How MSPs and VARs Can Create a Successful Digital Marketing Strategy

You’ve heard it at nearly every conference, in most articles, and from colleagues and experts alike: Marketing is the key to success for VARs and MSPs targeting the IT channel. But it’s a daunting prospect. There are so many moving parts to it all. Where do you start?

We’ve developed a marketing game plan for you to follow when streamlining your marketing efforts.

Key Components of an Effective Digital Marketing Game Plan

Inbound marketing is a significant investment to make, but the basic process is straightforward. All you need to do is to follow these six steps.

1. Create a Strategy – In this step, you gather all your existing assets and information and review them to identify gaps. You also define your goals and metrics.
2. Develop Digital Assets – For digital marketing to truly work, you’ll want to build out the fundamental elements such as a search engine-friendly website, social media accounts, and a marketing platform that helps you measure the success of your digital marketing strategy.
3. Drive Traffic and Awareness – Once you have all your assets, you create and run campaigns designed to get them in front of the right prospects at the right time.
4. Convert Traffic into Leads – Ultimately, the purpose of driving traffic is to capture leads using landing pages and forms.
5. Convert Leads into Customers – To be successful, marketing teams and sales teams need to work together to identify sales-ready leads found using inbound assets.
6. Convert Customers into Promoters – By providing excellent customer experiences, you’ll be able to ask for and receive referrals. Offering incentives to your customers encourage even more referrals.

By following these steps, you can implement a strategy that is virtually guaranteed to grow your business.

Seeing Results

IT channel VARs and MSPs face unique challenges in marketing their businesses. A highly technical industry, a changing marketplace, evolving customer demands and increased competition are a few of the most pressing ones. Even if you manage to keep up with the first three, it’s growing harder to stand out.

The size of the MSP market is predicted to grow by 11.1% CAGR until 2022 reaching a market value of $257.84 billion according to a report by Research and Markets. VARs are also beginning to put more emphasis on their services to stay competitive in the market.

How can you let your prospects know you offer solutions that meet their needs in such a crowded space? Implementing a solid digital marketing strategy is your answer.

Why Digital Marketing is Important to the IT Channel

Vendors provide marketing materials, and sometimes marketing platforms, to their IT channel partner VARs and MSPs. Often though, these materials aren’t effective at marketing your company.

One of the reasons is that the focus is often on products and not on solutions. B2B buyers today are looking for answers, and the marketing materials you receive from vendors may not always align with your overall digital marketing strategy. To connect with your prospects, you need to create, distribute and track content that fits their buyer personas.

A digital strategy begins with buyer personas and a deep understanding of the unique IT channel buyer’s journey. By embracing this approach, you can expect your marketing to be more effective and to achieve a higher ROI.

Getting Started

You can see the benefits of adopting an inbound marketing strategy as an IT channel partner. In the competitive market for VARs and MSPs, it can help you get found by the right prospects at the right time.