4 Steps to an Impactful MSP Marketing Plan

You’re running an IT business – you don’t want to waste any more time on marketing than you need.

Developing a strong MSP marketing plan is a surefire way to relieve a huge portion of that headache, while also boosting your revenue.

Typically, however, MSPs sell managed services, often as a preventative service. What that means is that in the best-case scenario, your company isn’t being actively sought out at all by the customer.

So how do you grow your monthly recurring revenue?

You need a consistent way to by bringing in leads that convert into sales. A well-crafted IT company marketing plan can do just that.

Here are a number of steps your business can take in order to craft a killer MSP marketing plan.

1 – Start with Strategy Before Tactics for Your IT Services Marketing Plan

You can’t put the cart before the horse; you can’t make a MSP marketing plan without a strategy.

Too often IT companies get involved in the granular aspects of their business (cybersecurity, cloud migration, IT management) and attack all these marketing goals without an overarching strategy.

To be successful, an IT services company marketing plan will have a IT marketing strategy before focusing on tactics.

Key components of a strategy include:

• • Identifying the target audience
  • Messaging Frameworks (very important!)
  • Key performance indicators (KPIs)
  • Quarterly Roadmaps
  • Identifying most effective tactics at converting leads and sales

Typically you want to leverage a Senior marketing strategist who has experience in developing successful marketing strategies for other MSPs so you are aligned in the right direction.

As you develop the specifics of your IT services company marketing plan, you can delve into conversion-focused web design and how to optimize SEO.

But in the initial stages of crafting a marketing plan for IT, keep in mind that you need to have a well-thought out strategy before you can rush headlong into tactics.

2 – Define Your Tactics to Create a Top-Notch IT Company Marketing Plan

Now that we have our strategy, we can get to tactics.

A high-ROI MSP marketing plan for an IT company involves making use of the most effective tactics to achieve your overall strategic goals.

Some of the tools at your disposal are:

• Content (Blogs, Videos, Podcasts, Offers, Webinars)
• Marketing Automation
• Conversion based Design
• Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
• Pay-per-click
• Several others as outlined above in the Engine above

Each tactic and sub tactic is designed to cater to a different need. Some audiences, for instance, are more likely than others to read blogs, while others will prefer emails or webinars.

SEO is also critical here; it’s how you get people to interact with the content in the first place.

When considering SEO, concepts like national, local, and maps pages are all valuable to ranking on search engines.

As seen above, this page targets the keyword ‘NYC Managed IT Services Company’ while the next page . . .

…Allows you to compete for the ‘IT Company Manhattan NY’ keyword.

This is local SEO, while national SEO is focused on ranking on broad keywords (like ‘managed IT services’) and forgoes the local tags.

Maps SEO, meanwhile, is ranking on the Google maps search function.

As you can see above our client Power Consulting ranks in #1 position for both Local Maps and Local Organic → this is the most powerful position to obtain.

If you can be in the top 3 for maps and local organic you will garner the highest percentage of the market share of leads.

All of these are valuable SEO marketing tactics that can generate not only more MSP leads, but also higher quality leads.

What’s more, through things like ad retargeting (whereby you’re able to ‘follow’ a user online and continue to place ads on their screen) and emails, you can combine all these efforts so they form a holistic, symbiotic approach.

The alternative – focusing exclusively on one set of tactics – can lead to siloed marketing, which in turn means a weaker ROI.

At the end of the day, to achieve the goals you’re setting in your IT services marketing plan, the key is to use the best tools for the job and make sure you’re letting the tools support each other.

MSP Success Magazine found that 58% of MSPs are not doing any email marketing or doing it so inconsistently that it’s gaining them no traction.

Email marketing can be very effective at winning and nurturing leads, so you can already see a gap here that would have been filled by a solid sales business plan for IT services.

Two important things to remember at this stage:

• Market research is key to understand how best to meet your customers where they are at (and be most effective at converting sales)
• A well-designed marketing plan will put most resources into high-yield, high-ROI tactics

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MSP marketing ideas for social media would, as you’d expect, emphasize Facebook, LinkedIn and other platforms.

Important to note here: not all social media are created equal.

50% of buyers of B2B products and services use LinkedIn when they make a purchasing decision, according to Hootsuite. There are even better days of the week to post for your specific industry and market. These tiny details can make a big difference in your ROI if understood and properly exploited.

When making a marketing plan for content creation, you’ll want to know which types of content are going to be the most effective at reaching your target audience and driving sales.

3 – Deploy a Proven Methodology for Your IT Services Company

E4 Methodology

Jumpfactor employs its proprietary E4 methodology that incorporates everything we’ve discussed into a high-functioning marketing plan.

Adopted from the tech industry and known for its efficiency, the agile methodology consists of four components: Expose, Engage, Enroll, Enhance. Internally it’s executed best by using a scrum system with weekly sprints.

You track along the buyer’s journey from expose (top of the funnel with a wide audience) to engage (middle of the funnel, narrow down on your buyers) to enroll (bottom of the funnel, turn leads into sales).

Enhance is the use of metrics, benchmarks and KPIs to determine which tactics are most effective and making constant micro-tweaks to reflect the new information.

It’s an organic, iterative process that is focused on constantly improving outcomes, aligned with the Japanese kaizen philosophy of ‘continuous improvement’.

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4 – Use Benchmarks & KPIs to Measure Your MSP Marketing Plan

A Content Marketing Institute report shows that what the most successful B2B marketers have in common is clear goals and objectives when it comes to their marketing plan.

In the survey, 81% of the most successful organizations were clear on what an effective or successful content marketing program looks like.

And 88% of the most successful were able to effectively measure marketing content ROI.

Essentially, you should know who you want to reach and how to measure the effectiveness of your campaign before you theory-craft and begin planning specific content.

The reason being that call tracking, Google analytics, and other tools will help you identify which specific tactics are most effective once you implement your IT services marketing plan.

When you’ve completed all the steps above, benchmarks and KPIs will inform your next steps.

Moreover, it’s important to distinguish between leading and lagging KPIs.

Leading KPIs are used to determine what actions will lead to desired outcomes, while lagging indicators are measurements and metrics of past performances.

In other words, leading KPIs are used to ‘lead’ to more sales in the future, while lagging KPIs are used to determine how successful past actions were.

Leading indicators include:

• Traffic
• Bounce rates
• Pages per session
• Conversion rates

Lagging indicators include:

• Cost per lead
• Cost per click
• # of leads
• MCAC (Marketing Customer Acquisition Cost)

Putting It All Together to Create a High-Quality MSP Marketing Plan

Marketing is about understanding: understanding your own company and understanding your customer.

The more you know, in other words, the more able you can put that knowledge to work maximizing the ROI.

Coming up with MSP marketing ideas can be time-consuming and expensive. But the headaches can be minimized and the revenue benefit to your company can be massive.

The good news is that you don’t have to go it alone. Jumpfactor is a data-driven marketing agency that holds a deep understanding of the IT industry. Having generated revenue of over $250 million for IT and MSP firms, Jumpfactor is the IT marketing genius that can get your plan firing on all cylinders.

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Many IT companies aren’t seeing the returns they want on their marketing plans – but that can change, fast.
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