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With growing competition for government contracts, companies are looking for ways to improve their B2G marketing by communicating better with the government and potential teaming partners, as well as creating more efficient processes, and tapping into new and emerging technologies. The goal is to gain a tactical advantage in an increasingly crowded marketplace, and find ways to differentiate your business from others.
Over the last 15 years, improvements in technology have raised the bar for small and mid-sized businesses looking to compete for contract opportunities.
Never the less, many companies still fail to execute on the most basic marketing and communication tactics. There are many businesses that still have poor website designs, inaccurate capabilities statements, and vague product or service offerings. This continues despite an increase in the number of government officials, contracting officers, govcon consultants and others sounding the alarm on what small to mid-sized businesses need to do at a basic level to be successful.
Meanwhile, for those B2G businesses that have listened to what the government customer wants and how they want it, technology and competition have helped grow the number of marketing tactics necessary to get their business in front of buyers and potential teaming partners.
In an effort to connect with both types of audiences, we have put together the B2G marketing strategies and tactics that government contractors should be using.
We have grouped this guide to start with the marketing strategies and tactics that will form the foundation of your marketing operations. As you go through the guide, each section will be another advancement in your marketing operations. The last items on our list represent the most sophisticated approaches that are dependent on your business having the foundation in place to support them, as well as being able to successfully execute some of the tactics before them.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Click on a section title below to jump to that section.
CRM and Marketing Automation
Establish a foundation for marketing and business operations
Define Your Mission and Identify Your Government Audience
Create customer / buyer personas
Start Looking For The Right Business Opportunities
Short list of government contract databases / services (federal and state)
Finding government decision-makers
Optimize Your Website Around What The Government Customer Needs
Audit your website
Identify what your audience is searching for online
B2G Marketing
Content Marketing / B2G Storytelling
E-mail Marketing
Events (Face to Face and Webinars)
Education
Account Based Marketing
Personalization of Content
Social Media (Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube / Vimeo, Instagram, etc)
Advertising
Deploying More Advanced Technologies and Concepts
Retargeting
Geo-Fencing
Virtual Reality Experiences
Marketing automation is a form of CRM or customer relationship management. It is a software tool (typically cloud-based) that allows marketers to better manage their engagement with prospects and customers on communication channels such as: websites, e-mail, social media, online search, and advertising.
A CRM is another software tool. A CRM is sometimes integrated with a marketing automation platform (such as SharpSpring or HubSpot), but not always. Salesforce is a powerful CRM that has a separate marketing automation tool. In many cases, marketing automation platforms have built-in integrations for popular solutions, such as Salesforce, making it easier to adopt this type of technology into your business.
One of the core benefits of marketing automation connected to a CRM is that ability to automate communication with prospects and customers. This increases efficiency and more accurate messaging. A B2G company can engage people instantly with relevant information or information that connects to a user's behavior.
Some of the functions that you can automate include manual tasks and multi-step processes involving:
- Lead generation
- Email marketing
- Segmenting audiences
- Lead nurturing and scoring
- Cross-channel marketing campaigns
- Measuring ROI and analytics reports
- Social media engagement
- Personalized content and messaging, and more.
For example, by automating responses when people fill out forms, download documents, view videos, or take other action, you free-up people from having to perform those tasks.
When a government buyer or potential teaming partner indicates they are interested in a particular program, a marketing automation and CRM collects that information and notifies specific people. Your colleagues can then take action. Meanwhile, the automation system can send out a pre-programmed set of communications (typically linking to or including resources) that keep a prospective customer engaged.
The reason why we list marketing automation and CRM as a critical part of any govcon marketing foundation is because without a way to collect, manage, view, analyze, and interact with your prospects and customers, you are flying blind. You need to know "if" and "when" people are downloading assets, who is requesting information, which member of your sales team is speaking with your prospects and what they are saying, as well as which opportunities are near deadlines and which ones need more development.
To learn more about marketing automation, we recommend you read:
