It was a great privilege and honor to serve on the Executive Committee for Northern Virginia’s Step Out: Walk to Stop Diabetes Campaign in 2014. As leaders in our community, you know that each day, different storms can become a threat. One storm that is a growing threat is the growing number of people being diagnosed with diabetes, but one that still remains invisible to those not exposed to the suffering it can cause to our families – especially our children.

 

At the 2014 Northern Virginia Step Out: Walk to Stop Diabetes, thousands of volunteers, sponsors and supporters came together for one goal – to STOP DIABETES! It was inspirational to see so many people join the movement and spread awareness.

 

As we head into the holiday season, let’s continue to be inspired by the power we have a a community to stop this horrible disease.

Who doesn’t like inbound leads? The fruit of your content marketing labor is finally coming to bear. You sit back and the emails and calls are flying in. It is the ultimate feeling for a marketer across any industry.

Before you run to the bank, however, it is smart to ask if your website and diready to handle the leads? At Bluetext, we believe that focusing on your net is often as important as your bait.

Websites need to be structured a specific way to effectively handle inbound leads. Inbound marketing is a science and that science needs to be applied to your entire website and landing page eco-system.

Here are 10 ways to critique your site:

1. This is not your Father’s responsive website…

Does your website have iWatch and other wearables in the responsive requirements as your site evolves? The form factor requirements are changing so fast that you must make sure your site is built in a responsive manner to be able to scale.

2. Is your net sticky?

Have you looked at your retention analytics lately? How are people navigating your site? Have you buried the most impactful content elements?

3. ABC – Always be closing?

It is all about clear and easy conversion throughout the entire site. Unless prompted, most visitors will browse and then run for the hills. Make sure that the entire site, including the homepage and all interior pages, are optimized for lead capture and conversion? Does every blog post end with an “ask”? Are you asking visitors to download something premium and relevant? Are you suggesting that they follow the author or the company brand? You have to be very aggressive and show a full commitment to this opt-in.

4. Have you done an SEO audit of your website in the last year?

Remember, algorithms change. Rules change. Bing continues its growth. YouTube is more important than ever as the #3 search engine. Make sure to continuously review your keywords to capture both short and long tail opportunities.

5. What are you doing to differentiate your user experiences to drive engagement with your brand online?

Are you presenting content in new and unique ways? We have done some recent work with CSC (www.csc.com/dbc) and McAfee (www.bluetext.com/futureagency.com) to help them create virtual briefing centers to get their content out virtually to create very powerful experiences.

6. Do you have a comprehensive landing page ecosystem to address all of your organizational KPIs?

Make sure to think through all of your metrics and have a clear, concise offer to address all of them.

7. Are you updating your programmatic digital advertising buys with retargeting and other social media buying as they are evolving?

CRM and adtech are getting more close than ever. It is important to ensure that they are in synch to make sure your campaigns work as hard as they can.

8. Hide the Keywords

Get the keywords out of your meta header. Google doesn’t value them and you are sharing your seo strategy with your competitors.

9. Reverse the IP and Get Smart About Your Traffic

Many off the shelf tools can help you understand your traffic with reverse IP matching technology to let you know which businesses are reviewing your site. This is great information to share with the sales team.

10. Commit to video and interactive content

The world is changing. Think about how people are consuming data. Make sure that you are modernizing your content and delivering it in new and unique ways.

Messaging seems more like a PR term than a marketing creed, but in reality key messages are perhaps the most important element of every marketing campaign. While paring down thoughts, opinions and aspirations to effective messages can be a daunting task, it is often the first step in launching a new campaign. It informs not just the way you talk about your brand, but also its look and feel and the direction of the creative. It conveys the themes that you are driving into the market.

Solid messaging is integral to many campaign assets, including campaign microsites and landing pages. It often drives blog posts from top executives as well as infographics. And it can be a key element in any organization’s search strategy.

Every new campaign should begin with a process that is designed to identify the right messaging, and—in the cases where that messaging doesn’t exist or needs refinement—develop fresh messaging. Here are seven tips for developing the best messaging to insure that your campaigns will be heard by the right audience:

1. Don’t reinvent the wheel, or yourselves. Begin with a thorough review of existing messaging to see if that is still resonating and hitting the intended mark. If there are new products or services, see if the existing messaging applies, or if more likely you will need some new directions.
2. See what your competitors are up to. Conduct a thorough competitive analysis as to how they are positioning themselves in the market through their web site, digital campaigns, and advertising. If you have recent market research, that should be part of the review. If not, additional research might be a good idea if time and budget permit.
3. Talk to a wide range of stakeholders. Initiate a series of in-depth interviews with key executives, members of the sales and marketing teams, and external stakeholders that range from customers to channel partners to board members. These interviews should be structured with similar lines of questions in order to get results that can be compared and synthesized. But also make sure to let these interviews have some free flow of discussion to go into new directions and ideas for the brand.
4. Get buy-in from the team. Everyone will have an opinion on new messaging. It’s better to have that aired before implementing it. One of the best ways to reach consensus and maintain support is through a Message Summit, a closed door meeting with cell phones and laptops offs that includes the marketing team and key executives. The purpose of this meeting is to explore in-depth what you’ve learned, what you’re hearing and your initial thoughts, and to begin to gain perspectives how best to present the brand in the market. What is most important in the Summit is obtaining executive buy-in to the direction that you want to go. The goal is to reach consensus, not necessarily on the exact wording of the key messages, but on the tone and direction.
5. Put it on paper. Follow up with a Message Guide to allow the team to respond to the proposed wording from the Message Summit.
6. Follow the three “C”s. The best messages need to be Clear, Concise and Compelling:
   1. Clear is not as simple at it might look. There’s a great video of a 60 Minutes profile of Razorfish, the web enablement company. The reporter repeatedly asks the two Razorfish founders what the company does, and they are absolutely unable to answer the question without slipping into meaningless jargon. The frustrated reporter finally tries to explain himself what the company does–hardly an effective way of talking about your band. A clear message will remove uncertainty and insure that your target audience recognizes what you are trying to tell them.
   2. Concise is equally important. Brevity is important not just for campaign headlines, but also as the message plays out across a wide variety of collateral, including ads, direct mail and social media. In most cases, there just won’t be the space or the attention span to have a long message.
   3. Insuring that the message is Compelling may be the most difficult challenge, but it deserves the most attention. It is easy to have a message that might be an accurate portrayal of your products or solutions but that doesn’t convey the sense of value that you bring to market. A compelling message will resonate with key target audiences and entice them to want to learn more, to click on a button and download a piece of premium content, and ultimately to enter into the sales funnel.
   4. Align to your SEO. The right keywords based on search engine analytics can give a big lift to your search results. Make sure those terms are part of the your messaging, and use them strategically across your digital platforms. This can boost your rankings dramatically is best practices are followed.

The final messages can be leveraged for headlines and text throughout the marketing assets, and can jump-start the creative process of the right look and feel of the brand. They will give you the right tone to inform only the color palette and style but also the types of images that might be selected. It can extend to a refresh of the logo itself.

Messaging is too important to take casually or be an after-thought. A regular review of the messaging should be an integral part of every brand’s marketing programs.

If you canvas the most respected marketing decision makers, each can no doubt share examples of bold, innovative marketing programs that did not work out. But the enemy of marketing innovation isn’t failure, its repetition; repeating the same approach again and again – even if the results do not meet expectations. As you sit down to create your marketing plan for 2015 and evaluate what worked and what came up short this year, here are six ideas to consider if you are not driving the amount of visibility, buzz and sales that you expect.

 

1. Throw out the Baby with the Bathwater. Sometimes you need to cut your losses. A poorly designed website, a poorly received message, or a poorly produced video which cost a lot of money may be hindering your ability to market your company and get your message out. Be honest about what is working and be prepared to scrap that campaign which you spent a lot of money on.
2. Put an influential name or face to your product or company. This is a strategy that has been written about extensively with clear results. Our clients have contracted with celebrities including Lewis Black, Joe Torre, and Frank Abagnale to put a face to their brand. The celebrity can be leveraged for a variety of activities, including social media, customer events, and immediate recognition across ads, etc. Please reference this blog post for more on this tactic – http://bluetext.com/celebrity/.
3. Sometimes the Local is the Way to Go. The content marketing train is zooming across corporate America, much to the displeasure of the PR budget. It is not the only way to get to your destination however. PR has a very important place within every marketing budget. While many consider it to be an old school tactic, the validation you can receive from a well-placed story about your product or service can be worth 10x the investment if done right. My partner Brian Lustig will be writing about this in a blog post next week.
4. Go Out on a Limb with a Sponsorship. How many times have you said that my company does not have the budget to do a major sponsorship? Take a step back to look at the number of events you have sponsored with a lame table top to appease a sales representative where no viable leads came out of it. Those costs add up. Take that money and do sponsored Tweets, webinars or branded social properties, or sponsor a well-known organization that will create some buzz for your company. This can be measured in many ways and is often used to put a company, product or service on the map.
5. Zig When your Market is Zagging. The best marketers are known for executing bold campaigns to stand out in crowded markets. How bold are you willing to go? Are you marketing to save your job or get your next one? I was in a pitch the other day where the CEO of a start-up SaaS company talked about taking on an entire industry.
6. Go Mobile First. Anyone that tells you that you don’t need to worry about mobile visitors and site traffic has ocean front property in South Florida to sell you. Sure, we can all look at the analytics and it is true that data trumps opinion, but mobile is only getting more popular and the user experience should be well designed for a mobile world. Responsive design is clearly the direction that the industry is headed and one that you must deploy to stay relevant for the long term.

 

Are you ready to get started? Are you ready to break new ground with your marketing program? Don’t look now but unless your foot is on the pedal then your competitors will leave you in the rear view mirror…and that is not a place that most marketers want to be.

 

 

Today’s digital landscape and the unification of social, mobile, and the web into a cross-channel experience are fundamentally changing the ways our portfolio of brands engages with its customers.  This new paradigm has led to an evolution of user experience (UX) into Customer Experience (CX), influencing how we approach creating digital experiences that drive business impact for our clients.

One of the implications of CX is the increased role of content management systems (CMS) in delivering and managing customer experiences across channels. In the not-too-recent past, companies implemented CMS platforms to help them manage and maintain website content, generating operational efficiencies and gaining greater control over their web properties.  The new focus on CX requires that CMS must become an enabler in helping clients go to market differently and transform the way they deliver products and services.

Here are three examples of the new demands CX is placing on content management technologies:

Marketing Automation

The most effective demand generation processes are those where marketers respond individually to each prospect in the buying process. But given the volume of marketing campaigns, that’s not practical. Marketing automation gives companies the ability to manage their interactions with customers and deliver the right messages at the right times over the right channels.

Marketing automation software like Eloqua and Marketo are established solutions with proven performance. However, best-of-breed CMS need to go beyond simply enabling easy integration with current marketing automation applications and build automated targeting, testing, and analytics tools right into the content workflow.

Personalization

Digital personalization serves users content and even unique experiences based on their profile and behaviors.  Delivering a more relevant, or personalized, experience results in higher user engagement and enables a website to more effectively drive key business outcomes.

Personalization takes one of two forms, explicit and implicit. Explicit personalization is straightforward. Data is gathered when the user performs an action, such as filling out a form. Content can then be customized based on what the data tells us about the user.

Implicit personalization employs passive tools like cookies to gather data about users from behavior such as page views, searches, and location.

Retailers like Amazon employ complex and extremely granular personalization that requires a significant investment in resources. However, best-of-breed CMS technologies will need to enable a personalized experience to be created with very basic user information.  This means that organizations can implement a personalization strategy without the massive investment.

Multi-site

Many marketing organizations today face the need to deliver an increasing number of stand-alone and unique digital experiences for marketing campaigns, product launches, or new brands.  Whether it’s a landing page, microsite, or more complex website, they frequently have new content, a unique look-and-feel, and an accelerat ed time-to-market.

CMS platforms will need to make the process of delivering large numbers of unique web experiences repeatable and scalable, taking days instead of weeks and months.  Marketers are able to maintain high brand consistency while more effectively react to market opportunities.

When reviewing the current CMS landscape, products like Adobe CQ and Sitecore clearly stand out from the pack in terms of CX enablement. Another  entry worth noting is Drupal.

Beginning as a flexible open-source platform for on-line communities, Drupal has evolved into a truly enterprise CMS platform, capable of delivering content-driven brand engagement and sales enablement.  As a pure CMS, Drupal is powerful, yet user-friendly, with a streamlined development, admin, and publishing processes that helps accelerate a site’s time-to-market.

In the past, custom modules and expert code development could enable Drupal to deliver a degree of marketing automation, personalization, and multi-site capabilities.  Acquia, the commercial open source software company that provides products and technical support for Drupal, then introduced two products that brought Drupal to the next level.

Acquia Lift –an interoperable platform that delivers testing, targeting, and analytics capabilities to simplify the delivery of personalized digital experiences. By mining and interpreting data, it automates contextual relevance to create a one-on-one conversation with users.

Acquia Site Factory –a turnkey solution that reduces the complexity of and time necessary to deploy one site or hundreds of sites. Intended for non-technical users, Site Factory allows for customized design and content, without the need for back-end Drupal development.

For companies currently on Drupal or who prefer open-source technologies, Drupal is a powerful and viable solution for customer experience management.

Decisions around digital technologies come with an investment and companies have to weigh a number of factors such as existing infrastructure, total cost of ownership, and business requirements.  The emergence of CX means that ROI and revenue performance management are now starting to become part of the decision-making process.  Whether you’re considering replacing your current CMS or upgrading your current system, be sure to make customer experience enablement a “must have” and a high priority requirement.

 

Are you planning to integrate or upgrade your content marketing into your online marketing strategy? Not sure where to begin? Here is a basic rundown of how to create an effective content marketing strategy.

 

1. Establish Your Conceptual Target

An effective content marketing strategy must begin with this first critical step. The goal is typically pursuing new customer opportunities while preserving your core customer base. Understanding who they are, where their interests lie and how to get them to take action and engage with your brand is key to developing your content strategy.

2. Don’t be a One Hit Wonder

As opposed to advertising – which is driven by “The Big Idea” – to stay fresh and engaging, your content marketing strategy needs to offer a variety of premium content on a number of contextually relevant topics When content marketing teams are under resourced, they tend to gravitate back to the big idea and get boxed into a an approach that’s not scalable long term.

 

3. Use an Editorial Approach

Too many content marketing programs fail in the planning phases of the program because the a long term content strategy has not been fully thought out – so the content being developed using a shoot from the hip approach tends to be more episodic than strategic. The most effective way to avoid failure is to identify specific themes for your content strategy that align with the cyclical business or personal needs of your target audience

 

4. Be Contextually Relevant

The content you develop must be interesting, engaging and above all else, relevant. Your conceptual target should be able to quickly connect the dots between his challenges and the capabilities you can offer to overcome them – the more contextually relevant your content is to them the easier they will be able to make that connection

 

5. Process Driven Approach

Since content marketing is still a relatively new approach, a lot of companies are not investing adequate resources or the defined process that planning, managing and publishing an adequate amount content requires. Building a solid content marketing workflow process, and investing in the necessary resources to implement it – whether internal or external – are critical to your success.

6. Collaboration is Key

As with any emerging marketing channel – and social media is a good example of this -there is an internal struggle over which department actually “owns” it. Until that’s figured out, many companies will make it a shared responsibility between their PR, Advertising and Creative departments – passing the content baton from one silo to the next with no clear strategy. If you must borrow the resources, make sure there is a coordinated effort to collaborate as a team on the themes, goals and structure of your content marketing program.

7. Cadence and Consistency

When creating your content strategy, be sure to decide on the frequency of your content marketing so that once your audience is engaged, they stay engaged. Having a consistent and predictable flow of content that your customer can rely on is critical to establishing brand credibility.

8. Use the Right Channels

Instead of hoping your audience stumbles upon you, be sure to publish your content where they already are – in their own environment where they will be more willing to engage. Consider promoting your content on broader social sites like Twitter can make it go viral. If the content is what readers are looking for, they won’t hesitate to share – and that’s the holy grail of content marketing.

9. Leverage SEO

A solid content marketing strategy geared toward the right audience is worthless if it doesn’t reach that audience one way or the other. One of the most effective ways to leverage that content is to employ a strong SEO strategy to incorporate keywords that your customers are using to search for the solutions you are ultimately trying to sell to them

 

Whether it is a 12-year-old buying a new basketball shoe, a college student looking for a new smartphone, or an IT manager evaluating which cloud CRM tool to purchase on behalf of the company, there is no denying that each can be influenced in the buying decision. Price, design, and features all play a huge part, but consumer and business brands have also recognized, going back centuries, that the right celebrity endorsement can have a disproportionate impact on the buying decision of a large number of individuals.

 

For businesses considering the use of celebrity spokespeople for their brands, it is not as simple as forking over a sack of money to someone famous and expecting a flood of new product/service orders to follow. Success requires a mix of the right chemistry, strategy, and execution.

A brand might turn to a celebrity for a variety of reasons ranging from inspiration to desperation. In the latter category, one might look to when BlackBerry appointed singer-songwriter Alicia Keys “Global Creative Director” a couple of years back. BlackBerry was suffering from a brand perception as a functional device lacking innovation and hoped that Keys, a genuine BlackBerry user/fan, could inject creativity into branding efforts.

While opinions differ on how much a celebrity can impact sales, research published in Marketing Science in the March/April 2013 issue found that the right celebrity endorser could in fact boost sales. Research authors found that from 2000 to 2010, the Nike golf ball division secured an additional profit of $103 million via the acquisition of $9.9 million in sales from Tiger Woods’ endorsement. Through additional sales generated when Woods topped the rankings, Nike recovered 57 percent of the $181 million the company paid Woods between 2000 and 2010 – and that was on just U.S. golf ball sales alone.

Celebrity endorsements can and often do work. To maximize the use of celebrities for brand marketing campaigns, there are a few considerations and strategies to keep in mind:

Analyze the celebrity’s social reach and audience

When partnering with a celebrity for a marketing campaign, your brand should conduct a thorough analysis of the celebrity’s social channels (Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, etc.). This analysis must extend beyond simply concluding the celebrity has a large number of followers, and take into account several questions:

• Is the celebrity willing to reach out to his/her followers as part of this campaign? If so, how often?
• Does the general profile of the celebrity’s social audience align with the product or service your brand offers?
• How has the celebrity’s audience reacted in the past to brand endorsements? Receptive? Hostile? Skeptical?
• What is the tone of the celebrity’s past social media communications, and does this tone pose risks based on the current brand mission?

If your brand believes the celebrity’s social media presence needs to play a significant role in the success of the campaign, it is critical to answer these questions before any paid partnership is struck.

Leverage celebrities passionate about your brand

It goes without saying that the overwhelming majority of celebrity endorsements are transactional in nature. In other words, a brand offers to pay a celebrity a certain fee to serve as spokesperson, and the celebrity agrees to that price. Brands should be tuned into how celebrities talk about their brand – whether it is a particular smartphone, food item, airline, or even a conference calling service – and if it finds celebrities organically speaking positively about the brand in a passionate way, a more genuine marketing opportunity is created. It is hard to artificially create “celebrity chemistry” with a brand and/or its product, so when that already exists, audiences will recognize it and the impact can be more tangible.

Don’t fear “odd couple” pairing of brand and celebrity

Chuck Norris’ endorsement of The Total Gym makes sense. So does, for example, a supermodel hawking a skin care product or an NBA player endorsing Gatorade. These endorsements follow a logical path of how we perceive the celebrity’s persona to be (even if that persona is purely based on fictional characters they play) and the brand, product or service.

But sometimes the celebrity marketing campaigns that stand out are the ones where the celebrity’s persona clashes in a humorous or dynamic way with the brand. A few years back, our team worked on a marketing campaign for Identity Guard that leveraged the in your face, brutally honest, comedian Lewis Black. On the surface, having a comedian film a series of Web videos for an identity theft protection and credit monitoring service might seem an odd fit, but it worked because at the time LifeLock was marketing with their CEO spokesperson daring thieves to steal his identity. We took the opposite tact and used Lewis Black’s personality to say NONE OF YOUR D*MN BUSINESS (NOYDB). Who better to say NOYDB than loud comedian Lewis Black?

Don’t get hung up with A-List celebrities and professional athletes

Brands often fear that only A-List celebrities can move the sales needle, but the fact is that these endorsement deals are very expensive and there is no such thing as a sure thing when it comes to the economic impact of a celebrity endorsement. A-List celebrities can come with an entourage of rules, handlers, skepticism and endorsement “baggage,” and the irony is that some celebrities are so over-exposed that when we see them endorsing a product it doesn’t have the desired impact.

Find spokespeople

who embody brand philosophy

Brands often find it challenging to attach a set of values to what is in effect a faceless corporate entity. In these cases, it can be more effective to try and find an individual whose career and experience embodies that philosophy. This approach was used for an advertising campaign, Game Changer, on behalf of leading accounting firm CohnReznick (a Bluetext client). Torre was a strong choice to serve as CohnReznick’s national spokesperson because, as the firm stated, “Joe Torre exemplifies the same characteristics that CohnReznick strives for every day in serving our clients – excellence, integrity, dedication, proven performance, and results-driven leadership.”

In summary, for businesses considering the use of celebrity spokespeople, success requires a mix of the right chemistry, strategy and execution.

Last week we launched a new digital experience for Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business. The new website, msb.georgetown.edu, gives alumni, global executives, prospective students, master’s candidates, faculty and staff a world-class digital experience. It is specifically designed to show how the McDonough School of Business helps its students succeed in their goals and the institution move up in the highly competitive business school rankings.

Site launches are always an exciting time for the Bluetext team, and McDonough was no different. It’s opening night, the curtain is raised, and the target audience will determine if the strategy, creativity, discipline and hard work have paid off. Shortly after the site launch, we gathered the team to review the project, discuss lessons learned, and identify ways to apply those to current and future projects.

 

The session was also an opportunity to further refine our core approach to innovative digital experiences to Higher Education as a market. Here are some of the key take-ways:

• Build a strong and sophisticated brand connection. Clean, bold, and straightforward design lets the institution’s brand speak for itself. The design, imagery, headlines and copy should convey confidence. Videos, infographics and interactive functionality can showcase the value proposition and the work of faculty and students.
• Address Return-On-Investment up-front. Students are savvier than ever. They want to understand the value proposition and why the degree at any particular institution is worth the cost. Address the question up-front in a way that students understand, speaking to their concerns and goals.

• Show the “bigger picture.” How will the education experience help students make an impact or shape their world in a positive way? Talk about how their education correlates to what’s relevant today. Depending on the discipline, it could be entrepreneurism, clean energy research, transforming the public education system, or even global citizenship.
• Engagement is essential, just like in the real world. It’s about social engagement and community. Smart use of social tools will put a face on the educational product, faculty and institution.

• Simplify. Put phone numbers and contact information at their fingertips. Clearly describe the admissions process and what they need to know to get started.
• Deliver a coherent digital experience across all touchpoints. Digital audiences are more connected, more empowered, and more distracted than ever before. They are constantly interacting with one or more devices that place data from websites, apps, and social media at their fingertips. Responsive design can give a consistent brand experience across multiple devices. What’s also important, but often neglected, is making sure that content is structured in a way that makes it reusable across desktops, laptops, mobile devices, social media and digital campaigns.

These core principles provide a solid foundation for creating a successful digital experience that drives ROI for any institution. Today, the user experience is about how a broad range of audiences interact with the brand and product across multiple contexts. That requires thinking of the .edu presence as a digital platform, not simply a “website,” to drive enlistment, revenue, and engagement goals.

This is certainly not news, but the amount of information available to target customers continues to grow by the day. Researching issues that might seem obscure and unique means sorting through dozens if not hundreds of options, regardless of how detailed or long-tale the search. The amount of information can be overwhelming, and quickly finding the best answers is becoming a more difficult challenge. This is especially true on the Internet, where chaos and complexity reign. The dilemma is that buyers don’t want to sort through the noise; they want simple choices to complex problems.

Brand simplification is one of the strategies that Bluetext is recommending to our clients as a way to reach customers with a message that resonates amongst the clutter. Paring down the brand to its core values can play across its presentation, its key messages, and even its logo. This is the essence of brand simplification, and it can be an effective approach when refreshing a brand.

People want choices; they just don’t want too many choices. The same is true when it comes to research on the Internet. They enter long-tale searches because short phrases offer too many options. Yet when they visit your site, are they quickly seeing the information that they want and need to engage with your brand, or are they confused about what you are stand for, what you are offering and how you’re different than your competitors?

For more established brands, simplifying the brand presentation to the market can convey both brand value and confidence in their relationship with their customers and a broader audience. We can see how this has played out with logos from Starbucks, Microsoft, and even Pepsi. In each case, the logos have evolved dramatically over time (and in the case of Pepsi, over a long period of time), beginning with a busier mark and moving to a more simplified design that retains many but not all of the original elements.

From logo to messaging to the larger brand presentation, this was the recent challenge facing the Altimeter Group, a successful research, analyst and consulting firm in the digital market based in Silicon Valley. It publishes a wide range of cutting-edge analyses on social media, native advertising and other trends that can help companies better engage consumers, and its team of experts has become a go-to resource for reporters and executives alike. When Altimeter Group wanted to update its brand, it turned to Bluetext. Bluetext designed a new, simplified approach, including how it presents its name, its image and all of its digital and physical assets.

We began with the simple premise that a brand simplification would help Altimeter deliver its core value and message more directly and effectively, and began with a recommendation to adopt Altimeter as a single word. The logo was streamlined with a contemporary design, and the color pallet and typefaces were revised to match.

A significant part of the brand refresh was a new website that engages visitors and provides information in a simplified and more direct approach. Instead of a multitude of confusing navigation options, Bluetext’s design offer three content paths – Our Ideas, Work With Us, and About Us. This approach allows visitors to quickly find the research they are looking for, how to engage Altimeter, and background on its team of experts without having to click through layers of pages. The content is highly search optimized.

Core to this approach is simplification of the way Altimeter tells its brand story, its new look and feel, and the way it engages its audience. When coming to the Altimeter site or seeing its new collateral and reports, there is no question about the story it wants to tell. There are still many content options for visitors to the new website, ranging from a broad selection of research to blog posts and articles from a variety of its experts. The difference is that the process to reach those options is simplified. The Altimeter team is easily found, navigation is reduced to its core elements, and messages are clear and direct. The new brand leverages the position that Altimeter has established, and will help take Altimeter to the next level in the market.

www.altimetergroup.com