The Challenge:

A leading scientific association came to Bluetext with a unique challenge. The association’s goal was to drive higher click-through-rates (CTRs) for its core web properties without altering the front-end design of each site before 2016. Built on a custom, legacy CMS, these sites featured an aged look and were not built responsively. The Bluetext team knew immediately that there was one way to boost traffic to these properties in an effective, long-term fashion that would simultaneously increase conversion rates to purchase, and grow overall engagement with the association’s premium content. Bluetext mapped out a highly-detailed Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Strategy for each of these properties and executed it methodically through the first half of 2015.

Tactics

Our team ran a series of detailed reports on these web properties’ performance in search, analyzing every factor that could possibly be weighing the site down. When assessing SEO rankings, it is key to remember that a website’s “domain authority” is impacted by two main audiences: the search bots crawling the website, and the people searching it and reviewing its content.

Bluetext crafted a multi-phase plan that aimed to improve perceptions of the web properties among both audiences, making sure that any changes made to appeal to crawler bots also suited the needs and expectations of live searchers. Bluetext made recommendations for highly-relevant short and long-tail keywords to include in meta data and content across the site. We then pointed out specific pages on the site that housed meta data (titles, descriptions, URLs) that was too short or too long- and harmed the sites’ search “scores” by breaking structural rules. Bluetext collaborated with the association to rewrite meta data so that it fit Google and Bing’s structural guidelines, and also incorporated keywords that would draw the right searchers to relevant pages, thus boosting overall search authority.

Our next step was to assess website speed and load, and to point out specific tactics to improve these metrics and optimize the user experience. In comparing these web properties to competitors, we found specific referring domains that the client could form relationships with to gain backlinks and grow trustworthiness. Our team explored the client’s social media activity in-depth on platforms that could be used to strengthen relationships with their target audience. We sat with the association’s marketing team and pointed out opportunities to broaden awareness of events and useful materials, and to stimulate engagement among members with posts that ask questions or offer a short piece of valuable information. And since we are a digital design agency and we couldn’t quite help ourselves, we offered design insight on how to effectively rearrange the homepage to improve CTRs to interior pages and display timely, relevant content without drastically changing the current design.

Execution

After receiving a green light from the association to make the recommended changes to their web properties, we got straight to work. Using Google Analytics and Webmaster Tools to identify pages that served as the top 75 “entry points” to the organization’s largest domain, we recreated meta titles and descriptions for these pages so that they fit structural guidelines and utilized keywords that are heavily searched on a monthly basis.

To grow breadth and depth of keyword usage on the sites, our team filled in “Alt Tag” descriptions for images. We looked back at periods where web traffic sharply declined or increased, pinpointing dates when the search algorithm changed and caused these fluctuations. Since the overall quality of a business or association’s Wikipedia profile plays a strong role in search rankings, we combed through the client’s Wikipedia properties and elegantly filled them with high-volume, specific keywords. To draw a closer relationship between the pages across a large site, we created a highly-detailed internal linking strategy that mapped many high-volume keywords on interior pages to particularly relevant interior pages in other areas of the site.

We extended our recommendations to the client’s properties in other countries, identifying ebbs and flows in traffic to these other sites and noting vital changes that should be made to site structures. We also compiled a set of recommendations for the client to manipulate the current mobile design without making major changes so that mobile and tablet users could have a more pleasant user experience.

The Outcome

The time and effort spent by Bluetext to optimize search for this association’s web properties made a drastic impact. Total traffic to the largest site in early June was 13X larger than original average traffic to the site. This same domain saw 12X the number of users visiting the site by early June, alongside a 500% growth in the number of users visiting the property on mobile and tablet devices since project inception. User engagement with website content also increased through project conclusion, with users visiting each page for 20 seconds longer than before. This association is now getting the website CTRs that it deserves with a design that remains almost entirely untouched.

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

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

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

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

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

When it comes to where a brand should spend its video ad dollars, YouTube has long been the go-to destination. With more than 3 billion video views per day, content producers direct the majority of its efforts here – and unsurprisingly the advertiser budgets have followed.

But this presumption is being seriously tested by a video traffic explosion – chronicled in great detail by Fortune magazine writer Erin Griffith – underway at Facebook. Facebook users are watching 4 billion video streams a day, which is a 4x jump from just twelve months ago. Granted, Facebook counts a “view” as any video that plays for three seconds, which means that users scrolling down their feed and allowing a video to briefly auto play before moving on inflates the view total. Nonetheless, 4 billion is 4 billion.

Fortune’s Griffith goes into some of the reasons behind social network’s video success – which unsurprisingly includes efforts by engineers to adjust algorithms that make it not only easier to watch videos, but also to share them. While Griffith’s focus is on how all of this impacts advertisers and where they spend their money, Facebook’s rapidly growing impact with video presents a conundrum for B2B and B2G brands and the public relations/marketing firms that represent them.

In evaluating the major social networks and where to focus resources, investment and, most importantly, content, Facebook typically comes up last for firms seeking to influencer decision makers across government and businesses. Sure, everyone is on Facebook, so it goes, but the working assumption is that the largest social network is where you go to view new pics of the grandkids or post updates from the beach – not to consume B2B/B2G focused content.

Griffith’s article supports as much when it comes to videos, with the author pointing out that, “…Facebook’s biggest advantage over YouTube and other video providers may be boredom.” Griffith suggests someone lands on a YouTube video either because they are searching directly for it or a related topic, or a video being shared is ultimately sourced on that site. With Facebook, most of the time we are watching videos because we are killing time on the site and it is just another thing to do.

Because Bluetext works with so many B2G and B2B firms, social media strategy comes up quite a bit. Often, recommendations lean towards LinkedIn, Twitter and YouTube depending on the ultimate goal and category of decision makers the client is trying to reach. Even with B2B and B2G clients for whom we are not supporting social media, Facebook is usually trailing the pack in their social efforts.

But the fact is that Facebook drives one-quarter of all web traffic, and its video traffic explosion demands B2B and B2G firms reevaluate how best to use the site with video content. Is it ideal for placing corporate marketing, event or deeply technical product and service videos? No, absolutely not. But are there times when Facebook, rather than YouTube, should be ground zero for launching a more consumable brand humor video or engaging content that can be easily viewed – and shared – across Facebook and then on to other destinations? 4 billion video streams a day say yes, and going forward B2B and B2G brands may be saying yes as well.

AddThis GM Charlie Reverte calls 2015 the year of the personal web. He talks with Bluetext’s Buzz Lounge about the move to personalized web sites across the internet, making the web personal for individuals while generating more revenues for web sites.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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