Beyond 2021: Customer Centric-Marketing Insights For MSPs
By Melissa Andrews, Chief Marketing Officer, Logically
No matter your industry, the role marketing plays in your operations and your goal achievement doesn’t change. Marketing is about uncovering new opportunities and enhancing existing ones through connections and sharing a value story that resonates.
Managed Service Providers (MSPs) have an opportunity to remove the disconnect between the value we know we can provide and our audience’s awareness of that value. Superior technology, products, and services are the baseline. Value is created when we make the connection to business value, the unique human ingenuity of our team, and the collective innovation of our partner ecosystem.
There is so much expertise that goes into effectively implementing and executing technology-driven projects, but not all work can be easily broken down into marketable segments. Technology is a complex, critical part of doing business. By failing to focus on the business impact of that technology, rather than the technology itself, we do our customers a disservice.
So how do you establish and sustain a customer-centric approach when it comes to delivering technology services?
Provide Valuable Insights
Data is critical to driving business strategy, marketing, and value creation. Gathering and modeling data are just the foundational steps. The most important aspects are in the analysis and derived insights. This empowers MSP marketers to identify leading indicators, subtle macro shifts that could eventually impact industries as a whole, and niche opportunities that should be maximized. Data-informed insights become the catalyst for finding opportunities and empowering existing and future customers.
Build Relationships Through Video
Technology is complex and critical to any business's long-term success. MSPs best serve customers when we reduce and translate complexity into actionable insights. Packaging up these insights into high-value content, such as video, prompts audiences to engage with your brand and lays the foundation for building a trusted advisor relationship. Video allows for customers to see and hear the team, creating an initial connection. It’s also an effective medium for distilling complex topics into understandable information.
What’s more, you can track viewer engagement making them an excellent mechanism for data gathering and analysis. At the very least, consider implementing a threshold to capture an email address in exchange for a downloadable resource or template; by doing so your customers receive something of value in exchange for their time, and you’ll be one step closer to drawing in a new client.
Adapt Your Mindset
As a result of COVID-19, we have all experienced the “hybrid” shift in the way we work, how we attend events, etc. The hybrid shift is something that should go beyond that context. MSPs need to consider hybrid marketing approaches as well – marrying digital and analog, in-person and virtual – evolving their approach for what data to capture, and how and when.
The ability to adapt and adjust marketing approaches to this new hybrid mindset is a game changer. Digital marketing, virtualization, and remote are driving trends but one of the biggest mistakes MSPs can make is eliminating tried and true traditional marketing. Remember to think “hybrid” and ensure that your marketing mix is inclusive of the best-fit tactics.
Understand Customer Needs
Our ultimate goal is to convey our value in a way that aligns with the priorities of our audience. While we love to geek out about technology, it puts technology and not the customer at the center of our value story. Additionally, while data and analytics are amazing tools to have in our marketing arsenal, there is no substitute for real-time, real human ingenuity.
Even as you’re focused on delivering excellence, pursue avenues for feedback, whether that’s a focus group, customer surveys, or informal discussions at industry events. It’s all about perspective –– and the ability to acknowledge and incorporate a customer-centric view is what will take your marketing and your company to the next level.
About The Author
Melissa Andrews is Chief Marketing Officer at Logically.