Force 3 is one of the fastest growing network security services and solutions company servicing the Federal Government with revenues of more than one billion dollars annually. When it’s brand, messaging and website needed an update it turned to Bluetext. We added a fresh set of colors and a new design with the sensation of motion to the logo, a theme that plays out across the website. We also created an animated introduction that uses the color palette to draw the visitor into the site.

The new website is infused with search engine optimization so that Force 3 comes up when customers are searching for network security solutions. One of the company’s key differentiators is the expertise and passion of its team of experts. That message is persistent across the site.

The imagery is clean and modern on each page.The new brand design plays out not only on the website, but in collateral, iconography, and a new trade show booth. It delivers a brand that is in tune with today’s government customer and differentiates their offering and value from competitors.

When it was announced that Reston-based Maximus Inc. signed a definitive agreement to buy Acentia for $300 million, I must admit I got a little teary eyed.

Acentia (formerly called ITSolutions) selected Bluetext following a very competitive search to do a full rebranding effort, from name to logo to corporate identity to messaging to website to videos to launch, etc.

Todd’s challenge was hefty – he had to unify a brand across nine diverse companies (not an uncommon issue in Federal Contracting) to create a brand that would enable his company to be acquisitive and get in the game as a mid-size contractor.

This was one of our first major rebranding assignments since founding Bluetext and turned out to be an incredible project for us, working with Todd Stottlemyer and his entire management team.

If you have ever had a chance to work with Todd, his passion and commitment to excellence are second to none, and he pushed us to create work which we are still proud of today.

We spent weeks developing a name and message that not only was powerful but truly reflected the focus on his people. When the tagline was selected, Essential to the Mission, it became a rallying cry that pulled together employees, created a sense of purpose for the company and its brand, and became the theme for the company’s first advertising campaign we developed which highlighted historic people like Jackie Robinson and Clara Barton who were essential to their mission.

As my partner Jason Siegel pointed out to me last night, this is first company we named as Bluetext that is now off the market. It is a great feeling for our entire team knowing that our efforts helped them achieve their goals. Here is a link to a testimonial from Todd following the successful rebrand effort – http://bluetext.com/acentia-ceo-todd-stottlemyer-on-bluetext/

Trade associations that represent the interests of and provide services for their members, be they large companies and organizations or individuals, all face the challenge of retaining their current members every year, growing their member base and reaching non-members who may be involved in the policy or business arenas. Competition among associations is fierce. Even without competitive pressures, it’s not always easy to convince individuals, organizations, small business or large corporations to devote resources and pay fees to an industry association year-after-year. They not only have to see the value, they need to feel part of the group and believe that it is looking out for their interests and providing them the services they want.

With industry associations as with other organizations, the website is the hub of activity for members and others who want to know about the group and its issues. Too often, the hub is ignored because it’s not viewed as central to the mission of the group. We think a strong website is essential, because that is the first place that any target audience is going to look for information. Bluetext has helped dozens of industry and membership organizations leverage their web presence to better recruit and retain their members, grow their revenues and maintain a close relationship with their constituents. Here are our top five tips:

Make It Engaging. Compelling website design and graphics are extremely important to reach those key audiences and to keep them interacting with the site. First impressions are important, and if the design doesn’t resonate, the visitor may leave quickly without engaging. A tired or out-of-date design signals that the association may not have the resources or digital savvy to have a modern and fresh look and feel. The design should also allow the visitor to find a wide range of information that spans their interests. Visitors come to association sites not to purchase a specific product, but to learn about a variety of topics, policy issues, and services that are relevant to them. Burying that information under layers of tabs may lose the target audience. A responsive design is a must, as more and more individuals are accessing the sites through mobile and tablet devices. We also recommend longer scrolls as visitors swipe to navigate the screen, rather than waiting for a new page to refresh as they move about the site.

Make It Personal. This should be fairly obvious, but it is surprising how many membership organizations and trade groups fail to highlight their own members. Why is this important? Because individuals need to be able to relate to the other people in the organization, to understand the types of people who are also part of the group and what value they get from their dues. Not only does this draw in new members, but it also serves to “humanize” the organization by putting faces and stories on what otherwise might seem like a faceless group.

We recommend setting up a section on the website that is full of videos and scrapbook-type photos of members and their families. For Forest America, which represents the nation’s private forest owners, we set up a section called “Caretakers” on its website, with profiles of dozens of landowners and their families who are part of the organization. To capture the footage, we take a video crew to their annual meetings and film them during breaks telling their stories—with other family members at their side. We add in photos that they send us and any other materials that help tell a personal story. The Caretakers section serves three important functions:
1) It shows visitors to the site, including policymakers and other organizations, the human faces that comprise the organization;
2) It helps with recruitment, as other private forest landowners see that they can be part of the team; and
3) It energizes current members, who love to see their colleagues and friends—and their own families—in a scrapbook setting.

Give Them The Tools They Need. Members are busy, so any shortcuts that make their lives easier are welcome. For the Society of Human Resource Management, a membership organization that includes thousands of human resources executives, retention was suffering due to the economic downturn. HR directors needed an easy way to convince their CEOs that membership in SHRM paid valuable dividends in training and resources for their annual fees. Rather than their typical request for approval, which might be shuffled to the bottom of the in-box, we built a tool for members that with just a little bit of information would create a compelling brief presentation to be send to their top executives. The deck, which explains the value of joining or renewing their membership, was far more likely to get the attention and approval of the boss. After launching the new tool, SHRM saw its renewals increase dramatically.

Make It Easy. Not only do members appreciate better tools, they need easy ways to take action and interact with the organization. Having persistent Calls-To-Action across every page of the site is essential to get the type of engagement that demonstrates value for the organization. In some cases, those Calls-To-Action can be as simple as “Join Now.” But for advocacy sites, having a sophisticated application built-in that can send a tailored email or letter to a Member of Congress or a regulatory agency serves many purposes.

First and foremost, individuals will contact policymakers only if it’s a relatively simple process. Most do not have the time to write a note to their Congressmen, nor do they know the issues well-enough. In addition, they might have no idea how to find the right policy-maker and obtain their email or physical address. We have installed a number of effective applications for associations that take the burden off of the member. By filling out, for example, their zip code, these tools can auto-populate a letter with the correct Member of Congress and address, and offer a “Mad Lib” draft where certain fields can easily be completed.

Build In Engagement. There are excellent new tools to engage visitors to the site. The first is obvious: Make social sharing persistent on every page and section of the site. Whenever a visitor sees anything they like—a position paper, an infographic, a video or a blog post—encourage them to push that around to their larger network.

Another tool that we have implemented in a number of sites is a Tweet-Builder—a tool that poses a topic and then invites the visit to complete a tweet, with recommended hashtags that can be included. That tweet then goes in real-time into the associations Twitter Stream.

The benefits of this tool are that it encourages the visitor to participate while helping to populate the social media arena. It also gives an incentive for that person to follow the group on social media, and to broadcast posts out to their larger community.

A third tool that we implemented is a polling functionality—that poses questions on the site in the form of polling questions, and then displays the results on that same page. Designed to resemble a Pinterest Page, polling tools invite participation and give the visitor a reason to keep coming back to the site. This is one that we built for a media company that publishes a variety of sportsmen-focused magazines.

Bloomberg BNA is one of top providers of legal information for attorneys, ranging from court decisions and legal filings to law review articles and news coverage that can affect a company or case. Bloomberg saw a huge opportunity to reach in-house counsel at companies and organizations where litigation, intellectual property, transactions and compliance are managed internally. It needed a dynamic campaign to reach those target attorneys with a good reason why they should add Bloomberg BNA tools to their arsenal.

Bluetext designed a campaign micro-site that begins with a live-action video with six individual personas, representing six use cases, so that target visitors could select the example that most closely matches their own responsibilities. Once the individual is selected, the visitor is taken to a page that provides in-depth details about that particular offering including examples and screen shots.

The site serves as its own segmentation filter, placing targets more directly into the best lead nurture channel. Calls-To-Action are prominent across every page to make it simple to download a whitepaper or infographic, sign up for a relevant newsletter, request a free trial or to learn more. The campaign included a direct mail piece with graphics and designs that match the site.

 

CITRIX TAKES ON ITS COMPETITION

When Citrix wanted to go after its competitor VMware head-on, Bluetext designed a gamificiation experience that pitted the two contenders against each other. The teaser video features the training regime of a real world champion fighter, and leads to an interactive rock-em, sock-em fighters game with the Citrix kid taking on Victor Machismo– and winning of course. Key messages fill the screen with every punch.

 

In the massively competitive real estate industry, companies can gain serious strategic advantage from modernizing their marketing tactics to take advantage of new strategies and tools that are impacting how they communicate with customers and prospects.

Here are five trends we are seeing that could benefit commercial real estate companies as they look to up their marketing game in 2015.

1. Leverage your data
Data provides one of the biggest opportunities to show your strategic differentiation, and in today’s world it can be leveraged in so many visual ways. Buyers leverage it across so many of their key decisions. Embrace it, leverage it, and present it in new and unique ways so that the industry continues to drive toward more visualization…

2. Advertising Goes Digital
Paid digital advertising offers so many more unique and exciting ways to present your business compared to the traditional print methods used for so many years. You can present your assets in so many unique ways, micro target your buyers, and measure the impact to evaluate and evolve your visual message on a constant basis.

3. Social = Snackable
At Bluetext we have been preaching the snackable method for delivering content for a while. Few industries, due to the nature of the services, lend themselves better to this approach. Take your visuals and data and information and present it in bite sized chunks. Be consistent with templates and design for a professional look. Your customers and prospects will take notice.

4. Content. Content. Content
Create great content that can be delivered via reports and webinars, and use it to continuously push your message to your customers and prospects. No one realizes you are expert unless you let them know.

5. Customize Your Campaigns
You know who your targets are. You know what content is important to them. Don’t throw everything on the wall and hope it sticks. With new opportunities to micro target across channels like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn to deliver a message to a very targeted audience, now is the time to make sure you are maximizing every opportunity to take the message directly where your prospects are.

Those are just some of the trends that should be considered for 2015. If you are looking for a commercial real estate marketing firm, we are doing a lot of great content marketing for real estate and data visualizations to help marketers differentiate their brand in the competitive commercial real estate arena.

My colleagues and I at Bluetext have spent a fair amount of time developing brand and positioning strategies for dozens of new, disruptive and innovative brands…and more often than not are tasked with creating a new name for the company, the products or services they deliver, or both.

With 99.9 percent of the commonly-used words in the dictionary already taken among the close to 300 million registered domains from more than 125 million companies worldwide, how many great names could possibly be left?

We are currently in the process of branding and naming a highly disruptive technology product that is almost certain to quickly become one of the most visible B2B product brands in the US. We thought this might be a good time to define the five critical tenets of coming up with a great new name:

1. The most important aspect of a brand or product’s name is a crystallized vision statement and its supporting proof points. The name should deliver against your core objective for the business and central vision for the brand. Perhaps the most important question you need to answer is whether the brand should be company-focused or product-centric. In most cases it’s the former – but many well-known brands – like RIM’s Blackberry – have successfully incorporated a strategy that leads with the latter.

2. Before you begin the name-storming process, agree on what you want the attitude or voice of the brand to be – what emotion, feeling or idea do you want it to evoke when you see and hear it? Starbucks Chairman and CEO Howard Schultz summed it up best by saying, “A great brand raises the bar – it adds a greater sense of purpose to the experience, whether it’s the challenge to do your best in sports and fitness, or the affirmation that the cup of coffee you’re drinking really matters.”

3. Once you establish your vision, there is a set of ten key initial criteria that any name being considered must meet:

• Is it easy to remember?
• Is it easy to understand?
• Is it easy to pronounce?
• Is it easy to spell?
• Does it sound good when spoken?
• Does it look good when written?
• Is it unique?
• Is it trademarked?
• Is the domain name available?
• Are there any negative connotations with it?

4. Consider the five primary approaches to naming to determine which may best represent your central vision for the brand in a distinct and powerful way:

• Functional or Descriptive (Facebook, Instagram, UnderArmor )
• Derived from Color, Number, Shape or Word Root (Accenture, RedBull, Starbucks)
• Experiential based on Human Processes (Discover, United, Visa)
• Abstract or Evocative (Apple, Uber, Virgin)
• Invented (Google, Skype, Xfinity)

5. Quantity and Diversity Equals Quality – Naming is a matter of satisfying many competing criteria – and while we have seen cases where the first name our team comes up with ends up being the final one chosen – the chances of having a name just pop into your head that meets all of them is practically impossible. The most effective way to come up with a name is to think of lots of different ideas, carefully screen and choose, and repeat. One method that’s proven effective is having all names under consideration sorted into an A and B list and reconciling it every time a new one is introduced. It is interesting to see names held initially in high favor lose a little bit of their luster with each review, while others move up the ladder.

Once a name is chosen – it will be forever attached to the brand or product it is developed for – so continuous review is critical to ensure it will stand the test of time.

Need help with a branding or marketing challenge?  Lets talk!

 

 

 

Real Estate marketing is a fast-paced and ever changing target, and we often see big trends come and go in how websites are designs. Many of the real estate centric web design trends we’ve seen in the last few years are still around, and more new trends are emerging in 2016.

Here are 5 trends that will likely dominate the best real estate websites in 2016:

 

Stick with Sticky
Fixed or “sticky” navigation bars are a prevalent trend in some of the most shockingly beautiful sites across the web. These benignly set bars allow for ease of access to a website’s core functionalities, regardless of where a user may be in the midst of a page’s content.
Some pro’s for going with a sticky interface:
• Advantages in usability
• Speed up your customer journey
• All the cool brands are doing it – its white hot

Real estate companies like HomeAway.com and Kangaroom.net are doing this very well. With users needing to recall all their search parameters and being able to easily toggle from map view to list view, Real Estate is one of the best vertical markets that can benefit its digital experiences by adding sticky interface elements.

Hamburgers Attack
We have all seen the hamburger icon. As a matter of fact most of us probably use it on a daily basis. It has become a staple in website and app design. I’m even looking at it now on the top right corner of Google Chrome.
Real estate sites continue to attack their interface design projects with hamburgers. Why? Because hamburgers are the most minimal interface you could have. And that means more screen real estate for those great real estate images and videos.

 

Where are you with Wearables?
Wearable Technology is the latest “next big thing” and its main focus is making life simpler.

Wearable technology will redefine the world. The shift to the proliferation of mobile devices meant that many new design principles had to be created and learned. The same will apply with Wearables, so don’t get left behind!

All websites for real estate companies should look at their responsive website design deliverables and add wearable browsers to the list of deliverables you would like to see your website looking optimized for.

Suggest “Search Suggest”
As digital advertising costs continue to rocket, having consumers search on your website instead of Trulia, zillow, redfine, etc is more important than ever.

If you’re optimizing your site aggressively that should be accompanied by a search centric homepage and general interface design.

The old adage was you want less clicks to the most critical conversion points. How about ZERO clicks. Search should be up front and center and EVERYWHERE.

On top of being search centric, you should streamline even further with a multi data point search suggest experience. In that magic AJAX powered fly out you should have closest geographic matches which have accompanying information like real time pricing and inventory, and other compelling content.

3D Virtual Tours
Companies like Matterport have introduced a ground-breaking technology for real estate – 3D Experiences assembled from still photography. Think Google Street View for your interior home tours. Create a realistic and immersive online experience covering the entire interior of any home. Captivate Buyers and impress Sellers with this innovative technology.
With 3D Experiences, companies like Matterport are revolutionizing how brokerages and agents showcase homes. A special camera rotating 360 degrees and controlled by an iPad is placed in multiple locations in every room in the home. The image data is then uploaded to a cloud server, and then you have a captivating 3D model of the entire home is ready for viewing. Embed this model directly into your Virtual Tours so Buyers can experience the 3D tour everywhere your content goes, be it your corporate website, MRIS, Realtor.com, your Broker site, your realtors site, Zillow, Trulia, RedFin and many more.  A great company for capturing Matterports are HomeVisit.

So those are the trends that we see as critical for real estate websites in 2016. Other ideas come to mind? Let us know your feedback. Looking for help? Contact us.

Clients are asking us all the time about SEO. The truth is, in the changing game of organic search, trying to keep up with Google and Bing and their sophisticated algorithms is nearly impossible. As new marketing avenues emerge, however, the concept of delivering relevant, thought leadership content will always be important to the search engines. In fact, it remains the case that the attributes of your content which the search engines find most important are whether it is relevant, authoritative, and different.

It is this term authoritative which I want to explore a little more, because driving authoritative content is no different than having an opinion and being knowledgeable about a subject, classic attributes of a traditional thought leader. You need to know your targets, know how to reach them, know what content they will care about, and know what may incite them to transact or interact with you. You need to start a conversation with them on your website and on social media channels, comment on relevant industry articles and blog posts, and generally be in the mix with advice, ideas, and opinions. The search engines are using social signals to validate the impact of users, determining if that user is trusted.

So what can you do, given potentially limited budget and limited time to focus on thought leadership and authoritative content? Here are 6 keys for developing authoritative content:

1. Be provocative. Start conversations with an opinion that enables others to challenge it.
2. Be active. Take the time to research your targets and produce a steady stream of content.
3. Be smart. You should be an authority on your topic.
4. Be timely. When something happens, be the first with insights, ideas, feedback.
5. Be yourself. Have a personality. Be known for something.
6. Walk before you run, but once you start running, run hard and stick with it….your targets will notice your commitment.

P.S – Don’t forget to optimize your meta data and keep current with a list of good keywords.

Do you feel out of touch with the latest digital government marketing jargon and worried that your bosses and co-workers might catch on? Maybe you’re new to the industry and trying hard to wrap your head around the myriad of acronyms and government marketing terms being used in nearly every workplace conversation. In the digital age, government marketers, companies and industry thought leaders are constantly introducing new ideas, solutions and technologies that can be impossible to keep up with. We’ve put together a comprehensive Government & Public Sector Marketing Lingo glossary to help ensure you’re in the loop and not left out of the conversation.