Spider Chart, Spider Chart,
Visualizes whatever a spider can
Spins a chart, any size,
Catches insights just like flies
Look Out!
Here comes the Spider Chart

A spider chart plots the values of each category along a separate axis that starts in the center of the chart and ends on the outer ring. These charts are great ways of visualizing the strengths and weaknesses of your current or future state website user experience. At Bluetext we have a deep focus on the science of user experience. After all, when you design and build sites for Fortune 500 companies, every fraction of a percent counts.

Bluetext likes to help visualize the various states of our analysis in spider graphs.

Competitive Analysis Visualization Through Spider Graphs

In today’s fast moving digital marketing world it’s critical to be a watchful eye for our clients to ensure they have a competitive advantage. A real time pulse and visualization of where they fall in the competitive marketplace can be very valuable. The below sample spidergraph can show a marketing leader where they stack in many categories. They can review these sequentially chronologically to see how they are progressing and ensure they have the best opportunity to capture and convert users across their desired journeys to achieve the key performance indicators the site is measured against.

SEO and Landing Page Optimization Visualization Through Spider Graphs

If you really want to impress during a presentation, this is the chart for you. It allows you to display multivariate data easily while also impressing with the visual appeal of its radar shape. Check out the chart above which shows SEO traffic by landing page. This Spider Chart stylishly displays SEO traffic for each series of pages in a specific time frame. This kind chart allows you to easily see real SEO traffic rather than just keyword ranking reports like those  from Google Analytics. At the end of the day, the quality and amount of traffic matters more than just keyword ranking. translations The Spider Chart can be used to hold the attention of your audience as you explain the insights you’ve discovered in a way which won’t scare them off.

These charts are just the tip of the data visualization iceberg. Talk to us at Bluetext about your story, brand, or data visualization needs.

Brand Strategy.  Brand Presentation.  Brand Delivery.  Bluetext.

Ok all you Thornton Mellon fanatics, the stats are in and the truth must be told. Some interesting data points I hope you all reflect on as you gear up for going back to school.

DATA POINT NUMBER ONE – DEDICATED TO OUR FAVORITE TEACHER SAM KINISON
The mobile revolution is complete. Smartphones account for more than half of searches in 10 countries—including the U.S. and Japan—according to Google, which didn’t release exact percentages or a full list of countries.

Why this is important?

Is every aspect of your digital infrastructure optimized for mobile?

You shouldn’t just stack your desktop elements. You should think through the human factors of mobile design and what your users truly want in the palm of their hand on first visit. Mobile first should be in the DNA of your marketing organization.

DATA POINT NUMBER TWO: THE TRIPLE LINDY OF DATA POINTS

60% of B2B marketers use web traffic to measure success instead of using sales lead quality or social media sharing.

Why this is important?

Success comes down to the key performance indicator and the analytics that you can generate. It’s much easier to track performance and measure return on investment with reliable website traffic data. Great data gives you a clear picture of an online campaign’s viability, but traffic isn’t your only solution. This stat also shows the immaturity of marketing measurement in the majority of organizations and the need for more in-depth data and analysis. If you can ramp up your content marketing analytics in 2015, you’ll be leaps ahead of your competitors.

DATA POINT NUMBER THREE: EMAIL GETS NO RESPECT

63% of consumers prefer to be contacted by email

A new study by Adobe claims that marketers are failing to engage ‘email addicts.’

While 63% say they prefer to be contacted by email, only 20% favor direct mail, 6% social media, 5% the brand’s mobile app, 4% text message and 2% phone.

Why this is important?

Surprisingly, this shows that email campaigns are favored way above even the second most-preferred form of contact from brands, suggesting that email marketing should still be high on every digital marketer’s agenda.

Bluetext was one of the first agencies to sound the alarm for mobile-optimized websites after Google tweaked its search algorithm in late April. Dubbed “MobileGeddon” by SEO experts, Google announced that it would now reward mobile-friendly sites in search results that were coming from mobile devices. The only question in the minds of search marketers was how much of an impact this would have, or whether it was more of a bluff.

The results are in, and this was no bluff! According to a survey by Moovweb, having a mobile-friendly site is absolutely essential in the SEO competition for search result rankings. Moovweb tracked more than 1000 important keywords across a range of industries over a six-week period to see if Google was serious. Here is a snapshot of the results:

• 83 percent of the key words returned a mobile-friendly website as the top result.
• In 81 percent of the cases, the top three rankings went to mobile-friendly sites.
• When looking at all 10 of the search results that make up the first page of a Google search, 77 percent were mobile-friendly.

In other words, if you aren’t mobile-optimized, the odds of landing towards the top of a search, or even at the bottom of the first page, are very low. And for any company that relies on search to drive leads, conversions or outright sales, that can be very costly. According to recent report on CNN Money, the fall from the top can be precipitous:

• The top spot on a search result receives 20-to-30 percent of the page’s clicks;
• Spots number two and three produce five-to-10 percent of the page’s clicks;
• Any results below the fold attract less than one percent of the clicks;
• If you’re on the second page or lower, your clicks from search will be negligible.

The survey results can be interpreted as the glass being half full and as the glass being half empty. It’s impressive that such a high percentage of results returned mobile-friendly sites, demonstrating that companies with a lot at stake were able to quickly meet the Google requirements. That might be partly explained by Google’s early warning to the market that it was making this change—a heads up that Google has rarely given previously when it comes to search algorithm revisions.

On the other hand, who are the companies that show up in the 17 percent of the top results where sites are not mobile-friendly? The survey doesn’t say, but those brands may not be there for long. As the impact of the algorithm changes continues to be felt, those numbers will all climb towards 100 percent.

What’s interesting about the results when broken down by industry is that some sectors are more advanced than others, at least based on this survey. For example, retail has the highest percentage of mobile-friendly sites ranked in the number one spot for the keywords that Moovweb reviewed. That makes sense, as retailers have been early adapters in the mobile commerce world where the competitive stakes are so high. Close behind are healthcare, insurance and travel and hospitality.

Lagging far behind are the education and transportation verticals. These markets may simply not be as competitive in terms of SEO and are behind on the “mobile maturity” curve. Yet, as the use of mobile devices increases and search engine results become more important and more competitive in these lagging markets, organizations without a mobile-optimized platform will be left behind.

Here’s the bottom line: MobileGeddon is real, and the effects are being seen as well as felt. Even small changes to Google’s search engine algorithm can have a huge impact on a brand. The CNN Money report cites one company that had to lay off 10 percent of its work force because of its slide down the search result pages. Mobile matters, and that will only become more apparent over time.

We have leapfrogged almost overnight from a digital first to mobile first multi-screen world.

Brands – no matter their size – can no longer afford to ignore the mobile market.  Users aren’t just browsing on mobile devices – they are now finding content, sharing it socially and completing purchases at a rate that is increasingly on par with their older desktop siblings – and this is now having significant implications on website design.

Where responsive design was the new frontier not more than 18 months ago – most progressive digital studios have adopted a mobile first design mentality. Instead of designing websites for desktop users and degrading the experience and functionality for mobile  – they are now starting with the mobile screen as their primary palette and adding layers to ‘dilute’ the experience for desktop and larger screens.

Putting mobile at the front of the website design process leads to sites that are simpler, faster, more usable and – most importantly – more accessible to your customers. Here are the five primary keys to a smart, mobile first design strategy.

Speed

With users – and Google – demanding sub-one-second page loads – speed is a critical component of mobile first design methodology. As a result, you will be seeing a lot more sites going to a flat, 2D design with single blocks of color and streamlined images.

Navigation

Navigation is a major consideration for mobile website design, so we’ll be seeing more brands using fixed menu bars and infinite scrolls for continuous access and loading of content…and of course the ‘hamburger’ menu with three horizontal lines is now almost ubiquitous.

Typography

Since the days of newspapers – type has always been a good way to show the visual hierarchy of page elements. But in a mobile first world, readability is critical, so many brands are using a wider range of larger fonts that better render text as easily visible on smaller screens.

Layout

A desire to cater to mobile users has led to a variety of new layout trends, including tile or grid-based layouts where the content shifts to accommodate different dimensions, displaying single or multiple tiles depending on the screen size. Parallax scrolling to make page elements shift or disappear is also seen as a cool and sophisticated trend in mobile design.

Usability

The last – but far from least – consideration is usability, which brings everything together to optimize how much content can actually be consumed on a smaller screen through gestures, taps, swipes and clicks to get to more content faster. This is huge push for the Google search engine algorithm, so companies whose audiences are coming in via their mobile devices need to understand how important mobile usability has become.

Don’t let your content get left behind in a cloud of mobile dust – or worse yet – your brand annihilated by ‘Mobilegeddon’…don’t be last to mobile first.

For several companies, the new HTML5 and video based immersive executive experiences Bluetext has been creating are delivering amazing results. For example CSC (Fortune #175) is seeing this experience as #1 out of 12,000 website pages in its domain. These digital experiences represent our clients’ commitment to leading-edge user experiences for thought leadership, sustainable technology, and delivering deep, rich contents to address the requirements of their diverse personas.

“Our new Immersive Executive Experience offers an incredibly powerful demonstration of 3D, with unmatched visual quality and fidelity,” comments Ray Holloman, Director of Marketing and Digital at 1,300 employee firm NJVC. “The new web design and digital experience is integral for immersing our customers in understanding our Mission Critical IT capabilities.”

NJVC was looking for a new powerful message to the market as well as an immersive experience. The video snippets of this experience below provide a good sense of how we are merging marketing campaigns with thought leadership content marketing.

Bluetext, a top digital agency in Washington DC, has produced these user experiences for CSC, McAfee, Intel Security, Deltek, TalkShop, Cooper Thomas, GovPlace, Futures Industry Association, VMWare, and NJVC and would love to explore producing one for you.

Nick Panayi, Director of Global Brand and Digital Marketing at CSC stops by the Bluetext Buzz Lounge to share his thoughts on trends in digital marketing.

Former Eloqua CEO Joy Payne tells Bluetext’s Buzz Lounge that 2015 is the year for sales and marketing to work closely together to fully understand the buyer’s journey in order for marketing to develop the best content for every step of the process. Joe explains that buyers want to facilitate their own journey, and so finding the right content when they need it is essential.

This is part 1 of a 5 part series by Bluetext about innovation in marketing and communications.

Before hurling yourself into a production and budget battlefield to get that amazing video shot for your next campaign or brand asset, marketing commandoes now have a variety of tiny, toss-able reconnaissance robots they can hurl into any business or consumer use case as it follows you around and keeps your brand battling above its weight class.

For challenger brands without the resources of a major real estate marketer or major retailer etc, they can now have million dollar footage integrated in their marketing mix of assets for amazingly low cost.

These tactical flying robots have gained a ton of traction within the marketing world as of late for several reasons, not least of which is the fact that any time you send a robot to execute an expensive and trick task, you’re not sending a human. And that is scalable and cost effective.  Traditionally robots are generally complicated, fickle machines packing a lot of moving parts. They often require on the ground pilot operators to undergo special training just to learn how to use them and fly them everytime. Not this technology, toss and follow.  Really amazing technology and solution.

Removing the pilot and giving this new paint brush to the creative minds in marketing departments and their partner agencies will really improve the experiences we will start to see as this innovation sinks into the millions of brand messages we see a day.

At Bluetext we work with many companies that can benefit from this kind of technology.   For example, in our real estate practice, we see many of our clients like JLL, Kettler and HomeVisit to leverage this kind of technology to deliver better more impactful imagery to deliver their product and service to market.

Interested in being innovative with your brand, marketing or communications?   Talk to Bluetext

During my younger days I was fortunate enough to cut my teeth in the public sector at powerhouse Washington radio station WTOP, and was part of the launch of FederalNewsRadio. During that part of my career, I was lucky to be able to work with CMOs at just about every major defense and global technology brand serving the federal government. At the time, my biggest competitors were the stacks and stacks of Federal IT and Defense magazines that filled the bookcases behind them. These were the reams of tangible, tactile publications that their CEO’s demanded they advertise in before even considering buying 60-second slices of intangible “air.”

The precipitous decline in those print publications, combined with the impact of budget cuts on the federal agency buyer’s ability to travel to attend industry conferences, trade shows and seminars, has flipped that model on its head over the last 5 years. The resulting void of strong brand void has led to an increased thirst for more readily accessible “premium” content—white papers, e-books, survey reports and other in-depth materials that can be indispensable for government decision-makers. Yet, defense and technology vendors and contractors continue to peddle their wares using increasingly ineffective traditional methods of marketing.

The most notorious of these are companies that load up on traditional marketing to push government contracting vehicles—their IDIQs, GWACs and GSA Schedules – especially at the end of the federal buying season. There was once a time and a place for that – but no more. Marketing is now forever changed thanks to Al Gore – or who ever invented the internet.

As a result – government buyers have become real buyers just like you and I, involved to varying degrees in researching, influencing and taking themselves 75 percent through a buying process to ultimately select a solution that your company – and your 10 largest competitors – all provide.

This is why it is now so critical to target your marketing with premium content to specific and very real buyer personas. You need to put yourselves in their shoes to differentiate your brand and fill that void with contextually relevant content before your competitors do. No matter who that buyer is, they are all facing the same quandries:

1. I have a problem, but I don’t know what the solution is.
2. I know what some solutions are, but I don’t know which one is best for me.
3. I know which solution I want, but I don’t know who to buy it from.

And while the best way to answer these is with content, the biggest obstacle I find since joining the agency side is that most of the companies we work with do not yet have mature content marketing strategies and lack the in-house resources needed to generate enough thoughtful, relevant content to drive engagement that results in traction for their brands in this market. The other challenge is their inability to harness the thought leadership of their subject matter experts. The people inside their company who have the expertise on issues most relevant to your target audience often do not have the time or have not been engaged to contribute content on a regular basis. As a result, marketers are struggling not only to develop the editorial calendar, but more importantly the content itself.

It’s no secret that a lot of successful marketers are turning to agencies to overcome this very challenge. When they do, they realize very quickly that we can capture more eyeballs – and drive much more significant and targeted brand engagement—by empowering them to become masters of their own content for far less than what they used to spend on traditional ads in all of those long-gone publications– and for a fraction of the cost of those radio ads. They all once had their time and place – and so will your brand if you continue to allow your competitors to outmarket you and find a cozy place for their content in the minds of your buyer.

CSC’s Nick Panayi and I presented at the 2015 Mid Atlantic Marketing Summit on the customer journey and how digital marketing technologies are continuing to evolve, personalize and empower this very effective demand generation platform. We drilled deep into CSC’s massive digital infrastructure that supports many of their journeys, and most importantly the Bluetext produced CSC Digital Briefing Center.  Slide 56 shows some outstanding results.

The Mid Atlantic Marketing Summit is greater Washington’s largest annual symposium of thought leaders in marketing. The theme focused on emerging technologies and trends in marketing communications. Topics included: metrics, mobile, social media, multi-platform campaigns, online video campaigns, experiential advertising, B2B, business development, and much more. This summit explored the disruptive technologies that are creating a major shift in how marketing and business development professionals reach their audiences and decision makers.