I had a federal marketing list call me the other day. They said at first the leads they were getting with federal buyers was great but over time it has fizzled out. I said that’s no good, let’s figure this out, can you send me the last three emails you sent to your focused list of federal buyers.
When I received the list I had one of those “oh no” moments. The emails were different but for all intents and purposes the same. They contained the firm’s capability statement as well as a listing of a few of their top products. I could see how a federal buyer would be engaged the first time they saw the email but each successive time become less and less engaged. The failure point for this client was they understood I told them they needed to engage their list in content marketing but I don’t think they had a really good grasp as to what that means.
Content Marketing (according to wikipedia) – is a form of marketing focused on creating, publishing, and distributing content for a targeted audience online.
My personal feeling on content marketing is that their needs to be a trade-off. The marketer gives special industry insight in the hopes of building a relationship that may later generate a sales inquiry. It is not selling.
Content Marketing Tips
- 80% information / 20% your products and/or services
- Information should include insights that would not be obvious to a person not in the industry.
- Be consistent with the high quality of your contents. Poor content is worse than none at all.
- Include videos, pictures, tables, graphs if possible.
- Links from you content should go to webpages that are designed to sell to federal employees.
- Focus on solving an agency challenge.
- Share stories of solutions you brought to other federal agencies.
- Higher priced ticket items should have more specific content then lower ticket sales.
- Keep track of your most successful content marketing so you can learn what content resonates best with your federal buyers.
Once you have your content ready make sure you are contacting the correct federal buyers with your campaign. If you are unaware of the best way of doing this we can help.
