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.

The lunch options surrounding our offices are, shall we say, limited. Perhaps this is one reason the line for Sweetgreen during peak lunch hours can run a solid twenty-minute wait. Diners, myself included, wait until we are ready to eat lunch to get the salad, hence the long line. Now what prevents me, or anyone else for that matter, from running out to get my salad at 11am, when the place is completely empty?

It’s a salad after all. I can stick it in the fridge and eat it whenever I want. One could ask the same question about how we purchase clothes at stores (which old-timers like myself still do). Around this time of year when stores are pushing summer clothes, the sale racks are filled with heavily discounted fall and winter wear – probably the same winter clothes you paid double or triple for just a few months ago. But no matter how enticing the sale, we often bypass the out-of-season sale items in favor of what we will wear in the here and now.

Both of these examples came to mind as I started thinking about how businesses market their products and services to – whether its b2b, b2g or b2c. You not only have to hit prospective new customers you want to convert and existing customers you want to upsell with the right message, but it has to be the right message at the right time. The right time, as is the case with winter clothes on sale as summer begins, often comes down to when prospects and customers are in the frame of mind to be thinking about your product or service. Catch them too early and they will get distracted and move on; catch them too late and, well, that’s self-explanatory I suppose.

This challenge becomes more difficult for marketers trying to blanket a large number of customers and prospects. The ability to personalize the message and the timing is why more marketers are increasingly intrigued by Account-based marketing (ABM). With ABM you concentrate efforts on a very defined set of target accounts within a market, and then utilize campaigns personalized down to the single account level.

Marketing automation leaders are also looking at ABM to round out their services portfolio. Recently inbound marketing and sales leader HubSpot invested in ABM startup Terminus as part of a $10.3 million Series B round. In its blog explaining motivation for the investment, HubSpot talks about the fact that while inbound marketing is valuable for targeting an individual throughout the purchase process and beyond, ABM is useful when there is a need to build a relationship with multiple stakeholders at once. When done right HubSpot notes, ABM is about “precision and personalization not brute force.”

If you are a CMO thinking holistically about marketing to b2b, b2c and b2g customers, Account- based marketing has earned some mindshare. Altera Group research finds that 97% of marketers surveyed said that ABM has a somewhat higher or much higher ROI than other marketing initiatives. And in its 2016 State of ABM study, market research firm SiriusDecisions found 70% of B2B companies are beginning to build ABM programs, while 87% of participants said ABM is extremely or very important to their marketing efforts.

Marketo recently highlighted five key benefits of ABM, and I think they’ve hit the nail on the head:

1. Clear ROI – Effective ABM drives clear business results. In fact, compared to other marketing initiatives, the 2014 ITSMA Account-Based Marketing Survey found that “ABM delivers the highest Return on Investment of any B2B marketing strategy or tactic.”
2. Reduced Resource Waste – Because ABM is so targeted, it allows marketers to focus their resources efficiently and run marketing programs that are specifically optimized for target accounts.
3. It’s Personal and Optimized – ABM entails personalizing your messaging and communications to specific accounts so that your campaigns resonate with these target audiences. Targeted customers are more likely to engage with content that is geared specifically to them, and is relevant to their business and stage in the buyer journey.
4. Tracking Goals & Measurement is Clear – When you’re analyzing the effectiveness of campaigns, whether email, ads, web, or events, it’s easier to draw clear conclusions, because you look at a smaller set of target accounts instead of a vast set of metrics.
5. Sales Alignment is Easier – ABM is perhaps one of the most efficient ways to align sales and marketing. This is primarily due to the fact that the marketer running an ABM program operates with a mindset very similar to sales—thinking in terms of accounts and how to target them, bring them to the table, and generate revenue from them.

Account-based marketing can help you reach the right prospect and customer with the right message at the right time. It’s 10am, so I’d love to tell you that I’m off to go buy my salad while no one is in line but…

Have a marketing or communications challenge?  Contact us.  We can help!

Google has done it again, quietly making a significant change to the way its algorithms process Google AdWords that could be significant challenge for digital marketing if not understood and managed.  At Bluetext, we closely monitor all of updates to how the Google’s search engines returns query results, and we have posted a number of blogs to let our clients know about these changes and how to address them.

This time, it’s a little different because this change, which Google announced on March 17, addresses AdWords, the tool companies use to implement their keyword purchasing strategies, rather than a revision of its organic search functionality. With this change, marketers may need to adjust their spending programs for purchasing the keywords that drive traffic to their sites.

In the past with AdWords, marketers would select a set of short-tail search terms that would be part of their search advertising mix. For example, a hotel chain might include simple key phrases like “best hotels in Nashville,” mirroring the way customers search for a list of places to stay. Up until the latest change, that exact phrase would drive the Adwords results. But Google has decided that people don’t always type their searches as that exact phrase, dropping the “in” by mistake or even misspelling it as “on.” As a result, Google has decided to expand its close variant matching capabilities to include additional rewording and reordering for exact match keywords.

What does that mean? In layman’s terms, Google will now view what it calls “function words” – that is, prepositions (in, to), conjunctions (for, but), articles (a, the) and similar “connectors” as terms that do not actually impact the “intent” behind the query. Instead, it will ignore these function words in Adwords exact match campaigns so that that the intent of the query will be more important that the precise use of these words.

Sounds like a good move, because if you search for “best hotels in Nashville” or “Nashville best hotels,” the result will be the same in AdWords.

But what if the search is for “flights to Nashville,” which isn’t the same as “flights from Nashville”? Ignoring the function words “to” or “from” would change the purpose of the query. Google says not to worry, its algorithm will recognize the difference and not ignore those words since they do impact the intent.

Hopefully, Google will make good on that promise. But advertisers who have been briefed on this revision aren’t too certain. Their carefully constructed AdWords investments might take a hit if the function words are not managed precisely to meet this new approach.

We like the old adage of “Trust but verify.” While we take Google at its word, we know there are always growing pains with these types of revisions. For our clients, we are recommending that they carefully review the terms they are including in their AdWords mix. Our advice: Be as precise as you can and factor in how these functions words might be perceived before pulling the trigger. Losing traffic to your site because of placement of a simple word should be a real concern.

Want to think more about your adWords, search and SEO strategies. Bluetext can help.

It is not hard to quickly discover, when sitting down with a client or prospect, when they feel that they are not executing efficiently. A few simple questions and they get that look indicating that they know they need help. This blog post is not another list to make you feel badly about your marketing efforts. This is a list of 10 signs that you are doing marketing right. This is by no means an exhaustive list, and is in no particular order, but hopefully when scanning you can mentally check off a handful of these to show you are taking your marketing efforts in the right direction.

1. You have an editorial calendar to align marketing efforts for thought leadership, product launches, news, events, and other corporate activities. An editorial calendar helps deliver a consistent message across all channels.
2. You are part of the right conversations. Conversations about companies, products, services, technologies, etc. are happening everywhere. It is important to be part of these.
3. Social media is integral to your marketing operations.
4. When a prospect visits you at an event, they get the same brand look/feel/attitude from your booth as when they visit your website or scan your social properties.
5. Your website is responsive, and you are starting to think of the mobile user experience first. The trend is your friend here – several recent studies show that more than half of web traffic is now coming from mobile.
6. You “own” your website, and
   don’t need to rely on IT or an outside vendor for consistent updates.
7. You are leveraging Google Analytics to ensure website content is most effectively displayed to deliver a solid experience for a variety of target personas.
8. You lead your business or marketing reviews with actual statistics on your results pulled from various tracking systems.
9. You listen to your customers. They know what they want and can be a fickle bunch across any industry.
10. Your brand tells a story. From the logo to the look to way your employees talk about you company, everything is aligned and powerful.

This list may be missing many tell-tale indictors, but it’s a good place to start. Please feel free to throw out other ideas, and we will add to this on a regular basis as markets and marketing efforts continue to diversify.

It’s the beginning of a new year, and that means that industry experts will pull out their magic eight balls, clean their Google glasses, and attempt to see into the future. But as a marketer, it’s going to be tricky to understand what trends are real, and which ones aren’t worth spending time or resources chasing. Here’s what we can confidently predict: When technology experts take a stab at projecting into the future, they both overestimate the rate of consumer adoption and underestimate the resistance from political regulation. We all love the idea of Amazon’s warehouses in the sky delivering our packages by remote-controlled drones, and we may well be able to manufacture self-driving cars that are safe and efficient. But saying yes to UAVs circling our neighborhoods and giving the green light to driverless vehicles, that’s a different story altogether.

Digital marketing is evolving by the hour, but we can make some predictions on what’s going to be important to markets this year. Most important is how to survive these changes. So what should we expect in 2017 that may be more down to earth and actually come to pass, and how should you plan your strategy?

To find out, download our 2017 Digital Marketing Survivor Guide.

Well…given the polarizing nature of the 2016 presidential election, it’s a fair bet that families will spend as much time on Thanksgiving “talking turkey” as they will devouring it. The phrase “talking turkey” has an interesting history, with some tracing it back to colonial times to describe when colonists and Indians would barter over wild turkeys.

Since then, the phrase has been primarily associated with stating something frankly and matter-of-factly. I’m sure there will be plenty of frank comments at the Thanksgiving dinner table about how a Donald Trump presidency will impact the stock market. The energy sector. Foreign relations. The economy. How about the cupcake industry? Ok, so Red Velvet cupcake sales will probably not be materially affected by a new president, but you get my point: When a seismic news event occurs, an avalanche of commentary soon follows on how, in this case, a Trump presidency will impact every nook and cranny of society.

Rather than speculate in those areas, the focus of this post will be to view Trump’s victory through a publicity lens. Is there a “teachable moment” for the marketing and public relations industry given the uniqueness of how Trump used his brand and marketed himself? What does his victory say about the value of the estimated millions upon millions of dollars in “free” earned media coverage national and local media lavished upon him for several months, reducing his need to spend on traditional TV, radio, print and online advertising?

Depending on which way you bend politically, each person will no doubt have their own opinion on why Trump won. Either way, ad and marketing agencies across the country are re-evaluating what they know and thought they knew about consumers in the wake of the election results. An article in today’s Wall Street Journal cites how ad giant McCann Worldgroup assembled top execs to dissect what Trump’s victory means from an advertising perspective. The broader article theme postulates on whether brands have overlooked the same rural voters who fell under the big data and polling radar to propel Trump in key battleground states.

The uniqueness of the presidential campaign offers some insights for marketing, advertising and PR agencies wondering if consumer behavior will match voter behavior in the coming months and years.

Modesty doesn’t always sell

Imagining how and why Trump’s message resonated with so many people harkens me to a person watching infomercials at 3am. Deep down, you know that the BackMassage 3000 can’t possibly cure your back pain in five minutes or less, but its three o’clock in the goddamn morning. You’re tired, and everything else you’ve tried hasn’t worked, so why not give it a chance?

Trump as a brand was not modest about what he thought he could accomplish during the campaign, and the results suggest many voters responded favorably to his ambitious promises. Perhaps some knew deep down that he wasn’t going to be able to deliver on all of it, but like the BackMassage 3000, it sounded bigger and bolder than anything they heard before.

Jargon can obscure the brand promise

As an acronym, keep it simple stupid (KISS) has been applied to endless use cases, from politics to sports to sales. KISS traces back to a U.S. Navy design principle in the 1960s, and has served as a reminder to avoid adding unnecessary complexity. Trump kept his messages very simple; and these messages were either embraced or reviled by voters because the messages were easy to understand. Brands often complicate the product message with jargon that may be technically accurate, but falls flat when it comes to establishing a connection with everyday users.

It pays to be memorable

And then there was one. The Republican party began the 2016 presidential campaign with 17 candidates. My bet is that if voters were asked to describe 1-2 unique ideas that the other candidates had – whether it was Scott Walker, Marco Rubio, Rick Perry or Jeb Bush – they’d be scratching their heads for quite some time.

Think about the commoditization of budget to mid-level hotel chains, who typically offered similar rooms, at similar prices, with similar amenities. How does a traveler pick one over the other? It can often come down to creating some calling card that is memorable. For Hampton Inn, it was the Belgian waffles at the free breakfast buffet. Guests remembered the Belgian Waffles, and returned to Hampton Inn just for the breakfast.

Trump marketed campaign promises that were very, very different from other candidates, which made these promises memorable and, by default, Trump memorable with voters struggling to figure out how each of the 17 candidates was difference from one another.

You can’t build a brand overnight

One of the most overlooked but critical elements of Trump’s success is that he had spent decades building an oversized brand that could be immediately activated for his campaign. This was critical, because while 17 candidates on the GOP sides sounds like a lot, many ran out of time and money to develop brand awareness – not only around who they were but what they represent. For every Jeb Bush and Chris Christie entering the fray with baseline brand awareness, there was a Bobby Jindal, George Pataki, Scott Walker and Jim Gilmore – folks known inside the beltway but certainly not to most Americans. Trump came in with an established brand known to probably most every single voter, and the media fed this brand throughout the campaign with free publicity that negated his need to advertise heavily or introduce himself to voters.

Big data has its limits

Marketers and advertisers are stepped in big data today, but the previously referenced WSJ article makes another good point: Big data may not be telling them everything they need to know, and if this data skips over important source blocks such as rural voters, then it is by default flawed data. Finally, if the data misses key demographic segments, brands might make assumptions about who their customers aspire to be. Rural voters may not aspire to have the latest iPhone that celebrities and athletes use, but may just want reliable phone and data service that can be hard to come by in rural areas.

Will Donald make sales of Red Velvet cupcakes great again? Only time will tell.