Your Guide to Communicating Your MSP’s Cybersecurity Value

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.

Your First Step: Appreciating Where Your Prospects Come From

If you want your messaging to reach your target audience, you need to know what that messaging needs to address. While cybersecurity basics apply to everyone, different industries have specific concerns and needs. Healthcare providers must prioritize compliance, while manufacturers often focus on efficiency.

Therefore, you must first identify the root cause of their concerns. For instance, healthcare providers frequently emphasize HIPAA compliance to avoid the regulatory fines, the chance of high-risk downtime, and damage to their public image. Focusing on how your business can address these fears gives your communications a clear direction to follow.

From there, use these insights to share appropriately targeted messaging through your content and other marketing materials, using the language and acronyms commonly used in their industry. This not only makes your business easier for them to find, but it also boosts your credibility in their eyes.

Your Second Step: Translating Industry Jargon into Common Speech

Like we said, you need to speak in a way that your target audience can easily understand. By communicating in terms of value and outcomes, you can contextualize what you have to offer in a way that your audience can grasp.

Carefully considered analogies can help you accomplish this, but it can also be as simple as stripping your service of its branding and describing what it does in plain English. It isn’t that you offer 24/7 fully managed detection and response services; it’s that their network will always be watched over. By making it easier to connect your services to the benefits they bring, you can make them that much more appealing to your prospects.

This is why we put together marketing resources like our MSSP Cybersecurity Kit, which combines engaging deliverables with educational materials that help pull its readers deeper into the marketing funnel. Don’t hesitate to ask us about it if you’d be interested in using it!

Your Third Step: Positioning Yourself as a Partner 

If you want to be seen as a trusted resource, not just another vendor, you need to build that trust. There are a few ways you can do that.

First and foremost, assure them without overpromising. Show them what you have to offer, including the incident response plan you would follow should they have an issue. Critically, don’t make guarantees you can’t support with factual history. Most prospects will see through these claims. A better tactic is to guarantee that you’ll be there to help.

Of course, your history will be even more convincing if third parties can confirm your claims—third parties like those you’ve already worked with. By collecting case studies and testimonials that describe your past successes and making them available, you help your prospect visualize themselves experiencing the same success by working with you. Security can be an especially impactful topic for these accounts to address.

In addition to these accounts, sharing informative and insightful articles and blogs also helps reinforce your experience and inherently builds trust. This is precisely why we offer the Ultimate MSP Blog service… it establishes your professionalism and expertise (while also boosting your website’s search engine bait).

Your Fourth Step (and Beyond): Committing to a Full Strategy

While we all wish we could simply send one email and immediately convert everyone we talk to, that's just not realistic. There’s a reason coordinated marketing campaigns exist… they’re necessary to cultivate the relationships your business relies on.

As a result, it helps to identify the different points your prospects will cross as you convert them and establish which marketing efforts will be most effective at promoting your cybersecurity services. For instance, during the awareness phase of the marketing funnel—when a prospect is just starting to learn about your business—blogging and interacting on social media help establish your name and associate it with helpful advice and information. Once you get their attention (and contact information), you move them into the consideration phase, where they start turning to you for more and more advice. At the decision phase, meetings and cybersecurity assessments allow you to showcase a practical example of what working with you will bring.

In short, your audience needs to hear from you regularly to view you as a viable option… and to keep coming back when other needs arise, perhaps beyond their security concerns. Marketing across multiple channels increases the likelihood of this.

To Sell Your IT and Cybersecurity Services, Stop Selling Your IT and Cybersecurity Services

Instead, solve the problems that your prospects are concerned about, building trust through clear communication. Make no mistake—this is a lot of work, especially since you can’t exactly take time off from protecting the clients you already have.

We can help. We offer MSP marketing services—including cybersecurity marketing—that you can take advantage of and get the best of both worlds. If you’re ready to boost your sales pipeline using some of the services we mentioned here (and many more!), reach out to us at URL.

Don’t want to wait? Give us a call at 888-546-4384 now.