Four Helpful Tips for Seizing Government Marketing Opportunities
The world of government marketing is unlike any other area of business. It’s one that many companies would love to enter, but doing so successfully requires learning entirely new ways of doing business. This is what we at Asher Strategies help businesses do: make that transition from B2C or B2B to B2G, with time-proven strategies and tactics for successfully selling to governmental agencies.
While we go into far more detail in our intensive training workshops, here are some of the things a new entrant into the government marketing sphere must understand.
4 Tips to Help You Succeed When Marketing to Government Organizations
- Get amentor.
One of the best ways of learning the ropes is to partner with an established and usually larger company which has already been successful in government sales. The government maintains a mentor- protégée program specifically to encourage these sorts of partnerships, which usually see the protégée acting as an auxiliary arm of the mentor.
It’s free to participate and if you find the right mentor, you can receive invaluable on-the-job training as well as making vital connections.
- Small businesses, look for agencies not meeting their goals.
Government marketing is not only for huge enterprises. Quite the opposite, in fact. Agencies are given specific goals to meet in terms of sending work to small businesses, which is tracked in the Federal Procurement Data System. This means that a smart small companies regularly check that system for agencies that aren’t meeting their quotas and therefore will be more receptive to meeting new possible vendors and service providers.
- Read the budgets.
In B2B marketing, you often have to take guesses as to what the company might be interested in buying. In B2G, you often have that information in black and white, via the Office of Management and Budget. In some cases, you can get great information on what an agency will be looking to buy, and tailor your sales presentations to match.
- Learn to read the winds.
You can’t market to the government without spending a lot of time following politics and even news information about departmental personnel and their projects. Having more sources you can connect with will help you “connect the dots” between news items. You will soon be better positioned to do th early work necessary to win new contracts. You might even get in on the ground floor when the RFP is being prepared. That’s the real key to long term success.
Learn More from Asher Strategies
We can quickly prepare you for the realities of government marketing. Contact us today!
