IT Marketing Tips to Design Representative Customer Personas

Your IT marketing benefits from the design of valid customer personas. This helps you to know where to aim outreach and how best to construct new marketing materials. But you’ve got to be careful to consider a few things. 

First and foremost, people are always changing. Who they were isn’t who they are, or who they’ll be. Secondly, the line between stereotype and demographic outline is thin. Following are tips to help you stay on the side of accurate clientele representation rather than marketing for stereotypes: 

Inform Personas with Data from Real Clients 

IT marketing needs to be based on information, not opinion. Your opinions will be informed by your bias. Your biases may not necessarily be fair, especially if the personalities of your target demographic have a pernicious edge. 

Stereotypes come from shallow mental segmentation of those other from either yourself or your group. This is harder to do when you’re developing things from data than when you’re developing them through experience you’ve had personally.  

Don’t Design an Outline, Get Deep 

Don’t use the data to design some shallow solution which only partially represents the reality of the situation. Get deep. How long did X customer remain with you before either leaving your operation, upgrading, or closing down? What was their regular spending? What could you have done better? Each new client provides more information that allows you to increase the depth of buyer personas for more success in future conversions. 

Reviews and Content Reveal Additional Data 

How clients review you and how they react to content you produce provide additional data points you can use to help round out forward marketing endeavors and create more effective personas. 

Effective Buyer Personas 

Informed marketing should yield increased conversion. An IT marketing team which uses diverse means of collecting data, informs personas from actual data, and puts as much information as possible into personas will likely establish more representative outreach.  

Managing IT marketing with an SEO provider which specializes in MSPs can help you avoid common content marketing mistakes in outreach. Following are three tips that will help you overcome content marketing errors:

(more…)

IT marketing spread can be too little or too much. It’s almost as bad to oversaturate as it is to undersaturate. The only saving grace of too much outreach is that you increase your footprint, expanding clientele awareness. However, this puts you in danger of being spread too thin. Following are a few signs to help you know which way to go in terms of your present spread:

(more…)

It’s useful for those in IT marketing to design content around the sales cycle. There are many groups that specialize in both SEO and providing such solutions for MSPs. They can be instrumental in helping you design content for each stage. The six stages are: 

  (more…)

Your IT marketing campaign must contend with prospects that are busy and value personal time highly. Technology has further fractured attention spans such that Time magazine felt like printing an article likening human attention spans to something below the ability of goldfish was accurate.

Well, brevity is the soul of wit, and you must respect that in outbound marketing. Following are ways to condense and render effective your pitches such that prospects are interested in hearing you out, and perhaps even converting:

(more…)

Your IT marketing must optimize. Technology is always in flux, new things are always available, and new ways of using new technology to meet new relevant demographics must be employed. Still, there are basic ways you can buff up your interface in terms of client conversion through a few simple tactics which hold firm even as new developments arise. Especially when you’re dealing with other businesses, you need techniques which transcend trend. Several include: 

  (more…)

Your IT marketing campaign requires careful strategy to maximize positive impact. Firstly, the marketplace is always in flux. Secondly, mobile internet usage has overtaken traditional desktop interface in terms of web surfing. Your marketing outreach needs to strategically consider this reality. Several means of maximizing mobile impact include:

• Knowing who your audience is
• Ensuring produced content is legitimately readable
• Negative space properly managed is positive
• Ensuring that sharing isn’t something difficult for your audience

Knowing Who Your Audience Is 

Provide your IT marketing content to those who are most likely to actually consider them. It’s no good marketing products or services to a demographic which doesn’t match. You need to determine your audience and structure content accordingly. Mobile audiences differ from desktop audiences in terms of tech interface, so much of the strategy here involves formatting content for mobile use.

Ensuring Produced Content Is Legitimately Readable

Your content needs to be in text large enough for the eye to comfortably read, broken up with pictures, and straightforward in terms of navigation.

Negative Space When Properly Managed Is Positive

Negative space is the empty white area between paragraphs. The less of this there is, the more daunting a document can be. No one wants to read a wall of text. Negative space is especially necessary in mobile content.

Ensuring That Sharing Isn’t Something Difficult for Your Audience

Put all sharing links to varying social media sites right on the page of your content. You want to make it as easy as possible for those who interact with what you produce to share if they want to. Encourage them subtly through buttons and graphics initiating the share (“Share now!” or “share with your friends!” can be good hyperlinks).

Making Mobile Content Work for You

An online IT marketing campaign built for a specific audience, with readable content, negative space management, and facilitated sharing, will likely have a more positive impact. Working with SEO agencies specializing in MSPs can help you more effectively optimize mobile content for maximized effectiveness.

In your IT marketing, you must avoid the sand of poor planning for the bedrock of secure strategy. If you’re going to have a sustainable, profitable, continually growing business, it’s going to take a little work. Following are a few tips to help ensure the basis of operations has requisite strength for future security: 

Competition Mindfulness 

You must keep the competition in mind. You’re going to have prime competitors, and you’re going to have those that only compete with you in one or another service provisions. You need to know who your competitors are, you need to know if they’re actually doing a better job providing services than you are, and you need to know how you can counteract them. This requires a level of forward cognizance and conscientiousness in terms of market observation. 

Making Relationships 

You need to make relationships with employees, with vendors, with clients, and even with your competition. Quid pro quo basically means ”something for something”. Basically, it’s a “you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours” mentality. Foster such relationships with vendors and competitors, and you can support one another incidentally. If a client has needs you can’t meet, send them to a competitor, and when they encounter a similar issue, they’ll send such clients to you.  

Acquire Contributors 

Don’t only trust in your internal team to facilitate effective IT marketing. Additionally, you want to get contributors who know what they’re doing and are willing to work for you in a piecemeal capacity. Read through articles you like online and contact their authors. Find blogs and other marketing materials that resonate, and see if any freelance work can be commissioned.  

More Robust, Reliable Operations 

You need to design a streamlined IT marketing program which includes acquisition of outside contributors, strong business relationships, and mindfulness of the existing competition. When you’ve done that, you’ll be set up to handle the peaks and valleys of fluctuating business over time.

IT marketing is increasingly involved in what’s known as “content marketing”. It works like this: you produce content on a regular basis that is optimized for greatest online visibility. This content must be qualitative, value-rich, relevant, and targeted toward the right demographic. It needs to be carefully managed and strategically designed. Working with SEO organizations who specialize in providing solutions for MSPs can be a wise tactic; several other considerable strategies include:

(more…)

You have to be careful to facilitate effective branding in your IT marketing campaign. There are many schools of thought here, but there are also many basic mistakes which surfeit all outreach strategies. If you’re going to be the most successful in branding, you want to avoid basic outreach errors. Several common ones MSPs make include: 

• Not even having a brand
• Basic inconsistency
• Being a copycat

Not Even Having a Brand 

IT marketing is difficult if you don’t have a real brand. Just naming your company and putting that on a letterhead won’t cut it. You’ve got to do market research into prospective clientele, you’ve got to determine what core principles and outreach provisions will be, and you’ve got to build your brand around these things. It’s essential to consult with marketing professionals if you don’t already have a pool of them from which to draw relevant data. 

Basic Inconsistency 

A brand that waffles isn’t trusted, especially in tech. There are enough turbulent waters ahead. Those who are investing thousands of dollars in the services of your MSP on a monthly basis must be sure what you’re doing for them is worth the cost. Don’t waffle. Be consistent. Have a color scheme, similarly-situated slogans, a logo that is recognizable, advertisement outreach that has a running theme, services of a similar kind which reflect core directives; you get the idea. Line out precepts defining your MSP and stick with them as much as possible. 

Being a Copycat 

Pepsi is known in the U.S., but the rest of the world could care less; they’re into Coca-Cola. Don’t be a copy-cat. At best you’ll be second, at worst you’ll be seen as an underhanded, dishonest provider of services. But that doesn’t mean you can’t adopt similar successful means of outreach as competing brands; it just means you have to make them your own. 

Stronger Branding 

In terms of effective IT marketing, ensure you’ve got a real brand, be consistent, and don’t act as a copycat. These things should make your brand more efficient, effective, and successful.