Companies that market themselves to Government (B2G) face more challenges as compared to the companies that do business-to-business (B2B) or business-to-consumer (B2C) marketing. The challenge to attract the right audience has increased manifold because of the fundamental change in how people make purchasing decisions and how technology evolves constantly. With the government contracting arena challenging to navigate and government contracting officers, procurement officers, and program managers finite in number, it is becoming difficult for companies to market themselves to the government. New marketing strategies and techniques need to be in place to showcase business presence and secure a foothold with government buyers. This blog discusses four effective marketing strategies government contractors can implement to build awareness and relationships with all decision-makers.
Digital Presence
Your digital presence includes everything from your website to your blog, social media profiles, and customer reviews. Therefore, you ought to make an effort to keep it simple but attractive. Being adaptable and creating a far-reaching digital presence are the best things you can do to improve your company’s visibility. Here are the four ways to improve your digital presence:
- Build a captivating website:
In today’s advertising environment, clients decide a company’s popularity and relevance based on its website’s appearance. Within seconds of scanning your homepage, clients decide whether or not the information provided on the website is authentic and valuable and whether or not they should know more about your company. So, you need a compelling internet layout to generate clients’ interest in your company. Begin with the aid of using compelling graphics to assist visitors in recognizing your brand and adding textual content to your homepage. They can navigate to different pages for more relevant information if they find your web page dependable and user-friendly. If you need the visitors to spend more time on your website, the layout and navigation ought to make the experience hassle-free and intuitive.
- Know your target audience:
You must recognize your target market to create content that resonates with them. Your definition of the target market has to incorporate the product/service you offer, your audience’s demographics, and your intended outcomes from your content material. It consists of knowing who your ideal clients are, your main competitors, and the core problems your competition can’t resolve, which you could do with your services.
- Create a social media strategy:
A social media marketing strategy is a synopsis of everything you intend and hope to accomplish on social media. It is a plan to increase engagement and social media interactions to achieve the company’s goals, such as generating leads, raising brand awareness, or creating a viral effect. It also directs your actions and informs whether you are succeeding or failing to achieve these goals.
You should track the following metrics to analyze and optimize your social media strategy performance :
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- Reach: This metric measures the number of customers who have seen your social media post, and the higher your reach, the “viral” your content material is.
- Clicks: If you’re linking to a landing web page or blog post on your website, see the number of clicks on the link. This is known as the “click through rate:” the proportion of individuals who see a link and click on it.
- Engagement: Track the social engagement stages for your posts to see how powerful it is at making your audience do something. Social media algorithms like to prioritize content that sparks conversations. The better your engagement rate, the greater involved your audience is.
- Hashtag performance: If you’re using hashtags as a part of your content material strategy, choose whether or not the terms you’re using to drive attention to your social media post are generating traffic. By tracking your hashtag performance, you can see which works best for your brand – so you can double down on them.
- Search Engine Optimization
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the technique of elevating your website’s ranking in search engines to help more people find out about your business offerings. Once the Government officials begin their search, they turn to search engines like Google to explore their options. If your website is not SEO optimized, it will not be visible in the search engines; hence, you can lose the leads to your competitors. So you’ll need to put relevant content on your website and identify the keywords that are most searched concerning your business offerings. The relevant content and the usage of the right keywords will make your website more visible in search engines. This increases your web traffic and chances of presenting your business to a broader audience.
Inbound Marketing
Inbound advertising and marketing are primarily based on providing valuable content to the prospects to inform, engage, and entertain them throughout their journey, from initial contact with the brand to maintaining the customer relationship. Inbound advertising and marketing rules are designed to arrange all experiences from when your target market first interacts with your brand to becoming a customer. Inbound advertising and marketing strategies help businesses attract clients to their website, nurture contacts who’re inquisitive about converting and probably build long-term relationships, and automate the marketing technique to increase conversions. It’s primarily based on a set of unobtrusive strategies that help you get there faster.
Website Engagement
Website engagement analyzes the time a visitor spends on your website, visited pages, and the bounce rate. Bounce rate is the percentage of visitors that leave the website after viewing only one page. All of these three metrics are present in your website analytics. Understanding the concept of website engagement is not complex. However, the art and science of improving website engagement metrics can be pretty challenging. Below mentioned factors contribute to an engaging website:
- Website Navigation
Good website navigation will keep the visitor engaged and provide opportunities to get directed to multiple pages and read more. A purposeful user flow can be created to direct the visitor to various pages through a widening funnel. A good user flow will directly affect the pages visited.
- Website Content
Content is what you present on your website – the written text, pictures, videos, graphics, etc. The purpose is to educate and inform visitors about what your business has to offer. Without compelling content, no one can understand what your business offers, its benefits, and what you stand for as an organization. Content is what keeps visitors glued to your website.
Creating an engaging website requires thought and planning. Answer the following questions while creating the content for your website:
- Who is our target audience?
- What are their interests?
- How easily can they navigate to the information they are looking for?
- Have we defined the path to the next exciting article or past performance criteria?
Human attention spans are shorter in today’s world, and website visitors will be disinterested in unorganized and cluttered information. If visitors cannot find what they are looking for in seconds, they will leave and go to the competitor’s site to get their answer.
- Website Speed
Website speed is the time taken by your website to load. If your website takes more than 3 seconds to load, there is a problem, and it will impact the website’s engagement. If it is over 8 seconds, it will result in increased bounce rate and eventually a decrease in website visitors. The website speed can be checked by various tools available out there in the market.
- Responsive Website
Creating responsive landing pages that work effectively on different screen sizes is critical. As per Statista, 50% of world wide web traffic comes from mobile devices. Hence, mobile device users should have a comparable experience to those using desktop or bigger form factor devices. Responsive landing pages enable web pages to adapt to various devices they are being opened on. Such websites also rank higher in the search engine, thus giving you an edge over your competitors.
- Call-to-Action (CTA)
The website’s objective is to make your visitors take actions like buying products, scheduling meetings, or sending a submission form. All of these will require some form of a Call-to-Action. Here, it needs to be clear how customers are expected to move ahead and take action; layout and navigation would be the deciding factors for a CTA. Using an easy-to-navigate layout and simple wording can lead to increased CTAs. Be impactful and try to create a sense of urgency.
Targeted Campaigns
- Determine Your Mission and the Government Audience You Are Addressing
It’s crucial to understand that you can’t do everything for every government agency as a small to a mid-sized contractor. To deliver solutions, even the most prominent organizations in the sector require strategic partners. However, some businesses continue to approach prospective clients in the government with the attitude, “give us your problem, and whatever it is, we will solve it.” That argument will not persuade a government buyer.
For instance, if you tell a senior agency official at the Department of Veteran Affairs that your company, which has 15 employees and three years of experience, can handle all of their cloud storage, IT security, or telecommunications needs, that official will likely be sure of one thing: you are NOT a reliable business partner for the government. Even if you have a wealth of prior expertise but insist on pursuing as many contracts as possible and transforming your business into whatever opportunity you want, rapid developments will make it impossible to maintain consistency between your company’s internal and external identities. Because of this, every company needs to determine its objective and develop several buyer personas to identify its target market.
Obtaining a federal contract can frequently be a lengthy procedure. Being organized to provide particular solutions, becoming an authority in a select few crucial areas, and being aware of the individuals you must communicate with, and the information they require is the only effective way. B2G businesses frequently hear to “concentrate on overcoming the agency dilemma.” It’s crucial to remember how this relates to your company’s objective, your skills, and the buyer profiles, and it continues by locating the best possibilities.
- Create a focused campaign to pursue a particular contract
There will always be marketing initiatives aimed at decision-makers in various civilian or military agencies, and occasionally both. These external efforts could promote the contractor’s team’s knowledge, service process, or product capabilities. However, in today’s very competitive market for agency contracts, creating creative and targeted campaigns to pursue a particular contract or target decision-makers at a specific agency might be the difference between a contract win that changes everything and a crushing loss.
In search of specific contracts, more contractors are turning beyond conventional advertising and marketing and instead relying on creative branding and outreach strategies that may maintain attention throughout the course of what is frequently a contract pursuit process of unknown duration.
- Think about the agency’s challenge, not yours
Regarding their communication skills, contractors need to exercise far more creativity. The Government IT press doesn’t want to know about products; instead, they are interested in learning about the trends and problems affecting agencies and how contractors are coming up with solutions to these problems. Once the problem is identified, the message about the product or solution is immediately given, avoiding the need for outreach activities focused on problem-solving initiatives.
We understand that marketing for government contractors is tricky, but with a streamlined process, targeted approach, advanced technologies, and the proper guidance, it can be achieved perfectly. We at iQuasar help government contractors market themselves and their solutions in such a way that they address specific challenges of the government agencies and thus increase their credibility, outreach, and chances of winning contracts.
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