Customers today have access to vast amounts of information before engaging with businesses to procure new products and services. In the business to government B2G sector, content marketing is essential for creating a successful marketing strategy. B2G marketing presents unique challenges, including building strong relationships, establishing industry authority, and remaining patient during procurement.
This article presents information about creating a successful B2G marketing strategy. Small businesses in any sector can benefit from these tips. However, we are specifically focused on B2G content marketing for small companies working to connect with public sector procurement professionals.
Understanding Your Audience Through Market Research
Understanding your target audience is crucial in today’s competitive marketplace. Performing initial market research to understand your audience is the first step; regular audits of buyer personas are another essential step in understanding your audience. First, your target audience is who you want to reach with your message. In the B2G sector, that includes employees responsible for purchasing and procurement. Performing market research using existing customer data using customer relationship management software, current email list and purchase history will produce valuable insights into who your existing customers are and give you direction about how to nurture those relationships and attract new customers.
Compelling Optimised Website
Every piece of marketing you share needs to lead people to your website. A company website is a core marketing tool for your business. It is vital to have a well-designed, effective, optimised website full of updated information about products and services, easy-to-find communication links and a library of helpful information available for free. Publishing valuable information and having an open line of communication help establish your business as a thought leader in your industry. B2G companies need responsive landing pages and engaging content that ultimately brings customers to an enticing call to action. An optimised website will rank high in search results for targeted keywords and phrases. In addition, employing skilled SEO professionals to manage and scale your website SEO is critical to enhancing site performance and maintaining and improving ranking in search results.
Build Trust and Industry Authority
Sharing customer reviews and case studies about your B2G products and services can help build credibility in your industry. Other ways to establish trust and credibility are sharing helpful information, tips, e-books and guides to help customers. Building trust using digital marketing also means delivering what you promise and avoiding a hard sell. Customers today are savvy consumers, not interested in a hard sell and more interested in building trust through research, information, references and relationships.
Define Goals
Content marketing campaigns are not a one-size-fits-all marketing approach. Instead, your business will launch many marketing campaigns that may have different goals and objectives. Defining goals for each campaign is critical for success. For example, a goal to increase early engagement meaning, establish a connection with potential customers prior to their need for products and services requires a different approach than one designed to increase website traffic. Defining goals for each campaign allows your marketing team to track specific key performance indicators (KPIs), providing valuable data for future marketing campaigns.
Create Omni-channel Content
An omnichannel marketing approach involves creating content to provide customers with an integrated, seamless experience across multiple channels, including online and offline. Research is a driving force for companies in every industry today looking for the best products and services to solve challenges and ease their pain points. Delivering valuable omnichannel content helps increase visibility and brand awareness. Providing easily accessible, helpful content also helps build industry authority by showing a commitment to customer service by offering valuable information over many channels.
Deliver Value through In-depth Content
Longer content consistently performs better in search engines than shorter content. With that in mind, creating long-form content full of answers to relevant questions, valuable tips, and up-to-date industry knowledge is crucial. Long-form, in-depth content offers content marketing teams the advantage of having plenty of content to repurpose. Repurposing content expands your reach through omnichannel exposure.
Understand Your Buyer’s Journey
Every touchpoint matters in content marketing. Content must be engaging at any stage of your buyer’s journey. Often content marketing is approached as a method to attract new website visitors or as the first point of contact for a buyer. While this is an important intended result of content marketing, in the B2G sector, buyers may look at many pieces of content from your business as they research products and services to purchase. Understanding your buyer’s journey is an essential part of creating content with the potential to guide your buyers along the journey, answer questions, mitigate concerns and eventually decide to make a purchase.
Email Marketing
Email marketing effectively improves brand awareness, establishes industry authority and increases sales. It is a cost-effective way to send personalised messages directly to existing and prospective customers, full of tailored information designed to bring customers closer to purchase decisions without a hard-sell approach.
Local Presence through Content Marketing
In the B2G sector, all marketing is designed to reach and win business with government officials and agencies. Building a local presence through online content marketing can increase brand awareness when government agencies seek products and services. Building a local online presence involves
- using local keywords,
- tagging local places in posts when applicable,
- claiming your Google Business Profile Listing, and
- carefully managing local reviews.
Cadence Marketing
Content marketing is essential for a successful B2G sales strategy. Cadence Marketing offers specialised services for businesses to government marketing solutions. We use an efficient data-driven system to help B2G businesses build targeted content designed to inspire engagement. Applying an omnichannel approach for distribution helps your target audience see your content and brand. We deliver measurable results for each campaign to help you meet your goals and make quick adjustments when needed. Our team includes experienced public sector marketing experts with the knowledge and skills needed to help you create a content marketing strategy to help you succeed in the public sector. We are ready to discuss taking your B2G strategy for your marketing campaigns to the next level. Contact Cadence Marketing today.
