Mastering MSP Marketing: Beyond Traditional Techniques

Hey guys, it's me, Megan Killion, MKC Agency. Uh, recently a friend of mine asked me, how is MSP marketing so much different than traditional marketing, and why would they need, you know, like specialized marketing consultants? And my answer was sort of like, well, we don't necessarily need a marketing consultant that is specialized. In MSPs. In fact, I've seen better results for a lot of MSPs in working with a traditional B2B agency, uh, in doing some of the foundational work that many of the like MSP-specialized consultants and sales and marketing gurus seem to just kind of skip over. But there are some things that are different about how MSPs approach marketing than other B2B technology companies. That I have worked with. So I guess the first thing to answer is, what's MSP marketing? MSP marketing is focused on promoting IT services and solutions. The important thing is that it's not just about tech. It's about offering peace of mind, reliability, and expertise. And sometimes MSPs skip the last part. MSPs have a unique selling proposition. They provide specialized solutions tailored to clients' unique tech challenges, and their marketing needs to communicate their personalized approach to that. There are thousands of MSPs in the United States. Like, for example, there's a little over 200 here in Orlando, over 300 in Boston, over 250 in Washington, D.C. And those are verifiable numbers you can check on CloudTangle or Clutch. Those are just the ones that have bothered to list themselves. So there are many more managed service providers that kind of aren't on our digital radar because they might be, you know, a single-man operation or whatever and not really be bothering with making sure they're listed on all the popular platforms. So how, how does that MSP marketing actually differ from kind of a more traditional marketing approach? First and foremost, IT decisions impact entire organizations, so there's typically a pretty complex decision process even at smaller businesses. You could have like a 10-12 person company and still need to talk to an office manager, an owner, And the financial person. So marketing needs to address not just the benefits, but also some potential risks and how they're mitigated. If you've watched any of my previous videos or content, you can kind of look into my banter. We need to start qualifying for how risky people think our solutions are. Obviously there are multiple stakeholders. In B2C, usually someone just makes a decision on their own. In the B2B industries, There are going to be IT managers, C-level executives. This gets more complicated as MSPs try to go upmarket and they're trying to go after larger and larger companies, um, do something maybe like co-managed IT. That stakeholder conversation, the multi-threading becomes super important on the sales side, and marketing actually needs to address the pain points of multiple buyer personas inside of your ICP, where ICP stands for ideal client profile. Education-based marketing is huge in the MSP space and knowledge building and positioning yourself as a thought leader. Because of the technical nature of services, MSP marketing needs to map that back down to day-to-day pain points. And we need to keep in mind that our buyers may not be that educated about what we do, especially the technical side of it. Education posts could be about the latest cybersecurity threats, cloud solutions, or IT best practices, especially as things are constantly evolving. One of the key factors in whether someone chooses to go with your MSP or not is going to be whether they think you are smart. You Whoever your big brain is at your MSP, that they think you can solve their problems. Trust is paramount in the MSP space. Anytime that you're doing B2B service-based services, your clients have to trust you. And especially when we're talking about IT, where for the last 20 years we've used a lot of fear-based messaging to drive home the need for cybersecurity, the need for managed IT. So once you've convinced people that there's something to be scared of, they have to trust you to protect them from the threat. So trust has become even more important than it was before. Um, additionally, it's really, really important to niche down, focus on a specific industry so you can speak their language. Um, I think a lot of the ways that MSP marketing differs from traditional marketing really comes down to the ways that MSPs struggle with marketing. Most MSP owners come from a technical background, and because of that, they want to focus on all the benefits of a product or service in a technical way. Tech speak may impress your peers when you're at a conference and you're talking to other people who are in IT. They're going to love that you know terms like left of boom and right of boom and that you can speak to all the different kinds of cybersecurity solutions that are out there and cloud versus on-prem. Buyers don't really care at all. Successful marketing communicates benefits in clear and relatable terms, and it also maps benefits to actual problems. Because the reality of MSP marketing today and MSP sales today is that 80-90% of the time you're selling against an existing solution Very few companies are at a stage where they don't think they need to do IT. As I think you guys all know that as you hit like 5 employees, you need some solution, whether it's internal IT, a managed IT solution, or something else. Very few companies in 2023 are sitting around going, oh, we don't need to manage our technology in any way. We don't need it to work all the time. We all know we need it to work. All the time. We know there's a cost to downtime, but the importance is being able to speak to what that means to their company and why you're better. Companies don't switch over their IT because there aren't any problems. So you need to think about the pain points of the person that you're talking to and how those impact their day-to-day and use their language. So like for a lawyer, the cost of downtime could be, you know, matched to billable hours, right? When we talk about like a CPA, we could talk about what would it cost them to have to restart you know, a tax document. We also have to think about how our prospects think of their clients or prospects. Are they talking about customers, clients, partners? How did— what, what jargon did they use? It doesn't matter the jargon you use or that you've learned in the industry. What matters is learning their industry jargon and speaking to that. There's a lot of lack of differentiation in the MSP space. And like I said, this market is inundated. And new MSPs are entering every day. We have large MSPs buying up local smaller shops and we can't really compete with their marketing dollars. And then we have really agile small shops of like maybe 1 or 2 guys and they typically have larger profit margins because they don't have a— they're not running like a business really. They're, they're really operating like consultants. Um, and some of them might be really good at automation and so they've driven down their costs and then they're throwing that money into marketing and sales. So think about what makes you unique. If you've heard of the Entrepreneurial Operating System, they have this concept of the 3 uniques. What are the 3 things that you do different than anybody else? And for many MSPs, this is going to come back to your people. We all want the tech to be the differentiator, but for buyers it's not. For buyers, it's, you know, how easy is it to put in a ticket? Who comes out and replies to me? How fast are the response times? You know, does— is the person clean? Do they Do they have good interpersonal skills? Do I have to talk to someone who's awkward and doesn't like me? Those types of things. Then a lot of MSPs have inconsistent branding, and when you're small, this might not matter very much. But once you start putting money into marketing, it's extremely important to have consistent branding and consistent messaging. Again, many MSPs have kind of smaller budgets than other B2B tech companies. So if you look at The average SaaS company, they typically take a decent amount of funding. And they have, you know, I can, I've worked with them before, so I can speak to $10,000, $20,000, $30,000 a month agency marketing budgets that they're just giving away to someone to throw behind them. And typically when I talk to an MSP, the budget's somewhere between like $2,000 and $10,000 a month, with $10,000 being on the high end. Someone who's really serious about their go-to-market strategy. And so with those budgets, it can be hard to compete with the big tech trends. Like a good SEO agency could be charging you $10,000 a month just for that. So how do we do more with less budget and pick a niche? And at the end of the day, this sort of funnels down in, in the way that I process and work with MSPs is first and First and foremost, who are you? Secondarily, who are you talking to? And then after that, you know, where do they hang out and how do they make decisions? And what— because once we decide like who it is that you really want to talk to, you can build like a 90-day sprint based on your budget surrounding, you know, like where are they really getting their info that they believe in and how are they making their business decisions? Because you need to be where they are, not wherever you want to be.