Across the nation, state and local government agencies are working feverishly to modernize their systems, enable a better citizen experience, and manage a more remote workforce.

When you consider the opportunity, it’s truly astounding—state and local government entities are set to invest a staggering $2.3 trillion in technologies and services this year.

To put that into perspective, that's equivalent to Brazil's entire GDP, and Brazil is the 8th largest economy in the world.

With that much money in play, the competition is fierce for government contractors. New businesses registering are up 20% (Source: GovTribe), while state and local government employees are overwhelmed. We’ve heard executives in big cities, small counties, and states lament the number of cold sales calls they get a week (sometimes up to 40 calls and 5x that in emails!).

The blueprint for winning in the state and local market has changed.

• Discovery, learning, and evaluation have shifted to the digital realm, with 67% to 80% of the buying process now taking place without any sales rep engagement.
• Governments are buying more narrowly with more information at the onset about what is both available and required to meet their needs now and in the future.
• The buying committee has expanded in a way that sellers often need to educate and engage 15+ individual decision-makers before a project can move forward.
• Government buyers expect vendors to walk in the door fully aware of their priorities, underlining the crucial need for comprehensive understanding. (Some are even infamous for ending meetings abruptly if a sales rep asks, “What is keeping you up at night?”)

Gone are the days when companies could pair an RFP aggregator with attendance at a handful of conference events to fill their pipeline and hit their number. To win in this new environment, you need a more modern approach.

In this four-part series, we’ve put together a modern blueprint for your next state and local win.

Step 3: Focus on targeted distribution.

The state and local market is still very much a multi-channel game reliant on:

• Dedicated communities
• Search engines
• Email

All are on the rise.

Social media is falling behind. In-person events are (kind of) back—more on that in step 4.

As in most markets these days, the companies that win effectively target messages to motivated potential buyers at the right time. However, when 85% of state and local decision-makers don’t turn to company websites for information, it’s becoming harder for companies to rely exclusively on their owned channels.

Over the last four years, building on the foothold Route Fifty has in the state and local market, GovExec acquired a variety of companies for their unique access to the decision-makers that matter in state and local government. That includes:

• A community connecting more than 3,500 leaders daily around best practices 
• A training platform that state and local government agencies invest in to support professional development for more than 20,000 key employees
• Call-verified contact data for more than 340,000 leaders
• Media platforms with extensive coverage in crucial markets like New York and Pennsylvania.

Targeting and accessing specific agencies, personas, and people through trusted, first-party channels is critical to your success.

Regardless of who you ultimately want to influence, we have turnkey and custom multi-channel programs that will streamline your workload and increase your impact.

For example, we’ve rolled out a display program that leverages our opportunity data to immediately push pre-set client ads to users within a specific geographic region across our media sites, email, and social media, anytime a new, relevant RFX is released.

When your total addressable market includes nearly a hundred thousand agencies, targeting keeps your marketing dollars from going out the window.

In a market where 90% of sales go to the first company at the table,
you should have started yesterday.

Reach out to Solutions@GovExec.com to implement the best intelligence for a winning strategy.

Stay tuned for Part 4 of this series!
Catch up on Part 1 and Part 2 here.