What Is MSP Marketing?
MSP marketing involves promoting managed IT service providers to boost their visibility and sales. Your company can connect with the right target audience and convert potential clients into customers with the right MSP marketing strategy. You can also use MSP marketing to engage and retain existing customers.
MSP marketing techniques aren’t that different from the strategies to promote other types of businesses. However, you cannot successfully promote an MSP company without identifying the obstacles stopping customers from purchasing your fully managed IT services.
The obstacles frustrating your marketing efforts may include:
- Price
- Lack of trust
- Scalability and security concerns
Once you identify what’s impeding your lead generation, you can create a marketing plan that turns the impediments into unique selling points that win over customers.
For example, prospects may be hesitant about hiring your MSP company because they doubt that it can add value to their business. You can convert these prospects by showing them how your services will reduce overheads and increase profitability.
What Is the Difference Between MSP Sales and MSP Marketing?
Several MSP marketing companies use the terms MSP sales and marketing interchangeably, but the terms have different meanings.
Effective MSP marketing strategies will get new customers by engaging and educating your target audience instead of focusing on sales. By educating prospects about the value of your services, you increase the trust that prospects have in your brand and expedite the sales cycle.
Remember that the people to whom you are marketing your managed services have probably never heard of your company or its solutions. It’s your job to enlighten them without overwhelming or boring them with the technical details of your services.
An effective MSP marketing strategy will accomplish this by explaining how your managed services can add value to a client’s business.
Once a potential client understands the value of your solution, you will have an easier time convincing them to proceed to the MSP sales process.
Why Do You Need MSP Marketing?
Marketing for MSPs is crucial, especially if you are new and unfamiliar to your target customers. Even if your target customers have heard about your services, they may not know enough about your product to care about it.
Since more than 59% of the global population is now online, internet marketing has become the preferred choice for reaching more prospects and generating valuable leads. However, we have discovered that combining traditional and internet marketing for MSPs yields the best results.
The most powerful traditional marketing tactic is word-of-mouth referrals, when one company loves your product and refers it to other companies. It is low cost, low effort, and generates quality leads because the prospects that contact you are ready to try your MSP IT services.
Relying solely on word-of-mouth referrals isn’t enough to reach all your potential clients in different localities though. The top managed services providers stay ahead of the competition through technology-based MSP marketing that leverages the internet’s extensive reach.
Important MSP Marketing Phrases You Should Know
Before promoting your MSP company and its solutions, you should know these MSP marketing terms:
MSP Email Marketing
Email marketing is an effective internet marketing strategy that involves sending emails to prospective clients. The email may contain ads, promotional offers, and other information related to your business.
Leads
Leads are people who contact your MSP company after engaging with your marketing campaign. Qualified leads are the most likely to patronize your MSP IT business.
Call-to-Action (CTA)
Every marketing message must contain a CTA. The CTA guides your target customers towards taking the action you want. The action may be calling your company, signing up for a free trial, booking a consultation, or anything else that converts potential clients.
MSP Inbound Marketing
MSP inbound marketing is a digital strategy that requires creating engaging content about how your product can solve your audience’s problems. You will then promote the content on websites, social media, and other online channels to generate leads.
MSP Outbound Marketing
MSP outbound marketing is a marketing process that involves promoting your services via traditional mediums like TV, newspaper ads, and cold calls. With outbound marketing, there are no guarantees that viewers will become qualified leads.
Lead Generation
This activity involves identifying and turning prospective customers into buyers.
Landing Page
A landing page is the website page at which potential clients arrive after clicking on your online ad. The webpage contains optimized content to convert prospects.
What Is in an MSP Marketing Plan?
Marketing plans for managed service providers typically consist of a strategy and tactics. The strategy defines your target audience and marketing message. You can create an effective MSP marketing strategy by asking:
- Who is my perfect customer, and what IT problems are they facing?
- Can my solutions resolve those problems?
- What’s the best marketing strategy for reaching my potential clients?
- What sets my brand and solutions apart from those of other managed services providers?
Your answer to these questions will help you create a marketing campaign that resonates with prospective customers.
Your tactics are the marketing methods you use for promoting your brand. The right type of tactic for your IT business will depend on your budget, target audience, desired results, and other factors.
What Are the Marketing Tactics Available to MSPs?
Pay-Per-Click (PPC) is a fast and efficient way to generate leads and boost your visibility online. The most popular option for PPC is Google Ads (formerly Google Adwords).
After launching a well-planned Google Ads campaign, your MSP website should appear at the top of relevant search results in the paid Ads sections. (In this way, it differs from SEO, the goal of which is to rank high, organically).
One of the upsides of PPC is that you only need to pay for each time a user clicks on your promoted website. You can also modify a PPC campaign to target specific classes of users. For example, you can target your campaign at certain demographics in specific locations or of specific ages and increase the likelihood of getting only qualified leads.
While PPC can generate brand awareness, it’s best for reaching people in the middle of the sales funnel. Mid-funnel customers are people who already know about your services and are considering making a purchase. Besides Google Ads, you can run a PPC campaign through YouTube advertising or other search engines like Bing.
Search engine optimization aims for your website to appear on the first page of search results, but unlike PPC, it takes longer to see results. SEO requires improving your website's architecture and content so that Google believes that your site will have the best answer to a searcher’s query.
Once a paid (PPC) campaign ends, your website will disappear from the top of search results pages unless you can engineer it to rank there organically. Your MSP website will stay at the top of search results with search engine optimisation as long as your content is the best.
Being at the top of search pages will increase your online reputation and visibility, leading to more customers knowing your brand and considering you their first choice for MSP services.
Content marketing involves creating blog posts and other types of content to answer your target audience’s questions. When prospective customers think of you as a reliable and authoritative information source, they become more inclined to buy your product.
Content marketing has several benefits. For instance, it increases your brand reputation and your chances of appearing in organic search engine results since it contributes to SEO.
MSP marketing companies can perform content marketing on your company website or by guest posting on other websites and pointing readers to you. Guest posting allows you to reach potential customers visiting other websites.
Email marketing is one of the oldest digital marketing strategies for generating sales leads. Besides helping you gain new customers, you can also use it to retain old ones. It involves sending emails to people on your email list. Each email should contain relevant and valuable information about your brand or product, such as promotional offers or how your services can help the reader.
Regularly sending such emails will keep your brand at the forefront of the recipients’ minds. Marketing automation platforms can simplify sending such emails by automatically sending them on your behalf at specified times.
Social media marketing is one of the best digital marketing tools for boosting your online presence. Over two billion people use Facebook alone. The large user base gives you huge opportunities to reach more B2B clients.
However, the right social media platforms for your needs will depend on your online marketing tactic. For instance, YouTube and Instagram are great places to promote your brand if you prefer video marketing. IT service providers that primarily communicate via text should do social media marketing on LinkedIn and Twitter.
Online reviews are another digital marketing strategy that can benefit your MSP company. When potential customers see positive reviews from past customers, they become less skeptical about your brand and more likely to make a purchase.
Showcase customer reviews on your website and other platforms, such as Google, third-party sites (Better Business Bureau), and social media for the best marketing results. Since you don’t have to pay for online reviews, it’s a cost-free way to promote your services. In addition to boosting your online reputation, customer reviews will also improve your SEO by creating strong backlinks for your site.
A professional digital marketing agency doesn’t stop at lead generation. They also track leads to identify which ones convert and why others failed to convert. The marketing team will also use the data from tracked leads to identify customer pain points and learn how to personalize MSP marketing strategies to convert more customers.
Search engine marketing (SEM) involves using paid digital marketing strategies like PPC and social media advertising to boost a site’s search visibility. It also leverages a bit of SEO to ensure that the leads your campaign generates will convert searchers to site visitors to clients.
Simply put, SEM combines the best parts of paid and unpaid online marketing to generate leads for your website.
An experienced MSP marketing company will look at your business website before working on a campaign to promote your business. That’s because your MSP website will be the foundation of your digital advertising campaign. Without it, the leads that your increased online visibility generates will have nowhere to go to learn about your brand or make purchases.
At the very least, your MSP website should have:
- Relatable Content: Avoid confusing or losing your visitors. Eliminate technical jargon and keeping your content easy to understand. Use simple words and short paragraphs, and speak directly to the reader. Be sure to complement your text with relevant visual media, graphics, and images.
- Contact Details: Your address, phone number, email, and other contact details should be easy to find on all your pages. Visitors need details so they can contact you to ask questions or buy your solutions.
- Responsive Design: More than 54% of today’s internet activity originates from mobile devices. That means more than half of your website visitors are using their smartphones and tablets. If you have an unresponsive website design, these mobile users will not be able to access your website, which will cause a high bounce rate and lost traffic. Also, remember that Google gives higher search result rankings to mobile-friendly sites.
- Fast Loading Time: Your website should load in less than two seconds. A slower loading speed will lead to 53% of your visitors abandoning your page for a faster MSP website. Speed up your site to avoid losing visitors to your competitors.
- Calls-to-Action: You should strategically place CTAs in different parts of your site. The CTAs will guide a visitor’s journey through your pages. Without the CTAs, visitors won’t know what specific actions to take on your business page and will possibly fail to convert due to a lack of clarity.
- Search Optimization (SEO): Google can easily find and understand content from a search-engine-optimized site. If Google can’t find your content, it won’t show up in relevant search results. Professional website developmentwill make your site easy to navigate so search engines can crawl your pages and index them.
At least once a month, check your website for errors and add new testimonials and any other updates the site needs to perform better and win over more prospects.
Other offline and online marketing tactics for your MSP services include:
- E-books
- Industry events
- Podcasts
You can provide these offerings for free to people who sign up for your email list. You can stay in touch with these prospects via email marketing to promote your brand and services.
Also, industry events and podcasts are great for showcasing the value of your products and responding to the questions of potential customers. By answering their questions, you eliminate the hesitations stopping these prospects from converting.
The Cold, Hard Truth about MSP Marketing Scope
Your MSP marketing services team should tell you from the start that no one-size-fits-all solution exists for a successful campaign. If you want tangible marketing results, you’ll need the right combination of MSP marketing techniques tailored for your business.
You’ll want to make sure you select an MSP marketing agency that will consider your unique needs and goals so you can be sure to increase sales leads and convert prospects.
After identifying your target audience and understanding your goals, you can talk to your agency about PPC, SEO, and other tactics to form an MSP marketing plan that works specifically for you.
If online marketing cannot reach your target customers fully, you may want to incorporate traditional marketing strategies to create a rewarding campaign. Your marketing team should also monitor your campaign and lead generation making tweaks if necessary, to ensure that you’ll get a high return on investment.
Liongard software solutions help MSPs standardize, secure, and scale their IT Managed Services through unified visibility into their IT stacks. Contact the Liongard team today at 1 (800) 332-0460 to learn more and request a free demo.
FAQs
The best MSP marketing strategy for acquiring clients quickly will depend on your target customers and other factors. That said, digital marketing, especially social media marketing and PPC, are some of the fastest ways to reach several prospects quickly.
Select an MSP marketing agency that will provide you with an MSP digital marketing campaign that engages your target customers and leads them through the sales process.
A Managed Services Provider (MSP) offers remote IT services to businesses—but if you run an MSP, you already know that. The question is, do your customers? That's where MSP marketing agencies come in. These agencies use marketing strategies to increase the visibility, attractiveness, and profitability of MSP companies. An experienced MSP marketer will find ways to get your company in front of your target audience even if your target audience has no idea what an MSP is by focusing on the problems they’re trying to solve directly.
What problems are your customers looking to solve? Determining that is part of effective MSP marketing, and online search engine data is the key. By digging through popular searches surrounding your services, you can market your MSP company to people who don’t even know what MSP stands for.
An SEO company can help you improve your website so that it will perform better in search engine results. However, it will take more than SEO to boost the online competitiveness of your MSP business. You are better off hiring an MSP marketing agency that understands the peculiarities of the MSP industry and what it takes to succeed in it.
So, what happens when your marketing efforts start paying off and leads start pouring in? Liongard has your back when it comes to pre-sales assessments with data that can help you accurately price jobs and increase deal size. Want to see how we can transform your sales process? Schedule a personalized demo today. View Liongard’s Website Best Practices 101.
Not every MSP marketing company will be a good fit for your needs. Run a Google search for MSP marketing companies in your locality and select the ones with the most experience and positive customer reviews to make the short list.
Schedule a consultation with each company that made your short list. During your consultation, ask questions that will reveal which agency fits your goals, budget, and other requirements.
Schedule a Free Demo
See firsthand how automating the steps on your IT onboarding checklist with Liongard lets you add new customers quickly and easily.
Request a Demo