Does Marketing Have to Be Boring? (The Answer is No)

Okay, let’s take a moment and address the elephant that’s in the room, and has been in the room ever since the managed service industry really took off. Ready?

Managed services are really, really tough to make interesting—which can have an impact on your marketing efforts and their efficacy. So, let’s take a few moments to consider how to make your marketing more engaging, without detracting from the message you’re trying to convey.

The Problem: It’s Hard to Sell Dry Steak

Stay with us here. One might think that something so many find desirable (like a steak dinner) would, as they say, sell itself. However, there are a few complications that you need to consider:

• Some people may assume that the steak you’re offering wouldn’t be worth the money.
• Some people may prefer to prepare their steaks themselves, and not want to trust someone else with that responsibility.
• Some people may have had a bad steak before, and are reluctant to try again.
• Some people may not find steak to their liking, making it a bad fit for them.
• Some people may not understand what is included in the steak dinner, and instead stick to their usual dinner selection.

…and so on and so on. In essence, while a steak dinner might sound fairly self-explanatory and in need of little additional context, there are many reasons why someone may be reluctant to make the investment without more information. They may have only been served dry steak up to that point. Trying to sell managed services can create similar complications. For example:

• Some people may assume that the services you’re offering wouldn’t be worth the money.
• Some people may prefer to manage their IT themselves, and not want to trust someone else with that responsibility.
• Some people may have had a bad experience with an MSP before, and are reluctant to try again.
• Some people may not rely on enough IT to justify managed services, making it a bad fit for them.
• Some people may not understand what is included in a managed service agreement, and instead stick to their usual sources of IT support—even if these sources are falling short.

So, what can you do to make your marketing more effective? To stick with our steak metaphor, you need to prepare it properly. Let’s explore how to do so.

How to Prepare Your Marketing the Way You’d Prepare a Steak

Again, stay with us. Let’s consider all the ways that the approach you’d take to plan your marketing efforts lines up with the ways you might prepare a nice steak dinner.

First, You Need to Determine How You Plan to Market Your Services/Prepare Your Steak

There are a lot of different ways you can cook a steak—you can cook it on the grill, in a cast iron, by broiling it, you can even prepare steak tartare. It can be cooked rare to well done. It’s all a matter of preference. There are lots of different cuts of steak you have to select from, as well, that all cook in different ways.

Likewise, there are a lot of options as to how you share your MSP’s messaging. You have your website and the content on it, direct mail, email marketing, video content, and social media activity, as well as live events, webinars, and so many more. Just like people like their steak prepared differently, from the method of cooking to the dish that is made with it to the temperature it is cooked to, different marketing strategies will be more effective when used to communicate with different contacts at different stages in the buyer’s journey.

Second, You Need to Lay the Groundwork for Success

When you’re cooking your steak, you’ll find far more success if you let your steak come up to room temperature before you start the cooking process. Will your steak cook directly out of the refrigerator? Sure, but if you care about the quality of your results, taking that extra step puts you in a much better position to accomplish them.

Your marketing works in the same way, in that having campaigns prepared ahead of time to fire off when the time comes makes it a lot easier for you to find success. This is particularly the case if you incorporate some level of automation into your marketing processes. Did one of your contacts click through a certain link or spend time on one of your service pages? Set it up so that the next steps in your marketing process are automatically initiated—an email sent to the contact that did so, for instance.

Third, It Needs to Be Presented Well

It’s no secret that the way a steak looks can be a big part of its appeal, which explains why plating is such an important part of a restaurant’s focus. The better the dish looks and the sizzle sounds, the more appealing it will be for a patron of the restaurant to order.

Again, the same goes for your marketing. Taking the time to be careful about the way that you frame your messaging can help keep it from being boring. Instead of focusing on the features that your offering has, highlighting the benefits that your clientele will see from adopting it makes it more engaging and relatable.

We’re Here to Help You Prepare Your Marketing to Be Just as Appealing

With years of experience working as an MSP, we’ve done the work to perfect the recipe that will help make the most of your marketing efforts. To take advantage of this effort, give us a call at 888-546-4384 today.