Your MSP Would Benefit from a Marketing Strategy: Why and How

It’s possible most of the people you want to know about your managed services probably don’t have a clear understanding of what it is that you do, what makes you different from any other provider of IT services, or what services you offer at all. So, how do you reach out to prospects like these and convince them to become clients?

This is why every business—especially a managed service provider—needs a marketing strategy.

So, What is a Marketing Strategy?

We’ve talked in the past about the importance of a marketing plan, so we can hardly blame you if you assumed that these two concepts were one and the same. While they are definitely closely related to one another (and our marketing plans do actually outline a marketing strategy within their pages) there’s actually a pretty significant difference between the two terms.

A marketing strategy is your tactical approach to reaching prospective clients and customers and how you will convert them. A marketing plan focuses on the actual initiatives you will be executing upon in order to accomplish this strategy.

Like we said, these concepts are closely related—it’s really just a difference of what you want to do, and how you plan to actually do it. You can also think of your marketing strategy as your business’ vision behind its marketing. As such, it is important to pay close attention to it so you can design your marketing to be as focused on your goals as possible.

What Does a Marketing Strategy Do For You?

There are four real benefits of basing your actions around a set marketing strategy:

1. Optimization: With all your goals, strategies, and messages laid out clearly, it gives your marketing efforts a clear purpose to help guide them.
2. Data: By condensing the information you have into your marketing strategy, you can pull actionable insights out of your data to make better decisions in where your focus should be.
3. Boundaries: Without a strategy to help keep your efforts on track, there is a chance that your marketing could be diluted by less-effective efforts. The guidelines that a strategy incorporates helps prevent this kind of bleed.
4. Efficacy: With a direction for your marketing to follow, you can focus on your most promising leads and opportunities, making it more likely that you’ll successfully convert them into paying clients.

What Your Marketing Strategy Should Involve

So far, we’ve been pretty nebulous about what actually goes into an effective marketing strategy. Let’s break down some of what we’ve already talked about in a bit more detail to make it that much more actionable for you.

The Goals You Intend to Reach

There are numerous intentions that you can have for your company, many of which will ultimately be tied to its profitability. Having said that, there are many other goals that your marketing can help promote—increasing awareness of your brand and services, for instance. 

What Your Market Looks Like

It’s also important to fully understand the environment you’re operating in, in terms of your competition, the conditions in your market, and the various circumstances that could impact your operations. 

Who Your Clients/Customers Are and What They Deal With

On a related note, your strategy needs to involve all of your insights into who you should be targeting and what pain points these businesses frequently struggle to deal with. Understanding who you should be talking to and how to talk to them most effectively is intensely important to your success.

What You Can Offer Them

You also need to communicate how your services address the aforementioned challenges you’ve identified your prospects to be struggling with—meaning you need to determine how to frame this message, and how to most effectively get this message in front of them.

What Makes You Different Than the Others

Finally, you need to identify your business’ differentiators: what is it that you do that sets you apart from the crowd, in terms of your customer service, your service offering, or your record of success. By establishing these differences and centering them in your marketing messages, you give your prospects more motivation to choose you as the provider they reach out to.

We Can Help You Craft a Strategy and Incorporate It into an Actionable Plan

One of our specialties is being able to identify the most effective strategy for your business to adopt and design a marketing plan for your business to follow, complete with a recommended calendar to shape your efforts around. Reach out today to learn more about the services we offer to not only help you design your marketing, but also execute it. Give us a call at 888-546-4384.