Establishing your brand identity online can be a daunting task, but it’s necessary to improve your brand awareness in today’s media landscape. With more than 45% of the world’s population actively using social media, it is more important now than ever to expand your brand’s reach via social media platforms. The top social media marketing and branding agencies will know just how to navigate the social sphere to bring your brand to your customers’ fingertips.

Consistent visual identity is key

Maintaining a strong corporate visual identity (CVI) across all of your social platforms is not only imperative to help your audience recognize your brand across platforms, but it also maintains the feeling of consistency, showing your customers that you’re confident with your brand. Top branding agencies can develop branded snackables for all of your social platforms, keeping the fonts, graphics and general brand identity consistent across all visuals. From Facebook and Instagram to Twitter and LinkedIn, Bluetext can provide your company with a variety of snackables for each social site, bringing your brand identity to the next level. See how Audi Field combined its digital advertising strategy with its social media strategy.

Define your brand’s voice

Okay, great – you have your company’s visual identity established…now what? Defining your brand’s voice is just as important as nailing down your CVI. Social media marketing agencies know how to position your brand to ensure that you have a unique and consistent voice across all of your social platforms, setting yourself apart from your competitors.

Although it is important to have a consistent voice, you should try to modify your tone to match the audiences across different platforms. For example, you may want to tweet something more relaxed and humorous on your company’s Twitter feed, but you would prefer to keep your LinkedIn page more professional. By tailoring your brand’s tone to match your company’s audience on each platform, you will drastically improve engagement across your social profiles.

See how Wendy’s changes their tone of voice between Twitter and LinkedIn:

The nature of social media: content sharing

It’s no secret that social media is intended to be used to engage and share content with your peers online. This is why establishing a digital presence is a crucial step in developing your brand online. Social media users consume your posts and share them with their friends, making your brand look and feel legitimate to potential customers.

Elevate your social strategy to the next level by incorporating social media influencers to give your online presence that extra boost. Influencers will give you access to a whole new set of users outside your normal audience. With influencer marketing, you can generate brand awareness among new segments through influencers’ follower bases. The top social media marketing agencies can help you gain access to the right influencers for your audience, ensuring that your brand gets in front of large targeted audiences.

Creating your social sharing strategy

With a newly established CVI, brand voice and social media audience, you’re now equipped to draft your social calendar. It’s important to experiment with days and times when sharing content across your platforms to capture your audience when they’re actively using social media. Given the nature of each social site, your audience is likely not going to be active at the same time across all channels. This is why you should vary your post times and content. Creating unique posts per platform will keep your followers engaged from platform to platform and keep them from getting bored with your content. 

 

Branding and social media marketing agencies like Bluetext will know how to help position your company for success online. From developing your visual identity and voice to drafting a social media content strategy, top branding agencies will give your company the exposure it needs to succeed in the social media sphere.

 

Ready to bring your brand and social strategy to the next level? See how Bluetext can help.

We all know the feeling: You’re scrolling through social media and you see a sponsored ad for a piece of clothing you were just looking at on your favorite retailer’s website. By now, you’re used to seeing your favorite B2C companies pop up on your social media. While it’s most common for consumer-facing companies to have a strong social media presence, B2B companies can also leverage these platforms in a similar way.

As social media has evolved, we understand much of it to be visual media, a tool that lends itself well toward B2C marketing to drive purchase conversions. While many B2C companies have already seized upon this opportunity, B2B companies can also take advantage of social media to drive insights and profits in much the same way. By turning to the right B2B marketing agency, they can help you develop an organized and creative content strategy and enhance your brand’s messaging.

The Art of LinkedIn

For B2B companies, Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn are the most reputable of the social media sites to establish your brand and drive awareness, with LinkedIn being the most impressive in terms of leads generated via social media.

LinkedIn is one of the most important social media channels for B2B companies to focus their attention on. This is where you can interact with industry leaders, potential employees, and future clients. While you may not necessarily be selling your capabilities through these sites, you will be able to express your brand’s legitimacy and display an understanding of your industry’s cutting-edge technologies or thought processes. A B2B marketing agency can help you develop a comprehensive social media plan to ensure that your brand’s page rollout is thoughtful and informed, which gives your company credibility and helps generate leads.

The Stats Say It All

Today, LinkedIn is by far the most efficient social media channel. 97% of B2B marketers use LinkedIn for content marketing purposes, and 80% of social leads for B2B are generated on LinkedIn.

An infographic describing the number of conversions per social platform.(Source)

Additionally, 64% of corporate website visits originate on LinkedIn. That’s not a number to ignore. With the right B2B marketing agency and LinkedIn content strategy, you can be generating leads at exponentially higher rates than before you turned to LinkedIn. A B2B marketing agency, like Bluetext, will be sure to engage your audience, resulting in more site visits and leads.

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Using social sites such as LinkedIn positions you as a forward-thinker in today’s digital world, illustrating to future clients and employees that your company is modern and innovative. Social media can be your company’s next best marketing tool that drives leads and expands your profit margins. Working with a B2B marketing agency to elevate your brand to its greatest potential ensures that you are taking advantage of all that social media has to offer.

Bluetext is a B2B marketing agency that works to advance our clients’ brands in the digital sphere, resulting in maximum lead generation and profits.

See how Bluetext has served its clients in the social media realm.

Our apologies to Samuel Taylor Coleridge, but in today’s social media landscape, it often feels like, “Content, content everywhere and not an engagement to be found!” That certainly seems true on a wide range of social media platforms, including LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.

We’ve all been there, posting on social media for our clients’ B2B brands and expecting the improbable – an engagement from a high-quality, ready-to-buy lead. Yet, as traffic on the major platforms continues to evolve, it seems like those quality leads have become more scarce. Digital Media Buying is proliferating as competition for customers heats up. But this growing competition to winning the audience’s attention is making the engagement challenge more difficult.

But thankfully, LinkedIn has figured out how to get that elusive engagement with the right targets, by literally making the improbable possible. Even better, it does so in a rather natural, organic manner.

That finally gives marketers, especially those of us who work primarily in the B2B space, something to smile about. Recent modifications to the algorithm that governs LinkedIn’s feed are boosting impressions and engagement for users with smaller audiences and connection bases while minimizing the extensive outreach of LinkedIn’s “power users.” (We see you Gary V and Richard Branson).

The market is sensing this new opportunity. There is an endless supply of professional content on LinkedIn, generating over nine billion Impressions each week. Most of this content, of course, isn’t useful, and users will soon catch on. But the demand from the public is there — waiting for the right company, thought-leader or piece of content to come along. I believe B2B Marketers have a rare opportunity to really grow with LinkedIn, and should strongly consider doubling down on their efforts.

Understanding LinkedIn’s Algorithm. If we want to build engagement, then we need to know a little about the algorithm responsible for serving content. The lofty goal of the algorithm created by LinkedIn’s engineering team is to ultimately deliver more value for the company by keeping users on the platform as long as possible. The strategy for doing that is simple: Make users feel like their time on LinkedIn is well-spent by serving up a feed of relevant, personalized content to every single one of its 610 million users.

LinkedIn’s home feed is the starting point of every user’s journey. To keep users engaged, the feed must understand the quality of every piece of content, and understand which content is relevant to whom. Failure to do so will destroy the quality of a user’s experience and turn “time well spent” into “time wasted.”

To understand how to do this, let’s first take a look at some of LinkedIn’s tactics.

LinkedIn Activity Graph. One of the core elements of the LinkedIn algorithm is the Activity Graph – a system designed to understand deep relationships between members’ content.

What’s A LinkedIn Activity? LinkedIn considers an activity to be any piece of user-generated content capable of having a subset of connected activities, which can include “likes,” comments, and shares – the common responses that demonstrate an interest in the content. And in turn, these actions become content as well.

Content Priorities. LinkedIn has a number of content types that it evaluates in order to rate them in terms of feed priority. Handpicked articles and paid ad campaigns have a much higher probability of showing up than user-generated content. Within user-generated content, LinkedIn has shifted towards a stronger balance between the various types, but with a slight priority given to video and text-only posts.

Some other types of content include:

  • User-generated content by the people and pages you follow, relevant LinkedIn #hashtags and predicted interests, such as
    Pulse Articles and Posts (Text, Photos, Videos, Documents, Links)
  • User Activities & Events (Liking, commenting, sharing, connecting, new job)
  • Promoted/Sponsored Content, both internal (LinkedIn Learning Courses, LinkedIn Premium) and external (Paid ad campaigns)
  • Curated Content
  • Dynamic Content

How it works. The ability to keep a user’s feed relevant is critical to LinkedIn’s success and requires the ability to programmatically identify the quality and relevance of the content. Here are the steps that LinkedIn’s algorithm takes to make these determinations.

Step 1: Quality Filter Scoring: Immediately after a user posts a piece of content to their page, and before it ends up in anyone’s feed, LinkedIn’s algorithm reviews the content and marks it as Spam, Low Quality or Clear. Only the Clear survive.

For everyone’s sanity, I’ll refrain from diving into what makes a post spammy. But I do think it’s important to focus on what is deemed low-quality, which according to LinkedIn are posts that are flagged for one or more of the following:

  • Having fewer than 500 words
  • Having software generated responses
  • Having highly promotional content.

Once that post is marked as “Clear,” it gets allocated into other users feed based on the initial priority of the content. Here’s where the real fun begins. LinkedIn begins immediately monitoring the engagement that each post generates. These include, for example:

  • The number of likes, comments, and shares for the post
  • The types and quality of comments
  • The time spent writing the summary and post
  • The engagement rate compared to the baseline rate of the person who is posting
  • The action that the reader takes when they see the post. For example, do users click the post and spend time reading the article or do they immediately go somewhere else.

Step 2: Engagement Test: As noted above, the post is now being analyzed for the amount of engagement it gets within the first hour. The more likes, shares, and comments the post receives, the greater the chance of moving on to the next step.

Step 3: Relevancy Assessment. During the third step, LinkedIn will assess the profile of the person posting the content to determine the relevancy of the post to their network. The lower the relevancy, the higher the probability the post will fizzle out.

Step 4: Taking it Up a Notch. LinkedIn has decided that machines can’t have all the fun and has introduced a human element into the mix. If your post is fortunate to reach this phase, it will be passed onto a human for review to determine if it’s worth pushing to the masses.

In my next post, I’ll take this a step further and outline strategies you can begin to incorporate into your ongoing LinkedIn B2B marketing strategy. If you have questions, topics you want to be explored, or any feedback please let me know!

Want to learn more about how to design and execute a successful LinkedIn strategy?

Given the sheer amount of content playing across social media feeds in today’s online landscape, producing eye-catching, dynamic content is a must.

In order to stand out from the crowd, businesses across many different industries are increasingly turning towards creative motion to catch the attention of potential customers on social networks like Facebook and Twitter.

Why animated business video?

While there’s nothing wrong with relying on static images on your business’s social media, there’s a limit to the story you can tell, and what your potential customers can take away from a single picture or photo.

Images can only provide a limited amount of information, and are confined by their own borders to a relatively small amount of creative content. What audiences immediately see in an image is all they’re going to get.

By integrating creative motion video into your social media strategy, you gain an important tool for not only conveying more information to your potential customers, but also providing them with more eye-popping, creative content that tells a story.

While you could go with live action video, this choice, like sticking with photos and images comes with a lot of productive and creative limitations.

Animation, on the other hand, has near-infinite creative possibilities to tell your story, none of which are limited by the need to use live actors or film production equipment.

As a result, animated video is more likely to catch the attention of internet users, 50% of whom look for videos related to a product or service before visiting a store (Insivia).

Paya

We helped Paya revamp their social media pages on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram with brand new creative motion animations like the these two:

 

 

 

Balancing concision and content delivery was critical for making sure these posts kept the attention of users while maintaining their creative charm.

Though each animation is only about 10 seconds long, the descriptions link to a longer article promoted by the video.

These posts are meant to draw in potential clients with concise, creative flair and deliver them straight to Paya’s website, where they can find more helpful articles, and a wealth of information on all the services Paya provides.

Here are three strategies for ensuring your use of animated video on social media is as effective as Paya’s.

  1. Take advantage of creative motion
    To catch the attention of scrolling social media users, it’s critical to stand out. One way to do that is by creating highly dynamic content that creates a contrast with the still images around it. Creative motion describes content that doesn’t just use video but is full of movement set in a creative environment or background. Creative motion videos are striking and fun to watch meaning users are more likely to stop and take a look at your content.
  1. Use colors that pop
    Along with making sure you content is full of movement, you want it to pop against the dreary grey and whites of platforms like Facebook and Twitter.
    Paya uses bright colors like green, orange, and blue that catch people’s eyes and keep them watching. Experiment with different color schemes and choices to find a combination that is vibrant and pleasant to look at. Catching users’ eyes with lots of movement and bright colors is especially key for video content on social media where you’re competing with so much other content for consumers’ attention.
  1. Concision is a must
    A recent study found that the average attention span is now around 8 seconds. That you means you have very little time to get and hold your audience’s attention. We recommend following Paya’s lead and limiting your social media video and animation content on social media to around 10 seconds to ensure potential customers don’t scroll on before you’ve gotten your message across. While a video on another platform, like on your own website, can of course be longer than 10 seconds, your social media strategy should focus on drawing users in with very short investments of their time and then exposing them to more involved content once they have left social media.

Using creative motion video on your businesses’ social media pages is an excellent way to draw in consumers with rich, but easily digestible content.

Balancing concision and compelling, creative content can be a challenge, but doing so successfully can be highly rewarding in terms of site visits and lead conversion.

Learn how Bluetext can get results for your digital marketing campaigns.

 

 

Top digital marketing agencies are quickly learning that mobile retargeting is now a key element in any successful campaign. But moving our clients to this strategy is not always an easy sell, as the many challenges that mobile presents can be intimidating. In spite of the roadblocks, mobile retargeting can increase reach and engagement far beyond other channels. Here are Bluetext’s six top tips for getting started with a mobile strategy:

  1. Unsure on how to reach target audiences on their mobile devices? Think social media platforms. Today’s target audiences are more likely to browse their social media apps on their mobile than search websites. Take advantage of the tools that Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter offer for their ad campaigns.
  2.  Want to increase mobile traffic to your site? Optimize your website for mobile to fully take advantage of this platform. That means a design that is responsive for all devices, and features simple and concise headlines, titles and other text. More importantly, make sure that images are sufficiently compressed, reduce the number of redirects (nobody wants to wait for a new screen to load), and minimize code to maintain a high-performing experience.
  3. Not sure how to design for mobile? Think like a visitor to your brand would, accessing your site via a mobile device. That means simplified designs and copy, but also calls-to-action that are clear about where the visitor will land if they click on that button. Viewers don’t want to leave the screen they are on unless they know there they are going.
  4. Need to improve your reach on mobile? Safari is the leading browser for mobile devices, but leveraging Apple’s tool is not so easy. One simple trick: Make sure you are enabling Safari, which typically blocks third-party cookies in its default setting. Find a provider that is skilled at accessing Safari’s massive number of users.
  5. Still not seeing the conversions you expect? It could be your landing page. Try to simplify the actions on the landing page to make sure there is no confusion or abandonment from that conversion point.
  6. Want to get hyper-specific with your targeting? Try geo-fencing for conferences, events, shows and other gatherings of target audiences. Sophisticated new geo-locating tools allow geo-fencing to specific blocks around convention centers, hotels and other venues. Serving ads at the right time and place can pay big rewards.

Any marketing campaign can be much more effective with a mobile component, as long as it’s well-executed.

If you want to learn more or need help with your campaigns, Bluetext can help.

It’s almost January again, already! With 2017 almost behind us, amidst the holiday cheer and eggnog, it’s also time to reflect on 2017. It goes without saying that today, changes in digital marketing happen within the blink of an eye. There’s simply no better strategy for your business than a continual adaptation; the years of resting your laurels with time-tested methods are long gone. What works best with digital simply changes too fast, and nothing is really stable.

With that in mind, we know how busy you are this time of year, so we’ve gotten together and brainstormed what we believed to be a list of the most important digital marketing trends for 2018. It’s a big list, but we’ve narrowed it down to just a top four. We invite you to take a look — if only to just keep up with the ever changing modern media environment.

Contact us Today!

The year was 2014. The new Apple Watch was all the rage; selfies weren’t annoying the bloody hell out of everyone yet; and The Ice Bucket Challenge had everyone soaking themselves for a good cause. It was also the year I examined some of the most innovative B2G marketing and PR strategies that were helping government contractors and IT providers stand out from the crowd and grow their public sector revenues.

This past February, I put together a brief update on B2G digital marketing ideas for 2017, looking at the emergence of B2G virtual reality initiatives, innovative go-to-market campaigns, as well as 3-D interactive experiences for lead generation. But as we approach 2018, the time is right for anyone selling technology products and services to the government to think about what will move the needle in sales, branding and market leadership next year. Yes, white papers, webinars, as well as traditional public relations and advertising all play a valuable role if executed properly, but it requires more to become top-of-mind with government decision makers – and to stay there.

Here are 5 innovative B2G marketing strategies to consider for 2018:

Geo-Fencing

Geo-fencing is location-based digital technology that allows you to select a geographic point using latitude and longitude and then to create a virtual “fence” around that point of a given radius in which your ads can be served up.

For contractors and Federal IT providers, there are multiple ways that geo-fencing can be utilized to reach government decision makers. If you are seeking to do business with a specific agency, you could pinpoint a single DC Metro station in proximity to the agency office, then  deliver a targeted ad to anyone who comes within a 1-block radius of that location. Ads delivered through geo-fencing typically yield higher conversions and better ROI for marketers since they’re highly contextual.

Geo-fencing can also make an impact reaching prospective buyers at key industry and government conferences. Geo-fencing at conferences:

  • Uses GPS or Wi-Fi information
  • Create a barrier around a location and target everyone within that location
  • Usually a tight radius (around an event or storefront)
  • Deliver display, audio, video ads or mobile app notifications

Bluetext recently completed a project for client ARQ at the International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP) Conference. The police body cam and digital evidence market is crowded with products that frustrate their users. So when a new player with a better, complete approach wanted to enter the market with a solution far ahead of the competition, it turned to Bluetext for a name, brand, corporate identity and website that would get attention and convey its value to law enforcement agencies. For the official launch, Bluetext executed a sophisticated outreach campaign including mobile geo-fencing to drive attendance to ARQ’s booth at IACP that included interactive product demo’s, and a comprehensive retargeting campaign pre and post show.

Mobile Retargeting

The government decision makers you need to reach – as well as government workforces if you are employing bottom-up marketing initiatives – are on mobile devices…a lot. Frost & Sullivan found that almost three-fourths of government organizations issue smartphones to at least some employees and more than half deploy tablets. Consumers overall spend 5 hours per day on mobile devices, so the bottom line is that if you want to reach government decision makers, mobile has to be a big part of the equation.

Mobile retargeting is now a key element in most any successful government-focused campaign seeking to increase reach and engagement far beyond other channels. There are six key strategies to get started with mobile retargeting:

  1. Unsure on how to reach target audiences on their mobile devices? Think social media platforms. Today’s target audiences are more likely to browse their social media apps on their mobile than search websites. Take advantage of the tools that Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter offer for their ad campaigns.
  2. Want to increase mobile traffic to your site? Optimize your website for mobile to fully take advantage of this platform. That means a design that is responsive for all devices, and features simple and concise headlines, titles and other text. More importantly, make sure that images are sufficiently compressed, reduce the number of redirects (nobody wants to wait for a new screen to load), and minimize code to maintain a high-performing experience.
  3. Not sure how to design for mobile? Think like a government decision maker visiting your website via a mobile device. That means simplified designs and copy, but also calls-to-action that are clear about where the visitor will land if they click on that button. Viewers don’t want to leave the screen they are on unless they know there they are going.
  4. Need to improve your reach on mobile? Safari is the leading browser for mobile devices, but leveraging Apple’s tool is not so easy. One simple trick: Make sure you are enabling Safari, which typically blocks third-party cookies in its default setting. Find a provider that is skilled at accessing Safari’s massive number of users.
  5. Still not seeing the conversions you expect? It could be your landing page. Try to simplify the actions on the landing page to make sure there is no confusion or abandonment from that conversion point.
  6. Want to get hyper-specific with your targeting? Try geo-fencing for conferences, events, shows and other gatherings of target audiences. Sophisticated new geo-locating tools allow geo-fencing to specific blocks around convention centers, hotels and other venues. Serving ads at the right time and place can pay big rewards.

Bluetext does mobile retargeting for many of its engagements, including:

  • For a leading satellite networking services provider, Bluetext surrounded the perimeter of a major trade show to drive traffic to its booth
  • For a leading cybersecurity company, Bluetext surrounded the perimeter of the RSA conference to drive traffic traffic to their booth featuring a cool virtual reality experience
  • For a leading healthcare company, Bluetext coordinated with their sales team and surrounded medical centers where their prospects work to drive brand visibility when they walked into work everyday on their personal cell phones.

Account Based Marketing (ABM)

If you are an old-timer like myself who still buys clothes at actual physical stores, you know that the sales racks are filled right now with unsold summer inventory, probably the same summer clothes you paid double for just a few months ago. But no matter how enticing the sale, we often bypass the out-of-season sale items in favor of what we will wear in the here and now.

This comes to mind as I started thinking about how businesses market their products and services to the public sector. You not only have to hit prospective new customers you want to convert and existing customers you want to upsell with the right message, but it has to be the right message at the right time. The right time, as is the case with summer clothes on sale as the weather turns colder, often comes down to when prospects and customers are in the frame of mind to be thinking about your product or service. Catch them too early and they will get distracted and move on; catch them too late and, well, that’s self-explanatory I suppose.

This challenge becomes more difficult for marketers trying to blanket a large number of customers and prospects. The ability to personalize the message and the timing is why more marketers are increasingly intrigued by Account-based marketing (ABM). With ABM you concentrate efforts on a very defined set of target accounts – a single Agency or even units within an Agency – and then utilize campaigns personalized down to the single account level.

Marketing automation leaders are also looking at ABM to round out their services portfolio. Recently inbound marketing and sales leader HubSpot invested in ABM startup Terminus as part of a $10.3 million Series B round. In its blog explaining motivation for the investment, HubSpot talks about the fact that while inbound marketing is valuable for targeting an individual throughout the purchase process and beyond, ABM is useful when there is a need to build a relationship with multiple stakeholders at once. When done right HubSpot notes, ABM is about “precision and personalization not brute force.”

Embrace the Inhumanity of Content Marketing

For government marketers, it can be incredibly frustrating to create a compelling white paper or develop a webinar you know will be of value to agencies, but see that content sit untapped or underappreciated. The fact is that prospective customers may want your white paper or webinar but…they may not know they want it. You might have to sweeten the pot.

Cards against humanity, the self-described, “party game for horrible people,” has gone from kickstarter campaign to global phenomenon. It is also an example of how you can utilize the concept of game cards to incentivize key prospects to download and access marketing content – ideally using a more sanitized version of the game.

Think about your buyer persona. What is their typical age range, gender, title, geographic location, etc.? This can inform a creative content marketing campaign in terms of theme (Game of Thrones, professional sports trading card sets, or a variation of Cards Against Humanity like ‘Cards Against IT Complexity’ that could feature various challenges that Agencies face with their IT systems and available only to prospects who download an ebook or whitepaper, or participate in a webinar.

Virtual Reality and 3-D Interactive Design

Virtual reality can lead to real government contracts. For all of the noise surrounding virtual reality in the consumer market, it has emerged as an effective platform for storytelling with technology companies targeting decision makers in the government and enterprise markets. For a Bluetext virtual reality project with client Varonis, we enabled their marketing team to navigate a complex customer landscape and to share the Varonis story and product to a wider audience using innovative technology. The Varonis Digital Briefing Center launched at a major conference that many of their existing and prospective customers attended, and enabled Varonis to scale their demos concurrently by 6x, differentiate in a global trade show, and drive traffic to their booth.

To drive user engagement and leads, forward-thinking B2G companies are looking beyond white papers and webinars and towards immersive user experiences. Bluetext client NJVC was looking for a powerful new message as well as an immersive experience to engage and inform its global audience. Bluetext delivered a cutting-edge user experience that merged 3-D interactive design with thought leadership content marketing.

With 1,300 IT professionals deployed globally supporting 200+ sites on six continents, NJVC is the partner of choice for federal agencies, commercial clients and large and small businesses. The NJVC experience is integrated into a responsive Mission CrITical campaign microsite designed to enable users to easily access the content that best aligns with their needs. Bluetext also recently collaborated with XO Communications to develop a 3D “Etherverse” experience placed prominently in the site to drive user engagement and leads.

Are you interested in taking your marketing strategy to the next level. Contact us

 

There’s good news and bad news for companies hoping to make their mark in the cyber security universe. First the good news: The market for these products is huge and growing exponentially. Security Analyst and researcher Richard Stiennon, in a column on Forbes.com and extrapolating from Gartner data, projects a ten-fold increase in IT security spending over the next 10 years- to $639 billion annually by 2023. That’s a number that would have any company executive working overtime to tap into.

But here’s the bad news: This is not exactly a secret. The competition is fierce and growing, as the growing number of solution providers races to meet this demand and take advantage of the opportunity.

It’s easy to have a marketing plan that pushes key messages out to prospective customers. At Bluetext, we think an influencer strategy is essential as part of that plan, and especially in such a crowed space as cyber security.

How any company—from established household names to challenger brands—can break through the noise and the clutter to attract the attention of this market requires an engaging and creative marketing approach that clearly sets it apart and above the competition. This demands a fine understanding of the value it brings to its customers and why it’s the best solution for any particular challenge.

Yet, simply having great creative is only half the battle. Getting that message out to the market is a whole new challenge, and needs both a direct approach and an in-direct strategy—the bank shot to reach the intended audience. Direct tactics are obvious—direct mail, email blasts, online and print advertising, a digital presence, trade shows and webinars; these are all direct appeals to potential customers.

The indirect approach is in many ways more difficult. It requires using industry influencers to reach their larger audiences with your content and messages. That is no small task, and it takes a dedicated investment in time and research. Here are some of the required elements to implement an effective influencer strategy:
1. Identify the best influencers for cyber security.
2. Recruit those influencers as allies and advocates for your thought leadership.
3. Engage those influencers through social media and direct outreach so that they will spread the word to their audiences.

Let’s take these one at a time.

Identify. Identifying the right influencers for any market, and in particular for cyber security, takes some research and digging. The key is finding the leaders who not only have the most followers on social media, but whose content—including tweets, blog posts and news articles—are shared the most frequently. When Bluetext executes an influencer campaign for its clients, we look first at the number of twitter followers and LinkedIn connections for each influencer candidate. But that’s only our starting point. More important is researching their history of shares among that audience. If a particular individual has a large number of followers yet few who share and rebroadcast that content, it could mean that his followers don’t find his content to be valuable, or that he doesn’t post content very often. If there are a lot of shares, retweets and comments, that’s a good indication that the person is read and taken seriously across the industry.

Recruit. Recruiting an influencer doesn’t mean offering them a job. It means building a relationship so that that person knows you are reading his content and pushing it out to your audience. The best way to do this takes work. The first step is to follow that person on Twitter, and to subscribe to his feed if he has a syndication service. The second step requires that the person’s content be reviewed on a daily basis. Any time there is a post that is relevant to your market, share it, follow it, retweet it, comment on it or call it out and add your own perspective. The idea is demonstrate that you are an active fan and follower who is paying attention to the expert.

Engage. Engaging with the influencer is a long-term project. After you have shown interest and built a credible track record of reading and sharing his content, he can be approached as an industry expert, a colleague and a reporter. That might include asking for his opinion on a new development, offering to share an announcement that he might find interesting, and even giving an advance look at a new piece of research or development. The goal is to be viewed the same way that a reporter would view a valuable source—with credibility and interest. When that engagement is solidified, the influencer is much more likely to pay attention to your content and to share it with his audience.

This may seem like a cumbersome process, and Bluetext dedicates a fair amount of energy to make this happen for our clients. But the payoff is significant. Using the bank shot to reach a much broader audience through sources that they trust can help rise above the competition in a crowded and growing market. A smart influencer strategy takes time and commitment, but it’s worth the effort.

 

If your digital marketing agency team doesn’t have a SMAC roadmap, you may find your company drifting off-course in 2017 and beyond. Here’s brief refresher course on SMAC.

Social Media

Social Media continues to evolve.   Platforms rise and fall by the year vs the decades of old.   Some new trends we see emerging that we see potentially continuing to gain momentum.
1. Snap’s Evolution Will Result in Interesting New Opportunities.
2. Twitter Fatigue Will Worsen.
3. Users Will Crave More Vicarious Experiences.
4. New Areas of Communication Will Emerge.

Mobile

Mobile devices are the cornerstone of how new business is being built and legacy businesses are reinventing themselves. Mobile devices allow users to constantly update their profile, stay aware of deals and promotions, and track locations and buying habits by virtue of connecting to various wireless signals and near-field communication (NFC) devices.

Some new trends we see emerging that we see potentially continuing to gain momentum.
1. Consumers redefine purchase boundaries; mobile marketing, brand partnerships deepen
2. Department stores, mobile marketing partners tackle the ‘Amazon Effect’
3. Programmatic accelerates: brands, tech, marketing continue to invest
4. Next-generation creative, video redefine mobile engagements

Analytics

As databases have grown larger and processors and memory have become capable of chewing through hundreds of millions of records in a short time, we have begun to see how analytics can do more than just track clicks. Analytics can establish links between entities and make intelligent predictions about customer behavior based on knowledge a system has about a customer — knowledge that has been informed by social networking.

To keep up with the explosion in Big Data, companies and corporations are beginning to invest in BI projects and more and more sophisticated analytics infrastructure.  Some new trends we see emerging that we see potentially continuing to gain momentum.
1. Multi-channel Attribution
2. Focus on ‘Return on Analytics Investment
3. Monetization of Data
4. Exciting new players in the MarTech arena to complement the core analytic platforms

Cloud

The cloud element of SMAC refers to the capability a business has to spin up vast amounts of capacity that are paid for by the minute or hour. Businesses do not need to spend millions of dollars building another data warehouse – they simply rent it from a cloud provider, do their work and turn it off. When the business environment changes, they simply spin up another cluster in the cloud, pay another few hundred dollars and continue building insights.

Some new trends we see emerging that we see potentially continuing to gain momentum.

1. Artificial intelligence (AI) will make personalization a reality in 2017.
2. Self-service will be the new normal.
3. Enhancing the Buyer Journey
4. Google Tag Manager and other granular analytics modules being the norm
With buyer sophistication growing daily, marketers need to deliver increasingly smarter strategies and campaigns. Are you taking the time to measure how your efforts are working and think about how you might enhance your efforts, or do you find yourself quickly moving from one campaign to the next?

Need help with your SMAC TALK?  Contact the digital marketing gurus at Bluetext.

A lot happens every 60 seconds online across digital platforms. In fact, a staggering amount of posts, uploads and emails take place in the space of a minute – every minute of every day. By looking at this data in detail, and comparing trends over the past three years, marketers can glean a lot of useful insight as to where to focus their brand’s attention when developing media programs – whether for specific targeted campaigns or for ongoing outreach.

A collection of these stats across the most important platforms was recently published by SmartInsights, and it reveals some significant trends. First and foremost, the 800 pound gorilla platform in terms of activity isn’t Twitter and it isn’t email. It’s Facebook. While there are nearly 450,000 Tweets every minute, there are 3.3 million Facebook posts in that same amount of time. In fact, if you said that Facebook literally dwarfs the other contenders, that would be accurate.

Except when it isn’t.

As the stats show, the outlier that is the largest by far is What’sApp, the free cross-platform app that can do just about what every other app does, and encrypt it in the process – with more than 29 million messages sent every minute. It’s widely popular around the globe (although not so much in the United States yet).

And who owns What’sApp? Facebook, of course. See a trend here?

60 Seconds Online: Where to Focus?

So where to focus your media campaigns? Look at some of the trends for what’s growing the fastest, and what’s being left behind. For example, Twitter’s 2014-2015 growth line came way down for 2016. Yes, there are more Tweets than a year ago, but not by much. Facebook shows no growth from 2015 to 2016 – which could mean that it has reached its upward potential. On the other side of the spectrum, YouTube and Instagram have increased their activity significantly.

Let’s not forget – Facebook also owns Instagram, while Google owns YouTube. So the upstarts are really just growth opportunities for the giants who continue to battle it out for dominance.

What does all of this mean for marketers? We tell our clients to look at where the growth is, not what was hot two years ago. Twitter is great for sports, entertainment and politics, but not so strong for b2b marketing. Instagram, on other hand, is expanding its reach across demographics, and can reach new target audiences that may have not been a focus of previous campaigns.

Thinking about your marketing and media mix? Contact Bluetext