Amentum, a leading contractor to U.S. federal and allied governments, launched as a new independent company in February 2020, right at the beginning of the pandemic. The brand awareness strategy that we had in the initially planned had to be adapted. Our goal throughout 2021 was to increase brand awareness of the new brand as some people e were still referring to us as our other legacy companies. In an industry that is considered more conservative, we also had to figure out a way to humanize the brand and increase engagement. Since digital marketing had become the norm for conducting business, we focused on digital marketing especially thought leadership, LinkedIn and debuting the brand at national industry conferences.
In our industry we focus on a pull strategy as you typically can’t interact with our clients directly. The first aspect of our strategywas to utilize LinkedIn to humanize our brand through our thought leadership, CEO’s activities, and employee spotlight series. The employee spotlight series were paired with national celebrations such as Black History Month, Women’s History Month, Safety Month, Veterans Month to name a few. By focusing on highlighting our CEO, employees and their expertise we generated great engagement and impressions, and followers. For instance, Black History Month spotlight on Cheryl Cabill became the number 6 best performing post of all our posts in 2021. This post alone had 9000+ impressions, 256 likes, 50 comments and 7 shares.
The second aspect was to introduce the brand at our key defense industry events, the Air Force Association’s Air, Space & Cyber Conference and the Association of the United States Army’s 2021 Annual Meeting and Exposition. In our industry, exhibiting at and sponsoring events are key opportunities for defense contractors to interact directly with clients. Since our competitors also exhibit at these shows, we had to find a fun and engaging way to break through the clutter and reach our audience. We created four short videos featuring our employees, who were chosen strategically. We wanted to showcase diversity, expertise and those that are known to our clients and familiar in the industry.
We launched a LinkedIn campaign that ran for one month and targeted those attending or interested in each of the conferences. Employees briefly talked about their expertise, Amentum’s capabilities and ended with an invitation to stop by our booth to learn more. In addition, those interested could click and land on our event page for more information. By launching the campaign few weeks before the conference, it allowed us to reach those who were going to attend virtually as well.
Amentum had a monumental year in 2021. Being just one year old amid the pandemic, we were able to exceed our goals. Due to our organic strategy, we increase our impressions by 88.1%, comments by 67.1%, reactions by 56.4%, shares 19.7%, and follower count by 160% compared to previous year.
Creating paid campaigns around AFA and AUSA was imperative as these are the top conferences for defense contractors to attend. By the time people came to our booth, they had already learned about Amentum through the ads and had some familiar faces to greet them. Each campaign generated 500,000+ impressions, 400,000+ views, and an 82%+ completion rate (compare to LinkedIn platform median of 37.7%).
