The Ultimate Guide to Event Marketing for MSPs

Managed service providers can get real, quantifiable value from hosting an event for prospects or existing clients. Stick around because, by the end of this blog, you’ll be able to track the value your MSP receives from properly utilizing event marketing to pursue your goals.

The Difference Between Success and Wasting Your Time and Money on an Event

There’s a reason we said, “properly utilizing event marketing.”

If you want your audience to show up or even know that you’re holding an event, you need to excite them about it. It’s a matter of drumming up interest and getting your target audience excited about your offer. People are busy, so you need to have something of value to offer before anyone will consider investing their valuable and very scarce time into registering for and attending your event.

This even includes any free events you plan to hold. As much as people like a free lunch, your lunch and learn needs to offer more value than just a party sub and assorted chips. You have to give your audience something of value to take away from your event and put into action, whether or not they intend to lean on your MSP for more assistance.

Speaking of lunch and learns, let’s explore what shapes your marketing events should take.

Types of Marketing Events Your MSP Should Be Pursuing

There is no shortage of events that an MSP can benefit from hosting or supporting. For our own MSP, we’ve seen some very good results from webinars, lunch and learns, and leaning on our local chamber of commerce by participating in meetings and events.

Participating in trade shows also helps you get seen by an interested target audience, putting your name in their heads for when they experience the kinds of IT problems you solve. Hosting workshops for your local businesses and teaching them some basic best practices is also worthwhile, as these workshops reinforce your status as a trusted provider.

These are relatively inbound events, most likely to attract an audience somewhat aware of your business and your IT services. In addition to these benefits, event marketing can serve as an excellent outbound opportunity for your MSP, getting your name in front of a larger audience that may not have known you were an option.

To accomplish this, you might sponsor local sporting events, like golf tournaments and little league teams, or promote non-profit organizations and charitable events. Not only can this help associate your name with positive community experiences, but it also allows you to put your branding in a public forum, putting your logo in front of more faces. How many of these faces might belong to business owners dealing with IT challenges and would be interested in talking to you?

Goals of Your Marketing Events

One objective you might harness marketing events to pursue is getting your name out there to introduce your business to new prospects and expand your marketing list. Event marketing can help you embrace many other opportunities. Sponsoring something the community has put on can help boost your brand awareness simply by having your logo printed everywhere. Hosting educational events helps show your expertise to new prospects and current clients and proves you to be an excellent informational resource for them. 

Different events may be better suited to different goals. Let’s say you wanted to boost the relationships between your MSP and its current clientele. Inviting these clients to a picnic as a sign of your appreciation may help forge that connection to be a little more resilient. 

Meanwhile, if you want to impress the other members of your chamber or any other professional group you have joined, hosting exclusive events—like golf tournaments or other leisure sports and activities—for these fellow members might be something to consider. Maybe you want to upsell your current clients and have found that your webinars are relatively effective ways to communicate your sales pitch.

When we contemplate what marketing events will best serve us, we often focus more on boosting our image in the public eye. This helps reinforce the Directive brand as a positive contribution to the community and the businesses we serve, which people are more enthusiastic about supporting. Hence, we tend to donate to local causes like pet shelters and host motorcycle runs to help raise funds for veterans and their families.

How to Promote Your Marketing Event

It’s important to establish a timeline to ensure that you not only prepare for your event but also have time to market it sufficiently to get your audience in the seats.

Define Your Goals and Your Audience

First, you need to know what you want to accomplish and whom you are trying to reach with your event. We covered some of the goals you may be trying to achieve above. This goal will largely inform the audience you are trying to reach, as different MSP services will attract different audiences with different pain points. 

Set a Budget

This step is crucial, as spending too much money on a marketing event could remove any profit you see from it. After all, you’ll need to generate more money to cover the acquisition costs of each client you convert. You need to control your cost per lead, and setting a budget as you plan your event is a great way to accomplish this.

Build Out Emails

Emails are a great way to spread awareness about your event, provided you’ve put in the effort to build your email lists and are ready to produce the messaging that will entice your contacts to at least investigate more. We’ll touch on email marketing’s benefits again in a moment.

Build Out Free Materials and Handouts

Generally speaking, an MSP’s marketing should always try to teach a lesson, whether that’s security best practices, productivity boosters, or other things that can tie back to your services. Providing handouts and other materials will help reinforce your lessons and remind your audience about what they learned… while also conveniently providing them with your contact information to answer any other questions they may have.

Establish Pre-Event and Post-Event Drips

We’re back to email marketing. As you will have plenty to do preparing whatever event you’re putting on, you don’t want your marketing messages to go unsent after being overlooked. Creating automated email drips that fire off before and after your event helps to prevent this issue, allowing you to focus more on making the event as good as promised.

Build Out the Presentation/Booth/Slide Deck

Any event you put on will benefit from some visual aid, whether in the form of a booth at a trade show or a presentation to share during your webinar or lunch and learn. Take the time to make it as informative and impressive to see as possible to make as large of an impact as you can.

Practice and Rehearse

It is critical to prepare for your event in every way possible, whether running through your presentation or confirming your venue is set up correctly, simply to ensure that it goes as smoothly as possible. A mistake during your event may detract from the message of trustworthiness and professionalism you’re trying to convey, so practicing can reduce the chances of that happening.

Sharing Social Media Posts

If appropriate to your event, put together some social media posts to promote it to your followers. Not only does this make it easier to drum up excitement and awareness of your event, it helps you directly funnel potential participants to the registration page you should have set up on your website to track who is coming.

Send Personal Invitations to Key Guests

If you want to ensure that any VIPs attend your event, it helps to go the extra mile and personally invite them. This attention to detail will help encourage those you want in attendance.

Share a Press Release

If you really want to milk your event for all the social currency you can, sharing a press release helps establish that there are events that your MSP offers. While this can’t retroactively make an event more successful, getting the word out that you hold such events and potentially announcing your next one may help make it a hit.

A press release leading up to an event can also generate excitement and potentially encourage more participation.

Sending Postcards and Letters

If sent on time, snail mail communications can give interested parties and confirmed attendees a tactile reminder of your upcoming event or invite them to it, depending on how you use your letters and postcards. This physicality also makes the event seem more beneficial and worthwhile—after all, you invested in printing and mailing these deliverables—which further encourages the recipient to attend.

Paid Advertisements

Google Ads, as well as ads in local publications and newspapers, can help you spread the word about your event in a different format, one that is also likely to stick around for a while. Regarding Google Ads and ads on social media, you can customize your intended audience to make it more likely that the people you hope to attend will do so, as they will more likely see your advertisement.

Update Your Website

So, you’ve invested all this time and money into putting together a marketing event and spreading the word about it. It would be a real shame if a potential attendee followed the link you provided only to find an outdated website, inviting them to a completely different event. Your website can have a big impact on your audience’s impression of your business and its services… especially considering that you work with IT. Make sure your website represents your business and event in a way that gives a visitor confidence.

Provide Swag and Merch

Reason number one: everyone likes free stuff, especially if it offers some value, like a guide to keyboard shortcuts printed on a mousepad or a stress toy featuring your phone number. Reason number two: by providing these kinds of deliverables, you effectively incept your branding into a target’s workplace, making your business the one they’re most likely to call. After all, you were the one who taught them so much during that event you put on.

Track and Measure

Leading up to and following your event, you will want to keep track of how effective your different efforts were, measuring the success of your initiative overall. This data can then be used to generate insights that help make the next attempt more successful.

The JoomConnect platform makes this process much easier, automating your data tracking and generating reports that make these insights more apparent and actionable. If you want to learn more, contact us and ask about it! It takes the rote administrative elements of marketing off your plate, making your tasks more efficient.

Post Event Marketing

Even if your event is over, the job is not done. You should still reach out to those who participated to thank them, deliver any promised deliverables, and invite them to ask any additional questions about your event, your services, or your business.

This is also a good time to invite your participants to your next event, whether it’s the next installment of an ongoing series or something completely different. 

Need Help with Your Next Marketing Event?

Not only have we assisted many of our clients in putting together successful events, but we’ve also seen positive results in our own efforts on behalf of the MSP we operate. 

Reach out to us today to find out how we can help you prepare for your next MSP marketing event.