B2G Content Marketing: 5 Questions for Improved Sales Alignment

I originally published this blog post as a LinkedIn article on July 2, 2018.

Marketing to the public sector can feel like tapping on the side of a fishbowl to capture the attention of its occupants. Inside is a captive, well-defined audience — our government customers. They're swimming in circles, always moving, trying to achieve their missions in the face of resource constraints and institutional hurdles. We largely know who they are, because there aren't that many of them (compared to many commercial markets), and they tend to stay for a while. Most of their contact information, budgets, organizational structures, and mission objectives are available through public documentation for all to see (for those who know where to look). We're watching their every move, trying to get them to look directly at us. Tap-tap-tapping on the glass.

I believe the best way to get their attention is to feed them good content. Like fish food hitting the water's surface, content quickly gets noticed by individuals hungry for information to make the right decisions. Some of it is ingested immediately. The rest spreads out, slowly surrounding the prospects and settling into the ecosystem, where it waits to be consumed at a later time.

As many distraught parents have learned, feeding your fish too much, too little, the wrong diet, or at the wrong time can have unintended consequences. So it is with content. Careful planning is required to ensure you're not metaphorically flushing valuable resources down the toilet by creating assets that your customers don't want; distributing it too often, or too infrequently; or failing to introduce it right when your target audience needs it.

Much of that coordination happens at an operational level within the marketing organization. But success is more likely when marketing and sales are actively collaborating.

Content in the B2G Sales Process: An Inexact Science

This past week I spoke with a senior executive at a B2G company. The exec had read my recent article on 7 Reasons to Invest in Business-to-Government (B2G) Content Marketing but questioned whether such investments could have a tangible, measurable impact on the company's pipeline and deal closure rates. This skepticism is understandable.

The B2G sales cycle can be quite long for high-dollar, highly-considered product and service purchases — often much longer than in a Business-to-Business (B2B) environment. That's due in large part to the complexity of government procurement and acquisition processes for purchases over $150,000 (succinctly summarized in this CRN article by immixGroup co-founder Steve Charles). The length of that sales cycle creates an interesting conundrum: it makes content marketing more important as a vehicle to attract, maintain, and sustain engagement as the process plays out, while simultaneously making attribution more challenging.

As content assets are distributed, shared, reviewed, evaluated, and discussed among myriad influencers and decision-makers throughout an extended purchasing process, it becomes increasingly difficult to track their direct connection to the resulting sale. Decisions move slowly and are affected by many individuals and factors along the way. As time passes and customer touch points increase, even those organizations with the most well-planned attribution models and advanced marketing technology stacks will be unable to follow every engagement or accurately determine how it affected the final decision to buy. It's an unfortunate reality, and not one that inspires confidence among CEOs and CFOs. But even though it can't be tracked as cleanly as we'd like, there's plenty of value to be found in using content to support your sales efforts.

Inside the Bowl

Our government customers largely operate in bureaucratic, risk-averse, and highly-politicized environments. And as their buying journey unfolds, they've got a lot to consider. They're developing business and technical requirements, planning procurement strategies, drafting RFIs, conducting competitive research and side-by-side comparisons, soliciting word-of-mouth recommendations, reviewing past performance, ensuring funds are allocated properly, and much more.

Through it all, your target audience is getting pitched by (and consuming content from) both you AND/OR your competitors. B2G content marketing provides the tools and support that most sales and business development teams need to remain top-of-mind and nurture prospects through this drawn-out adventure.

In their 2017 Federal Content Marketing Review study, research firm Market Connections and marketing agency Merritt Group surveyed federal decision makers to learn what types of B2G content they most relied upon at different points in the purchasing cycle. Research reports, white papers, product demos, marketing collateral, and case studies were among the most valued content cited by respondents. But the data made clear that a wide variety of content resources are consumed at each stage.

5 Questions to Align Sales and Marketing

For content to be effective as a sales tool, your sales/BD and marketing teams must collaborate to ensure they're aligned on exactly what subject matter, formats, distribution channels, and timing are most likely to achieve their desired outcomes. There are several considerations that should guide how (and how much) you rely on B2G content as a means to support revenue generation. Consider the following 5 questions to get things rolling:

1) How can content extend your existing advantages?

Many established government contractors start out with built-in assets, including: hall-walking business development teams; retired government employees/consultants on staff; ongoing contracts; agency-specific blanket purchase agreements; and badged personnel working on-site with customers. As government agencies place a high value on past performance and trusted partnerships, these organizations clearly have a head start on developing relationships and securing opportunities for up-sells, cross-sells, and renewals.

For them, content can help to capture, articulate, and amplify recent successes and positive past performance while bridging between the agency's current state and emerging needs to position for future upgrades or expansions.

2) What methods are you using to engage with new prospects?

Expanding beyond your current federal customer base, or trying to establish your first foothold in a new agency, requires your prospects to willingly engage (once you've even identified the right offices, people, and programs). The challenge is convincing all relevant influencers to give you their time and attention, and doing it before they're too far into the process.

The default options are often directed outreach activities such as email, phone calls, presence at events, or social media invitations. While these outbound tactics will always be part of your B2G sales and marketing mix, they are expensive and can be inefficient without content to draw the prospects in.

Industry-generic email metrics from Constant Contact and MailChimp dictate that roughly 80% or more of your emails will remain unopened, with only a handful out of every hundred sent drawing an active engagement via a click. Outbound cold call statistics are even worse, with many prospects avoiding your telemarketing calls and ignoring voice messages. Events are valuable but also infrequent and expensive; they also require significant planning and execution. Social media outreach that immediately results in a sales pitch (with no demonstrable value provided) usually won't get you past the first touch. Remember, fish don't actually like the tapping. They prefer to be fed.

Pairing these efforts with an inbound, content-oriented approach increases the chance that prospects will find you, become interested, and proactively initiate the engagement. Well-placed, thoughtful content that provides real value encourages customers and prospects to connect with you on their own terms, when it's convenient for them, and when it's most relevant to their own buying journey. It also gives them a reason to respond to a voice message from your sales team, open your email, stop by your trade show booth, flip through your catalog, or accept your social media connection request.

To be clear, I'm not suggesting that content marketing will replace face-to-face meetings, presentations, demonstrations, or phone calls as the primary means to move a deal to closure. But it can enhance and support your outreach efforts while helping you get the prospect's attention in the first place.

3) How and when does the customer or prospect want to engage?

Your prospects will likely begin (or be brought into) the buyer's journey at different times that are impossible to predict and difficult to align with your regularly-scheduled call blitz days, event schedules, or email calendar. They often want to do their homework and educate themselves on options long before they talk to a potential supplier. They have their own trusted information sources, and an unknown, commissioned sales rep is usually not at the top of that list.

Content marketing allows you to hit them where they are, or where they're looking, when they're ready, to minimize wasted sales cycles and qualify opportunities more quickly and accurately. Sales, BD, and customer success teams tracking a potential deal can provide unique insights into what they're hearing about customer pain points to inform content creation, timing, and distribution channel decisions.

4) How much does each touchpoint cost, and how will you sustain engagement over time?

The most valuable commodity in sales is time. There are only so many hours in the day, and so many weeks before the next month-end or quarter close. Limited sales hours must be spent on opportunities with the highest likelihood of closure within forecasted time frames. Each unqualified lead that consumes follow-up bandwidth costs the company money. Each meeting that goes nowhere adds to the hard cost and the opportunity cost a sales rep incurs. Demand generation firms often charge between $800 to $1,200 per "qualified" meeting scheduled, with varying degrees of true qualification.

Even after a qualified lead is identified, the long, drawn-out procurement cycle can conspire against the best-laid plans. Churn among federal sales teams (due to territory realignments, layoffs, or job changes) or within customer organizations can set back relationships and delay (or scuttle) deals already in the pipeline.

Content helps to qualify and nurture prospects early on in the sales cycle. Analysis of content consumption, supported by lead scoring, improves the relevance of target audience development, call scripts, and sales presentations, boosting call-to-meeting ratios and meeting follow-up rates. And content supports consistent, repeatable nurturing of opportunities over time, allowing new entrants into the decision-making process to get up to speed on your story quickly while minimizing messaging conflict. When planned and executed with scale in mind, the cost per content touch can remain relatively low as assets are re-purposed for different audiences and maintained to incorporate shifts in market dynamics or priorities.

5) How will you reach the influencers you haven't identified yet?

Digitized content in particular is easy for customers to share with peers via email, social media, mobile devices, and even plain old-fashioned printing. It invites word-of-mouth recommendations, forwards, and posts to people who may influence a decision but don't yet appear on the radar of your sales team. And well-chosen content marketing channels make it possible for you to influence key personnel on a 24/7, self-service basis, often as they're self-educating or just beginning to understand their requirements and options. Those are very difficult tasks for any sales team to replicate and scale unless they are already deeply embedded within an agency.

Talk It Out Together

Before you run off and start building content, make sure sales and marketing sit down to discuss these questions. Set proper expectations about the role content will play in the sales process and how success will be measured. Use that information to create your plan, which I've covered here: Answer These Questions When Developing Your B2G Content Marketing Strategy. And please, stop tapping on the bowl. It makes the fish anxious.

If you’re not sure where to start, contact Allan Rubin at Market B2G, LLC to talk about your content strategy.

Allan Rubin is Owner and Principal Consultant at Market B2G, LLC, which provides Business-to-Government (B2G) marketing services for the government contracting community.