or links and frequent posting, while a more visual platform like Instagram only requires 1-2 posts per day.
Going forward: using your metrics to stay agile
Once your strategy is established, you can simply put it into place, start posting content, and forget about it, right? Wrong. Effective use of social media for the robotics industry requires ongoing evaluation and adjustment.
If you’ve defined the right metrics to track, the data you collect should help you determine where your efforts are successful and where your methods need to be adjusted. As you refine your strategy and learn the needs and preferences of your target audience, you’ll find that social media is an extremely effective tool for capturing leads, broadening your brand’s reach, and building your reputation.
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by Fronetics | May 21, 2019 | Blog, Content Marketing, Data/Analytics, Logistics, Marketing, Supply Chain
Supply chain companies are increasingly recognizing the need to align sales and marketing teams through the use of analytics.
Highlights:
- Sales and marketing alignment can be aided by analytics tools.
- A content audit can ensure sales has relevant material for every stage of the buyer’s journey.
- Digital Asset Management Software acts as a unified repository for content and analytics data.
Often, when we first talk to prospects about digital marketing, their sales teams start to get the jitters. There’s a big misperception out there that inbound marketing is bound to make sales teams obsolete – but this couldn’t be further from the truth. In fact, when companies take steps to align sales and marketing teams, their efforts start to pay off in big ways.
We’ve written a lot about how to align sales and marketing, as well as the dangers that crop up when companies haven’t synchronized these departments. That’s not to say that it’s an easy task. In fact, HubSpot’s 2018 State of Inbound report found that a mere 22% of companies report that their sales and marketing relationship is tightly aligned. Increasingly, supply chain companies are finding success using analytics tools to meet the challenges of aligning sales and marketing teams.
Understand your target audience
If you’re on the marketing side, you probably have a picture of your target audience, including multiple specific buyer personae. But how familiar is your sales team with this information? Chances are, sales has knowledge about your target audience that is based as much on experience as it is on the goals your marketing department created.
If the lines of communication aren’t clear when it comes to understanding your target audience, you’re shortchanging both marketing and sales. The sales department needs clear and complete communication from marketing about the type of buyers being targeted. Meanwhile, the knowledge that sales personnel will have accrued from their on-the-ground experience can help shape future marketing efforts.
To align sales and marketing in their understanding of your target audience, web analytics tools like Google Analytics are extremely beneficial. Use analytics to track user interaction with all your digital assets and build accurate personae that are data-driven. Ideally, analytics can validate and enhance the knowledge that sales teams have built.
Align sales and marketing with content that enables sales in a digital space
One of the most frequent complaints sales teams voice is that they lack relevant materials from marketing. And on the other side of the coin, marketing departments often report that sales teams aren’t clear about their needs, nor do they use the materials they’ve provided.
To get everyone on the same page, perform a content audit to determine which of your existing content matches with each target buyer persona, as well as what content will be most useful to your sales team at each stage of the buyer’s journey. Next, put some analytics in place. You need to know how your content is performing not just from a lead-generation perspective, but from the standpoint of closing deals.
To help you develop a process for evaluating the success of your content and soliciting and incorporating feedback from sales, Digital Asset Management Software is a great resource. Tools like Canto or Bynder can be a synchronized, discoverable repository of marketing assets and their function for sales, as well as help you keep track of your analytics.
Final thoughts
As supply chain companies are increasingly recognizing the need for sales and marketing teams that work in tight alignment, analytics are an invaluable resource for synchronizing efforts across departments. And the possibilities are continuing to expand for what analytics, including artificial intelligence, can do.
Keeping the lines of communication open, and sharing analytics data will help lead to accurate, data-driven buyer personas and an optimally functioning sales team.
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by Fronetics | Apr 4, 2019 | Blog, Content Marketing, Marketing
The best way to come up with creative and engaging content is to think outside the box and sometimes, take risks. Here are 4 rules to break to produce truly creative content.
Highlights:
- Throw out the template approach to content and start thinking about what makes you stand out.
- Don’t be afraid to showcase what you do best through different avenues, like customer or vendor testimonials.
- When you’re committed to curiosity, you naturally become a learning organization and this learning leads to more creative content.
Video transcript:
I’m Elizabeth Hines, and I’m the Creative Director at Fronetics, and today we’re talking about for more creative content, you have to break these four rules.
With over 4 million blog posts published every day, you have to be really creative with your content in order to drive traffic and win over prospects and leads.
So in order to do so, you’re going to have to break these four rules.
1. Mirror competitors
If you’re in this certain industry, then you have to cover these certain topics. You might think because your competitors are covering this certain topic or that certain topic, you should be covering it as well. Not so. You should be covering the topics that are unique to your business, that your company offers expertise in and the ways you stand out from your competitors.
2. Marketing mindset
While your marketing team has a great idea of what is going on in your, some of the best stories and the best blog content comes from your other teams. Maybe your sales team, sometimes your customers or your vendors have a really good prospective or a really good story to tell. And some of the most creative content comes from those unique prospectives.
3. Keep it obvious
It can be really tempting to do a quick brainstorm, come up with a couple good ideas, things that are obvious and things that stand out about your company. But you’re going to get much more creative content if you dig a little deeper. For example, if your first instinct is to talk about self-driving vehicles, a very popular topic right now, can you offer a new perspective on that topic? Can you talk specifically about the sensors that are involved in that technology? Can you talk about government regulations of that technology? What new perspective can you offer to that often talked about conversation?
4. Repeat success
Now this is a little bit controversial because I do encourage you to look at what’s been successful in the past and try to build on that and try to repeat that. But you should also be taking some risks when you’re developing your content calendar. Build in a healthy mix of what’s worked for you in the past, what resonates with your target audience. Then something new, something different, something totally out of left field, because you need to keep experimenting. You need to keep trying new things because your audience is going to evolve and your content should evolve creatively as well.
For more information, visit our website at fronetics.com.
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by Fronetics | Apr 3, 2019 | Blog, Content Marketing, Manufacturing & Distribution, Marketing, Supply Chain
Here’s why manufacturing marketers should skip the sales pitch and create content that prioritizes the needs of their target audience.
Highlights:
- Research indicates that only about half of manufacturing marketers are prioritizing their audience’s needs when creating content.
- Inbound marketing (like content marketing) is more effective than outbound marketing for B2B businesses.
- A documented strategy will help you get started creating focused, quality content.
One statistic is sticking out to me in the Content Marketing Institute’s Manufacturing Content Marketing 2019: Benchmarks, Budgets, and Trends report. According to the research, half (51%) of manufacturing marketers reported that they always or frequently prioritize their sales/promotional message over their audience’s informational needs when creating content for content marketing purposes.
Let’s think about that for a second.
A preponderance of manufacturing content marketers are, unfortunately, missing the point.
We’ve written before about why inbound marketing, like content marketing, is more effective for the supply chain than more traditional outbound marketing techniques. And while it’s true that “the supply chain is increasingly seeing the value of moving to an inbound marketing strategy,” the CMI’s research suggests that it’s taking some marketers a long time.
Why you should be putting your audience’s informational needs first
Why should you be emphasizing your audience’s informational needs over your promotional goals when creating content?
[bctt tweet=”One of the basic premises of content marketing is the recognition that, increasingly, your customers want much more from you than your product.” username=”Fronetics”]
The short answer is: because your audience prefers it. One of the basic premises of content marketing is the recognition that, increasingly, your customers want much more from you than your product. For manufacturing marketers, this means that customers want value separate from and outside of the sales funnel.
Enter content marketing. Creating effective marketing content relies on accepting that your business has much more to offer than its primary products and services. In fact, your most valuable commodity, as we’ve often said before, isn’t any material or service — it’s the knowledge, expertise, and informed, unique perspectives you have to offer.
Strategize to put customers first
To successfully adjust your content marketing efforts to put your customers’ informational needs first, the first step is having a well-defined, measurable strategy — and documenting it. This means defining precisely who you’re trying to reach and developing a complete target buyer persona(s).
Once you’ve defined exactly who you’re trying to reach, it’s time to identify the unique questions, needs, and challenges this target buyer faces. Chances are, your business has not only the products to meet those needs, but also the information to answer question and offer valuable insights.
One of the benefits of a documented strategy, with clearly stated objectives, is that it allows you to set up metrics and evaluate your successes and shortfalls. This is where you can start listening to your target buyers. You can even solicit responses from them via email and social media that will allow you to target and hone your efforts in the future.
Meeting manufacturing marketers’ challenges
The CMI’s research reinforces the fact that manufacturing marketers face unique challenges. The top reported challenge was “creating content that appeals to multi-level roles within the target audience.”
According to Achinta Mitra, founder of Tiecas, an industrial marketing consultancy, “Buying decisions are made by a committee and very rarely, if ever, by an individual. Some of these stakeholders may never interact with your content or visit your site.”
Essentially, there are various types of buyers with various needs — meaning their content needs are different. Mitra advises bringing “subject matter experts to the forefront, and letting marketing do the heavy lifting in the background.” He bases his advice on the belief that “one engineer to another is a powerful concept for earning trust, gaining credibility, and winning the mindshare of engineers and industrial professionals.”
If you’re thinking beyond downloads when creating content, and truly prioritizing quality information, your content will function broadly throughout the complex manufacturing buyer’s journey.
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