3 Steps to Improve your MSP Marketing Plan

What can MSPs do to readily improve the flow of information, remedy communications fears and focus their communications on attracting new business?

• Train, train, train: every IT services company should be focused on continual improvement
  • Helping its employees’ strengthen their customer relationship skills. Your marketing needs to start from the ground up. Quality sales and communications development programs are readily available to any business owner, with several tailored to address the specific needs of managed services organizations. That includes CompTIA Channel Training, vendor and distributor-facilitated courses, and a variety of other fee-based programs.
  • TIP: From these successful interactions come testimonials, case studies and other extremely useful marketing communications to feed your overall marketing mix.

• Social Media: these sites create an internet-based two-way conversation between a company and its followers.
  • The key is to develop relevant business pages with creative and engaging content that customers and prospects (especially key decision makers) will pay attention to. It’s a great forum for uncovering potential company shortfalls and discussing strengths, using polls and eliciting feedback on business-related topics. Of course, social media can also help MSPs promote their portfolio of products and services, including new and underutilized customer service programs that can help boost renewals and increase revenue.
  • TIP: Performing searches on socialmention.com for terms that are related to your offering can help you tag onto relevant trending conversations, and add your views/ build your audience.

• Content Marketing.
  • This includes creating and distributing relevant and valuable communications materials to attract and engage a company’s target audience. From press releases and company blogs to instructional videos and slide sharing programs, these resources can give customers greater insight into their MSPs’ value proposition and operations. The emphasis of content marketing should always be on the clients, addressing concerns that affect their businesses and offering advice or ideas that can help them strengthen their operations.
  • TIP: When crafting the titles for your blog posts, run a quick search on ubersuggest.org to ensure your posts are optimized for SEO keywords that are actually being searched for!

Of course, getting customers engaged in the discussion isn’t always easy, but with the right strategy, each option will help MSPs improve their communications skills. The best discussions often start at the lowest level, talking with the end users who first feel the pain when systems are slow or the processes just don’t work. For example, get them to join the company’s LinkedIn group to discuss their challenges and share industry best practices. Those relationships can grow quickly when others are brought into the conversation, including their coworkers and other key decision makers.

The right communications strategy can help an MSP gain a lot of valuable insight into a client’s (or prospect’s) business challenges—leading the way to larger contract renewals or new sales opportunities.