Podcast

Peter Jacobs  Welcome to Lay of the Brand, where we talk with the experts on tech, marketing, creative, and PR to learn what’s new, what’s working and what’s next. I’m Peter Jacobs with Merritt Group. From now until September 30, it’s all hands on deck for federal contractors as agencies rush to commit unused budgets and technology providers hurry to submit those last proposals before the end of the government’s fiscal year. But that shouldn’t mean marketing gets put on hold every end of fiscal year has its own story. To find out what’s different about this year, what isn’t and how B2G, marketers can better position their companies, not only for this sprint, but for the long term, we’re talking with author, speaker and founder of Amtower and Company, our friend Mark Amtower. Mark, it’s always great to talk with you.

Mark Amtower  Hey, Peter. It’s wonderful to be back on the show, man. 

Peter Jacobs  Oh, thank you so much for being here. We’re at the end of the fiscal year, which means everyone’s scrambling. What should their priorities be right now?

Mark Amtower  Well, good lord, you know, if you haven’t queued up the business that you’re looking for, you know the bigger things, it’s too late for the bigger things. But that doesn’t mean it’s too late for task order business on GWACs, IDIQs, MACs, those types of vehicles, or GSA Schedule business. So reminding your your core audience, people who already buy from you especially, that you’re out there, and reminding them both of what you do in the vehicles by which they can access you is still critical. You know, we both have heard stories, and we’ve seen activities, where end of FY can be really, really good for the proactive and for those people waiting for the phone to ring, you know, cobwebs occur.

Peter Jacobs  Is there anything about this year in particular that B2G companies should be aware of?

Mark Amtower  You know, it’s an election year, and those are always weird. This one may be a little weirder than usual. There’s always migration after an election, so monitor where your key contacts are going, especially if they’re staying inside government, but moving, you know, either within an agency or to a new agency, and maintain that relationship. You know, offer to help it out wherever they go.

Peter Jacobs  It really is a relationship business. We’ve talked about this before. Government marketing is Account Based Marketing, and that means it’s building relationships. It’s getting to know them and helping them solve their problems instead of just churning out proposals. It seems like people should remember the end of the fiscal year doesn’t mean marketing is done.

Mark Amtower  No, no. Well, frankly, marketing should never be done. Everything is marketing. You showing up at an event is marketing. You posting on LinkedIn is marketing. You reaching out to anybody that you’re doing business with is marketing. Your people, butts-in-sea-at-agency is marketing. So making sure you look good and add value across the board is important. But the overt marketing activities, particularly you know, content and developing, you know, venues for face-to-face is perpetual. You never want it to stop.

Peter Jacobs  So, what do you see — and you of course, get to see a lot of different B2G companies doing a lot of different things. And you also help teach marketers do a better job at what it is that they’re trying to accomplish. What do you see that government tech providers in general could be doing wrong, and what could they do to better target the right people at the right agencies?

Mark Amtower  Well, as usual I would start out with LinkedIn, but I think targeting events is an extremely important thing, and too often events are driven by relationships your executives have with a higher up in another organization. They’re wined, they’re dined, and they’re sucking your wallet dry for an event that may or may not produce any results. So, you know, having set criteria for event selection involving, you know, salespeople, because they’re out front, business development people, and not letting event decisions be made by executives who, you know, “this person is my favorite person in the market. Let’s do his or her event.” You know, a lot of those events are, they’re People Magazine type things, they’re photo ops. And you need to attend — especially IT companies — you need to attend events where program managers and frontline IT people actually go, and especially go for continuing professional education. So they’re there to get the criteria or the certifications they need for, you know, to maintain their their status and for their next performance review. Okay? Those are the people you want.

Peter Jacobs  Right, and there’s different kinds of events based on who’s throwing them. As you’re saying here, you’ve got the media partners who put them on, you’ve got industry associations who put them on. The government sometimes does their own there’s vendors who are putting on their own events. How do you even judge where you should be putting your time and money.

Mark Amtower  Well, if it’s a vendor specific event, then you know, if they’re a partner, you need to consider maybe sponsoring their event. If they have exhibit space there definitely exhibit if they’re a partner, if they’re a competitor, you want to downplay it as much as possible across the market. You know, “Oh God, you’re going to that? (snickers)” But I mean, you know, there’s some, you know, I interviewed Lisa Sherwin-Wolf on my show a couple weeks ago, and we talked about 930gov, which is a low-key event, but it’s high impact, because frontline IT people and program managers go there, and they go there for five specific IT-related topics, and you get continuing professional education credit for attending those sessions. And you have eight hours to meet up to you know, there’s probably 800, 900 feds that’ll be there. It’s a low-cost event, high impact. As far as who you’re going to meet, if you’re involved in one of those five stovetops or five areas, those funnels of IT, you know, like resource management, cyber, zero, records management, I forget what are they all are, but that’s the kind of thing that’s often overlooked because it’s not sexy, you know. Photo ops, no. Real information, yes, relationship building, certainly. You know, the agencies do put on events occasionally. You know the Fort Belvoir partners with AFCEA to do a PEO event every year, primarily for smalls, but not exclusively for smalls, and that’s a great event. So AFCEA, ACT-IAC and PSC NDIA and a few others do really, really good events for the market, and they usually attract the right people. There’s other vendors out there. Again, I’ll just, I’m not going to name any, but I call them the People Magazine variety.

Peter Jacobs  So, events clearly need to be a big part of your strategy, but you need to use them judiciously to reach that audience. Part of marketing, and part of the reasons you’re going there to build and maintain those relationships is so that you can inform, so that you can educate, because you need to build trust, and you’re not going to do that by just saying, “Hey, I’ve got something to sell you.” So, something near and dear to my heart is content. And what are you seeing in the content world that makes you happy and not so happy?

Mark Amtower  You know, when blogs came around, my first thought was the old concept that if you give a million monkeys a million typewriters, sooner or later, they’ll come out with all the classics. I’m not sure I’ve ever departed from that particular thought. Well, with the advent of generative AI, I’m seeing something of the same starting to occur. There is a massive amount of content going out every day, particularly through LinkedIn, company websites, company blogs, etc., and even though it’s positioned as thought leadership, what I am seeing, experientially, 90% of it is “me too” crap, and it’s just it’s flooding the airwaves with stuff most people do not need. So I believe content is king, but I believe that delivery is the ace. So how do you get your content in front of the right audience? And it’s because of those relationships, and this is why we always talk about it. It’s the relationship between you and your target audience, you and your client, you and your prospects. Do they trust you as an information source, and are you providing legitimate, valuable information on a regular basis? So if, you have a great content producer on your marketing team, and they put great stuff on the public sector page of your LinkedIn group or your LinkedIn presence, but nobody shares it. It’s like being alone in the Walmart parking lot at 2am right? 

Peter Jacobs  That’s exactly it. So, it’s a combination of, you’ve got to say something that means something to your audience, which is what those relationships will tell you, and then you’ve got to make sure it actually gets seen by somebody. And it seems to me that we’re not always seeing B2G companies doing that.

Mark Amtower  No, it continues to amaze me that sales people do not see the value of sharing the content that is produced through them to help them sell. And it’s something that is very easy, not time consuming, to do, and they don’t seem to grasp that if they don’t post, there’s no reason for anybody to visit their profile. You know, if you’re active on LinkedIn, if you’re sharing valuable information, there’s more reason you will have an increase in views, and you will have an increase in views from people that matter, and you know, a lot of them are going to be second degrees, and those are new prospects for you as a salesperson. So if you have a good piece of content, you have 50 people, each of whom have 500 connections, and you’re focused on Navy, you’re focused on doing business with DHS and all of your salespeople, all of your BD people have some relationships there — if each of them shared that information, you will have some duplication in reach, but you’ll also start to develop exponential reach for that particular content. And the content can be in support of a contract. It can be trying to shape an RFP. It can be just educational. And it could be, you know, “here’s what’s going on in the market.” It’s got nothing to do with our company, but it has everything to do with what your company brings to the market. So, I mean, there’s a lot of different stuff that you can put out there, but again, if your team is not sharing it, you know, incentivize them or shoot them.

Peter Jacobs  It’s got to be one or the other. Well, let’s talk about a topic near and dear to your heart. Since we’re on this subject here, let’s talk about LinkedIn. Yes, it’s there. Yes it’s available. Are people using it well? 

Mark Amtower  From my perspective, probably about 20% of the companies are, maybe 25% are leveraging it well, above average. 75% of the companies are still, you know, “Yeah, we post new stuff, yeah, we reach out to connect. Yeah, we’re all there.” But what are you doing? You know, how are you being active in a value-add kind of way. And the answer is usually no, not really,

Peter Jacobs  Right, just so everyone has that the latest level setting here every year you take a look at just how many people in the federal government are using LinkedIn, and what is the current number?

Mark Amtower  Okay, so my last census came out in January. At that point, I had found about 690 company pages for Feds on LinkedIn. We’re up to about 720, company pages now, and we’re pushing 2.9 million people.

Peter Jacobs  That’s a lot of potential relationships

Mark Amtower  Everybody you need to know, including key people in the IC are here. ICs in lesser numbers, and they’ll often not list which agency they’re with. They’ll just say, “I’m with the US government, or I’m with the Defense Department.” So, but if you put in, you know, Department of Defense and a location for you know, Fort Meade, Maryland, you can figure out that they’re going to be either NSA or DISA.

Peter Jacobs  And something you said just a minute ago really strikes home with me, because I don’t understand why people aren’t participating. What they’re doing is frequently, and I’m not saying everybody does this, because clearly some people are doing a good job with it, and they’re to be congratulated. But too often, someone will post something on LinkedIn that says, look at us. This is what we did, or this is what our thing does, but not join into a conversation, comment on somebody else’s post. Something useful besides, “Yeah, I agree.” Explain what your thinking is and add to that conversation. Why are people not doing that?

Mark Amtower  Because it’s time-consuming and they don’t see the value. You know, I was just brought back in to train a company where I’ve been three or four times over the last decade. And the introductory email to the new executives was, “Just so you know, every two years or so, we bring in Mark to train our new people on LinkedIn and to do refresher sessions for our team.” And this is a company that, you know was maybe 150 people when I started working with them. They’re pushing 1000 now. And they dominate a particular aspect of one of the uniform services. I mean, they dominate it.

Peter Jacobs  So,  it’s not a one and done kind of thing, and too often that gets forgotten in the rush to we’ve got to hit our quarterly number or this, this submission date is coming up. 

Mark Amtower  Yeah, and you know, how you quantify, how you determine if your time is well spent. There’s no immediate gratification on a tool like LinkedIn. It is an incremental gratification. You’re building out your I mean, you and I have been talking about this since we met. You’re building out the connections you have in a particular agency. You’re understanding more about what that agency does. Your profile should communicate that. So, if you’re focused on a part of DHS, okay, what’s it, just say FEMA, and you’ve been doing it for, you know, three-plus years. You know the key players, you know the pain points. You know the preferred contractual vehicles, you know the buying cycles. You’re a subject matter expert on doing business with FEMA, regardless of whether you’re sales, marketing or BD. Your profile should reflect this, because that’s going to create a comfort level when you reach out to new FEMA people, they’re going to see that you share, you know, 30, 40, connections, and half of those connections are in FEMA, that develops comfort. That gives somebody, you know, more credibility than anything their profile could overtly state. 

Peter Jacobs  You and I chatted recently, and you brought up LinkedIn groups that may be an underutilized mechanism for people to really become the thought leaders in the way of contributing to the conversation in the community. How should people look at using groups?

Mark Amtower  

You know, 10 years ago, exactly 10 years ago, LinkedIn took away a lot of the functions of group managers, group owners on LinkedIn, and they have not replaced it, so the functionality is still down. There’s not a lot of conversations that occur, but it’s still a good place to post information and to monitor who’s reading it, who’s liking it, and who’s sharing it so that can identify some key people for you. It’s, again, a slow roll. But the other value of certain groups, particularly groups that don’t have a million members, if they’re narrow, tech focused, scrolling through the membership of that group can identify for you some key people to reach out to. And the cool thing about groups there is you can message them through the group and not use your InMail credit. 

Peter Jacobs  What other lesser-known capabilities or lesser-used capabilities in LinkedIn do you believe B2 G companies should take advantage of?

Mark Amtower  When you post content, not everybody who reads it is going to like it or comment or share. But when they do, number one, if they comment on it, it’s important to comment back, because that’s the way you develop followers. That’s the way you further a relationship. If you have people who like your stuff on a regular basis, but you have not reached out to them, start reaching out to people that like your stuff now. Again, salespeople aren’t going to want to do this, because they’ll see it as you know, more of a criminal call. It’s not really because they liked your stuff, okay? So if they liked it, especially if you reach out to them within a week, “Hey, you liked my stuff the other day.” You know, not you like you attended a trade show, you know, 10 years ago, right? We used to get those calls three months later: “Hey! You. were just at our event!”

Peter Jacobs  That’s right. “You dropped your business card in the fishbowl. And sorry you didn’t win, but you did get a sales call.” 

Mark Amtower  Timeliness in responding to these things and acknowledging, “Hey, thanks for the like. Was there anything in particular that you liked about that? Would you like to discuss it?” I’ve made a number of great connections that way, and some of them have turned out to be, you know, dead ends, and some of them have turned out to be new clients. 

Peter Jacobs  And earning those likes means that you’ve posted something that people will find valuable to their professional life. I don’t know if you’ve noticed that — you probably have, because you probably spend a good deal more time looking at LinkedIn than just about anybody. 

Mark Amtower Let’s not go there.

Peter Jacobs  But sometimes, it looks like it’s turning into Facebook a little bit. People are getting a little too personal. And while it’s okay to express your personality, because all business is person to person, even if it’s government business. If you’re going to be effective in a marketing sense, you’ve got to stick to what’s going to help people succeed in their business world.

Mark Amtower  Right. So you know, my rules of thumbs are no politics and no religion, especially no politics on LinkedIn this year. Everybody has politics to greater or lesser degrees. You do not want to talk about it here, because this is a business forum, and if you come down on in favor of one or the other, you’re going to push a certain amount of people off. And they may be people who are ready to sign something with you, and they’re going to go, “I’m not working with that butthead.” We all have strong opinions that way. And the emotional equivalent of cat videos as posts, you know, feel good stuff has a very, good place to go, and it ain’t LinkedIn. So take it to Facebook, take it to Instagram, take it to Tiktok.

Peter Jacobs  Well, let’s talk about channels. Where else besides LinkedIn, should federal contractors be spending time?

Mark Amtower  Well, you mentioned it earlier, and there’s two significant things: events put on by the publications, events put on by the associations. You know, if you have a good relationship with a publication, there’s a possibility of getting bylined articles in there. If you do not have a good relationship with them, leveraging a firm like Merritt could benefit you in getting article placement or interviews. You know, the media is still there, there’s still power. You know, I’ve been writing for Nick Wakeman at WashTech for almost 17 years now and and I just sent him another article this week, and I’m not gonna, I mean, until he tells me to go away, I’m not stopping.

Peter Jacobs  And we’re fortunate to have people like Nick who have been doing this consistently for this long, because they understand the market. They understand what the potential readers of this information are looking for, and they’re going to give you guidance as to what’s going to work.

Mark Amtower  Right. And Nick will also vet people before he publishes their stuff. So WashTech takes a fair amount of outside articles, so leverage it. I’m not sure how many others do. I mean you we have the, I’ll call it the “pay for play” model, and there’s several of those out there that have newsletters, e-newsletters coming out every day. But if you’re not a member or supporter or something, your stuff is not getting in there. Doesn’t mean it’s not worthwhile being a member, but you have to determine where your audience is, and nobody has an unlimited budget anymore, except for Elon Musk.  But I mean, we all live with budget constraints, so figuring out where to spend your limited budget in the most impactful way is the most important thing. A marketing team should be educating sales, business development and executives. You know, they should be creating the priority pyramid for market spend. And, you know, oftentimes that will entail working with outside consultants or outside marketing firms. You know, in the, I think it was a late 90s, early 2000s you know, back when Federal Computer Week was 120 pages an issue, that kind of thing, and they were producing events. So was Government Computer News. So was GovExec, you know, the publications were fat. I created a concept called the “one book buy.” Because if you found the right publication, you would be able to advertise. You could get in their e-newsletter, you could be at their events, but the price came down if you negotiated well and your marketing spend was focused, but more impactful. I’m not certain you can really do that anymore, but maybe.

Peter Jacobs  Well between consolidation at the publications and all the cross pollination of them, it’s entirely possible to do something, say across a number of pubs, and still get some kind of deal. 

Mark Amtower  Yeah, yeah. But I mean, there’s also smaller pubs in — can I name a couple?

Peter Jacobs  Sure. 

Mark Amtower  

Orange Slices, GovCIO media are two of my favorites. They send out really good information. GovCIO does events. I think Orange Slices is kind of working with them on the events. Now, I’m not sure how that works. I haven’t talked to them lately. I like those. I you know, they’re, they’re upstarts. You know, they may have started in the hopes that GovExec would buy them, too.

Peter Jacobs  I want to pivot for a sec and talk about something that is a hot topic among PR and marketing people, both on the B2G and the B2B side of things. And of course, B2C, definitely B2C, and that’s influencer marketing. Does that work for reaching government decision makers, many of whom are influencers themselves. 

Mark Amtower  It impacts our market in, you know, the direct-to-government side and the direct contractor side. I still have companies reach out to me — I shouldn’t say “still have” — continued to have companies reach out to me seeking endorsement for, you know, the latest AI tool or an event, and I’m extremely careful about who and what I endorse, because I’ve spent 40 years building a reputation, and, you know, one misstep and I’m gone again, you know. But you get people, you know, like Bob Gourley used to be inside government, CTO, I think it was at defense intelligence. Went out 10, 12,14 years ago on his own. Bob is a huge influencer in the cyber realm, anything. You know, when I get a client or a prospect calling and ask if I will help them, my first inclination is to call Bob and say, “Are these people real? And can you explain to me in one-syllable words what they do?” And he’ll I mean, and this is the cool thing about people like Gourley, he’ll respond. I mean, Bob and I have known each other for a while. I know what he was inside government, but he’ll respond, and he’ll say, interesting tech, not really tested, you know, on the edge, very cool. Go for it. Give me a real appraisal, but I’m not allowed to tell anybody what that appraisal is, which is great, but if he endorses something in one of his media outlets, you know that that’s manna. So, does it work? Yeah. How do you become one? I have no friggin’ clue. 

Peter Jacobs  Well, for one thing, you put in the work like you’ve done for the past 40 years, and you build that reputation by building trust. So, you’ve got the government leaders who are influencers, by virtue of their position, who generally have something useful to say regardless. Well, you’re not going to get them to endorse anything of course. They’re thinking more about what direction should this agency be heading? Then you’ve got leadership at the contractor side. It could be the CEO, it could be someone else at the C level, it could be a very technical person who is very trusted and very believed. In your experience, do the government decision makers pay attention to what the industry thought leaders are saying?

Mark Amtower  It depends on how the word is getting out. You know? I mean, if somebody says something at a major event, and it gets some play in the market, yeah, there’s always a possibility. But you know, I’ve had lord knows how many people on my show. I’ve had you on my show. And I need to get you back. But, you know, I’ve had a lot of a lot of people who influence a lot of things. Larry Allen, contract guru, used to be president of the Coalition for Government Procurement. He was there for like, 15-20 years. He knows just a ton about contracts, particularly GSA contracts. Is he an influencer? Maybe, maybe not. Is he one of the smartest people out there on that? Yeah. So where do you draw the line? I mean, do influencers need you know, 200 or 10,000,15,000 followers. You know, you can be an influencer in a really small niche. So in our market, particularly, there are a lot of really small niches. So I had a zero trust guy from from Zscaler on my show about a year or so back. And, yeah, I wish I understood what he was talking about. That’s why I like Bob to explain these things to me in one-syllable words. But I’m saying, you know, he just knows a lot of stuff. And he was, he was putting it out there in a way that actually was intelligible even to me. Do I know what zero trust is now? Eh… sort of. Certainly better off now than I was before that interview. Again, the influencer thing is predicated on trust. We are not, you know, basketball stars. We are not Katie Ledecky, we’re not Caitlin Clark. Are they influencers? I’m sure they are, but I’m not sure why. In our market, there’s got to be a why.

Peter Jacobs  I want to leave it there, because we’ve covered so much. But I do have to ask you one last thing, are you using AI in any way? And if so, how and what do you think? 

Mark Amtower  I taught graduate school at George Washington University for four years in their government master’s program, and when I didn’t understand something, I had my students research it. And AI and machine learning was part of it. And this was six, seven years ago. So AI has been around for a while. Generative AI is what’s new. And when it first hit the fan, I asked it to, you know, tell me about thought leadership. Well, it came back with a bunch of stuff, and half of it was stuff that I had written. Lately, I’ve been using it to ask for ideas for article topics. So I’ll put in what I consider to be a coherent phrase, and say, “What topics could I get from this area of thought?” And it comes back with some pretty neat stuff. And every now and again, I’ll take the beginning of a thought process, put it into a couple of paragraphs, plug it into LinkedIn as a post, and ask AI, you know, rewrite with AI, and I do it, and then I make a determination as to which is best. And I gotta tell you, you know, I’ve been pretty happy with some of the results that I’m getting, but my fear is somebody’s going to take somebody else’s stuff and put it in that, create a post thing, and rewrite and hopefully come up with something that’s quote “theirs.” And it’s not a fear, it’s happening. I encourage people to experiment with it, particularly on LinkedIn and elsewhere. ‘Cause you know, if you’re a content person at a company, if you’re the marketing guy that generates content and gee, Peter, you’ve never been here, can you use this? Hell yes, you can, but just learn how to use it properly. Learn how to prompt it. Learn that, you know, and don’t take the first draft as manna. You know, I my writing reflects certain attributes of me, i.e., it has my attitude. I can’t afford to put something out there that doesn’t have that kind of stamp on it. I have no desire to come across as playing vanilla. I never have been. I don’t plan on ever being that way. 

Peter Jacobs  Your content and your approach to content is a big part of your brand, and it’s part of your value, and that’s what we have to be conscious of, that while these tools can be helpful in the ways that you’re talking about — and we are using them to some extent here at Merritt Group, not to generate content that goes to a client or that our clients use, but to help with brainstorming idea generation: maybe here’s an angle that we hadn’t considered that we can then really follow through with the kind of content that we want to be known for.

Mark Amtower  I work alone. I’ve been a solopreneur for 39 years and three, four months, it’ll be 40 years. It’s a long time, you know? So I can sit here and ideate by myself. Generative AI has helped me to do that brainstorming a little more, but that’s also why I am a co-lead of a group of 30-plus marketers that get together twice a week for 30 minutes a day, Tuesday and Friday, GovCon ideators. We meet, we have, usually Tuesdays, we’ll have a topic that’s led by somebody for 15 minutes or so, and then it’s a discussion. Friday’s kind of free for all. Bring any thought you want, and we’ll discuss it. But that’s my brainstorming. I live in Columbia. Most of you guys are in Virginia. Everything’s in friggin’ Virginia. 

Peter Jacobs  Well, you created your own AI.

Mark Amtower  I certainly tried to. But you know, the AI extension is a group of people with whom you can share ideas freely and get legitimate feedback from that. That’s cool. And then you can take the results, then plug it into, you know, your favorite generative tool, and say, “Hey, what do you think of this?” It’ll come back with some new stuff.

Peter Jacobs  Yeah, and that’s the future. 

Mark Amtower  Yep. 

Peter Jacobs  All right, well, I think there’s still a future for you, Mark. I hope there’s one for me. 

Mark Amtower  Hey, if there’s not a future for us, we’ll learn how to play golf.

Peter Jacobs  There you go. I have been talking with Mark Amtower of Amtower and Company, and as always, it has been a huge pleasure. Thanks for being here.

Mark Amtower  Hey, it’s Peter, my pleasure, man, anytime. 

Peter Jacobs  And thank all of you for joining us. Lay of the Brand is brought to you by Merritt Group, an integrated strategic communications firm that blends the best of PR, marketing and creative to help our clients tell their stories and build business. Got a topic suggestion or want to share feedback, subscribe to the lay of the brand on your preferred podcast platform, and leave us a review, and please spread the word and tell your friends and colleagues to tune in as well to learn more about Merritt group and the show. Check out layofthebrand.com.