I had a client who worked with a federal marketing list call me the other day. They said at first the leads they were getting with federal buyers were great but over time it’s 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 could 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 that 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 there 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 content. Poor content is worse than none at all.
-Include videos, pictures, tables and graphs if possible.
-Links from your 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 than 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, I always recommend an industry expert such as Fedvital. They specialize in helping small businesses to improve their Low Cost/Low-Medium Effort federal marketing channels so that firms can get their feet wet in the federal marketplace for a few hundred to a few thousand dollars. They can be reached at (859)360-1320.