Introduction

Revisiting Key Marketing Concepts

• Understanding your audience
• Messaging & audience-appropriate language
• Creating awareness
• Very clear offerings & marketing

Refresher: Key Marketing Concepts

It’s important to approach these initiatives with the right mindset and strategy. These key concepts will form a strong foundation for all of your marketing efforts.

Foundational elements of marketing:

1. Strong messaging: A strong and consistent brand message is crucial. Varying descriptions can lead to confusion and weaken your brand identity. Make sure you know what your company’s key messages are. You should be able to describe what your company does in one succinct sentence.
2. Understand your audience: Knowing your audience is vital for effective marketing. For example, you should know the size and industry of the companies you want to target. In addition, you should know who your primary customer points of contacts are. For example, do you typically sell to CEOs, office managers, IT admins, or a different role? Understanding these factors will help you tailor your messaging and efforts to the right people.
3. Understand your audience: No, we didn’t make a mistake – understanding your audience is so important, we put it twice. There’s understanding who your audience is (above), and then there’s understanding how your audience thinks. You should constantly be putting yourself in your audience’s shoes. With every ad you design, every blog you write, and every campaign you create, ask yourself: how will this resonate with my audience?
4. Awareness is important: Building awareness is a slow process, and it can be hard to attribute a return on investment (or ROI) to your awareness efforts. This often drives MSPs to scrap their awareness efforts. But awareness building is critical to growing your customer base. After all, if someone doesn’t know about your company, they can’t become a new customer. So, trust the process and resist the urge to skip or give up on this important step.

Example:

Our company handles all IT-related tasks to improve security and productivity across the businesses we work with.

Audience: <500 employees, healthcare and insurance industries, IT decision-makers, CTOs, CEOs

Lack of IT knowledge or resources -> Audit struggles -> Security issues

AVOID:

1. Being self-centered
2. Messaging inconsistency
3. Mismatched language
4. Confusing syntax
5. A tone that won’t resonate

Look out for these common mistakes:

1. Unclear service offerings. Just like your brand message, your messaging around your services should be clear and consistent. When MSPs don’t define their services clearly enough, or when they talk about them differently in different places, it creates confusion that can lose them potential sales.
2. Language that doesn’t make sense to your audience. This goes in the “put yourself in your audience’s shoes” category. If your common point of contact with customers is a CEO or an office manager, they likely won’t understand highly technical jargon. Conversely, if you typically work with IT teams, they’ll be relatively savvy and won’t like being spoken down to with overly simple language. Always match your language to your audience.
3. Talking about yourself too much. Marketing revolves around the potential customer’s problem: the reason they started looking for a solution in the first place. And modern customers like to do a lot of the shopping around themselves, so jumping straight to talking about your services will likely turn potential customers away. Instead, make sure you understand your customers’ common problems, and make sure your marketing speaks to those problems and how you solve them.

For more in-depth guidance around building your marketing strategy, check out volume 1 of this eBook series.