Don Goldberg, Author at Bluetext

Acquia, the leading hosting and support company for Drupal open-source content management systems, has named Bluetext as a finalist in its 2018 awards for best digital marketing firms and website design. Acquia chose Bluetext for its work with Mindtree.com, one of the global leaders in digital transformation and technology services. Bluetext created a revitalized digital brand, a new website user experience, and a state-of-the-art Drupal content management platform for Mindtree.

Acquia considered more than 100 submissions from top digital marketing firms for its annual award. Among the factors it evaluated for for its best digital marketing companies and websites were client projects that demonstrated an advanced level functionality, integration, and performance, including the results and key performance indicators for each site. Acquia also evaluated overall user experience for each website. Acquia called the breadth of submissions “inspiring… and continues to affirm that Acquia’s partners and customers are setting the precedent for exceptional digital experiences.”

For the new Mindtree.com, Bluetext developed an intuitive, fully responsive user-experience that leverages personalization to serve relevant content to each user. The site was built on a Drupal 8 CMS platform to provide the flexibility and scalability that a large enterprise needs to support its digital marketing initiatives. Best of all, the web design reflects the vibrancy of the brand and its employees, a specific goal of the brand.

Bluetext and the website will be featured during Acquia’s annual Engage conference, where the best digital marketing companies and the foremost leaders in digital will take center stage to share their insights, revelations, and lessons learned in the quest to deliver best-in-class customer experiences.

Learn how Bluetext can deliver a great user-experience for your brand.

In today’s continually evolving digital landscape, top brands look to their digital marketing firms for direction on how best to leverage every tool to reach their target audiences. And while it’s easy for agencies to sit back and relax after they’ve set the strategy, the old school approach of “set it and forget it” will come up short. The best digital marketing companies know that they must continually analyze results and optimize their campaigns to achieve their clients’ marketing goals.

At Bluetext, for the past several years we have been managing digital campaigns for the National Retail Federation – the industry’s top association – to help drive interest in and attendance at their most important annual conferences. Perhaps the most challenging of those shows, Shop.org, takes place this September in Las Vegas. The conference focuses on e-commerce and digital strategies for retail brands who leverage online shopping as part of their sales mix. But for digital marketing firms to get retailers to travel to a show in Las Vegas isn’t the easiest task. We all love Vegas, but traveling there can be expensive and takes precious time away from their business.

For Shop.org, we worked with NRF to create more than just interest in the conference, channeling our efforts into making it a “must-attend” show for any retailer who also lives and dies in the online space. That meant building in urgency, highlighting the top-line speakers and attendees and letting retailers know what they would learn there. The best digital marketing companies recognize that digital campaigns have arcs and that the key messages must follow those arcs while optimizing along the way for the best-producing creative.

The arc we developed for Shop.org began with urgency. That included messaging that pushed registration deadlines and cost incentives for meeting those deadlines.

The next focus was on the breadth and depth of the speakers who would be there, who would share their path to online retail success as well as the networking opportunities that come with those brand names.

The final focus was on the biggest names who would be there, in order to drive particular interest among retailers. With this year’s Shop.org, that meant tennis superstar Serena Williams, whose own clothing brand has become a huge success.

With this campaign arc firmly in place, we put on our web marketing agency hat and began analyzing the numbers. Some creative concepts that didn’t perform in our a-b testing were put on hold, while others that proved successful – especially the Serena announcement – were accelerated. The result was an uptick in visits to the Shop.org website as well as registrations to the show.

That’s what the best digital marketing companies do: Analyze and optimize for their clients.

Learn how Bluetext can analyze and optimize your brand’s digital campaigns!

It’s always rewarding to see a client do well and continue to grow in their market. It’s doubly exciting when two clients team up together to build a powerhouse brand. That’s exactly what has happened with CQRoll Call, one of the best-known and most widely-respected publishers of both policy content and advocacy tools, was recently acquired by FiscalNote, a Google-backed player in the governmental affairs and advocacy that has grown into a data-driven, global player and has expanded into digital advocacy and issues management.

The partnership takes advantage of CQ Roll Call’s rich history of unbiased coverage of the Federal government and FiscalNote’s expertise in technology and real-time policy data and analytics to provide a broader suite of products and services in a dynamic market. The acquisition allows both brands to identify new opportunities to adapt and grow in the digital news landscape.

CQ Roll Call chose Bluetext to design a new website for its wide selection of both policy information and advocacy platforms in order to better attract and convert target prospects into customers. We developed an approach that allows visitors to quickly self-select what they are looking for on the website and gets them to those software options with in-depth product information and pricing.

For FiscalNote, Bluetext designed a new approach for its brand and website to simplify the user experience, delivering the right content and information to prospective customers to understand the best options for leading advocacy campaigns in today’s digital age.

For both brands, Bluetext was able to take them to the next level in terms of their position in the market, transforming them into cutting-edge industry players.

The end result: A strategic acquisition that makes the new combined powerhouse brand the market leader both in the U.S. and globally.

If you’re a brand that sells and markets to the Federal agencies, the floodgates are about to open. Because of the Appropriations bill that was signed into law earlier this year, Federal agencies have $140 billion more than they thought they would before the legislation was agreed to. That’s funding that agencies need to spend before September 30th, the end of the Federal fiscal year. That’s an additional $80 billion for defense and $63 billion for civilian agencies. Those funds are “use-it-or-lose-it”- whatever they don’t spend goes back to the Treasury.

As a result, as Professional Services Council (the trade association that represents Federal contractors) President David Berteau recently told NextGov.com, “(i)f agencies are going to spend the extra money in fiscal 2018, it’s going to have to be at a much higher percentage in the fourth quarter than it has been historically.”

According to NextGov, “only two of the 10 largest federal agencies have managed to spend 70 percent of their projected discretionary budgets by the beginning of the fourth quarter.” Analysts believe the Federal market will see a mad scramble by procurement officials to spend as much on contracts as possible.

This influx of money is both an opportunity and a challenge for companies that see the Federal marketplace as a key vertical market. The opportunity is to present their solutions that can help solve agency problems and help government executives meet their mission requirements and make some key sales before the end of the year.

The challenge is finding the right marketing mix and messaging to get in front of government decision-makers quickly, before the fiscal clock runs out. Here are our recommendations for getting your brand message out to Federal agencies before the end-of-year deadline:

Federalize the Message. Remember, Federal officials think differently – and react differently – than commercial clients. Because agencies have fixed budgets, ROI (return on investment) is less important. Government officials have mission requirements to meet and want solutions that will achieve those.
Fit In. Government officials don’t want to see campaigns that aren’t relevant to their needs. Nor do they react to campaigns that don’t look like them. Don’t simply recycle commercial marketing materials – develop new campaigns that look and feel like government solutions.
Speak Directly to Government Executives. Create a government-targeted landing page that is easy for them to find on your home page. Otherwise, they won’t spend much time hunting around hoping to find marketing materials that talk about their challenges and mission requirements.
Market to the Whole Audience. It’s easy to think that there are only a handful of Federal officials involved in purchasing decisions. While that might technically be true for the final decision, there are lots of people involved throughout the process. These include top officials who set the policy and goals, program directors who have to implement those policies, project managers who run the actual programs, researchers who might be tasked with exploring options and evaluating choices, and procurement officials who make sure the entire process is followed to the exact letters of the Federal Acquisition Regulations. Make sure your marketing appeals to every step of the process, and every part of the sales funnel.

Need Help Marketing to the Federal Government? Bluetext Can Help.

We often get requests from clients to upgrade not just the user experience for their websites, but also the website design to ensure a rich visual experience that will separate them from their competitors. This is not an idle request. Potential clients and customers of digital services often want and expect to see a contemporary website design that looks like it is at the cutting edge of the market. Having a design that even looks three years old can make you appear to be out of date and not competitive.

At Bluetext, we recognize that for industries that are seeking a digitally-savvy audience, style and presentation are essential components of what will attract the interest of target prospects, and what will turn them into customers. For our clients, we employ a website design approach that focuses on four design elements:

UX, Navigation, and Imaging. There are two websites in particular that exemplify the kind of experience we like to show to our clients: Stripe and Qualcomm. Both sites have the type of navigation and that really show off the software interfaces of their products, in a smart, simple, but sophisticated way.
Visual Storytelling. It may not be intuitive to associate how to describe a product or service with telling a story, but that is exactly what the best websites do for their solutions, leveraging a storytelling approach to tell a strong brand and product story. The enterprise technology company Palantir is a first place to find inspiration. Not only is the design and layout very elegant but notice how the scroll begins with the stars and the sky, but as you move down, it takes you through the clouds to the ground in a seamless and engaging way. Another strong example is WealthSimple. Like Palantir, it is a single scroll that uses a clever and interesting rolling visual that tells the story of the product. Each scene includes just a little animation and movement to keep your eyes engaged.
Scale. Finding the right approach to present a design that has the right scale and proportions, carries the corporate image and brand, and has a clean look, is always a challenge. This is especially true when the pressure is on to include as much information on separate software products as possible. One look at XO’s website gives a sense of how we can create a clean look that has the corporate brand and appeal as well as the right scale for what we want to convey to website visitors.
Production Quality. How each company and its brands and products are portrayed can have a significant impact on those customers whose engagement is essential. That’s why we think high production value on products is so important. No brand does this better than Volkswagon of American. Check out its website to get a sense of how to use the highest quality of product for images, movement, and layout to give visitors a successful website experience.

Learn how Bluetext can help your brand’s website design tell the right stories with a rich visual approach.

The Federal government Buying Season is right around the corner. That means that any company that has the technology to help government agencies meet their mission requirements needs to start getting in front of those buyers quickly. The Federal Buying Season begins in August and runs through September as agency procurement officers will make their final selections to meet end-of-year spending requirements. With the government, allocated funds are often “use-it-or-lose-it,’ meaning they won’t carry on through the next fiscal year. Anything unspent becomes out-of-reach.

For government contractors and global brands who consider the agencies a key vertical, putting in place a comprehensive marketing campaign to reach these decision makers starts now. As we pointed out in our previous post, government agencies respond differently than commercial markets. For their Buying Season, they have mission requirements to meet and are looking for the best solutions that will help them do that. That’s why a marketing campaign needs to speak their language and not simply rely on the same campaigns targeted to the commercial sector.

Here are some of the key elements to consider when designing your Federal Buying Season marketing campaign:

Start with Messaging. As we noted in our previous post, messaging targeted towards the needs of the government buyer is critical. Make sure that messaging talks to their pain points, their mission requirements, and the past experience you have in the market. Those are the three top components that this audience needs to see.
The Creative Needs to Match the Market. Cutesy, humorous, out-of-the-box campaigns are ok, but within limits. Stay away from the controversial, but adding a little humor can be effective. We recently did a campaign for Intel that included a guy wearing pajamas on the bottom with a suit on top to demonstrate how its technology helps Federal telecommuters. It was clever, cute, and got people thinking while keeping far away from anything offensive.
Go Directly After the Market. Programmatic campaigns, relying on sophisticated email workflows and paid banner and social media can be effective for driving leads if done in a way reaches those audiences in an intelligent way. Bluetext has had significant, measurable success with well-constructed campaigns targeted at government decision-makers and buyers.
Coverage in Government Publications Gives Air Cover. A strong media relations component of the campaign can provide thought leadership, wide exposure, and air cover for the sales team. Many government tech trades are happy to publish submitted bylines from industry experts provided that they explore market needs and trends, and are not simply marketing pieces disguised as a news article.
Drive Time is Prime Time. In the D.C. region – the home to most of the nation’s Federal executives – commuting is a fact of life. That means a captive audience twice a day every day during morning and evening rush hours. We are big believers in radio spots as well as broadcast interviews to reach this audience when they are most receptive.
Leverage All of Your Company Assets. Every company has a number of Members of Congress that represent their employees. Turn these legislators into advocates for your brand. They can help open doors across the government.

Learn how Bluetext can help your brand with a successful Buying Season campaign.

Technology and defense companies who include the public sector as an important market view mid-summer as their time to get busy. For marketing to the Federal government, whose fiscal year begins October 1, we call this the “buying season,” because in August and September agency procurement officers will make their final selections to meet end-of-year requirements. With the government, allocated funds are often “use-it-or-lose-it,’ meaning they won’t carry on through the next fiscal year. Anything unspent becomes out-of-reach.

That’s why a sound marketing strategy tailored specifically to the Federal agencies is so important starting after the July 4th holiday. Giving program managers and those in procurement your best effort to select your products or solutions for their purchasing decisions is essential during these next several months. Here are our top tips for marketing to the Federal agencies during the Buying Season:

Federalize the Message. Big brands who sell to many different sectors often don’t have the in-house knowledge or expertise to deliver a message to Federal agencies that will resonate with their decision-makers, instead simply repurposing marketing and messaging developed for the commercial markets. Big mistake. Federal officials think differently – and react differently – than commercial clients. Because agencies have fixed budgets, ROI (return on investment) is less important. Yes, budgets can be tight and the best value is important. But that’s a little different than ROI. Government officials have mission requirements to meet and want solutions that will achieve those. Telling them how your product will do that will have a far greater impact than how much money they can save.
Look Like You Belong. Government officials don’t want to see campaigns that aren’t relevant to their needs. Nor do they react to campaigns that don’t look like them. My favorite mistake that I see all the time is campaigns that use stock images of executives in ultra-modern glass office high-rises. That’s not what government offices look like, and it’s hard to see the connection.
Make Them Feel Like They Belong. Create a government-targeted landing page that is easy for them to find on your home page. Otherwise, they won’t spend much time hunting around hoping to find marketing materials that talk about their challenges and mission requirements. Use images and color palettes that fit in but also leverage accent colors to stand out. But… give the Feds some credit. They won’t jump at a jet fighter unless there is something about that jet that means something to them. Find the right images, not just ones that you think look patriotic.
It’s a Big Audience With Lots of Input. It’s easy to think that there are only a handful of Federal officials involved in purchasing decisions. While that might technically be true for the final decision, there are lots of people involved throughout the process. These include top officials who set the policy and goals, program directors who have to implement those policies, project managers who run the actual programs, researchers who might be tasked with exploring options and evaluating choices, and procurement officials who make sure the entire process is followed to the exact letters of the Federal Acquisition Regulations (the voluminous procurement Bible that includes all of the complicated purchasing rules). Make sure your marketing appeals to every step of the process, and every part of the sales funnel.

Need Help Marketing to the Federal Government? Bluetext Can Help.

We’re now halfway through the year and it’s time to check in on some of the top digital marketing trends that we’re seeing for the second half of 2018. The past two years have seen a near-universal transition to digital marketing strategies being implemented across every industry. A digital approach to marketing is now a given. It’s now more a question of which tactics and strategies companies are going to follow to get the best messages in front of the right audiences, how they will measure those programs, and how they will manage the results. With that in mind, here is what we are seeing in the market here at the half-way point.

Analytics is Everything. There’s an old saying in marketing: If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it. In previous eras, measuring wasn’t so easy, particularly with online outreach and strategies. Today, that’s no longer a viable excuse, and top marketing agencies (like Bluetext) will be held accountable for results through analytics. That’s good news because when done correctly, marketing analytics tell you at every step how the campaign is performing. That allows us to revise and optimize campaigns in real time – for example, abandoning creative that isn’t performing as well as other themes. If your agency isn’t proactively incorporating analytics into their programs, it’s time to find a new agency.
Video is Now the Norm. A report by Cisco demonstrates that video marketing continues to increase as an essential component to digital marketing campaigns. Cisco predicts that by the end of 2019, more than 82 percent of online marketing campaigns will include video. There’s a reason for this: Video is compelling and engaging, exactly what brands want to attract new customers. We’re already seeing this across social media platforms. But here’s the catch – it needs to enhance the experience, not get in the way. Too heavy a load time will drive customers away.
It’s All About the Mobile. As the march of demographics moves on, a larger percentage of the workforce will be relying on their mobile screens for their first interaction with a brand. At Bluetext, we create mobile screens right alongside our desktop versions so clients can see and approve the mobile versions. This is significant for search engine optimization, as Google will continue to evolve its algorithms to reward websites that are mobile-optimized – punish those that aren’t.
What Happened to Virtual Reality? We love virtual reality as a key tool in digital marketing and have created a variety of very cool and effective VR experiences for our clients. But not everyone has seen the light on VR, and it simply hasn’t caught on with consumers the way many of us hoped it might. But there is a glimmer of light at the end of the tunnel… with augmented reality. Apple’s ARKit for app developers is poised to make the delivery of augmented reality much more consumable for marketing.
Blockchain Could be a Game-Changer. One of the hesitations we see with digital marketing revolves around the delivery of online ads, whether they are banner or social media. Part of the problem is measuring their delivering to the right target audiences at the right time. Even with the best analytics installed across a campaign, we can still only measure end results; it is difficult to verify which ads are delivered to which targets, and what they do when they see those ads. That is changing with blockchain technology. Blockchain can give us real verification on campaigns while protecting against over-serving ads and ensuring that bots aren’t pretending to be influencers.

Learn how Bluetext can get results for your digital marketing campaigns.

Today, a website is the front door to your association, and every effort must be made to deliver a powerful user experience for current and
prospective members. Your digital platform must be modern and intuitive. Beyond a great design, it is important to make sure your website is addressing all of your association’s key performance indicators around member services, member retention, communications, activism, and engagement.

To this end, when thinking about your association’s website, a great design is not necessarily where you should begin. The first question you should ask yourself is, “Can our website help us achieve our association goals in the most efficient manner.” Understanding where your members and prospects are coming from, how are they accessing the site, and what tools they need to be successful all must be asked up front through a discovery process in order to maximize the impact of a new website.

With that thought process in mind, here are some recommendations to consider when undertaking a new website design for your association:

Provide the tools and resources to help your members do their jobs more effectively. They are paying you to be their advocates, and they need your help in taking action, remaining relevant, and proving the impact and rationale for their membership. For one membership organization, we built a tool that enabled human resources professionals to directly send a presentation to their bosses to show the value and impact of their membership in that organization. It was a very effective tool for ensuring membership dues.
Clearly communicate the value and impact you provide. Make sure your messaging and value is clear right up front. We have worked with many
associations who are going through an identity crisis and don’t understand why membership may be down or why they are less relevant
than in the past. It may be time to audit your messaging and positioning, both internally and externally, to ensure it is relevant to your
members and the communities you serve.
Don’t be afraid to brand with impact. Changing colors or changing logos can go a long way toward sending a powerful signal to your constituencies. And make sure that the design direction you take aligns with that of the industry you serve. If that’s the tech community, make sure your brand feels “techy.” If you serve the healthcare community, make sure your brand aligns. You get the picture. Modern, fresh and engaging can really make an impact in the perception of your association as you go to market with a new website.
Content. Content. Content. Being a thought leader and delivering authoritative content is critical for success. Keep your content fresh and engaging, update it regularly, and address the current and emerging topics that are of importance to your members. Association content marketing is becoming a must for the most advanced associations.
Make sure your content is Search Engine Optimized and your architecture is designed for SEO best practices. There is so much talk about SEO that people get confused. But that should not be the case. Go analyze what people are searching for and align your content around that. Ranking high with Google can be very effective.
Go mobile. Look at your stats. People are accessing the web from mobile devices more than ever and the stats continue to rise. A responsive site is a must in today’s digital environment. If a user does not have a great experience with your association on a mobile device it can impact your value immensely.

Contact us Today to Discuss Trade Association Marketing in a Competitive Landscape!

In their drive to attract, engage, recruit and ultimately retain new members, Association marketers are facing added competition from more
than other trade associations. Increasingly, they are being squeezed by for-profit commercial businesses that have ramped up their own efforts to attract this same audience. One of the primary services that associations offer to their members is information, in the form of content, and that’s where the battle lines are being drawn.

The majority of the critical information that members used to get solely from an industry association today can be easily found and obtained elsewhere—and typically free of charge with no annual membership fees. The American Heart Association for example – once had a near-exclusive lock as the sole source of premium content for all things related to the heart. That role kept membership strong and growing. They now are now facing increasing competition for share of mind from hospitals, medical groups, for-profit businesses and manufacturers of prescription drugs for the treatment of cardiovascular disease. As more competing content sources compete for mindshare, the less valuable the association becomes as a leading resource for information – let alone a ‘paid’ resource.

Associations should look at this as not just a challenge in terms of member acquisition but also as a major threat to their member engagement and retention strategy. And what aggravates that is the fact that many lack the resources and strategy to run robust and ongoing integrated member acquisition and retention campaigns to keep existing and prospective members engaged.

The bottom line is, Associations can no longer rely on traditional tactics to acquire and retain members – they need to get into the content game and start producing fresh, relevant content to drive traffic and engagement. This is not a simple task – it takes a disciplined approach that regularly creates and distributes new insights, ideas, and information, packages them in a concise and compelling way that attracts attention, and communicates the value that the content delivers to its members. And to truly be effective, that content must also be search engine optimized to make it easy to find, and properly coded with relevant keywords in key areas of the site that Google is looking at, including page URLs, page titles, and content across the association’s website. When this is done properly, a dashboard can be set up to track, measure and optimize engagement and conversion of the content marketing program.

With organizations of all sizes jumping into the content game – it is absolutely critical that you begin a smart content marketing strategy to re-capture and retain the membership base and reclaim your stake as the dominant voice of your industry.