The next time you’re in a public setting, look up, and chances are you’ll notice almost everyone around you has their eyes glued to a mobile device in hand. Modern-day mobile devices are essentially mini computers, enabling on-the-go browsing, communication, and connection at unprecedented ease. Society has become accustomed to instantaneous connection, but not all websites are up to par with user expectations. While desktop sites were once the focus, a disappointing mobile performance of websites is holding many companies back from their full online potential to garner customers. Aside from a frustrating user experience, poor mobile performance can hurt a website from a technical SEO perspective. This is why many companies are turning to digital agencies like Bluetext to revamp or create entirely new, responsive web designs & optimized performance to stand out among their competitors. 

On average, mobile devices account for more website user traffic than desktops. However, despite the high traffic volume, conversion rates on mobile environments are significantly lower. So what’s turning our mobile users away? Adrienne Clem, Director of Search Ads Growth and Optimization at Google, describes that it could be an issue with any one of the following pillars of mobile website design:

Speed

Page Speed is a key indicator of website quality, as it is a critical first impression of your website. The longer a user must wait for your website content to load, the higher the risk of the user leaving the page and increasing the bounce rate. Bounce rate, performance, and speed metrics all play a critical role in Google search crawlers’ evaluation of a website.  (such as, In addition to limiting bounce rates, reducing your Time to First Byte can also increase your site’s SEO ranking. You can keep tabs on your site’s speed performance using tools like Google, PageSpeed Insights, or GTMetrix.com, but consulting a website development agency can offer further insight into actionable steps to improve your site’s performance.

User Experience

All websites should be designed to be as simple as possible for users to navigate. However, this isn’t as easy as it sounds. Content hierarchy, navigation, and calls to action are all critical components that need to be equally accessible and intuitive across desktop & mobile formats. Responsive layouts are essential in a mobile-optimized design, but more important is the speed at which content loads for a user. Mobile site speed tends to lag behind its desktop counterpart, but a poor mobile performance can significantly ding your site’s SERP ranking and create a poor user experience. Even the most creative & persuasive landing pages are wasted if features take too long to load on the screen. Pages that utilize AMP (Accelerated Mobile Performance) technology both rate higher on Google search rankings and increase chances of conversion for paid media promotions. AMP HTML is an open framework based on existing web technologies, that allows for more lightweight and speedier mobile web pages. In an initiative to enhance the shift to mobile browsing, AMP-powered webpages load instantaneously, even when they contain rich media like video, animations, or graphics, including things like Twitter and YouTube embeds.

Iterative Design

Website design is an iterative and ongoing process. Platforms & technology are constantly evolving to include new features, remedy existing pain points and approach the ever-moving target that is positive user experience. Companies should approach this process in the interest of continued learning and constant improvement. Collecting feedback should be built into the plan for any mobile site development, as the site’s performance should be re-evaluated at least every 3-6 months. Keeping track of your site’s vitals is an important step for ensuring that your site stays relevant and isn’t losing out on potential conversions.

In an increasingly mobile-first world, emphasizing the performance of sites on mobile devices can increase customer loyalty and satisfaction. Whether a prospective customer’s impression of your campaign landing page or an existing customer’s experience browsing your full website, speed is the name of the game. Keeping up-to-date with best practices in website development and enlisting the help of seasoned designers and UX specialists can transform users from mindless mobile scrolling to enthusiastic interactions on your site. 

If you’re ready to start designing your site with a mobile audience in mind, Contact Bluetext for guidance and expertise.

The needs of a modern consumer are not static; they are constantly moving and advancing, shifting and changing. Customers adopt and discard products at breakneck speeds, seeking new opportunities for enjoyment and discarding them at the first sign of trouble. For a product to remain relevant in the eyes of today’s consumers, it must be able to not only meet their present needs but evolve alongside them to seamlessly adapt to future needs. Effective product management requires two critical steps; first, a deep understanding of how consumers use a product, secondly the ability to leverage that knowledge into actionable improvements. To do so, your business must understand product intelligence and its essential role in an impactful relationship with your customers.

What Is Product Intelligence?

Product intelligence refers to the use of software to collect and analyze data about a product’s performance with users. These systems gather and interpret information about how users’ interaction delivers critical insights on strengths and opportunities for improvement. Product intelligence also takes into account external factors that influence the customer relationship. Shipping, marketing, customer support, and countless other service touchpoints all influence consumer perception and ultimately the experience of your offerings. Product intelligence software helps aggregate these factors to evaluate the performance of your product holistically.

The ultimate goal is to create a positive feedback loop that enables product teams to iterate and innovate with greater speed and higher accuracy. By leveraging critical insights about the customer experience, product management teams can implement improvements to engage, convert, and retain users more effectively.

Product Intelligence Best Practices

1. Understand the Customer Journey – While website interactions and app behavior are important, you need to include insights from marketing campaigns, ad spend, and other touchpoints to drive a deeper and more impactful understanding of your customers. Analytics, behavioral targeting, and customer data management cannot remain isolated from each other when optimizing product experiences.
2. Collaboration Cannot Be an Afterthought – Services and integrations don’t get you a great product experience; teams do. For product intelligence to make a real impact on your business, you need to support efficient collaboration among product teams. That means being able to keep pace with rapid question-asking, in-depth exploration, agile decision-making, and generally enabling the most frictionless product development process possible.
3. Assess Your Competitive Landscape – Your product offerings don’t exist in a bubble, and understanding the potential interactions consumers could have with the competition helps guide you towards truly differentiable improvements. You should strive to know your competitor’s products, strategies, and marketing tactics just as well as you know your own.

Why Is Product Intelligence Important?

Consumer preferences can change in an instant, and companies that can’t keep pace are destined to fail. Product intelligence ensures that your business will never be left behind by shining a light on the key factors that influence whether or not a consumer buys and continues using your products. Whether it’s through illustrating conversion paths, documenting user interactions, or detailing which marketing campaigns attract new visitors, the product intelligence process provides a holistic view of how your product adds value to people’s lives.  

Navigating the high-stakes challenge of effective product marketing can seem like a daunting task. That’s where Bluetext can support. From omnichannel media campaigns to product videos & landing pages, Bluetext’s digital marketing experience can ensure customers old and new take notice of your company.

Have you ever searched for a term or product, then had to wade through a sea of ads before you could find what you were looking for? What’s even more frustrating is seeing the same ads over and over again. As a social media firm and B2B marketing agency, Bluetext knows there’s a fine line between getting your message in front of users and overdoing it. 

Ad fatigue, the term for “when your audience sees your ads so often that they become bored with them and stop paying attention,” can be costly and can make your advertising ineffective. Over the years, as a social media firm and B2B marketing agency, we’ve found several of the most effective ways to avoid ad fatigue. Keep reading to learn 4 ways you can avoid wasting your paid media budget:

1. Decrease Ad Frequency

The best and most obvious way to decrease ad fatigue is by limiting the number of times a user sees your ad. Unless you place a frequency cap or have an audience of millions, advertising platforms will continuously serve your ads to the same users. For the user, this can be frustrating and can even turn them away from your brand. In fact, AdEspresso conducted a study to see the impact of ad fatigue on Facebook and found the following results:

In this study, as frequency increased, CTR decreased and CPC increased. Of course, there is no one size fits all approach to frequency; that said, however, through our time as a B2B marketing agency, we recommend making changes if frequency surpasses 4 or 5 on Facebook.

2. Refresh. Refresh. Refresh.

Another great way to reduce ad fatigue is by updating your creative frequently. By doing so, users get to see fresh ads all the time. Your company and message may remain the same, but a new visual approach will catch the eye and give the impression of a new, shiny nugget of content. If you don’t have the resources to constantly update your ad creative, something as simple as adjusting the description text, links, or CTAs on Facebook, LinkedIn, and other social platforms can help refresh your content. Otherwise, a social media firm, like Bluetext, can be a helpful resource for achieving scalable creative production.  

3. Test Your Audiences

One of the most important ways to optimize your creative and reduce ad fatigue is by A/B testing your creative. From CTAs to copy, A/B tests can vary in goals. It’s vital, however, that you run the test for long enough to reach a large enough sample size. Using a sample size calculator is the best way to ensure your audience is large enough to reach statistical significance.

4. Create Custom Segments

By creating custom audience segments, you can exclude users who have already completed the desired action on your landing page. In turn, you can avoid overwhelming users and make sure you’re spending your media dollars as efficiently as possible. With custom segments, you can also create retargeting audiences. With specific retargeting and dynamic creative, you can serve customized content to users based on their previous search queries and interests.

Needless to say, ad fatigue negatively affects campaign performance by increasing CPCs, decreasing CTRs, and frustrating users. Taking steps, like the ones listed above, to combat ad fatigue will ensure you are spending your money efficiently and keep your audience engaged.

Interested in working with a social media firm and b2b marketing agency to ensure your ads have a positive lasting impact? Contact us here!

 

When you think of your business’ data, what is the first thing that pops into your head? Graphs, charts, and databases? Spreadsheets filled with row upon row of figures waiting to be put to use? While all of these things are important to your business’ data structure, they’re only individual parts of an extensive data ecosystem, an understanding of which is critical. Data ecosystems provide companies with reliable data to understand their customers and to make better pricing, operations, and marketing decisions.

What is a Data Ecosystem?

A data ecosystem is defined as a collection of infrastructure, analytics, and applications used to capture and analyze data. These applications collect and filter information for businesses to better understand their users, website visitors, and audience members. The term “ecosystem” is used because data ecosystems are dynamic and expected to constantly evolve to accommodate the changing needs of your organization.

At their core, data ecosystems are used to capture data and produce meaningful insights. As customers use products, especially digital ones, they leave behind data trails. By creating a data ecosystem, companies can catalog and analyze data trails so product teams can better understand user preferences. The best data ecosystems are constructed around a product analytics platform that enables teams to integrate multiple data sources, provide machine learning tools for automation improvements, and track user cohorts to simplify calculating performance metrics. Additional applications that analytics platforms empower include increasing user engagement, increasing user retention, and conversion tracking and marketing funnels.

Creating a Data Ecosystem

The three essential elements of a data ecosystem are infrastructure, analytics, and applications. Infrastructure can be thought of as the foundation on which everything else is built. It’s the hardware and software that capture, collect, and organize data, including servers for data storage, search languages like SQL, and hosting platforms. Analytics serves as the entryway that teams use to access their data ecosystem. Analytics platforms sift through and summarize the data within the infrastructure, so all data is visualized in a centralized place. At this level, an organization can segment users and measure them with marketing funnels, identify the traits of ideal buyers, or automatically send in-app messages to users who are at-risk for churn. Finally, applications are the individual components of the ecosystem, the services, and systems that act upon data and make it usable. At this level, users can work with their analytics data to drive critical outcomes across the organization, like a marketing team drumming up leads based on activity or a sales team tracking key user engagement. Finally, applications are the individual components of the ecosystem, the services and systems that act upon data and make it usable.

Optimizing Your Data Ecosystem

There is no one-size-fits-all approach to optimizing your business’ data ecosystem. There are, however, two concepts you can keep in mind as you work towards the right fit; democratizing your data science and establishing strong data governance. A key benefit of good data management is that everyone has the ability to access reports and insights. By democratizing your data and purchasing a large number of licenses for your analytics software, rather than restricting access to only a few employees, you can prevent bottlenecks in the flow of information and promote a frictionless exchange of information. That’s not to say that you should leave everything unbound, however. Setting rules and boundaries for employees about collecting, protecting, and accessing data is essential for shielding your company from liability and complying with federal laws about privacy protection. A marketing analytics agency, such as Bluetext can assist with prescribing the right data ecosystem tailored to your organization’s needs. 

 

Impactful Outcomes of a Data Ecosystem

For an organization to remain competitive in any industry, they have to have a comprehensive understanding of their data. Understanding your company’s data ecosystem is the first step towards segmenting your user base, learning who they are, and revealing how they interact with your business. Informed decision-making at every level of an organization stems from understanding and engaging with its data ecosystem.

It’s no secret the digital marketing industry depends upon and craves data. Any piece of information gathered about a user can be used to strengthen your lead generation, campaign or website strategy. While every digital marketer is hungry for data, there is no value without context and robust understanding. Marketing analytics can and should be used to inform, as well as validate any digital strategy.

Contact Bluetext if you’re interested in turning analytics into action.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Begin with the End Goal in Mind

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

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

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

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

The Stakeholder Development Lifecycle

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

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

Stakeholder Development Lifecycle for B2A Marketing

Considering Stakeholder Segments

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Executing on B2S Marketing with a Data-Driven Approach

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Division of Labor Between Departments for the Stakeholder Development Lifecycle

With an improved strategic approach to B2A marketing, focusing directly on the stakeholders, and a commitment to building the infrastructure and processes to gather and interpret data about them, your company will be better positioned to win government contracts for many years to come. 

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

How Do I Get Started? 

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

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

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

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

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

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

Search marketing has powerful potential with infinite nuances. This digital marketing medium has an unmatched ability to reach mass users at a macro level on the basis of targeted browsing & interest. Search marketing is a demand-driven opportunity to engage in individual conversations at a mass scale. Just like the phrase implies, the ‘world wide web’ is an incredibly complex and interconnected ecosystem of users, websites, search queries, and advertising. So how and where should you start to navigate the infinite avenues of search marketing? First, consult a digital marketing agency, especially one which specializes in marketing analytics & paid media strategy like Bluetext. 

A digital marketing agency can offer search marketing services that you help identify: your website user personas, what organic keywords are bringing traffic to your site, what keywords & phrases have the optimal cost-per-click (CPC), and competitive density for paid search efforts.

Automation: the Answer to Search Marketing

Basic search marketing strategy connects a user’s intent to an ideal and relevant response. Automated search marketing strategy uses automation to constantly improve and become more efficient and effective over time. A basic search strategy can be simple to set up and understand, but results may flatline without consistent nurturing. Automated search marketing can be complex and intimidating, but when set up correctly, can yield impressive and compounding results. 

Some search marketers have been hesitant to embrace automation and trust algorithms and data processing power. However, avoiding the advancement of automation only hurts your strategy and puts you at a competitive disadvantage in comparison to more future-focused competitors. 

Search engine tools have matured over time to provide increased control, transparency, and tangible results than ever before. Real-time automation has evolved to be the foundation of the search engine ecosystem. What was once an analog concept (imagine a physical directory) has been transformed into a dynamic digital medium. The modern search marketing experience is an always-on, cross-device experience capable of delivering almost any type of content a user is looking for.

The key aspect to keep in mind with search marketing is its dynamic nature. New features and improvements are constantly being implemented, with new queries and signals added every second. Hundreds of data points are aggregated for every interaction. The term “big data” is an understatement to summarize the sheer volume of data that can be collected and harnessed to provide the most personalized experience to users possible.   

Finding the Right Search Strategy

Search marketing is not a one size fits all solution. The optimal strategy should be assessed by individual companies and use cases. To inform your strategy, it is key to fully understand how your paid or organic search terms have performed in the past. Past bidding and budget history can provide not only a baseline for improvements but insight into your audience and receptiveness to paid search advertising. If you’re not already doing so, separate campaigns out by specific audiences. This allows you to track isolated segments of customers or prospects and compare performance. 

The beauty of search marketing automation is the paradox of scale and specificity. It allows companies to scale their messages and strategies to a massive audience, while simultaneously making users feel heard with personalized results.

If you’re ready to optimize your search marketing strategy and take your campaigns to the next level, contact Bluetext.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Begin with the End Goal in Mind

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

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

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

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

The Stakeholder Development Lifecycle

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

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

Stakeholder Development Lifecycle for B2A Marketing

Considering Stakeholder Segments

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Executing on B2S Marketing with a Data-Driven Approach

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Division of Labor Between Departments for the Stakeholder Development Lifecycle

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

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

How Do I Get Started? 

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ever heard the phrase “if you’re not first you’re last”? A little extreme, but not untrue when it comes to search results. Businesses of every industry are scrambling to refine their content strategy in hopes of ranking within the first page of search results for relevant searches. However, the advice for how to do so is muddled by different strategies and outdated information. Keywords. Inbound links. Outbound links. Content velocity. Imagery alt text. Which one is it? Well, the simplest answer is all of the above…plus more. The truth is Google search algorithms are not completely transparent. If you feel like you’ve been shooting in the dark for a stronger search ranking, you’re not alone. Thankfully, Google does hint to what goes into its search algorithms and what search crawlers are prioritizing in rankings. And the latest news from the tech giant is the consideration of page experience. 

Beginning mid-June, Google will be factoring Page Experience metrics into how they rank websites on the search engine’s results page. Is your website ready for this update? Before you panic over years of perfecting your organic search and content strategy, let’s break down exactly what Google means by “Page Experience”. 

Despite the subjective phrase, Page Experience is actually dependent on measurable technical factors that affect how a website visitor interacts with your content. The latest update will concentrate on Web Core Vitals, but also include the following UX considerations, such as:

• Mobile-friendliness
• Safe-browsing
• HTTPS-security
• Intrusive interstitial guidelines

Breaking Down Core Vitals:

1. Largest Contentful Paint: The time it takes for the main content (defined as “above the fold”, first viewport or hero zone) of a page to fully load. Websites should strive for a LCP measurement of 2.5 seconds or faster.
2. First Input Delay: Reaction time of user’s first action (click, hover, tap). This measures the time it takes for a page to become fully interactive. An ideal measurement is less than 100 ms for 75% of pages.
3. Cumulative Layout Shift: Time for all content on page to load and position correctly. This refers to the amount of unexpected layout shift of visual page content. For example, ever visiting a web page that loads, then jerks and shifts a couple seconds later? It’s a frustrating user experience, especially if you have begun reading or interacting with content. The ideal measurement for CLS is less than 0.1 seconds for 75% of pages.

75 and Sunny Rule 

Each of these benchmarks have defined benchmarks that Google recommends for 75% of pages on a website. This is what Bluetext refers to as the 75 and Sunny Rule. Especially with an older website build, it may not be achievable to reach these metrics for every page. However, if you prioritize pages by traffic level or content hierarchy, you can isolate the 75% highest value pages that should reach these measures. With these prioritized pages in mind, site speed and page experience optimization can be made by website developers to meet Google’s recommended benchmarks. 

There is even rumor of visual tags being implemented on Google search results to show which websites are meeting these Core Vital criteria. It’s likely that in the near future there will be no hiding whether or not your site meets these benchmarks. 

How often do I need to check my core vitals?

Well, how often do you visit the doctor? Just like your health, your website’s Page Experience should be evaluated on a regular basis. You should be checking the pulse of your website every 3-6 months to ensure everything is running smoothly and not getting dinged by Google search crawlers. There are a number of site speed and page experience tools available, each providing varying levels of detail. Google PageSpeed Insights will most prominently display core vitals with lab data (measured by single, predefined device, location, and internet connection.), field data (aggregate measure of real time user experience), diagnostics and recommended solutions. However, use caution. This tool is not known for consistent accuracy. Most experienced website development agencies will cross check site performance across multiple tests, such as: Google Search Console, Lighthouse and GTMetrix.com.  Consulting a website development agency offers many advantages in optimizing your website, as they are best equipped to diagnose a problem, address and resolve an issue and conduct regular maintenance to continue optimizations.  

If you’ve been ignoring your site’s technical health, there is no better time than now to ramp up your site speed and site experience to give you a competitor an edge on the search engine results page. SEO is a marathon, not a sprint. A strong SEO strategy involves a multi-faceted approach to cover the bases across multiple fronts. Keyword strategy, site speed, page experience, mobile compatibility, and more still need to be considered to reach or maintain a top search ranking. As a digital marketing agency that specializes in website development and SEO content strategy, Bluetext understands the importance of page experience in both initial site build and ongoing maintenance. 

Ready to be proactive and take the pulse of your website core vitals? Contact Bluetext for a website assessment and learn how we can optimize your site to meet Google’s – and your user’s – expectations.

You’ve crafted your brand message, settled on a new visual strategy, or launched your new product. So what’s next? You probably have the urge to shout your new message from the rooftops. But in 2021, you may need a more modern digital media strategy. Paid media is essential to put that message in front of your target audience. While earned media (i.e. public relations, email, organic search, organic social) is also an important part of GTM, paid media can both expand your brand’s current reach and reel in interested parties, and convert them into customers.

A Full-Funnel Approach Drives both Awareness and Acquisition

As a top digital marketing & design agency, we know that the funnel is everything when talking about paid media. Online user behavior is very rarely linear or systematic. Consider how you browse the web. Do you click on the first link you see and immediately start a purchase online? If you’re like most people, you click around, do an informed search, and learn more before making a purchasing decision.

Awareness Builds the Top of the Funnel

When crafting a digital media strategy, we account for user behavior by focusing on the overall user journey. That journey can be broken up into two main parts: awareness and acquisition. Each category has an ideal mix of channels and tactics that accomplish specific key performance indicators (KPIs). At the top of the funnel is awareness: a user’s understanding of your business or specific product. The KPIs for awareness are typically impressions or site visits – really just eyeballs on ads and on your site content.

Channels that we typically include in awareness campaigns include programmatic media (which includes display, native and video ads), paid social, and other advertising (billboards, podcasts, etc.). These ads are meant to capture a broad audience and expand the awareness of the business to new – and potentially lucrative- audiences. Within these channels, we also use tactics that will increase impressions and site visits. Third-party targeting (showing kitchen tool ads to someone marked as interested in cooking) is particularly helpful, as is contextual targeting (showing kitchen tool ads to someone browsing a recipe site).

As a top digital marketing & design agency, we craft awareness ads that grab user attention and build an informed target audience. Our client, Appgate, urgently needed to drive brand awareness traffic to the website, recently redesigned by Bluetext. To do so, our brand creative captured user attention with eye-catching motion and sustained interest with useful and digestible information. It is key your ads give just enough information to be helpful, but also entice someone to click the ad and learn more. Within one month, Appgate’s campaign had increased sessions to the landing page by 17% and drove a 25% increase in site engagement.

Acquisition Tactics Convert Qualified Audiences

While all businesses need to start with an awareness campaign, some also want to focus on the acquisition with lower-funnel tactics and conversion-focused KPIs. KPIs for this part of the campaign include engagements on the site (form fills, content downloads, subscriptions, etc.), conversion rate, and cost per acquisition (CPA).

There are many channels that can be used for acquisition campaigns, but one of the most common is paid search. Others include programmatic channels (display, native, video) and paid social. Account-based marketing – which targets specific businesses – is also more of an acquisition-focused tactic. Within these channels, the tactics that optimize toward acquisition are different. Retargeting (showing specialized ads to users that have visited or engaged with your site) is a commonly used acquisition tactic. All tactics and channels in an acquisition campaign rely on strong brand awareness. Paid search success, for example, regularly relies on traffic searching for a certain business or brand name. In addition, retargeting doesn’t build a new audience – it just converts the audience that has already interacted with your site.

Creative for acquisition campaigns are typically more urgent and action-based. Instead of “Learn More”, CTAs focus on specific actions (downloading a demo, registering for a webinar, etc.). Consider, for example, EXL. For this acquisition campaign, Bluetext focused on highlighting certain webinars and speakers, resulting in a 5% increase in ad click-through rate on programmatic display and a 185% increase on paid LinkedIn. 

Upcoming Trends in Paid Media for GTM

All top paid media & content marketing agencies to know what’s ahead for GTM tactics and strategies. One major change on the horizon for paid media is the trend away from cookies and pixels. Though many companies have done internal media campaigns based on retargeting and third party targeting they’ve collected in the past, those tactics will become obsolete by the end of the year.

Privacy laws are becoming more prevalent and Internet browsers are moving away from collecting cookies – retargeting is becoming a thing of the past. In its place are solutions such as Google’s Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoC), among others. Need help navigating the new media landscape? Contact the experts at Bluetext for all of your awareness and acquisition needs.

For many websites, organic traffic represents over half of their visitor volume. What’s scary, however, is that any company could lose the value of months (or even years) of consistent and diligent SEO work in mere seconds. The main culprit? Not resolving SEO issues in a timely manner. As companies and web traffic grow, it’s easy to ignore small SEO issues and add them to the ‘to-do’ list. Those SEO ‘to-dos,’ however, add up and can cause skyrocketing bounce rates and free-falling traffic. As a marketing data analytics firm, we’ve assisted countless companies with their SEO issues, helping to prevent ranking, conversion, and sales losses. 

Google Search Console

As a content marketing analytics company, we rely heavily on Google Search Console, as it reveals so much of what’s going on with your site’s traffic. Given that it is such an incredibly powerful tool, it can be overwhelming to know what to look for without help from a marketing data analytics firm. Here are a few things you can find in Google Search Console that are invaluable for troubleshooting your organic search traffic:

• Site errors and warnings 
• Search queries that help your site appear in search results
• A list of internal and external pages that link to your website
• Crawl rate and when Google accesses your site

Although not comprehensive, these metrics are a fantastic first step to properly diagnosing any organic search issues you might be having. If your car breaks down, the first place you would look is under the hood. If your organic traffic begins to break down, the first place you should look is Google Search Console.

Algorithm Changes

Every year, Google changes its algorithm over 600 times. Needless to say, it can be difficult to keep track of every change. As a marketing data analytics firm, we understand how important it is to keep track of each and every iteration, as it makes it possible to determine what changes you need to make and when. There are plenty of resources – like Moz, Search Engine Journal, and more – you can use to learn how changes will impact what Google is penalizing, why Google is making changes, and how you can stay on Google’s good side. If you begin to see a decline in your search traffic, you should review these resources to ensure your website is compliant with Google’s policies.  

Quality of Content

As a key focal point for Google’s algorithm, they have worked to prevent low-quality and thin content from appearing in search results. In short, search engines work to provide the results that best match the search intent of a user. If you want to rank highly, you have to convince search engines you’re answering the questions of users. With that, we live by a simple principle when it comes to organic search traffic: Content Is King. Ensure the content you are posting answers prospect’s questions, utilizes strong H1s and H2s, leverages strong supporting imagery (don’t forget alt. text!), and isn’t stuffed with unnecessary keywords.

Inbound Linking

Having inbound links is one of the most valuable ways to signal to Google that your website is high-quality and authoritative. In short, an inbound link is a link from another website to yours.  Although highly valued in Google’s organic search algorithm, the tricky part about inbound links is that you have very little direct control over them. Should you see a decline in your organic and/or referral traffic, using link checkers like Smallseotools and majestic is a great way to determine if there has been an inbound link decline for your website. If this is the case, a couple of ways you can strengthen your inbound linking strategy is by writing guest posts on websites and creating valuable original content that other writers can use.

Sudden drops in any traffic channel are scary. Given that organic traffic is composed of high-intent users, it can be even more concerning, as it means fewer conversions and revenue. Should this ever happen to you, avoid panicking. At the end of the day, it’ll likely be something easily identifiable and can be remedied quickly in-house or with the help of a marketing data analytics firm.

Interested in working with a content marketing analytics company to help troubleshoot your organic search traffic? Contact Us!