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.
Real Estate marketing is a fast-paced and ever changing target, and we often see big trends come and go in how websites are designs. Many of the real estate centric web design trends we’ve seen in the last few years are still around, and more new trends are emerging in 2016.
Here are 5 trends that will likely dominate the best real estate websites in 2016:
Stick with Sticky
Fixed or “sticky” navigation bars are a prevalent trend in some of the most shockingly beautiful sites across the web. These benignly set bars allow for ease of access to a website’s core functionalities, regardless of where a user may be in the midst of a page’s content.
Some pro’s for going with a sticky interface:
• Advantages in usability
• Speed up your customer journey
• All the cool brands are doing it – its white hot
Real estate companies like HomeAway.com and Kangaroom.net are doing this very well. With users needing to recall all their search parameters and being able to easily toggle from map view to list view, Real Estate is one of the best vertical markets that can benefit its digital experiences by adding sticky interface elements.
Hamburgers Attack
We have all seen the hamburger icon. As a matter of fact most of us probably use it on a daily basis. It has become a staple in website and app design. I’m even looking at it now on the top right corner of Google Chrome.
Real estate sites continue to attack their interface design projects with hamburgers. Why? Because hamburgers are the most minimal interface you could have. And that means more screen real estate for those great real estate images and videos.
Where are you with Wearables?
Wearable Technology is the latest “next big thing” and its main focus is making life simpler.
Wearable technology will redefine the world. The shift to the proliferation of mobile devices meant that many new design principles had to be created and learned. The same will apply with Wearables, so don’t get left behind!
All websites for real estate companies should look at their responsive website design deliverables and add wearable browsers to the list of deliverables you would like to see your website looking optimized for.
Suggest “Search Suggest”
As digital advertising costs continue to rocket, having consumers search on your website instead of Trulia, zillow, redfine, etc is more important than ever.
If you’re optimizing your site aggressively that should be accompanied by a search centric homepage and general interface design.
The old adage was you want less clicks to the most critical conversion points. How about ZERO clicks. Search should be up front and center and EVERYWHERE.
On top of being search centric, you should streamline even further with a multi data point search suggest experience. In that magic AJAX powered fly out you should have closest geographic matches which have accompanying information like real time pricing and inventory, and other compelling content.
3D Virtual Tours
Companies like Matterport have introduced a ground-breaking technology for real estate – 3D Experiences assembled from still photography. Think Google Street View for your interior home tours. Create a realistic and immersive online experience covering the entire interior of any home. Captivate Buyers and impress Sellers with this innovative technology.
With 3D Experiences, companies like Matterport are revolutionizing how brokerages and agents showcase homes. A special camera rotating 360 degrees and controlled by an iPad is placed in multiple locations in every room in the home. The image data is then uploaded to a cloud server, and then you have a captivating 3D model of the entire home is ready for viewing. Embed this model directly into your Virtual Tours so Buyers can experience the 3D tour everywhere your content goes, be it your corporate website, MRIS, Realtor.com, your Broker site, your realtors site, Zillow, Trulia, RedFin and many more. A great company for capturing Matterports are HomeVisit.
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.
Marketing professional understandably struggle to make the best decisions on how to most effectively spend their marketing dollars. The options for building creative assets and reaching customers through media buys are extensive. We have all seen how quickly budgets can be squandered with little or no results.
That’s why we believe that constantly measuring each campaign is essential, in order to make the directional shifts necessary to achieve the desired results. Our approach is to work with our clients to establish the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for the campaign, and working backwards from these to develop an effective strategy scaled to optimize budget, desired timeline and client resources.
So as we begin to get deeper into 2015, here are 5 of the most effective tactics we employ to maximize budget:
Re-Targeting
Retargeting is a recent tool that allows you to place a cookie on any potential customer who visits your website, your campaign microsite or even a landing page. Leveraging that cookie, targeted ads can be placed on sites that they visit at a much lower cost than serving up ads on a site that every visitor would see. Re-Targeting allows you to continue reaching potential customers who came to your site to motivate them to return to the site and take further action. Regardless of the number of potential customers that visit your website, retargeting will almost certainly deliver an increase in conversions.
Retargeting doesn’t rely on collecting any personally identifying data; the cookie merely confirms the area of your site that your visitor browsed, allowing your ad to be targeted accordingly. Retargeting has the potential to deliver up to a ten-fold increase in the ROI of your marketing spend – making each dollar invested perform like five to ten.
As powerful a tactic as this is however, it is important that the immediacy and frequency that your retargeted ads are served up are proportionate to the degree of purchase intent exhibited by a visitor, otherwise it could very well turn them off. So make sure and dial it up and back accordingly
Conversion Rate Optimization
While retargeting can be effective for visitors who leave without making a purchase, you should also be working on optimizing first-time conversion rates for your site. While it is smart to use retargeting to pursuing the potential customers who come to your site for the first time, it is always preferable to convert more of them on their initial visit.
Too often, businesses don’t develop a user experience that effectively mirrors their customers’ journey through the sale process. The first step in reversing that is by identifying the reasons they decide to leave in the first place.
A thorough, professional audit and analysis of your site’s overall information architecture, design, content structure, and functionality will provide you with a roadmap to address these problems. Some critical components we recommend include:
- Headlines and Visuals
- Navigation and User Paths
- Calls to Action
- Content & Structure
- Site Analytics
Finding the right digital agency will help you convert a higher rate of first time visitors move them faster through the sales cycle.
Geofencing
Geo-Fencing is location-based digital technology that allows an advertiser to select a geographic point using latitude and longitude and then to create a virtual “fence” around that point of a given radius in which your ads will be served up. For example, an advertiser can pinpoint a specific store, office or branch location, then deliver a targeted ad to anyone who comes within a 5-mile or 5-block radius of that location depending upon its density.
Ads delivered through geo-fencing typically yield higher conversions and better ROI for marketers since they’re highly contextual. It’s very much like being able to display a “special offer” sign across a dozen city blocks instantly, and only show it to the consumers you actually want to reach.
Well-Timed Ad Delivery
Rates for digital and mobile ad placement can vary widely depending on factors like the popularity and demand for the online property, available inventory, the quality of premium placement you want the ad displayed in – and of course – the time of day you want your ads served. Online traffic of all kinds tends to peak at different times during the day and week, so it’s critical to understand the persona you are trying to reach. The time an ad runs can be based, for example, on weekday versus weekend usage patterns.
It is equally important to split test the times that ads are run, to see when it is most effective. Coming from an advertising background myself, I have seen many broadcast media companies charge advertisers a premium to run their ads at a fixed time everyday, when in fact that strategy will only result in them reaching the same people at the same time without reaching additional prospects. Using an attitudinal approach, we might recommend that a B2B client try marketing to its audience after 5pm when they are done with their day and have more time engage with your ad. It’s important to evaluate interactions at all times of day to identify the best windows to most efficiently optimize performance.
Paid Twitter Promotion
Often overlooked in favor of better-known pay-per-click options, Twitter’s advertising offerings make good sense for business owners in almost every industry. Easy to use and suitable for even limited marketing budgets, promoted tweets are a great way to boost an existing campaign or to raise the profile of something new.
One of Twitter’s strengths is the relatively unobtrusive nature of its advertising products. These are native ads and are thus identical to an everyday tweet except for a discreet “Promoted by” tag. Users report that engagement with paid-for tweets is often at the same level as that engendered by natural activity, making them ideal for businesses that already have an active Twitter presence.
In addition to promoting their tweets in search results and on other users’ home timelines, Twitter advertisers have the option to send highly targeted and relevant promoted Tweets to a specific audience only. A further benefit is the syndication of promoted Tweets through Twitter’s mobile apps and to selected third-party Twitter-management tools.
With Twitter, drilling down to your audience is straightforward; in addition to keyword targeting, Twitter offers segmentation by user geolocation, device type, language and other preferences. Setting up specific campaign parameters makes it easy to target in a pre-determined period, and specifying a maximum cost per engagement and daily budget allows you to lock in spend and prevent cost overruns. You’re paying only for each retweet, reply, favorite or click for your tweet, so you’ll be able to assess whether it’s working before a small portion of your budget is even exhausted.
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.
Content management systems (CMS) are a dime a dozen and selecting the right solution for your next website can be challenging. They have become a commodity and being able to objectively evaluate one versus another is hard. All of them do the same thing and when you’re done you will have a fully functional website that will hopefully serve your needs. What sets them apart are their processes. Specifically, how they empower you and your team to build and maintain your website. It’s these differences like licensing, installation, front-end coding, content construction, user management, extension and maintenance that you should focus on when comparing one system with another.
In this post we’ll use these factors to investigate the differences between two popular content management systems on the market today: ExpressionEngine and WordPress.
Licensing
Before wading in to the features and how-to’s of each system you first need to look at their licensing. Are they open source or propriety? If open source, what license do they use? Any commercial limitations? If proprietary, do you have access to the source code? Are there ongoing expenses beyond the initial licensing fee? How much does it cost? It’s important to answer these questions first and make sure the answers jive with your organizations’ rules and regulations before deciding to move ahead with any particular system. You have access to the full source code and there are no ongoing licensing costs or restrictions.
WordPress is one of the most, if not the most, popular CMSs on the market today due in large part to its open source license. Users are free to use and/or modify WordPress for any personal or commercial project without restriction. ExpressionEngine is built on LAMP technologies, just like WordPress, but is closed source and propriety. Users can purchase it for a one-time fee but will need to ensure they continue to use it within any requisite license restrictions.
Installation
Before you can start using either CMS you first need to install them on your server and run any necessary updates. WordPress and ExpressionEngine are both very straightforward and simple to install. WordPress has its famous “5-minute install” process as well as plenty of automated install options offered by hosting providers. ExpressionEngine’s install process doesn’t get as much hype, or have as many automated options, but it is equally straightforward to get up and running. The primary difference is that WordPress requires less IT support and resources where ExpressionEngine will likely require a helping hand from IT to get up and running.
Front-end Coding
When it comes to writing the HTML, CSS and JavaScript of your site, content management systems offer two clear options: those that are theme based and those that are template based. Theme based CMSs, like WordPress, are more plug-and-play and modularized. You can easily purchase pre-made designs and be up and running in a matter of minutes. Template based CMSs, like ExpressionEngine, provide developers with easier workflows and lower learning curves but are not as modular, making it more difficult to find available plug-and-play front-end components. This is important to consider when determining what kinds of internal technology resources you will have to work on your project. It is important to ask yourself which will they be more comfortable working with?
Content Construction
How does the CMS manage the content? All systems tend to work off a content categorization concept that closely resembles the information architecture of your website. Meaning that if your site has a news section, you will likely have a news content type or category where all content matching that footprint should be placed. Out of the box, WordPress provides two content types: posts and pages. Posts are meant for “dynamic content” or content where content will be added or changed often and pages are for “static content” which doesn’t change. ExpressionEngine provides a different set-up out of the box, allowing administrators to create their own completely custom content types in the admin area which tends to keep things a little more organized and straightforward for website managers.
It’s worth mentioning that WordPress allows for the creation of custom post types, which creates a very similar kind of workflow to ExpressionEngines. However, this functionality needs to either be defined within the theme (by a developer) for each post type or enabled by installing a plug-in which allows administrators to create custom post types and fields through the control panel.
User Management
Will visitors be able to register for an account on your website? Manage a profile or configure account settings? These are common features on a lot of websites today and using a CMS that provides a framework for this out of the box can save time and money. Both WordPress and ExpressionEngine have user registration capabilities but offer different levels of configuration. WordPress’ approach is limited out of the box requiring users to use the CMS log-in screen, not providing much in the way of user profiles or other capabilities. ExpressionEngines user management functionality is extensive and highly customizable, allowing administrators to create custom profile fields, custom log-in pages/workflows and additional advanced features.
Extension
Your website is unique and as such will likely require whatever CMS you choose to be modified slightly to fit your needs. Can this be done easily or will developers have to hack in to the core code of the system causing all sorts of headaches in the future? Both WordPress and ExpressionEngine provide robust extension options empowering developers to modify both front-end and control panel look, feed and functionality. WordPress plug-ins can be written to change everything from the CMS log-in process to how content is passed to the front-end of your site independently from the core code. Same for ExpressionEngine, where developers have the option of developing modules, plug-ins, extensions, accessories or field types without interfering with the core system code.
Maintenance
You should always be keeping the concept of maintenance, as in “how much will this solution cost to maintain?”, in the back of your mind. Beyond the strictly financial cost there is also staff time and required skill level to consider as well. It’s very important that your CMS be updated and maintained on a regular basis to keep your website secure and ensure everything is working correctly. WordPress has the clear upper hand when it comes to updates and maintenance as it’s largely automated. The system will, from time to time, automatically install minor updates to ensure your install remains current. But other major updates can be completed with one click and little to no IT intervention. ExpressionEngines update process is much more traditional and requires IT intervention throughout.
Picking a content management system today is hard. Trying to filter through the marketing lingo and hype to find the right solution for your organization is difficult but extremely important. The next time you find yourself in the CMS isle of the Internet superstore try using some of the above criteria to help you choose the right software for your project.
Need help with a content management or other digital marketing project. Please contact us.
As trends and technologies continue to accelerate at a pace faster than many marketers can match, the New Year is going to provide even more challenges for business-to-business marketers. With that in mind, here are what I believe are the top five most essential strategies you need to consider for 2015.
Omni-Channel Marketing
B2B marketers have been disproportionately focused on the shiny new marketing toy du jour – from mobile to display to social media to content marketing and back to mobile. With the rapid growth of digital consumption and what seems like the daily proliferation of social media channels, marketers are faced with more choices than ever when considering how they want to reach the business customer.
With each choice comes a certain amount of risk as marketers choosing to put a heavy investment in one channel may miss the untapped potential of another. This leaves a smaller margin for error as highly informed business consumers have become acutely aware of how to seek out information across a myriad of interactive channels, poll their networks and complete transactions.
Any effective B2B marketing strategy for 2015 should be one that integrates every channel across every device. This approach requires marketers – with the help of their agency – to understand the experience the customer is seeking when interacting with their brand. Omni-channel is a reflection of the wide variety of choices that customers have in how they engage a brand. The successful brand will enable their prospects to use all of the available channels.
Micro-Targeting
The proliferation of mobile, search and social analytics give us marketers all the tools we need to develop custom B2B strategies to hyper-target target customers with surgical precision – allowing us carve out the waste of traditional print and broadcast media and touch each prospect with the near intimacy of a one-to-one conversation.
Critical to creating these targeted messages is knowing who you’re talking to. Developing buyer personas allows you to craft and aim your marketing messaging with a higher degree of accuracy. As a digital-first agency, every campaign we develop is informed by the buyer personas of our clients. We look to yield as much information on these personas as possible, honing in on attributes such as their challenges, goals, background and the channels they use to research their decisions.
Committing to persona development lets you deep dive into needs, lifestyle, and motivations of your buyers. The work is well worth the results, which is the ability to construct more relevant content strategies throughout the buying cycle, post-purchase efforts, and account-based marketing activities. The more we understand their pains, the better we can create content that will point them in the right direction to address that pain.
Social Advertising
A dramatic shift has already begun towards paid social media advertising, a result of the decline in organic reach as social networks surge in popularity. This is a natural result of the growing competition for audience across these social platforms from bigger brands with more resources to spend on both organic and paid social.
As social networks and large publishers move away from earned media and towards paid media, B2B marketing teams will have to spend more time – and money – investing in paid or sponsored placements to engage hard-to-reach business targets. Changes to the Facebook algorithm in late 2013 have already produced a 44 percent decline in non-sponsored brand content in users’ newsfeeds. LinkedIn, Twitter, and even Pinterest now offer sponsored content placements and ads that promise specific reach.
The days of free social exposure are over and the only way to gain mindshare over the competition is to establish a budget to supplement your organic storytelling.
The key is to invest in those social properties that are working best for you and reinforce posts with strong calls to action (CTAs) and other supporting elements. For example, rather than embedding a link to a whitepaper download in the post, send interested users to a content landing page to extend the conversation. Then split test CTAs so you can get the right piece, in the right place, at the right time to further optimize every dollar spent.
Mobile
With more than 50 percent of internet traffic coming from mobile devices, B2B marketers must keep in mind that business prospects are still the same consumers outside of work that expect the same kind of omni-channel access to the types of digital experiences that consumer brands offer.
As B2B marketers, our challenge is to create these digital experiences to fit the preferences and needs of our buyer persona. More and more B2b brands are achieving omni-channel success with highly targeted digital properties that speak to very specific business users. And these efforts aren’t just flashy websites. They fold in mobile-optimized elements, offline activities and dynamic content offers to round out the personalized digital experience.
The key is to consider a “mobile-first” digital strategy so that it incorporates the totality of your content marketing and distribution strategy into dynamic display technology that adjusts content offers and image sizes based on the users’ screen resolution. Mobile is quickly becoming the hotbed of engagement in B2B marketing – if there is one race where you don’t want to get left behind – this is it.
High-Quality Visual Content
As brands turn into publishers, their content needs will span beyond grammatical accuracy and into the finer points of writing compelling copy adaptable across omni-channel platforms, crafted to resonate with the hyper-targeted personas we talked about above.
We are in an age of visual content where the need for well-crafted copy and visuals goes hand-in-hand. Unfortunately, one of the content marketers’ consistent pain points is not being able to produce enough to fill their content pipelines. This has lead forward-thinking marketers to seek out experienced agencies that specialize in creating masterfully written and visually gorgeous content specific to their buyer persona.
To do this most effectively, you must develop in-depth creative briefs with documentation that provides a complete view of what you’re trying to accomplish. Why?
- Articles with images get 94 percent more total views
- Including a Photo and a video in a press release increases views by over 45 percent
- Sixty percent of buyers are more likely to consider or contact a business when an image shows up in a search result
- Sixty-seven percent of online buyers say the quality of a product image is “very important” in selecting a brand or purchasing a product
- Online buyers think that the quality of a products image is more important than product-specific information (63 percent), a long description (54 percent) and ratings and reviews (53 percent)
- There is a 37 percent higher level of engagement for photos over pure text
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.
Marketing to agency decision makers is just one piece of the puzzle. For small to mid-sized contractors, marketing and public relations efforts must often extend to larger prime contractors in order to ensure these lesser-known firms are on the radar when Primes are assembling teams to pursue contracts. Large contractors, for their part, must also market needs and capabilities to smaller partners that might hold an elusive product/service, market expertise, status or agency relationship.
We have assembled 6 ways that forward-thinking contractors and IT providers can grow their business and contract opportunities by looking beyond traditional marketing, advertising and public relations tactics.
Leverage responsive landing pages
esponsive design is a critical website approach for providing customers with a seamless experience across all device sizes. With a responsive website, government contractors and IT providers can be in front of buyers at every step of their online journey. A user viewing a website on the go via a mobile device can have the same powerful experience as when sitting in their office.
Responsive websites provide continuity between different viewing contexts, remaining completely agnostic to the type of device used and the size of the screen the user has. Responsive websites also rank higher in search engines’ rankings, as Google recommends responsive web design because having a single URL for desktop and mobile sites makes it easier for Google to discover content and for Google’s algorithms – which are constantly changing – to assign indexing properties to content.
It was the need for a responsive website that brought GovDelivery, which enables public sector organizations to connect with more people and to get those people to act, to Bluetext.
As the number one referrer of traffic to hundreds of government websites, including IRS.gov, SBA.gov, FEMA.gov, IN.gov, and BART.gov, the GovDelivery Communications Cloud is an enterprise-class, cloud-based platform that allows government organizations to create and send billions of messages to more than 60 million people around the world. Bluetext was hired by GovDelivery to help them reach public sector organizations that can benefit with tremendous cost savings while reaching more people, automating complex communications and driving mission value through deeper engagement with the public.
For this responsive design project, Bluetext conceived and designed a responsive landing page with an infographic demonstrating the benefits of using GovDelivery for government agencies as the centerpiece of the campaign. We also developed a responsive email template and infographic poster to be used across many marketing channels.
Extend reach and share budget with partner campaigns
While going it alone from a marketing and public relations perspective provides a company with more control over a campaign, it also can be costly and restrict the reach and impact that could otherwise be achieved by aligning in an innovative way with industry partners.
Bluetext has worked on numerous occasions with industry partners that align around a specific campaign targeting government decision makers. Govplace, a leading enterprise IT solutions provider exclusively to the public sector, turned to Bluetext to develop FedInnovation, a destination designed to help government agency executives get the latest information on current technology challenges and solutions for big data, cloud, security, mobility and storage. Developed in conjunction with leading technology providers including Dell, Intel Security and VMWare, it includes exclusive content, videos, blogs, and real-time social feeds.
FedInnovation combines relevant, fresh content, complementary offers, and financial resources to deliver an educational platform to drive awareness and leads for Govplace across its target market. The development of platforms is a continued focus for Bluetext as we look to conceptualize, design and develop creative solutions that deliver measurable business impact for our clients. It is increasingly clear that customers of our clients demand unique experiences with premium content delivered in an easy to consume manner.
Another partner campaign targeting U.S. public sector executed by Bluetext was FutureAgency.com, a digital content experience effort on behalf of McAfee and Intel that depicted virtually a “future government agency.” For this project, Bluetext created a virtual experience around client subject matter experts in an effort to present content for government decision makers in a more engaging fashion. Rather than static white papers and marketing slicks that often go unread or unfinished, Bluetext created an experience whereby avatars of actual company thought leaders were created, and they delivered presentations on topics in a virtual conference environment. The clients found length and quality of site visitor engagement superior to that of traditional white papers and similar content.
Create compelling digital experiences to reach decision makers
The web has become a go-to resource for decision makers to research products and services prior to purchase. Product sheets, white papers and other pieces of online collateral can be useful supporting resources for government decision makers, but will hardly help contractors stand out in a crowded marketplace.
Recognizing this, government contractors and IT providers are creating more dynamic, immersive digital experiences that can more effectively engage target constituencies and impact the decision making process. Additionally, these experiences are molded to be as valuable as any in-person interaction site visitors would have with products and services.
A recent Bluetext project showcases a forward-thinking technology provider, CSC, which was seeking to ensure prospective customers could have a similar experience as they would if they were physically at CSC’s corporate headquarters.
Bluetext designed and built CSC’s Digital Briefing Center, a virtual experience where clients and CSC’s entire ecosystem can come to learn about CSC’s key technology conversations across its target verticals.
Bluetext designed a virtual office building where each floor represents a specific vertical industry, and visitors can learn about CSC’s key solutions and experience across cloud computing, big data, applications, cyber security, and mobility. While not specific to the government market, it is indicative of how “stickier” digital experiences are reshaping how existing and prospective customers interact with content.
Highlight customer innovation
No matter how large or well-known a government contractor/Federal IT provider is, gaining approval from an agency to speak publicly about a technology project is often mission impossible. Agencies must be careful not to appear to endorse a specific vendor in public comments or a press release quote, and even when project leaders are amenable, the process often grinds to a halt with the more conservative public affairs officers.
As such, vendors often have their hands tied on how to showcase a successful project so that other agencies – or even other decision makers within the same agency – will take notice. An approach that can bear more fruit involves shining the spotlight on an agency leader or the agency itself through awards and speaking opportunities.
Multiple editorial publications and associations hold annual award programs that showcase outstanding IT projects and agency leaders at the federal, state and local government level. Agencies tend to be more open to sharing an IT story through an award because it demonstrates innovation and can assist with employee morale and retention.
Beyond award programs, there is also significant benefit in generating media coverage and awareness of state & local customer projects. These agency customers tend to be more amenable to participating in public relations campaigns, and the drawing attention to these projects can demonstrate capabilities to prospective Federal customers as well.
Develop targeted campaign to pursue a specific contract
As contractors and IT providers know all too well, winning an agency contract requires a very different sales cycle than a small business user signing up online for Dropbox or a similar “as-a-Service” software offering.
At some level, there will always be marketing activities designed to reach decision-makers across multiple civilian or military agencies – and in some cases both segments. These external efforts may involve communicating product capabilities, service chops, or the expertise of the contractor’s team. But in today’s hyper-competitive market for agency contracts, developing innovative, targeted campaigns in pursuit of a specific contract or that are designed to reach decision makers at a particular agency, can make the difference between a game-changing contract win and a devastating loss.
Bluetext is increasingly tasked to partner with contractors in developing innovative branding and outreach campaigns around a specific contract pursuit. In early 2014, L-3 Communications, in partnership with Harris Corporation, hired Bluetext to help them pursue the Air Force’s $1B Satellite Control Network (AFSCN) Modifications, Maintenance & Operations (CAMMO) Contract.
Bluetext worked with the L-3/Harris Capture teams to develop a campaign strategy that would position them as a Prime by highlighting the many advantages they bring to the table. The overarching campaign theme Bluetext developed is:
“The Power of Partnership, From Vision to Reality”
The creative strategy of this project began with the core concept of the ad, “from vision to reality.” The left side of the ad is a wireframe representing the vision with the right side representing its reality. After the wireframe of the satellite was created, it was overlaid on top of the red diagonal to create a striking visual element to draw attention to the campaign. The first series of ads were placed in high visibility areas inside of Colorado Springs Airport, a key travel hub for Air Force brass. The media plan for the campaign also includes online, print and OOH media placed strategically to maximize reach and frequency throughout the entire contract RFP and award lifecycle.
Focus on agency challenge, not yourself
Dramatic changes in staffing and mission of government IT media outlets means that the days of getting a product reviewed or corporate profile written are for the most part a thing of the past. As such, contracts and IT providers must get far more creative when it comes to communicating capabilities.
Government IT press don’t want to hear about products. They want to hear about trends and challenges sweeping through agencies, and how contractors and IT providers are developing solutions to solve those challenges.
This was the backdrop for a media strategy Bluetext architected for Adobe Government. Over the past few years, government-wide budget cuts have been swift and relatively unsparing in their impact on agency in-person conferences and training events. This presented a significant challenge for agencies seeking to maintain the collaboration and education benefits these events delivered.
The challenge dovetailed with Adobe’s web conferencing solution Adobe Connect, which was seeing a rise in demand in the public sector due to pullbacks in physical, in-person conferences. Bluetext built a PR campaign around this angle that included a pair of thought leadership articles (one targeting the broad federal IT community and one targeting military decision makers), generating multiple articles around this topic in key federal, state and local media outlets, including:
Federal Computer Week – Budget cuts push conferences online
Washington Technology – Budget cuts, scandal fuel videoconferencing boom
Federal Computer Week – Could virtual meetings replace conferences in sequestration age?
Defense News – Communicating in an era of canceled conferences
Federal Computer Week – Defense Connect Online hits milestone
State Tech – Mobile Video Conferencing Powers Collaboration on the Go
Federal Computer Week – DOD connects online to cut travel
Government Executive/NextGov – Agencies are saving millions with virtual events
Federal Computer Week – Cutting costs with virtual conferencing
Reaching and impacting government decision makers requires government contractors and IT providers to push beyond the status quo and engage with partners able to help develop and deliver innovative campaigns to grow their business and increase contract opportunities.
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
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.