3 Types Of Technology Stacks For Marketing In Local Government

We’ve made a small guide for if you’re looking to increase the communication and marketing efforts in your municipality.

When marketing in local government, you’ll need to think about multiple parts of the process: organizing projects, collecting information on current residents, creating interactive emails and landing pages, and automating communication among segmented demographics. Obviously, every place should start with a website, and if you need help with that check out the article that we wrote.

These are some tools that you can use and we’ve broken them down into three categories:

• Beginner
• Intermediate
• Advanced

Marketing in Local Government – Beginner

When just starting out with marketing efforts in local government, it’s difficult to know where to begin and most importantly what tools are going to help through the process. The task that marketing or communications professionals should take a look at first is collecting emails and basic information about people. A marketer can’t do much without contact information, so start there.

After that, move on to designing the brand, building the website, and automating the email send campaigns that you’ll make. These are the first things that you should do when marketing in local government and these are some tools to help:

Canva: “Empowering the World to Design”, and that’s what they help with inside of local government as well. Easily make logos, banners, t-shirts, stickers, mugs, postcards, brochures, or videos with this tool. In fact, the govStrategy logo was created using Canva!

Canva + Mailchimp or ConvertKit: On top of a platform that will help you design, you’ll want automation tools for your emails. Mailchimp and ConvertKit are two options for that. Turn emails into revenue with Mailchimp or dive into the creator marketing platform with ConvertKit. They allow you to select audiences and build user-friendly emails and land pages.

Airtable + Canva + Mailchimp or ConvertKit: With a design and automation tool in place, the last step for a beginner is having a platform to organize projects. Airtable is a simple tool to help make sure everything is either being started, in progress or complete. Make sure you’re staying on top of your marketing campaigns.

Marketing In Local Government – Intermediate

Congratulations – you know your marketing stuff! And now that you understand the tools needed for beginner-level marketing in local government, it’s time to step it up a bit and use tools with more robust features. While continuing to use an email capture and design tool, you’ll be able to maintain the brand building. Next, you’ll start sharing that brand on social media, creating videos to support the brand, and introducing surveys and forms to your email list so you can collect more information.

These are some software tools that you can use to help:

(Beginner tools) + Typeform+ Hootsuite + Wistia: Along with the beginner tools of Canva and an email automation tool, adding Typeform will allow the municipality to collect more information using interactive and simple forms. Since you’re probably looking to get more active in social media, a tool like Hootsuite will help manage your posts. And if you have the budget to create promotional videos, Wistia will be what you use to upload and manage those easily.

(Beginner tools) + Marketo + SurveyMonkey + Buffer + Wistia: The same thing goes with this technology stack in that you can use these on top of the beginner tools. Marketo is the world’s most widely known marketing automation platform and can help automate and build any type of outreach. Add a survey tool like SurveyMonkey after you create an account for free in order to gather more precise information. Buffer is also a tool that can be used for managing social media posts

Marketing in Local Government – Advanced

We were so close to calling this section “expert level”! Communication and Marketing professionals in local government who have become fluent in the beginner and intermediate tools have created plans, and strategies, and performed enough tasks to be considered an expert. The next step is learning the tools that will help you grow from here.

We’ve collected a list to get you started:

(Beginner & Intermediate tools) + Wrike + Marketo + Adobe Express + Rank Math: Referring back to the beginner and intermediate tools doesn’t hurt and you can always keep using them! However, these tools are much more capable and if you’re paying the price, might as well use all of the features. Wrike is a robust project management tool that will help keep multiple team members and multiple projects in line. Marketo is the automation tool that will help with all of the outreach. Adobe Express will allow the team to be more creative than originally thought. Rank Math will help in SEO because marketing efforts should be worth it in the long run.

(Intermediate tools) + Wrike + Marketo + Adobe Express + Ahrefs: Just like the other technology stacks, these can be used with the prior tools. These also have great features and are able to be used as opposed to the other ones. The only difference in this technology stack is Ahrefs, which will allow you to perform more tasks involving SEO

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List of Technology:

Below is a list of Marketing and Project Management tools to help you get started or continue to grow!

Project Management: Wrike, Airtable, Notion, Miro, Trello, Workflow

Automation: Marketo, Hubspot

Design/Website: Adobe Express, Canva, Optimizely

Email Collection/Conversion: ConvertKit, Mailchimp, Hubspot, Constant Contact

Surveys/Forms: SurveyMonkey, Typeform, Survey Anyplace

SEO: Ahrefs, SEMrush, Rank Math/Yoast,

Social Media: Hootsuite, Buffer

Analytics: Google Analytics and lots of tools have their own reporting features

Video: Wistia,

Events: Facebook Events/Eventbrite, Marketo

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If you need help with your methods of communication, we’ve got you covered. Also, take a look at other communication department resources available!