MSP Marketing Tips: How to Stand Out from Big Box Companies

Is your business struggling to keep up with big box IT companies? They seem to offer every product imaginable and claim to be a “jack of all trades.” How can your small or medium-sized IT business keep up with that? Our team has seen this countless times as we provide MSP marketing services across the country. In this blog, we’ll teach you how to differentiate yourself from big box IT companies online. Plus, we compiled our best tips in this MSP marketing resource for you to check out later.

Optimize for Local Search

What’s one thing your business has on the big box IT companies? You actually have a location IN the area where your clients reside! It’s hard to do IT repairs on physical hardware if you’re located across the country. To show prospective clients that you’re nearby, you need to optimize your online presence for local search. Local searches are for phrases like “IT providers near me.” They’re vague, but search engines like Google know the location of the searcher. Does Google know the location of your business? Using a platform like Google My Business to update your business’s information (address, phone number, operating hours, services) is crucial. To improve your online presence, you need to work on citation building. Accurate, consistent citations across the Internet will positively impact your local search rankings.

Once you’ve established your business on platforms like Google, Bing, Yelp and other online directories, you’ll want to continuously monitor and improve your ranking. There are a handful of ways to do this, with a number of moving parts. First off, you’ll want to focus on local keywords in your SEO strategy. The words you optimize your webpages for should be based on common searches in your area. The second strategy is to create location pages on your website. This allows you to optimize a page with the specific city or town your target market resides in. Our third tip is to get reviews on online directories: This builds your credibility on search engines and with customers who come across your profile. Does that sound like a lot to manage? MSP marketing agencies can take the work off your plate by following these MSP marketing tips.

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Keep IT Personal

Another differentiator of your small or medium-size MSP is the level of human connection your team can provide. To highlight this, be sure to proudly display your team members in the content you share. You can create a dedicated “team” page on your website with a headshot and short bio for each person. You can also share “meet the team” posts on social media. These types of posts are the best performers for our tech clients! Your customers will appreciate knowing who they are working with, even if the interaction is mostly virtual. (Feeling camera shy? Don’t be: Doing a team photo shoot can be an effective marketing move.)

Another way to add a personal touch to your business is by specifying the partners you work with. Gigantic IT companies claim to “do it all,” but in the process they lose individualized industry knowledge. Ensure that your customers know your expertise lies within their specific industry. Do this by creating specific website pages for the industry you serve. You can talk about specific compliance standards in different fields and the latest tech news in a certain sector. This is a great opportunity to hone your SEO strategy, too. For example, an IT company that serves accounting firms could create a page optimized for the keyword “accounting IT services.”

Use StoryBrand

Big box IT companies are so vast and broad that they may not have a clear super-focused message; that’s a problem for overwhelmed consumers. Your goal is to make IT easy for your clients, so your promotional material should be easy to understand, too. The StoryBrand methodology was created to help businesses simplify their services in order to help more people by driving more leads. Next on our list of top MSP marketing tips is to understand and implement StoryBrand for your content.

What are the steps of StoryBrand?

There are six parts to the story in the StoryBrand messaging approach. A character (1) with a problem (2) meets a guide (3) who gives them a plan (4) and calls them to action (5) that results in either a success or a failure (6).

There is a lot of work that goes into crafting StoryBrand messaging. First, interviews with key stakeholders must be completed. This may include your management team and your employees. Then you’ll talk with your tech clients for customer discovery. From there, your findings need to be translated into a StoryBrand script that perfectly fits with your brand. This will keep your messaging consistent within your team and when it’s shared in external environments. Once it’s done, however, you can implement your clear messaging everywhere: your website, your social media posts, your emails, you name it! Learn more about using StoryBrand for your MSP.

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You work hard to provide the best IT services, so you deserve marketing that gets you noticed. For more MSP marketing tips, give our agency a call. We’ve delivered tangible results for MSPs just like yours, from next-day lead generation to rankings on page1 of Google search results.