How do you feel about Marmite?
Some people love the delicious stuff (me included). Others would rather lose a finger, than have its extract of yeastiness come anywhere near them.
The marketers of Marmite caught onto this years ago, and loving or hating Marmite has been a pretty successful marketing campaign.
Here’s the thing. With your marketing, you want to achieve a Marmite effect too.
By that I mean you want some people to look at your website and LOVE you. The only way to truly achieve that is for others to look at your website and DISLIKE you.
That’s a sentence that normally distils fear into any owner of an MSP Marketing / MSP Marketing business.
Because as owners, we want everyone to love our business as much as we do.
But here’s a reality check. Not everyone will love your business. And you really, truly, can’t be all things to all people.
In fact, the more you try to appeal to everyone, the less appealing you actually are.
The most successful MSP Marketing / MSP Marketing campaigns have a narrow marketing focus which is reflected across everything they do – their website, their emails, their adverts.
Sometimes, you don’t need to do a great deal of work to be more attractive to the right audience.
I recently met with a successful IT support company that wants more entrepreneur clients. The partners love working with fast moving, ambitious people who grow quickly and appreciate a technology partner who can think three steps ahead with them.
To make their website more relevant to those kind of people will take a few tweaks in the language used on the site, and a couple of comprehensive case studies from entrepreneurs they are already working with.
There are 5 steps to take to make your marketing more Marmitey.
1) Define your perfect prospect
What does your perfect future client look like? What kind of prospect makes you salivate? Describe them in detail. Geographically where are they based? What level decision maker are they?
How big is the business? How many users? What level of technical competence do they have? What’s their attitude to cloud? The clearer you are on the perfect prospect, the more you can appeal to them.
2) Put yourself in their shoes
“The only way to affect what John Smith buys, is to look at things through John Smith’s eyes”.
People are driven by needs, wants and the avoidance of pain. What do your perfect prospects need from their IT? What do they want from it? These are different questions. I might need some IT support. But I want someone to take all the pain away for me without me having to think about it.
What keeps your perfect prospect awake at night? What are their fears, their frustrations, their annoyances? Solve these for them and you become a trusted partner; not just a supplier.
3) Change all your marketing to appeal directly to that person
Once you know how they think, you need to make sure every part of your marketing talks directly to that person. You address their needs, wants and fears.
That’s why my website is quite personal and based around me. My perfect prospect is the owner of an IT support or IT consultancy business that’s doing OK, but could do a LOT better.
I put a lot of my personal story in my marketing to demonstrate that I understand, and I’m just like you. I’m a business owner with the same needs, wants and fears. I get that you want a higher personal income, and more free time to enjoy it! And I know some of the answers, because I’ve built and sold a profitable business.
That message appeals to the right kind of business owners I can work with, and turns off the wrong audience. Perfect.
4) Make it personal
The internet has made the world a smaller place. Virtually anyone can talk to virtually anyone else, with ease. That’s made everything more personal.
Your marketing needs the same approach. Don’t be all corporatey and professional and official, and aloof. That’s a terrible approach. Make it personal. And warm.
At our level of business, people buy from people, not from brands or corporations. The more personal and relevant you make your marketing, the better the response will be.
5) Measure by response
You know the worst people to listen to about your marketing? Your other half. Or your friends. Or your staff. Particularly if they have not been privy to the marketing development process you have just been through.
The only true judge of good marketing is response. You should be constantly monitoring leads generated; sales closed; conversion rate; quality of client; average spend; retention.
The answer to “does my marketing work” is within those figures. Not within the opinions of people who don’t really know what they are talking about.
