Thank you for joining us for the Q1 2021 Bluetext Cybersecurity Summit. Exclusively open to CXO’s, our goal with this summit is to deliver a value-add platform to network in the C-Suite with businesses facing similar opportunities and challenges.
Topics:
We plan to discuss the following items:
- Technology Customer Investment Trends
- Technology Consolidation Trends
- 2021 Trends
Date/Time:
2:30pm-4:00pm EST
Thursday, January 28th, 2021
Where:
COMING SOON: A link will be distributed with a calendar invite to all invited.
Agenda:
- Welcome from Jason Siegel: 1 minute
- Welcome and Introduction from Moderator, Morgan Wright, SentinelOne: 3 minutes
- Introductions of each business by one of the representatives (2 minutes each): 15-20 minutes
- Five questions will be softballed out, each receiving 5-10 minutes of airtime.
Summit Specifics: Things to Know
- We will mute all microphones for audio clean-ness
- The raise hand functionality will be used to orderly unmute speakers
- A recording of this conversation will be archived so keep it clean, friends
Moderator
Morgan Wright
Chief Security Advisor, SentinelOne
Morgan is an internationally recognized expert on cybersecurity strategy and cyberterrorism. He currently serves as a Senior Fellow at The Center for Digital Government, Chief Security Advisor for SentinelOne, and is the chief technology analyst for Fox News and Fox Business on cybersecurity, cyberterrorism, national security, and intelligence.
Companies in Attendance:
AffirmLogic
About: AffirmLogic’s Hyperion platform applies advanced Mathematical Behavioral Computation that enables security teams to detect, analyze, and defend against even the most insidious malware—including advanced persistent threats (APTs) and other sophisticated, potentially devastating forms of attack.
Invited:
Larry Roshfeld, Chief Executive Officer
ArdentMC
About: ArdentMC is a trusted provider for geospatial information, cloud migration, and DevOps in the federal, state, and local business spheres, delivering quality products and outstanding performance initiative to every client.
Invited:
Michael Matechak, Chief Strategy Officer
CI Security
About: CI Security provides Managed Detection and Response and Cybersecurity Consulting services to help their customers to be secure, compliant, and resilient against threats to the life-safety, life-sustaining, and quality-of-life systems and services they provide to customers and communities.
Invited:
Jake Milstein, Chief Marketing Officer
EnHalo
About:
EnHalo is a group of global companies under one brand that is locally engaged, while globally operated. EnHalo focuses on three business pillars: Reducing Risk through its cybersecurity offerings, Reducing Cost through digital transformation, and Increasing Revenue through automation.
Invited:
Chris Beard, US President
Carol Watson, Director, Sales & Operations
Illusive Networks
About: Illusive Networks, the leader in deception-based cybersecurity solutions, empowers security teams to preemptively harden their networks against advanced attackers, stop targeted attacks through early detection of lateral movement, and resolve incidents quickly.
Invited:
Claire Trimble, Chief Marketing Officer
Infinite Group (IGI)
About: IGI works with organizations on all levels of IT security. Its areas of practice include managed security, incident response, social engineering, physical & perimeter security, administrative security, and internal security.
Invited:
Andrew Hoyen, President & COO
Kryptowire
About: Kryptowire provides software assurance tools for mobile application developers, analysts, enterprises, and telecommunication carriers.
Invited:
Alex Lisle, Chief Technical Officer
Obrela Security Industries
About: Obrela Security Industries (OSI) provides enterprise-class professional and managed IS services to assess and manage information risk in complex enterprise environments.
Invited:
George Patsis, Chief Executive Officer
Phosphorus Cybersecurity
About: With a 7 year half-life for vulnerability patching, and infrequent, if ever, credential rotation, IoT is the softest target on the network today. Phosphorus automates remediation of the biggest vulnerabilities in IoT.
Invited:
Chris Rouland, Chief Executive Officer
Rebecca Rouland, Chief Financial Officer
Sertainty
About: Sertainty technology implements a proprietary zero-trust architecture by embedding actionable intelligence into data-files. Sertainty makes it possible for data to be self-aware, self-protecting, self-acting. This gives software developers, systems integrators and their end-users a better way to monetize valuable information, lower the cost of compliance and mitigate risk in real time.
Invited:
Rivers Nesler, VP, Communications & Legal Affairs
Securonix
About: Securonix delivers a next generation security analytics and operations management platform for the modern era of big data and advanced cyber threats.
Invited:
German Fabella, Creative Director
SonicWall
About: SonicWall Boundless Cybersecurity safeguards organizations with seamless protection that stops the most evasive cyberattacks across boundless exposure points and increasingly remote, mobile and cloud-enabled workforces.
Invited:
Geoff Blaine, Senior Vice President, Corporate Marketing
SpyCloud
About: SpyCloud is laser focused on preventing online fraud with our proactive solutions, which protect billions of employee and consumer accounts worldwide from account takeover.
Invited:
Company CXO’s
Stage2Security
About: Stage 2 Security is an Adversary Simulation, Protection, and Prevention company focused on building confidence in our clients’ IT systems.
Invited:
George McKenzie, Chief Executive Officer
2020 will forever mark a significant milestone in remote work practices. To comply with COVID-19 safety protocols many companies have closed or limited office capacity and enabled their workforce to work remotely. There is a significant change in everyday work practices, but even more significant change in large industry events from trade shows, networking events, and conferences. While industry events as we know them are not yet possible, business must go on. Luckily, digital-based agencies such as Bluetext, have been hard at work to innovate solutions that can replicate the in-person experience as much as possible with virtual events.
Virtual events will become a universal industry standard in the future, regardless of when large gatherings become safely possible again. Hosting a virtual event eliminates the time and cost associated with work travel and allows flexibility to attend event sessions while keeping up with the normal day to day operations. Virtual events allow employees or colleagues from anywhere in the world to easily join from the comfort of their own home or office and can choose to be present at only event sessions relevant to them and their interests. Rather than having your whole team out for three days, there is the flexibility to attend select sessions for a couple of hours at a time.
If your company is considering hosting a virtual event, there’s a couple of things to consider first. After the success of Citrix Bootcamp and SonicWall Boundless 2020, Bluetext has rounded up their top tips for the first step of any virtual event: registration.
Ace the Virtual Event Invite
One of the first things to consider with any event is: Who is the audience? Is this a trade show for a number of different companies? An employee only training? Select clientele? A virtual event marketing agency will assist with the outreach to attendees, whether that strategy is based on a specific email list or advertised publicly. From email nurture campaigns to targeted paid advertising, the options are endless for inviting attendees. Based on who the target audience is, a digital marketing agency can prescribe the right strategy for your company and design promotional assets to get people interested in the virtual event.
Load Up the Landing Page
Once you’ve sent out invites or promotional messages, attendees will need a place to RSVP. Just like a traditional in-person event, a headcount of attendees is needed to properly plan and test for specific traffic levels. Registration numbers are also a great KPI to measure event success. To fully close the conversion, the landing page for the virtual event must be clear, concise and enticing. There’s no formula for the perfect virtual event registration page, but at Bluetext we recommend the following components:
- A concise listing of event details (date, time, time zone, etc.)
- Spotlight of the top event sessions to get users interested
- A sizzle reel to showcase the event highlights in a minute
- A clear and easy to find the registration form
Who’s On the List?
A key component to consider with virtual event registration is registration security. Will there be proprietary information discussed at the event? Will sessions be targeted at only your employees to introduce not in market products or strategies? If so, you may want to consider white-listing your company’s email domain. If the event is centered around internal strategies and training, you may want to also black-list the email domains of your top competitors. Depending on the size and subject matter of the event, it may also be important to reinforce security by black-listing personal email addresses and ensuring all attendees are relevant business partners and colleagues.
Always Say Thank You!
Once a user has found your enticing landing page and successfully registered for your virtual event, don’t let the excitement end there. Be sure to send them an equally interesting thank you page. In our virtual event marketing experience at Bluetext, we have found that dynamic countdown clocks are a great way to get users excited about the event. A great thank you page may also want to link out to event FAQs, or highlight a special session to look forward to.
Reminder Emails They’ll Want to Read
Once a user is registered don’t let your virtual event fall off the radar. Use the registration email list to trigger a nurture email campaign that can send additional event details, reminders, and more! A full event agenda can be overwhelming to a user two months out but would be useful when they’re blocking off their calendar a week or so in advance. It’s always a best practice to remind users a week, a day, and an hour in advance of the date. Check out the recent SonicWall Boundless 2020 virtual email for some inspiration on event teasers and reminders.
2020 has been the year of transitioning workforces, meetings finally turning to emails, new office place attire, and most of all, virtual conferencing. With pandemic restrictions putting a pause on in-person interactions, many industry conferences, trade shows, and events have been forced to postpone, cancel, or adapt.
In the spirit of adaptation, many companies have found ways to work around the obstacles of the pandemic and preserve the annual events and conferences that customers and business partners have come to rely on. Virtual events have become the new normal. Businesses are realizing the potential of virtual conferencing and webinars, and using a variety of virtual networking platforms to achieve their event objectives completely online.
As an agency with virtual event marketing capabilities, Bluetext has seen a range of approaches and ways to make businesses virtual. Our favorite virtual event trend thus far has been the “real-corded” style of virtual events. Instead of simply posting videos or recordings online to viewers, some companies are opting to recreate the expected live event experience for viewers. This attempt to preserve the familiarity of traditional trade shows and industry events is well received and appreciated by attendees, as it gives some sense of normalcy and expectancies in an uncertain period of time that we live in. There is a large amount of risk that comes with hosting a completely live-streamed virtual event, including technical issues, presentation quality, user behavior, and platform capacity. However, clever companies have found a way to disguise recordings as live streams and provide some sense of community and group experience to viewers.
The “Real-corded” Experience
Here are some of our favorite ways recorded events have simulated live stream experiences:
1. Countdown Clocks
For SonicWall Boundless Virtual Event, a dynamic countdown clock was added to the pre-event site to show exactly how many days, hours, and minutes until the virtual event would go “live.” The pre-event site was loaded with everything a viewer might need to know about the event, including promotional teasers to agenda and FAQs.
2. Event Log-In
Once the countdown hit zero, the pre-event site updated to allow an attendee to log-in. Very similar to a normal in-person protocol, where a user would sign-in and verify that they had registered for the event before entering the venue. After logging in the user would be greeted with the simulated “Lobby” of the live event site.
3. Time Gated Resources
The pre-recorded video sessions were locked prior to their specified showtime and featured a branded thumbnail to notify an attendee the session had not yet begun. Just as a live event attendee could not time travel to future sessions, the event site did not allow viewers to fast forward the schedule. Once the session was 30 minutes away from scheduled showtime, a new countdown GIF would replace the thumbnail to announce the upcoming video.
4. Virtual Booths
Another hallmark of the virtual event experience was the affordance of networking. While the majority of the event was pre-recorded to allow for post-production editing and ensure visual and audio quality, there were portions of the event where viewers could join a streaming platform and chat in real-time with hosts.
All of these features had guests wondering, real (or recorded?) during the event. The transition between real and recorded video content was made seamless by custom web integrations and streaming platforms. Interested in making your virtual event truly come to life? Check out Bluetext’s virtual event experience, and contact us to learn how we can make virtual a reality for your business.
So you want to host a webinar? In the wake of COVID-19, webinars are your safest option for meeting with your network. According to ON24, at the onset of COVID-19 webinar usage jumped up by more than 330% as a result of the work from home shift. Six months later and webinars are the new normal. So how can you ensure yours is as successful as possible? Check out our virtual experience tips below
Timing is Everything
Studies show that unlike before, your webinar is most likely to draw in participants if it’s held on a Tuesday. While webinars have increased in popularity across every day of the week, Tuesdays have proven to be the most effective. Additionally, any promotional emails for your webinar should be sent early to mid-week for maximum effectiveness. Let’s face it, most of us are most effective early in the week–before the week gets too crazy. Bluetext can help you put together and execute a comprehensive marketing plan to advertise your webinar when audience attention is highest. From coordinated social media posts, designing promotional email templates, and even creating and placing ads, Bluetext is ready to assist you every step of the way.
Tech Support
We’ve all come to learn with work from home protocols, technical difficulties have been encountered by the best of us. However, they can change the tone and impression of professionalism for every participant. As an experienced virtual event and webinar agency, we’ve learned a few ways to avoid this frustrating user experience. First, always conduct dry runs internally to ensure all your settings and equipment work properly–the last thing you want is for your host to have AV problems at the start of your webinar. Second, we recommend having team members on standby to provide any last minute tech support to your attendees. Third, have a backup plan! Whether you offer a second platform for viewing the webinar like Facebook Live or Twitch, or a backup laptop for your host, think through any potential issues ahead of time. Lastly, if you need to contact customer support, be prepared to wait. With the increase in virtual meetings, vendors are struggling to keep up with the tech support demand. That’s why we recommend preparing in advance and working with a trusted agency, such as Bluetext, that has experience troubleshooting these sorts of technical problems.
Resources
What good is a webinar if you don’t have actionable content for attendees to access? Whether you present a PowerPoint or review a whitepaper, attendees should have access to it all. The goal of a webinar is to engage and inform, so ensure any content you provide will be relevant for a few months. We also recommend having your resources link back to your site to increase engagement and keep your company top of mind. Additionally, ensure the content you share establishes you as a thought leader in your industry. Industry leadership is established by valuable content, but also professional and impressive brand identity. Be sure all of your collateral is aligned with your brand, contains digestible and insightful graphics or diagrams, and above all else creates a lasting and positive impression of your company. If your resources need a refresh, Bluetext is a full-service creative and copywriting agency that will ensure your content is as effective as possible.
Webinar Platforms
When it comes to webinars, there are countless platforms to choose from, but these are not one size fits all. So how do you know which is right for you? Each platform offers different features, branding opportunities, and security features. From experience in virtual networking and webinars, Bluetext has dug through all the major players and can recommend the platform that best fits your needs. We have been perfecting the webinar experience for the past few months with our virtual events and learned quite a few things along the way. Experience equates to first hand knowledge on what to expect from each platform, and the pros and cons the platform itself may not tell you.
Why settle for the same old webinar when you can increase engagement and memorability with a fully polished immersive experience. With our customizable virtual events, your users will feel like they’re attending an in-person conference again. In these times, a taste of normal is what we all need. Want to learn more about how Bluetext can help your webinar be a hit? Get in touch with us here.
Thank you for joining us for the Q4 2020 Bluetext Cybersecurity Summit. Exclusively open to CXO’s, our goal with this summit is to deliver a value-add platform to network in the C-Suite with businesses facing similar opportunities and challenges.
Topics:
We plan to discuss the following items:
- Technology Customer Investment Trends
- Technology Consolidation Trends
- MUCH MORE ….FILL IN SURVEY LINK BELOW
Date/Time:
COMING SOON: PLEASE FILL IN THIS SURVEY
Where:
COMING SOON: A link will be distributed with a calendar invite to all invited once the survey is done below.
Agenda:
- Welcome from Jason Siegel: 1 minute
- Introductions of each business by one of the representatives (2 minutes each): 15-20 minutes
- Five questions will be softballed out, each receiving 5-10 minutes of airtime.
Summit Specifics: Things to Know
- Jason will mute all microphones for audio clean-ness (something our 1st Presidential debate should have done)
- The raise hand functionality will be used to orderly unmute speakers
- A recording of this conversation will be archived so keep it clean, friends
Companies in Attendance:
AffirmLogic
About: AffirmLogic’s Hyperion platform applies advanced Mathematical Behavioral Computation that enables security teams to detect, analyze, and defend against even the most insidious malware—including advanced persistent threats (APTs) and other sophisticated, potentially devastating forms of attack.
Attending:
Larry Roshfeld, Chief Executive Officer
Bill Yarnoff, Chief Growth Officer
Infinite Group (IGI)
About: IGI works with organizations on all levels of IT security. Its areas of practice include managed security, incident response, social engineering, physical & perimeter security, administrative security, and internal security.
Attending:
Andrew Hoyen, President & COO
Phosphorus Cybersecurity
About: With a 7 year half-life for vulnerability patching, and infrequent, if ever, credential rotation, IoT is the softest target on the network today. Phosphorus automates remediation of the biggest vulnerabilities in IoT.
Attending:
Chris Rouland, Chief Executive Officer
Rebecca Rouland, Chief Financial Officer
Sertainty
About: Sertainty technology implements a proprietary zero-trust architecture by embedding actionable intelligence into data-files. Sertainty makes it possible for data to be self-aware, self-protecting, self-acting. This gives software developers, systems integrators and their end-users a better way to monetize valuable information, lower the cost of compliance and mitigate risk in real time.
Attending:
TBD
Trusona
About: Trusona is the pioneer and leader in password authentication. Stolen or weak passwords are responsible for over 80% of breaches, and Trusona’s mission is to thwart cybercrime by eliminating them from the user experience.
Attending:
Ori Eisen, Founder & Chief Executive Officer
Kevin Goldman, Chief Experience Officer
T2
About: T2™ manages large-scale technology projects for some of the most respected health systems and businesses in the United States.
Attending:
Kevin Torf, Managing Partner
Jim Rockenbach, Chief Strategy Officer
Verve Industrial Protection
About: Verve Industrial Protection’s mission is to protect the world’s critical infrastructure. For twenty-five years, Verve has helped its clients simplify and reduce the cost of building and maintaining secure, reliable, and compliant industrial control systems – DCS, PLC and SCADA.
Attending:
John Livingston, Chief Executive Officer
Read Part 1 of our Behind the Scenes of Citrix Boot Camp here.
After a tight two-and-a-half-month turnaround, the teams had done it – Citrix Boot Camp: Build a Ready-for-Anything Network was a success! The original goal was met as Citrix hosted a completely seamless and completely virtual networking experience. Citrix was able to offer its attendees the same quality of content and connectivity as an in-person event. This blog will discuss what new-found virtual empowerment means for long-term business goals, but first, Bluetext is proud to share some immediate virtual event tracking metrics…
How Successful Was the Virtual Event?
The Virtual Event platform and marketing campaign delivered an engaging, data-rich and interactive digital experience that the Citrix audience (and revenue stream) loved. On Thursday, August 13th, 2020, Citrix Boot Camp: Build a Ready-For-Anything Network, succeeded in the following ways:
- Unique web visitations: 2,317
- Average page duration: 33:24
- Bounce Rate: 37.9%
- Total page views: 22,608
- Average page views per session: 7.6
Bluetext was able to leverage additional reporting tools including:
- Social Media engagement with an official event hashtag
- Survey data related to the relevance and effectiveness of the speakers, sessions, and resources
- Transcripts from live Networking Lounges Q&A
Why This All Matters for Citrix?
True, the virtual event surpassed the metrics defined by the Citrix team. However, the real success came from the fact that Citrix was able to accomplish this at all! In-person marketing teams had the rug pulled out from under them when lockdown went into effect in Q2 of 2020, but lead gen was expected to continue despite familiar tactics being crippled for the foreseeable future.
Nevertheless, businesses reinvented themselves at every opportunity. A virtual event signifies that brands can keep moving forward, offering delightful digital-first experiences for their audience wherever they are in the world or sales funnel. Connecting people is now harder than ever, but Bluetext’s Virtual Event team helps enterprises build human relationships and drive growth.
Where are they Now?
Bluetext and Citrix are both working hard to continually improve the reach, capabilities, and user experience of the next virtual event. However, the Citrix Boot Camp: Build a Ready-for-Anything Network is still alive and kicking as an on-demand platform through November 14th, 2020.
Interested in learning more about Bluetext’s Virtual Events? Contact Us!
There’s no doubt that the past five months have looked quite different from what we’re used to. Each day, we log onto our computers, join video conferencing lines, and do our best to make this new virtual work-from-home experience feel as in-person as possible. Day to day social situations may have been put on pause, but business certainly has not. Happy hours with coworkers? Via Zoom. Pivotal presentations with clients? Via WebEx. In-person large events and seminars? We have a solution for you.
Just two short months ago, Citrix turned to Bluetext to help bring one of their networking events into a completely virtual space. The Citrix team had one goal: create a seamless virtual experience that provided the same quality of content and connectivity as an in-person event.
With only six short weeks to build a fully custom microsite complete with new, event-specific branding, Bluetext hit the ground running.
First, came the wireframes. In order to fully understand the user journey, the Bluetext UX and design team worked closely with Citrix to understand their virtual event goals, which included providing a seamless user journey and navigation. Just as each in-person event has a lobby, there needed to be a ‘home dashboard’ where users could easily access all relevant sessions on the day of the event. With a maximum of eight general sessions, we explored a few different possibilities for displaying the session information.
Ultimately, we landed on our two-column grid with a featured keynote session. This enabled us to include as many relevant details as possible, including a countdown clock that would show a user how much time was remaining until a certain virtual event session begins. Think of an in-person event: any attendee would have been provided an agenda of events, along with locations and maps. The same guidance and resources need to be readily accessible in a virtual event. Through the selected UX, the homepage of Citrix Boot Camp could provide a high-level overview of the event’s itinerary. We explored a grayed-out ‘completed’ state for each session, which gave users the signal that the session has completed.
Not only was it important to create simple and seamless UI and UX that would provide all registrants an intuitive experience, but it was just as important to make the event feel as lively as possible. With no physical event staff to welcome, direct, or answer questions, the website had to serve any and all personal touches one would expect. Bluetext designed a pair of pre- and post-event thumbnails to display before and after the live video play to transform the event microsite into an exciting and lively virtual space for all registrants.
Once we had a beautiful site ready for build, our team began to work through a major development goal of the site: the live-video playback. Our team leveraged the Zoom integration to provide live Q&A sessions for registrants to engage directly with Citrix representatives. This gave users the traditionally intimate networking experience that is generally lost when transitioning events into the digital world.
Read Part 2 of our Behind the Scenes of Citrix Boot Camp here.
Looking to reinvent your company’s event experience? Bluetext can help. Contact us today.
For a top marketing agency, trade shows are essential events to attend to learn all the tricks of the trade. It is usually a one time a year event where all the major industry players convene to learn about new products, network and promote their brands. It brings back old notions of experiential event marketing, but in 2020, brands are adding a digital twist. Now more than ever, companies are pairing their physical trade show presence with huge digital thumbprints, from hyper-targeted ads to Micro-Moments.
National Retail Federation (NRF) and their annual Big Show is a great example of how to do a trade show right. NRF’s Big Show is the largest retail conference and expo event, gathering over 40,000 attendees and 18,000 retailers from over 99 countries under one roof. Big Show capitalizes on Micro-Moments both before and during the show. By analyzing these tactics, we can learn how important Micro-Moments are for users and how to properly utilize them.
So what is a Micro-Moment? A Micro-Moment is an intent rich moment when an attendee uses their device to act on a need, including to know, to go, and to buy. The brilliance behind micro-moment marketing is that in the world today, consumers are bombarded by content everywhere they turn. Inc.com says the industry has reached a point of “content shock” where consumers are oversaturated and cannot consume any more content than they already are. Consumers spend an average of 4.7 hours each day on their smartphones, continually distracted and overstimulated. This only escalates the challenges marketers face to achieve consumers’ attention.
To combat the new challenges encountered with fragmented media interactions, top digital marketers have adopted a new mentality. This new philosophy zeroes in on distinct moments in the consumer buying process. The I-want-to-know moment, the I-want-to-buy moment and even the I-want-to-go moments.
Before the Show, NRF was strategic in focusing on the Micro-Moments of their target audiences’ “I-want-to-know” and “I-want-to-buy” moments through the use of various paid media tactics. Through the use of paid social, NRF increased brand awareness and utilized the “I-want-to-know” moment of users. Before driving users to register for the event, it’s crucial to make them aware of the brand, educating them about the event, as well as driving upper funnel traffic down the line. Paid display is where lower funnel traffic acts upon the “I-want-to-buy” moment. Paid display not only helps to generate qualified leads but also drives registrants.
During the Show, the various speakers and topics expanded upon Micro-Moments as well. A huge focus of sessions was on how to drive better experiences, better content and better strategy for consumers. There are various innovative technologies and solutions companies can utilize, as seen in the Innovation Lab and Startup Zone, that can help improve the user experience for customers in every stage of their individual Micro-Moments. Opening speaker, Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, expanded upon this during his keynote session on the first day of the show. Nadella focused on how companies need to focus on the future of the retail industry, upcoming trends and how to utilize technology to transform how companies operate, are marketed and relate to consumers. By doing so, these Micro-Moments for users will be more memorable and excite consumers to change from “I-want-to-know” to “I-want-to-buy.” To see the full list of speakers, visit the NRF Speakers Page and check out the NRF Big Show 2020 recap for a full list of articles, videos, session presentations and more.
A key takeaway from NRF’s Big Show 2020 was the importance of personalizing and concentrating the customer experience in the digital era. Staying true to the NRF Vision, the National Retail Federation has acted as the eyes and ears of the retail industry. For over 100 years they have brought together important leaders from top retail companies and are the only organization committed to bringing critical foresight and insight to leaders, movers and makers.
Leading by example is an understatement, as the organization itself has been ahead of the curve in their paid media tactics and lead generation strategy. To learn more about the NRF media strategy, check out their Bluetext Hall of Fame.
In previous posts, we’ve discussed some of the components that top marketing firms know make a successful marketing campaign. In this post, we’ll explore why audience segmentation is so important to a campaign’s success, and how top marketing firms can drive the messaging themes and creative approach to the campaign.
One client of ours is a membership industry organization that represents information technology specialists and serves more than 140,000 professionals around the world. Its services to its members include providing services for IT professionals who need to gain the skills and qualifications required of their market.
The client partnered with us its 2018 program to reach out to its target audiences about the value it brings to this industry. Bluetext developed an email and banner ad campaign around several themes designed to communicate that value to its members, and to deliver compelling creative that would quickly get the attention of target audiences. In addition, the campaign used sophisticated programmatic and analytics-based targeting to ensure that the right target was receiving the brand message.
One of the first steps in our process to develop an effective campaign to reach the organization’s goals was to take a deep dive into its data and outreach list segmentation. We divided the campaign into four segments:
1) Students considering IT as a career
2) IT professionals in the early stages of their careers looking to move up
3) Mid-career professionals seeking to make the next career move
4) Mid-to-late career professionals seeking to stay up-to-date and relevant in their careers
For each of these four segments, we created specific messaging and creative for use in banner ads, paid social, and email targeting, with each prominently featuring the organization’s brand and logo in order to reinforce that awareness and brand recall. For example, for those starting their careers, we created themes around starting their careers, while for those in mid-career our themes focused on advancing their careers and becoming indispensable.
The results exceeded our expectations; the organization’s total brand awareness rose 13% points from its pre-campaign level. This campaign demonstrates why top marketing firms view audience segmentation as so important to a campaign’s success. Without a clear set of messages specific to each segment, target audiences would not have seen messaging and creative relevant to where they are in their careers. With those differentiated approaches, audiences responded far more positively to the campaign.
Learn How Bluetext Can Help Design and Execute Your Next Digital Campaign!
Annual trade shows are often the biggest events of the year for brands hoping to make connections, network with players across their industry, identify new solutions for their business, and generate solid sales leads. The Bluetext team has vast experience with association conferences and trade shows, generating attention for our clients, arranging media interviews and coverage, crafting the creative approach for their floor space, and publicizing their successes.
For our trade association clients, we work with them to help market their shows, growing their attendance and revenues through sophisticated, multi-platform outreach campaigns. One of our premier clients, the National Retail Federal (known as NRF), has been holding The Big Show for more than a century. We have worked with NRF for several years, starting with its Big Show for 2017 and this week attended NRF 2018 in New York City to see how it came off.
The theme this year is “Transformation,” and speaker topics centered around the retail industry’s need to transform itself in the wake of the digital revolution in retail sales. We developed the creative approach for the show and the marketing activities generating attendance. It is the retail industry’s largest annual gathering, and as the agency partner responsible for generating registrations and revenue, we are proud to say that this year, the show attendance was bigger than ever – and exceeded NRF’s registration and attendance goals.
As part of the creative approach to this year’s event, Bluetext created a “Transformation Ribbon” of deep red that can fold and unfold with digital GIF video that works across the show website, and through static images on emails and signs. For The Big Show itself, we designed a three-dimensional version that would pop among the attendees at the Jacob Javitz Center in New York City.
On the other side of the continent, Las Vegas played host to the annual Consumer Electronics Show, which is a massive gathering of the industry to show off the latest electronic devices, ranging from big screen TVs to driverless cars to commercial and hobby drone to everything in-between. The Bluetext team was there to help several of our clients reach new audiences and get attention for their products and solutions. The one thing to say about CES is that it’s cool, and that was most evident in the variety of new consumer electronics that was on display.
