I’m about to tell you one of the biggest secrets to effective marketing.
But first, see if this sounds like you.
Most MSPs, when doing their marketing, just do a bit here and a bit there. A Facebook post one day, LinkedIn the following week, an email thrown into the mix every now and then. Basically, they just do it when they remember to do it. Because MSP owners are busy people, right?
But actually, this is fairly pointless. Here’s where the secret comes in.
To do marketing well, you've got to treat it like a system and not like a series of random events.
And that means doing marketing on a daily, weekly and monthly basis.
Here's why. What you sell is really difficult to sell. Actually, you couldn't have picked something harder to sell than managed services. Because the people that you're selling to don't know what they don’t know about technology. And because they don't understand it, they don't really know how to buy what you sell.
This creates something called inertia loyalty. They stick with their existing MSP rather than switch over to someone new - even if they're unhappy - because it just feels easier.
So the goal for you is being in front of people at exactly the moment they’re ready to buy. When they’re fed up with their current provider, for example.
And this is where your marketing system comes in.
Because if you just do the series of one-off marketing events I described earlier - a bit of LinkedIn here, a bit of Facebook there - you never build up big mo, aka big momentum.
Big momentum is where your marketing is happening daily, weekly, monthly without fail. It runs like clockwork. And while at first it may seem like you're getting no reward for all that effort, what you’re actually doing is building up momentum. So that, at that exact moment when someone is ready to make a buying decision, you're right there in front of them.
You know what SYSTEM stands for, don't you? It's an acronym.
S - Saves
Y - you
S - stress
T - time
E - energy
And you need to set up a SYSTEM for your MSP's marketing, just like any other area of the business.
How do you do this? Well, here are three easy wins for a daily, weekly, monthly schedule;
Daily
Put out social media. Post new content on LinkedIn, on Facebook, on any other channels you use. And it doesn’t have to be complicated - if you want some ideas on what to post, have a look at my Ultimate Guide to Video which explains how effective even a short iPhone video can be.
Weekly
Send out an educational email. Teach your prospects about the thing they don't know about, which is technology.
Maybe get your technicians to jot down the questions they’re getting asked the most, or just pick up a few calls to the service desk yourself one morning, then answer one of those questions in an email every week. Simple.
Monthly
This is when I’d recommend sending out something printed, like a newsletter. Pretty much everything you need to know about using printed stuff in your MSP's marketing is in my Ultimate Guide to Direct Mail.
If you're worried about time, there are some good tools out there for scheduling this kind of content - some of them are even free. That means you can block out something like one day a month to create all your content, then tell your tool what days you want each bit posted. Then you can forget about it for a bit. Here's a good run down of where to start with free scheduling tools, but my choice is Buffer for basic free social media post scheduling.
This may all sound like yet another thing to do, but once you get it set up, those three easy wins I mentioned are actually a super simple marketing system for your MSP, but a seriously effective one.
You can always email me (and it’s actually the real me on the other end, so I’ll reply. As long as you’re nice.) at hello@paulgreensmspmarketing.com .
