Marketing for Government Contracting Companies
Win More Contracts, Attract and Retain Teaming Partners and Top Talent.
Ocean 5 Strategies is a Marketing Agency Specializing in Government Contractor Marketing
Are you searching for help to • modernize your branding • clarify your messaging • redesign your website • build visibility and trust with government decision-makers, teaming partners, and top talent?
Build
Credibility and Trust
Win
More Contracts
Attract
Teaming Partners/Employees
Ocean 5 helps B2G companies clearly communicate their services, differentiators, and the value that they bring to critical audiences using modern marketing best practices and techniques—specifically refined for the GovCon industry.
Government Contractor Marketing Has Changed—Will Your Company Lead, Follow, or Lag Behind?
Marketing to the federal, state, or local government—a.k.a. Business to Government (B2G)—has a different dynamic than B2B marketing. And the way the government finds, evaluates and engages with vendors has evolved. A digital transformation is taking place, and you don’t want to be left behind. Growing GovCon companies turn to Ocean 5 because of our extensive experience and understanding of Government Contracting marketing.
*After our engagement, WBB was acquired by Serco. Website shown received 2 awards for B2G websites.
B2G Marketing Overview
- Common Misconceptions About Marketing to the Government
- The Role of Government Contractor Websites
- How Websites Improve Business Development Success
- Content for Government Contractor Websites
- Messaging
- Is Your Website User Friendly?
- Search Engine Optimization
- Target Audiences for Government Contractors
- Quiz—How Does Your Website Measure Up?
- Ocean 5 and Govcon Marketing
Common Misconceptions About Marketing to the Government
There is an all-too-common misperception that government contracts are won solely through personal connections and boots-on-the-ground business development activities and therefore government contractor websites and search engine optimization (SEO) are irrelevant for government contracting companies.
While the role of business development remains critical, this narrow interpretation overlooks two things:
- The extent to which government buyers are conducting self-directed research and validation before they engage with business development
- Government decision-makers are human beings, and human beings use the internet
Research from Market Connections, a highly reputable research firm in the government contractor space, revealed the following data:
“82% of Federal decision-makers rated search engines as their top-rated sources for research.”
“Websites are the #1 most important resource at various stages of the government buyer decision-making process.”
The Role of Government Contractor Websites
The modern role of government contractor websites has become far more critical. Historically websites were considered online brochures to simply validate your company’s existence. Now your GovCon website should be a primary source of information about your business in five major categories.
- Building trust in your brand
- Describing your products and services to your target influencers and buyers
- Clearly articulating how you are different from the competition
- Being a repository of specific helpful information your target audience expects to find
- Being a valuable resource for government decision-makers and influencers as well as potential teaming partners and top talent
How Websites Improve Business Development Success
Business development plays a critical role in winning new contracts. But a lot of activity takes place before buyers engage with the business development team.
For each contract and each agency relationship, there are common questions your buyers will ask. There are also vital messages that your company wants to impart.
The two ways to accomplish this are:
- Ask your business development team to deliver these messages on an individual basis
- Provide this vital information through your website
Since government decision-makers and influencers are increasingly conducting their own independent research online, you need to respond accordingly. Use your website to help build a relationship before they meet your business development team—or your competitor.
Websites with the right content can play a significant role in helping business development win new business.
Government Contractor Website Content
Content for a government contractor website falls into four categories:
- Information the contracting officers and other decision-makers expect to find
- Information about your products and services
- Educational content
- Conversion content
Content That Government Decision-Makers Expect to Find
Federal buyers and decision-makers expect information to be readily accessible, for example, your capabilities statement and NAICS codes. Make life easy for everyone, and add these to your website.
To learn more about the five most common content requirements for govcon websites, Download: Website Checklist for Government Contractors.
Information About Products and Services
Listing products and services may seem obvious, but listing them in such a way as to get attention is more complex. With government buyers using search engines to investigate vendors, it is essential to get your messaging right and structure web pages correctly.
Generic descriptions such as “Cloud Solutions” are not helpful to buyers or search engines. Buyers will not understand why they should consider your cloud solution instead of your competitor’s. Google’s search engine algorithm cannot differentiate this broad search term from other websites using the same description.
You, therefore, have two reasons for structuring your product and services web pages logically:
- To help you visitors find and understand the things they want quickly
- Enable the search engines to crawl and index your web pages
Educational Content
Educational content can provide valuable information to visitors about your skills, capabilities, and thought leadership position.
This same content can also be a valuable part of a search engine optimization (SEO) program. Planning is critical to make sure you squeeze all the value out of the investment you make in content.
Written content includes blogs/articles, white papers, case studies, and guides. Each of these can (and should be) used in other formats such as videos and webinar recordings.
Content Summary
Content is the foundation of any sales and marketing program.
Content should have a specific purpose. Each piece of content should help the viewer understand more about your business and guide them to take the next step towards a buying decision.
The best bang for your budget dollars is not only to create, but to also repurpose content.
- White papers can lead to blogs and webinars.
- Blog articles can feed social media programs.
- All content can help attract new website visitors and become more visible.
With a solid content plan, you can build a pipeline of opportunities. And you can identify prospects who are ready to have meaningful conversations with your business development team.
How Does Messaging Impact Government Contractor Marketing?
Messaging is the underlying theme that runs through your communications both internally and externally. It is your ability to explain that your company has the ideal solution to your clients’ problems.
The greater the targeting and alignment between your message and your clients’ problems, the more likely you are to close new deals. Don’t forget that your messaging also has a direct impact on teaming partners and job seekers.
Good messaging will
- Speak to your target audience
- Clearly articulate what you do
- Illustrate how you add value to the relationship
- Differentiate you from the competition
Messaging distills all your ideas into a concise package that you repeatedly leverage in common sales and marketing scenarios. Corporate level messaging will also need to be adapted for
- Different audiences
- Different product and service
- Different stages of the buyer’s journey
- Internal brand alignment
Messaging directly impacts the success of your website. You have just 5-7 seconds to capture the attention of a visitor, and messaging plays a vital role.
To overcome the challenges of fragmented messaging, Ocean 5 has developed the marketing message strategy workshop. The workshop helps government contractors establish their own unique identities and value propositions.
Learn More About Marketing Messaging
Is Your GovCon Website User-Friendly?
According to industry surveys, websites are the top resource used by federal decision-makers and influencers. — Market Connections
Since these people determine whether you win business, it is in your best interests to make your website user-friendly. To press the point home, Google ranks websites based on user-friendliness.
User-friendliness is achieved through a combination of excellent website design and optimized technical website development.
What is a User-Friendly Website?
User-friendliness, or user experience (UX) is broken down into five broad categories.
- Load speed—no one likes waiting, especially busy government decision-makers.
- Mobile friendly—it’s easy to scroll through on a phone or tablet.
- Predictability—the buttons do what the visitor expects and are located where they expect to find them.
- Logical navigation and page design—it’s obvious where to find things.
- Well structured—the things people want most are easily accessible.
What is Google’s Definition of a User-Friendly Website?
Google’s goal is to return the best possible websites in response to a Google search. Their motivation is to keep you using their platform, which allows them to grow their advertising revenues.
In practice, this means that Google has defined measurable website characteristics that their algorithm can use to rank your website. Here is their list:
- Mobile-friendly design: Google is committed to improving mobile-friendly websites and has adopted a mobile-first policy. With mobile-first indexing, it is the mobile version of your site (not the desktop version) that will determine where your website appears in Google’s search results.
- Security: Google measures two security aspects—does your website contain malware, and does it have an SSL certificate? Failure to meet these criteria can cause a warning to appear on your website. A warning is the wrong message for government contractors to give to their federal government buyers.
- Intrusive pop-ups: Pop-ups are not banned, just intrusive ones. Those that help the visitor with their quest are ok. Just as an added note, although helpful pop-ups are not banned by Google, they may frustrate your government visitor so use with discression.
Passing Google’s Core Web Vitals
Google updates its algorithm frequently, some are small, and some are big. Passing Core Web Vitals (CWV) is big!
However, passing CWV to pacify Google is not usually a main concern for government contractors, but it should be. Passing these criteria also contributes to a satisfying user experience that keeps visitors from becoming frustrated and leaving to research your competitor. And, if you are prioritizing attracting teaming partners and top talent, these vitals are, well, vital.
CWV focuses on three measures that directly impact website design and development
- Load Time
- Interactivity
- Visual Stability
Load Time is the amount of time it takes to display enough information to be helpful to the visitor. Load Time is measured in terms of the Largest Colorful Paint (LCP).
Interactivity determines how long before a visitor can interact with that webpage. Interactivity is measured by First Input Delay (FID).
Visual Stability determines if website content shifts around as the page loads. Visual Stability is measured by Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)
Failure to address CWV will negatively impact your ability to be visible and findable to government agencies and will ultimately impact brand trust.
Search Engine Optimization
87% of federal decision-makers use search engines to find products and services, according to data from Market Connections, a leading research firm.
Why is SEO Important for Government Contractors?
Government contractors can significantly benefit from optimizing their online presence, as federal decision-makers heavily rely on search engines to find and validate information about potential vendors. Teaming partners and potential top-talent job seekers rely even more on searches to find the best companies that they want to work with. Government buyers actively search for companies that qualify for set-asides, making it critical for contractors to accurately list all their products, services, and contract vehicles on their websites
There are over 250 different criteria used by search engines to rank websites in search results. Done well, SEO can help get your website found. Done poorly, it can negatively affect your position and get you banned from search engines altogether in the worst-case scenario.
Search engine optimization can be broken down into four subcategories, five if you include local search optimization.
- Technical SEO
- On-page
- New (optimized) content
- Backlinks
Technical SEO is developing the website to make it easy for search engines to understand how the site is structured. It is also how we meet Google’s user-friendly criteria and meet the latest Core Web Vital requirements.
On-page SEO is structuring each page so that the search engines understand what is important. These include page titles, URLs, H tags, and meta descriptions.
New content signals to Google that your site is actively helping to provide up-to-date, valuable information. Both on-page SEO and new content rely on keyword research conducted before starting an SEO program.
Backlinks demonstrate to Google that your website is important because other important websites are willing to refer to it as a credible source of information.
The process of optimizing a website requires knowledge, skills, and time. SEO practitioners also need to keep up-to-date with search engine algorithm changes.
Learn more about SEO: Download SEO—Do You Really Need It?
What are the Target Audiences for Government Contractors?
Clients for government contractors, by definition, are the federal government agencies and SLED (state, local, and education) entities.
However, your target audience may also include teaming partners—primes and or subcontractors—vendors, employees, and recruits. All of them will check out your website and form an opinion about your business.
In developing your online strategy, it is essential to consider your audiences upfront and plan accordingly.
Digging further into the target audience, we can also define Personas. Personas are a fictitious visualization of the people you are trying to guide through a decision-maker’s journey. The messages, content, and pathway through your website should be designed around a specific target persona.
Take the Quiz—How Does Your GovCon Website Measure Up?
In summary, today’s challenges include
- Websites must be responsive and mobile-friendly
- Increasing website traffic
- Keeping your company top-of-mind during a long sales cycle
- Creating the outstanding content and educational assets that your potential buyers and influencers want
- Building message consistency and brand reputation
- Connecting marketing budget and ROI
- Getting sales and marketing aligned and working together
- Creating end-to-end sales and marketing reporting
- Finding outsourced marketing that brings you an entire marketing team
Ocean 5 and GovCon Marketing
Ocean 5 provides consulting and marketing services to government contractors. Most engagements start with an assessment of the existing website or search engine optimization status.
Primary services for govcon companies include:
Core capabilities include writing content for government contractors and graphic design.
Problems We Solve
Challenge 1: Messaging is outdated, vague, too technical.
Solution: Improve messaging to better explain the company's solutions to clients' problems, increasing the likelihood of closing new deals.
Challenge 2: Website / digital presence is stale.
Solution: Use a Growth-Driven Design approach to learn about visitors through data and continually improve the website and digital presence.
Challenge 3: Lack of brand consistency / visibility / awareness / trust.
Solution: Ensure consistent messaging and brand story across all touchpoints in the decision-making process to build trust and affect prospects, teaming partners, recruitment, and retention.
Challenge 4: Not seeing ROI on trade show activities.
Solution: Maximize trade show investment by creating pre and post-exposure and conversion opportunities, along with providing outstanding materials needed during the event.
Challenge 5: Need flexibility and the ability to pivot and reprioritize.
Solution: Use an Agile program management approach to allow room for unexpected changes, new opportunities, new ideas, and adjustments based on data, feedback, and results.
What Our Clients Are Saying
“Delivered More Than Anticipated”
“We hired Ocean 5 to build a marketing strategy to meet our aggressive growth goals. The workshops delivered far more than we had anticipated, and we now have a clear plan that aligns our sales, marketing, and software development activities.
Their insights into marketing to both Federal and Local Governments were particularly helpful. I would wholeheartedly recommend Ocean 5.”
“Knowledgable and Insightful”
“I knew we would get a great website. What was well beyond my expectation was how much we would learn as Ocean 5 took us through the design and development process. An overall outstanding experience.”
“Makes the Comples Seem Simple”
“I was impressed with Ocean 5’s ability to make the complex seem simple.”
We provide technology and IT solutions (SaaS) to both the federal government and private sector. Ocean 5 stood out due to their expertise in both.”
“Gained Clarity and Focus”
“We hired Ocean 5 to build a marketing plan for our technology services targeting the Federal government. With renewed clarity and focus from the workshop, we partnered with Ocean 5 to design our new website incorporating the improved messaging.”
A Sampling of Our Clients
We are recognized for our expertise in established business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-government (GovCon, B2G) companies with a growth goal. Our clients include cybersecurity, staff augmentation, IT/technology/IoT, software/SaaS, engineering, logistics, and manufacturing companies looking for a strategic marketing partner to help them get to the next level.
