The battle is in full force on who wins and who loses in the new world of streaming content. It’s not just about consumers who want more choices and are not happy with the bundled offerings they now pay for. The impact extends to advertising, the cable wars and the mega-digital platforms – Facebook, Google, Amazon, Netflicks, Instagram, YouTube and others. To help navigate these uncharted waters, I recently appeared on “Boom Bust: Unplugged,” on the RT Network, to discuss the evolution of TV, the rise of streaming content, and the battles within the communications sector.

The caption that accompanied the interview sums it all up: “Who wins in the world of digital media? We dig into the world of digital advertising, streaming, cable, YouTube, Facebook, Google and more. Guest Jason Siegel from Bluetext helps make sense of it all.   Are digital ads pushing out traditional cable ad-spots? Will streaming devour cable or will cable providers avoid being swallowed whole by this digital onslaught?”

Streaming vs Cable: Who Wins? BoomBust w/Jason Siegel Chief Digital Offer of Bluetext from Bluetext on Vimeo.

The interview delivers my view of the ongoing competition that is the result of streaming adoption, and why I believe that in the world of passive content, the trends are like a pendulum swinging back and forth for the business involved. How will the “Proprietary-Content-Only” platforms such as HBO GO fare against the “Hybrid-of-Proprietary-and-Licensed Content” plays like Netflix? Watch the video, then share your views with us. I would love to know what you think, and who the winners and losers will be!

Contact me to discuss this, or if you want to learn how Bluetext can help execute your brand’s digital strategy.

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.

At Bluetext, we know that branded name searches are the most common way potential customers, partners, prospective employees and investors will find you online. We also recognize that a change in name and brand identity can be critical components to growth in a rapidly evolving, global digital economy.

We have a trio of these unique projects right now and understand that – because a name will inevitably involve a domain change – it could have significant consequences to the search equity you have built around your current name and website. Here are the five most critical steps to minimize the negative impact of a name and/or domain change and preserve the organic search rankings, domain authority and link equity you have worked so hard to acquire:

1. SEO & Inbound Link Analysis

During the initial phases of a rebranding exercise, you will likely be tempted to roll out fresh content as quickly as possible with your new website. It is important, however to begin this process with both an SEO Audit and ROT Analysis to carve out redundant, obsolete or trivial content and at the same time identify assets that your analytics can clearly demonstrate have delivered site traffic, leads and positive brand exposure up to this point.

During the brand migration process, we also recommend retaining your existing web properties for a few months and performing an inbound link analysis of the external web pages that are still linking to them. Deleting them immediately would deprive you from leveraging the link equity gained by these pages as Google begins to understand and assimilate the changes you have made in order to update your index in conjunction the new content you are rolling out.

2. 301 Redirects

Because rebranding is by its very meaning the process of changing your company’s corporate name and identity – it is impossible to maintain two separate versions. Therefore, one of the most important steps to take when launching a new domain is to redirect your old URLs to their new equivalents.

The primary purpose of keeping the old content as described above is to preserve and leverage the link equity you have acquired from existing backlinks to other websites and transfer that organic value as you redirectthat page to a new one. This helps everyone – and most importantly Google – understand that both old and new domains refer to the same organization.

3. Avoid 404 Errors on Deleted Pages

On the other side of that same coin, be careful not to allow pages you are deleting in the migration process to suddenly disappear – it is critical to redirect them to either the new homepage or a placeholder page on the new site – otherwise you will risk losing any equity that page once had as well as its potential for associated traffic to the new domain. Every link pointing towards your new domain has the potential to transfer incremental value to your new domain.

4. Google Search Console

Google’s Search Console is by far your most critical tool for communicating a name and domain change to Google. Before your new site launches, you should ensure that both your old and new domains are verified in the search console. Once you migrate to the new environment, you can submit a change of address request through your old domain’s account to ensure that your redirects are working perfectly.

In addition, we recommend submitting the sitemap for your new domain to the search console so Google can register those changes and ultimately index your domain more quickly post launch.

5. Optimize. Optimize. Optimize.

One of the most important steps in preserving search equity during the migration process – and one that is given a back seat – is the maintenance of on-page optimization after your new site is launched. This starts with optimizing your title tags for each primary keyword – this the text that Google will display as your page title for every search result – as well as the text that will display in the user’s browser when they visit your page. From there is critical to leverage H1, H2, H3 and H4 tags to reinforce your primary and secondary keywords, as well as their long tail keyword variations you want to rank for.

And finally – continue to acquire new links for your site. Each link coming in is a signal to Google that your content is valued, reinforcing how you are indexed and maintaining your position at the top of rankings for the keywords that are driving your business.

Looking for a new agency.  Lets talk!

So, you want to sell to the federal government?

Good. Every year, Uncle Sam and his army of acquisition specialists have money to spend to achieve the critical missions of the federal government. In 2014, the most recent data available, the federal government spent nearly half a trillion dollars on contractors.

 

But there’s still another question left.

 

Who are you selling to? And I don’t mean which agency or which department. I mean, who?

 

Every contract issued by the government has a signature on it, an actual person who has selected your company to provide a product or service. Behind the signature are a small group of influencers. So, of that half-trillion dollar enterprise, your opportunity probably has been shaped by fewer people than are on an NFL roster.

 

So we ask again, who are you marketing to? Are you marketing to The Government or are you marketing to those who matter?

 

Why Personas Matter

Federal contracting is its own subspecies of marketing. We don’t have the intense feedback cycles or as many point-of-sale validations.

 

At Bluetext, we’ve helped dozens of clients reach the right government customers with carefully designed strategy backed by creative that makes an impact. It’s not always the same as business-to-business marketing or business-to-consumer, but one area that never changes is persona creation.

 

Why?

The government is not a single entity. It comprises agencies and departments, which in turn comprise directorates and activities and program management offices and thousands of personnel who play a role in acquiring products and services on behalf of the government.

 

How you reach them all won’t be the same. The avenues available to market to a program manager in the access-controlled world of the Intelligence Community, for example, won’t be the same as those available to reaching a director at the National Institutes of Health. Their missions aren’t the same, their needs aren’t the same, and their pain points aren’t the same.

 

Even within your target opportunity, your approach must vary.

Unlike traditional commercial services marketing, where you may aim for a thousand buyers of a million dollar contract, in federal marketing you’re more frequently aiming for one sale of one 100 million contract influenced by a dozen people. Not only does the persona exercise of understanding who your buyer is matter in fed tech, it matters even more.

 

Government Personas, in Four Broad Strokes

 

Directors and Deputy Directors and High Ranking Government Executives

This is typically the big ideas crowd.  They’re usually looking for what’s next. Their interest is less day-to-day and more focused on how to better achieve their agency’s mission. Major changes begin at this level, whether it’s a product like a weapon systems or the federal cloud-first mandate, which has reshaped federal IT since its issuance by the then Chief Technology Officer of the United States. In the Intelligence Community, the largest IT transformation in its history began as a plan issued from the Director of National Intelligence.

 

Be bold and be visionary.  If you want to radically change the government’s mindset, this is where you enter the bloodstream. Personnel in these positions aren’t always technically savvy and often have a more generalist approach to their departments, but they’re always eager to find the next great idea. They’re intensely focused on mission achievement, so help them understand how your solutions helps them better achieve the department’s goals.

 

Contracting Officers & Program Managers

What is a contract for your company is a career decision for contracting officers (COs) and program managers. On most acquisitions, the PM and the CO (or KO, as it’s often abbreviated, particularly in defense) are the most important decision maker. The program manager will be responsible for oversight of all the requirements in the proposal and of its execution once underway. The CO/KO can later modify the contract to add scope.

 

While PMs and COs appreciate the big idea, they are also intensely interested in the nuts and bolts and your capability to deliver. Every contract is an act of trust between these two positions and your company. These are experienced government personnel with whom you’ll want to build a long-term brand relationship. Depending on the size of the contract, they may not be subject matter experts in all technologies involved, but will likely understand enough to separate contractor-speak from actual capability.

 

Acquisition Influencers

For competitive bids, acquisition is done through an evaluation board which helps advise the source selection authority on its choice. Acquisition influencers are often subject matter experts and will be interested in the details. While their interest is in the proposal before them, your marketing should include this group as well. Are there third-party validations you can include to bolster your technical credibility, such as CMMI appraisal or AWS or Microsoft organizational certifications? Is your accounting system approved by a government auditor?  Can you demonstrate applied expertise in your area of work, through white papers and blog posts? The big idea is great, but this is the group that will pop your marketing balloon if your big idea is all hype and no substance.

 

End Users

The role of a federal contractor is never simply IT for IT’s sake or product for product’s sake. It’s about empowering the end-user to achieve agency mission. And while the end-user, be it a help desk technician, a service member or a scientist, won’t sign a contract, their opinion of your product or service, particularly once it’s in use, will heavily influence whether it continues to be in use. Prior to acquisition, a groundswell of support could be cause for a pilot program. Market to the end-user’s pain points, rather than a technology-first view.

 

Every contract is different and Bluetext has helped dozens of clients craft specific marketing strategies by agency and by opportunity.

 

But like all marketing, it doesn’t just start with the what, it starts with the who!

 

As businesses compete for the hearts and minds of prospective customers, there are some basic tenets of successful campaigns that must be followed. Especially in a technology b2b world where there is so much noise around products and solutions and it is harder to differentiate, flawless execution combined with awesome creative concepts can be a recipe for success.

 

Here are six important elements that should be considered sacrosanct when thinking about executing a digital advertising campaign.

 

1. Spend Time on a Great Creative Concept

Every campaign needs reference points. This can come in the form of current brand recognition where prospects know who you, competing in a market where there is specific budget allocated for a specific solution, or great, memorable creative.

 

Recently we undertook a campaign with a fast growing software company with little brand recognition that competes in a poorly defined market. We spent a lot of time creating a concept that would be memorable and catch prospective customers off guard to drive interest and clicks.

 

2. Know Your Audience

Make sure you know your customers and where they hang out online. Audience targeting options, like geographic and behavioral targeting, enable you to target the campaign to the right audience. While everyone has an idea of specific sites they read and assume that their campaign should be there, combining specific sites with a programmatic approach ensures the right people see your great creative.

 

3. Define Clear Calls to Action

The call to action is critical as it tells your prospect what they are getting as part of this transaction. You need to offer something of value that they cannot get other places. Make it compelling and something valuable that can stand on its own. Make sure that the benefit of the offer is clear and the user understands what they will get.

 

4. Create an Optimized Landing Page or Series of Landing Pages

The landing page is critical because it provides necessary information that your user needs to convert. From a design standpoint, make sure there is consistency between your ad campaign and the landing page. And make sure the benefits to the user are clearly outlined in a very simple, consumable manner. There should be a clear call to action and a simple experience for the user to complete the transaction. Creating multiple landing pages for multiple offers as part of the same campaign is highly recommended to test and determine what is converting best.

 

5. Tracking and Optimization

Tracking the activity you get from your banner ads is a necessary part of your display advertising campaign strategy. Tracking metrics like impressions and clicks is important, but you also want to measure conversions in the form of registrations or submissions. Establish a lead management or scoring process for all your online advertising that can be operationalized and optimized, and make sure it is integrated into your demand gen and CRM systems.

 

6. Focus on Retargeting

We have all read the stats about the number of interactions that are required to drive a conversion. Use every opportunity to get your ads in front of your targets beyond the first impression. Leveraging re-targeting to have your ads follow your prospects as the search the web can be a very effective method for driving multiple touches.

 

When it comes to B2B digital advertising, there is no silver bullet. Great creative combined with a smart process can give you the best chance at success. Be willing to try new things while measuring effectiveness on an ongoing basis. You will find the right approach and your business will benefit from it long term.

 

It’s no secret that a first-class mobile app experience is essential for any brand seeking to build customer loyalty and engagement. The mobile app user experience needs to recognize not only the way audiences ingest information as they consider their options, but also how they interact with the app itself. In a previous post we offered a number of top tips for delivering the best mobile app experience. In this post we offer additional top tips to keep your customers engaged on their mobile devices.

 

Keep the Design Simple. A customer’s attention span is a precious resource that is often in short supply. A cluttered user-interface that gives numerous options for information or services may check all the boxes for the brand, but it runs the risk of overloading the user with too much information. Every added button, text, image or call-to-action complicates the screen and challenges the focus they need on the essential content you want them to see.

 

Design with the Platform in Mind. Trying to shoe-horn in features and elements from all of the various operating systems in order to mimic all of their specific behaviors brings us back to clutter. Stick to features native to the platform you are building in so that users know how to navigate and use the native components they are already familiar with.

 

Design for Channel-Switching. Most users don’t complete an engagement in a single session, so design for the entire process, not just a single setting. That means a seamless experience across devices that allows users to switch channels as needed to meet the way they interact with the app. A useful cross-device experience will enable customers to engage at their own pace.

 

Animation is Good, as Long as it is subtle. It’s the little things on the screen that give a warm feeling about your brand, so feel free to leverage that emotional connection. Small details such as animated feedback, in-app sounds, and even animated micro-interactions imbed a personality to your app, and go a long way towards building loyalty. Just keep it subtle.

 

Respect the Small Screen. Trying to fit a lot of information into a mobile user-interface is challenging at best. Don’t make the mistake of trying to cram too much content into the screen. It has to be readable. At least 11-point font is highly recommended. Increase the line height or spacing if that helps to get the content presented most effectively. A heaping portion of white space makes the screen inviting and uncluttered.

 

Testing is Your Friend. Most designers have large monitors on which they design. But something designed on a big screen may not work as well when shrunk down to a mobile app. Engage real users for their feedback, and make sure you have a cross-selection on a variety of mobile devices. Every design is bound to have an unseen flaw until it’s in the user’s hands.

 

Need help designing a mobile app with a great user experience? Bluetext can help.

The visual elements of a brand’s identity are the most immediately recognizable form of brand expression – subconsciously communicating brand message, tone and personality – in less than an instant. After that – it’s all about the experience.

A modern brand presents itself visually across more environments than ever before – and unless you’re McDonald’s, the most dominant of those is its digital manifestation, which also happens to be the primary environment in which it is first experienced beyond its visual state.

Because your customer may be experiencing both your brand and digital presence simultaneously for the first time, simplifying the user experience – and by virtue of that your focus on the customer – will immediately reinforce that customer’s initial brand experience before they explore a single product or solution that you offer.

While most visual design principles for digital brand mirror those of its non-virtual counterpart’s – digital brand design presents some unique opportunities to more effectively shape your customers initial online brand experience.

Typography

Typography is the art and technique of arranging type in order to make the language it forms most appealing to the user’s overall experience. Wikipedia defines it as an art form that can manipulate the significance of what it communicates – a definition that most digital first branding agencies like Bluetext might consider the holy grail of developing a brand identity. You need to consider very carefully how typography will fit into your overall digital brand architecture – and iconography shouldn’t be too far behind.

Content Strategy

As it relates to customer experience, content strategy is broadly defined as the plan for the creation, delivery and governance of useful and usable digital content that is ultimately designed to meet the needs of – and therefore expressed by the voice of – your customer. Therefore, content and creative strategies need to be aligned to ensure the user experience supports the desired narrative for your brand story to play out online.

Mobile UX

This leads us right back to simplifying the brand experience by focusing on the customer. A mobile first strategy helps develops brands that communicate their core values rapidly, simply and without clutter. The result is a focused, cleaner, and more user-centric brand experience.

Simply introducing mobile to the initial stages of brand development empowers creative teams to concentrate on what is at the core of a brand and establish priorities in the context of the mobile experience.

Ultimately a brand is the holistic sum of customers’ experiences, composed of visual, tonal and behavioral brand components – all of which can now be shaped by interactive design and manifested perfectly in the digital expression of your brand.

It’s October. That means CyberSecurity Month. Unfortunately, the breaches are getting more severe, with global companies dominating the headlines. So what should companies do for CyberSecurity month?

I am not a cybersecurity technical expert, but my company does have a lot of experience working with cybersecurity software and services organizations to help them drive brand awareness and visibility. I am not here to educate on the right technical architecture or newest solution that should be employed, but instead list several ideas that marketers of cybersecurity companies can do to differentiate in a very crowded market.

1. Don’t Rely on Just Words to Differentiate. Visual storytelling to create an attitude can help a company stand out from the crowd. Our team had the opportunity to work with Sourcefire twice to rebrand the company. The second time we created a series of animated brand elements to represent their key areas of focus and differentiators that you can see on their website today at www.sourcefire.com. Things turned out pretty well for Sourcefire, as they were acquired by Cisco in October 2013 for close to $3b.
2. Attack Vertical Markets Aggressively. We recently completed an exciting project with FireEye, one of the most successful cybersecurity companies of 2014, to create vertical focused videos that target specific cyber challenges found across key verticals. The videos, built in a 3-D world, focus on the concept of “We Don’t Blink” and visually tell the story about how the company is re-imagining security.
3. Take the Message to Your Customers. There is a growing challenge, especially across the public sector market, where potential customers are not going to events and therefore cannot learn about the solutions that vendors are bringing to market. For Intel and McAfee we designed a virtual Federal agency environment called www.futureagency.com, so that prospective customers and partners could learn directly from their thought leaders in an engaging digital environment.
4. Take on Your Competition, and Have Fun Doing It. While this example is not cybersecurity related, many cybersecurity marketers face a similar challenge as Citrix did when they hired us a few years ago to take on their largest competitor. Their solution was better, but they were getting out marketed. So we launched the Rumble In the IT Jungle, a channel driven campaign to demonstrate their product superiority in a bold way – check out http://www.rumbleintheitjungle.com/game/boxing.html

 

When you are competing in a crowded market, it is not enough to say that your product or service can “out feature” the competition. You need to get creative. You need to get bold. And you need to get moving fast, as the company just down the street is already thinking of their next move.