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When you think of your business’ data, what is the first thing that pops into your head? Graphs, charts, and databases? Spreadsheets filled with row upon row of figures waiting to be put to use? While all of these things are important to your business’ data structure, they’re only individual parts of an extensive data ecosystem, an understanding of which is critical. Data ecosystems provide companies with reliable data to understand their customers and to make better pricing, operations, and marketing decisions.

What is a Data Ecosystem?

A data ecosystem is defined as a collection of infrastructure, analytics, and applications used to capture and analyze data. These applications collect and filter information for businesses to better understand their users, website visitors, and audience members. The term “ecosystem” is used because data ecosystems are dynamic and expected to constantly evolve to accommodate the changing needs of your organization.

At their core, data ecosystems are used to capture data and produce meaningful insights. As customers use products, especially digital ones, they leave behind data trails. By creating a data ecosystem, companies can catalog and analyze data trails so product teams can better understand user preferences. The best data ecosystems are constructed around a product analytics platform that enables teams to integrate multiple data sources, provide machine learning tools for automation improvements, and track user cohorts to simplify calculating performance metrics. Additional applications that analytics platforms empower include increasing user engagement, increasing user retention, and conversion tracking and marketing funnels.

Creating a Data Ecosystem

The three essential elements of a data ecosystem are infrastructure, analytics, and applications. Infrastructure can be thought of as the foundation on which everything else is built. It’s the hardware and software that capture, collect, and organize data, including servers for data storage, search languages like SQL, and hosting platforms. Analytics serves as the entryway that teams use to access their data ecosystem. Analytics platforms sift through and summarize the data within the infrastructure, so all data is visualized in a centralized place. At this level, an organization can segment users and measure them with marketing funnels, identify the traits of ideal buyers, or automatically send in-app messages to users who are at-risk for churn. Finally, applications are the individual components of the ecosystem, the services, and systems that act upon data and make it usable. At this level, users can work with their analytics data to drive critical outcomes across the organization, like a marketing team drumming up leads based on activity or a sales team tracking key user engagement. Finally, applications are the individual components of the ecosystem, the services and systems that act upon data and make it usable.

Optimizing Your Data Ecosystem

There is no one-size-fits-all approach to optimizing your business’ data ecosystem. There are, however, two concepts you can keep in mind as you work towards the right fit; democratizing your data science and establishing strong data governance. A key benefit of good data management is that everyone has the ability to access reports and insights. By democratizing your data and purchasing a large number of licenses for your analytics software, rather than restricting access to only a few employees, you can prevent bottlenecks in the flow of information and promote a frictionless exchange of information. That’s not to say that you should leave everything unbound, however. Setting rules and boundaries for employees about collecting, protecting, and accessing data is essential for shielding your company from liability and complying with federal laws about privacy protection. A marketing analytics agency, such as Bluetext can assist with prescribing the right data ecosystem tailored to your organization’s needs.

The Digital Marketing Ecosystem, where to start?

Impactful Outcomes of a Data Ecosystem

For an organization to remain competitive in any industry, they have to have a comprehensive understanding of their data. Understanding your company’s data ecosystem is the first step towards segmenting your user base, learning who they are, and revealing how they interact with your business. Informed decision-making at every level of an organization stems from understanding and engaging with its data ecosystem.

It’s no secret the digital marketing industry depends upon and craves data. Any piece of information gathered about a user can be used to strengthen your lead generation, campaign or website strategy. While every digital marketer is hungry for data, there is no value without context and robust understanding. Marketing analytics can and should be used to inform, as well as validate any digital strategy.

Contact Bluetext if you’re interested in turning analytics into action.

20 times a day — that’s how often people on average check their email. Sounds like a lot, but in reality emailing has become so ingrained in our everyday routines. Whether email is the first thing you check when you wake up, in line at the coffee shop, or multiple times during the workday it is a key aspect of our personal and professional lives. Hence, the importance of email marketing. Seems like a no-brainer–sales and marketing outreach is a natural fit for email inboxes. So why are your email performance metrics dwindling?

The prevalence of emails is a double-edged sword. Yes, email is an undeniably popular form of communication. However, this means inboxes are being constantly flooded. On average people receive 121 emails a day. This heightens the challenge of effective email marketing but does not dilute the significance of email marketing. It’s the most popular channel for business communications and the reliable channel for nurturing and converting leads to sales throughout the funnel. Many It is a tricky, but highly rewarding digital marketing platform. The nuances of email marketing and widespread frustration with stagnant performance metrics have led Bluetext to identify the 5 most common email marketing mistakes and how to improve your email performance metrics.

1. Subject Line Skepticism

One of the most challenging aspects of email marketing is the subject line — this is the hook that entices a user to either open your message, or ignore it entirely. When your inbox is being constantly flooded with marketing emails it can become second nature to simply ignore or mark a promotional email as spam. However, a strong and attention-grabbing subject line can dissuade a user from these practices and pay attention to your messages. Below are some of the most common subject line faux pas:

Too wordy – your subject lines need to be short, sweet, and pack a punch. Think about all the words on your average inbox interface, there’s a lot! In a 5 second scan, your subject line should jump out with concentrated keywords. The highest open rates occur with subject lines 6-10 words in length. This keeps the full message readable in the line item without truncating with those dreaded … A subject line doesn’t need to contain entire sentences, or detail every piece of content inside. Instead, try a catchy phrase or question to spark curiosity, which instantly drives engagement.
SPAM Red Flags – subject lines written in all caps immediately sound the alert for SPAM filters – both by the reader and email system!
Pre-Header Connection – subject line and pre-header text are two key elements of any email that when used effectively form a dynamic duo. Both are prime opportunities to capture attention and prompt an open, thus need to complement one another. Strive for subject lines that briefly describe what the message is about, and a pre-header provides important context. Together they form a cohesive narrative that gives a sneak peek, driving the reader’s engagement.

2. Forgetting the Filters:

Keep in mind the success of your email marketing campaign hinges on two parties: the recipient and their email provider’s SPAM filters. More often than not marketers concentrate on the human reader and forego considerations of the automated filter system. To avoid getting trafficked to SPAM folders, watch out for the use of these warning signals: clickbait phrases, all caps, overuse of “you” and “I” pronouns, and listicles. Email providers most commonly scan content on the following levels:

Header filters – look for spam indicators in email subject lines and pre-headers (for example clickbait phrases, all caps)
Content filters – crawl the content of the email to find spam indicators
General backlist filters – use the database of spammers to determine if the email is clickbait
Permission filters – ask the reader for confirmation before opening the email

3. Over Genercism:

Personalization is key and leads to 25% higher open rates. In any aspect of digital marketing, it’s important to recognize basic human psychology: people want to feel special. Whether that’s by seeing their pain points addressed, persona-based navigation, or even as basic as being addressed by name. Personalizing emails with first and last names is a simple, but effective way to grab the reader’s attention and qualm the suspicion of copy-and-paste clickbait. Additionally, the overuse of first-person pronouns is a trigger for SPAM filters. Consider adding their name to a subject line (ex. John, your system needs updates” or at the least beginning the body copy with a personalized greeting “Hi John Doe,”. With this approach, your email immediately feels like a one-to-one conversation and less of a robotic one-to-many outreach.

4. Unclear Call-to-Action:

Let’s backtrack: the goal of your email is to guide your subscribers from opening an email to going to a landing page where they can learn more information about a promotion, request a demo, or contact you. Your email marketing strategy is aimed at turning leads into prospects, and eventually customers. Getting users to open your email is half the battle, the other half is guiding them to conversion. Don’t make a reader dig through email content to find the end goal. Add a CTA or landing page link to the beginning and end of an email body, in the event that the user does not read the entire message. A CTA stands for “calls to action” for a reason — they should be action-orientated and exciting! Experiment with different language that goes beyond the boring “Learn More” to inspire clicks. Perhaps try a stylized button to really catch the eye. The most important aspect is to be cautious of burying your CTA, if it can’t be found in a 5-10 second scan chances are your reader will give up and forgo the opportunity.

5. Ignoring the Technicalities:

Before getting into all the bells and whistles of your content strategy, set yourself up for success with a strong foundation. Deliverability of your emails is crucial to getting your foot in the door with your messages. About 10% of emails never even reach inboxes due to bounces, SPAM filters, or other technical issues. Most email service providers (ex. Marketo, Pardot, HubSpot) systems have built-in functions to assist with technical evaluation of domain authority, IP reputation, and email testing before you hit send. On a regular basis, you should be checking the health of your email systems, removing inactive subscribers, and analyzing important deliverability & bounce metrics.

As you can see there’s a lot to consider within your email marketing strategy. It’s a tricky path to navigate, but when done right, is a powerful digital marketing tool.

Need to uplevel your email marketing strategy? Contact Bluetext to learn more about our services.

After crafting the perfect campaign, ad creative, and hook-worthy copy, there is nothing more frustrating than a user coming to your website only to leave after a few seconds.

In order to prevent those high bounce rates and low clickthrough rates, you need to set up engaging and informative landing pages that lead visitors to the actions you want them to take on your website. It’s not an easy task, but thankfully digital marketing agencies, such as Bluetext, have experience and tips to share. Let’s look at five ways you can master the art of the landing page.

1. Emphasize Calls to Action

As this Elementor article states, “Unlike most webpages, landing pages often actively discourage exploration in an attempt to push visitors toward the CTA.” The whole goal of your landing page will be to push your users to a certain action or link, so make sure you place CTAs throughout your landing page to encourage clicks as the user scrolls. Also, be certain the CTAs are the most prominent component of your landing page, by color, placement, or other characteristics, they need to stick out to grab visitors’ attention and entice click-throughs. Also consider adding sticky CTA menus that follow the user down the page, enticing them to click-through at any time during their experience with your site. Some top placements of sticky CTAs lock onto the right-hand side or directly under the main menu navigation.

2. Think Through Your First Viewport

When a user first appears on your landing page, they are looking for an immediate answer to their question. Every one of us has looked at a website for all of one second before exiting because we could not immediately find the information we wanted or perhaps there was too much text to read through.

Make sure that you use that first viewport wisely to start appealing to user needs. Have informative, relevant headlines, eye-catching images or video, and helpful secondary text. All of these pieces will go a long way in convincing your users to continue to scroll, and eventually click that CTA button.

3. Write Intriguing Copy

If you can grab your visitor with their first look at your landing page, you’ve already overcome a significant challenge of landing pages. However, now you need to sustain that attention. It’s a tricky maneuver, balancing providing immediate information while also ensuring they absorb additional details. Give everything away at once and the user never interacts further with your website, but tease it out too long and you risk users bouncing off the page. Digital marketers recommend to not overwhelm the user with small, dense text but instead offer answers to their questions. Additionally, psychological elements can be used to reach your visitors and convince them to use your CTAs. By the time someone finishes reading your landing page, they should have a clear idea of why your product or service will give them the best solution to their problem.

4. Optimize for Search Engines

You may have the most magnificent landing page in the world, but that does nothing if people can’t find it. Using keyword phrases and writing rich meta descriptions is an important part of SEO for a successful landing page. By getting to the top 20 results of Google (or in the first two pages of results), the chances of someone actually seeing and clicking on your landing page rise substantially.

5. Design with Your Users in Mind

As with any page, design can make or break your user experience. As you write copy, consider what information is most important to the user and needs to be emphasized in valuable H1’s and H2’s, think about which details could be shown in more interactive formats, and choose media that adds to instead of distracts from your main purpose. You also need to ensure that your landing pages are fully accessible for all your potential users.

A great example of a compelling, successful landing page comes from our campaign with Varonis. Bluetext worked with Varonis to create ads that drove viewers to landing pages and CTAs. By targeting the right audiences and leveraging intriguing copy, Bluetext helped Varonis grow its click-through rates above the industry benchmarks.

Want to learn more about creating successful landing pages or are interested in working with Bluetext to create a successful, data-driven landing page strategy? Contact us today.

In our recent blog post, we discussed the power of strategic branding in the world of private equity. As we mentioned, the first step in developing a new brand for an M&A should be to gain understanding and consensus on how you want to be (and can/should be) positioned within the market via your company messaging and positioning. Once you have the words right, it’s time to get the looks down. Your company CVI (corporate visual identity) includes the logo, the color palette, typography, graphics and iconography, unique branded elements like an image masking or pattern overlay, and so much more. As we stated before, you only get to go to market with your new brand once – make sure it counts by following our steps to a successful M&A brand launch below.

3. Define the New Company Structure

When merging multiple companies, it’s important to think through the new structure, from multiple points of view – the employees’ roles, the products/services/capabilities, the customers and partner channels, the company values and culture, just to name a few. Understanding and clearly communicating how everything will fit together will help employees adapt to the change and ultimately help the brand strength. Ideally, you should already be thinking about this during the messaging and positioning phase and should have an idea of what’s overlapping, what’re the new capabilities that need to be accounted for, and write new content for? How do they fit into the company story and how do you market them? How does this affect the website’s sitemap, content, and user journey? How does this affect current and new contracts?

Understanding the company’s new structure and thinking about new processes early on makes it easier to design around the new information architecture, flag problem areas that employees or customers might be confused about, and address them before it becomes a challenge. It’s also beneficial to look ahead – many times during an M&A, companies might be in the process of acquiring another new company/companies towards the end of when they’re launching the new brand. Accounting for that potential while thinking about the new company structure and information architecture encourages a scalable structure knowing that the company’s solutions and capabilities will likely continue to expand throughout the process of building the new brand.

4. Plan Your Internal & External Go-To-Market Campaign

Now that you have strategic messaging and positioning, a new corporate visual identity, and a good understanding of new company architecture, it’s time to start planning the launches – both internal and external go-to-market campaigns.

Employees are brand ambassadors, so set them up for success with a smooth internal launch by setting expectations and communicating in a clear way how this change will affect their roles/responsibilities, the culture/values, etc. Employees are looking to understand what this change means for them. How is their job changing, what’s the new org chart, who do they report to, how do they refer to the brand, etc? A personal touch like a letter or video from the CEO can go a long way in delivering a level of unity and excitement about the upcoming changes. Prep them with swag bags of new branded merchandise, prepare a digital brand assets package with all new branded collateral templates like pitch decks/presentations, datasheets, white papers, business cards/stationery, email signatures, brand guidelines on how to use and apply the new branding, etc. A well synced internal launch promotes confidence about the new company and its opportunities, and the employees are an extension of the brand, so preparing them and motivating them for the changes to come are necessary for the brand to hold strong internally before launching externally. The better you communicate to and prepare employees, the stronger the brand will be represented through them.

A compelling Go-To-Market campaign is essential for an external brand launch. This includes everything from PR and media outreach, to ensuring the website is ready to launch, to a strategic paid social campaign with PPC, hyper-targeted ads, geofencing, marketing automation with email campaigns, optimized SEO, and maybe even a brand launch or brand essence video to really stand out and help tell your story.

The GTM campaign is where everything comes together – the messaging and positioning weaved in the campaign theme, the compelling visuals representing the new corporate visual identity, and the excitement around the new company’s capabilities and what this means for customers. Executing on a strong go-to-market campaign is not only critical in getting brand awareness, but also in driving home the value of being stronger together – both internally and externally. It’s not about the change; it’s about what’s next, together.

Case Study: SpaceIQ

Enter three leading brands of the workplace management industry: SiQ, Archibus, and Serraview. Each with a rich product portfolio with distinct features, designed for the needs of different sized companies. United, they offer integrated workplace solutions that optimize the workspace and enhance employee experience for companies of any size. Project Union became the name of this powerful merger of three companies into SpaceIQ, a comprehensive solution on a mission to make the workplace good for business and great for people.

To solidify the merger, SpaceIQ needed a new website that spoke to its breadth of offerings and united company mission. The company turned to Bluetext to turn their new branding into a fully responsive and intuitive website to communicate all of their product lines. The new site was designed with the end customer needs top of mind. Using dynamic components to showcase success stories, custom glossary pages, and a robust resource center for all post types, SpaceIQ customers can easily find all the educational resources they need. The three legacy brands’ relevant products are clearly identifiable through the sitemap and component features, but balanced by cohesive branding and streamlined user journey.

5. Keep It All Going

Finally, keep the momentum going, and even ramp it up! The early stages of launching a new brand from multiple companies require a lot of time, energy, and effort to maintain the excitement and continue to push brand awareness. Also from a technical perspective, there are things to consider like not immediately redirecting all legacy websites to the new site since a lot of content, like contract vehicles, for example, needs to still be accessed. However, it should still be obvious that it’s now a new company – so adding homepage banners on legacy sites with the brand launch announcement, or updating logos on the legacy LinkedIn pages (but not removing them), can help make the transition easier for customers until the brand has had time to fully establish itself in the market and stand on its own. SEO is another area that requires some time and love to see improvement since it’s likely a new name and some new search term combinations that google is processing.

A company is only as strong as its talent, so maintaining and recruiting top talent should be a priority. Consider starting a series of video vignettes with current employees speaking about their time at the legacy companies and how it’s been at the new company. Why do they love it, what makes this company different from competitors, how are there more opportunities now, etc.

Along with recruiting campaigns, continuing to execute strategic brand-awareness campaigns via paid and organic social, continuous content writing for SEO and thought leadership, etc. is a long-term game that’s critical in moving from brand awareness into more specialized branded experiences that will resonate even more with the market.

The stronger the M&A brand launch is, the easier it is for PE firms to sell

The most important thing to address in an M&A brand creation is the why (aka, the value prop) behind the new brand and set clear expectations of what this means for employees and ultimately the market. What new, innovative outcomes can we enable? Prove the value proposition of being better together. If you can get the employees and your target audience on board with the new mission, it becomes less about corporate changes and transactions and more about the new opportunities that arise from being part of this new market-dominating company. And when the portfolio companies succeed, the PE firms succeed. For PE firms, having a strong brand itself, as well as a portfolio of strong brands, is crucial for deal sourcing, fundraising, and ultimately achieving higher investment returns.

A brand is often considered a company’s most valuable asset – make sure it’s in the right hands.

If you’re looking for expert strategy and implementation for your next M&A brand launch, you’re at the right place with Bluetext. We know a thing or two about M&As. 40 of our clients have been acquired within 24 months of an engagement with Bluetext. See some examples of our work with these M&As here, and contact us to get started.

PE firms need portfolio companies with strong branding

Private Equity (PE) continues to be the preferred growth financing mechanism for most “for-profit” businesses. According to McKinsey’s 2019 Market Annual Review, “global private equity valuation has grown more than sevenfold since 2002” – more than twice the growth of publicly held equity valuation. While PE fundraising declined in 2020 to the Covid Pandemic, PE markets are experiencing a strong increase in 2021.

PE firms make most of their profits by acquiring companies, helping management increase Enterprise Value through various strategies, and then selling these companies at a much higher value. Value is quantified using metrics such as Earnings (typically EBITDA – Earnings Before Interest Taxes Debt and Amortization), Earnings Multiple (a factor applied to EBITDA to determine Enterprise Value), and valuation of Intellectual Property.

A common and highly effective growth strategy for PE portfolio companies is buying competitive or complementary companies through Mergers and Acquisitions (M&A). The brand is almost always a key component of a) the Earnings Multiple and Intellectual Property Value metrics in the valuation process and b) a successful M&A strategy. Here’s why.

Branding is so much more than a name and a logo; it’s a representation of how your company is perceived – more specifically, how your customers and the market perceive you. It’s a gut reaction, a feeling. This is why it’s critical prior to going through an M&A to create a strategic, memorable, and unique brand that provides a consistent experience across all channels, and makes sense to not just the market, but to all employees, as they become brand ambassadors themselves. PE firms have many tools and metrics to measure the value of a brand (brand loyalty, recognition, and impact) which drive a monetary valuation.

Sloppy, outdated, or inconsistent branding can make employees and the market feel uneasy and unconfident with the new company. A powerful, cohesive brand right from the gate is essential in sending the right message of being “stronger together.” In addition to looking the part, strong brands are more profitable, grow faster, and sell more frequently. You only get to go-to-market with your new brand once – make sure it counts by following our steps to a successful M&A brand launch below.

Our steps to a successful M&A brand launch

1. Develop New Positioning & Messaging

A strong brand is designed to dominate the market, which is why the first step in developing a new brand for an M&A should be to gain understanding and consensus on how you want to be (and can/should be) positioned within the market. You need to understand where you could be within the market as this new company with more talent and more vast capabilities. Determine how all the current brands’ are currently perceived, vs. how you want to be perceived. What are the brands’ value propositions and how will they be combined? If possible, involve your target audience via surveys or workshops to understand how the companies are perceived. That knowledge is a baseline on how all the companies are perceived in the market today and what needs to change in order to be perceived differently and help set expectations.

Once those baselines are understood, you’ll want to define a specific positioning strategy then base your new messaging off of that. With combined capabilities and potentially different focus areas, the positioning strategy likely will shift, so you need to identify how it should shift and define clear and compelling differentiators early on that the positioning and messaging are based on.

Market your new capabilities, but don’t become a generalist. By combining two (or frequently, more) companies together, it’s obvious there’s more diversity and broader capabilities, but if not done the right way, growing this list can make you seem too generic or disjointed. You don’t want to come across as a “jack of all trades”, but rather, a “specialist of many.” This is why considering not just the increased amount of advanced capabilities, but the outcomes of those capabilities and communicating that clearly and effectively in the new messaging is critical.

2. Create New Corporate Visual Identity

This is what most people think of when they hear “brand”. Corporate Visual Identity, CVI, is how a company visually portrays itself to the public. The logo, the color palette, typography, graphics and iconography, unique branded elements like an image masking or pattern overlay, etc. all work together to form the CVI.

Merging a brand portfolio is challenging, and there are several factors to consider before creating a new CVI. If you’re not going in the “house of brands” direction where the parent company is not associated with the products, then you’ll want to develop a unified CVI that is unique in the competitive landscape, is compelling and memorable, and visually represents the story you want to tell from the messaging. Some questions to consider include:

How do customers/the market connect with each of the brands?
What is the brand equity of the company or companies in consideration?
How will you decide which assets, if any, to retain from each brand impact projected revenue?
What story are we trying to convey and how can we visually portray that?

M&As set many new paths for success, but if the new company’s Corporate Visual Identity is not unified, meaningful, and applied in a cohesive, creative, and consistent manner, it creates a weak brand without solidarity and won’t have the impact it should.

Case Study: BlueHalo

When Arlington Capital Partners acquired several top-performing companies in national security, the AEgis team looked to Bluetext to help merge multiple companies together to create one superior brand, BlueHalo. Bluetext worked closely with AEgis to develop the new name, logo, messaging and positioning, corporate visual identity brand system, website re-design and development, video work, and a go-to-market strategy and launch plan, and in record-breaking time.

Part of what made the new BlueHalo brand so strong was the powerful corporate visual identity that Bluetext created. Bluetext moved fast to create a bold new name and brand within just weeks that would make a lasting impression on the market. The name BlueHalo represents the unbroken global line that ensures the technical advantage in the most advanced battlespace. The logo embodies the name by featuring a blue swoosh shape that depicts in a clean but strong manner, a halo of protection.

The striking blue colors to accompany the name, the branded engineering vector graphics woven in the photos to create unique, branded imagery, and the blue wires to form shapes that pull from the halo in the logo all work together to create a cohesive, meaningful, and regal brand system.

To learn more about strategic branding and how M&As can succeed with it, check out part 2 of this blog. To learn more about Bluetext and our services, contact us today.

Where is the next great opportunity for your business? Well, government agencies for one. According to USAspending.gov, approximately five trillion dollars is being allocated to government agencies in Fiscal Year 2021, with over $1 trillion going to Health and Human Services alone. These agencies are growing, and their needs for hardware, software, and services are increasing along with them.

If you are already marketing to “the government,” you understand that winning government contracts is a long sales cycle. The opportunity-to-award process might be 90 days on average, but the lead-up to those 90 days is a critical period where the deal is won or lost. During those 90 days, all data gathering and relationship-building you have done over the previous 2-5 years comes to fruition. So what exactly sets the winning businesses apart? Memorability. Government contracting is a long game, built on endurance. After many years of B2G marketing experience, Bluetext is here to break down what gets your foot in the door and sustains success in business to government marketing.

Division of time between positioning your company for success with government agencies and bidding on specific contract awards.

Winning government contracts is not as simple as pointing your existing sales and marketing engine at a new target. “The government” is not a monolithic entity, and even “the agency” needs to be treated with more nuance: It is composed of dozens of sub-entities that make independent decisions based on independent decision criteria. In enterprise sales, winning over a single decision-maker can often close the deal. In government contracts, groups of stakeholders across the agency influence which business wins the contract, even if a single decision-maker completes the signs off. So instead of persuading a single stakeholder, B2G companies are tasked with winning over multiple groups, at multiple different stages and occasions. Hence, why brand endurance is critical.

Complicating matters further, traditional channels for establishing relationships with government agencies have been disrupted by the pandemic. Most in-person conferences and meetings will not occur this year, and some will remain online for the foreseeable future. Government stakeholders are more geographically distributed and digitally dependent than ever.

The tides have shifted. Once an industry that operated in an isolated silo of its own rules, businesses seeking government contracts must adopt new, digital marketing initiatives to effectively position themselves.B2G companies should leverage the data-driven, digital marketing tools developed for B2C companies to segment and personalize their approach to agency stakeholders. B2G is too broad a term, and even business-to-agency (B2A) abstracts away from the customer understanding your company needs to have to win contracts consistently. A business-to-stakeholder (B2S) marketing approach is what your company needs to win consistently.

To succeed in data-driven B2S marketing, we explore:

What success looks like in B2S
The lifecycle of data-driven stakeholder cultivation
The division of labor between internal departments for successful execution of that lifecycle.

Begin with the End Goal in Mind

Before we determine how to develop our marketing and sales pipeline, we need to define success. Agency leadership and stakeholders can frequently change, at a minimum, with every new government administration.

Therefore, we prioritize targets that will allow your company to evolve as agency priorities and decision-makers change. Your company must first make its impression as a strong, reputable industry player, whilst also remaining top of mind through consistent brand recognition and relevant thought leadership content. These are the characteristics of a successful B2A marketing approach:

Your company is considered a thought leader in the space where the agency is procuring products and services.
Government agency stakeholders regularly call your company to ask your opinion on upcoming agency initiatives, product and service specifications, RFPs, and contract awards. Occasionally, you are invited to co-craft the RFP in ways that position your company to win.
You are aware of the potential for shifting priorities months before those shifts occur.
Information on the priorities and interests of your agency stakeholders is filtering directly to your sales team, who pass relevant information to content creators, who are crafting bespoke campaigns that reach your contacts as related conversations occur internally at the agencies.
Business development staff follow up on that content with meaningful conversations with key stakeholders. Those conversations assure your agency contacts that your company is focused on their individual and organizational priorities.
You have both breadth and depth of relationships at the agency: deep relationships with key stakeholders and associations across the organization. A few people leaving the agency does not impact your company’s ability to retain the status and relationships described above.

Does your content dress the part? A sure sign of a reputable industry player is professionally branded collateral assets, such as Invictus

The Stakeholder Development Lifecycle

In order to accomplish those goals, start by treating the agency as a combination of individual stakeholders and stakeholder groups. Organize your company’s sales and marketing approach around the Stakeholder Development Lifecycle for B2A marketing, which includes:

Acquiring Stakeholder Contacts: Start with breadth. In order for your company to establish deep relationships in an agency, you need to acquire as many points of contact as possible. Target ads based on geolocation to get in front of as many relevant stakeholders as possible. Get their title, contact information, and social media presence. Build from there.
Monitoring Stakeholder Contacts: Capture social media posts, digital content interaction (with a privacy-first approach of course), conference attendance, and internal agency relationship information from contacts over time so that you can understand and target their needs, interests, and priorities.
Segmenting Stakeholder Contacts: Based on a contact’s position in the organization and their activities and expressed perspectives, segment them into groups that should be targeted and messaged together consistently.
Nurturing Stakeholder Contacts: Develop marketing, business development, and sales outreach that messages contacts according to their segment and the depth of their relationship with your company. Build a customer journey map that helps you identify what messages move contacts deeper into understanding your company’s value proposition and believing in it.
Fostering Stakeholder Promoters: Identify your company’s highest value and strongest promoting contacts as the champions your company needs to win individual contract awards. Prioritize according to how naturally the contact aligns with your company’s offerings and how important the contact is to your company’s long-term relationship with the agency.

Stakeholder Development Lifecycle for B2A Marketing

Considering Stakeholder Segments

Within each agency, there are groups of stakeholders with priorities that will govern how well your company competes in a given contract award. The priorities of the agency can be efficiently stored within a single person’s head. But understanding the priorities of each stakeholder within each stakeholder group requires a data acquisition and data management approach that efficiently captures, aggregates, and generates insights about how your company is positioned with regard to that stakeholder group and the awards they oversee.

To understand how stakeholder priorities can differ, we use an example company, CyberSample, selling cybersecurity solutions to the Department of Transportation (DoT).

If CyberSample were to interface only with the DoT’s contract oversight and contract administration team, they would get a simplified and sanitized understanding of what governs the contract award. They would miss the critical details and priorities needed to assuage the concerns of each stakeholder group.

If they were to interface only with agency leadership or technology leadership, they would get a sense of broad organizational priorities and gain credibility from being introduced by internal power brokers. However, unless they leverage those introductions to dig deeper into specific needs surrounding an award, CyberSample’s team is unlikely to understand the tactical needs of technology implementers, users, or initiative leaders.

Example stakeholder groups and their corresponding priorities for CyberSample are provided in the figure below.

CyberSample stakeholder segments and their priorities. Segments and priorities should be validated by marketing interactions, public discussions, and business development and sales conversations.

Within each agency and with regard to each industry vertical selling into the agency, there will be a different set of stakeholder groups that influence decision-making. Your first task is to gather the intelligence needed to identify, segment, and target each stakeholder group. Taking a card from the B2C marketing playbook, it’s very similar to traditional customer personas, focus groups, data collection and tracking. Businesses that open their minds to alternative digital marketing and outreach methods are putting themselves miles ahead of the competition. This will allow you to move from a broad B2A approach to a more focused B2S methodology.

Executing on B2S Marketing with a Data-Driven Approach

For the approach described above to be successfully executed, each of your internal departments needs to coordinate. That coordination is built on a shared understanding of the agency landscape. A shared understanding requires a consistent and comprehensive approach to data collection, manipulation, and utilization.

Within the Contact Acquisition phase, your company’s Marketing and Content teams need to develop top-of-the-funnel landing pages, emails, webinars, white papers, and presentations that make agency contacts want to opt-in to a relationship with your company. Your Technology team needs to have the systems in place to capture customer interactions from your web properties and events, as well as to trigger intelligent outreach based on those interactions. Your Data team needs to clean and integrate the information captured from these interactions so that intelligence can filter back to Marketing, Content, Business Development, and Sales.

A summary of your company’s information needs is provided in the table below.

Once your company has acquired contacts and is actively monitoring activity, your Marketing, Content, and Business Development teams need to know what messages are resonating with agency stakeholders, and who are credible thought leaders through which to filter those messages. That provides the platform for new content development and for influencer marketing via the people who already have your stakeholders’ attention.

Those messages also enable the Business Development team to schedule meetings and start having conversations with stakeholders about their individual priorities and the interaction between those priorities and the organization at large. Your company can surface conflicts between agency groups to discover how to navigate potential barriers to contract awards.

Meanwhile, your Marketing team can deepen relationships with agency stakeholders through increasingly targeted messaging that moves those stakeholders closer to being promoters of your business. Your Product & Service team can ensure that your product or service value proposition is aligned with the priorities of each stakeholder group as you enter the RFP process. Your Business Development and Sales teams can focus on the individual needs of key stakeholders and customize your messaging to those stakeholders’ needs.

It is the job of your Data team to ensure that each department has the intelligence they need, when and where they need it, to effectively cultivate those relationships and respond with well-honed sales and marketing messages.

Below, we illustrate the division of labor between different departments throughout the Stakeholder Development Lifecycle.

Division of Labor Between Departments for the Stakeholder Development Lifecycle

Centauri utilized Bluetext’s services to launch a new name, brand, and website following a merger. Their go-to-market strategy succeeded in winning new awards, company recruits, and even an acquisition from KBR. Check out how Bluetext has set up more brands for M&A success.

How Do I Get Started?

For the approach described above to be successfully executed, each of your internal departments needs to coordinate. That coordination is built on a shared understanding of the landscape within the agency. A shared understanding requires a consistent and comprehensive approach to data collection, manipulation, and utilization.

The starting point depends on the maturity of your company, specifically in the Data and Marketing Teams. For those with fully staffed teams that can execute, you can follow the plan outlined in this post.

The Data Team holds responsibility for timely, reliable access to data to allow the MarCom Team to execute and your other teams to act on the results. If you are still attempting to develop the overall strategy and buy-in from departmental or executive leadership, or if you don’t have the confidence in the systems in place, Bluetext has several options to help you move forward:

Data Summit: This workshop is customized to your specific requirements, but is designed to bring together stakeholders from the relevant departments to educate them on the goals of the initiative, gather input from various departments about any concerns or limitations, and move toward a consensus regarding the strategic approach that will improve your targeted marketing efforts.
Data & Systems Assessment: For those who have made the decision to move forward with improved data-driven marketing, it is critical to have confidence in your data systems (reliability, scalability, and accessibility), data governance (security and policies), and ROI (time to value and budget). Our assessment process addresses all of these aspects and culminates with the development and delivery of a Data Infrastructure and Capabilities Roadmap (DICR). The DICR includes the findings of the assessment, strategic vision, proposed infrastructure solution, and an implementation plan (typically phased).

With the organizational buy-in in place, and you have the data and reliable systems in place, but require assistance in execution in the marketing and content, working with industry-leading partners like Bluetext will allow you to start executing your strategy.

Bluetext brings the marketing and business development expertise needed to elevate your targeting and messaging and brings the data expertise needed to make your web, marketing, sales, and business development data work for you. Reach out to start the conversation about how we can position your company to succeed with government agency marketing and business development.

Search marketing has powerful potential with infinite nuances. This digital marketing medium has an unmatched ability to reach mass users at a macro level on the basis of targeted browsing & interest. Search marketing is a demand-driven opportunity to engage in individual conversations at a mass scale. Just like the phrase implies, the ‘world wide web’ is an incredibly complex and interconnected ecosystem of users, websites, search queries, and advertising. So how and where should you start to navigate the infinite avenues of search marketing? First, consult a digital marketing agency, especially one which specializes in marketing analytics & paid media strategy like Bluetext.

A digital marketing agency can offer search marketing services that you help identify: your website user personas, what organic keywords are bringing traffic to your site, what keywords & phrases have the optimal cost-per-click (CPC), and competitive density for paid search efforts.

Automation: the Answer to Search Marketing

Basic search marketing strategy connects a user’s intent to an ideal and relevant response. Automated search marketing strategy uses automation to constantly improve and become more efficient and effective over time. A basic search strategy can be simple to set up and understand, but results may flatline without consistent nurturing. Automated search marketing can be complex and intimidating, but when set up correctly, can yield impressive and compounding results.

Some search marketers have been hesitant to embrace automation and trust algorithms and data processing power. However, avoiding the advancement of automation only hurts your strategy and puts you at a competitive disadvantage in comparison to more future-focused competitors.

Search engine tools have matured over time to provide increased control, transparency, and tangible results than ever before. Real-time automation has evolved to be the foundation of the search engine ecosystem. What was once an analog concept (imagine a physical directory) has been transformed into a dynamic digital medium. The modern search marketing experience is an always-on, cross-device experience capable of delivering almost any type of content a user is looking for.

The key aspect to keep in mind with search marketing is its dynamic nature. New features and improvements are constantly being implemented, with new queries and signals added every second. Hundreds of data points are aggregated for every interaction. The term “big data” is an understatement to summarize the sheer volume of data that can be collected and harnessed to provide the most personalized experience to users possible.

Finding the Right Search Strategy

Search marketing is not a one size fits all solution. The optimal strategy should be assessed by individual companies and use cases. To inform your strategy, it is key to fully understand how your paid or organic search terms have performed in the past. Past bidding and budget history can provide not only a baseline for improvements but insight into your audience and receptiveness to paid search advertising. If you’re not already doing so, separate campaigns out by specific audiences. This allows you to track isolated segments of customers or prospects and compare performance.

The beauty of search marketing automation is the paradox of scale and specificity. It allows companies to scale their messages and strategies to a massive audience, while simultaneously making users feel heard with personalized results.

If you’re ready to optimize your search marketing strategy and take your campaigns to the next level, contact Bluetext.

Design trends reflect the world we live in, and the past year has been tumultuous, to say the least! Below, Bluetext explores 5 branding trends and how marketing designers can make the most of them when expressing their brand identity.

1. Motion Logos

We all want our users to spend as much time as possible engaging with a brand, and adding motion to a logo will do the trick. Logo animation is a modern and dynamic way to attract clients. They hold the user’s attention, make for better storytelling, and increase brand awareness. People gloss over hundreds of brands each week, so this is the perfect way to stand out.

2. Geometric Shapes

Recently we’ve seen many brands go back to basics. Especially through the use of simple shapes, you may recognize from way back when in geometry class. Geometric shapes are a straightforward way to establish consistency across the visual identity of a brand. While appearing simple at first glance, these shapes pack a punch with the ability to express a range of emotions. Squares and rectangles feel solid and stable while circles feel unrestrained and fluid. Take a look at how we use geometric shapes to give these brands a sleek and minimalistic feel.

3. Natural Designs

Recently, designers have been looking to nature for inspiration. This includes more natural color palettes as well as gradients to represent natural light. With our daily lives inevitably turning more and more digital, more natural elements provide a refreshing contrast from bright screens and persistent notifications. Studies have shown the benefits of natural branding include stress relief and enhanced creativity, which companies & users alike know and love.

4. Simple and Classic Fonts

When choosing a font for your brand, remember simple and classic fonts can evoke nostalgia, elegance, and trustworthiness. Streamlined typography marries the widespread push towards consumer trust with recent retro trends Design and marketing agencies are moving towards a more modern and minimalistic branding, which is often complemented by simplified type. Users are finding the fine details and complex logos to be distracting from key brand messaging and attributes. Simple and classic fonts are also more compatible with reduced mobile screen sizes and digital platforms.

5. Data Visualizations

Sharing raw data holds little value to the viewer. Why? Because nobody wants to look at a bunch of numbers. Especially when quickly scanning a webpage or collateral asset, key statistics often get overlooked. Data visualizations are not only more visually appealing, but they provide a bigger picture for the viewer. Attractively branded diagrams and illustrations naturally draw the eye and focus attention to the story your statistics tell. Improving data visualization is an easy way to make the user stop scrolling and absorb your brand’s value and relevance.

Branding has the power to instill trust and excitement in any audience. Take advantage of these upcoming trends to increase user attention and spread brand awareness this year. Need help? Bluetext is here to give you the tools you need to develop or enhance your brand. Contact us today.

When it comes to marketing, knowing your customer and their needs is crucial. To truly make an impact, ads need to be not only well-targeted but more importantly, meaningfully tailored to address specific customer needs at the right place and at the right time in their decision-making process. Effective advertising involves a keen awareness of the conversion funnel and customer considerations at every stage.

Ads have to first grab the attention of the target audience, but also communicate the customer value that the product or service delivers. The most impactful ads go beyond just stating customer benefits – they forge a connection between the customer and the brand that continues throughout the customer journey. Ideally, the ad captures enough attention to generate interest and sustains that interest to create longer-term loyalty. Meeting customers at the correct place and time while simultaneously delivering a meaningful and resonant message is a delicate balance. These nuances have propelled dynamic advertising automation to the forefront of advertising strategies across industries.

Anyone who regularly browses the internet is presumably familiar with personalized advertising. For example, if you decide to browse online for a new pair of sneakers, you likely are going to see ads for sneaker brands populating your browser soon after — it’s not a coincidence! Using automation to create “meaningful” ads goes a step beyond this kind of personalization. It culminates in advertising that acknowledges underlying customer values. For example, the sneaker ad and messaging might change based on whether the customer values a long-lasting and practical shoe or a sleek and fashionable one. How do we know these preferences? Well, maybe this customer has previously searched “highest rated sneakers” or “durable running sneakers”. This action signifies a preference for practicality, as opposed to a “sneaker trends 2021” search.

The automation of meaningful ads synthesizes customer behavior, customer preferences, and personal values to deliver a more effective and less bothersome version of the digital ads we’ve grown accustomed to seeing and often ignore. Advertising automation creates an experience that is helpful as well as enjoyable for the customer.

Conceptually, meaningful ads should be the answer many brands are looking for when trying to connect to their target customer, however, does it work in practice? According to this study, the implementation of meaningful ads caused purchase intent to increase by 15% and click-through rates to increase by 30%. So, not only does meaningful advertising forge stronger brand connections, it also yields tangible and quantifiable results. The same study also found that less than 6% of users had a negative reaction to the level of personalization used in these meaningful ads. This tells us that so long as the ad facilitates a helpful and positive brand experience, the customer will be happy to see their preferences reflected in your ads.

While this data is based on B2C customer behavior, the same mentality can and should be applied when considering B2B ad campaigns. In all cases, ads are speaking to human beings with the capacity to form emotional connections to brands, and the automation of meaningful ads allows that crucial process to occur at scale. All of these insights reinforce one consequential truth – knowing your customer, their needs, their values, and why that matters at each stage of the customer journey is the most important piece of the advertising puzzle. Automating meaningful ads puts that concept into practice and the results will speak for themselves.

Ready for quantifiable advertising success? The first step is analyzing your user personas and unique needs. A marketing analytics agency can help you identify these groups, and find critical insights into their online behaviors. A digital agency can then help turn those insights into actions, and place targeted advertisements that yield conversions.

Contact Bluetext if you’re interested in maximizing your advertising dollars towards real success.

This post is a collaborative effort with Ross Katz and our partners at CorrDyn, a data-driven consultancy that helps enable scalable growth. CorrDyn’s data expertise combined with Bluetext’s command of marketing provides an additional opportunity to segment and target in the B2G marketplace.

Division of time between positioning your company for success with government agencies and bidding on specific contract awards.

The tides have shifted. Once an industry that operated in an isolated siloe of its own rules, business seeking government contracts must adopt new, digital marketing initiatives to effectively position themselves.B2G companies should leverage the data-driven, digital marketing tools developed for B2C companies to segment and personalize their approach to agency stakeholders. B2G is too broad a term, and even business-to-agency (B2A) abstracts away from the customer understanding your company needs to have to win contracts consistently. A business-to-stakeholder (B2S) marketing approach is what your company needs to win consistently.

To succeed in data-driven B2S marketing, we explore:

What success looks like in B2S
The lifecycle of data-driven stakeholder cultivation
The division of labor between internal departments for successful execution of that lifecycle.

Begin with the End Goal in Mind

Your company is considered a thought leader in the space where the agency is procuring products and services.
Government agency stakeholders regularly call your company to ask your opinion on upcoming agency initiatives, product and service specifications, RFPs, and contract awards. Occasionally, you are invited to co-craft the RFP in ways that position your company to win.
You are aware of the potential for shifting priorities months before those shifts occur.
Information on the priorities and interests of your agency stakeholders is filtering directly to your sales team, who pass relevant information to content creators, who are crafting bespoke campaigns that reach your contacts as related conversations occur internally at the agencies.
Business development staff follow up on that content with meaningful conversations with key stakeholders. Those conversations assure your agency contacts that your company is focused on their individual and organizational priorities.
You have both breadth and depth of relationships at the agency: deep relationships with key stakeholders and associations across the organization. A few people leaving the agency does not impact your company’s ability to retain the status and relationships described above.

Does your content dress the part? A sure sign of a reputable industry player is professionally branded collateral assets, such as Invictus

The Stakeholder Development Lifecycle

Acquiring Stakeholder Contacts: Start with breadth. In order for your company to establish deep relationships in an agency, you need to acquire as many points of contact as possible. Target ads based on geolocation to get in front of as many relevant stakeholders as possible. Get their title, contact information, and social media presence. Build from there.
Monitoring Stakeholder Contacts: Capture social media posts, digital content interaction (with a privacy-first approach of course), conference attendance, and internal agency relationship information from contacts over time so that you can understand and target their needs, interests, and priorities.
Segmenting Stakeholder Contacts: Based on a contact’s position in the organization and their activities and expressed perspectives, segment them into groups that should be targeted and messaged together consistently.
Nurturing Stakeholder Contacts: Develop marketing, business development, and sales outreach that messages contacts according to their segment and the depth of their relationship with your company. Build a customer journey map that helps you identify what messages move contacts deeper into understanding your company’s value proposition and believing in it.
Fostering Stakeholder Promoters: Identify your company’s highest value and strongest promoting contacts as the champions your company needs to win individual contract awards. Prioritize according to how naturally the contact aligns with your company’s offerings and how important the contact is to your company’s long-term relationship with the agency.

Stakeholder Development Lifecycle for B2A Marketing

Considering Stakeholder Segments

To understand how stakeholder priorities can differ, we use an example company, CyberSample, selling cybersecurity solutions to the Department of Transportation (DoT).

Example stakeholder groups and their corresponding priorities for CyberSample are provided in the figure below.

CyberSample stakeholder segments and their priorities. Segments and priorities should be validated by marketing interactions, public discussions, and business development and sales conversations.

Executing on B2S Marketing with a Data-Driven Approach

A summary of your company’s information needs is provided in the table below.

Below, we illustrate the division of labor between different departments throughout the Stakeholder Development Lifecycle.

Division of Labor Between Departments for the Stakeholder Development Lifecycle

With an improved strategic approach to B2A marketing, focusing directly on the stakeholders, and a commitment to building the infrastructure and processes to gather and interpret data about them, your company will be better positioned to win government contracts for many years to come. We understand that building the Stakeholder Development Lifecycle from the ground up may be daunting, which is why Bluetext and CorrDyn are partnering to help B2A companies build the systems, processes, and brand assets needed to accelerate your path to agency contract awards.

How Do I Get Started?

For the approach described above to be successfully executed, each of your internal departments needs to coordinate. That coordination is built on a shared understanding of the landscape within the agency. A shared understanding requires a consistent and comprehensive approach to data collection, manipulation, and utilization.

Data Summit: This workshop is customized to your specific requirements, but is designed to bring together stakeholders from the relevant departments to educate them on the goals of the initiative, gather input from various departments about any concerns or limitations, and move toward a consensus regarding the strategic approach that will improve your targeted marketing efforts.
Data & Systems Assessment: For those who have made the decision to move forward with improved data-driven marketing, it is critical to have confidence in your data systems (reliability, scalability, and accessibility), data governance (security and policies), and ROI (time to value and budget). Our assessment process addresses all of these aspects and culminates with the development and delivery of a Data Infrastructure and Capabilities Roadmap (DICR). The DICR includes the findings of the assessment, strategic vision, proposed infrastructure solution, and an implementation plan (typically phased).

Bluetext brings the marketing and business development expertise needed to elevate your targeting and messaging. CorrDyn brings the data expertise needed to make your web, marketing, sales, and business development data work for you. Reach out to start the conversation about how we can position your company to succeed with government agency marketing and business development.