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sean-parnell · 6 months ago

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SEO for Manufacturers: Boost Traffic & Sales – Part 1: Onsite

When implemented effectively, search engine optimization (SEO) is a powerful tool that can transform your website into a lead generation machine and e-commerce powerhouse.

However, for it to attract the right prospects—and convert them into customers—SEO must be grounded in a deep understanding of your served market, their problems, and what they search for.

This is part 1/2 of our manufacturing SEO series – read our first article SEO for Manufacturers: Boost Traffic & Sales – Part 2: Onsite here.

Why SEO Matters for Manufacturers

SEO is the process of optimizing your website and getting high-value, third-party links to it so that you rank higher on search engines. Since Google has a 91% share of the market for searches, your SEO strategy needs to center around being within the top Google search results for your most relevant and strategically important keyword phrases – a.k.a. “keywords.” For manufacturers, this involves making your products more discoverable to potential customers instead of being a well-kept secret.

High visibility in search results for keywords your prospects search translates to more traffic, which leads to increased leads and sales. However, for SEO to be effective, it must be strategic. You must first attract relevant traffic—your target markets—to your site, then leverage engaging, high-quality, educational content to convert them into sales.

The first bedrock for a successful, comprehensive SEO strategy is onsite optimization.

Onsite Optimization: The Foundation of SEO

Keyword Research & Integration

The process starts with comprehensive keyword research to understand what terms your target audience uses to find products like yours. Tools like the Google Ads Keyword Planner, Google Search Console, Moz, SEMRush, and Spyfu can help you identify relevant keywords.

When conducting keyword research, consider the problems your prospects seek to solve and think carefully about terms that may sound pertinent. Using poorly selected keywords—those that are too general (e.g. “induction heater” vs. “induction bolt heater”) or that sound relevant but aren’t (e.g. “mold cleaner” referring to cleaning injection molds vs. your shower), can attract the wrong kind of traffic to your site and generate a lot of noise – but limited or no results.

Once you’ve identified keywords relevant to your prospects with the highest number of searches, it’s important to integrate them into your website's content, including page titles, meta descriptions, headers, and body text – naturally, so they read well and don’t get flagged by Google as “keyword stuffing.”

Content Quality

Google rewards high-quality, relevant content marketing so it’s important to ensure your website educates prospects throughout the buyer’s journey on what will solve their problem, how it works, and how it compares with direct and indirect alternatives. Increasingly, prospects want to self-educate thoroughly before speaking with a sales rep or getting a demo – if they want to speak with a rep at all. This can include more than just product data sheets and take the form of product comparisons, case studies, blog posts, how-to guides, recorded demos and webinars, product configurators, and return on investment (ROI) calculators. Weave keywords in when appropriate but avoid keyword stuffing and anything else that degrades the quality of the writing.

User Experience (UX)

A well-structured website that’s easy to navigate improves user experience and keeps visitors on your site longer. Ensure your site has an effective navigation menu and is mobile-friendly, as a significant portion of web traffic comes from mobile devices – especially when you conduct many email campaigns.

Using clear calls-to-action (CTAs) guides visitors towards filling out forms that generate leads – i.e. for signing up for a webinar, requesting an assessment, or downloading a guide. It’s also recommended to have a search bar in your header so they can find what they’re looking for there if they don’t find it in your navigation menu.

Technical SEO

Optimize your website's technical aspects, especially core web vitals and mobile site speed (a key determinant in rankings), XML sitemaps (a list of your site’s pages), and robots.txt files (which tell search engine crawlers which URLs they may access on your site). These elements help search engines crawl and index your site more efficiently.

Many would like you to believe that most SEO is technical and that highly specialized web skills are needed, but only a relatively small portion is.

Offsite Optimization: Building Authority

Link Building & Content Syndication

Building a network of high-quality backlinks from reputable, third-party websites enhances that have a higher Google PageRank than your website. Consider guest authoring blogs and articles on high-ranking websites, collaborating with industry influencers, and getting listed in industry and other online directories.

Additionally, there is a litany of “pay-to-play” article placements, which can be effective but it’s important to ensure that these websites have a significantly higher Google PageRank than yours or they can negatively affect your rankings.

And whatever you do, avoid the temptation to syndicate poorly written or “fluffy” content that fails to educate the reader. Though the goal of content syndication placements is for the links, some of your prospects will find and read this content so, if it’s not reflective of your thought leadership and culture, it could create a negative perception of your company.

Social Media

Promoting your content on social media platforms increases its reach and will generate more traffic to your site – LinkedIn is the most relevant, but what you can post there can be posted simultaneously to Twitter/X and Facebook.

B2B manufacturers take note: while it may be tempting to build up page followers and post often, this rarely generates a significant volume of leads or even brand awareness and can be a big drain on your time.

Leveraging Thought Leadership Content for SEO

Simply put, content is what generates leads and e-commerce sales when leveraged with SEO. Without content, you won’t have anything to optimize for search, you won’t rank for anything, and you won’t be found by prospects actively seeking your products – growth will entirely be up to your sales team and referrals. However, creating content for content’s sake is misguided.

More and more prospects are self-educating far into their buyer’s journey before they want to speak to your sales reps and some want to buy without speaking with anyone at all (ecommerce). Educating prospects on what will solve their problems and how your products do so is critically important and is achieved with thought leadership – i.e. original content vs. using ChatGPT, which recycles existing content from websites that may or may not have credibility.

Thought leadership content positions your company as an expert in your field. This educates your prospects and builds credibility and trust with your audience while also enhancing your SEO efforts. Here are some types of thought leadership content you can create:

Foundational Web Content: needs to educate your prospects on how you solve their problems with your products, process, and people, whom you serve, your culture, and who you are as a company all set the stage for prospects

Blogs & Articles: regularly publishing 1-2 blog posts per month that address industry trends, best practices, new products, and more that can also be syndicated on third-party websites will attract and engage your prospects

Case Studies: showcasing your successful projects and the value you have delivered to clients through case studies provides tangible proof of the impact of your products

Guides & eBooks: long-form educational content that is valuable educational resources can be gated and used as lead magnets to capture contact information from prospects

Comparisons & Reviews: content that compares your products with direct and indirect competitors as well as strategic alternatives (including doing nothing), not only helps prospects make informed decisions but also gives credibility to your brand – especially when you highlight areas where competitors are stronger

Calculators & Configurators: tools that help visitors calculate costs or configure products based on their needs can significantly enhance user engagement and generate leads

Maximizing Inbound & Outbound Opportunities

To fully leverage your marketing efforts for sales growth, it’s important to strike a balance between the following:

Inbound Marketing: focus on what we covered above – leverage your content with SEO to attract those actively searching for your products (demand capture)

Outbound Marketing: leverage your thought leadership content in outbound campaigns (email, direct mail, advertising, PR, social media) to reach the much larger group of prospects who are not actively searching but likely have a need (demand generation)

Expand Your Market with Blue Ocean Strategy

Once you have optimized SEO and content marketing for your existing products, it’s time to explore new markets and product opportunities. Conducting market research identifies unmet needs and opportunities for innovation, which can be the foundation of leveraging Blue Ocean Strategy to generate new demand in uncontested market spaces, driving further growth.

Partner with an Experienced Marketing Agency

Achieving all of the above can be extremely challenging and unlikely going it alone. That’s why it’s important to partner with a manufacturing and industrial marketing agency or a company that provides B2B content marketing services. To learn more, read our article How to Select the Ideal Manufacturing Marketing Agency.

#manufacturing marketing #industrial marketing #search engine optimization

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sean-parnell · 1 year ago

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Why Infor SyteLine ERP Is Ideal for Mid-Market Manufacturers & Service Providers

When electronics and other mid-market manufacturers want their ERP system to enable growth and create a new competitive advantage, they rely upon Infor Infor SyteLine, also known as CloudSuite Industrial (CSI).

When service and rental equipment providers want their ERP system to enable their growth into world-class service organizations and empower field technicians with data at their fingertips, they also rely upon Infor Infor SyteLine CSI.

We’ve all heard the horror stories of failed ERP implementations so, when manufacturers and service providers want SyteLine ERP successfully implemented—and guaranteed—they rely upon Bridging Business Technology Solutions (BBTS).

An ERP Ideal for Manufacturers

Infor SyteLine is the primary ERP we support because it’s ideal for use by discrete and process manufacturers, especially electronics manufacturers. We also guarantee the success of your Infor SyteLine implementation whether you’re commissioning an ERP system for the first time or replacing your current system, so you can cross the risk of a failed implementation off your list of worries.

SyteLine also can be customized to recognize customer-owned inventory and allocate it only to that customer so you don’t have a unique part number for the same part used by multiple customers. You can also reserve stock for specific products of the same customer or reserve any part in your inventory for a specific order until the order is released.

SyteLine delivers the same type of functionality as SAP and Oracle for a fraction of the cost and headache of implementing a tier 1 ERP system.

An ERP Ideal for Service Providers

Infor SyteLine is the primary ERP we support because it’s a perfect fit for service providers, especially those who rent equipment. We also guarantee the success of your Infor SyteLine implementation. So, whether you’re commissioning an ERP system for the first time or replacing your current system, you don’t have to worry about the disruption of a failed implementation.

Among the biggest benefits of SyteLine for service providers is no longer having to enter data multiple times into disparate systems. Working with common data means that everyone works from the same real-time information, which:

Empowers your service technicians to complete more service orders

Enables your employees to spend more time building relationships with customers

Gives your managers the tools to analyze data and find strategic growth opportunities

SyteLine delivers the same type of functionality as SAP and Oracle for a fraction of the cost and none of the headaches associated with implementing a tier 1 ERP system.

Successful Implementations, Guaranteed

The BBTS team has implemented SyteLine successfully over 165 times since 2013 with a proven ERP implementation process that begins with improving inventory control, planning and forecasting, financial close, and other business processes. SyteLine then standardizes these process best practices and ensures they are followed.

BBTS also provides post-implementation SyteLine enhancements, upgrades, business process improvements, and workflow optimization so you get the most out of your SyteLine investment.

Get Started Today

To determine if SyteLine ERP is right for you, we will connect you with one of our implementation experts as part of a process review. A successful implementation begins with understanding your core business processes, then recreating and evolving them in SyteLine.

Together, we can determine how you will benefit from SyteLine and calculate a target return on investment (ROI) to help justify the move. Contact us to learn more about SyteLine and how we are able to guarantee a successful ERP implementation when so many fail. You can also take advantage of the process review offer.

#erp software #infor #syteline #cloudsuite industrial (CSI)#manufacturing #service providers #customer owned inventory

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sean-parnell · 1 year ago

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Electropolishing for Deburring Critical Metal Parts

Stamping and machining processes can leave metal parts with burrs that can affect the fit, function and durability of metal parts.

When these parts are destined for food or pharmaceutical production equipment or fuel lines and gear assemblies used in aerospace manufacturing, burrs are more than just a surface imperfection – they’re a potentially catastrophic defect that can prevent the proper sealing or connection between two parts, become dislodged near moving parts, or cause seizing of screws and other fasteners.

To prevent such risks, manufacturers in many industries often specify electropolishing as the final step in finishing their critical metal parts.

How Does Electropolishing Work?

Electropolishing is a highly effective finishing process for removing metal surface defects like microburrs caused by processes like broaching, fine blanking, grinding, lapping or milling.

Using a combination of a chemical bath and a rectified electrical current, electropolishing removes a precise and uniform layer of surface material, leaving behind a shiny, smooth, passive and defect-free surface.

Among other advantages, electropolishing can remove a microscopically precise amount of surface material with surface roughness improvement of up to 50%, eliminating surface defects for high-quality results within very tight tolerances.

By eliminating microcracks and other defects that can harbor bacteria or become initiation sites for corrosion, electropolishing also leaves metal parts with significantly improved resistance to corrosion and pathogen growth. The ultrasmooth surface finish that electropolishing leaves behind has been shown to inhibit the formation of bacterial biofilms that can be resistant to ordinary cleaning methods. The finish also leaves behind a surface that is easier to clean, without cracks or defects where pathogens can hide – a critical advantage for medical, pharmaceutical and food and beverage production.

Why Use Electropolishing for Deburring?

Fragile or intricate metal parts, like those used for medical devices and implants, are not well suited for finishing processes like mechanical or vibratory polishing, which can damage fragile parts or create inconsistent results for parts with complex shapes.

Successful deburring for critical metal parts is contingent upon the ability to remove a precise layer of surface material. No other process can match electropolishing for its ability to control the material removal to +/- .0002”.

By deburring the threads on metal fasteners, for example, electropolishing can reduce the risk of adhesion between two mating surfaces, also known as “galling,” which can cause material between the surfaces to deteriorate and seize up when parts are pressed together.

Burrs can also shorten the lifespan of a part, by breaking off or becoming an initiation site for corrosion.

Larger burrs that occur as the result of rough milling or displaced metal from drilling operations, however, may need pre-treatment using other methods. Likewise, heavy die break burrs caused by improper tooling maintenance will generally require additional treatment.

Much in the way that lightning is drawn to the highest points, electropolishing delivers higher current density on the high points or edges which makes it ideal for micro-deburring The customized nature of the electropolishing process, from racking to chemical formulation to timing, would be of little value if it could not be reproduced consistently. But unlike other finishing processes, electropolishing is prized for its consistent results.

Electropolishing also offers a key advantage for parts with critical microfinishes or made from the lighter, more fragile materials increasingly used in the manufacturing of medical devices, electrical components and semiconductors, among other industries. These parts are not suitable for mass finishing techniques that can create distortion, nicks and scratches. Electropolished parts are individually racked to prevent contact and ensure the even application of the process for even the most fragile parts.

Advantages of Electropolishing for Deburring

The electropolishing process can be customized by alloy, by application and by the desired results. Beyond its ability to remove a uniform layer of surface material to eliminate surface defects like microburrs, microcracks, scale and staining, electropolishing offers many collateral benefits for the manufacturers of critical metal parts.

Microscopically precise removal of surface material with control to +/-.0002”

Customized racking to accommodate fragile and complex parts small and large

Leaves parts with enhanced durability and cycle life

Creation of a pathogen-resistant surface

Superior cleanability

Ultraclean finish

Decorative finish

One stop process for cleaning and removing surface defects

30X more corrosion resistance than passivation alone

Parts are also left passivated in the process

Improves conductivity of copper and aluminum alloys

What Alloys Can Be Electropolished?

A long list of alloys can be effectively deburred using electropolishing. The process is also equally effective on parts that are fully annealed or hardened. That is one reason that electropolishing is frequently specified for the final deburring and finishing of parts after all fabrication and heat treating processes have been completed.

Electropolishing is effective for a wide variety of alloys including:

Stainless Steel 200-300 Series

Stainless Steel 400 Series

Stainless Steel: Precipitating Hardening Grades

Nitinol

Titanium

Aluminum

Carbon Steels

Copper

Brass

Nickel Alloys

Specialty Alloys

And more

Electropolishing for Critical Metal Parts

As the world’s largest electropolishing specialist with seven decades of electropolishing expertise and innovation, Able Electropolishing provides consultation and collaboration from the earliest stages of prototyping through production to create highly customized electropolishing processes for a wide variety of metal parts.

#electropolishing #deburring

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sean-parnell · 1 year ago

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How Manufacturers Can Leverage Content Marketing to Grow

Cold calls, print advertising, tradeshow participation, and knocking on doors once worked well manufacturers can no longer rely on them to generate leads that fuel sustainable, double-digit growth despite having an effective sales team that may still have some skills in these areas.

Inbound lead generation in commercial and industrial markets requires compelling brand storytelling and thought leadership that educates prospects along the buyer’s journey, who don’t want to talk with salespeople before they’re good and ready as they fear being “sold to” by people that don’t have their best interest in mind.

Problems Solved vs. Products & Services, Features & Benefits

Powerfully resonating with prospects requires brand storytelling that converts website visitors into prospects then into customers.

Your brand story begins with having a deep understanding of the problems faced by your prospects, what they need to overcome them, and the value to them in doing so before promoting all of your products and services and their features and benefits. Prospects are searching for who can solve their problems and may have a limited understanding of what will solve their problems, so claiming your solutions are “the best” and that you’re an “industry leader” may mean nothing until they have an understanding of how your products will help them.

The hero of your prospects’ story is themselves, so you need to educate them on how you can solve their problems, and how your people, process, products, and services – not just products – do so. This is what will resonate powerfully with them. In this way, you serve as a guide for achieving success and avoiding failure. Your products and services with their features and benefits are how you solve these problems..

Thus, your “brand story” needs to be told throughout all of your marketing: on your home and about pages, blogs, guides, case studies, marketing collateral, presentations, proposals, press releases, third-party website profiles, direct mail, email campaigns, your tagline, and anywhere else you promote your company.

A brand story for each product and service you sell can also be developed as each of them solves different problems in different ways for different markets. This “sub-brand storytelling” is also effective for different vertical and geographic markets as each has different requirements.

Extracting & Promoting Thought Leadership

When they have a problem that they want to solve – because the pain of not changing exceeds the pain of the change – prospects self-educate themselves by researching the internet before speaking with any vendors, so it’s important to provide educational content that will help them understand how you can solve their problems:

TOFU: Top of Funnel: this content builds awareness by providing an overview of the problems you solve and how your products solve them

MOFU: Middle Funnel: this content goes one level deeper and helps them consider between different options that can solve their problem

BOFU: Bottom Funnel: this content gets very specific and helps prospects make their final decisions

OOFU: Out of Funnel: this content is created in a misguided attempt to maximize keyword rankings and website traffic as part of a flawed search engine optimization strategy (SEO) but fails to generate leads though can be quite costly

Tip: it’s important to have a good balance of all types of content (except OOFU).

It’s especially important for manufacturers to understand that, in addition to learning about how you solve their problems with your products and services, your prospects want to know how your solutions and business practices compare with both direct and indirect competitors. They also want to understand how their investment can be cost-justified so they can sell the idea of buying from you to internal decision makers that may not be in communication with you. Product comparisons are very useful because this is what prospects try to compile themselves, especially if they include areas where your competitors have an advantage over yours. Case studies that include return on investment (ROI) estimates are also highly useful for prospects.

Lead-Generating Content Begins with Keyword Research

Understanding and prioritizing what your prospects are searching for is a critical first step for lead generation, which begins with conducting keyword research on all the different terms your prospects may use.

Onsite SEO then fully leverages the content you’ve already developed when you work the highest priority keyword phrases into your page titles, meta descriptions, H1 headers, and throughout the content of each page – just remember it has to read well and should only be performed by someone that thoroughly understands your business and what prospects value.

Brainstorming content ideas that incorporate these keyword phrases and educates prospects along the buyer’s journey is the next step, following by prioritizing these content ideas into an editorial calendar. The best content comes from getting a professional copywriter to interview your company’s thought leaders and then writing up what is learned in the form of foundational website content, blogs and guides.

Best Practice: Google Search Console reports the keywords people searched for to find you.

Creating Lead Magnets

When your prospects discover that you are providing education and thought leadership for how you can solve their problems, many will be willing to provide their contact information to download this gated content – especially long-form, MOFU and BOFU content including guides, whitepapers, ebooks, and webinars. It’s also important that your contact forms ask prospects where they found out about you so you can attribute each download to the marketing or other activities that generated them. It’s not recommend to gate promotional material that prospects expect to be freely available, including blogs, brochures, data sheets, infographics, case studies, and similar materials.

Promoting MOFU and BOFU also generate even more website traffic and leads, including in Google Ads, LinkedIn Campaigns, Microsoft Ads and other pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns, your social media profiles (especially LinkedIn and Twitter), on third-party article publishing sites (e.g. Medium), and throughout your public relations activities.

The Manufacturing Content Creation & Lead Generation Process

Here are the steps for creating content that has been proven to generate leads and product sales from many commercial and industrial manufacturers:

Conduct keyword research and optimize all of your current content for search

Develop brand storytelling and implement it throughout your home and about pages, marketing collateral, presentations, and all other marketing materials

Write blogs and publish them on a consistent schedule, educating prospects on a wide variety of topics that help them understand how your products and services will solve their problems

Syndicate unique versions of this content on high ranking, third-party websites

Launch Google ads and email campaigns to bring more prospects in

Create microsites to promote how you solve specific problems in your top vertical markets

Launch ecommerce to supplement sales through your channel partners for people that want to speak with and buy directly from you – just don’t undercut them, so selling only at list price is recommended

Evaluate new market opportunities where your current competitors are irrelevant with Blue Ocean Strategy

This approach routinely generates sustainable, double-digit sales growth with an ROI of over 300% within 12-18 months when executed by an experienced industrial marketing agency – and your company will no longer be a well-kept secret in your markets.

The Case for a Marketing Audit

While it may be appealing to hire a full-time content marketer, SEO specialist, or to outsource to a manufacturing marketing agency that may wow you with shiny objects, conducting deep dive marketing due diligence with an experience marketing consulting resource understands your industry is typically a better way to start.

An effective marketing audit will identify what it will take for you to generate sustainable, double-digit growth by leveraging brand storytelling, content marketing, SEO, content syndication, email campaigns, marketing automation, social media, advertising, PR, and more.

Most marketing audits focus only on promotional marketing communications, so you may want to find an industrial marketing agency that can auditing the other three Ps of your marketing: products and services, pricing and placement (selling through channels and go-to-market strategy).

#manufacturing marketing #industrial marketing #b2b marketing agency #content marketing #search engine optimization (SEO)#brand storytelling

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sean-parnell · 1 year ago

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How to Build a Holistic Entity Compliance Management Program in 2024

Due to the rapidly changing and convoluted business environment, adopting a corporate compliance program has become necessary for companies in essence to avoid rolling the dice.

According to Statista, 41% of the risks encountered by leading companies included supply chain disruptions, followed by cyber incidents at 40% which is not surprising given what we have gone through the past few years. In terms of entity management, there has been ebbs and flows for changes in legislation and regulations and market developments like mergers and acquisitions. These are some reasons businesses must have regulatory compliance policies in place.

Organizations are increasingly facing regulatory challenges, operational disruptions, and risks to their reputations. Therefore, creating legal policies that encompass not only regulatory requirements, but also social and ethical responsibilities is compulsory for companies.

The goal of holistic compliance is to build a culture of ethical behavior that includes everyone, from stakeholders to employees, customers, and suppliers. Explore the key elements of ducking your proverbial head by creating a compliance program with all of its benefits for enterprises just below.

What Is a Corporate Compliance Program?

A corporate compliance program is a set of policies, controls, and procedures ensuring an organization operates responsibly and within legal and ethical limits.

The purpose of this program is to identify and resolve potential violations of laws in the organization’s regulations and internal policies.

Importance of a Corporate Compliance Program

In today’s business landscape, a company’s prestige is its most valuable asset. While rules for business practices are becoming onerous, violations can lead to severe financial and reputational consequences for an enterprise.

According to the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s 2018 Annual Snapshot of the Federal Regulatory State, the annual regulatory costs in the U.S. in 2017 were estimated to be almost $1.9 trillion.

Federal Regulations in Entity Management Compliance

The big daddy here is the Corporate Transparency Act (CTA). This is a U.S. federal law that was passed in 2021 with the aim of increasing transparency around the ownership and control of U.S. companies. The law requires certain companies to report information about their beneficial owners (i.e., the individuals who ultimately own or control the company) to the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN), which is a bureau of the U.S. Treasury Department There are federal regulations that govern entity management.

The CTA applies to certain corporations, limited liability companies, and other similar entities that are formed or registered to do business in the U.S. Specifically, it applies to companies that are defined as "reporting companies," which are companies that are not already subject to certain types of federal oversight, such as publicly traded companies or financial institutions.

From an entity management perspective, the CTA will likely have an impact on the way that certain companies are managed and organized. In particular, companies that are subject to the CTA will need to ensure that they have accurate and up-to-date information about their beneficial owners, and that this information is reported to FinCEN in a timely manner.

This may require companies to implement new processes and procedures for collecting and verifying beneficial ownership information, and for ensuring that this information is maintained and updated on an ongoing basis. In addition, companies may need to review their existing governance structures and make changes to ensure that they are in compliance with the CTA's reporting requirements.

Overall, the CTA represents a significant shift towards greater transparency in corporate ownership and control, and companies that are subject to the law will need to adapt their entity management practices accordingly.

In addition, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has regulatory authority over certain types of entities, similar to CTA that includes publicly traded companies, investment funds, and investment advisors.

The SEC requires publicly traded companies to file regular reports that disclose information about their financial performance, operations, and other matters that could affect investors' decisions. By the same token, investment advisors are subject to registration and reporting requirements under the Investment Advisers Act of 1940.

The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and the Department of Labor (DOL), also have regulations that may impact entity management. As an example, the IRS has rules regarding tax filings and reporting requirements for certain types of entities, while the DOL has regulations related to employee benefit plans and fiduciary responsibilities.

In general, poor compliance policies can erode the trust of stakeholders and result in investor withdrawal, supply chain disruptions, reduced employee productivity, and lost business opportunities.

But proper compliance program oversight minimizes legal risks and sustains a company’s reputation by ensuring it meets its regulatory obligations. They can also help avoid costly penalties and identify and manage data privacy fraud and corruption risks.

Moreover, a compliance program improves engagement among employees so they can understand and act in accordance with their company’s rules.

Ultimately, a corporate compliance program can assist an organization in defining its risk tolerance in pursuit of its objectives. This isn’t a ‘put your finger up in the air to see which way the wind is blowing’. It's a concerted effort to assess whether your organization is more conservative and risk adverse or flexible in pursuing its objectives, each should focus on implementing policies and procedures that reflect this which will allow everyone involved to operate accordingly.

7 Elements of an Effective Corporate Compliance Program

If you invest in building robust compliance programs, it will guarantee the long-term success of your business. The value here is we are hoping this outline takes the bite out of getting started.

For the policies to be fruitful, you must follow the U.S. Sentencing Commission Guidelines. Its eighth chapter, amended in 2004, describes the seven elements of an effective compliance program. Grab some coffee, it’s a challenging read or take a glance at the highlights here which include:

Standards and Procedures

The first element relates to the establishment of written policies and procedures. These policies should establish the legal and ethical standards to which all employees must adhere, identify compliance risks, and the consequences of non-compliance.

Governance and Oversight

Establish a compliance committee and assign someone who is in charge of overseeing the implementation of the compliance program and resolving significant compliance risk. High-level executives, the board of directors, and senior personnel must govern the compliance policies. They should be responsible for maintaining and enforcing the program across the organization, as well as establishing a compliance officer.

Education and Training

Your company must provide education and regular training to employees. This training will make them aware of your organization’s expectations and requirements to comply with regulations and enable them to understand the severity of compliance.

Implement a compliance training program, including an annual session and revisions that clearly remind your employees of your business’s ethical code of conduct.

Monitoring and Auditing

Establish an internal and external monitoring system and conduct regular audits. Assess areas of weakness and identify potential non-compliance risks in your organization.

Reporting

Your organization must deploy an internal mechanism for investigating regulatory violations. Employees should be able to report compliance concerns and fraudulent activities anonymously. Establish two-way communication that can help analyze the issues and take timely, appropriate action.

Internal Enforcement and Discipline

You must have a strategy in place to enforce employee disciplinary measures promptly. The standards must clearly define the consequences of violating regulatory policies.

Response and Prevention

The seventh element of corporate compliance programs is response and prevention. Your organization must continuously evaluate and improve compliance based on your employees' responses, stakeholders' experiences, and changes in regulations.

Besides, depending on these experiences and changes, you’ll be able to discover violations and take consistent measures to prevent them.

How To Create a Corporate Compliance Program

Creating a successful compliance program for your business requires you to take a systematic approach that involves following several steps. Here’s how you can build effective regulatory policies for your business:

Involve All Necessary Parties A.K.A Posterior Protection

Digging into this, the first step to building an effective regulatory plan is to involve all necessary parties, including senior management and employees. Your board must be on one page regarding the program and should support staffing, resources, and the budget needed to build regulatory policies.

It’s easier for the employees to follow the plan with the help of leadership support. Next, create a compliance team that includes representatives from your legal, HR, finance, and operations departments. This team should be responsible for developing, implementing, monitoring, and maintaining compliance policies across the organization.

It should also take input from all involved parties to identify potential risks, write policies to address them, and outline directives that employees are expected to follow. Moreover, the compliance team should seek feedback from all parties to ensure the regulatory program meets their needs.

Moreover, including everyone in your organization in the compliance plan ensures they understand their role and responsibilities regarding maintaining it.

Assess Current Risk and Increase Transparency

This is a biggie. Assessing current risks and increasing transparency are crucial components of creating an effective compliance procedure. Transparent assessment guarantees a company is adhering to existing laws and regulations and therefore mitigating risks like penalties, reputational damage, and other negative consequences.

Start by determining the regulatory requirements that apply to your organization. These requirements may include industry standards or regulations that affect your company’s operations.

Your compliance team should be able to assess your company’s current legal status by reviewing policies, training materials, and procedures. This is necessary to ensure your business is meeting all regulatory requirements. Make sure that there are processes in place that allow full visibility on all compliance aspects.

In addition, the team should conduct a risk analysis. This includes assessing your organization’s operations, supply chains, customer interactions, and partnerships to identify non-compliance issues.

Based on the potential risks, the compliance team should be able to develop strategies like internal monitoring and training programs. A periodic risk assessment can also help establish procedures to determine new compliance risks and visibility issues and mitigate them on time.

Establish Guidance Across Departments

Establishing guidance across departments can help you identify areas of non-compliance you may miss if only one department is involved. This also means all the stakeholders in your organization are held to the same regulatory standards - more CYA.

Your compliance team should be able to review past incidents and consult with departmental managers and stakeholders to recognize potential risks each department faces.

Next, they should develop standards and controls tailored to each department’s specific needs and align them with the overall compliance objective of your company. Your team should also establish cross-functional communication so each department can communicate with the other regarding compliance concerns. Maybe in your intranet or via a slack channel.

Communication can include regular meetings, collaboration on compliance initiatives, and reporting channels like a hotline or email address.

Furthermore, your compliance team should assign clear responsibilities to each department and establish accountability at appropriate levels so employees can report without fear of reprisal. Also, the team should regularly review or establish a cadence to update legal controls based on changes in regulatory environments.

Launch New Guidelines

Still with us?

Launching new guidelines is a critical aspect of a business compliance plan. It ensures that all regulatory updates are communicated, accepted, and adopted by the stakeholders. Your compliance team must develop the new guidelines by consulting with subject matter experts and reviewing existing legal procedures.

Once the new policies are developed, they should be disseminated to all stakeholders via mail, your company’s website, or through meetings and training. Make everyone aware of the new requirements.

Your team should also incorporate feedback from all senior management, department heads, and front-line employers to adjust the new guidelines accordingly.

Continuously Monitor and Adjust

Last but not least, it is equally vital to monitor and adjust your compliance program continuously. Your compliance team should set up a monitoring plan that identifies key performance indicators (KPIs) to track incident reporting and training completion rates and audit results.

The data collected from the monitoring plan should be used to recognize key compliance trends and areas of improvement. Continuously reviewing your legal policies will also help your company to remain relevant to regulatory requirements.

Additionally, your legal compliance team should use the data analysis to make informed decisions like modifying policies and procedures and providing additional training to employees.

Maintaining a Corporate Compliance Program

Maintaining a corporate compliance program can be difficult, as it includes a complex set of policies, employee training, investigation mechanisms, and reporting. Manually managing regulatory policies is impossible, especially for large enterprises, as the legal procedures require a high level of transparency.

Therefore, you’ll need compliance management software to streamline and automate your compliance program. Allied Market Research has already forecasted the global market for compliance management software to grow at a 15.7% compound annual growth rate (CAGR) to reach $3.06 billion by 2027. Here’s how this tool can help you:

Provides Entity Management Reporting

We are Filejet, a leading legal entity management software, and we spearhead a comprehensive entity audit upon implementation. This helps establish current status visibility and a baseline to determine active compliance risk. Our software will help you maintain regulatory consistency and accuracy across your organization surrounding entity management. Which is often the most overlooked part of a compliance program and one that can garner a quick win for a new corporate compliance program.

Automates Legal Processes

Automating your compliance procedure can save time and minimize the risk of errors primarily because most entity management programs are organized around a spreadsheet relying on busy teams to maintain it. Filejet can help. We establish practices that automate the compliance process, keeping entities in good standing.

Offers Real-Time Reporting

At Filejet, we have witnessed the hefty costs for non-compliance and the dread of having to write checks for fines, penalties, back taxes and legal entanglements. When an entity has become out of compliance or has been administratively dissolved due to non-compliance or illegal continued operation, the costs can be excessive. From our point of view, if your organization is paying out dollars in any measurement on entity management, that equates to a high tolerance for risk in an attempt to align with company growth goals.

Filejet provides real-time reporting on the performance of compliance measures as it relates to entity management, ensuring timely identification of potential violations. This can help save your organization from reputational damage, legal penalties and potential liabilities and lawsuits. Filejet is your get out of jail card that you can keep in your back pocket.

Enables Collaboration…Makes You Fearless

Filejet compliance management software enables collaboration between stakeholders, senior management, employees, and departments. Accountability can be managed and documented, and specific entities can be assigned to people or departments. This ensures everyone is on the same page and can work effectively for the success of regulatory policies. It also promotes crucial cross-company visibility and communication ensuring that nothing falls through the cracks.

Easy To Scale

Whether you have a small business or a large enterprise, compliance changes can be challenging to adopt. Due to the engagement with government agencies for entity management it can be daunting to keep up with federal, state and jurisdiction requirements. Filejet is comprehensive and flexible and can cost-efficiently scale to adjust to these regulatory requirements and the needs of your company.

Efficient Compliance with Filejet

A corporate compliance program is critical for the long-term success of any business as it can mitigate legal risks. While managing compliance is not easy, Filejet, a legal entity management system, can streamline your regulatory workflows and ensure transparency across all your business entities.

We aren’t handing out superhero capes but Filejet can help maintain your organization’s credibility, reduce legal inefficiencies, and notify you when your filing date is due. So, what are you waiting for? Explore Filejet today for efficient compliance and entity management.

#entity management #legal tech #legal ops

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sean-parnell · 1 year ago

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B2B Content Marketing Best Practices & How to Avoid 3 Critical Mistakes

Content marketing is the foundation of qualified lead generation. It works as a key part of search engine optimization (SEO); it can increase the number of indexed pages on your site, inbound links and overall interest in your brand.

Any content marketing provider who guarantees that they can boost your online ranking with “content” alone is telling you a tired story. With over 409 million people viewing more than 20 billion pages each month on WordPress sites alone, the same old story doesn’t get you anywhere.

It’s important that your content marketing has a clear purpose, a compelling message, and a strategy tied to the needs of your audience. In content marketing, quality wins over quantity, every time.

Promotion Is Just One of the Four Ps of Marketing

E. Jerome McCarthy’s 1960 "Four Ps" framework for marketing, while not the only available model, lays a basic foundation for successful marketing. Models like these are called “marketing mixes” because effective marketing requires a multi-faceted approach. McCarthy’s Four Ps are product, price, placement and promotion, and all four Ps must work together to create compelling messaging that attracts prospects.

The purpose of content marketing is not pure promotion, but many content marketing providers treat it as such. The real purpose of content marketing is to create interest around a product or service, not to promote it explicitly. Oxford Dictionaries’ definition of content marketing says that it is “a type of marketing that involves the creation and sharing of online material…that does not explicitly promote a brand but is intended to stimulate interest in its products or services.”

So why do so many B2B providers focused on pure promotion in their content?

Staying Afloat in the Sea of Content

Whether you’re a content marketing provider, freelancer or business owner, your approach to thought leadership and lead generation should be strategic and comprehensive – an approach that includes market research, competitive intelligence, comprehensive marketing planning, and branding work.

If you start without a comprehensive marketing plan, your efforts are likely to fall short. Here are some of the most common mistakes made by content marketing providers:

Mistake #1: Inexperienced Creators

Many content marketing providers employ a revolving door of inexperienced people without a background in the subjects they are writing about or a background in writing and reporting. High turnover combined with a high learning curve is a recipe for shallow, uninspired and frequently unoriginal content.

Many of these content providers also claim to have more SEO experience than they really have without extensive keyword research and the on-site optimization required to maximize inbound lead generation. They also typically lack B2B experience and create B2B and B2C content as if it were the same.

Mistake #2: Quantity over Quality

What is the real goal of content marketing? Why is it such an effective tool for generating leads?

All content is not equal. Content marketing providers who focus on superficial, top-of-the-funnel content instead of building a combination of mid and bottom funnel content, won’t do much to generate leads. Companies who pump out “fluffy” content do little more than create another indexed page on the website.

Copywriters at companies like these lack solid journalism experience and don’t recognize the difference between shallow, derivative content and real substance, especially if they’re trying to create case studies, whitepapers and other forms of vital higher-level content.According to a recent Demand Gen report on content preferences, case studies are the most valuable type of content in the B2B sphere. Moreover, 41% of respondents reported reading between three and seven pieces of content before contacting a salesperson. So if your marketing collateral doesn’t provide the educational content your potential clients find valuable, they won’t stick around to learn more.

Mistake #3: Tunnel Vision

Your marketing strategy should be based on a holistic approach – content marketing built around quantity, or around doing what everyone else is doing accomplishes very little. For example, while having a social media presence is important for B2B companies, some are hyper-focused on it, even though it is not a reliable form of B2B lead generation.

It’s a waste of time and effort to just robotically publish content in hopes that it will resonate with someone. The ability to step back and analyze both the reach and strategic value of your content, including a review of web analytics, is not something all companies do, or even understand. Expertise in the digital and marketing factors that distinguish content that gets results from content that just takes up space is a rare thing in the B2B market

Going Beyond Promotion

Effective B2B content marketing takes more than just engaging blog posts and well-researched case studies. Blog content is important, but so is creating effective home page and foundational content on-site. Every interaction a potential client has with your marketing materials or website should give them the knowledge they need to make informed decisions about your product or services, or make them want to learn more.

While they provide some facets of an inbound marketing strategy, most B2B marketing agencies and other content providers don't do many other outbound activities that have high value, including light website development, article and speaker pitches, email campaigns, and B2B SEO. Without the right a mix of inbound and outbound marketing efforts, your content marketing efforts won’t get you far.

#b2bmarketing #b2b lead generation #b2b content marketing #b2b seo services #b2b marketing agency

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