Our association clients often ask us what our process is for developing digital campaigns that will deliver the best results, whether that’s awareness for their brand or attendance for their conferences and events. Top marketing firms understand that a strong, repeatable process is key to getting the right messages and creative to the right audiences at the right time. They also know that analyzing results on a continual basis is the only way to optimize performance by revising and adjusting when needed.
At Bluetext, we take a disciplined approach to every campaign, and that begins with discovery. We start by asking three questions:
- What is the goal of the campaign?
- Who are the target audiences?
- What do you want them to do?
These might sound like simple questions, but you might be surprised at the discussion that follows within the association world to get to an agreement on each of those. Top marketing firms like Bluetext know that we have to act as both a facilitator and as a honest broker who can push each stakeholder to reach that agreement. The reason is that at most membership and trade associations, there are different “clients” who have different goals for each campaign. In some cases, it might be membership renewal, while for others in the same organization it might be registration for an event that drives revenue. For others, it might be awareness of the services that the association provides.
But it’s not until that decision is made that we can move on to the next question: Who are you targeting? Again, that might sound simple, but we’ve witnessed our share of knock-down, dragged-out fights inside organizations where stakeholders have a different opinion of the audience. In some cases, part of the client team might be focused on entry-level IT professionals for their particular association, while their colleagues might believe that the true target is the mid-level professional seeking to move up in their career.
But the most difficult question seems to always come down to, What do you want them to do? The easiest response might be to do something that drives revenue, whether it is to become a member of the organization, or to renew their membership. It might also be to attend an event or purchase a service. But it might also be simple awareness of the value of the trade association and the services it brings to its members.
For each of these possible answers, there might be a multi-step process to take the action. We don’t expect, for example, a new prospect to commit to attending an annual conference just because they receive an email or see a banner ad or paid social post. It may take a sophisticated email “drip” campaign that methodically delivers different types of information that drives them down through the sales funnel before they click on a landing-page for registration. Each step of the process requires clear messaging and strong creative. And each step requires effective analytics to measure performance of the subject line (for an email) or headline (for a banner ad). We are always A/B testing subject and headlines to see which are performing the best so we can adjust accordingly.
Top marketing firms will provide detailed methodologies and analytic tools before the campaign is launched so that organizations understand exactly how the campaign will run and achieve the desired results.
Learn How Bluetext Can Help Design and Execute Your Next Digital Campaign.
Marketing analytics may seem like a dry topic, but there’s an old adage in marketing communications: If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it. With the advent of digital marketing, online outreach, marketing automation, and digital media, this is more important now than ever. In the digital world, measuring is both easier and more difficult, but it underpins every successful campaign.
Why is it so difficult – yet so critical – to have the right analytics? Let’s take a look at four key marketing channels one-at-a-time to understand why.
Media campaigns. In the analog days of print advertising, brands could see their advertising at work, in the pages of the publications that their industry would subscribe to and read from cover-to-cover. The circulation of publications was certified by outside organizations, so calculating the reach was a matter of doing the math. What was missing was a measurement of who saw the ad and how they reacted or engaged with the brand.
In today’s world of digital advertising, campaigns are sophisticated and programmatic, meaning they don’t go to every visitor to a publication’s website, but rather only to those whose characteristics match the target audience. We take it as an article of faith that our media partners are delivering the ads as intended. The only real way to measure success is by looking at the analytics of who clicked on the ad, and what action they took once they got to that landing page. That’s why the analytics are more crucial than ever.
Email outreach. Not too long ago, direct mail was a key element in most marketing campaigns. Today, that has been largely supplanted by email marketing. Besides the significant cost savings of email versus direct mail, it’s can also be much more targeted with a good database to start from. Adding the right marketing analytics to the emails can assure that we know who has received the email, who has opened it, and who has clicked through to the landing page.
For our clients, we often will test different subject lines to see which results in the most engagement. That’s a key part of our analytics. We will also develop two compelling subject lines, and send the same email with the second subject line to any of the recipients who didn’t open it the first time. For those who never open the email, we may take them off the list after five or six emails, or keep them on the list to remain top-of-mind for when they might be in the ready-to-buy.
Social media. It’s easy to judge the effectiveness of social media by the number of followers on each platform. That would be a mistake. Followers don’t always translate into engaged audiences or influencers. It’s too easy to be fooled by “bought” followers or people who automatically follow everyone as a way to build their own profile. More important is the influence of key followers, the ones that are known as thought leaders for that market and have their own brand and a substantial following. We would rather have a limited number of these type of individuals who have an interest in and will engage with our clients’ brands, than a large number of followers unrelated to the business. Analytics tools that measure this type of impact are key.
Traditional public relations. In the pre-internet days, we could measure the impact of a pr campaign much like we did advertising: add up the number of subscribers for each publication that runs an article for a total reach. Again, that tells us little about the impact that article might have. In today’s digital age, we are more interested in strategic coverage that focuses on our clients or positions them as thought leaders – either through authored bylines or being quoted for their insight – than the mere number of hits.
Successful digital marketers are constantly evaluating where to put their resources, and how to measure the programs they are funding in terms of lead generation and sales. Advanced marketing analytics allow companies to go far beyond baseline metrics, by providing the tools to really understand how their target buyers are consuming content, what entices them to engage and interact, and what triggers a conversion. In-depth analytics -including multivariant as well as A/B testing – provide the types of information that enable more automation and personalization to map to each buyer’s journey. Getting that data in real-time from the right analytics and tools will offer the most current insights for reacting quickly and putting the best content in front of that audience, responding to what’s happening now, not what took place a week or month earlier.
Our recommendation is to invest in marketing analytics that will provide real-time, data-driven insights to meet your marketing and revenue goals.
Learn how Bluetext can help develop marketing analytics that help your brand meet its marketing goals.
Google recently updated its ad muting tools to give users even more controls over ads that auto-play in your feed. In its blog post announcing this capability, Google reiterated its commitment to transparency and control over a user’s own data. The new tool allows users to go into their Google Ad settings and select which ads that are targeted at each user, and select them for a sound-off setting. In addition, it will engage ad muting across all of your devices.
Sounds great for users, but what about for marketers who are trying to get their ads in front of potential customers who have expressed interest in the product or service? After all, retargeting potential customers who may be solid prospects due to the interest they’ve expressed can be a successful arrow in a marketer’s quiver, while ad muting may seem like a killer.
The immediate reaction in the marketing world was that the sky was falling with the new Google ad muting tool. We think that’s an over-reaction. In fact, we are strong believers that the more that target customers believe that the ads they are seeing are appropriate and of interest – and not annoying, irrelevant, and out-of-date – the more likely they will have the confidence to engage with the ads.
Here are our four tips for making sure you online targeting will be successful, and not fall on deaf ears:
- Don’t use auto-play in your retargeting campaigns. This might seem obvious, but there’s a reason that Google upgraded its ad settings for users: They keep complaining about them. Yes, they do force viewers to react, but that’s not always a good thing. If a target audience wants to engage, they will do it because of the content, and not because of auto-play.
- Limit your retargeting for each user. One of the complaints about auto-play in response to Google’s announcement is that these ads often target users for months, even though the interest may have vanished after days. For our retargeting campaigns, we recommend no more than six ads. If the target customer hasn’t engaged at that point, we don’t believe additional placements will help.
- Make sure your ads have great creative. This should also be obvious. Target customers are far more likely to notice and react to an ad that gets their attention in a good way. That means professional creative with a message that says something to your targets. It doesn’t always have to be humorous or outrageous to get their notice. But it does need to be good.
- Make it count. Being relevant and timely is what users really want. That means paying attention to when the user expressed interest and acting quickly before they move on to another solution.
Looking to make your digital media campaigns more effective? Learn how Bluetext can help.
Successful digital campaigns need to connect to its audience while simultaneously getting the company’s message across. Digital marketers spend a huge amount of time analyzing their target market and audience before building a campaign and crafting an implementation strategy for seamless execution. Here are five tips to help your company create a successful digital campaign.
- Know your personas. Personas are fictional characters representing a company’s potential customers. Each persona has its own role, goals, challenges, company, job, skills, preferences, and so forth. Understanding your personas and building a detailed profile for each is a key step in creating an effective digital campaign.
- Analyze your competitors. Keep an eye on the public-facing marketing efforts of your competitors to understand how they are targeting their consumers. By gaining a better understanding of your competition, it provides insight to how you should position yourself in the market to stay ahead of the competition.
- Optimize your SEO. Understand the keywords your personas are searching for on search engines and integrate those keywords in your digital campaign’s SEO strategy. Optimize the meta data of your campaign by integrating your target keywords in your campaign’s title, content, meta description, URL, and image alt text.
- Set an offer strategy. Once your digital campaign has successfully captured a consumer’s attention, you need an offer strategy to draw them in. A common approach is through the promotion of gated premium content. Understanding the content that appeals to each of your personas will direct the premium content offer that should be tailored for each. A complete profile for each persona will guide a company’s content creation and fill any gaps in its content offerings.
- Create a lead strategy. Although generating leads is the goal of a digital campaign, it is not the end goal. An internal strategy needs to be in place to continuously inform and engage a lead, whether through email or other mediums, with the end goal of transition a lead to an eventual customer.
A successful digital campaign requires a significant amount of planning before it can be built, tested, and implemented. Developing an adept understand of the market environment alongside a solid SEO and content strategy are the key factors to launching a successful digital campaign.
Looking for best in class digital marketing? Contact us.
In the arena of top marketing firms, data-driven marketing seems like the key buzzword of the past few years. In fact, it’s no passing fade. Leveraging analytics to reach target customers has become a key component of any successful digital campaign. According to a recent survey by the Global Alliance of Data-Driven Marketing Associations, employing a data-driven approach has become the backbone to just about any campaign or messaging—whether it’s targeting the right audience, or even predicting potential success. And as marketing technology continues to make inroads across the industry, it’s should not be surprising that more businesses want to take a data-driven approach to their marketing.
The use of data to improve the effectiveness of marketing, and to measure it, is virtually universal these days. In fact, a recent study found that the number of marketers who still don’t use data are now just one in 10. In addition, even more complex data techniques, such as integration of third-party data and cross-channel measurement, were found to be widely used.
The survey found that more than nearly 80 percent of advertising and marketing professionals are now using data-driven techniques to maintain customer databases, measure campaign results across multiple marketing channels, and segment their data for proper targeting. Again, for those of at the top digital marketing agencies, this finding makes perfect sense. Marketing automation platforms, when configured properly, can easily deliver this type of feedback, and those platforms have been aggressively showcasing these capabilities.
The survey, which targeted both advertising and marketing executives from a wide variety of industries, notes a clear shift in spending patterns. The survey respondents reported a strong expectation that spending on data-driven efforts would continue to rise. Nearly two-thirds of the respondents said their spending on data analytics for marketing would rise, while only seven percent said they expected a decline in spending the coming year.
While data-driven marketing is not quite yet a flawless solution, that’s not unexpected for a relatively new approach that relies on new technologies, data-driven marketing isn’t a perfect solution, at least not yet. A recent analysis from Square Root found a challenge for many companies is gathering the type of high-quality data that is necessary to optimize results. Data analysts are searching to find more effective ways to collect, manage and understand data. Forty-four percent of the survey respondents reported that they were still using outdated tools. A similar amount believed they could make decisions without in-depth data. According to the survey, over a quarter of respondents cited other time wasters from data source overkill to bad numbers. Square Root’s study, in particular, found more than half of data professionals felt they could use better training, closely followed by another 49% who desired more user-friendly or updated data tools.
But chief marketing officers and other executives wouldn’t be making these investments if they didn’t think they deliver results. They recognize the benefits to the bottom line.
Want help delivering a data-driven marketing program that delivers clear results? Give us a call and see how Bluetext can help.
If your digital marketing agency team doesn’t have a SMAC roadmap, you may find your company drifting off-course in 2017 and beyond. Here’s brief refresher course on SMAC.
Social Media
Social Media continues to evolve. Platforms rise and fall by the year vs the decades of old. Some new trends we see emerging that we see potentially continuing to gain momentum.
1. Snap’s Evolution Will Result in Interesting New Opportunities.
2. Twitter Fatigue Will Worsen.
3. Users Will Crave More Vicarious Experiences.
4. New Areas of Communication Will Emerge.
Mobile
Mobile devices are the cornerstone of how new business is being built and legacy businesses are reinventing themselves. Mobile devices allow users to constantly update their profile, stay aware of deals and promotions, and track locations and buying habits by virtue of connecting to various wireless signals and near-field communication (NFC) devices.
Some new trends we see emerging that we see potentially continuing to gain momentum.
1. Consumers redefine purchase boundaries; mobile marketing, brand partnerships deepen
2. Department stores, mobile marketing partners tackle the ‘Amazon Effect’
3. Programmatic accelerates: brands, tech, marketing continue to invest
4. Next-generation creative, video redefine mobile engagements
Analytics
As databases have grown larger and processors and memory have become capable of chewing through hundreds of millions of records in a short time, we have begun to see how analytics can do more than just track clicks. Analytics can establish links between entities and make intelligent predictions about customer behavior based on knowledge a system has about a customer — knowledge that has been informed by social networking.
To keep up with the explosion in Big Data, companies and corporations are beginning to invest in BI projects and more and more sophisticated analytics infrastructure. Some new trends we see emerging that we see potentially continuing to gain momentum.
1. Multi-channel Attribution
2. Focus on ‘Return on Analytics Investment
3. Monetization of Data
4. Exciting new players in the MarTech arena to complement the core analytic platforms
Cloud
The cloud element of SMAC refers to the capability a business has to spin up vast amounts of capacity that are paid for by the minute or hour. Businesses do not need to spend millions of dollars building another data warehouse – they simply rent it from a cloud provider, do their work and turn it off. When the business environment changes, they simply spin up another cluster in the cloud, pay another few hundred dollars and continue building insights.
Some new trends we see emerging that we see potentially continuing to gain momentum.
1. Artificial intelligence (AI) will make personalization a reality in 2017.
2. Self-service will be the new normal.
3. Enhancing the Buyer Journey
4. Google Tag Manager and other granular analytics modules being the norm
With buyer sophistication growing daily, marketers need to deliver increasingly smarter strategies and campaigns. Are you taking the time to measure how your efforts are working and think about how you might enhance your efforts, or do you find yourself quickly moving from one campaign to the next?
Need help with your SMAC TALK? Contact the digital marketing gurus at Bluetext.
Successful digital marketers are constantly evaluating where to put their resources, and how to measure the programs they are funding in terms of lead generation and sales. Digitally mature enterprises go one step further– They put their money where their data is. That’s because they know that data-driven marketing is an essential component of their maturity. It provides a foundation for their programs, and takes the guesswork out of marketing.
Advanced analytics allow companies to go far beyond baseline metrics, by providing the tools to really understand how their target buyers are consuming content, what entices them to engage and interact, and what triggers a conversion. In-depth analytics -including multivariant as well as A/B testing – provide the types of information that enable more automation and personalization to map to each buyer’s journey. A recent survey from Adobe found that digitally mature enterprise organizations plan on growing their measurement programs by 41 percent over the next three years. Digitally mature companies rate the whole customer view, predictive marketing, and attribution modeling as their highest priorities. And that means having a clear picture of who the target customer is if they want to deliver a personalized experience that will drive conversion.
As the survey found, data no longer just informs, it also predicts. “Customers expect digital marketers to know who they are and what they’re interested in.”
Combining in-depth analytics and machine learning begins to give a picture of the entire individual journey that buyer is on, delivering insights that enable an experience that is relevant to that customer, including his or her preferences, expectations and timing. Providing the right types of content when the target buyer wants that content is the most likely path to turning a prospect into a client. Getting that data in real-time from the right analytics and tools will offer the most current insights for reacting quickly and putting the best content in front of that audience, responding to what’s happening now, not what took place a week or month earlier.
Our recommendation is to let a digitally mature brand be your model, and invest in the best analytics that will provide real-time, data-driven insights to meet your marketing and revenue goals.
Let Bluetext assess your digital maturity and analytics so you can meet your lead and revenue targets.
Today CSC launched the 2.0 version of its Digital Briefing Center. CSC’s Digital Briefing Center is where customers, partners and prospects from across the globe can come to learn more about the key technology conversations and shifts CSC is driving into the market.
The center is driven with immersive 3D video technology that is completely interactive through html 5 overlays throughout the user journey.
Following launch, Bluetext’s collaborative creation with CSC’s Digital Marketing team became the top performing component of the csc.com global web presence, a huge feat for a Fortune 500 corporation.
Version 2.0 features new capabilities spanning:
- Multi-floor scalability
- Triple screen experience
- Dynamic social media integration
- Triggered infographic visualizations synched with briefing videos
- Chaptered video interactivity
The following video of CSC’s head of global brand and digital marketing talks about this project:
Contact us to learn about how we create innovate digital experiences for brands like yours.
Measure. Evaluate. Evolve
At Bluetext, every campaign we execute is different – some clients need to strengthen their brand, some need to sell more services, some need to differentiate versus upstart competitors, and some even need to energize their internal sales force. It is amazing how often this last point is a motivator for our campaigns.
For this reason, the simple question about our process for measuring success at Bluetext is not always black and white. What are you trying to achieve? Sure, we use Google Analytics or Eloqua or any of the various lead tracking systems. We also survey the market to get a baseline today then again in 6 or 12 or 18 months of where a brand stands. All of these measurements are valid for marketing campaigns, but there is no one size fits all approach.
Just as we recommend that clients ensure they understand the sandbox they play in through our messaging and discovery process, it is just as important to determine how you are going to measure success, and then be prepared to course correct quickly. What are you going to do with that great website or infographic we developed? How will you hit your target audience with it? Channels are always evolving, but success metrics should not.
The old adage “Build it and they will come” simply does not work in our world. Think about these three questions when executing a campaign:
- What are you trying to achieve?
- What do you want your audience to do?
- What message can we deliver to them?
If all of these questions are answered up front, we will work with you to create a powerful campaign delivered via the right channels to achieve the right metrics…that is how we define success with every campaign we execute.
Google’s new Hummingbird search engine algorithm is sending shock waves throughout the digital marketing arena. What it means, and how marketers need to adjust their SEO thinking will be on the to-do list for the foreseeable future.When Google released its latest changes this fall, it used a very clever strategy that took almost everyone involved in SEO by surprise. First, it ran the new algorithm for 30 days before telling anyone. No big announcement, no public launch, just a quiet change. Then it held a press conference to discuss what was quickly recognized as its most significant revision in more than a dozen years. And with a full 30 days’ worth of data under its belt, Google was able to say that the world had not ended by its revision. Not only did the industry feel no seismic disruptions, but by most accounts no one had even noticed.