Marketing Data Center Services with JSA

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We recently sat down with JSA’s founder and CEO, Jaymie Scotto Cutaia. JSA had just joined the prestigious ranks of the 2021 Inc. 5000 List of America’s Fastest-Growing Private Companies.

In this overview, Jaymie shares her insights on marketing and brand promotion in the data center services industry, and we hear about the past, present, and future of not only JSA, but of the public relations within the sector.

About Jaymie and JSA

Jaymie was the Director of Marketing and Public Relations for Telx, a colocation operator. Originally, Telx had a PR firm that dealt with a variety of clients, but with no real specialization in networking, telecoms, or IT. They were underperforming and didn’t understand the mission, so Jaymie let them go. She built the entire capability internally, and soon the company was doing all of their own advertising, promotion, and media. When Telx went through their first sale, she started JSA as her own firm.

J. Todd Raymond, the head of Telx’s Legal and Acquisitions team at the time, was the one who helped Jaymie with filing the company formation documents. He suggested the name Jaymie Scotto and Associates. It felt strange to her at the time, because she had no associates! That’s why on the ten-year anniversary, they made sure to change the corporate logo to JSA, making it about the entire firm as a family.

The Value of Good PR

David asked who Jaymie and her team decided on what services and values that JSA would bring to the table in those early days?

She said that the company had to redefine the word 'agency'. She never liked dealing with ad agencies in the past, and so she worked hard on JSA’s image within the industry. Public relations, event planning, and marketing were just tactics used to create a core message for a company. The real deliverable was setting up clear calls to action for each campaign, and then using the best tools available, rather than taking a scattershot approach and seeing what stuck. ROI, data-driven approaches were central to their method. And it worked.

In 2008, JSA started their blog ‘Telecom News Now’, recently rebranded to The JSA Blog which now has 250,000 readers in the industry. Readers include data center operators, telecom carriers, and enterprise businesses across all sectors who were interested in the colocation (and more recently Cloud hosting) industry. Eventually, they moved into social media, videos, podcasts... pretty much adopting them as soon as those mediums emerged on the scene.

Planning and Executing a Media Strategy

David asked what advice Jaymie would give to people who are interested in starting blogs and podcasts?

She said that now is the time, as they're hotter than ever. As an example, JSA started Datamovers the year of the pandemic, and they already have 7,000 regular listeners. Because people are working differently, some remotely, others with a commute if they're essential workers, others with odd or flexible hours... you simply don't know what the best way will be for any given individual to consume your content. So providing different methods to digest information is critical. Multiple channel marketing plans are the key to success in 2021.

Step 1: Start with strategy. Ask yourself: Why do this? How will it incorporate your brand? Who are the listeners, what are their interests and pain points? Will you be solving their issues with fresh content?

Step 2: Get together the list of aspirational speakers to include, both as hosts and as guests. What's the host structure, one or multiple? What is each host bringing to the podcast... a baked-in audience? Credibility? Will they promote the show on their end? Finally, which guests will drive value to the exercise?

Step 3: Build a content calendar. Given the selected speakers, the goal is to build a consistent schedule. The time frame needs to be achievable, reliable, and realistic. Build in two to four weeks between recording and release dates, so you can be proactive in production, rather than reactive and frantic.

Step 4: Book guests, promote, record, optimize, repeat. Any issues? Contact JSA!

David agrees with the consistency theme. Investing recording time, editing time, creating the associated text and interactivity tools, and marketing the podcast all need to be considered as costs in both time and energy. But delivering the same high-quality show fifty or more times in a row brings massive value to the table. He gives Jaymie credit for being a leader in talking to people within the industry and putting faces to important names.