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. 

The term “Content Strategy” may be one of the mosts misunderstood concepts in the marketing industry. One of the reasons is that there are many different definitions for the term, not to mention that most agencies, organizations, and even core teams have differing opinions of what makes up content strategy and execution. Everywhere I have worked has handled content strategy in different ways, but all had one common trend: Content Strategy was integral to a successful website build.

One such definition by marketing guru Rahel Bailie states:

Content strategy deals with the planning aspects of managing content throughout its lifecycle, and includes aligning content to business goals, analysis, and modeling, and influences the development, production, presentation, evaluation, measurement, and sunsetting of content, including governance. What content strategy is not is the implementation side. The actual content development, management, and delivery is the tactical outcomes of the strategy that need to be carried out for the strategy to be effective.

Rahel Bailie, coauthor of Content Strategy: Connecting the dots between business, brand, and benefits and principal of Intentional Design

Rahel does a great job in articulating the essence of Content Strategy. At the end of the day, it is about the process that is put in place to deliver the right content to the right person at the right time. Content Strategy is not a set-it-and-forget-it task; it requires active attention and ongoing support to ensure success.

At Bluetext, content strategy is a key component of every website project. At the beginning of a project, we work with our clients to define the right balance of support required to ensure that they are successful. We strongly believe that without a well-defined and well-executed content strategy there is an abundance of business opportunity left on the table. Whether this be in the form of missed SEO juice, messaging gaps, or outdated and unimportant content, the bottom line is that your organization is missing out on some of its potential.

So what does a sample content strategy process look like?

In this blog post, we walk through a very high level overview of the core pieces required to have a successful content strategy. These are by no means the only things that make up content strategy and there will be different flavors/add-ons/adjustments based on your organization’s specific needs.

Step 1: Define your Audience

The core of a sound content strategy is defining your audience. A content strategy may have more than one target audience, but without at least a basic understanding of your users, you will effectively be shooting in the dark. For growing companies whose business goals are raising more capital, investors will be an important audience in your content strategy. Differentiating between primary and secondary audiences will help prioritize your website’s content curation, presentation, and execution.  Understanding the nuances of your audience — their goals and their behaviors — will allow you to tailor the content on your website such that you give them the best experience possible.

Sample Tasks:

• Analytics Trend Analysis
• Stakeholder Interviews
• Market Research

Step 2: Define your Content Areas

Having a clear definition of what content you need and how it will be structured will help ensure a sturdy foundation for your website. Thinking through how content will be grouped and how a user will find content are key to being successful in this area. Outputs from Step 1 should inform how you construct your content areas. Do you need a page dedicated to target audience testimonials? Are you planning on being a thought leader in your space? Consider where on your site your content areas will be most effective at delivering your core messaging to your target audience.

Sample Tasks:

• Sitemap Audit
• ROT (Redundant, Outdated, Trivial) Analysis
• Competitor Sitemap Analysis

Step 3: Define your Editorial Strategy

Editorial strategy covers many different topics. Defining the voice, point of view, and writing style will help you create a unified website that is easy for your user base to consume. The last thing you want is every page to read like it was written by a different author with no cohesion or consistency.

Sample Tasks:

• Keyword Analysis & Planning
• Competitor Research

Step 4: Define your Editorial Process

As I mentioned earlier, Content Strategy is not a “set it and forget it” type of task. It takes constant attention to keep up with not only your competition, but also evolving web trends and expectations of your user base. An editorial process will provide a guideline for you and your team to continually monitor and improve your websites content strategy.

Sample Tasks:

• Blog Planning
• Content Refresh Schedule
• Ongoing SEO Analysis

Ultimately, the content strategy for every business, industry and organization will be a little bit different. The important part of a content strategy is that you have one, you are actively engaged and thinking about it and that you and your team understand it is a living, breathing thing.

Looking for help with your content strategy? Contact Us!

The realm of online marketing is constantly changing and being forced to adapt to new trends inaugurated by industry frontrunners.

Though many of these trends come and go, few are becoming as ubiquitous across all industries as the rising use of video for business.

Web marketing videos seem to attract consumers in a way very few other mediums can.

Though static images certainly have their uses, industry experts are realizing the limits of marketing with still photos and graphics alone.

With images, what your audience sees is immediately what they get. Compare this to an online marketing video that can deliver a significant amount of information quickly and creatively, all while retaining viewers’ attention, and it’s no contest: using video for marketing is the wave of the future.

And consumers seem to agree. One study found that having video on your landing page can increase conversion by 80%. Another found that people spend 2.6x longer on webpages that videos compared to one’s that don’t.

Consumers routinely find motion-based content more attractive than static content, suggesting it should be a consistent part of any ambitious business’s marketing strategy.

HughesNet Impresses with Polished Video Demo

Our client, HughesNet took advantage of creative motion marketing to produce a video demo for their mobile app:

HughesNet Mobile App from Hughes on Vimeo.

HughesNet’s video balances the need for concision with clear, guided visuals and audio to maintain their audience’s attention while still providing an informative and comprehensive demo of their mobile app.

This video demo succeeds by a following a set of key best practices for marketing with video.

1. Guide Audience Attention

As opposed to cluttering the screen with a mix of complicated visuals, the HughesNet mobile app demo consistently guides viewers’ attention to a single or couple important locations on the screen.

In place of blocks of text or overly complex diagrams, the video uses a mockup of a smartphone combined with a helpful narrator to walk the audience through the array of features contained in the app.

The video succeeds in never allowing for viewers’ to be confused about where they should be looking or what they should be focused on.

2. Use Clarifying Visuals

In addition to making sure the audience is looking in the right place, the demo is designed to make sure viewers know what exactly they are looking at.

As the narrator runs through the apps’ different features, a checklist appears so viewers’ can more easily keep track of everything being said. At the same time the smartphone displays the relevant feature, so viewers understand the app UI associated with that feature.

After going over features, the demo walks viewers through each step of finding and downloading the app, all of which is said aloud by the narrator and mirrored on the smartphone mockup.

By syncing the narrator’s directions with helpful on-screen visuals, it’s always completely clear what everything being shown and said means.

Another key element of successful visual presentation is ensuring your video works with or without audio. A majority of video on social media starts on mute which means you can’t rely solely on audio for messaging, especially for a video demo.

The use of kinetic text can help you solve for this potential issue while simultaneously adding some creative flair to your video. Text that is too kinetic to the point of being distracting, however, can take away from the clarifying role it should play.

3. Keep things concise

Despite running through a list of different features and a helpful download guide for the app, the demo is still only 45 seconds long.

As people’s attention spans get shorter, it’s important not to bog them down with loads of technical information, especially in a video demo.

With the help of dynamic visuals, it’s completely possible to run through all relevant information while still keeping your videos short and to the point. Not doing so risks viewers leaving before they’ve received all the information you’re trying to give them.

The allure of online marketing video is here to stay. In order to produce compelling creative motion video that helps convert leads, it’s important to follow these guidelines.

In the digital world, keeping up with trends is critical, but even more so is starting them by putting out the highest quality content you can. More now than ever, this will require a comprehensive approach to video marketing.

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

 

 

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

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

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

In their drive to attract, engage, recruit and ultimately retain new members, Association marketers are facing added competition from more
than other trade associations. Increasingly, they are being squeezed by for-profit commercial businesses that have ramped up their own efforts to attract this same audience. One of the primary services that associations offer to their members is information, in the form of content, and that’s where the battle lines are being drawn.

The majority of the critical information that members used to get solely from an industry association today can be easily found and obtained elsewhere—and typically free of charge with no annual membership fees. The American Heart Association for example – once had a near-exclusive lock as the sole source of premium content for all things related to the heart. That role kept membership strong and growing. They now are now facing increasing competition for share of mind from hospitals, medical groups, for-profit businesses and manufacturers of prescription drugs for the treatment of cardiovascular disease. As more competing content sources compete for mindshare, the less valuable the association becomes as a leading resource for information – let alone a ‘paid’ resource.

Associations should look at this as not just a challenge in terms of member acquisition but also as a major threat to their member engagement and retention strategy. And what aggravates that is the fact that many lack the resources and strategy to run robust and ongoing integrated member acquisition and retention campaigns to keep existing and prospective members engaged.

The bottom line is, Associations can no longer rely on traditional tactics to acquire and retain members – they need to get into the content game and start producing fresh, relevant content to drive traffic and engagement. This is not a simple task – it takes a disciplined approach that regularly creates and distributes new insights, ideas, and information, packages them in a concise and compelling way that attracts attention, and communicates the value that the content delivers to its members. And to truly be effective, that content must also be search engine optimized to make it easy to find, and properly coded with relevant keywords in key areas of the site that Google is looking at, including page URLs, page titles, and content across the association’s website. When this is done properly, a dashboard can be set up to track, measure and optimize engagement and conversion of the content marketing program.

With organizations of all sizes jumping into the content game – it is absolutely critical that you begin a smart content marketing strategy to re-capture and retain the membership base and reclaim your stake as the dominant voice of your industry.

Download Our Free eBook on Trade Association Marketing in a Competitive Landscape!

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

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

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

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

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

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

Trade association marketing is never easy, and for trade associations, the competitive landscape has never looked more crowded. Not only are there more organizations chasing new members, there are also more for-profit companies offering competing services. As a result, whether you are with a trade association whose members include large corporations, or a membership association with thousands of individuals enjoying your services and offerings, it takes a strong brand strategy and a sophisticated outreach plan to efficiently and effectively continue to attract new members and retain existing members, and to drive attendees to your conferences and events.

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

The old way of doing business for even the most established associations may not cut it anymore. In just one example, we’ve been working closely with a long-established membership association that is feeling the increased competition and has realized through market surveys that its brand awareness has been flat or declining over the past several years. Part of the reason is that more competing organizations are offering similar services. But much of the cause may be a result of having spent years branding its products and events separately from the association itself – a significant challenge for organizations that offer a wide range of services that have each been branded individually. As younger prospects are entering the market, they may know the products, but they don’t know the brand. Our solution is a multi-tiered, integrated approach that combines programmatic online media campaigns, fresh and compelling themes and creative, and a separate set of campaigns for the branded products themselves, all tied together through new messaging with the simple measurable goal of increasing brand awareness and engagement with the association.

For another large association that has been around longer than any other competitor in its vertical, one of the challenges has been a result of its age – its brand was getting stale. Our approach was a fresh look for the conference that brings in most of their annual revenue. For this client, our focus was on a bold new creative design that takes the brand color palette and re-imagines it as bold, contrasting tones that pop from a distance, with 3-D shapes that both fit the brand and stand out at a large trade show.

The point is that, for trade association marketing, there is not one solution for associations who need to up their game to attract and retain members. We’re not in Kansas anymore, and the old ways of doing business won’t get you where you need to be. It’s 2018, and time to take your marketing program to the next level.

It’s pretty obvious that videos placed on YouTube have huge appeal with consumers who love to be entertained while seeing a product or brand in action. YouTube videos can be cutting and funny, irreverent or just dumb, yet they have the capability of capturing consumer attention and driving interest and conversion. Good videos translate to more sales—according to one recent survey, consumers are nearly two-thirds more likely to purchase a product after watching a video.

But how well does that work for enterprise and business-to-business companies? Do videos on YouTube help with marketing when the the target buyer may be a busy executive, the sales cycle can be long, and a variety of different types of individuals may have input into the decision?

With B2B and enterprise products and services, it is even more important to leverage a channel as important as YouTube. Here are a few simple reasons why:

• YouTube is the second most frequently used search engine, which not only means that your target audience is probably researching solutions on YouTube, but also that a properly labelled and tagged video can show up high in the search results;
• Attentions spans are getting shorter, and a tight video or animation can capture that attention better than words or images on a web page;
• It offers strong opportunities to engage with your target customer; and
• It allows you to show off your creativity and position your company as a thought leader in your market.

Here, then, are six tips for how to leverage YouTube for B2B marketing:

1) Short is Sweet. As recently as two years ago we were producing videos up to five minutes in length to showcase brands and their executives. That time has dropped by more than half. A recent study confirmed that the most successful videos on YouTube are under two minutes in length—and those around the one-minute mark are the most popular.

2) Set Up a Branded YouTube Channel. Creating a company channel delivers a better experience than individual uploads, even if the titling and tags are already aligned for the best search results. A branded channel allows for a branded experience, with creative elements that showcase the company or product. It also allows a company to segment the videos so that the target viewer can better find what they are after.

3) Be Disciplined About New Content. Just like your other social media platforms, YouTube thrives on consistent content. Just posting video without a regular refresh leaves too much silence and no reason for a viewer to come back. When you develop your YouTube strategy, make sure you can add new content on a regular basis for a sustained campaign.

4) Treat Your Video Like a Blog Post. Don’t waste the opportunities to drive traffic to your YouTube channel through other social media platforms. Think of it as you would a blog post. The more nurturing it gets from all of your social activities, the more traffic it will get. So tweet it, blog about it, post it on Facebook, and promote it through your email newsletters.

5) Advertise. Remember, YouTube is owned by Google, so you can promote your videos through Adwords for Video. There are currently three ways to advertise and drive traffic to your channel: as a pre-roll ad before the videos that viewers watch; as a banner ad when people are browsing and searching the Internet; or as a promoted video when people are searching for similar videos. Each requires a careful selection of keywords to make sure you are getting to the right targets.

6) Be Creative. A static video of an executive talking about the company won’t capture anyone’s attention. If it’s meant to be instructive, consider using animation to tell the story. If it’s a thought leadership campaign, then have experts discussing trends. Use multi-camera shots, tight editing, and professional sound and lighting to keep it engaging. It’s ok to be entertaining, but it also needs to give viewers the information they are searching for.

YouTube should be a key element in every campaign’s mix of platforms to reach and engage the right audiences. It provides the audience with visual content that can showcase the brand, and it’s easy to gather the analytics about what is working and what’s falling flat. It requires a disciplined and smart approach, but the results of a smart YouTube campaign are more engagement and conversions.

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

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

Contact us Today!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Speed is by far the most critical metric to consider when re-designing an enterprise website – it won’t matter how beautiful your new site looks if nobody is going wait an extra millisecond for your homepage to load. In addition to providing a fast loading, responsive user experience – speed has a direct impact on your ability to optimize higher user engagement, conversion rates and SEO rankings – all of which drive better brand and marketing performance.

One of the primary signals Google’s algorithm uses to rank performance is site speed – but by extension it is really page speed that Google is measuring. According to Moz, page speed can be described as either “page load time” (the time it takes to fully display the content on a specific page) or “time to first byte” (how long it takes for your browser to receive the first byte of information from the web server).

Page speed is also vitally important to user experience – pages with longer load times tend to have higher bounce rates and lower average time on page that result in an immediate negative impact on conversions. According to Google, 53% of users will abandon a site or web page if it doesn’t load within 3 seconds. This also has a direct impact on search rankings – with less than half a second separating the first and third pages of Google search results.

So how do you measure site speed? Google introduced its own web-based tool, accessible via Google Labs, called Page Speed Online. It’s available as a web-based tool as well as a Chrome extension. With it, you can quickly get an overview of high priority, medium and low priority fixes that can help increase your page speed.

Here are the top 5 for your digital agency implement to add instant horsepower right out of the gate:

1. Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) Technology – AMP is a new open framework built entirely out of existing web technologies to dramatically improve the performance of the mobile web by enabling code to work across multiple platforms and devices so that content can load instantaneously —no matter what type of phone, tablet or mobile device you’re using. With Google splitting its index into separate versions for mobile and desktop – the time has finally come to start prioritizing mobile
2. Wrangle Your Javascript and Stylesheets – Have your scripts and CSS load in external files instead of cramping up each and every web page. This way, only the browser has to load the files one time, rather than every time someone visits each page of your site. Ideally, put your external CSS in the portion of your site, and your external Javascript file as close to the tag as possible. As a result, the browser isn’t bogged down wading through all those requests for external files right from the start. The only time you won’t want to do this is if the Javascript needs to load near the top of the page – such as to display a name or load up an image carousel.
3. Optimize Your Images – In Photoshop or Fireworks, you can use the “Save for Web” option to drastically reduce image size. An image quality slider lets you see the visual trade-offs between graphic file size and crispness. Also – don’t rely on HTML to resize Images – while HTML makes it easy to create a smaller version of a larger graphic it doesn’t mean it’s taking up any less room on the server. The browser still has to go through the process of loading the entire image, checking the width and height you want and then resizing it accordingly.
4. Use GZIP compression – You’ll want to ask your web host if they use GZIP compression and deflation on their servers. These are two techniques that can significantly speed up a site, reducing file size by as much as 70% without degrading the quality of the images, video or the site itself.
5. Caching – Many content management systems now have plugins that will cache the latest version of your pages and display it to your users so that the browser isn’t forced to go back and dynamically generate that page every single time. Plugins like WP Super Cache can take a serious bite out of page load times.

You can also look beyond your website itself and consider a Content Delivery Network (CDN) that serves up pages depending on where the user is located. Faster access to a server near their geographical area translates into faster load times.

While speed is the most critical metric of any re-design effort – it’s not the only metric. Working with a smart digital agency to define KPIs for the re-design of your next generation website will significantly improve performance metrics across your digital marketing ecosystem right out of the gate.

Go the need for speed?  Contact us