At Bluetext, we are frequently approached by organizations who are questioning the strength and positioning of their brand. They sometimes feel that their brand is getting stale, or that their service and solutions offerings no longer match up to the original name and are looking for guidance on what they should do. This is never an easy question. Any brand that has been in a market has built up brand equity and has begun to stand for something. Target audiences, including current customers, prospects, employees, partners, industry analysts and influencers, have perceptions of the brand, an image in their heads about its people, what the company can deliver, the quality of its products, solutions and services and whether they want to do business with the organization.

Knowing if and when to update the brand, through a new look and feel, a refreshed logo or tag line, its messaging and even its name, is important. We talked with a large company recently that was the market leader in their key verticals. Yet they didn’t think that their legacy brand and name would take them where they wanted to go, and wanted our counsel. Making the decision to jettison a name for a company in a leadership is a huge commitment and one that should never be taken lightly.

The answer is often found in market research in the form of a carefully crafted survey that will uncover what customers and prospects know about the brand, feel about the brand and how they would be likely to react if that brand underwent significant changes. It might be that a simple brand refresh is the best move, modernizing the logo and look and feel, for example. In other cases, a whole new name and approach to the market might be what’s needed to move the company to the next level. In every case, that decision should be informed by real insights into the market, and not just gut feelings that executives might have, no matter how close they think they are to their customers.

By surveying customers about a brand, the goal is to gain insight into very specific areas of knowledge and associations. This means that the survey approach has to be deliberate and precise. When done right, a brand awareness survey can offer the needed insights into:

Brand Recall: With brand recall, the respondent is given what’s known in the trade as an “unaided” question about which brands come to mind when, for example, they think about that particular market or solution. No options are provided to select from.
Brand Recognition: This is the “aided” opposite of an “unaided” question. The respondents are provided a list of companies with the goal of understanding when presented with a list of brands, do they recognize the company as a reputable option.
Brand Identity: Brand identity seeks to test which attributes the respondents associate with the company, and to understand how effective the marketing efforts have been in presenting the brand to the audience.
Brand Image: A brand’s image is based on the customer’s perception alone. Tracking disparities in the marketing and the image can reveal important gaps in marketing campaigns and results.
Brand Trust: This a fairly direct question that measures whether your audiences feel the brand is trustworthy, and is important for understanding client retention trends as well as new client acquisition.
Brand Loyalty: Loyal customers are often the best way to win over new ones, so tracking loyalty can give insight to whether the company is building the kind of customer relationships that turn them into evangelists for the brand.
Customer Profile: Changes in your core customer base may signal the need for a pivot, either in the product or service or in the marketing.

We are big believers in market research to inform these types of high-risk decisions, but only if it is the right kind of research that will deliver the insights that are needed. Not every research tool is going to deliver the best results for the client. Bluetext employs a number of methodologies for understanding how a market perceives a brand. They fall into a family of four types of survey tools and strategies, each providing a different way to reach a target audience and each that will deliver different types of insights:

IDI’s—In-Depth-Interviews are an easy way to understand the perspectives of the company’s executives as well as key customers. They are typically done one-on-one and follow a guided set of questions in order to compare answers among executives. They are conversational in order to get into more depth than a multiple choice question on a survey. We recommend including the CEO and head of sales as well as board members, customers and partners.

IDI’s help set a baseline from those with the most knowledge of the company and the market. They also allows us to gain insights from those on the front lines with clients and prospects, and how those key decision makers react and respond to the brand’s messaging. What IDI’s don’t do is give an unbiased view of the company, because by definition they rely on those with the most knowledge of the company. We think that is very valuable when beginning any research project. We use IDI’s extensively as part of our Discovery process and to develop new messages.

Online Panel Surveys—Online panels are today’s version of the phone surveys that used to dominate the research field, and understanding the difference is important. Panel surveys are gathered from people who agree to be included in online surveys, and are broad enough to provide a random sample for statistical purposes. One of the main differences from phone surveys is that the audience is self-selecting: they agree in advance to be included in panels.

Phone surveys have gone out of favor for our purposes due to the shrinking demographics of households that have phone lines, legal restrictions on calls to cell phones, high cost and declining participation rates. While phones surveys are important when a very precise analysis of public attitudes is needed, such as political campaigns, for example, we rarely include these in our clients’ projects.

Online panel surveys deliver a broad section of the target market with a randomized sampling that enables projections within a margin of error, and are the most economical way to do that. Online panels will include individuals who may not have a direct knowledge of the company or brand at issue, and so may provide insight into how well a brand is known compared to its competitors. However, those same individuals won’t have any insights to a company with which they are unfamiliar. For that reason, these types of surveys make the most sense when the company has enough name recognition or a large enough footprint that a majority of the survey respondents would have a good likelihood of at least some recognition of the company. We also recommend online panel surveys to understand market trends, audience behavior and to generate news or content in the form of proof points or even surprising results that challenge conventional wisdom.

Database Surveys—When the goal is analyzing how a company’s market and ecosystem perceives that brand, for example in relation to its key competitors, relying on people who already have familiarity with the company can often deliver the best results. This is especially true for brands that may not be a house-hold name in that market, and thus the majority of respondents to an online panel survey would not know the company. In these situations, we often recommend leveraging the company’s own database, which typically includes current and past customers and clients, prospects and others with whom they have communicated with or marketed to previously. By definition, this audience will have at least some familiarity with the brand, either through direct experience or through receiving emails or being targeted in marketing campaigns.

We call this approach “database surveys.” This allows us to employ a method that is  more cost effective while still obtaining the valuable insight the company needs to make the hard brand decisions. The cost savings come in not having to purchase an online panel list or survey tool. We can employ survey tools like Survey Monkey to compile the responses and parse the data.

Focus Groups—The fourth tool that we use is called a Focus Group, which is a conversation with up to a dozen people at one time, led by a moderator who guides the discussion. Focus groups can use recruited individuals who fit certain categories, such as the industry they work in, the rank in their company, and even demographics for age and location. They can also use members of the company or customers, much as the IDI’s do. Focus groups are not randomly selected and do not return statistically significant responses, but that is not their purpose. They are better suited for testing new messaging, getting a response to a new brand or look and feel, or diving more deeply into perceptions and biases. One challenge of a focus group is that a particular individual can dominate the discussion and limit the participation from others, but a good moderator can keep the group on track and the conversation productive.

If you feel that your brand isn’t performing up to expectations, or believe it may be time for a refresh or a new direction, gives us a call. Bluetext can craft the right approach that will deliver the insights and results to make the right decisions.

Over the past 5 years, Bluetext has designed over 100 enterprise websites, and over that time the CMS question has evolved – like most technologies – from what is the best CMS for my organization to which platform is most secure.  Both open source and proprietary options can and do make a strong security argument, however for the most part the answer to the question lies completely outside of either platform.

The leading open source platforms – Drupal & WordPress – are developed by a community of thousands of developers around the world. And while the software code by its very nature is open and visible, vulnerabilities can be identified and corrected far more quickly due to the sheer number of developers testing it versus those in a closed source environment. The obvious downside being that these vulnerabilities also have the potential to be exploited by more unsavory characters for the short time they are exposed – which together with the number of prominent sites on the platform – works only to ensure a more secure code base.

On the other hand, from a closed source perspective, the platform is owned by a very small team of specialists who are developing code that the world has no visibility to. What this means is, that while best practices are put in place to protect against potential vulnerabilities, it is all done so in theory versus the perpetual vigilance of a global open source community. So, just because the code is developed in a closed environment, it doesn’t make it any more secure than it’s more open minded brethren.

From a global CMS perspective, it is impossible to claim definitively that one is more secure than the other due to all of the external variables they are exposed to during their lifecycle. The most critical path to optimal security is making sure the CMS software is well maintained well and kept up to date to ensure that no vulnerabilities are left open.

But as I suggested right up front, the majority of security challenges lie completely outside of the platform –the CMS is just one piece to the security puzzle – the user base it interacts with and the server environment it sits in everyday are the other external variables that will prevent any CMS from ever being completely secure – so there is no clear winner here.

Your organization’s ability to implement sound security practices globally will have a much greater impact on the security of your CMS than whether you are in an open or closed source environment. A strong digital agency partner can also help ensure that your CMS is tested and updated on a regular basis to provide optimal security across your digital enterprise.

In the digital age, digital marketers, companies, and thought leaders are constantly introducing new ideas making it almost impossible to keep up. Lingo overload can leave you:

• Out of touch with the latest digital marketing jargon.
• Feeling left out of the marketing conversation.
• Paranoid that your boss will catch on.

That’s why Bluetext has put together a complete guide to 2016 Digital Marketing Lingo!

Bluetext, an award winning integrated digital marketing agency, has created a Digital
Marketing Lingo E-Book to ensure you’re up to speed on digital marketing’s latest and greatest.

Click here to download the General Lingo eBook!

This goes to the heart of every company’s SEO strategy. The clues come in a patent filing for something called an “implied link.” Before I explain why this is important, let’s first take a trip back to the early days of SEO and link-building.

Early on, Google would evaluate where a site ranks for any given search by looking at how many other sites were linking back to that page. If you were a valuable site, visitors would link to you in order to share that with their audience or to cite you as a good resource. That type of analysis would seem like an obvious way to measure the quality of the site.

But SEO gurus are always trying to stay one step ahead, and once link-farms and other shady techniques for creating myriads of back-links became prevalent, Google recognized that there’s no way to verify whether a link was added because a user genuinely likes the content or whether the link was paid for. The quality of a link can be corrupted through a wide variety of Black Hat tricks, and thus the value of all links came into question.

And while Google has updated its algorithms on numerous occasions over the years, that doesn’t mean that links aren’t still valuable for SEO. They are just much less valuable than they once were. Google is now much more selective about the quality of the site that is doing the linking. The New York Times continues to be the gold standard for the most valuable links.

But what if a publication like the Times mentions a brand or its product without a hyperlink? Shouldn’t that carry some weight, even though it doesn’t include a url?

That’s where Google’s patent comes into play. SEO insiders believe that the patent is related to last year’s Panda update, and that it describes a method for analyzing the value of “implied links,” that is, mentions on prominent sites without a link.

Let’s say the Times mentions in an article the website of NewCo as a great resource for a particular topic, but doesn’t include a link to NewCo’s website. Previously, there really wasn’t a measurable way for NewCo to benefit from that quality mention. With implied links, Google sees the mention in the Times article and factors that into its search ranking.

Implied links are also used as a sort of quality control tool for back-links in order to identify those that are most likely the result of Black Hat tricks. For example, if Google sees numerous incoming links from sites of questionable quality, it might search for implied links and find that no one is talking about that brand across the internet. Google looks at that evidence from the implied links to determine if the back-links are real and adjusts the rankings accordingly.

Here are four tips for adapting to Google’s focus on implied links:
• Don’t abandon your link-building strategy. Earned links are still effective when they come from valued sites. The most valuable links will still be for relevant, unique content.
• Brand reputation is key. When asking for mentions on other sites, try to have them use your brand name as much as possible. The same is true when you are posting on other sites. Use your brand name. Do the same in descriptive fields such as bios at the bottom of contributed content.
• Engage your audiences in conversation. Similar to word-of-mouth marketing, the more your brand name is being mentioned, even without links, the more it will benefit your SEO. Encourage that conversation as much as you can.
• Be creative and flexible. Google is always evolving its search engine algorithms. It’s difficult, but not impossible, to predict how they may change over the next year, or how effective today’s best practices will be tomorrow if you know how to follow the clues.

Recently, Bluetext has been engaged to design and develop several global, enterprise class websites that have required a significant amount of user experience research. This more immersive step in the full lifecycle of our design process has become increasingly more critical given the role corporate websites play in the overall go to market strategy of any successful brand – and as such often begs the question – what is the difference between market and user experience research – and which is more important?

The short answer to the first question is that market research uses both qualitative and quantitative methods – focusing on a large sample size that verifies insights with large numbers – primarily to get an understanding of what people want to buy and why. User research is exactly the opposite – it’s not about demographics, markets, pricing or trends that capture generalizations – it’s about how your customer feels about using a product or service – preferable yours. User experience research is more valuable than its market brethren in that it provides direction about what aspects of your experience will meet your customers needs that we identify during the UX research process and answers the question of how and why they buy your product. User research helps us understand how your buyers live their lives, so that we can respond with an informed and inspired design strategy that creates a more direct and effective pathway to their innermost needs. And since we are creating design solutions for customers who are typically nothing like our clients – user research also helps them steer clear of their own biases

Because UX research isn’t interested in the statistical validity of large sample sizes, it focuses on smaller audiences to delve into the innate desires of the user to discover how your customer will actually engage with your product, providing us with the window to see what they actually do during that experience to uncover needs that could not otherwise be articulated.

We have discovered that research of any kind is far less about designing a product to address the demand of a specific market than it is about capturing deeper insight into the subconscious motivations of your buyer to create an experience that people actually want to use – before the market for it even exists. So if you want the answer to the second question – just ask Apple.

Spider Chart, Spider Chart,
Visualizes whatever a spider can
Spins a chart, any size,
Catches insights just like flies
Look Out!
Here comes the Spider Chart

A spider chart plots the values of each category along a separate axis that starts in the center of the chart and ends on the outer ring. These charts are great ways of visualizing the strengths and weaknesses of your current or future state website user experience. At Bluetext we have a deep focus on the science of user experience. After all, when you design and build sites for Fortune 500 companies, every fraction of a percent counts.

Bluetext likes to help visualize the various states of our analysis in spider graphs.

Competitive Analysis Visualization Through Spider Graphs

In today’s fast moving digital marketing world it’s critical to be a watchful eye for our clients to ensure they have a competitive advantage. A real time pulse and visualization of where they fall in the competitive marketplace can be very valuable. The below sample spidergraph can show a marketing leader where they stack in many categories. They can review these sequentially chronologically to see how they are progressing and ensure they have the best opportunity to capture and convert users across their desired journeys to achieve the key performance indicators the site is measured against.

SEO and Landing Page Optimization Visualization Through Spider Graphs

If you really want to impress during a presentation, this is the chart for you. It allows you to display multivariate data easily while also impressing with the visual appeal of its radar shape. Check out the chart above which shows SEO traffic by landing page. This Spider Chart stylishly displays SEO traffic for each series of pages in a specific time frame. This kind chart allows you to easily see real SEO traffic rather than just keyword ranking reports like those  from Google Analytics. At the end of the day, the quality and amount of traffic matters more than just keyword ranking. translations The Spider Chart can be used to hold the attention of your audience as you explain the insights you’ve discovered in a way which won’t scare them off.

These charts are just the tip of the data visualization iceberg. Talk to us at Bluetext about your story, brand, or data visualization needs.

Brand Strategy.  Brand Presentation.  Brand Delivery.  Bluetext.

“If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?” The age old philosophical question that actually has a lot of applicability to modern marketing. The truth is that the best marketing campaign with the perfect message will fall flat if there is not an audience of people to see it. data mining At Bluetext, our go to market can be divided into three areas that must work in concert to be successful:

• Brand Strategy, which focuses on creating the right message and brand positioning;
• Brand Presentation, which focuses on taking that message and making it visual; and
• Brand Delivery, which focuses on taking that strongly designed visual message and delivering it out into the market via multiple channels.

The dirty little secret is that so many companies focus on their strategy and their presentation but then fail to really attack the proper channels for the delivery of their message. So here are four things you should be asking yourselves or your marketing agency to ensure that your message is delivered to the right audiences in order to properly achieve your goals:

1. Do you have a database and are you leveraging it? There are many modern techniques for properly leveraging your corporate database to drive awareness and interest in your products or services beyond sending out HTML email blasts. Just this week Google announced a new product called Customer Match that will let advertisers upload lists of emails and match them to signed-in Google users on Gmail, Search and YouTube. This same functionality is available inside of Facebook for very specific targeting.
2. What conversations are you a part of or could you be a part of? What assets (people) do you have that we could insert into conversations to better position your company as thought leaders to drive thought provoking agendas? Have you created an editorial calendar that you review each week and track against KPIs?
3. Are you putting any budget to paid media? If you are looking to drive leads as opposed to straight awareness then taking a portion of the budget and putting it toward paid channels (for sponsored content, advertorial, infographics, etc.) is critical for success. Think about going programmatic as well to maximize every dollar. My partner Rick Silipigni wrote a blog post about this approach recently – check it out here – https://bluetext.com/planning-a-digital-media-buy-get-with-the-programmatic/
4. Are you thinking outside the box? Every company has a handful of activities that they take on from a marketing standpoint every quarter, but only the most successful companies carve out budget to launch innovative campaigns to drive differentiation in the market. Every quarter you should be asking your team and your agency for ideas that would be considered innovative and outside the box. Check out this amazing pop up book my team just created for Workday to help them tell their story in a unique way…http://www.workday.com/payroll_evolution.php

If anyone is looking for a strong example of the impact of website personalization, they don’t need to look any further than this year’s redesign of ESPN.com. ESPN’s move shouldn’t come as a surprise—after all, most enterprises redesign their websites every 18-to-24 months. But the reason that ESPN received so much attention is that it made one very significant strategic shift—its new website adapts to the person who is viewing it.

Some of the techniques that were built into the site allow it to reflect the location, preferences, interests and the device of each of its visitors. For example, it can predict (within reason-more on that later) your favorite team based on its best guess on your location. Once preferences are determined, it can prioritize relevant content every time you return to the site. That means the dynamic delivery of relevant content, a tailor-made river of information that is constantly updated.

ESPN certainly isn’t a pioneer in website personalization—after all, Amazon has been delivering that type of individualized content for years. But ESPN has figured out what every enterprise company needs to learn: Website visitors across all industries and sectors now expect at least some level of a customized experience. In fact, according to one recent survey, three-quarters of online consumers get frustrated when websites offer content that has nothing to do with their interests.

In other words, enterprise organizations that don’t start offering a more personalized experience will soon see their target audience abandoning their websites—resulting in lost opportunities for conversion, and, ultimately, lost revenues.

Here are four tips to help get you on your way to a better customized experience for your visitors:

Go Mobile First. This means installing technology that identifies the various devices that visitors use to view your content. First and foremost, Google rewards mobile-friendly sites in its page ranking, and is beginning to penalize those that aren’t. Viewers using their mobile devices need to be easily able to access content on those devices, and that requires a far different design than for a desktop or laptop.

Recognize the Buyer’s Journey. A first time visitor is going to need different types of content than someone who has already visited the site on several occasions. That means more general explanatory content for first-time visitors, with content moving towards specific questions and specifications as they move through the journey and towards a purchasing decision.

Use the Best Tools for Persona-based Content. Cookie technology is a necessity to understand and track where returning visitors have been on the site, what types of information they have sought, and what they might need next. Anticipating their needs and interests will result in a significant increase in conversion, and a decrease in frustration.

Allow Visitors to Contribute Their Own Personalization Settings. In the case of ESPN, it might seem obvious to assume that a visitor from Washington, D.C., was a Washington Nationals fan. translate But they could just as easily be a Baltimore Orioles lover. Checking in with that visitor directly will deliver better engagement, and better results.

Programmatic buying for display ad inventory hit an inflection point this year and is expected to account for 70% of total display expenditure in 2016. This major shift is being driven primarily by digital agencies like Bluetext who are leveraging rapid advances in advertising technology systems such as Demand Side Platforms (DSPs) that automate the buying process with real-time bidding (RTB) – the backbone of programmatic buying. Programmatic media buying allows agencies to manage and purchase inventory from multiple ad networks through the single interface of the DSP – allowing advertisers to buy a select set of algorithmically filtered impressions across a range of publisher sites simultaneously – all targeted at a specific user persona.

With RTB, a media buyer can create a set parameters such as bid price and network reach, and can combine those with demographics and attitudinal data and auto adjust dozens of performance based variables in real time to determine the right campaign settings to achieve the desired ROI.

So what are primary advantages that programmatic media buying provides to marketers?

1. Speed

The automated buying process allows marketers to place ads through the DSP enabling quicker turnaround and increased speed to market, both of which become more critical as planning cycles get shorter, and more stringent performance goals call for dynamic testing and optimization of new strategies that can be obtained via RTB.

2. Targeting

Programmatic buying in its purist sense isn’t media buying – its audience buying. DSPs allow marketers to target a specific segment of users, wherever they are – and with retargeting capabilities built in – wherever they’re going based on previous interest in a specific product or service.

3. ROI

Increased ROI is achieved by the buying efficiency that programmatic platforms afford marketers – from both a time and cost perspective – as well as the ability to target and optimize in real time. The ability to gain traction in the market at an increasingly rapid rate with new technology also allows marketers to test various strategies simultaneously and shift budgets to the best performing channels

As advertising technology advances, approaches to programmatic buying are sure to become more sophisticated. With the addition of RTB to social networks – and even more traditional channels like print, tv and radio as some predict – new strategies will present themselves that weren’t previously possible. At Bluetext – 100% of our online display buying is programmatic – so I recommend taking a peek over your agency’s shoulder to make sure they are buying smarter and giving your brand the best opportunity to win in today’s highly charged competitive environment.

Ok all you Thornton Mellon fanatics, the stats are in and the truth must be told. Some interesting data points I hope you all reflect on as you gear up for going back to school.

DATA POINT NUMBER ONE – DEDICATED TO OUR FAVORITE TEACHER SAM KINISON
The mobile revolution is complete. Smartphones account for more than half of searches in 10 countries—including the U.S. and Japan—according to Google, which didn’t release exact percentages or a full list of countries.

Why this is important?

Is every aspect of your digital infrastructure optimized for mobile?

You shouldn’t just stack your desktop elements. You should think through the human factors of mobile design and what your users truly want in the palm of their hand on first visit. Mobile first should be in the DNA of your marketing organization.

DATA POINT NUMBER TWO: THE TRIPLE LINDY OF DATA POINTS

60% of B2B marketers use web traffic to measure success instead of using sales lead quality or social media sharing.

Why this is important?

Success comes down to the key performance indicator and the analytics that you can generate. It’s much easier to track performance and measure return on investment with reliable website traffic data. Great data gives you a clear picture of an online campaign’s viability, but traffic isn’t your only solution. This stat also shows the immaturity of marketing measurement in the majority of organizations and the need for more in-depth data and analysis. If you can ramp up your content marketing analytics in 2015, you’ll be leaps ahead of your competitors.

DATA POINT NUMBER THREE: EMAIL GETS NO RESPECT

63% of consumers prefer to be contacted by email

A new study by Adobe claims that marketers are failing to engage ‘email addicts.’

While 63% say they prefer to be contacted by email, only 20% favor direct mail, 6% social media, 5% the brand’s mobile app, 4% text message and 2% phone.

Why this is important?

Surprisingly, this shows that email campaigns are favored way above even the second most-preferred form of contact from brands, suggesting that email marketing should still be high on every digital marketer’s agenda.