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Branding for Your Business 

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📣 Attention all businesses with a website (you should have one), this message is for you. 📣 

Branding is more than a set of colors and a logo. Today, branding refers to how your business stands and speaks when you are not personally doing the talking. It refers to your content, your audience, the platforms you choose to be active on, and how often you interact with your digital community.  

We’re going to take a direct approach and provide you with an actionable checklist of items to update, create, or utilize as you configure your business’ brand going forward. 
Take a moment to answer the following questions.  

Branding:  

– Do you have a cohesive brand voice?
– Does your voice online resonate with your leadership and employees?
– Do you know your ideal audience/avatar?
– Do you know how your audience wants to receive information?
– Are you incorporating your company culture into your brand’s voice? 

Website:  

– Is it updated to 2020?
– Does it have your correct phone number?
– Is there an active “contact us” page?
– Do you have a page for news/blogs?
– Does it showcase your leadership?
– Are your capabilities clearly conveyed?
– Is it easy to navigate? 
– Does it load quickly?
– Do the links work? (Yes, ALL of the links.)
– Are your social profiles linked? 

Social Platforms: 

– Do they link back to your website? (Activate Your Buttons.)
– Are you speaking actively to your community?
– Is your contact information visible?
– Is your leadership following the pages?
– Are you updating them consistently (see our blog on consistent content here) 

 

In the world of marketing, statistics say that new clients and customers will take time to visit your website, social profiles, and more before reaching out to talk to you. Put your best digital foot forward before getting on the phone or connecting through an email. If you answered no, or have several question marks next to the items above we recommend seeking a branding update, stat. The experts at BOOST are able to provide you with a digital diagnostic to identify areas of strength and recommendations for improvement for your GovCon’s digital company culture. We know these tasks have been on your to-do list for a while now, let’s dust them off and get them taken care of before the start of the new federal fiscal year.  

Marketing Your Business, Consistency is Key 

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Do us a favor and imagine our best James Earl Jones impression “…and if you’ll look to your inbox, everyone is writing about COVID.”
We know, we know. 
While we may be exhausted by the constant deluge of COVID this, and social distancing that, the fact remains that the way we do business now has changed. Forever. This doesn’t mean you can’t have some consistency in your marketing.

In the case of marketing there seem to be two camps for business. Those who doubled down on marketing and content, and those who cut down on their GovCon marketing. Can you guess which ones are currently succeeding? If you said “double down” you’re right! Those who continued to push forward with valuable, insightful, and above all else, helpful information are seeing the payoff in website traffic, social discoverability, and new leads. Luckily for those who pulled back on the marketing reigns a bit, the good news is that there’s still an opportunity here. You can create a goal-oriented, measurable strategy for your ongoing marketing efforts and have it pay off.  

There’s simply one thing to remember: Be Consistent in your GovCon marketing.  

Much like a new routine takes 30 days to become a habit, it takes several opportunities, or “touches” as we call them in marketing, to become recognizable to your ideal customer or client. That means you’ll need to have 3 to 5 times as much content as you expect people to see and read. While content creation may seem like a full-time job itself (and it is) there are ways of making the load a bit easier to bear.  

  1. Do NOT hire a random person off the street to create your content. 
    It is important that the content you share, whether it be on your website, social media, or in print, be of a consistent voice and tone. You want all of your messaging to come from a single source, the voice of the company. If you, the leadership, are writing content and the part-time virtual assistant from a local college is also writing content on the same platform, chances are it’s not going to sound cohesive. A lack of cohesive branding will encourage confusion and mistrust, two things that are very difficult to combat in the world of marketing. One or two big slip-ups can be the thing that makes someone shy away from your company, it’s important to have a hand in the writing, and better yet if you can hire a professional. Your content should be created by someone internal, or at very least, someone with very good access to your internal stakeholders. This is absolutely critical to consistency in marketing.
  2. Fuel that baby up and get rolling!
    Once you jump on the content train, do not stop. Post, share, comment, and interact often. The more active you are on your chosen platforms the better opportunity you have to connect with like-minded individuals and those seeking your services. If you post consistently for a week and then not again for three weeks people will find you forgettable. If you’re concerned about keeping things consistent once you get started, choose 2-3 days per week and share regularly those days instead of forcing content out 5-7 days per week. Offering more consistent content less often is far better than burning out of content early on and being left silent on your social media platforms. In GovCon marketing strategy, this consistency in marketing can be the defining trait that convinces someone of how reliable you are.  
  3. Utilize your partnerships. 
    We all have business friends and frenemies. Choose one day per week or a couple of days each month to highlight content that is shared by other businesses. To do this you’ll need to share it directly from their platforms or website and tag them in your social postings. This will get you the kudos for being a team player and showcase the depth of your bench when it comes to trustworthy sources for referrals and experience.  Part of every good GovCon marketing strategy should be leveraging these contacts and creating a mutually beneficial arrangement with each of them.

Once you’ve been bitten by the marketing bug, it’ll feel like things are moving rapidly toward your new opportunities. This is a fast–moving track and you’ll need your wits about you to make timely, poignant decisions regarding the current landscape of content and social responsibility. No GovCon marketing strategy is ever set in stone, and you’ll almost certainly have to make some difficult decisions about what direction to go next. Take time to check in on your initiatives, pivot when things aren’t working (after you’ve given them a fair chance), and always be sure to follow up.  

While we know that you’ve always meant to get your marketing chops wet, maybe you haven’t made it a priority. Now is the time. Reach out to the GovCon marketing experts at BOOST to discuss the opportunity for a strategy session and a roadmap for continued growth and success. Contact us today! With BOOST by your side, we’ll develop a GovCon marketing strategy that will get you the contracts you’ve been working toward.

Updated 03/28/2023

Current Events and the Job Market

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Updated 03/17/2023

It goes without saying that the world is in quite an upheaval in culture and moving toward a new normal.
Yet, as we’ve said before, business must continue especially in the GovCon market and that includes hiring.

We must ask: Are you in the job market right now?

If so, you’re probably questioning whether to use your “professional platform” like LinkedIn to express your viewpoint during this #blacklivesmatter social justice movement. Well, you’re certainly not alone. Our talent acquisition team is constantly looking at candidates on a multitude of platforms before moving forward with them in the hiring process*. It would be difficult to present an outwardly misogynistic candidate – per his Instagram page – to a woman-owned/operated small business.  That would probably blow up in our faces as it should. However, simply moving forward with a candidate based on the meeting of requirements alone, sans a full picture of digital activity, is a definite oversight and a lesson learned once and forever. As social media presences have mattered before to recruiters, you can be sure they continue to be important now. The job market is too tight for recruiters to skip checking your platforms, with cultural fit being as important as credentials.

What does that mean for you as a candidate in an already COVID-19 riddled US job market?

Do you shy away from posting things, or go out of your way to make accounts uber private and difficult for a google search or your name to find? Our answer to you would be a resounding “Hell NO!” Do not shy away from posting well-thought-out viewpoints because you’re concerned an organization may use it against your candidacy. Quite frankly if they do, you don’t want to work for them anyway, believe us. The US job market right now is much too nice for you to settle for a company that doesn’t agree with your principles. Our Talent Acquisition team wants to know that you are confident, expressive (a great way to show off your writing skills!), committed, and vocal when it mattered above all else. We wouldn’t want you to be any other way. If the tables were turned (we have ALL been candidates before) we would absolutely post about a ‘controversial’ topic without thinking twice about the ramifications because we’re very secure in our value as a candidate, and we would hope an organization would see it the same way. Our advice to all of the recruiters and the candidates in the market today would be to lean in. Lean in purposefully, kindly, with your eyes and hearts wide open. Through well thought out action we can all work toward the change that we’ve hoped to see in this world. With the job market being what it is, you’re going to make a great candidate for an organization, but you can’t settle for offers along the way that don’t fit who you are.

(*As a note, we are NOT lawyers, but we know some great ones, so to CYA you may want to double-check things with your lawyer friends to be safe.)

If you would like to discuss more about your digital footprint and best practices for job searching as a candidate or as a company, let’s have a conversation. Our Recruiting and Marketing teams know the job market right now, and will work together to determine our client’s company culture and how you appear online to your potential employees.

Netiquette

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Now more than ever digital marketing is a peak requirement for visibility. While the world is hunkering down, business for many in the GovCon space continues. It’s time to get on the social train or get run over! Social Media isn’t just for “the kids” or the younger generation anymore. Businesses across industries are utilizing newer marketing techniques to stay connected and GovCon back office is no different. When viewing digital marking from a place of visibility, NOT being on social media could be harming your prospects before you have a chance to throw your hat in the ring.

For starters, let’s talk netiquette, or the etiquette you use when interacting online.

Be Human
You will NOT ruin your business’s brand simply by being on social media.
Our advice is to avoid the big three:

• Anything that you don’t want plastered on the side of a bus
• Anything you wouldn’t say on a stage in front of potential clients
• Anything that belongs on TMZ (you know, the gossip show.)

Instead, what you should do is to remember that you’re speaking to your audience on your profiles the same way you speak to someone in conversation. Humor is okay, conversation is okay (and encouraged), being a resource to your network is invaluable. **Side note here: Being human means speaking as you would when in a face-to-face conversation. You wouldn’t insert your business offerings to conversations randomly, so don’t link drop and run!

Be Active
Committing to a social presence means being active regularly. Long gaps between postings on your LinkedIn profile may be more detrimental than not having a social presence at all. When a potential client or customer searches your business online, and you know they will, they want to see that you take pride in what you do. Social media is the ultimate “we love our business’ pride machine. If you’re not willing to talk about it online, why would they?

Be Patient
As much as an audience of thousands or tens of thousands sounds nice in reality it is more of a vanity metric than a gauge of success. What matters more is the engagement (comments, shares, direct messages) that drives the success of a digital presence. If your posted content is driving new people to your website, that’s success. Even better, if your email or phone are becoming more active due to the content you’re sharing online, that’s Social media is no longer an “if you build it, they will come” type of endeavor. It takes strategy, execution, and patience to build a robust presence that turns connections into leads.

At BOOST we practice what we preach. While we understand that times are currently changing (and very likely unstable) we also know that business will continue! We believe in providing value through our blogs (like the one you’re reading), our free consultation (schedule one here), our free downloadable white papers, our back office services for GovCons, and more. We recommend that you take a look at your current social presence and identify which platforms and what kind of content could make a difference for your business. We can help with a high-level digital diagnostic to get you started.  Contact us!