How to build MSP marketing messages that resonate with buyers

Following on from the third article in the series ‘How to build a quality audience of prospects for your MSP marketing’, we will now be exploring how to build MSP marketing messages that will resonate with buyers. As explored in our recent video, linked here.

Previously we explored what a marketing audience is, how to identify who should be in your marketing audience, and how to go about building that audience. In this article we are going to look at the next step. 

Assuming that you have an audience in place and you’ve been working to profile them, understand their business, and gain intelligence, what do you do next?  

Now the focus should be on marketing messages and how to build them.

Why would they listen to you?

You could be forgiven for thinking that the MSP market is full of copycats! Everyone seems to say the same thing, with free IT audit or free cyber security audit promotions dominating many websites, or common claims that their support is proactive or fully inclusive. All are industry wide and common offers your prospective clients are likely to see most places they look. Very little stands apart as being unique when all the MSPs they look at are saying exactly the same thing. In all honesty it’s unlikely your prospect cares much for anything that’s free anyway, generally believing that anything free isn’t usually worth having or has no real value. 

There are of course a number of things that you do within your business that make it unique. It’s all about identifying exactly what those things are but admittedly that can be tough. It might be your people, your processes, your experience, your service, your attentiveness or perhaps the way you tailor your offering to uniquely suit your clients’ needs. A bespoke offering demonstrating you are aware that one size does not fit all is a powerful message. Try and get under the skin of your own business, seek the involvement of all of your team and even perhaps your clients to see what they feel really makes you different and what you provide that other didn’t or can’t. 

The next thing to do is find out what makes your prospects tick. Think about your messaging not as what you want to say, what you offer, or the value that you think you can provide, think instead about the owner/ manager of a small to medium sized business. What are their responsibilities? What challenges do they have in growing their business? What pain points do these organisations and the people within them deal with on a regular basis? Think about the key challenges they may have in their own minds. What resources do I have? How can I maximise the use of my resources? How can I control costs? How can I improve our customer service? How can we reduce customer churn and increase sales?  

All are valid questions that would be relevant in any business or industry setting, these questions don’t have one specific answer but most of them can be addressed in some way through the right application of tech.  

People only listen when someone is speaking the same language as them, so be sure that you are speaking their language when you consider the questions a business is asking itself and you are aligning your marketing message.  

Your message should be solution led, demonstrating how you and your company can address their pains and soothe them with Tech.  Make sure benefits are always shown ahead of features, for example, instead of ‘we provide Microsoft 365 as a Cloud-based solution that can help your staff be more efficient’ use ‘to help the agility and efficiency of your team we can tailor the Microsoft 365 suite of Cloud tools to the way your organisation needs to work’.  That’s one small example but it demonstrates how the same message can be delivered in two completely different ways. One shows how the needs of the organisation can be better served while the other simply tells someone what the product is.  

At all times the idea is to concentrate not on what you do but how you can help.  Your `buyers` will expect a technical solution but few will be interested in the actual technology or process that drives it. What they care about in identifying a problem is that a solution can be provided. Does it work? Will it save money and or time and what other positives impacts will it have on the business?   

You could even go one better and be even more specific. As well as research on individual organisations, or a cluster of organisations as explored in our second article in the series with regards to audience grouping, you could take your research to include sector specifics as well. If you are targeting Co`s in the financial service sector you could obtain information from the regulator, understand the compliance hurdles that those businesses face and think about the implications that has on the applications that they use.  Where do they store their data, how do they access their data, and usually as the regulator advice can be vague at best, you can benefit from the opportunity to provide them with practical advice on how they can best tackle those challenges.

This is something we will be exploring in our next article. 

Thank you for reading, we hope you found this information useful – if you are an MSP and you’re looking to grow we’d love to help, please get in touch with our expert team and see how we can help you.