Marketing

The role of marketing

Marketing is the foundation of successful delivery, and it is not optional. It’s not enough to design and test your product, program, service, or system; you must also market it so that your audience can learn that it exists and take advantage of it.

Additionally, your marketing strategy helps you figure out a key piece of your next phase, Measurement. [link to Orientation in the HCD process section]. Frequently, the big why statement [link to Measurement Guide] you use to establish your effectiveness measure is, in fact, a broad, market- or brand-oriented statement. So by going through the actions in this section, you will not only create a marketing strategy and implementation tactics, but also get a jump on the Measurement phase.

Overview: What is marketing?

Marketing is the process by which an individual or organization presents and then trades a product, program, service, or system to another individual or organization for something in exchange.

That’s it.

The platform for that trade is usually the immediate transfer of money in the private sector. But in the public sector, that money is provided for by taxes, so the platform is less immediate, but still it has still occurred. All public sector organizations need to understand that they are delivering offerings that have been paid for by their target audience, just not in the moment of trade.

Including the trade as part of “marketing” might seem a stretch: isn’t the trade of money for an object or service actually the sale, not the marketing? That logic is incorrect; the transfer or trade of an object or service to a customer is part of marketing, for two reasons:

1. The manner in which that transfer is executed matters. It’s part of the overall customer experience that a team provides to their audience. So thinking of the transfer or trade itself as part of successful marketing helps you complete the task you’ve set out to do with the most possible impact. Executing the trade in a way that makes your customer feel good is the business version of sticking the landing. Additionally, it sets your team up well to take advantage of point.

2. The majority of the value each customer represents to the group offering the product, program, service, or system extends over the lifetime of that customer’s potential interactions with the marketing group. You’re not marketing for one sale today; you’re marketing for 1,000+ sales across a lifetime.

Stopping here quickly to note that many public sector teams might consider the ideas of marketing and/or 1,000+ “sales” alien or even repulsive. If that’s your perspective, change it.

Consider this scenario: you are part of a team offering preventative health strategies. You successfully launch a smoking cessation program completed by 1,000 people. Hooray! Success. But just because people complete your program, that doesn’t mean it’s the end of your organization’s relationship with those new non-smokers. Smoking cessation was only the first part of improving their health. They, in fact, have additional preventative health needs, and offering preventative health strategies is your organization’s business. Product, meet Market. For a lifetime.

This is the approach private sector, for-profit companies and not-for-profit organizations take with their customers. A university doesn’t wave goodbye forever to its graduates, considering their education completed; it tries to entice them back with advanced degree and public programs. Not necessarily to make money (although many advanced degree programs do that) but in the pursuit of a lifetime of learning.

Target audience

The purpose of this section is to narrow in on the market with whom you have the best possible product-market fit, solve your Specificity problem and start to solve your Hostess problem. Singling out a target audience isn’t about eliminating any person or group from your offering; it’s about finding the best starting point for your offering. That starting point is your target audience; they are the people with whom your product, program, service, or system will most resonate.

Public sector teams frequently state that their target audience is “everyone”. That’s probably true, but it’s not going to help you successfully deliver your offering. Remember: “Everyone” will always be there. Your product, program, service, or system, however, will fail if you don’t market it correctly.

Availability versus Applicability: Narrowing in on your ideal customer

Your offering likely serves multiple market segments, especially if your work is targeted towards “everyone”. Entrepreneur Alan Dibb has created a way to quickly and precisely narrow into your core audience. He calls it “the PVP Index”¹

Dibb is a private-sector worker, so we’re going to do this using two slight, public sector-oriented tweaks to the PVP Index from his work. In Dibb’s index, “PVP” stands for “Personal fulfillment”, “Value to the market”, and “Profitability”. We’ll tweak this for the public sector, changing PVP to stand for:

1. P - Precision fulfillment: How well does your offering actually work for the organization that offers it? Answer this in terms of level of power and influence you have. Can you answer for the entire agency? For your department? For your individual branch, group, or team? It can be hard if, honestly, it seems like your offering doesn’t work that well with the mission or vision of your organization, but that’s important to note here. That might mean that you need to continue supporting this offering, but actually go back to the Discovery phase to figure out why the precision fulfillment just isn’t happening. Remember: it’s always better to know and take action, rather than continuing to offer something that doesn’t really work well for anyone.

2. V - Value to the marketplace: How much does this customer type value your offering? Do they seek it out in times of leisure? Do they seek it out as part of their work? Do they only seek it out in times of stress or desperation?

3. P - Profitability: How much are users willing to spend on your offering? In the public sector, thinking about “profit” in terms of “time” is useful, since the public rarely pays directly for our services. Some helpful framing questions here include: do people want to spend any time with my offering? If not, the offering has very low profitability (which is fine, if that’s the reality of your situation). Will people return to this offering if they get what they want out of it, as in the case with preventative health guidance?

Marketing Framework

19th century American entrepreneur P.T. Barnum summed up marketing in this way:

If there’s a circus coming to town and you write a sign about it and put it up, that’s advertising.

If you hang the sign on the side of an elephant and walk the elephant down Main street, that’s promotion.

If the elephant goes awry and tramples the garden in front of City Hall and a local newspaper picks it up and writes about the story, that’s publicity.

If you get the mayor to laugh about it, that’s public relations.

If you organize the circus so that people ultimately spend a lot of money playing the games and buying tickets for the show, that’s sales.

And if you planned all of this, that’s MARKETING.

Marketing professional Allan Dibb adds a further, modern element to this definition, stating that:

If you set up a call center so that people can find out all the fun activities and shows that are going to be available at the circus, how to get there, and where to park, that’s customer service.²

You need all of these elements to successfully market and deliver a product, program, service or system. Although the public sector might lack the exact pressures of the entertainment field that Barnam existed in, all of these elements apply to successful public service delivery.

Analysis of public sector marketing

Taking Barnam’s and Dibb’s marketing framework as a starting point, here’s where most public sector offerings can shine and where you might anticipate some trouble:

Advertising:

Advertising is typically passive and stable. Your target audience has to encounter it in the course of their lives and then take action on it. They have to see the billboard and call the number; they have to hear the radio or podcast commercial and look up the website; they have to stop scrolling and click.

You put your advertising in a place you think your target audience will see it, then wait for them to take action. Because of this lack of control, a frequent lament from people buying advertising space is that they know half of their advertising budget is wasted, but they don’t know which half.³

That’s frustrating for the ad-buyers of the world, but it’s not exactly a public sector problem. In the public sector, we can readily create and place ads in our own installations, like VA Medical Centers or Passport Offices, but we can’t readily place them in outside contexts like billboards, radio, and paid posts on social media sites because our budgets don’t allow it; many times, we don’t have funds allocated for advertising. So because a lack of advertising budget is the case for the vast majority of public sector teams, we will assume that readers of this guide are in that situation. Not to worry: no advertising budget just means you can’t buy ads; it does not mean that you can’t market your offering.

Promotion

Promotions are temporary and active. Promotions are where public sector teams can meaningfully market, as some budget is allocated for community engagement. You set up a booth, participate in an event, or even just work a crowd to let folks know about your offering. Piggybacking on commercial events located or speaking to our target audience is a great way to market public sector offerings. To decide where to spend your promotional time and energy, consider your ideal customer: where do they hang out? Where will you most likely find them? The barrier here is building the bridges to the community to access these events. For that, community engagement offices and liaisons are your best bet.

Publicity

Publicity is temporary and passive, from the team’s perspective. When we talk about publicity in marketing, we’re talking about when someone else talks about us without our paying them or partnering with them. A great way to get publicity is through a promotion. For example, you set up a fun booth at a local fair, and a blogger specializing in speaking to your target audience snaps a picture and includes it in their newsletter with a blurb about how informative and eye-catching your booth was, that’s good publicity. On the flip side, if the blogger snaps a photo of the booth with an overflowing trash can in front of it, writing about how the booth was messy, that’s bad publicity. Obviously, as much as you can, you want to avoid that.

Public Relations

Public relations is ongoing and active, from the team’s perspective. It’s definitely possible to do very well in the public sector, but it does require advance planning. That’s because you need to have a team that’s trained and empowered to engage with public events and commentary on them, as they occur.

Taking from our previous scenario, good public relations means that you know about that blogger who speaks to your target audience, and you have an active relationship with them. That means that you either know the blogger will likely snap a photo and write something positive, or you know that they likely will do the opposite and you can be ready to reply to their post.

Sales

Sales are not normally our end game in the public sector, but substitute “sign ups”, “readership”, or “information distribution” for the word “sales”, and you get the same idea. Sales are the most basic way we know our marketing is working. Do people sign up? Do people take the information? Is there a way we can confirm that they’ve absorbed that information? In many ways, these are the only questions that matter in marketing.

Customer Service

Customer service is where the public sector can truly shine. This might sound odd, because the overwhelming narrative is that government services are terrible. But that’s a management issue, not a mission one. From their root to their farthest branch, public sector organizations are service organizations. We are staffed with people temperamentally oriented and trained to provide service. So this part, the part where we tell people about all the benefits they can get or the prevention they can take part in, is the part of the marketing process that has the biggest potential for the public sector. You’re likely already doing this when you can; the next step is to maximize the value of that work.

Up Next