It goes without saying, no two government buyers are the same, just like no two b2b or b2c buyers are exactly the same. 

But as far as marketing is concerned, buyers usually take on similar characteristics, traits and sensibilities.

Taking these common characteristics and creating a fictional representation of your targeted buyer can help marketers better understand their customer’s needs, pain points and purchasing behavior.  

These buyer personas often become the cornerstone of targeted marketing strategies and relevant content creation. 

Buyer personas in the business-to-government market are no different.

Government buyer personas are helpful to understand the general needs, characteristics, and responsibilities of a certain government role. 

While government buyer personas are a great place to start for B2G marketers, they are limited in the amount of nuanced information needed for an effective content campaign. 

Winning a state or local government contract requires marketers to dig a little deeper into a specific organization and buyer. 

If you do, you’ll learn quickly there is nothing generic about your target government buyer. 

According to the 2021 CivicPulse survey of localities, 62 percent of respondents listed “obtaining financial approval or resources” as the primary concern throughout the procurement process. 

However, nearly as many respondents named implementation challenges and a lack of expertise as a main pain point. 

Because pain points run the gamut in state and local governments, it’s important to research exactly what your target customer struggles with at an organizational level. 

While many organizations struggle with resources and financial approvals, many do not. So, before you lament with a potential buyer about resource issues, for example, check to make sure this is a relevant pain point for their organization.  

Go beyond government personas to optimize the buying experience. 

By learning detailed information about the hierarchy, culture, finances and tendencies of your government buyer’s organization, you’ll be able to create a more refined user experience in your sales process. 

Armed with personalized information, you can guide your buyer through the sales process while avoiding known roadblocks and minimizing inefficiencies, which will create a better result for your buyer and your team.

1. Contextualize your government buyer in the overall contracting market. 

It’s a common myth that governments are not influenced by market forces. In fact, there is no magic wand that government buyers can use to remove market volatility or disappear supply chain issues. 

The market informs government contracting decisions, and the government contracting world has patterns and trends that inform buyer decisions. 

Ask yourself how the current contracting market and forecasted market influence your target buyer’s impression of your outreach. 

GovWinIQ shares examples of market related questions in the context of federal IT contracting, which can be applied to the state and local markets:

• What will my customers’ budget environment look like now and five years from now?

• What do my agency customers care about; what are their IT purchasing priorities?

• What are the policy and legislative factors directing or influencing what, when, how, and from whom agencies procure IT?

• What are the most significant market and technology trends impacting IT investment decisions?

  
  

2. Identify the organization entry point with the greatest chance of success.

You want to do business with a local or state government, but that doesn’t mean your value proposition will appear the strongest to the mayor, city manager, or deputy chiefs. 

Depending on the organization, your initial sales pitch could target a department, an agency, or even a small, focused project team. 

You need a clear understanding of your options before you can effectively target your most effective entry point. 

The data might surprise you. According to the 2021 CivicPulse survey regarding specialized software purchases, fire departments and law enforcement were most likely to purchase and adopt new civictech. 

You might assume CIOs or leaders of IT departments would be the best to target for technology products, when in reality some of the oldest public services are on the forefront of technological adoption. 

According to that same survey, public works departments saw the greatest positive impact from the technology they procured. 

Research on your target market can uncover positive or negative attitudes toward your category of goods and services, pointing you toward potential champions and shielding you from naysayers. 

3. Illuminate organizational power dynamics. 

Quality, nuanced research can uncover the complex power dynamics that govern decision making on a state and local level. 

When developing your B2G marketing strategy, you must understand who the influencers are and who the decision makers are. 

• Influencer - Who are the people that inform the decision through advice, user testing, focus grouping, or other methods of collaboration?

• Decision maker - Who is signing on the bottom line? Who is accountable for the purchase? Who has approval or even veto power?

A decision-making manager at one local government may not have decision-making authority at another organization. Titles can also differ from one municipality to another, not to mention between the state and local levels, meaning that a “senior manager” might have budgetary power in one county, but only have advisory power to a budget manager in another county. 

This is one of the biggest potential hazards of relying on government buyer personas. No two state and local governments operate the same way. 

User research can help you define unique organizational power dynamics and navigate the relationships in a way that will appear respectful of the government buyer’s time, expectations and colleagues. 

4. Define organizational roles. 

B2G sales and marketers need to have an understanding of who is doing what at each stage of the pipeline, because each person involved in the procurement process plays a different role and can influence the outcome of a sale.

Role-based personas can be valuable, but without the context of larger organizational structure, it’s challenging to translate personas into nuanced content. 

Instead of creating user personas in a vacuum, effective research explores how roles work together to complete a procurement. 

This allows you and your marketing team to curate content for each role, designed to address individual priorities, concerns, and boundaries. 

Here are some examples of organizational roles that you might see represented when trying to win a government contract:

• Administrator - Who will take a leadership role in implementing and operating the good or service? They’ll likely be on the forefront of procurement, but might not hold decision making power. Titles can range from manager, coordinator, analyst or advisor. 

• End User - Who will operate the good or service on a regular basis? They might be a public servant in one department, a variety of departments, or they could be a contractor hired specifically for implementation. 

• Financer - Who will be in charge of paying for the good or service? This person could be a department head, a budget or finance liaison, or another type of manager. 

• Regulator - Who will ensure that this good or service is in line with organization policies and procedures? This person could be a chief procurement officer, a procurement liaison, or even a member of the legal team. 

All of these roles are important to the overall journey of your offering from pitch to implementation, but some may not be involved in procurement. 

Detailed research can uncover who is involved in the sales funnel, when they should be targeted, and the most effective technique for doing so. 

Download the eBook: Build Trust with B2G Content: Business-to-Government Sales and Content Strategies that Actually Work

Your B2G marketing strategy can win contracts without sacrificing scalability. 

Individualized messaging is key to winning a government contract, but personalization comes with its own challenges. 

This degree of individualization requires more time, expertise and investment than a broad marketing approach. 

But just because an effective B2G marketing strategy requires personalization doesn’t mean it’s not scalable. 

Here are two strategies to scale your B2G marketing efforts: 

• There is so much data available to help b2g marketers segment organizations based on funding availability, budgets, priorities, organizational structure, political makeup, and more. 

Using data will help to break down the vast B2G and SLED markets into more manageable target segments - ones that share common characteristics based on B2G market indicators. 

• Start thinking of your nuanced messaging as a flexible framework, rather than approaching each sale as a disparate campaign. After your first contract win using personalized messaging, celebrate! Then, consider what buyer research created the most return. 

What types of insights proved the most influential in the sales and negotiation processes? The professional preferences of your specific government buyer might not be applicable to the next contract opportunity, but how you learned them and how you used them will be.

Then, add these takeaways to your growing bank of government buyer knowledge. As your rolodex grows, so will your chances of nailing personalized messaging on the first try. But as with everything, agility - the art of trying, failing, and adapting - is vital to these first forays into winning government contracts. 

Elevate your B2G marketing strategy beyond one-size-fits-all to make an impact on government decision makers. 

Government buyer personas are convenient and a useful starting point for any B2G marketing strategy. But you’ll never know what champions you’re overlooking, avenues you’re not exploring and contracts you’re sacrificing if you settle for generic personas. 

The key to reliably winning government contracts is curated B2G marketing content. That begins with quality user research that asks and answers, “who is my buyer, what systems do they operate in, what are they looking for, and how can I deliver it to them?”

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