A GovCon growth article co-authored by Katie Helwig and Kris Brinker.
Setting Your GovCon Up for Growth
The 1st quarter of Federal FY25 is a great time to re-focus and recharge your government contracting company’s corporate infrastructure—setting you up for continued growth.
Here are 8 key areas to prepare for success—all of which are affected by brand trust, brand visibility, and brand perception.
1. Stand Out from the Crowd
Your company brand should support the messages you’re trying to send about how and why you are the best choice and build trust with your target audiences.
Creating brand trust is NOT just a marketing activity. It is derived from building foundational characteristics within your business.
Brand trust is a combination of factors that prove your company is capable of satisfying the requirements of a Federal government contractor. Some factors are criteria the government openly stipulates, and others are based on the characteristics exhibited by companies that ultimately win contracts.
Consistency is key to building and maintaining brand trust. Your brand message and image must be consistent across all channels or you will compromise brand trust.
Every functional area needs to support your brand in its own way. For instance:
2. Government Contractor Marketing
Marketing for government contracting companies is different from the B2B market! Your marketing team is responsible for creating a corporate look and feel with messaging that reflects your corporate values and mission.
You need to generate BD and marketing materials that illustrate your brand trust. Brand messaging is the crucial first step to creating effective marketing assets. These critical assets include professionally designed and technically optimized government contractor websites, pitch decks, capabilities statement(s), thought leadership articles, case studies, trade show materials, and more.
3. Human Resources
Your benefits, salaries, and corporate culture help attract and retain quality employees who are coached on how to positively represent the company. This is internal-facing.
Externally this is also crucial to build a sense of confidence with government decision makers. They need to know that your company has a culture that attracts top talent to fulfill their contracts and mission.
Hiring the right people is crucial to meeting government requirements on services contracts, differentiating your proposal responses, and closing new business opportunities. On-point messaging and your website presence should be tailored to this specific target audience.
4. Business Development
With a capture strategy that aligns with corporate strengths and past performance, your BD/Capture team leverages the materials marketing—either your internal department, or from your government contractor marketing company partner—provides to build and progress the sales pipeline from identification to teaming, proposal, and submission. These professionals are the representatives of the company and should embrace the corporate values you’ve chosen as important to your overall brand. Arm your BD team with consistent company messaging and the assets they need to be successful.
5. Operations / Security / Contracts Management
Here your brand is strongly formed by the user experience/customer experience (UX/CX). It’s all about past performance. Don’t lose sight that your teaming partners are also your customers. Whether you’re the prime or the sub-contractor, UX/CX is key for future teaming.
You need a specific message that builds upon the foundation of your core messaging to nurture brand trust and ensure your teaming partners that it is YOUR company they want to team with.
6. IT Department
Securing the supply chain and all that entails. Consider the SolarWinds and Crowdstrike’s public cyber breaches and the possible damage it caused to their brand. Communicating your cybersecurity rigor is a marketing/branding/messaging focus, particularly when CMMC audits become a requirement.
On August 15, the proposed amendment was published outlining the contractual requirements related to CMMC and the three-year-long phased rollout. It also empowers DoD program managers to expedite the requirement for contracts being procured within the 3-year phase-in window.
Companies on top of these requirements will have a competitive edge as the DFARS rollout could begin in Q3 2025.
7. Finance
Aligning various lines of credit is instrumental for rapid growth. If you’ve just won a big contract but did not have the financial plan in place to cover the initial set-up, you put yourself in a situation to rob Peter to pay Paul.
You don’t want to develop a reputation for not paying your employees or subcontractors on time. People talk! Word of mouth is a powerful mechanism for tarnishing a company’s brand with customers and industry partners.
Larger acquisitions targeting small and mid-tier businesses are asking for documentation that you have secured satisfactory lines of credit to prove that you’re ready to execute a large contract.
8. Executive Leadership
Your marketing brand and values need to align with your executive values and work ethics. Here is where refining and abiding by the company mission, vision, and values comes into play. “Do what I say, not what I do” is not a successful mantra for successful growth. “Walk the walk and talk the talk” is a better cliché. One way to demonstrate thought leadership is by sharing your leader’s expertise to further the industry’s capabilities and agency mission.
Summary
Brand trust can only be built on genuine characteristics within your business, such as past performance, understanding requirements, and established contract vehicle/and award. It is not something that a marketing agency can magic out of thin air! Remember, creating brand trust is NOT just a marketing activity. It is derived from building foundational characteristics within your business. Every functional area of your company needs to support—and is affected by—your brand in its specific way.
A clear, well-articulated, easy-to-understand brand message that is authentic, and quickly explains your company’s mission and value will allow your company to stand out in a crowd.
Related Resources
- Boost Your Government Contractor Branding
- Specialized Government Marketing Branding for GovCon Companies
- Government Marketing is Crucial for Government Contractors—Brand Matters
- Recruiting Top Talent: 4 Ways Your Government Contractor Website Can Help
Katie Helwig is the President of Mild Red LLC, a niche consulting firm that is offering a 90-day onramp package to help businesses new to OASIS+ understand the GWAC’s ecosystem.
Kris Brinker is a GovCon marketing expert and co-founder of Ocean 5 Strategies—an award-winning growth-focused marketing agency specializing in Branding and Marketing strategies and programs for GovCon and B2B companies.
Government Marketing with Ocean 5 Strategies
Ocean 5 provides consulting and marketing services to government contractors. Most engagements start with an assessment of the existing brand messaging, digital presence, or website status.
The services we are hired for the most:
We help our clients modernize their branding, clarify their messaging, redesign their website, and build visibility and trust with government decision-makers, teaming partners, and top talent. We help B2G companies clearly communicate their services, differentiators and the value that they bring to these critical audiences using modern marketing best practices and techniques specifically refined for the GovCon industry.
