As part three of our Top Marketing Trends 2019 series, with this post, we are focusing on the look and usability of one a brand’s most valuable marketing and revenue asset – the website. Here are our top website design trends for 2019, culled from our insights into the market, feedback from clients, and discussions with top marketing industry experts.

  1. Expect a bold new look from many top brands. Bright colors are in because of its ability to draw attention quickly. And in today’s crowded online market, the competition is fierce to stand out from the crowd. Beyond its power to stand out, brands are more willing to be seen as a bold organization. As a result, we are seeing more clients wanting to boldly take risks with color variations, blends, and saturation.
  2. Typography will follow this trend. Look for bolder typography with large fonts that dominate the page. Expect to see less of the cursive style and thin lines, and more fonts that allow letters to clear, obvious, and thick. Brands will be better able to express themselves with a bolder style.
  3. Look for more custom illustrations. It’s hard to stand out from your competitors when everyone is using similar stock photos. Customers gravitate towards brands that are authentic and appear confident in the market, and stock photos are neither. Customer illustrations give a brand a platform to express itself, tell its story and differentiate itself in the market.
  4. Integrated animations will help improve navigation. This trend will continue at high speed in 2019. Also called micro-animations, these features can both grab users attention and guide them on their journey through the website by showing them that they are in the right place and that they’ve taken the intended action.
  5. Mobile first design. Okay, we’ve been saying this for several years now, but it’s even more important. According to a recent report from Google, “Every day, people are becoming more reliant on their smartphones to help make last-minute purchases or spur-of-the-moment decisions. In fact, smartphone users are 50% more likely to expect to purchase something immediately while using their smartphone compared to a year ago.”

Learn how Bluetext can help you make the most of the top marketing trends for 2019.

We recently launched our Top Marketing Trends 2019 series, that will take a close look at what digital marketers should expect for next year. We started with privacy because of a sea change in consumer attitudes about their online privacy over the past 18 months – much of it the result of huge changes in policy around the world, like the European Union’s GDPR requirements, as well as data breaches that put a massive number of Americans at risk. In our post last week, we dove into what GDPR means for marketers here in the U.S.

In today’s post, we will examine changes resulting from Facebook’s sale of its data to Cambridge Analytica, which used the information on Facebook users for controversial political targeting. Why is this a top marketing trend for 2019? Because the realization of how social media platforms like Facebook are using consumer information has had a significant impact on Facebook’s users and financial status, a trend that will extend to other social media outlets in the coming year.

Here are out three key takeaways from the Facebook fiasco that will have a significant impact on digital marketers:

The challenge with marketers who want to leverage platforms like Facebook to reach their target audiences is that the social media companies themselves are just now putting in place consumer safeguards about how their data is being used- in the face of serious public and political pressure. We all know that consumers want an easy experience when looking to research or purchase on the internet, which is what we marketers want, as well. Now that consumers see that this convenience comes at a cost, they want more control over how their personal information is used.

Our first takeaway for 2019: There’s a big difference between serving the consumer’s interest and using that same data when it doesn’t benefit that individual. Our recommendation is to take a close review of how you use your customer data and make sure it actually serves the customer.

Another challenge is expectations. Having a privacy policy at the bottom of your website, filled with unintelligible legalese that no consumer is ever going to read or understand, isn’t going to be enough. That CYA language needs to become useful.

Our second takeaway for 2019: Give visitors to your website real choices that they can understand over how their information is used. One idea that is making headway is having a privacy dashboard that is readily accessed by visitors, where they can make their own decisions about their data.

Finally, we all need to know who we are dealing with when it comes to third-party vendors. The issue with Cambridge Analytics was not simply that Facebook was providing data to an outside entity – after all, that is its business model, and in our opinion, there is nothing wrong with that when used appropriately. The scandal was that the outside firm was using the data for ways that Facebook users would never have sanctioned – to influence how they vote in elections.

Our third takeaway for 2019: Make sure you know your partners, including data brokers and ad buyers, and exactly what they are doing with the information. Ask them if they are acquiring personal data without the user’s permission. It won’t be enough to claim ignorance about your third-party vendors.

In our next post on top marketing trends 2019, we’ll look at website design and build, and what to expect next year.

Learn how Bluetext can help you make the most of the top marketing trends for 2019.

In our previous blog post, we discussed how top marketing firms take a disciplined approach to digital campaigns in order to measure, analyze, and optimize results throughout the campaign. In this post, we will talk about our process of how top marketing firms invest time and energy into the creative approach that needs to grab audiences’ attention in order to convert them into a customer.

At Bluetext, we believe that great creative approaches come from an organized process that brings in fresh minds that work across different agency disciplines. First and foremost, we go beyond the client team to engage in an agency-wide brainstorm, often getting the best ideas from colleagues who may not have ever touched the particular client. But we don’t just through them in a room and ask them to come up with great ideas. Instead, we rely on the initial team members to prepare a thorough creative brief based on the in-depth discovery that begins our process.

That brief will be based on a number of research elements, including:

  • The key target audiences, including what is likely to motivate them to take action and engage with the campaign.
  • The campaign’s top messaging. What do we want to get across to the target audiences that will get them to pay attention?
  • Any available market research. What’s already out there to help us design the campaign, and is there additional research that needs to take place?
  • The competitive landscape. What are the messages that competitors are using, and what creative are they using in their marketing?
  • The client’s attitude towards the campaign. How innovative or clever is the client willing to be in this campaign? Does it need to be a conservative approach, or can something a little more edgy we acceptable?

This brief provides our team members with the guidance they need to start thinking about a creative approach that will succeed for our campaigns without reinventing the wheel or sending them down a path that we already know will not be effective.

In our next post, we will explore some recent creative examples that bring this approach altogether as part of the process that top marketing firms employ to achieve success for their clients.

Learn How Bluetext Can Help Design and Execute Your Next Digital Campaign!

Our association clients often ask us what our process is for developing digital campaigns that will deliver the best results, whether that’s awareness for their brand or attendance for their conferences and events. Top marketing firms understand that a strong, repeatable process is key to getting the right messages and creative to the right audiences at the right time. They also know that analyzing results on a continual basis is the only way to optimize performance by revising and adjusting when needed.

At Bluetext, we take a disciplined approach to every campaign, and that begins with discovery. We start by asking three questions:

  1. What is the goal of the campaign?
  2. Who are the target audiences?
  3. What do you want them to do?

These might sound like simple questions, but you might be surprised at the discussion that follows within the association world to get to an agreement on each of those. Top marketing firms like Bluetext know that we have to act as both a facilitator and as a honest broker who can push each stakeholder to reach that agreement. The reason is that at most membership and trade associations, there are different “clients” who have different goals for each campaign. In some cases, it might be membership renewal, while for others in the same organization it might be registration for an event that drives revenue. For others, it might be awareness of the services that the association provides.

But it’s not until that decision is made that we can move on to the next question: Who are you targeting? Again, that might sound simple, but we’ve witnessed our share of knock-down, dragged-out fights inside organizations where stakeholders have a different opinion of the audience. In some cases, part of the client team might be focused on entry-level IT professionals for their particular association, while their colleagues might believe that the true target is the mid-level professional seeking to move up in their career.

But the most difficult question seems to always come down to, What do you want them to do? The easiest response might be to do something that drives revenue, whether it is to become a member of the organization, or to renew their membership. It might also be to attend an event or purchase a service. But it might also be simple awareness of the value of the trade association and the services it brings to its members.

For each of these possible answers, there might be a multi-step process to take the action. We don’t expect, for example, a new prospect to commit to attending an annual conference just because they receive an email or see a banner ad or paid social post. It may take a sophisticated email “drip” campaign that methodically delivers different types of information that drives them down through the sales funnel before they click on a landing-page for registration. Each step of the process requires clear messaging and strong creative. And each step requires effective analytics to measure performance of the subject line (for an email) or headline (for a banner ad). We are always A/B testing subject and headlines to see which are performing the best so we can adjust accordingly.

Top marketing firms will provide detailed methodologies and analytic tools before the campaign is launched so that organizations understand exactly how the campaign will run and achieve the desired results.

Learn How Bluetext Can Help Design and Execute Your Next Digital Campaign.

Acquia, the leading hosting and support company for Drupal open-source content management systems, has named Bluetext as a finalist in its 2018 awards for best digital marketing firms and website design. Acquia chose Bluetext for its work with Mindtree.com, one of the global leaders in digital transformation and technology services. Bluetext created a revitalized digital brand, a new website user experience, and a state-of-the-art Drupal content management platform for Mindtree.

Acquia considered more than 100 submissions from top digital marketing firms for its annual award. Among the factors it evaluated for for its best digital marketing companies and websites were client projects that demonstrated an advanced level functionality, integration, and performance, including the results and key performance indicators for each site. Acquia also evaluated overall user experience for each website.  Acquia called the breadth of submissions “inspiring…  and continues to affirm that Acquia’s partners and customers are setting the precedent for exceptional digital experiences.”

For the new Mindtree.com, Bluetext developed an intuitive, fully responsive user-experience that leverages personalization to serve relevant content to each user. The site was built on a Drupal 8 CMS platform to provide the flexibility and scalability that a large enterprise needs to support its digital marketing initiatives. Best of all, the web design reflects the vibrancy of the brand and its employees, a specific goal of the brand.

Bluetext and the website will be featured during Acquia’s annual Engage conference, where the best digital marketing companies and the foremost leaders in digital will take center stage to share their insights, revelations, and lessons learned in the quest to deliver best-in-class customer experiences.

Learn how Bluetext can deliver a great user-experience for your brand.

With the national mid-term elections fast approaching, state government election officials at every level are scrambling to assess their system’s vulnerabilities to hacking or other interference, with the goal of protecting those systems from all threats. Akamai partnered with Bluetext to develop a compelling outreach campaign to educate state decision makers on the solutions that Akamai can bring to their election systems.

Bluetext created a three-part creative approach that leveraged engaging images and headlines to drive awareness of Akamai’s solutions. These include a patriotic message of responsibility these election officials have for protecting democracy, as well as the use of the iconic “I Voted” stickers revised to read, “I thought I voted” as an emotional appeal to what’s at stake. The result was a campaign that cut through the noise and delivered the Akamai story to the target audience.

In today’s continually evolving digital landscape, top brands look to their digital marketing firms for direction on how best to leverage every tool to reach their target audiences. And while it’s easy for agencies to sit back and relax after they’ve set the strategy, the old school approach of “set it and forget it” will come up short. The best digital marketing companies know that they must continually analyze results and optimize their campaigns to achieve their clients’ marketing goals.

At Bluetext, for the past several years we have been managing digital campaigns for the National Retail Federation – the industry’s top association – to help drive interest in and attendance at their most important annual conferences. Perhaps the most challenging of those shows, Shop.org, takes place this September in Las Vegas. The conference focuses on e-commerce and digital strategies for retail brands who leverage online shopping as part of their sales mix. But for digital marketing firms to get retailers to travel to a show in Las Vegas isn’t the easiest task. We all love Vegas, but traveling there can be expensive and takes precious time away from their business.

For Shop.org, we worked with NRF to create more than just interest in the conference, channeling our efforts into making it a “must-attend” show for any retailer who also lives and dies in the online space. That meant building in urgency, highlighting the top-line speakers and attendees and letting retailers know what they would learn there. The best digital marketing companies recognize that digital campaigns have arcs and that the key messages must follow those arcs while optimizing along the way for the best-producing creative.

The arc we developed for Shop.org began with urgency. That included messaging that pushed registration deadlines and cost incentives for meeting those deadlines. 

 

The next focus was on the breadth and depth of the speakers who would be there, who would share their path to online retail success as well as the networking opportunities that come with those brand names.

The final focus was on the biggest names who would be there, in order to drive particular interest among retailers. With this year’s Shop.org, that meant tennis superstar Serena Williams, whose own clothing brand has become a huge success.

With this campaign arc firmly in place, we put on our web marketing agency hat and began analyzing the numbers. Some creative concepts that didn’t perform in our a-b testing were put on hold, while others that proved successful – especially the Serena announcement – were accelerated. The result was an uptick in visits to the Shop.org website as well as registrations to the show.

That’s what the best digital marketing companies do: Analyze and optimize for their clients.

Learn how Bluetext can analyze and optimize your brand’s digital campaigns!

Has your CMS become a drag on your organization? One of the most frequently-asked questions we get in conversations with clients is, “Should I upgrade my Content Management System?”.  As trends in marketing evolve, so do the feature sets of tools used by marketers. As your CMS begins to show its age, the costs of keeping it up to date and adding enhanced functionality increases.

For many technical, marketing and IT teams, a clunky CMS, or one that they have simply outgrown, can mean lost opportunities to update and management content and analytics from one of the most valuable corporate assets. To help you determine if your Content Management System is weighing you down, we have put together a list of questions that can help you decide if it is time to upgrade your CMS platform. 

First, Consider Refreshing your Brand

  • When was the last time your refreshed your brand? If you don’t remember the answer, it’s probably time for a refresh.
  • Is your brand identity fresh and modern? Take a look at your website, your logo, your digital assets and email campaign you use to sell your brand and connect with your customers. Also look at what your competitors are doing.
  • When was the last time you did market/user research to identify your target audiences? Do you know if you are you still marketing to the right audiences?
  • Does your messaging and positioning accurately reflect your current value proposition and customer pain points?

Asking yourself these types of questions should help determine if it’s the right time to progress your brand with a fresh perspective to meet customer preference and expectations. A brand refresh is the perfect timing for an update to your Content Management System. It also allows you to take advantage of the ever-growing feature sets that today’s platforms provide. Take the time to review the CMS market and do a comparison to determine what platform best meets your business needs.

Upgrade your Technology Stack

  • Does your current CMS platform allow your team to easily and effectively find, create and update content?
  • Are you managing several web properties across multiple technology platforms? Would it be easier if these were consolidated into a single platform?
  • Does your Content Management System provide you with the tools you need to effectively reach and attract you target market?
  • Is your Content Management System built for IT or is it built for Marketing?

Over the past few years, there has been a dramatic shift in ownership of Content Management Systems in the Enterprise. No longer are CMS’s provisioned and managed by your IT teams. No longer is it enough to provide an easy, structured way for non-technical users to create and manage content. No longer is it enough to provide useful tools such as WYSIWYGs, Form Builders, Workflow Tools and Enhanced Navigation Structures.

Today’s CMS’s are expected to not only support native content management tasks, but they are expected to support multiple digital properties. They are expected to keep up with ever evolving policies like accessibility and privacy. They are expected to enable a conversation with users based on what is known about them.

Improved Security

  • Is your current Content Management System supported by a company and/or a community?
  • Is your CMS currently up to date with the most recent version of the technology?
  • Do you have old legacy custom code preventing you from updating the underlying CMS technologies?

Security is always a concern when dealing with your website. The last thing you want is for the homepage of your website to become a poster-board for the hottest deals on the dark web. Having an old or outdated CMS leaves you vulnerable to well-known security vulnerabilities that are just waiting to be exploited. It might be time to get that ticking time bomb disarmed.

Most platforms provide tools to keep you informed about platform security and notify you both when a vulnerability is found and when a patch is presented. We highly recommend learning how your platform handles this type of communication to ensure you are in the know. Below are some links to useful information for Drupal/WordPress.

Reduce Maintenance Costs

  • Are you paying a hefty monthly retainer to keep the lights on for your CMS?
  • Do simple changes (like text or image updates) require a technical team to implement and/or take days or weeks to get updated?

Wouldn’t you like to use all of the money you are dumping into keeping your technology up and running into your marketing campaigns and content initiatives? If you are spending more money on your technology than you are on your marketing, it is likely past time to upgrade your CMS. A CMS should streamline your content management tasks and empower your team, not suck it dry.

Save Time

  • Do simple changes (like text or image updates) take days or weeks to get updated?
  • Are your page templates flexible and adaptable across desktop and mobile?
  • Are you spending a majority of your development efforts trying to keep your website up and running rather than enhancing it?
  • Does your system allow you to effectively market to your customers?

 If the answer to any of the questions listed above are “yes”, then it is likely you have outgrown your current CMS platform and need to upgrade.

Looking for help in determining if your organization is in need of a CMS upgrade? Contact Us Today!

The Federal government Buying Season is right around the corner. That means that any company that has the technology to help government agencies meet their mission requirements needs to start getting in front of those buyers quickly. The Federal Buying Season begins in August and runs through September as agency procurement officers will make their final selections to meet end-of-year spending requirements. With the government, allocated funds are often “use-it-or-lose-it,’ meaning they won’t carry on through the next fiscal year. Anything unspent becomes out-of-reach.

For government contractors and global brands who consider the agencies a key vertical, putting in place a comprehensive marketing campaign to reach these decision makers starts now. As we pointed out in our previous post, government agencies respond differently than commercial markets. For their Buying Season, they have mission requirements to meet and are looking for the best solutions that will help them do that. That’s why a marketing campaign needs to speak their language and not simply rely on the same campaigns targeted to the commercial sector.

Here are some of the key elements to consider when designing your Federal Buying Season marketing campaign:

  1. Start with Messaging. As we noted in our previous post, messaging targeted towards the needs of the government buyer is critical. Make sure that messaging talks to their pain points, their mission requirements, and the past experience you have in the market. Those are the three top components that this audience needs to see.
  2. The Creative Needs to Match the Market. Cutesy, humorous, out-of-the-box campaigns are ok, but within limits. Stay away from the controversial, but adding a little humor can be effective. We recently did a campaign for Intel that included a guy wearing pajamas on the bottom with a suit on top to demonstrate how its technology helps Federal telecommuters. It was clever, cute, and got people thinking while keeping far away from anything offensive.
  3. Go Directly After the Market. Programmatic campaigns, relying on sophisticated email workflows and paid banner and social media can be effective for driving leads if done in a way reaches those audiences in an intelligent way. Bluetext has had significant, measurable success with well-constructed campaigns targeted at government decision-makers and buyers.
  4. Coverage in Government Publications Gives Air Cover. A strong media relations component of the campaign can provide thought leadership, wide exposure, and air cover for the sales team. Many government tech trades are happy to publish submitted bylines from industry experts provided that they explore market needs and trends, and are not simply marketing pieces disguised as a news article.
  5. Drive Time is Prime Time. In the D.C. region – the home to most of the nation’s Federal executives – commuting is a fact of life. That means a captive audience twice a day every day during morning and evening rush hours. We are big believers in radio spots as well as broadcast interviews to reach this audience when they are most receptive.
  6. Leverage All of Your Company Assets. Every company has a number of Members of Congress that represent their employees. Turn these legislators into advocates for your brand. They can help open doors across the government.

Learn how Bluetext can help your brand with a successful Buying Season campaign. 

Technology and defense companies who include the public sector as an important market view mid-summer as their time to get busy. For marketing to the Federal government, whose fiscal year begins October 1, we call this the “buying season,” because in August and September agency procurement officers will make their final selections to meet end-of-year requirements. With the government, allocated funds are often “use-it-or-lose-it,’ meaning they won’t carry on through the next fiscal year. Anything unspent becomes out-of-reach.

That’s why a sound marketing strategy tailored specifically to the Federal agencies is so important starting after the July 4th holiday. Giving program managers and those in procurement your best effort to select your products or solutions for their purchasing decisions is essential during these next several months. Here are our top tips for marketing to the Federal agencies during the Buying Season:

  1. Federalize the Message. Big brands who sell to many different sectors often don’t have the in-house knowledge or expertise to deliver a message to Federal agencies that will resonate with their decision-makers, instead simply repurposing marketing and messaging developed for the commercial markets. Big mistake. Federal officials think differently – and react differently – than commercial clients. Because agencies have fixed budgets, ROI (return on investment) is less important. Yes, budgets can be tight and the best value is important. But that’s a little different than ROI. Government officials have mission requirements to meet and want solutions that will achieve those. Telling them how your product will do that will have a far greater impact than how much money they can save.
  2. Look Like You Belong. Government officials don’t want to see campaigns that aren’t relevant to their needs. Nor do they react to campaigns that don’t look like them. My favorite mistake that I see all the time is campaigns that use stock images of executives in ultra-modern glass office high-rises. That’s not what government offices look like, and it’s hard to see the connection.
  3. Make Them Feel Like They Belong. Create a government-targeted landing page that is easy for them to find on your home page. Otherwise, they won’t spend much time hunting around hoping to find marketing materials that talk about their challenges and mission requirements. Use images and color palettes that fit in but also leverage accent colors to stand out. But… give the Feds some credit. They won’t jump at a jet fighter unless there is something about that jet that means something to them. Find the right images, not just ones that you think look patriotic.
  4. It’s a Big Audience With Lots of Input. It’s easy to think that there are only a handful of Federal officials involved in purchasing decisions. While that might technically be true for the final decision, there are lots of people involved throughout the process. These include top officials who set the policy and goals, program directors who have to implement those policies, project managers who run the actual programs, researchers who might be tasked with exploring options and evaluating choices, and procurement officials who make sure the entire process is followed to the exact letters of the Federal Acquisition Regulations (the voluminous procurement Bible that includes all of the complicated purchasing rules). Make sure your marketing appeals to every step of the process, and every part of the sales funnel.

Need Help Marketing to the Federal Government? Bluetext Can Help.