Today I was honored to be asked to speak to the University of Maryland’s Smith School of Business MBA class about creative and digital marketing. The students were senior execs spanning many Fortune 500 companies across a variety of industries.  The interactive dialogue was great.  Jeb Brown, the MBA professor, issued three mandates for my presentation:

1 – Describe what makes a bad client

2 – Describe how to get the most out of your agency

3 – Describe the way you solve clients problems 

#1 I wanted to start out with some humor. The following “client sayings” are great signals for what makes a bad client.

 

#2 When asked to talk about how to get the most out of your agency, I focused on this simple list…

• Be thoughtful

• Be patient

• Be open

• Be kind

• Be consistent

• Be appreciative

• Be budget-realistic

• Be schedule-realistic

• Be generous with your time

#3 When asked to describe the way Bluetext solves Marketing, Branding, and Communications challenges, I decided to use client case studies and present our methodology through the lens of each client’s custom solution.   Please click the following links to learn about those stories.

1 – Google

2 – Adobe

3 – FireEye

It was a real honor to talk to so many great marketing, branding and communication executives from so many industries.  The conversation was lively, with humor at times but also serious when talking about the importance of Return On Investment in the ever-changing marketing and digital world we live in.  To learn more about this presentation and Bluetext please contact me.

 

 

 

 

Over the last five years there has been a lot written about the customer journey and the changing nature of how marketers must develop and present content to address a more informed customer with so many channels for gaining knowledge and insight into your product or service.

McKinsey recently found that 50% of all interactions for a customer happen during some multi-step, multi-event journey. That is why marketing automation platforms like Marketo, Pardot, and Eloqua have gained so much attention and momentum over the past few years.

At Bluetext, we are not in the business of recommending or optimizing marketing automation platforms. Anecdotally, what we hear and see from our clients and prospects is that while their enterprises are moving to these platforms, and there are technology consultants to help optimize them, the care and feeding of them with smart, relevant and consistent content is where they struggle.

Marry that with our belief that every online or offline interaction between an enterprise and their customers must deliver the same powerful, consistent brand attitude and message, and you see where we work with enterprises in the customer journey.

If you are struggling with how to deliver a clear, consistent and powerful message throughout the customer journey process, it is time to step up. You can rest assured that your prospects have noticed and have moved on to a competitor. Here are six baby steps that can make a difference in your 2015 execution.

1. Think Strategically, Not Episodically. When a client requests a quick ad or poster for an event that has just popped up, we always try to start with the why versus the what. Ask yourself the tough questions and push everyone around you to make sure that the output they are delivering helps tell your overall product or service story.

2.Is Your Content in Context? You have a new feature in your product, hired a new executive, or won a new contract…and you want to tell the world. Ask yourself so what? Why should the customer care? If the news is going to help you drive home an important message to your customer or prospect, go for it. If not, create content in the context of your customer’s pain points and ensure you hit those messages effectively.

3. Map Out Campaigns and Plans. Create Quarterly Campaign Themes that Can Drive Every Marketing Element You Plan to execute. Make sure these campaigns align with outside factors that are impacting customers, such as budgets or the seasons, and the direction of your enterprise product roadmap.

4. Deliver with Visual Impact. The world is changing. The white paper is getting replaced by infographics. Written blogs are getting enhanced with video. Are you making sure that when a customer sees anything from your organization, it is consistent and delivered with impact? Do customers get the same experience when visiting your website on their iphone as when they visit you at a breakfast seminar?

5. Put Your Customer First. Are you talking their language? Does your CTO talk about technology for the sake of technology, or how it will impact customers? If you put yourself in their shoes and stop drinking the kool-aid during your planning process, the end content and result will always be better.

6. Analyze. Analyze. Analyze. Not much needs to be said here. If you can’t measure it then you definitely can’t manage it.

Are you ready to step up your game in 2015? Whatever marketing platform you are using, you need to make sure that you are following these steps to take your prospects on a meaningful, contextual journey. We can help. Give us a call. Having an agency riding shotgun on this process can remove a lot of risk and ensure every deliverable is as impactful as possible.

In this week in 1930, following a desperate search by the radio industry for a magic bullet to increase advertising revenue, the first soap opera was born. The industry managed to convince manufacturers of household goods to sponsor programming content that appealed to their primary consumers and “Painted Dreams” debuted on WGN in Chicago – its first sponsor was no other than Colgate-Palmolive.

It didn’t take long for Proctor & Gamble to jump in and up the game with its own innovation – producing and sponsoring its own branded programming content as consumers migrated from radio to TV. That run lasted 80 years and sparked a sudden and seismic shift in the way consumers digested content.

Fast forward to the present, and technology has forced marketers to become both publishers and innovators of branded content to keep up and stay engaged with a customer whose primary screen of interest now changes by the minute.

Chief among them are the hot Cyber Security brands that have stormed onto the global technology stage – in such masse that they are desperately seeking a way to differentiate themselves and appeal to their primary customers. And just like P&G did in the 1930s – they too are producing and sponsoring their own branded content. And given the endless number of channels their customers can chose to digest it, there is no shortage of compelling examples.

Identity solutions leader Lexis Nexis’ “Fraud of the Day” franchise hits it on the nose with breach stories that keep every potential customer of theirs wide awake at night and staring at the ceiling. A simple yet brilliant concept to keep their brand in front of them daily in a contextually relevant way.

http://www.fraudoftheday.com/

Intel & Toshiba pushed the boundaries of branded content with “The Power Inside” a blockbuster film that combined social media and technology to create an immersive, participatory experience for their primary consumer to experience their technology against the backdrop of a full feature motion picture.

http://www.insidefilms.com/en/

Palo Alto Networks has taken a less risky, more proactive and automated approach of creating a library of branded content that they license to partners and re-sellers to co-brand and amplify their industry focused solutions through what we like to call “social shrapnel” to extend the reach of their message.

http://www.computerlinks.com/fms/13679.173466_

McAfee went much farther than a library…they hired Bluetext to build an entire virtual agency on The Mall in Washington – 10 years into the future. “Future Agency” – the rich, immersive and interactive experience we created is a branded “house of content” that their primary consumer can literally fly through to access all things McAfee – branded content so appealing that it drove average time of engagement beyond the six minute mark.

http://bluetext.com/futureagency/

What does this all mean for the modern marketer in today’s increasingly digital environment? That branded content has worked effectively for nearly 100 years to engage the primary consumers it was intended to appeal to, enhanced, of course, by the technology that takes that marketing one step farther by allowing us to interact with it and share it to the friends and colleagues we think it will most appeal to. The only thing that’s changed is how they digest it.

As you plan your marketing strategy to drive visibility and demand for your brand in the red hot and highly competitive cyber security space, branded content can and should play a critical role. Even more critical is finding an agency partner with the creative firepower to “paint your dream”  and drive customer engagement with a truly differentiated and professionalized branded content experience.

 

The Content Marketing Institute defines content marketing as “…a marketing technique of creating and distributing relevant and valuable content to attract, acquire, and engage a clearly defined and understood target audience – with the objective of driving profitable customer action.”

This definition is of course part and parcel to a CMO’s core objectives, which is why marketing teams are devoting a greater share of budget and resources to content marketing. In a 2014 survey of Fortune 500 CMOs conducted by The CMO Club and Spredfast, 60 percent of respondents intend to increase their content marketing budgets. Their enthusiasm is not based on a “cross our fingers and hope it works” approach; almost two-thirds (66%) of CMOs are predicting a positive return on investment (ROI) from their content marketing campaigns.

As CMOs gain confidence directing more resources and budget towards content marketing, there is very likely a team within the organization growing less sure of its footing within the content ecosystem – public relations. There is irony here, as public relations professionals no doubt read the content marketing definition and grumble to themselves (or perhaps out loud), “sorry to burst your bubble here, but we’ve been doing this content marketing thing for quite some time.”

This is true, to an extent. The efforts may not always be branded in this fashion or as inclusive of as many channels, but PR professionals have long been tasked to create and distribute high-strategy content. And therein lies the danger; that CMOs may forge ahead with content marketing and pull in the PR team as an afterthought, or not at all. This approach threatens to create counter-productive silos by leaving capable, experienced PR teams without a role that can add the most value to the organization.

Because content marketing increasingly lives in an organizational gray area, CMOs with ownership of content marketing budget, staff, and direction should consider the following to fully maximize the value of PR staff, and ultimately the content marketing program itself:

Recognize budgets are growing, but not infinite

Content marketing budgets are expanding, but unless CMOs are seeing immediate, across-the-board ROI it will be difficult to get blank checks from CXOs. Earned media is a no-cost (beyond labor time) investment that can allow content marketing efforts to continue interrupted – even during periods when budget is not allocated to “paid media” channels.

While drawing a straight line between media relations and lead generation or website visits can be difficult to see, it is there. Earned media can drive down customer acquisition costs for a content marketing campaign, as long as the right measurement tools are in place to capture the results of these earned media efforts.

Earned media remains top purchase influencer

Not only can earned media be the most cost-effective content marketing channel for CMOs, it can also be the most effective. A 2014 Nielsen in-lab study commissioned by inPowered exposed consumers to three content sources: third party news and other credible sources (earned media), branded content (owned media), and user-generated content (reviews, etc.). Not surprisingly, earned media emerged as the most effective information source at all stages of the purchase lifecycle and across all product categories. And the difference was not subtle; against branded content, earned media was found to be 80 percent more effective at the bottom-of-the-funnel or purchase consideration stage, 80 percent more effective at the middle-of-the-funnel or affinity stage, and 38 percent more effective at the top-of-the-funnel or familiarity stage.

Bottom line: content marketing initiatives are ultimately judged by sales and revenue generation, and earned media continues to prove itself as a powerful purchasing influencer.

Be cognizant of PR paranoia

The current state of media likely has your PR team fairly freaked out at this point. Print publications continue to disintegrate faster than BlackBerry’s market share, and chasing the social media payoff pot of gold is a tedious exercise. If the CMO shuts PR out of content marketing strategy and execution, or brings the team in so late that it is relegated to a tactical role, significant PR brainpower is going to be left rotting on the sidelines. Identify areas where public relations – whether it is an internal team or external agency – can add the most value, and then provide them with the mandate and resources to execute in those areas.

All content writers are not created equal

Marketing teams excel at developing content designed to sell – whether it is through collateral that provides air cover for the sales team, website and landing page content that can convert leads, advertising copy, etc. Editorial content opportunities however, tilt increasingly towards sponsored content, advertorials, and even earned thought leadership content that requires a much softer sell. In fact, much of the time this type of copy cannot reference the company’s product/service or be in any way self-promotional.

PR teams understand how to walk the tightrope of creating and placing content that communicates core messages without reading like overt marketing copy, and CMOs should leverage this expertise.

Don’t let content volume kill content marketing

Ending up with too much of a good thing is problematic enough – the gourmet cupcake craze is Exhibit A of that fact. Too much of a bad thing is even worse, and therein lies the danger for content marketing operations that spew out page after page of useless content. PR teams are a proven source of valuable content, understanding that low-quality articles cannot be placed in reputable, high impact articles.

$135 billion will be spent on new digital marketing collateral (content) in 2014, and automation tools will spike this volume even further. In this scenario, quality content becomes the great unequalizer for CMOs to differentiate their products, services and brand.

Who doesn’t like inbound leads? The fruit of your content marketing labor is finally coming to bear. You sit back and the emails and calls are flying in. It is the ultimate feeling for a marketer across any industry.

Before you run to the bank, however, it is smart to ask if your website and diready to handle the leads? At Bluetext, we believe that focusing on your net is often as important as your bait.

Websites need to be structured a specific way to effectively handle inbound leads. Inbound marketing is a science and that science needs to be applied to your entire website and landing page eco-system.

Here are 10 ways to critique your site:

1. This is not your Father’s responsive website…

Does your website have iWatch and other wearables in the responsive requirements as your site evolves? The form factor requirements are changing so fast that you must make sure your site is built in a responsive manner to be able to scale.

2. Is your net sticky?

Have you looked at your retention analytics lately? How are people navigating your site? Have you buried the most impactful content elements?

3. ABC – Always be closing?

It is all about clear and easy conversion throughout the entire site. Unless prompted, most visitors will browse and then run for the hills. Make sure that the entire site, including the homepage and all interior pages, are optimized for lead capture and conversion? Does every blog post end with an “ask”? Are you asking visitors to download something premium and relevant? Are you suggesting that they follow the author or the company brand? You have to be very aggressive and show a full commitment to this opt-in.

4. Have you done an SEO audit of your website in the last year?

Remember, algorithms change. Rules change. Bing continues its growth. YouTube is more important than ever as the #3 search engine. Make sure to continuously review your keywords to capture both short and long tail opportunities.

5. What are you doing to differentiate your user experiences to drive engagement with your brand online?

Are you presenting content in new and unique ways? We have done some recent work with CSC (www.csc.com/dbc) and McAfee (www.bluetext.com/futureagency.com) to help them create virtual briefing centers to get their content out virtually to create very powerful experiences.

6. Do you have a comprehensive landing page ecosystem to address all of your organizational KPIs?

Make sure to think through all of your metrics and have a clear, concise offer to address all of them.

7. Are you updating your programmatic digital advertising buys with retargeting and other social media buying as they are evolving?

CRM and adtech are getting more close than ever. It is important to ensure that they are in synch to make sure your campaigns work as hard as they can.

8. Hide the Keywords

Get the keywords out of your meta header. Google doesn’t value them and you are sharing your seo strategy with your competitors.

9. Reverse the IP and Get Smart About Your Traffic

Many off the shelf tools can help you understand your traffic with reverse IP matching technology to let you know which businesses are reviewing your site. This is great information to share with the sales team.

10. Commit to video and interactive content

The world is changing. Think about how people are consuming data. Make sure that you are modernizing your content and delivering it in new and unique ways.

Messaging seems more like a PR term than a marketing creed, but in reality key messages are perhaps the most important element of every marketing campaign. While paring down thoughts, opinions and aspirations to effective messages can be a daunting task, it is often the first step in launching a new campaign. It informs not just the way you talk about your brand, but also its look and feel and the direction of the creative. It conveys the themes that you are driving into the market.

Solid messaging is integral to many campaign assets, including campaign microsites and landing pages. It often drives blog posts from top executives as well as infographics. And it can be a key element in any organization’s search strategy.

Every new campaign should begin with a process that is designed to identify the right messaging, and—in the cases where that messaging doesn’t exist or needs refinement—develop fresh messaging. Here are seven tips for developing the best messaging to insure that your campaigns will be heard by the right audience:

1. Don’t reinvent the wheel, or yourselves. Begin with a thorough review of existing messaging to see if that is still resonating and hitting the intended mark. If there are new products or services, see if the existing messaging applies, or if more likely you will need some new directions.
2. See what your competitors are up to. Conduct a thorough competitive analysis as to how they are positioning themselves in the market through their web site, digital campaigns, and advertising. If you have recent market research, that should be part of the review. If not, additional research might be a good idea if time and budget permit.
3. Talk to a wide range of stakeholders. Initiate a series of in-depth interviews with key executives, members of the sales and marketing teams, and external stakeholders that range from customers to channel partners to board members. These interviews should be structured with similar lines of questions in order to get results that can be compared and synthesized. But also make sure to let these interviews have some free flow of discussion to go into new directions and ideas for the brand.
4. Get buy-in from the team. Everyone will have an opinion on new messaging. It’s better to have that aired before implementing it. One of the best ways to reach consensus and maintain support is through a Message Summit, a closed door meeting with cell phones and laptops offs that includes the marketing team and key executives. The purpose of this meeting is to explore in-depth what you’ve learned, what you’re hearing and your initial thoughts, and to begin to gain perspectives how best to present the brand in the market. What is most important in the Summit is obtaining executive buy-in to the direction that you want to go. The goal is to reach consensus, not necessarily on the exact wording of the key messages, but on the tone and direction.
5. Put it on paper. Follow up with a Message Guide to allow the team to respond to the proposed wording from the Message Summit.
6. Follow the three “C”s. The best messages need to be Clear, Concise and Compelling:
   1. Clear is not as simple at it might look. There’s a great video of a 60 Minutes profile of Razorfish, the web enablement company. The reporter repeatedly asks the two Razorfish founders what the company does, and they are absolutely unable to answer the question without slipping into meaningless jargon. The frustrated reporter finally tries to explain himself what the company does–hardly an effective way of talking about your band. A clear message will remove uncertainty and insure that your target audience recognizes what you are trying to tell them.
   2. Concise is equally important. Brevity is important not just for campaign headlines, but also as the message plays out across a wide variety of collateral, including ads, direct mail and social media. In most cases, there just won’t be the space or the attention span to have a long message.
   3. Insuring that the message is Compelling may be the most difficult challenge, but it deserves the most attention. It is easy to have a message that might be an accurate portrayal of your products or solutions but that doesn’t convey the sense of value that you bring to market. A compelling message will resonate with key target audiences and entice them to want to learn more, to click on a button and download a piece of premium content, and ultimately to enter into the sales funnel.
   4. Align to your SEO. The right keywords based on search engine analytics can give a big lift to your search results. Make sure those terms are part of the your messaging, and use them strategically across your digital platforms. This can boost your rankings dramatically is best practices are followed.

The final messages can be leveraged for headlines and text throughout the marketing assets, and can jump-start the creative process of the right look and feel of the brand. They will give you the right tone to inform only the color palette and style but also the types of images that might be selected. It can extend to a refresh of the logo itself.

Messaging is too important to take casually or be an after-thought. A regular review of the messaging should be an integral part of every brand’s marketing programs.

If you canvas the most respected marketing decision makers, each can no doubt share examples of bold, innovative marketing programs that did not work out. But the enemy of marketing innovation isn’t failure, its repetition; repeating the same approach again and again – even if the results do not meet expectations. As you sit down to create your marketing plan for 2015 and evaluate what worked and what came up short this year, here are six ideas to consider if you are not driving the amount of visibility, buzz and sales that you expect.

 

1. Throw out the Baby with the Bathwater. Sometimes you need to cut your losses. A poorly designed website, a poorly received message, or a poorly produced video which cost a lot of money may be hindering your ability to market your company and get your message out. Be honest about what is working and be prepared to scrap that campaign which you spent a lot of money on.
2. Put an influential name or face to your product or company. This is a strategy that has been written about extensively with clear results. Our clients have contracted with celebrities including Lewis Black, Joe Torre, and Frank Abagnale to put a face to their brand. The celebrity can be leveraged for a variety of activities, including social media, customer events, and immediate recognition across ads, etc. Please reference this blog post for more on this tactic – http://bluetext.com/celebrity/.
3. Sometimes the Local is the Way to Go. The content marketing train is zooming across corporate America, much to the displeasure of the PR budget. It is not the only way to get to your destination however. PR has a very important place within every marketing budget. While many consider it to be an old school tactic, the validation you can receive from a well-placed story about your product or service can be worth 10x the investment if done right. My partner Brian Lustig will be writing about this in a blog post next week.
4. Go Out on a Limb with a Sponsorship. How many times have you said that my company does not have the budget to do a major sponsorship? Take a step back to look at the number of events you have sponsored with a lame table top to appease a sales representative where no viable leads came out of it. Those costs add up. Take that money and do sponsored Tweets, webinars or branded social properties, or sponsor a well-known organization that will create some buzz for your company. This can be measured in many ways and is often used to put a company, product or service on the map.
5. Zig When your Market is Zagging. The best marketers are known for executing bold campaigns to stand out in crowded markets. How bold are you willing to go? Are you marketing to save your job or get your next one? I was in a pitch the other day where the CEO of a start-up SaaS company talked about taking on an entire industry.
6. Go Mobile First. Anyone that tells you that you don’t need to worry about mobile visitors and site traffic has ocean front property in South Florida to sell you. Sure, we can all look at the analytics and it is true that data trumps opinion, but mobile is only getting more popular and the user experience should be well designed for a mobile world. Responsive design is clearly the direction that the industry is headed and one that you must deploy to stay relevant for the long term.

 

Are you ready to get started? Are you ready to break new ground with your marketing program? Don’t look now but unless your foot is on the pedal then your competitors will leave you in the rear view mirror…and that is not a place that most marketers want to be.

 

 

Are you planning to integrate or upgrade your content marketing into your online marketing strategy? Not sure where to begin? Here is a basic rundown of how to create an effective content marketing strategy.

 

1. Establish Your Conceptual Target

An effective content marketing strategy must begin with this first critical step. The goal is typically pursuing new customer opportunities while preserving your core customer base. Understanding who they are, where their interests lie and how to get them to take action and engage with your brand is key to developing your content strategy.

2. Don’t be a One Hit Wonder

As opposed to advertising – which is driven by “The Big Idea” – to stay fresh and engaging, your content marketing strategy needs to offer a variety of premium content on a number of contextually relevant topics When content marketing teams are under resourced, they tend to gravitate back to the big idea and get boxed into a an approach that’s not scalable long term.

 

3. Use an Editorial Approach

Too many content marketing programs fail in the planning phases of the program because the a long term content strategy has not been fully thought out – so the content being developed using a shoot from the hip approach tends to be more episodic than strategic. The most effective way to avoid failure is to identify specific themes for your content strategy that align with the cyclical business or personal needs of your target audience

 

4. Be Contextually Relevant

The content you develop must be interesting, engaging and above all else, relevant. Your conceptual target should be able to quickly connect the dots between his challenges and the capabilities you can offer to overcome them – the more contextually relevant your content is to them the easier they will be able to make that connection

 

5. Process Driven Approach

Since content marketing is still a relatively new approach, a lot of companies are not investing adequate resources or the defined process that planning, managing and publishing an adequate amount content requires. Building a solid content marketing workflow process, and investing in the necessary resources to implement it – whether internal or external – are critical to your success.

6. Collaboration is Key

As with any emerging marketing channel – and social media is a good example of this -there is an internal struggle over which department actually “owns” it. Until that’s figured out, many companies will make it a shared responsibility between their PR, Advertising and Creative departments – passing the content baton from one silo to the next with no clear strategy. If you must borrow the resources, make sure there is a coordinated effort to collaborate as a team on the themes, goals and structure of your content marketing program.

7. Cadence and Consistency

When creating your content strategy, be sure to decide on the frequency of your content marketing so that once your audience is engaged, they stay engaged. Having a consistent and predictable flow of content that your customer can rely on is critical to establishing brand credibility.

8. Use the Right Channels

Instead of hoping your audience stumbles upon you, be sure to publish your content where they already are – in their own environment where they will be more willing to engage. Consider promoting your content on broader social sites like Twitter can make it go viral. If the content is what readers are looking for, they won’t hesitate to share – and that’s the holy grail of content marketing.

9. Leverage SEO

A solid content marketing strategy geared toward the right audience is worthless if it doesn’t reach that audience one way or the other. One of the most effective ways to leverage that content is to employ a strong SEO strategy to incorporate keywords that your customers are using to search for the solutions you are ultimately trying to sell to them