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.
You need to have an effective IT marketing strategy if you wish to sustain long-term success in the competitive IT industry. However, many IT providers make simple advertising mistakes that can limit earning potential. Here are the three most common digital marketing errors and the best ways to avoid them:
1. Not Using Social Media
Does your IT company have a social media presence? Social media provides an excellent opportunity for your IT business to reach out to new customers and build upon existing relationships. However, many IT providers are not on social media platforms, which significantly limits the effectiveness of a digital marketing strategy. A social media presence will not only build your brand but is a free form of advertising that can help you reach a broad audience. (more…)
MSP marketing should communicate the security that cloud computing provides to gain clientele trust. With the cloud, data is uploaded into a group of servers representing expanded storage and computational ability. Data is stored in a sort of holographic way across all the servers. Space is “apportioned” for users and utilized for things like Hardware as a Service, Software as a Service, Desktop as a Service (HaaS, SaaS, DaaS) and more.
MSP marketingmust communicate security in cloud solutions in order to help MSPs capitalize on a $1 trillion dollar-market (through direct and indirect spending) over the next five years.
There are factors confusing buyers; security chief among them. In 2016, there were a record number of security breaches. Estimates have 2017 putting that record out the window. But many of these breaches have less to do with cloud transition, and more to do with bush-league security.
MSP business is part of an extensive network of technological development, ultimately encompassing many burgeoning aspects of modern technology. Remaining on the cutting-edge requires a bit more than even the most concerted research. In the process of sourcing new IT innovations and spreading their application, you need to go where those developing solutions are.
MSP marketingneeds to demonstrate value to potential clients. One of the best ways to do this is through showing tangible cost-savings. The more vendors involved in problem resolution, the more expensive this becomes for your end-user. Reasons include:
Time/Opportunity Cost
Maintaining More Relationships
Increased Complications Between Issue Identification and Resolution
MSP marketing must consolidate data, but this can be difficult with more than one outlet. When a store has more than one location, it’s likely that multiple databases become involved in the categorization of clients. Inventory and the kind of customers which buy that inventory are categorized singly, but not entirely. The solution is consolidation, but this can be a little bit esoteric if you haven’t organized everything into a single database before. You want a single main server that collects all the information.
Certainly, you want there to be an on-site data storage solution, but that should be updated to a primary server which parses through all the data from all locations. This will allow you to properly conduct MSP marketing campaigns which most cohesively match target markets.
Your MSP business is unique. Still, there are certain practices which have a history of greater success than others. To understand, let’s look at BYOB or Bring Your Own Beer. BYOB parties don’t always have the most welcoming feel, do they? Everybody guards their refreshments and you guard yours. Certainly, nobody’s discomfited by having to drink that which they don’t prefer, but at the same time, there isn’t an atmosphere that feels nearly as “free.” It’s kind of the same with BYOD, or Bring Your Own Device. When companies have employees who produce their own tech solutions— smartphones, tablets, laptops and the like— they come up against difficulties that company-provided resources don’t have. Several of these difficulties include:
MSP business solutions incorporating cloud technology usually consolidate resources even while expanding profitability potential. With the cloud, it’s possible for you to immediately test new solutions. It’s already known that in the world of tech, the atmosphere is always in flux, and cloud computing is at the head of that flux. It’s providing tech possibilities which conserve resources and expand opportunity with greater swiftness than many could have expected. Cloud computing is the next technological advancement worth embracing.
MSP marketingbenefits substantially from gathering information into one spot. Today, tablets, personal computers, smartphones, and end-user devices primarily collect such data. When all these sources feed into one “master” system, businesses save hours of research and thousands of dollars in misspent resources.