When undertaking a branding process for a new or just-acquired company, many Private Equity clients are desperate to create their new logo and consider it a project complete. Yes, the logo is critical. But branding is less about the actual logo, and more about the visual story and impact that logo demonstrates to the market. This is especially the case with companies that have had a brand and logo, but through a private equity acquisition or other M&S activity, need to quickly change course and differentiate themselves from their former affiliations. Branding agencies like mine have a process that includes messaging, positioning and brand meaning, all captured through a series of exercises. While the words matter, the attitude and meaning behind a brand is what differentiates it and sets it apart. Think about visual impact,

I read a blog post recently talking about word of sight replacing word of mouth. It was spot on. Today, what you see matters much more than what you read or what you hear. Think about when scrolling through your Facebook feed. Three paragraphs about a great Hawaii vacation barely gets a notice, but a great picture at sunset sipping a cocktail with a great caption is liked by everyone. Attentions spans have shrunk and we are all visual learners and thinkers.

As your brand ambassadors, every stakeholder on your team, from executive management to sales to support to the front desk needs to understand the meaning of the brand and why it is important. It is a branding agencies’ job to work with the team to distill that meaning and make sure that it comes to life through the branding exercise in all of your public facing communications. Think of the Facebook generation as your audience. You want them to stop, notice your brand, and give you a chance to tell them your story. Fewer words, more visual meaning is critical. Brand managers and marketers need to think about this and give their work a critical eye.

Unless you have created groundbreaking software, it is becoming more and more difficult to differentiate. The visual impact and meaning behind your brand are critical for success. The right branding agencies can help extract this from your story and give you a brand that can differentiate and ensure success as you grow your business in 2018. The writing is on the wall; make sure that your audience sees it.

Looking for an agency to take your branding to the next level?  Contact us.

As the first quarter of 2018 comes to a close, it’s a good time for a pitstop to assess your digital marketing strategy and make tweaks and adjustments for the upcoming months. Based on what we’re seeing in the market and what we’re learning from the campaigns we are running for clients, here are a half dozen top tips for Q2 for a smart and effective digital marketing strategy:

1. Strategy Before Tactics. It’s easy to go directly to tactics, especially with all of the new and fun ways to use data to reach target audiences. But without a clear, well-defined strategy of who you want to reach, what you want them to learn, and what action you want them to take, even the best tactics are likely to fall short of expectations. So don’t forget the basics – What do you need to accomplish, what are the options for getting there, what is the rationale for the strategy you’ve selected. These should be among the first questions to ask. Once you’ve answered those, you can turn to tactics.
2. Should you Gate Your Premium Content? We’ve always been proponents of leveraging premium content, including white papers, eBooks, and even infographics, as a way of getting leads and tracking the buyer’s journey through the sales funnel. But that doesn’t mean you should always put up the gates. When content is ungated, it can provide for a better SEO return. The challenge is setting the right mix between gaining ground in a crowded space through organic search versus capturing leads, and there are many factors that need to be weighed. HubSpot has moved to an ungated model, hoping to capitalize on a stronger organic presence, but we are not yet recommending that move for all of our clients.
3. Marketing Automation is Your Friend. We are a big fan of solid marketing automation software that can take over the management and tracking of your digital marketing campaigns. While we’re partial to Hubspot, we have successfully built campaigns off of virtually every flavor of tools that our clients have invested in. The value is not only in efficiently managing repetitive tasks. More important is the ability to build complicated workflows for campaigns that take every new lead and place it at the right level of the sales funnel at the right time.
4. What About Twitter? We’ve moved away from Twitter as a key element in our clients’ social media strategy if they are in the B2B or B2G space. The reason is that for the most part, while Twitter is great for consumer brands as well as for celebrities, sports figures, and politicians, Twitter users aren’t looking for information or insight on the platform for enterprise brands. But the other reason is that Twitter has not invested in its ad platform, instead focusing on user acquisition. If that changes, we will let you know.
5. Don’t Stop Testing! If you have the luxury of a large database for your digital marketing campaigns, use the first couple hundred recipients to test subject lines for open rates and headlines for click-throughs before launching to the rest of the list. Don’t dwell on small differences: an open rate of 15.2 percent versus 14.7 isn’t significant for lead generation purposes. But a jump of just three points for a target list of 100,000 names can translate into several thousand new leads.
6. Video and Animation can Work Wonders. Adding a little bit of movement to a banner ad can draw people’s attention and get them to click onto to something that they otherwise would have skipped. If you can show off a product, that’s great. But even using the creative process to include a little bit of activity, animation or movement can break through the clutter and get viewers to pay attention.

Learn how Bluetext can help you take your digital marketing to the next level.

Marketing analytics may seem like a dry topic, but there’s an old adage in marketing communications: If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it. With the advent of digital marketing, online outreach, marketing automation, and digital media, this is more important now than ever. In the digital world, measuring is both easier and more difficult, but it underpins every successful campaign.

Why is it so difficult – yet so critical – to have the right analytics? Let’s take a look at four key marketing channels one-at-a-time to understand why.

Media campaigns. In the analog days of print advertising, brands could see their advertising at work, in the pages of the publications that their industry would subscribe to and read from cover-to-cover. The circulation of publications was certified by outside organizations, so calculating the reach was a matter of doing the math. What was missing was a measurement of who saw the ad and how they reacted or engaged with the brand.

In today’s world of digital advertising, campaigns are sophisticated and programmatic, meaning they don’t go to every visitor to a publication’s website, but rather only to those whose characteristics match the target audience. We take it as an article of faith that our media partners are delivering the ads as intended. The only real way to measure success is by looking at the analytics of who clicked on the ad, and what action they took once they got to that landing page. That’s why the analytics are more crucial than ever.

Email outreach. Not too long ago, direct mail was a key element in most marketing campaigns. Today, that has been largely supplanted by email marketing. Besides the significant cost savings of email versus direct mail, it’s can also be much more targeted with a good database to start from. Adding the right marketing analytics to the emails can assure that we know who has received the email, who has opened it, and who has clicked through to the landing page.

For our clients, we often will test different subject lines to see which results in the most engagement. That’s a key part of our analytics. We will also develop two compelling subject lines, and send the same email with the second subject line to any of the recipients who didn’t open it the first time. For those who never open the email, we may take them off the list after five or six emails, or keep them on the list to remain top-of-mind for when they might be in the ready-to-buy.

Social media. It’s easy to judge the effectiveness of social media by the number of followers on each platform. That would be a mistake. Followers don’t always translate into engaged audiences or influencers. It’s too easy to be fooled by “bought” followers or people who automatically follow everyone as a way to build their own profile. More important is the influence of key followers, the ones that are known as thought leaders for that market and have their own brand and a substantial following. We would rather have a limited number of these type of individuals who have an interest in and will engage with our clients’ brands, than a large number of followers unrelated to the business. Analytics tools that measure this type of impact are key.

Traditional public relations. In the pre-internet days, we could measure the impact of a pr campaign much like we did advertising: add up the number of subscribers for each publication that runs an article for a total reach. Again, that tells us little about the impact that article might have. In today’s digital age, we are more interested in strategic coverage that focuses on our clients or positions them as thought leaders – either through authored bylines or being quoted for their insight – than the mere number of hits.

Successful digital marketers are constantly evaluating where to put their resources, and how to measure the programs they are funding in terms of lead generation and sales.  Advanced marketing analytics allow companies to go far beyond baseline metrics, by providing the tools to really understand how their target buyers are consuming content, what entices them to engage and interact, and what triggers a conversion. In-depth analytics -including multivariant as well as A/B testing – provide the types of information that enable more automation and personalization to map to each buyer’s journey. Getting that data in real-time from the right analytics and tools will offer the most current insights for reacting quickly and putting the best content in front of that audience, responding to what’s happening now, not what took place a week or month earlier.

Our recommendation is to invest in marketing analytics that will provide real-time, data-driven insights to meet your marketing and revenue goals.

Learn how Bluetext can help develop marketing analytics that help your brand meet its marketing goals.

Content marketing is one of the best ways to drive target audiences to your website and to get into your sales funnel. A key question to ask is whether you you have the right content marketing strategy to drive organic search and grab attention in your outreach. Is it innovative and using graphics the right way? And while innovation in content marketing is certainly not a new concept, many brands still struggle with moving their content away from the traditional heavy text and towards a more engaging graphics-based approach.

Here are four solid tips for brands that are embracing a more innovative strategy for their content marketing:

1) Interesting is good. Boring not so much. This might sound obvious, but with many business-to-business or business-to-government solutions, it’s not always easy to sound interesting on technical topics. Resist the temptation to edit out content that might be fun and relevant, and that plays on popular topics or cultural experiences. Take Hootsuite as an example. There’s nothing very sexy about a tool that allows you to manage your social media posts. It’s mostly a dashboard with a number of useful applications tacked on. But Hootsuite rose to immense popularity by playing off a popular theme, the HBO television series “Game of Thrones.” It created a video called “Game of Social Thrones,” using graphics and music similar to the television show to demonstrate its capabilities. Each popular social platform has its own Game of Thrones city, and logos and images are cleverly used throughout. Timing is everything, of course, and the Hootsuite video garnered lots of buzz on YouTube. Hootsuite also makes sure that its content, even when serious, is fun, increasing its popular appeal. So while your brand or product may be technical and specialized, you can still write content with which your audience will identify on a popular level. The lesson: Don’t feel that you need to be serious all of the time. Create some fun, light content now and then.

2) Make sure your strategy aligns with your brand. IBM is known for three key assets: Its technical expertise, its role as long-time market leader, and its position as a respected source of IT information. To match its steady flow of content to its brand attributes IBM follows the same path. To uphold its reputation as a technology leader for more than a century, it has to produce authoritative content that underscores its thought leadership. Because the company is a technical powerhouse, it has to ensure that the content is technically authoritative. And because the company is trusted by millions to provide detailed descriptions of challenges and solutions, it has to make sure that its content is at an expert level. While trying to follow in IBM’s footsteps is not an easy task, it provides a strong lesson for how to approach your content. It should be well-written, possess authority, and have an expert voice. That’s what customers want and respond to.

3) Storytelling never gets old. It’s easy to fall back on technical explanations, and these are often important when conveying the value that a product or solution brings to the market. But telling a human interest story that illustrates what that technology brings to customers can be much more penetrating. Few do this better than Microsoft, whose “Stories” blog posts rarely even include the term software. Instead, they tell stories of how Microsoft technology has helped people, and in some cases changed their lives. In one example featuring sportscaster Daniel Jeremiah, the story is one of the human experience, of triumph, challenge and redemption. Daniel explains how as a scout for the Philadelphia Eagles, when he didn’t trust his instincts and the data at his disposal, he lost the opportunity to push for Seattle Seahawks superstar Russell Wilson. It’s a fun,personal and powerful story, and one that demonstrates Microsoft’s leadership not with a hard sell of its products, but with a tale that will stick in your mind.

4) Let visuals help tell the story. Visual images draw attention, tell a story, and help illustrate a brand’s true value. The problem is, many companies, particularly in the technology space, don’t believe they have much they can show using photos or high-impact graphics. I’m going to put forward GoPro as a great example of a company that relies on the visual to tell it brand story. And yes, I recognize that it’s not a fair comparison—a company that sells action-oriented video equipment of course would have great videos to show off its products. But the thing about GoPro is that it almost never actually shows its cameras in its marketing efforts. Instead, GoPro focuses on its users. One of its leading cameras is called the Hero, and its campaign is to turn its customers into heroes. Much of its content is created by passionate users who are, in turn, becoming public heroes. Companies who aren’t in the video business can take a similar approach. Tell the story of your customers and end users using video and other visual assets to make them the heroes—for the challenges they are addressing and the problems they are solving. At the very least, use visual content and images to enhance your text-based content.

Taking an innovative approach to content marketing can pay off in spades for any brand willing to think creatively and act accordingly. But sticking to some basic truths about what customers want and expect will increase your brand footprint and drive market recognition and share.

Learn how Bluetext can help you design and execute a successful content marketing program.

Google recently updated its ad muting tools to give users even more controls over ads that auto-play in your feed. In its blog post announcing this capability, Google reiterated its commitment to transparency and control over a user’s own data. The new tool allows users to go into their Google Ad settings and select which ads that are targeted at each user, and select them for a sound-off setting. In addition, it will engage ad muting across all of your devices.

Sounds great for users, but what about for marketers who are trying to get their ads in front of potential customers who have expressed interest in the product or service? After all, retargeting potential customers who may be solid prospects due to the interest they’ve expressed can be a successful arrow in a marketer’s quiver, while ad muting may seem like a killer.

The immediate reaction in the marketing world was that the sky was falling with the new Google ad muting tool. We think that’s an over-reaction. In fact, we are strong believers that the more that target customers believe that the ads they are seeing are appropriate and of interest – and not annoying, irrelevant, and out-of-date – the more likely they will have the confidence to engage with the ads.

Here are our four tips for making sure you online targeting will be successful, and not fall on deaf ears:

1. Don’t use auto-play in your retargeting campaigns. This might seem obvious, but there’s a reason that Google upgraded its ad settings for users: They keep complaining about them. Yes, they do force viewers to react, but that’s not always a good thing. If a target audience wants to engage, they will do it because of the content, and not because of auto-play.
2. Limit your retargeting for each user. One of the complaints about auto-play in response to Google’s announcement is that these ads often target users for months, even though the interest may have vanished after days. For our retargeting campaigns, we recommend no more than six ads. If the target customer hasn’t engaged at that point, we don’t believe additional placements will help.
3. Make sure your ads have great creative. This should also be obvious. Target customers are far more likely to notice and react to an ad that gets their attention in a good way. That means professional creative with a message that says something to your targets. It doesn’t always have to be humorous or outrageous to get their notice. But it does need to be good.
4. Make it count. Being relevant and timely is what users really want. That means paying attention to when the user expressed interest and acting quickly before they move on to another solution.

Looking to make your digital media campaigns more effective? Learn how Bluetext can help.

Top digital marketing agencies are quickly learning that mobile retargeting is now a key element in any successful campaign. But moving our clients to this strategy is not always an easy sell, as the many challenges that mobile presents can be intimidating. In spite of the roadblocks, mobile retargeting can increase reach and engagement far beyond other channels. Here are Bluetext’s six top tips for getting started with a mobile strategy:

1. Unsure on how to reach target audiences on their mobile devices? Think social media platforms. Today’s target audiences are more likely to browse their social media apps on their mobile than search websites. Take advantage of the tools that Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter offer for their ad campaigns.
2.  Want to increase mobile traffic to your site? Optimize your website for mobile to fully take advantage of this platform. That means a design that is responsive for all devices, and features simple and concise headlines, titles and other text. More importantly, make sure that images are sufficiently compressed, reduce the number of redirects (nobody wants to wait for a new screen to load), and minimize code to maintain a high-performing experience.
3. Not sure how to design for mobile? Think like a visitor to your brand would, accessing your site via a mobile device. That means simplified designs and copy, but also calls-to-action that are clear about where the visitor will land if they click on that button. Viewers don’t want to leave the screen they are on unless they know there they are going.
4. Need to improve your reach on mobile? Safari is the leading browser for mobile devices, but leveraging Apple’s tool is not so easy. One simple trick: Make sure you are enabling Safari, which typically blocks third-party cookies in its default setting. Find a provider that is skilled at accessing Safari’s massive number of users.
5. Still not seeing the conversions you expect? It could be your landing page. Try to simplify the actions on the landing page to make sure there is no confusion or abandonment from that conversion point.
6. Want to get hyper-specific with your targeting? Try geo-fencing for conferences, events, shows and other gatherings of target audiences. Sophisticated new geo-locating tools allow geo-fencing to specific blocks around convention centers, hotels and other venues. Serving ads at the right time and place can pay big rewards.

Any marketing campaign can be much more effective with a mobile component, as long as it’s well-executed.

If you want to learn more or need help with your campaigns, Bluetext can help.

B2B website design that focuses on the user experience will continue to be a top priority for brands who thought UX was only for consumer and e-commerce sites. In a recent blog post, we offered some of the best practices for developing an effective user experience on a business-oriented website. In this post, we will explore some additional best practices for the B2B website design that puts the user first in its architecture.

Write the way your targets think.  When potential buyers visit your website, they will have a level of knowledge that most often is not as deep as you. Write content for who they think and eliminate jargon or text that won’t keep their attention. Use language, phrases, and concepts that are more likely to be familiar to them.

Make sure the text you include on your site appears in a logical order, but it should be natural as well. Confer with key customers and ask them to describe what your solution, services or products mean to them. What problems do they solve, and what were their pain points before working with you?

Let the buyer maintain control. Eliminate designs that override how a prospect might want to interact with the website. Autoplay videos, which have become ubiquitous across social media platforms and many news websites, can frustrate visitors who view these are a nuisance.

Don’t assume what the visitors want to do; let them play the video only if they want to. It should supplement, not be a substitution for, good content that is in text on the page.

Automatic carousels, once a common feature on many high-end websites, have also lost their allure, for the simple reason that they don’t work. Besides the fact that motion in carousels is distracting and rarely timed at the right intervals, it doesn’t present key messages to the visitor where they will be certain to see all of them. Layer information for your website in a way that makes it easy for your buyers to discover and explore instead of using an element that is less effective.

See how Bluetext can help your brand deliver an effective user experience.

The plan by the new chairman of the Federal Communications Commission to end the net neutrality regulations developed by the previous Administration is generating intense response across social media as well as news coverage. Whatever the outcome of the policy debate, it could have a significant impact on every brand’s digital strategy. If you haven’t been thinking about how you are going to prepare for this change, now is the time.

The debate over who controls the Internet is more than a decade old, and the carefully laid plans to implement a net neutrality system across the digital landscape has been thrown into turmoil by the new head of the FCC’s announcement that he would reverse these regulations has everyone scrambling. The depth of this issue and the debate can get complicated, but at heart, it’s about whether internet service providers such as Verizon and Comcast can charge different prices to different customers depending on their bandwidth requirements. On the surface, that seems like a reasonable request. After all, if you need more bandwidth, why should you pay extra for that?

On the other side, those in favor of net neutrality, are the content providers, including Google, Facebook, and Netflix, who stream high content including video that requires increased bandwidth. Their fear is that the service providers can discriminate against their content by charging more while favoring their own competitive content offerings, creating an unfair playing field. Regardless of how you feel about net neutrality and what the final outcome of this dispute will be, the FCC’s move could mean a lot to your digital strategy.

For example, if you have e-commerce capabilities that you are planning on expanding, or if you include high-quality video as part of your website content, you may be facing an entirely new regime of costs to have the same quality and speed of delivery. And as numerous studies have shown, slower website speeds, load times and latency all can have an impact on online sales. The Internet Association, which represents Amazon, Dropbox, eBay, Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Microsoft, Uber, and Spotify, issued a strong statement this week criticizing the FCC’s move. In reality, those companies have the resources to purchase the faster services. Other Internet-reliant brands may not have that same luxury.

As Jason Citron, co-founder and CEO of the video game-centric chat and video-conferencing app Discord, recently told Wired Magazine, “Net neutrality is incredibly important for small startups like Discord because all internet traffic needs to be treated as equal for us all to have access to the same resources as the big companies.”

Nolan T. Jones, managing partner and co-creator of Roll20, a video-conferencing and community platform for tabletop role-playing gamers, went ever farther. “We believe this would affect more than just our voice and video equipment, but our entire ability to host folks interacting across our services,” says Nolan T. Jones, managing partner and co-creator of Roll20, a video-conferencing and community platform for tabletop role-playing gamers.

The new rules will most likely hit mobile apps first, as many internet services include limits on data use for mobile platforms. Having a solid mobile strategy in place that recognizes these limitations will be key.

Learn How Bluetext Can Help With Your Digital Strategy

The year was 2014. The new Apple Watch was all the rage; selfies weren’t annoying the bloody hell out of everyone yet; and The Ice Bucket Challenge had everyone soaking themselves for a good cause. It was also the year I examined some of the most innovative B2G marketing and PR strategies that were helping government contractors and IT providers stand out from the crowd and grow their public sector revenues.

This past February, I put together a brief update on B2G digital marketing ideas for 2017, looking at the emergence of B2G virtual reality initiatives, innovative go-to-market campaigns, as well as 3-D interactive experiences for lead generation. But as we approach 2018, the time is right for anyone selling technology products and services to the government to think about what will move the needle in sales, branding and market leadership next year. Yes, white papers, webinars, as well as traditional public relations and advertising all play a valuable role if executed properly, but it requires more to become top-of-mind with government decision makers – and to stay there.

Here are 5 innovative B2G marketing strategies to consider for 2018:

Geo-Fencing

Geo-fencing is location-based digital technology that allows you to select a geographic point using latitude and longitude and then to create a virtual “fence” around that point of a given radius in which your ads can be served up.

For contractors and Federal IT providers, there are multiple ways that geo-fencing can be utilized to reach government decision makers. If you are seeking to do business with a specific agency, you could pinpoint a single DC Metro station in proximity to the agency office, then  deliver a targeted ad to anyone who comes within a 1-block radius of that location. Ads delivered through geo-fencing typically yield higher conversions and better ROI for marketers since they’re highly contextual.

Geo-fencing can also make an impact reaching prospective buyers at key industry and government conferences. Geo-fencing at conferences:

• Uses GPS or Wi-Fi information
• Create a barrier around a location and target everyone within that location
• Usually a tight radius (around an event or storefront)
• Deliver display, audio, video ads or mobile app notifications

Bluetext recently completed a project for client ARQ at the International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP) Conference. The police body cam and digital evidence market is crowded with products that frustrate their users. So when a new player with a better, complete approach wanted to enter the market with a solution far ahead of the competition, it turned to Bluetext for a name, brand, corporate identity and website that would get attention and convey its value to law enforcement agencies. For the official launch, Bluetext executed a sophisticated outreach campaign including mobile geo-fencing to drive attendance to ARQ’s booth at IACP that included interactive product demo’s, and a comprehensive retargeting campaign pre and post show.

Mobile Retargeting

The government decision makers you need to reach – as well as government workforces if you are employing bottom-up marketing initiatives – are on mobile devices…a lot. Frost & Sullivan found that almost three-fourths of government organizations issue smartphones to at least some employees and more than half deploy tablets. Consumers overall spend 5 hours per day on mobile devices, so the bottom line is that if you want to reach government decision makers, mobile has to be a big part of the equation.

Mobile retargeting is now a key element in most any successful government-focused campaign seeking to increase reach and engagement far beyond other channels. There are six key strategies to get started with mobile retargeting:

1. Unsure on how to reach target audiences on their mobile devices? Think social media platforms. Today’s target audiences are more likely to browse their social media apps on their mobile than search websites. Take advantage of the tools that Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter offer for their ad campaigns.
2. Want to increase mobile traffic to your site? Optimize your website for mobile to fully take advantage of this platform. That means a design that is responsive for all devices, and features simple and concise headlines, titles and other text. More importantly, make sure that images are sufficiently compressed, reduce the number of redirects (nobody wants to wait for a new screen to load), and minimize code to maintain a high-performing experience.
3. Not sure how to design for mobile? Think like a government decision maker visiting your website via a mobile device. That means simplified designs and copy, but also calls-to-action that are clear about where the visitor will land if they click on that button. Viewers don’t want to leave the screen they are on unless they know there they are going.
4. Need to improve your reach on mobile? Safari is the leading browser for mobile devices, but leveraging Apple’s tool is not so easy. One simple trick: Make sure you are enabling Safari, which typically blocks third-party cookies in its default setting. Find a provider that is skilled at accessing Safari’s massive number of users.
5. Still not seeing the conversions you expect? It could be your landing page. Try to simplify the actions on the landing page to make sure there is no confusion or abandonment from that conversion point.
6. Want to get hyper-specific with your targeting? Try geo-fencing for conferences, events, shows and other gatherings of target audiences. Sophisticated new geo-locating tools allow geo-fencing to specific blocks around convention centers, hotels and other venues. Serving ads at the right time and place can pay big rewards.

Bluetext does mobile retargeting for many of its engagements, including:

• For a leading satellite networking services provider, Bluetext surrounded the perimeter of a major trade show to drive traffic to its booth
• For a leading cybersecurity company, Bluetext surrounded the perimeter of the RSA conference to drive traffic traffic to their booth featuring a cool virtual reality experience
• For a leading healthcare company, Bluetext coordinated with their sales team and surrounded medical centers where their prospects work to drive brand visibility when they walked into work everyday on their personal cell phones.

Account Based Marketing (ABM)

If you are an old-timer like myself who still buys clothes at actual physical stores, you know that the sales racks are filled right now with unsold summer inventory, probably the same summer clothes you paid double for just a few months ago. But no matter how enticing the sale, we often bypass the out-of-season sale items in favor of what we will wear in the here and now.

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

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

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

Embrace the Inhumanity of Content Marketing

For government marketers, it can be incredibly frustrating to create a compelling white paper or develop a webinar you know will be of value to agencies, but see that content sit untapped or underappreciated. The fact is that prospective customers may want your white paper or webinar but…they may not know they want it. You might have to sweeten the pot.

Cards against humanity, the self-described, “party game for horrible people,” has gone from kickstarter campaign to global phenomenon. It is also an example of how you can utilize the concept of game cards to incentivize key prospects to download and access marketing content – ideally using a more sanitized version of the game.

Think about your buyer persona. What is their typical age range, gender, title, geographic location, etc.? This can inform a creative content marketing campaign in terms of theme (Game of Thrones, professional sports trading card sets, or a variation of Cards Against Humanity like ‘Cards Against IT Complexity’ that could feature various challenges that Agencies face with their IT systems and available only to prospects who download an ebook or whitepaper, or participate in a webinar.

Virtual Reality and 3-D Interactive Design

Virtual reality can lead to real government contracts. For all of the noise surrounding virtual reality in the consumer market, it has emerged as an effective platform for storytelling with technology companies targeting decision makers in the government and enterprise markets. For a Bluetext virtual reality project with client Varonis, we enabled their marketing team to navigate a complex customer landscape and to share the Varonis story and product to a wider audience using innovative technology. The Varonis Digital Briefing Center launched at a major conference that many of their existing and prospective customers attended, and enabled Varonis to scale their demos concurrently by 6x, differentiate in a global trade show, and drive traffic to their booth.

To drive user engagement and leads, forward-thinking B2G companies are looking beyond white papers and webinars and towards immersive user experiences. Bluetext client NJVC was looking for a powerful new message as well as an immersive experience to engage and inform its global audience. Bluetext delivered a cutting-edge user experience that merged 3-D interactive design with thought leadership content marketing.

With 1,300 IT professionals deployed globally supporting 200+ sites on six continents, NJVC is the partner of choice for federal agencies, commercial clients and large and small businesses. The NJVC experience is integrated into a responsive Mission CrITical campaign microsite designed to enable users to easily access the content that best aligns with their needs. Bluetext also recently collaborated with XO Communications to develop a 3D “Etherverse” experience placed prominently in the site to drive user engagement and leads.

Are you interested in taking your marketing strategy to the next level. Contact us

 

There’s good news and bad news for companies hoping to make their mark in the cyber security universe. First the good news: The market for these products is huge and growing exponentially. Security Analyst and researcher Richard Stiennon, in a column on Forbes.com and extrapolating from Gartner data, projects a ten-fold increase in IT security spending over the next 10 years- to $639 billion annually by 2023. That’s a number that would have any company executive working overtime to tap into.

But here’s the bad news: This is not exactly a secret. The competition is fierce and growing, as the growing number of solution providers races to meet this demand and take advantage of the opportunity.

It’s easy to have a marketing plan that pushes key messages out to prospective customers. At Bluetext, we think an influencer strategy is essential as part of that plan, and especially in such a crowed space as cyber security.

How any company—from established household names to challenger brands—can break through the noise and the clutter to attract the attention of this market requires an engaging and creative marketing approach that clearly sets it apart and above the competition. This demands a fine understanding of the value it brings to its customers and why it’s the best solution for any particular challenge.

Yet, simply having great creative is only half the battle. Getting that message out to the market is a whole new challenge, and needs both a direct approach and an in-direct strategy—the bank shot to reach the intended audience. Direct tactics are obvious—direct mail, email blasts, online and print advertising, a digital presence, trade shows and webinars; these are all direct appeals to potential customers.

The indirect approach is in many ways more difficult. It requires using industry influencers to reach their larger audiences with your content and messages. That is no small task, and it takes a dedicated investment in time and research. Here are some of the required elements to implement an effective influencer strategy:
1. Identify the best influencers for cyber security.
2. Recruit those influencers as allies and advocates for your thought leadership.
3. Engage those influencers through social media and direct outreach so that they will spread the word to their audiences.

Let’s take these one at a time.

Identify. Identifying the right influencers for any market, and in particular for cyber security, takes some research and digging. The key is finding the leaders who not only have the most followers on social media, but whose content—including tweets, blog posts and news articles—are shared the most frequently. When Bluetext executes an influencer campaign for its clients, we look first at the number of twitter followers and LinkedIn connections for each influencer candidate. But that’s only our starting point. More important is researching their history of shares among that audience. If a particular individual has a large number of followers yet few who share and rebroadcast that content, it could mean that his followers don’t find his content to be valuable, or that he doesn’t post content very often. If there are a lot of shares, retweets and comments, that’s a good indication that the person is read and taken seriously across the industry.

Recruit. Recruiting an influencer doesn’t mean offering them a job. It means building a relationship so that that person knows you are reading his content and pushing it out to your audience. The best way to do this takes work. The first step is to follow that person on Twitter, and to subscribe to his feed if he has a syndication service. The second step requires that the person’s content be reviewed on a daily basis. Any time there is a post that is relevant to your market, share it, follow it, retweet it, comment on it or call it out and add your own perspective. The idea is demonstrate that you are an active fan and follower who is paying attention to the expert.

Engage. Engaging with the influencer is a long-term project. After you have shown interest and built a credible track record of reading and sharing his content, he can be approached as an industry expert, a colleague and a reporter. That might include asking for his opinion on a new development, offering to share an announcement that he might find interesting, and even giving an advance look at a new piece of research or development. The goal is to be viewed the same way that a reporter would view a valuable source—with credibility and interest. When that engagement is solidified, the influencer is much more likely to pay attention to your content and to share it with his audience.

This may seem like a cumbersome process, and Bluetext dedicates a fair amount of energy to make this happen for our clients. But the payoff is significant. Using the bank shot to reach a much broader audience through sources that they trust can help rise above the competition in a crowded and growing market. A smart influencer strategy takes time and commitment, but it’s worth the effort.