The third annual GAIN conference took place earlier this month and was again a huge success. GAIN has become the conference to attend for B2G marketing professionals. Hundreds of government marketers gathered to share best practices around the general theme of customer experience.
My personal favorite was the presentation on the customer journey given by Tracey Moon, Chief Marketing Officer of cybersecurity company Verodin. Tracy opened her talk with a realistic evaluation of the challenges facing B2G marketers. It’s a noisy battle for mindshare out there, with so many options for decision-makers to choose from when researching a product or solution.
Never forget that the customer is in charge – most of the sales process is done before your company ever encounters a prospect. Tracey uses the term “dark funnel” for this and says that 75 percent of research is typically done before a company makes contact with a prospect. This term reminded me of the seminal research done by the Corporate Executive Board and Google back in 2013 that pegged that number at 57 percent. My biggest takeaway from these numbers has always been that if you’re not educating the market on your company’s expertise and value, someone else is and prospects will make their own conclusions.
To overcome these challenges precision marketing is required. Tracey recommends five steps to ensure your marketing campaign maps to the customer journey:
- Establish shared governance
- Identify shared goals and align expectations
- Agree on the joint focus
- Develop a shared engagement strategy
- Define a customer-centric process
Tracey identified the five stages that make up the customer journey shown in the graphic above – Attract, Engage, Nurture, Retention and Advocacy. Then she went beyond that and tied it all together with customer stage, campaign timeframe, internal ownership and content type – right click to view larger image:
What a great slide! As a content marketer implementing campaigns for many B2G firms this process rang true with me. This really was something that every attendee at GAIN could take with them and implement at their company.
There are lots of ways to get involved before next year’s conference if you’re involved in B2G marketing. Check out the re-designed Goverment Marketing University site and decide how to participate. A special shout out to the Health IT marketing community of interest that I’m organizing along with Tina Hamann of Leidos and Matt Langan of L&R Communications.
Happy Thanksgiving!