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customers believe that the ads they are seeing are appropriate and of interest – and not annoying, irrelevant, and out-of-date – the more likely they will have the confidence to engage with the ads.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.

 

Six tips for getting influencers to share your content. Identify, recruit and engage thought leaders with established followers who can extend your content to their audiences.

Wondering whether to take the plunge into partnering to create sponsored content?  Learn how to define successful sponsored content, budget for your project, assess media outlets, and much more…

What is Render Caching?
Have you ever found yourself asking the question “Why are my changes to my twig template not showing up?” or “Why do I have to clear my cache every time I make a change to a preprocess function?”. The answer is: Render Caching. Render caching is the process of storing post-rendered data so that Drupal does not needlessly rebuild and re-render arrays.

Why Render Cache?
The process of loading, rebuilding and re-rendering entities in Drupal is a very expensive task and much of the time, is unnecessary. Render caching allows us to bypass much of the unnecessary processing and dramatically improve the site performance.

So… What does the Render Cache look like?
The first step in your journey is to understand what makes up the Render Cache property:

  • Cache Keys – a representation of a set of code that you want to make cacheable, and is typically something that is too expensive to render on every page load.
  • Cache Contexts – variations of what I am rendering. Does my display change based on user role, language, time of day, location, etc?
  • Cache Tags – custom identifiers that this render array depends on to render properly, such as Referenced Entity ID’s
  • Cache max-age – determines how long the item I am rendering can be cached for.  This should always be set.

The render cache is a “#cache” property that is defined on your render arrays. You are able to add and/or customize this for any render element.

Plan for caching
Working with render caching is something that you should be thinking about from the beginning of your project.

Some questions that may help you in the early stages of your project would be:

  • How often are pages on my site updated?
  • Are there any highly dynamic sections of the website? (ie. Stock Ticker, Countdown Timer, etc…)
  • Is there any content that is context specific? (ie. Location based, user role based, etc…)
  • Is the website complex enough to require custom render processing?

The importance of cache tags
Cache tags are where the magic happens! Cache tags allow the system to identify dependencies to a render object and invalidate pages when there are changes made to the dependent page.

As mentioned above, cache tags are custom identifiers that this render array depends on to render properly, such as Referenced Entity ID’s.

Real World Scenario:
Lets walk through an example: We have a website that has a blog post node/123: “My Drupal 8 Render Test” which is referenced in the recent content section on the home page, featured on a few of our product landing pages and in the related content of other blog pages.

In the example above, assuming that we have followed best practices and rendered our cache property arrays, the cache tag of “node:123” should have been added to the render tags array of the homepage, product landing pages and relevant blog posts that reference this item.

Now, we want to change the title of that page to be “Drupal 8 Render Caching”. When I save my node to make this update, it will trigger a cache invalidation of all nodes that have “node:123” in their cache tag list, thus ensuring that my new title shows up on pages where it is referenced.

For more advanced cache purging (memcache, varnish, CDNs), you will need to utilize the purge module. Acquia has recently launched their Public Beta for Acquia Purge as well, so if you are hosting on Acquia, it simplifies the process significantly.

There are more useful tidbits in the presentation that John Doyle, our CTO, gave at the DC Meetup in October.

 

Some additional community information around render caching:

Assumptions can be a dangerous thing. Often, sales, marketing and PR teams make assumptions that not only undermine integrated marketing efforts, but the viability of the business itself.

Marketing Team Assumptions About Sales

A marketing team might assume that content it is creating for sales teams proves invaluable to generating leads or closing sales. The fact is, however, a 2015 survey by Highspot indicates that 65 percent of that content is never actually used by the sales teams. That same survey indicates less than 10% of the marketing budget goes to efforts that produce sales results.

An effective integrated marketing effort requires a two-way conversation between marketing and sales, and these conversations must happen frequently and with multiple members of the team. Sales executives can provide marketing leaders with a holistic view of market trends, sales team paint points, and competitive challenges, but on-the-ground sales troops are the ones who interact with existing and prospective customers every day. They understand nuances between different market verticals (i.e. – government buyer v enterprise buyer v non profit buyer), and what content is proving most valuable in meetings. Integrating that sales team feedback must happen before – not after – marketing content strategies are developed.

PR Team Assumptions About Sales

PR teams might assume that media coverage is creating “air cover” for sales teams to go in and close sales. But often this is not the case. First, PR and marketing teams may not understand the buyer “trigger point.” Too often, integrated marketing efforts attempt to solve a sales problem that doesn’t exist – or doesn’t exist yet. For example, a marketing team might assume that the primary paint point for sales is that competitor technology product offerings are positioned more strongly in the market, thus requiring content to demonstrate your product is superior based on price, performance, efficiency, etc.

This may be valuable; however, it is possible the more immediate sales team obstacle is that the buyer is stuck earlier in his/her decision journey. They may require content that educates buyers on why an underlying technology is more secure and superior to what is currently being used. There may be a lack of understanding on the company’s suite of offerings, or even credibility issues with the brand itself. Only through in-depth and frequent conversations with sales teams can you be sure that the content being created is optimized to the buyer trigger point, and timed correctly on the buyer journey.

Another false assumption often made by PR teams is that there is a process in place to ensure any media coverage generated or thought leadership content produced is funneled in real time to sales. The Highspot survey indicates otherwise, finding that 28% of content is never even found by sales, and that sales teams spend nearly one-third (31%) of their time searching for it. Highspot also found that 24% of companies have formalized marketing to sales handoffs, which helps explain why PR and integrated marketing content often never quite makes it to the individuals who can do the most with it.

Everyone company’s definition of “integrated” is different, but for organizations to truly benefit from valuable marketing content and efforts, it is critical to ensure sales teams are not on the outside looking in.