Sterling’s award-winning communications strategy delivers surge in share-of-voice and executive visibility
Cloudticity is a managed-service provider (MSP) focused exclusively on helping organizations harness the power of the cloud to modernize and reshape healthcare. The company signed on with Sterling Communications in June 2020, aiming to grow its share of voice and better stand out in the crowded cloud provider market.
Understanding the unique PR needs of healthtech clients
That may sound like standard fare for a Silicon Valley PR firm. But as it happens, Cloudticity’s bonafide expertise was uniquely suited to aid in confronting the coronavirus pandemic, so we embraced our mission with extra zeal.
“I didn’t truly understand the value of public relations until I started working with Sterling Communications. They are INCREDIBLE!”
— Gerry Miller, Founder & CEO, Cloudticity
Rising to meet the healthtech PR challenge
In the spring of 2020, while the entire country struggled to adapt to a historic and rapidly evolving public health emergency, Cloudticity got busy helping where its skills were needed most.
New York City was the epicenter of a wave of COVID-19 transmission swamping hospitals and health services. Antiquated and disjointed information technology systems exacerbated the crisis, making it nearly impossible for health leaders to maintain situational awareness and effectively coordinate resources for response. New York urgently needed to modernize its healthcare data management — and fast.
Leveraging granular understanding of health data constraints and cloud-migration logistics, Cloudticity’s talents proved pivotal in pandemic response. Cloudticity helped the New York State Department of Health (NYDOH) create the nation’s first COVID-19 data registry — in just 6 days! — enabling real-time analysis of critical clinical data needed to flatten the coronavirus curve. That kind of technical prowess deserves recognition.
Crafting the Sterling PR strategy
After collaborating with Cloudticity on messaging, it was clear that the company could improve its visibility as an IT innovator. But more importantly, it needed to build greater recognition among the community it aims to serve.
The healthcare sector is heavily burdened by entrenched and limiting legacy IT systems — and extremely reticent when it comes to adopting new technologies. Under CEO Gerry Miller’s leadership, Cloudticity is committed to easing healthcare’s digital transformation, unifying and utilizing exorbitant amounts of disparate health data by leveraging the cloud to help the industry quickly adapt and evolve.
The goal was to demonstrate Cloudticity’s ability to deliver a pattern of cost reduction, improved operating efficiency, and stronger competitive positioning by expanding the company’s share of voice in both the healthcare and IT sectors.
Raising the company and CEO profile
Our PR strategy showcased Gerry as a thought-leading expert on topics that he’s genuinely passionate about — scalable IT innovation, healthcare compliance, telehealth, and cloud maturity for healthcare organizations — and linked them to Cloudticity’s organizational goals.
In addition to media outreach and analyst relations, we launched an intensive thought leadership campaign highlighting his expertise through informative issue-based bylined articles clarifying key health IT matters, media and industry-influencer outreach, analyst relations, and awards procurement.
We translated Gerry’s passion and Cloudticity’s stellar results into position pitches and original content on the nexus of healthcare and information technology, examining the importance of enabling health organizations to better provide the life-enhancing and life-saving services that we all need. Key elements included:
Reaching out to relevant media and industry analysts
To gain brand recognition, we cultivated an extensive media list positioning Gerry in conversations about how healthcare organizations could quickly and cost-efficiently use the cloud to transform their IT capabilities and operations, as well as monitor, aggregate, measure, analyze, and visualize clinical data in real-time to see emerging trends/changes, manage inventories, and uncover deeper correlations with machine learning — such as comorbidities, demographics, and social determinants — that often influence health outcomes.
Contributing the content the piques the press and the public
Amplifying visibility efforts along similar themes, Sterling developed and placed Gerry’s insights on important and timely issues with key healthcare and IT media outlets in the form of bylined contributed content.
The same goes for industry awards. Collaborating closely with Cloudticity Director of Marketing Kate Wang, we doggedly used real-world examples and hard data to tell a compelling story about Gerry and Cloudticity, securing high-profile recognition that reinforced his company’s credibility and enhanced his personal brand.
Achieving Sterling results
Sterling’s efforts resulted in a huge jump in Cloudticity’s visibility, including an impressive leap in share-of-voice over its competitors.
To date, our campaign has secured more than 140 media mentions and targeted features, several appearances on key industry broadcasts and podcasts, as well as a dozen CEO-bylined articles in outlets such as Federal News Network, Network Computing, Medical Economics, and MedCity News. Cloudticity has also scored a slew of awards and honors, earning Best Solution Delivering COVID-19 Value in the 2020 AWS Public Sector Partner Awards, a spot on Fast Company’s first-ever list of the Most Innovative Teams of the Year, and placement in Inc. Magazine’s 5000 Fastest Growing Companies and Best Workplaces lists. The company was also named a 2021 SIIA CODiE Award finalist for Best Healthcare Technology Solution, 2022 winner in the Pioneer 250 category for the CRN MSP 500, Next Generation MSP Innovation Award for 2022 in the CPI MSP Innovation Awards, HostingAdvice’s 2022 Developer’s Choice Award for HIPAA-Compliant Infrastructure Services, and CEO Gerry Miller was an EY Entrepreneur Of The Year® Finalist in both 2021 and 2022.
Sterling’s program was also recognized by the PR Daily Awards as the 2021 winner for Thought Leadership Communications in Healthcare PR and Marketing. We won for comprehensive and effective communications strategy showcasing:
- Cloudticity as a transformative partner in healthcare IT modernization, and
- CEO Gerry Miller as a dynamic thought leader and industry expert.
“Sterling capitalized on Cloudticity’s high-profile success and quickly established the company as a leader of the pack in healthcare IT.”
— PR Daily
Of course, delivering Sterling success is driven by collaborating with the dynamic team at Cloudticity, who consistently push boundaries in the service of transformative healthcare IT innovation, achieving impressive milestones such as Premier Partner status in the AWS Partner Network (APN), adding the NIST 800-53 and NIST CSF Frameworks to its healthcare platform, supporting multicloud HITRUST inheritance with equal services for AWS and Azure, and becoming the first non-hyperscale cloud provider to release a published HITRUST Shared Responsibility Matrix (SRM).
