Zebra launched a new blog – Your Edge – worldwide in March 2019 as a way to engage in meaningful conversations with stakeholders, including customers, partners, third-party industry experts and others who are trying to navigate the ever-changing market dynamics affecting everything from manufacturing and warehousing to retail, hospitality, healthcare, government and energy. This unique thought leadership platform, a first-of-its-kind for Zebra, is intended to connect readers with a community of subject matter experts from Zebra Nation and the broader industry who can directly address the market trends, technologies and business issues that matter most to them.
Our goal with this blog is to create a channel through which we can openly and directly address customer pain points. Though Your Edge may be used to engage, activate, and educate customers throughout the sales and product lifecycle, posts cannot be self-promotional. We see Your Edge as the platform by which we will share new ideas, useful information and industry insights to help customers be more innovative and quickly capture their operational and performance edge in a dynamic, highly competitive environment. We want to become trusted advisors to Your Edge readers, and the blog is an opportunity to build recognition as credible experts, beyond traditional sales and marketing communication channels.
We are also showcasing Zebra Nation: how we collaboratively spend our days developing solutions that deliver better outcomes for our customers; how we work together to give back to our communities and how we support our employees and global channel partners.
In 2019, Your Edge was published exclusively in English with all 15 local language versions of Zebra’s global websites providing access to content through redirects to NALA, APAC and EMEA regional English content hubs. It is accessible via multiple navigation paths on Zebra.com or directly at www.zebra.com/blog.
In order to elevate “Your Edge” as a go-to industry resource for useful, thought-provoking information on key business and technology issues, we engage a community of Zebra, partner and third-party contributors who, together, deliver critical news analysis, exclusive insights on the state of global industries, and guidance on how organizations can leverage a number of different proven technology platforms and strategies to capture their performance edge. We publish dynamic, compelling content, including:
Key Features of Your Edge:
Promotion of Your Edge Content:
We made phenomenal strides to elevate Zebra’s thought leadership platform in a short period of time. In just nine months, there were over 103,000 unique visits to the blog by more than 85,000 people across the globe! We published 161 posts with an average 52.79 percent bounce rate.
The feedback from Zebra Nation and the global community is tremendous. We receive requests from partners and customers to share the blog posts via PDFs so they can share with colleagues, bosses, customers and others who could benefit from the insights when making technology buying and integration decisions. There is also significant demand for translated versions of the content by customers, partners and internal stakeholders who feel the posts could benefit a broader audience. (That’s on our 2020 roadmap.) We have also increased our video and podcast cadence to reach audiences who may not have time to read a post but have expressed interested in hearing what our experts have to say.
We built a strong contributor community and successfully delivered a diverse and balanced set of technology, business and human interest stories. Content contributions skyrocketed as subject matter experts discovered the value the blog platform was providing as a collaboration and education tool, with frequent feedback such as this received:
“Starting from its humble beginnings early this year, I think Your Edge has become a valuable resource, within Zebra and without. This is amazing because so many of these corporate blogs end up being vanity/marketing tools with little or no value.”
