Cyberspace is where most people get their news and where the majority of real-time communication takes place. How can public agencies adjust to this transition and best reach their audiences?

In this social media age, the public sector cannot afford to not be in the digital space. Many agencies have slowly, reluctantly, if not begrudgingly, jumped onto the social media bandwagon, yet there still remains a glaring disconnect between digital era technologies and communications in the public sector.

There is a need to fill that vacuum. After all, the majority of digital natives—the phrase used to describe those who have an innate knowledge of digital technology because of the era in which they were born—effectively leverage these technologies to communicate at hyperspeed. Why hasn't the public sector caught on?

At first, digital platforms seemed daunting for the public sector. Rife with privacy and branding or messaging concerns that could send any agency HR professional over the edge, social media and digital communication presented major problems for government organizations. The answer? Just ignore it, and hopefully it will go away.

Fast forward a few years, and the cyber wave is an unimpeachably dominant presence in the world. It is how most people get their news, where the majority of real-time communication takes place, and how billions of dollars of marketing budgets are spent every quarter.

So, how can public agencies adjust to this transition? Stodgy, time-consuming bureaucracy must embrace the Millennial way of reaching its audience. But don't think this process has to be expensive, difficult, or challenging for digital immigrants (those belonging to previous generations, who did not grow up using digital technology).

Public-sector marketing professionals must be honest with their organizations about the changing landscape of communications. And that's on top of their duty to be mindful of their public mission. So, what goes into an effective digital marketing strategy?

Government agencies need laser-specific audience targeting, social listening, and content management to remain relevant in a high-speed world. Often, agencies spend the majority of their resources creating content.

Between researching, polling, and synthesizing, content is rarely the limiting agent to an organization's digital visibility. That's because these agencies are used to spending resources on data; they've been doing it this way since their inception.

However, the paradigmatic shift comes, in promotion of this content. Every content producer has dreams of his work going viral, yet very few ever achieve this goal, and an even smaller percentage comes from the public sector.

A complete digital marketing strategy leverages material across three major areas of visibility: paid, owned, and earned media. In each area of visibility, audience targeting is critical to success. The concept of audience targeting is as simple as it sounds, though much more difficult to apply in reality because of the challenges created by current advertising models.

Targeting Your Audience

Retargeting, or the practice of using social media or web-based advertisements to target users who have researched your brand or agency, is the method du jour. However, retargeting is fraught with complications.

For one, increased security options in Google's new https rollout will affect retargeting's ability to identify people who have looked up particular phrases or companies. For another, retargeting often has an irritating effect on the online audience for several reasons. The feeling that a nefarious bot is "following" the user around is just one example that affects brand trust.

As with any evolution on the Internet, advertising must follow suit. Enter the concept of "pre-targeting," which enables agencies to intelligently spend their small marketing dollars on an audience that actually cares about them. For example, why blow the advertising budget on Facebook when the majority of your agency's audience interacts on Twitter?

The use of blanket spending on "social ads" is wasteful and ineffective. Pre-targeting identifies where your target audience exists and spends its energy, and avoids useless expenditures on forums that do not engage with your offering.

But advertising is only part of the puzzle. A solid digital marketing strategy is multichannel and diverse in its content.

Creating Content That Resonates

Time and money are always scarce resources, and content creation and promotion requires both. Another key part of audience targeting lies in creating content that is of value to your audience. Determining what exactly resonates with your audience requires social listening, content curation, and informed keyword optimization.

Content comes in all forms. "Content marketing" is a trendy buzzword that advertisers use to imply added value to their various marketing software or tracking tools. However, a more appropriate term to describe effective leveraging of content would be "content promotion."

We've already discussed why content production is rarely the bottleneck to effective digital visibility. Instead, getting your message to the right people at the right time proves to be the most challenging task for marketers, because it requires a complex data set to identify the proper audience.

At Audienti, I worked with one particular government organization, a household name and recognized internationally for its integrity in programming and development, to target its audience. The agency's main concerns were budget and brand trust. It was embarking on a fairly public digital initiative in an industry rarely associated with creativity and innovation.

Three major parts of Audienti's software toolkit that proved valuable in this project were site optimization, keywords, and competitor tracking. "One of the most important aspects of maintaining or redesigning your website is focusing on search engine optimization (SEO)," according to the web communications specialist at this organization. While SEO isn't necessarily hard, it can be cumbersome and is certainly important to maintain because it increases your organization's visibility to its target audience.

Fortunately, there are many websites that create SEO reports for you and point out any mistakes you might be making. Unfortunately, a lot of these tools are expensive—especially if you are a smaller market station.

A site-optimization tool identifies issues you may have with your site, including problems with links or images and meta data. The tool tells you whether the issue is just a minor problem or a major one, so you know what to focus on first.

For example, a site-optimization tool may identify slowness as an issue. Fixing these problems before they are widely experienced by the end user helps to combat the government stigma of slowness and inefficiency, and ultimately develops greater brand trust.

Tracking competitors may not seem like a common practice in the public sector, but it's an important one to remain relevant in the highly competitive digital marketplace. You can compare features such as domain and page authority with competing or similar sites, and learn about improvements you might make. This also highlights the importance of keeping up-to-date with both your web infrastructure as well as your web copy.

Spreading the Message

Government agencies must spread their messages over multiple platforms and through different channels to ensure brand recognition, which is a first step to awareness, trust, and eventually, advocacy.

Audience targeting is the leaner, more effective answer to directionless ad spends and content production that sees no social lift. Through effective marketing strategies, your online audience is subtly, and perhaps permanently, affected by your content and messaging.

The question of whether you must take your marketing campaigns online is no longer relevant. Instead, marketing professionals in the public space must ask themselves, "How can I get my message heard in a space cluttered with digital noise?" The answer isn't as difficult as it may seem.