For part four of our Top Marketing Trends 2019 series, we now turn to digital media campaigns and trends that we expect to see in 2019 based on what we are seeing today. Privacy, transparency, and confidence will have a significant impact on how digital media is leveraged for successful campaigns in the coming year.
How digital media is delivered and received by consumers will continue to evolve in 2019. Privacy will be an even bigger issue for audiences; more publicity around Facebook and Google about how individuals are targeted, how their information is shared (and sold), and how they believe they are being manipulated will continue to take a toll on their online behavior. Amazon’s entrance to the digital media market will only compound these concerns.
To give a little bit of context, according to eMarketer, more than $46 billion will be spent on programmatic advertising in the United States by the end of 2018, an increase exceeding 33 percent – or about $10 billion more than last year. More than four-out-of-five digital display ads in this country will be bought via automated channels.
However, issues of consumer privacy are changing online behavior, as individuals move away from banner ads that follow them from site-to-site. Already, we have seen click-through rates from banner ads plummet. We expect consumers in 2019 not only to shy away even further from banner ads but also to enlist ad blockers to keep them out altogether. As a result, marketing campaigns will move to other more strategic platforms, and especially to LinkedIn for its content and influencer marketing programs.
This will be mostly fine with many brands, as transparency into the media-purchasing process becomes more of an issue. It is almost impossible with digital ads to verify how many dollars in media spend are going to ad inventory versus overhead. This is new to digital media, as print and broadcast ads can be seen and evaluated. In addition, the negative publicity about brands whose ads show up on controversial websites will also drive marketers to other digital media approaches.
According to eMarketer, of the nearly $19 billion in additional ad dollars that will be spent on programmatic display between 2018 and 2020, most will be targeted to private setups such as private marketplaces (PMPs) and programmatic direct transactions. Platforms such as LinkedIn may be more expensive than online display, but that price comes with the confidence that it is being spent on the right audiences who aren’t blocking them.
Learn how Bluetext can help you make the most of the top marketing trends for 2019.
As part three of our Top Marketing Trends 2019 series, with this post, we are focusing on the look and usability of one a brand’s most valuable marketing and revenue asset – the website. Here are our top website design trends for 2019, culled from our insights into the market, feedback from clients, and discussions with top marketing industry experts.
- Expect a bold new look from many top brands. Bright colors are in because of its ability to draw attention quickly. And in today’s crowded online market, the competition is fierce to stand out from the crowd. Beyond its power to stand out, brands are more willing to be seen as a bold organization. As a result, we are seeing more clients wanting to boldly take risks with color variations, blends, and saturation.
- Typography will follow this trend. Look for bolder typography with large fonts that dominate the page. Expect to see less of the cursive style and thin lines, and more fonts that allow letters to clear, obvious, and thick. Brands will be better able to express themselves with a bolder style.
- Look for more custom illustrations. It’s hard to stand out from your competitors when everyone is using similar stock photos. Customers gravitate towards brands that are authentic and appear confident in the market, and stock photos are neither. Customer illustrations give a brand a platform to express itself, tell its story and differentiate itself in the market.
- Integrated animations will help improve navigation. This trend will continue at high speed in 2019. Also called micro-animations, these features can both grab users attention and guide them on their journey through the website by showing them that they are in the right place and that they’ve taken the intended action.
- Mobile first design. Okay, we’ve been saying this for several years now, but it’s even more important. According to a recent report from Google, “Every day, people are becoming more reliant on their smartphones to help make last-minute purchases or spur-of-the-moment decisions. In fact, smartphone users are 50% more likely to expect to purchase something immediately while using their smartphone compared to a year ago.”
Learn how Bluetext can help you make the most of the top marketing trends for 2019.
We recently launched our Top Marketing Trends 2019 series, that will take a close look at what digital marketers should expect for next year. We started with privacy because of a sea change in consumer attitudes about their online privacy over the past 18 months – much of it the result of huge changes in policy around the world, like the European Union’s GDPR requirements, as well as data breaches that put a massive number of Americans at risk. In our post last week, we dove into what GDPR means for marketers here in the U.S.
In today’s post, we will examine changes resulting from Facebook’s sale of its data to Cambridge Analytica, which used the information on Facebook users for controversial political targeting. Why is this a top marketing trend for 2019? Because the realization of how social media platforms like Facebook are using consumer information has had a significant impact on Facebook’s users and financial status, a trend that will extend to other social media outlets in the coming year.
Here are out three key takeaways from the Facebook fiasco that will have a significant impact on digital marketers:
The challenge with marketers who want to leverage platforms like Facebook to reach their target audiences is that the social media companies themselves are just now putting in place consumer safeguards about how their data is being used- in the face of serious public and political pressure. We all know that consumers want an easy experience when looking to research or purchase on the internet, which is what we marketers want, as well. Now that consumers see that this convenience comes at a cost, they want more control over how their personal information is used.
Our first takeaway for 2019: There’s a big difference between serving the consumer’s interest and using that same data when it doesn’t benefit that individual. Our recommendation is to take a close review of how you use your customer data and make sure it actually serves the customer.
Another challenge is expectations. Having a privacy policy at the bottom of your website, filled with unintelligible legalese that no consumer is ever going to read or understand, isn’t going to be enough. That CYA language needs to become useful.
Our second takeaway for 2019: Give visitors to your website real choices that they can understand over how their information is used. One idea that is making headway is having a privacy dashboard that is readily accessed by visitors, where they can make their own decisions about their data.
Finally, we all need to know who we are dealing with when it comes to third-party vendors. The issue with Cambridge Analytics was not simply that Facebook was providing data to an outside entity – after all, that is its business model, and in our opinion, there is nothing wrong with that when used appropriately. The scandal was that the outside firm was using the data for ways that Facebook users would never have sanctioned – to influence how they vote in elections.
Our third takeaway for 2019: Make sure you know your partners, including data brokers and ad buyers, and exactly what they are doing with the information. Ask them if they are acquiring personal data without the user’s permission. It won’t be enough to claim ignorance about your third-party vendors.
In our next post on top marketing trends 2019, we’ll look at website design and build, and what to expect next year.
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It’s time again for our top marketing trends 2019, Bluetext’s annual look at what trends are going to drive digital marketing come the new year. In this and subsequent blog posts, we will discuss additional trends for 2019, including the public’s change of attitude towards social media platforms, and then assess what to expect next year in website design, digital marketing, branding, and public relations.
For 2019, identifying an over-arching theme that will drive a significant part of the marketing industry is not hard. Privacy, ranging from significant new regulatory requirements, massive industry failures, and changing consumer expectations, wasn’t merely a distraction (or some might say annoyance) – it was a bludgeoning that top marketers had to take repeatedly, as changes to successful digital strategies got turned on their head over and over throughout the year due to changes in privacy rules as well as blow-back against platforms that appeared to disregard privacy.
First and foremost for us marketers was the General Data Protection Regulation, better known as GDPR. The regulation, which took effect in the European Union on May 25th, is a legal framework that sets guidelines for the collection and processing of personal information of individuals within the European Union. Of course, since just about every brand either does business now in the EU or wants to do business there, it is a framework that impacts every organization that interacts with our friends across the pond.
GDPR in and of itself tells you everything you need to know about how privacy is becoming the driving force behind changes to digital marketing. In a nutshell, the regulatory framework behind GDPR places personal information back in the hands of the individual, and removes it from the control of private companies, because it requires the explicit informed consent of an individual to make their information public. There are other requirements as well in the regulation, but it essentially requires marketers at every company that does business in the EU to obtain the “opt-in” consent from their customers (and non-customers). And because few people can be expected to give that permission, it is drastically changing how marketers can use the types of behavioral data that we generally collect for marketing (and other) purposes.
Here’s how Inc.com summarized the impact of GDPR on digital marketers:
“(A) s a digital marketer, you are going to have to be transparent any time you wish to collect data on someone. You will have to communicate very clearly that you want to collect data, and explain explicitly how that data is going to be used. You then have to gain consent while also informing consumers about their right to refuse or withdraw their consent. This means that you might have to get a lot more creative when trying to convert a website visitor into a lead.”
GDPR presents some very real challenges to digital marketers, who are going to be held to a higher standard than pre-GDPR. But it’s also forcing fresh thinking and more creative strategies, and ultimately it should help build better relationships between businesses and their consumers that are built on trust and transparency.
Next in our Top Marketing Trends 2019 series: How privacy blow-back to top digital platforms is changing digital marketing.
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If 2018 saw significant changes to how technology is leveraged for marketing, 2019 is certainly going to be just as transformative, and just as challenging. So as we enter the fourth quarter of 2018, every organization from global enterprises to challenger brands to growing industry associations needs to start thinking about making sure it has the right agency partner for 2019.
As we all know, of course, hiring a top branding agency can be extremely stressful. How do you evaluate your organization’s marketing needs and match them to a top branding agency that has the skill sets, the experienced team, and the vision to meet your revenue targets. Key to making the case for a top branding agency is recognizing that an agency with the right experience and creativity will help your business grow, and can be one of the most important investments you make.
Here are our five tips for finding a top branding agency that will take your brand to the next level:
- It’s the Creative. First and foremost, creative can make or break every brand. The first question you need to ask before selecting a top branding agency is if it has a range of creative designers bringing different options and creative approaches to the project. A small team will never have the range of styles of a successful agency. With a small shop, it’s not long until all creative tends to look the same. Check out the creative that’s on the agency’s website. Does it look too much the same, or is there a wide range of styles and concepts across the site? Do you like what they are promoting? If not, find an agency that you do like.
- What About Consistency? How is the quality of the branding work? For agencies where branding is not their core focus, we often see that the work is inconsistent, both in quality and in tone. A top branding agency recognizes the importance of consistency to your brand.
- Can They Handle Brand Management? Can the agency take you through your projected growth as an organization? A top branding agency isn’t valuable only on the one project but will be with you for the long-term. That means that as your brand grows and evolves, it lessens the risk of diluting it as new ideas are explored and boundaries pushed. The right agency team can make sure that new directions are kept within the context of the brand style guide. A great branding agency can lead the development of new deliverables and can deliver on the vision for the brand.
- Industry Insights. Is the agency’s team viewed as a thought leader in the marketing industry? The best agency partners work across a variety of industries and keep on top of trends and styles across many verticals. Read their blog posts. Do they practice what they preach?
- Can They Create a Vision and Stick to it. Can they help you tell your story? A top branding agency has the expertise and creativity needed to develop a comprehensive brand that is consistent and tells a compelling story. It takes lots of work to develop that skill and requires significant know-how and ability to both see the vision and execute on that vision. The right firm recognizes the intricacies of taking a brand from concept to completion at different stages in their client’s business lifecycle. That skill – to see the big picture of your organization and help you bring your brand to life – is critical and valuable.
Considering a Branding Agency? Learn how Bluetext can help.
Choosing a new name for a brand or a product is never easy. This is particularly true for companies that, through private equity acquisitions and spin-offs or other M&A activity, find themselves needing to quickly find a new name to separate them from their past affiliation. But finding a name that is original and conveys the right tone and attributes is difficult. Add to that the requirement that a URL be available, and it becomes seemingly impossible. Yet, as top branding agencies know, finding a strong new name can help launch a new brand that gets noticed, or re-ignite an old brand that is need of a new direction. What it takes is a proven and disciplined approach.
Finding the right name is hardly a new problem. Ford Motor Company notoriously faced this issue in the mid-1950s when launching a new line of vehicles into the U.S. market. Recently retold in an article in The New Yorker magazine, Ford searched long and hard to find a name for its newest car, even turning to a poet for help. She came up with a long list of suggestions that didn’t sound like a car, including the Intelligent Bullet, the Ford Fabergé, the Mongoose Civique, the Bullet Cloisoné and (my favorite) the Utopian Turtletop. Instead, Ford chose to name the car after the founder’s son and called it the Edsel. It went on to become one of the most notorious failures in automotive history.
Would a better naming strategy save the car from its ignominious demise? Maybe not, because the vehicle had other issues that didn’t resonate very well with consumers.
Flash forward 60 years, and the name challenge is even more difficult, with the modern twist of the proliferation of URL “squatters” that buy up every word combination in the hope that they can sell it at a profit, making it nearly impossible to find an available word without paying a fortune for the domain. Today, bad naming decisions still plague the corporate world. Earlier this year, the Tribune Publishing Company, owners of the Los Angeles Times and Chicago Tribune among other papers, decided to rebrand itself as a content company and chose the name Tronc, short for Tribune Online Content. The name was not well-received in the market, and the company has since put itself up for sale (and has seen a half-billion-dollar sale to Gannett fall through). Any branding professional would have seen that coming.
Why? First and foremost, because it’s an ugly sound, that’s a key criterion for a new name. As The New Yorker article points out, there is lots of research about how people respond to words and sounds. So, for example, front-vowel sounds – ones that are formed in the front of the mouth like the “i” in “mil” – evoke “smallness and lightness.” Those that come from the back of the mouth, such as the “a” in “mal,” emote “heaviness and bigness.” Softer consonants, like “s” and “z,” seem lighter than so-called “stop consonants,” like “k” and “b,” which seem weightier. When George Eastman invented the name Kodak in 1888, he did so because he liked that “k” was “a strong, incisive sort of letter.”
Bluetext’s Four Pillars of a Good Name
We’ve developed our own four naming pillars that we strive to meet when working with our clients. We believe that a new name should:
* Be easy to say
* Be easy to spell
* Be easy to remember, and
* Most important, Tell a story
We know that hitting all four of those elements is not always possible, especially as URL and trademark issues often require the use or words purposely misspelled, like the car service Lyft. Tronc fails on several fronts. It doesn’t tell a story about the brand, nor is it obvious on how it should be spelled. As The New Yorker puts it, “Tronc wants to seem light, fast, forward-looking, and unburdened by the media industry’s past, but its back-vowel sound and its leaden ‘k’ ending sonically convey something heavy, slow, and dull.”
Real words when used as names need to make a connection between the underlying meaning and the brand itself. So, for example, Tesla was a genius on the cutting-edge of innovation. Bluetext is the color that text turns when hyperlinked in a document, and thus is the window to the digital world. Made-up names don’t always have this connection, and thus need to rely on the root syllables and sound for their meanings. Lexus suggests luxury, Viagra both vitality and virility. Inspirata, a medical analytics company we recently helped to brand, suggests inspired data.
Names are the first exposure that key target audiences have to the brand or product, and need to be carefully thought out. A disciplined process for evaluating the key messages, the nature of the audiences, the competitive landscape and what that brand aspires to be in two-to-four years all need to be part of the process.
ManTech, a multi-billion-dollar public company that provides technology services to the U.S. government, had the challenge to elevate its online presence and continue its competitive position in the crowded Federal government marketplace. To achieve its goal, ManTech selected Bluetext to take its brand to the next level and transform its online presence – all to meet tight deadlines in less than 6 months.
Bluetext designed a fresh, bold look and feel that embodies ManTech’s cutting-edge capabilities and sets the company apart within its industry. The designs and collateral made thoughtful use of ManTech’s color palette, balancing the brand’s vibrant red tones with whitespace. The use of dynamic motion throughout the visual identity showcases ManTech’s innovation and adaptability, always moving forward to meet the evolving technological needs of the government.
Part of the project included a new website. ManTech and Bluetext worked together to design, architect, and develop a fully responsive site with an enhanced user experience. The intuitive, well-organized design drives users to their needs quickly and functions as a lead-generation tool. The new site also provides a new experience to recruits with a seamless integration of job application workflow, allowing prospects to quickly search and filter jobs relevant to their specific interests and experience.
The site was built on a Drupal 8 CMS platform to provide the flexibility and scalability the large enterprise needs to support its digital marketing initiatives. The team conducted a comprehensive content overhaul and developed a strategic SEO plan to make ManTech.com an organic SEO over-achiever. The ManTech marketing team is now empowered to “own” its digital platform and market to its users, no longer requiring the involvement of the development team.
One of the key aspects that sets ManTech’s new site apart is the use of motion. As one of the final components of the project, Bluetext produced a series of videos for the website, weaving ManTech’s suite of capabilities into one cohesive and powerful story. These videos highlight ManTech’s mission-driven brand while educating potential customers on its world-class solutions.
Click here to see more examples of the ManTech project, or learn how Bluetext can help your organization elevate its brand and online presence.
In previous posts, we’ve discussed some of the components that top marketing firms know make a successful marketing campaign. In this post, we’ll explore why audience segmentation is so important to a campaign’s success, and how top marketing firms can drive the messaging themes and creative approach to the campaign.
One client of ours is a membership industry organization that represents information technology specialists and serves more than 140,000 professionals around the world. Its services to its members include providing services for IT professionals who need to gain the skills and qualifications required of their market.
The client partnered with us its 2018 program to reach out to its target audiences about the value it brings to this industry. Bluetext developed an email and banner ad campaign around several themes designed to communicate that value to its members, and to deliver compelling creative that would quickly get the attention of target audiences. In addition, the campaign used sophisticated programmatic and analytics-based targeting to ensure that the right target was receiving the brand message.
One of the first steps in our process to develop an effective campaign to reach the organization’s goals was to take a deep dive into its data and outreach list segmentation. We divided the campaign into four segments:
1) Students considering IT as a career
2) IT professionals in the early stages of their careers looking to move up
3) Mid-career professionals seeking to make the next career move
4) Mid-to-late career professionals seeking to stay up-to-date and relevant in their careers
For each of these four segments, we created specific messaging and creative for use in banner ads, paid social, and email targeting, with each prominently featuring the organization’s brand and logo in order to reinforce that awareness and brand recall. For example, for those starting their careers, we created themes around starting their careers, while for those in mid-career our themes focused on advancing their careers and becoming indispensable.
The results exceeded our expectations; the organization’s total brand awareness rose 13% points from its pre-campaign level. This campaign demonstrates why top marketing firms view audience segmentation as so important to a campaign’s success. Without a clear set of messages specific to each segment, target audiences would not have seen messaging and creative relevant to where they are in their careers. With those differentiated approaches, audiences responded far more positively to the campaign.
Learn How Bluetext Can Help Design and Execute Your Next Digital Campaign!
In our previous blog post, we discussed how top marketing firms take a disciplined approach to digital campaigns in order to measure, analyze, and optimize results throughout the campaign. In this post, we will talk about our process of how top marketing firms invest time and energy into the creative approach that needs to grab audiences’ attention in order to convert them into a customer.
At Bluetext, we believe that great creative approaches come from an organized process that brings in fresh minds that work across different agency disciplines. First and foremost, we go beyond the client team to engage in an agency-wide brainstorm, often getting the best ideas from colleagues who may not have ever touched the particular client. But we don’t just through them in a room and ask them to come up with great ideas. Instead, we rely on the initial team members to prepare a thorough creative brief based on the in-depth discovery that begins our process.
That brief will be based on a number of research elements, including:
- The key target audiences, including what is likely to motivate them to take action and engage with the campaign.
- The campaign’s top messaging. What do we want to get across to the target audiences that will get them to pay attention?
- Any available market research. What’s already out there to help us design the campaign, and is there additional research that needs to take place?
- The competitive landscape. What are the messages that competitors are using, and what creative are they using in their marketing?
- The client’s attitude towards the campaign. How innovative or clever is the client willing to be in this campaign? Does it need to be a conservative approach, or can something a little more edgy we acceptable?
This brief provides our team members with the guidance they need to start thinking about a creative approach that will succeed for our campaigns without reinventing the wheel or sending them down a path that we already know will not be effective.
In our next post, we will explore some recent creative examples that bring this approach altogether as part of the process that top marketing firms employ to achieve success for their clients.
Learn How Bluetext Can Help Design and Execute Your Next Digital Campaign!
Our association clients often ask us what our process is for developing digital campaigns that will deliver the best results, whether that’s awareness for their brand or attendance for their conferences and events. Top marketing firms understand that a strong, repeatable process is key to getting the right messages and creative to the right audiences at the right time. They also know that analyzing results on a continual basis is the only way to optimize performance by revising and adjusting when needed.
At Bluetext, we take a disciplined approach to every campaign, and that begins with discovery. We start by asking three questions:
- What is the goal of the campaign?
- Who are the target audiences?
- What do you want them to do?
These might sound like simple questions, but you might be surprised at the discussion that follows within the association world to get to an agreement on each of those. Top marketing firms like Bluetext know that we have to act as both a facilitator and as a honest broker who can push each stakeholder to reach that agreement. The reason is that at most membership and trade associations, there are different “clients” who have different goals for each campaign. In some cases, it might be membership renewal, while for others in the same organization it might be registration for an event that drives revenue. For others, it might be awareness of the services that the association provides.
But it’s not until that decision is made that we can move on to the next question: Who are you targeting? Again, that might sound simple, but we’ve witnessed our share of knock-down, dragged-out fights inside organizations where stakeholders have a different opinion of the audience. In some cases, part of the client team might be focused on entry-level IT professionals for their particular association, while their colleagues might believe that the true target is the mid-level professional seeking to move up in their career.
But the most difficult question seems to always come down to, What do you want them to do? The easiest response might be to do something that drives revenue, whether it is to become a member of the organization, or to renew their membership. It might also be to attend an event or purchase a service. But it might also be simple awareness of the value of the trade association and the services it brings to its members.
For each of these possible answers, there might be a multi-step process to take the action. We don’t expect, for example, a new prospect to commit to attending an annual conference just because they receive an email or see a banner ad or paid social post. It may take a sophisticated email “drip” campaign that methodically delivers different types of information that drives them down through the sales funnel before they click on a landing-page for registration. Each step of the process requires clear messaging and strong creative. And each step requires effective analytics to measure performance of the subject line (for an email) or headline (for a banner ad). We are always A/B testing subject and headlines to see which are performing the best so we can adjust accordingly.
Top marketing firms will provide detailed methodologies and analytic tools before the campaign is launched so that organizations understand exactly how the campaign will run and achieve the desired results.