Government Executive’s Market Connections released their latest Marketing For the Public Sector survey results to examine how public sector decision makers are consuming content. The findings can inform marketing strategies, helping companies decide what tactics are most wanted and where to focus efforts and budget for the best return on investment.
Responses reflect the input of 575 public sector employees across federal, state, and local organizations and a range of job functions, including IT, administrative, project management, and finance.
Barriers to Content Lifted
The study found that the majority of public sector employees work remotely three days a week with only one fourth of federal and one third of state and local going into the office daily. This access to work information at home opens many doors that were previously blocked due to content and bandwidth filters in government offices. Now, even though people may still be using government-issued laptops, they have personal devices sitting next to them that they switch to throughout the day to complete work and personal tasks. Content on social media platforms and videos now have a better chance of reaching people during work hours.
Timing Your Content
The research looked at what type of content government buyers want throughout the decision-making cycle. For those exploring options, buyers are looking for longer form content with strong third party voices. Research reports were the most desired for the federal market with webinars being most preferred by state and local. Case studies, white papers, and news articles were also cited as helpful at this stage.
As buyers determine project specifications, white papers, research, and case studies remain desirable with webinars and product demos entering the mix. This shows that initially people want to discover information on their own and at their own pace, but as they move closer to a decision, they are looking to interact with vendors via events or one-on-one meetings.
The decision phase sees the introduction of marketing collateral into the content mix. For vendors, this indicates that longer-form, educational content like white papers and research have a “longer tail” and are used throughout the buying process, while marketing collateral is a last-minute, “close the deal” piece of material.
Finding Your Content
Government decision makers show a clear preference for self-guided education. They want to read pieces that have the perspective of people beyond just the company selling to them. This preference makes SEO a critical piece of the marketing mix. If you take the time to create educational content, people need to be able to find it.
To improve the findability of content it needs to be located in multiple places. This means coordinating with partners to share it on their websites, blogs, and social media. It also means finding places to post content outside of company-owned sites. GovWhitePapers is a great option (if we do say so ourselves) and allows you to post your white papers, research papers, case studies and more for free.
For the full report, reach out to the Market Connections team. Here at GovWhitePapers and GovEvents we’ll continue tracking trends we see on our sites in terms of downloads and uploads of collateral as well as types of events and report back with any interesting shifts in how the government media is getting their content.
