MSP Marketing Blogs

How to Perform a UX Audit for Your MSP Company

Always looking at ways to improve the user experience is essential for an MSP company. Failure to improve the user experience will inevitably cause you to lose clients to your competition. However, performing a UX audit on a routine basis is a great way to rise above all your competitors and help your IT company reach as many clients as possible.

Here are three ways to perform a UX audit for your IT company:

#1 Define the Scope

One of the first steps in creating a UX audit is to define the scope. Setting a limit on the audit is key in maintaining productivity and avoiding costly scope creep due to a never-ending audit. Creating clear parameters is key to setting up an audit that is easy to understand and make future changes.

#2 Choose Your Auditing Tools

The next key step in creating a UX audit for your MSP company is to choose your auditing tools. Many tools are available to use, such as Google’s PageSpeed Insights, BrowswerShots, or CheckMyColours. These auditing tools provide helpful information that can help you identify areas of improvement that can enhance the user experience for each customer.

#3 Ask for Feedback

Gaining feedback from your existing clients is one of the most effective ways to improve the user experience. You can segment client feedback in a variety of ways, such as the length of the relationship and your history with each customer. You can also sort potential areas of improvement by cost, ease, and urgency. All this information is highly valuable and can play a big role in helping you determine which areas to focus on improving the user experience.

Conclusion

Performing a user experience audit is critical to the success of an MSP company. Defining the scope, using auditing tools, and asking for feedback are important aspects of creating an effective audit for your company. Continually looking at more ways to improve and never remaining satisfied is one of the main keys to a successful IT company.

3 Reasons Social Media is Key to Managed Services Marketing

One of the best ways to improve your managed services marketing strategy is to focus on social media. Marketing through social media offers a wide range of benefits and can give you a significant edge over your competitors. Social media marketing also doesn’t cost anything and is highly versatile compared to other marketing strategies. Social media can also help you focus on a specific target audience.

If you are still undecided, here are the top three reasons why you should consider marketing on social media:

1. Your Clients Use Social Media

One of the main reasons to advertise on social media is that many of your customers spend a lot of time on various social media platforms. According to Statistica, Over 70% of the population in the United States have at least one social media profile. This number is only expected to continue to grow, and it provides a great opportunity for IT providers like you to reach more customers.

2. Improve Brand Recognition

Another advantage of managed services marketing on social media is that it is a great way to increase brand recognition. Social media gives you the perfect opportunity to improve visibility and interact with clients. Posting compelling content also adds value to your target audience and can help spread awareness of your IT company.

3. Increase Your Inbound Traffic

Marketing on social media is an effective way to increase your inbound traffic to your website. Each social media post gives you an opportunity to increase visitors to your site. Always creating high-quality content on a consistent basis will maximize traffic to your site and help you develop new leads.

Understanding these managed services marketing tips on social media is an excellent way to increase your consumer base and improve the brand of your company. Social media will continue to make a significant impact in the business world, and learning how to market on social media gives your business a competitive edge over other companies. Begin using these simple tips today and experience the many benefits of marketing on various social media platforms!

3 Ways to Write a Winning PR Pitch for Your MSP Business

Increasing your MSP business visibility is one of the main keys to success. Understanding how to create a winning PR pitch is an excellent way to help your IT company stand out from the rest of the competition. A successful PR pitch is easy to understand and can allow you to reach a wide range of potential clients.

Here are three simple tips to help you create a winning PR pitch for your IT company:

1. Introduce Yourself

The first step in writing a successful PR pitch is to introduce yourself. You can introduce your company by discussing your expertise, personal experiences, and educational background. Taking the time to create a personal touch is a great way to differentiate your company from others and make your story come alive.

2. Focus on Context

Another tip for a successful PR pitch is to focus on context. Opening your MSP business is great, but opening an MSP company to focus on the needs of legal firms is even better. Showing ways that your IT company is unique is a great way to stand out from the crowd and make a lasting impression. Highlighting key features that makes your company unique is essential in helping you attain long-term success.

3. Understand the News Cycle

Always remaining aware of the news cycle is important in helping you create a winning PR pitch. For example, your pitch may focus on the importance of cybersecurity in response to a large data breach gaining headlines on the news. Understanding how to take advantage of the news cycle will help you maximize the effectiveness of your PR pitch.

Writing a successful PR pitch is essential to the success of your MSP business. Following these simple-yet-useful tips are a great way to make a significant impact on crafting a PR pitch. The IT world is always competitive, and learning how to utilize a PR pitch can help your business rise above the competition and reach higher levels of success in today’s workplace.

IT Marketing Strategy: Customer Segmentation

One of the keys to successful IT marketing is getting to know your customers better. One of the best ways to understand your clients better is through customer segmentation. The use of customer segmentation allows you to divide your customers into various groups to better meet their individual needs. Customer segmentation includes three distinct classifications to help you organize your consumer base by their general characteristics, needs, and value.

1. A Priori

A priori is a simple segmentation that includes a range of general characteristics. These traits typically include gender, age, engagement medium, and income level. A priori segmentation is the most basic level of information that gives you a general overview of your customers.

2. Needs-Based

Needs-based is another category of customer segmentation that uses information gathered through your IT marketing research to divide clients based on their needs. Needs-based is much more sophisticated compared to a priori and can help you better understand the relationship between your customer and business.

3. Value-Based

Value-based segmentation divides clients by their overall value. This includes harvesting data from client interactions over an extended period of time. Value-based segmentation isn’t limited to value, but also includes the strategic value of the customer to your IT company.

Looking for ways to improve your IT marketing is essential for your MSP. Customer segmentation plays a key role in helping your IT company unlock its full potential by helping you to learn more about each one of your clients. The needs of customers are always changing, so it is critical for you to continue to learn and never remain satisfied with the status quo. Customer segmentation allows you to gain a better understanding of your customers, enabling you to best meet their needs.

4 Ways to Write a Good Business Plan for Your MSP Business

Developing a plan for your MSP business is key to long-term success in today’s competitive workplace. Setting various goals will help you measure your progress while providing additional incentives for your company. It is also a good idea to review your business plan on a regular basis and make adjustments.

Here are a few things to consider in writing a business plan for your IT company:

1. Why Do You Want to Start a Business and How Will You Measure Success?

The first thing to consider is why do you want to start a business and how will you measure your success. Developing detailed goals can provide you with structure while making it easier for you to measure success. Always looking for ways to improve is a key aspect of achieving long-term success for your IT company.

2. What Resources Do You Have?

Understanding the number of resources you have available is also key to long-term success. These resources play a key role in helping you reach more clients. Developing strategies to improve these resources is always a must for any MSP business.

3. What Are Your Services?

Detailing the various IT services you offer is important in helping you reach new clients. Adding more IT services can also help you stay up to date with current trends, as technology is always evolving. Understanding the costs of your IT services can help you create a budget and maximize profit for your business.

4. Who Are Your Target Customers?

Understanding your consumer base and how you will reach them is key to the success of your company. Many IT providers focus on reaching small businesses, and you can develop a detailed strategy to reach this demographic.

Developing a plan is essential to the success of your MSP business. Asking yourself the questions discussed above and always looking for ways to improve will help you maximize your consumer base and lead to success. Keeping your business plan updated is an excellent way to sustain success and reach as many clients as possible

Key IT Marketing Tactics That Are Known to Be Effective

Your IT Marketing will be more successful if you use the latest tools available. This is easier to say than do for many reasons, not least of which being the continuously shifting nature of technology. However, it is possible to line out operational protocols and best practices that retain the most effective outreach innovations. Presently, digital solutions represent some of the best.

Specific Advantages to Consider

When you go the digital route, it becomes easier to reach more people at less cost. This is something especially considerable in a competitive market that has burgeoning tech companies arising every day. Consider the following digital advantages:

Success Can Be Tracked, Monitored, and Augmented

An IT marketing campaign that uses digital outreach such as SEO has potential to track, monitor, and augment advertising with greater precision. Whether you’re using content like blog posts, white papers, videos, pictorial presentations, slide shows, or coupons, with digital outreach, you can determine precisely how effective each foray into the market is. This helps you avoid unnecessary trial and error. Consultation from SEO groups which serve MSPs is a very worthwhile tactic here.

Digital Options Are Known for Their High ROI

Return on investment is very high for digital outreach because the cost of production isn’t as steep as other outreach avenues. That said, some avenues of outreach take longer to produce ROI. For example, an SEO blog may require six months to a year.

Top-Tier Customer Engagement At Bottom-Dollar Cost

Digital outreach includes social media, and because of its computerized nature, specific communication becomes more streamlined. You can’t click on a billboard and talk with a salesperson, but you can do that with the chatbox on your page’s website.

Maximized Marketing Through Digital Outreach

Incorporating digital strategies into your IT marketing expands customer engagement, increases ROI, and provides clear statistical touchpoints for enhancement when properly deployed. If you’re not using digital marketing, it’s definitely something worth looking into, especially as an MSP.

Tips to Produce a More Successful IT Marketing Campaign Through Email Channels

In your IT marketing, you shouldn’t ignore the potentiality of email outreach. Even though many have begun to avoid using email strictly owing to things like “spam”, targeted email campaigns built around clients’ pain-points and drafted to be intriguing at every level do have their positive effect–especially if you include incentivization like discounts or freebies with a FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out) flavor.

Tactics to Enhance Email

There are a lot of different ways you can buff up your email outreach campaign. Getting a little consultation through SEO groups can save you a lot of trouble in the process and produce more ROI quickly. These tactics are common:

Understand Who Your Audience Is

Your IT marketing campaign needs to be informed. Certainly, you want to research target clients and calibrate emails that direction. But, you also want to construct those emails with a “voice” your clients resonate with, and use data to clarify that voice. High-powered corporate clients are less likely to respond to “counter-culture” themes than younger, more “hip” operations.

Design Email Titles That Can’t Be Ignored

Draw prospects in through the titles of your emails. If you can say something like “X service costs X dollars and saves X money”, that makes sense. Don’t be homogenous, though. The key is to use your title like a lure. The better the lure, the bigger the fish.

Value and Substance Should Be Led Into with Intriguing Opening Remarks and CTAs

A lure isn’t substantive. Once you’ve got clients reading your message, you need to provide real facts and data that pertain to their core needs or issues. In the first one or two sentences, validate your title and expand on it. Use the body to clarify your points, and include calls-to-action (CTAs) at the end.

Maximized Email Outreach

An IT marketing strategy which enhances email outreach with substantive value, irresistible design, and accurate market data should see appropriate ROI. Consultation helps avoid trial and error. Find what works for your brand and clientele, and keep up with it as it makes sense to.

Using White Papers to Enhance IT Marketing

What Are White Papers?

IT marketing commonly uses what are essentially expositional research papers to give your clients key information pertaining to varying technology issues. The truth is, most of what they need is something only an MSP could do anyway, owing to resources and how technical IT is. Educating prospects helps drive them to you.

How Do You Write a White Paper?

When clients realize even though they know what to do, they can’t do it internally, they consider your products or services. Naturally, you should write white papers with this in mind. Additionally, use the following tactics for best results:

Research, Identify Problems, Provide Solutions

Your IT marketing needs to proceed from clear research that’s cumulative and accurate. Research pain points of clients, use your white paper to show how those problems can be solved.

Be Clear What Your White Paper Is About

Don’t beat around the bush getting to the point. Tell clients what you’re going to talk about, talk about it, then recap at the end. If you can, let the first sentence be an abbreviation of your white paper’s thesis. If you can’t, at least get it out inside the first paragraph.

Carefully Educate Your Audience

Careful audience education is key. You want to give them information they need to understand why you’re worthwhile. You can tell them the “how”, and go into great detail; but if you’re doing that, you should be sure they’re unlikely to employ that information.

Concentrate on What You Know

Don’t break new ground, you’re not writing some thesis for a doctorate. Design white papers around topics that are central to your MSP and simultaneously central to clients. Whatever you’ve got expertise on, write about that.

White Papers Are Worthwhile Marketing

IT marketing teams that design white papers should do so from a position of expertise, carefully educate readers, construct clear white papers, research client pain points, and provide valid solutions. Construct white papers like this, and you should see marketing success from your efforts.

Optimizing Conversion Through IT Marketing Techniques

When you’ve got IT marketing that’s effective, it’s going to set salespeople up for more conversions. Marketing is the lure, sales is the reel, and you want a good lure if you want to reel in a big fish.

Answer Critical Questions for Incremental Sustainable Growth

A few points you might want to consider involve a pragmatic examination of your demographic, and the way in which your MSP is perceived by them. Additionally, what do you do with the information you’re able to get? Well, you should apply it strategically. A few more questions to answer include these:

How Many Site Visitors Are Worth Bothering With?

Your IT marketing campaign will produce visitors that may or may not be worthwhile. Some are going to be fundamental to your business’s success, some don’t mean anything. Conduct statistical surveys of site visitors to determine what percentage provide profit over time, who they are and other data pertaining to their interaction with your site. Then, optimize to match that data.

Are You Providing Value on the Website You’re Using to Attract Clients?

Your website needs to provide clients real value. Answer questions you know they’ll have. Respond to pain points. Design white papers that provide exposition into relevant issues. Tactics like these make clients want to visit your site, and even position you as a resource.

In Terms of Multi-Channel Marketing, What Sort of Arrangement Works Best?

Multi-channel marketing is essential to client conversion. Some combinations will work better than others. Consultation with SEO groups specializing in serving MSPs help eliminate some of the “static”. Figure out what works best and keep it up.

Answer the Right Questions to See More Conversions

In your IT marketing, you have to know the best balance of multi-channel marketing, client value, and statistical thresholds of necessary visitors, and you will have information that’s ideal in helping construct more informed and ultimately effective marketing outreach campaigns.

MSP Marketing Tactics to Help You Handle Social Media Crises

Your MSP marketing department needs to understand how to manipulate outreach in a positive way and handle fallout from marketing disasters. This isn’t going to happen incidentally, it will require direct, strategic effort.

Social Media Crisis Protocols

Working with SEO groups which regularly provide ROI-rich marketing for MSPs helps you avoid trial-and-error in developing crisis response protocols. Such groups are likely going to advise you use tactics like these during such events:

• Develop a means of sorting issues
• Directly address associated fallout
• Put together “quick win” options from known-effective solutions

Develop a Means of Sorting Issues

Your MSP marketing team needs to understand how to sort social media issues. Sometimes you’re dealing with something big, sometimes you’re not. For example, a bad review of services should predicate direct response. If you can’t reach a resolution, bury the bad review under a pile of good ones to keep it from impacting you.

However, that’s a lot different than some PR disaster where an ad from your outreach campaign is turned into an offensive meme, or something similar. Such a situation may predicate a total shift in marketing strategy. Know how to sort issues to understand which way to go.

Directly Address Associated Fallout

When you’ve got true fallout from an issue, address it as directly and comprehensibly as it’s feasible to. Think “damage control”. You’ve got to put the fires out, or they’ll keep burning up social media until your whole MSP is compromised.

Put Together “Quick Win” Options from Known-Effective Solutions

When you successfully handle PR disasters on social media, note what you did so you can handle similar issues quickly in the future. This is the “quick win” strategy, and it can be integral in helping you learn from and contend with social media disasters.

Bouncing Back from Bad Social Media

An MSP marketing campaign which follows “quick win” social media management strategies, directly addresses negative fallout and determines the best way to manage diverse issues should have expanded security in the face of unexpected online PR disasters.