Megan Hermosillo
Growing your MSP is critical for lasting success, but how will you attract an audience to power that growth? Getting the word out is half the battle, which is why MSP marketing is so important.
Whether you’re going to market as a new provider or looking to open new channels as an existing one, here are some proven marketing strategies for growing your organization.
Want to scale your MSP? Try these proven marketing strategies
Social media and forums
Social media platforms and online forums are prime spaces for sharing your insights and thoughts on certain topics. You can really flex your thought-leader muscle in social media forum-based networks like Reddit and Quora where joining and responding to conversations is easy and expected. Just be careful to identify yourself as a business and respect the community guidelines of any space you want to enter, or else you can do much more harm than good.
Social media and forums are also good spots to glean information on different topics to help round out your marketing copy and content.
Account-based marketing
Marketing is only successful when your target audience is actually seeing your content, and account-based marketing helps you stay hyper-targeted in your outreach.
According to an ITSMA online survey, nearly 85% of marketers who measure ROI agree that account-based marketing initiatives do significantly better than most other marketing investments.
What does ABM look like for MSPs?
When it comes to ABM for MSPs, there are two main points of use:
- Small-Scale: Small-scale ABM allows you to find your ideal targets online, write content around recent news, and connect with consumers on social media.
- Freestyle: This option allows you to send personalized direct emails that identify the issues your target audience is most likely to deal with and how you’re able to solve them.
Ambassador and referral program
Ambassador and referral programs are especially important for incentivizing, empowering, and retaining your existing customers. Consider offering your customers discounts on services in exchange for referrals.
This strategy often eases the sales cycle because referrals come from already-vetted trusted networks.
Ready to run your campaigns? Keep these 3 operational steps to successfully marketing your MSP in mind
Now that you’ve got some MSP marketing strategies in your pocket, how do you implement them? These 3 operational steps will help you market your MSP successfully for optimal growth.
1. Planning and budgeting
When developing a marketing plan, forecasting growth and knowing how much your organization is ready to scale is key. New MSPs can quickly go under if they invest too much in marketing without doing the research first to ensure ROI.
You must have your buyer personas figured out. Look at your current customers and get to know their needs and pain points. Consider interviewing some of them (ideally long-time advocates and new customers) to learn about their internal decision-making processes and research and purchase habits.
Be sure to keep your plan organized by documenting it in a playbook or project management tool. Also, take care to make it visible to key team members at your organization to help with buy-in and project accountability.
[Learn how you can scale your MSP operations to support more clients]
2. Reporting and optimizing
As you put your campaigns into motion, you can begin measuring your performance and optimizing how you interact with customers. Based on your results, you can tweak how you reach current and new target audiences.
As you continue optimizing your marketing strategies, be sure to track these key metrics:
- Top of Funnel KPIs: web traffic, site and page views, and SEO keyword rankings
- Middle of Funnel KPIs: email opens, PPC clicks, and social media engagements
- Bottom of Funnel KPIs: form submissions, sign-ups, and downloads
[Read how you can optimize your conversion funnel from ToFu to BoFu]
3. Loop in sales
As you build up your MSP marketing strategies, also develop a plan for handing off new leads to members of your sales team. Sales is an extension of marketing and both teams need to be aligned for sustainable and successful business growth.
Implementing these proven marketing strategies will help you grow your MSP and give you the tools needed to identify your target audience and draw them in. Whether you apply one strategy or all of them, you’re sure to see positive results.
Contact us to learn how you can scale your MSP operations to support more clients.
