As a managed service provider (MSP), one of the most important services you can provide to your clients is in regards to their cybersecurity, which also makes it an invaluable asset to utilize in your marketing efforts. Let’s go over some tips to help you draw in potential clients by effectively marketing your cybersecurity services—something that’s often easier said than done.
JoomConnect Blog
Tips to Write a Successful MSP Marketing Blog
The task of creating blogs for your marketing might seem daunting. But remember, you're the expert when it comes to the services your MSP offers. You can use your blog as a platform to showcase your experience and insights, convincing readers of your unparalleled expertise.
Your business’ Facebook Page is about as important of a marketing tool for your business as your website is. For some of your prospects, your Facebook page is their introduction to you and your business. With that being the case, you, no doubt, want to make not only a good impression on your clients and prospects, but you’ll also want a URL that is easy to market and share.
When it comes to search results, all search is local. The more connected you are to your community, the better your chances are to rank higher in local search results. While there are a variety of steps to increase your local search marketing, the most basic, but critically important, is to ensure that Google knows where your business is. If your NAP (Name, Address, Phone Number) isn’t consistent throughout your presence on the internet, there is a chance that you may not appear in your localized search results.
Whether you are just a one or two-person IT shop or you have dozens of technicians and specialists, marketing your MSP isn’t necessarily going to come naturally. When we get introduced to new MSPs, we always ask what they’ve been doing for their marketing up until now, and the answer is almost always the same—word of mouth.
There are several options available to MSPs to market their business and services, from social media to blog content to direct mail. With so many options available to your MSP, you may find it hard to know where to begin with your marketing. We recommend developing a documented marketing strategy to make sure your MSP marketing has a clear purpose and a schedule with time and resources to execute the initiatives.
It’s a shame that more businesses don’t use webinars as a marketing tool. They are so effective that, in 2013, 62 percent of all marketing campaigns involved a webinar. Seemingly the perfect combination between video and content, webinars can help your business grow and reach a whole new audience.
One of the biggest pitfalls MSPs have when attracting leads is that many small businesses don’t know what an MSP is, let alone what it does. Your MSP blogs are crucial because not only do they answer the questions potential leads have, but they also introduce them to what an MSP does.
Is your MSP having difficulty showing up for searches in local locations? Instead of adding keywords of cities to your website, let Google and local searchers know your MSP is serving their area. Here’s how.
Every business that markets products or services on a website does so in hopes of improving customer engagement, or to reach suspects and turn them into prospects. The problem is that many sites don’t utilize marketing best practices that allow for the kind of engagement they’d like to see. One of these practices is the use of calls to action (CTA) to persuade users on your website to take a specific action.
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.
There are three basic forms of SEO—Technical SEO, On-Page SEO, and Off-Page SEO. On-page SEO is the content you create to solve people’s problems. Off-Page SEO are things you are doing outside of your website to increase your visibility. Technical SEO are the things you do in the “backend” of the website, and while not as prominent as the content, it is just as important. Schema Markup (Structured Data) should be part of your technical SEO, as it can provide your MSP website the visibility it needs to stand out from the competition.
Marketing your MSP may seem like a huge endeavor, or that you need to be a marketing mastermind to actually effectively market your business, but that is not true. If done right, marketing can be done without any stress or hassle. Where do you start? With a plan of course!
There’s no school like the old school, and when it comes to marketing, “old school” more or less means “outbound”... an approach where you are reaching out to your audience, as compared to them seeking out what you offer. Let’s review some of the marketing techniques that you could use as part of an outbound-focused initiative that (especially with our help) proves to be a worthwhile endeavor as you promote your managed services.
Marketing is an integral part of the business process. If your MSP isn’t allocating any time to marketing, then your MSP isn’t growing. However, if you allocate too much time to marketing, you take time away from other aspects of the business process. You can escape this trap by utilizing your time marketing effectively and efficiently.
When you market your business’ services you want to make sure you are marketing effectively! With too broad a target market, you could be wasting your marketing efforts. You want to narrow your marketing focus - so try target marketing. By doing this you will be breaking your marketing into groups. Then you will narrow those groups down, to those that would need your product or services the most.
As the COVID-19 virus continues to sweep its way through the world it is imperative that businesses remember and continue, with a little adjustment, their marketing efforts. When it comes to marketing your MSP, you can consider it a best practice to always be marketing your services. No matter what complications or difficult outside circumstances your MSP may face, you should always be marketing your business.
Trust is a critical factor in running any business successfully. A business owner needs to trust their employees to work effectively, a business as a whole needs to trust its vendors and service providers, and—perhaps most pressingly—a business’ audience needs to trust that business.
Maintaining your business’ reputation can be hard in today's age when there are so many ways and places for people to share exactly what they think about your business, whether it be correct or even true! Unfortunately, some people share fake or false accounts of their interactions with a business, and oftentimes, the business is unable to outright remove those comments. So, here is what you do if you ever find your business facing this problem:
Managed service providers, as well as other B2B vendors and service providers, have a very different market to compete within than they once did. In fact, the competition between different businesses has transformed into hypercompetition—the shifting adoption of various tactics for the express purpose of undermining another business’ advantages. Let’s consider how the right kind of marketing activities can help your MSP to gain an advantage over its competitors.