Lately, it seems like we’ve been living at both a snail’s pace and at warp speed as the pandemic continues to reshape our worlds. On the home-front without school, sports, social engagements, or even new movie releases to catch, life feels like it’s slowed down. But switch to the other side of the room and enter the home office and here’s where it feels like someone pushed the hyperdrive button, particularly for those who work in the B2G space.
Where other sectors may have ground to a halt, government agencies have a more important mission than ever as they help support citizens and the economy, drive research on COVID-19 and a vaccine, not to mention continuing to deliver on existing mission-critical activities. And, by the way switch seamlessly to remote work. Inevitably, this presented challenges not only to federal workers, but also to the technology partners that support the agencies as they keep calm and carry on.
This reality, and how it has required marketing and sales leaders to adapt just as rapidly, formed the basis of a recent episode of The Government Huddle with Brian Chidester and his guest, Tom Mahoney, head of marketing at DLT Solutions. For Mahoney this change has presented a great opportunity to demonstrate the value of his marketing team and their support for the sales organization.
“DLT’s mission is still to accelerate change for the public sector and take the latest technology and deliver it to government,” he shared during the conversation. “What we do hasn’t changed, but how we do it has.” Which, for Mahoney has meant adjusting some marketing programs to meet the buyer on their journey and amplifying other programs to connect engagement to demand with analytics that can be used to shape collaborative sales and marketing plans and drive success.
One of the strategies that Mahoney employed prior to the pandemic, but which have become more valuable since March, have been three online buyer communities. These communities – GovDesignHub, GovCybersecurityHub, and the most recent addition, GovDevSecOpsHub – draw readers from the public sector into the community by offering them a wealth of thought leadership and newsworthy content that brings greater value to public sector readers through its diverse perspective and validation by third parties.
What Mahoney knows, thanks to the analytics, is that these hub sites bring in not only the right readers but demonstrates engagement through time on site and other KPIs. “We know that we can build a preference for partner solutions and educate the public sector reader on their buyer’s journey, and also demonstrate that we understand their pain points and more importantly know how to solve them,” noted Mahoney.
But this is just a snippet of a lively and interesting conversation between Mahoney and Chidester on the art and science of connecting engagement to demand in the public sector. To learn more about how Mahoney is driving value and getting a click through rate of nearly 30 percent on marketing emails, you can listen to the complete podcast here.
