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How To Successfully Make A Career Change Into Supply Chain

Deciding what you want to do with your life can be overwhelming, especially when that decision is made early in your career. In fact, an astounding majority of people don’t find their calling right away and trends are showing people are no longer working for one company their whole career — the average person changes jobs an average of 12 times during his or her career. 

But making that switch can be daunting and confusing. There are so many options, and the wrong move can set you back in your career and in your finances.

However, switching to supply chain can be a great option. The field is broad enough to be a fit for people with a variety of technical and soft skills. It's also a growing industry, with millions of new employees being added to the workforce.   

Leveraging Omni-Channel Marketing For B2B

Today’s marketing world is filled with many terms and buzzwords. From acronyms like “KPI” and “CTR” to rising industry trends like “big data” and “hyperlocal,” sales and marketing leaders in the manufacturing space constantly find buzzwords left and right. So when you come across the word “omni-channel,” you may be quick to dismiss it.

That would be a mistake.

What Can B2B Industrial Marketers Learn From B2C Marketers?

When it comes to marketing, many manufacturers put themselves in a very narrow box, focusing on niche messaging — and niche strategies — to get the job done. As a result, you can end up looking, sounding, and acting a lot like your competitors. 

Business-to-business (B2B) marketing is designed for a complex process of consideration and comparison way of communication, often with heavy emphasis on cost or time-savings and efficiency — which makes sense since these products and services are often more expensive with longer purchasing cycles than those sold directly to consumers. Business-to-consumer (B2C) marketing, on the other hand, has greater flexibility to be light, creative, and even play to consumers’ emotions rather than pure logic.

5 Things Every Product Manufacturer Must Know To Drive Leads

According to Forrester Research, rich omni-channel experiences deliver several competitive advantages for B2B businesses and manufacturers — especially those with complex products. A multi-channel experience is about providing more options while omni-channel supply chains serve customers across different channels and are fully integrated in order to provide a seamless customer experience.

Engineers and sourcing professionals rely on comprehensive, digitized product data in order to do their jobs. They need accurate data, and they need it fast. But some manufacturers are challenged with meeting the needs of B2B buyers and delivering a seamless customer experience. 

We’ve listed out five things all OEMs and industrial manufacturers must know to generate more leads, satisfy customers' needs and increase sales.

Lead Nurturing: How To Convert Website Traffic To Leads

Sellers know all about leads. You know the difference between marketing-qualified leads (MQLs) and sales-qualified leads (SQLs). You know you need more of the former in order to get more of the latter.

That’s great. You can see the destination. But what about the traffic that's on your website? How can you identify MQLs in your sales pipeline and, more importantly, how can you offer effective nurturing that turns them into SQLs? Let's break down the basic steps.

The Last Phase Of Inbound Marketing: Keeping Your Customers Happy

Buyers often encounter different challenges every day, and each phase of the buying process has opportunities (using inbound marketing!) for suppliers like you to position yourself as the best partner. 

Inbound marketing is defined as the data-driven approach to marketing that attracts people to your brand, engages them, and converts them to lasting customers. The approach is multi-channel and accounts for where people are, and how they want to interact with you using the main driver of quality content. It allows you to bring visitors into your site through various forms of channels like blogs, email marketing, and social media.

Unfortunately, a lot of marketers don’t even consider this last element of inbound marketing after the sale is made. That phase — customer delight — is perhaps one of the most important of all.

4 Steps To Grow Your Social Media Networks

What now? If you’re like many other small business owners, that may be what you’ve been asking yourself after taking the first steps in a social media marketing plan: setting up your accounts, branding your pages, and creating and sharing content. There’s one important element missing: building your network.

And you’ve probably even begun that process and connected with existing customers who had also taken the plunge, big OEMs with hundreds of thousands of followers, maybe some friends and family, perhaps even a celebrity or two (depending on who’s in charge of your accounts). From everything you’ve heard about social media, there must be more to it. So, what now?

6 Social Selling Tips: For Sellers In Manufacturing

Facebook? Check. Twitter? Check. LinkedIn? Check.

If you’ve already put in the work of building out profiles on these major social media platforms and have gained some followers, you’re off to a great start. But even more important than gaining followers, of course, is gaining customers — and simply having a social media presence isn’t enough to reliably convert connections into leads.

Below, we’ve outlined six tips to remember when developing and optimizing your social media marketing strategy. These tips will help you to better leverage your professional online brand to create more relationships with buyers through social media interactions — the process known as social selling. Here's how you can keep your social selling on point.