Avoid These Common Mistakes When Marketing Your MSP

Unsure where you’ve gone wrong when it comes to your MSP marketing efforts? Don’t worry; you’re not the only one. To help, we’ve put together a list of common mistakes that MSPs make when trying to promote their company, and what you can do to avoid falling prey to them. 

Common Marketing Mistakes that MSPs Make

Overall MSP Marketing Strategy

Before you start to worry about the individual pieces of your MSP marketing strategy, you need to look at the big picture. Here are some issues that MSPs often face regarding it: 

• No Overall Marketing Plan - Without a marketing plan for your MSP, your marketing could possibly be inconsistent, infrequent, and ultimately ineffective. If you don’t have one yet, consider our Marketing Plan Service to help get you on track. 
• Lack of Targeted Campaign Efforts - Whether it’s because you fail to understand your audience or don’t know how to frame your marketing materials correctly, your marketing is going to fall flat if you make it too broad and/or generic. Consider smaller, targeted campaigns instead.  
• Failure to Move Prospects Through Sales Funnel - Without the proper marketing touches, your leads and prospects will fail to move through your sales funnel. Make sure you keep in contact with them throughout the buyer’s journey so this doesn’t happen. 
• ‘Digital Only’ Approach - Companies in the technology sector seem to think that the only way to promote themselves is online. While this is a viable way to do so, don’t ignore the power of print marketing! Direct mail is a great way to target both clients and prospects. 

Website

Your website is your central marketing hub, and needs to be treated with care. Be sure to avoid making the following mistakes if you don’t want your website visitors to bounce too quickly: 

• Poorly Designed Website - Your website should represent your company in a positive light. Make sure that is mobile friendly, easy to navigate, well branded, and visually appealing. You should also make it easy for them to contact you by including your contact information throughout and adding forms to many of your pages. 
• Lack of New Website Content - Don’t let your website grow stale! Make sure you are adding new content to it on a regular basis (having a company blog helps with this), and edit or unpublish pages that are no longer relevant. 
• No Social Proof - Don’t make your website visitors take your word for it; prove to them you’re the right choice by including valuable social proof on your website in the form of testimonials, case studies, awards won, and certifications your employees have. 
• Little to No Deliverables - Give your website visitors something to take away when they visit your website. Brochures, case studies, and whitepapers are great collateral pieces to have. 

Search Engine Ranking

Without a proper SEO and content marketing strategy, prospects are going to have trouble finding you. Here are some issues MSPs face when trying to improve their search engine ranking, what you can do to fix them. 

• Pay-Per-Click Without A Foundation - PPC ads are certainly a way to improve your search engine ranking. However, they aren’t the first thing that you should be doing to improve your ranking. Work on your SEO and your website first. 
• Technical SEO Issues - Make use of title tags, H1/H2/H3 tags, image ALT tags, and meta descriptions so that Google knows what parts of your content are important and sprinkle in relevant keywords that you are trying to rank for. Make sure you do this by following white hat SEO practices so you don’t get flagged by Google. 
• Lack of Content Variety - A well-rounded content strategy includes a variety of content that includes not only well-written blog articles, other content on your website, including videos, downloadable deliverables, and more. 
• Failure to Direct Target Market to Website - Part of a content marketing strategy needs to include directing traffic to the content on your website through link building efforts. Pair a link a page on your website with the right call-to-action on your social media posts, emails, and direct mail pieces. 

Email Marketing

Email is an easy and effective way to market your MSP. However, there are plenty of mistakes that you can make that render it ineffective. 

• Building and Maintaining Your List - You need to obtain permission in order to send emails to individuals if you want to be compliant with the CAN-SPAM Act. If they unsubscribe at any time, you need to make sure you honor this. In addition, it benefits you to maintain your list by removing duplicates, inactives, and junk emails to get more accurate open and click rates. 
• Picking the Right Email Content - When it comes to your marketing emails, you need to mix it up! Consider holiday emails, monthly newsletters, and service promotion campaigns. 
• Emails Aren’t Being Opened - If your email recipients aren’t opening your emails, consider A/B testing different subject lines, sending your emails at different times, or perhaps consider cleaning your list.
• Click-Rate / Conversion Issues - If you aren’t getting enough clicks to your website from your emails, there might be issues with your call-to-action or your offer. Related, if they’re making it to your website without doing what you wanted them to do, you might need to redesign your landing page. 

Social Media Marketing

Social media is a great place to educate and build relationships with your target audience, and not enough small businesses know how to use it to do this. Here are some common issues that you need to work to overcome:

• Little to No Social Media Presence - Your company should be on the major social media platforms: Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube, and Instagram. After establishing these accounts, you need to brand them to your MSP’s logo and company colors. 
• Lack of Followers - It’s important to build up a following on social media so that clients and prospects are able to see the content you share. Consider running a Like Campaign if you have a low follower count. 
• Failure to Post - If you don’t post anything on social media, you’re letting the power of social media marketing go to waste. Make sure you are posting frequently, include links to your website when relevant, and share a variety of content that your target audience would be interested in. If time is an issue, consider using a tool like Hootsuite and scheduling your posts in advance. 
• No Engagement - You want your target audience to engage with your posts by liking, commenting, sharing, and following the link you include. If you aren’t getting this, try posting more engaging content, make sure you are including a visual element, and try boosting your posts. 

Start Marketing Your MSP the Right Way

Marketing is a LOT of work… but with the right help, it becomes so much easier. You can lean on us for your marketing needs whether you need a marketing plan, marketing services to supplement your own MSP marketing strategy, or someone to help keep your marketing efforts running smoothly. Contact us today at 888-546-4384 for more information.