Government Contractor Marketing—2 Winning Strategies

What Portion of $1 Trillion Would Make Your B2G Company a Success?

Each fiscal year, federal contract spending typically ranges between $700 billion and $1 trillion+, distributed across defense, infrastructure, professional services, technology, construction, healthcare, and more. The largest opportunities remain in defense, infrastructure modernization, and professional services.

The federal marketplace can be difficult to navigate. The customer base for government contractors and public-sector IT is becoming increasingly difficult to reach. To secure a foothold, new marketing techniques and technologies are needed to stay competitive.

Judy Bradt, a respected strategic advisor on government business and published author, said, “Many GovCons use databases to look for their next opportunity and can waste THOUSANDS of dollars and hours chasing work. That’s ‘Opportunity Illusion.’ Instead of asking, ‘What can I bid?’, winners focus on the right question: ‘Who’s my buyer?’”

There is a fundamental shift in how people are now making purchasing decisions. To increase your chances of winning contracts, you will need new and innovative marketing strategies. Starting with building brand reputation and visibility long before the RFP. It continues by building upon those relationships with buyers and decision-makers throughout the long sales cycle.

Increasingly, that visibility also needs to extend to AI-powered search and answer tools like ChatGPT and Google’s AI Overviews. Alongside traditional search engines and websites, these AI-powered tools are becoming part of how federal buyers research vendors.

Here are 2 Winning Strategies to increase your federal sales.

Winning Strategy #1: Inbound Marketing

The inbound methodology responds to a fundamental shift in consumer behavior. The majority of government agencies have already made their purchasing decision before contacting any potential vendors.

Contracting officers typically rely upon their own experience, personal influences, and online research when making decisions regarding risk mitigation, brand reputation, and visibility. This means your potential customers have already decided what they want—and who they want it from—before you even know they are interested.

Federal Buyer Personas

Developing federal buyer personas is a fundamental building block of the inbound methodology. These buyer personas are semi-fictional representations of your ideal customers based on qualitative and quantitative data and research.

Deeply understanding your buyer persona(s) is critical to content creation, sales follow-up, product development, customer acquisition, and customer retention.

Personas Respond to the Shift in Buyer Behavior
Decision-makers today are accustomed to self-educating. They have mastered online research and frequently make purchasing decisions online. They expect to quickly and easily find information and content that address their concerns, answer their questions, and guide them toward the best solutions to their challenges.

“Self-educating” also means using an AI tool to summarize their options before visiting a vendor’s website directly. This is another reason why your content needs to be clear and well-structured so AI tools can represent you accurately.

How Can Federal Personas Increase Win Rates?
Creating a detailed persona of your federal buyer helps you understand their goals, needs, pain points, and fears—both professionally and personally. With this knowledge, you can create educational materials and marketing messages from a voice of empathy, not selling. Knowing your customer can increase all of your marketing ROI.

Federal, and state and local decision-makers don’t want to be sold to.  They want to be educated. Your content should help them make informed decisions that reduce their risk.

High Quality Content

B2G companies must provide compelling, high-quality educational materials, thought leadership, high visibility of capabilities, and past performance to attract customers to their brand. This is generically referred to as “content” and must be readily available online.

• Blogs
• White papers
• Guides
• Videos
• Infographics
• Case studies
• Podcasts, etc.

This is the critical information that today’s Federal contracting officers are searching for.

Visibility and Reputation

It will take time to create visibility and build your company’s reputation through the content you produce. Understanding what appeals most to your carefully refined buyer personas will help you create content, in the format they prefer, that aligns with your company’s abilities and your consumer’s needs.

Once a prospect is attracted to your content, the next step is to convert them into leads by capturing their contact information. This opens new, more personalized marketing opportunities through emails and other communications.

Federal decision-makers consume online content!

According to studies by Market Connections, they:

• Download content from vendors they work with.
• Rely on research like white papers.
• Are willing to spend 1 hour+ reading work-related ebooks.
• Incorporate online content into RFPs/RFIs.
• Will download and share online content with colleagues and supervisors.

Marketing Automation

Inbound marketing can be a manual process, typical for smaller companies, or an automated one using marketing automation software. While marketing automation is a relatively new concept for many B2G companies, those who learn how to utilize its powerful potential first will have an advantage over their competitors.

Note: Inbound marketing is one term coined by Brian Halligan, founder of HubSpot—the popular inbound marketing automation platform. Other companies in the marketing automation space include Marketo, Pardot, Eloqua, SharpSpring, and Keap. Other terms you will hear associated with inbound marketing are “content marketing,” “non-interruptive marketing,” or “permission-based marketing.”

Winning Strategy #2: Website Performance – Engagement

Website Engagement – Overview

Website engagement is measured by: time spent on your website, number of pages visited, and bounce rate (visitors who leave without viewing another page). Your website analytics contains all three metrics.

The concept of engagement is simple. The art and science of improving these performance statistics, however, can be quite complex. It is the combined effect of the following critical factors:

Website Navigation

Good website navigation gives the visitor opportunities to find and read more. It presents related topics, leading to clicks to new pages, directly affecting the pages visited measure.

Website Content

Content—written text, pictures, graphics, video, etc.—all contribute to engagement. After all, no one stays long on a website that is not useful or entertaining.

An engaging website requires thought and planning. Who are you trying to engage with? What are they interested in? Can they quickly find the information they need? Is there a clear path to the next interesting article or past performance criteria? Today’s human attention span will not tolerate uninteresting or disorganized information. If a visitor cannot find what they are looking for in seconds, they will go to a competitor’s site for their answer.

Questions to ask when creating content:

• Who are you trying to engage with?
• What are they interested in?
• Can they quickly get the information they are searching for?
• Is there a clear path to the next interesting article or past performance criteria?

Website Features

Websites have many design features that present information in creative, engaging ways—image rotators, pop-ups (love ‘em or hate ‘em, if done well they work!), online chat, etc. They all play a role in website engagement.

However, and this is a big one, you cannot compromise your website’s speed just to show that hero video that seems so important or a series of images in a rotator that takes precious seconds to load. This brings us to our next point.

Website Speed

How fast your website loads is critical. If it’s over 2.5 seconds, you have a problem. Pages that take longer than 2.5 seconds to load risk increased bounce rates, lower conversions, and possible ranking penalties.

Mobile website performance standards are increasingly demanding; currently, just 41% of mobile pages meet all recommended benchmarks, whereas 53% of desktop sites do. Sites that load quickly—meeting these expectations—can keep up to 95% of visitors engaged. Slower load times lose about 38% of users almost immediately.

You can use PageSpeed Insights to check your speed.

Mobile-Friendly Websites

According to Statista, mobile devices account for more than 64% of web traffic worldwide. This marks a consistent upward trend in recent years as mobile usage continues to outpace desktop. The array of devices and displays available is staggering and seems to change annually. Your website UX/UI will need to be tested for all of them.

Your marketing team will need to keep a close watch on Google and where it is going when planning your content marketing strategy, SEO roadmap, and website development. Companies need to consider a mobile-first approach.

Responsive websites are now a minimum barrier to entry. Success will mean providing great content across all devices.

Beyond SEO: AEO and GEO

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is still essential, but it’s no longer the whole picture. Federal buyers are increasingly turning to AI-powered search and answer tools like ChatGPT and Google’s AI Overviews to do their research, which has given rise to two newer disciplines:

• AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) – structuring your content so AI tools can pull clear, accurate answers from it.
• GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) – optimizing your content so generative AI tools are more likely to cite your company when summarizing a topic for a federal buyer.

The good news: the same fundamentals that drive good SEO and website engagement – clear content, logical structure, fast load times, mobile-friendliness –  also support AEO and GEO. For a closer look at how these disciplines relate, read AEO vs GEO: What Content and Digital Marketers Need to Know.

Website Engagement — Summary

Website engagement is the combined effect of website design, website content, and an understanding of the website features that are available to guide the visitor’s experience. Engagement is measured by time on your site, page views, and bounce rate. These metrics are in your (Google) Analytics. If you have designed your website using the features your target personas respond to, and have provided the content they are looking for, speaking in their language, the analytics will reveal your success.

Summary

With hundreds of billions of federal contract dollars to compete for, a fundamental shift in how people make purchasing decisions, and continually changing technology, companies that market to government agencies navigate more obstacles than ever before to win new contracts.

B2G companies need to embrace new techniques such as inbound marketing, marketing automation, and paying diligent attention to mobile-friendly, responsive design and mobile-first approaches to website design and development.

And don’t forget AI. Pay attention to how AI tools discover and represent your company. SEO, AEO, and GEO all play a role in whether the right federal buyers find you.

Government Contractor Marketing for B2G Companies

The bad news: Government contracting competition is steep, contracting officer attention spans are short, and B2G marketing teams must continually create high-quality content presented in formats for rapidly changing technologies.

The good news: There are plenty of federal contracts to win. With strategic inbound marketing plans and content, you become the subject matter expert for the contracting officers you are targeting. Marketing automation tools can help propel your company towards success and elevate you over your competitors.

Read more about Preparing Your GovCon Company Now for Great Opportunities Coming.

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Kris Brinker is co-founder of Ocean 5 Strategies, providing continuous improvement of sales and marketing performance with plans, strategies, and programs that deliver results, and a track record of helping their customers grow their businesses.

You can connect with Kris on LinkedIn. Or send a message below.

Related Blogs:

• 8 Technical Elements of Website Design and Development
• 5 Keys to Excellent GovCon Website Design
• Government Marketing Best Practices for Government Contractors
• 5 Marketing Strategies for B2G Businesses
• How Digital Marketing Helps Government Contractors Grow
• AEO vs GEO: What Content and Digital Marketers Need to Know