by Elizabeth Hines | Jan 16, 2019 | Blog, Content Marketing, Logistics, Marketing, Supply Chain
Digital marketing for the supply chain has become necessary to position your company to not only be found online, but also to be researched, to be compared, and to be concluded upon.
Highlights:
- Digital marketing uses your website, related social media, and other online industry channels to showcase your industry knowledge and experience.
- Thought leaders are the informed trusted sources in their field of expertise.
- Supply chain and logistics industries need content marketing to achieve confidence and relationship-building with buyers.
Today’s B2B buyers are researching, evaluating, and coming to conclusions about companies without a single contact with a team member or salesperson.
This kind of B2B buying landscape requires cutting edge marketing strategies to showcase nut-and-bolt industries that have survived without them for many years.
Digital marketing for the supply chain
Digital marketing for the supply chain uses your website, related social media, and other online industry channels to showcase your industry knowledge and experience (rather than trying to convince people of it with a marketing message).
With inbound digital marketing, you publish relevant, informative information to adds value to every stage of a potential customer’s buying journey.
It is the content that you publish that walks them through the initial stages of the sales process.
What should you publish? A good content marketing strategy is about understanding the questions and concerns that are particular to your customer base, and offering quality information and analysis that answers those needs.
[bctt tweet=”A good content marketing strategy is about understanding the questions and concerns that are particular to your customer base, and offering quality information and analysis that answers those needs.” username=”Fronetics”]
Showcasing thought leadership through digital marketing
Discovering and meeting the needs of your customers that go beyond your products and services will catapult you in their minds as a knowledgeable, helpful “thought leader” in your industry.
Thought leaders are the informed trusted sources in their field of expertise. They have innovative ideas, can showcase their thinking, and can replicate their successes again and again.
Consider it: Your business has so much more to offer than its primary product or service. You have a team of people with a tremendous aggregate of experience, expertise, and perspectives.
Allowing your customers this sort of access to your team’s experience and knowledge provides them with tremendous value outside the sales funnel, which builds trust and cultivates lasting, fruitful relationships.
Why digital marketing?
In this B2B buying landscape, supply chain and logistics industries need content marketing to achieve a level of confidence and relationship-building with buyers that used to come from face-to-face meetings. Potential and current customers will view your company as a valuable resource for everything related to not only your products and services but to the industry as a whole.
No time to execute?
The downside? Content marketing requires significant time, labor, and resources, and it can take quite some time to start reaping benefits. Feeling overwhelmed and like you and your team can’t possibly add on more marketing? Outsourcing certain key marketing tasks allows insourcing your core competencies while delegating specialized tasks to external experts.
This post originally appeared on EBN Online.
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by Fronetics | Oct 3, 2017 | Blog, Content Marketing, Marketing, Social Media, Strategy
Learn how a mobile advertising network and an inbound marketing agency tried Quora as a marketing tool.
Last month, I gave you some tips on how supply chain and logistics marketers can use Quora to build their brands. If you’ve forgotten why you should be incorporating Quora into your marketing strategy, here’s a quick recap:
- Research: Quora offers amazing insight into what thought leaders in the supply chain and logistics industries are focused on. Just by tuning into the conversation, you can gain extremely valuable knowledge.
- Connections: This social media platform gives you a perfect space to connect with peers in your industry and with potential buyers, as well.
- Reputation building: Quora is one of the best tools out there for reputation building. It allows you to participate in and contribute to conversations that can shape the future of your industry. Using this platform effectively gives you the opportunity to become a resource for others in your industry and for your target buyers — and there’s no better reputation builder than that.
Plenty of business are already using Quora extremely effectively, seeing ROI and more. But supply chain and logistics companies have yet to jump on this untapped opportunity. Let’s take a look at a few success stories.
2 B2B companies successfully using Quora
Kiip
This mobile advertising network has a unique business model that “redefines how brands connect with consumers.” Back in 2014, the marketing team did a series of experiments — one of which was answering questions on Quora — to figure out which growth strategies would be most beneficial for the business model. Read about Kiip’s Quora experiment here.
Kevin Fishner, Kiip’s director of growth, said that his goal in answering Quora questions was to “build our brand presence in the mobile advertising space while driving quality leads to our site.” He offers the important insight that there is a fine line between offering valuable answers and blatantly pitching your product.
“If the question directly pertained to Kiip,” Fishner says, “I’d drop a link at the bottom of my answer. If it was a more generic mobile advertising question, I’d use insights from our campaigns at Kiip and leave it at that.”
Fishner points out that answering questions thoughtfully takes a significant time investment. But in the end, this investment is worth it for your business in all kinds of ways.
As you join the Quora conversation, keep Fishner’s insights in mind. Promoting your brand isn’t always about pitching your product. Becoming a thought leader can be just beneficial, if not more so, for your brand and, ultimately, for your bottom line.
IMPACT
Impact is an inbound marketing agency based out of Connecticut. Earlier this year, IMPACT blogger Carolyn Edgecomb wrote about how the company used Quora marketing to build brand awareness. Like Fishner, she points to following core advice for using this platform: “Hustling or selling is exactly what you shouldn’t be doing on Quora. Instead, aim to spread knowledge.”
Based on IMPACT’s experience on the site, she suggest that “by regularly engaging with other members, you’re able to gain key insights from leading experts, target your audience, and even repurpose your content while answering and asking questions.”
For IMPACT, Quora was less about generating ROI and more about “increasing brand awareness and establishing thought leadership.”
Supply chain and logistics companies can take inspiration and insight from these two Quora marketing success stories. The field is largely open. Start looking for questions you can answer, become a part of the conversation, and aim to become a thought leader.
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by Fronetics | Sep 5, 2017 | Blog, Content Marketing, Marketing, Social Media
Use Quora to answer potential customers’ questions, and they’ll perceive you as a valuable source of knowledge and an industry thought leader.
Despite gaining popularity over the last several years, Quora’s potential as a marketing tool for supply chain and logistics companies remains largely untapped.
In case you haven’t jumped on the bandwagon yet, Quora touts itself as “a place to share knowledge and better understand the world.” It’s a simple premise, but one that’s been highly effective since its founding in 2009: “It’s a platform to ask questions and connect with people who contribute unique insights and quality answers.” Essentially, the site is a community-generated question-and-answer forum.
How does Quora work?
Anyone can ask or answer questions on Quora. A key feature of the site is voting feature: community members vote on which answers are most helpful, boosting those responders’ visibility and credibility. A few other things the site allows you to do:
- Target your question to specific users;
- Publish content (much like LinkedIn’s publishing platform);
- Search for questions or topics relevant to your business, and follow these keywords to get notifications of new questions.
You might already be starting to see the exciting potential in this social media platform. But let’s talk about three specific ways you can use Quora to build your brand, generate leads, and engage with your potential buyers.
3 ways supply chain and logistics marketers can use Quora
1) Research
Using Quora is about gaining and spreading knowledge. Your peers and competitors might be talking about their new projects with an audience that’s actively offering feedback on what it wants or doesn’t want. Before even jumping in with your own content, just staying attuned to the conversation can be a valuable resource as your business builds its marketing strategy.
2) Building and maintaining connections
Relationship-building is a key benefit of using Quora. While sites like LinkedIn and Twitter are valuable for quicker engagement, Quora offers a forum for substantive conversations, a crucial building block for lasting buyer engagement.
The site also offers a great opportunity to reach beyond your normal sphere. Emma MacAnnally of Torchlight suggests: “Don’t be afraid to ask questions and engage in conversations with others you respect and admire.” She points out that doing this will broaden your audience, offer new insights, and give you recognition with thought leaders in your field. “Networking can happen anywhere,” she says.
3) Reputation building
Quora offers you the ability to run a quick search of your business’ name, and tune in to what’s being said about your brand. Also, by answering others’ questions with substantive, reliable content, you can become a resource for potential buyers, as well as others in the industry.
Your business is more than its product. You can offer your audience valuable knowledge. Quora gives you a direct way to answer the questions that your potential buyers are asking, building your reputation as a resource for knowledge and as an industry thought leader.
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