Jason Siegel, Author at Bluetext

The marketing and communications business is at a bewildering junction, with two simultaneous models vying for brains and assets. Most marketing campaigns look at personas of their buyers and determine what is the best path to the promise land.

Bottom-up marketing is a concept with no single definition, but a few distinct components that set it apart from traditional top-down marketing strategies. Unlike traditional marketing, where executives create a marketing plan and a strategy to promote a company’s products and services, bottom-up marketing is mainly driven by the employees of a company. Employees recognize one specific customer need the company can meet and create a marketing strategy around that single idea.

A great example is Dropbox. Dropbox rose to $10 Billion valuation through its connection with the end user. Dropbox focused on providing the masses of end users (both personal and professional) a block of cloud storage that elegantly and brilliantly stayed synchronized on your local hard drive and your collaborative peers hard drives. Dropbox didn’t sell the CFO on cost benefits and the CTO on the power of the cloud. Dropbox simply delivered a great service with a viral approach to a roll out that created an ever growing desire for more and more storage in the cloud. In the end so many businesses had hundreds and thousands of BYOS (bring your own storage) and they needed to take control of this corporate intellectual property, and reached out to Dropbox for the suite of tools and administration to make managing the cloud instances so much more manageable, secure, and scale-able.

The top-down marketing plan contains four principal sections: situation analysis, marketing objectives, marketing strategy, and tactics. A company’s marketing objectives should be logical deductions from an analysis of its current situation, its prediction of future trends, and its understanding of corporate objectives. In the end, a top down marketing approach focuses on the top executive personas most often. The constituent who controls the purse strings. All SaaS and Enterprise technology companies are always looking for the high and mighty inside an enterprise that has the power to sign on the dotted line. Top down marketing focuses its message and offers so they should relate to the needs of specific target markets and specify sales objectives. Marketing-target objectives should be specific, quantitative, and realistic. The messaging of a top down approach often caters to the fears and dreams of that influential executive.

A great example of top-down marketing is the hyper growth industry of cyber-security. Every executive fears waking up to their employer’s brand on the headlines of major media outlets next to the word breach or hacked. Years and years of customer loyalty and brand preference can be washed away overnight. Cyber security companies are preying on these executives with a top down marketing approach that strikes fear into their hearts and minds and forces them to strike the check and implement countless solutions to help them sleep easy at night as they try to appease key constituencies including public markets.

Does your business ever wonder how to harness its precious marketing and communications budget to achieve its short and long term goals? Contact Bluetext. We are a top marketing agency that delivers results whether your campaign is focused top down or bottom up. Let us use our proprietary methodologies to define the right method, and then develop the campaigns, platforms, and content assets to knock the cover off the ball.

We have all been there. The requirements start stacking from all areas of the enterprise and the politics are thick. Companies are ignoring some white lies they are preaching and it is impacting a major driver that can impact your business….THE LOAD TIME OF YOUR RESPONSIVE OR MOBILE-OPTIMIZED WEBSITE.

WHITE LIE 1: “Just throw that 3rd party code snippet in the header”
Technical Saying: Minimize HTTP requests

What this means:

The quickest way to improve site mobile speed is to simplify your design.

Streamline the number of elements on your page.
Use CSS instead of images whenever possible.
Combine multiple style sheets into one.

And more. Contact us if you would like an SEO assessment.

WHITE LIE 2: “Servers are all the same, it’s the cloud, ya know….right?
Technical Saying: Reduce server response time

What this means:

Your target is a server response time of less than 200ms (milliseconds). Bluetext recommends using a web application monitoring solution and checking for bottlenecks in performance. Contact us if you would like help measuring this.

WHITE LIE 3: “You don’t need compression with these fat pipes we have now”
Technical Saying: Enable compression and Optimize Images

What this means:

Large pages (which is what you could have if you’re creating high-quality content) are often 100kb and up. As a result, they’re bulky and slow to download. The best way to speed their load time is to zip them via a technique called compression. Compression reduces the bandwidth of your pages, thereby reducing HTTP response. You do this with a tool called Gzip. Oversized images take longer to load, so it’s important that you keep your images as small as possible.

WHITE LIE 4: Just throw a redirect on that problem…
Technical issue: Reduce redirects

What this means:

Redirects create additional HTTP requests and increase load time, so you want to keep them to a minimum. Considering redirecting your digital business to another agency? Contact Bluetext

WHITE LIE 5: “As we co-develop just throw the JavaScript up top”
Technical issue: Anchor pages with JavaScript vs Leading with JS
You want to place all your JavaScript at the BOTTOM of the page. This will optimize the perceived latency because as the page is loaded it stops upon encountering JavaScript. Putting scripts at the bottom allows the user interface to display before the JavaScript is loaded.

In the crowded and highly-competitive non-profit 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!

PR is not a sinking ship. It’s still an essential element in your marketing mix, especially in the crowded real estate market. 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.

Today’s landscape requires the need for constant database care and feeding…smart marketing campaigns, hyper targeted, very personalized, with highly engaging and rich creative presentation. Spray and pray marketing tactics have not worked for quite some time, and just trying to mimic the new hot buzz wordy marketing approach doesn’t also pay off as well as a thoughtful, disciplined and collaborative developed marketing strategy between a client and its marketing agency. So where does the” certified” and the “vegetarian” come in?

Vegetarian Marketers love TOFU. That’s their meat!

What’s TOFU?

Top of Funnel focused marketing activities.

Or better defined.

Good top of the funnel content marketing serves to commence a relationship (by way of opt-in) with a prospect visiting your site who otherwise might leave without making contact

Here are the key questions you should ask when putting together top of the funnel content.

Does this intersect my prospects’ information journey at the right point?
Does this look to take control of the information journey thereafter?
Is this too obviously marketing?
Have I considered what else I’ll back up this content with?

Why TOFU (Top of Funnel)?

There is no middle of the funnel or bottom of the funnel without the top of the sales funnel. The challenges brands experience in the middle of the funnel usually fall into one of two areas. The first area is non-opportunities. These are the “deals” that aren’t qualified opportunities at all. The second group is stalled opportunities. These opportunities are usually missing some of the commitments necessary to move them forward internally. The end of the funnel problems are usually around capturing value. But top of the funnel problems are far trickier. Think about how a funnel works. If you feed it in dribs and drabs you get dribs and drabs out of the other end. But if you keep a nice steady stream pouring into the funnel, you get a nice steady stream out of the skinny end.

Make a long story short. Worry first—and most—about the top of the sales funnel.

Now for the “certified” part of the equation

Bluetext works with many marketing automation and CRM systems, including Eloqua, Hubpost, Marketo, Pardot, and Salesforce – integrating, configuring, pushing creative through them, optimizing with them. These tools are the personalization marketing brain and the central data hub of value that all of our blood, sweat and tears deliver for our clients every day.

Bluetext is proud to announce we have expanded our credentials by being named a certified Hubspot agency.

Why work with an agency that has certified credentials versus a lot of lip service?

There are a lot of agencies that offer marketing automation services, but not all of them have the appropriate certifications. For organizations looking to partner with an agency to help them with their marketing automation readiness and implementation it is important to verify that an agency has the expertise to do so. A HubSpot Certified Agency Partner provides validation of the depth of an agency’s inbound expertise.

Bluetext delivers innovative content marketing campaigns for many consumer brands like Google, WeatherBug and SoundExchange. Contact Bluetext to learn how we can build your sales funnel with innovative digital content marketing services.

With competitive global markets, what makes your brand different from your competitors?

Sometimes, it takes market research to identify what makes you unique and what’s really important to your target customers. Fill out the form to download Bluetext’s Market Research Primer so you can understand how to:

Leverage research to craft a market message
Develop a positioning strategy
Stand out from the crowd

Download the Market Research Primer to get ahead of the competition here!

PR is not a sinking ship. It’s still an essential element in your marketing mix, especially in the crowded government market. 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.

In the competitive real estate market, what makes your brand different from your competitors?

Sometimes it takes market research to identify what makes you unique and what’s really important to your target customers. Fill out the form to download Bluetext’s Market Research Primer so you can understand how to:

Leverage research to craft a market message
Develop a positioning strategy
Stand out from the crowd

To download the Market Research Primer, click here!

With competitive global markets, what makes your brand different from your competitors?

Leverage research to craft a market message
Develop a positioning strategy
Stand out from the crowd

Download the Market Research Primer to get ahead of the competition here!

PR is not a sinking ship. It’s still an essential element in your marketing mix, especially in the crowded professional services market. 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.