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.

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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.

Let Bluetext assess your digital maturity and analytics so you can meet your lead and revenue targets.

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.