There is no such thing as set it and forget it; when it comes to marketing your business, you have to commit.
The cold, hard truth is that marketing will take hard work, financial investment, and persistent efforts; however, marketing will help fuel your growth. As a business owner, it is understandable that this may seem like a lot of resources, but with some knowledge, you can achieve this on a minimum budget and with minimum time.
The cornerstone of all your marketing efforts is your Web site. Long before the phone rings or somebody sends you an email, a business that wants to do work with you is going to visit your Web site. If it doesn’t have a professional look to it and clearly articulate what you do, you may have lost a sale. The number one goal of our Web sites is to convert someone with interest into an actual business opportunity.
Look at your Web site and compare it to your competitors. There are so many MSP Web sites out there that say the same thing! If we are all saying the same thing, than why you? You need to find a unique aspect of your business in order to become a traffic magnet; this can be anything from partnering with a specific company to establishing certain areas of specialization.
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Consider What Business Owners Actually Care About
You can save yourself a lot of efforts if you take into consideration what business owners actually care about and want to see from you. What do business owners care about? They care about partnering with a company that can help them increase revenue, lower costs, and maximize operating efficiencies – ultimately, achieving greater business outcomes. If you can market with this type of terminology, you are speaking the language that business owners understand.
The next thing that your prospects will be wondering is why they should trust you. Find a way to communicate the way that you do things and how you help your clients in order to show them what it’s like to be one. Put effort into client success stories and other social proof that truly speaks to business owners. With that being said, it’s important to back up what you are saying by making yourself easily accessible. Make it easy to find contact information or forms for people to take action.
No One Cares How Good You Say You Are
It’s all about that social proof we talked about. Focus on storytelling content versus dictation type content; consider publishing case studies, testimonials, and project spotlights. Your prospective clients want to know what others say about you, not what you say about yourself.
Along with this, don’t get too hung up on SEO—what is true today is content. You have to have a content marketing strategy. Blogs, press releases, and the social proof mentioned above are all part of your strategy. From this, your SEO rankings will naturally rise anyway.
People Do Business With People – Actively Communicate
It’s important to get involved in groups to connect with vendors, partners, prospects, and clients both online and offline. Provide consumable content, spread it well, and actively communicate with the people who have interest in you. Even if someone doesn’t currently have a need for your services, have a system in place so that when they do, they know where to turn.
Experts say that you should be touching your clients and prospects electronically over 400 times a year. This could include a monthly newsletter, email blasts, webinar invites, and social media interaction, and client-only email marketing.
Reach Out for Successful Solutions
As far as your email marketing strategy goes, Infusionsoft is one of the best tools out there for marketing automation. For those who can’t afford Infusionsoft, however, we offer Ulistic’s Poor Man’s IT Marketing Email Service. This service provides you with the benefits of MailChimp (free under 2,000 members), WordPress blog tags, as well as RSS to email so that when a new blog post comes out on your website, for instance, it will be sent out as an email too.
We do this because as a business owner, finding the resources to execute or even create a successful marketing plan can be too much on your plate. Aside from getting out there and connecting with prospects and partners offline, we have solutions for everything else. In order to improve your marketing strategy, we can:
- Create a lead generating website for your business.
- Provide social media management.
- Publish articles on Pulse.
- Implement marketing automation management.
- Administer webinar hosting.
- Offer video editing.
Stuart Crawford is an IT services and managed services marketing expert. He founded Ulistic in 2010 and has been a regular contributor to CDN ever since.
At Ulistic, we have the expertise to help you get your company’s message out there and maximize your connections. We offer a wide array of unrivaled services and relevant content designed for your company’s success! To learn more about the solutions that Ulistic can bring to your strategy, give us a call at 716.799.1999, or send us an email: info@ulistic.com.
There’s also a little-known all-in-one (email marketing, CRM, marketing automation) software called ActiveCampaign. Nice article.