Your MSP's brand... It's not your logo. It's not the design of your website. It's not your accreditations or qualifications. So what is it?
Being a marketing expert is a bit like being an IT expert - it's a very broad canvas. Just as you might be good at many things but not blowing fluff out of an RS232 port 😃 I'm good at many marketing subjects, but not all of them.
You'll rarely hear me giving detailed advice on pay per click (PPC) or search engine optimisation (SEO) as they're very technical subjects that change constantly.
Another area I've never been comfortable discussing is branding. But recently I've been interviewing some very smart branding experts for my podcast, and it's helped me get a better grip on what branding really is.
It's not your logo.
It's not the design of your website.
It's not your accreditations or qualifications.
Your brand is you. And your team. And the way you communicate. And critically...
How that makes people feel
Because that's what a brand really is. It's the reflection of how people feel about something. And their feelings affect whether they buy or not (most purchases are driven by the heart rather than the brain - especially picking a new MSP).
Let's take some big consumer brands. How do you feel about Microsoft? About Apple? About Coke, or Pepsi?
You will have negative or positive feelings towards these brands based on your past experiences with them. And of course these big consumer brands spend millions every year to influence you.
Really, a B2B brand like your MSP is no different - except you're not spending advertising dollars to try to change people's emotional response to you (and neither should you).
The way that people feel is based on every possible kind of communication you do. That includes:
- What's on your website
- What you say on social media
- The blogs and articles you write
- The videos you make
But also...
- How the phone is answered
- The way your technicians talk on live chat
- What's written in tickets
See? Your brand is EVERYTHING you do.
And so the only way to influence that brand perception is to create the right culture within your business.
Because you can't control freak everything every technician says every day (and you really don't want to... that's the route to divorce and a heart attack).
But you can set out what your MSP's mission is and constantly train and encourage your team to serve that mission with everything they do.
An example: My MSP Marketing Edge's mission is: Make marketing and winning new clients easy for MSPs.
I have a team of 12. And a constant focus on this mission in all internal conversations allows them to make the correct decisions every day without having to refer back to me.
Whatever a member asks, my team can think "If I do this, does it make marketing easy for this member?"
You add that up over 1,000 communications and it becomes a solid, clear brand - based on how they FEEL.
Three questions for you:
- Do you know how you want people to feel about your MSP?
- Is this reflected in your business's mission?
- If I asked your technicians tomorrow, would they be very clear on what that mission is?
