A Marketing Challenge Your MSP Will Have to Tackle

There are a million and one challenges businesses will have to tackle to market themselves, but things are even more difficult when the business you're trying to market is a managed service provider. 

Today, we’re going to explore one of the challenges that many MSPs have had to face, and how overcoming it is just a matter of approaching it with the right strategy.

“It’s Getting Harder to Get the Right Prospects—There Are More Competitors to Deal With, and The Prospects We Do Get Aren’t a Good Fit.”

As managed services have grown more accepted as the norm, more and more companies have started to offer a version of these services—although compared to what we would see as the standard, they more often than not are a pale imitation.

Unfortunately, your potential clients aren’t going to be aware of this… at least, not at first. One of the many goals your marketing should pursue is to educate—really, that should be the primary objective that you’re trying to accomplish. After all, the services offered by an MSP are undeniably beneficial to the businesses that subscribe to them. The big obstacle is that many of the prospects you’ll deal with simply don’t know the true depth of these operational benefits.

This, again, needs to be resolved through the messaging contained in your marketing, showing and telling your prospects about how working with you helps them. Just as pressingly, you need to be sure that you are directing your marketing efforts in the right direction so that the right people see the message.

How to Find Your Audience:

As you may imagine, this part takes a bit of legwork and a lot of research. Who is it specifically that you are trying to reach through your marketing? What industries do these businesses operate in, who in the business itself is making the decisions, and where do their priorities lie?

Answering these questions will allow you to build a buyer persona for your marketing to laser in on. As for the industry you intend to target, taking stock of your area will help to guide your decision. This is why we analyze census data whenever we work on a marketing plan for our clients… it helps to inform which targets are potentially the most lucrative for you to pursue, giving you the opportunity to optimize your efforts.

Of course, you also shouldn’t discourage potential clients from reaching out to you, which means that you need to also embrace a few inbound marketing efforts as well. 

Rather than inserting yourself into your target’s attention and selling them the service as the traditional outbound marketing and advertising playbook would have you do, inbound marketing takes the opposite approach.

In an inbound marketing strategy, the idea is to identify the numerous pain points that your products and services can help to relieve. Then, thanks to the magic of search engine optimization, or SEO, your entire online presence can be shaped to better attract the attention of the various search engines—or if we’re being honest, Google—when someone searches for that term. 

For example, we offer marketing services to MSPs. Therefore, it is in our best interests to do all we can to ensure that the almighty Google (read: search engine of your choice) directs people here whenever someone searches for “MSP marketing” or even “marketing Oneonta NY”, in addition to a whole host of other search terms. These evaluations cover a wide spectrum of considerations, too, from what is shared on your website to how the website is built to how well the website functions.

While this may sound like a lot of work (and trust us, it is!) the benefits to be gleaned from it are substantial. Not only will you attract more of the right visitors to your website, because you’re putting yourself in a better position for them to find you, but there’s also a chance your competitors haven’t yet embraced these strategies fully, or correctly for that matter.

Interested in learning more about the complex science that is search engine optimization? Check out these blogs next, or give us a call and ask!

• Three Reasons Why SEO Doesn’t Work For MSPs (Don’t worry, we also show you how it can!)
• Top Fourteen SEO Frequently Asked Questions

One of Many

Finding your audience isn’t the only challenge you’ll face and have to overcome when attempting to market your MSP. But you don’t have to face this or any other challenge alone! We’re always ready to lend a helping hand to any MSP who needs help with their marketing efforts. Don’t hesitate to reach out to contact us and give us a call at 888-546-4384.