Social Media Archives | Page 9 of 11

Shana Glenzer, VP of Social Marketing at SocialRadar, talks about how real time location-based marketing is disrupting the retail sector.

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

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

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 A tired or out-of-date design signals that the association may not have the resources or digital savvy to have a modern and fresh look and feel.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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What’s more valuable to a company? A visitor to its website who spends 15 minutes scanning a wide variety of pages, or a visitor who comes and goes in three minutes? The obvious answer is the first one, because as any marketing executive can tell you, “stickiness” and time on site are drivers for the website experience. But what if the first person is taking so long because they can’t find what they are looking for and the second person came and left quickly because they readily found the white paper they wanted or even transacted? The lesson here is not that time on site isn’t the only metric you should be evaluating. In fact, using metrics to evaluate the performance of your site may not be as straightforward as it looks.

Take the recent news about Instagram over-taking Twitter in terms of volume last year. “Instagram Is Now Bigger Than Twitter” was the headline everywhere from CNBC to Re/Code to the New York Times. But how meaningful is that comparison? Twitter has some 284 million active monthly users, Instagram more than 300 million. Yet, as an article in Slate describes it, the two are different: “One is largely private, the other largely public. One focuses on photos, the other on ideas. They’re both very large, and they’re both growing.”

Another metric that is often bandied about is unique monthly visitors. This measures the number of people that come to a site and discounts repeat visitors. Again, that might sound like the ultimate metric for evaluating the attention that a site is getting. Still, it doesn’t measure what those unique visitors are doing on the site. If it is a content-driven website, like the Huffington Post or Buzzfeed, a more important measure may be “total time reading.” There, the number of visitors who come and leave quickly isn’t very valuable to advertisers who provide the revenue for content-driven sites. Total time reading is far more important, and smart advertisers recognize the difference and factor that in accordingly.

A common measure reported on widely in the media when comparing different brands’ web traffic is the number of website visitors. This is frequently sourced to web measurement and analysis companies who make these types of evaluations. But even these can be highly misleading. First and foremost, according to a recent post in medium.com, the most widely quoted source of web traffic, Comscore Networks, only counts U.S. users. If a brand is global or operates overseas like a many government defense contractors, the metrics will not include that traffic in the totals. In addition, these reports are often based on sampling which can distort the actual numbers for smaller brands with a more limited number of visitors. It’s also not yet clear whether these services are including site traffic from mobile apps, which may be a very important measurement tool for many websites as more and more visitors use mobile devices to access information on the web.

So if the three most commonly-used metrics for measuring the success of a website—time on site, unique monthly visitors, and total traffic—all have their flaws, what is the best way to evaluate how a site is doing?

The answer is there is no best answer. All three of those key metrics are useful, but they need to be taken for what they are which is a set of imprecise and blunt tools.

A better way to look at the most effective mix of metrics is to find the best blend that will help evaluate “value.” Time on site is important, but only as an element in value. In reality, for media websites, advertisers don’t actually want a customer’s time, they want to make an impression that will lead to a transaction or buying decision. On the other hand, for an enterprise site offering IT solutions where the buying cycle is long and a visit to the website may be part of the research process, time is valuable as a measurement for a customer’s information gathering step in the cycle. Where they go on the site—to resources, for example—may say a great deal about where that customer is in the cycle and how to best to pursue him or her.

Where the visitor enters the site may be a key performance indicator for both organic search results or for a lead-generation driven campaign that takes the visitor directly to the intended content. Spending time on the blog page may be an indicator that the site’s content is fresh and engaging and is bringing target audiences back for more. Reading product and solutions pages may indicate a prospect that needs to be watched to make sure they are getting what they need to make a purchasing decision.

The right answer is that value has to be a combination of a number of factors, and using multiple metrics can help understand if the site is achieving its goal of providing that value. But no marketer should get too hung up on any single measurement.

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

Bluetext Survey Shows How Government Executives Make IT Decisions

Survey Results in Federal Computer Week

Federal agencies can be great customers because they remain some of the biggest spenders and their budgets stay fairly stable even during economic downturns. Yet sales and marketing teams used to marketing to consumer or commercial enterprise customers often find that their efforts fall flat in the government space — wasting everyone’s time in the process.

That’s because talking to the government customer can require a different approach, including the channels used to reach that audience and the messages included. Understanding those needs and preferences can help contractors and feds alike.

We recently surveyed 150 top government executives involved in the decision-making process for IT purchases, to understand directly how they get the information that helps inform their purchasing decisions. The results provide a road map for targeting this audience — and a valuable look in the mirror for agency leaders who wonder if there are better ways to gather the information they need.

READ THE FULL STORY HERE AT FCW.COM

6 Ways Government Contractors Can Use Innovative Digital Marketing and PR Strategies To Win Business

When it comes to marketing and communications, government contractors and public sector IT providers face a set of unique challenges. For one, the customer base of Federal, state and local decision makers responsible for purchasing technology products and services – ranging from CIOs and CTOs to program managers, IT managers and procurement officers –represents a finite group that can be difficult to reach.

Compounding this predicament is the fact that government contractors must not only market their brand, product and services to these decision makers, but also time these marketing efforts strategically. This means building awareness far enough in advance of a contract award, and then sustaining marketing and PR efforts throughout what can be a multi-year process from pre-RFP to the contract award – and even beyond due to potential contract protests, delays and budgetary obstacles.

READ THE FULL BLOG POST HERE:
6 Ways Government Contractors Can Use Innovative Digital Marketing and PR Strategies To Win Business

READ THE FULL STORY HERE AT FCW.COM

On its 10th anniversary of connecting communicators, Capitol Communicator determined that to continue to grow and be a vibrant part of the Washington, D.C., marketing and communications community, its next 10 years would be built on a new digital strategy and complementing user experience strategy. As a central hub for news, events and information for communicators in the mid-Atlantic, Capitol Communicator wanted a more modern platform.

Capitol Communicator selected Bluetext to partner with for this complete digital overhaul. Bluetext has delivered an enterprise-level WordPress implementation with comprehensive CMS publishing technologies that are integrated to allow Capitol Communicator to get best-in-class SEO, content management and smart, modern design.

Said Paul Duning, publisher of Capitol Communicator, “After a very exhaustive review, Bluetext had the energy, creativity, digital savviness, and firepower to be our new digital partner, and they really delivered. Our community has spoken, and they all love the new site which is helping us further validate that we are taking the brand in the right direction with a new digital platform as the centerpiece.”

Capitol Communicator is dedicated to bringing together the vast spectrum of communications professionals who influence and educate the Mid-Atlantic region and the world by providing news; trends; education; and opportunities for networking, career enhancement, business exchange and showcasing great work, Capitol Communicator serves as a resource to the region’s communications community. Capitol Communicator focuses on building a community that encompasses professions that include public relations, advertising, marketing, media, creative, video, photography, printing, digital and the multitude of other professions that support this region’s multi-billion-dollar communications industry. And, Capitol Communicator is a proud supporter of many organizations that share in their mission of providing professional development to the communications community.