Bluetext, a leader in association marketing, is proud to announce that it has been selected by the Plastics Industry Association (PLASTICS) as its design, marketing, and brand agency-of-record for NPE2021: The Plastics Show. NPE2021 is the industry’s largest and most influential plastics trade event and is held every three years in Orlando. Bluetext is designing the show’s logo, brand look and feel, website, and collateral, and is creating and executing the go-to-market campaigns to attract exhibitors and attendees to the event. It will also manage public and media relations as well as both organic and paid social media.

“We selected Bluetext because of its team’s strong creative and strategic vision that can help move the industry forward,” said Susan Krys, PLASTICS VP of Tradeshows and Marketing. “We’re off to a great start.”

NPE2021 will take place at the Orlando County Convention Center in Orlando, Florida May 17-21, 2021.

Learn how Bluetext can help with your association marketing, brand, and campaign needs.

It’s no question that the American media landscape has gone through growing pains in the past few years. From “fake news” allegations that branched from the 2016 general election to the decline of print sales, it’s safe to say that the relationship between the media and its readers is in flux. Thanks to the pressure on the media industry to continuously seek online engagement as a key element in its current business model, public relations professionals now face the same pressures that incentivize reporters to develop articles that garner as much attention as possible.

Because of the tumultuous relationship between politics and media organizations, it’s easy to believe that American citizens’ trust in the news has declined. But new data shows that the pendulum may be swinging back. According to Cision’s 2019 Global State of the Media Report, trust in the media may actually be on the rise. In fact, only 63 percent of journalist respondents feel the public lost trust in media over the previous year, a number that seems high except when compared to the staggering 91 percent who felt that way in 2017.

While the role of journalism in our society isn’t dead, it is clear that it’s in a state of metamorphosis, and as the industry evolves, it’s important to remember that the public relations field also needs to adapt if it is to remain effective.

Where Journalism is Headed
Between budget cuts, a shaky business model and a larger emphasis on social media, journalism is now more than ever in flux. The biggest change comes from the move to online media and the role that social media plays within that relationship. According to Pew Research, the average unique monthly visitors to newspaper websites increased from 8 million in 2014 to more than 11.5 million in 2016 and 2017—a substantial uptick in only two years.

Not only does the mass exodus from print news mean that the pressure is on reporters to have an exclusive scoop, but it also means that they need to be the first to publish. Another symptom of focusing on digital rather than print is the need to receive a large number of clicks in order for a story to be deemed monetarily successful. According to the Cision report, 65 percent of reporters said that the availability of audience metrics—engagement measures such as the number of views, shares, and reposts—has changed the way they evaluate stories they are interested in covering. The old adage “if it bleeds, it leads” has never been truer in the age of click generation.

What This Means for PR Specialists
Because social networks and influencers are quickly bypassing traditional paper media, public relations practitioners have a growing opportunity to help our journalists colleagues with timely and relevant sources for the stories they’re working on. In the Cision report, 42 percent of respondents said that they work on stories no more than a day in advance, meaning PR agencies and their clients need to ready to engage with the news cycle swiftly.

This change in strategy has benefits for public relations pros because they are able to better build relationships with the reporter. In fact, 27 percent of journalists said that their relationships with PR representatives have become more valuable since 2018, compared to only 9 percent who had the same response the year before.

How to Build Lasting Relationships with Reporters
Despite the fact that rapid response pitches are king in 2019, journalists often receive a slew of emails from PR representatives every day, many of which are offtopic or self-serving. To fight through this noise, it’s vital to be prepared with all essential materials and contacts when reaching out– especially when pitching a time-sensitive story.

Another key to building a beneficial relationship with a reporter is to value their time. There’s no question that reporters are extremely busy, so keep pitches short and remember that they don’t just receive your pitches. Ensuring the correct reporter is contacted is vital as well. While someone may be listed as a technology reporter, for example, it’s important to check what aspect of technology they cover. Do they cover consumer products? Business technology? Networking? The list can go on. But public relations reps need to do their research and ensure they contact the reporter with the appropriate beat.

It’s also important to consider the content you’re sending to reporters. It may come as a surprise, but 71 percent of journalists reported that news announcements and press releases are what they are most interested in receiving. This is followed by invitations to events and original research reports. While many PR pros spend their day perfectly crafting pitches complete with possible story angles, the most important part is to make sure the information is new and relevant.

Today’s hectic media climate will require everyone in the newsmaking process to adapt. For PR pros, the evolving industry will provide new opportunities to create meaningful and mutually beneficial relationships with journalists to ensure quality reporting continues.

Learn how Bluetext can help with your public relations program.

When the stars fall smartly into alignment with a new brand, it can elevate the organization to new heights. For Integrity Applications, a government contractor comprised of three of the leading companies in space, intelligence, cyber, the stars became a main focus of the rebrand. It turned to Bluetext to develop a new name, messaging, and brand that would represent the value that it brings to its U.S. government customers in the intelligence and national security community.

The company had several significant challenges that needed to be overcome, the first of which is that it works primarily in a sector where the programs are very sensitive and highly classified. Second, a primary goal for the brand is recruiting a talented team with advanced skills in software engineering as well as all elements of STEM. And third, it needed to stand out as a prime contractor in a crowded field of competitors.

Bluetext employed an extensive discovery and research process that included In-Depth-Interviews (IDIs) with top experts and executives across the company to define the specific attributes that make the organization unique. Our goal was to define what ties together the missions that the company supports. After interviewing senior executives across the organization, we conducted a separate set of IDIs with newly hired recruits to understand what made them choose the company for their careers. The focus on space became a key component in our process. We also talked to a number of veteran employees to understand what made them stay and what was important to their longer-term careers, a crucial component of the new brand story and recruiting materials. Using the results of these interviews together with competitive analyses and additional research, we created a messaging platform that recognizes its strong commitment to space as a key part of its legacy as well as its biggest opportunity for growth.

Employee engagement was a critical element in the process, especially given the competition to attract the best candidates with the technical skills and security clearances required by government customers. Once the new brand was approved, team members across the company were asked to participate in the brand launch through parties, branded clothing, contests, and a variety of other engaging activities. We also created a “Brand Essence” video to help tell the story.

Because of its interest in and focus on space, we also wanted to capture the hopes and vision that space exploration suggests. The result was the new brand Centauri. Centauri, from the star system Alpha Centauri, is the closest star system to Earth. And, like the company, it is composed of the brightest stars in the sky. It also has always been used as a navigation guide throughout history. We believed that because of these associations, Centauri was a great fit for the brand.

Once the name was approved, we turned to the corporate visual identity. Bluetext designed a cutting-edge look and feel for Centauri that sets it apart from the competition. Written in a custom lowercase typeface, the Centauri logo is modern and approachable with a unique icon representing the stars that make up the Centauri constellation. The star pattern around the logo became the basis for texture and patterns across collateral and the website.

We then turned to the website. Centauri’s new website incorporates all of the brand’s new elements, ensuring consistent brand identity and a strong web presence. Bluetext designed a site and user experience that prioritizes recruitment.

With the brand in place and the website launched, we introduced Centauri to the market through a series of media interviews with key vertical trade publications. Offering details and interviews with CEO Dave Dzaran in advance to key target outlets under an embargo agreement, we were able to shape the initial launch coverage to focus on Centauri’s growth strategy as it continues to acquire new capabilities for its customers.

For Centauri, with the help of Bluetext, the stars aligned for a bright new brand and a successful launch.

Interested in Refreshing Your Company’s Brand? Learn How Bluetext Can Help!

For our final post to end the year and look forward to 2019, let’s turn to the marketing component that is perhaps undergoing the most significant transition: Public Relations. PR was once universally recognized as the bread and butter for communications activities, the core element of any marketing program. That’s no longer the case, as publications that a generation ago would readily cover almost any technology pitch have seen their print ads shrink. As a result, they have drastically cut back on reporters and news coverage as they scramble to define their business models in the digital age.

As a result, public relations firms are having to work harder to create their own opportunities to get coverage for their clients. Instead of a reporter writing on a topic, editors now ask for submitted bylines that they can print – which makes perfect sense, since that’s free content that agencies are providing on behalf of their clients.

Public relations, as a practice, is in need of a significant overhaul. Media relations is not simply a subset of PR, which must focus on a much broader range of channels to reach prospects and customers. This means that influencer marketing, paid content, submitted bylines, content syndicators, specialty websites, and even trade associations must now be part of the outreach mix. It’s not enough to rely purely on earned coverage – practitioners must look for new, creative ways to get their messages out to core audiences.

Some of this is self-preservation. As the economy slows, PR is the first marketing practice to take the hit.

Here is what see as the most important public relations trends for 2019:

Influencer Marketing is on the Rise. Identifying, engaging, and recruiting influencers who have their own followers will be the biggest change for 2019. Understanding which ones have the most valuable followers will be a challenge requiring more sophisticated social measurement tools. Learning how to pitch influencers will mean a steep learning curve, as many influencers try to figure out their value in the market and on the social media channels where they thrive.

Public Relations Must Drive Better Content. Instead of drafters of press releases for clients, PR agencies must evolve into content providers that know how to produce rich, graphical content that can attract attention. Visual assets – which require a creative team in addition to media relations experts – will be essential to delivering content that can be quickly posted for key audiences to see.

Building Relationships. Press releases will still serve a purpose – sometimes a legal requirement and other times as a shorthand tool for reporters. But more important for PR agencies is the ability to build relationships with target audiences across multiple channels. Social media will play a part, but so will communications to targets through a regular cadence of outreach that includes emails, eNewsletters, blog posts, and other content formats.

Blurring the Line. The once-thick-but-now-fine line between public relations and marketing will continue to blur. Long-form client-generated content is getting more popular for several reasons. First, you control every word and don’t have to worry about lousy quotes, misinformation, or competitors being included higher up in the article. Second, publishers are desperately trying to find new revenue streams, so they will continue to push paid native advertising as a way to reach customers and generate more cash. And third, customers would rather hear from experts within companies than reporters who most likely are not as technically proficient.

It’s All About the Metrics. The impact and value of earned media have traditionally been difficult to measure. Agencies must go beyond the typical share of voice, reach and ad value equivalency metrics to include more useful tools that connect the audience with actions. One start-up described in a recent Wall Street Journal article has created a service to measure readership information of articles that specifically mention brands. Look for more analytics tools from Google and other platforms that can connect more of the communications software stacks together for a better look at how prospects are reacting to PR campaigns.

These are all pretty big changes in how we approach the public relations programs we deliver for our clients. Making the shift won’t be easy, but it’s essential to drive results.

Learn how Bluetext can help you make the most of the top marketing trends for 2019.

The Federal government Buying Season is right around the corner. That means that any company that has the technology to help government agencies meet their mission requirements needs to start getting in front of those buyers quickly. The Federal Buying Season begins in August and runs through September as agency procurement officers will make their final selections to meet end-of-year spending requirements. With the government, allocated funds are often “use-it-or-lose-it,’ meaning they won’t carry on through the next fiscal year. Anything unspent becomes out-of-reach.

For government contractors and global brands who consider the agencies a key vertical, putting in place a comprehensive marketing campaign to reach these decision makers starts now. As we pointed out in our previous post, government agencies respond differently than commercial markets. For their Buying Season, they have mission requirements to meet and are looking for the best solutions that will help them do that. That’s why a marketing campaign needs to speak their language and not simply rely on the same campaigns targeted to the commercial sector.

Here are some of the key elements to consider when designing your Federal Buying Season marketing campaign:

1. Start with Messaging. As we noted in our previous post, messaging targeted towards the needs of the government buyer is critical. Make sure that messaging talks to their pain points, their mission requirements, and the past experience you have in the market. Those are the three top components that this audience needs to see.
2. The Creative Needs to Match the Market. Cutesy, humorous, out-of-the-box campaigns are ok, but within limits. Stay away from the controversial, but adding a little humor can be effective. We recently did a campaign for Intel that included a guy wearing pajamas on the bottom with a suit on top to demonstrate how its technology helps Federal telecommuters. It was clever, cute, and got people thinking while keeping far away from anything offensive.
3. Go Directly After the Market. Programmatic campaigns, relying on sophisticated email workflows and paid banner and social media can be effective for driving leads if done in a way reaches those audiences in an intelligent way. Bluetext has had significant, measurable success with well-constructed campaigns targeted at government decision-makers and buyers.
4. Coverage in Government Publications Gives Air Cover. A strong media relations component of the campaign can provide thought leadership, wide exposure, and air cover for the sales team. Many government tech trades are happy to publish submitted bylines from industry experts provided that they explore market needs and trends, and are not simply marketing pieces disguised as a news article.
5. Drive Time is Prime Time. In the D.C. region – the home to most of the nation’s Federal executives – commuting is a fact of life. That means a captive audience twice a day every day during morning and evening rush hours. We are big believers in radio spots as well as broadcast interviews to reach this audience when they are most receptive.
6. Leverage All of Your Company Assets. Every company has a number of Members of Congress that represent their employees. Turn these legislators into advocates for your brand. They can help open doors across the government.

Learn how Bluetext can help your brand with a successful Buying Season campaign. 

Metrics-driven PR is an essential strategy in today’s competitive media landscape, helping to set the direction for public relations as well as validating its success. Traditional public relations and media outreach that seeks placements and coverage in print and online publications remains one of the most valuable assets in a marketers mix of activities. But how do you know if your PR program is achieving the right objectives? How do you know if you’re getting the value from your PR expenditure, or if the needle is stuck in the same position?

Top executives who are managing budget, as well as sales and marketing teams who have specific sales numbers to hit, continue to ask difficult questions to justify the cost of a successful public relations program because it is so difficult to assign revenues and leads directly to public relations efforts. This is not a new issue, but with so many other options that can be tied directly to lead generation, top public relations agencies know they need to have strong metrics to validate the effectiveness of their programs.

At Bluetext, we have been practicing metrics-driven PR since we launched our agency more than seven years ago. The reason is not that it’s a way to justify the expense of using a top PR firm, but more importantly, because it gives us a real-time ability to manage every PR campaign we launch for our clients, and to make quick adjustments to improve results. The alternative is to launch and execute a program without any idea of the impact on what matters most to clients: increased leads and higher revenues. The challenge, of course, is what to measure that will provide real insight into the results that matter.

That’s why we’ve published our eBook on Metrics-driven PR as a comprehensive primer on what you need to know – whether it’s for the commercial markets, for the public sector, focused on cybersecurity, or with an acquisition in mind, we share case studies and top tips for a program that measures results and achieve your strategic and revenue goals.

If any industry vertical is a prime opportunity for metrics-driven PR, it’s the public sector. Government agencies are a massive opportunity for technology and other companies that can help supply the products, services, and solutions that agencies need on a daily basis. Yet, many brands struggle with how to market to the public sector, especially at the Federal level. How purchasing decisions are made, the way agencies issue contracts and the buying cycles they follow are much different than the commercial sector.

More importantly, the messages that resonate with Federal executives are different. Return on investment, a key marker in the commercial world, isn’t as much of a factor in the public sector. Agencies have fixed budgets; and while they have downward budget pressures, they don’t have to answer to investors or the stock market. Instead, they focus on mission requirements, staying within budget parameters, and meeting legislative and policy mandates. They are risk-averse and look for solutions that will enable them to accomplish their goals without jeopardizing their own careers.

For these reasons, it takes a different approach to public relations to execute an effective campaign that will reach, educate, and motivate government buyers. There are fewer media outlets that cover the vertical, and fewer reporters available as the size of the publications have shrunk. Because of this demanding market, metrics-driven pr in the public sector is essential for implementing a successful media relations program.

One of our clients that has the public sector as one of its key target markets is Cloudera, an industry leader in open-source Hadoop big data solutions for enterprise organizations to leverage the intelligence in their systems. When Cloudera wanted to expand its presence in the Federal market, it turned to Bluetext to design and execute an effective metrics-driven public relations program.

Some of the key elements of the program, in addition to plain old-fashioned nuts and bolts media relations, was to “Federalize” Cloudera’s messages and news. This included:

• Identifying customer advocates early in their relationship to secure customers that would share their results with Cloudera for media relations purpose;
• Identifying Cloudera-specific messages and differentiated angles on news topics;
• Streamlining the pitch review cycle, especially for rapid response; and
• Enlarging the spokesperson bench to establish early on the topics and areas of expertise that each expert could talk to.The results of this program have proven the point that when a sophisticated program is linked to metrics, it has the best chance of achieving the program goals.

Here are some of the results of the program over the previous 12 months:

• 39 stories, surpassing the target goal
• 18 target publications hit, including American City & County, FCW, MeriTalk, The Hill, Federal News Radio, and NextGov
• 7 bylines placed in NASCIO, FCW, GovLoop, American City & County, SIGNAL, Fifth Domain

More importantly, we were able to garner a more than 44 percent Share of Voice in the market against Cloudera’s main competitors.

Need help implementing a metrics-driven PR program in the public sector? See how Bluetext can help.

We’ve been writing a lot recently about metrics-driven PR. One metric that is often key to certain clients is being acquired. Of course, when Bluetext first engages with a client for public relations (or any service for that matter), the client rarely opens the conversation by stating their goal is to get acquired. That may, in fact, be one of several desired outcomes, which could include raising venture capital, making acquisitions themselves, penetrating new markets, accelerating growth, or all of the above.

At the end of the day, a public relations program that raises the enterprise value of the firm can greatly assist companies in achieving any of the aforementioned objectives, which in part may be why numerous Bluetext clients over the years have seen successful acquisition exits.

The most recent example: BroadSoft, which was recently acquired by tech giant Cisco for nearly $2 billion. For 7-1/2 years leading nearly right up to its acquisition by Cisco, Bluetext served as the North America public relations and industry analyst relations agency of record for BroadSoft, a global unified communications software provider whose customer base is 600+ carriers and telecommunications service providers (including 20 of the top 25 by revenue) across 80+ countries.

When we think about public relations that raises the enterprise value of a client, what we mean is that press coverage and brand building for their own sakes do not lead to desired outcomes. That’s precisely what our goal was for Broadsoft. PR that enhances enterprise value has several components to it, including:

• Drawing attention to all key parts of the business – Technology firms may have products, services, capabilities and customer stories that are most conducive to press. For that reason, it is easy for agencies to milk them until the opportunities are bone dry, and over-rotate at the expense of other parts of the business. Yes, locking in on PR sizzle is a good strategy, but enterprise value is strengthened when a complete business capability story is told.
• Determine high-value assets – Maybe the client has assembled the best application development team in the industry, something that potential acquirers or VC investors would find as valuable as the product itself. Maybe it’s a unique set of patents, or market penetration in a growing vertical, whatever it is, public relations should lock in on those assets and build campaigns to highlight them.
• Create a vision for the future – Past results matter, but…demonstrating a client is uniquely positioned to capitalize on future market opportunities and growth shows the potential going forward is even greater than what has already been achieved. Articulating a vision and communicating why the client is leading the market towards that vision demonstrates rising future enterprise value.

For the early part of this engagement, BroadSoft considered itself an “ingredient brand” – much like Intel Inside – for telecommunications providers. The providers would white label BroadSoft’s unified communications services and sell them to enterprise and residential customers. The downside of that positioning was that the market began to consider BroadSoft a legacy voice telecommunications provider – a growing brand challenge as upstarts such as Skype, Slack positioned themselves as innovators and disruptors.

To address this challenge, Bluetext worked to position BroadSoft as an innovative brand not only with telecommunications providers but with enterprise decision makers, end users, and influencers. Our approach was to establish a vision for “the future of work” and then communicate through media coverage, speaker opportunities, awards and thought leadership how businesses needed to enable the future of work. The pillars of “the future of work” vision were educating business decision makers and end users that 1) the workforce was increasingly millennial; 2) the workforce was increasingly mobile; 3) the workforce was increasingly geographically dispersed and 4) the workforce was increasingly inundated with applications, information, and meetings. Then we sought to increase BroadSoft’s “share of voice” in these conversations.

A sampling of results for the most recent full three years (2014-2016) indicates the result of these efforts.

• – 325 media articles for which BroadSoft was a substantial part of the story (there were also dozens of other media mentions not included in this number).
• – 175 industry analyst briefings
• – 35 bylined articles developed and placed by Bluetext
• – Dozens of bylines created by Bluetext were then leveraged by BroadSoft
• – 17 significant industry awards
• – 18 non-fee speaking opportunities

All of these efforts successfully focused on extending the BroadSoft brand as an innovator with enterprise decision makers, end users, and its telecommunications provider customer base.

Want to Up Your PR Game? Learn How Bluetext Can Help.

We’ve been writing about the value of metrics-driven PR to drive revenue and lead generation for brands in order to tie media coverage directly to results for our clients. We call it metrics-driven PR. In this post, we will describe how to use market research to drive news coverage and thought leadership as part of a metrics-driven PR program.

Market research is a great tool for understanding a market, how customers view your brand as well as its competitors, and for laying out a roadmap of what prospects want to see in a product to make it the most useful for their business needs. At Bluetext, we believe that market research can go far beyond customer insights to create news hooks that can be pitched out to key target publications. But it’s not so easy – there must be careful thought given to what question need to be asked, and what answers should be anticipated that will deliver those results.

When our clients are proposing market research for their internal purposes, our first request is if we can add several questions to the survey. That way, there’s not extra budget needed for the research. We’ve also paid for questions on national “omnibus” surveys when no other vehicle is available. Here’s the filter that we use to ensure we will get results that will generate news coverage:

1. Is it credible? In other words, does the survey pass the simple test of giving statistically significant and defensible results. Many companies will offer to conduct surveys that they send to their own database. The problem with that is that isn’t statically sound from a scientific standpoint. We believe that using a validated research instrument and process that meets industry standards is a requirement to get publications to write about the findings.
2. Is it topical? It’s easy to find interesting results in survey responses, but if it isn’t related to something important in the industry, such as a relevant trend, it will hard to place.
3. Does it challenge the conventional wisdom? The best stories that come out of surveys are those that go against the grain of what everyone thought was true. Reaffirming what everyone already assumes may be important, but it’s not as interesting. Asking questions that will give answers that are unexpected will generate far more coverage.

An example. Alfresco is one of the leading content management software platforms that is a challenger brand to some of the larger competitors in the market. As such, it was imperative to make inroads against better-known competitors. One of the strategies we developed as a way to establish better name-recognition and thought leadership was a comprehensive media outreach program. As part of the program, we saw the the company was conducting a market research survey to better understand potential target customers.

Managing corporate email in a regulated environment is a key feature of the Alfresco content management offering. During the 2016 elections, when the use of emails by candidates was a much-argued topic, we added a brief question to the market survey: How often do you use your personal email for company/government business? While we had no idea how respondents would answer this, we were confidant that whatever the survey showed, it would be relevant to the election.

The results that came back also challenged the conventional wisdom: 25 percent of respondents working for government agencies reported that they sometimes used their own personal emails to conduct business. With those results, we were able to secure media coverage in the Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, Forbes, Fast Company, and dozens of other major business publications. The Washington Business Journal syndicated an article on the findings to each of its 46 different publications around the country.

The results drove substantial thought leadership for Alfresco that could be measured by reach and share of voice and allowed the company to reach its pr goals.

Learn how Bluetext can help elevate your brand through metrics-driven and research-based PR.

Rapid response is a core component of Bluetext’s public relations services. We focus on having messages and media targets teed up when there is an opportunity for our clients to contribute expertise to breaking news events, whether it is a cyber attack, tech policy development, or in this case the horrific wildfires raging across Southern California. As the leading Emergency Mass Notification Services (EMNS) provider, Bluetext positioned client OnSolve’s CEO to speak about the challenge local officials face to alert citizens when wildfires, hurricanes and other natural disasters hit; ways for citizens to stay safe; and innovative new capabilities available through providers like OnSolve. Multiple interviews were arranged for OnSolve, including this live segment with The Weather Channel.

Need help with driving better PR results?  Bluetext can help!