When it comes to running an enticing media campaign—whether organic, paid, or personal—animated video will prove its worth end-over-end in 2019. We have already seen a massive shift from written to visual content on every social media feed. Humans are inherently visual learners. Simple animation captures attention more than a stylish static piece. But don’t start to throw out any of those high-performing blogs quite yet! The best approach is to cut through the noise and draw traffic through dynamically rich media.
The solution is clear, but the path forward is still causing designers and marketers alike more than a little frustration. Promoting each piece of content with a unique animation is a huge project, not to mention the necessity of fast-paced delivery. So how do you keep a balance between speed and relevance?
A Balanced Approach
While the standard method was to assign your designer the task of creating unique animations for various promotional content, events, or announcements, there is now an easier way to do it. In our ongoing campaign for our client, the payments giant Paya, our designer and content-marketer teamed up to produce a family of animation templates that would satisfy Paya’s large media needs. By designing a system of video templates (built in Adobe products After Effects and Premiere) for content production use, the templates could be accessed directly by any campaign manager without involving the video team.
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Whether the client needed to promote thought leadership, make an announcement about an upcoming trade show, talk about their latest acquisition, or have their PR team react to something relevant in the industry, Paya was there with an animated post on-time, on-message, and on-brand!
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One Style. Infinite Possibilities.
Building an adaptable animation template that can express various topics and be exported to various sizes and be ready to deliver to multiple platforms requires creative ingenuity that goes beyond the typical one-and-done animations. Motion designers are tasked with creating a template style that is more than just a quick-burning Instagram post but instead satiates a myriad of topics, content, and announcements that the campaign manager will need to post on many social feeds.
Through a thoughtful design approach, we created a fool-proof template system that even newcomers to the Adobe toolset felt empowered to create with. Every template featured static brand elements to choose from, allowing users to alternate background colors, exchange font weights, swap logo color combinations, and pull text overlay effects to match any of the pre-loaded animation sequences. The templates were for more than just editing text between an intro and outro scene; they empowered the campaign managers with an editable, on-brand aesthetic that could convey any message.
While the organic posts looked as expensive as a paid ad (and could theoretically be used that way if needed), the brand could talk to its audiences in a visually polished and dynamic way without exhausting the budget or personnel. When it comes to launching an organic social media campaign, nothing could be smoother.
Animating a Multi-lingual Message
Whether it’s for a new brand-launch, a pivot in the target industry or audience, or just an upgrade for your editorial calendar, building a scalable video technique will be worth it in 2019. Animation simplifies complex topics, and working with a video template can deliver exciting topics on a regular schedule.
Imagine posting up-to-the-minute quotations from a popular conference, results of an ongoing political election, or even public announcements during an emergency event—one can access, customize, and export a unique animation without mobilizing the whole creative team on a Saturday afternoon. Use the messaging you already have, but make it come alive.
The sports world has already edged in this direction, but can you imagine a situation where releasing stats and highlights immediately after the game doesn’t demand a massive commitment from your whole marketing and creative squad? Think quick, engaging, and exciting posts in a personalized way.
An Account-Based Marketer’s Dream
This works beautifully for hyper-targeted campaigns. With a few clicks, you can talk to specific companies and audiences, subbing in relevant messaging between a unique intro/outro. You can target your next competitor or customer at the drop of a hat or develop a fleet of content ready-to-go for the entire campaign.
Taking a closer look at 2019 media strategies, video is being used more often for lead generation and conversion. Customers don’t spend as much time talking to sales reps as they do browsing their thought leadership ecosystems. Having a rich media layer in place for this bottom-of-the-funnel viewer is where you can stand out from the competition.
We will begin to see a lot of experimentation as brands find which video tactics resonate well, and which fizzle. Every competitor wants a personalized campaign, but only some are ready to invest the time and money. This approach allows you to do it all. Remember when seeing your name above a generic email made you feel special? This is the 2019 version, and enhancing your messaging map and fueling your personalization strategy with an animated zeal is not as hard as it sounds.
As marketing professionals improve at optimizing their advertising campaigns around personalized messaging and graphics for target audiences, a “Time Machine” strategy of targeting prospects will become more prominent in 2019.
What’s a Time Machine for marketing? It’s a new approach to targeting the best prospects based on what they might have done – or attended – in the past.
Tracking behavior via AI and advanced analytics of individuals who have attended an event in the past and targeting them for digital outreach offers a new avenue of personalized digital marketing. In one recent example, Bluetext identified everyone who has gone to see a sports team over the past year, with the intent of serving up ads for with offers to buy season tickets or branded merchandise. Only recently have the data analytics and AI been available that could identify who attended a game over the past year. That’s why we call it “Time Machine” technology.
Yet, Time Machine strategies don’t stop at just attendance. Personalization also means setting up a whole system of user personas, messages for each persona, and specific creative that will appeal to them. Then, if prospect (A) performs action (B), they receive item (C); while prospect (X) performing acting (B) will result in them receiving item (Z). So while two individual prospects may have both gone to the same game, getting them to buy the tickets for next season may require different messages to push them over the finish line. Tracking behavior via artificial intelligence and targeting audiences for digital outreach is just one of the ways that a “Time Machine” strategy leverages deep data as a new avenue of personalized digital marketing.
Personalization is powerful because it solves the problem of relevance. Traditionally, ads were targeted at mass audiences, meaning that the vast majority of impressions were useless because they were not relevant to the viewer. A Time Machine strategy, paired with a robust personalization system, means that you can deliver more relevant ads and, in turn, have a better chance of converting more prospects.
At the end of the day, a Time Machine strategy is all about increasing relevance by matching an individual’s past behavior with a message and/or creative that compels them to repeat that behavior. Your brand’s value proposition, communicated in the prospect’s language, matching their expectations, and addressing their unique needs and desires, will be more meaningful with a Time Machine strategy.
Learn how Bluetext can help you make the most of the top marketing trends for 2019.
Move aside, Don Draper. Artificial intelligence (AI) is moving in. Compelling creative and hard-hitting headlines aimed at the general masses are only a fraction of the modern marketer’s job description. With reams of data about millions of online consumers at their disposal, marketing professionals today more closely resemble a nerdy math geek, a spreadsheet in hand, than the smooth-talking Mad Men of old. In 2019, they’re more effective, too.
AI makes marketing smarter and more effective. That’s thanks to the advent of Artificial Intelligence in digital marketing. Although AI has been around the industry for some years, the power of AI to deliver personalized, relevant, and timely ads to an individual online is only growing stronger, and marketers are growing savvier with their new tools. By employing multivariate testing methods in advertising, marketers can test all of the traditional elements of an ad campaign – imagery, headlines, Call-to-Actions (CTAs), and color – and add the mountain of consumer data into an AI engine that will deliver the right ad to the right person at the right time in the right place. Rudimentary tests will optimize around single ads that perform the best to a broad audience. The best Mad Men of 2019 will use multivariate testing to serve unique combinations of each variable in a single ad for a single category of user. AI is here.
Artificial intelligence is offering a powerful new tool to digital marketers, who can use the capabilities of AI to both test and modify how marketing campaigns are delivered to target audiences in a far more personalized way. Before the advent of AI, the testing of banner ads or email campaigns would have been limited to A/B variables, such as subject lines for email or headlines for digital banners. Fancy experiments could also test different graphics, but it typically would be limited to two or three versions at most.
No more ‘spray and pray’. Appeal to individual consumers in 2019. With AI, marketers can now test a wide variety of media attributes, including colors, font, calls-to-action, and background image specific to an individual consumer. AI can assess that person’s past preferences to predict what will have the most impact. That opens up much greater opportunities with retargeting. Not only can the ad display the same product that the consumer was considering from the day before, but it can also suggest, as just one example, the angle of the image that would be the most appealing to that consumer.
The brains of AI, of course, are its algorithms. While AI software may vary in their algorithm, all deliver modern marketers with the unprecedented ability to make real-time calculations about advertisement opportunities. Known as Moment Scoring, AI can determine the likelihood that a digital consumer will engage with an ad and make the desired action based on the goals of the marketing campaign. More than just delivering ads in the moment, AI in 2019 is more cost-efficient by predicting what marketing actions to take in which moments, thereby optimizing your campaign’s spend toward those users that are most likely to convert from prospect to customer.
If you’re not using AI, you’re already losing. According to a report by eMarketer, advertisers around the world have caught on to the power of AI for their marketing campaigns. Nearly 40% of advertisers surveyed indicated that they already use AI’s media spend optimization tactics to make their campaigns more cost effective, with another 31% indicating that they plan to use that tactic. Dynamic creative – ads that change automatically based on the AI’s information about an individual user’s behavior, location, and interests – is already employed by 42% of respondents and is planned to be used by an additional 27% of those surveyed. All of this is to say, if you’re not yet incorporating the power of artificial intelligence into your digital marketing efforts, you’re already losing to the competition.
For a digital marketing campaign that optimizes your budget and delivers results thanks in part to the powerful tools of Artificial Intelligence, partner with Bluetext.
Learn how Bluetext can help you make the most of the top marketing trends for 2019.
Today’s consumer landscape is getting personal, which is why personalization is becoming an important marketing boost for brands. Between ad-blindness and jargon atrophy, we are all tired of generic campaigns attempting to target everyone. We want to feel special. We want to feel heard. This is why marketers in the digital landscape are headstrong on finding new and exciting ways to create campaigns and digital platforms that serve content specific to an individual’s interests.
The Race Is On. Marketers overwhelmingly agree that personalization is a huge benefit for developing and maintaining customer relationships, and nearly 90 percent recognize that their target audiences expect a personalized experience. Two-thirds of consumers say they will switch to brands that treat them like an individual rather than a data point, a trend that will continue to be driven by younger audiences who value brands that are transparent, authentic, and personal. At the same time, marketers know that their efforts at personalization have not kept up with customer demands. They are not satisfied with their current efforts and have low confidence in their ability to achieve successful personalization.
So what change is happening to boost marketers’ confidence in 2019?
Overwhelming Data. Let’s start with the root of the problem. The primary reason for falling behind in the race to personalize platforms does not come from a lack of creative personalization ideas. 2019’s copywriters and UX designers are poised and ready to unleash catchier content, worthwhile CTA buttons, and engaging storytelling experiences on the relevant user. Instead, the problem lies with the struggle to harness infinite user information, across multiple data platforms, into one cohesive customer profile. The solution to this marketing hurdle lies in finding an easier way to cultivate all of the customer data together, including tracking customer journeys and linking data and insights across the web, mobile, email, and social channels.
On average, marketers within companies store their customer data in at least four different systems, most of which are not shared or have no way to make meaningful connections. Dramatic investments are in store for whatever integration, platform, or process can unite the omnichannel user data and enhance data analysis. With this precise-user understanding at marketers’ fingertips, we enjoy the familiarity of personalized campaigns. With this solution still on the horizon, here are some trends happening in the meantime.
Email Is Still Mail. Let’s face it, our inboxes aren’t overflowing with personal communications from friends and loved ones. That doesn’t mean email marketing has to be impersonal. So how do we get a user to click on that one email subject line when they return from vacation to a mailbox full of ads? Personalize your headline copy, customize imagery by location, gender, or season, and insert dynamic CTAs to make the offer relate to what you know about them. Make it pop!
Introduce a Unique Digital Experience. Transforming your online offer to something more personally tangible is not as easy as it sounds. Take, for example, a recent frustration the Graduate Management Admission Council was having with engaging with prospective MBA students on its microsite, CallingAllOptimists.com. While the site looked nice, it lacked the functional depth to gather useful data from its audiences. However an introduction of a personalized 4-question quiz resonated with the site’s traffic on a more personal level, successfully capturing usable data from audiences to improve future marketing endeavors. Taking the quiz and getting their personal Action Report, the user exits the experience with satisfaction as their need was addressed, and continued their relationship by opting-in to an email-nurture campaign. The quiz seamlessly guided the user to customize messaging and content based on their answers, while simultaneously gathering actionable insight which integrated directly to GMAC’s marketing automation platform. Not only did this redesign improve the campaign’s functionality and awareness – it created a holistic brand ecosystem which drove both the user and the client to their desired goal.
You’re on the Right Landing Page. Let’s say you’ve finally convinced the user to engage with your content and click on the CTA button, you know you have their full attention. Making a personalized first impression when they arrive on the landing page both affirms they are in the right place and encourages them to remain there. In the above CallingAllOptimists case study, the media campaign was designed to match the messaging that worked in the first place to pull double-duty by complementing the interest on the landing page. Driving the target audience to the site, the user is met with a unique welcome message in the hero-zone correlated to the specific ad they engaged with.
Empathetic Marketing. No matter the tactic, the fundamental purpose of personalizing any campaign is to boost engagement by telling the user you understand their need. Communicating your own message by listening to their needs first will always prove to be worth the research, planning, and testing effort. Delighting the modern consumer is going to take some analytics-grit, but doing your marketing homework before investing in any large personalization initiative will pay off in 2019.
Learn how Bluetext can help you make the most of the top marketing trends for 2019.
Dynamic content may be the next big thing for digital marketers. In the marketing world, as personalization becomes more in demand, the power of artificial intelligence and data analytics to deliver personalization through dynamic content generation is taking on a larger role. That artificial intelligence is taking the guesswork out of marketing. No longer do digital marketers need to “hope” that, for example, a blue-themed campaign landing page with lots of large images or a certain type of blog post will appeal to all audiences. Artificial intelligence can provide real insights on messaging, graphics, color schemes, and even the types of content that marketers push out to target audiences.
This evolution may be closer than you think. In fact, according to eMarketer, forty percent of marketers in a recent survey responded that they were currently using AI to fuel their dynamic creative. That number was consistent with audience targeting and segmentation, creating a clear path to real personalization. This tactic has given advertisers the unparalleled ability to know their audience through identification, segmentation, and targeting.
Because various types of testing can be done now thanks to AI, marketers are able to find the optimal way to target a particular consumer. This includes elements such as colors, fonts, call to actions and images. Targeted advertisements not only serve a consumer the product they were looking at in the days or weeks before but in a way that would be most appealing to him or her, increasing the likelihood of engagement.
Beyond customizing the content that users are served, consumers are increasingly interested in curating their online experiences as well. That helps explain the endless number of social media platforms available to us.
We recently worked with the cognac company, Courvoisier, to launch their Honor Your Code campaign microsite which truly defines what we mean by “user-generated content.” The site encourages users to create a meme by uploading a photo, adding their hometown, and choosing a “code” that they respect and honor. Memes are then shared to social media, and ingested into the CMS by an Instagram API to display in a scrolling mosaic grid. Users are also able to explore the “Heatmap” by clicking on cities across the country to view other codes being shared and possibly even their own.
The Honor Your Code site on mobile provides for a unique user journey with more of a “native social” experience. Videos and Instagram posts display in a scrolling, digestible way users have become accustomed to. The site also features age authentication and a product locator.
It’s no question that people love personalized content. According to Janrain, 74 percent of online consumers get frustrated when content on the websites they visit has nothing to do with their interests. It’s clear that generating dynamic content for your audience is vital to a brand nowadays, so why not take a deeper dive into each individual’s profile to better understand what will work with that specific target audience? It is much more effective to serve content types and styles that the individual responds to instead of a blanket assumption of one-size-fits-all.
Learn how Bluetext can help you make the most of the top marketing trends for 2019.
The past few years have seen exponential growth when it comes to influencer marketing as part of modern marketing strategies. It is evolving at the speed of light and shows no sign of slowing down. In 2017, the industry was worth just $2 billion but is set to reach $10 billion by 2020. Influencer marketing is changing the way marketers reach out to their audiences and the expectations that consumers have for these campaigns. The reason is simple: According to Ion, not only do 49% of consumers depend on influencer recommendations, but 40% had purchased something after seeing it on Twitter, YouTube or Instagram. As a result, for every dollar spent on influencer campaigns, brands can expect a more than six-fold return.
The trick to a successful influencer marketing campaign is to retain the credibility, authority, and authenticity of these social marketing strategies. Modern-day heroes, including sports stars and celebrities, can reach large audiences with their endorsements or recommendations and can bring those key attributes to their followers. In fact, influencers who are able to build strong audiences with their fans are able to gain three times as many views, twice as many actions, and twelve times as many comments compared to videos from traditional celebrities.
Influencers who have thousands, as opposed to millions, of followers are becoming an even bigger asset for many campaigns because they are viewed as more authentic due to their smaller, more intimate audiences. Acknowledging their connection to their sponsors actually serves to build trust and transparency. While it can be argued that having to use #ad or #sponsor on posts will make the ads less effective because the audience knows the influencer is promoting a company’s product, the counterargument is that brands will actually be promoting trust with their audience.
Video is another great way to bolster influencer strategies, as it can be far more engaging than images. Additionally, because more and more Internet users are installing traditional ad blockers – 40% on laptops and 15% on mobile – videos are a key way to get an ad across to users. People don’t block videos from their favorite social media celebrities – in fact, they’re completely engaged in what they have to say. Advertising power is shifting to real people and influencers. Whether it’s on Facebook Live, Snapchat Stories or Instagram Stories, video content is going to have the highest impact of content that you and your influencer can create for your audience.
Bluetext has found great success when it comes to engaging in influencer marketing strategies. Built With Chocolate Milk, an organization that promotes the benefits of chocolate milk as a natural recovery drink, partnered with Bluetext to improve the site’s consumer digital experience through a website redesign that emphasizes the science-backed benefits of chocolate milk. A key way of doing this? Leveraging impressive partnerships with world-class athletes such as Klay Thompson of the Golden State Warriors.
It’s no question that social media has become a major element in our lives and gives a chance for “normal” people to build their own brands by promoting and engaging with content. With the rise of influencer marketing, companies no doubt have an opportunity to leverage these tactics to more effectively sell their products and solutions.
Learn how Bluetext can help you make the most of the top marketing trends for 2019.
Government marketing, whether to the federal government or to state and local agencies, poses a whole set of challenges for brands and organizations not familiar with the government sector.
One of the immediate and most apparent challenges is that the customers of a government contractor are wide-ranging and not easily defined, including Federal, state and local decision-makers responsible for purchasing technology products and services. It’s a discrete set of decision-makers – with job titles ranging from CIOs and CTOs to program managers, IT managers and procurement officers – that offer limited channels through which they can be reached. These government customers have firm sets of rules about how they can interact with contractors that make marketing even that much more challenging.
Government customers have mission requirements and set budgets, so the traditional return-on-investment messaging that works well in the commercial enterprise space may not resonate at all with government agencies. Buying cycles are long, procurement requirements extensive, and budgeting is uneven. But the rewards can be great, with a steady stream of revenue lasting years. That’s what makes government marketing both challenging and rewarding when it is successful.
It is these challenges that have led us to issue the following guidance for navigating this often bureaucratic and rarely straightforward environment with tips for marketing to government entities. Here are Bluetext’s top tips for reaching this audience:
Focus on agency needs, not yourself
This is a well-founded marketing principle, but particularly in the government contracting sphere. It is critical that marketers focus on the issues that government agencies face rather than trying to impress potential customers with their own solutions. This means identifying an agency’s particular challenges and crafting your communications to let the government stakeholders know you understand their issues and how you can help solve them.
Highlight previous successes across industries
While demonstrating your fluency in the public sector to a potential customer is critical in winning any government contract, do not be afraid to illustrate successes that are not government-specific. Bringing new and diverse ideas to the government landscape is a big selling point for these customers, as they look to effectively achieve their missions in new and creative ways.
Reach decision makers through compelling digital experiences
Many government decision-makers crave information that stands out in a world of monotonous white papers and unfounded promises of “unprecedented innovation.” We recommend investing in government-focused micro-sites or landing pages with messaging that appeals to the government customers rather than the commercial audience.
Identify specific contracts and targets
Micro-targeting your marketing tactics to specific government verticals, agencies or even decision-makers can make the difference in winning a potential contract. By tailoring your messaging and problem identification to the agency that is soliciting bids, your proposal will recognize the user needs and therefore become increasingly attractive to the buyer.
Government marketing is unlike any other in terms of identifying audiences and influencers, in addition to the lengthy timeline of buying cycles from initial engagement to execution. However if properly packaged, the benefits of winning what are often multi-million dollar contracts can provide contractors years of monetary security as well as the opportunity to assist in solving the nation’s toughest challenges. But it takes the right marketing – and messaging – to reach the government audience.
Learn how Bluetext can help you make the most of your government marketing strategy.
A new trend in progressive enterprise organizations is the rise of the CIO. No, not the Chief Information Officer, but the Chief Innovation Officer, charged with ensuring that idea-driven companies produce both customer-facing products and services as well as internal efficiency. For a brand’s marketing team, this means a new opportunity to incorporate the latest technologies and digital strategies into the marketing and communications programs that can take that organization to the next level.
The modern business environment is being propelled by startups, alongside small and mid-sized businesses who have the capacity to stay nimble and pivot amidst constant change. Large organizations on the other hand function more like monolithic battleships, that struggle to change direction as the seas of global markets shift. By failing to adapt away from business-as-usual, these companies will fail to execute enterprise-wide digital transformations when their markets, offerings, and landscapes shift. To keep up with the competitive digital marketing marketplace, that approach needs to move towards a culture of innovation.
Challenges CIOs Face
Even companies progressive enough to hire a Chief Innovative Officer experience difficulty incorporating the innovations they are brought aboard to spur. One of these challenges is that many organizations are worn out from optimistic promises of “digital transformation.” Upon entering their new roles, CIOs have found challenges receiving budget sponsorship from CEOs and advisory boards who do not want to undergo long holds in productivity for a comprehensive IT overhaul when rapid-fire business disruption is the norm.
What CIOs and organizations alike must realize is that change will come, but it will not happen overnight. These transformations will occur at a slower, more iterative pace, with the CIO being the champion advocate for how these transformations will lead to results.
For marketers, that means a strategy that begins to scope out results on a 12- to 24-month innovation cycles instead of the 5- to 7-year epic journeys digital transformations of the past. This may not be as fast as organizations desire (since most of us are used to two-day shipping and instant gratification shopping for new purchases), however taking a long view on steering the ship in the right direction can help organizations and their CIOs realize success in moving massive organizations toward higher-level goals.
Rethinking ROI
CIOs often have large ambitions for massive transformations – and rightly so. As always, these dreams must be balanced with a slice of reality in knowing that all organizational results are measured on how they affect the bottom line. However, rethinking Return on Investment will help stagnant organizations regain their positions on the cutting edge. One way of doing this is to measure business transformation and ranking digital technologies by their larger benefit to the organization, or a “Return on Innovation.” This measure-heavy approach will place additional emphasis on digital KPIs, thereby restoring value in smaller, periodic results over time.
This agile approach is proliferating through business environments, as companies begin to realize well-founded success is built on the sum of quality parts. For example, if you were to build a boat, you wouldn’t push to make all of the different parts of the boat at the same time. You would build it piece by piece, making sure each was quality to ensure that the boat was fortified enough to stay afloat for a long time. CIOs must take this iterative approach if they want to build real change in large organizations.
Sailing Into the Future
The new breed of CIO will ultimately help steer these massive ships toward a prosperous future, by breaking them free of the grooves they have dug themselves into. Organizations are often rooted in outdated methodologies which prevent acceleration toward organizational goals, and it is the responsibility of this new Chief Innovation Officer role to turn the ship in the right direction. Marketing professionals can help push organizations into helping steer the ship towards where they need to be in the market – with the most innovative approaches that are supported across the C-suite.
Learn how Bluetext can help you make the most of the top marketing trends for 2019.
For our final post to end the year and look forward to 2019, let’s turn to the marketing component that is perhaps undergoing the most significant transition: Public Relations. PR was once universally recognized as the bread and butter for communications activities, the core element of any marketing program. That’s no longer the case, as publications that a generation ago would readily cover almost any technology pitch have seen their print ads shrink. As a result, they have drastically cut back on reporters and news coverage as they scramble to define their business models in the digital age.
As a result, public relations firms are having to work harder to create their own opportunities to get coverage for their clients. Instead of a reporter writing on a topic, editors now ask for submitted bylines that they can print – which makes perfect sense, since that’s free content that agencies are providing on behalf of their clients.
Public relations, as a practice, is in need of a significant overhaul. Media relations is not simply a subset of PR, which must focus on a much broader range of channels to reach prospects and customers. This means that influencer marketing, paid content, submitted bylines, content syndicators, specialty websites, and even trade associations must now be part of the outreach mix. It’s not enough to rely purely on earned coverage – practitioners must look for new, creative ways to get their messages out to core audiences.
Some of this is self-preservation. As the economy slows, PR is the first marketing practice to take the hit.
Here is what see as the most important public relations trends for 2019:
Influencer Marketing is on the Rise. Identifying, engaging, and recruiting influencers who have their own followers will be the biggest change for 2019. Understanding which ones have the most valuable followers will be a challenge requiring more sophisticated social measurement tools. Learning how to pitch influencers will mean a steep learning curve, as many influencers try to figure out their value in the market and on the social media channels where they thrive.
Public Relations Must Drive Better Content. Instead of drafters of press releases for clients, PR agencies must evolve into content providers that know how to produce rich, graphical content that can attract attention. Visual assets – which require a creative team in addition to media relations experts – will be essential to delivering content that can be quickly posted for key audiences to see.
Building Relationships. Press releases will still serve a purpose – sometimes a legal requirement and other times as a shorthand tool for reporters. But more important for PR agencies is the ability to build relationships with target audiences across multiple channels. Social media will play a part, but so will communications to targets through a regular cadence of outreach that includes emails, eNewsletters, blog posts, and other content formats.
Blurring the Line. The once-thick-but-now-fine line between public relations and marketing will continue to blur. Long-form client-generated content is getting more popular for several reasons. First, you control every word and don’t have to worry about lousy quotes, misinformation, or competitors being included higher up in the article. Second, publishers are desperately trying to find new revenue streams, so they will continue to push paid native advertising as a way to reach customers and generate more cash. And third, customers would rather hear from experts within companies than reporters who most likely are not as technically proficient.
It’s All About the Metrics. The impact and value of earned media have traditionally been difficult to measure. Agencies must go beyond the typical share of voice, reach and ad value equivalency metrics to include more useful tools that connect the audience with actions. One start-up described in a recent Wall Street Journal article has created a service to measure readership information of articles that specifically mention brands. Look for more analytics tools from Google and other platforms that can connect more of the communications software stacks together for a better look at how prospects are reacting to PR campaigns.
These are all pretty big changes in how we approach the public relations programs we deliver for our clients. Making the shift won’t be easy, but it’s essential to drive results.
Learn how Bluetext can help you make the most of the top marketing trends for 2019.
No look at top marketing trends would be complete without considering the look and feel of a brand: the colors it uses, how the logo is displayed, and the tone and personality it conveys. They all can play a large role in how it is perceived and received by its target audiences. In Part Five of Top Marketing Trends series, we have identified six key directions to keep an eye out for in 2019 when it comes to the visual identities that brands are moving towards in the market.
- Bold Typography. Look for bigger and bolder designs in 2019. Extra-large font sizes, hefty headlines, and interesting artistic effects will be more common. While sans-serif font types have been a dominating factor in font styles, expect more of those in the Helvetica family, especially the extra-bold variations.
- Authentic Photography. Stock photography is getting old and tired. The same smiling perfect faces in gleaming sterile office settings doesn’t look like anything most audiences can relate to or engage with. Real photography through custom shoots will be in more demand. Images services will meet this demand with more photo libraries of authentic images that convey emotion or tell a story.
- Custom Illustrations. Like with photography, look for more custom illustrations that add personality and a little whimsy to a brand’s website and collateral. Look for more creativity and less formality in a broader range of styles as designers stretch their palette with these underused assets. Classic design techniques such as double-exposures and duotones are both re-emerging as modern trends.
- Movement and Animation. “Microinteractions” are one of the newest directions in brand design, and they are generating a lot of buzz already for 2019. Put simply, these are tiny animations used to help target audiences to perform tasks more simply and easily. These are now being widely used as a key UX design trend, and they are especially helpful in providing feedback for their actions. GIFs and SVGs can convey ideas, concepts, and processes, while making content engaging for audiences. They add more interest to emails, banner ads, social media, and even icons and logos.
- Gradients. The use of gradients by a brand was visible on every website button, page header, and PowerPoint deck in the earlier days of digital marketing. That all changed in favor of more flat designs; you can follow the history of the Google logo for a true chronology of this trend. But gradients are back, so expect to see them in vibrant branding, illustrations, and backgrounds as well as overlays. We’re also seeing an increased use of the term “color transitions” when referring to gradients.
- Responsive Logos. Our top marketing trend for 2019 is around a brand’s logo. Responsive techniques for website design came on slowly, but they have more recently become a best practice and an industry standard. With mobile accounting for a greater and greater share of online traffic, it’s no surprise that brands need better ways to show off their logos even on small screens. Applying responsive designs to logos is the next step in this process. Look for this as a major brand trend in 2019.