When Finite State, one of the hottest new start-ups in the cybersecurity market needed a strong visual identity and a website for its launch at Black Hat this year, it turned to Bluetext. Finite State has the first comprehensive and proactive cyber solution to the growth of IoT, which has quickly become a significant security challenge across enterprise networks. Bluetext developed a graphic approach that draws themes and connections across the business landscape, and a new website approach that educates the audience on the IoT threat while differentiating Finite State’s solution for the market.

It’s always rewarding to see a client do well and continue to grow in their market. It’s doubly exciting when two clients team up together to build a powerhouse brand. That’s exactly what has happened with CQRoll Call, one of the best-known and most widely-respected publishers of both policy content and advocacy tools, was recently acquired by FiscalNote, a Google-backed player in the governmental affairs and advocacy that has grown into a data-driven, global player and has expanded into digital advocacy and issues management.

The partnership takes advantage of CQ Roll Call’s rich history of unbiased coverage of the Federal government and FiscalNote’s expertise in technology and real-time policy data and analytics to provide a broader suite of products and services in a dynamic market. The acquisition allows both brands to identify new opportunities to adapt and grow in the digital news landscape.

CQ Roll Call chose Bluetext to design a new website for its wide selection of both policy information and advocacy platforms in order to better attract and convert target prospects into customers. We developed an approach that allows visitors to quickly self-select what they are looking for on the website and gets them to those software options with in-depth product information and pricing.

For FiscalNote, Bluetext designed a new approach for its brand and website to simplify the user experience, delivering the right content and information to prospective customers to understand the best options for leading advocacy campaigns in today’s digital age.

For both brands, Bluetext was able to take them to the next level in terms of their position in the market, transforming them into cutting-edge industry players.

The end result: A strategic acquisition that makes the new combined powerhouse brand the market leader both in the U.S. and globally.

In the world of digital business, it’s essential to stay up to date on the newest trends in branding and marketing to ensure your business remains an innovation frontrunner.

One increasingly powerful trend in the online world is the advent of motion design. Having already leveraged much of the potential of static image design and looking forwards towards new possibilities, many businesses are adding motion to their social feeds, their marketing and their branding.

While video and motion now dominate the fields of social media and marketing, most companies still rely on static logos for branding, making now the perfect time to stay ahead of the game with inventive motion branding.

The Benefits of Motion Branding

Your logo is an essential part of your brand and in many ways should attempt to distill everything your brand is about into one memorable graphic.

This in mind, moving from a still image to a creative motion graphic is a big change and will have wide-reaching reverberations that affect how your customers perceive and interface with your business.

Taking advantage of creative motion in branding is an ambitious and rewarding choice that comes with a number of attractive perks.

1. Tell a Story

Adding creative motion to your branding creates new possibilities for dynamic storytelling.

With static image logos, what you see is all you get. This is inherently limiting when it comes to telling a story. With creative motion branding, however, you introduce the possibility for progression and change into your branding, allowing you to tell a more complex story.

Telling a better, more fluid story can help you connect with potential customers on an emotional level which is critical for attracting their business. In fact, neuroscientists have found that people generally make their decisions based more on emotions than logical thinking, meaning that more robust storytelling is a surefire way to outdo competitors.

2. Raise Brand Awareness

Leveraging creative motion in video is an especially powerful tool for raising awareness of your brand.

Creative motion provides new opportunities to make your logo unique and engaging which reflects positively on and raises interest in your brand. When someone encounters an animated logo, they are a lot more likely to remember it and share it than they are with the static logos they are used to seeing.

Raising brand awareness is great for business. One cross-industry study, for instance, found that raising brand awareness has a significant impact on market performance.

3. Stand out from the Crowd

No matter where potential customers are encountering your branding, it’s sure to be surrounded by a variety of different static objects or images with which it has to compete for attention. This is true on social media, while browsing the web, on mobile, or even out in the real world.

Integrating creative motion into your branding guarantees that it doesn’t fade into the background, and instead leaps out at your potential customer in stark contrast to the static environment around them.

Before your customers can raise awareness about your brand, they first need to recognize it. Creative motion branding ensures that your logo will capture people’s attention and prevent potential customers from scrolling, clicking, or walking right by without a second glance.

Using animated branding is a surefire strategy for spreading awareness of your unique brand and story. Though static images sometimes do the trick, they rarely can compare to a dynamic logo that catches your potential customers’ attention all while enriching your brand story with exciting new detail.

We’re now halfway through the year and it’s time to check in on some of the top digital marketing trends that we’re seeing for the second half of 2018. The past two years have seen a near-universal transition to digital marketing strategies being implemented across every industry. A digital approach to marketing is now a given. It’s now more a question of which tactics and strategies companies are going to follow to get the best messages in front of the right audiences, how they will measure those programs, and how they will manage the results. With that in mind, here is what we are seeing in the market here at the half-way point.

1. Analytics is Everything. There’s an old saying in marketing: If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it. In previous eras, measuring wasn’t so easy, particularly with online outreach and strategies. Today, that’s no longer a viable excuse, and top marketing agencies (like Bluetext) will be held accountable for results through analytics. That’s good news because when done correctly, marketing analytics tell you at every step how the campaign is performing. That allows us to revise and optimize campaigns in real time – for example, abandoning creative that isn’t performing as well as other themes. If your agency isn’t proactively incorporating analytics into their programs, it’s time to find a new agency.
2. Video is Now the Norm. A report by Cisco demonstrates that video marketing continues to increase as an essential component to digital marketing campaigns. Cisco predicts that by the end of 2019, more than 82 percent of online marketing campaigns will include video. There’s a reason for this: Video is compelling and engaging, exactly what brands want to attract new customers. We’re already seeing this across social media platforms. But here’s the catch – it needs to enhance the experience, not get in the way. Too heavy a load time will drive customers away.
3. It’s All About the Mobile. As the march of demographics moves on, a larger percentage of the workforce will be relying on their mobile screens for their first interaction with a brand. At Bluetext, we create mobile screens right alongside our desktop versions so clients can see and approve the mobile versions. This is significant for search engine optimization, as Google will continue to evolve its algorithms to reward websites that are mobile-optimized – punish those that aren’t.
4. What Happened to Virtual Reality? We love virtual reality as a key tool in digital marketing and have created a variety of very cool and effective VR experiences for our clients. But not everyone has seen the light on VR, and it simply hasn’t caught on with consumers the way many of us hoped it might. But there is a glimmer of light at the end of the tunnel… with augmented reality. Apple’s ARKit for app developers is poised to make the delivery of augmented reality much more consumable for marketing.
5. Blockchain Could be a Game-Changer. One of the hesitations we see with digital marketing revolves around the delivery of online ads, whether they are banner or social media. Part of the problem is measuring their delivering to the right target audiences at the right time. Even with the best analytics installed across a campaign, we can still only measure end results; it is difficult to verify which ads are delivered to which targets, and what they do when they see those ads. That is changing with blockchain technology. Blockchain can give us real verification on campaigns while protecting against over-serving ads and ensuring that bots aren’t pretending to be influencers.

Learn how Bluetext can get results for your digital marketing campaigns.

In a crowded marketplace for trade and membership associations, keeping up with the top new marketing and branding trends is essential. Here are four top branding tips worth adding to your trade association marketing mix.

Find Your Audience. Many trade associations, especially those with large audiences, often think they have a sense of who the right members are, and where they are in their careers. Yet, the marketplace is dynamic and ever-evolving. It’s important to regularly survey both members and non-members through market research if possible, and through email outreach to your database at the very least. For membership associations, making sure you understand the trends of those in school or just entering the workforce is essential. This audience may be a key element in your long-term growth, but it will know very little about you or the value you can bring to them at the start of their careers. Recognizing what they want and need, and marketing that to them, is difficult – it’s often a hard audience to reach.

Feed Your Audience. Creating the right content that they will find valuable and not just a sales pitch needs to be a key component of your marketing mix. That means investing the time and energy to create a regular stream of blog posts as well as insights and offers so that your association is viewed as a thought leader that can help shape careers. The second part of this equation is getting that content in front of your
target audiences. This needs to include a regular cadence of emails that push out this content, a smart organic and paid search strategy, a cohesive social media plan with consistent execution, and a banner ad and retargeting program to ensure that your brand reaches the audience and reinforces your value.

Your Content Needs to Grab Their Attention. In today’s internet overload landscape, people no longer read but rather scan headlines and images, looking for something that is interesting and grabs their attention. While it’s easy to rely on text-based outreach, incorporating compelling graphics, video and even animation can move the needle more quickly. This will become even more significant as engagement moves more and more to mobile devices. The small screens favor video and graphics and are less kind to text that is hard to read and
navigate.

Measure and Monitor.  Keeping on top of the pulse of your members and target audiences takes time and effort, but is worth the energy. Membership surveys at least once a year are a good, cost-effective place to start, but it won’t get you insight into non-members. Invest in
a thorough market survey at least every other year to test how your brand is perceived versus other competitors. Monitor other players closely so that you know if they may be moving in a new direction, or increasing their efforts to dominate the space. The goal is no surprises. If there are changes to the market or your position in the market, the sooner you recognize these trends, the better you will be equipped to respond.

Download Our Free eBook on Association Marketing in a Competitive Market!

A Private Equity acquisition that creates a new entity requires a distinctive brand that conveys value and stands out in the crowd. This is particularly true for newly acquired companies that need to quickly and effectively establish a credible and competitive brand platform for their acquisition.

Perhaps the oldest and best-known example of that is Coca-Cola. Its flagship soft drink is mostly carbonated water, coloring and a little bit of flavor. Don’t get me wrong, I like Coke and drink a glass almost every day. But what distinguishes it as a brand isn’t only the flavor. It’s the 100+ years of brand equity, based on a simple color scheme and a curved bottle that make it so instantly recognizable. Without those brand assets, it’s simply another cola, a commodity that would need to compete solely on price rather than its distinctiveness.

And that may be the most valuable lesson of why a strong brand is so vital: Without it, you’re a commodity competing on price, not value. It really has little to do with how a company or product functions or its selling proposition, but it is the core elements that make the brand different and recognizable. These unique elements – in the case of Coke, the shape of the bottle and red and white color palette – and known as its “distinctive assets.” These are the crown jewels of the brand. The more distinctive, the more recognition and brand loyalty from customers. And that means revenues.

And that’s why selecting the core elements of the brand, including color, iconography, style and the logo itself, is so important. Marketers can control a brand’s prevalence in the market. More media buys, sponsorships and advertising translate into prevalence. But uniqueness is more difficult to maintain, for the simple reason that competitors may be using or decide to use those same brand elements. But if you’re using a brand element that is too closely tied to others in the market, that means that your marketing and advertising dollars are being spent at least in part to help your competitors. Identifying those key brand elements and monitoring the competitive landscape to ensure that others aren’t using the same elements is key to a successful brand management strategy.

Here are three key tips for managing your brand’s distinctiveness in the market:

1. Ask your customers what they think about your brand’s uniqueness. They are your early warning system to what’s happening across your market.
2. Leverage your distinctive assets across every campaign to maintain consistency. And do the same for advertising and marketing creative.
3. Monitor the industry closely for anything that looks similar to your brand assets.

Is Your’s a Distinctive Brand? Let Bluetext Assess Your Brand in the Market.

There are many aspects to consider in web design, and one important feature to ponder is the user journey.  There are many means to target an anonymous user, identify who they are and their needs, and direct them to the relevant content on the site.  Here are a few reasons why you should allow users to select their own user journey on your new website.

Direct Traffic.  By identifying the user early in their interaction with your website, the more effectively you can direct users to content they would be interested in.  From a UX perspective, the user’s experience on the site is swift and efficient.  From a business perspective, anonymous users are quickly identified and funneled to custom tailored content.  A notable example of directing a user’s journey is Bluetext’s recent launch of CQ Roll Call’s newly branded website: https://info.cq.com/

User Personas.  By choosing to define user personas on its website, a company is able to identify functionality needs on other areas of the site at a high level.  Personas define every aspect of each consumer group, and by mapping out a user’s journey a company is able to understand the key tasks each persona would expect to perform on its website.

User workflow.  When a company is able to understand the flow of how different users would interact with its website, it is able to use this information to ultimately inform its website interface and provide its users with the best possible experience.  Web design agencies are experts in this area to implement the optimal interface specific for a company’s users.

Identifying a persona and their user journey through a website increases efficiency on both sides.  Users want to view what is relevant to them and companies want to be able to tailor content to target consumer groups.  Defining a company’s personas ultimately informs the user experience design for an overall superior experience.

Looking for best in class digital marketing?  Contact us.

Private equity firms are constantly in need of developing a new brand for their acquisitions, often including a new name, look, logo, and visual identity, along with a website and a go-to-market strategy to launch into the market. Along with private equity acquisitions often comes risk, from regulators, legislators, and policymakers, particularly if the acquisition is in a regulated industry like financial services, healthcare, or even defense.

Bluetext has worked with dozens of private equity firms to develop effective brand strategies and successfully launch those new companies into the market. Whether the goal is driving drives leads and revenue for new acquisitions, mergers, and rebrands, or positioning a new brand in for growth, we’ve seen the challenges that they face, especially with regulators. We’ve often partnered with The Vogel Group, which specializes in assessing risk for PE firms, to help those companies find the right path to success.

Contact us Today!

When the word among private equity firms spread two years ago that one of the many companies that helps defend individuals’ financial security from identity theft may be for sale, it piqued the interest of some of the larger private equity firms in the market. The target acquisition would bring a ready-made brand to the buyer from which to build and grow its market share. That’s where the partnership between The Vogel Group and Bluetext comes in to play. When working with our clients on the opportunities and risks for an acquisition, we work together to determine if the purchase makes sense and how that company needs to be repositioned in the market to achieve PE’s business objectives.

PE firms saw two large hurdles to overcome if they wanted to acquire the company. The first was on the regulatory and legal side. By virtue of having one foot in the financial services sector and the other in the privacy and identity theft defenses world, any company in that space faces scrutiny at the federal level by the Federal Trade Commission and the Consumer Financial Protection Board—both of which take in complaints on a daily basis against companies that protect against identity theft.

The second was the brand itself. For the PE firm wanting to take advantage of the acquisition target’s name recognition and customer base, it would also have to contend with FTC charges that it had engaged in false advertising, and the fact that it had far more complaints with the Better Business Bureau than similar services.

To move forward with the purchase meant a thorough risk analysis in Washington that reviewed the possible exposure before regulatory agencies as well as Congress and a marketing and brand strategy that could reposition the company away from its past reputation. The winning bidder on the acquisition was one of the leading cybersecurity firms on a global scale. Its solution for how to upgrade the identity protection brand was not to rename the company, but rather to pair it with an existing brand that was a fit from a business standpoint and that would soften its image and give it more credibility – a halo effect that would allow the positives to overtake the existing perceptions and legacy.

The buyer performed an extensive brand audit to find the best fit within its portfolio of products and services. It smartly did not want to abandon the acquisition’s name altogether – it had far too much brand equity. And even though, like many companies in this market, it also had faced criticism from regulators and the Better Business Bureau, its market penetration was strong enough to overcome those reviews with the right positioning.

So instead of starting new, it looked for a line of products that complemented the new acquisition’s solutions and created a co-marketing strategy to soften its image. That other branded line of products was a consumer-grade suite of cybersecurity products that would have a target audience similar to those who need protection from identity theft. As part of its repositioning, it launched the brand strategy with a message that is loud and clear: The acquisition and the cybersecurity brand “are now part of one company, with one mission. More protection for the digital threats of today’s connected world.”

This positioning inspired a new logo for the brand, that never lets buyers forget that two companies now lived side-by-side as part of the larger company’s family of products. The marketing campaigns taking this new brand to its customers is laser-focused on keeping the two brands locked together – ensuring a larger market and a positioning strategy that move away from its legacy.

Want to learn more about how Bluetext and The Vogel Group can help you with your acquisition and brand strategy? Contact us today!

When undertaking a branding process for a new or just-acquired company, many Private Equity clients are desperate to create their new logo and consider it a project complete. Yes, the logo is critical. But branding is less about the actual logo, and more about the visual story and impact that logo demonstrates to the market. This is especially the case with companies that have had a brand and logo, but through a private equity acquisition or other M&S activity, need to quickly change course and differentiate themselves from their former affiliations. Branding agencies like mine have a process that includes messaging, positioning and brand meaning, all captured through a series of exercises. While the words matter, the attitude and meaning behind a brand is what differentiates it and sets it apart. Think about visual impact,

I read a blog post recently talking about word of sight replacing word of mouth. It was spot on. Today, what you see matters much more than what you read or what you hear. Think about when scrolling through your Facebook feed. Three paragraphs about a great Hawaii vacation barely gets a notice, but a great picture at sunset sipping a cocktail with a great caption is liked by everyone. Attentions spans have shrunk and we are all visual learners and thinkers.

As your brand ambassadors, every stakeholder on your team, from executive management to sales to support to the front desk needs to understand the meaning of the brand and why it is important. It is a branding agencies’ job to work with the team to distill that meaning and make sure that it comes to life through the branding exercise in all of your public facing communications. Think of the Facebook generation as your audience. You want them to stop, notice your brand, and give you a chance to tell them your story. Fewer words, more visual meaning is critical. Brand managers and marketers need to think about this and give their work a critical eye.

Unless you have created groundbreaking software, it is becoming more and more difficult to differentiate. The visual impact and meaning behind your brand are critical for success. The right branding agencies can help extract this from your story and give you a brand that can differentiate and ensure success as you grow your business in 2018. The writing is on the wall; make sure that your audience sees it.

Looking for an agency to take your branding to the next level?  Contact us.

Does GovCon need marketing? Or is it really all in the proposal?

Find out how why we think marketing the single most important tool federal contractors have to play big in D.C. and leave small-sized perceptions behind in a series brought to you by Bluetext & Baird.

Is your marketing making your D.C. presence seem smaller than it is?

“Why do we need marketing? Everything that matters is in the proposal.”

While possibly an odd question, it isn’t out of line for the way contractors operate. After all, awards are decided by very specific and very transparent evaluation of proposals, and, not once in a debrief has any evaluator ever said the difference was an incredibly impressive display ad on Washington Technology. 

But it’s exactly the type of thinking why most federal contractors squander their single most important opportunity to step out of the sea of sameness.

Because in government contracting, marketing isn’t just important. It’s absolutely essential.

And most of us are doing it completely wrong.

Why We Get It Wrong

Perhaps the reluctance to embrace marketing is that most contractors do it wrong and don’t understand how to make marketing most effective when marketing to the core audience of federal contractors. The marketing isn’t full cycle and aligned to the pipeline. It’s insular. It’s more customer-following than demand-generating. It’s focused on the safe and the bland, not the intriguing.

And generally speaking, it has all the variety of a Baskin Robbins that’s out of 30 flavors. Everybody is innovative, everybody is a great partner, and everybody solves the most complex challenges of the federal government. Every company is exactly what you’ve asked for in the proposal, whether we’ve actually done it or not and whether we can even find the client site without Google Maps.

Why? Because we market to say we are what the prop says and what we think the government wants repeated back to it.

But there is nothing more valuable than thinking a level deeper than the bromides, thinking not about just how you answer the mail, but what makes you you.

In federal contracting, market to stand out. Not to fit in.

Why Marketing Matters in Government Contracting

By design, federal contracting is a market designed to create commodity. 

The government doesn’t want a single bidder for any services, nor does it explicitly want to disadvantage any competitor. (At least, this is the way the system is designed). As a result, procurements are much longer and more transparent than B2B. Federal contractors all respond to the same RFPs, work with the same labor categories, same general pricing targets and promise to deliver against the same statement of objectives. Contractors talk to the same small handful of people that sit on the evaluation board and we repeat all the post-contact factors.

And this is where marketing matters most. When you get squeezed into commodity and differentiation is all but impossible, distinction matters.

Marketing Is Your Biggest Opportunity Stand Out

“You may have any attributes you like,” the famously rigid Henry Ford might’ve quipped if he marketed contractors rather than made cars, “so long as it’s innovation, partnership, and commitment to mission.” 

Because contractor marketing is often so insular and customer-following, we recite the bromides of the government. Innovation is important. Partnership. Mission above all. These are category factors. Things true of everyone in your category. After all, have you ever seen a company position as proud Luddites, terrible partners or only driven by the SOW? 

So, no matter how much you spend, all you’re doing is telling the market and your own company that you’re just another contractor.

But in marketing, you can be distinct. 

The big tagline. The great brand name. The incredible brand promise. The forward design makes you stand out from the sea of templated design. The customer-focus on what you enable them to do, not the recitation of your biography of more than X years.

In marketing, federal contractors can be distinct, the live musician in a sea of elevator music, even though they’re not differentiated on capability.

Marketing Means You Start Ahead 

Because the first question the evaluation board ponders when a prop is reviewed shouldn’t be ‘who?’ 

Marketing builds an identity, and a feel for your business. If you do it right, it makes you seem larger than you are.  It makes you distinct, so your prop gets read with a positive feeling of your company, not the prove-it-to-me approach to an unknown bidder. 

At least at the current time, evaluation boards are people, not AI. People can be influenced. The small handful of people who will decide awards may control millions or billions, but they’re influenced into buying major programs just as they are peanut butter. Evaluators, like everyone else, are comfortable with the brands they know. Building that relationship starts with building your brand. (And of course, if your marketing is focused on the RFP, you’re already behind the curve. We’ll get further into how to align your marketing to your pipeline and how to influence perception well to the left of the RFP later).

Be the company they want to award, not the company they have to be talked into.

It Creates an Identity for Your Company

It’s not just the government that pays attention to your marketing.

It’s potential investors, too.

Marketing is the most important expression of how you want your company to be perceived. No one will ever consider your company more exciting and impressive than you do. Your marketing should set the highest bounds of how you want to be thought of.

It’s not just for your customers and your teammates. It’s your current and future employees, those invaluable assets that actually do the work for federal contractors. The same ones you are unlikely to be able to pay much more than anyone else bidding for the experience and qualifications, due to the commoditization of labor in federal contracting. Offer them an opportunity to work in something that’s meaningful in a way that doesn’t sound like everyone else. (And if the phrase, “It’s more than a job, it’s a career,” appears on your website, please stop what you’re doing, delete it, and then return.)

It becomes a clear statement of who you are, what you’re trying to achieve, and how they’ll play a part in incredibly big stories. Most employees, particularly those that want to support the government, want to be a small part of a small story. Marketing is where the big story gets defined.

Because in a sea of sameness and industry lifers, the ability to be distinct is the single greatest opportunity any contractor has.

“Baird’s Government & Defense team is a leading M&A advisor to the sector. Since 2018, we closed 64 transactions totaling over 23 billion in value. ”