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So you want to build hype for your campaign? Our campaign strategists at Bluetext have some tips for you. Assuming you’ve already started building out your campaign, you should have an idea of what your goals are. A common goal is to build awareness and excitement. When building excitement ahead of your launch, you want to bring an air of mystery. Balance announcing details of your campaign while leaving enough to the viewers’ imagination. Some effective teaser mediums include social media snackables, physical swag, email campaigns, or teaser trailers.

When Bluetext recently launched Phosphorus’ Thing Tamer, we decided to keep things mysterious. So, we began with the organic promotion of teaser videos to curate a collection of content for the dramatic launch of a full campaign without sacrificing ad spend. Once our audience’s interest was piqued by compelling graphics and intriguing headlines, we directed their attention to the campaign landing page. This landing page hinted at all things to come and encouraged users to sign up for exclusive notification of the launch. The landing page was designed to be as engaging as possible, with promotional movie posters, two different trailers of the Thing Tamer series, and on-scroll animation to introduce the personified things and interactive carousels to reveal campaign messaging and key stats. signed up for the email list, they received a thank you email that further teases at the Things to come.

The first trailer named the Beast Trailer worked to establish the problems Thing Tamer solves. Offices with countless enterprise IoT devices are at high risk of being exploited by unsuspecting sources. Each device has its own firmware and unique language making managing all of them a complicated process. Without giving too many details away, we put a spotlight on common problems enterprises face. This was followed up with the second trailer, which starts off by slowly revealing our hero, the Tamer, an IT version of Indiana Jones meets Crocodile Dundee. By shifting focus to our IT guy wearing the Tamer’s hat, users are able to envision themselves as the ones resolving their IoT devices’ vulnerabilities. The teaser strategy allowed for the campaign to slowly introduce the problem with an air of mystery, leaving them craving more for the full campaign to unveil the solution. Separating the story into digestible trailer videos keeps the target audience engaged for an extended period of time, building upon their interest and education with every touchpoint. Not only does it allow for multiple follow-ups and a nurture strategy, but the shortened length of each video also ensures that viewer attention does wane while watching a long-form video. Hitting the viewer with messages one at a time increases the likelihood of memory retention and builds upon Phosphorus’ brand association. At the end of the day, a successful message is one that users can connect with, and that’s just what we did.

Similar to Thing Tamer’s landing page where visitors could engage with different elements to learn more, the recent The Batman movie had a fun way of building hype ahead of the movie’s premiere. Visitors who found the secret website through a hidden message on the official movie poster were able to talk with the Riddler and solve additional puzzles. Those who solved the puzzles were rewarded with exclusive clips and pictures from the yet-released movie. Once the movie was released, Warner Brothers went a step further and updated the page to reflect the domain being seized by the fictitious Gotham police department. Warner Brothers managed to engage with their target audience over the course of weeks, thanks to a clever Easter Egg hidden in their posters. Being given the opportunity to dive into the Gotham universe in this unique way allowed the audience to connect with the film and get hyped for the official movie release.

Phosphorus also engaged in a few organic social media promotional posts to promote its campaign launch. Social media serves as a great opportunity when trying to build awareness. That being said, Phosphorus didn’t want to spoil too much, so we kept the captions short and used the two trailers and social snackables for the LinkedIn promotions. Utilizing cross-channel promotions and various forms of media increases the likelihood of your users finding your content and engaging with it. Again, at the end of the day, how can you build excitement if your campaign isn’t known? Agencies like us here at Bluetext have the expertise to guide you through the optimal campaign launch.

No two campaigns will be the same, and while the Phosphorus campaign succeeded based on its goals, your success isn’t a guarantee. At the end of the day, your best bet is to engage with a trusted campaign-focused agency to build hype for your campaign launch. Once you’ve launched, we work with you to drive paid marketing and PR efforts, ultimately driving users to engage with your business. Want to learn more about how Bluetext can help your campaign? Get in touch with us here. To learn more about our Thing Tamer campaign, check out the full breadth of our work here.

Al Davis, the former coach and owner of the Oakland Raiders, famously coined the phrase “Just win, Baby!”. And while that’s the goal for any PR agency building out an award nomination for clients, it’s easier said than done. How do agencies make their nomination stand out from the thousands of others that the judges receive? What do clients gain from winning these honors? For such a common staple in PR campaigns, award nominations are often not leveraged for maximum impact.

How to Build a Winning Nomination

Bluetext develops and executes award programs for clients across a broad range of industries and verticals. We hold considerable expertise with B2B Tech and B2G Tech Award Programs, and based on our experience, here are some keys to success when it comes to winning award submissions:

First, avoid cluttered technology jargon and be clear in your nominations.

Award nominations that struggle to present a compelling case are often guilty of being too product-oriented. Assume the judges do not know anything about your solution. It’s crucial to articulate the benefits in as clear of a manner as possible rather than just stuffing entry sections with generic content to hit word count targets.

Second, before submitting your final nomination, ask yourself – does this nomination address what the judges are looking for in a submission?

It’s always important to build a nomination that fits what the judges are looking for. Do you homework on the criteria and past winners. The website of the organization hosting the awards often has a list of criteria on what to answer when nominating clients’ solutions. In fact, some of them even hold webinars on what defines a winning submission. Adhering to those guidelines offers the best chance of winning.

Third, when drafting award nominations, it’s important to tell a story about how the solution is addressing a significant industry problem.

Build a case for the product you are nominating by answering the following questions – What’s the industry problem? What separates a client’s technology from industry competitors? Why does this particular piece of technology drive superior results? Winning nominations offer such an intriguing story about their clients’ products that the judges can’t help but recognize the importance of this solution.

Finally, always be honest with clients.

Just because a client wants to move forward with an award doesn’t mean it is a smart use of time and financial investment. If you have concerns, make your case or push to strengthen the nomination. Review past year’s award winners to demonstrate what it really takes to bring home the hardware.

Benefits of Winning Awards

Bluetext also believes there are four key benefits of winning these awards:

1. Enhances Brand Reputation

Winning awards provides positive momentum for a company’s solutions by offering third-party validation of a client’s technology or executive team leadership. Wins serve as testaments to the hard work the company has been putting into its solution. These accreditations boost both internal and external stakeholders’ confidence in the product and the company’s direction.

2. SEO Boost

Award wins are easy opportunities to leverage in press releases and social media. Often, the organization behind the awards will also celebrate the winners with press releases of their own. Wins are therefore easy ways to bring your company to the top of search engines’ results page.

3. Unlocks Important Networking Opportunities

Typically, awards come with a presentation or ceremony that presents opportunities to mingle with businesses and executives in the same industry. Furthermore, the increased brand awareness that comes with winning awards may open the doors to new business opportunities and potential partnerships.

4. Air Cover For Sales Teams

For many tech companies, especially those competing with more recognized names – sales teams often spend a chunk of their new business meetings establishing brand credibility. Showcasing highly regarded award wins can assist in overcoming the credibility hump.

The Last Piece of the Puzzle

Finally, before drafting the award, be sure it aligns with the client’s overall PR goals and strategy. Oftentimes these awards have a cost associated with them. With that in mind, it is important to align with clients on what nominations make the most sense for their overall PR strategy to get the most out of this investment.

Learn more about Bluetext’s success in submitting award nominations and contact us if you’re interested in partnering with us to get your award nominations on track.

Finding Success in Public Sector PR

According to Fortune, Walmart is considered the largest company globally, with an annual budget of approximately $524 billion dollars. However, one entity dwarfs Walmart with a massive $1.5 trillion dollar budget – The Federal Government of the United States. Although many analysts predict a slump in procurement spending in 2022, the United States federal government is still the most lucrative and prized customer globally.

Finding success in communicating with government customers is an area many companies fall short of due to a fundamental misunderstanding of the golden rule of the public sector: Communicating to the government is uniquely different from any other audience, whether it be businesses or consumers.

To navigate these unique waters, you need an experienced team that understands the government agency and worker from top to bottom and who works and breathes the ins and outs of the ever-changing and complex world of communicating with the public sector. Also, know that a true public sector communications professional is a rare breed. While some PR professionals have worked for a public sector client, there are painfully few that specialize in this area, and they are becoming harder and harder to find.

Give it to the pros. You go to a doctor when you are sick. You seek a lawyer when needing legal advice. Even the military has special forces to handle the most difficult tasks. It is imperative to know when to seek the skills and guidance you need for a specialized task. The communications and networking landscape that is more complicated than ever, so don’t attempt to navigate it without qualified public relations guidance.

If you have a public sector division, you need a specialized team to support your engagement and communications efforts. It’s a lot like the intro to the 80’s TV show the A-Team.

If you have a problem, and no one else can help, and if you can find them, maybe you need to hire. . .

the Public Sector PR team.

Without having to get into any arguments on where Mr. T fits into the grand scheme of my symbolism, the important takeaway is simply this: a public sector PR team is a lean, highly-specialized group of professionals that will provide support and guidance for your organization to maximize success in the government space. Full Stop.

Unique Needs of the Public Sector

Government agencies and the people that work within have uniquely different needs and offer challenges not seen in private sector businesses. They respond to their own language and terminologies – and traditional marketing buzzwords fall flat in the government sector. In order to engage and communicate effectively, your public sector PR program needs to speak to the distinct demands and needs of both the government official and their respective agencies’ core mission.

Simply inserting words like ‘federal’ and ‘government’ into your existing enterprise messaging is not going to cut it with government audiences. Government employees have their own language, with each agency having a distinct dialect with mandates, certification requirements, and other factors that dictate how they shape their needs as well as find vendors. Federal, state, local, and education entities each have needs and challenges you need to hand-tailor your approach, messaging, and engagement to truly resonate with these audiences.

By having a B2G Public Relations team, you gain the proficiency and experience required to establish your organization, brand, people, and offerings to the public sector customer in a manner that provides long-term stability and success.

State, Local, and Education (SLED) PR

Much like federally public sector PR – state, local, and education comms require a specialized approach and methodology in order to educate, help drive leads, and raise awareness for your brand and services – often in multiple target regions. This is where your public sector PR team will also show extreme value in that SLED communication programs can be executed from any location, giving your organization both awareness and presence in multiple target areas without the need to have permanent ‘boots on the ground.’

Why is this important now? Government contracting dollars and opportunities for state, local, and education (SLED) budgets have made a comeback in 2022, with states showing the largest annual spending increase in more than a decade and many reporting tremendous tax revenue growth from 2021. This, coupled with federal aid from the American Rescue Plan Act and the infrastructure bill, point to substantial opportunities with SLED entities – and the right PR and marketing strategy can help you take full advantage of these opportunities.

A public sector SLED team is specially equipped to handle multiple regions with different cultural, governmental, and social norms to help you project an expansive market footprint for your brand and expertise in mission-critical areas. Whether it’s in Houston, Texas, or Fairbanks, Alaska, a strategic SLED PR campaign will help establish your presence where you need it.

Public Sector PR Expertise

Public sector teams, their missions, and definitions of success come in all shapes and sizes, many times wholly different from the rest of the business – and your communications program and PR team need to as well.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard, ‘I can just use my corporate communications team to handle public sector comms.’ The response to this is a simple question – ‘Are you using your corporate sales team to sell into the public sector?’ Of course not; you need your sales team to know your customer base and the specifics of the marketplace – so you have a team that specializes in the public sector customer. Your organization is making a strategic investment to go after government customers, and that investment should include communications that specializes (just as much as your sales team) in that customer space. While your in-house comms team or corporate agency might be able to help get you started, these efforts will only be table stakes if you don’t have a team that truly understands the federal, state, local, and education sectors.

There are countless unique differences between the public sector and business/consumer corporate communications. Understanding sales cycles, trends that will gain traction, how social media works in the government space, and how to most effectively engage the people who are going to help make a difference in your public sector strategy are just some of the key differences and capabilities a public sector PR team will bring to your team to help drive success.

Measuring Success for Public Sector PR

Historically, measuring PR success has always presented challenges, and traditional means of measurement are not conducive to adequately measuring or portraying success in the public sector. Most companies rely on measuring PR efforts directly back to sales, which in the public sector is a tough row to hoe. Our public sector teams are adept at benchmarking and measuring the metrics that count the most in the public sector.

They have the ability to measure web traffic, inbound leads from content and social media, the share of voice, and qualitative comments from customers and partners – data points your team can rely on to justify and optimize your public sector engagement and confidently measure your public sector PR success.

Find Your Public Sector PR Team

You are now asking yourself – where can I find highly specialized public sector communications professionals to support my needs? Regardless of the size of your company or government division, Bluetext can help you establish, engage and scale your communications to the public sector and get the most out of your communication efforts! Contact Bluetext to help your organization drive B2G brand awareness and lead generation through public relations.

When strategizing and creating the UX of a B2B website, making informed and data-driven decisions can make or break the impact of your site. Getting the user to your site is the first step, but once they have arrived, your content and user experience are the only things standing between a standalone visit and a conversion.

Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) is the process of strategically enhancing your website to grow conversions. Depending on your business, this could mean a variety of different things. A conversion is defined as the completion of the desired goal, and we all know goals are never one size fits all. A goal could be a form completion, direct product purchase, a resource download, or event registration. For most B2B businesses, lead generation is the top goal. This means any action on your website in which a user demonstrates interest and provides their information is a conversion. The importance of content and UX in terms of CRO cannot be overstated, and tools like A/B and multivariate testing can be leveraged to ensure all website elements are optimized for lead generation.

Types of Testing

A/B testing allows you to test the impact of one specific variable (for example, CTA button placement, CTA copy, page heading copy) to determine the most effective version of the page content and user experience. It analyzes user action on the variable page (version B) against the control page (version A) and ideally results in statistically significant insights.

Multivariate testing, on the other hand, tests multiple pages and content variables against the control page. While A/B testing gives insight into the effect of variables on an individual basis, multivariate testing reveals the collective impact of those variables and how they work together in one page design against another.

Multi-page funnel testing is similar to the aforementioned test types, however rather than testing variables on multiple versions of just one page, multi-page testing evaluates the impact of variables across the full user journey. This is helpful information, specifically when it comes to lead generation. Finding the ideal user experience and user journey across multiple pages and having the ability to analyze user actions from top of funnel activity to conversion allows you to make the most informed and well-strategized decisions when it comes to page content. If increased conversion rates are your goal, you want to be able to set yourself up for success with a data-supported UX.

How to Conduct A/B and Multivariate Testing

It is highly recommended that you use a CRO tool (Google Optimize, for example) to conduct user testing to avoid any SEO issues that may be caused by just creating multiple pages with specified variables in your CMS and evaluating the results in Google Analytics. Using the right tool will not only help to ensure you don’t negatively impact SEO but will also allow you to differentiate results and insights that are statistically significant from those that occur by chance.

Our Tips for Split Test Execution:

Determine the specific question you want the test to answer and form a hypothesis – An example of that question may be: Why are users not clicking the CTA on our product page? Your subsequent hypothesis will inform the type of testing you should conduct as well as the variables you should examine.
Form a hypothesis – If your hypothesis to that question is “Users are not clicking the CTA because it does not visually stand out on the page.” The variable you could then analyze via an A/B test is making that CTA button a bolder, more eye-catching color on-page version B.
Make sure you are using the right tools – accuracy and reliability are crucial when venturing into user testing. Setting up your test to yield clear and statistically significant results is the first and most important step in testing and CRO. Without establishing that foundation, you can end up with data that doesn’t tell you anything about user patterns but rather just a collection of events that occur by chance.

Consulting a B2B marketing analytics and intelligence company like Bluetext to guide you through strategizing and testing the many variables that come with creating a website. Reach out to learn how Bluetext can support your organization.

How can you bring in lucrative contracts for your business? B2B social media marketing can be an underutilized, yet incredibly useful channel, given that 62% of CEOs are present on at least one social platform. B2B social media marketing is the use of social channels to market products and services to business clients. All social channels can be used for B2B marketing, but the strategy for each will differ. It’s essential to know the strengths and demographics of various social platforms to effectively reach the targeted decision-makers. Let’s look at some of the top social media channels used for B2B marketing.

3 Social Media Channels Great for B2B Marketing

LinkedIn is far more than a recruitment platform; it is a great tool to attract talent, but also can go to great lengths to promote your business. More than 30 million companies use LinkedIn, with the most common age group on the site being middle-aged working professionals (36- to 55-year-olds). Serving as the most popular platform for corporate CEOs, LinkedIn can get your business in front of CXOs and other decision-makers to initiate those B2-B relationships. LinkedIn organic and paid media options are viable opportunities positively showcase your company’s achievements and drive traffic to your website. Your organization can demonstrate thought leadership as an industry leader through blog and news posts on trending topics. Not only can you update followers on company progress, but you can also present the employees who make up your organization when there is strategic value in doing so. This conveys company culture, which is a great indication of whether you might be the right potential business partner. LinkedIn also provides plenty of data to better optimize your social campaign and ensure you’re reaching the right decision-makers.

Twitter
Twitter also can be an effective platform for connecting with customers and developing influence. Through short messages, Twitter can be used to portray your brand’s voice. With Twitter, your business can quickly get out a message to an audience and engage with users in real-time. Twitter has 166 million monetizable daily active users, which are logged accounts that are able to show ads. Unlike LinkedIn, Twitter is predominantly used by millennials, meaning it is great for targeting entrepreneurs and younger professionals who are involved in start-ups.

YouTube

With 1.7 billion unique monthly visitors, YouTube is one of the best social media platforms for driving traffic back to your company’s website. Video, as a medium, is a great way to tell your brand’s story and mission. With YouTube, your business can create educational content to display your business’s unique value proposition. People searching for advice and how-to-videos will land on your page, increasing brand awareness and subject matter expertise. Ensure your video is optimized for google search results by placing relevant keywords in the title.

Even for organizations intimately familiar with social channels, there is a science to building B2B social media marketing programs with the optimal mix of channels, content, and timing. Contact Bluetext to help your organization drive B2B marketing results on LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube, and other social media channels.

No matter what industry your company is in, or who your target market is, the goal of any customer interaction is to foster a relationship that converts to revenue. In today’s digital landscape, customers’ expectations have elevated to instant yet personalized feedback to their questions at the click of a button. While this seems like an impossibly daunting task, it has become an expected digital experience with the help of technology. Artificial intelligence-powered live chat, chatbots, and messaging apps have all helped companies achieve this blend of efficiency and customization. Below, we dive deep into the power of conversational marketing and how to implement the right strategy for your business.

What is Conversational Marketing?

In its essence, conversational marketing is a series of one-to-one interactions in real-time across multiple channels. Conversational marketing enables you and your team to foster relationships with both potential customers and existing customers, improving overall online customer experience and brand perception. A successful conversational marketing strategy ensures your customers feel satisfied and supported in all their questions, and trust your brand throughout every stage of the sales funnel. Additionally, as we know, data is a powerful tool, and utilizing conversational marketing technology can increase that amount of data allowing you to tweak your strategy and increase conversions. Every conversation could be considered a mini focus study and learning experience for how to continually improve your business.

Chatbots

As your business scales up, so will the number of questions from prospective and existing customers. That being said, there will come a time when it is simply not feasible to increase the number of sales representatives you have to answer every question that comes in via your website. That’s where chatbots come in. Chatbots have become the go-to conversational marketing tool for a lot of businesses. Platforms like Drift, which integrate seamlessly with your existing website make chatbots a very easy and effective way to up your conversational marketing efforts. Chatbots are very effective when it comes to easing customer pain points quickly and provides a visual cue of reassurance upon landing on a web page that support resources are readily available. Pre-programmed answers to frequently answered questions allow you to talk to your customers, regardless of the time of day. This is especially beneficial for businesses with an international reach, as customers outside your local time zone will always feel supported. If the query is too unique to respond with a canned response, chatbots can connect the customer with a live representative who can better answer their questions. Plenty of conversational marketing platforms enable businesses to identify which leads are most likely to buy and then move them to the front of the line.

Customer Feedback

Pulling data from your chosen conversational marketing tool on customer engagement will only get you so far. At the end of the day, you’ll need to gather feedback from your customers, asking them their thoughts on how to improve the customer and prospect experience on your site. This will not just enable the customer to feel that they have a say but also will help in the optimization of the tools after some time. Adding a quick feedback survey to the end of a chatbot or live chat conversation will go a long way in improving customer satisfaction.

How to Get Started

Implementing a successful conversational marketing strategy starts by choosing the web pages where you want your conversational bot to engage with your visitors. Sometimes it makes sense to have a constant chatbot available on every page, at all times. Other times, and especially when utilizing live chat versus a chatbot, it pays off to choose the pages that get the most traffic, have the most conversion opportunities, or have visitors with a high intention of buying. This will help maximize the number of interactions you enter into, and the likelihood of success of those interactions. Now that you’ve decided where you want to speak to your customers on your website, it’s time to define what kind of information customers will ask for, and how in the simplest terms you can provide them with that information. As a general rule of thumb, try to keep the conversations simple. Your customers will expect the interaction with your company to be smooth and want to get answers and guidance quickly.

Regardless of the size of your company, having a conversational marketing strategy is key to increasing customer satisfaction and therefore revenue. Are you looking to begin your conversational marketing strategy but not quite sure where to start? Contact Bluetext and see how we can help.

Being a technology company can be tough, there is often pressure to appear futuristic, scientific, or impressively complex. The market often expects the latest and greatest features and widgets, especially in website UX and design. However, not every company is the space-age, robotics, AI-generated stereotype that comes to mind with “tech”. But across all technology companies, there is a shared level of expertise in software and computing that may not be found in the everyday website viewer. Technology companies can easily fall into the trap of flexing their brain power a little too strongly, and overachieving the “tech aesthetic”. And while there are a million ways to design an impressive website, there are a couple of practices that stand out as common pitfalls for technology companies. Bluetext recommends the following as what NOT to do in web design:

Too much content on one page

This is often the result of poor content planning. When a user is overwhelmed with animations, visuals, and walls of text, they lose interest quickly. Focus each page on answering a specific question or describing a specific product, and link out to additional information that you feel is relevant. If there is any “take it or leave it” language on the page, it might be best to leave it.

Too little content on one page

As the saying goes, too much of a good thing can be a bad thing. We appreciate minimal site design when it helps a user find exactly what they’re looking for, but barely-there content doesn’t help anyone. Each page should be thoughtfully designed and written and should provide a user with clear next steps in their journey on your website.

Jargon or unapproachable language

Messaging across the site ought to be crystal clear. Just like having too much content, using complicated language and jargon can deter a user from continuing on your site. We recommend tailoring your content to your audience by considering how they would speak during a conference—widely-understood industry terms are acceptable, but should be embedded within digestible, humanized language. When customers can easily understand your product language, they gain confidence in your brand.

Recently, Bluetext partnered with BigBear.ai to develop a new messaging strategy that frames them as a leader in their field while explaining their highly-technical product with accessible language. As a result of this partnership, BigBear.ai is able to strike a balance between technical and approachable language, and build trust with its audience. To learn more about this project, click here.

Falling into the trap of trends

We see this most often when personal taste takes precedence over user experience. Some trends have staying power and can help you stand out from out-of-the-box websites. Some trends, though, are fleeting.

When adopting new web design styles, carefully consider the relevance of each trend to your brand and your users. More often than not, the best thing you can do for your users is to be consistent. They want to know what to expect from your website, so as you explore trends, it’s good to meet (or exceed!) those expectations.

No clear CTA

Each page on your site should provide clear, relevant next steps. This could take the form of related resources at the bottom of the page or quick links to associated product pages. Whichever next steps you choose to display, they should proactively provide the user with additional information related to the page they’re on. This practice is also helpful with interlinking content across your website, which can boost your search rankings.

For a great example of CTA placement throughout a site, check out Axient’s website. Bluetext worked with Axient to devise a comprehensive website strategy that would optimize the user journey and maximize conversions. To read more about this project, click here.

Poor mobile experience

More than half of users will leave a page that takes more than a few seconds to load on mobile, according to Google. Given that mobile use is steadily increasing year-over-year, this means that the longer your site takes to load, the more users you could be losing to competitors.

One solution for the mobile-desktop conundrum, as recommended by Nielsen, is to have a mobile site separate from your desktop site. This will allow you to pare the mobile experience down by removing content and features that are only relevant to desktop users. To see how your site’s mobile experience stacks up, try out Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test.

At the end of the day, the best thing you can do for your website is to design and write with your end-user in mind. A site that works for them is a site that works for you.

To learn how Bluetext can help you avoid these mistakes, get in touch with our web design experts today.

When it comes to digital marketing analytics and tracking, there’s a clear winner of the worldwide popularity contest. With use on over 50 million sites, Google Analytics is the most popular tracking and analytics platform available –and for good reason. With detailed insights and reports, Google Analytics gives marketers a comprehensive look at how effective their website and/or application is as a marketing tool. As a DC marketing analytics company, Bluetext has worked with countless brands to set up their Google Analytics and make use of its insights. Along the way, we’ve learned many lessons from best practices to little-known tips and tricks. In the setup process, a key step is properly defining and deploying goals in your Google Analytics instance to better report on conversion actions. As a dc marketing analytics company, we know that defining these goals is a foundational aspect of any analytics and attribution plan, so we’ve outlined the fundamentals of Google Analytics goals below.

How Do Google Analytics Goals Work?

The beauty of Google Analytics is that it’s never a one-trick pony, or built for a specific type of business. The analytics platform is highly adaptable to any company’s business goals and creates custom dashboards to visualize your specific objectives. Google Analytics goals are uniquely customizable and can track many different actions, from specific page views, how long users stay on your site or application, form submissions, and more. Goals, additionally, can have a monetary value assigned to them, which allows you to track general ROI, ROAS, and countless other marketing metrics. The goal and conversion data computed by Google Analytics also allows you to define a series of reports to dive deeper into your website and paid marketing metrics. The chart below helps further define the four-goal types in Google Analytics:

How Can I Start And Be Smart About Their Goals?

If you aren’t tracking explicit conversions yet, Google’s “Smart Goals” are a simple way to help optimize your performance. Smart goals were developed by Google as a way for marketers to track the most engaged sessions on their website. With smart bidding, Google uses machine learning to identify and examine dozens of intent signals about your website sessions, assign each session a score, and determine the sessions that would be most likely to convert. While smart goals can be great for many reasons, there are limitations. For example, smart goals are not customizable, they are currently only available for websites (not applications), and they are not available for websites that receive more than 1 million hits per day. It’s like turning on autopilot for your tracking, great for a period of time to be a little more hands-off and let algorithms do the work, but eventually, you will want to drill down and focus on converting potential prospects. With these limitations in mind, we recommend working with a marketing analytics company, like Bluetext, to ensure you are able to track explicit conversions, making your data more valuable and accurate.

What Are Best Practices For Setting Up Goals?

When setting up your goals, consider these best practices:

Give each goal a unique and descriptive name. Especially when your marketing analytics becomes more robust over time it pays off to be organized from the start.
When possible, assign a goal value to help monetize and evaluate your conversions. You can also use a number scale to assign importance to your goals (low-value = 1 and high value = 10) if you are unable to assign a monetary value.
If you ever need to change goals, keep track of when and what you did. Goals are not applied to historical data, so changing one will change conversion data from the point of the change.
Before pushing your goals to the live environment, ensure you use Google Analytics’ “Verify this Goal” feature to see how the goal would have converted over the last seven days.

Setting up goals in google analytics can be frustrating and time-consuming. The work it takes to set up google analytics goals, however, is worth the time investment. Working with a marketing analytics company can be a great way to effectively implement goals and reduce the amount of time needed to do so.

Interested in working with a marketing analytics company to ensure your Google Analytics goals are effective and properly set up? Contact us here!

Whenever you add or change a feature on your website, you should consider the impact on the UX, or user experience. When you assess how users will interact with your website, it is important to consider users with differing abilities. Accessibility is a critical component of website design, not only for inclusivity but also because Google search crawlers reward websites that implement accessibility best practices.

Most websites don’t even realize that their content is not accessible to all users and use designs and visuals that create poor accessibility unintentionally. For example, you might like the relaxing feel of muted colors, but there needs to be enough contrast for users with visual impairments to read your content. If you use video content, be sure to include closed captioning to provide users who are deaf and hard of hearing the same access to information.

When thinking about accessibility, it’s also important to remember the universal benefit to every single user of your website. Too often, we think of accessibility as a way to benefit a small subset of users who need accommodations, but making your content more accessible actually helps everyone. If you’ve ever tried to watch a video on the metro, you know the benefit of closed captioning. On that day your mouse broke, you probably learned pretty quickly which websites you could access using a keyboard.

While there are many different ways you can improve accessibility, here are some great ways to start bettering your site.

Check Color Contrast

Run your website through a contrast checking tool (there are many free options online, such as a11y’s color contrast tool). This will help you spot any colors that might be difficult to read or view, so you can update text and CTAs to ensure that all your users interact more easily with your site.

Break Up Long Chunks of Text

While some areas of your site might require a long article when possible try to break up long periods of text with images or different types of components. This will make your content more accessible for neurodiverse users, and it will make important content more digestible for anyone who comes to your website.

Add Alternative Text for Images

Many content management systems will already ask you for alternate text for images, so this is an easy way to immediately make your website more accessible. This text does not need to be a detailed description of every single piece of the image but should be a few descriptive words that capture the main points of the image.

Make Menu Items Unique

Repeated menu items are confusing for everyone. If you have the same item under two different parts of the menu, it is difficult for users to tell which one has the information they need. It becomes more difficult to tell the difference when using a screen reader. Think through your menu, and choose the single most accurate spot for each menu item.

Improve Heading Hierarchy

Headings help you visually separate your content, and using the correct headings will help neurodiverse users and people using screen readers. Most websites use headings from <h1>, being the most visually impactful and important, to <h6>, being the least. As you write your content, think about where it makes sense to group content under a heading and what type of heading should be used. A major section of your page should not be delineated by <h6>, and a short paragraph should not use an <h1>.

Hopefully, these recommendations will help you as you begin creating a more accessible website. Reach out to Bluetext to dive further into accessibility and make sure every user has a great experience on your website.

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In any website design, call-to-action (CTA) buttons are key to highlighting the important actions available to users. Buttons make the difference between a general site visitor and a converting sales lead. Pointing out relevant information and next steps to the user can help them navigate your site with less friction, reducing decision fatigue and decreasing bounce rates. Here are six key questions you should consider when designing the CTA buttons to be used on your website.

Should the button style stay the same?

While it’s important for button styling to be consistent across a site, in some cases, there are multiple actions available to a user in a single viewport. To avoid overwhelming users with numerous identical buttons on the screen, you can use different styles to indicate a visual hierarchy. You’re already asking a user to make one decision, therefore, the UX should eliminate any additional, unnecessary decisions in what button to select. For actions that are top priority, bold-colored, solid buttons tend to draw a user’s attention first. Secondary and tertiary button styles should be less emphasized, with unfilled boxes or simply underlined text to indicate less important actions. The styles should be distinct but linked by common elements such as color or shape to make them easily recognizable. Try to use the primary button styling predominantly throughout the site, and avoid creating more than three distinct button styles.

What colors are best to use for CTA buttons?

When choosing the fill color of CTA buttons, it may be tempting to rely on your company brand color scheme. The button design shouldn’t diverge from the brand entirely, but the button color should stand out from the rest of the content on your site. Say you have a minimalistic black and white or muted color palette, you’d want your colors to pop against those backgrounds. Using the predominant brand color risks the button competing for user attention, leading to lower clickthrough rates. Color psychology also plays a key role in communicating the meaning behind buttons. It’s usually best to avoid red CTA buttons, because red buttons are associated with dangerous or harmful actions. Blue buttons, on the other hand, have positive connotations for users since blue text (the namesake of the Bluetext agency) has been used to indicate hyperlinks since the inception of the internet. Users are familiar and comfortable with clicking clue hyperlinked text, so why initiate a change? When choosing the color for a group of buttons on the site, assigning different colors to each action can create a higher cognitive load for users trying to distinguish between their choices. It’s best to use the same color for all the buttons in a group, so that users can focus on the text. However, you may want to consider indicating a default action to make one choice stand out, as discussed in the next section.

Should you highlight a default action?

If you are showing choices on a screen, and one of the choices presented is more likely to be the user’s preferred action, then it may be best to highlight that option to indicate it as the “default” to help users choose this option faster. However, if the choices are equal, then highlighting a default action could confuse the user or steer them to click the default choice rather than considering the options equally. When showing two choices next to each other, it’s also important to consider right and left hand placement. Showing an option on the right may make users more likely to choose it due to right hand bias, so it’s best to put the default option on the right. However, if the default action is something irreversible like “delete all,” it may be best to put that CTA on the left to force users to give more consideration to their decision. When presenting multiple options, just consider which option will be chosen the most often, and how quickly you want the user to navigate the decision.

Should icons be added to the CTA buttons?

Usually, text alone is enough to communicate clear actions to the user, but when buttons are grouped together, it may be harder for the user to distinguish the difference between the options presented. For example, if a new user on your site sees “Download” and “Contact Us” CTAs right next to each other, they might have to take a second to think about the difference between the two actions. In cases like this, icons can help users to discern the difference between the options faster. When assigning icons to the CTAs, make sure that the icon is helpful in communicating the meaning behind the text. If the icons themselves are too similar or generic, they may only lead to more user indecisiveness. Choosing the right icons can make all the difference in the user experience.

Should designers think “outside-the-box”?

The standard button styling is a rectangular box shape, with rounded corners. While designers could use colors and text styling to flex the brand, the overall button shape shouldn’t stray too far from the norm. The oblong-shaped CTA is emerging in popularity with more rounded, organic brands and is a great example of applying brand elements without feeling foreign. The goal of a CTA is to be instantly recognizable to the user, and in this case, thinking outside the box could lead to users being confused or less likely to interact with CTAs. One way of ensuring standardization across buttons is by adhering to the “common grid” measurements. The grid spacing ensures that buttons have adequate clear space around the text, making them easier for viewers to read and recognize the anatomy. Clean, simple designs also tend to be more palatable, as buttons with numerous effects applied can end up looking tacky and unprofessional.

What considerations should be in place for accessibility?

Accessibility is necessary for legal compliance, but it’s also recommended to ensure that designs are easy to read for all users. Font size and color contrast are two of the main considerations for button accessibility. Gradient treatments can also add complications to website accessibility, especially when overlaid with text. As a designer, it’s important to ensure that legibility is never sacrificed for aesthetics. The Importance of Website Accessibility doesn’t go ignored at Bluetext; read more about how we test for accessibility compliance to ensure that our sites are functional for everyone.

At Bluetext, when designing a site for a client, the number one priority is to ensure that the website will engage users in order to achieve business goals. Experienced designers know that CTA styling is key to capturing users and directing them to the most important content on the site. Thoughtful design can increase brand recognition, improve clickthrough rates, and remedy bounce rates for your site. Contact Bluetext to learn more about our services and how we can address all of your website design needs.