When television owned the only screen in a single screen world –  it controlled 100% of the “digital” content – brands and consumers alike were literally shackled by the format and programming television once controlled.

Today’s hyper connected consumer has gained complete control over what they want to watch, when they want to watch it and the screen they want to watch it on – but the majority of corporate brands have been slow to catchup to this change in consumer behavior and fail to recognize the role that consumers are now playing to drive corporate marketing strategy. This is largely because they are still beholden to more traditional channels – including online display – that dictate where, when and how their messages are served up to consumers.

Brands have to design customer experiences that meet the needs and expectations of an increasingly mobile consumer, and the creation and distribution of content plays a significant role in that customer experience. With so much noise and so many media formats vying for the customer’s attention, marketers now need to tell their own compelling, contextually relevant and visually impactful brand story.

As consumers gain control of the content they allow to reach them, some of the most modern brands are making the transition to what is probably the most significant shift in marketing since television and launching content publishing studios to create, manage and distribute content that rivals some network news rooms. Brands are experimenting with virtual reality, infographics, videos, mobile ads, native advertising and other creative ways to try and get their message in front of their customers in a time, channel and format that they chose to digest it.

And to compound that, technology is rapidly changing consumer behavior in unpredictable ways with mobile having become the primary enabler of the personal interactions the smartest brands are now having with their customers. As consumer preference for digesting content shifts to smaller handheld screens, innovative marketers will leverage that to create a more personalized experience with their customers. Branding is now a two-way conversation now that social media has given consumers a voice unlike anything ever seen before. As brands track individual consumer behavior in real-time, they can use it to tailor the individual experience for each specific person and their specific behaviors on a mass scale to create engagement and conversations at every consumer touch point.

With the rise of mobile, Brands will also need to become more nimble and at the same time, creative and digital agencies will eventually morph into one – like Bluetext – so that ideas are cohesively executed across all channels simultaneously to meet the needs of a new consumer culture – rather than those of the traditional media culture that has ignored them for far too long.

Even the most established brands risk becoming irrelevant if they fail to recognize that they need to adapt to these changes in human behavior. As consumers choose to embrace only the world that knows them – marketers need to develop and nurture a compelling brand narrative with content consumers will seek out to customize their own individual life experiences.

In its mission to connect people with experts across a variety of fields, Expertise recently reviewed 256 advertising agencies in the greater Washington market to identify the best of the best. Bluetext is honored to have been named as one of the 20 best agencies in the region. We were judged on more than 25 variables across six categories:

• Reputation,
• Credibility,
• Experience,
• Availability,
• Professionalism, and
• Engagement.

Because the competition was so tough, we’re especially proud to be recognized for the hard work we put in for our clients across a variety of projects and industries, from Google to Intel to Cisco. To learn more about Expertise and their work to identify the best advertising agencies in Washington, click here. And to put Bluetext’s expertise to work for you, reach out today:

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve probably browsed a popular news site and seen a sponsored post. You might not have known it was sponsored at the time, but we promise it was there.  Whether it’s a BuzzFeed “listicle” promoting an upcoming movie or a Forbes post on a new piece of software, sponsored content is everywhere. While it may have been clunky in its early days, sponsored content is becoming increasingly tailored to the platform it’s being published on. Brands are now creating great content that users want to read, instead of boring content that users inevitably scroll past. Great sponsored content is engaging to the reader, but gets your name out there in the end. However, it takes work to create this type of content and integrate it into an effective campaign. You have to know what news outlet to work with, what kind of content to create, and how much money to put behind your campaign. In today’s content marketing landscape, sponsored content is a key tool for any marketer looking to create exposure for their brand.

That’s where we come in. At Bluetext, we have experience creating effective, engaging sponsored content for our clients. If you’re a CMO looking to get a greater understand of how our process works and what factors we consider for our sponsored content campaigns, download our eBook.

As most anybody reading this post already knows, the marketing challenges faced by B2B organizations in an increasingly content driven social landscape, require vastly different social marketing strategies and technologies than B2C companies. The more B2B marketers invest time, money and resources in the creation and distribution of premium content, the more they are under pressure to deliver social media ROI. And as most social platforms continue to change the rules of engagement, I thought it might be helpful to share a few insights on what B2B marketers can control to improve the effectiveness of their social presence to drive greater levels of awareness, engagement and demand.

Employee Activation

Because marketing departments in mid-market and enterprise level organizations are often outnumbered by their sales department brethren by at least 10 to 1 — they are looking for new and innovative ways to motivate sales organizations and employees alike to start being active social advocates in their own brand’s social ecosystem.

The good news is that new social marketing technologies enable corporate marketing to push messages down to individual reps who can then share the social content, become thought leaders and help build brand awareness in places like LinkedIn where they can now expose their entire network to new and relevant content to grow pipeline – their pipeline – and once they see that start to work for them they will become your biggest advocates.

Social Advertising

As social networks continue to manipulate their hidden algorithms to downgrade organic promotional posts at the same time they upgrade sponsored content – paid social promotion is becoming a growing and necessary channel for brands who want to stay visible and maintain their social reach.

Paid social media offers a wide range of valuable targeting options, allowing B2B marketers to hyper target an audience with rich and contextually relevant content across a wide range of emerging social platforms. However, many of these platforms have self-service interfaces available to launch paid social ads that might appear easy to use, but are often not leveraged or used properly by the brand owner.

For this reason, we recommend investing considerable time testing and analyzing social ad performance to stay in control of ROI. And while we recommend to our clients that they continue to maintain their paid search budget, we are seeing more and more of that being directed towards the increasing demand for content development that’s necessary to feed the social marketing beast – paid or otherwise.

Social Mobilization

Most B2B marketers use a multichannel social content distribution strategy, and therefore spend more than half their annual marketing budget on the development and production of content. The problem we are seeing is that all of that rich, premium content is increasingly being consumed on mobile devices – yet not being fully optimized for the mobile user.

B2B social engagement is now almost entirely mobile – with more than 75% of Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn users accessing the social network via mobile – brands have the opportunity to leverage social channels quickly get their messages out to their customers and prospects.

The key to leveraging mobile for B2B social marketing isn’t just in it being presentable in a mobile accessible format – in needs to be easily sharable with share buttons and direct links that connect users to your website and other online properties to drive engagement, demand and measurable ROI.

In today’s mobile dominant world, app indexing is signaling the beginning of a seismic shift in the direction of search, and marketers need to pay attention.

Google has been offering app indexing for over a year and its algorithm for mobile apps has grown in complexity in lockstep with the potential impact they can have on your company’s search rankings. While the advent of mobile optimized, responsive websites has worked wonders for appealing to a now mobile dominant crowd – brands can no longer afford to ignore the online visibility advantages of a dedicated app.

Not only can mobile apps do everything that websites can – they can also deliver a more intuitive, convenient and accessible user experience – so much so that if Google has its way – apps are destined to replace websites at the speed and voracity that desktop was overtaken by mobile browsing.

According to Google, “App Indexing allows us to index apps just like websites. Deep links to your mobile app appear in Google search results, letting users get to your native mobile experience quickly and easily, landing exactly on the right content within your app.”

From a practical perspective, this means that when you perform a Google search on a mobile device, the search results will include not just web pages, but also relevant content that is within an app – even if the app is not installed on your mobile device – further assisting users in the discovery of new apps.

Google’s expansion of in-app search increases the amount of content that is being indexed – improving the search experience for mobile users – and at the same time driving higher engagement with apps.

The clear takeaway here is that brands need to grow their mobile presence to stay relevant – period. Marketers need to leverage mobile to gain traction among users and work with digital agencies like Bluetext who are already tuned into the full conversion optimization potential that mobile delivers.

This is the beginning of a mobile dynasty – and marketers need to optimize it in every way possible.

Perhaps the most critical component of the dozen or so enterprise websites Bluetext currently has in development is personalization. This shift in focus to personalized customer experiences is becoming increasingly important for B2B companies because of the significant impact it can have on increasing engagement and conversion rates with your target audiences.

Website personalization allows companies to serve up a custom experience based on the characteristics, preferences, actions, and perceived intent of an individual or persona group. Personalization goes beyond simply accommodating a user with content we think they like, and if done right, establishes a relationship between you and the user to drive specific actions designed to achieve specific objectives for your business.

The drive to personalization is being accelerated by the fact that your B2B customers are also engaged in the B2C space, where they are active on highly personalized consumer sites like Amazon and Netflix. Because users of these sites have become accustomed – if not addicted – to the personalized content and buying recommendations these sites are known for, they are more likely to be responsive to B2B sites that deliver that same kind of personalized experience.

So just like their B2C counterparts, B2B companies are clamoring for personalization functionality because of the impact the increase in the relevance of content and calls-to-action have on their ability to attract and acquire customers. So as the expectations of B2C users increase – the more their B2B alter egos will expect websites to reflect their unique business preferences. However, this in turn will enable increased conversions by constantly meeting your customers’ expectations, building customer trust and loyalty, and making it easier for buyers to make purchasing decisions to acquire your products and services.

At Bluetext, our personalization process begins at discovery – segmenting your database according to target customers with similar qualities such as size, industry, revenue, and location. From there we develop buyer personas within those customer groups and customize calls-to-action for that persona at different stages in their buying journey to deliver the right message to the right person at the ideal time in the buying process.

It is clearly time for B2B marketers to get personal…

Uber just killed off the most recognizable U on the planet. Unlike the black and white U that has emblazoned itself in the minds of millions of Uber users around the world – including myself – the new logo bears no obvious relationship to the company name.

We all know that Uber isn’t alone in leaving a loyal customer base dumbfounded – if not outright offended – by such a seemingly misguided departure from one of the most sought after icons in the world. Over the past couple of years, we have seen AOL, GAP, Pepsi, Tropicana and even Apple be indicted for similar blunders.

The most recent of these was Spotify’s stealth attempt to brighten the tone of its green that literally drove its most devoted users berserk to the extent that some even thought there was something actually wrong with their phones. What Spotify learned from this is that it was not simply about the color or even that the company changed the color, but more that it did so without clear communication to its community of users – and more importantly – not involving them in the design process.

While we can only assume that Spotify learned something about branding through this process – it appears abundantly clear by our near unanimous and collective disaffection with its head scratching visual analogy of “bits & atoms” – that Uber CEO Travis Kalanick did not. While the dust is still settling – what’s also become clear is that he simply refused to entrust the rebranding process to anyone else – and in his attempt to use “bits & atoms” to bring out the human side of the brand in contrast to the starkness of the monochrome U – he has managed to strip its personality altogether – leaving us cold and disconnected from a brand that is suddenly as abstract as it is unfamiliar.

David Shantz sums up the problem perfectly in a comment he left on this VentureBeat article:

“When building a brand – and the visual identity around that brand – the most important audience is the audience. The millions of people who will use Uber day by day. As a semi-regular Uber user, the output of this imaginative and time-consuming re-branding exercise totally leaves me cold. I don’t see or feel anything “Uber” in the logo. I don’t know what I’m looking at.”

At Bluetext, we preach brand simplification – if you have to launch into a detailed explanation of the logo – you have already failed. We strive to create an icon that is instantly recognizable and just as quickly evokes an emotional connection with the brand – through the lens of the customer. To that extent – I have to say that I do love the bolder look of Uber’s new wordmark.

But let’s flash forward three years from now – is it possible that we could look back on this and declare Kalanick a genius by identifying the perfect inflection point in consumer branding which signaled that no one really cares about the logo anymore? A future where people are more interested in what a brand can do for them than how it makes them feel when they see it?

The most powerful thing Uber has going for it that might actually fulfill that prophecy is the sheer might of its social brand platform – its ability invite participation and create value by reinventing itself and its usefulness in authentic and relevant ways is uniquely rare and clearly absent from brands that fail to impose their will to evolve without a strong social foundation.

At the end of the day – will any of us really care what their icon looks like next time we stumble out of our favorite restaurant and order up an Uber Black?

Probably not…

What’s a year-end blog without trends for the next? At Bluetext, we want to make sure our clients are armed with the latest digital marketing best practices so they can continue to compete at the highest level in an increasingly digital environment – here are a handful to keep top of mind as you map out your strategy for 2016:

1. Content is King

Developing a steady cadence of quality content that maps to your customers’ buyer journey remains priority tactic number one to build brand awareness, perception, engagement, trust and ultimately conversion. Aside from being the tool du jour for establishing and maintaining market leadership – content marketing is an equally powerful driver of SEO – and a significantly less expensive demand generation mechanism than traditional paid and/or earned outbound marketing that, if done right; will provide you with greater ROI and overall marketing effectiveness. And Instead of disrupting a user’s daily activity to convince them to buy a product or service when 70% of their buying decision has already been made, you’re establishing digital brand authority well in advance of their need to do so.

2. Visual Storytelling

Google’s most recent algorithms have placed a premium on visual content over keyword optimization. Search engines use SERP (search engine results page) rankings to measure how valuable your website content is to your users. By prioritizing images, infographics, video and other visual content over plain, less engaging keyword dense text, you are more likely to deliver the quality and relevancy of content to your customers who will then be inclined to spend more time on your website versus your competitors’ to complete their search

3. Mobile First

This is the year mobile domination – within the next twelve months mobile will surpass desktop browsing and never look back. That – combined with Google’s latest algorithm putting much more weight on the availability and accessibility of mobile content – have rendered responsive, mobile optimized websites not just essential for growth – but vital to the long term survival of any modern business enterprise.

And this isn’t just about millennials, every demographic is becoming increasingly tethered to their mobile devices as those devices become a more integral part of their daily routines. Strong mobile functionality is so critical that a growing percentage of users won’t even do business with a company without a viable mobile digital presence.

4. IOT Marketing

As my Partner Brian Lustig mentioned in his blog last week, user adoption of wearable technology is expected to reach 30% over the next twelve months, providing marketers with more data and even greater insights into our everyday lives that can and will enable them to target people based on their daily habits. As such, we should expect to see the first advertising native to wearable devices in 2016. For marketers this hyper connected world means that your data will have to become more behavior-driven, allowing you to predict your customers every move and target them in real time – and with near perfect accuracy-  as users make their way through their individual buying cycles.

5. Snapchat

Continuing on the real time theme, Snapchat is quickly looking to become marketers’ new shiny toy for 2016 as they move away from the one size fits all approach and attempt to leverage consumers’ voracious appetite for exclusive, unique and expirable content. And with over 20 million snaps being shared daily across the world, businesses are now taking advantage of Snapchat to promote their brands through real time social engagement marketing. In this increasingly inpatient world, communicating messages that are shorter and more direct have a better opportunity to drive conversion than their older, longwinded brethren.

At Bluetext, we understand that marketers need to adopt real time digital strategies and be more nimble than ever to get the attention of our customers. John Maynard Keynes summation of this challenge is more relevant to today’s modern enterprise than they were nearly a century ago…

“The difficulty lies not so much in developing new ideas as in escaping from old ones…“

And his insights could have no greater application today than they do with marketing.

Lets chat about your 2016 plans and how Bluetext can help you achieve your goals.

 

Over the past 5 years, Bluetext has designed over 100 enterprise websites, and over that time the CMS question has evolved – like most technologies – from what is the best CMS for my organization to which platform is most secure.  Both open source and proprietary options can and do make a strong security argument, however for the most part the answer to the question lies completely outside of either platform.

The leading open source platforms – Drupal & WordPress – are developed by a community of thousands of developers around the world. And while the software code by its very nature is open and visible, vulnerabilities can be identified and corrected far more quickly due to the sheer number of developers testing it versus those in a closed source environment. The obvious downside being that these vulnerabilities also have the potential to be exploited by more unsavory characters for the short time they are exposed – which together with the number of prominent sites on the platform – works only to ensure a more secure code base.

On the other hand, from a closed source perspective, the platform is owned by a very small team of specialists who are developing code that the world has no visibility to. What this means is, that while best practices are put in place to protect against potential vulnerabilities, it is all done so in theory versus the perpetual vigilance of a global open source community. So, just because the code is developed in a closed environment, it doesn’t make it any more secure than it’s more open minded brethren.

From a global CMS perspective, it is impossible to claim definitively that one is more secure than the other due to all of the external variables they are exposed to during their lifecycle. The most critical path to optimal security is making sure the CMS software is well maintained well and kept up to date to ensure that no vulnerabilities are left open.

But as I suggested right up front, the majority of security challenges lie completely outside of the platform –the CMS is just one piece to the security puzzle – the user base it interacts with and the server environment it sits in everyday are the other external variables that will prevent any CMS from ever being completely secure – so there is no clear winner here.

Your organization’s ability to implement sound security practices globally will have a much greater impact on the security of your CMS than whether you are in an open or closed source environment. A strong digital agency partner can also help ensure that your CMS is tested and updated on a regular basis to provide optimal security across your digital enterprise.

 

Recently, Bluetext has been engaged to design and develop several global, enterprise class websites that have required a significant amount of user experience research. This more immersive step in the full lifecycle of our design process has become increasingly more critical given the role corporate websites play in the overall go to market strategy of any successful brand – and as such often begs the question – what is the difference between market and user experience research – and which is more important?

The short answer to the first question is that market research uses both qualitative and quantitative methods – focusing on a large sample size that verifies insights with large numbers – primarily to get an understanding of what people want to buy and why. User research is exactly the opposite – it’s not about demographics, markets, pricing or trends that capture generalizations – it’s about how your customer feels about using a product or service – preferable yours. User experience research is more valuable than its market brethren in that it provides direction about what aspects of your experience will meet your customers needs that we identify during the UX research process and answers the question of how and why they buy your product. User research helps us understand how your buyers live their lives, so that we can respond with an informed and inspired design strategy that creates a more direct and effective pathway to their innermost needs. And since we are creating design solutions for customers who are typically nothing like our clients – user research also helps them steer clear of their own biases

Because UX research isn’t interested in the statistical validity of large sample sizes, it focuses on smaller audiences to delve into the innate desires of the user to discover how your customer will actually engage with your product, providing us with the window to see what they actually do during that experience to uncover needs that could not otherwise be articulated.

We have discovered that research of any kind is far less about designing a product to address the demand of a specific market than it is about capturing deeper insight into the subconscious motivations of your buyer to create an experience that people actually want to use – before the market for it even exists. So if you want the answer to the second question – just ask Apple.