Effective Marketing Strategy of General Dynamics

In a previous article, we explained the detailed Marketing Strategy of Safran. In this blog, we will discuss the marketing strategy of General Dynamics – an American publicly traded, aerospace and defence corporation.

This article aims to learn about General Dynamics and gain insight into it and how it became the fifth-largest defence contractor in the world with arms sales and total sales.

A company’s marketing strategy is a crucial element that could either benefit or harm it. Marketing has shifted to the digital globe along with users from all over the world. Check out Karan Shah, the CEO and founder of IIDE, Free MasterClass on Digital Marketing 101 if you’re interested in modern digital marketing.

We will learn the entire marketing strategy of General Dynamics by the end of this blog. Before diving deep into it, let’s begin with the company’s back story, target audience, and digital presence.

About General Dynamics – 

Source – PngPix

General Dynamics Corporation (GD), an American aerospace and defence company with its main office in Reston, Virginia, is a publicly-traded company. General Dynamics Corporation is a Fortune 100 company and ranked 83rd in 2020. It had more than 100,000 full-time employees and $37.9 billion in worldwide sales in 2020. Phebe Novakovic serves as both the chairman and CEO at the moment.

The Corporation, which was founded in 1954 as a result of the union of the aviation and submarine manufacturers Canadair and Electric Boat now has business in 45 countries and ten subsidiary businesses. Gulfstream business jets, nuclear-powered submarines of the Virginia and Columbia classes, guided-missile destroyers of the Arleigh Burke class, M1 Abrams tanks, and Stryker armoured battle vehicles are just a few of the company’s products.

General Dynamics announced a net income of US$3.257 billion for the fiscal year 2021, with yearly revenues of US$38.469 billion, an increase of 1.43% from the prior fiscal year. In 2021, the share price of General Dynamics exceeded $187, and in March 2022, the company’s market capitalization was estimated to be US$68.12 billion. General Dynamics have 10 distinct businesses organized into four operating areas as of 2021 i.e. Aerospace, Combat Systems, Marine Systems, and Technologies. 

With powerful domain skills and significant, growing growth possibilities, General Dynamics is well positioned to take advantage of both current and future growth potential in the business of aerospace, armoured vehicle, and submarine domains.

QUICK STATS

Marketing Strategy of General Dynamics –

Let’s learn about the marketing strategy of General Dynamics! And how it carries out its marketing campaign etc.

Segmentation, Targeting, and Positioning

General Dynamics segments its products and business into Marine systems, combat systems, information technology and systems, and aerospace.

General Dynamics has target market customers in the armed forces, other governments, and businesses.

General Dynamics has a positioning of providing military customers, as well as other government and commercial clients, with superior goods and services.

Marketing Campaigns

• General Dynamics’ USD 5 million advertising BLITZ

This was the first and only advertising campaign launched by the company way back in 1990. The campaign spent around USD 5 million on a radio and newspaper advertising campaign aimed at Washington Insiders and Capitol-Hill decision makers.

The ads didn’t highlight a projected reduction of global tensions because they were made before democratic change swept Eastern Europe. But the message is quite clear: The government shouldn’t ignore improvements in defence capability.

General Dynamics was only a defence contractor based in St. Louis at that time and was ranked 41st on the Fortune 500 list the previous year, therefore the advertising expenditure is modest for a Fortune 500 firm. However, this was the corporation’s first product-focused campaign in all these years.

An overview of the campaign that was sent to senior General Dynamics officials shows that it is a continuation of an effort to boost the company’s reputation during a probe into its federal contracting operations in the middle of the 1980s.

This campaign was fully responsible for the success of GD and helped it stand at the 5th rank in the domain. The market-leading Civil Aerospace firms are extensively covered in the company strategy studies from MarketLine Premium. 

• GDIT MARKETING CAMPAIGN

Organic and paid social media efforts that debuted on day one used the new brand. For the internal launch of 35,000 workers over seven concurrent live events and virtual events in the United States, messaging and creative were prepared. A radio campaign, an airport advertising campaign, a DC metro stop advertising campaign, a radio campaign, and a geo-targeted internet advertising campaign were all conducted after the launch.

In 8–10 weeks, the external campaign generated more than 280M impressions.

12,000 unique users visited the new GDIT.com on the day of its debut. Since its debut, the brand’s social media engagement has increased by 358%, it has gained 5500 new LinkedIn followers, website traffic has increased by an average of 105%, and the recently created “Brand Central” intranet page has had over 50,000 views.

Social Media Marketing

• Instagram – 7K+ 
• Facebook – 100K
• LinkedIn – 290K
• Twitter – 6K+ 

General Dynamics maintains a presence on various Social Media platforms like Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn where they frequently post about their company updates and new business. The company is most followed on LinkedIn and Facebook. If you want to connect with them you can connect with them, you can check out all their handles.

SEO Strategies

Source – UberSuggest 

According to SEO ranking, it is assumed that the number of keywords – below 500 is bad, above 1000 words is good and above 10,000+ is considered amazing. So from the SEO analysis of www.gd.com, it has 56K+ organic keywords, so we can say that General Dynamics has an excellent SEO strategy in place and is working for them. 

With an excellent SEO strategy in place, they are generating a very high number of organic traffic with 104K+ people visiting their website monthly. It is perfect for the B2B company’s SEO ranking and the SEO strategy put in place by General Dynamics is giving them the fruits of their efforts.

Influencer Marketing

General dynamics usually ran its ads on traditional means of media, that is GD usually conducted its marketing campaign via TV commercials, newspapers, and billboards. However, with the shift of marketing media towards social media platforms like Twitter and Instagram GD is also running relevant marketing campaigns on their socials in collaboration with many small to large acting and directing names. 

General Dynamics recently appointed Chuck Brooks as Principal Market Growth Strategist who also worked as an influencer for the firm for Cybersecurity and Emerging Technologies. In this role, he will drive market strategy for existing and new market segments in the public and private sectors, influencing the market, defining product inception, and developing go-to-market strategies and partnering opportunities.

E-commerce Strategies

General Dynamics has a website where the clients directly approach them. And not only this, as General dynamics work in a B2B marketplace and most of their client projects are with the government, the payments are done in online mode only. 

The company has set up its website so that clients can pitch directly to them and gather all the necessary details and company values with the website only. 

Content Marketing Strategies

General Dynamics focused on this marketing approach which focuses on creating and sharing content in the form of blogs, videos, or social media posts. These provided relevant and helpful information to potential clients, thereby facilitating them to make a decision.

The sales cycles of aerospace engineering and such B2B companies are usually very long and complex. Since the supplied products are not inexpensive, it takes extensive investigation to believe any company. Before choosing, the procurement teams evaluate all of their possibilities.

General Dynamics provides specialised, one-of-a-kind, and perhaps unpopular technologies and solutions. This made creating content a very trustworthy way to inform your B2B market and raise awareness of the company’s services.

The marketing strategy of General Dynamics has now come to an end.

What’s Unique in the Marketing strategy of General Dynamics?

It’s not uncommon for aerospace and arms businesses to promote their products using conventional marketing strategies. However, it is increasingly crucial to follow trends due to the constantly changing nature of digital marketing strategies. 

However, General Dynamics positioned itself as dominant in the market by establishing its presence and visibility digitally. They worked on all the possible aspects of growth online that a B2B corporation should have to maximize its business. 

Digital marketing is essential since it connects a business with its customers when they are online and works in many industries. Google’s SEO and PPC programs, social media marketing, and email marketing, connect companies with their target customers. Check out IIDE’s 4-Month Digital Marketing Course and 11-Months Digital Marketing Course if you want to learn more and improve your skills.

To learn more about the topic of digital marketing, you can also enrol in one of our free online masterclasses taught by Karan Shah, CEO of IIDE.

We hope that our blog post about the marketing strategy of General Dynamics has provided you with valuable insight into the company’s marketing plans.

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