Ever since Google’s last significant evolution of its search engine algorithm, known as Hummingbird, the marketing world has been treading water trying to understand how to drive search traffic to digital campaigns and websites. In the pre-Hummingbird era, search could be gamed by gaining multiple links back to a page and installing keywords throughout the content. So-called “Black Hat” experts charged a lot of money to get around the rules. In today’s Hummingbird era, it’s no longer only about keywords, but rather having good content with a smart keyword strategy that is relevant to the target audience. Attempting to manipulate the system through meaningless links and keyword overload no longer affects the search results.

While the Google algorithm is extremely complex, SEO itself is not complicated. It’s actually very easy to understand. In sum, Google’s algorithms are designed to serve the best, most relevant content to users. That’s the filter that any company or organization needs to use when deciding whether any particular activity that is part of your online strategy will have an impact on your SEO.

It’s just difficult to execute.

For example, if you’re thinking about blasting a request to bloggers to link back to your site, don’t bother. If they haven’t created good content, it won’t make a difference. Want to change the title of every page on your site to your key search term? It won’t work. Thinking about jamming every keyword into a blog post? If it’s not good content, don’t do it.

The challenge is determining the definition of “good content,” at least as far as Google is concerned. That’s where the hard work begins. Good content is not a subjective evaluation, but rather an analysis that the web page or blog post is relevant to users as measured both by the type of content and the extent of its sharing by other influential users. Let’s break those apart and take a closer look.

The merit of the content is important because if Hummingbird detects that it’s crammed full of keywords, or that it is copied from other sites or even within other pages of the same site, it will quickly discount the relevance. The Google algorithm will see right through those types of attempts to create SEO-weighted pages. Good content needs to be original and unique.

More importantly, good content is also a measurement of how much that content is linked to or shared by influential sites and individuals. When you have created a blog post or web page with good, relevant content, it is vital to share this with your intended audience and with influencers that they trust. This is the hard part. There are no shortcuts when it comes to developing good content and in getting it in front of your audience. Nor are there easy ways to identify trusted influencers and get the content in front of them.

For the content itself, the goal is not just to be informative and provide the types of information that the target audience is seeking, although that is important. The goal is also to have that information shared, whether via social media platforms or through other sites and feeds. That means it must be interesting and sometimes even provocative so that the intended audience takes the next step and slips it into its own networks. It should challenge the conventional wisdom, offer valuable and actionable insights and educate the audience with information not already known. And it must be relevant to the audience.

How do you find the right influencers for your audience? That’s not easy, either. At Bluetext, we do in-depth research into who is talking about the topics and issues important to our client campaigns, and then evaluate each of those potential influencers to determine the size and reach of their audience. These can include industry insiders, trade journalists and columnists, government officials, and academic experts.

A solid SEO strategy takes time and patience, and a lot of hard work. It’s not complicated, but it is difficult.

Blackphone, powered by Silent Circle – the most secure solution in mobile privacy – launched earlier this year at the Mobile World Congress with such an overwhelming response to the user privacy features delivered by the phone’s state of the art PrivatOS operating system that MIT Technology Review recognized Blackphone on its prestigious list of the “10 Breakthrough Technologies” of 2014.”

When Switzerland based Blackphone and Silent Circle sought out an agency partner to deliver their story – and the freedom of privacy their new encryption technology brings to the world – they chose Bluetext. To coincide with the announcement that Blackphone handsets have started shipping to the device’s first pre-order customers around the world, Bluetext officially launched the brand across Europe and the Middle East via a trio of in-flight campaigns featured in Lufthansa, Emirates Air and American Airlines that you will have the benefit of seeing if you are traveling along any of those carrier’e major routes across the region this summer.

The first campaign – “Privacy. Purpose Built” – highlight’s the phone’s key differentiator – a device built from the ground up by a privacy company versus a privacy ‘bolt-on’ by a device manufacturer. The inherent beauty in the phone’s elegant simplicity gave us the license to let the device itself standout as the focal point of the artwork for the campaign.

The second, “Whisper” campaign focuses on the security and peace of mind delivered across 130 countries worldwide by Silent Circle, the device’s hard core, ultrasecure PrivatOS operating system to protect what matters most…your personal privacy.

The numbers don’t lie. Traditional advertising, including online banners, print and broadcast, is becoming less effective by the minute. Business consumers know how to tune it out and have all the tools to avoid it. In your buyer’s eye, paid media is practically invisible.

So what is the alternative? First and foremost, it’s delivering content that the buyer wants and needs in order to address their challenges and understand your solution. This is the essence of today’s content marketing. It provides a steady stream of engaging content rather than traditional ads that may be intrusive and not relevant. The primary reason for this is that buyers have shown they are more apt to respond to content that addresses their pain that they opted in for versus the intrusiveness of content that is pushed on them touting a product or service they didn’t request.

Marketing allows marketers to develop a closer bond with buyers by delivering contextually relevant information that makes them more intelligent. In turn, buyers reward them with their business and loyalty. So that begs the question…isn’t it better to “own” the content rather than “rent” the real estate for traditional paid media?

There are dozens of brand studies that show content marketing generates upwards of two-and-a-half times the return on investment for every $1,000 invested in “owned” versus “rented” media. This finding makes sense based on the widely accepted assumption that most B2B buyers have already gone through 70% of their buying journey – having identified their challenge as well as potential solution providers – by the time they are ready to buy.

According to Ad Age’s BtoB Marketing Outlook Survey, 75.1 percent of B2B marketers will invest more in their content campaigns in 2014 than last year. Smart marketers are going to funnel more of their budget toward content creation, forcing them to make hard decisions about where to pull that money from. Advertising is set up to be the fall guy.

Marketers need to pay close attention to these changing dynamics. Advertising will always have a place in marketing budgets, but for the growing number of us that live and die by ROI, having an effective content marketing publishing and distribution strategy will be a top priority in 2015. What’s in your budget?

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.

In an era of budget cuts and dwindling resources, hundreds of government organizations are achieving real success and showing a measurable return on investment using GovDelivery’s communications platform to communicate their messages and services.

Bluetext was hired by GovDelivery to help them reach public sector organizations who can benefit with tremendous cost savings while reaching more people, automating complex communications and driving mission value through deeper engagement with the public.

Bluetext conceived and designed a responsive landing page with an infographic demonstrating the benefits of using GovDelivery for Government agencies as the centerpiece of the campaign. We also developed a responsive email template and infographic poster to be used across many marketing channels.

CSC turned to Bluetext to design and launch an industry-specific landing page around its approach to targeting the requirements of the manufacturing industry. CSC’s vision is called Orchestrated Manufacturing, and it represents an age where manufacturing processes are orchestrated through digital interactions and cyber-physical production systems. CSC is working with clients to implement advanced solutions that leverage a new generation of systems is providing real-time awareness and autonomic interactions between machines, systems, assets and things.

Bluetext worked with CSC’s digital brand marketing team, as well as their Manufacturing industry marketing team, to design a landing page unlike anything CSC has ever launched inside of its corporate domain. It includes a modern design with one long, scrolling page to showcase the vision and its practical application to the market, and then lead visitors to download key content and interact with CSC.

At Bluetext, we find that many large companies with diverse industry focuses and solution offerings sometimes make it hard for target audiences to find exactly what they are looking for. The idea behind Orchestrated Manufacturing is for CSC to tell its story in a unique way with an online and offline strategy to drive a consistent visual message into the market. The landing page is complemented with two videos that can be used by sales teams to succinctly tell the story, as well as a highly produced poster for sharing at events.

Please check it out at www.csc.com/om. We would love to hear about how you are designing landing pages targeting unique audience groups and what strategies you are finding work best.

Something has happened on the way to marketing automation domination: brands are realizing that they didn’t have as much content as they believed; had a large quantity of content that was low quality; or burned through its content reserve and lacked the time, focus or resources to maintain the required pace of content creation. Out of this realization we are starting to see startups and even established players develop tools to automate content creation and delivery.

My latest PR Week Hub Comms article looks at the key role content automation may plan for companies seeking to maximize the ROI marketing automation can deliver.

We asked 150 top government executives who are involved in the decision-making process for IT purchases, both as decision makers and as individuals who have input into decisions, how they get information to help inform IT decisions.

Communicating Your Brand Position
When it comes to learning about new IT services, solutions and products, 44 percent report having previously worked with a contractor or hearing good things about that contractor from others as most important. But nearly the same number of those respondents—39 percent– find that vendor websites are important. Following closely behind are technology trade publications (38 percent). Further down the lists are trade shows (25 percent), webinars (23 Percent) and social media (21 percent).

What this means is that a marketing organization that targets the government market needs to have to a well-thought out mix of marketing activities that includes:

• Messaging to make sure that decision-makers understand your value proposition;
• A dedicated website or landing page that targets this market; and
• A thought leadership campaign that gets visibility in key trade publications.

Trade shows, webinars and social media need to play a part in that mix, proportional to their importance, leveraged strategically to reach the part of the audience that does rely on these tactics.

What Channels do Decision-Makers Use
Government IT decision makers want information on products and solutions, and they want to be able to find it easily and targeted to them. In our survey, 43 percent found most useful an information website on that solution, and 30 percent said that specific digital campaigns were effective for them. Less useful are radio spots (16 percent) and banner ads (13 percent).

Our takeaway is that this target audience is happy to go to your website and engage with your digital campaigns if they are providing the needed information to evaluate their IT challenges. What’s important is having a website, landing page or digital campaign that does speak to their mission needs and isn”t hidden behind When the blood circulates to the soles, and the skin draws the toxins from the blood to the outer layer, the Foot Pad can absorb eliminated toxins released from the acupuncture points. a larger, commercial-markets focused site.

Premium Content Has Great Value
We asked how likely these decision-makers would be to download information to learn about new IT services, solutions and products. Forty-three percent said they would download a white paper or case study, while an additional 33 percent said the same for an infographic and 31 percent for other premium content.

Good content is in demand, and when you bring these target audiences to your website or digital campaign, it is important to have more in-depth information to generate leads and create engagement. A well-designed white paper or case study that hits their mission challenges and is thoughtful and accessible is valued by this audience. So will an infographic that helps tell the story or other types of premium content, including a well-produced video or presentation via SlideShare.

The lesson from this research is not that one strategy is favored over another. Resources need to be allocated through a blend of activities that map to how these audiences prefer to get the information they need. At Bluetext, we believe that a successful marketing campaign for the government customer includes a blend of tactics that work together in context to deliver a powerful, consistent message on a consistent basis.

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).

In an effort to rally its thousands of sales and customer facing teams at its Global Sales Conference in Dallas in April 2014, CSC turned to Bluetext to conceptualize and deliver a brand launch video and interactive experience around the key technology conversations that the company is focused on for the year ahead. The concepts of partnership and innovation, based on CSC’s decades of experience, came to life in an effort to position the company for the next wave of technology trends facing enterprises across the globe.

Bluetext built a storyboard concept around the “Road to Next-Gen IT”, and designed animated illustrations weaved throughout the video to most effectively tell the story. Now Bluetext is working on a virtual briefing center where CSC’s clients and entire ecosystem can come to learn more about these key technology conversations, set to launch in the next few months.

“Your focus, partnership and can-do attitude allowed us to deliver a complex world-class project in record time. Your ability to co-imagine and co-create with us is appreciated and valued greatly.”

Director of Global Brand & Digital Marketing
CSC