RSA Conference 2015 attendees convening on San Francisco April 20-24^th in search of scantily clad woman fronting vendor booths will be sorely disappointed, as RSA became the latest group to ban “booth babes.”

There are many factors at work in the push away from booth babes, with the most substantive being that they are undeniably demeaning. In evaluating this conference shift, I can’t help think of the recent Hooters TV ad with Jon Gruden, which infers that “Hooters Girls make your wings taste better and your beer colder.” I’m not sure that can be scientifically proven, but if it could then the chain is really onto something. Along those lines, my guess is that conferences and technology vendors would likely give greater pause to moving away from booth babes if the women in fact made their technology produces look cooler and work better.

But there is scant evidence that booth babes generate more leads and sales. In one such proof point, Spencer Chen, head of marketing and growth at Frontback, penned a guest post for TechCrunch that drew attention to their own split-testing (two different booths at a show, one with booth babes, one staffed with subject matter experts) at a major industry conference. The result: the booth babes generated a third of the foot traffic and less than half the leads.

Isolated results? Perhaps, but probably not. The attendees who are drawn to booth babes are probably the same ones who are more interested in stuffing their swag bag than they are evaluating vendor offerings. For me personally, I find vendor employees far more approachable and less intimidating than women in bikinis, but I wasn’t exactly High School prom king so maybe that’s just me. Either way, given how this booth tactic portrays women and lack of evidence the strategy even works, booth babes smack of an outdated relic that can undermine customer perception of the brand.

For vendors that have used booth babes and now must look at alternative approaches, it is a gut check to solidify common sense strategies such as staffing the booth with seasoned employees who can address prospect inquiries at a business and technical level; ensuring prospects and customers are alerted pre-show and are compelled to stop by your booth; aligning the show marketing team with public relations and social media efforts, etc.

I’ve attended several major technology conference shows with clients over the past year, and beyond the tried-and-true tactics referenced above, some of the more effective booth “pull” strategies I have seen include:

• Booths that adapt to time of day – Attending a recent conference, one vendor had a gourmet coffee station set up during the morning and early afternoon hours of the show, and then switched to a beer tap towards later afternoon. This ensured a steady flow of traffic throughout the day.
• Smartphone charging station – One vendor at a security conference set up a charging station, which not only became popular as the day progressed and batteries drained, but also led to a longer attendee booth visit and individuals had to wait for their phones to sufficiently charge.
• Lounges – Typically booth seating is reserved for customer/partner/press/analyst meetings. Offering a small set of seats or lounge if budget permits can provide attendees with something that is very hard to find on the show floor – a place to rest. Even better, provide demonstrations at designated times for those seated for further engagement.
• Raffles – Give attendees a reason to come back during show times and days that are typically low traffic. Whether it is through capturing information that can be used to email/text later in the Conference for a giveaway, this can bring back individuals during parts of the Conference that might otherwise see light traffic.

Shana Glenzer, VP of Social Marketing at SocialRadar, talks about how real time location-based marketing is disrupting the retail sector.

With crowded markets, how do you differentiate your brand from your competitors?

While you’re thinking about how to stand out from your competitors, download a poster from our Adult Coloring Book that you can bring to life, and let Bluetext solve your bigger marketing challenges.

Click here to download our free Adult Coloring Book!

In the massively competitive real estate industry, companies can gain serious strategic advantage from modernizing their marketing tactics to take advantage of new strategies and tools that are impacting how they communicate with customers and prospects.

Here are five trends we are seeing that could benefit commercial real estate companies as they look to up their marketing game in 2015.

1. Leverage your data
Data provides one of the biggest opportunities to show your strategic differentiation, and in today’s world it can be leveraged in so many visual ways. Buyers leverage it across so many of their key decisions. Embrace it, leverage it, and present it in new and unique ways so that the industry continues to drive toward more visualization…

2. Advertising Goes Digital
Paid digital advertising offers so many more unique and exciting ways to present your business compared to the traditional print methods used for so many years. You can present your assets in so many unique ways, micro target your buyers, and measure the impact to evaluate and evolve your visual message on a constant basis.

3. Social = Snackable
At Bluetext we have been preaching the snackable method for delivering content for a while. Few industries, due to the nature of the services, lend themselves better to this approach. Take your visuals and data and information and present it in bite sized chunks. Be consistent with templates and design for a professional look. Your customers and prospects will take notice.

4. Content. Content. Content
Create great content that can be delivered via reports and webinars, and use it to continuously push your message to your customers and prospects. No one realizes you are expert unless you let them know.

5. Customize Your Campaigns
You know who your targets are. You know what content is important to them. Don’t throw everything on the wall and hope it sticks. With new opportunities to micro target across channels like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn to deliver a message to a very targeted audience, now is the time to make sure you are maximizing every opportunity to take the message directly where your prospects are.

Those are just some of the trends that should be considered for 2015. If you are looking for a commercial real estate marketing firm, we are doing a lot of great content marketing for real estate and data visualizations to help marketers differentiate their brand in the competitive commercial real estate arena.

My colleagues and I at Bluetext have spent a fair amount of time developing brand and positioning strategies for dozens of new, disruptive and innovative brands…and more often than not are tasked with creating a new name for the company, the products or services they deliver, or both.

With 99.9 percent of the commonly-used words in the dictionary already taken among the close to 300 million registered domains from more than 125 million companies worldwide, how many great names could possibly be left?

We are currently in the process of branding and naming a highly disruptive technology product that is almost certain to quickly become one of the most visible B2B product brands in the US. We thought this might be a good time to define the five critical tenets of coming up with a great new name:

1. The most important aspect of a brand or product’s name is a crystallized vision statement and its supporting proof points. The name should deliver against your core objective for the business and central vision for the brand. Perhaps the most important question you need to answer is whether the brand should be company-focused or product-centric. In most cases it’s the former – but many well-known brands – like RIM’s Blackberry – have successfully incorporated a strategy that leads with the latter.

2. Before you begin the name-storming process, agree on what you want the attitude or voice of the brand to be – what emotion, feeling or idea do you want it to evoke when you see and hear it? Starbucks Chairman and CEO Howard Schultz summed it up best by saying, “A great brand raises the bar – it adds a greater sense of purpose to the experience, whether it’s the challenge to do your best in sports and fitness, or the affirmation that the cup of coffee you’re drinking really matters.”

3. Once you establish your vision, there is a set of ten key initial criteria that any name being considered must meet:

• Is it easy to remember?
• Is it easy to understand?
• Is it easy to pronounce?
• Is it easy to spell?
• Does it sound good when spoken?
• Does it look good when written?
• Is it unique?
• Is it trademarked?
• Is the domain name available?
• Are there any negative connotations with it?

4. Consider the five primary approaches to naming to determine which may best represent your central vision for the brand in a distinct and powerful way:

• Functional or Descriptive (Facebook, Instagram, UnderArmor )
• Derived from Color, Number, Shape or Word Root (Accenture, RedBull, Starbucks)
• Experiential based on Human Processes (Discover, United, Visa)
• Abstract or Evocative (Apple, Uber, Virgin)
• Invented (Google, Skype, Xfinity)

5. Quantity and Diversity Equals Quality – Naming is a matter of satisfying many competing criteria – and while we have seen cases where the first name our team comes up with ends up being the final one chosen – the chances of having a name just pop into your head that meets all of them is practically impossible. The most effective way to come up with a name is to think of lots of different ideas, carefully screen and choose, and repeat. One method that’s proven effective is having all names under consideration sorted into an A and B list and reconciling it every time a new one is introduced. It is interesting to see names held initially in high favor lose a little bit of their luster with each review, while others move up the ladder.

Once a name is chosen – it will be forever attached to the brand or product it is developed for – so continuous review is critical to ensure it will stand the test of time.

Need help with a branding or marketing challenge?  Lets talk!

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.

So those are the trends that we see as critical for real estate websites in 2016. Other ideas come to mind? Let us know your feedback. Looking for help? Contact us.

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.