A successful MSP marketing campaign can be of great benefit to your business. If you find your sales dropping and outside leads decreasing an inbound marketing campaign can be exactly the strategy you need to bring customers to you. However, your campaign has to speak to potential customers to be effective. What follows is a brief overview of how to focus your marketing campaign.
Before designing any material for your campaign, you need to construct your buyer personas. A buyer persona is highly important because it allows you to shape your inbound marketing campaign based on your target market. When designing your campaign you will have several buyer personas representing the various customers you serve. As a managed service provider, a multitude of companies and people make use of your services. It is important to understand each and market to them accordingly. Ideally you personas will be based on marketing information and information from your existing customers. Here is an example of a buyer persona.
Name: Holly Hospital
Title: Hospital Administrator
Career Background: Has been in the industry for 10+ years, recently promoted to administrative duties
Age: 35 to 70
Income: $48,395 to $177,115
Education Level: College graduate to advanced degree
Location: Urban, Central Texas
Goals: To continue to train and hire quality employees, ensure the department runs smoothly, make sure the hospital meets federal and local laws, increase efficiency
Issues Faced: The hospital’s database system is out of date and, aside from its age, it is unable to handle current employee needs. The current IT staff is not large enough to upgrade and manage a larger system.
Personality Profile: Holly works hard and works long hours to make sure things are done properly. A perfectionist, she hates inefficiency. She sees out of date infrastructure as a hindrance on her employees. As someone who worked her way up she is all too familiar with how outdated systems can negatively impact a job. Holly is technically proficient owning both a smartphone and a laptop. Because of this she is open to technological improvements that make her workplace more organized, easier, and improve worker productivity.
Now that you have established each of your buyer personas, you can create and cultivate content that specifically targets these personas at each stage of the buyer's journey.
When a buyer is looking to buy a service, they go through three main phases before deciding on a course of action. Here is a brief overview of each and the actions that take place during each phase.
Awareness: The first step in a buyer’s journey is becoming aware that there is a problem. At this point they start preliminary research. This often takes the form of general research of the problem’s symptoms. The content they will be looking for includes reports, ebooks, editorials, expert papers, and educational information to further their understanding of what their problem is.
Consideration: The next step involves the buyer having isolated what their underlying issue is and researching solutions. Information will now take the form of expert written guides, comparison papers, live footage, and media such as podcasts and videos.
Decision: Once the problem and its possible solutions are understood the buyer will start comparing vendors. Information at this stage is highly exact and includes comparisons of vendors, demos, free trials of services/software, case studies, and reviewing of vendor provided information.
Remember you not only have to reach your desired customers but also reach them at various stages of the buyer's journey. Therefore your marketing campaign has to have information available at each of the three stages. When designing your campaign, make sure your information is varied and easily accessible.
Creating buyer personas and targeting them based on the buyer's jouney are just two steps on the road to starting a sucessful MSP marketing campaign. If you are stuck let a Rizen Inbound Specialist help you implement a succesful campaign.
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