Company: OpsTechnology
Agency: VerbFactory
Timeframe: 2004 to present
Many PR professionals will either laugh or cringe in recalling executives who demand (not expect, demand) coverage in publications such as the Wall Street Journal
or the New York Times. But here's a twist: What if there is a PR professional who openly balks at pitching the Journal and the Times? Even better: What if
that PR professional's client openly approves the dis of those two vaunted dailies in favor of small-circulation trade publications?
On the surface, the PR challenge for OpsTechnology would appear to be fairly restricted. The San Francisco-based company provides a high-tech solution to streamline the
ability of real estate operating companies in the multifamily housing industry to manage and standardize their processes for procurement, purchasing and payables.
While the company's target market is substantial - there are 20 million professionally managed multifamily housing developments across the United States - the PR opportunities
are not. With only a half-dozen trade publications, a handful of trade conferences and little reason for outreach to the mainstream business media, OpsTechnology's PR
expectations would seem limited to a small niche.
It would seem that way, but it has been quite the opposite. Through a vigorous PR strategy incorporating trade media, the online environment and industry gatherings,
OpsTechnology has been able to take its narrow niche and stretch it to unexpected lengths and depths.
Information, Please
OpsTechnology was created in 1999 as OpsXchange with the purpose of bringing an online technological solution to the traditionally paper-based processes within its
industry (the company changed its name in 2002). Though originally, the company put too much emphasis on the tech solution while forgetting the need to spread the word that the
solution existed.
"We're really a technology company, so our focus was on the product and not so much on marketing the product," recalls Andy Larson, national sales director for OpsTechnology.
"For our first two years, there was a fair amount of confusion about what the company did. There was no strategic marketing campaign in place. We were basically responding to
our existing customers while digging around for new ones."
Fortunately for the company, the industry it served had a specific finite space and the search for new customers did not require extensive networking. "There are a very narrow
group of folks here," says Larson. "Most of them know each other, traded places or worked each others' job."
But at the same time, the company was not successfully getting the word out, particularly with news of new product additions. The company had worked with a PR agency in its
early days, but the relationship did not prove satisfactory. In 2004, OpsTechnology sought to go the agency route again with the San Francisco-based VerbFactory, a start-
up created a year earlier by Richard Berman, formerly the director of corporate communications at TCSI, a publicly traded telecom software firm.
From his high-tech PR perspective, Berman realized immediately where OpsTechnology's PR campaign needed to start. "The technology was there, but the messaging and branding was
not there," recalls Berman. "We had to work to articulate the brand position, explain the product benefits, define who it was designed for, and build the company's
credibility."
PR Trifecta
To achieve this, Berman opted to take a three-pronged approach. The first and most important thrust was to build a canon of case studies of property management leaders using
the OpsTechnology products. "We needed to focus on how companies like United Dominion, Camden and Avalon Bay achieved bottom-line benefits with this technology.
Previously, there was no media coverage on this."
Berman wanted to keep the case studies short and succinct (one page with information broken into bullet points). However, he insisted that all case studies come with financial
data to show how the OpsTechnology customers benefited from the products. Since many of the customers were publicly-traded companies, Berman found himself going through the
corporate chain to get the required information.
"To document these situation solutions results, I would sometimes have to make up to 30 calls," he says, noting the entire process took six months to complete. "I'd call the
CEO, the IR people, etc. Clearly there were sensitivities with anything dealing with metrics."
The second activity was to update the OpsTechnology Web site. Graphic and Web design is among the VerbFactory service offerings, which Berman acknowledges as being uncommon in
the agency realm.
"The previous Web site had some issues that needed to be fixed," he says. "We wrote all of the content for the Web site. It is not a PR activity, but it is a communications
activity."
Working The Trades
The third step required greater outreach in the industry's trade conferences. Berman's agency took over this function fully, handling all aspects from booking hotel rooms and
shipping exhibit hall booths to creating the booth signage and arranging speaking engagements for OpsTechnology co-founder/COO Sukhi Singh.
On the media side, Berman kept his activities aimed solely at the industry's trade journals. "That is the alpha and omega of what we do on the PR side," he says, noting
there's been no shortage of news and features to pitch (including a feature profile on Singh in the trade monthly Multifamily Executive). "We've never taken the story to
the Wall Street Journal or the general technology/business trades because we're not going to attract the business decision makers in the multifamily housing industry
through those publications."
OpsTechnology's Andy Larson concurs on keeping the PR in the trades, noting the PR push helped to increase sales inquiries to the point that the OpsTechnology sales staff grew
from one to three.
"We may not get the bang for our buck going outside of the trades," he says, adding the company's future goals will require a concentration on other trade journals. "We've had
some discussions on moving into different real estate verticals, such as commercial offices, and targeting their industry specific trades will be of great value. After all, there
are only a few thousand folks who influence the purchase of our products."
Contacts:
Andy Larson, 415.222.6996; Richard Berman, [email protected].
Andy Larson