How Do I Find a Marketing Agency for My MSP?
How do I find a marketing agency for my MSP? It’s a question that often arises for many MSP leaders. Marketing can be a substantial pain point for many MSPs. It’s hard to know if marketing your MSP will not only produce substantial results but also be worth any potential complications or expenses that come from finding and retaining a marketing agency.
The reality is quite the opposite.
There are massive benefits to investing in marketing, including new lead acquisition, increasing your MSP’s marketplace visibility, upping your sales, establishing authority in your field and building trust with your customers. You can start making transformative marketing decisions today with the help of valuable resources or by simply hiring a digital marketing agency to do that for you.
While trying to find a marketing agency for your MSP, you should become familiar with the following key factors:
- The most important marketing elements for MSPs
- The difference between marketing in-house vs hiring an agency
- What to look for when hiring an MSP
Once you have substantial marketing knowledge, you can increase the authority of your MSP in the field and gain more sales. Most importantly, marketing efforts can help you become more aware of your strengths and limitations.
6 Essential Elements of Marketing for MSPs
When considering what you should do with your MSP’s marketing needs, you’re probably wondering about what strategies or tactics work.
Consider the following:
1. Content Marketing
This is the most important element of MSP marketing today. If done correctly, it will do much more than increase your MSP’s visibility, it will also build trust with your customers. Google searches and word-of-mouth are the two primary ways MSPs get new leads. Those channels are interconnected.
It’s important to build a sound knowledge base that provides value to your customers while following the best search engine optimization (SEO) practices. It is good to have generalized and niche content (meaning specialized topics, such as medical office IT support, security, etc.).
2. SEO
This is how you organically increase the quality and quantity of your website traffic without paying for ads. In this process, it is essential to satisfy Google’s SEO requirements and provide quality content through text and video formats.
A good rule of thumb is to make your website’s homepage very descriptive to continually ensure visitor engagement in longer sessions as they scroll through your site. However, the content on your website needs to resonate with Google as well. You do this by developing a strong keyword strategy optimized for SEO.
You can find ideal keywords by seeking out a word or phrases that are important and relevant to your clientele and MSP business. Once you get the results, take note of what content appears at the top or on the first page of search engine results pages (SERPs).
While you don’t want to duplicate the content (Google lowers rankings on web pages that show duplicate content) it’s helpful to have an idea of what content the competition used to be at the top of SERPs.
SEO can also be paired with other strategies, such as paid Google or social media ads, depending on your budgetary and specific campaign needs.
3. Geographically Specific Ads and Content
Want greater value for your money? Your marketing agency can combine text and video content, tailoring your message and making sure it reaches people in a particular city, state or country. Convenient and cost-effective, right?
4. Paid Ads
These are highly beneficial when done the right way. SEM, PPC, banner ads and sponsored social media posts are ways an MSP can engage in paid advertisements.
5. Marketing Analytics and KPIs
Glean valuable information from contact forms, phone calls, downloads and social media engagements. You can also rely on the “bucket of engagement metrics” that indicate how long a user spends on your site, the bounce rate of marketing emails and website page visits per session.
6. StoryBranding
Here’s something that often gets overlooked when leaders search “how do I find a marketing agency for my MSP?” What works today is a people-centric, story-driven approach. Making the customer the hero of the story allows your MSP to get more leads and grow.
This source of differentiation makes your brand stand out from the overly corporate image of your competition, and creates an engaging connection to your customers’ pain points and how your MSP is uniquely qualified to solve them.
Should You Keep IT In-House or Hire a Marketing Agency?
Whether you’re looking to hire a marketing agency or promote your business with an internal team, you need someone who understands your MSP and the marketing world.
It is a good idea to stay flexible and try different approaches in marketing. Your strategy doesn’t have to be thoroughly mapped out from the start (that’s where an agency can prove invaluable.) Become receptive to what resonates with your target market and repeat and optimize what works.
You can also outsource to a marketing agency or specialist. Shopping for your tagline, logo and brand statement can get very pricey if you switch from provider to provider. Instead, for the average-size MSP, the focus should be on organic content because that is what generates the most leads.
What Should I Look for in a Marketing Agency for My MSP?
Locating and working with experts in any field can be daunting. Since the MSP industry has unique challenges, it’s ideal to work with a company that has several years of experience in IT services and MSP marketing.
Wondering what to look for in an agency? Seek out companies that have:
- A good system with a firm structure.
- Established success in their associated fields.
- A client rapport that is reliable and results-oriented.
- Compatibility between your MSP’s culture and their ethos.
- People-oriented professionals.
If you’d like to learn more about marketing solutions for your MSP, book a meeting with BigOrange Marketing and learn new and innovative ways to get quality leads and grow your business.
