MSP Marketing Companies: How to Choose the Right Marketing Partner for your MSP

• What are MSP Marketing Companies?
• Who Should Consider Using MSP Marketing Companies?
• What are the Benefits of MSP Marketing Companies?
• What are the Drawbacks of MSP Marketing Companies?
• Five Things to Consider When Choosing Between MSP Marketing Companies

At their core, MSP marketing companies are exactly what they sound like – partners who can help you market your services in a way that positions you to find new customers on a regular basis. These are organizations dedicated to helping generate as much interest in your managed services as possible, not only with the largest audience but with the right audience of people who are most likely to become your ideal customer in the first place.

Of course, at this point you’re probably asking yourself – “isn’t this something I can do on my own? After all, part of running a successful business involves knowing how to successfully market yourself, right?”

Well… yes and no.

Success in terms of being a managed services provider depends on your ability to position yourself to take full advantage of the incredible growth opportunity that you have in front of you. For most organizations, this is something they simply don’t have the time (or the resources) to do on their own – which is why MSP marketing companies are so important.

But at the same time, how do you find those MSP marketing companies and how do you make sure that you’re ending up with the right marketing partner for your specific business? The answers to those questions require you to keep a few key things in mind. 

What are MSP Marketing Companies?

In an over-arching sense, MSP marketing companies help craft collateral and develop campaigns that will attract attention for your company up to the initial point of contact, at which point those prospects are handed off to your sales team so that they have an opportunity to close the deal.

Note that all of this is important because MSP marketing and MSP sales are two entirely different concepts and should be treated as such. MSP sales is a critical step in your customer acquisition process, yes – but we’re not quite at that point yet.

MSP marketing is all about doing whatever you can to speak to the people who just aren’t quite ready to make a purchase yet. They may have heard of your company… but then again, maybe they haven’t. They might be aware of why a managed service provider is important for their business… but they may not be quite there yet, either.

Therefore, MSP marketing companies are dedicated to helping you build as much trust among the members of your target audience as possible. They help you communicate not what your managed services can do in the most literal, technical sense, but with regards to the raw value that you’re able to provide someone who has already worked so hard to build their own business on a daily basis.

In other words, MSP marketing isn’t about what you can do. It’s about what you can do for someone else. 

At that point, you’re able to accomplish two important goals at the exact same time. First, you’re getting someone warmed up – and likely even excited – about the possibilities that working with a managed services provider will bring them. Then, because you’ve laid a solid groundwork of trust, you’re dramatically increasing the chances that when they are ready to make a purchase, the number they dial when they pick up the phone is yours. 

Who Should Consider Using MSP Marketing Companies?

By and large, MSP marketing companies are for any managed services provider that wants to be able to actively grow their business in a planned, predictable manner. 

Think for a moment about the sheer volume of competition that you’re facing, even just in your particular service area. There are a lot of MSPs out there who do what you do in a technical sense. But nobody does what you do quite like how you do it – which is why partnering with the right marketing team is so essential.

MSP marketing companies can help take full advantage of social media sites like LinkedIn, for example, and will leverage other channels to help boost your brand presence. They can bring together the best in inbound marketing, outbound marketing, email marketing and other lead generation techniques to bring a steady stream of new prospects right to your door. They can do all of this on your behalf so that you can free up as much of your valuable time as possible to focus on the most important thing of all: actually running the business you’ve already put so much of your time and energy in.

Yes, it’s true that word-of-mouth is still incredibly valuable to an MSP and there’s nothing quite like getting referrals from real-life clients to build your business in a natural way. But at a certain point, that just won’t be able to sustain the level of growth that you need. When that day comes, MSP marketing companies are absolutely the right move for you.

What are the Benefits of MSP Marketing Companies?

The biggest benefit of working with MSP marketing companies is that they can leverage a full array of techniques to your advantage. Certainly, they’ll be able to embrace far more digital tactics than you’d have the capacity to on your own. MSP websites are great, but they really are just one small part of a much larger and more important story.

Just a few of these include but are certainly not limited to:

• Pay-Per-Click, or PPC. This allows you to pay a publisher (usually Google or Bing’s ad network) every time one of your ads is clicked. This is a great way to target people at the middle of the sales funnel, otherwise known as the consideration stage.
• Search Engine Optimization, or SEO. This is a great chance to target those people who would never even think of clicking on a paid ad in an engine like Google – and rest assured, there are many. Leveraging SEO and PPC together is a great way to take full advantage of what a search engine can do for your MSP.
• Content Marketing. By far, this is the most important way to actually build a relationship with someone before you ask them to invest in your MSP services. Content marketing is all about building trust by offering high quality, relevant content that is valuable enough on its own.
• Email Marketing. This is important for managed services providers in particular because it’s more than just a great way to generate more leads. You also do so in a predictable way that helps you hit the growth rate you need for your business. It’s also known for a return on investment of about $38 for every $1 you spend, so it’s also a perfect chance to really get your money’s worth.
• Social Media Marketing. B2B audiences like the type you’ll be targeting with your MSP are spending more and more time online these days – and they’re doing it on sites like Facebook and LinkedIn in particular. Therefore, social media marketing becomes a perfect way to both continue to build your relationships with existing prospects and generate new ones at the same time.

What are the Drawbacks of MSP Marketing Companies?

Possibly the biggest potential drawback of MSP marketing companies is that MSP lead generation is challenging – there really is no getting around that simple fact. This is true regardless of what stage MSP you operate.

There is absolutely a certain level of dedication and commitment that is required to make sure your efforts succeed, and an MSP marketing company will be able to help get you to that point. But Rome wasn’t a day, and your successful MSP marketing strategy won’t be, either. Meaning that if you think you’re going to partner with an MSP marketing company and achieve overnight success, you’re really only setting yourself up for disappointment.

Things will be slow at first, but the most important thing is that they are steady. Once you have a system in place (developed through equal parts expertise and trial in error), you’ll begin to have a consistent stream of new leads coming right to your virtual door. Then, you’ll be able to grow that stream over time. But it’s going to take awhile to get to that point, which is why you need to make sure your expectations are in order.

Five Things to Consider When Choosing Between MSP Marketing Companies

Of course, one of the most important things for you to understand about this entire process is that not all MSP marketing companies are created equally. There are a lot of objectively great marketing partners out there – but not every single one is going to be the best fit for your business. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with that, and it’s nobody’s fault – but you certainly want to make sure you do your research today before you wind up with someone who isn’t an appropriate fit tomorrow.

Having said that, there are five key things that you’ll want to consider when choosing between MSP marketing companies to help make sure you find the one that is right for you.

1. Always make sure you’re partnering with MSP marketing companies that have experience in your specific niche. If you offer your services exclusively to healthcare providers in your area, whatever marketing company you partner with has to be able to speak that same language. 
2. Find MSP marketing companies that are a true collaborator in every sense of the term. Any MSP marketing company that tells you “this is what we do, this is how it is” and insists on complete autonomy is not the partner you think they are. Instead, find someone who will value your input and who will let you help guide their efforts, and vice versa.
3. Value honest above all else. Even the best MSP marketing companies will tell you that what they’re doing is not a “silver bullet.” There will always be certain gaps that exist between what you hope to achieve and what you actually get. Therefore, you need to find MSP marketing companies who are just as honest about what they CAN’T do for you as they are about what they CAN.
4. Find out who they’ve worked with in the past. At Tech Pro Marketing, we’ve worked with MSPs with revenue ranging from $250,000 to $25,000,000. Regardless of what someone’s scale happens to be, make sure you fall firmly within it somewhere.
5. Find someone willing to play the long game. Again – anyone who tells you that MSP marketing is going to be “fast” or “easy” is only trying to sell you something. A true partner should be trying to help you build something, and that means both parties need to be realistic about everything that is about to play out.

If you’re still not sure where to begin in terms of choosing the right marketing partner for your MSP, don’t worry – we’re here to help. At this point, I’d recommend contacting either myself or a colleague at Tech Pro Marketing so that we can schedule your free “getting to know you” phone call. At the very least, it will give us a chance to learn as much about your MSP as possible so that we can determine if we’re an appropriate fit for one another. If we aren’t, that’s okay – we can at least help point you in the right direction so that you can find the right marketing partner at exactly the right time.