Our long-term users are well acquainted with the value Paper.li provides to their customers. In case you didn’t know, our platform provides an all-in-one, low cost solution for email marketing, social media updates, and can even act as a website for brands. Yep, it’s true!
All of these options serve external customers, but did you know you can also serve internal customers, such as your marketing department? We’re talking today about using Paper.li as a tool to monitor industry trends.
Lets use a hypothetical company, The Big Paperclip Company, as our example. BPC is one of several paperclip manufacturers. Currently they only offer red paperclips and have noticed a gradual decline in sales. They would like to know why, and are going to use Paper.li to find out. Here’s how they can use Paper.li to monitor their industry trends:
Blog RSS Feeds
BPC’s biggest competitor, Green Paperclips Unlimited, publishes a weekly blog. By adding the blog RSS feed as a primary source, BPC can see what their competition is publishing online. The advantage here is, rather than visiting their competitors blog daily (because who has time for that?), BPC’s marketing team now receives a weekly email digest of everything GPU published directly in their inbox.
Hashtags
Listen to the pulse of your buyers as well as other industry leaders by including tailored hashtags as a source. For example, one thing BPC learned from monitoring their competition’s blog was about a promotion being offered: a free box of paperclips to anyone who tweeted a link to GPU’s blog and included the hashtag #GPUFree in their tweet. BPC can add this hashtag as a source sources and get a feel for how widespread this message is.
Industry News
To effectively stay ahead of the competition, BPC needs to be aware of all factors affecting their business. Our hypothetical business model for them is dependent on the oil industry: their primary retail outlet are convenience stores, their materials are tied to the price of oil, and transportation costs determine how much they can charge for their product. Therefore, their sources should include appropriate news outlets to keep them informed of upcoming changes that could affect their business. If they see the price of gas going up, in order to maintain sales they can offer coupons or other offers to their loyal customers.
While a free paper can include all of this, the beauty of a Pro Paper is privacy. After all, BPC doesn’t want their competition to know about (or even see) their paper.
A paper can be set to private simply by visiting its Dashboard. Under the Global Settings menu, simply slide the Private option to “On” and your paper is now only visible to you and your collaborators.
Using a Pro paper to monitor industry trends is easy, cost effective, and convenient. To find out more about this and our other great features, visit Paper Pro today!
