The primary goal of any good digital marketing strategy is to generate new leads, but what comes next? If prospects visit your MSP website and complete forms to download valuable resources you’ve published or request a consultation, how do you ensure those leads have the best chance of closing?
Building a strong platform that will both nurture and support people as they come through your marketing funnel and enter the sales pipeline is critical to ensuring you maximize value from your marketing efforts.
This probably isn’t a new problem for you. Whether you’ve previously purchased social media marketing services and found them ineffective at driving new business or have paid a small fortune for a month or two of ads in Google, only to find those leads withering in the pipeline, it’s common to see even the best B2B efforts for MSP companies fall apart without the right followup.
How to Build an MSP Marketing System That Leads to Sales Success
To ensure your marketing efforts are effective, you need a system in place that works from the start. To do that, we’ve broken down the process into three vital components. Let’s take a look:
- Strategy and Targeting Based on Personas
What do all the largest companies on the Internet have in common? High levels of customization. They know who their audience is, how they interact with their content, and what they want to see. Your Amazon homepage experience is unique from every other Amazon homepage experience for this very reason.
While your MSP website cannot realistically offer this kind of customization, it can do the next best thing, building content and presenting solutions based on the personas you are targeting. Broad language that speaks to all business owners can be generic, and while potentially effective in getting people in the door, it doesn’t do as good a job as is necessary to convert those prospects to leads and ultimately into customers.
A strategy that highlights the key personas within the MSP field – whether it’s practice owners for local law firms and medical offices, or CTOs for startups and growing firms that need to augment internal staff – will help you streamline and target your content in a way that it currently is not.
- A System to Capture and Nurture New Leads
By understanding who your target audience is and how they will likely engage with your website, you can start to build a system designed specifically for them. The goal here is to capture information from as many visitors to your website as possible. Fortunately, we now know exactly how to do this because of the time invested in learning more about these personas.
If you know a practice manager is concerned about potential security breaches and managing on premise materials without a reliable backup, you can provide a downloadable PDF about the steps they should take to better secure that data without adding excess management time to their schedule. And because you know that this information is valuable to them, you can put a form in front of it and ask for their contact details in exchange for downloading it.
By better understanding the type of content that these individuals are interested in reading, you can greatly increase the volume of traffic that visits your website and converts to new leads. Whereas a simple contact form might convert at a rate of 0.5% from all traffic, these high value educational resources can convert as high as 2-3% of your overall traffic, vastly increasing the number of new leads in your database.
And this doesn’t have to be a massive eBook that takes weeks or months to produce. A 2-3 page checklist or short guide that covers key things they need to know is often enough to be useful and valuable. Getting them into your funnel is the first step in this process. Once there, lead nurturing becomes equally important. Segmented by persona and content downloaded, you should have separate email tracks that address additional issues an MSP can help resolve. Common questions about cloud migration, IoT security, emergency backup, disaster recovery, and more can all be the focal point of these followups, within the context of the industry or role that you know your prospects hold.
- A Strong Traffic Source
Finally, with a well optimized website, full of high value content that addresses common concerns and questions from your highest value prospects, you can shift gears to focus on driving traffic to your website. You now have a well-oiled machine in place that will convert a higher percentage of people who arrive, and in turn a higher percentage of those leads into clients.
Traffic generation comes in many forms – social media promotion of that content you are producing, organic search optimization, and paid search through Google (for those that want to see immediate results). Match the traffic methods that make the most sense based on your budget and timeframe for execution.
Execution Drives Improve Lead Generation and Conversion Rates
When all three of these steps are properly implemented, your MSP website will become a lead generating machine. The reason digital marketing is so often unsuccessful is that companies spend a small fortune on step 0 – the foundational step before all this. They have a fancy website built and then skip straight to step 3 to drive new traffic, and nothing happens.
Steps 1 and 2 are vital to ensuring the right people find your site, the right people engage with your content, and that you capture a decent percentage of those people as leads you can nurture into future customers and clients. The really great thing about this type of strategy? Most companies don’t do it. Simply by following these three steps, you put yourself into the top echelon of MSPs in the region, providing key information that many others do not.
Whether you’ve had poor results from past digital marketing efforts or are just getting started with your first major campaign and want to be sure it succeeds, follow the above steps to ensure everything works toward your ultimate goals. With the right amount of research, planning, and careful execution, you can be sure your MSP website is designed to succeed at generating quality leads and ultimately converting them into sales.
