Discuss the Concept of the Procurement Process of Government Marketing?

Introduction: The concept of government marketing involves both, the complexities and competitiveness at the same time. The companies who are GSA Schedule certified get easy access to federal, state, city, county, and municipal level agencies. Though there are competitors, yet, the agencies are looking forward to buy products and services from these companies.

The goods and services both are purchased by the Government from the private sector. Governments play the role of a private sector consumers and buy the same types of products and services from the private sectors, additionally buy some exotic products such as aircraft carriers, spy satellites, fighter jets, nuclear weapons, tanks as well. Since past decades there has been a trend of outsourcing traditional government services to private firms, such as prisons — this trend is growing now.

The government marketing can be categorized in to two parts — The Institutional market (here the institutions are run by private sponsors and funds), and the Government market (run by institutions which are run only by government funded bodies).

The major difference between private sector marketing transactions and government marketing transactions are the process that one has to go through in order to establish the government as a customer. This process is called as government procurement. As per the laws, the governments are subject to proper action that the taxpayers’ money should be spent for judicial purposes, contracts are to be awarded fairly and solve correct public purposes. After winning a government contract, the contract winner shall be subject to a remarkable oversight during the fulfillment of the contract. To be precise, the government is counting on the contract winner, to ensure that the winner will continue till the end of bargain process. Although procurement process may differ from government to government.

The government contracting is a huge concept, which has complexities and competitiveness at the same time. As because the GSA Schedule certified companies are accessing to federal, state, city, county, and municipal level agencies for buying and selling goods and services — therefore, there is a need to know about the basics of government marketing. Knowing the basics shall give more access in selling products and services. The basic strategies the companies are supposed to apply like –

• Start with an impressive website — First step towards success is to launch a very strong website with the help of professional IT consultant if possible, so that, from the very start there should be no mistakes. The website should be informative; so that the visitors must be glued to the website.
• Be a frequent visitor on social media — Be regular on social media, increase the presence on website through live chat, webinar, update the webpages regularly, check with SEO for right content, right placement of keywords — do the best to secure good ranking on internet — compromise will not be accepted in case of search engine optimization. This creates strong impression to the target audience.
• Good Understanding of target market/customer — No matter what the business size is, another major step towards government marketing is to know the target market/customer base. This step can be taken by reviewing the mission and vision of the government agencies. Understand the need of the customer, as in, what kind of products/services they are looking forward to, take continuous feedback from them about how are they liking the products or do they need any changes etc., — these will improve the productivity of the business firm.

Conclusion: Small- and large-scale businesses are getting few options to market their products to the various levels of government marketing bodies.