Time to Write My Blog…I Wrote My Blog…Time to Write My Blog

Remember the iconic Dunkin Donuts campaign from the early 80s featuring Fred the Baker?

What a classic campaign. 30 years later the lessons we can learn from Fred are relevant and applicable to modern content market.

It is hard….It is time consuming…but it can really pay off when done right. In my estimation a disciplined approach to blogging and content marketing can be a relatively low cost way of tilting the playing field for your products or services.

We have built one of the strongest content marketing practices in D.C. by working with our clients to create aggressive, consistent content marketing campaigns that ensure they have a strong presence across the web with their key audiences. We create quarterly editorial calendars that align with key company and product milestones, as well as industry events where we can help amplify messages. We instill content marketing into the DNA of our clients so that they can experience the benefits of a disciplined approach.

Content marketing, however, is not something you can just set and forget. It takes care and nurturing. It takes discipline and an entire team effort. And it takes some creativity.

So the next time someone says they don’t have time to write a blog or are too busy, tell them to give me a call. We can share war stories and I can show them significant results. I think it will make them think twice and find that extra 30 minutes each week.

A few months ago my partner Don Goldberg got a Google Cardboard viewer and was showing it off around the office but was not getting much of a rise out of the team. Maybe we all thought Virtual Reality was too far out there and the hype of Oculus Rift was overblown. Fast forward to early November and I got a Google Cardboard viewer packaged with my Sunday New York Times at home (yes, we still get the Sunday Times!). I downloaded the app and was immediately transformed. Being in the visual storytelling business, I knew that a seismic shift was beginning. Video was no longer just video. VR transformed the story, brought the user (me) into the story, and created an experience that everyone in my family was amazed by. With the price point of the Cardboard viewers it would not create a barrier for marketers to reach their audiences, even in the b2b world.

To quote Google’s news release from October: “Google Cardboard is bringing virtual reality worldwide. Starting today, the Google Cardboard app is available in 39 languages and over 100 countries on both Android and iOS devices. Additionally, the Cardboard developer docs are now published in 10 languages to help developers build great VR experiences. With more than 15 million installs of Cardboard apps from Google Play, we’re excited to bring VR to even more people around the world.”

The conversations inside our agency quickly moved to figuring out how to make VR a reality for our clients. Virtual reality could be the next medium for us to do creative storytelling. As a company focused on visual storytelling married with advanced development (see our work for brands like Workday, Adobe, and Jones Lang LaSalle), it was the perfect storm.

Fast forward two months and today we are designing a digital briefing center in Virtual Reality. We are marrying up our creativity, advanced video capabilities, and cutting-edge app development to help an enterprise software company more effectively tell its story. We see virtual reality as more than games and entertainment. We see it as a platform to tell stories in a fun and engaging way.

From what I can tell there are very few agencies doing virtual reality. We are diving in headfirst. With the launch of Google Cardboard we have an opportunity to help our clients tell their story like never before. That is the business we are in and that is what sets us apart.

 

At Bluetext we do a lot of branding and website design. It is a service area where we have achieved a lot of success for clients across many industries, effectively helping them leverage their brand and visual identity to more easily achieve their business goals through their digital platform.

For many of our clients branding and website go hand in hand. We either create a new logo and visual identity from scratch, or evolve a brand identity to update a design system that needs some love, and then design and launch a sophisticated website to bring the brand to life.

You never really know where this process will go until you immerse yourself in the client’s business, getting to know their leadership, sales teams, customers, partners, and other stakeholders that can add valuable perspective.

Over the last several months across a few major client initiatives some unique perspectives emerged that made me step back to think about some tenets of branding that continue to arise as best practices we preach.

 

1. Bigger is not always better. There is this false perception that the best way to represent the strength and boldness of a brand is to make the logo as big as possible on a website. This is simply not true. Rarely is the fix to a brand question to make the logo bigger. There is a trend toward simpler, smaller branding whereby companies let their logo breath. Beyond the fact that we are moving to a world with smaller screens and a reliance on mobile devices where icons need to stand on their own, bigger logos make it look like you are trying too hard and in fact make your business look smaller.

2. Stand Alone. If possible, a brand mark/icon should stand on its own. I was meeting with the CEO of a major corporate client recently as we were working through a very fast moving branding process. He looked at the simplicity of the Bluetext “BT” icon and said that he really wanted us to replicate that for his brand. While flattering, it is not always that easy. Corporate names can be clunky, but necessary. The Nike swoosh was not globally recognized when it was launched in 1971. So the best advice I can give here is to create a strategic plan for how long it may take for you to feel comfortable enough with brand recognition around your mark whereby people would recognize it without your company name attached to it. Creating an “iconic” brand does not happen overnight, but with careful planning and a commitment to success it is possible.

 

3. Be Simple. We are all visual storytellers, so if your brand mark can tell a simple story that is the ultimate success. The old adage a picture is worth 1,000 words is truer than ever. Look at how people consume content. Create a brand that simply explains who you are or what you do, or at a minimum provides a platform to easily explain your corporate story.

To learn more about the importance of a strong brand, read our latest blog post:

Earlier this year we began working with the developer of a product called NetWatcher which is designed to provide SMBs the same level of IT security as usually afforded only by large enterprises.

Last week we launched the company at the MSP World Conference in Las Vegas where our team was onsite to support the company with a great booth where we were able to demo the product to over 100 Managed Service Providers who can leverage NetWatcher to drive new revenue streams with their customers.

In advance of the company we launched a new website designed to help customers and MSPs understand the benefits of the solution to their organizations.

During the awards portion of the conference, NetWatcher was honored with the “Best in Show” award for its innovative and promising solution designed specifically to address the security needs of small and medium-size businesses (SMBs). NetWatcher works to immediately alert SMBs when customer or employee data is at risk. For example, weak passwords, unsecure assets, unsafe employee behavior, and outdated software are all things that require continuous monitoring to defend against cyber-attacks.

Despite the constant threat of attack towards SMBs, many companies still lack sufficient protection to thwart off cyber criminals. Check out the top five vulnerabilities that are often overlooked by SMBs.

Congrats to our client Scott Suhy and the entire NetWatcher team. Keep an eye out for much more to come in the coming months from this promising company that is addressing a major need in the market which is currently underserved.

To learn more about how Bluetext can help you be best in show, too, click here:

“If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?” The age old philosophical question that actually has a lot of applicability to modern marketing. The truth is that the best marketing campaign with the perfect message will fall flat if there is not an audience of people to see it. data mining At Bluetext, our go to market can be divided into three areas that must work in concert to be successful:

 

• Brand Strategy, which focuses on creating the right message and brand positioning;
• Brand Presentation, which focuses on taking that message and making it visual; and
• Brand Delivery, which focuses on taking that strongly designed visual message and delivering it out into the market via multiple channels.

 

The dirty little secret is that so many companies focus on their strategy and their presentation but then fail to really attack the proper channels for the delivery of their message. So here are four things you should be asking yourselves or your marketing agency to ensure that your message is delivered to the right audiences in order to properly achieve your goals:

1. Do you have a database and are you leveraging it? There are many modern techniques for properly leveraging your corporate database to drive awareness and interest in your products or services beyond sending out HTML email blasts. Just this week Google announced a new product called Customer Match that will let advertisers upload lists of emails and match them to signed-in Google users on Gmail, Search and YouTube. This same functionality is available inside of Facebook for very specific targeting.
2. What conversations are you a part of or could you be a part of? What assets (people) do you have that we could insert into conversations to better position your company as thought leaders to drive thought provoking agendas? Have you created an editorial calendar that you review each week and track against KPIs?
3. Are you putting any budget to paid media? If you are looking to drive leads as opposed to straight awareness then taking a portion of the budget and putting it toward paid channels (for sponsored content, advertorial, infographics, etc.) is critical for success. Think about going programmatic as well to maximize every dollar. My partner Rick Silipigni wrote a blog post about this approach recently – check it out here – https://bluetext.com/planning-a-digital-media-buy-get-with-the-programmatic/
4. Are you thinking outside the box? Every company has a handful of activities that they take on from a marketing standpoint every quarter, but only the most successful companies carve out budget to launch innovative campaigns to drive differentiation in the market. Every quarter you should be asking your team and your agency for ideas that would be considered innovative and outside the box. Check out this amazing pop up book my team just created for Workday to help them tell their story in a unique way…http://www.workday.com/payroll_evolution.php

 

Last week some very interesting data came out of Parse.ly, an analytics firm which collects data for 400 digital publishers including Conde Nast, Reuters, Mashable, and The Atlantic. The headline is that, as of June 2015, Facebook is driving more traffic to websites than Google’s sites including google.com and Google News.

HUH you ask? How is that possible? Google is the king of referral traffic, right? It is all about search engine optimization.

Not so fast. The data points to some recent shifts in how Facebook focuses on driving content to its site, and validates the fact that this is not some random stat that will course correct. The trend line has actually been going this way since 2012.

So as a marketer, what are you to do? Well, don’t ring the alarm bells too quickly. Search engine optimization is still critical for success and needs to be a big part of your marketing mix. But don’t ignore Facebook and write it off as a nice place for consumers to share pictures with friends. That is an uneducated and naïve viewpoint and one that is clearly not valid based on these numbers.

I think it is safe to say that Facebook is just getting started, and optimizing your content to play off the Facebook algorithms, as much as that is possible, is a very smart approach. Some of the concepts that we continuously share with clients include:

• Make your Content snackable and consumable
• Encourage social sharing
• Create conversation and dialogue
• Be unique, relevant, or different, but never be boring

How is your organization optimizing social content? Are you seeing an uptick in conversations due to your efforts or are you just scratching the surface?

We get a lot of requests from companies of all sizes looking to “rebrand.” These requests can range from changing some colors and messaging, to completely overhauling a brand and website to address a new market or opportunity where the current brand identity may not be sufficient to address emerging corporate goals.

Enterprises across all industries face a lot of tough questions when deciding on the degree of their rebrand. Is the logo in play? Should the company consider a name change? Is there a mascot or other brand element that drives the culture? Have they gotten as far as they can with the current brand? Are there situations whereby they want to enter a new market and their current brand can actually be detrimental to future success?

To answer these questions we combine insights from both inside and outside the corporate walls, as well as the competitive environment and external market factors to define a path forward that helps them achieve their future corporate goals while addressing different budgetary requirements.

Sometimes there are brand elements that are so ingrained in the culture that tough decisions emerge. A great example was the first time we were asked to rebrand Sourcefire. Sourcefire rose to fame with the commercialization of its open source intrusion detection software product Snort in the 2000s. The product included a massive community of loyal and dedicated supporters who were passionate about Snort and its technical capabilities. They helped the company grow in terms of revenues and fame, and were closely aligned with the company’s mascot Snorty the Pig.

Snorty the pig was always associated with the brand, and all marketing materials including an annual calendar were very popular across the IT security community.

They engaged the Bluetext team to drive legitimacy for the company and brand as they looked to diversify their revenue base into Government. This was a new audience and there was a feeling that the Snort Pig mascot and company attitude would not play well. Following a thorough discovery process our recommendation was to tone down Snorty without eliminating him from their marketing efforts. Our goal was to present the brand as more stable and conservative. The results were tremendous. When they came back to us three years later to rebrand again, Snorty was playing a significantly less prominent role but they continued to leverage the pig in ways to embrace the old while expanding into new markets. The rest for Sourcefire is history as they were sold for $2.7 billion to Cisco in 2013.

The lessons learned from Sourcefire are quite valuable. Many factors need to be assessed to measure the value of your brand equity with your current and prospective customers, including search equity, brand equity and association, and name recognition. If your current customers are loyal and you are in a position of strength with them, but you need help entering a new market, they should understand the reasons for the rebrand and what it means to them without disrupting their relationship with you.

As brands mature, what has gotten them to one point may not be the best path to get to the next level. Many factors should be addressed. Weigh the pros and cons, and don’t make judgments based on gut. Look at the market, assess the opportunity, and make sure to give your brand the best chance at long term success. While you may be succeeding in many categories, it is possible that you have to take a step back in order to move forward. Here are six questions that must be answered when embarking on a “rebrand” effort:

1. How will this rebrand impact current customers?
2. Have you taken this brand as far as it can go?
3. How will your current brand play with prospective customers in new or adjacent markets?
4. Have you thoroughly analyzed the market to see what the outside world thinks about our brand and market positioning?
5. Are you positioning around how customers search for and consume products or services, or how you internally orient your business?
6. Do you want to zag if all of your competitors zig?

A rebrand effort can come in many shapes and sizes. Make sure you do a thorough assessment of your needs and growth opportunities, as it is critical to never disrupt your business as you embrace the market through a rebranding effort.

This week, just in time for its Global Sales Conference in Orlando, Bluetext client CSC (NYSE: CSC) launched its redesigned, fully responsive website. This was an incredible collaboration that the Bluetext team is so pleased to have been involved with from the beginning.

As one of our largest clients, CSC is always pushing Bluetext to think outside the box to get more creative and push the limits for the global brand. Over the past year we have collaborated on several exciting projects including their Digital Briefing Center (http://www.csc.com/digital_briefing_center/aut/110681-digital_briefing_center) and their Manufacturing industry go to market web experience (www.csc.com/OM).

Last fall we proactively approached them to highlight several areas of their corporate website that we believed could evolve. I guess it is just in our nature to try and proactively look at our clients key marketing channels and make recommendations to push them out of their comfort zone in ways that we feel could be executed more flawlessly.

Our client Nick Panayi, Head of Global Brand & Digital Marketing for CSC, spearheaded this effort and had this to say:

The thing I value the most in Bluetext as a true partner is that they don’t tell us what we want to hear, but what they truly think is needed with solutions ready. You cannot teach an agency to do that. That is in the DNA of the agency. And once you find that, my recommendation is to keep that agency around for a long time.

The new fully responsive website design centers around the key technology focus areas that CSC is driving solutions for into market. Big beautiful imagery and clear calls to action, all aligned with cross industry brand efforts are hallmarks of the new site. We worked with their in-house development team to integrate many modern techniques, including a snap navigation for a seamless browsing experience and a smart lazy loading strategy for fast browsing.

The launch of the new csc.com is the first phase in a multi-phase rollout for CSC with new phases rolling out in the coming weeks. We are very proud of our partnership with CSC.

 

When it was announced that Reston-based Maximus Inc. signed a definitive agreement to buy Acentia for $300 million, I must admit I got a little teary eyed.

Acentia (formerly called ITSolutions) selected Bluetext following a very competitive search to do a full rebranding effort, from name to logo to corporate identity to messaging to website to videos to launch, etc.

Todd’s challenge was hefty – he had to unify a brand across nine diverse companies (not an uncommon issue in Federal Contracting) to create a brand that would enable his company to be acquisitive and get in the game as a mid-size contractor.

This was one of our first major rebranding assignments since founding Bluetext and turned out to be an incredible project for us, working with Todd Stottlemyer and his entire management team.

If you have ever had a chance to work with Todd, his passion and commitment to excellence are second to none, and he pushed us to create work which we are still proud of today.

We spent weeks developing a name and message that not only was powerful but truly reflected the focus on his people. When the tagline was selected, Essential to the Mission, it became a rallying cry that pulled together employees, created a sense of purpose for the company and its brand, and became the theme for the company’s first advertising campaign we developed which highlighted historic people like Jackie Robinson and Clara Barton who were essential to their mission.

As my partner Jason Siegel pointed out to me last night, this is first company we named as Bluetext that is now off the market. It is a great feeling for our entire team knowing that our efforts helped them achieve their goals. Here is a link to a testimonial from Todd following the successful rebrand effort – http://bluetext.com/acentia-ceo-todd-stottlemyer-on-bluetext/

In the massively competitive real estate industry, companies can gain serious strategic advantage from modernizing their marketing tactics to take advantage of new strategies and tools that are impacting how they communicate with customers and prospects.

Here are five trends we are seeing that could benefit commercial real estate companies as they look to up their marketing game in 2015.

1. Leverage your data
Data provides one of the biggest opportunities to show your strategic differentiation, and in today’s world it can be leveraged in so many visual ways. Buyers leverage it across so many of their key decisions. Embrace it, leverage it, and present it in new and unique ways so that the industry continues to drive toward more visualization…

2. Advertising Goes Digital
Paid digital advertising offers so many more unique and exciting ways to present your business compared to the traditional print methods used for so many years. You can present your assets in so many unique ways, micro target your buyers, and measure the impact to evaluate and evolve your visual message on a constant basis.

3. Social = Snackable
At Bluetext we have been preaching the snackable method for delivering content for a while. Few industries, due to the nature of the services, lend themselves better to this approach. Take your visuals and data and information and present it in bite sized chunks. Be consistent with templates and design for a professional look. Your customers and prospects will take notice.

4. Content. Content. Content
Create great content that can be delivered via reports and webinars, and use it to continuously push your message to your customers and prospects. No one realizes you are expert unless you let them know.

5. Customize Your Campaigns
You know who your targets are. You know what content is important to them. Don’t throw everything on the wall and hope it sticks. With new opportunities to micro target across channels like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn to deliver a message to a very targeted audience, now is the time to make sure you are maximizing every opportunity to take the message directly where your prospects are.

Those are just some of the trends that should be considered for 2015. If you are looking for a commercial real estate marketing firm, we are doing a lot of great content marketing for real estate and data visualizations to help marketers differentiate their brand in the competitive commercial real estate arena.