The Artful Dodger may be a beloved character, but feeling as if you’ve had your professional pocket picked isn’t quite as endearing. The numbers don’t lie. Chief Marketing Officers are having their pockets picked. They are being sold marketing activities that are little more than a bill of goods. The world of marketing spend is changing and you need to change with it.
The Bluetext team is regularly talking with CMOs at organizations ranging from mid-sized and emerging companies to some of the world’s largest global enterprises. They all struggle with how to allocate their budgets to most effectively achieve their marketing goals, including lead generation, thought leadership, sales enablement and brand awareness. CMOs who don’t analyze what is working and what is not fall victim to CMO Pickpockets, wasting money with no return for the investment. Here are just a few of ways that slippery fingers are reaching for their corporate wallets:
- The promise of in-your-face on-line banner ads is that they can’t be ignored. Yet, the downside can be substantial. 84 percent of 25-to-34-year-olds have left a favorite website because of intrusive or irrelevant banners ads.
- In a surprisingly large amount of cases, on-line ads are lost in the noise. 31 percent of ad impressions are delivered (and thus paid for) yet never seen by customers.
- Direct mail can be one of the most costly outreach tactics. Yet 44 percent is never opened.
- The only sure-fire broadcast ads that viewers don’t skip are those on sporting events (virtually all sports fans watch in real time). Non-sports represent a much different story. Overall, 86 percent of people skip television ads.
- Facebook’s new algorithm makes it very difficult for businesses to reach their fans. In one recent test, a story with a link reached just 3 percent of those who had opted to “Like” the brand. Instead, companies who pay to be seen hit Facebook users even if those users haven’t enlisted as fans.
- While Americans are moving to mobile devices in droves, marketing professionals have yet to devote a significant share of their spending to mobile marketing. Consumers spend roughly 10 percent of their media time on mobile devices, but advertisers commit only one percent of the ad budgets there.
- Conversely, print publications get only about 7 percent of media users’ time, but advertisers spend 25 percent of their ad budgets on print.
These numbers show a large disconnect between how marketing budgets are allocated and how target customers spend their time and where they get information that informs their decisions. At Bluetext we know that there is no “one size fits all” solution. The marketing pie needs to be sliced very carefully to get the best results. We analyze campaigns and budgets against the habits of target audiences to make sure they map up closely and return that bang for the buck.
Sources:http://contently.com/blog/2012/05/25/the-benefits-of-inbound-vs-outbound-marketing-infographic/; http://paidcontent.org/2012/01/19/419-comscore-study-a-third-of-ad-impressions-are-never-seen/; http://www.forbes.com/sites/stevecooper/2012/11/30/dealing-with-facebooks-unfriendly-new-algorithm/; http://www.minnpost.com/business/2013/02/goin-mobile-cloud-based-lifestyle-moving-fast
WASHINGTON – January 30, 2013 – Bluetext, one of the nation’s fastest growing digital marketing, branding, and strategic communications firms, today announced that it has been chosen by The Washington Times to rethink and redesign the media property’s digital platform.
The Washington Times, which recently celebrated its 30th anniversary as an alternative voice in the nation’s capital, has earned a reputation as one of the premier sources of news and commentary for U.S. conservatives. Since its founding, The Times’ award-winning political, social, national security and intelligence reporting, along with insightful editorial and opinion pages, have attracted growing national and international audiences online. As part of its transition to a Digital First news Compatibility horoscope concedes the possibility of romance, but states that long lasting relations are not quite probable. orientation, The Washington Times has embarked on a top-to-bottom reorganization to provide its audience with more timely and comprehensive information, reporting, and perspective on the major stories of the day.
“We chose Bluetext not only for its experience with some of the largest national media brands including Adobe and Google, but also because of its creativity and insight on how to appeal to our audience with the news and information they are looking for,” said John Martin, Chief Operating Officer for The Washington Times. “Bluetext brings us both a great user experience and fresh ideas on growing our revenue opportunities.”
“We are excited to work with The Washington Times to challenge national market leaders as the most innovative media property covering the news and issues coming out of Washington,” said Jason Siegel, Creative Director for Bluetext.
Well, you’ve survived the Mayan Apocalypse, finished your last-minute holiday shopping (why shop if the world is ending?), and slept off the New Year’s Eve revelry. Today it’s back to work! What’s the first thing on your to-do list? Get smart on your digital marketing strategy!
Bluetext’s resident creative director and co-founding partner, Jason Siegel, has unveiled his 11 top digital marketing trends to watch in 2013. Take a look for a glimpse into the factors that will impact:
- Opportunities for cross-channel promotion
- Why your infographics aren’t getting the attention you think they deserve
- Maximizing paid online media
- Snackable content
- The evolution of live IP content
- How to best leverage geofencing
- And more!
We’re extremely excited for a big 2013 here at Bluetext! If you’d like to ask us any questions about these trends or how we can help with your digital marketing and strategic communications programs in the new year, please feel free to comment, contact us, or hit us up on Facebook and Twitter.
Google’s new Hummingbird search engine algorithm is sending shock waves throughout the digital marketing arena. What it means, and how marketers need to adjust their SEO thinking will be on the to-do list for the foreseeable future.
When Google released its latest changes this fall, it used a very clever strategy that took almost everyone involved in SEO by surprise. First, it ran the new algorithm for 30 days before telling anyone. No big announcement, no public launch, just a quiet change. Then it held a press conference to discuss what was quickly recognized as its most significant revision in more than a dozen years. And with a full 30 days’ worth of data under its belt, Google was able to say that the world had not ended by its revision. Not only did the industry feel no seismic disruptions, but by most accounts no one had even noticed.
Hummingbird is a massive change in the way in which the Google search engine returns search results, and it has major implications for the way that companies and organizations need to approach SEO.
First, a little search engine background. Search has always been a game of cat-and-mouse. The marketer’s goal is to use links, key words, and other tactics to ensure that their website comes up high during relevant searches. Google’s interest is in having the most relevant results that don’t favor a site just because it has tricked the search engine. So, for example, when inbound links were weighed heavily, tacticians could create “link farms” that gave the impression of links that weren’t real. When Google altered the algorithm to degrade unimportant links, new tricks were developed that included keyword stuffing, or the heavy use of searched terms throughout the site. Google responded by setting parameters on how many words could be used in a given paragraph. The back-and-forth continued.
Hummingbird marks a steep departure from this word-based game. It focuses on context and what are known as “long-tail” queries to deliver results that are more specific to the needs of an evolving Internet where mobile devices and voice commands are replacing simple word searches. Hummingbird is supposed to reflect that context when, to use an obvious example, we search for Chinese restaurants. What earlier search engines would deliver was a list of restaurants. But what we really want to learn is a good place to eat that is nearby. The intent of Hummingbird is to understand that context and deliver recommendations of good restaurants in our area. Remember that what is a “good” place to eat is a subjective notion and will become very important in how marketers will need to structure their SEO strategy going forward.
That context gets more difficult as people speak their questions rather than type. So for example, while a typed query might read, “nearby Chinese restaurant,” a spoken query might say “What’s the best place to get Chinese near my home.” Google needs to recognize the actual location of your home, understand that ‘place’ means you want a brick-and-mortar restaurant, and get that “Chinese” is a particular type of restaurant. Knowing all these meanings may help Google go beyond just finding pages with matching words.
Google has reoriented its search algorithm in three very important ways in Hummingbird, and two of those changes have to do with what it determines is “good.”
The first is that Google now rewards good content. That means that long, detailed and well-sourced articles are going to get better results than mere word mentions on a page. Do a search on “slavery” and you will find long articles from The New York Times as well as The Smithsonian magazine. Search for “best rain jackets” and you will get reviews from publications and “How to choose” articles from within the REI site, instead of links directly to items for sale.
The second is that Google is putting links to what it considers to be good content directly on the results page, and is including related articles and other information that it didn’t previously deliver. From a consumer’s point of view, this turns the search results page into a sort of encyclopedia with snippets of content pulled from others’ sites. From a marketers perspective, it could mean that viewers will see information from your site, but not need to click onto your site to get it. Skeptics have theorized that Google is actually trying to keep you on their page as long as possible in order to run more ads and realize more revenues. Whatever the motive, getting someone to leave the search page for your website is more challenging.
The third is that social media, and in particular Google+, will become a larger part of the search engine equation. Google’s goal is to tap into your network of friends to give you additional insight on your query. Go back to the question about a good nearby Chinese restaurant. If Google sees that friends within your Google+ circles like a particular restaurant, that might be included in the search results.
This is a lot to think about, and requires a different mindset when executing your SEO strategy. If this is starting to make your head spin, join the club. Much of what has been written about Hummingbird so far is difficult for anyone not steeped in algorithm technology to understand. So with that in mind…
This phrase widely attributed to Frederick R. Barnard, who published a piece commending the effectiveness of graphics in advertising with the title "One look is worth a thousand words", in Printer’s Ink, December 1921.
And while I am sure that ‘time’ was at a premium in 1921, its ‘attention’ that’s the new gold standard in today’s four screen world. And as a result, brand owners are turning to techniques that allow them to tell their story at a glance. Infographics , for example, help marketers make an immediate impact on their target audience using a much more progressive style of storytelling than traditional media can deliver.
Infographics are the graphic visual representations of information, data or knowledge…manifested in a clear, simple, effective…and often times very beautiful…way to present complex information quickly. And with our attention spans being dwindled down to the tweet, having customers spend few minutes longer…and more engaged with your brand…than an ad or a white paper, it sounds like Mr. Barnard knew what he was talking about.
Predicting the future is tough, especially on the web. After all, from Friendster to MySpace to Facebook to Twitter to Pinterest, the game keeps changing. Will infographics replace press releases as the dominant form of communicating brand vision? Will trade show floors be consumed by interactive experiences that bridge the online and offline experience? In this presentation, I highlight 9 marketing trends for 2012 that are as exciting as they are important. Add any I missed in the comments.
Arnold Schwartzenegger, Terry Sanford, John Ensign, what’s with all these guys? Don’t they know that in politics, you can’t get away with anything? But a significant question to ask is, “Does the Public Care?” I think we are going to find out, given the histories of many of the Republican candidates for president. Check out my appearance on CNN’s Piers Morgan discussing the implications of the recent scandals:.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_l0T_XkWV9Q
The Google +1 strategy will make the search optimization maze even more complicated. The +1 will be integrated into everything today’s progressive marketer needs to drive brand recall and market leadership through integrated digital marketing and communications programs.
You may be aware of the Open Graph Protocol introduced by Facebook. With the Open Graph Protocol, all the content in the web, websites and the web pages are turned into the graph objects (if the concerned websites have decided to embrace Open Graph Protocol). What that means is that every time you go to a website or a web page and press the like button, you associate your profile with the graph object. The challenge with this approach for marketers is that it is creating a walled garden, which was one of AOL’s biggest downfalls.
Google’s open and transparent brand culture combined with the introduction of the +1 button will drive the kind of laser targeting marketers have been looking for with the Google platform beyond just targeting keywords. Gmail combined with +1 creates a social graph that is a tidal wave of dream data for marketers.
With +1 the search optimization game will drastically change because a site, blog, video, landing page, etc. will have search ranking impacted by collected +1s. Integrating the +1 everywhere in a brand’s marketing, and developing campaigns to drive your targeted audiences to “just +1 it” will be critical for driving this preferred brand position.
Open your eyes marketers. It’s time for a website audit to see where your +1s should go to be fully integrated throughout your digital media strategy. Bluetext can help you make these critical integrated marketing and communications decisions. Give us a shout if you need any assistance.
Those of us still paying attention saw that the court overseeing the long-running legal battle between Google and authors and publishers ruled against the proposed agreement last week (“Judge Rejects Google’s Deal to Digitize Books,” New York Times). Good luck figuring out what it means, and more importantly, why anyone should care. But it is important, if for no other reason than it is the result of a massive collision between an industry– book publishing–and the realities of the Internet and digital access to information. If you think you’ve seen this movie before, it does look like the fights over Napster and Internet file sharing that has decimated the music industry. Only in this case, the major players are attempting to find a legal solution.
I’ve been following this since the American Association of Publishers, together with the Author’s Guild, sued Google in 2005 to stop it from copying every book known to man–allegedly in violation of copyright protections. Google’s ambitious project was greeted enthusiastically by researchers, journalists, historians, people who read– just about everybody except those whose intellectual property might be given away for free over the Internet (remember those old companies in the recording industry, and what happened to them after the Internet got popular?) [Full Disclosure– Both the AAP and Google have been clients of mine over the years.]
But it is interesting, if perhaps not quite so important for most of us, to understand at least a little of what this is all about. For Google, it was co-founder Larry Page’s effort to digitize books and make them widely available, at least to search snippets, for students, researchers, historians, and anyone else wanting to experience the bulk of human knowledge leveraging the Internet. Sounds good enough, and that’s the easy part.
What gets complicated is sorting out the three broad categories of authors. Actually, two are easy, and one is difficult. The first is the volume of works through history where their copyright protections no longer apply– think Shakespeare, the Bible, The Iliad and The Odyssey, etc. Google (and anyone else) is entitled to go for those. The second is the volume of works under copyright protection where the author and publisher are known and active. Think of all the popular authors you know and love, Anne Tyler, Bill Bryson, Sarah Palin, fiction, non-fiction, and everything in-between. This is, of course, a little more complicated, but those authors (and their publishers) can actively protect their intellectual property, and do so by cutting their own deals for licensing rights, directly with Google or via organizations such as the Copyright Clearance Center [another former client]. Or they can choose not to license their works for internet distribution at all.
That leaves the third category, and that’s what the fight now is really all about. This group includes all of the works where copyright still applies, but where the holder of that copyright– the author or publisher, her relatives, spouse or estate– cannot be found. In this category are (mostly) out-of-print books and other publications, known as “orphan” works, and these are what the judge decided that the settlement was not adequately protecting. The terms of the settlement– worked out between Google, the publishers, and the authors–according to the judge, “would have granted Google a “de facto monopoly” and the right to profit from books without the permission of copyright owners.” He called that “unfair.”
What the settlement would essentially do for orphan works is set up an “opt out” process, where copyright owners could come forward and decide not to participate in the settlement (keeping their works out of Google’s search engines). What he believed is appropriate is an “opt-in” process, where works of copyright owners could be included if the copyright owners come forward and gave permission. The problem with that, of course, is that by definition these people can’t be easily found. That’s the dilemma.
So why do we care? Most of us probably don’t. We are not hot in pursuit of out-of-print obscure books that have been long-forgotten. Unless you are a researcher, historian, journalist, academic, blogger, hobbyist, or anyone who likes to know what there is to know about a subject. Then being able to include these works in your scholarly pursuits can open up long-lost information, and maybe even a gold-mine of data. The courts will ultimately decide what’s fair, but it is a good example of how the Internet is challenging all of our assumptions– for better for for worse.