Many MSPs feel that now that they have their website, the leads will start flowing in. Unfortunately, the reality is that a website is just the first step to lead generation, not the end. MSPs need to realize that marketing their business requires more than just a website; here’s why.
It’s one thing to attract new people to your business initially… it’s quite another to keep their interest over time and cultivate a professional relationship with them. As such, it is important that you look beyond pure engagement… past the sizzle, so to speak… when communicating with your audience.
You also need to consider how you should follow up on your engagement efforts to reach a sale and how to keep these new clients engaged with your services and interacting with you long afterward. Let’s discuss a few strategies you may consider in your attempts to do just that.
Capturing leads is only the first stop. Turning them into clients? That’s where the real challenge lies. Success isn’t just about making a good first impression—it’s about maintaining the momentum. A well-crafted email nurture sequence bridges the gap between the initial interest and long-term commitment, providing a scalable, strategic way to guide leads through the sales funnel.
Cybersecurity is essential for every business. Many decision-makers are now actively seeking cybersecurity solutions, which opens up valuable opportunities for MSPs to provide these critical services. If cybersecurity isn’t yet part of your service offerings or isn’t regularly featured in your marketing, website, and QBRs, now is a great time to consider integrating it to meet evolving client expectations and stay competitive.
Marketing managed IT services, much like marketing any service offering, largely depends on the quality and applicability of your content and the topics it discusses.
As a result, it is essential to produce good content and address the topics your audience is most interested in learning about. Let’s discuss a few things that this could—and really should—entail.
Trust is the bedrock of any successful business relationship. Whether it’s a business owner depending on their employees to do the right thing, a company relying on its vendors to deliver what’s been promised, or a prospect choosing between service providers, trust is the differentiator that turns prospects into loyal customers.
A major point of your website is to attract prospective clients to your business, educate them about your services, and entice them to contact you for more information (or even sign up!). Of course, for this to happen, these prospects must first visit your website, contributing to the all-important metric known as traffic.
This is where your content can prove its worth. Let’s discuss using it to attract as much organic traffic as possible.
Little can be more frustrating than thinking you’re doing everything right, only for your desired outcome to elude you… for instance, if your marketing prospects aren’t being drawn in.
Let’s explore some potential reasons why your prospects aren’t converting and how you can resolve the issues that may be present.
We spend a lot of time discussing how beneficial a blog is to a managed service provider—or any B2B organization, really—as it serves as a simple means of attracting attention from search engines, demonstrating your business’ value, and boosting awareness of what problems you can solve for them. One question remains, however:
How do you get the appropriate eyes on your blog?
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.
When you’re trying to advertise your MSP services, your content—the materials you share with your audience, like service pages, blogs, deliverables, social media, and others—and its quality will be critical to your success. You need your audience to be informed, engaged, and even excited about what you have to offer.
Of course, for your content to have a chance of inspiring these reactions, you need your audience to read it first.
To develop a strategic marketing approach, it helps to know where your strengths and weaknesses lie and how your opportunities compare to the threats you’ll face. This is the purpose of the SWOT analysis… it allows you to assess your internal and external factors so you can refine and improve your marketing of the managed services you offer.
Let’s explore what goes into a SWOT analysis and how to use it to your advantage, beginning with a breakdown of its most basic parts.
I don’t have to tell you that, for the managed service provider, the sales cycle doesn’t have an end… it kind of just keeps going. While the finish line may seem to be signing a new contract, there’s a lot you still have to do to encourage continued and increased business with your new client. Much of it will depend on your ability to communicate with them.
From your sales team to all those who work with your clients regularly, everyone must remember a few critical practices when communicating with your clients and prospects.
“Content is king.”
This is a relatively common piece of marketing advice, but what does it really mean?
Simple: Regarding your marketing, your content will communicate most of your message with your audience. It pulls traffic to your website, gives visitors a reason to be there, and gives them ample opportunity to reach out to you. That said, your content also represents your business, so let’s discuss how to ensure your content puts you and your company in the best possible light.
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.
If there’s one thing marketing needs to be successful, it’s consistency. Sure, it needs to be informative, engaging, and convincing, but if your audience doesn’t see it regularly, it just will not be as effective as you need it to be. Of course, to create this level of consistency, you need to be consistent in your activities.
That’s why we’ve outlined five things that you should do each and every day to help make your marketing as effective and impactful as possible.
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.
If you want to build trust with your audience, you could do a lot worse than relying on testimonials. These accounts, straight from the mouths of your previously satisfied customers and clients, can easily bear much more weight than many—arguably most—other marketing efforts. After all, they are first-hand accounts of what someone can expect from working with you. That said, there are still ways that you can and should coax the best, highest-quality testimonials from your happy clientele. Let’s go over the four questions you should always ask while collecting customer accounts to accomplish just that.
Unfortunately, if you’re like most MSPs, you’re not promoting your services in a way that reaches the local businesses that may need these services. Are you doing everything you can to introduce your business to, and explain how you can help, your local community?
Is your MSP’s marketing plan taking your content for granted or worse, “phoning it in”? As Google continues to focus on user experience, they have implemented “The Helpful Content Update.” The goal of which is to ensure content provides users with the information they are searching for, while penalizing organizations that fail to do so with reduced page position.
