PR is not a sinking ship. It’s still an essential element in your marketing mix, especially with competitive global markets. But is your PR program delivering the results you need to meet your revenue goals?

Let Bluetext do a Free PR Assessment to see if:

• Your outreach is delivering the results you need
• You are gaining ground in the market
• You’re getting the coverage that will drive your growth

Our Share of Voice Assessment can let you know if you are hitting on all cylinders, or if your program needs a shot of high-test to get it in gear.

Sign up for our Free PR Assessment by clicking here!

Branding is no different than any other business investment. In the end, it comes down to return on investment.

The challenge is that with branding, ROI can be difficult to measure. You can look at increased sales. You can see an uptick in your social media and digital media analytics. One of the toughest questions to anwers, however, is if an acquisition were to occur, how much precisely is the purchase price affected by branding or even that a deal is in play because of brand investment?

What I can confidently say is that branding can contribute enormously. It can contribute to the possibility of your business being acquired and the value the ownership receives for the business.

Executives constantly question how a re-brand impacts enterprise value and the probability of being acquired. Here are some reasons that should open your eyes to the “why” of re-branding and the impact it can have on your enterprise.

Re-positioning. Through the lens of a rebrand could be a signal to the market that you are now an expert and market leader in the hottest and fastest growing market segments in your industry. This re-positioning exercise makes your business much more attractive.

Internationalization. In some cases re-branding is necessary so that a brand can also be used internationally. This may be because the brand name is too specific to a particular country. In certain countries a brand name may also conjure up the wrong associations. Organizations that sell the same products in several countries but under different brand names are also increasingly opting to use one brand internationally.

Bad Reputation. Bad reputations can have a serious impact on the enterprise value of a company. Re-branding can ensure that negative associations with the brand are forgotten or dispelled, both outside and inside an organization. This is the only way that a branding effort can remove any negative feelings about the brand.

Other reasons to re-brand include an outdated image or visual identity, or when a new CEO is put in place. These business changes usually have a desire to send a signal to the market that this isn’t your father’s Oldsmobile.

Bluetext has had quite a run of helping companies shape their brands as they position for growth and some type of liquidity event.

Some recent branding to acquisition stories can be found here:

Sourcefire Acquired by Cisco for $2.7 Billion (12 months after rebrand launch)

Sourcefire Case Study from Bluetext on Vimeo.

Acentia Acquired by MAXIMUS for $300 Million (4 years after rebrand launch)

Altimeter Acquired by Prophet (18 months after rebrand launch)

We recently launched some exciting re-branding efforts, including Cigital’s following their $50 million capital raise. The live website, the centerpiece of the branding effort can be found here. It will be interesting to see if  our recent brand births eventually blossom into great acquisition stories. Are you next to be acquired? Lets talk about your brand and how we can help.  

The Challenge:

A leading scientific association came to Bluetext with a unique challenge. The association’s goal was to drive higher click-through-rates (CTRs) for its core web properties without altering the front-end design of each site before 2016. Built on a custom, legacy CMS, these sites featured an aged look and were not built responsively. The Bluetext team knew immediately that there was one way to boost traffic to these properties in an effective, long-term fashion that would simultaneously increase conversion rates to purchase, and grow overall engagement with the association’s premium content. Bluetext mapped out a highly-detailed Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Strategy for each of these properties and executed it methodically through the first half of 2015.

Tactics

Our team ran a series of detailed reports on these web properties’ performance in search, analyzing every factor that could possibly be weighing the site down. When assessing SEO rankings, it is key to remember that a website’s “domain authority” is impacted by two main audiences: the search bots crawling the website, and the people searching it and reviewing its content.

Bluetext crafted a multi-phase plan that aimed to improve perceptions of the web properties among both audiences, making sure that any changes made to appeal to crawler bots also suited the needs and expectations of live searchers. Bluetext made recommendations for highly-relevant short and long-tail keywords to include in meta data and content across the site. We then pointed out specific pages on the site that housed meta data (titles, descriptions, URLs) that was too short or too long- and harmed the sites’ search “scores” by breaking structural rules. Bluetext collaborated with the association to rewrite meta data so that it fit Google and Bing’s structural guidelines, and also incorporated keywords that would draw the right searchers to relevant pages, thus boosting overall search authority.

Our next step was to assess website speed and load, and to point out specific tactics to improve these metrics and optimize the user experience. In comparing these web properties to competitors, we found specific referring domains that the client could form relationships with to gain backlinks and grow trustworthiness. Our team explored the client’s social media activity in-depth on platforms that could be used to strengthen relationships with their target audience. We sat with the association’s marketing team and pointed out opportunities to broaden awareness of events and useful materials, and to stimulate engagement among members with posts that ask questions or offer a short piece of valuable information. And since we are a digital design agency and we couldn’t quite help ourselves, we offered design insight on how to effectively rearrange the homepage to improve CTRs to interior pages and display timely, relevant content without drastically changing the current design.

Execution

After receiving a green light from the association to make the recommended changes to their web properties, we got straight to work. Using Google Analytics and Webmaster Tools to identify pages that served as the top 75 “entry points” to the organization’s largest domain, we recreated meta titles and descriptions for these pages so that they fit structural guidelines and utilized keywords that are heavily searched on a monthly basis.

To grow breadth and depth of keyword usage on the sites, our team filled in “Alt Tag” descriptions for images. We looked back at periods where web traffic sharply declined or increased, pinpointing dates when the search algorithm changed and caused these fluctuations. Since the overall quality of a business or association’s Wikipedia profile plays a strong role in search rankings, we combed through the client’s Wikipedia properties and elegantly filled them with high-volume, specific keywords. To draw a closer relationship between the pages across a large site, we created a highly-detailed internal linking strategy that mapped many high-volume keywords on interior pages to particularly relevant interior pages in other areas of the site.

We extended our recommendations to the client’s properties in other countries, identifying ebbs and flows in traffic to these other sites and noting vital changes that should be made to site structures. We also compiled a set of recommendations for the client to manipulate the current mobile design without making major changes so that mobile and tablet users could have a more pleasant user experience.

The Outcome

The time and effort spent by Bluetext to optimize search for this association’s web properties made a drastic impact. Total traffic to the largest site in early June was 13X larger than original average traffic to the site. This same domain saw 12X the number of users visiting the site by early June, alongside a 500% growth in the number of users visiting the property on mobile and tablet devices since project inception. User engagement with website content also increased through project conclusion, with users visiting each page for 20 seconds longer than before. This association is now getting the website CTRs that it deserves with a design that remains almost entirely untouched.

In the crowded and highly-competitive cybersecurity market, how do you differentiate your brand from your competitors?

While you’re thinking about how to stand out from the crowd, download a poster from our Adult Coloring Book that you can bring to life, and let Bluetext solve your bigger marketing challenges.

Download our Adult Coloring book here!

For several companies, the new HTML5 and video based immersive executive experiences Bluetext has been creating are delivering amazing results. For example CSC (Fortune #175) is seeing this experience as #1 out of 12,000 website pages in its domain. These digital experiences represent our clients’ commitment to leading-edge user experiences for thought leadership, sustainable technology, and delivering deep, rich contents to address the requirements of their diverse personas.

“Our new Immersive Executive Experience offers an incredibly powerful demonstration of 3D, with unmatched visual quality and fidelity,” comments Ray Holloman, Director of Marketing and Digital at 1,300 employee firm NJVC. “The new web design and digital experience is integral for immersing our customers in understanding our Mission Critical IT capabilities.”

NJVC was looking for a new powerful message to the market as well as an immersive experience. The video snippets of this experience below provide a good sense of how we are merging marketing campaigns with thought leadership content marketing.

Bluetext, a top digital agency in Washington DC, has produced these user experiences for CSC, McAfee, Intel Security, Deltek, TalkShop, Cooper Thomas, GovPlace, Futures Industry Association, VMWare, and NJVC and would love to explore producing one for you.

Cybersecurity is a crowded space, with fierce competitors all vying for the same clients. Make
sure your lead gen program is working as hard as your competitors’.

Let Bluetext do a free assessment of your lead generation content to make sure you are getting
the best results.

Topics can include:

• Overall Marketing/Branding
• Target Audience
• Lead Generation Strategy
• Media Strategy
• Search Engine Optimization
• Social Media/ Blogging
• Website/Landing Page Conversion Optimization
• Content Strategy
• Lead Nurturing Strategy
• Analytics/ Website Management

To sign up for Bluetext’s FREE Lead Generation Assessment, click here!

Nick Panayi, Director of Global Brand and Digital Marketing at CSC stops by the Bluetext Buzz Lounge to share his thoughts on trends in digital marketing.

AddThis GM Charlie Reverte calls 2015 the year of the personal web. He talks with Bluetext’s Buzz Lounge about the move to personalized web sites across the internet, making the web personal for individuals while generating more revenues for web sites.

Former Eloqua CEO Joy Payne tells Bluetext’s Buzz Lounge that 2015 is the year for sales and marketing to work closely together to fully understand the buyer’s journey in order for marketing to develop the best content for every step of the process. Joe explains that buyers want to facilitate their own journey, and so finding the right content when they need it is essential.