The next time you’re in a public setting, look up, and chances are you’ll notice almost everyone around you has their eyes glued to a mobile device in hand. Modern-day mobile devices are essentially mini computers, enabling on-the-go browsing, communication, and connection at unprecedented ease. Society has become accustomed to instantaneous connection, but not all websites are up to par with user expectations. While desktop sites were once the focus, a disappointing mobile performance of websites is holding many companies back from their full online potential to garner customers. Aside from a frustrating user experience, poor mobile performance can hurt a website from a technical SEO perspective. This is why many companies are turning to digital agencies like Bluetext to revamp or create entirely new, responsive web designs & optimized performance to stand out among their competitors.
On average, mobile devices account for more website user traffic than desktops. However, despite the high traffic volume, conversion rates on mobile environments are significantly lower. So what’s turning our mobile users away? Adrienne Clem, Director of Search Ads Growth and Optimization at Google, describes that it could be an issue with any one of the following pillars of mobile website design:
Speed
Page Speed is a key indicator of website quality, as it is a critical first impression of your website. The longer a user must wait for your website content to load, the higher the risk of the user leaving the page and increasing the bounce rate. Bounce rate, performance, and speed metrics all play a critical role in Google search crawlers’ evaluation of a website. (such as, In addition to limiting bounce rates, reducing your Time to First Byte can also increase your site’s SEO ranking. You can keep tabs on your site’s speed performance using tools like Google, PageSpeed Insights, or GTMetrix.com, but consulting a website development agency can offer further insight into actionable steps to improve your site’s performance.
User Experience
All websites should be designed to be as simple as possible for users to navigate. However, this isn’t as easy as it sounds. Content hierarchy, navigation, and calls to action are all critical components that need to be equally accessible and intuitive across desktop & mobile formats. Responsive layouts are essential in a mobile-optimized design, but more important is the speed at which content loads for a user. Mobile site speed tends to lag behind its desktop counterpart, but a poor mobile performance can significantly ding your site’s SERP ranking and create a poor user experience. Even the most creative & persuasive landing pages are wasted if features take too long to load on the screen. Pages that utilize AMP (Accelerated Mobile Performance) technology both rate higher on Google search rankings and increase chances of conversion for paid media promotions. AMP HTML is an open framework based on existing web technologies, that allows for more lightweight and speedier mobile web pages. In an initiative to enhance the shift to mobile browsing, AMP-powered webpages load instantaneously, even when they contain rich media like video, animations, or graphics, including things like Twitter and YouTube embeds.
Iterative Design
Website design is an iterative and ongoing process. Platforms & technology are constantly evolving to include new features, remedy existing pain points and approach the ever-moving target that is positive user experience. Companies should approach this process in the interest of continued learning and constant improvement. Collecting feedback should be built into the plan for any mobile site development, as the site’s performance should be re-evaluated at least every 3-6 months. Keeping track of your site’s vitals is an important step for ensuring that your site stays relevant and isn’t losing out on potential conversions.
In an increasingly mobile-first world, emphasizing the performance of sites on mobile devices can increase customer loyalty and satisfaction. Whether a prospective customer’s impression of your campaign landing page or an existing customer’s experience browsing your full website, speed is the name of the game. Keeping up-to-date with best practices in website development and enlisting the help of seasoned designers and UX specialists can transform users from mindless mobile scrolling to enthusiastic interactions on your site.
If you’re ready to start designing your site with a mobile audience in mind, Contact Bluetext for guidance and expertise.
The recent Labor Day continued to shine a spotlight on an ongoing problem brought on by COVID-19: The Great Job Exodus of 2021. According to Microsoft’s 2021 Work Trend Index, 40% of the global workforce is considering leaving their employer this year. While many companies adopted more flexible work policies to adapt to the pandemic — with some being here to stay permanently — employees are continuing to experience burnout and businesses are seeing employees flee by the dozens.
Social media platforms such as LinkedIn have exposed a high percentage of PR and marketing professionals leaving their positions no matter the industry or tenure. Businesses large and small are struggling to fill key marcomms positions — specifically those in the mid and senior roles. And who can blame them when they’ve been working for 5 years or more, exhaustedly grinding away with a pandemic raging?
Finding and retaining top in-house talent can negatively impact the ability of marcomms teams to execute. The absence of senior leaders can make it difficult to provide the C-Suite with the strategy and ideas essential to growing the business. Additionally, if you can’t fully staff the team with junior and mid-level professionals, it can bog down more experienced marcoms professionals in tactical, rather than strategic, work.
The current conditions make a strong argument to fill the gap with a tech PR agency, like Bluetext. Leaning on an agency partner for additional services and support can alleviate some of that workload and bring fresh ideas and perspectives to your business. However, picking an agency is no easy task. Businesses need to find trusted advisors and agencies that will be an extension of the company; trustworthy firms that understand your business, products, and values. So, how do you pick the right partner to fill these gaps? Let’s dive in!
Benefits of an Agency Partner vs. In-House Staff
While both options have their benefits, deciding on an agency or in-house staff really depends on what your business is looking for, and it can depend on a variety of factors. While an in-house employee will, over time, know the ins and outs of your brand, it is rare to find an in-house marketer who is adept at all aspects of digital marketing. And if you do find someone who knows all aspects of digital marketing, it could be an overwhelming experience for them and may impact employee retention.
With an agency, you gain the benefit of a team of individuals with complementary skills who already work well together. An agency can also bring a fresh perspective, based on work with others in your industry, and even competitors. In-house marcomm professionals are at times so close to the brand it can lead to overly subjective decisions.
As for media relations, a public relations agency will have years and years of experience in multiple industries. Their media relations roots are continuously growing as they’re passed from client team to client team. Agencies have a plethora of relationships with media that are nurtured continuously from client’s both past and present. In general, agencies have a better understanding of media, industry trends, and the ever-changing media landscape and can easily adapt a strategy to meet the needs of their clients.
What to Ask Yourself when Finding an Agency
1. What are my goals?
This is a no-brainer! What are your marketing goals? The answer will determine which agency is right for you, what resources an agency should have, and more. Does this agency have enough experience and resources to help you achieve core objectives, does it have a presence in your target market or will you be able to build relationships with media through this agency? All of these questions are important to ask when it comes to choosing the correct agency partner.
2. Does my staff have the required resources and skills needed to achieve said goals?
By understanding which marketing tactics your business needs and the resources and skill level needed to do it, you’ll be able to find the right agency for your business. If you’re looking for more comprehensive marketing services none of your in-house roles can accomplish, be sure to pick an agency that has a diverse skill set to cover your bases. As a fully integrated marketing agency, Bluetext has a variety of services we offer to our clients that include messaging, branding, website design and development, go-to-market campaign strategy, public relations, social media, and so much more.
3. What value will I get for the cost?
When evaluating an agency, the math needs to be done to compute the true cost of the output. With an agency, you get the support of an entire team rather than just one person, therefore, getting more for less.
4. What is my budget?
By determining your budget, you can decide how much you can afford to invest in marketing which will dictate how much work your agency will take on. Sometimes what you can afford is too little to drive real results with one agency but can work for another.
Once you’ve asked yourself what your goals, budget, staffing needs, and skillset needs are, be sure to contact Bluetext to learn how our B2B tech PR team can help you fill any in-house skills gaps you are facing.
Video marketing can be a vital tool when it comes to leveling up your marketing program. Video, as a medium, is an exceptional opportunity to tell your brand’s story and mission using dramatic visuals, voiceover, and music. Video allows you to inject emotion and feeling into your content, something that written mediums like blog posts and product pages just can’t compete with. As some may say, the medium is the message. To humanize your brand and create a memorable connection, audiovisual content can build that bridge. Additionally, the ease with which you can upload your video content to a variety of social media platforms allows you to share your story with as many potential customers and reach as wide an audience as possible.
Below, we dive deep into the five reasons you need to use video in your marketing strategy and why partnering with a video design and production firm like Bluetext is the right choice for you.
1. Authentic Video Builds Trust
Perhaps most importantly, video content helps build trust between you and the prospective buyer. Trust is the foundation that drives conversions and overall sales. 57% of consumers say that videos give them more confidence to purchase online. With a great voiceover and a moving music track, videos can provoke a very emotive, and therefore, human response, more impactful than any generic landing page. Having your team on camera explaining your product or service is also a great way to provide prospective customers with a sense of your company culture and why they should work with you. Additionally, video content filmed and edited the right way evokes authenticity and transparency, both key points when aiming to build trust.
Through our work with Invictus, we produced a video around the story of their unique, military family-oriented mission that resonated with their prospective customers.
2. Explain Difficult Concepts With Ease
We live in a fast-paced visual-based world, where users are less likely to read through a product description and more likely to prefer an infographic or video that explains the solution succinctly. Technology has made us all accustomed to immediate satisfaction in finding the answers we seek. And if users don’t find the information they’re looking for, they lose interest or look elsewhere. Video content reduces the overall effort it takes to learn something new, especially when it may be a difficult concept to understand. If you’re launching a new product or service, explaining its features and advantages will be easier through video than a product landing page. The way the human brain processes information varies by individual, some are more visual learners, some auditory, and even some kinetic. If you don’t have the words to explain your product, the use of animation can help bring any concept to life. An audiovisual medium allows you to effectively reach a wider audience. The quicker someone can understand your product, the quicker the conversion from prospect to a customer will be.
Through our work with IoT cybersecurity company, Phosphorus, we told the story of their mission and the power of their groundbreaking platform.
3. Google Loves Video Content
There are a variety of reasons Google loves video. Perhaps most importantly, Google places great value in the length of time a user spends on your webpage. If your video content is enticing enough for the user to watch it all the way through, they’re more likely to spend more time watching a video on your site than reading through a lengthy landing page. Additionally, as we know, including keywords in your written content is important in any SEO strategy and helps improve your search rankings. Using the latest Video Intelligence API, Google can catalog the relevant keywords in your videos and increase your ranking in search engine results. Relevant keywords in your video and written content packs the maximum SEO punch into your webpage. Another great reason video content is a great SEO value is as video content can be adjusted to multiple screen sizes, Google ranks this content very high in search results.
4. Mobile Users Benefit
In the world we live in, everyone is glued to their smartphones throughout the day, watching, liking, and sharing content. According to a recent study, 90% of users actually watch videos on their smartphones rather than on computers or televisions. The ready availability of so much video content on smartphones is driving this statistic and will only grow as more and more content is produced. So what does this mean for you? Increasing the amount of video you put into the market will only increase the engagement with your content from prospective customers. Well-produced, informative content will be more likely shared and will lead to increased sales.
5. The Competitive Advantage
Stay one step ahead of the competition by producing video content. A lot of companies are still of the mindset that video content is way too expensive; and sure, some very well-produced content can get expensive when you’re factoring in custom shoots, actors, and multiple 8K cameras. That being said, video content doesn’t have to be expensive. With the right story and a camera as readily available as the one on your smartphone, you can create perfect video content that will resonate with your target audience and lead to many conversions. Being smart with your resources (financial & human) can result in an impressive video that no one would know was built on a budget.
Videos can play a massive role at every stage of the marketing funnel. That being said, creating high-performing video content takes time and effort. Ensure you have the right video content strategy from the get-go and that you maximize authenticity, creativity, and uniqueness. Need support putting together your video content strategy? Contact Bluetext today.
In our modern world, nearly all marketing campaigns integrate some level of digital communication to broaden their reach across their target market. But technology is changing so fast that it can be difficult to keep up with the latest and greatest. And let’s face it, trends have an expiration date. So how do marketers know what digital assets will be the most effective for their campaigns and how do they know what will stand the test of time? Let’s take a look at some digital marketing trends with timeless potential:
1. Quality UX
With more and more digital users every year, it is more important now than ever to make your presence known in the digital sphere. Though, checking off the box for “having a website” doesn’t mean that you can sit on it and let it be. It is important to ensure that your website continuously provides a quality user experience for your end-users to keep them coming back and that it appears modern and relevant to new users.
Whether you are looking to update the look and feel of your website every two or three years, or keep your content strategy up-to-date every few months, it is important to connect with a digital marketing agency, like Bluetext, who can work with you to create a well-informed and exciting new website plan. Digital marketers can work with you to keep your thought leadership up to date, create a new digital brand presence, and develop a smart, sustainable navigation strategy to ensure that your users are able to find what they are looking for on your website. User experience is a broad discipline, with many proven principles that should lay the foundation of every unique design. Quality, well-informed UX will help drive leads, make conversions, and ultimately boost revenue for your business.
2. Virtual Events
We know that the coronavirus pandemic led to a hunkered-down workforce, many working from the confines of their makeshift home offices and connecting with coworkers and clients virtually. Large-scale events were unimaginable and virtual events quickly took their place.
Virtual events are exactly what they sound like ― virtual. This means that attendees don’t need to travel to attend a virtual event as they can enjoy them from the comfort of their own homes. No venue means no geographical constraints and the elimination of travel expenses. Attendees can join from all across the country, and all around the globe without costing their companies a dime.
Virtual events also allow companies to shift their budget away from venue fees and reallocate it toward production costs for their event. High-quality production captures and sustains attendee attention. If your event is lacking in production value, your attendees will be more inclined to spend time on their email instead of participating and actively listening to your hosts and guests.
See how SonicWall successfully garnered a 135% increase in attendance over their previous high-mark partner event. The high-quality production of pre-recorded videos, a custom website with a quasi-live experience, and motion graphics all worked together to untie attendees in a shared interest no matter their physical location.
3. Augmented Reality
3. Augmented RealityFor a few years now, brands have been experimenting with augmented reality to help place their products directly in front of their potential customers. For example, Wayfair and other furniture companies have an augmented reality feature that places a new piece of furniture directly in your space, allowing you to see how it would fit before making the purchase. Warby Parker leverages augmented reality to show consumers how a new pair of glasses may look without going into the store to try them on or waiting for their at-home try-on box to arrive.
Augmented reality truly allows brands to revolutionize the way consumers interact with their brands, and ultimately their products. And if you’re thinking, ‘that’s neat, but only for flashy consumer brands’ you might want to think again. B2B companies are adopting and innovating on the trend to make this technology applicable to their offerings. Because, why let consumer brands have all the fun?
Bluetext worked with AppGate to provide an immersive augmented reality experience at RSA® Conference 2020, the world’s leading information security conference in San Francisco. Bluetext conceptualized, designed, developed, advertised, and coordinated the ground-breaking Kill Your VPN campaign and augmented reality booth experience to help AppGate stand apart from the 658 other exhibitors in 2020.
4. Content from Micro-influencers
The influencer marketing industry was worth $8 billion in 2019, and it is estimated to grow to $15 billion over the next two years. But according to Kali Ridley, a marketer on Google’s Brand Studio team, the future lies not with megastars and their millions of followers; it’s with micro-influencers.
Micro-influencers are those with smaller followings, somewhere between 1,000 and 10,000 followers, who are able to form a community within their reach and share messages that will resonate with their fans. More and more, marketers are discovering relatability outshines star power. Relatability feeds directly into trust, therefore, creating a much stronger argument for your product or service.
LinkedIn has undoubtedly made changes to its platforms that enable these micro-influencers to make a further impact. The new “Creator Mode” for LinkedIn allows users to pin specific hashtags to the top of their profile to signify the themes they frequently post about. With creator mode enabled, the presentation of profiles is altered to emphasize the hashtags directly under job titles. Additionally, users can “Follow” these influencers rather than adding them to their personal networks. Now instead of feeling uneasy sending network invitations to a complete stranger, users can follow their favorite thought leaders just as easily as on other social networks.
These small changes in the social media platforms signal that micro-influencer marketing strategies are worth the investment and aren’t going anywhere anytime soon.
If you want your brand to stand out and succeed today, and tomorrow, consider getting in on any of these trends. Each of the four above have a promising future of long-term success. As a digital marketing agency, Bluetext expects these trends to be adopted by many companies over the coming years, and only improve with iterations on previous success. Contact Bluetext today if you’re interested in a future-focused marketing strategy.
Last week the goliath of technology conferences held in the U.S., CES, announced that its January 2022 event will require vaccination proof for in-person attendees. The motivation for the Consumer Technology Association, the show’s organizer, to resume a face-to-face component is strong: exhibitors recognize that generating enthusiasm for new consumer products and technologies through virtually is not nearly as powerful as live demonstrations.
Few in the tech marcomms space have endured a more challenging professional pivot over the past 18 months than those responsible for conference and event strategy and execution – whether it is determining what kind of investments should be made in industry events as well as how to manage their own annual user conferences and smaller events so critical to cultivating customer, prospect and partner relationships.
Pre-pandemic, there was of course no need to make decisions on whether to hold in-person, virtual, or hybrid events — often several months in advance of the event date itself. And through the first 15 months of the pandemic, COVID-19 in effect made the decision for marcomms and event decision-makers as everything shifted to virtual. This was no easy feat but at least the decision was.
The emergence of the Delta variant, right as tech companies were resuming planning for in-person events, exponentially complicates the decision-making process for the 2021-2022 tech conference strategy. While CES is planning in-person for vaccinated attendees, plans for other events run the gamut. As this Marketwatch article notes, tech companies with large user and developer events are re-assessing given Delta. Salesforce.com’s CRM Dreamforce is still planning for an “in-person experience” for the Fall event, but so many others have already reverted back to virtual or hybrid experiences with a limited in-person component.
As you evaluate your 2021-2022 tech conference and event strategy in light of the Delta variant and other unpredictable developments we should all expect in the months ahead, keep the following strategies in mind:
Look at the event track record
Tech conference organizers that have already executed a virtual event last year during the pandemic offer a track record that can be analyzed when it comes to attendance, engagement, and results. The Marketwatch article raised the valuable point that what virtual events lack in intimacy they make up for in some cases with larger attendance, citing feedback from Juniper Networks that attendance for its virtual Global Summit held in April was more than 2x in-person attendance for recent and similar events. It is of course easier and more cost-effective to hop into a live panel discussion on your laptop at home than it is to fly halfway across the country to attend in-person.
But for every Juniper, there is a Mobile World Congress, which forecast a significant in-person attendance drop for its hybrid 2021 Barcelona event, where the 50,000 in-person attendees expected to attend was half the number compared to its “normal” pre-pandemic numbers.
The more information you have from organizations that have already executed events during the pandemic, the less guesstimating you have to do when it comes to the right investment level for attending, speaking, sponsoring, exhibiting, or skipping altogether.
Track records matter because, with conference and event investments, you can’t just assume that all of the money will be recouped if the in-person event is canceled. There can be a difference between an organizer canceling of its own volition, and an organizer canceling because it is subject to city or state directives that are issued prior to the event. The more confidence you can have in the event organizer, the lower the risk of a negative financial and business outcome.
Size matters
If the pandemic has communicated anything to marcomms professionals it is that bigger isn’t necessarily better. Most attendees are going to baby step back to live events, so going from working from home to a crowded pavilion with 100,000 of your closest friends may be a bridge too far.
Dialing it down from potential ‘super-spreader’ to ‘super-intimate’ events that still allow for facetime but in a more controlled environment with modest numbers of people can support corporate and sales objectives. If you are a tech company evaluating what in-person events to attend, don’t discount these smaller events and if you are an event organizer, converting a large annual event into, for example, quarterly smaller regional events can pay off.
The key for user events is data. You can’t just guess how attendees might act when presented with options between in-person, hybrid, or virtual, or what size of in-person event they might be comfortable with. Survey, survey, and then survey again. External third-party data has value, but you know your customers best and keeping your finger on the pulse of their event and travel preferences is critical.
In its latest PULSE Survey, Northstar Meetings Group found that two-thirds of the 826 respondents will hold their next in-person event in Q3 or Q4 of this year – with half of them requiring attendees to wear masks indoors and 28 percent requiring proof of Covid-19 vaccination. But the survey also reinforces the need for conference organizers and meeting planners to be nimble and resilient in the face of constantly evolving federal, state, and local policies.
Re-imagine your traditional event approach
Pre-pandemic tech conferences and events were far from perfect, which helps explain why many have seen value in the shift – as temporary as it might be – to virtual and hybrid events. Marcomm and conference decision-makers should use the challenging environment as an opportunity to re-imagine traditional approaches.
Virtual and hybrid events unlock new content and access opportunities, new ways to engage with and receive feedback from attendees in real-time to drive experiences not possible with in-person events where individuals are scattered and engagement is harder to measure. While larger tech conferences made great strides in trying to make their events “smaller” when it came to networking rather than releasing thousands of people into venues to try and find each other, the results were imperfect.
Each event model comes with its own challenge. User conference organizers know that while virtual events may be easier for customers to join, they are also easier for them to blow off because it doesn’t require the same level of travel, financial, and planning commitment. Hybrid events create challenges for tech brands unsure of which path provides the better value for lead generation, networking, sponsorships, speaking, and exhibiting. And for all of these models, trying to figure out whether it still makes sense to shell out $20,000 for a sponsored virtual speaking slot in lieu of being on the big stage is no easy task.
When it comes to working with B2B tech PR, B2C tech PR, and B2G tech PR firms, Bluetext has been helping clients navigate tech conference strategy for industry events as well as client user conferences. If you are looking for the right partner to maximize your tech conference investments in the months ahead, contact Bluetext to learn how we can help.
TikTok — the clock is ticking on traditional advertising strategies. As conventional methods wane, a new star player, TikTok, is making waves. At inception, TikTok gained a sticking association with Gen Z via dance videos & lip-syncing parodies. It’s true, TikTok is a popular platform for many teens or young adults to create and send entertaining video content. However, this platform is not just a fleeting fad, but very much here to stay and continue to evolve.
Like any trend, TikTok’s high number of young users caught the attention of older demographics. All wanting to know “what the cool kids are doing”, TikTok’s user base matured. As of March 2021, research found that teenagers are only 25% of the TikTok audience. Who are the rest? Well, it’s a pretty even split of users in their 20s, 30s, and 40s, with even a significant slice of people 50 years and older!
A more diverse user base brought new opportunities, as marketers observed new niche categories rise in popularity. For example, trending hashtags such as #financetok or #taxadvice providing financial advice to users during tax season. Just one of the many unique use cases of the social media platform, as everything from investing to cleaning hacks, has been reenergized by the fun, engaging nature of video clips.
So what does this mean? Well, it’s time that digital marketers begin to take TikTok seriously. Here’s why:
1.Video Content is on the Rise
Video content is on the rise — and won’t pause anytime soon. That’s why popular video publishing platforms, TikTok and Vimeo, have joined forces to become an advertising powerhouse. Recent updates have integrated Vimeo creation tools with TikTok AdManager. This enables businesses of any size to create and publish ads directly to TikTok Ads Manager. Effectively breaking down prior production banners, smaller and medium-sized businesses can easily create and distribute engaging video ads at low cost. Going a step beyond, Vimeo offers ad templates specifically optimized for the TikTok platform. Known as Spark Ads, this format allows businesses to take organic content and quite literally re-energize ads on a new short and snippy platform.
2. Self-Served Success
Speaking of the TikTok AdManger, a few of the hallmarks of this platform are the self-service ad publishing, creator marketplace, and other features that empower content creation. With an easy-to-use publishing experience, it allows for more experimentation and freedom with campaign concepts, creative or targeting. The format pushes brands to make their advertisements everything they should be: short, succinct, and engaging. Time limitations force marketers to cut the extraneous details that users wouldn’t retain anyways and hone in on a single direct message. It’s like the bootcamp marketers didn’t know that they needed.
3. Live it Up
That’s right, TikTok has jumped on the trend of live streaming video content (thank you Instagram & Facebook). While this has playful applications, it’s also a prime opportunity for commentary from thought leaders and brand ambassadors on new product launches, industry events, or current trends. Live stream content has been popularized on alternative platforms (looking at you, Facebook & Instagram) for hosting Q&As and panel discussions. New TikTok features allow both the scheduling & promotion of a live-streamed event but also co-hosting to allow for multiple speakers. This creates a split-screen view and allows hosts to interact one-on-one with another, and with live audience comments.
While the first wave of use cases for these features may be tied to e-commerce and pop culture, it will be the next wave of marketing pioneers who bring a more practical flavor to the platform. Facebook and Twitter started out as purely ‘social’ social media platforms, but look what business opportunities have arisen from there. TikTok will be no different, and the businesses that invest now in their video content creation and production skills will have the upper hand.
Need to amp up your video & social media marketing? Contact Bluetext to learn more about our creative & digital marketing services.
With a constantly increasing amount of online content being published each day, it is important to stand out in the search engines results. Social media does not directly contribute to your SEO ranking, however, it does have the potential to drive quality web traffic to your site. When links to blog posts, videos, podcasts, and more are shared, Google and other search engines use it to rank your website. The right strategy will allow you to increase overall brand awareness, improve traffic, amplify your audience, and overall benefit your SEO. Want to know how? Read further to learn more about four practical social media tips that will explain how these marketing channels will help you improve your site’s ranking.
1. Generate New Ideas
Whether it is for blog posts or Instagram captions, social media can help you generate new ideas. One way a social media post can generate content ideas is through user feedback. Oftentimes, followers post questions or topics they would like to hear more about in the comments section. Questions within your comment section can also provide great feedback regarding your content that may not be readily available on your social page or website. Using this process, you can use feedback from your followers to generate a list of ideas that will boost your site traffic.
2. Post Content Frequently
Search engines want to know if your company’s website is relevant for its users. Therefore, it is important to regularly post SEO-saturated content to ensure your business looks helpful to users and trustworthy. The more content you post on your website, the more social posts you can create to promote and boost that content. You can accomplish this by creating a social media schedule for each month to monitor the frequency of your posts as well as important analytics like traffic, engagement, etc.
3. Know Your Audience
One of the many benefits of social media is getting to know your audience segments. Social media insights and tools like Google Analytics can tell you where your audience interacts with your content most. This is helpful for improving your SEO ranking because it makes finding the right keywords to use throughout your website a much easier process, boosting your company brand recognition and improving your search engine optimization and page rank.
4. Use Keywords
It can’t be stated enough: using the right keywords is crucial. Start by making a list of crucial keywords for each page on your website and commit to using those keywords throughout the copy of those pages. It is important to keep in mind what your audience might be searching for to arrive at this post. Tools such as Semrush Keyword Research and Similar Web can be helpful resources for picking the right keywords.
The benefits of improving your SEO results are you can increase brand exposure, improve traffic, and amplify your audience. Therefore, it is an important part of your social media strategy. Contact Bluetext to learn more and about how we can boost your SEO results.
Financial service providers typically fall into one of two buckets: legacy brands and disruptors. Legacy brands are what you typically think when you think “bank;” large, established brands, often with physical locations, that provide a range of financial services. Disruptors, on the other hand, are innovative and digitally focused, pioneering new ways to simplify finance.
As the finance industry continues to be disrupted by new technologies and innovations, keep an eye out for these three digital-first trends on the rise.
A focus on financial literacy will improve consumer relationships with finance
Banking and finance are critical to our everyday lives, yet many individuals struggle with understanding basic financial terms and concepts. Many FinTech companies make it a priority to educate their consumers with content marketing on how to make healthy financial decisions and gain a more holistic understanding of their relationship with money.
Some leading FinTech startups are specifically targeting the younger generation, making it a goal to establish healthy financial habits early on around debt, budgeting, and investing for the future. Startups like FamZoo make learning finance basics fun, positioning parents as “banks” and children as “customers”. This metaphorical language encourages children to take out “loans” from their parents and earn allowances. Understanding how the loan process works from an early age removes the intimidation that can often accompany personal finances.
Promoting financial literacy in creative ways will continue to be a priority in the coming years as startups vie for a share of the digitally-focused finance consumer pool.
Microservices allow for agile and customizable solutions
The advent of microservices is one of the key reasons innovators have been able to disrupt legacy providers, releasing many of the constraints that have previously kept legacy institutions one step ahead. Microservices add a flavor of personalization, a proven marketing trend across multiple industries. Emerging technology enables FinTech companies and consumers alike with the ability to customize their solutions, adapt to real-time problems, and provide on-the-fly solutions.
Traditionally, legacy institutions have offered uniform solutions with many interdependencies, making it difficult to evolve and innovate without impacting the entire architecture. While large financial institutions can be innovative, it often takes much longer to introduce and establish new technologies.
Conversely, microservices serve as independent applications, allowing for the speedy development, testing, and deployment of updates. This model allows FinTech companies to work on many different solutions simultaneously, and, with fewer dependencies, quickly deploy service and product updates. The ‘a la carte’ concept is attractive to consumers, as they can select the specific services they want without relying on a full-service solution.
Check out how Bluetext client Paya is serving end-to-end, seamless, and innovative payment solutions specifically suited to their customers’ needs.
Predictive Analytics provide FinTech companies with a competitive advantage
Still a relatively new arm of data science, predictive analytics studies current and historical data to make predictions about future events, playing a central role in the FinTech space. Predictive analytics is especially relevant in this space because FinTech disruptors focus on developing technology that simplifies our long-term relationship with finance. Wouldn’t finance be a lot simpler if we had tools to predict future behavior?
Predictive analytics comes in handy for FinTech innovators for a variety of reasons, from cybersecurity and identifying employee value-add to customer experience. The ability to monitor and measure customer behavior across platforms allows FinTech innovators to provide the best possible experience for their consumers. Companies are now able to measure purchasing patterns, loyalty, and even feedback to tailor their services individually. This personalization will become even more important as the burden shifts to financial institutions to simplify finance.
As FinTech companies continue to evolve and level the financial playing field, keep an eye on how these three trends will serve key players in the FinTech space. Are you a company in the FinTech space looking to take your brand to the next level? Contact Bluetext.
Search marketing has powerful potential with infinite nuances. This digital marketing medium has an unmatched ability to reach mass users at a macro level on the basis of targeted browsing & interest. Search marketing is a demand-driven opportunity to engage in individual conversations at a mass scale. Just like the phrase implies, the ‘world wide web’ is an incredibly complex and interconnected ecosystem of users, websites, search queries, and advertising. So how and where should you start to navigate the infinite avenues of search marketing? First, consult a digital marketing agency, especially one which specializes in marketing analytics & paid media strategy like Bluetext.
A digital marketing agency can offer search marketing services that you help identify: your website user personas, what organic keywords are bringing traffic to your site, what keywords & phrases have the optimal cost-per-click (CPC), and competitive density for paid search efforts.
Automation: the Answer to Search Marketing
Basic search marketing strategy connects a user’s intent to an ideal and relevant response. Automated search marketing strategy uses automation to constantly improve and become more efficient and effective over time. A basic search strategy can be simple to set up and understand, but results may flatline without consistent nurturing. Automated search marketing can be complex and intimidating, but when set up correctly, can yield impressive and compounding results.
Some search marketers have been hesitant to embrace automation and trust algorithms and data processing power. However, avoiding the advancement of automation only hurts your strategy and puts you at a competitive disadvantage in comparison to more future-focused competitors.
Search engine tools have matured over time to provide increased control, transparency, and tangible results than ever before. Real-time automation has evolved to be the foundation of the search engine ecosystem. What was once an analog concept (imagine a physical directory) has been transformed into a dynamic digital medium. The modern search marketing experience is an always-on, cross-device experience capable of delivering almost any type of content a user is looking for.
The key aspect to keep in mind with search marketing is its dynamic nature. New features and improvements are constantly being implemented, with new queries and signals added every second. Hundreds of data points are aggregated for every interaction. The term “big data” is an understatement to summarize the sheer volume of data that can be collected and harnessed to provide the most personalized experience to users possible.
Finding the Right Search Strategy
Search marketing is not a one size fits all solution. The optimal strategy should be assessed by individual companies and use cases. To inform your strategy, it is key to fully understand how your paid or organic search terms have performed in the past. Past bidding and budget history can provide not only a baseline for improvements but insight into your audience and receptiveness to paid search advertising. If you’re not already doing so, separate campaigns out by specific audiences. This allows you to track isolated segments of customers or prospects and compare performance.
The beauty of search marketing automation is the paradox of scale and specificity. It allows companies to scale their messages and strategies to a massive audience, while simultaneously making users feel heard with personalized results.
If you’re ready to optimize your search marketing strategy and take your campaigns to the next level, contact Bluetext.
Have you ever navigated to a new website with a question, and spent too much time hunting for an answer? While companies spend large amounts of time developing and building out an information architecture for their user journeys, they may not always have the use case of each unique user in mind. To be fair, they aren’t mind readers! There are times when consumers may simply need to be guided to exactly what they’re looking for – and there is no better way to ensure that than with a chat experience integrated on your site.
As consumer behavior changes over time, it is important to be able to meet your user and provide a user experience that matches what they have become accustomed to. In the same way that it has become the norm to order a pizza online instead of calling into your neighborhood spot, the prevalence of 24/7 support and availability should be captured in the online experience.
With younger generations, in particular, an instant messaging option is a preferred way to communicate, and if companies can make it easier for their customers to get what they are looking for through a chatbot, this will pay off. A recent study found that up to 68% of respondents indicated that they are more likely to use a business that offers convenient communications if they have the option to choose where to make a purchase.
A seamless integration for a chat experience where a bot or a real person responds in real-time is critical. It can be extremely frustrating when users are waiting around for something that should warrant a quick response. Ever been stuck on the phone waiting for hours to get past automated messaging machines to ask a question? It’s incredibly frustrating and more often than not people get impatient and hang up. Online inquiries are no different, if you leave a user aimlessly browsing on their own and unsuccessful in finding their answer they will get impatient and bounce from your site. Installing an automated chatbot gives users a clear destination for their questions, and avoids the dead-end drop-off. While chatbots may not be real people, it gives users the illusion of a more personal experience and grows brand trust that your company is willing to solve their problems. Convenience is key in today’s society, and online browsing is no exception.
Online chatbots sound great in theory but can seem intimidating to execute. However, with the assistance of a website design and development agency, such as Bluetext, you can integrate a chat service into your current or new website design. The advantage of working with a full-service digital marketing agency is that they can analyze your search traffic patterns, help identify some common user journeys and pain points, but also style and develop a chatbot fit to your brand identity. This creates an even more seamless user experience on your site because the chatbot integrates and matches the current website, almost like a well-dressed store employee ready and able to answer any questions.
Is it time for your website to step up its support game? Consult Bluetext to find out what kind of chatbot or user experience modifications can improve your website.