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marketing for managed service providers

How to Market for Managed Service Providers

Jacob Brain

Author

Marketing is all about humanizing your managed service provider business. Admittedly, it can feel hard to humanize the world of IT. When you throw money at your marketing team for larger paid advertisements, TV spots, for your typical interruptive marketing, you’re just burning your budget.

In today’s oversaturated world of interruptive advertisements, this approach no longer works. Instead, marketing for managed service providers is all about bringing the customer to you.

This approach is the basis for inbound marketing, New North’s specialty. With inbound marketing, it’s all about becoming a helpful resource for potential clients. You want to draw them in with relevant engaging information that improves their life on some level.

So, how can you get started with this approach? Take a look at these five marketing tips below.

Write Helpful Content

This first tip for marketing for managed service providers sounds so easy. How hard is it to be helpful? But keep in mind that you’re not attempting to provide value for just anyone—what does your audience need help with? What do they struggle with? What information do you have that they need?

Once you understand exactly where your audience is coming from and what they want, the next step is to create a blog for all this helpful content. An engaging blog post should be between 800 and 1300 words, with an easy to read breakdown of content. Bullet points and headings are your friend. If they’d like to, your readers should be able to skim a post and extract the most important information.

Blogs are a great way to spread your helpful content and attract customers. They should be related to keywords that would help your blog post appear in a google search. This way, when a customer searches for a keyword or phrase, your blog ideally appears on the first page of search results. Through blogs, you’re bringing customers who are interested in your expertise to you.

Boost Your SEO Rankings

Remember those keywords and phrases we just mentioned? Those are absolutely key to boosting your search engine optimization rankings. SEO rankings are crucial to marketing for managed service providers. Essentially, the higher up the results your blog post appears when a keyword is searched, the better chance you have of attracting customers.

When you need a product or service, what’s the first step you take? For most people, they turn to the internet. This includes going through reviews, the company’s website, and their blogs. However, most people don’t go past the first page of search results. This can be a huge issue if your managed services aren’t ranking on the first page.

You can boost your SEO rankings through your blogs. The more blogs that rank high, the higher up your business will be on the search results and the more business you’ll get.

Find Your Audience on Social Media

Social media is a great place to have more human marketing for managed service providers. What do we mean by that? Well it’s difficult for customers to engage with a bunch of cables, the cloud, or server virtualization. But it’s easy for people to engage with the stories of other people, animals, or living things.

Social media is the perfect place to humanize your IT business. You can post the stories of your clients (with their permission), your employees, or even post more cultural photos of your business. Approach social media with the idea, “what is the story of my business?” This can include throwbacks to when your business first started, pictures of office parties, and welcoming posts for new employees.

No matter how you approach it, your social media needs to be about the culture and human side of your business. It’s a great place to show people who you are—not just what you do.

Use Email Marketing Effectively

The last thing anyone wants to be is another spam email in someone’s inbox. But there’s a different way to approach email marketing that doesn’t have to do with buying an email list and throwing information out to an unwilling audience. Again, inbound marketing for managed service providers is all about bringing the customer to you.

When customers willingly sign up to be on your email list through your website, all of a sudden email becomes a place where a pre-engaged audience is waiting to hear what you have to say. This means email can become a powerful tool. Through email you can set up workflows, that target specific people with personalized products or services that are relevant and interesting to them.

Continue to Delight Your Customers

Once you have a customer on a month to month subscription, don’t become complacent. It’s still important to continue to delight your customer. You don’t want them to stop at just being a customer, but you want them to promote your company for you. Look at your customers as an extension of your marketing efforts. A good review from an existing customer holds much more weight than just self-promotion of your services.

Continue to market towards your existing customers. This can include inviting them to company events, giving out thank you cards with small treats at your monthly service visits, or offering occasional coupons for clients that have been with you for a while. The day you start to take your clients for granted is the day that you’ll being to lose them.

Use a Marketing firm that knows Managed Service Providers

Marketing for managed service providers is not your typical marketing job. When you’re looking for a marketing firm for your managed IT company, go with one that has experience in the industry. Managed IT Services is misunderstood by many of their own clients. Increase clarity and start landing the leads your sales team needs to grow.

At the end of the day, MSPs are built to provide IT solutions – not to market themselves. But, marketing is essential to growing your business. Fortunately, the benefits of outsourced IT services – deep expertise, scalability, and cost efficiency – are served by outsourced marketing, too. New North offers a full-service marketing department, at your disposal, with deep experience helping Managed IT Service Providers to grow.

If you’re ready to grow your business with marketing for managed service providers, contact New North today.

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