Lead Gen is Changing: Are You Ready?
It’s always a debate: Do you invest in marketing first? Or build out your sales organization? For many MSPs, this “chicken or egg first” question can leave them stagnant—doing nothing to build their business.
In today’s competitive MSP landscape, you must build both sides of the team and also keep an eye on how modern technology has changed traditional marketing strategy. Where do you start? Understanding your target customers is essential before you can build out either sales or marketing.
Who is Your Ideal Customer?
Understanding who you are targeting is a pillar of success for any business, but is particularly important for an MSP focusing on service. Ideal customer profiles, or their more complex cousin—the customer persona—go well beyond size and type of preferred clients. To be effective, you’ll need to know age, gender, revenue, industry, geography, employee number, endpoints managed, preferred vendor partners, and more. Just as important is knowing who doesn’t fit your model. No experience with compliance, then don’t pitch to healthcare and government targets. Still a small regional business? Don’t look for new prospects across the country unless you have a strategic plan for servicing them. Being realistic about what you can and can’t do is crucial when you are evaluating target markets and demographics.
What Tools Do You Need?
Automation is your friend when it comes to marketing and lead gen. One of the first decisions you’ll have to make is what tools are needed to create and execute efficient lead gen efforts. What are some of the options you’ll need to explore?
CRM solutions such as Salesforce, Zoho or Hubspot can provide a place to aggregate the data you need to understand your target audiences, build customer personas, have a line of sight up and down your pipeline, and monitor engagement and performance. CRMs come in a wide range of price and complexity options—think through what your ROI will be and the learning curve for more expansive tools, and make the choice right for your business at this time and the near future. There are many cost effective solutions, but if you are really going to get serious about your marketing efforts, you cannot use your ticketing system as your marketing CRM anymore.
Marketing automation support from tools such as HubSpot, Hootsuite, Mindmatrix, and others is also important. When you evaluate your choices, keep in mind what works for your team when it comes to automation—from social media to email campaigns, RSS feeds to workflows. Look for easy-to-learn, intuitive tools with full, customizable reporting capabilities.
Understand Where to Look
Many MSPs fall into the trap of limiting their lead funnel to a few touchpoints—a classic mistake. A successful marketing effort stretches across numerous engagement points—some old school and some driven by new technology options. Make sure your plan includes options for:
- Pay Per Click (PPC)
- Your website (that means amping up your SEO)
- Email campaigns
- Display advertising
- Social media marketing (and we don’t mean organic posts)
- Podcasting and webinars
- Influencer marketing
- Media partnerships and programs
All these new options work hand in hand with your more traditional methods—referrals, lists, traditional advertising, and events. Start exploring as many of these opportunities as you can—you can start slowly and build momentum as you learn more about what works best for your business.
Next Up: Creating a Winning Revenue Team
