In an increasingly saturated market, it is essential that you are leveraging the MSP marketing tools available to elevate your business above the competition. As an expert in everything MSP, you understand the value you can provide to both your existing and prospective customers. You empathise with their common pain points, and you have the know-how, the nous and the services to remedy the issues they face. But, without a marketing strategy or plan, the solutions that you provide could well go to waste.
In this month’s blog, we will be taking a look at 7 MSP marketing tools that you should be using to boost your visibility, showcase your services and uncover actionable analytics from your marketing efforts. Our top 7 recommended MSP marketing tools are:
- Website
- Customer Relationship Manager (CRM)
- Marketing Automation Platform
- Social Media Management
- Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
- Analytics and Reporting
- Design
Website
Your website is probably your most valuable MSP marketing tool of them all. In the digital world, having a high-performing website is like having a virtual shop window. Your website helps prospects understand your business, your services and the challenges you solve. It needs to be optimised for SEO and conversion. This is your number one lead generation tool, and it needs to be of high quality because of the high competition in the space. The most common is WordPress, due to its flexible content management system (CMS) features and its ease of use. However, HubSpot CMS is also very popular among MSPs, once again due to its ease of use and the myriad of different reporting capabilities it possesses, which allows greater visibility and insight into how your marketing collateral is performing. HubSpot allows the user to view their CMS and CRM through one single pane of glass, making them exceptionally user friendly, practical and beneficial.
CRM
Accurately storing your existing customer records as well as prospect contacts is the difference between effective, relevant and valuable marketing and sending the same message to everyone which is very ineffective. With GDPR in the EU this is also a legal requirement. Your CRM is the hub from which you manage interactions with both existing and prospective customers, and is one of the most essential MSP marketing tools for any organisation. With a huge amount of business now being conducted digitally, your CRM is effectively your customer black book, and, as customer demands continue to grow, your CRM is your key weapon to staying above the ever-increasing waterline of delivering a great customer experience.
It can also be leveraged for marketing and sales purposes when linked with or being part of a Marketing automation platform – see the next section – CRM platforms such as HubSpot allow your organisation to create bespoke audience segmentations for certain clients, and enable a more focused, honed approach to your marketing and sales. Through HubSpot, you are able to store all your valuable data and information about leads, customers and partners in one place, granting you greater visibility over your operations.
Marketing Automation Platform
As mentioned above, these go hand-in-hand with your CRM platform, and are often combined into the same tool, like HubSpot for instance. This powerhouse of an MSP marketing tool, in many cases, brings most, if not all, of your other tools together, allowing you to do many facets of digital marketing with email being one of those most common. Email is great for communicating with existing customers and prospecting to new ones. And with automation capabilities built-in you can automate the communications based on engagements or actions taken by your audience.
Social Media Management
Social media is fast-paced and tough to keep up with. A social media management tool helps you to stay ahead with your social content, schedule future posts ahead of time, review performance and analytics so you can see what your audience engages with. You can track growth and reach as well as keeping an ear to the ground with “social listening” to be able to jump on trends and mentions of your brand and key service areas. There are a number of social media management tools that you can deploy, including Buffer, Hootsuite and Sprout Social amongst others.
SEO
The most successful long-term growth comes from investing in SEO. But by having an SEO tool such as SEMrush, Ahrefs or Moz, you can analyse your own sites performance, ranking, and keywords as well as seeing how you compare to your competitors. This gives you the upper hand in identifying areas of opportunity, strength and weakness to get ahead of the competition and higher up the Search Engine Results Page (SERP).
Analytics and Reporting
Analysing performance is key as we discussed in a previous blog. Being able to visualise information helps a business make better sales and marketing decisions. Some MSP marketing tools such as Google Analytics and Google Search Console are free, but there are other tools out there that can help you build performance dashboards to track performance across your channels including PPC, website, email, social and everything in between. One of the many advantages of HubSpot, is that it already has the analytics and reporting features built in. This means that you can manage your CMS, CRM, data, analytics and reporting from a single platform. Not only does this save on time, as you don’t have to continuously switch between tools and platforms, but it gives you a more holistic idea of how your marketing collateral is performing, and a greater understanding of your operations as a whole.
Design
You need your content to be striking, distinctive and grab attention. Whether you’re creating banner ads, social graphics or eBooks, these need to be professional and on brand. The obvious tool is Adobe Creative Suite, but there are other alternatives out there like Canva for the less creative who are dipping their toe into the design water.
Leverage MSP Marketing Tools with Trusted Experts!
The benefits of having these MSP marketing tools in place are clear to see but managing them, and using them to their full potential, can be expensive and requires time, effort and in most cases expert knowledge. At Marketopia, we have been providing marketing services for MSPs for over 8 years, and on a global scale. By opting to use our full services, you benefit from our integrated agency that can manage all these MSP marketing tools, other technologies and campaign execution for you.
To find out how Marketopia can help you market your business, book a growth consultation with one of our experts, today.
