This post is a collaborative effort with Ross Katz and our partners at CorrDyn, a data-driven consultancy that helps enable scalable growth. CorrDyn’s data expertise combined with Bluetext’s command of marketing provides an additional opportunity to segment and target in the B2G marketplace.

Where is the next great opportunity for your business? Well, government agencies for one. According to USAspending.gov, approximately five trillion dollars is being allocated to government agencies in Fiscal Year 2021, with over $1 trillion going to Health and Human Services alone. These agencies are growing, and their needs for hardware, software, and services are increasing along with them. 

If you are already marketing to “the government,” you understand that winning government contracts is a long sales cycle. The opportunity-to-award process might be 90 days on average, but the lead-up to those 90 days is a critical period where the deal is won or lost. During those 90 days, all data gathering and relationship-building you have done over the previous 2-5 years comes to fruition. So what exactly sets the winning businesses apart? Memorability. Government contracting is a long game, built on endurance. After many years of B2G marketing experience, Bluetext is here to break down what gets your foot in the door and sustains success in business to government marketing.

Division of time between positioning your company for success with government agencies and bidding on specific contract awards.

Winning government contracts is not as simple as pointing your existing sales and marketing engine at a new target. “The government” is not a monolithic entity, and even “the agency” needs to be treated with more nuance: It is composed of dozens of sub-entities that make independent decisions based on independent decision criteria. In enterprise sales, winning over a single decision-maker can often close the deal. In government contracts, groups of stakeholders across the agency influence which business wins the contract, even if a single decision-maker completes the signs off. So instead of persuading a single stakeholder, B2G companies are tasked with winning over multiple groups, at multiple different stages and occasions. Hence, why brand endurance is critical. 

Complicating matters further, traditional channels for establishing relationships with government agencies have been disrupted by the pandemic. Most in-person conferences and meetings will not occur this year, and some will remain online for the foreseeable future. Government stakeholders are more geographically distributed and digitally dependent than ever. 

The tides have shifted. Once an industry that operated in an isolated siloe of its own rules, business seeking government contracts must adopt new, digital marketing initiatives to effectively position themselves.B2G companies should leverage the data-driven, digital marketing tools developed for B2C companies to segment and personalize their approach to agency stakeholders. B2G is too broad a term, and even business-to-agency (B2A) abstracts away from the customer understanding your company needs to have to win contracts consistently. A business-to-stakeholder (B2S) marketing approach is what your company needs to win consistently.

To succeed in data-driven B2S marketing, we explore:

1. What success looks like in B2S
2. The lifecycle of data-driven stakeholder cultivation
3. The division of labor between internal departments for successful execution of that lifecycle.

Begin with the End Goal in Mind

Before we determine how to develop our marketing and sales pipeline, we need to define success. Agency leadership and stakeholders can frequently change, at a minimum, with every new government administration.

Therefore, we prioritize targets that will allow your company to evolve as agency priorities and decision-makers change. Your company must first make its impression as a strong, reputable industry player, whilst also remaining top of mind through consistent brand recognition and relevant thought leadership content. These are the characteristics of a successful B2A marketing approach:

• Your company is considered a thought leader in the space where the agency is procuring products and services.
• Government agency stakeholders regularly call your company to ask your opinion on upcoming agency initiatives, product and service specifications, RFPs, and contract awards. Occasionally, you are invited to co-craft the RFP in ways that position your company to win.
• You are aware of the potential for shifting priorities months before those shifts occur.
• Information on the priorities and interests of your agency stakeholders is filtering directly to your sales team, who pass relevant information to content creators, who are crafting bespoke campaigns that reach your contacts as related conversations occur internally at the agencies.
• Business development staff follow up on that content with meaningful conversations with key stakeholders. Those conversations assure your agency contacts that your company is focused on their individual and organizational priorities.
• You have both breadth and depth of relationships at the agency: deep relationships with key stakeholders and associations across the organization. A few people leaving the agency does not impact your company’s ability to retain the status and relationships described above.

Does your content dress the part? A sure sign of a reputable industry player is professionally branded collateral assets, such as Invictus

The Stakeholder Development Lifecycle

In order to accomplish those goals, start by treating the agency as a combination of individual stakeholders and stakeholder groups. Organize your company’s sales and marketing approach around the Stakeholder Development Lifecycle for B2A marketing, which includes:

• Acquiring Stakeholder Contacts: Start with breadth. In order for your company to establish deep relationships in an agency, you need to acquire as many points of contact as possible. Target ads based on geolocation to get in front of as many relevant stakeholders as possible. Get their title, contact information, and social media presence. Build from there.
• Monitoring Stakeholder Contacts: Capture social media posts, digital content interaction (with a privacy-first approach of course), conference attendance, and internal agency relationship information from contacts over time so that you can understand and target their needs, interests, and priorities.
• Segmenting Stakeholder Contacts: Based on a contact’s position in the organization and their activities and expressed perspectives, segment them into groups that should be targeted and messaged together consistently.
• Nurturing Stakeholder Contacts: Develop marketing, business development, and sales outreach that messages contacts according to their segment and the depth of their relationship with your company. Build a customer journey map that helps you identify what messages move contacts deeper into understanding your company’s value proposition and believing in it.
• Fostering Stakeholder Promoters: Identify your company’s highest value and strongest promoting contacts as the champions your company needs to win individual contract awards. Prioritize according to how naturally the contact aligns with your company’s offerings and how important the contact is to your company’s long-term relationship with the agency.

Stakeholder Development Lifecycle for B2A Marketing

Considering Stakeholder Segments

Within each agency, there are groups of stakeholders with priorities that will govern how well your company competes in a given contract award.  The priorities of the agency can be efficiently stored within a single person’s head. But understanding the priorities of each stakeholder within each stakeholder group requires a data acquisition and data management approach that efficiently captures, aggregates, and generates insights about how your company is positioned with regard to that stakeholder group and the awards they oversee. 

To understand how stakeholder priorities can differ, we use an example company, CyberSample, selling cybersecurity solutions to the Department of Transportation (DoT). 

If CyberSample were to interface only with the DoT’s contract oversight and contract administration team, they would get a simplified and sanitized understanding of what governs the contract award. They would miss the critical details and priorities needed to assuage the concerns of each stakeholder group.

If they were to interface only with agency leadership or technology leadership, they would get a sense of broad organizational priorities and gain credibility from being introduced by internal power brokers. However, unless they leverage those introductions to dig deeper into specific needs surrounding an award, CyberSample’s team is unlikely to understand the tactical needs of technology implementers, users, or initiative leaders. 

Example stakeholder groups and their corresponding priorities for CyberSample are provided in the figure below.

CyberSample stakeholder segments and their priorities. Segments and priorities should be validated by marketing interactions, public discussions, and business development and sales conversations.

Within each agency and with regard to each industry vertical selling into the agency, there will be a different set of stakeholder groups that influence decision-making. Your first task is to gather the intelligence needed to identify, segment, and target each stakeholder group. Taking a card from the B2C marketing playbook, it’s very similar to traditional customer personas, focus groups, data collection and tracking. Businesses that open their minds to alternative digital marketing and outreach methods are putting themselves miles ahead of the competition.  This will allow you to move from a broad B2A approach to a more focused B2S methodology.

Executing on B2S Marketing with a Data-Driven Approach

For the approach described above to be successfully executed, each of your internal departments needs to coordinate. That coordination is built on a shared understanding of the agency landscape. A shared understanding requires a consistent and comprehensive approach to data collection, manipulation, and utilization.

Within the Contact Acquisition phase, your company’s Marketing and Content teams need to develop top-of-the-funnel landing pages, emails, webinars, white papers, and presentations that make agency contacts want to opt-in to a relationship with your company. Your Technology team needs to have the systems in place to capture customer interactions from your web properties and events, as well as to trigger intelligent outreach based on those interactions. Your Data team needs to clean and integrate the information captured from these interactions so that intelligence can filter back to Marketing, Content, Business Development, and Sales.

A summary of your company’s information needs is provided in the table below.

Once your company has acquired contacts and is actively monitoring activity, your Marketing, Content, and Business Development teams need to know what messages are resonating with agency stakeholders, and who are credible thought leaders through which to filter those messages. That provides the platform for new content development and for influencer marketing via the people who already have your stakeholders’ attention. 

Those messages also enable the Business Development team to schedule meetings and start having conversations with stakeholders about their individual priorities and the interaction between those priorities and the organization at large. Your company can surface conflicts between agency groups to discover how to navigate potential barriers to contract awards. 

Meanwhile, your Marketing team can deepen relationships with agency stakeholders through increasingly targeted messaging that moves those stakeholders closer to being promoters of your business. Your Product & Service team can ensure that your product or service value proposition is aligned with the priorities of each stakeholder group as you enter the RFP process. Your Business Development and Sales teams can focus on the individual needs of key stakeholders and customize your messaging to those stakeholders’ needs. 

It is the job of your Data team to ensure that each department has the intelligence they need, when and where they need it, to effectively cultivate those relationships and respond with well-honed sales and marketing messages. 

Below, we illustrate the division of labor between different departments throughout the Stakeholder Development Lifecycle.

Division of Labor Between Departments for the Stakeholder Development Lifecycle

With an improved strategic approach to B2A marketing, focusing directly on the stakeholders, and a commitment to building the infrastructure and processes to gather and interpret data about them, your company will be better positioned to win government contracts for many years to come. We understand that building the Stakeholder Development Lifecycle from the ground up may be daunting, which is why Bluetext and CorrDyn are partnering to help B2A companies build the systems, processes, and brand assets needed to accelerate your path to agency contract awards.

Centauri utilized Bluetext’s services to launch a new name, brand, and website following a merger. Their go-to-market strategy succeeded in winning new awards, company recruits, and even an acquisition from KBR. Check out how Bluetext has set up more brands for M&A success.

How Do I Get Started? 

For the approach described above to be successfully executed, each of your internal departments needs to coordinate. That coordination is built on a shared understanding of the landscape within the agency. A shared understanding requires a consistent and comprehensive approach to data collection, manipulation, and utilization.

The starting point depends on the maturity of your company, specifically in the Data and Marketing Teams.  For those with fully staffed teams that can execute, you can follow the plan outlined in this post.  

The Data Team holds responsibility for timely, reliable access to data to allow the MarCom Team to execute and your other teams to act on the results. If you are still attempting to develop the overall strategy and buy-in from departmental or executive leadership, or if you don’t have the confidence in the systems in place, Bluetext and CorrDyn can help you move forward: 

• Data Summit:  This workshop is customized to your specific requirements, but is designed to bring together stakeholders from the relevant departments to educate them on the goals of the initiative, gather input from various departments about any concerns or limitations, and move toward a consensus regarding the strategic approach that will improve your targeted marketing efforts.     
• Data & Systems Assessment: For those who have made the decision to move forward with improved data-driven marketing, it is critical to have confidence in your data systems (reliability, scalability, and accessibility), data governance (security and policies), and ROI (time to value and budget).  Our assessment process addresses all of these aspects and culminates with the development and delivery of a Data Infrastructure and Capabilities Roadmap (DICR).  The DICR includes the findings of the assessment, strategic vision, proposed infrastructure solution, and an implementation plan (typically phased).

With the organizational buy-in in place, and you have the data and reliable systems in place,  but require assistance in execution in the marketing and content, working with industry-leading partners like Bluetext will allow you to start executing your strategy.    

Bluetext brings the marketing and business development expertise needed to elevate your targeting and messaging. CorrDyn brings the data expertise needed to make your web, marketing, sales, and business development data work for you. Reach out to start the conversation about how we can position your company to succeed with government agency marketing and business development.

Thank you for joining us for the Q1 2021 Bluetext Cybersecurity Summit. Exclusively open to CXO’s, our goal with this summit is to deliver a value-add platform to network in the C-Suite with businesses facing similar opportunities and challenges.

Topics:

We plan to discuss the following items:

• Technology Customer Investment Trends
• Technology Consolidation Trends
• 2021 Trends

Date/Time:

2:30pm-4:00pm EST

Thursday, January 28th, 2021

Where:

COMING SOON: A link will be distributed with a calendar invite to all invited.

Agenda:

• Welcome from Jason Siegel: 1 minute
• Welcome and Introduction from Moderator, Morgan Wright, SentinelOne: 3 minutes
• Introductions of each business by one of the representatives (2 minutes each): 15-20 minutes
• Five questions will be softballed out, each receiving 5-10 minutes of airtime.

Summit Specifics: Things to Know

• We will mute all microphones for audio clean-ness
• The raise hand functionality will be used to orderly unmute speakers
• A recording of this conversation will be archived so keep it clean, friends

Moderator

Morgan Wright

Chief Security Advisor, SentinelOne

Morgan is an internationally recognized expert on cybersecurity strategy and cyberterrorism. He currently serves as a Senior Fellow at The Center for Digital Government, Chief Security Advisor for SentinelOne, and is the chief technology analyst for Fox News and Fox Business on cybersecurity, cyberterrorism, national security, and intelligence.

Companies in Attendance:

AffirmLogic

About: AffirmLogic’s Hyperion platform applies advanced Mathematical Behavioral Computation that enables security teams to detect, analyze, and defend against even the most insidious malware—including advanced persistent threats (APTs) and other sophisticated, potentially devastating forms of attack.

LinkedIn

Invited:

Larry Roshfeld, Chief Executive Officer

ArdentMC

About: ArdentMC is a trusted provider for geospatial information, cloud migration, and DevOps in the federal, state, and local business spheres, delivering quality products and outstanding performance initiative to every client.

LinkedIn

Invited:

Michael Matechak, Chief Strategy Officer

CI Security

About: CI Security provides Managed Detection and Response and Cybersecurity Consulting services to help their customers to be secure, compliant, and resilient against threats to the life-safety, life-sustaining, and quality-of-life systems and services they provide to customers and communities.

LinkedIn

Invited:

Jake Milstein, Chief Marketing Officer

EnHalo

About:

EnHalo is a group of global companies under one brand that is locally engaged, while globally operated. EnHalo focuses on three business pillars: Reducing Risk through its cybersecurity offerings, Reducing Cost through digital transformation, and Increasing Revenue through automation.

LinkedIn

Invited:

Chris Beard, US President

Carol Watson, Director, Sales & Operations

Illusive Networks

About: Illusive Networks, the leader in deception-based cybersecurity solutions, empowers security teams to preemptively harden their networks against advanced attackers, stop targeted attacks through early detection of lateral movement, and resolve incidents quickly.

LinkedIn

Invited:

Claire Trimble, Chief Marketing Officer

Infinite Group (IGI)

About: IGI works with organizations on all levels of IT security. Its areas of practice include managed security, incident response, social engineering, physical & perimeter security, administrative security, and internal security. 

LinkedIn

Invited:

Andrew Hoyen, President & COO

Kryptowire

About: Kryptowire provides software assurance tools for mobile application developers, analysts, enterprises, and telecommunication carriers.

LinkedIn

Invited:

Alex Lisle, Chief Technical Officer

Obrela Security Industries

About: Obrela Security Industries (OSI) provides enterprise-class professional and managed IS services to assess and manage information risk in complex enterprise environments.

LinkedIn

Invited:

George Patsis, Chief Executive Officer

Phosphorus Cybersecurity

About: With a 7 year half-life for vulnerability patching, and infrequent, if ever, credential rotation, IoT is the softest target on the network today. Phosphorus automates remediation of the biggest vulnerabilities in IoT.

LinkedIn

Invited:

Chris Rouland, Chief Executive Officer

Rebecca Rouland, Chief Financial Officer

Sertainty

About: Sertainty technology implements a proprietary zero-trust architecture by embedding actionable intelligence into data-files. Sertainty makes it possible for data to be self-aware, self-protecting, self-acting. This gives software developers, systems integrators and their end-users a better way to monetize valuable information, lower the cost of compliance and mitigate risk in real time.

LinkedIn

Invited:

Rivers Nesler, VP, Communications & Legal Affairs

Securonix

About: Securonix delivers a next generation security analytics and operations management platform for the modern era of big data and advanced cyber threats.

LinkedIn

Invited:

German Fabella, Creative Director

SonicWall

About: SonicWall Boundless Cybersecurity safeguards organizations with seamless protection that stops the most evasive cyberattacks across boundless exposure points and increasingly remote, mobile and cloud-enabled workforces.

LinkedIn

Invited:

Geoff Blaine, Senior Vice President, Corporate Marketing

SpyCloud

About: SpyCloud is laser focused on preventing online fraud with our proactive solutions, which protect billions of employee and consumer accounts worldwide from account takeover.

LinkedIn

Invited:

Company CXO’s

Stage2Security

About: Stage 2 Security is an Adversary Simulation, Protection, and Prevention company focused on building confidence in our clients’ IT systems.

LinkedIn

Invited:

George McKenzie, Chief Executive Officer

Thank you for joining us for the Q4 2020 Bluetext Cybersecurity Summit. Exclusively open to CXO’s, our goal with this summit is to deliver a value-add platform to network in the C-Suite with businesses facing similar opportunities and challenges.

Topics:

We plan to discuss the following items:

• Technology Customer Investment Trends
• Technology Consolidation Trends
• MUCH MORE ….FILL IN SURVEY LINK BELOW

Date/Time:

COMING SOON: PLEASE FILL IN THIS SURVEY

Where:

COMING SOON: A link will be distributed with a calendar invite to all invited once the survey is done below.

Agenda:

• Welcome from Jason Siegel: 1 minute
• Introductions of each business by one of the representatives (2 minutes each): 15-20 minutes
• Five questions will be softballed out, each receiving 5-10 minutes of airtime.

Summit Specifics: Things to Know

• Jason will mute all microphones for audio clean-ness (something our 1st Presidential debate should have done)
• The raise hand functionality will be used to orderly unmute speakers
• A recording of this conversation will be archived so keep it clean, friends

Companies in Attendance:

AffirmLogic

About: AffirmLogic’s Hyperion platform applies advanced Mathematical Behavioral Computation that enables security teams to detect, analyze, and defend against even the most insidious malware—including advanced persistent threats (APTs) and other sophisticated, potentially devastating forms of attack.

LinkedIn

Attending:

Larry Roshfeld, Chief Executive Officer

Bill Yarnoff, Chief Growth Officer

Infinite Group (IGI)

About: IGI works with organizations on all levels of IT security. Its areas of practice include managed security, incident response, social engineering, physical & perimeter security, administrative security, and internal security. 

LinkedIn

Attending:

Andrew Hoyen, President & COO

Phosphorus Cybersecurity

About: With a 7 year half-life for vulnerability patching, and infrequent, if ever, credential rotation, IoT is the softest target on the network today. Phosphorus automates remediation of the biggest vulnerabilities in IoT.

LinkedIn

Attending:

Chris Rouland, Chief Executive Officer

Rebecca Rouland, Chief Financial Officer

Sertainty

About: Sertainty technology implements a proprietary zero-trust architecture by embedding actionable intelligence into data-files. Sertainty makes it possible for data to be self-aware, self-protecting, self-acting. This gives software developers, systems integrators and their end-users a better way to monetize valuable information, lower the cost of compliance and mitigate risk in real time.

LinkedIn

Attending:

TBD

Trusona

About: Trusona is the pioneer and leader in password authentication. Stolen or weak passwords are responsible for over 80% of breaches, and Trusona’s mission is to thwart cybercrime by eliminating them from the user experience.

LinkedIn

Attending:

Ori Eisen, Founder & Chief Executive Officer

Kevin Goldman, Chief Experience Officer

T2

About: T2™ manages large-scale technology projects for some of the most respected health systems and businesses in the United States.

LinkedIn

Attending:

Kevin Torf, Managing Partner

Jim Rockenbach, Chief Strategy Officer

Verve Industrial Protection

About: Verve Industrial Protection’s mission is to protect the world’s critical infrastructure. For twenty-five years, Verve has helped its clients simplify and reduce the cost of building and maintaining secure, reliable, and compliant industrial control systems – DCS, PLC and SCADA. 

LinkedIn

Attending:

John Livingston, Chief Executive Officer

As the world has changed in the blink of an eye, so has the way we market to consumers. Now, more than ever, your website exists as BY FAR THE MOST IMPORTANT doorway to your brand and your brand experience. While stores stay shut, and face-to-face interaction is vastly limited, brands will rely on reaching their target audiences via their websites. Therefore, your website is mission-critical to your success.

Bluetext has published a 5 part blog series to help you think about and pressure test if your website is the best it can be.

Bluetext clients are often asking for our recommendations on the best content management system for their website, whether as a redesign or a re-platform for their business. We are a forward-thinking digital marketing agency that provides game-changing digital experiences for brands looking to make a difference in the market, and as such, we have always been a technology-agnostic company and supporters of the open-source community.

Over the years, we have helped countless clients identify the appropriate CMS to meet their specific use cases. We work with organizations of all sizes: from startups looking to launch their first website, to large, established organizations with complex business workflows and integrations and distributed teams. No matter where your company falls on this spectrum, we have proven guidelines for deciding on which CMS will be the most appropriate for your organization. Here are three key considerations to guide you through your CMS selection process to ensure you are set up for success for the next 3-5 years.

1. Determine Your Stakeholders and Their Needs

The first step in selecting the best content management system is to identify those individuals who have a stake in the redesign/re-platform and analyze their needs. To begin this process, take stock of who is involved with the current website (typically Operations (IT), Marketing and Executive Management). Depending on the size of your organization, there could be many additional stakeholder groups.

For each stakeholder group, take time to understand their specific needs for the new CMS and use these insights to develop KPIs for the platform:

• Operations (IT) – Your IT team is likely concerned about the technology stack (what can they support), where it lives (cloud, on-prem) and what their role will be in terms of ongoing maintenance.
• Marketing – The marketing team typically drives the website. They are likely concerned with the feature set: content management features, workflows, learning curve, marketing integrations, social sharing, etc.
• Executive Management – Most often, the executive team is focused on two things: cost and timeline. How much is this going to cost, and how long is it going to take to build?

It is important to conduct this step every time your organization goes through a redesign or re-platform, as structure, needs, and concerns evolve over time. For example, in recent years, day-to-day website ownership has generally shifted away from traditional operations/IT teams into the hands of marketing teams.

2. Outline Requirements

The next step in the process is to translate stakeholder needs into requirements. We recommend building a requirements matrix that outlines the full set of necessary features for the new CMS platform. Much of the matrix will consist of functional requirements, but it should also include cost, technology, and timeline constraints. A forward-thinking mindset must be applied when developing requirements. Consider feature sets that are planned for the next 2-5 years to ensure the selected CMS has the flexibility to accommodate business changes. To build an effective matrix, leverage the following strategy:

1. Gather Requirements.  Supplement and expand upon the needs of the stakeholders by gathering wholistic requirements from actual users. We recommend conducting workshops with each user group. In some organizations, the user groups may include the marketing, operations and sales teams. In other organizations, distinct business units or regional teams may make up other user groups. The workshops will result in pages and pages of notes, which should be consolidated into a set of functional requirements.
2. Consolidate & Group into Usage Scenarios. Consolidating your requirements into high-level usage scenarios will help you, and your team, come to a consensus on critical functionality. During the CMS product demos, you will be armed with your list of usage scenarios and can ask specific questions regarding how the platform in question would handle such scenarios. Some possible usage scenarios could be:

• As a content editor, I want to be able to manage and reuse digital assets from within the CMS so that I do not need to re-upload items.
• As a content editor, I want to be able to manage content from my mobile device so that I can provide real-time updates from remote locations.
• As a content approver, I want the ability to review content before it is able to be published on the website.
• As a site administrator, I want the ability to update the menu links on the website when the organization decides to change the navigation of the website.
• As an IT Stakeholder, I want the CMS application to be built in PHP so that my existing team of developers can manage and support the website.  

Creating a Prioritized Feature Matrix

Leverage the usage scenarios to develop your feature matrix and prioritize each requirement. What are the must-haves, nice-to-haves, and stretch features that you could live without? Prioritization is very important and should not be taken lightly. Be sure not to let your feature matrix get out of control. This should be a list of no more than 50 “features” that you need the new platform to provide.

The matrix will allow you to score the products against each other in a logical way and get a good idea of the product’s compatibility for your organization.

Easy, right? Of course, gathering large groups of people for workshops is easier said than done! No matter the size of the organization, the scheduling for these types of workshops is a challenge, but ultimately, the work pays off. Skipping this step will, more often than not, result in the selection of a sub-optimal product and the need to rebuild the CMS again next year.

3. Market Research & Validation

Market research will help down the list of products available on the market to arrive at a “short-list” of candidates for consideration. There are several resources available to inform your research. Two of our primary sources of information come from top analyst companies Gartner and Forrester. Dries Buytaert put it beautifully in his blog post:”If you want to find a good coffee place, you use Yelp. If you want to find a nice hotel in New York, you use TripAdvisor. Similarly, if a CIO or CMO wants to spend $250,000 or more on enterprise software, they often consult an analyst firm like Gartner.”

To give a brief recap in case you are unfamiliar with how Gartner rates vendors, they look at two key, top-level criteria: Ability to Execute and Completeness of Vision. They rate vendors on their ability to deliver what they promise and their ability to stay ahead of market trends to provide a quality product to their customers.

While this is not a complete step-by-step guide to performing a CMS comparison audit, it should give you the tools you need to get it started. While every organization is different – wether it be organization structure, specific requirements or current marketing goals –  utilizing these activities while performing your CMS selection will help ensure that you are setting your organization up for success.

Looking for help in determining what CMS is right for you? Let us help!

As the world has changed in the blink of an eye, so has the way we market to consumers. Now, more than ever, your website exists as BY FAR THE MOST IMPORTANT doorway to your brand and your brand experience. While stores stay shut, and face-to-face interaction is vastly limited, brands will rely on reaching their target audiences via their websites. Therefore, your website is mission-critical to your success.

Bluetext has published a 5 part blog series to help you think about and pressure test if your website is the best it can be.

Virtual Executive Briefing Centers are a valuable resource for companies wishing to show customers and prospects their full range of solutions in action, especially new solutions that the partner may not have implemented yet in its own organization. Customized presentations, live demos and in-depth discussions can be arranged. VEBCs offer a lot of great benefits for organizations including:

• Present your brand in a very innovative way with the latest HTML5 and video technologies
• Reach a wider audience, save money and drive efficiencies by reducing travel costs to visit a physical center
• Get your thought leaders delivering their message to a wider audience than their physical weekly calendar allows
• Deliver vertical specific messaging and solutions in a customized fashion
• Personalize the experience based on the understanding of the audiences job title, history with the enterprise, and other components the digital environment can capture and feed into the site
• Juice up your SEO with a smart build and customer journey that enhances your SEO footprint

Bluetext has had a lot of experience designing and developing Virtual Briefing Centers.  Here are just a few examples of the innovation we have helped drive for our clients:

McAfee and Intel Security’s Future Agency

McAfee and Intel turned to Bluetext to design a campaign to demonstrate the advancements in cyber security that the companies are driving across the Federal Government. Named The Agency of the Future and found on the web at futureagency.com, the solution integrates an interactive, 3D experience and a series of videos with lead generation integrated throughout. The experience was enhanced with a continuous monitoring webcast that targeted federal IT security experts and drew more than 3000 leads. The campaign won major kudos at McAfee corporate.

CSC’s Digital Briefing Center

CSC’s Digital Briefing Center is where customers, partners and prospects from across the globe can come to learn more about the key technology conversations and market shifts CSC is driving into the market.

The center is driven with immersive 3D video technology that is completely interactive through Html 5 overlays throughout the user journey.

Following launch, Bluetext’s collaborative creation with CSC’s Digital Marketing team became the top performing component of the csc.com global web presence, a huge feat for a Fortune 500 corporation.

Version 2.0 features new capabilities spanning:

• Multi-floor scalability

• Triple screen experience

• Dynamic social media integration

• Triggered infographic visualizations synched with briefing videos

• Chaptered video interactivity

The following video of CSC’s head of global brand and digital marketing talks about this project:

TalkShop by Cooper Thomas

From corporate meetings to conferences and workshops, connecting with your workforce and customers is an essential element of business. Bluetext was hired by Cooper Thomas to help enhance their virtual training and meeting services and next-generation virtual platform that can help their customers get the most out of their customers’ virtual events.

With their virtual event platform, you can now connect with employees, customers, and clients conveniently and cost-effectively. The unique speaker-training program guides your presenters to deliver more effective and engaging virtual presentations. The speaker coaches provide focused support to help busy subject matter experts become polished presenters. They also provide project management and program support for events ranging from single training sessions to multi-day conferences, as well as on-site support for virtual and face-to-face events.

As the world has changed in the blink of an eye, so has the way we market to consumers. Now, more than ever, your website exists as BY FAR THE MOST IMPORTANT doorway to your brand and your brand experience. While stores stay shut, and face-to-face interaction is vastly limited, brands will rely on reaching their target audiences via their websites. Therefore, your website is mission-critical to your success.

Bluetext has published a 5 part blog series to help you think about and pressure test if your website is the best it can be.

In the avalanche of predictions for marketing teams, one that should be among the top is the need for consumer user-experience website design.  In the consumer sphere, getting buyers to convert on a website takes much more information. It’s more likely you are going to explain a lot to get your buyers to convert into customers.

The higher and more complex the value of what you are selling, the more questions you will need to answer throughout your site. That makes information architecture essential to the success of the website, and a step in the process that demands significant attention. It’s easy to dismiss the effort by arguing that “our sales don’t take place on our website.” Marketers know that that attitude means falling behind the competition.

Give Consumers a Road Map. High-value products and services require in-depth information, including top-of-funnel messaging, mid-funnel details including video and other premium content, and bottom-funnel data sheets, pricing options and other data that will close the sale. As the buyer moves around the website, confusion about where they are and want to be will result in a frustrated visitor or is more likely to abandon your site for some other brand. There are ways to lessen the chances of a lost customer because of confusion. Here are some key best practices for a successful consumer user-experience website design that will meet your team’s expectations:

• Breadcrumbs – Breadcrumbs let your visitors know exactly where they are on your website, regardless of how they got there. It’s like having GPS navigation that has a path laid out that tells them how they got there. Whether location-, attribution- or path-based, breadcrumbs are a good option.
• Page headers – Make sure that the page header is similar to the copy of the navigation items or links that have been clicked. This is a good B2B user experience website design practice that has the added benefit of being good for SEO. If the page header of the page matches what the visitor clicked on, they will be reassured of their choices.
• Highlighting selected menu options – Keep the navigation highlighted when it is clicked. It can be bolded or underlined or have some other creative way of standing out and will give the visitor instant feedback about the menu options.
• Show progress bars – A progress bar that indicates page load time will let a visitor know what’s happening if taking an action on the website, whether downloading a white paper, loading a calculator widget, or processing a form submission.
• Thank You pages – These also give strong cues about the action taken. If a visitor subscribes to a webinar, downloads a pdf, or submits a request for information, confirms the action that was just taken.

We’ll be exploring more consumer user experience website design best practices in upcoming posts.

See how Bluetext can help deliver a successful user-experience website design.

As the world has changed in the blink of an eye, so has the way we market to consumers. Now, more than ever, your website exists as BY FAR THE MOST IMPORTANT doorway to your brand and your brand experience. While stores stay shut, and face-to-face interaction is vastly limited, brands will rely on reaching their target audiences via their websites. Therefore, your website is mission-critical to your success.

Bluetext has published a 5 part blog series to help you think about and pressure test if your website is the best it can be.

In a digitally-driven age, professionally designed websites have become the standard across any industry. Website aesthetics, functionality and navigability will make or break a business. Research has shown that 48% of people cited website design as the number one indicator of credibility. Designing a beautiful and functional website, however, is not as easy as it looks. While various content management systems (CMS), such as WordPress or Drupal, promise to deliver beginner-friendly DIY capability, website design is a trade best left to the experts. Here are Bluetext’s top five reasons for hiring a website design agency.

1. Brand Consistency 

You’ve likely invested a lot of time and money into developing a brand identity. Don’t let your digital brand style become muddled and mismatched across your website. A website design agency can ensure that font faces, sizing and color schemes remain consistent throughout the entire site. Not only does design consistency make a greater impact on brand recognition, but it will also improve readability and hold your audience’s attention for longer. 

A website design agency will also build smart CSS into all of your digital ecosystem front end codebases. Agencies will consider organization and consistency when building out your CSS. Gone are the days where your headings are a disorganized range of sizes, font faces, and colors. Bluetext is a website design agency that provides clients with a web style guide, which translates all traditional brand style guidelines into digitally compatible requirements.

Before a Bluetext website redesign, the Mindtree homepage was inconsistent with no clear brand identity. Now the entire website follows a web style guidelines for on-brand font faces, sizing, and coloring. 

2. Resist Template Temptation

Because a CMS can offer an overwhelmingly wide variety of templates, it’s easy to be drawn toward super-stylized options. In practice, though, simplicity is key. 

Overcrowding is the most common mistake made on webpages and is a leading cause of high bounce rates. An overly complex template will bog down your users with unnecessary functionalities, and cause slow loading times. You should first determine the purpose of each page and let that guide template choice, as aesthetic elements can always be added later by designers. A website design agency will be able to select the templates that best serve your business needs and flow into a seamless customer journey. 

3. Design Mobile-ly Minded 

In web design, the user is king. The tell-tale sign of a sloppily designed site is an incompatibility with different browsers and screen sizes. With the millennial and Gen Z markets so dependent on mobile, your site needs to be mobile responsive, not just mobile-friendly. 

Mobile-friendly designs will feature static content, typically with smaller image displays and simplified navigation. On the other hand, mobile-responsive websites will dynamically adjust content and images to different screen sizes by correcting the padding and condensing navigation. While web amateurs may be satisfied with mobile-friendly, any experienced design agency will develop a responsive site that projects credibility. An experienced website design agency will conduct thorough quality assurance (QA) across different browsers and devices to ensure the customer experience is kept consistent.

An agency can not only make your pages attractive on mobile but can also optimize the performance of your site. Using AMP (Amplified Mobile Pages), a website design agency will build an open-source, stripped-down HTML that accelerates page speed. AMP is like a secret weapon for mobile sites, but it requires expertise to properly implement strict HTML and tagging requirements. 

To learn more about the benefits of AMP, check out this video:

4. Easy navigation

Your site navigation should be simple and easy to use. If a user can’t quickly and easily find what they’re looking for, then you’ve got a problem. A concise but comprehensive menu bar will make all the difference. A website design agency can bring a new perspective to your sitemap and make recommendations that ensure navigation is intuitive to any new visitor. 

Search functionality is also key to a great user experience.  A website design agency can be trusted to tag your content and properly link any searched keyword to the correct site pages. With an easily accessible search bar, users can quickly navigate toward desired content. By working with a website design agency, you can also include top features, such as previous searches and suggested searches based on the user’s previous experience on the site, improving the overall user experience.

5. Easy maintenance

So you’ve built your website, what’s next? Surely your business has growth in mind, and your site will need to keep pace. Using an agency can build flexible and adaptable web design, and help sustain your site for long term growth. With a website designed by experts, you will find it easier to maintain your website and update it with the newest and latest content. 

Lesson Learned: Save the DIY motivation for home renovations. Building a website is best left to an experienced website design agency.

As the world has changed in the blink of an eye, so has the way we market to consumers. Now, more than ever, your website exists as BY FAR THE MOST IMPORTANT doorway to your brand and your brand experience. While stores stay shut, and face-to-face interaction is vastly limited, brands will rely on reaching their target audiences via their websites. Therefore, your website is mission-critical to your success.

Bluetext has published a 5 part blog series to help you think about and pressure test if your website is the best it can be.

With 57% of the world’s population now on the internet, promoting your business through a website has become even more critical. Additionally, over 50% of website traffic comes from mobile, and over 66 million American adults now own a smart speaker with digital assistant capabilities. Your website is where a potential customer will get their first impression of your business, and navigating the way website browsing behavior continuously evolves can be tricky.  Because having a poorly designed website can be worse for your business than having no website at all, turning toward an expert website design agency can help you find the best website solution for your company. An agency can help you stay on top of the latest web design trends, and bring both your website and your business to the next level.

User experience (UX) is one of the most important things to consider when redesigning your new website. According to Jakob’s law, users spend most of their time on websites other than yours. This means that users prefer for your site to function in a similar manner to other sites they frequently interact with. Staying up-to-date with current web design trends is imperative to keep your users engaged.

Bluetext suggests considering the following seven trends when building your website to ensure that your site combines SEO functionality with the best UX, boosting your brand’s presence online.

1. Make Mobile a Priority

 Over 50% of all website traffic comes from mobile. With a user-base continuously becoming more dependent on mobile, it is even more important for website designers to prioritize and optimize web experience for mobile devices. Designers must create a thumb-friendly design to not only make mobile navigation easier for the user but also create a seamless, visually-appealing design.

More than 60% of companies reported an increase in sales after designing mobile responsive platforms; however, approximately 40% of people will leave your website if it isn’t mobile-friendly. While simply having a mobile presence may seem good enough, optimizing this experience through design to cater to mobile users is the most important factor.

If these statistics aren’t convincing enough, it’s also important to keep in mind that Google gives priority to mobile-friendly sites by ranking them higher in search results, positively impacting your SEO. Lacking a mobile-friendly experience can negatively impact your website’s ranking, whereas sites that are mobile responsive will often receive a ranking boost, even for searches on a desktop.

Check out some of Bluetext’s work on mobile with Paya and Mindtree.

2. Increase Page Speed 

It takes users only three seconds to decide whether or not they want to stay on your website. These three seconds are crucial to your website’s dwell time (aka the time a user spends on your website before returning to the search results). Web design agencies can provide creative solutions to help engage your users within these three seconds. Additionally, web agencies know the best tactics for improving page speed, such as image compression. Image formats like JPEG 2000, JPEG XR, and WebP often provide better compression than PNG or JPEG, which means faster downloads and less data consumption.

The less time it takes your website to load, the better your SEO. Because of the Google Speed Update, Google won’t prioritize your website to users if it will take too long to load. Taking your site to a web design agency will ensure that your website is optimized for the user, while also ensuring that you have the best possible SEO ranking. 

3. Optimize for Voice Search

Page speed is also becoming more important as the number of smart speakers and digital assistants continues to grow. Over 66 million American adults now have a smart speaker, and designing a website that capitalizes on Voice Search Optimization is the only way to ensure that those using smart devices for their searches will have access to your site. Voice search is meant to be a faster, more convenient way to get information, and if your website takes too long to load, it is less likely to be returned for a voice search result.

According to a PWC study, 71% of respondents would rather use their voice assistant to search for something than manually typing their query into a search engine. The differences between these spoken and typed searches may lead to different SERP results, and if your website is not properly optimized for vocal search, you may lose ground to your competitors. Because vocal searches only result in one top result, everyone is vying for this “ground zero” position. You can obtain this coveted position by gaining Google’s featured snippet spot, which aims to directly answer users’ questions. Voice searchers are also more likely to search in long-form questions as opposed to using shorter keywords, so it’s important to consider the types of questions your target audience may ask, and to position your website well to answer these searches. 

4. SEO vs. SEM: Choose Wisely

How can you tell whether to focus your marketing efforts on SEO or SEM? Let’s return to square one: what’s the difference? Search Engine Optimization (SEO) was traditionally thought of as a component of Search Engine Marketing (SEM), which comprised of both paid and organic tactics. However, this language is shifting, with SEM now referring exclusively to paid search. SEO is a method to optimize your website to receive organic traffic, while SEM is a way to funnel in relevant traffic from search engines by buying paid or sponsored ad listings. 

So which is better to focus on for your website? SEO allows your business to get more visibility, building brand awareness at a low cost. Choosing keywords that are relevant to your website can earn you a spot on the first page of the SERPs, automatically earning you credibility and trust from search users. In order to increase your website’s chances of making this first page, follow these simple steps:

1. Use relevant keywords in the URL to describe the content of the page
2. Use your main keywords in the beginning of the title tag of your page
3. Use the right keywords in the meta description of your page and make sure it is enticing enough for users to click-through to your site
4. Use your primary keyword(s) in the H1 tag of your page
5. Use your main keywords along with related long-tail keywords in the first few paragraphs of the page

SEO will bring your website brand visibility at a lower cost, but it’s important to invest in researching which keywords will best optimize your website. 

While SEO is typically more sustainable, turning to SEM can also do wonders for your website. SEM allows you to capture the attention of your target audience by claiming a spot above-the-fold of the SERPs. Sponsored listings also give you more control over the results you achieve; every element of the ad can be customized and tweaked to target your audience. SEM charges on a per-click basis, and while this may be more expensive, it allows you to achieve quick, measurable results without going through the trial-and-error process that SEO typically involves.

Both SEO and SEM have their pros and cons, and both may be right for your business at different times. Turning to an agency that specializes in SEO and SEM will help you choose the right tactic at every turn. 

5. Hello, Homogenous Hero

 The fast pace of modern life means that people have less time to spend on your website. When they enter your site, simple and intuitive web design will allow them to quickly find what they’re looking for. The use of minimal design allows for the rapid digestion of information and ultimately leads to more satisfied users.

The inability to spend endless time searching for information on a website also means that many web design agencies are moving away from the once-popular ubiquitous site, and shifting instead toward the homogenous hero. Instead of boldly featuring the headline in the center of the landing page, designers are opting instead to move the header and CTA to one side, with the image on the opposing side. This split-screen aesthetic also allows for easy conversion to mobile, providing a clear dividing line between the two content blocks.

Check out some of Bluetext’s latest homogenous hero designs through their work with Centauri and Perspecta.

6. Animate Your Site 

The use of animation is an easy way to make your website appear polished and dynamic. Animation also helps bring your brand’s story to life, quickly engaging users and drawing more visitors to your homepage. When used as a tool to communicate complex messages easily, animation can reduce the time that a user must spend in order to understand your message, which enables them to spend more time exploring your website. 

When adding animation and motion into your website design, it is important to consider web image optimization, which is the process of providing the smallest-sized images optimized in terms of quality, resolution, and format. With the rise of internet browsing on mobile, images and animations must be optimized to perform well on mobile. While animations are a fantastic way to engage your site visitors, they can also slow down your website load times and negatively impact your SEO. Let a professional website design agency like Bluetext help ensure that your website can support lively animation without dragging down your website load time. 

When Bluetext redesigned the Clarabridge website, we made sure to incorporate motion in a sophisticated way, making the UX come alive. We used motion throughout the homepage to engage the user and pull them further down the landing page. This design also quickly explains how Clarabridge works and allows a site visitor to visualize how they might best use Clarabridge’s services.

7. Incorporate More Video Content

Video content diversifies your web page, and also appeals to those fast-moving users who do not have the time to search through a lot of text. Videos are also a great way to make an emotional connection to your users and lead to a better overall website experience. By 2020, experts predict that 80% of online traffic will be video. Additionally, 72% of businesses say that video has improved their conversion rate, and 45% of people watch an hour or more of video per day. 

While video content is clearly an important marketing tactic, 64% of marketers see video as the most difficult content to create. Not only do videos take time to plan, shoot, and edit, but it is also tough to decide exactly what type of content should be presented in your video. Because viewers’ attention starts to drop off after roughly two minutes, finding an expert who specializes in video content may be the best route for creating the perfect video for your website. 

Not only will video content boost your website’s success, but it is also rewarded by Google. If your site includes video, it is 53X more likely to get a first-page spot in search results. Video improves SEO, which boosts your ranking. But if a short video is one of the first impressions a user will have of your business, how do you go about creating successful video content, and keep the user coming back for more? Many website design agencies have video specialists who can tell your story in a clear and powerful way. Check out Bluetext’s latest video work with Invictus.

Invictus Brand Essence Video, July 2019 from Bluetext on Vimeo.

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 was to 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 2017. 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 farther 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 mostly will be  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.