Digital Maturity is no longer just a buzzword – it’s where your competitors are now and where you need to be to succeed in the digital marketplace. As a top digital marketing agency, we are making the move to digital maturity a priority for our clients. The ones who are there already know the four essential elements they need to master and balance if they want to get the most from the digital market:
- Data-driven Marketing
- Mobile
- Customer Experience
- Cross-Channel Marketing
These are where digitally mature organizations are committing their attention and their resources, according to a recent survey by Adobe of its marketing customers. They are mining their troves of data to understand their customers, predict their needs and preferences, and personalize their experience to deliver the right messages at the right time. Personalized engagement must translate across whichever device their customers choose, and wherever they go regardless of channel.
The first step towards digital maturity is analyzing where you are on that path. Here are eight questions to ask to find out if you are there yet, if you’re getting closer, or if you need a thorough strategy to reach it:
- Do you have a digital strategy that will achieve your goals?
- Are your marketing activities being adopted across the organization, or is your marketing team working alone?
- How do you compare to your competitors, especially those who are further along the path?
- Are you leveraging your tools to reach customers at the right time with the right message?
- How have you tapped into your customer data? Are you getting the insights you need to plot your strategy?
- How is the customer experience? Is it building to the type of engagement and relationship you need to meet your marketing goals?
- Is mobile a top priority?
- Are you engaging customers across every channel, and is the story you’re telling consistent and seamless?
No one expects you to reach digital maturity quickly. It takes time, commitment, focus and a disciplined approach. Without a clear strategy, you may be left behind. Need help? Call Bluetext, and find out how we can help.
The battle is in full force on who wins and who loses in the new world of streaming content. It’s not just about consumers who want more choices and are not happy with the bundled offerings they now pay for. The impact extends to advertising, the cable wars and the mega-digital platforms – Facebook, Google, Amazon, Netflicks, Instagram, YouTube and others. To help navigate these uncharted waters, I recently appeared on “Boom Bust: Unplugged,” on the RT Network, to discuss the evolution of TV, the rise of streaming content, and the battles within the communications sector.
The caption that accompanied the interview sums it all up: “Who wins in the world of digital media? We dig into the world of digital advertising, streaming, cable, YouTube, Facebook, Google and more. Guest Jason Siegel from Bluetext helps make sense of it all. Are digital ads pushing out traditional cable ad-spots? Will streaming devour cable or will cable providers avoid being swallowed whole by this digital onslaught?”
Streaming vs Cable: Who Wins? BoomBust w/Jason Siegel Chief Digital Offer of Bluetext from Bluetext on Vimeo.
The interview delivers my view of the ongoing competition that is the result of streaming adoption, and why I believe that in the world of passive content, the trends are like a pendulum swinging back and forth for the business involved. How will the “Proprietary-Content-Only” platforms such as HBO GO fare against the “Hybrid-of-Proprietary-and-Licensed Content” plays like Netflix? Watch the video, then share your views with us. I would love to know what you think, and who the winners and losers will be!
Contact me to discuss this, or if you want to learn how Bluetext can help execute your brand’s digital strategy.
Re-targeting campaigns that reach across platforms and devices allow marketers to reach the same prospect as they move across the web, social networks, and mobile devices, creating a new level of engagement and interaction based on data. Understanding the best ways to implement a successful re-targeting strategy can result in dramatic improvements in customer conversion. When done poorly, you run the risk of annoying target audiences with constant messages that do not resonate. When done right, they can go a long way toward driving personalized engagement.
By collecting anonymous information on user behavior and intent, brands are able to convert prospects by engaging them with the right creative and messaging at the right time. By simply placing a short snippet of code, marketers can turn valuable customer data into actionable advertising strategies in real-time.
With that in mind, here are our top four tips for an effective re-targeting strategy that will deliver the results that brands need for a successful campaign:
Pick the Best Platforms. As mobile devices and social media become the dominant platforms for consuming news and information, incorporating the right channels into a campaign is critical. Social networks attract engaged consumers and give brands a direct line to those prospects. Re-targeting on social lets you take advantage of native tools such as shares, likes, and comments to further expand your reach.
At Bluetext, we often recommend Facebook for B2B clients and tend to shy away from Twitter, where users are more interested in entertainment, sports and politics as opposed to business issues. To get the most out of Facebook campaigns, test messaging and creative on smaller subsets of viewers to understand which is going to produce the best engagement. We like to test variations on headline copy, CTA buttons, offers and creative concepts to make sure we are optimizing for the right ads.
Don’t Neglect Mobile. Mobile traffic has surpassed desktop for most brands. There are now more opportunities to leverage retargeting on mobile to reach these prospects. With mobile retargeting, advertisers can retarget desktop visitors as they browse across social networks on their mobile devices or retarget mobile site visitors as they move to desktop computers to research larger purchases. One study found that, on average, AdRoll customers who include a mobile element to their retargeting campaigns receive a boost of nearly 25 percent in clicks and nearly 10 percent more conversions.
Personalize the Experience. While it’s especially important to reach the right user at the right, it’s not always obvious how to do that. Here are three categories of segmentation that marketers can identify to reach their audiences through mobile retargeting and personalization throughout the buyers’ journey:
Level of intent. A visitor who has checked out a half-dozen pages is obviously more valuable than one who has bounced after 10 seconds. When you see a level of interest, focus on that visitor.
Products viewed. When a visitor views a product or services page, make sure your messaging is focused on that product. You already have them half-way down the sales funnel, so don’t try to force them back up again.
Those who have converted. Just because someone has already been a customer doesn’t mean you should cut them out of your campaign. Enlist them instead into a loyalty campaign that can help validate your brand for other prospects or else offer them additional products or services that complement what they have already purchased.
Looking for agency help? Contact us
If your digital marketing agency team doesn’t have a SMAC roadmap, you may find your company drifting off-course in 2017 and beyond. Here’s brief refresher course on SMAC.
Social Media
Social Media continues to evolve. Platforms rise and fall by the year vs the decades of old. Some new trends we see emerging that we see potentially continuing to gain momentum.
1. Snap’s Evolution Will Result in Interesting New Opportunities.
2. Twitter Fatigue Will Worsen.
3. Users Will Crave More Vicarious Experiences.
4. New Areas of Communication Will Emerge.
Mobile
Mobile devices are the cornerstone of how new business is being built and legacy businesses are reinventing themselves. Mobile devices allow users to constantly update their profile, stay aware of deals and promotions, and track locations and buying habits by virtue of connecting to various wireless signals and near-field communication (NFC) devices.
Some new trends we see emerging that we see potentially continuing to gain momentum.
1. Consumers redefine purchase boundaries; mobile marketing, brand partnerships deepen
2. Department stores, mobile marketing partners tackle the ‘Amazon Effect’
3. Programmatic accelerates: brands, tech, marketing continue to invest
4. Next-generation creative, video redefine mobile engagements
Analytics
As databases have grown larger and processors and memory have become capable of chewing through hundreds of millions of records in a short time, we have begun to see how analytics can do more than just track clicks. Analytics can establish links between entities and make intelligent predictions about customer behavior based on knowledge a system has about a customer — knowledge that has been informed by social networking.
To keep up with the explosion in Big Data, companies and corporations are beginning to invest in BI projects and more and more sophisticated analytics infrastructure. Some new trends we see emerging that we see potentially continuing to gain momentum.
1. Multi-channel Attribution
2. Focus on ‘Return on Analytics Investment
3. Monetization of Data
4. Exciting new players in the MarTech arena to complement the core analytic platforms
Cloud
The cloud element of SMAC refers to the capability a business has to spin up vast amounts of capacity that are paid for by the minute or hour. Businesses do not need to spend millions of dollars building another data warehouse – they simply rent it from a cloud provider, do their work and turn it off. When the business environment changes, they simply spin up another cluster in the cloud, pay another few hundred dollars and continue building insights.
Some new trends we see emerging that we see potentially continuing to gain momentum.
1. Artificial intelligence (AI) will make personalization a reality in 2017.
2. Self-service will be the new normal.
3. Enhancing the Buyer Journey
4. Google Tag Manager and other granular analytics modules being the norm
With buyer sophistication growing daily, marketers need to deliver increasingly smarter strategies and campaigns. Are you taking the time to measure how your efforts are working and think about how you might enhance your efforts, or do you find yourself quickly moving from one campaign to the next?
Need help with your SMAC TALK? Contact the digital marketing gurus at Bluetext.
As one of the leading digital marketing agencies in Washington, we get called in by a variety of prospective clients to discuss their needs. These clients are corporations selling to business, selling to government, or selling to consumers, and even associations and other industry organizations with unique audiences. Invariably they hone in on their target audience and want to see recent examples of work we have done for similar clients with similar targets. In other words, if they are selling directly to consumers, they want to see consumer case studies.
The more work we do across different industries and types of clients the more I am convinced that the question people should be asking is not have you done something similar for another client, but what are examples where you combined your creativity and ability to drive a unique message into a specific market. Let’s face it… a business buyer has a lot of similarities to a typical consumer buyer and the lines have blurred. They do a lot of research on their own, they want to read the reviews and see what other like-minded people think of the product or service, and they expect to engage with your brand in a unique, differentiated manner in order to take action. While the channels to reach them may be different and therefore the message needs to be able to translate easily, they want to be wowed with your product or service and they want to make sure you are addressing their needs.
Business and consumer buyers react to a strong message, delivered with impact in a creative way. They require multiple interactions. They are smart. They expect you to speak to them.
Now don’t get me wrong – consumer buyers are traditionally more emotional than business buyers, and business buying cycles are generally longer. I could write a similar post about the differences between the two. But as the world of marketing evolves and buyers have the power in their hands, the lines are clearly blurring.
So the next time you ask your agency for similar examples of client projects, maybe the better question to ask is “what examples can you share to demonstrate your passion and creativity to address a unique challenge.” The way the agency responds to this question, no matter their previous expertise or client projects, should go a long way in helping you decide on an agency partner.
At Bluetext, we know that branded name searches are the most common way potential customers, partners, prospective employees and investors will find you online. We also recognize that a change in name and brand identity can be critical components to growth in a rapidly evolving, global digital economy.
We have a trio of these unique projects right now and understand that – because a name will inevitably involve a domain change – it could have significant consequences to the search equity you have built around your current name and website. Here are the five most critical steps to minimize the negative impact of a name and/or domain change and preserve the organic search rankings, domain authority and link equity you have worked so hard to acquire:
- SEO & Inbound Link Analysis
During the initial phases of a rebranding exercise, you will likely be tempted to roll out fresh content as quickly as possible with your new website. It is important, however to begin this process with both an SEO Audit and ROT Analysis to carve out redundant, obsolete or trivial content and at the same time identify assets that your analytics can clearly demonstrate have delivered site traffic, leads and positive brand exposure up to this point.
During the brand migration process, we also recommend retaining your existing web properties for a few months and performing an inbound link analysis of the external web pages that are still linking to them. Deleting them immediately would deprive you from leveraging the link equity gained by these pages as Google begins to understand and assimilate the changes you have made in order to update your index in conjunction the new content you are rolling out.
- 301 Redirects
Because rebranding is by its very meaning the process of changing your company’s corporate name and identity – it is impossible to maintain two separate versions. Therefore, one of the most important steps to take when launching a new domain is to redirect your old URLs to their new equivalents.
The primary purpose of keeping the old content as described above is to preserve and leverage the link equity you have acquired from existing backlinks to other websites and transfer that organic value as you redirectthat page to a new one. This helps everyone – and most importantly Google – understand that both old and new domains refer to the same organization.
- Avoid 404 Errors on Deleted Pages
On the other side of that same coin, be careful not to allow pages you are deleting in the migration process to suddenly disappear – it is critical to redirect them to either the new homepage or a placeholder page on the new site – otherwise you will risk losing any equity that page once had as well as its potential for associated traffic to the new domain. Every link pointing towards your new domain has the potential to transfer incremental value to your new domain.
- Google Search Console
Google’s Search Console is by far your most critical tool for communicating a name and domain change to Google. Before your new site launches, you should ensure that both your old and new domains are verified in the search console. Once you migrate to the new environment, you can submit a change of address request through your old domain’s account to ensure that your redirects are working perfectly.
In addition, we recommend submitting the sitemap for your new domain to the search console so Google can register those changes and ultimately index your domain more quickly post launch.
- Optimize. Optimize. Optimize.
One of the most important steps in preserving search equity during the migration process – and one that is given a back seat – is the maintenance of on-page optimization after your new site is launched. This starts with optimizing your title tags for each primary keyword – this the text that Google will display as your page title for every search result – as well as the text that will display in the user’s browser when they visit your page. From there is critical to leverage H1, H2, H3 and H4 tags to reinforce your primary and secondary keywords, as well as their long tail keyword variations you want to rank for.
And finally – continue to acquire new links for your site. Each link coming in is a signal to Google that your content is valued, reinforcing how you are indexed and maintaining your position at the top of rankings for the keywords that are driving your business.
Looking for a new agency. Lets talk!
We provide deep drupal development best practices with unique creativity and strategy to drive success for our clients.
Through discovery, our drupal developers and product managers create the perfect project plan aligned to your goals. Our drupal plan is customized to your needs. We have created drupal websites for clients across multiple industries, including commercial, government, education, non-profit, association, consumer, and native web designed for mobile.
Our technology team implements custom Drupal modules, design themes, server support and platform upgrades to meet your unique goals. For Bluetext, drupal is a platform to help you achieve your marketing and business goals – implementing goal is a means to an end, it is not the goal. Our full service approach includes:
- Strategy. Results from competitive analysis, focus groups and user surveys inform our decisions for Drupal features, as well as the site’s information architecture and content.
- Design. We provide a powerful Drupal design that reflects the brand, engages users and focuses on usability
- Content. By understanding your goals, audience and brand, we craft meaningful messaging that drive traffic and inspires action across your Drupal website.
- Marketing. With Drupal’s powerful email, search engine optimization and social media tools, we help you create long-term relationships with your users. Plus, we continually optimize campaigns with your ROI in mind.
A lot happens every 60 seconds online across digital platforms. In fact, a staggering amount of posts, uploads and emails take place in the space of a minute – every minute of every day. By looking at this data in detail, and comparing trends over the past three years, marketers can glean a lot of useful insight as to where to focus their brand’s attention when developing media programs – whether for specific targeted campaigns or for ongoing outreach.
A collection of these stats across the most important platforms was recently published by SmartInsights, and it reveals some significant trends. First and foremost, the 800 pound gorilla platform in terms of activity isn’t Twitter and it isn’t email. It’s Facebook. While there are nearly 450,000 Tweets every minute, there are 3.3 million Facebook posts in that same amount of time. In fact, if you said that Facebook literally dwarfs the other contenders, that would be accurate.
Except when it isn’t.
As the stats show, the outlier that is the largest by far is What’sApp, the free cross-platform app that can do just about what every other app does, and encrypt it in the process – with more than 29 million messages sent every minute. It’s widely popular around the globe (although not so much in the United States yet).
And who owns What’sApp? Facebook, of course. See a trend here?
60 Seconds Online: Where to Focus?
So where to focus your media campaigns? Look at some of the trends for what’s growing the fastest, and what’s being left behind. For example, Twitter’s 2014-2015 growth line came way down for 2016. Yes, there are more Tweets than a year ago, but not by much. Facebook shows no growth from 2015 to 2016 – which could mean that it has reached its upward potential. On the other side of the spectrum, YouTube and Instagram have increased their activity significantly.
Let’s not forget – Facebook also owns Instagram, while Google owns YouTube. So the upstarts are really just growth opportunities for the giants who continue to battle it out for dominance.
What does all of this mean for marketers? We tell our clients to look at where the growth is, not what was hot two years ago. Twitter is great for sports, entertainment and politics, but not so strong for b2b marketing. Instagram, on other hand, is expanding its reach across demographics, and can reach new target audiences that may have not been a focus of previous campaigns.
Thinking about your marketing and media mix? Contact Bluetext
Get your mind out of the gutter. I’m talking about persistent navigation. But of course (wink)!
At Bluetext, we are designing and producing websites for the most exciting brands of all sizes across a multitude of industries. We live in the cross section of trends. We see things happening cross markets, and that can be essential when looking at user behaviors and preferences when needing to grab their attention and entice them to engage with a brand. And that means when we see a trend that is becoming more prevalent across platforms, we take notice.
The biggest new user-interface trend we are seeing today is navigation on the left side of the screen. Clients are calling this:
- Unique
- Different
- Fresh
- Smart
For us, this is going full-cycle, back to first-generation sites that were left dominant. But this isn’t your father’s left nav. These left navigation paradigms lock. They personalize. They respond to resolution and device and browser. They have many ways to expand and drill into the subpages structure of the site map with ease.
We see great brands like Qualcomm, VW, and Riverbed, all moving to left navigation systems.
Are you thinking about going left vs top for an upcoming site redesign? Here are five things to consider in making this decision:
- Is desktop a heavy user-base? If yes, then investing in slick navigation can pay off handsomely. If no, then it may not be worth the effort to do an adaptive responsive navigation module.
- Is your sitemap narrow and deep? If you answer yes, then you’re a strong candidate for a left nav.If you answer no and you have a bloated tier one navigation, then best to leave it alone.
- Does your brand logo work in the narrow navigation plate system? Many brand systems don’t contemplate this web application possibility. They also don’t have rules about stacking text about the logo mark. Or they show no name at all, just the logo icon.
- When you look at sites like Riverbed’s, you see the logo move over on scroll down. And when you look sites like ATT’s, you see they are throwing out the word all together. Just like Starbucks is doing everywhere.
- Is your target demographic a savvy web user audience? If you answer no, then consider a small user focus group to ensure they learn and adapt to the new navigation system paradigm with ease. If not, plan on going top navigation.
Here are some more sites that go left nav (or quasi left nav):
Thinking about redesigning your website. Contact Bluetext
Having worked with Drupal 8 in a production setting at one of the top development agencies for the last 15 months, I feel that I can responsibly say that Drupal 8 is ready for prime time. In fact, given all of the great improvements that the platform has to offer, it’s hard to think of an scenario where I would recommend Drupal 7 to a client. These include a standardized Symfony2 framework, a twig templating system, partial page caching, configuration management, layouts, and much more.
To learn more about Drupal 8’s new features, I spent a day recently at DrupalCon Baltimore, an experience that has heightened my excitement about Drupal and the future of the platform. Here are the takeaways that we got from the conference:
- Focus on Lowering the Barriers of Entry
- Core initiatives targeted at improving content authoring
- Revamped Release Cycles
- Drupal maturing in large enterprise
Opening the Flood Gates
The Driesnote was amazing as always. This one was more exciting than usual as there was a strong emphasis on the community and the shift for Drupal to become more user-friendly and lowering the barriers of entry. From a technical standpoint, the standardization on the Symfony2 framework and the addition of the twig templating system make working with Drupal more attractive to PHP developers, opening the platform up to a much wider developer market. From the content side, Dries highlighted the work being lead by Keith Jay to provide a better out-of-the-box experience to all users.
Content is King
In an ever changing market, it is important to stay ahead of the curve and adapt your organization to meet the needs of your client base. We validated a big shift that we are seeing in the market where the decision-maker is no longer the IT team – It has shifted to the marketing team. It is great to see Drupal follow this trend with the strong focus on the new core initiatives around UX, such as layouts and in-place editing. Dries also highlighted Cristina Chumillas for her work in improving the UX of several core pages.
Maintenance made easy
Another exciting announcement was around the revamp of the Drupal release cycles to make core upgrades for both minor and major versions of Drupal easier. The new 6-month cycles have been running great, and I for one am excited to see it. In this new model, functionality will slowly be deprecated (instead of removed) throughout the minor release versions as new functionality is added. This will give module developers an extended period of time to upgrade. Major releases will go one step further and remove the set of deprecated functionality to start the codebase off on a clean slate.
Climbing the Corporate Ladder
Drupal continues to gain traction in the large enterprise space with organizations and marketing teams looking to spend more of their budgets on content and campaigns rather than recurring subscription fees. This can be validated by the uptick in features and functionality that the community is providing for Drupal 8. As the market changes, so should the technology. The greatest thing about Drupal and the community around it is that we are the ones choosing the direction of the platform. We have thousands, or even hundreds of thousands of people validating this platform in the market and pushing the direction of the platform forward.