SEO or PR? Strategies to Get Your Content Seen by Government Buyers
Photo by Edho Pratama
In a world where a single Google search can pull up thousands of relevant results, do we still need traditional public relations (PR) strategies?
In this Internet Age, who’s actually reading an opinion editorial or relying on friends and coworkers for trusted reading material?
You’ll be surprised to learn just how powerful traditional PR methods can be when used with modern search engine optimization (SEO) techniques. Here’s why:
According to a 2015 report in Computers in Human Behavior, user trust in the web experience is built through displayed honesty, competence, benevolence, and social reference.
In short, people are most likely to trust a site when its content seems true, smart, or well-meaning and it was recommended to them by another trustworthy source.
How can you apply this user experience research to your B2G marketing strategy?
Search engines, traditional PR platforms and your audience all reward content that is trustworthy and share worthy. Quality content, delivered through curated channels chosen to meet your marketing goals, will grab the attention and develop the trust of government buyers.
Leading a horse to water is the easy part.
Some digital marketers will have you believe that in the information age, ensuring your content sits at the top of the Google search page is an unfailing strategy. However, without investing just as much effort into your content as you do in making it findable, you risk abandonment.
In the context of digital marketing, abandonment is when a user navigates to your content, perhaps because of your strong investments in SEO, but then leaves the page without completing the desired task, whether that’s providing their contact information, signing up for a demo, or even proactively reaching out.
It might be helpful to think of abandonment in e-commerce terms. The e-commerce industry sees an average of 71% cart abandonment each year, meaning that of all the items users put in their digital carts, only 29% are actually purchased. That 71% of merchandise might initially catch a customer’s eye, but something about the quality, cost, timeliness, style, popularity… just doesn’t cut it.
Quite literally, users are just not buying it. Accessibility does not ensure desirability.
The same goes for your B2G marketing strategy.
Even if a government buyer sees your content at the top of their Google search results, they still need content to deliver honesty, competence, benevolence and social legitimacy. Without meeting those needs, you risk abandonment.
So how can your B2G marketing strategy deliver on both SEO and quality content? This is where more traditional PR techniques come into play.
To become a government vendor, get granular with your goals.
Setting goals is a foundational element of building strategy. Your B2G marketing strategy should begin with a set of discrete goals rooted in measurable objectives.
Goals are mission-based and visionary (you want to improve your brand recognition), while objectives are more specific (you want to increase your earned media coverage by 35% this quarter).
Your goals, and the objectives that help you reach them, will inform the strategies you use to optimize your content, both in accessibility and engagement.
Here are some business goals that need both SEO and traditional PR.
Build awareness.
If you’re looking to simply grow your digital footprint, it’s safe to balance quantity with quality. Your audience for this goal is essentially limitless.
You may have scoped out potential segments of your audience in your initial analysis, but at the start, any exposure strengthens your space in the market. This is where investment in strong, content-based SEO is a good idea. Let’s explore what content-based SEO is.
You may remember when search engine optimization consisted of jamming blog articles with key words and phrases, repeated again and again in a desperate attempt for the algorithm to pick up the content. This not only makes for unreadable, low-value content, but it’s also a great way to demote your site in search results.
Today, SEO is rooted in more than keywords. It’s rooted in the readability, accessibility, usefulness, and uniqueness of content.
Content that does well in SEO is WAVI:
Well-written. We’ve all opened an article that’s borderline gibberish. It must be understandable and organized.
Accessible. It meets best practices for digital accessibility, like mobile optimization for cell phone users and high contrast or alternative text for blind and sight-limited folks.
Valuable. It helps the user by educating, persuading, or simply connecting the dots.
Individual. It is not simply copied and pasted from other more established or reliable sites. It has its own contribution to offer the content area that, in turn, sets your offering apart.
When your content is WAVI, it will help develop trust in the audience that reads it. But it will also have high value to the algorithm, growing your digital footprint and building general awareness.
Build authority.
Building authority, or being perceived as an expert in your field, requires more time and work than building awareness. Awareness is a springboard to authority, but you should prepare yourself for a longer timeline if you want to become a trusted source in your buyer’s eyes.
Because authority is rooted in how others perceive you, building digital authority requires content that connects - content that doesn’t just exist in a vacuum, but serves to associate your business with an ever-growing, legitimate network.
So, who should your content connect you with to build authority in the eyes of government buyers?
Trusted trade publications. Web-based trade publications offer an opportunity for a beautiful marriage of SEO and traditional PR tactics. Linking to trusted websites that you know government buyers consider authoritative will boost your authority as well. Consider using user research to determine which sites your type of government user (elected official, IT pro, program manager, etc) might frequent. Alternatively, you could look to sites with high domain authority, meaning that they might be more likely to appear on a search engine results page (SERP) than their competitors.
Other experts in the field. By building a digital connection between your content and that of more prominent experts, you can ensure your audience and the algorithm that you recognize and value expertise. Do this by linking to quality articles, studies and other proof points. Take your connection a step further by proposing a content collaboration or even an “expert spotlight” where you can feature their wisdom on your platform. They’ll be thankful for the exposure, and you’ll benefit from their reliability.
Respected sources in the buyer’s world. This may seem broad, but it can get quite specific, depending on your targets. When doing research into your most likely audience, consider to whom or what they might turn for authoritative opinions, like neighboring localities or leadership groups. For example, groups like the International City/County Manager Association (ICMA) are massively trusted and provide resources to local public servants of all kinds, while the Public Technology Institute is a group of local leaders specifically dedicated to championing technological innovation in government.
Drive leads and inspire action.
Because of the high barrier to entry in the local government contracting market, if the goal of your content is to see conversions on a specific call to action, like viewing an official demo or requesting a quote, you have to max out the user’s trust in your content.
That brings us back to key user research findings, which hold for public servants as much as they do for average web users: the audience wants to see honest, competent, benevolent content that can be validated by the people they trust.
That requires more than SEO strategy; that requires a concerted effort to develop a positive relationship with the buyer.
To drive leads and inspire action, you need to capitalize on the awareness and authority you’ve already built and flex your muscles as a trustworthy voice offering an immediately applicable solution to the buyer’s need.
For example, you’ve linked to trade publications to build authority. You know what your ideal government buyer reads, and you’ve made it clear that you respect those publications as well.
Now, it’s time to bring your content outside of your “owned media,” or platforms that you control, like your email marketing or website. Bring your unique voice and expertise to the very platform that you relied on to build authority by pitching WAVI content.
If you strike gold - being featured on a platform read by your target audience that also enjoys strong SERP performance - both your digital footprint and your bottom line will benefit from a joint SEO and PR strategy.
It’s not as simple as SEO. Government contracting is still about trust.
Even the strongest SEO strategy is not a replacement for quality content. It’s merely one of many important tools in the toolbox of a vendor looking to build trust with government buyers. On the other hand, strong content without the right eyes on it is a waste of your time and effort.
It’s not enough for your content to be at the top of search engine results or for it to just be WAVI in a vacuum. It has to engage your audience to meet your goals, whether you’re looking to close a deal or simply build brand recognition.
This means that a combination of modern digital engagement technologies and tried-and-true PR tactics, both of which are rooted in quality content, are the best way for you to be both visible and trusted.
Engagement with government vendors begins with curated content.
When you design your B2G marketing strategy, you must consider which traditional PR tactics are appropriate, based on your goals. And when you execute your B2G marketing strategy, you must work with a copywriting team that understands the balance between accessibility and desirability.
That way, you can create messaging that will not only maximize your digital footprint but keep your potential buyers coming back for more of your honesty, expertise and advice.
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