JoomConnect Blog

Most MSPs aren’t short on marketing activity. They’re short on clarity.

Content gets published. Emails get sent. Websites get traffic. But when it’s time to review the quarterly results, one uncomfortable question always surfaces: which of these actually turned into a real sales conversation?

For many MSPs, the answer is uncertain. That’s because marketing often runs without a clear line between effort and outcome. You might know traffic is up, but you don’t know whether those visitors are qualified prospects, casual researchers, or automated traffic that will never convert.

IT services are a tough racket. It’s easy to alternate between lots of work and opportunities, and drought. A lot of businesses approach this issue by going all in on their marketing efforts during low points and stopping completely when prospects start converting into clients.

This approach is flawed in many ways. First of all, it’s a lot of work crammed into a little bit of time, and second, it feels like you don’t get the return you should for the money you invest. The secret to properly promoting your managed services isn’t throwing money at the problem, it’s consciously going about it with strategy and forethought.

When it comes to marketing, a campaign serves as a roadmap—aligning specific goals with the strategies and tactics needed to achieve them. While tools and platforms continue to evolve, the foundational campaign types that drive results remain largely unchanged.

In this article, we’ll explore four proven marketing campaign types, how they’re commonly used today, and when each one makes the most sense for your marketing efforts.

So, you’ve just completed a marketing campaign, investing your time and money into its successful completion. It’s done… so what do you do now?

For many businesses, it’s time to move on… but smart business owners dwell on their campaigns for a moment, for the real profit comes from the follow-up. Understanding why a campaign performed the way it did—whether it succeeded or failed—is critical to effectively allocating your available funds and achieving the results you want in the future.

Let’s explore how to gain this kind of understanding.

Managed service providers face a challenge that should resonate with businesses and organizations of all kinds: they often know their products and services too well, and therefore focus too much on the minutiae—instead of the benefits a product or service brings—when trying to make a sale. While this is never ideal, it can be particularly dangerous for your audience when you’re trying to educate them about cybersecurity, as they’re vulnerable without it.

Therefore, you must position your services not as impressive technological feats, but instead, highlight how they solve your prospect’s problems and assuage their fears. Let’s discuss how you can do so.

Without an understanding of its unique and nuanced client acquisition and retention process, no business—especially a managed IT service provider—is going to find business growth optimally attainable. MSPs especially need to have a structured approach to nurture prospects from the awareness stage of the marketing funnel to become fully-fledged, long-term partners.

One process that greatly helps this endeavor is the use of customer journey mapping.

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.

Today, every business needs cybersecurity. In some industries, we (and other MSPs) are starting to see more and more decision-makers actually come to us and request it. If you are an MSP and cybersecurity isn’t a part of your service stack, and you aren’t talking about it each and every week on your website, in your QBRs, and in your marketing, then you are going to be left in the dust.

Let’s talk about how you can maintain that balance with some strategic marketing and culture-building.

Any successful marketing effort that a managed service provider—or any business, for that matter—puts out will need to be designed with a few key questions in mind, regarding the content it includes. Who is your content meant to assist? Why is it that this content is important for your intended audience to see? What is it about your content that makes it uniquely helpful?

These questions are a critical element to what is known as a content marketing strategy. Let’s go over what one of these strategies is made up of, and how to use it to its fullest potential.

Managed Service Providers (MSP) have been using our JoomConnect software to integrate and automate marketing, service and e-commerce with ConnectWise since 2009. Our success thanks to customers all over the world has allowed for consistent improvements to be made to our application. By now, our users know that the JoomConnect software is full of many useful features. Our development team strives to provide our customers with more effective ancillary features to make the complex or time-consuming tasks they face as an MSP easier. With each update, we are working on practical issues and problems that our users experience. We are are always brainstorming, and using customer experiences, to build solutions that allow our software to help users save time and avoid frustration.

Ever since the first marketing email was sent out over the ARPANET in 1978, the tool has been a cornerstone of many businesses’ marketing strategies, in just about every industry. Managed services are no exception to this rule.

Let’s take a look at some of the strategies and tactics that you should be incorporating into your MSP marketing emails.

Okay, let’s take a moment and address the elephant that’s in the room, and has been in the room ever since the managed service industry really took off. Ready?

Managed services are really, really tough to make interesting—which can have an impact on your marketing efforts and their efficacy. So, let’s take a few moments to consider how to make your marketing more engaging, without detracting from the message you’re trying to convey.

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.

You've got a shiny new website and it's time to start turning those visitors into leads, and then turn your leads into prospects.  There are a lot of different paths you can take to do this, but first you'll need a basic understanding of the web marketing funnel.On your website, you need to have an offer.  Frankly, you should have a few offers to cater towards the different ends of the marketing funnel. 

Marketing can be a challenging endeavor for a business in any industry to tackle, but this is especially true when considering how a managed service provider should approach it. Indeed, there are a few challenges that can—and, more pertinently, do—stand in the way of an MSP’s success in its marketing and, by extension, its business operations.

Yes, we’ve mentioned the marketing challenges and hurdles facing MSPs before, and we’re mentioning them again! Marketing can be challenging for any business, in any industry, but it is especially challenging when considering how a managed service provider should approach marketing and the hurdles that stand in the way of its marketing efforts' success.

There are a million and one challenges businesses will have to tackle to market themselves, but things are even more difficult when the business you're trying to market is a managed service provider. 

Few marketing endeavors are as nerve-wracking as hosting and/or attending a live event. Lunch and learns, webinars, podcasts, and trade shows are four events that have proven to be successful initiatives for managed IT service providers. Each type of event has different attributes that must be considered when deciding on which event is right for your MSP’s marketing goals. Here’s a breakdown of these four events to help you make the best choice.

We’ve been known to talk quite a bit about how important it is for Managed Service Providers (MSPs) to produce consistent, high-quality marketing efforts to achieve success. Unfortunately, many MSPs tend to make the same mistakes over and over. In order to fight against this trend, we will identify these common errors, and will provide an improved method to handling a marketing strategy.