The Role of Social Media in B2G Marketing
A timeless marketing truism you’ve likely heard: Awareness trumps all other metrics.
It speaks to every company’s ultimate goal, which is to get noticed by the right people, at the right time.
As a company selling to government, you face a unique challenge in reaching a more specific, specialized audience.
You want your business to get noticed by an audience strictly defined by their industry, their job titles, and even their location or jurisdiction.
Government audiences often have little in common with one another. Their pain points differ depending on myriad factors, which makes targeted marketing efforts and content creation that much more challenging.
Even departments within the same city have different needs and will respond to marketing in vastly different ways.
Not only that, but government buyers are different individuals outside the 9 to 5. Their interests, search terms, and online behavior may have nothing to do with their work.
These, and other factors, make social media marketing to the B2G market unique.
The traditional marketer’s answer to increasing visibility in the B2G market is a carefully curated public relations push. The surest bet for reaching a government audience is by syndicating articles in trade publications.
PR is a tried and true technique, to be sure. But it also requires relationship-building, high-quality writing, and acquiescence to the tone and topic preferences of the publication.
The answer to increasing the visibility of your B2G business is more nuanced than simply adopting one strategy.
Owned, not earned, media opportunities are more prolific than ever, which is why social media is one of the most popular forms of marketing today.
4.7 billion people around the world use social media on a regular basis. Platforms are free or low cost and hungry for quality content. Algorithms are navigable, if ever changing. And your specific government audience is somewhere out there.
The trick is creating a social media strategy that works for both your customer and bottom line. Social media is primed for the B2G market, it just takes a little more strategy to make it a truly useful tool.
The Benefits of Using Social Media in B2G Marketing
Social media presents a relatively inexpensive, open forum for communicating and connecting with your audience. It’s also a fantastic way to share content that appeals to the unique government buyer.
The flexible format of most social media platforms allows you to post your own content, connect your audience to your website, develop relationships with potential customers, open the door to potential partnerships… and more.
Take, for example, the fact that government buyers are generally repelled by sales language. Social media platforms allow you to avoid sales-language in good faith. Rather than targeting individual buyers, you can make impressions on like-minded folks and build some brand awareness along the way.
Top Challenges with Social Media for B2G Marketing
The main concern with relying on social media for B2G marketing is simple: it’s hard to know where government buyers are online in large enough concentrations for a social media marketing campaign to be effective.
Paid advertisements aren’t worthwhile if the message, however carefully designed, is being shared into the void, rather than directly to an interested audience. The same goes for the time and effort that go into unpaid content.
That’s why, overwhelmingly, the value of social media is in the tools platforms provide, not in the broad, open landscapes of the platforms themselves.
When considering where to invest your time and resources, consider these opportunities that social media platforms uniquely offer.
The Best Social Media Platforms to Use in B2G Marketing
Social media platforms are a great way to find potential clients, segment users, reach your audience, and build awareness.
In the vast and ever-growing landscape of social media platforms, your content stands the best chance of reaching a specific audience with tools that allow you to segment, target and iterate.
Different platforms have different options to filter users, but here are the basic functions of most social media platforms you want to use.
Segment - Divide your overall audience into sections based on their demographic features or behavior, such as location, age, profession, or purchasing history
LinkedIn is a great social media tool for B2G marketing.
Target - Direct content, messaging and advertising to audience segments in a planned and measurable way
Iterate - Evaluate the success of your targeted messaging to audience segments and reform campaigns accordingly to improve performance in the future
Generally, the platforms with the tools to meet these needs and those for most B2G marketers are LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook.
LinkedIn is particularly useful for targeting individuals and organizations by occupation, title and professional interests.
While you shouldn’t necessarily rule out any platform, especially if you have reason to believe a segment of your audience may rely on it for product research, these three should form the pillars of the social media arm of your B2G marketing plan.
5 Social Media Strategies for Public Sector Marketing
Segment your audience on your own terms.
LinkedIn offers the strongest opportunity to segment government users, simply because it’s a social media platform designed for professional networking. The platform gathers information on users’ industries, job titles, employment history, affiliated organizations, professional connections, and even professional philosophy or priorities.
Because of this, you have the opportunity to target professionals based on a series of characteristics when distributing paid advertisements. But don’t limit yourself to paid services; the vast amount of public-facing data and an effective search feature make it possible to segment government employees and target them without using LinkedIn’s paid algorithm.
2. Learn from and target messaging to existing segments.
In Facebook’s long and, at times, scandalous history as a social media giant, “groups” has proved one of its more celebrated features. Facebook groups encourage users to self-segment, carving out spaces specifically for folks with similar interests. While Facebook, unlike LinkedIn, is not an explicitly professional platform, plenty of groups are founded to share professional and business interests.
You can use these pre-existing segments to your benefit, requesting or choosing to join groups in line with your industry that welcome vendors. Be warned that most of these communities ban sales content. However, you can use the group to learn more about the segment of your audience and problem-solve alongside mission-minded professionals, just like you.
3. On social media, the creativity is low in cost and high in return.
With a more traditional PR strategy, you probably want to keep your messages tailored and safe, with broad-based appeal. That will make the hours of relationship-building, writing and negotiating worthwhile.
On social media, short form content gives you the format and flexibility you need to get creative. Tossing a surprising, thought-provoking idea out there is low risk, but analytics will let you know quickly and concretely whether your musing has struck a chord.
This is particularly valuable because we know government buyers value thought provoking content that challenges presumptions about their line of work.
4. Platforms with strong analytics allow you to test your messaging in near real time.
With a social media account, you gain access to more than just a platform to share your ideas. You also have back end tools to evaluate their popularity, resonance, and reach. Some platforms are stronger in providing user analytics than others.
Twitter Analytics arrived early to the metrics game, acknowledging that their users wanted to know how their individual pieces of content performed. Paid Twitter advertisements allow the user to track conversions made possible by the ad, allowing you to evaluate whether your paid social media investment is worthwhile.
Beyond simply evaluating whether you’re making an impact, you have the opportunity to tweak your content based on what your audience is responding to. Engagement numbers tell a story about the voice, tone, copy and visuals you chose for a post, and they can point you in a different direction, if you’re open to iteration.
5. Sometimes, social media allows you to benefit from existing relationships, rather than having to build your own.
Social media is, first and foremost, a social experience! While Facebook and Twitter may lack some individual segmenting and targeting tools if you choose not to invest in paid advertisements, it’s easy to tell who holds the political capital in speciality spaces.
You may think of influencers as virtual personalities living lavish, globetrotting lifestyles hawking the most stylish consumer goods, but industry influencers are real. The social media landscape can illustrate to you who is a thought leader in the government space you want to sell to. We know state and local government employees look to their friends and neighbors for guidance in procurement decisions - that can easily translate to the virtual sphere.
Social media is evolving. Make sure your B2G marketing strategy can keep up!
We’re not afraid to sound like a broken record - the key to selling to government is quality content. And in the grand scope of your B2G marketing strategy, the tools social media has to offer are too good to pass up.
Social media allows you to not only put your quality content on display, but also to target your content to the exact audiences who will best respond to it.
For now, LinkedIn is the clear leader for its ability to segment and target the vast government audience. In encouraging iteration and tapping into existing networks, Twitter and Facebook, respectively, take the lead.
However, we’ve seen evidence of platforms, especially those owned by Meta, scouring the marketplace to implement high-value features to make their product ever more relevant and helpful to the user.
As more government agencies choose to use social media platforms to fight disinformation, share community events and public information, and even engage in customer service, governments and government vendors will encompass a larger portion of the social media market.
This means more features designed for government-adjacent needs and more opportunity for you to meet your audience on evolving platforms.
Social media is part and parcel of an effective B2G marketing strategy.
Nobody is arguing that the future of communications and marketing lives entirely on social media. But in today’s landscape, the opportunities social media has to offer are too good to pass up. Your social media approach is an important complement to your overall B2G marketing strategy, working alongside traditional public relations, SEO strategy, and more to build awareness and drive conversions.
So get to know your platforms, identify your audiences, and get messaging!
Need help connecting with your public sector audience? The professional copywriters at BHD Agency can craft compelling and relevant content to engage your unique audience. Click here to schedule a discovery call.
