Content Marketing Trends for Supply Chain!

Content Marketing

Content has never been at the forefront of supply chain companies’ marketing strategies. However, things are starting to change, and businesses have started investing a considerable amount of time into their marketing services especially in content marketing which has become such an indispensable component of a wholesome online presence. 

In this article, we want to look into the types of content that are very popular at the moment and why chain supply companies should explore them to build a solid brand image, provide their customers with valuable information, and establish thought leadership within their industry and niche.

Let’s dive right in, shall we? 

Exploring video content

Video content took over the internet a few years ago, around the moment the social media platforms like Facebook have started autoplaying videos in their users’ feeds and sites like YouTube began to play videos continuously for their customers. This has had a significant impact on SEO. 

Some sources report that search engine algorithms have started favoring the websites that have video content on them. This may also be associated with the fact that users will typically spend way more time on a page watching a video than otherwise, which wins the business “SEO points” for engaging their followers. Whatever the reason is — it will benefit your company’s efforts to gain exposure on the web.

However, the aspect can provide supply chain companies with the most benefit is the humanization of their brand. 

Content marketing trends today are revolving around the concepts of authenticity and transparency. Informative videos can serve as an essential tool to create an image your customers will appreciate. And you may be asking why video content specifically? Essentially, it has to to with its accessibility. It’s much easier to consume, compared to other types of media and you may want to consider buying views.

Take your customers on a tour

Various social media platforms have introduced 360º photos, which have added another dimension to our online experiences. However, supply chain businesses can turn that up to the notch a bit by creating 360º tours through their facilities. 

 This will allow you to take your customers on an excursion, showing them the peculiarities of your facility and the people that work there. This is another brilliant way of humanizing your brand. Besides being a much more interactive and efficient method of marketing your services, it will create a human bond between your existing and potential customers with your business and the people that represent it. 

To close off the video content section of the article, we’d like to provide you with a list of essential things you need to consider adding to your content to maximize transparency, which can be applied to content in a variety of formats, from texts to infographics. 

Here they are:

  1. Be straightforward about the way price your services or products.
  2. Never hide customers’ experiences and allow other customers to know their reviews and opinions, whatever they are. 
  3. Align content with your overall mission.
  4. Allow content to be a channel that will make doing business with your pleasant. 

Finding the golden mean of text

There is an important distinction to be made when it comes to writing content for the small business blog: writing for SEO and writing for people. 

Focusing too much on the former will render your text unbearable to read, which will pretty much dissuade your followers from coming back for your content and defeating the purpose of writing content in the first place. On the other hand, focusing too much on the latter will be detrimental for your ranking on search engines. So there is a golden middle to be sought. 

Create content for humans

It can be argued that the algorithms that are behind Google’s ranking principles value human experience over keyword density. You may remember that fifteen years ago, the internet was flooded with pages ranking in the top of the search results for very important queries, that featured nothing but keywords and fragments of text. It was the total opposite of positive user experience. 

But think of the machines as well

Focusing on human experience does not in any way invalidate the need to optimize your text for the algorithms properly. 

First off, you need to take care of readability. This aspect of content writing is commonly measured by using the Flesch-Kincaid scale. It measures the word complexity, the amount of adverbs, passive voice, sentence length, and other crucial metrics to help you establish just how readable your text is to the average person. 

Secondly, keyword density isn’t totally written off; it can be argued that it has a lesser impact on your rankings. 

This is why it’s imperative to find the middle ground between writing natural, insightful, and elegant text, but also be very mindful of the more technical facets of content writing.

 Optimizing text for voice

Voice tech has become one of the more intriguing parts of content marketing, due to how different this technology is, and how it changed our perception towards content in general. It is now safe to say that there are more questions in this field than answers, but we’re starting to get a better understanding of how to make our texts more accessible to voice assistants. 

Furthermore, this isn’t a trend that is going just fade away soon, because the number of daily performed voice searches continues to grow and is becoming a prevalent means to seek for data on the web. Plus, it has a considerable impact on the way we do things on the web, which infers that businesses of all industries and calibers should start optimizing content for voice right away. 

Here are a few things you need to do to better suit your content for voice tech:

Here are a few essential tips to optimize your content for voice search:

  • Adding conversational characteristics will improve its rankings and will be favored by search engines
  • Deliver the ideas in a quicker, more straightforward manner, and must be accessible to people with any education
  • Structure your articles so that they have much more bullet points and have a skimmable and accessible structure. Make it look like an FAQ
  • Look into adding long-tail queries
  • Most importantly, focus on the value of the content to the readers

Chatbots and engagement

Chatbots have become one of the most intriguing ways of collecting data and distributing valuable content to your customers and followers. Supply chain businesses will find it extremely comfortable to integrate chatbots into their marketing mix in order to quickly share valuable content with their customers that have been tailored specifically according to their interests.

Chatbots are also impressive sources of first-party data, which allow you to get an in-depth understanding of who your customers are and what they’re passionate about, which should, in effect your content strategy, along with your sales strategy by continually adapting your buyer persona.  

Here’s how your supply chain business can benefit from integrating a chatbot into your content marketing strategy:

  • Access to a broad spectrum of information about your followers’ interests 
  • The ability to intertwine your other marketing channels with chatbots, like your email marketing platform to extract a more significant “kick” and make much more efficient
  • Create a traffic loop from Facebook’s messenger to your corporate website  
  • There is a body of research suggesting that users are much more comfortable to share their personal data via chatbots, compared to other channels

Don’t sleep on influencer marketing

Influencers are the next big thing in content marketing and are considered among the most effective ways of representing your business online. 

Connecting your brand to micro- and macro-influencers will allow you to achieve impressive engagement with specific subsections of your target audience. 

Probably the most complicated aspect of influencer marketing is actually finding the right influencer that will, in a way, represent your company. 

The best way to approach influencer marketing, if you’re new to the field and, more importantly, if your niche doesn’t necessarily have many influencers to offer in the first place — start low and slow. Invest little amounts of money into carefully selected influencers and observe what the effect will be and gradually maximize their volume over time when you’ve established a good working relationship. 

Conclusion

Supply chains businesses may not have the experience to have a strong content marketing strategy just yet, but one thing is for sure — it’s time to start investing time and effort into content, whatever format it is. 

Good luck! 

Author’s bio:

Daniela McVicker is a passionate digital marketer and editor at StudyClerk. Daniela is interested in everything related to SEO and blogging. She contributes to TopWritersReview and other websites where she shares her experience and helps marketers make their name in the online world.

Daniela McVicker
Chief Editor, StudyСlerk

Content marketing article and permission to publish here provided by Daniela McVicker. Originally written for Supply Chain Game Changer and published on September 4, 2019.

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