How to stop sucking at marketing your MSP

In a quick survey that we’ve done in our MSP marketing webinar, half of the attendees said that they don’t have any idea how to start their marketing strategies. This is a problem because marketing is critical not only in bringing in more clients, but also in nurturing your existing ones. Simply put, it’s impossible for you to grow without effective marketing in place. 

E. Beginners or not, here are some tips on how to stop sucking at marketing:

1. Stop making excuses and just START

“We have no budget.” 

“We don’t know where to start.”

“No one in the team can do it.”

Get rid of all your excuses and just begin! If you have no budget, use free tools. Don’t know where to start? Research and make a plan. No one knows marketing in your team? Hire one or outsource marketing services. Too busy? Book a time weekly (And stick to it) to discuss all your marketing efforts. 

No excuses, you gotta somewhere.

2. Start with understanding who your customers are and build a buyers persona

Understanding who your customers are is critical for any marketing success. We see so many of our partners waste money on marketing initiatives because they just do marketing for the sake of it. 

Documenting who your customers are within a buyers persona will help

• Identifies who your customers are
• Identifies the gaps in who you think your customers actually are
• Drive your marketing messaging
• Allow you to properly target your marketing
• Aligns internal and external parties such as sales reps and marketing agencies

Check out our on demand webinar about building a buying persona and download our buyer persona template to help get you started. 

3. Make a plan 

Don’t go straight to the battle without being prepared. 

Apparently, marketing isn’t a one size fits all kind of thing. In order to create marketing strategies that work, you should first define who your target customers are. This can be done by creating buyer personas, segmenting your customers according to age, geography or pain points and deciding which is better to focus on depending on your MSP’s expertise- vertical or horizontal markets. 

Once all of these are identified, you can then proceed in developing content and choosing marketing channels that would fit your specific customers and which stage they belong to in the buyer’s journey.

Leverage our educational resources below to get started:

• White paper: Marketing 101 for MSPs
• On demand Webinar: Marketing 101 for MSPs
• On demand Webinar: Kick start your marketing in 2022

4. Take advantage of free tools and automation

You don’t need to go big on your marketing budget just to kick things off. You can start with free tools that you can use on a small scale and upgrade when you’re ready to spend more on marketing.

Creating business pages in Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Reddit and other social media platforms is so simple and free these days. 

Aside from socials, here are more free tools you can use:

• Email marketing – Hubspot, Sender, Benchmark, Mailchimp
• Design – Canva, Pablo, Gimp
• Social media scheduling – Buffer, Hootsuite
• Website and landing pages – WordPress, Wix
• Website analytics – Google Analytics

Additionally, when your customer base starts to grow and all the marketing tasks become a bit of hard work then it’s time to be smarter and automate. Marketing  automation will help your MSP save time in doing repetitive tasks. 

What can you automate?

• Email marketing (Newsletters, personalised emails, follow-up emails, etc)
• Social media promotions
• Dynamic content
• Customer service replies
• Reports

Recommended for you:

On Demand Webinar: Email marketing best practices

5. Focus on your customers, not yourself

People are turned-off by self-promotion. When you create your content, think about how your customers could relate and benefit from it. Why did we even create your buyer personas in the first place, right? Your customers may have little idea or interest on how technology works, so best not to focus on the technical aspects of your services, instead focus on how you could help them address their pain points through educational topics.  

6. Track your progress

The process doesn’t end with building and executing your plans. In order to measure the effectiveness of your campaigns, you need to consistently track their results. In this way, you will be able to determine and focus your efforts and budget more on the strategies that work.

Over to you

No matter how big or small your MSP is, there’s always a way on how you can market your solutions. If you still haven’t started yet, then begin now. If you fail on one thing then try another. Don’t expect different results if you keep on doing the same thing.

Moreover, if you feel like you’re stuck, our team is always happy to help. Aside from advice from our MSP marketing experts, our partners have access to our Marketing Concierge within our Partner Portal. Here, you can download ready-to-use and rebrandable marketing assets to enable you speed up your go-to-market strategies and win more business. If you’re interested in becoming a partner, just click the button below and register.