Supply Chain Solutions: Who Has the Largest Share of Voice?

There’s no denying that 2021 was a troubling year for the supply chain (2022 hasn’t been much better). Catastrophic events such as the COVID-19 pandemic and the Suez Canal blockage disrupted supply chains around the world. These events strained the flow of raw materials and goods, slowing down manufacturing. 

With many in-store shelves vacant, consumers were forced to buy their goods online from vendors like Amazon, causing delays in transit and goods shortages. To meet growing consumer demand and improve continuity, companies within volatile industries turned to supply chain solutions to improve risk management, better assess real-time performance, and enhance visibility and transparency in supply chain data and processes.

This heightened need for better supply chain solutions created fiercer competition in this market, pushing companies to amplify their marketing to differentiate and gain control of the industry conversation.

To provide you with an overview of supply chain technology companies’ marketing activities and how they positioned themselves to maneuver the recent industry focus, we’ve created a brand new report entitled, “Competitive Intelligence Insights: Who Led the Conversation In the Supply Chain Solutions Industry?”

Using intel pulled straight from Crayon’s competitive intelligence platform (CI), the report explores marketing activities from the following industry leaders: Blue Yonder, Honeywell, Infor, and SAP Supply Chain Management.

Curious who is competing like they mean it and had the largest share of voice? SAP! In today’s blog, we’ll give you a glimpse of how we came to this conclusion. Let’s dig in!   

Our findings at a glance

The report explores CI intel across three categories–content, social media, and earned media. It also digs into messaging and positioning changes over time from these companies. Here are the categories and specific channels through which Crayon gathered intel from: 

• The content category includes blog posts, guides, ebooks, videos, whitepapers, podcasts, infographics, etc. 
• Social media covers Facebook, Instagram, Quora, Twitter, Pinterest, Reddit, and Wikipedia. 
• Earned media includes news mentions, press releases, and awards. 

Now that you know what we evaluated, let’s explore some concrete examples from the leader, SAP.

Marketing activity across the board

There’s an obvious winner here. 

SAP far exceeds its rivals in marketing activity–with an exceptionally strong presence on social media, in particular. While the company’s press release and media mentions were lower, the high volume of social posts and content made up for it. 

Across all of the companies, social media was the most popular marketing channel with 52.6% of activities happening there–versus 33.8% across earned media and 13.6% across content. 

So, what’s being discussed on social media in the industry? We’ll show you!

Top social media buzzwords 

Across the report, we included Insight Word Clouds, pulled directly from the Crayon platform. These word clouds showcase the 50 most popular terms used over a period of time in each marketing category. For reference, a given term’s font size correlates with its level of popularity and usage.  

For social media, some of the top terms included: Supply, chain, help, business, and read. These terms are to be expected on social media–supply chain addressing the industry while read, for example, refers to a call to action. 

But what really stands out (further solidifying our conclusion) is another top term–SAP.

Leverage competitive intel to claim the top spot in your industry

We could go further–pulling out the key takeaways, showcasing website changes, comparing those who used videos in their marketing strategies, and so on. You’ll find all of that (and more) in our report, which shows the value that CI can bring to companies–in this case, the marketing department at a supply chain software solution. 

The Crayon platform makes analyses like this easy, compiling the intel and data needed for your team to make more informed decisions based on the competitive landscape. These insights just scratch the surface of what the Crayon platform uncovered. 

Click the banner below to download the comprehensive report–your marketing team will thank you for the valuable intel!