JoomConnect Blog

When it comes to B2B marketing, many small to medium-sized businesses feel like they are rowing against the current with no compass. You’ve likely tried the "spray and pray" approach—buying lead lists, posting sporadically on LinkedIn, or sending out generic emails—only to find the silence on the other end deafening.

It’s an especially common story in the IT world: the complexity of the service in question gets lost in all the technical jargon, and the core message fails to land with the right people. The secret isn’t working harder; it’s working with precision.

Let’s be honest: nobody wakes up in the morning excited to read a cold email. If you’re an MSP owner, you probably delete a dozen generic "I can boost your SEO" emails before your first cup of coffee. Yet, when it comes time to grow your own IT business, you might find yourself paradoxically sending the exact same kind of digital noise.

The truth is, cold outreach isn’t dead; it’s just evolved.

Nowadays, the "spray and pray" method isn’t just ineffective—it’s dangerous for your domain reputation. To cut through the noise, you need more than just a template. You need a strategy.

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.

We all love a personal touch—the barista who gets your order right, the dentist who asks about your pets. Why not bring that same familiarity to your email marketing?

This is the goal of segmenting your email lists. It enables you to communicate more directly with your contacts and address their specific concerns and needs. Let’s explore what goes into this kind of strategy to maximize the engagement and growth you can see from your own efforts.

Acquiring new clients—especially as a managed service provider—often commands significant attention and resources. However, a valuable pool of potential revenue could already be in your existing database: prospects who may have previously shown interest but have since become less engaged, or past clients whose contracts have lapsed.

Neglecting these dormant opportunities can be a costly oversight. A well-defined strategy for re-engagement not only offers a more efficient path to revenue generation but also leverages the prior investment made in initial outreach and relationship building.

Seeking out the right businesses for your managed IT service offering is critical to your success; otherwise, you’ll find yourself trying to make deals with people who simply aren’t the right fit. This means that you need to seek out these businesses mindfully and strategically.

Let’s break down how you can more effectively identify who makes up your ideal audience and optimally target them. 

Your business’ success is heavily influenced by your marketing. Similarly, your marketing’s success is heavily influenced by how accurately your marketing reaches who you want to be talking to… your prospects and even your current clients, your target audiences. They need your marketing to show them that your values align with theirs and that you’ll be invested in their success.

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.

The simplest way to explain inbound vs. outbound marketing is not to look at the actions of the business or its marketers, but rather, how the target market responds to the information presented to them. For inbound and outbound marketing, the true difference comes from how the client receives, consumes, and acts upon that information. Let’s compare the two marketing strategies and how to use them to reach your marketing objectives. 

Here's a beautiful thought, what if your clients and prospects actually looked forward to receiving your marketing material? What if customers spent more time reading your company newsletter than reading their favorite magazine? What if instead of tossing your newsletter in the junk mail pile, customers filed it away as a helpful resource? This kind of customer connection is possible with content marketing.

It may be considered a cliche at this point, but the mantra, “content is king” is one of the truisms of digital marketing. Content drives traffic, develops authority, and encourages conversions. However, while original or custom content is hard to come by, syndicated content is a great workaround. However, to take full advantage of it, it needs to be customized.

Have you visited a website, left it and then had that company’s ads follow you around the web? This is a marketing tactic known as retargeting (also referred to as remarketing). Retargeting allows you to continue to pursue a suspect or lead who visited your website without converting by displaying ads about content viewed as they continue to browse other websites.

Part 7 of 7 - Expand your Reach with Lookalike Audiences on Facebook [Series]

Facebook Advertising is an excellent resource for business owners. Everything you need to run a successful advertising campaign is all in one place, including your audience. Did you run a successful advertisement, and aren’t sure where to turn? Re-run that campaign to the same audience, well it’s clone, with Facebook’s Lookalike Audiences!

While we’ve spoken at length about how subscribing to a syndicated blog service to provide you with content is perfectly fine, we have to admit that there’s a lot to be said about the benefits of custom content. If used alone, custom content can provide your audience with a direct view of your unique insights, observations, and experiences.

Twitter has been transformed by the B2B marketing community by offering another platform to engage with your audience, to address their questions, to contribute valuable knowledge, to accentuate what your company stands for. Every day there are opportunities that you could be embracing from being active on social media. Whether you turn these opportunistic moments into high-quality leads, well that is your prerogative.

Case studies are a key marketing tool that too few small businesses take advantage of. But, using case studies to showcase your problem-solving capabilities can be an especially powerful social proof and lead to an increase in conversion rates.

What kind of marketing results is your website producing? Are you attracting new leads that are filling out calls to action, or are people hitting the back button as soon as they read your page’s headline? How you word your sales pitch can make or break your entire marketing campaign.

One of the biggest mistakes that many small businesses make is to not attempt to seek out new clients. They hope that an ideal client will stumble across their company in a Google search, or maybe hear about them by speaking to another small business owner in the area. And yes, this definitely does happen. I’m sure that’s how you’ve gotten a lot of your clients.

Whether you are determining what marketing strategies to use in your MSP’s overall marketing efforts, or deciding what to do during your next marketing campaign, it helps to know who you are marketing to.