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:
- I have a problem, but I don’t know what the solution is.
- I know what some solutions are, but I don’t know which one is best for me.
- 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.
Bluetext Presents with CSC on Digital Customer Journey from Jason Siegel
and Nick Panayi, Head of Global Brand and Digital Marketing
As business grows, driving innovation can be challenging. Bluetext recently developed this mascot character to inspire one of our clients to drive innovation and promote an innovative spirit across its global client projects.
Bluetext named her Ana-Vation – a female spin on the key phrase Innovation.
Bluetext loves these kind of creative challenges. We see companies like consulting firms and government contractors that need to find ways of driving innovation as employee de-centralization and work on client sites can be a cultural challenge.
Here are some ideas to drive innovation in your marketing, branding, and overall cultural efforts:
- Be easygoing.
- Hire for culture.
- Bring on people who love the work they do.
- Build a diverse workforce.
- Manage innovation in a transparent methodical fashion.
- Schedule time for brainstorming.
- Tolerate and expect mistakes.
The Mid Atlantic Marketing Summit is greater Washington’s largest annual symposium of thought leaders in marketing. The theme will focus on emerging technologies and trends in marketing communications. Topics will include: metrics, mobile, social media, multi-platform campaigns, online video campaigns, experiential advertising, B2B, business development, and much more. This summit will explore the disruptive technologies that are creating a major shift in how marketing and business development professionals reach their audiences and decision makers.
A presentation being given by:
Nick Panayi, Global Brand and Digital Marketing, CSC
Jason Siegel, Co-Founder & Chief Creative Officer, Bluetext
Location: Mid Atlantic Marketing Summit
Gannett Building
May 8th 3PM
Nick and I will be presenting on the customer journey and how digital marketing technologies are continuing to evolve, personalize and empower this very effective demand generation platform. We will drill deep into CSC’s massive digital infrastructure that supports many of their journeys, and most importantly the Bluetext produced CSC Digital Briefing Center.
Learn why CSC’s Digital Briefing Center was so strongly needed for their most critical journeys, the concepts considered, and how we got to this great performing end product.
Triblio’s CMO and Co-Founder Jason Jue talks about trends in marketing automation, analytics, and digital marketing.
While it might seem like a bad movie plot, websites that aren’t friendly to mobile devices are about to be in for a rude awakening. In late February, one of Google’s top webmasters announced in a blog post that the dominant search engine was about to make a significant change to the way it ranks search results. Beginning on April 21st, its search algorithm would increase the weight it gives when returning search results to what it called “mobile friendliness.” Not only does that mean that mobile-friendly websites would enjoy better results, it also means that sites that don’t meet those standards will face the consequences. Some have already dubbed it “Mobilegeddon.”
The stampede from desktops to the wide variety of shapes and sizes now available as tablets, cell phones and even wearables—think Apple Watch—that has taken place over the past several years is only getting larger. A recent survey by ComScore Networks—a firm that analyzes internet traffic and trends—found that in the final three months of last year, desktop searches in the U.S. decreased, while the searches with smartphones jumped 17 percent. The volume of tablet searches increased 28 percent.
And while many of our clients have made this shift to mobile friendly, they are in the minority. A survey by Didit.com took a look the sites of the largest companies to see if they have adopted a mobile-friendly approach. Didit looked at the home pages of publicly-traded companies on the Standard & Poor’s top 100 list by checking them against Google’s “mobile-friendly test page.” The result—some 25 percent of those home pages failed the test, including the Walt Disney Company, a brand that is typically at the forefront when it comes to leveraging technology for visitors to its theme parks.
The Disney home page looks great on a desktop. But as the screen size gets smaller on table and mobile devices, the Google tool found that the text was too small, the links overlapped each other and the content was often wider than the mobile screen.
We’ve been working with our clients for the past four years to make the move to responsive designs that automatically resize their user interface depending on the size of the display screen. A responsive site takes a standard website and instructs the mobile device on how to display it properly. Responsive websites can handle any resolution with changes in CSS files, which affect how the elements on Web pages are presented. Computers, laptops, smartphones, and tablets will all display the website in the best way possible.
One of the reasons responsive design is so important is the “fat finger” problem—as menus shrink, it becomes nearly impossible to engage the functionality since our fingers are too big. Responsive designs shift the menus from ones that are driven by discreet buttons to larger options that are easier to see and easier to select. Without this type of design, visitors will be frustrated and leave the site in search of one that is user friendly.
This approach insures that the website appropriately presents itself on every size display, from the smallest to the largest. Another approach is to have a separate mobile website. Yet, since new devices in different sizes seem to hit the stores about every 10 minutes, this could be a large problem for websites, and certainly would not be cost-effective.
To put this in perspective, while this is a significant move by Google, it doesn’t mean you have to panic. Some of us have been advising our clients for several years that more and more users are accessing their websites via tablet and mobile devices. Google is simply responding to the shifting trends of how consumers are accessing the web. It will not unduly penalize a website that doesn’t immediately meet its requirements like it did in previous search changes—you can still make the move to a mobile-friendly site and see your rankings adjust accordingly. And if you haven’t been paying attention to the marketplace and to the shifting needs of your audiences, you may have a bigger problem than Mobilegeddon.
Working at a Washington DC digital agency that works with brands spanning the largest, most cautious Fortune 500 companies to the most speedy of start-ups disrupting every corner of Earth, we need to back up our creative and marketing recommendations with stats. Here are some that stats could arm you in your next planning phase, ranging from user experience design to marketing promotion and branding.
WHO ARE YOU BROWSING FOR?
The latest stats are in from the US Government on Browser and device usage. Plan your next website user experience design based on these stats as well as the stats from your analytic application.
WHAT DID THAT ICON SAY?
According to ScienceDaily’s recent study, Icons need to tell something very clearly or face horrible usability issues with your user experience.
The recent report asked users to look at an icon and try to avoid thinking of both the word of that image, as well as how many letters that word had (for example, a subject is told to look at a iPhone and not think “iPhone” or think “6,” the number of letters in the word). Nearly 80% of people could not stop themselves from “sub-speaking” the word in their head and only 50% could stop themselves from saying the number of letters in the word. Stopping the brain from making associations in the subconscious is nearly impossible, which makes it extremely important to ensure that visual icons and representations are completely recognizable and aren’t easily confused by the user to have another meaning.
Placement of icons should not just be for visual effect. It can actually aid your user without making them think at all. It’s important that you choose the right icons as well, because you don’t want to trigger an automatic association from your user about something unrelated to the purpose of the icon.
DO YOU PERSUADE WITH VIDEO?
A recent User Experience Dynamic study by SearchEngineWatch shows that 73% of people will convert to the sites desired action when they enhance their user experience design with video.
HAVE YOU JOURNEYED BELOW THE FOLD?
Countless recent studies are showing that almost every user (yup over 99%!) these days are scrolling below the fold. Be adventurous and think of the user experience taking place on a tall dynamic canvas.
GOT SHARES?
Facebook continues to be the most widely used social channel for sharing. It gained 8.2% share and made up 81% of all shares in Q4. Sharing activity by email also increased, but it still only represents about 1% of total share volume. Looking at the channel distribution of sharing on mobile, Facebook edges out the competition even further. Facebook activity jumped 51% from last year and now represents 85% of mobile sharing activity. Pinterest and Twitter have also gained traction on mobile.
Shana Glenzer, VP of Social Marketing at SocialRadar, talks about how real time location-based marketing is disrupting the retail sector.
My colleagues and I at Bluetext have spent a fair amount of time developing brand and positioning strategies for dozens of new, disruptive and innovative brands…and more often than not are tasked with creating a new name for the company, the products or services they deliver, or both.
With 99.9 percent of the commonly-used words in the dictionary already taken among the close to 300 million registered domains from more than 125 million companies worldwide, how many great names could possibly be left?
We are currently in the process of branding and naming a highly disruptive technology product that is almost certain to quickly become one of the most visible B2B product brands in the US. We thought this might be a good time to define the five critical tenets of coming up with a great new name:
1. The most important aspect of a brand or product’s name is a crystallized vision statement and its supporting proof points. The name should deliver against your core objective for the business and central vision for the brand. Perhaps the most important question you need to answer is whether the brand should be company-focused or product-centric. In most cases it’s the former – but many well-known brands – like RIM’s Blackberry – have successfully incorporated a strategy that leads with the latter.
2. Before you begin the name-storming process, agree on what you want the attitude or voice of the brand to be – what emotion, feeling or idea do you want it to evoke when you see and hear it? Starbucks Chairman and CEO Howard Schultz summed it up best by saying, “A great brand raises the bar – it adds a greater sense of purpose to the experience, whether it’s the challenge to do your best in sports and fitness, or the affirmation that the cup of coffee you’re drinking really matters.”
3. Once you establish your vision, there is a set of ten key initial criteria that any name being considered must meet:
- Is it easy to remember?
- Is it easy to understand?
- Is it easy to pronounce?
- Is it easy to spell?
- Does it sound good when spoken?
- Does it look good when written?
- Is it unique?
- Is it trademarked?
- Is the domain name available?
- Are there any negative connotations with it?
4. Consider the five primary approaches to naming to determine which may best represent your central vision for the brand in a distinct and powerful way:
- Functional or Descriptive (Facebook, Instagram, UnderArmor )
- Derived from Color, Number, Shape or Word Root (Accenture, RedBull, Starbucks)
- Experiential based on Human Processes (Discover, United, Visa)
- Abstract or Evocative (Apple, Uber, Virgin)
- Invented (Google, Skype, Xfinity)
5. Quantity and Diversity Equals Quality – Naming is a matter of satisfying many competing criteria – and while we have seen cases where the first name our team comes up with ends up being the final one chosen – the chances of having a name just pop into your head that meets all of them is practically impossible. The most effective way to come up with a name is to think of lots of different ideas, carefully screen and choose, and repeat. One method that’s proven effective is having all names under consideration sorted into an A and B list and reconciling it every time a new one is introduced. It is interesting to see names held initially in high favor lose a little bit of their luster with each review, while others move up the ladder.
Once a name is chosen – it will be forever attached to the brand or product it is developed for – so continuous review is critical to ensure it will stand the test of time.
Need help with a branding or marketing challenge? Lets talk!
With the housing market climbing back up again, it’s hardly the time for real estate developers to sit back and coast. With a rising market comes increased competition, a savvy customer base, and a real need to use great creative approaches to attract the right buyers. Here are eight tips for making sure you reach customers with the right messages to make the sale:
1) It’s about telling a story. The home buyer doesn’t want a bunch of facts and figures, he or she wants to know why it is essential that they live in that development in that community. Rather than showing floor plans and materials, demonstrate how that space will work for your customers. Use visual story-telling to communicate what your developments are really about.
2) Compelling creative is more important now than ever. With the decline in traditional print media, the first impression that your development will make is online. At a time when your competition may be simplifying their message and not trying as hard as they should, you have the opportunity to build the emotional connection that will deliver the sale. The online experience needs to show that your brand is unique, creative and meets the needs of its audience.
3) Understand the trends. As buyers age, they often want smaller footprints, even at a time when they could most afford the larger models. Anticipate these trends and use your digital assets to explain why your houses meet their evolving needs.
4) Analyze your data. Many developers have no real idea how and why their prospects land on their website. What brought them there in the first place? It is essential to closely monitor your web traffic and recognize how your target audiences are reaching your site. That allows the right allocation of resources into the channels that are delivering the most results.
5) Make it easy on your customers. Don’t force them to do all of the leg work and research. Determine what your prospects want to know and proactively deliver that across all of your digital platforms. This will attract buyers and promote social sharing, and grow your reputation in the process.
6) Give your prospects a reason for returning. Once a potential buyer has hit your digital properties, keep your developments top of mind with ad retargeting that promotes your latest blog post or a new look at your inventory. Not only does that keep them interested, but if the content is good, they may share it with friend who may also be in the market. Let referrals drive more audience and conversion.
7) Keep your social media active. Yes, it takes work and time to be active in social media, but it will pay off with prospect engagement. Don’t single track through one platform, like Twitter or Facebook. It is important that a number of platforms are leveraged, with Pinterest leading the way for the real estate industry. Paid Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn ads can micro-target prospects by location, interests and even job title.
8) Mobile is a must have. While prospects may do their primary research from a laptop or desk-top, more and more internet access is via mobile devices. In addition, buyers by definition are mobile when they are looking at properties, and won’t have their large screens with them. It’s an absolute requirement that you have a responsive design for your website that makes mobile access simple and easy.