Four Low-cost MSP Marketing Strategies

Marketing costs don’t have to be prohibitive if you take the right approach to get your managed services brand in front of prospective customers. Thanks to the web and social media, a little creativity and focus goes a long way to marketing your business.

It all starts with your website. What you put on the site about your will determine whether readers stick around and read the information or move on as their eyes glaze over. Avoid language that is too technology-oriented, and therefore impenetrable to the average business owner. Focus instead on how can help your customers run and grow their businesses.

Keep your messaging clear and simple, but don’t condescend. Apply that principle to all your marketing efforts, and you’re bound to see positive results. Here are five low-cost marketing strategies any MSP can execute.

1. Publish a Blog

Somewhere visible on your website you should have a link to a regularly published blog. Use this tool to tell clients and prospects about your business, the IT services market and industry news relevant to your business and theirs. If you have a specialization, here’s a good opportunity to explain to customers how your business differs from the competition. Keep the blog analytical and informative; if you use it strictly for advertising purposes, you’ll limit your readership.

2. Get Their Pulse

Learn about your customers’ interests and goals by doing an occasional poll. Plenty of tools are available for online polling, and you don’t need to come up with elaborate 20-question surveys. A weekly question with multiple-choice answers on your website might entice viewers to keep coming back.

3. Encourage Feedback

Get feedback from clients by periodically asking if your services are meeting their needs. You bring it up in regular communication, but a good way to measure customer satisfaction is through periodic surveys. A yearly customer satisfaction survey is a good idea. Another good time to measure customer sentiment is following a big project, when you can send them some questions about their experience and determine if you should change anything next time.

4. Get Social

Social media is controversial because it tends to reflect the best and worst of humanity. Used wisely, it can help build brand awareness. The beauty of social media is it opens up a nearly limitless range of marketing opportunities, from linking to blogs to offering special promotions to making company announcements to encouraging discussions about topics relevant to your clients’ businesses. If you use social media for marketing, be sure to monitor discussions and respond promptly to questions or people will stop participating.

5. Be the Expert

It costs you nothing to offer a quote for a trade press article. Make yourself or other company experts available to talk to reporters. This gets your brand out there and positions your people as experts on specific subjects. Cultivate a good rapport with the press and, more often than not, it will benefit your business.

MSPs often struggle with marketing, viewing it as a costly or challenging endeavor. But it doesn’t need to be. Follow these simple, low-cost ideas, and you can start building brand awareness.

Marvin Blough is StorageCraft’s Vice President of Worldwide Sales where his focus is on expanding the company’s global reach by establishing channel partnerships that enhance the profitability for the channel partner.