In their drive to attract, engage, recruit and ultimately retain new members, Association marketers are facing added competition not just from other trade associations, increasingly they are being squeezed by for-profit commercial businesses that have ramped up their own efforts to attract this same audience. One of the primary services that associations offer to their members is information, in the form of content.
The majority of the critical information that members used to get solely from an industry association today can be easily found and obtained elsewhere—and typically free of charge with no annual membership fees. The American Heart Association for example – once had a near exclusive lock as the sole source of premium content for all things related to the heart. That role kept membership strong and growing. They now are now facing increasing competition for share of mind from hospitals, medical groups, for-profit businesses and manufacturers of prescription drugs for the treatment of cardiovascular disease. As more competing content sources compete for mindshare, the less valuable the association becomes as a leading resource for information – let alone a ‘paid’ resource.
Associations and nonprofits should look at this as not just a challenge in terms of member acquisition but also as a major threat to their member engagement and retention strategy. And what aggravates that is the fact that many lack the resources and strategy to run robust and ongoing integrated member acquisition and retention campaigns to keep existing and prospective members engaged.
The bottom line is, Associations can no longer rely on historical or traditional tactics to acquire and retain members – they need to get into the content game and start producing fresh, relevant content to drive traffic and engagement. This is not a simple task—it takes a disciplined approach that regularly creates and distributes new insights, ideas and information, packages them in a concise and compelling way that attracts attention, and communicates the value that the content delivers to its members. And to be truly be effective, that content must also be search engine optimized to make it easy to find, and properly coded with relevant keywords in key areas of the site that Google is looking at, including page URLs, page titles, and content across the association’s website. When this is done properly, a dashboard can be set up to track, measure and optimize engagement and conversion of the content marketing program.
With organizations of all sizes jumping into the content game – it is absolutely critical that you begin a smart content marketing strategy to re-capture and retain the membership base and reclaim your stake as the dominant voice of your industry.
It’s no secret that a first-class mobile app experience is essential for any brand seeking to build customer loyalty and engagement. The mobile app user experience needs to recognize not only the way audiences ingest information as they consider their options, but also how they interact with the app itself. In a previous post we offered a number of top tips for delivering the best mobile app experience. In this post we offer additional top tips to keep your customers engaged on their mobile devices.
Keep the Design Simple. A customer’s attention span is a precious resource that is often in short supply. A cluttered user-interface that gives numerous options for information or services may check all the boxes for the brand, but it runs the risk of overloading the user with too much information. Every added button, text, image or call-to-action complicates the screen and challenges the focus they need on the essential content you want them to see.
Design with the Platform in Mind. Trying to shoe-horn in features and elements from all of the various operating systems in order to mimic all of their specific behaviors brings us back to clutter. Stick to features native to the platform you are building in so that users know how to navigate and use the native components they are already familiar with.
Design for Channel-Switching. Most users don’t complete an engagement in a single session, so design for the entire process, not just a single setting. That means a seamless experience across devices that allows users to switch channels as needed to meet the way they interact with the app. A useful cross-device experience will enable customers to engage at their own pace.
Animation is Good, as Long as it is subtle. It’s the little things on the screen that give a warm feeling about your brand, so feel free to leverage that emotional connection. Small details such as animated feedback, in-app sounds, and even animated micro-interactions imbed a personality to your app, and go a long way towards building loyalty. Just keep it subtle.
Respect the Small Screen. Trying to fit a lot of information into a mobile user-interface is challenging at best. Don’t make the mistake of trying to cram too much content into the screen. It has to be readable. At least 11-point font is highly recommended. Increase the line height or spacing if that helps to get the content presented most effectively. A heaping portion of white space makes the screen inviting and uncluttered.
Testing is Your Friend. Most designers have large monitors on which they design. But something designed on a big screen may not work as well when shrunk down to a mobile app. Engage real users for their feedback, and make sure you have a cross-selection on a variety of mobile devices. Every design is bound to have an unseen flaw until it’s in the user’s hands.
Need help designing a mobile app with a great user experience? Bluetext can help.
The visual elements of a brand’s identity are the most immediately recognizable form of brand expression – subconsciously communicating brand message, tone and personality – in less than an instant. After that – it’s all about the experience.
A modern brand presents itself visually across more environments than ever before – and unless you’re McDonald’s, the most dominant of those is its digital manifestation, which also happens to be the primary environment in which it is first experienced beyond its visual state.
Because your customer may be experiencing both your brand and digital presence simultaneously for the first time, simplifying the user experience – and by virtue of that your focus on the customer – will immediately reinforce that customer’s initial brand experience before they explore a single product or solution that you offer.
While most visual design principles for digital brand mirror those of its non-virtual counterpart’s – digital brand design presents some unique opportunities to more effectively shape your customers initial online brand experience.
Typography
Typography is the art and technique of arranging type in order to make the language it forms most appealing to the user’s overall experience. Wikipedia defines it as an art form that can manipulate the significance of what it communicates – a definition that most digital first branding agencies like Bluetext might consider the holy grail of developing a brand identity. You need to consider very carefully how typography will fit into your overall digital brand architecture – and iconography shouldn’t be too far behind.
Content Strategy
As it relates to customer experience, content strategy is broadly defined as the plan for the creation, delivery and governance of useful and usable digital content that is ultimately designed to meet the needs of – and therefore expressed by the voice of – your customer. Therefore, content and creative strategies need to be aligned to ensure the user experience supports the desired narrative for your brand story to play out online.
Mobile UX
This leads us right back to simplifying the brand experience by focusing on the customer. A mobile first strategy helps develops brands that communicate their core values rapidly, simply and without clutter. The result is a focused, cleaner, and more user-centric brand experience.
Simply introducing mobile to the initial stages of brand development empowers creative teams to concentrate on what is at the core of a brand and establish priorities in the context of the mobile experience.
Ultimately a brand is the holistic sum of customers’ experiences, composed of visual, tonal and behavioral brand components – all of which can now be shaped by interactive design and manifested perfectly in the digital expression of your brand.
It’s October. That means CyberSecurity Month. Unfortunately, the breaches are getting more severe, with global companies dominating the headlines. So what should companies do for CyberSecurity month?
I am not a cybersecurity technical expert, but my company does have a lot of experience working with cybersecurity software and services organizations to help them drive brand awareness and visibility. I am not here to educate on the right technical architecture or newest solution that should be employed, but instead list several ideas that marketers of cybersecurity companies can do to differentiate in a very crowded market.
- Don’t Rely on Just Words to Differentiate. Visual storytelling to create an attitude can help a company stand out from the crowd. Our team had the opportunity to work with Sourcefire twice to rebrand the company. The second time we created a series of animated brand elements to represent their key areas of focus and differentiators that you can see on their website today at www.sourcefire.com. Things turned out pretty well for Sourcefire, as they were acquired by Cisco in October 2013 for close to $3b.
- Attack Vertical Markets Aggressively. We recently completed an exciting project with FireEye, one of the most successful cybersecurity companies of 2014, to create vertical focused videos that target specific cyber challenges found across key verticals. The videos, built in a 3-D world, focus on the concept of “We Don’t Blink” and visually tell the story about how the company is re-imagining security.
- Take the Message to Your Customers. There is a growing challenge, especially across the public sector market, where potential customers are not going to events and therefore cannot learn about the solutions that vendors are bringing to market. For Intel and McAfee we designed a virtual Federal agency environment called www.futureagency.com, so that prospective customers and partners could learn directly from their thought leaders in an engaging digital environment.
- Take on Your Competition, and Have Fun Doing It. While this example is not cybersecurity related, many cybersecurity marketers face a similar challenge as Citrix did when they hired us a few years ago to take on their largest competitor. Their solution was better, but they were getting out marketed. So we launched the Rumble In the IT Jungle, a channel driven campaign to demonstrate their product superiority in a bold way – check out http://www.rumbleintheitjungle.com/game/boxing.html
When you are competing in a crowded market, it is not enough to say that your product or service can “out feature” the competition. You need to get creative. You need to get bold. And you need to get moving fast, as the company just down the street is already thinking of their next move.
Successful brands have learned that if you want to engage with your customers and earn their loyalty, you need to provide a solid mobile app user experience on their handheld devices as much as on their larger screens. While many organizations understand that they need to design for mobile, they often ignore some of the most important elements in delivering the type of experience that meets their customer’s user needs in their apps. Mobile apps must be both useful and intuitive. No one wants to take the time to navigate a confusing set of commands, or invest the time and effort to learn them if it’s not simple.With that in mind, here are our top tips for designing a mobile app experience that will keep your customers engaged:
First impressions are everything. Just like in real life, what a customer sees first can often color the entire experience. Getting that first interaction to be smooth and easy is key. Keep on-boarding for the mobile app light and simple, giving users just what they need to get started without loading them down until they get comfortable with the app.
Interruption is a fact of life. Given all of the digital and real distractions we constantly face, it is unrealistic to think that every app experience will be in a single session. More likely, users will be shifting from social media to payments to a variety of other applications while using yours. We recommend breaking up larger tasks into a series of smaller ones so the user isn’t overloaded. Try to keep it to one primary action per screen, and design for interruption so that a user can easily save and return later.
Keep the navigation intuitive. Try to use functions that are similar to other apps and therefore familiar to users. Make the flow feel natural, as if there were a guide helping the user to explore different options. It’s tempting to add all sorts of features and buttons, but if no one can find it, it’s not particularly helpful.
Keep it fat-finger friendly. When designing for mobile, size matters. Smaller touch target are difficult to hit cleanly, and often hard to see for anyone with eyesight issues. The minimum size should be 7 to 10 mm so they can readily be activated by fingers of all sizes. This allows fingers to fit inside the target, and keeps the edges in view when tapping.
Design needs to go hand-in-hand. Remember that users often access their device with a single hand, and operate with the fingers wrapped around the device. Let hand and finger placement drive the placement of controls. Avoid making any touch too much of a reach, especially for those with smaller hands.
Need help with your mobile app? Find out how Bluetext can help!
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. Digitally mature enterprises go one step further– They put their money where their data is. That’s because they know that data-driven marketing is an essential component of their maturity. It provides a foundation for their programs, and takes the guesswork out of marketing.
Advanced 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. A recent survey from Adobe found that digitally mature enterprise organizations plan on growing their measurement programs by 41 percent over the next three years. Digitally mature companies rate the whole customer view, predictive marketing, and attribution modeling as their highest priorities. And that means having a clear picture of who the target customer is if they want to deliver a personalized experience that will drive conversion.
As the survey found, data no longer just informs, it also predicts. “Customers expect digital marketers to know who they are and what they’re interested in.”
Combining in-depth analytics and machine learning begins to give a picture of the entire individual journey that buyer is on, delivering insights that enable an experience that is relevant to that customer, including his or her preferences, expectations and timing. Providing the right types of content when the target buyer wants that content is the most likely path to turning a prospect into a client. 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 let a digitally mature brand be your model, and invest in the best analytics that will provide real-time, data-driven insights to meet your marketing and revenue goals.