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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Trade associations that represent the interests of and provide services for their members, be they large companies and organizations or individuals, all face the challenge of retaining their current members every year, growing their member base and reaching non-members who may be involved in the policy or business arenas. Competition among associations is fierce. Even without competitive pressures, it’s not always easy to convince individuals, organizations, small business or large corporations to devote resources and pay fees to an industry association year-after-year. They not only have to see the value, they need to feel part of the group and believe that it is looking out for their interests and providing them the services they want.

With industry associations as with other organizations, the website is the hub of activity for members and others who want to know about the group and its issues. Too often, the hub is ignored because it’s not viewed as central to the mission of the group. We think a strong website is essential, because that is the first place that any target audience is going to look for information. Bluetext has helped dozens of industry and membership organizations leverage their web presence to better recruit and retain their members, grow their revenues and maintain a close relationship with their constituents. Here are our top five tips:

Make It Engaging. Compelling website design and graphics are extremely important to reach those key audiences and to keep them interacting with the site. First impressions are important, and if the design doesn’t resonate, the visitor may leave quickly without engaging. A tired or out-of-date design signals that the association may not have the resources or digital savvy to have a modern and fresh look and feel. The design should also allow the visitor to find a wide range of information that spans their interests. Visitors come to association sites not to purchase a specific product, but to learn about a variety of topics, policy issues, and services that are relevant to them. Burying that information under layers of tabs may lose the target audience. A responsive design is a must, as more and more individuals are accessing the sites through mobile and tablet devices. We also recommend longer scrolls as visitors swipe to navigate the screen, rather than waiting for a new page to refresh as they move about the site.

Make It Personal. This should be fairly obvious, but it is surprising how many membership organizations and trade groups fail to highlight their own members. Why is this important? Because individuals need to be able to relate to the other people in the organization, to understand the types of people who are also part of the group and what value they get from their dues. Not only does this draw in new members, but it also serves to “humanize” the organization by putting faces and stories on what otherwise might seem like a faceless group.

We recommend setting up a section on the website that is full of videos and scrapbook-type photos of members and their families. For Forest America, which represents the nation’s private forest owners, we set up a section called “Caretakers” on its website, with profiles of dozens of landowners and their families who are part of the organization. To capture the footage, we take a video crew to their annual meetings and film them during breaks telling their stories—with other family members at their side. We add in photos that they send us and any other materials that help tell a personal story. The Caretakers section serves three important functions:
1) It shows visitors to the site, including policymakers and other organizations, the human faces that comprise the organization;
2) It helps with recruitment, as other private forest landowners see that they can be part of the team; and
3) It energizes current members, who love to see their colleagues and friends—and their own families—in a scrapbook setting.

Give Them The Tools They Need. Members are busy, so any shortcuts that make their lives easier are welcome. For the Society of Human Resource Management, a membership organization that includes thousands of human resources executives, retention was suffering due to the economic downturn. HR directors needed an easy way to convince their CEOs that membership in SHRM paid valuable dividends in training and resources for their annual fees. Rather than their typical request for approval, which might be shuffled to the bottom of the in-box, we built a tool for members that with just a little bit of information would create a compelling brief presentation to be send to their top executives. The deck, which explains the value of joining or renewing their membership, was far more likely to get the attention and approval of the boss. After launching the new tool, SHRM saw its renewals increase dramatically.

Make It Easy. Not only do members appreciate better tools, they need easy ways to take action and interact with the organization. Having persistent Calls-To-Action across every page of the site is essential to get the type of engagement that demonstrates value for the organization. In some cases, those Calls-To-Action can be as simple as “Join Now.” But for advocacy sites, having a sophisticated application built-in that can send a tailored email or letter to a Member of Congress or a regulatory agency serves many purposes.

First and foremost, individuals will contact policymakers only if it’s a relatively simple process. Most do not have the time to write a note to their Congressmen, nor do they know the issues well-enough. In addition, they might have no idea how to find the right policy-maker and obtain their email or physical address. We have installed a number of effective applications for associations that take the burden off of the member. By filling out, for example, their zip code, these tools can auto-populate a letter with the correct Member of Congress and address, and offer a “Mad Lib” draft where certain fields can easily be completed.

Build In Engagement. There are excellent new tools to engage visitors to the site. The first is obvious: Make social sharing persistent on every page and section of the site. Whenever a visitor sees anything they like—a position paper, an infographic, a video or a blog post—encourage them to push that around to their larger network.

Another tool that we have implemented in a number of sites is a Tweet-Builder—a tool that poses a topic and then invites the visit to complete a tweet, with recommended hashtags that can be included. That tweet then goes in real-time into the associations Twitter Stream.

The benefits of this tool are that it encourages the visitor to participate while helping to populate the social media arena. It also gives an incentive for that person to follow the group on social media, and to broadcast posts out to their larger community.

A third tool that we implemented is a polling functionality—that poses questions on the site in the form of polling questions, and then displays the results on that same page. Designed to resemble a Pinterest Page, polling tools invite participation and give the visitor a reason to keep coming back to the site. This is one that we built for a media company that publishes a variety of sportsmen-focused magazines.

Bloomberg BNA is one of top providers of legal information for attorneys, ranging from court decisions and legal filings to law review articles and news coverage that can affect a company or case. Bloomberg saw a huge opportunity to reach in-house counsel at companies and organizations where litigation, intellectual property, transactions and compliance are managed internally. It needed a dynamic campaign to reach those target attorneys with a good reason why they should add Bloomberg BNA tools to their arsenal.

Bluetext designed a campaign micro-site that begins with a live-action video with six individual personas, representing six use cases, so that target visitors could select the example that most closely matches their own responsibilities. Once the individual is selected, the visitor is taken to a page that provides in-depth details about that particular offering including examples and screen shots.

The site serves as its own segmentation filter, placing targets more directly into the best lead nurture channel. Calls-To-Action are prominent across every page to make it simple to download a whitepaper or infographic, sign up for a relevant newsletter, request a free trial or to learn more. The campaign included a direct mail piece with graphics and designs that match the site.

 

CITRIX TAKES ON ITS COMPETITION

When Citrix wanted to go after its competitor VMware head-on, Bluetext designed a gamificiation experience that pitted the two contenders against each other. The teaser video features the training regime of a real world champion fighter, and leads to an interactive rock-em, sock-em fighters game with the Citrix kid taking on Victor Machismo– and winning of course. Key messages fill the screen with every punch.

 

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!

 

 

 

Clients are asking us all the time about SEO. The truth is, in the changing game of organic search, trying to keep up with Google and Bing and their sophisticated algorithms is nearly impossible. As new marketing avenues emerge, however, the concept of delivering relevant, thought leadership content will always be important to the search engines. In fact, it remains the case that the attributes of your content which the search engines find most important are whether it is relevant, authoritative, and different.

It is this term authoritative which I want to explore a little more, because driving authoritative content is no different than having an opinion and being knowledgeable about a subject, classic attributes of a traditional thought leader. You need to know your targets, know how to reach them, know what content they will care about, and know what may incite them to transact or interact with you. You need to start a conversation with them on your website and on social media channels, comment on relevant industry articles and blog posts, and generally be in the mix with advice, ideas, and opinions. The search engines are using social signals to validate the impact of users, determining if that user is trusted.

So what can you do, given potentially limited budget and limited time to focus on thought leadership and authoritative content? Here are 6 keys for developing authoritative content:

1. Be provocative. Start conversations with an opinion that enables others to challenge it.
2. Be active. Take the time to research your targets and produce a steady stream of content.
3. Be smart. You should be an authority on your topic.
4. Be timely. When something happens, be the first with insights, ideas, feedback.
5. Be yourself. Have a personality. Be known for something.
6. Walk before you run, but once you start running, run hard and stick with it….your targets will notice your commitment.

P.S – Don’t forget to optimize your meta data and keep current with a list of good keywords.

When it comes to marketing and communications, government contractors and public sector IT providers face a set of unique challenges. For one, the customer base of Federal, state and local decision makers responsible for purchasing technology products and services – ranging from CIOs and CTOs to program managers, IT managers and procurement officers –represents a finite group that can be difficult to reach.

Compounding this predicament is the fact that government contractors must not only market their brand, product and services to these decision makers, but also time these marketing efforts strategically. This means building awareness far enough in advance of a contract award, and then sustaining marketing and PR efforts throughout what can be a multi-year process from pre-RFP to the contract award – and even beyond due to potential contract protests, delays and budgetary obstacles.

Marketing to agency decision makers is just one piece of the puzzle. For small to mid-sized contractors, marketing and public relations efforts must often extend to larger prime contractors in order to ensure these lesser-known firms are on the radar when Primes are assembling teams to pursue contracts. Large contractors, for their part, must also market needs and capabilities to smaller partners that might hold an elusive product/service, market expertise, status or agency relationship.

We have assembled 6 ways that forward-thinking contractors and IT providers can grow their business and contract opportunities by looking beyond traditional marketing, advertising and public relations tactics.

Leverage responsive landing pages

esponsive design is a critical website approach for providing customers with a seamless experience across all device sizes. With a responsive website, government contractors and IT providers can be in front of buyers at every step of their online journey. A user viewing a website on the go via a mobile device can have the same powerful experience as when sitting in their office.

Responsive websites provide continuity between different viewing contexts, remaining completely agnostic to the type of device used and the size of the screen the user has. Responsive websites also rank higher in search engines’ rankings, as Google recommends responsive web design because having a single URL for desktop and mobile sites makes it easier for Google to discover content and for Google’s algorithms – which are constantly changing – to assign indexing properties to content.

It was the need for a responsive website that brought GovDelivery, which enables public sector organizations to connect with more people and to get those people to act, to Bluetext.

As the number one referrer of traffic to hundreds of government websites, including IRS.gov, SBA.gov, FEMA.gov, IN.gov, and BART.gov, the GovDelivery Communications Cloud is an enterprise-class, cloud-based platform that allows government organizations to create and send billions of messages to more than 60 million people around the world. Bluetext was hired by GovDelivery to help them reach public sector organizations that can benefit with tremendous cost savings while reaching more people, automating complex communications and driving mission value through deeper engagement with the public.

For this responsive design project, Bluetext conceived and designed a responsive landing page with an infographic demonstrating the benefits of using GovDelivery for government agencies as the centerpiece of the campaign. We also developed a responsive email template and infographic poster to be used across many marketing channels.

Extend reach and share budget with partner campaigns

While going it alone from a marketing and public relations perspective provides a company with more control over a campaign, it also can be costly and restrict the reach and impact that could otherwise be achieved by aligning in an innovative way with industry partners.

Bluetext has worked on numerous occasions with industry partners that align around a specific campaign targeting government decision makers. Govplace, a leading enterprise IT solutions provider exclusively to the public sector, turned to Bluetext to develop FedInnovation, a destination designed to help government agency executives get the latest information on current technology challenges and solutions for big data, cloud, security, mobility and storage. Developed in conjunction with leading technology providers including Dell, Intel Security and VMWare, it includes exclusive content, videos, blogs, and real-time social feeds.

FedInnovation combines relevant, fresh content, complementary offers, and financial resources to deliver an educational platform to drive awareness and leads for Govplace across its target market. The development of platforms is a continued focus for Bluetext as we look to conceptualize, design and develop creative solutions that deliver measurable business impact for our clients. It is increasingly clear that customers of our clients demand unique experiences with premium content delivered in an easy to consume manner.

Another partner campaign targeting U.S. public sector executed by Bluetext was FutureAgency.com, a digital content experience effort on behalf of McAfee and Intel that depicted virtually a “future government agency.” For this project, Bluetext created a virtual experience around client subject matter experts in an effort to present content for government decision makers in a more engaging fashion. Rather than static white papers and marketing slicks that often go unread or unfinished, Bluetext created an experience whereby avatars of actual company thought leaders were created, and they delivered presentations on topics in a virtual conference environment. The clients found length and quality of site visitor engagement superior to that of traditional white papers and similar content.

Create compelling digital experiences to reach decision makers

The web has become a go-to resource for decision makers to research products and services prior to purchase. Product sheets, white papers and other pieces of online collateral can be useful supporting resources for government decision makers, but will hardly help contractors stand out in a crowded marketplace.

Recognizing this, government contractors and IT providers are creating more dynamic, immersive digital experiences that can more effectively engage target constituencies and impact the decision making process. Additionally, these experiences are molded to be as valuable as any in-person interaction site visitors would have with products and services.

A recent Bluetext project showcases a forward-thinking technology provider, CSC, which was seeking to ensure prospective customers could have a similar experience as they would if they were physically at CSC’s corporate headquarters.

Bluetext designed and built CSC’s Digital Briefing Center, a virtual experience where clients and CSC’s entire ecosystem can come to learn about CSC’s key technology conversations across its target verticals.

Bluetext designed a virtual office building where each floor represents a specific vertical industry, and visitors can learn about CSC’s key solutions and experience across cloud computing, big data, applications, cyber security, and mobility. While not specific to the government market, it is indicative of how “stickier” digital experiences are reshaping how existing and prospective customers interact with content.

Highlight customer innovation

No matter how large or well-known a government contractor/Federal IT provider is, gaining approval from an agency to speak publicly about a technology project is often mission impossible. Agencies must be careful not to appear to endorse a specific vendor in public comments or a press release quote, and even when project leaders are amenable, the process often grinds to a halt with the more conservative public affairs officers.

As such, vendors often have their hands tied on how to showcase a successful project so that other agencies – or even other decision makers within the same agency – will take notice. An approach that can bear more fruit involves shining the spotlight on an agency leader or the agency itself through awards and speaking opportunities.

Multiple editorial publications and associations hold annual award programs that showcase outstanding IT projects and agency leaders at the federal, state and local government level. Agencies tend to be more open to sharing an IT story through an award because it demonstrates innovation and can assist with employee morale and retention.

Beyond award programs, there is also significant benefit in generating media coverage and awareness of state & local customer projects. These agency customers tend to be more amenable to participating in public relations campaigns, and the drawing attention to these projects can demonstrate capabilities to prospective Federal customers as well. 

Develop targeted campaign to pursue a specific contract

As contractors and IT providers know all too well, winning an agency contract requires a very different sales cycle than a small business user signing up online for Dropbox or a similar “as-a-Service” software offering.

At some level, there will always be marketing activities designed to reach decision-makers across multiple civilian or military agencies – and in some cases both segments. These external efforts may involve communicating product capabilities, service chops, or the expertise of the contractor’s team. But in today’s hyper-competitive market for agency contracts, developing innovative, targeted campaigns in pursuit of a specific contract or that are designed to reach decision makers at a particular agency, can make the difference between a game-changing contract win and a devastating loss.

Bluetext is increasingly tasked to partner with contractors in developing innovative branding and outreach campaigns around a specific contract pursuit. In early 2014, L-3 Communications, in partnership with Harris Corporation, hired Bluetext to help them pursue the Air Force’s $1B Satellite Control Network (AFSCN) Modifications, Maintenance & Operations (CAMMO) Contract.

Bluetext worked with the L-3/Harris Capture teams to develop a campaign strategy that would position them as a Prime by highlighting the many advantages they bring to the table. The overarching campaign theme Bluetext developed is:

“The Power of Partnership, From Vision to Reality”

The creative strategy of this project began with the core concept of the ad, “from vision to reality.” The left side of the ad is a wireframe representing the vision with the right side representing its reality. After the wireframe of the satellite was created, it was overlaid on top of the red diagonal to create a striking visual element to draw attention to the campaign. The first series of ads were placed in high visibility areas inside of Colorado Springs Airport, a key travel hub for Air Force brass. The media plan for the campaign also includes online, print and OOH media placed strategically to maximize reach and frequency throughout the entire contract RFP and award lifecycle.

Focus on agency challenge, not yourself

Dramatic changes in staffing and mission of government IT media outlets means that the days of getting a product reviewed or corporate profile written are for the most part a thing of the past. As such, contracts and IT providers must get far more creative when it comes to communicating capabilities.

Government IT press don’t want to hear about products. They want to hear about trends and challenges sweeping through agencies, and how contractors and IT providers are developing solutions to solve those challenges.

This was the backdrop for a media strategy Bluetext architected for Adobe Government. Over the past few years, government-wide budget cuts have been swift and relatively unsparing in their impact on agency in-person conferences and training events. This presented a significant challenge for agencies seeking to maintain the collaboration and education benefits these events delivered.

The challenge dovetailed with Adobe’s web conferencing solution Adobe Connect, which was seeing a rise in demand in the public sector due to pullbacks in physical, in-person conferences. Bluetext built a PR campaign around this angle that included a pair of thought leadership articles (one targeting the broad federal IT community and one targeting military decision makers), generating multiple articles around this topic in key federal, state and local media outlets, including:

Federal Computer Week – Budget cuts push conferences online

Washington Technology – Budget cuts, scandal fuel videoconferencing boom

Federal Computer Week – Could virtual meetings replace conferences in sequestration age?

Defense News – Communicating in an era of canceled conferences

Federal Computer Week – Defense Connect Online hits milestone

State Tech – Mobile Video Conferencing Powers Collaboration on the Go

Federal Computer Week – DOD connects online to cut travel

Government Executive/NextGov – Agencies are saving millions with virtual events

Federal Computer Week – Cutting costs with virtual conferencing

Reaching and impacting government decision makers requires government contractors and IT providers to push beyond the status quo and engage with partners able to help develop and deliver innovative campaigns to grow their business and increase contract opportunities.

Bluetext Survey Shows How Government Executives Make IT Decisions

Survey Results in Federal Computer Week

Federal agencies can be great customers because they remain some of the biggest spenders and their budgets stay fairly stable even during economic downturns. Yet sales and marketing teams used to marketing to consumer or commercial enterprise customers often find that their efforts fall flat in the government space — wasting everyone’s time in the process.

That’s because talking to the government customer can require a different approach, including the channels used to reach that audience and the messages included. Understanding those needs and preferences can help contractors and feds alike.

We recently surveyed 150 top government executives involved in the decision-making process for IT purchases, to understand directly how they get the information that helps inform their purchasing decisions. The results provide a road map for targeting this audience — and a valuable look in the mirror for agency leaders who wonder if there are better ways to gather the information they need.

READ THE FULL STORY HERE AT FCW.COM

6 Ways Government Contractors Can Use Innovative Digital Marketing and PR Strategies To Win Business

When it comes to marketing and communications, government contractors and public sector IT providers face a set of unique challenges. For one, the customer base of Federal, state and local decision makers responsible for purchasing technology products and services – ranging from CIOs and CTOs to program managers, IT managers and procurement officers –represents a finite group that can be difficult to reach.

Compounding this predicament is the fact that government contractors must not only market their brand, product and services to these decision makers, but also time these marketing efforts strategically. This means building awareness far enough in advance of a contract award, and then sustaining marketing and PR efforts throughout what can be a multi-year process from pre-RFP to the contract award – and even beyond due to potential contract protests, delays and budgetary obstacles.

READ THE FULL BLOG POST HERE:
6 Ways Government Contractors Can Use Innovative Digital Marketing and PR Strategies To Win Business