Earlier this year, Apple rolled out a feature that allows end users to limit the personalization of ads delivered across their devices (iPhone, iPad, Mac, iPod). At first you might be thinking: “Great! Fewer ads!”
But unfortunately, this feature doesn’t limit the actual number of ads you’ll be served. You may no longer see an ad for paper towels when you’re eerily low on coffee or paper towels, but you’ll see other, less relevant ads, in their place.
How Personalized Ads Work:
In Apple’s words, “Apple delivers advertising helps people discover apps, products, and services while respecting user privacy. To deliver personalized ads, Apple uses information about you to serve ads that are more relevant to you.”
Depending on the sites you browse, the content you interact with, the purchases you make through Amazon, the fitness app you use to track your runs, the flights you booked through Google – the list could go on forever – you will receive ads tailored to your user behavior. Personalized ads are a controversial subject — some may say it’s spooky, others may say it’s smart and helpful. No matter what side of the spectrum you’re on, it’s important to understand the privacy settings of your devices and what it means to users, advertisers and the mass population.
Impacts of the Opt-out on Advertisers:
Advertisers use this information all the time. In fact, it’s the very information we (advertisers) need to generate a successful campaign.
When campaign management teams go to set up campaigns in a platform, we have the capabilities to select from a list of personal identifiers. We can select from the general demos – Age, Gender, Location; and we can select from a wealth of In-Market, Affinity, or Contextual audience segments that have been identified through data sources. From a paid media placement perspective, it’s important to know where the ad spend dollars are going toward ensuring the right audience is being served.
The more relevant the ad is to the end user, the stronger the campaign will perform. So if a user chooses to opt out of personalized ads through Apple, they no longer fall into the audience segments we have selected, and we lose the ability to target that person. Our audience pool may get smaller; however, the selected audience will at least remain relevant.
For us advertisers, there’s no need to panic, at least not yet. Ad blockers – and features to limit the amount of personalized ads shown to end users – have been around for years. According to a study that Innovid ran in 2020, 43% of consumers think it’s important that ads are personalized; 32% of consumers like personalized ads, and 30% of consumers even like brands more when the ads are personalized. 23% of consumers said they are more willing to share information with brands today than they were a few years ago.
Of course, internet behavior is constantly changing. We should look for reports and insights into this new feature over the next few months. Advertisers should also look at campaign performance pre and post Apple feature. Have you seen a dip in conversions, click-through rate, or costs per impression? Has activity across Apple devices dropped? The sooner you can look into this data, the quicker you’ll be able to pivot strategy, if needed.
We asked Bluetext’s campaign manager Georgia Putney her thoughts on these new features. “As not only an advertiser, but as an end user myself, I will not be turning off this feature. I would much rather prefer to see relevant ads over irrelevant, useless ads across my devices. And sure, maybe I do need an ad to remind me to stock up on paper towels every now and then.”
But Don’t forget…
As mentioned at the top of this blog, keep in mind that turning off the Personalized Ads setting on your device “may not decrease the number of ads you receive, but the ads may be less relevant to you.” Personalized or not, ads won’t be going away anytime soon. So the choice is yours, more relevant and targeted, or more randomized. But the bottom line, is the free websites, and platforms are still reliant on advertising spend to operate and continue publishing content and features you enjoy.
Need support in setting up your digital marketing campaigns or optimizing performance around new features? Contact Bluetext to learn more about our campaign management services.
With the amount of time the average person spends on their phones, particularly scrolling social media, the use case for popular apps is ever-expanding. It is no surprise that many organizations are turning to social media for a multitude of reasons: to attract new business, employees, and consumers and grow brand awareness. Every day people turn to social media to connect with friends and family, pass the time, and find answers. In a recent Hootsuite social media webinar, it was revealed that consumers are turning to social media for recommendations over Google. So while your SEO strategy may be strong, traditional search engines aren’t where your marketing efforts should end. If users are searching for the best (fill in the blank) on social media first, it’s anyone’s game whose business will rise to results. Businesses across all verticals are taking note of this, and so should yours.
Here are some of the top social media considerations your business should look out for when developing your social media strategy:
1) Growth in Influencer Marketing
The pandemic accelerated the growth of influencer marketing in 2020, and this growth is predicted to continue well into 2023. It stands true that consumers like to hear a review by someone they trust. That is why more and more businesses are turning to influencer marketing to reach and communicate with their target audience. To make influencer marketing worthwhile, it is important to choose the right person to represent your brand. Reach out to creators that work with your specific niche, remembering that the number of followers is not everything. A micro-influencer with a small audience could have followers that are more invested than a more widely known influencer. Additionally, if influencers are outside of your marketing budget, it never hurts to send freebies to creators. If they really like your product or become interested in your brand, oftentimes influencers will promote it naturally on their own to remain authentic.
2) Measuring Social Media’s Direct ROI
CMOs are increasing their investment in social media, even when marketing budgets are decreasing. In a recent Hootsuite survey, it was found that 96% of the marketing respondents felt that social media had a direct return on investment. However, the kinds of things executives are looking for to measure social media’s success often differ from social media practitioners. Rather than just considering high impressions and engagement rates, investors use sales and revenue to measure success. As a result, business executives are starting to require direct measurements of how their social media is providing direct returns to the business. Some are starting to only count impressions that lead to a purchase to be factored in metrics. It is important for organizations to align goals among executives and social media strategists and clearly determine what exactly is considered a success.
3) Narrowing in on Relevant Social Media Channels
You might be surprised to find that your business does not need a presence on every social media platform. Instead, it is best to select two to three networks to focus your efforts on. Prioritize where your target audience frequently visits and also consider the reason why users are going to that social network. Most users go to LinkedIn for recruiting, company updates, searching for business partners, etc, while Tik Tok users are visiting the platform for entertainment/recreational purposes. Therefore for B2B organizations, it is better to invest resources into a social platform like LinkedIn rather than TikTok, which is largely consumer-oriented.
A relevant social media strategy is crucial for your business’ success. Contact Bluetext if you are ready to enhance your social media technique.
When talking about Search Engine Optimization (SEO), people are quite attuned to focusing on the website content end of things — such as meta text, internal linking, and keyword selection. What is often forgotten or completely neglected, is the rich media’s end of things. SEO strategies span far beyond text and link updates. As video content continues to grow as a medium for web content delivery, Video SEO is becoming an increasingly significant pillar of content optimization that can’t be ignored.
Like other forms of SEO, Video SEO refers to the process of optimizing video content to improve its visibility and ranking in search engine results pages (SERPs) — whether it be Google or YouTube, or Vimeo. The goal of video SEO is to increase the chances of your video being discovered by potential viewers and driving more traffic to a website, or often in the case of video, a specific channel.
Unsurprisingly, the key concepts that underlie Video SEO are not too different than that of other SEO. The principles that form the foundation of SEO can be applied universally to all forms of content — just with slightly different tactics and methods.
Here are some tips and guidelines to improve your video SEO.
- Create high-quality video content: Above all else, content matters. SEO itself is a measure to improve visibility and discoverability, but it cannot replace the benefits quality content bequeaths. Quality content is ultimately what drives viewership and viewer retention for future videos. Make sure any video content is high-quality, engaging, and ultimately provides utility and value to your viewers. Anything else is simply a waste of money and worse, a waste of time for the viewer. Longer videos tend to rank and perform better, so aim for videos that are at least 5 minutes long.
- Conduct keyword research: Just like traditional SEO, keyword research and selection are the most important steps to form a solid foundation for all following SEO activity. Use keyword research tools, like Moz and SEMRush to find the most relevant keywords and phrases related to the video content to be optimized. Recall that even the best videos will never be found if the content itself isn’t referencing commonly queried search terms. Incorporate these keywords into the video title, description, tags, and transcript.
- Optimize the video title: Think of video titles as parallel to traditional metatext. Use a descriptive and compelling title that accurately reflects the content of the video and includes your target keywords. Keywords should be leveraged early in the title, ideally within the first five words, to improve visibility from relevant viewers. Quality titles will not only attract clickthrough, but they’ll also help the video stand out in a sea of competitors.
- Write a detailed video description: A detailed video description will not only help viewers understand the video’s purpose but will also help contextualize your video to the ranking algorithms. The video description should provide a summary of your video, include relevant keywords, and include links to relevant websites and social media channels. As the first 150 characters will be present on Video SERPs, these first few phrases should be clickthrough-driven as much as possible. Leverage phrases like “Find out how…” or “Learn more about…” to increase curiosity and drive views. YouTube allows up to 5000 characters, so feel free to leverage the rest of this space to include detailed descriptions of content and the purpose of the channel at large.
- Use relevant video tags: While not as essential as in the past, tags still do help with the contextualization of videos. The listing algorithms will use associated tags to better understand the content of a video and offer related recommendations. However, attaching needless keywords to bulk up a video is a losing proposition — YouTube and other major providers no longer use tags as a direct method for rankings — only to build context and understanding for the algorithm. Instead, only Include relevant tags that accurately describe your video content and include your target keywords.
- Transcribe your video: Accessibility on the web has increasingly become a cornerstone of Google’s strategy in the past few years. Transcriptions for videos, or better yet, timed subtitles for videos, offer a strategic competitive advantage. Not only will viewers with limited hearing equally enjoy the video content, significantly increasing reach and viewership opportunities, but also the transcription provides crawlable content that a crawler can direct parse, compared to the complex nature of a bot breaking down rich media sources like video. Subtitles will also mean that viewers who cannot activate audio (e.g., in a work/office environment), can still equally enjoy the video. Transcribing and subtitles can be very backbreaking work, so this work is best contracted through a transcription specialist, like Rev.
- Promote your video on social media: Share the video on social media channels and embed it on your website to increase its visibility and reach. Cross-channel promotions will only increase visibility and viewership, especially if the underlying video channel is less mature.
- Encourage engagement: Encourage viewers to like, comment, and share the video, as this can improve your engagement and retention rates, which can ultimately boost your video SEO. Ask viewers questions directly in the video (e.g., “What do you think about… or Do you agree with…”) to help stimulate discussion in the comments. Creating a two-way street with the viewer is a great way to drive return visits.
Again, the fundamental concepts of SEO remain solidly in place for video — albeit tactically in slightly different locations and methods. As video platforms like YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram continue to grow, Video SEO will quickly transition from a competitive advantage to table stakes. Implementing these tips as regular actions for video teams will help keep brands and websites relevant on these newer platforms.
If you’re looking for more help or a broader strategy for video, feel free to contact Bluetext for an in-depth breakdown of how video can help your company to grow.
The average American is exposed to around 4,000-10,000 ads every day. We have adapted by scrolling past the ‘noise’ that is of no personal interest to us. Modern brands feel the repercussions of the oversaturated market, finding it hard to stand out and capture viewers’ attention. They are faced with questions like how do we appeal to individual users? How do we connect with our audience? For a time, linear videos that had a clear beginning, middle, and end were effective ways to learn more about a brand and its values. However, many of these brands are faced with the reality that the linear videos once produced, simply aren’t having the same impact they once did.
Enter: Interactive videos. Interactive videos allow the viewer to interact with content that lives within the video itself. Think quizzes, clickable buttons, polls, and even games that prompt the user to interact with the ad. An Interactive video is non-linear, often referred to as a branching video or a “choose your own adventure” video. The viewer is able to determine the direction of the video’s narrative based on their personal interests.
The magic behind interactive videos is how the story is told. It is dynamic and flexible, but still simple and communicates a clear message. This makes it user-friendly and impactful. It also drives high engagement and high retention rates because the user is able to get the information they need in a story they are invested in. Viewers are no longer passive observers but rather active participants, who in turn have a better chance of remembering and connecting with the message.
Think about the popular Black Mirror episode Bandersnatch, as the viewer is taken through the film they are faced with a series of choices at key moments in the film that change the course of the film based on what they are interested in seeing.
This interactive film allowed the viewer to create a highly personalized and engaging experience for themselves, and in turn, they felt more invested in the outcome of the storyline. Now imagine taking these same properties to evolve your brand and generate higher engagement and increased loyalty toward your brand.
Interactive videos can be a highly effective tool for increasing brand awareness. By allowing viewers to make choices within the video, companies can create a more personalized experience for potential customers, with the ability to create multiple narrative paths within a single video. This can lead to increased engagement and conversion rates, as viewers are more likely to watch the video multiple times and for longer periods of time in order to explore all of the possible outcomes.
Interactive videos can be used to enhance product demos, training, educational content, and internal communication. With the right strategy and resource investment, interactive videos can be a powerful tool for businesses of all sizes and industries. It keeps employees engaged and further aids in building a strong brand foundation that gets both employees and customers excited to be involved.
By giving viewers the power to choose their own adventure, interactive videos have the potential to revolutionize the way we consume and interact with video content. If you are interested in learning more about how Bluetext’s video production services can help you create an unforgettable video ad, contact us.
The competitive landscape for capturing visitor attention through digital experiences is crowded and overwhelming to say the least. Not only do you need to grab visitors’ attention, but also present thoughtful UX design that guides them to a desired action and outcome. So how do you accomplish this when it seems like everyone else wants the same thing?
Creative differentiation is a key first step in grabbing the attention of your audience and unique interactivity throughout the user journey can be the extra step that keeps visitors present and engaged in your site content. At the end of the day, a website is a tool for presenting information – so why not do it in the most unique and engaging way that you can? This is where 3D interactive design comes in. With the limitless content possibilities available to us all, thoughtful and creative 3D design with helpful elements of interactivity can elevate your website’s content and UX to a memorable and effective experience resulting in conversions and lead generation.
Check out Bluetext’s work for Aeyon’s go-to-market campaign leveraging custom 3d animation throughout the page scroll experience!
Immersive design is a balance – it should have the coveted wow factor but also should achieve practical benchmarks like accessibility, effective communication of information, and an intuitive user journey. The implementation of 3D interactive design should follow best practices to ensure that site visitors are delighted and not overwhelmed by the UX – more is not always more. For example, the use of complex 3D layering and visual effects on every component of your homepage would create a visual overkill and also harm the practicality of the page when it comes to loading times, page speed, and site performance metrics. On the other hand, having an eye-catching 3D hero with engaging hover states is enough to entice the visitor to continue on the site where they can find other elegant 3D applications of the visual brand.
There is a multitude of 3D design styles that can be applied to a brand through web design, each with its own capacity to tell the brand story. Layering and masking can create depth in design while allowing the intermixing of imagery and brand shapes.
The use of illustration can also be used in 3D design to emphasize the real objects seen in brand imagery, it can also be used in a brand that wants to convey simplicity while avoiding the use of generic stock images.
Typography can even be brought to life with 3D shadowing and interactive states!
In addition to the possibilities for 3D design elements, there is endless opportunity to create unique interactivity within those elements. Things like hover states, scroll transitions, the reveal of content on hover, interactive graphics and more can elevate an already elegant 3D design application. It is crucial to remember, though, that each of these elements should be chosen carefully to reflect the ultimate goal of the page whether that is a form completion, subscription sign-up, resource download, or simply continued site engagement.
Want to learn more about how 3D interactive design can elevate your brand? Contact Bluetext to learn about our 3D design services!
The recent appointment of music icon Pharell Williams as Louis Vuitton’s newest Creative Director certainly raised eyebrows. While this ‘Happy’ singer-songwriter undoubtedly has style, this was an out-of-the-box pick for one of the most iconic luxury brands. Radical changes in leadership, technology platforms, and data utilization are shaking up the creative industry. It’s led many to wonder ‘What exactly is the role of a Creative Director’? More importantly, what makes a modern Creative Director?
Bluetext asked our own Creative Director, Jason Siegel, how the role has evolved in recent years, especially with the introduction of next-age AI technology within creative fields. Check out his insights on the future of creative direction, the importance of vision, and leveraging the technology tomorrow.
What do you think of Pharell Williams being named Louis Vuitton’s newest creative director?
I think the Louis Vuitton Creative Director assignment to Pharrell Williams is amazing. I am a massive fan of his music and anything else he’s involved in. I think he is one of the most genius artists on the planet and when you’re a legendary brand like Louis Vuitton, you want to have creative prowess at the top, as well as on the bottom. Pharrell will bring up a fresh perspective and style that will shake up the fashion industry and the world will enjoy it.
Why would or wouldn’t you have made this decision?
I would make decisions like this because when you are known as a creative powerhouse and fashion is a creative art, medium in the end. Brands need to affiliate themselves with creative powerhouses if they want to be thought of as fashion powerhouses. Celebrities who have well-known fashion styles and unique tastes, such as Pharell have an untapped creative potential that spans far beyond music. Brands like Louis Vuitton need to affiliate themselves with those sorts of folks and try to embed them in the internal conversation of where the brand is headed as well as the externally communicate as to where the brand is going.
Who was your first creative director?
Two people were most influential in my career
1. Bill Replogle of Sparky’s Garage fame taught me a lot about storytelling and the power of the word. Growing up I was always looking for better effects and more intense media delivery. And Bill taught me that just a couple of words and just the right photo could make everyone in the conference room fall off the chair in laughter. Bill also taught me that having a great attitude and opinion; knowing what is a good product and what is not is a critical skill.
2. Rand Kramer was my first real professional creative director mentor. Rand taught me the art of pixel, and that perfect is the only way to go. Rand taught me a lot about how to manage designers and different personalities. Rand taught me a lot about the importance of making sure clients feel they’re heard and see the value and professionally prepared files; as well as the underrated value in a conference report after a phone call. Rand was 99% creative, but a really really amazing 1% percent business.
If you could tap a celeb creative director who would it be?
I would tap Bob Marley to be Creative Director. I find creatives work great in an environment that is collaborative and positive and has agreeable background music. Who doesn’t like Bob Marley? Bob Marley is the essence of creative positivity.
The ‘Modern Creative Director’ must align both internal teams and external clients with the creative strategy. Which is the most challenging to bring to that strategic vision?
The more strategic, the bigger the results. When you take chances, you can create massive results and use data to build validation and confirmation, and confidence with the client that your strategic vision is going to win. But at the end of the day, there is never enough data to ever get someone 100% confident in the grand slam because there is risk in everything. There is always a challenge in convincing external clients to take risks, but we often look to the other trophies we have on the case to help persuade them.
What’s been your career hallmark favorite brand or campaign of pitch?
I have been fortunate to have worked on some iconic brands. When the first iPhone was released I led two historic applications. First was the first app ever published by the Washington Post. When Steve Jobs announced the iPhone our app for the “going out guide” was featured in the backdrop as he stood on stage and amazed the world. That led to another historic app for the Obama Inauguration. For that app, I was featured on ABC News with Charles Gibson to unveil and later invited by The Washington Post to redesign key aspects of post.com
My favorite campaign ever was working with the comedian Lewis Black for a security company called Identity Guard.
Lewis, a loudmouth cursing New Yorke, was wrapped up in police tape and had him screaming, “None of your damn business” for three days in New York City. Check out some snippets of that work and a great out-takes video.
As for the pitches, well the pitch is my favorite part. When we won Stanley, Black & Decker’s global site for their number one brand dewalt.com That was an amazing pitch — it included a loud intro, showing a mash-up of AC/DC back in black with a focus group of construction workers on the dewault.com drinking Bud Light. Followed by a complete spec user experience design presentation that knocked the cover off the ball. We won the account and it changed our agency forever from that day forward.
Technology & Its Role in Creative Direction
Creative Directors have historically been a balancing act of art, technology, and economics. How has this balance shifted in recent years?
The balance has swiftly changed over the last two decades. At the heart of it all, it comes down to the story you’re telling. The balance of the creative director’s role is to first establish a compelling story, and then be able to pressure test across an enormous amount of distribution channels to make sure that the story plays out ubiquitously. The modern-day creative director needs to be savvy enough to anticipate how a story is told through social media search engine optimization, connected TV, interactive shorts, augmented, reality, virtual reality, and going back to the old school with a 3-D male or??. Where the balance has changed most dramatically is in data analytics. Now there is a whole new player at the creative table, which is helping the creative Director pressure test and validate their ideation of the story across all these ubiquitous channels, and making sure that it’s highly effective, highly measurable, and that there are communities there to leverage. It’s no longer enough to have an artistic vision, creative directors have to be savvier than ever with technology, interactive mediums, as well as the traditional core skills of storytelling and oversight of high-quality art direction and production to be successful.
What’s the most valuable skill to have as Creative Director?
The most valuable skill to have as a creative Director is belief. Belief that your positioning, strategist, and messaging wordsmiths can produce a position that is defendable and sets up the creative floor for a grand slam. Belief in your team to push the boundaries of what they could physically do and trust in your team to get there together. The best creative directors don’t limit the thinking and belief that their team, including great 3-D artists and now great AI technology, can bring a vision into reality. Believe that your account strategy teams can manage a relationship, capture the essence of client preferences and collaborate with great creative people to bring what the client had intended for expectations to life. And overall the belief in growth, the confidence and drive to communicate the vision of growth to your employees and motivate them to grow with the agency.
How has curation become a larger part of creative direction?
Curation is equally as important as creation for a multitude of reasons. The first reason is language, the variety of talented people, both client-side and agency side, have a different language and limited language in talking about what they would hope to see creatively, and the breakdown of choice of words, or a limit of words can create a lot of waste and confusion. Using field trips, which show a curation set of visual examples makes the communication much clearer. We are constantly updating, verticalizing, and custom tailoring our field trip examples to client needs. Especially in industries challenged with bringing life to intangible concepts, field trip curation is critical. Our sources are really well-defined internally to run a smart agency and we are now super excited about artificial intelligence. AI technology is enabling us to rapidly ideate using platforms like mid-journey and dolly three so that rather than searching stock banks and design portfolios of the world we are prompting AI and seeing what they think. What they give us is often quite stunning, but often not perfect. We are looking forward to AI improving over time to be massively helpful, especially when fantastical art is a requirement and is a New Age version of Curation.
How do you foresee technology aiding creativity in the future?
Over the 20 years of doing this, I have seen some really critical breakthroughs that have allowed creatives to direct and open up channels and experiences like never before. A few of them that jump to mind include mobile technology and augmented reality, as great ways of using breakthrough technology in the creative direction of marketing efforts. What I am experiencing with platforms like chat GTP, mid-journey and Dolly 3 makes me think about what does the future look like? I’m highly convinced that this technology will doc octagon people just as Grammarly and Google have helped us speed up and advance over the last 20 years. This is another tool definitely not a replacement. But what I am most curious about is what I call ubiquitous dynamic media.
Ubiquitous dynamic media is a strategy for a brand where AI is constantly always producing in real-time, delivering branded content into the streams it will go from hosts to pulse and constantly pulsing constantly producing. The only way to do that is this video and imagery can be self-generated off of algorithms and prompts. Video that is dynamically producible, like we’re seeing right now with tools like mid-journey and open AI, has. the power to change the entire creative process and timeline. Imagine just writing the words “video of a child, running down the street chasing the ball” and generating a producible video where in real time you can change details like the color of the shirt on the child. Dynamic ubiquitous real-time branded content natively produced across every channel could allow you to optimize in real-time with algorithms of data trends that are coming in live. The future of technology is a vast ocean that a Creative Director could surf.
We wanted to get some feedback from an outside perspective, so we went to our strategic human capital partner, Chrissy (Ching) Mott, of Celertek. She had great insights on this topic.
“Data is now driving most technology hires across any industry. The ability to measure the success of what is being built or implemented is now as important as the product itself. There are very few organizations, even in the government services space that are without a data team, even if that team is relatively small. We have seen an increase in scaling data teams alongside QA, product management, and other more traditional technology areas across the last few years. The ratio of the data team to other traditional technology skill areas is only increasing year over year. What used to be a single person is now scaling at the same pace as other technology roles within a given organization.”
“A modern-day creative director has to understand how to read data and how to use it to positively impact the overall business. Without the digestion of data and applying its impact to the deliverable or product, the creative director is already behind their competitor.”
We’ve all experienced the infamous ‘Blaring Ad’ before. It strikes at the most inconvenient of times—one second you’re peacefully (and silently) scrolling through your phone, only to be interrupted by the ear-splitting sound of a video advertisement playing at full volume. What is it for? What do they have to say? It doesn’t matter. None of these questions so much as cross your mind before you shut it off (angrily) in one quick click. You don’t even take the time to consider the marketer’s message, as you’re either jarred by the sound or embarrassed to be the source of a sudden outburst in public.
The rise of silent video and closed captioning is occurring rapidly; we are seeing more and more videos that not only utilize subtitles but also do not require any audio to fully understand the premise and/or story of the ad. Data from Facebook demonstrates exactly why you might want to tone it down on the audio in your ads—approximately 80% of people will react negatively to a mobile ad that plays out loud as they’re scrolling. Rather than spending money on an ad that users will quickly click out of, you could be creating a compelling ad that can be watched in (peaceful) silence.
It’s time to say goodbye to the Blaring Ad, and hello to a silent video.
Three Tips on How to Create a Compelling Silent Video
1. Nail the First Three Seconds
Research has shown that when someone comes across a video, whether they are going to stick around and watch it or not is typically decided within the first three seconds. After that, they’re either in or they’re out. This means that the first three seconds of your video needs to have an interesting hook to keep your audience interested. There should be a great visual that draws people in without necessarily needing them to hear anything. The bottom line is that we as humans remember pictures better than words, and that’s a fact.
2. Utilize Closed Captioning
Captioning your videos is a no-brainer—it will increase viewer engagement, improve SEO, and most importantly, it will make your video more accessible. Video captioning ensures that viewers can comprehend any auditory cues and dialogue in your video, making it accessible for persons who are deaf, hard of hearing, or non-English speakers. Closed captioning can also boost brand memorability and awareness. According to research conducted by eMarkterer, subtitles increased average video viewing by 40%. Videos with subtitles led to a 91% completion rate compared to 66% when viewed without subtitles.
Closed captioning is also a great move when it comes to Search Engine Optimization. Your SEO efforts will benefit from captioned videos because it will be easier for viewers to find the content online. Videos, unlike articles and other text-based content, can easily get lost in the complex algorithms of search engines, unless they contain searchable captions that push the video to the top of a Google search.
3. Pick the Right Platform
When it comes to picking where your silent video will be advertised, social media is going to be your best friend. YouTube, Snapchat, and many other social network sites are moving gradually to a captioning system. Videos with captions are frequently associated with accessibility in the social media sphere since the majority of these websites will automatically mute their videos. In a study, Facebook reported that users will watch videos without sound in almost 85% of all cases. Because of this, it is even more crucial for content producers to think about using video captions or subtitles to keep and attract viewers.
In short, Overall viewing will rise as a result of using closed captions in video marketing, and the advertised brand or product may even become more popular. Don’t pass up the chance to add words to your ads and instantly make them readable to everybody for a fraction of the price of the video itself. If you are interested in learning more about how Bluetext’s video production services can help you create an unforgettable silent ad, contact us.
The technology industry, especially B2B, is high-paced, extremely complex, and simply put overly saturated. From start-ups to the legacy giants, the constant evolution of cybersecurity, managed IT, SaaS, AI, and not to mention the emergence of FinTech, HealthTech, and EdTech has widened the competition pool. Beyond a sea of overly hashtagged buzzwords, there are millions of companies trying to make or sustain a name for themselves. This makes marketing more critical than ever.
Marketing technologies start with building brand awareness but involves consistently showcasing proof of concept, case studies, and current customer experiences with the ultimate goal of driving lead generation. As technology companies grow, those that leverage marketing strategies in partnership with engineering, product development, and sales will become market leaders.
Taking a technology start-up to an enterprise, accelerating company growth, and disrupting the status quo require a powerful marketing strategy that solidifies and shares core messaging, generates attention, and creates demand. But no marketing strategy exists without challenges. Here are the top challenges Bluetext sees across marketing in the technology industry:
1. Messaging to Experts, Not Decision-makers
Let us state the obvious: technology is built by smart people. Highly educated, highly technical and well versed in a technology tongue the average person doesn’t use day to day. But when companies attempt to explain their product or service to primary audiences (usually the person with the purchasing power) as if they were an insider with perfect knowledge, they don’t support the customer decision process. Successful marketing strategies acknowledge and accommodate a natural learning curve to deliver digestible information. No matter how impressive the technology product or service, it still must serve a business benefit.
Marketing teams should strive must meet the audience halfway, understand where they are in the decision-making process and deliver ongoing, accessible, and understandable value.
2. Riddling With Industry Jargon
When you have mere seconds to capture prospects’ attention on a website, it’s critical to make the product relevant, instill its value, and motivate the prospect to learn more. Getting deep in the weeds with specs and jargon-filled content wastes everyone’s time because it often has no meaning to the prospect, and simply wastes time as for a user to scan, find no interest, and give up. A common mistake in attempts to establish expertise; is alienating the user.
Instead, marketers must speak in the prospects’ language, not their own. Messaging should convey everything a customer needs to know and lead with high-level business value.
3. Overlooking the Journey
Marketing is a journey, often not a straightforward linear point solution. When done successfully, it guides prospects and customers through the twists and turns of purchase decisions. Technology marketers should work backward from the business value of their products. No matter how flashy, impressive, or advanced the technology your prospect is tasked with solving a business challenge. To prove you can offer a business benefit, break down the steps your prospect must take to find a solution, evaluate the effectiveness or get the ultimate purchasing decision.
Rather than focusing on immediately driving revenue, technology companies must understand their target audience and the overall journey so that marketing efforts can weave in the right information at the right times.
4. Fine Line of Pushing vs Telling
Marketing and sales teams in any industry have a bad rap for coming on too strong, too soon. Cold calls, aggressive or unsolicited emails, and unqualified leads rarely result in success, because they don’t account for their audience’s stage of the decision cycle. Your sales and marketing team can shout impressive stats and flashy specs all day, but unless you convey a relevant and necessary value, you may as well be on mute. Consider how can you establish credibility by illustrating, not telling, and specific ways your technology impacts their business.
Technology marketers should strive to anticipate what information prospects need to learn in advance of purchasing — and create compelling, helpful content that will answer their questions before even asked. While we know marketers can’t be mind readers, but you can leverage historic customer profiles and past learnings to cater your content.
So How Can You Be Sure Your Strategy is Effective?
Data, data, data. The amount of data available from a tech product creates unique opportunities for marketers to make decisions quickly, optimize products, develop campaigns, and reach customers where they are. The effectiveness of your technology marketing efforts depends on your organization’s unique goals. Whether that be selling more products, raising awareness in a new audience, or solidifying a reputation to an existing customer base, make sure your marketing campaigns are adaptive and always optimizing.
Regardless of industry, marketing is getting the right information in front of the right people. Successful technology marketing comes with its fair share of nuances, especially in identifying the right target audiences and ensuring your message resonates to enhance the customer experience. Partnering with an expert with the right skills and experience in the technology industry landscape, such as a technology marketing agency like Bluetext, can help your organization overcome these challenges and reach your goals.
With all the buzz on AI-generated copy and design tools, we’re all wondering the same unspoken question: Can Google detect AI tools? Is this…allowed? Or looked down upon? With more and more companies beginning to leverage AI-powered tools for their marketing needs we are all wondering whether speed and efficiency may come at the cost of SERP rankings.
The answers to these questions are muddled, but here’s what we do know: Google itself relies on advanced algorithms and machine learning to detect and evaluate the quality of website content. The entire purpose of search engines is to provide users with the most relevant and useful content possible, hence our society has become so search engine dependent on everything from research to daily needs. Google algorithms are designed to identify and flag low-quality or spammy content.
Google’s spam policy stance defines “Spammy automatically generated (or “auto-generated”) content as content that’s been generated programmatically without producing anything original or adding sufficient value; instead, it’s been generated for the primary purpose of manipulating search rankings and not helping users.”
Historically, auto-generated content generated by machine learning scrips has had a reputation of being lower quality and overstuffed with keywords aimed at manipulating Google’s search results. This has led Google initiatives to detect this type of content and remove it from the SERPs in an attempt to preserve the integrity of its search results for the end user.
Google Search Central has stated that “scraping content, even with some modification, is against our spam policy.” As well as confirming that Google has put implemented, “…many algorithms to go after such behaviors and demote site scraping content from other sites.”
Prioritizing high-quality, human-generated content on Google results provides a better search experience for users and maintains their credibility. But with the rise of the new AI tools that promise more natural and higher quality outputs, marketers and writers have the opportunity to utilize these tools to generate higher quality, more helpful content for the users rather than an endless amount of spam content. Quality over quantity has become the universal goal for AI generators and users.
Therefore, the content generated by GPT-3 and other AI language models like ChatGPT, is at risk of being detected as machine-generated and flagged by Google’s algorithms. Like recognizes like, so there’s a good chance that machine learning algorithms will recognize similar machine learning. As far as technology has come, it will never be a complete substitute for human intellect. The writing style, grammar, and sentence structure of AI-generated content are often not as natural or accurate as human-generated content.
Editing has become the name of the AI game. It’s important to make sure that any content generated by AI models like ChatGPT is carefully reviewed and edited by a real person before being published on your website. This helps ensure that it meets Google’s quality standards and policies, and accurately reflects the subject. If you are choosing to leverage AI tools on your website it’s important to make sure that your website is balanced with plenty of original and unique content, so that it complies with Google’s policies in terms of user experience, design, and navigability.
Whether or not search engine consequences currently exist for websites leveraging AI-generated content has not been confirmed, nor denied by Google. For any company seeking to rank high in search engine results, it’s better to be safe than sorry and maintain a close human eye on your SEO strategy, from content to keyword selection. Contact Bluetext for more information on our expert search engine optimization services.
3 Ways to Optimize Your Website for Voice Search
We’ve seen how much voice as a channel is growing and how beneficial voice marketing can be for consumers and marketers, but if your company isn’t in a position to invest in voice marketing tools quite yet, there are still plenty of ways to keep up and optimize your website for Voice SEO.
What exactly is Voice SEO? It’s the optimization of keywords and keyword phrases for searches using voice assistants. According to research by Semrush, on average voice assistants can answer 93.7% of all search queries. And based on research from PWC, 90% of people think voice search is easier than searching online, and 89% think it’s more convenient. From the same study, 71% of people would rather use voice search than physically type a search query. With a voice as a search channel continuing to expand, your website needs to account for this new channel of search, too. So what’re the best ways to optimize your website for voice SEO? Let’s dive in.
1. Featured Snippet Optimization
Featured snippets are the selected search results that appear on the top of the search result page as the best answer to a query. Because of its location, a featured snippet is also often called position zero, since it’s above the first result. That sounds like the ideal position, right? Well, you can’t buy your way in if that’s what you’re thinking. Google generates featured snippets organically by checking the relevancy of the information pulled from web pages in Google’s index. Common formats of Featured Snippets include descriptions/definitions, steps/lists, and tables. Featured snippets are especially crucial in voice search since the voice assistant will reply to the answer to a user’s question with the position zero content.
According to SEMrush, “70% of voice search answers come from SERP features”, Featured Snippets being the most important. And a lot of this process can be AI-driven. Check out our tips on how AI could be an aid to SEO. Another Featured Snippet tip – don’t use your brand name in the featured snippet text. Replacing the brand name with general language will give the content a higher chance of receiving a featured snippet since adding a brand name could make the response too specific for the listener.
2. Structured Markup
Structured markups (added to the HTML) help Google and other search engines better understand and process your content and help optimize your search results. You can use schema.org structured annotations to allow Google to reliably retrieve up-to-date information directly from your website. A common and effective schema is FAQ. Adding FAQ schema to your FAQ page can expand your Google result with the most frequently asked questions. And the schema can be added to any place on your site that has FAQs, so to better optimize for voice search, add quick answers to the top of highly trafficked pages and top blog pages.
The more search engines better understand your content, the better. In fact, there’s even a specific voice-search markup by Google called Speakable that’s currently in beta that marketers should definitely keep an eye on.
3. Conversation-Based Navigation
Voice search equalizes access to information through conversation. Users can ask for what they want, in their own voice/language/literacy level, etc. But they’re asking, and most websites aren’t written or structured for questions or conversation-based navigation. Voice search is direct; people aren’t looking to explore a ton of search results. They’re looking for a reliable, comprehensive answer that doesn’t require further searching. So re-write your headlines as questions, not statements, for a more conversational format. An easy way to do this is by adding “What is” to the heading. Be sure to summarize the answer directly below the header so it’s easy for a voice assistant to read aloud.
Other basic SEO factors like page speed, good domain ratings, having quality long-form content, and being HTTPS secured, all also play a role in optimizing your website for voice search. Follow these tips to help optimize your website for the rapidly-growing voice search, or contact Bluetext today to learn more about our search engine optimization and content marketing services.