Throughout my career on the agency and in-house side of public relations and marketing, I’ve come across all kinds of agency founders and leaders. Some operate at the 10,000-foot level, focused on cultivating new business, shaping the agency brand and building a strong team. Strategic leaders, some would say, though every leader has to be strategic at some level or they won’t be a leader for very long.

These leaders spend very little time deep-diving into the space their clients operate in or understanding the products, services, technologies clients deliver versus those of competitors. Others have been more technical and hands-on; they attend client conferences and have built reputations as domain experts – while also happening to run agencies. Finally, you have hybrid leaders that fall somewhere in between and arguably make up the largest percentage.

To say one category of leaders is better than the others is too simplistic of an evaluation, as several variables factor into the equation such as: the makeup of the team these leaders have built, the personality and skillsets of the leaders themselves, and the enthusiasm each leader has for spending time on various aspects of the business.

This all came to mind after reading a recent article on the exploding volume of marketing technology (martech) tools available to CMOs, and how marketers are trying to manage them. The article points to a chiefmartech estimate that there were nearly 4,000 martech solutions available in 2016 – double the previous year and a number that will surely grow in 2017. And if you look at the top martech categories it is easy to see why the number of solutions is on the rise. The Walker Sands State of Marketing Technology 2017 survey of more than 300 professional marketers identifies social media marketing, email marketing, ad tech, analytics and content marketing as the five hottest martech categories for 2017 – each with its own solution set that CMOs must evaluate on a regular basis.

General Manager & CMO for Microsoft USA Grad Conn pointed out that martech tools have the attention of marketers increasingly charged with revenue responsibilities and needing a way to measure ROI on budget spend.

Conn notes that, “CMOs tended to be somewhat powerless in generating revenue so what you are seeing is CMOs investing in marketing technology to drive control and management of these levers so they can deliver revenue [and] keep their jobs.” So the opportunity exists for marketers to leverage these tools in a tangible way, but Conn cautions, “a lot of CMOs are being pushed into the technology space in a way that they are not comfortable with.”

And in this case, the difference between success and failure may come down to how willing CMOs are to come down from the 10,000-foot level I mentioned earlier, and get their hands dirty. For Conn, CMOs are handing off too much of the martech execution to vendors or in-house staff, thus making martech decisions without understanding how to run marketing technology. Conn states it bluntly: “It’s not a bad idea to get your hands dirty – a lot of marketers like to be strategic but it’s also not a bad idea to go and run some ads yourself. Go and see what the interface is like [otherwise] how will you have any perspective on how to leverage it.”

The ability of CMOs to strike the right balance connects to their organization’s broader digital transformation efforts. Conn likens the effort to the constant state of learning that top doctors and lawyers exist in – professions where these individuals can’t stop self-educating once they’ve attained positions of leadership. The process must continue indefinitely, and learning how various martech tools work is a big part of that. In fact, given the pace of martech innovation, one could argue there is an even greater need for CMOs to always be learning in order to stay at the top of their industry.

The lack of CMO comfort with martech that Conn speaks will only grow over time. The farther CMOs fall behind the learning curve, the harder it will be to generate revenues at a time when marketers are increasingly being asked to do so.

There are many reasons to go through a rebranding exercise. Most common among them are a merger or acquisition, change in corporate direction, desire to change a negative attitudes about your brand, or simply start over and hope to convince the market that something is different. All of them can be very valid and create a great opportunity to go through the exercise to create a logo, visual identity, new corporate name, positioning statement or color palette. As all companies are different, there is no one size all fits approach. There is one thing, however, that can really derail the process. That is losing sight of the original goals for going through this exercise. A rebranding exercise is not a cure all to solve a company’s problems. It should be done swiftly with clear goals and responsibilities so it does not get in the way of your business to execute. If something is not working, it is unlikely that a rebrand will fix it. That is why keeping your goals in mind and pressure testing every step in the process against them is so critical.

Here are five recommendations to ensure that you don’t lose sight of your goals to ensure a successful rebranding process:

1. Focus on the big picture in terms of messaging and meaning. No external audience will spend as much time as you or your management team thinking through the machinations of the messaging and meaning. Customers and prospects will often ask once but then will go back to focusing on your product, service and delivery.
2. A great logo and corporate visual identity can go a long way toward sending a strong message to the market. It is a design driven world, so don’t spend so much time focused on the message and lose sight of a great logo and corporate visual identity. Visual storytelling through a simple yet powerful logo with the right color palette, right imagery, right iconography, and right fonts can make a major impact for a brand to create the right position in the market.
3. Branding is a team effort. Get your employees involved. They are the ones out delivering your message and brand to the market. If employees fell invested in the branding process they are much more likely to help you sell the new name, brand and message to the market.
4. Don’t Do It Halfway. Once you commit to launching the new brand, ensure that your old logo does not show up anywhere. Assuming that the corporate website is the first place where the new brand shows up, ensure that the new branding is quickly rolled out at events, tradeshows, office locations, ppt templates, ad campaigns, etc. Your audience can only be as committed to your brand as you are. Take the time and spend the money to do it right.
5. Don’t let the process drag. Remember, a rebrand will not automatically fix your problems. You have a business to run and marketing campaigns to execute. The market is not going to wait for you take your time. Competitors will seize the opportunity if there is a market void.

At Bluetext, we have a proven process to ensure that every attitude and viewpoint is considered. But we follow the recommendations outlined above. We often rebrand companies in a timely manner, helping them focus on their goals to ensure they can focus on corporate priorities. From logo development to corporate visual identity to responsive web design to trade show booths and new collateral, we have the resources and expertise ready to tackle whatever challenge you are facing with your brand.

In its simplest form – content strategy is broadly defined as the plan for the creation, delivery and governance of useful and usable digital content that meets the business objectives of your company. User experience – on the other hand – is ultimately designed to meet the needs of – and therefore expressed by the voice of – the user.

The outcome of both of these business focused and user centered goals is the user experience – and core to that experience is content strategy. Having a plan that creates a bridge between user needs and business goals is essential – it is inherently impossible to design a great UX without it.

Content strategy creates a global framework for how digital content is prioritized, organized and presented based on its business purpose. UX strategy informs the information architecture – providing the structural context to bring the content to life based on the user persona it is designed to reach.

However – website design is often driven solely by UX teams who – absent a comprehensive digital upbringing – tend to overlook content early in the design phase of the project – or worse yet – after the templates have already been created. This is the point at which projects catch fire and timelines blow up – resulting in a large amount of rework later when the content doesn’t fit the templates and either the templates need to be redeveloped or the content reconfigured – not fun.

At Bluetext – we recommend identifying user needs and expressing them as user stories during the initial design phase. By gaining insights through the user stories – designers gain a better understanding of the content users need and therefore can apply more critical thinking around the templates they need to create to support that content.

With content becoming more critical to brand performance by the hour, designers have to work more closely than ever with content strategists to ensure the UX supports the desired narrative for the content play out without getting in the way. The more you can embed content strategy into each step of your design process, the better the user experience will be.

Google has done it again, quietly making a significant change to the way its algorithms process Google AdWords that could be significant challenge for digital marketing if not understood and managed.  At Bluetext, we closely monitor all of updates to how the Google’s search engines returns query results, and we have posted a number of blogs to let our clients know about these changes and how to address them.

This time, it’s a little different because this change, which Google announced on March 17, addresses AdWords, the tool companies use to implement their keyword purchasing strategies, rather than a revision of its organic search functionality. With this change, marketers may need to adjust their spending programs for purchasing the keywords that drive traffic to their sites.

In the past with AdWords, marketers would select a set of short-tail search terms that would be part of their search advertising mix. For example, a hotel chain might include simple key phrases like “best hotels in Nashville,” mirroring the way customers search for a list of places to stay. Up until the latest change, that exact phrase would drive the Adwords results. But Google has decided that people don’t always type their searches as that exact phrase, dropping the “in” by mistake or even misspelling it as “on.” As a result, Google has decided to expand its close variant matching capabilities to include additional rewording and reordering for exact match keywords.

What does that mean? In layman’s terms, Google will now view what it calls “function words” – that is, prepositions (in, to), conjunctions (for, but), articles (a, the) and similar “connectors” as terms that do not actually impact the “intent” behind the query. Instead, it will ignore these function words in Adwords exact match campaigns so that that the intent of the query will be more important that the precise use of these words.

Sounds like a good move, because if you search for “best hotels in Nashville” or “Nashville best hotels,” the result will be the same in AdWords.

But what if the search is for “flights to Nashville,” which isn’t the same as “flights from Nashville”? Ignoring the function words “to” or “from” would change the purpose of the query. Google says not to worry, its algorithm will recognize the difference and not ignore those words since they do impact the intent.

Hopefully, Google will make good on that promise. But advertisers who have been briefed on this revision aren’t too certain. Their carefully constructed AdWords investments might take a hit if the function words are not managed precisely to meet this new approach.

We like the old adage of “Trust but verify.” While we take Google at its word, we know there are always growing pains with these types of revisions. For our clients, we are recommending that they carefully review the terms they are including in their AdWords mix. Our advice: Be as precise as you can and factor in how these functions words might be perceived before pulling the trigger. Losing traffic to your site because of placement of a simple word should be a real concern.

Want to think more about your adWords, search and SEO strategies. Bluetext can help.

It is not hard to quickly discover, when sitting down with a client or prospect, when they feel that they are not executing efficiently. A few simple questions and they get that look indicating that they know they need help. This blog post is not another list to make you feel badly about your marketing efforts. This is a list of 10 signs that you are doing marketing right. This is by no means an exhaustive list, and is in no particular order, but hopefully when scanning you can mentally check off a handful of these to show you are taking your marketing efforts in the right direction.

1. You have an editorial calendar to align marketing efforts for thought leadership, product launches, news, events, and other corporate activities. An editorial calendar helps deliver a consistent message across all channels.
2. You are part of the right conversations. Conversations about companies, products, services, technologies, etc. are happening everywhere. It is important to be part of these.
3. Social media is integral to your marketing operations.
4. When a prospect visits you at an event, they get the same brand look/feel/attitude from your booth as when they visit your website or scan your social properties.
5. Your website is responsive, and you are starting to think of the mobile user experience first. The trend is your friend here – several recent studies show that more than half of web traffic is now coming from mobile.
6. You “own” your website, and
   don’t need to rely on IT or an outside vendor for consistent updates.
7. You are leveraging Google Analytics to ensure website content is most effectively displayed to deliver a solid experience for a variety of target personas.
8. You lead your business or marketing reviews with actual statistics on your results pulled from various tracking systems.
9. You listen to your customers. They know what they want and can be a fickle bunch across any industry.
10. Your brand tells a story. From the logo to the look to way your employees talk about you company, everything is aligned and powerful.

This list may be missing many tell-tale indictors, but it’s a good place to start. Please feel free to throw out other ideas, and we will add to this on a regular basis as markets and marketing efforts continue to diversify.

Email marketing is a key component of most lead generation campaigns. Leveraging a strong email data base via a competent marketing automation system allows a campaign to closely track every recipient’s actions as they move through the sales funnel, and target content and tactics that convert that interest to a sale. But how target audiences respond to email marketing campaigns can mean the difference between a new lead and a lost opportunity. A recent survey by Marketing Sherpa has some valuable insights that, while some might seem obvious, are too often ignored. Here’s a sample:

• Frequency. By far and away, customers and prospects prefer an email marketing cadence of no more than once a week. A smaller number believe monthly is the right amount.
• Content. It should go without saying, but apparently it needs to be repeated: Content that isn’t relevant to the prospect’s needs is not helpful. Nor are emails that only push a sales messages or are repetitive, or simply boring. Emails in this category are likely to elicit an unsubscribe.
• Conversion Strategy. The survey found that more than half of recipients rarely or never found emails to be useful to them. And while that may seem like a bad sign, the good news is that 44 percent found them to always, often or sometimes to be useful when it came to purchasing decisions. That’s a sizable pool of prospects to reach and convert with a good list.

The lessons for marketers are clear:

• Have a cadence that meets the preferences of your target audiences. That means no more than one email per week. If you are seeing an increase in unsubscribes, consider decreasing the frequency with a test sample to assess whether that’s a factor.
• A strong call-to-action is important, but too much of sales or marketing content is a turn-off.
• Make sure the content is interesting. Repetitive content or boring messaging is a wasted opportunity.

A well-designed email campaign can produce solid results. But it must meet the preferences of customers and prospects to deliver the right results.

It’s the beginning of a new year, and that means that industry experts will pull out their magic eight balls, clean their Google glasses, and attempt to see into the future. But as a marketer, it’s going to be tricky to understand what trends are real, and which ones aren’t worth spending time or resources chasing. Here’s what we can confidently predict: When technology experts take a stab at projecting into the future, they both overestimate the rate of consumer adoption and underestimate the resistance from political regulation. We all love the idea of Amazon’s warehouses in the sky delivering our packages by remote-controlled drones, and we may well be able to manufacture self-driving cars that are safe and efficient. But saying yes to UAVs circling our neighborhoods and giving the green light to driverless vehicles, that’s a different story altogether.

Digital marketing is evolving by the hour, but we can make some predictions on what’s going to be important to markets this year. Most important is how to survive these changes. So what should we expect in 2017 that may be more down to earth and actually come to pass, and how should you plan your strategy?

To find out, download our 2017 Digital Marketing Survivor Guide.

Today’s “need for speed” mantra is evident in everything we do. Your website is no exception. We all want everything to be instantly available at our fingertips – including our online experience. For websites, that means the faster the page speed, the better.  Top B2B Marketing Agencies have been working with their clients for the past decade to improve page speed, looking for all sorts of tricks and tips to reduce load time and improve response.  Some major players – including Akamai in the hosting space, Google’s AMP and Lightening from Facebook –  have developed significant technologies and innovations that are worth considering for your digital game plan.

A survey from Statistic Brain concluded that the average person’s attention span has fallen to 8.25 seconds down from 12 second in 2000. This statistic is projected to continue to decline. As a marketer, that means you have even less time to grab your audience’s attention before they’re on to the next shiny object.

Page speed is defined as the load time of one particular page on your website. Ideally, the site is completely rendered and ready to go on a screen within microseconds of someone typing in its URL and hitting enter. Does this seem like an impossible ask? The short answer is yes.  Since a feat such as this is borderline impossible in most cases, we’re forced to resort to more realistic metrics to achieve this lofty goal.

Here are the  top three reasons why lightning fast page speed is essential for the success of your organization’s website.

1) It’s all about the User

User experience is the number one priority. Without them, of course, your site is just a jumble of html that serves no purpose.  Site optimization is key and should be performed often.

• Fast page load time means users will be able to quickly navigate the site, increasing pages per session, time on page, and (possibly) decreased bounce rate.
• Better numbers for the metrics listed above mean better rankings from Google.
• Referrals become more likely when a user has had a good experience on your site.

In today’s ultra-competitive marketplace, a positive user experience could easily be the edge between your site and someone else’s.

2) The Fast and the Mobile Friendly

Google expects a mobile page to render above the fold in one second or less. Since more than half of the 3.4 billion daily Google searches are done on mobile devices, it’s imperative to have a fast and mobile-friendly site. According to an experiment done by Moz, Google has indicated it may actually be measuring “time to first byte” (TTFB) — which is how long it takes the first byte of information to get from a server to a browser.

Now that you know what Google’s looking for, there are numerous tools to help pinpoint where improvements could be made on a site’s backend. At Bluetext, we like to take out any guesswork and get our insights straight from Google. Put any URL into Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool and it provides recommended fixes, as well as a speed score on both mobile and desktop.

3) Page Speed + Stellar CTA = Increased # of Conversions

It’s been proven that page speed has a direct correlation to the number of conversions as long as it’s paired with an enticing Call to Action (CTA).  For example, if a user wants to download a white paper but has to wait for the page to load, that user will lose interest and most likely leave the site. For businesses, that means a prospect is bouncing and may be lost for good.

Every second counts. Don’t wait, start optimizing your site speed today because if you’re not recognizing the need for speed, you might as well go home. For more tips on making a great first impression? Click here: https://bluetext.com/top-branding-agencies-know-never-get-second-chance-make-first-impression/

Need help speeding up your digital platform to get the performance you want ?  Contact us

If the incoming administration is aligned on anything its increased U.S. security – both at home and abroad. Most predict that this will result in the elimination of the defense sequester and returning the defense budget to the levels proposed in the FY 2012 budget request – which would translate into spending increases of up to $500 Billion over the next 5 years.

The programs already being proposed go well beyond anti-terrorism to revitalizing the global defense infrastructure and increasing the foundational strength of the U.S. military across the board. This will require increased spending in a number of different categories – including agile force development, aircraft & aerospace systems, command & control systems, cyber security, smart technologies, shipbuilding, surveillance and ground, space based & missile defense systems – just to name a few.

However – since the last time the defense budget exceeded $600B in 2012 – the means by which government buyers, procurement agents and teaming partners across the defense contracting community consume industry related content has changed dramatically. Gone are the dozens of industry magazines that were piled high in their lobbies prior to the sequestration and gone are the days of flying around the country to attend big industry conferences, trade shows and events.

And to compound that, the industry will rebound in the face of an increasingly younger and mobile dependent demographic that has seized control of the content they want to consume and when and on what screen they want to digest it. Aerospace and defense industry brands must now adapt and market like every other major enterprise and consumer brands do and develop compelling contextually relevant content and deliver it to their customers – daily.

In other words –  you need to become your own publisher – because if you don’t shape your brand’s position in the market your competitors will gladly to do it for you – and have probably already started. The good news is that gives you significantly greater control over your message and how your brand is positioned and perceived in the market. But that market is about to become much more crowded and a hell of a lot noisier after the New Year with all of your competitor’s messages about innovation, transformation and the next big buzzword. So, you need to ask yourself – how am I going to differentiate my brand and defend my dominant market position – or in overtake the market leader – in this rapidly changing environment?

At Bluetext – we have achieved success for dozens of the most recognized and innovative brands in global defense and technology based on the premise that – to claim innovation you must demonstrate innovation. With the plethora of digital marketing tools, VR and other advanced technologies available for smart digital agencies to develop rich, immersive and interactive brand experiences to drive awareness, customer engagement and demand in the market – now is the ideal time to start making some noise.

Your path to brand – and market – domination begins and ends on the digital battlefield – the time to start preparing is now.

Last week it was announced that software company Synopys would acquire Cigital, a leading provider of software security services to help software developers build security into their application development process.

Here is the news:
http://www.darkreading.com/perimeter/synopsys-expands-software-security-with-cigital-codiscope-acquisitions/d/d-id/1327434

In 2015, following an exhaustive search Cigital selected Bluetext for a full scale rebranding effort, including logo, corporate identity, and fully responsive website.

At the time, Cigital’s challenge was a common one we hear from many of our prospects. To paraphrase, “our services and people are so far superior to our main competition, but our brand is holding us back and we are getting out marketed.”

This assignment was directly in our sweet spot.

We worked with the Cigital team to create a powerful brand that was differentiated and visually appealing to send a message to the market that things are different at Cigital and now is the time to take notice. The rebrand created a swagger for the company that clearly led to success as judged by last week’s news.

We were not specifically hired with the assignment of positioning the company for sale. But this is another instance in a long line of rebrand efforts, including Acentia, Altimeter, Force3 and several others, where the company successfully sold shortly after our rebranding effort.

Every client has a unique challenge.

Rarely does a client call saying that they want to sell and need to rebrand now. But when engaging with a client, it is always in the back of our minds. Our goal is to take a seat at the table with our clients, understand their unique challenges and ultimate goals, and help them execute a campaign to achieve this goals in the most efficient manner possible.

Kudos to Cigital, Jim Ivers and the entire team. We could not be more proud of the work we did to help successfully position you for this exciting news. To read more about our solution check out our Cigital case study. To learn more about the importance of a strong brand, read our latest: