Where Should My Marketing Budget Be Going?
It’s a common question we hear from our MSP clients. It doesn’t matter if you’re just starting to market your MSP business you want to make sure you’re getting the best possible ROI on your MSP marketing activities.
With so many channels and so much advice available, it can be difficult to work out how and where to spend your budget.
To help, let’s take a closer look at some of the areas in which you can best use your MSP marketing budget.
Owned Media
Let’s start by looking at the core of most online marketing campaigns: owned media that you publish and maintain. This includes your own website, a blog, and other downloadable resources that you have available.
Ads are only as effective as the website to which you’re sending people, so these pieces are vitally important to ensuring your marketing efforts generate real results.
Poor content and bad design mean it doesn’t matter how big your ad budget is – people won’t stay long and your spend will drive minimal or non-existent ROI.
- Your Website – Your website needs to be clear, clean and informative. Provide information about your products, services, past projects, and what sets you apart from the competition. It also needs to be visually appealing, if your website is ‘hard on the eyes’ and difficult to navigate, prospects are unlikely to spend much time looking.
- Your Blog – Blogs are a great way to publish relevant content on a regular basis. Your content should offer value to readers, in turn building trust with your brand.
- Downloadable Content – Downloadable content is a great way to entice your prospects into giving you their contact information. Build a library of downloadable content that is targeted to your MSP services. It will allow you to generate leads which you can then nurture into new business.
Earned Media
Earned media is anything that you generate through your outreach efforts and by leveraging the content you already own.
This includes:
- Press release coverage
- Links to your blog
- Social media shares
- Interviews
Earned media differs from both owned and paid in the sense that it focuses primarily on time investment. The more time you spend on it, the better it’ll perform.
- Press and Outreach – Traditional press channels — including MSP directories, MSP-specific trade magazines and websites, and local news — as well as blog and forum outreach for your owned content, will all help generate new traffic to your website.
- Social Media – Social media can be approached from multiple angles, so for MSP businesses, it’s best to focus on the channels that work best. LinkedIn and its groups and public facing broadcast platform, Twitter and the ability to directly engage with both large and small brands, and video channels like YouTube and Vimeo (if you can produce and publish video regularly) are all good outlets in which to invest time.
- Engagement with Other Thought Leaders – Actively engaging with other bloggers, content producers, and executives in the MSP space can generate greater thought leadership, and help introduce your brand and content to new audiences. This includes guest blog posts, interviews, video clips, and coverage at trade shows.
Paid Media
To many MSPs’ detriment, paid media is usually the only part of a marketing strategy that they use. And while no MSP marketing campaign is complete without a sound paid media strategy, it works best in conjunction with the earned and owned media we’ve already discussed.
When used in conjunction with a high quality website, frequent content marketing and an active outreach and social campaign, paid media can drive a substantial ROI for your business.
- Google Adwords – Paid ads in Google are one of the best ways for MSPs to be ‘found’ by interested prospects. If you’re interested in knowing how to run profitable Google Adwords campaigns watch our ‘Cracking The Adwords Code’ webinar here.
- Social Ads – Both LinkedIn and Facebook provide the ability to target specific job roles and other key demographics related to your marketing efforts. Make sure you think carefully about WHO you want to target before getting started though.
- Directories and Display Ads – Paid placement in directories like CloudTango can be beneficial if your targeting is good.
Display ads being shown on websites that your prospects frequent are another sound strategy to attract new attention to your services.
With a limited MSP marketing budget, ensure your website and all other online channels you manage offer REAL value to the people who find them.
Generating traffic to substandard content will only hurt your brand and cause people to not want to work with you.
You need to ensure you balance your time between creating quality content and generating traffic; one without the other is useless.
If you feel that you don’t have the time to do both, schedule a call with a Pronto Marketing Expert and learn how we can help.
