AI-generated spam has significantly contributed to the volume in our inboxes, further tarnishing their reputation as digital junk drawers. As such, the physical mailbox has become the most exclusive real estate in B2B marketing. While the competition is busy fighting the lure of the spam folder, the most successful small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) are finding that a tangible, high-quality postcard or letter is the ultimate pattern interrupt.
When it comes to marketing, a campaign serves as a roadmap—aligning specific goals with the strategies and tactics needed to achieve them. While tools and platforms continue to evolve, the foundational campaign types that drive results remain largely unchanged.
In this article, we’ll explore four proven marketing campaign types, how they’re commonly used today, and when each one makes the most sense for your marketing efforts.
Standing out in today’s very loud and congested marketplace is tough. You offer excellent service, you know your tech, but your marketing feels... generic.
It’s a common problem, especially amongst managed service providers. Many MSPs focus so heavily on the what (services) that they forget the how (communication). The solution: developing a unique, consistent brand voice. This isn't just marketing fluff; it's how you turn prospects into customers and customers into raving fans.
When starting with outbound marketing, you don’t need to spend thousands of dollars on lead list providers…quite the opposite. With a few simple tools and a clear process, you can build a targeted, high-quality list on your own.
Let’s go through a few best practices that will help you do so.
Let’s get this out of the way: you must communicate your message to the people you’re trying to convert into customers. These are the people who make up your leads, granted, but your leads are little more than a summation of data… notes you have about the businesses who may want to work with you.
However, you also mustn’t discredit your data on these leads, as it can easily be used to improve the message you share with the people receiving your communications. Let’s explore how you can do so via personalization.
In any marketing, the success stories of your prior clients can make a particularly large impact on your marketing efforts… more so than pure statistics typically do. This is because client accounts help provide a sense of authenticity to the claims your marketing makes. Hence, precisely why client testimonials are so impactful.
On top of that, there’s no denying that their impacts can be amplified by expanding them into full-blown case studies. Let’s go over how you can do so for your business’ benefit from start to finish… obtaining a testimonial, acquiring permission to expound upon it, and crafting an account that aligns with best practices.
Let’s rip off the Band-Aid and just say it:
Yes, direct mail remains valuable to a business’ comprehensive marketing strategy, particularly in B2B applications. The only caveat is that it must be used strategically for this to stay true.
Let’s take a few moments to review why direct mail is commonly seen as a good tactic and how you can (and should) optimize it for your organization’s operational benefit.
Let me ask you this: if everyone else jumped off a bridge, would you, too? You might… IF you were presented with evidence that everyone else had enjoyed some benefit from doing so.
This is the power of social proof—a phenomenon where we’re motivated to mimic those we see enjoying success to share in that success. We ask friends for restaurant recommendations or who they go to when they have a specific need, and we crowdsource these opinions online all the time.
Let’s explore how you can promote this discourse around your business services and use it in your marketing efforts.
Cold outreach has had a bad rep in modern marketing, but this reputation has not stopped it from being highly utilized and highly successful… when it’s done right.
Let’s review what you can do to make your cold outreach efforts more successful.
Let me ask you an important question: would you find a statement more impactful if it came from a business or if it was presented from the perspective of one of its clientele?
It's probably the second option. It only makes sense… even if it’s the business distributing it, the fact that someone else’s name is tied to a statement adds significant confidence that the contents are trustworthy. This is precisely why client success stories can be so compelling when featured in your marketing.
Let’s talk about how to use these powerful marketing tools for yourself, but first…
Managed service providers can get real, quantifiable value from hosting an event for prospects or existing clients. Stick around because, by the end of this blog, you’ll be able to track the value your MSP receives from properly utilizing event marketing to pursue your goals.
Modern marketing is essential to any business’ operations, making it even more critical that all marketing efforts are as effective as possible. Images can play a significant role in accomplishing this goal.
Let’s talk about how you can (and should) use images and other visual elements to make your content more engaging.
If you want to build trust with your audience, you could do a lot worse than relying on testimonials. These accounts, straight from the mouths of your previously satisfied customers and clients, can easily bear much more weight than many—arguably most—other marketing efforts. After all, they are first-hand accounts of what someone can expect from working with you. That said, there are still ways that you can and should coax the best, highest-quality testimonials from your happy clientele. Let’s go over the four questions you should always ask while collecting customer accounts to accomplish just that.
There are a lot of decisions to make in any marketing effort you put out, many of which could be the difference between success and failure. Even more common, however, are the decisions where the difference is between success and great success. Obviously, the latter option would be preferable…so how can you identify the right path?
Simple… by utilizing something called A/B testing. Let’s discuss what it is and, more importantly, how to do it.
With so much focus on digital marketing nowadays, it can certainly be tempting to focus solely on these efforts… often, to the detriment of other forms, like print. We wanted to take a few moments to address this temptation and talk about how print marketing, specifically in the form of printed newsletters, still has a lot of value to offer businesses… particularly, managed service providers.
Case studies are a great example of marketing collateral that any business should consider using for various reasons. Let’s review a few of these reasons, then cover what a case study should provide and how to put it to use.
We recently ran a Lunch and Learn series talking to local businesses about essential cybersecurity protections and laws they needed to uphold. We learned quite a bit throughout this process—thanks in no small part to an obstacle that suddenly required us to make some significant changes in the middle of our series—and wanted to share what we learned here so you could take advantage of the lessons the next time you plan an event… or how we can help you directly.
Ensuring your lists are well-managed, whether for email or direct mail campaign use, is crucial in optimizing your marketing strategy. Yet, the time-intensive process of both building and maintaining a list makes it a task prone to be neglected.
While it might be nice to think that your business can serve “anyone”—after all, being able to serve anyone means that you have the potential to work with everyone—this, unfortunately, isn’t the reality. Even the most accessible businesses will have certain clients that are inherently more valuable than others. These “ideal clients” are critical to identify, so let’s talk about how you can do so.
There are two kinds of customer feedback; both can be incredibly helpful to the business that pays attention to what is said. Negative feedback can help identify and correct shortcomings and friction in your processes, and positive feedback can be used to bolster your business’ marketing.
Let’s focus on the latter use case, discussing how you can use your clientele’s good feelings to benefit your marketing efforts and how to collect this feedback more effectively.
