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 Channel Futures

Sales & Marketing


CloudBerry Lab

Five Tips: Managed Services Marketing

  • Written by Joe Panettieri 1
  • December 22, 2008
While some Web sites go dark during holiday weeks, MSPmentor will continue to bring you fresh content. Over the next week, we'll offer five basic tips on:

  • Marketing (Dec. 22)

  • Sales (Dec. 23)

  • PR (Dec. 24)

  • Leveraging Web 2.0 Technologies (Dec. 26)

Managed Services Advertising While some Web sites go dark during holiday weeks, MSPmentor will continue to bring you fresh content. Over the next week, we’ll offer five basic tips on:

  • Marketing (Dec. 22)
  • Sales (Dec. 23)
  • PR (Dec. 24)
  • Leveraging Web 2.0 Technologies (Dec. 26)

Let’s kick things off with marketing — which often represents a managed service provider’s greatest challenge. Your target customers need to hear your marketing messages at least seven times to influence a buying decision, according to About.com.

Alas, many MSPs don’t develop effective brands, market positions or communication strategies. But some MSPs really understand the value of effective marketing. Here are five tips to get you started.

1. Start From Scratch: What’s your brand? What’s your elevator pitch? How do you describe your business to potential customers in one minute or less? Not sure where to start? Visit such Websites as Master IT, Everon Technology Services and inhouseIT.

In particular, check out the simple but strong company logos and taglines, such as inhouseIT: Your Technology Department. That three-word description perfectly captures inhouseIT’s business focus and core mission.

2. Write A Plan, Develop A Budget: Yes, your annual budget actually needs a line item called “Marketing and Advertising.” And that line item should gradually increase as your annual sales increase. This “Marketing Basics” article from About.com gives you the framework to get started.

3. Think Outside of Technology: Download a free PDF called The New Rules of Viral Marketing. From best-selling author David Meerman Scott, the free PDF explains how you can develop effective messaging and then spread those messages — either by word of mouth or on the web.

You’ll notice the PDF isn’t written for MSPs. Instead, it’s designed for a general business audience. I strongly recommend that MSPs spend more time reading general-interest business books, magazines and Web sites that cover small business marketing and business operations. A few of my favorites include bMighty, Mary Schmidt Marketing Troubleshooter and Startup Spark.

4. Drive What You Sell: I’m a big fan of being seen and being heard. Transform your daily commute and customer visits into non-stop branding opportunities. Investigate advertising wraps that turn your company’s mobile fleet into tasteful and effective billboards.

inhouseIT managed service provider

5. Measure Everything: Whether you’re doing an online marketing campaign or participating in a trade show, you need to measure exactly how much you’re spending on marketing and the return on investment.

  • How many business contacts did you get?
  • How many of those contacts turned into qualified sales leads?
  • How many of those sales leads turned into face-to-face meetings?
  • How many of those face-to-face meetings turned into actual sales?

If you measure your marketing programs from the start, you can begin to analyze the cost effectiveness of one program (say, online marketing) vs. another (say, face-to-face conferences).

MSPmentor is updated multiple times daily. Don’t miss a single post. Subscribe to our Enewsletter, RSS and Twitter feeds.

Tags: Cloud Service Providers Digital Service Providers MSPs VARs/SIs Sales & Marketing

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5 comments

  1. Avatar Eric Tsai December 23, 2008 @ 3:42 pm
    Reply

    Nice tips Joe, I would add that branding is an extension of your business, and your business is a representation of your organization. Marketing is to create awareness and develop your brand’s profile thus when someone thinks of you or your business it evokes a mental image or even an emotion that translates into value. It has to speak to your target audience with a call-to-action so knowing your customer base while identifying your brand’s strength and weakness becomes important. If you build a strong brand presence it reduces resistance from marketing to your customers and creates synergy inside your organization.

    The next time you go out to buy something or from what you’ve purchased this holiday season think about why you chose some brands over others and it won’t be solely on price point. Branding is the reason why people love Apple products, Apple’s marketing simple gets the word out there so people know when to start lining up outside the Apple store.

  2. Avatar Joe Panettieri December 23, 2008 @ 4:10 pm
    Reply

    Eric: Remember how tarnished Apple’s brand was in the mid-1990s? The products and services, ultimately, have to fulfill the brand’s promise. Apple didn’t fulfill that brand promise in the 1990s so no amount of marketing could have helped their bad products.

    That gradually changed with iMac (simplicity…) and iPod/iTunes (integrated user experience) and iPhone (game-changing technology, at time of launch).

    Likewise, MSPs need to make sure their services are fantastic before they market and build brands around them.
    -jp

  3. Avatar Erick Simpson December 23, 2008 @ 7:41 pm
    Reply

    Hi Joe;

    Great tips for marketing managed services. When we educate partners on this subject, we also discuss the difference between passive marketing vehicles such as websites, newsletters, white papers and case studies and direct marketing, such as direct mail letters, postcards and telemarketing, as well as the critical importance of the marketing list when conducting direct marketing, and how to source and filter it for maximum effect. Next we cover developing compelling messaging and collateral for the partner’s managed services, and leaving out the technical mumbo-jumbo, and focusing on identifying a prospect’s pain points and positioning managed services as the answer to those pains.

    Your 5th point, Measure Everything, is critical in tracking the success and/or weakness of the partner’s marketing campaign. A good marketing campaign should include both passive and direct forms of marketing delivered in a specific schedule or rotation, and all activity and its result should be tracked on an ongoing basis. This is the only way to determine the ROI of any marketing campaign and identify areas for improvement.

    We’ve got a webinar at http://www.mspu.us/courses titled “Effective Managed Services Marketing Techniques” in the “Our FREE Microsoft TS2 Managed Services Webcasts” section that goes into detail in each of these areas.

    Thanks, Joe – for all you do!

    Erick Simpson
    MSPU University
    http://www.mspu.us

  4. Avatar Joe Panettieri December 23, 2008 @ 10:57 pm
    Reply

    Erick: Thanks for being the rare person in the MSP industry who talks business strategy rather than pure bits and bytes. Happy Holidays.

  5. Avatar sjketterman December 24, 2008 @ 3:47 pm
    Reply

    Joe – Great post and comments.

    The two most important functions of a business are: Marketing and Innovation. What about profit you might ask. Profit follows successful implementation of the two above functions – it should never be the motive.

    Marketing is a function to do one thing: Create New Customers.

    Innovation is a vehicle to support marketing and keep your business fresh, new, and alive.

    While there are many many methods to do marketing – the most important one is to remember why you are doing it: to create a customer and follow that up with my own personal one: to KEEP a customer. Marketing in my opinion does not stop with a new customer….keeping those customers is just as important.

    sjk

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