Content marketing is based on the premise that engaging your consumer base and establishing your expertise increases your bottom line. This is because you are able to establish your expertise and engage your military and government consumer base in a way that is (1) scalable; (2) effective; and (3) valuable. This helps establish trust and familiarity, and increases your chances of becoming the go-to source for selling your knowledge, products, and services. And because so few companies in the defense space are doing this, the opportunity to seize government market share is a very legitimate one. No longer do you have to struggle to get the word out about your company, or about all your awesome thoughts about where the defense industry should go. You can just tell the world, and bring those eyes to you.
In order to become this go-to, trusted source for your products and services, the content you create should be informative, educational, entertaining, and most certainly relevant. And always authentic. Entertaining never hurts, and authenticity is always key; people can smell a half-hearted or forced effort from a mile away.
The reason content marketing works so well is because it allows you to build relationships with your federal consumers in a way that your other online marketing endeavors can’t really match. Even if people never comment on a given article you share with them, they will come back to your site often, refer you to friends, share a link to your content, and you will be able to really grow your reach in a way that is very valuable and scalable. Online content like this lasts forever and can get repopulated again and again. And while this type of community building and marketing reach takes time and does not happen overnight, it provides real bottom-line value to your business.
Social media creates opportunities for establishing relationships and personal connections. Building these relationships more efficiently and more effectively, and growing your community in a way that a one-on-one sales model can never match on its own, is a vital part of marketing to the new government buyer.
We are going to post a series of articles here shortly about the value of all of these things in marketing and selling to the military - and about social media's value specifically. In the mean time, check out this link from the Department of Defense, listing their enormous social media reach online.
If you'd like to learn more about expanding your own marketing reach online, please contact us here.
Maine regulators announced today that three utilities are on the path to being the first to provide commercial tidal power to the US Grid. According to the AP article, "the first turbine unit will be capable of powering 20 to 25 homes; the pilot program calls for additional units to power up more than 1,000 homes by 2016."
The US Navy is also evaluating the current maturity of wave energy conversion devices for possible installation at Navy and Marine Corps installations. The Navy would like to install them at coastal locations where technical and economic feasibility can be demonstrated. They have released a Request for Information, which tells more about the project.
In most basic terms, the point of an RFI is to educate the military. Here, the Navy wants to understand the technology a little better, and wants to understand which vendors might be able to provide them with the wave energy conversion technologies they need. So with this RFI, the Navy wants to hear from WEC providers. Here is the link to that RFI.
As part of the normal RFI process, vendors are able to ask the Navy questions, and the Navy answers them publicly. This serves two purposes: one, it helps the interested companies better understand the project, and two, it often helps the Navy scope their solicitation better and more accurately. So if you read through the RFI, you might have some questions about the work and the project. Here are answers to the questions some vendors have already asked.
As their Request for Information (RFI) articulates, the Navy is trying to "assess interest in testing wave energy conversion (WEC) devices at the Navy’s Wave Energy Test Site (WETS), located at Marine Corps Base Hawaii (MCBH), Kaneohe Bay, Hawaii. The ultimate objective of this effort is to support development and utilization of wave energy technology as a means to reduce dependence on fossil fuel and associated emissions, while reducing risk of environmental impact associated with fossil fuel in the energy production process."
If you are interested in this opportunity, you can add yourself to the interested vendors list, but you will need to be registered on fbo.gov in order to do so. Here is a quick and easy tutorial on how to register on fbo.gov.
If you want to learn more about opportunities like these, you can feel free to email me directly any time, or you can also check out one of our BootCampus courses.
The rules have changed in online marketing. As I've said before, no longer is a static website sufficient as a viable marketing tool for selling to the military or selling to the government (or selling to anyone else, for that matter). Gone are the days of cramming your website full of keywords to rise to the top of google's search results. Today, it's all about content, creating content, and engaging your community. In fact, this is how Google (and Bing) are actually now ranking your website. The more people you engage with your content, the higher you will rank in search.
One of the ways Google 'judges' your site and gives it a high ranking is by analyzing what other sites think of it. So if another site links to yours, google will like that a lot, and it will give you a higher rank. These links on other sites that point back to you are called back-links, and building a lot of back-links will increase your page rank significantly. But you have to create content in order to build back-links. Because if you think about it, why would another site link to yours if you're not creating any content? You've got to play ball and create something that people want to read. Otherwise, sites likely won't link to you at all and you're going to get left behind in the new era of inbound and content marketing. It's not just about keywords anymore. It's about content.
Whether you are marketing cloud services through FedRAMP, or selling energy to the Army, this type of content creation is central to marketing well to the military.
Competition is increasing and the web is changing faster than ever. Are you keeping up? Have you recently started a company blog? Do you think blogging is an effective tool for marketing in the defense industry? Comment below and share what you're doing to increase your marketing reach.
Concise, to-the-point video about from Bill Roth at earth2017, featuring Peter Asmus from Pike Research.
Important takeway for clean energy providers: the military wants clean energy technology because it improves operational effectiveness, reduces risk, and saves lives. These are "operational" considerations, and they drive the most reliable and longest-term opportunities in selling to the government and military.
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There is a major small-fish-big-pond problem in defense acquisition, and I'd say that about 95% of small to medium-sized businesses suffer through it each and every day. How can I stand out from the crowd? How can I get a subcontract? How can I get noticed? How can I make the valuable connections I know I need to make in order to grow my business? How can I become a market leader?
All great questions, and all extra important (and real) considerations in the defense business. More than any other industry I can think of, winning a defense contract or a government contract is this very exclusive thing, an esoteric process that truly does lock out a lot of the best players. Small companies have a tough road to hoe, and standing out seems damn near impossible.
'Social media' - the term - carries with it some sort of stigma now - it's probably been over-used and even I start to groan a little bit when I hear it. But here is why you need to add a bit of social media into your marketing mix, and here is what it can do for you:
1. Every company - EVERY company - like yours has a static website with their products on it. Boring. Not just boring, it is not even a consideration. It has become so basic that the viewer is never going to be compelled to remember you or come back and see you or think that you are any different from anyone else. So your static website is important, but in the same way your pants are important. You need to have it or you definitely won't get a deal, but you certainly won't be closing any business because of it.
2. Your website, however, is a great tool. You can use it as a platform to establish yourself as an expert. Now think about how great of a situation that is: you are the best at what you do, right? And you just want to get a meeting. Or you want people to know how awesome your product is. Or you know that you are the company Raytheon or Lockheed should be calling to fill their next order. You have these really basic 'wants' that you should be able to impact because your stuff is so good, and it is so hard to raise your hand or wave your flag in this crazy exclusive business to get noticed.
So, what if you started posting videos of yourself riffing on the next great thing in your industry? What if instead of posting product videos, you started just sharing your knowledge about your own industry? What if you started interviewing your suppliers, affiliates, or even your competitors, to talk about your industry. Instant Market Cred. You will automatically establish yourself - literally by default - as the go-to expert for that industry. Because you really are that expert, and because nobody else is doing this. This is the great opportunity in the defense industry. Huge vacuum. As hard as it is to make a splash, most industry players (i.e. your competitors) don't take advantage of this vacuum that's left open by everyone else just sticking to the status quo - relying on their static websites and trade show appearances and hoping someone remembers them when it's time to place an order. This isn't enough. Not anymore, anyway.
(Doogie Howser Had a Blog. Now He Hosts the Emmys.)
And there is no need to not do this, there is no reason at all to not step up and show off your stuff, your expertise, your market leadership. Not in your products (that comes later), but in yourself, the heart and soul of your business. That is how you get traction, and that is how you establish market leadership. Like every other business, the defense business is a people business, and establishing trust and expertise is the key ingredient that makes things happen. Trust, expertise, sales. You'll rarely find any two of those without the third, in any business transaction, anywhere. If you're not nourishing any one of these - or at least if you are not scaling that nourishment well enough to succeed on any repeatable level - you will have a much harder time breaking through to where you should be.
3. So how do you pump out and promote this content? That's a question for a different post entirely, which I'll write or record soon. But in the mean time, think about this stuff on your drive home from work tonight. Why aren't you doing this? What's holding you back? Who cares? If you're the market leader and the expert, tell me that. Otherwise, who will ever know!?
When your passionate content conflicts with expert marketing strategy, go with your passion every single time.
First video post. Enjoy.
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[Update: If you're a clean energy provider looking to do business with the government, our course offering is listed here.]
I have a confession to make. I'm responsible for about one half of our national deficit. Or maybe it's more like 25%. Or maybe 1%. I'm not really sure. But I'm responsible.
For about seven months a few years ago, I was spending your tax dollars like a drunken sailor. It was insane. I don't feel like looking up the exact dollar amount at the moment, but I think I spent around $3B.
I was the vehicle and uniform guy. I was in Iraq. We had an ammo guy too, but that wasn't me. For seven months, I wrote logistics plans and pressed some buttons and made some phone calls and made things happen and sent out $3B worth of stuff, mostly trucks and Humvees. I was in Baghdad and my job was to equip the Iraqi Military and Police forces.
The waste was astounding. Here's how it worked: I would write a logistics plan that was based on an Army guideline. I would get that plan approved by leadership (they were always great plans that I wrote, of course), and then I'd execute it. The Iraqi recipients would sign a hand-receipt for the equipment, and I would get confirmation of their signature. All good. And then a week later, the phone would ring or someone would show up. "The equipment never arrived." "You didnt send me my equipment." And I would have to re-issue it.
What was happening was that the equipment was either being sold on the black market after it was received, or it was being abandoned by the Iraqi recipients, who were afraid of being caught with it and then killed (i.e. an Iraqi soldier would burn his uniform on a Friday before he went home for the weekend so that no one would know he was working with the Americans, and then on Monday he would need another uniform). I can't say that I blamed him. He was in a bad situation.
The whole thing was a mess, a ridiculous cycle of waste. But there wasn't any other way to do it. Standard protocol when your mission is creating an army in another country. You can't stand up an army if the equipment keeps disappearing. You have to reissue it. I think I personally wasted about 1 billion dollars re-issuing equipment like this.
So why am I writing about this? Because it's just one tiny example - just one of my own examples, if you want to think about it that way - of how energy efficiencies impact a military operation, from operational security to the supply chain. I'll explain more about that in a second.
Fast forward to about a year and a half ago. I started learning about clean energy development and adoption as an industry. I discovered that the nation's leader in cleantech adoption is none other than DoD. I went to the MIT energy conference and listened to James Woolsey expound on the value of operational energy efficiency. It all surprised me at first, but it made complete sense. The military wants to move towards energy efficiencies at home and abroad because it helps them save money, and it helps them save lives. Forget about even reducing our dependence on foreign oil for a second - all those convoys I was sending out to deliver those Humvees etc. required escorts and fuel trucks, and all of those things involved additional risk and cost - to life, to tax dollars, to security. To the supply chain. All requiring fuel, and all depending on it.
The defense acquisition community can't get out of its own way to remove the waste in its own business processes, but the Army and the greater military really do have a great handle on understanding where they've got waste and how that waste impacts their mission. They understand innately that 'we need to fix this and get rid of that so we can do our job better and safer and more effectively.' And that's awesome, and I believe in the Army's and the military's long-term commitment to achieve those efficiencies. Because they are all driven by real, long-term operational needs, and those are the things that matter.
A Solar Field at Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada
So the Army's recent $7B Request for Proposal, titled “Large Scale Renewable Energy Production for Federal Installations,” gets me excited. So does Executive Order 13514, which requires that 95% of new contract actions for products and services be energy efficient. And so does the President's Better Buildings Initiative and the $2B he committed in December for Federal Building Upgrades. There are tons of these government opportunities for clean energy companies to sell their goods and services to the military, and it is all really happening as we speak, it is not lipservice or science fiction. Check out this website as proof; it sort of felt like a paradox the first time I saw it.
We are rolling out some classes in the next few months to teach clean energy companies how to sell their goods and services to the military. You can sign up for them now, and we think they represent a huge opportunity for the cleantech providers that exist out there in industry. We're pumped to offer them.
Others have written much better and smarter articles than this one about why DoD will finally be that catalyst that pushes the cleantech industry into the land of "real and here." But we are going to be players in that endeavor, and we'd love your support as we blaze a path for these companies to gain entry into the industry.
Share this article with a retweet. And enroll in a class if it's in your wheelhouse.
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Michael Koploy, Procurement Software Analyst at Software
Advice, wrote an excellent article last month, "State of the Union:
Public Sector and the Cloud." In it, Koploy and Alan Webber, Partner
and Principal Analyst at Altimeter Group, noted that the primary
incentive for public sector cloud adoption is cost savings. While they
are correct, satisfying security concerns is the first task you will need
to accomplish in order to sell your cloud-based solution to a military user.
"The Cloud offers a number of benefits over traditional enterprise software alternatives: a smaller upfront investment, subscription pricing, increased accessibility for users and a flexible architecture that easily scales to accommodate fluctuations in organizational size, among other benefits," Koploy writes.
"'It’s just a hard thing to take [cost] off the table,' says Webber. 'Considering the current economic situations that public-sector groups are in, it’s the number one decision criterion these days.'"
Webber continues in the article that the data storage location question is somewhat irrelevant, however, because data breaches can occur regardless of whether the software is on-premise or cloud-based.
"'One of the biggest questions in government IT is, 'Where is the data going to be stored?’ says Webber. 'I think that’s a fascinating question. At the same time, I think it’s an irrelevant question.'”
Webber is probably spot-on about the vast majority of other public sector adopters, but the security data storage location concerns are huge for the military user, even if those concerns might be technologically misplaced.
The military data user wants very much to know where his data will be stored, and that he can control it. The federal government recently rolled out FedRAMP, it's new standardized approach to vetting the security of cloud computing services, and the program will soon be mandatory across the federal government, including DoD.
Once the certification processes are in place through FedRAMP, cloud service providers will finally be able to sell their products to a waiting market - to date, there has been no official process for certifying and accrediting these types of software-based services.
Even with certification, however, the cloud service providers will still need to answer the military user's concerns about data security in an operational environment. And as the military adopts these increasingly complex technologies, marketing your products well will become an increasingly important part of your military sales program.
The key, of course, is to focus on the value you provide your military user:
Underscore how your cloud solution improves data longevity - that it will persist when a given data center is destroyed.
Explain how your solution provides greater data fidelity, because users can create it, update it and modify it from disparate locations, in near-real time.
Articulate how your solution makes data more accessible, because the user no longer must rely on platforms or locations to execute his mission.
Show how your data improves data temporality, providing information that is relevant and current in all phases of mission prep and execution.
I have high hopes for FedRAMP - fingers crossed, as always, with large government programs, and Koploy and Webber are right - the government will adopt cloud-solutions in greater regularity as security concerns decrease. But even then, cloud service providers will still have to address the military user's operational security concerns when marketing and selling their products.
If you are a cloud service provider and would like to learn how we can help you, please click this green button, below.
Since 1887, Punxsutawney Phil's predictions have been incorrect 61% of the time. Phil's clearly not the guy to plan your spring vacation around. And nor should you invite him along because he's as pessimistic as they come: he's predicted an early spring just fifteen times in 115 years.
But Phil's a great teacher, and here are 4 things we can all learn from him in the defense industry.
1. It Pays to be Optimistic
Phil's gamble on the bad news 87% of the time is a losing bet, and you shouldn't follow his lead. That bet should be made instead on the enormous opportunity in the budget, in how to do things differently, and how to solve problems.
Some will accomplish less because they view the landscape as too problematic or not worth their trouble to even bother. But if you see the opportunity in your environment and if you believe you can do things better, you will approach things very differently and you will succeed much more often. And this is because you'll believe you can succeed in the first place.
2. You Should Be Your Own Expert
The defense industry experts proclaiming a dire future will fail quickly, and like the PA proclaimer, they should be tuned out. The optimistic industry people will succeed because there is incredible opportunity in the current environment.
The military is calling for efficiencies in procurement, the government is asking for upgrades to its fleets, wings, facilities, etc., the defense budget is increasing (yes), and the experts and business people who pursue these opportunities will succeed much faster.
Learn how to answer the military's call for efficiencies and position yourself to meet their changing needs. Articulate your services well to industry partners, and help them understand your vaue.
3. If Things Aren't Working, Try New Approaches
If the acquisition system is broken, don't just keep hitting that alarm clock and living the same day over and over again. Instead, reassess your environment and see what you can do differently.
Requirements can be influenced (and industry can influence them), companies can get pulled into the sales stream, and the warfighter can buy more effectively. And to be sure, helping the military create the best requirements is a mutually beneficial endeavor.
You can do these things by understanding the military's requirement, and working backwards to re-engineer your sales pitch to meet those needs. Do a great job of explaining how you can provide value to the military commander, and you'll operate successfully in the industry.
4. Check Your Shadow Every Day
Where so much of the industry sees futility in doing anything differently, that is exactly why we see so much opportunity.
Greater market transparency will continue to drive success in the new defense era. Improved market efficiencies, a more level playing field, better understanding of market opportunities, and industry-best solutions to the warfighter - all of these things are up for grabs, and they are all driven by marketing and education. They're things any team can influence and improve under the current system.
How can you fill a market need? Lead creatively. See opportunity in challenges. Be success enablers for your buyers - military and industry.
We got an awesome quote this morning in Infoworld and CIO magazine. Our comments addressed the value of speaking across intramural business departments to bridge the knowledge gap in the IT profession. This concept is central to what our marketing endeavors in the defense industry boil down to: translating the technical into terms a non-technical buyer understands - so that he wants the value your technology provides him, not just the technical specifications you are selling.
The importance of "translating," or "articulating value" in describing any technology or highly technical solution is the holy grail in marketing to the defense industry, and this is why we often call it the industry's next frontier. Marketing in this way is more important than ever, because while your given widget may literally be the best in the world, if you describe it by its technical specifications you are going to have a whole lot of trouble selling it. And this is because (1) your buyers often won't understand what the specifications mean and (2) your message won't resonate (because of reason #1).
A great exercise is to look at your product and its technical specs, and try describing it without using any measurable data points or industry technical terms. Try and think of how those those technical terms and specs translate into value for your consumer, and you'll be well on your way to creating a much more compelling story that resonates with your target military buyer.