Why It’s Important to Avoid Falling into Your Own Echo Chamber

Let me ask you a question: how much does your average client know about IT?

This question is an important one to keep in mind, as it can help keep you from creating an echo chamber where your marketing is concerned. Let’s examine the concept of an MSP marketing echo chamber, and what you can do to avoid one’s influence.

What is an Echo Chamber?

From Techopedia, the phrase echo chamber describes “a situation where certain ideas, beliefs or data points are reinforced through repetition of a closed system that does not allow for the free movement of alternative or competing ideas or concepts.” In other words, because the person in the echo chamber is only receiving part of the whole picture, a biased viewpoint is the only possible outcome.

This is what makes an echo chamber such a dangerous environment for your MSP marketing.

Think about it—in an echo chamber, your world view (in this case, your impression of how effective your marketing strategy is) is repeatedly reinforced by your own biases, with any dissenting information disregarded and ignored by those within your echo chamber.

How an Echo Chamber Can Impact a Business

There are a few ways that developing an echo chamber can have some negative ramifications for your business and its operations, particularly in terms of its marketing.

An Echo Chamber Can Distort Your Message

First off, your marketing needs to address the right people, discussing the right things. It is important to remember that (while you very well may be trying to communicate with members of a business’ IT department) your primary target is a business’ lead decision maker—likely, the president or CEO, and they might not be the most tech-savvy. Sure, the technologies you offer may be very impressive, technically speaking, but your intended audience doesn’t care about the specs that your business solutions feature… they care about the benefits they’ll get out of using them.

However, an MSP echo chamber could very well result in marketing that focuses on the high-level features of your services, using the fancy jargon that makes up the MSP industry’s internal vocabulary. While there is a time and place for this kind of messaging, it shouldn’t be the focus you hone in on.

It’s just not what your prospects are interested in hearing—particularly since your target audience, putting it frankly, doesn’t care about the high-level stuff.

So, instead of talking about the things that interest your prospects, your marketing would miss its mark, with support coming from everyone on the inside. This also means that there would be no objective criticism of your marketing taken into consideration, as the echo chamber would drown it out. As we said above, the echo chamber would only reinforce biases and assumptions.

An Echo Chamber Results in Self-Congratulatory Messaging

Let me ask you another question: let’s say that you showed up to work one day wearing a truly heinous shirt. Maybe the pattern on it is remarkably ugly, or it has a particularly tasteless joke printed on it. Basically, it should be a shirt that nobody in their right mind could ever compliment.

How do you think your employees may likely respond, if you asked their opinion of the shirt, as compared to some stranger on the street?

If you think your employees might play down how ugly the shirt is, despite it being utterly awful, that’s a minor example of how an echo chamber works. Now, when you consider how this could impact your business when it's in regard to something more serious than your personal fashion choices, it should be clear that a company echo chamber is something to be avoided.

So, how do you do that?

How to Break Out of Your MSP Echo Chamber

Here’s the long and the short of it: you need to rethink your messaging if you’re concerned that your company is developing an echo chamber. Reframing your selling points to focus on the benefits that your clients will experience, rather than the features that will provide these benefits, will help to break the cycle.

We can help you adjust your message and reach your prospects and clients effectively. Find out more about our marketing services by calling 888-546-4384 today.