This is certainly not news, but the amount of information available to target customers continues to grow by the day. Researching issues that might seem obscure and unique means sorting through dozens if not hundreds of options, regardless of how detailed or long-tale the search. The amount of information can be overwhelming, and quickly finding the best answers is becoming a more difficult challenge. This is especially true on the Internet, where chaos and complexity reign. The dilemma is that buyers don’t want to sort through the noise; they want simple choices to complex problems.

Brand simplification is one of the strategies that Bluetext is recommending to our clients as a way to reach customers with a message that resonates amongst the clutter. Paring down the brand to its core values can play across its presentation, its key messages, and even its logo. This is the essence of brand simplification, and it can be an effective approach when refreshing a brand.

People want choices; they just don’t want too many choices. The same is true when it comes to research on the Internet. They enter long-tale searches because short phrases offer too many options. Yet when they visit your site, are they quickly seeing the information that they want and need to engage with your brand, or are they confused about what you are stand for, what you are offering and how you’re different than your competitors?

For more established brands, simplifying the brand presentation to the market can convey both brand value and confidence in their relationship with their customers and a broader audience. We can see how this has played out with logos from Starbucks, Microsoft, and even Pepsi. In each case, the logos have evolved dramatically over time (and in the case of Pepsi, over a long period of time), beginning with a busier mark and moving to a more simplified design that retains many but not all of the original elements.

From logo to messaging to the larger brand presentation, this was the recent challenge facing the Altimeter Group, a successful research, analyst and consulting firm in the digital market based in Silicon Valley. It publishes a wide range of cutting-edge analyses on social media, native advertising and other trends that can help companies better engage consumers, and its team of experts has become a go-to resource for reporters and executives alike. When Altimeter Group wanted to update its brand, it turned to Bluetext. Bluetext designed a new, simplified approach, including how it presents its name, its image and all of its digital and physical assets.

We began with the simple premise that a brand simplification would help Altimeter deliver its core value and message more directly and effectively, and began with a recommendation to adopt Altimeter as a single word. The logo was streamlined with a contemporary design, and the color pallet and typefaces were revised to match.

A significant part of the brand refresh was a new website that engages visitors and provides information in a simplified and more direct approach. Instead of a multitude of confusing navigation options, Bluetext’s design offer three content paths – Our Ideas, Work With Us, and About Us. This approach allows visitors to quickly find the research they are looking for, how to engage Altimeter, and background on its team of experts without having to click through layers of pages. The content is highly search optimized.

Core to this approach is simplification of the way Altimeter tells its brand story, its new look and feel, and the way it engages its audience. When coming to the Altimeter site or seeing its new collateral and reports, there is no question about the story it wants to tell. There are still many content options for visitors to the new website, ranging from a broad selection of research to blog posts and articles from a variety of its experts. The difference is that the process to reach those options is simplified. The Altimeter team is easily found, navigation is reduced to its core elements, and messages are clear and direct. The new brand leverages the position that Altimeter has established, and will help take Altimeter to the next level in the market.

www.altimetergroup.com

 

An emerging trend across business-to-business marketing is its “consumerization.” As customer expectations shift and their buying habits change, businesses that sell and market to other businesses are stealing tactics from “businesses to consumer” marketers.

Tried and true b2c marketing strategies such as user engagement, personalized content, rich media, gamification and alignment with offline events are increasingly nudging their way into b2b digital campaigns. This shift is not lost on businesses, advocacy groups and trade associations, which are all leading the charge in adapting consumerized marketing tactics to a business customer audience. They are creating digital communities to effectively tell their story, sell their products, and gain traction for their issues. These communities are designed to make complex messages more consumable, mobilize user or advocacy groups, and provide users the opportunity to join or “own” the conversation.

At Bluetext, our approach to developing and executing digital marketing campaigns for clients is to not be bound by conventional battle lines of business, consumer and government. Each market is surely unique, but by remaining open to innovative tactics and strategies we are consistently able to help clients’ marketing efforts stand out from the pack. Based on recent projects, we have assembled a set of core recommendations for any business or organization seeking to leverage the consumerization of b2b and advocacy marketing to impact customer buying decisions and brand awareness.

Drive Personalized Content and Experiences
By stepping back and letting your best customers and members take the lead in telling your story, the content becomes more real and personalized. One example is a campaign Bluetext developed for Google called GovTransformers that showcases a wide variety of public servants and how they are using Google’s enterprise applications. The campaign shines a spotlight on dozens of government workers all across the United States – from law enforcement to CIOs – with video profiles, photographs and written descriptions. By making customers the heroes, other customers are encouraged to share their stories.

We leveraged offline events to grow the community with a series of Hackathons in key cities around the country. Each Hackathon brings together programmers and developers over a weekend to help solve digital challenges using any developer tools they want, as long as one of Google’s enterprise apps is also part of the solution. For example, at the Denver Hackathon, one of the challenges involved automating the Colorado Disaster Assistance Center. Another challenge included designing a transparent budget data system for the state of Wyoming.

Enable Users to Join the Conversation

Giving stakeholders an easy way to join the conversation keeps them engaged and an active part of the community. We have built polling ecosystems for several clients that can span a portfolio of brand sites to access their opinions across a number of relevant issues, while giving them a platform to collect and contextualize the trends of the community through data visualizations.

For Intermedia Outdoors Network, a leading publisher of magazines for hunters, fisherman and outdoor enthusiasts, we created SportsmenVote with a Pinterest-type of format offering various issues in the form of questions that have “yes” or “no” or multiple choice answers. The results can be displayed in real-time, and a comment section is built in for those who want to expound more on the topic. The results provide an ongoing reason for the community to return to the site and engage in the dialogue, with content ready to be shared in a social “snackable” format.

Showcase Your Most Important Assets –Users
Showcasing stakeholders in their own element can be a powerful way of growing a community. The Forest Landowners Association represents families who harvest wood products from privately-owned forests that they manage. Sustainability is a key component of their effort to preserve these private forests. To help build a community of like-minded landowners with a common interest in these issues, we built a platform called Forest America. It serves as a news repository and a recruitment tool for advocacy purposes, complete with impactful videos and a simple way for families to submit their profiles.

Don’t Be Boring. Engaging Concepts & Content to Educate the Market
Govplace turned to Bluetext to develop FedInnovation, a destination designed to help government agency executives get the latest information on current technology challenges and solutions for big data, cloud, security, mobility and storage. Developed in conjunction with leading technology providers including Dell, Intel Security and VMWare, it includes exclusive content, videos, blogs, and real-time social feeds. From this platform, Govplace will drive blog posts, webinars, and other marketing programs to ensure its target audience understands the value that it, working with the leading IT providers to the Federal Government, can deliver.

Get Game
We are not talking about the next Grand Theft Auto or Call of Duty. But think about your audience and determine whether a game would engage them. Games can also throw off a lot of “social shrapnel” to drive content and interest. For Lucent Government Solutions (LGS) we designed a “Words with Friends” meets Scrabble experience to help recruit new engineers and drive awareness for the solutions they are delivering into the market.

Join the Cause – Everyone Wants to Take Action
Building a digital platform to showcase a community won’t be of much help if it’s not easy for new members to participate. We recommend offering opportunities to participate directly on the site, either through submitting your own story, taking a poll, seeking information and insight from other members of the community, or using an advocacy tool to weigh in with policy makers. What is essential is having well placed calls-to-action throughout the site so that visitors do not have to search for ways to participate. New Twitter tools like Tweet Builder increase a brand’s reach to its social properties by connecting with influencers whose posts then tie back into the digital platform. This social engagement extends the brand far beyond a single website to a wide variety of social sites.

The consumerization of b2b marketing is not about trying to fit a square peg in a round hole; instead, it represents the fact that forward-thinking businesses and organizations across every market recognize a fundamental shift in how business customers are accessing content and information, and what types of marketing initiatives will impact their buying decisions.

 

Across the federal government, agency IT leaders demand integrated approaches to technology to tackle their most pressing mission challenges. Govplace, a leading enterprise IT solutions provider exclusively to the public sector, turned to Bluetext to develop FedInnovation (www.fedinnovation.com), a destination designed to help government agency executives get the latest information on current technology challenges and solutions for big data, cloud, security, mobility and storage. Developed in conjunction with leading technology providers including Dell, Intel Security and VMWare, it includes exclusive content, videos, blogs, and real-time social feeds.

FedInnovation represents the concept of combining relevant, fresh content, complementary offerings, and financial resources to deliver an educational platform to drive awareness and leads for Govplace across its target market.

From this platform, Govplace will drive blog posts, webinars, and other marketing programs to ensure its target audience understands the value that it, working with the leading IT providers to the Federal Government, can deliver.

The development of platform is a continued focus for Bluetext as we look to conceptualize, design and develop creative solutions that deliver measurable business impact for our clients. We are finding that the customers of our clients are demanding unique experiences with premium content delivered in an easy to consume manner. That is the goal behind FedInnovation. Explore FedInnovation today (www.fedinnovation.com).

 

 

At Bluetext, we help many companies and organizations tell their brand stories through a family of imagery that delivers the message, attitude, and tonality for which marketing leaders are hungering.   Our clients want a platform for their brand that they can own, because as many markets become commodotized, this kind of differentiation allows them to stand out and represent their brand’s value.

Here are some recent samples:

Leveraging CSC’s brand mark, Bluetext was able to create these representative solution areas.

Gamescape produces eye-popping marketing retention programs leveraging gamification, social media, and a fire hose of sports data to deliver a completely brandable fun new experience for local and national bar and restaurant establishments across the country

Iron Bow retained Bluetext to bring its solution areas to life in a fresh new and inviting way. Iron Bow wanted to be portrayed as approachable.

Bluetext designed a series of illustrations consistent with a new brand attitude architecture. The four dimension illustration series was used throughout hundreds of assets for Sourcefire with both a white and black base design system, following research that the black and white option would be advantageous for Sourcefire marketing.

VMWare retained Bluetext to bring its value proposition to life in a fresh new and inviting way.

Bowman needed to convey their multi discipline multi vertical end to end solutions in a visually compelling way

Wouldn’t it be better if car trunks had built-in refrigeration for transporting groceries? What if the shower didn’t let out water until it was actually at the temperature you set it to?

These are just two of thousands of ideas put forward on the crowdsource ideation site Betterific. The ideas referenced above are nifty, but you might wonder how they benefit the individuals who come up with them, or ultimately if these ideas will ever get on the radar of companies in a position to execute on them.

To help businesses get a better sense of how to leverage the wisdom of crowds for product, service and marketing ideation, I recently conducted a Q&A with Betterific CEO and Co-Founder Micha Weinblatt – and wrote about it in my PR Week Hub Comms column. You can read the full article here.

The Cloud continues to be one of the hottest technology themes across all enterprise organizations, and that’s no different for government agencies at the Federal, state and local levels. Then-U.S. Chief Information Officer Vivek Kundra even announced an Administration-wide “cloud first” policy three-and-a-half years ago requiring agencies move some of their systems to a cloud-based service, and while budgets are in flux, that remains a priority for agencies. I read a recent article from IBM around top technology trends shaping the government’s future, and cloud computing was right behind mobile devices at the top of the list.

While there are conflicting reports across the public sector regarding the extent to which spending Cloud spending will grow in the near term, there is no uncertainty that the underlying spend figure is massive. As a result, companies in the cloud services business face opportunities and challenges in effectively marketing their offerings to federal agencies.

At the top of the list of challenges that makes government agencies a tough sell when it comes to moving to the cloud is security. Agencies require assurances on who has access to and controls their data, and about how they will get it back if a cloud provider goes out of business, is acquired or simply disappears. Messaging that works for the commercial sector might not resonate with government executives, while concepts around hybrid approaches might be a better solution.

My partner Don Goldberg recently wrote a blog post around Ten Tips for Marketing to the Government. Thinking about cloud service providers, some of these apply. Here are five that really need to be considered:

1- Dedicated Government messaging that is clear and easy to find is essential. Agency decision-makers will not sort through corporate messaging to discern what might be important to them.

2 – Speak the language of Government. Their needs are different than the needs of commercial enterprises. Understand their pain points and realize that mandates and mission requirements are driving a lot of the decision making. At the same time, don’t become consumed in ‘defensive messaging.’ In other words, companies become so sensitive to agency cloud concerns that messaging assumes a defensive posture that attempts to negate pre-conceived notions around security and control. These pain points are important, but don’t lose sight of putting forward positive messaging on all the benefits the Cloud can deliver.

3- Easy-to-find government specific landing pages are a must. If decision makers don’t quickly find information that is directly relevant to them, they will move on to a competitor’s website. We all too often find government subpages buried deep into a site, and masked with an all too obvious government façade that will only serve to completely negate the hard work of your sales and field marketing teams dedicated to this market

4 – Get involved in the community. If you are just getting started and don’t have case studies, getting involved in the community is important. Carpet baggers don’t succeed selling to the Federal government. It takes a dedicated, focused effort and commitment to the community.

5 – Think about many marketing avenues to get your message out. Buying some radio or sponsoring one event is not enough. Work with specialists who understand the government market and how to drive an integrated message into it – the impact of your spend will be easy to measure.

 

Sourcefire, one of the world’s leading security software enterprises, enlisted Bluetext to help it address numerous marketing and positioning challenges as it delivered a new generation of solutions in a crowded and competitive market. Our first task was to gather insights through a comprehensive global brand experience audit of how its brand is used and deployed, including a thorough market analysis. From that discovery process we were able to anticipate near- and long-term needs for the company. These insights allowed us to design a new corporate visual identity system and digital platform that would represent Sourcefire’s current and emerging brand.

Challenge

The Sourcefire corporate marketing team faced a number of challenges and opportunities as it headed into its next phase of growth. Many of these, such as brand control and identity consistency, were simply the result of the brand’s successful growth and rapid expansion. Others were tied to ever-changing and advancing technologies, and the effect these were having on the evolution of the overall cyber security marketplace as well as the impact on end-user wants, needs and behaviors.

Solutions

Bluetext’s first task was to conduct a comprehensive global audit of how the Sourcefire brand was being used and deployed, including the types of branding situations it faced in the market and its anticipated future needs. This analysis ultimately led to practical, real-world recommendations that would apply to the identity system we would develop.

Bluetext designed a series of illustrations consistent with a new brand attitude architecture we designed. The four dimension illustration series was used throughout hundreds of assets for Sourcefire with both a white base and black base design system, following research that the black and white option would be advantageous for Sourcefire marketing.

Finally, to complete the comprehensive new design system, Bluetext developed a comprehensive digital strategy spanning a responsive user experience design system, an enhanced Drupal content management system, partner and resource portals, and comprehensive brand identity guidelines building on the knowledge acquired from the brand audit. This tool set not only enables Sourcefire to effectively manage its brand consistently among internal stakeholders and external partners, but also serves as a touchstone, continually reminding all audiences of the brand’s strategic intent.

Results

Cisco acquired Sourcefire for $2.7 billion within one year of the completion of this engagement. By any measure, that would be considered a pretty good result.

If you have any doubts about where the business opportunities are growing in the technology market, come on out to the annual RSA information security conference in San Francisco this week and you will see a vibrant, action-packed explosion of companies showing off the latest developments in cyber security. Bluetext is out here this week, and the buzz is tremendous. RSA had to expand into a whole additional wing of the downtown Moscone Center just to house all of the vendors who are participating this year, and every night of the week there are dozens of parties and receptions.

Of course, the abundance of RSA participation underscores the central challenge for marketing and communications executives at companies here: How to break through the clutter and reach target customers in the face of hundreds of competitors. The simple answer is there is no simple answer. We’ve been spending hours walking the floors, talking with editors at the major publications, and chatting with many of the folks here from a wide variety of companies. There seems to be a consistent theme to what we’re hearing.

Reporters and customers don’t want to hear about the technology, they want to learn about how you have helped customers solve their cyber security challenges. The fact is, at the business level they don’t necessarily understand the technology, but they do know that they need to make a business case for any solution they want to consider. For those of us in the marketing and communications arena, this isn’t surprising. Talking about the market challenges and how a company has helped its customers is always a more compelling approach than describing the underlying technology, no matter how new and cool it might seem.

What we’re also hearing is that editors and customers want to know how that solution fits into the larger market trends that they are focused on, ranging from the move to the cloud to the aftermath of the Target security debacle from last year. They need to understand how they can meet their own market requirements and how they can avoid being the net poster-child for security breaches.

One of the hottest topics this year is around security automation; the ability to take measures across an organization’s network in near real-time to thwart attacks. It currently takes hours or longer to detect security events, and can takes weeks and months to resolve the attack. With automation, that can be handled in minutes. It also allows resources to be better allocated because they no longer have to respond manually to every threat. Bluetext’s client CSG Invotas is getting a huge amount of interest in its automation technology, but it’s clear that other competitors are using similar messaging—whether or not they can deliver on that promise.

And that offers the second lesson from RSA: Messaging needs to be both similar to the market space but differentiated from competitors. That might sound like a contradiction, and it’s no easy task. But the point is that if there a market trend that you are addressing, that must be made clear. Yet at the same time, how your solution is different from everyone else’s and why it is the best solution also needs to be part of that message.

Clear, concise and compelling messages, and telling your story through the customer’s eyes. Those are the two main marketing messages we’re getting from RSA.

Everywhere you turn, people are talking about responsive design. It is a critical website solution for providing your customers and prospects a seamless experience across all devices and making it easy for you to manage one web infrastructure.

With a responsive website, businesses can be in front of consumers at every step of their online journey. A user viewing a website on the go via a mobile device can have the same powerful experience as when sitting in their office.

Responsive websites provide continuity between different viewing contexts, remaining completely agnostic to the type of device used and the size of the screen it has.

Unfortunately, a mobile version of your website isn’t good enough anymore. Responsive websites simplify internet marketing and SEO. Instead of having to develop and manage content for multiple websites, businesses with responsive sites can take a unified approach to content management because they have only the one responsive site to manage. The same applies to analytics and strategy development and deployment. A responsive website means there is only one set of analytics to examine and a single strategy to develop and deploy.

Responsive websites are easier for consumers to find than traditional or mobile sites because they come up higher in search engines’ rankings. Google recommends responsive web design because having a single URL for desktop and mobile sites makes it easier for Google to discover content and for Google’s algorithms, which are constantly changing, to assign indexing properties to content.

Responsive Design in the Future

Responsive design is still in its infancy, and the future looks extremely bright. All of our websites are responsive today, and our developers are exploring emerging areas of responsive design by testing a multitude of integrations that are now available.

As the internet transforms further into a platform of services and user interfaces that tie those services together, leveraging responsive design principals will allow companies to integrate a plethora of back-end services, such as Facebook, Twitter, Salesforce.com and Amazon Web Services, and then present the integrated data to users in an integrated manner. Expensive back-end solutions are no longer a requirement to integrate legacy systems with business partners.

One thing is certain, you don’t want to fall behind and watch your competitors launch responsive websites while yours is still stuck in 2012. The time to get responsive with your web design is now.