A testimonial that says "great company, highly recommend" is not a sales asset. It's a participation trophy. The testimonials that actually move prospects are specific, story-driven, and almost always waiting inside conversations you're already having with your clients. The problem is knowing how to get them out.
Most managed service providers on LinkedIn are doing the same three things: posting a company update when they remember to, accepting connection requests from random vendors, and occasionally liking a client's post.
If you haven't revisited direct mail as part of your outreach strategy recently, it's probably worth a second look. The conditions that made it easy to dismiss, like high cost, limited targeting, and lack of integration with digital, have largely been addressed. What's replaced them is a channel with less competition, more prospect attention, and better measurability than most MSPs realize.
Most MSPs we talk to do not lack ideas for marketing themselves. They write a LinkedIn post here, send out a newsletter there, and maybe sponsor a local business event when the timing feels right. The effort is real.
The results, though, are harder to pin down.
A prospect’s journey from "Who are they?" to "Yes, I'll sign the contract" is less of a straight line and more like a high-stakes, multi-stage treasure hunt. The secret to bridging that gap for your MSP lies in a marketing concept almost a century old: The Rule of 7. This rule states that a prospect needs to see or hear your marketing message at least 7 times before they truly remember it and take action.
Forget one-and-done marketing, because this principle is absolutely vital for selling the complex, high-value services that a managed service provider delivers. Let's unpack how sustained, consistent exposure is the key to building the trust and familiarity that closes deals in the IT space.
So, you’ve just completed a marketing campaign, investing your time and money into its successful completion. It’s done… so what do you do now?
For many businesses, it’s time to move on… but smart business owners dwell on their campaigns for a moment, for the real profit comes from the follow-up. Understanding why a campaign performed the way it did—whether it succeeded or failed—is critical to effectively allocating your available funds and achieving the results you want in the future.
Let’s explore how to gain this kind of understanding.
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.
So, your team has an SEO strategy for your MSP website chugging along. You follow best practices and can drive high-quality, relevant traffic better than a dancing traffic cop. There’s just one problem: no calls, no forms completed, no emails received, and no conversions at all. So, what are you doing wrong?
The problem isn’t your SEO. What you actually need to do is reconsider your closing argument as to why you, not your competitors, are the best option.
Email marketing can be a powerful marketing tool for MSPs, but there is a very fine line between being productive and being detrimental. That said, you want to stand out enough that you get noticed, clicked on, read, and interacted with. Let’s talk about some email marketing best practices that your MSP can utilize for your next campaign.
Sometimes, viewing your business in terms of its different departments—less of a cohesive workforce and more disparate teams—can be too easy. This is often a dangerous pattern to watch develop, especially where your sales and marketing are involved.
Let’s discuss why this pair needs to work collaboratively for your business to see optimal success and explore ways to encourage these behaviors in your organization.
When you’re trying to advertise your MSP services, your content—the materials you share with your audience, like service pages, blogs, deliverables, social media, and others—and its quality will be critical to your success. You need your audience to be informed, engaged, and even excited about what you have to offer.
Of course, for your content to have a chance of inspiring these reactions, you need your audience to read it first.
To develop a strategic marketing approach, it helps to know where your strengths and weaknesses lie and how your opportunities compare to the threats you’ll face. This is the purpose of the SWOT analysis… it allows you to assess your internal and external factors so you can refine and improve your marketing of the managed services you offer.
Let’s explore what goes into a SWOT analysis and how to use it to your advantage, beginning with a breakdown of its most basic parts.
Spoiler alert: yes, you should.
We all know that Facebook did not initially offer hashtags to help users link related content together, adding the feature in 2013. However, with the feature being available for over a decade, using it as effectively as possible is more important to overcome the noise and draw interested attention to your presence as a managed service provider.
If there’s one thing marketing needs to be successful, it’s consistency. Sure, it needs to be informative, engaging, and convincing, but if your audience doesn’t see it regularly, it just will not be as effective as you need it to be. Of course, to create this level of consistency, you need to be consistent in your activities.
That’s why we’ve outlined five things that you should do each and every day to help make your marketing as effective and impactful as possible.
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.
Email is a hugely effective tool that you can use to boost your business’ marketing efforts, provided you use them correctly. If misused, however, email marketing can be less beneficial (or worse, actively harmful) to your business’ self-promotion.
Let’s determine how to balance between overdoing your email marketing and neglecting your contacts so that you can get the most value out of your efforts.
To successfully plan a business’ marketing initiatives, you must have a marketing strategy that determines how you’ll pull clients and customers in. This can be difficult for some trying to push their business-to-business services, if they are lacking a structured strategy to guide their efforts as they work to develop their brand. Let’s review some ways to simplify this process as you generate your strategies.
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.
Email marketing remains one of the most popular ways businesses can nurture leads, build the necessary impressions to convert prospects, and maintain relationships with current clientele. With this popularity, however, comes plenty of competition for attention in recipients’ inboxes. This means you must do everything you can to make your email marketing as effective as possible.
Let’s review ten things we recommend you prioritize as you work toward this goal.
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.
