MITRE innovates for public good—not for revenue—in fields already crowded with expertise and job opportunities in national security, cybersecurity, artificial intelligence, transportation, and more. Our objective: boost name recognition, reputation, and recall in the increasingly competitive DC and Boston markets, home to our main campuses. Communicating what sets us apart and attracting current and prospective talent, partners, and government customers take extraordinarily creative strategies. Why? Because our business model is unique. We operate federally funded research and development centers, which prohibits us from competing with industry. Our “products”—R&D; prototypes; patents; and collaboration with government, industry, and academia—help secure the systems and technologies behind daily life and provide intangible societal value. Our challenge: convey the national and global impact of our “unseen” work in a compelling way to connect with audiences.
Our goal: use our largest social media channel, LinkedIn, to get on the radar of and start conversations with our targeted audiences: government officials, Congress, tech influencers, Big Tech (Google, Amazon Web Services, etc.), micro-tech/policy influencers (knowledgeable personalities with a smaller following in a position to influence views), media, and prospective partners and employees. Reputational research by Harris Poll showed these groups knew of MITRE but were unfamiliar with our work. Specifically, we set out to clearly communicate how our mission to solve problems for a safer world benefits everyone, and inspire engagement above industry benchmarks. Our secondary goal: boost subscribers to our free monthly newsletter, MITRE 360.
We designed paid LinkedIn ad campaigns for eight topics: artificial intelligence, drone technologies to help first responders, aviation improvements, road safety, national security, climate resilience, global stability, and economic competition. Simultaneously, we ran an overarching brand campaign centered on the theme MITRE Connects—connecting patients to data, soldiers to key technology tools, cyber defenders to threat-sharing mechanisms, first responders to search capabilities, etc. The plan of action: make clear connections between MITRE’s impact on an average day, then draw a dotted line to the bigger picture and issue. For example, an image of a to-do list with errands such as “pick up prescription” and “buy groceries” rolls up to the ways our technical contributions make the global supply chain more resilient and secure.
For each campaign topic, we created user journeys to prod our target audience to learn more about MITRE’s work related to a topic of interest to them. In one case, our journey consisted of first serving an ad of brand-new research we developed, followed by re-targeting that audience with a technical paper outlining recommendations on the same topic, and finally re-targeting again by inviting the group that engaged with the previous two ad sets to attend one of our “Power Hour” events on the topic. We followed similar models in other campaigns, with each re-targeting offering deeper information about our work on a topic and demonstrating our thought leadership. We also accompanied our promoted posts from the company page with a new LinkedIn offering of promoted thought leader posts by our executives. Coupling these types of ads proved to increase engagement with our audience. This strategy allowed us to track audience engagement based on copy and image pairing and use those findings to inform new ads and edits to under-performing pairs.
Challenges we overcame: 1) persuading subject matter experts to trust our communications team to accurately “translate” their highly technical work into relatable language and imagery; 2) convincing senior leadership to buy into the value of these campaigns when not directly tied to a business outcome; and 3) collaborating with our talent acquisition team, which had several staff changes and shortages over the past year. We took the time to hear concerns from each group. We incorporated feedback in creative ways, without sacrificing our intent to grab audience attention in new, relatable ways.
Highlights from our best-performing campaigns: Our document ad about sending drones ahead of police/EMS was the eighth most trending in the IT services vertical in December, with 13% engagement vs. the 7% benchmark, and 15% engagement with drone aviators/manufacturers. The 16-page report was downloaded 383 times. Our VP’s promoted post (thought leader ad) sparked above-benchmark engagement with FAA, NASA, Boeing, and NYPD, with 706 reactions, 56 comments, and 57 shares. Boosting our executive’s post increased reactions by 160%, comments by 194%, and shares by 235%.
Our AI campaign featured our first document and thought leader ads, with different imagery and copy for 1) the MITRE-Harris Poll survey on public trust in AI, and 2) the Sensible Regulatory Framework for AI Security. The .79% click-through rate for poll ads exceeded the .44% benchmark, with shares and reactions from National Institute of Standards and Technology, Defense Intelligence Agency, Google, and more, bringing 9,300 clicks to our AI page. The document ad drew 186 new followers. Paid promotion of our SVP’s post boosted reactions by 21% and shares by 7%. Our top-performing ad had 11.15% engagement vs. the 7% benchmark.
Follow-up reputational research (2019 to 2023) showed 55% of tech and 53% of policy micro-influencers cited our LinkedIn content as their source for awareness and recall about MITRE’s AI work—up 18 and 8 points, respectively.
MITRE Connects email acquisition ads for our newsletter returned 568 subscribers. Our form completion rate: 58% vs. LinkedIn’s 11% benchmark. Our average cost per lead decreased 64%.
