The A-Z Guide to Government Marketing – Part Two

by Brian Chidester, Manager, Strategic Accounts & Content Marketing

In The A-Z Guide to Government Marketing – Part One, I covered letters A-M, and while most sequels tend to underwhelm, i.e. Ocean’s Twelve or Caddyshack II, I believe the sequel to my A-Z Marketing  – Part One will be equally as impactful.

So, here they are, letters N-S of the ABC’s of Government Marketing:

N: Nurture – Nurturing leads is about building relationships and establishing trust with your prospects in a way that is both consistent and relevant. Even if you have already implemented lead nurturing, there are still ways you can increase your engagement throughout the campaign. For example, look to segment your assets by persona and create multiple drips throughout your content map. While this can be more work on the front-end, it will pay dividends when evaluating your campaign performance.

O: Optimization – Optimization can be tedious and exhausting. Most marketers have little to zero bandwidth leftover once they are done designing a marketing strategy, creating content, and striving to reach lead generation goals. However, optimizing what you have in place is vital to the success of your existing campaigns. In my opinion, a good place to begin is at the tip of the spear, your campaign landing pages. They directly affect your website’s lead conversion rate and can produce dramatic increases in engagement if they are optimized for the content they are promoting and the individuals they are targeting. Each campaign landing page should logically address a specific concern, and lead your audience down a logical progression to your ultimate goal.

P: Persona – Knowing persona characteristics is a fundamental component as you develop your marketing campaigns and products over time. With personas, businesses can be more strategic in catering to each audience, internalizing the customer that they are trying to attract, and relating to them as human beings. Depending on how you sell to the government (direct vs. indirect) your personas will vary, but understanding their core needs and pain points is key to your marketing campaign’s success. If you are having trouble reaching your customers in a way that is valuable to your company, you might consider doing some research and building some personas.

Q: Qualifying – Not all sales leads hold the potential for becoming “qualified”, and there can be many reasons for this. Your qualified leads are the individuals who have shown the intent and the ability to make a purchasing decision within a reasonable timeframe. But, each organization defines what they deem to be “qualified” based on the engagement scores or grades assigned to them resulting from certain actions. It is important to not just have gated content (i.e. forms) spanning across your entire website and place the same value on any content that’s lead gated. Understand the types of personas downloading each content asset, set the appropriate form-friction level, and assign each download an engagement score. Setting up this system will help you develop a more strategic qualifying system leading to higher conversion rates.

R: Response Rate – Many B2G marketers struggle to get desired response rates making their digital marketing initiatives successful. However, there are a few things your can do right now to improve your response rate and your campaign’s overall success. Firstly — and the most important in my opinion— is to target the correct personas, and in the right way; this is vital to generating responses from your digital marketing efforts. Secondly, evaluate the content you are sending; this speaks to how well you know your audience because you want to ensure you are offering your personas content they find valuable. Finally— and probably the simplest change— is timing. For example, don’t send an e-mail on a Friday afternoon on a holiday weekend. Make sure to time your offering to ensure the most impressions and engagement possible.

S: Social Media – Get active on social media. Don’t simply use it to push out your content, but when you do share your content, make sure you create a hashtag that enables you and your readers to interact with each other. Take advantage of the broad spectrum of social sites that are out there — yes, LinkedIn and Twitter are top tier social channels, but make sure to preform your due diligence on the merits of using certain platforms over others — specifically those that specialize in content proliferation like SlideShare and YouTube; these are great ways to get your content front and center because prospects are able to more easily find your solutions over your competitors when they are researching online, and you want to ensure your product is communicated in the best light possible.

Hopefully this content is not only pertinent to your current marketing activities, but there is information you can take and use today. If you think of some marketing terms you’d like to see added in part three of my blog series, letters “T-Z”, let me know in the comments section below. Remember to, check back for The A-Z Guide to Government Marketing – Part Three blog post next week!

Follow me on Twitter at @chidesterab.