Bluecadet Interactive

Each company culture is unique, posing its own problems and opportunities. We need to know our clients: their structure, ambitions, successes, and failures. This is the first step in designing them new products and services with impact.

Researching the competitive landscape raises valuable questions: Are competitors creating content and experiences for communities that our clients have overlooked? How have they articulated their message, and is it resonating? Put simply, we want to see what’s good, what’s bad, and find ways to add in more of the good and less of the bad.

The digital world has been re-architected around people, whose profiles, content, and network of connections increasingly travel with them from site-to-site, location-to-location. In this environment technology is important but an understanding of people is primary: what they want, what they expect, and how we can give them more.

Web 2.0 laid the foundation for an Internet where everyone is now a cultural curator and critic. This means if nobody is writing, talking, or tweeting about what a company is doing, it might as well not exist online. We plan for propagation, identifying the networks, bloggers, and media channels most likely to be receptive to our client’s message and best equipped to spread it.

If you want to keep users happy, give them space, give them control, and do not disturb them, especially not with bugs and glitches that can ruin the perception of an otherwise elegant and functional website. Our team blankets our client’s websites, creating testable scenarios that confirm all pages and content load as they should, forms are submitted, and the user experience is fluid and uninterrupted.

At Bluecadet we work hard to create systems that will be easy for our clients to learn and maintain. To make sure our clients are comfortable with the system, we create a training package for each project, based on each project's scope, technology, and the clients' technical level. A training package can include text, graphical and/or video tutorials, one-on-one training, or training meetings with groups of staff. For our Drupal installations we have developed a custom module that stores tutorials right inside the drupal admin where our clients will be working. If a client forgets how to do complete a task, they can quickly and easily access tutorial content without logging out or opening other programs.

At Bluecadet we work hard to create systems that will be easy for our clients to learn and maintain. To make sure our clients are comfortable with the system, we create a training package for each project, based on that project's scope, technology, and the clients' technical level. A training package can include text, graphical and/or video tutorials, one-on-one training, or training meetings with groups of staff. For our Drupal installations we have developed a custom module that stores tutorials right inside the drupal admin where our clients will be working. If a client forgets how to complete a task, they can quickly and easily access tutorial content without logging out or opening other programs.

As a message moves from person to person, community to community, its effectiveness increases, as does its impact. That’s why appearing on social platforms like Facebook and Twitter means very little if you don’t understand why people choose to share things on these sites. We study the online networks that clients seek to engage and craft the messages and products that will best resonate and lend themselves to propagation. But sometimes these communications are just more efficient permutations of methods that still work in the brick-and-mortar sense: enthusiasm for your work, open communication with your customers, and responsiveness to concerns.

Email marketing is all about getting permission: an audience decides that a business’ messaging is interesting and relevant enough that they grant access to their already-overflowing Inbox on a semi-regular basis. It’s important not to abuse this privilege. We help our clients capture emails and organize contact databases for integration into new systems. Most importantly, though, we strategize and design email campaigns that audiences actually want to read. In turn, this helps our clients gain trust and loyalty from their user base.

Measurement is relatively simple: we install analytics on every digital campaign we create, then we study what we see. You can learn a lot from user pathways. How do they find your site? How much time do they spend there? Why do users click on this image and not that one? At what point do they typically leave? Our studying goes way beyond “Page Views” because this information helps us design the type of experiences that audiences want to return to, again and again.

At its core, search engine marketing is about increasing a site’s visibility in results pages. This is enormously important, and we always strategize the keywords that clients should purchase in order to best reach their audience. However, as our clients glean more insights from their user base’s likes and preferences (hat tip: Facebook), increasingly we’ll be able to determine more contexts in which we can find traffic. This goes beyond direct search and requires innovative strategies to identify users who are interested but don't know it yet.