CASE STUDY: Elevating Core Business Areas Through Content Marketing Syndication

This article is co-authored by Studio 2G and Booz Allen Hamilton. 

Breakthrough Thought Leadership Powered by Innovative, High-Performance Marketing

The Marketing Challenge

Booz Allen Hamilton’s defense and intelligence business includes practitioners capable of analyzing and solving the most complex challenges facing government and military leaders today. While Booz Allen has a deep bench of experts, the larger community of stakeholders and buyers lacked knowledge of the firm’s forward thinking on critical issues facing the public sector.

In early 2016, Booz Allen’s Strategic Market Development Team in the defense and intelligence business established a framework for driving awareness and understanding of its services and solutions throughout the government and military community. The initiative had the explicit goal of sharing its high impact intellectual capital with decision makers while cultivating a pipeline of high quality prospects. Specifically, Booz Allen’s objectives included the following:

1. Position Booz Allen as the expert in solving the most complex, pervasive challenges in the government and military;
2. Educate and engage government and military officials tasked with solving complex problems in the areas of consulting, analytics, digital solutions, engineering and cyber;
3. Educate officials on the depth of Booz Allen’s services and solutions; and
4. Establish a community of Booz Allen followers, including engaged and qualified prospects.

Having established the requirements, the team moved forward to implement the framework for driving awareness and understanding of its services and solutions.

A Strategic Partnership

In assessing the options for moving forward with its strategic marketing effort, Booz Allen acknowledged at the outset that it would need to supplement its in-house subject matter expertise, with a strategic partner. The partner would need extensive experience across the public sector driving engagement with purchase influencers, and ultimately identifying engaged and qualified prospects.

Booz Allen approached Government Executive Media Group (GEMG), producer of Defense One, the premier media resource for government and military decision makers and influencers. Since its launch in 2013, Defense One has rapidly become the authoritative resource for mission owners in the defense and intelligence community, eclipsing other long-standing editorial properties in overall reach and engagement among this important audience.

In addition to its leadership in the community and its proficiency at connecting with its audience, GEMG also supports the marketing needs of the public sector community through its marketing services division, Studio 2G. This group designs and executes innovative, targeted programs to achieve client objectives with maximum efficiency.

Through a series of discussions, Booz Allen and GEMG laid the framework for an unprecedented partnership in the public sector and professional services arena. Built on a foundation of trust and shared risk, GEMG and Booz Allen would collaborate to run an agile, high velocity marketing engine to drive unprecedented audience engagement and program return on investment (ROI).

This ongoing partnership has emphasized three pillars to drive breakthrough results and efficiency:

1. Trust. Booz Allen trusts and authorizes the Studio 2G team to create, test and monitor marketing deliverables and tactics in close collaboration with Booz Allen through regular and frequent reporting. This trust-based model drives exceptional efficiency by reducing Booz Allen resource requirements and enabling high velocity execution.
2. Innovation Through Shared Risk. As a laboratory for testing different techniques, Studio 2G continuously works to identify and execute the latest cutting-edge marketing tactics to deploy with direct input from Booz Allen. This high velocity innovation in most cases drives exceptional results, but it does require GEMG accepting some risk of “early adoption” failure. Should an individual tactic fail, GEMG and Booz Allen apply data driven marketing analysis to make sensible adjustments and pivot to different tactics in order to drive outsized results at a program level.
3. Priority. Because of the long-term commitment and level of trust incorporated in this partnership, Studio 2G is able to provide Booz Allen with dedicated, senior marketing expertise as well as priority access to strategic opportunities across the GEMG network portfolio of digital, events and content solutions.

Architecting High Performance Marketing

Spearheaded by David Salati, the Program Marketing Lead and a Business Partner in Booz Allen’s defense and intelligence business, and Will Colston, Senior Vice President, Strategic Marketing & Insights for GEMG, the joint team has assembled a program architecture and related processes.

Through the Strategic Market Development Team, Booz Allen maintains an editorial pipeline of primary content assets aligned to core business areas, including viewpoints and thought pieces authored by market leaders and subject matter experts. These content assets focus on complex challenges facing government and military as well as provide Booz Allen’s understanding of the underpinning drivers to those challenges and unique perspective or proposed approach for addressing them.

With Booz Allen generating the creation of primary content, Studio 2G has designed a systematic marketing engine to syndicate these assets across the community of mission stakeholders and decision makers. Using proprietary data on how this audience consumes information, Studio 2G has created a three-tiered framework to drive engagement with Booz Allen’s content assets.

Tier One: Amplification

The first step toward success in this type of program is to ensure that Booz Allen content is easily discoverable across the GEMG network and Defense One audience. Studio 2G creates and deploys a wide mix of high-visibility tools to sufficiently drive the promotion of content assets. Examples include:

• Digital display ads highlighting specific Booz Allen content assets.
• Content “skyboxes” - ultra-high visibility promotion modules located on every page of DefenseOne.com.
• Alignment with Defense One editorial eBooks, newsletters and cornerstone events.
• Targeted social media outreach across Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.

Standout metric: Booz Allen display ads created by Studio 2G outperform the average private sector contractor ads on the GEMG network.

Tier Two: Engagement

Central to the engagement strategy is creating a layer of related content based on Booz Allen’s primary content assets –including but not limited to native articles, infographics, videos and research – designed to attract audience readers. The audience is often interested in the topical and challenge areas but not necessarily able or ready to invest the time to download and read deep-dive viewpoints and thought pieces. By offering lighter content options, consumable in a few seconds or minutes, this allows interested readers to engage at their own pace.

The lighter layer of content serves as an access point with the main objective of continuing to offer the audience deeper content, ultimately leading them to download and consume Booz Allen’s viewpoints and thought pieces.

Standout metric: Booz Allen native articles written by Studio 2G drive more time spent on page than the average native article on the GEMG network.

Tier Three: Lead capture and nurturing

Following the activity of Tiers One and Two, Studio 2G encourages the audience to learn more by downloading Booz Allen’s primary content assets. For example, readers of native articles and viewers of video interviews are prompted to download the Booz Allen asset.

Lead capture is also driven through syndication with Defense One editorial initiatives. For example, Booz Allen’s assets “ride along” Defense One editorial eBooks – meaning that readers who download Defense One eBooks are provided the opportunity to also download a Booz Allen asset.

Through activities like these and others, Studio 2G has amassed over 18,000 contacts to date who are interested in receiving Booz Allen content. This contact database of followers, along with all related content produced, is fully owned by Booz Allen.

To serve as a regular and readily available resource, Studio 2G produces and deploys a monthly “Solutions for Mission Success” Insights and Events Update newsletter to subscribed and qualified followers featuring the latest content running in the program.

Standout metric: The Booz Allen “Solutions for Mission Success” Insights and Events Update newsletter drives an average open rate of 25 percent, higher than reported averages for content marketing newsletters.

The final step is identifying engaged and qualified decision makers and influential buyers for Booz Allen call plans and follow up discussions.

Key Outcomes and Learning Points

Outcomes

Across the program (that originated in February 2016) through February 2018, Booz Allen has achieved unprecedented marketing outcomes and ROI in the public sector.

Amplification: 26 million+ impressions toward the buyer audience of decision makers and influencers.

Engagement: 95,000+ page views of Booz Allen content among government and military readers.

Lead Capture and Nurturing: 18,000+ “followers” who have opted in to receive information from Booz Allen; 4,000+ registered content downloads of Booz Allen content.

Program ROI: By executing this impactful program through an innovative, shared-risk partnership with GEMG, Booz Allen has saved considerable marketing costs compared to a standard marketing engagement.

Learning Points

In conjunction with the impressive outcomes listed above, there have been a number of insights and learning points derived from the successes (and false starts) of the program. These insights tend to focus on three key areas:

• Content marketing is highly effective in the public sector, outperforming traditional advertising.
• Booz Allen’s primary content, along with related content created by Studio 2G, outperforms industry averages in engagement metrics.
• Agility and velocity in data-driven marketing, including the ability to test different tactics and pivot rapidly, drive outsized performance and ROI.

For any questions about this program, please reach out to studio2g@govexec.com.

This content is made possible by Studio 2G and Booz Allen Hamilton. The editorial staff of Government Executive was not involved in its preparation.