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.

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.

Download Our FREE MSP Referral Campaign

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.

Marketing is an integral part of the business process. If your MSP isn’t allocating any time to marketing, then your MSP isn’t growing. However, if you allocate too much time to marketing, you take time away from other aspects of the business process. You can escape this trap by utilizing your time marketing effectively and efficiently.

You can’t always expect to fit a square peg into a round hole, and you can’t always expect an IT technician to be a great salesperson. However, if you equip them with the right tools, you can turn anyone into an upseller… even if they have little to no experience in sales.

As a managed service provider (MSP), one of the most important services you can provide to your clients is in regards to their cybersecurity, which also makes it an invaluable asset to utilize in your marketing efforts. Let’s go over some tips to help you draw in potential clients by effectively marketing your cybersecurity services—something that’s often easier said than done.

Tips to Write a Successful MSP Marketing Blog

The task of creating blogs for your marketing might seem daunting. But remember, you're the expert when it comes to the services your MSP offers. You can use your blog as a platform to showcase your experience and insights, convincing readers of your unparalleled expertise.

Your business’ Facebook Page is about as important of a marketing tool for your business as your website is. For some of your prospects, your Facebook page is their introduction to you and your business. With that being the case, you, no doubt, want to make not only a good impression on your clients and prospects, but you’ll also want a URL that is easy to market and share.

When it comes to search results, all search is local. The more connected you are to your community, the better your chances are to rank higher in local search results. While there are a variety of steps to increase your local search marketing, the most basic, but critically important, is to ensure that Google knows where your business is. If your NAP (Name, Address, Phone Number) isn’t consistent throughout your presence on the internet, there is a chance that you may not appear in your localized search results.

Whether you are just a one or two-person IT shop or you have dozens of technicians and specialists, marketing your MSP isn’t necessarily going to come naturally. When we get introduced to new MSPs, we always ask what they’ve been doing for their marketing up until now, and the answer is almost always the same—word of mouth.

There are several options available to MSPs to market their business and services, from social media to blog content to direct mail. With so many options available to your MSP, you may find it hard to know where to begin with your marketing. We recommend developing a documented marketing strategy to make sure your MSP marketing has a clear purpose and a schedule with time and resources to execute the initiatives.

It’s a shame that more businesses don’t use webinars as a marketing tool. They are so effective that, in 2013, 62 percent of all marketing campaigns involved a webinar. Seemingly the perfect combination between video and content, webinars can help your business grow and reach a whole new audience.

One of the biggest pitfalls MSPs have when attracting leads is that many small businesses don’t know what an MSP is, let alone what it does. Your MSP blogs are crucial because not only do they answer the questions potential leads have, but they also introduce them to what an MSP does.

Is your MSP having difficulty showing up for searches in local locations? Instead of adding keywords of cities to your website, let Google and local searchers know your MSP is serving their area. Here’s how.

Every business that markets products or services on a website does so in hopes of improving customer engagement, or to reach suspects and turn them into prospects. The problem is that many sites don’t utilize marketing best practices that allow for the kind of engagement they’d like to see. One of these practices is the use of calls to action (CTA) to persuade users on your website to take a specific action.

Internet marketing is still relatively young. Fifteen years ago companies warmed up to having their own homepages. In the past five years, social media evolved from teenagers flirting on Myspace to a massive marketing tool which allows companies of all sizes to reach millions of people, all over the world. Today, the majority of businesses are heavily invested in internet marketing strategies. This creates a new problem, noise.

Noise happens when a customer is overwhelmed with a barrage of marketing messages. Just opening a web browser, users are faced with pop-up windows, spam, targeted ads, and more. The majority of users have learned to ignore these distractions.

There are three basic forms of SEO—Technical SEO, On-Page SEO, and Off-Page SEO. On-page SEO is the content you create to solve people’s problems. Off-Page SEO are things you are doing outside of your website to increase your visibility. Technical SEO are the things you do in the “backend” of the website, and while not as prominent as the content, it is just as important. Schema Markup (Structured Data) should be part of your technical SEO, as it can provide your MSP website the visibility it needs to stand out from the competition.

Marketing your MSP may seem like a huge endeavor, or that you need to be a marketing mastermind to actually effectively market your business, but that is not true. If done right, marketing can be done without any stress or hassle. Where do you start? With a plan of course!

There’s no school like the old school, and when it comes to marketing, “old school” more or less means “outbound”... an approach where you are reaching out to your audience, as compared to them seeking out what you offer. Let’s review some of the marketing techniques that you could use as part of an outbound-focused initiative that (especially with our help) proves to be a worthwhile endeavor as you promote your managed services.