What do you do when you are presented with marketing?
Do you skip YouTube ads? Do you throw away any envelope that looks like it’s an XM Radio offer? Do you delete marketing emails?
You are living, breathing proof that most people don’t want to be marketed to.
This might sound strange coming from an MSP Marketing Agency, but it’s the cold, hard truth. Fortunately, MSPs have a really great opportunity to skirt around this fact.
Cybersecurity is essential for every business. Many decision-makers are now actively seeking cybersecurity solutions, which opens up valuable opportunities for MSPs to provide these critical services. If cybersecurity isn’t yet part of your service offerings or isn’t regularly featured in your marketing, website, and QBRs, now is a great time to consider integrating it to meet evolving client expectations and stay competitive.
A major point of your website is to attract prospective clients to your business, educate them about your services, and entice them to contact you for more information (or even sign up!). Of course, for this to happen, these prospects must first visit your website, contributing to the all-important metric known as traffic.
This is where your content can prove its worth. Let’s discuss using it to attract as much organic traffic as possible.
When you’re trying to advertise your MSP services, your content—the materials you share with your audience, like service pages, blogs, deliverables, social media, and others—and its quality will be critical to your success. You need your audience to be informed, engaged, and even excited about what you have to offer.
Of course, for your content to have a chance of inspiring these reactions, you need your audience to read it first.
To develop a strategic marketing approach, it helps to know where your strengths and weaknesses lie and how your opportunities compare to the threats you’ll face. This is the purpose of the SWOT analysis… it allows you to assess your internal and external factors so you can refine and improve your marketing of the managed services you offer.
Let’s explore what goes into a SWOT analysis and how to use it to your advantage, beginning with a breakdown of its most basic parts.
I don’t have to tell you that, for the managed service provider, the sales cycle doesn’t have an end… it kind of just keeps going. While the finish line may seem to be signing a new contract, there’s a lot you still have to do to encourage continued and increased business with your new client. Much of it will depend on your ability to communicate with them.
From your sales team to all those who work with your clients regularly, everyone must remember a few critical practices when communicating with your clients and prospects.
“Content is king.”
This is a relatively common piece of marketing advice, but what does it really mean?
Simple: Regarding your marketing, your content will communicate most of your message with your audience. It pulls traffic to your website, gives visitors a reason to be there, and gives them ample opportunity to reach out to you. That said, your content also represents your business, so let’s discuss how to ensure your content puts you and your company in the best possible light.
The difference between success and failure isn’t just about how motivated you are. Most of us in the IT industry are very detail oriented, and it’s easy to get tangled up in the small details. Sometimes, getting stuck on the minutiae can really get in the way of launching and succeeding. Let’s talk about some common pitfalls MSPs often get stuck in that prevent them from driving business forward.
If there’s one thing marketing needs to be successful, it’s consistency. Sure, it needs to be informative, engaging, and convincing, but if your audience doesn’t see it regularly, it just will not be as effective as you need it to be. Of course, to create this level of consistency, you need to be consistent in your activities.
That’s why we’ve outlined five things that you should do each and every day to help make your marketing as effective and impactful as possible.
It’s one thing to deliver a message to an audience. It’s another thing entirely to have that audience believe and trust you, putting what you say into practice. The first just takes marketing. The second, however, requires you to have built up your perceived trustworthiness: your “ethos,” or credibility.
Let’s explore why credibility is so important to your business' success and how you can cultivate it among the audience you want to attract.
If you want to build trust with your audience, you could do a lot worse than relying on testimonials. These accounts, straight from the mouths of your previously satisfied customers and clients, can easily bear much more weight than many—arguably most—other marketing efforts. After all, they are first-hand accounts of what someone can expect from working with you. That said, there are still ways that you can and should coax the best, highest-quality testimonials from your happy clientele. Let’s go over the four questions you should always ask while collecting customer accounts to accomplish just that.
Unfortunately, if you’re like most MSPs, you’re not promoting your services in a way that reaches the local businesses that may need these services. Are you doing everything you can to introduce your business to, and explain how you can help, your local community?
Is your MSP’s marketing plan taking your content for granted or worse, “phoning it in”? As Google continues to focus on user experience, they have implemented “The Helpful Content Update.” The goal of which is to ensure content provides users with the information they are searching for, while penalizing organizations that fail to do so with reduced page position.
As MSPs, delivering value goes beyond just providing services—it’s about giving knowledge to our clients and prospects. However, with so little time in the day to manage and maintain your existing client base, how can you even think of providing this information, too? This is a question our MSP blog service answers.
In many ways, a case study is one of the most powerful marketing tools that any business— especially one that serves other businesses—can use. Not only does it serve as a highly effective form of social proof, it also gives your existing marketing collateral another impactful deliverable—provided that it is put together properly. Consider this your complete guide to putting together and utilizing great case studies.
To successfully plan a business’ marketing initiatives, you must have a marketing strategy that determines how you’ll pull clients and customers in. This can be difficult for some trying to push their business-to-business services, if they are lacking a structured strategy to guide their efforts as they work to develop their brand. Let’s review some ways to simplify this process as you generate your strategies.
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.
Referrals are the easiest, most cost-effective leads your MSP can get!
Whether your MSP has a $150,000/year marketing budget or shoestring marketing budget, referrals are always a reliable source of new prospects. A good referral campaign will incentivize your clients to refer you to their friends and colleagues, but a great referral campaign will give your clients something of value.
That’s the goal of this campaign.
Having a blog is critical to B2B marketing—it’s a great way to communicate your services and differentiators to your audience and an amazing way to provide value to your overall website experience.
However, if your blog isn’t built correctly, there’s no point in spending all that time writing and publishing great content. Let’s take a look at some of the biggest problems we see MSPs (and other businesses) run into when building their blogs.
