If you are building a Managed Service Provider or MSP business then you need to consider how to optimize your marketing to be more efficient and compete in today's crowded cloud environment. Everyone is racing to the ubiquitous cloud, you need to find new ways to get your offerings in front of the right prospects at the right time. Given the shift to recurring revenue models inherent to a MSP business model, you need to consider how to lower the cost of a lead if you are going to maintain an affordable marketing expense position. Based on a 2011 study conducted by HubSpot an inbound marketing lead costs 62% less than an outbound marketing lead.
What is Inbound Marketing?
Inbound Marketing is a process that leverages a series of online tools, such as Social Media, Search Engine Optimization, Blogs, Landing Pages, and Analytics to deliver improved ROI with your marketing investment. An Inbound Marketing methodology consists of four key elements:
- Driving increased traffic to your website
- Generating leads from the traffic
- Converting those leads to sales
- Then measuring and analyzing your results
Inbound marketing should not be the sole element of your MSP marketing plan, but it needs to be part of the mix. Customers shopping for Managed Services are clearly searching for and researching options online, an MSP marketing plan needs to reflect that. When you combine the practical realities of where clients of these services look for information with the need to improve the marketing ROI in a shifting business model, a good Inbound marketing plan is imperative.
To learn more about Inbound Marketing, you can request a copy of a Guide to Internet Marketing below. If you are interested in taking the next step, we do offer an Inbound Marketing Assessment which will give you a perspective of where you stand today and can help you understand where you stack up against your competition.