5 Types of Marketing Campaigns You Need to Be Using

The idea of marketing can be intimidating, particularly for small (or, yes, even medium-sized) businesses. After all, other work must still be done, and properly promoting your company and its services can drain your resources. That said, marketing is something that no business can go without.

We’ve strategized and tested different ways to execute marketing efforts most effectively, so we can confidently recommend a few marketing campaigns. In our experience, the five you’ll see below are essential to any MSP’s success.

First… What is a Marketing Campaign?

A campaign is a push. It’s a push you make so you can reach a goal.

We’ve discussed how to set goals before… keeping them specific, measurable, and attainable, ensuring they are relevant to your company, and setting a time limit for their achievement. That mindset will get you a SMART goal. A campaign is the process you actively follow to meet it.

By this logic, a marketing campaign is simply a strategic push to accomplish whatever goal you’ve set for your business using the right marketing tactics. 

Second… What are Marketing Tactics?

In this context, your tactics are your marketing tools—the means you have to communicate with your target audience, whether they’re fresh prospects or loyal clients.

There are plenty of tactics that a smart business could strategically put to use, such as:

Email

As long as you have a contact’s email address and permission to use it, you have a direct line to their inbox to share messages and insights. As you do so, being selective about what you send to your contacts is the best strategy. How often have you unsubscribed because the emails you were receiving were irrelevant to you? Be careful to maintain very specific marketing lists for this reason. If you do so, you can keep sending carefully crafted messages directly to the person you want to see them.

Social Media

Keeping a healthy social media presence is an excellent way to increase awareness of your business and its services. The native tools these platforms offer can help get your brand in front of your best-fit audience, and since this exposure often happens outside of working hours, it is all the more impactful. Boosting posts that let your business show off a little and highlight your involvement in your community helps you build a positive reputation for just doing what you’d do already.

Content

We’ve said it countless times before, and we’ll say it again now: content is king. With so many different formats—blogs, videos, deliverables, and so many more—you can communicate with different audience segments more effectively depending on the format you choose. 

It’s also important to note that you can use different formats to communicate the same message. You need your audience to consider you a trustworthy authority when all is said and done. Content helps establish that trust and authority.

Search Engine Optimization

SEO, for simplicity, is a series of small actions that help you rank better on search engine results pages (SERPS). Many have to do with how your website is built and maintained, but many have to do with the content (as seen above) your website offers. Crafting content that the search engines recognize as useful (particularly to the local searchers you’re trying to target) helps bring more attention to your website, attention that translates into traffic, traffic that brings opportunities.

Quarterly Business Reviews

These are big, as these allow you to sit down and discuss your client’s experience with your client. This way, you get information straight from the horse’s mouth, so to speak, as well as the chance to potentially fix any problems on the spot. However, the real benefit here is that your client sees you fully invested in their quality of service and overall satisfaction, if not success.

Networking Opportunities

All you’re trying to accomplish through your marketing can be summed up in two concepts: public awareness and social currency. 

You want people to know about you and be confident you can deliver on your promises. Attending a variety of events, like those put on by local chambers of commerce or peer groups, making an appearance at trade shows, and even sponsoring local sporting events, like a Little League team or golf tournament… all these help people be more aware of your business and feel positively toward it.

Using These Tactics, You Can Build Full Marketing Campaigns

We’ll run through five of our favorites now. 

They’re our favorites because, if executed properly, they can be lucrative in terms of new opportunities, reputation building, and, yes, even business transactions. Many overlap, too, meaning the same tactics can help you accomplish different goals.

Meet the Company Campaign

This one is, more or less, a way to introduce your business and services to new prospects. After pulling a list of potential new contacts and identifying the most promising options among them, direct mail is used to break the ice over the course of a month, with a few deliverables shared to show that you know what you are talking about. 

In doing so, you want to plant the idea in their heads that you are out there while also gaining their permission to contact them in other ways, such as email. After the last letter is sent, you call them to start a conversation.

Referral Campaigns

It’s not exactly a secret that the recommendation of a friend is almost always the most effective way to convince someone to try something out… even if that friend is your counterpart at some other business.

A referral campaign is simply an effort to have one of your current clients give you the name of someone they think might be interested or benefit from your services, along with their permission to use their name to open the door. You set yourself up to successfully convert a new client by doing so. You can start a referral campaign using several tactics, from email to direct mail to social media.

We have a referral campaign, including landing page content and emails, to help managed service providers collect these referrals as easily as possible. Reach out to us to learn more about it at 888-546-4384.

Educational Campaigns

These campaigns work by doing nothing other than showing a prospect how much better off they’d be with someone else handling all the details that they already don’t have time to do. Technically, you’re teaching them about a process or best practice they should be doing anyway…it just so happens that you’re available to help.

There are many, many ways you can educate through your marketing. Sharing essential technology and cybersecurity tips via postcards and social media is a good starting point and can help draw your audience to your blog for more information. Of course, you shouldn’t stop there. Hosting dedicated webinars means you can directly train your audience about any subject, and recordings of these sessions can be used as videos later, potentially adding to other educational videos you produce.

The nice part about many (not all) educational campaigns is that they don’t have to be very produced to be effective. Mostly, all it takes is some time and a bit of knowledge to produce something that works.

Event Campaigns

Event campaigns are more or less what they sound like… marketing efforts that capitalize on bringing interested people together and showing them the value you offer directly. The best part is that you don’t always have to be responsible for bringing people together! That said, there are a lot of benefits to hosting events for yourself as well.

For instance, you can host webinars and Lunch and Learns, which will attract targets who are more receptive to your messaging… especially when you feed them. You can also join networking groups and chambers of commerce, giving you access to a wider audience of potentially more motivated prospects. You can also get your name on events by sponsoring them or contributing to a trade show as a sponsor or just a participant.

There are even internal events you can capitalize on through press releases, showing off your own wins and accomplishments.

Upselling Campaigns

Internally, we like to call this “gold mining,” as it can be very lucrative to work with your existing clientele and identify the additional value you can give them in exchange for more incoming revenue. You’ve already managed to convert these audience members, so if you’ve proven your value, upselling should be relatively easy (compared to onboarding a new client).

Many of the usual marketing efforts, such as emails, newsletters, and direct mail, work well as part of an upselling campaign. The big benefits will come from the aforementioned quarterly business reviews, where you can sit down with your clients and find opportunities for them to accomplish more with your help.

By strategically implementing these tactics we discussed, you can enhance brand awareness, build trust, and drive growth. If you need a hand we are here to help. Call us at 888-546-4384 to discuss your marketing goals.