There is an old saying that says, “the fortune is in the follow-up.” The saying is actually pretty accurate. Follow-ups have the potential to influence a customer’s overall experience with your company. How frequently you follow-up and the quality of your follow-ups can be beneficial - or detrimental - to your MSP’s long-term success.
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.
There are two kinds of customer feedback; both can be incredibly helpful to the business that pays attention to what is said. Negative feedback can help identify and correct shortcomings and friction in your processes, and positive feedback can be used to bolster your business’ marketing.
Let’s focus on the latter use case, discussing how you can use your clientele’s good feelings to benefit your marketing efforts and how to collect this feedback more effectively.
Recently, Google has updated its requirements to run local ads from 1 review to 5 reviews. If you’ve been neglecting collecting reviews, now is the time to start, as they increase the value of your MSP marketing efforts.
When it comes to a company’s social media pages, every follower and “like” is valuable. Essentially, your social media followers are the ones who will most frequently see your marketing content. Therefore, when formulating your social media marketing strategy, you need to keep in mind their expectations, or else risk losing them.
It is now officially summer, with June 20th comfortably behind us. What have you planned for your business’ marketing, particularly as COVID-19 eases its grip on society even further? Let’s consider how you may consider marketing your business in the coming months, and how these strategies should shift.
Email marketing is a great tool for B2B marketers to take advantage of due to its flexibility and ease of use. Specifically, it can be a great tool to use to stay connected during holidays throughout the year.
Social media marketing, like all marketing, requires repeat viewings to enter the consciousness and equally important the subconscious of the audience. This is why there is the “Rule of 7” - the long-held belief that a potential customer needs to see your ad at least seven times before they are willing to commit to an action. Yes, there are impulse buyers, but they are the exception, not the rule. Most people take some time before they commit to a course of action and successful marketing demands you ‘touch’ them multiple times to reinforce your message.
Have you ever been set up on blind date or gone on a first date where you didn’t know the person all that well? If so, you understand all the anxiety that it can cause. Figuring out what to wear, what to say and what to do can really stress you out and so can managing your company's social media accounts. What to post, what to like and what to share while still managing your company’s personality and authenticity while striving to become the thought leader in your area, can also cause anxiety for some. How do you minimize that anxiety on a first/blind date? Make it a group date - invite your friends and have them invite theirs. How do you minimize that anxiety when it comes to your social media? Share, retweet or repost other companies’ social media - as long as you have a method to your madness.
To many small business owners, especially those in the arena of serving other businesses, social media seems like a waste of time. You’re not selling a brand new, up-and-coming consumer product, you’re a managed service provider trying to sell businesses various IT-related services to other business. So, what’s the point of trying to compete for attention in online spaces filled with baby pictures, memes, and funny animal videos? Why should you even bother?
If you’ve established social media pages but aren’t doing anything with them, you’re wasting so many valuable opportunities to connect with your target audience. This includes your clients, and even your prospects who decide to seek out more information about you.
Think about it: how many advertisements that you see actually capture your attention? How many leave a lasting impression that enables you to recall them days, weeks, or even months later?
When it comes to your business’ marketing, there’s one group who knows what works (and what doesn’t) better than anyone else: your audience. As a result, their feedback is some of the most important for you to hear. The best way of finding out what this group is thinking is to ask, and it just so happens that there are many ways for you to do so.
Your customers are the lifeblood of your business. You need them to keep your business afloat.To do so, you need to understand things from their perspective. What are their business needs? What product and service solutions are they looking for to solve those needs?
This phrase may sound familiar to you: “You don’t get a second chance to make a first impression.” There have been countless psychological studies that have shown how important it is to put your best foot forward when you first meet someone if you want to leave a positive, lasting impression.
As consumers, we encounter countless pieces of marketing and advertisements on a daily basis - estimates range from 3,000 to nearly 10,000! Ads are everywhere, meaning that the marketing you do is competing with hundreds, thousands, and possibly even millions of sources attempting to target the same people that you are. This makes it even more difficult to leave a lasting impression.
Business has always been something that benefits from a close professional relationship. A relationship like this can be challenging to accomplish, however, as it usually requires some deliberate and meaningful action by the business. There are some methods that you can use to encourage this kind of relationship between your clients and your business.
As an MSP, your company sells your products and services to other businesses - the typical nature of the business-to-business sector. And, as a business yourself, you probably understand this concept: time is money. You don’t want to waste this valuable resource in any way.
To grow as a business, you have to bring in new clients. And, while this is true, your focus shouldn’t only be on building new relationships. You also need to dedicate resources to ensuring that your current customers continue to do business with you.
As we’ve discussed before, marketing best practices state that utilizing your marketing to touch upon your audience’s pain points a total of 27 times will likely result in them signing on. While onboarding new clients is indeed a good thing, it is even better to retain them after their initial service has been completed. After all, it’s hardly worth all the trouble to claim a new client just to have them leave after one deal.
