As the owner of an MSP, one of your number one tasks is to grow your business. Simply put, without the revenue new contacts bring in, you’ll likely grow stagnant. While word of mouth is great, there is a limit to how many people you can meet. You have to market, advertise and promote your MSP services to reach a wider audience. In terms of reach, social media can provide access to a nearly unlimited source of leads.
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!
Need more traffic to your site? Want to increase brand awareness? Could you use more email subscribers? Try a giveaway! Maybe you’ve tried to do one before, but did not see the results you were looking for. Would you be willing to try again if you were armed with some additional knowledge?
How do you measure the results of your marketing? Is it an increase in traffic, a rise in rank? Phone calls? Social media attention? The uncomfortable truth is if you can’t define your terms of success, what hope do you have to determine the ROI of your MSP marketing campaigns?
Social media is not only one of the main drivers of traffic to your site, but it is also a primary tool for the marketing of your business. Social media is particularly valuable to smaller businesses, as it can level the playing field in regards to the ability to communicate with an audience. Unsure of how to find the time to set up, customize and develop an effective social media plan for your business? Now’s the time for The Ultimate Social Media Rig.
Social Media Strategy
We recently wrote about how useful linkbait can be to your MSP marketing efforts. This got us thinking… why not give you some actionable efforts to help you?
Your website can’t be an island all to itself and hope to be competitive. Your site can’t be considered truly engaging until other domains (websites) link to it. If variety is the spice of life, domain diversity is the ticket to page one of Google.
You may have heard the proverb, “The right tool for the right tool” and its cousin, “It’s a poor workman who blames his tools.” When it comes to using social media to promote your MSP and develop your brand, social media tools are not interchangeable. While social media is designed to be used as tools of engagement, they each achieve their goals in different ways. Read on to learn to choose the best social media tools to develop your MSP marketing funnel, promote your brand, and drive traffic to your site.
There are many Managed Service Providers out there that have decided, “we’re not going to bother with social media at all.” We understand where they’re coming from: managing multiple social media channels on top of handling all the day to day business processes can be overwhelming for a small business. Instead of even attempting to, some companies of smaller size won’t even bother setting up accounts for their company across the major platforms.
Whether you’re new to social media entirely or just new to using certain aspects of it as a business, you’ll probably admit that it can be a little complicated to use it effectively. There are a lot of ‘little things’ you need to know if you want to develop a strategy that actually sees noticeable, measurable results.
If you’ve established social media pages but aren’t doing anything with them, you’re wasting so many valuable opportunities to connect with your target audience. This includes your clients, and even your prospects who decide to seek out more information about you.
To many small business owners, especially those in the arena of serving other businesses, social media seems like a waste of time. You’re not selling a brand new, up-and-coming consumer product, you’re a managed service provider trying to sell businesses various IT-related services to other business. So, what’s the point of trying to compete for attention in online spaces filled with baby pictures, memes, and funny animal videos? Why should you even bother?
LinkedIn is a place where prospects can learn about your company through a social network that is designed for business professionals. It’s a place where your current clients often expect professional updates from. And, it’s a place where potential future employees are searching for employment.
Recently, we have been sharing insights on some best practices regarding social media. This time, we’re going to discuss the primary function of social media: engagement.
Social media marketing, like all marketing, requires repeat viewings to enter the consciousness and equally important the subconscious of the audience. This is why there is the “Rule of 7” - the long-held belief that a potential customer needs to see your ad at least seven times before they are willing to commit to an action. Yes, there are impulse buyers, but they are the exception, not the rule. Most people take some time before they commit to a course of action and successful marketing demands you ‘touch’ them multiple times to reinforce your message.
I’m sure you’ve been to dinners with friends and family whom you haven’t seen in a long time, and EVERYONE, young and old, is glued to their cell phones and not really fully present. Instead, they’re busy taking pictures of their food, shooting short video snippets, and snapping pictures of the event - all for social media.
You’ve probably heard of the many benefits that social media can provide for your company. But, despite your best efforts, you’re struggling to receive those benefits. To your knowledge, you’re already posting the right things, at the right times, on the right channels. No matter what you do, you just can’t seem to get more people to follow your pages.
One of the things that is great about social media is that it is free for your business to use. However, as a company in the B2B space, you’re greatly limiting the success of your company if you don’t consider utilizing some of the paid aspects of these platforms. One way to get started is to consider promoting, or ‘boosting’, the posts you are already doing.
Recently, we wrote about where to begin when starting to market your company in our blog Kickstart Your Marketing Efforts Using These Strategies. One of the things we suggested you should do first is to develop a social media presence. 96% of small business owners use social media marketing and believe it is important to their business. This means you should, too. What platforms should you use? What should you be posting? How do you grow your follower count? How should you be managing all of the channels you are on? These questions are easier to answer than you think.
Social media is more than just an excellent outlet for your marketing--it can also deliver highly valuable metrics that bring you valuable insights and information. You just need to know where to look for these metrics. In this blog, we’ve compiled the social media metrics that we feel could be the most helpful to your marketing.
