Before talking about marketing strategies, make sure you are clear on what makes your business unique, who you want to sell to and how your MSP stacks up against the competition.

I've created a short list of questions to guide you towards discovering the answers you should have before spending time or money on an marketing plan or hiring an expert.

What Makes Your MSP Unique?

In order to develop a robust marketing strategy, you need to have a clear sense of what makes your MSP stand out.

• Is it how you deliver your services? Look at the projects you’ve done and determine which are the most profitable, repeatable and if your approach to implementation is remarkable.
• Is there a unique product in automation, security or AI you sell? Compare your services offering to your competition, is there something you have that no one else near your does?
• Do you love working within a vertical? This presents a great opportunity then because potential clients love specialists.

If the uniqueness question is a real struggle, and trust me that it’s hard for most of us, then remember that you can find clues by keeping your existing clients in mind. What are the common support tickets about? What does your staff enjoy working on? What projects result in you getting love notes from clients? If clients are very happy about something, that is probably what you want to focus on for differentiation in your marketing strategy; that's the key to understanding what makes your MSP unique.

Who is Your Competition?

Once you know what makes your MSP special, you need to identify your real competitors. Who are they? Where are they? How do they position themselves? How do they get clients in the door?

Being aware of what potential clients will see during research will help you develop a winning strategy.

To identify your competitors you should follow these techniques:

• Talk to Your Competition: go to local events and talk to your competitors, try to find out what they are up to. For example, if you chose the vertical specialization, go to industry events and don't shy away from others MSPs. Also, since potential buyers will likely be there too, ask them what they are looking for!
• Ask Your Sales Reps: send out a survey to your sales team asking them what other competitors come up during the sales process with potential customers; try to dig more into frequently mentioned MSPs.
• Go Online: nowadays people rely on the opinions and reviews other shares on online communities, Google, or even social media. Taking time to read them and identify the most mentioned MSPs will help you get a better sense of which ones are doing a better/worse job.

Who is Your Ideal Buyer?

A successful marketing strategy is the one that talks to the right person at the right time. You need to determine who are those 1-3 ideal buyers you want to sell to when building these profiles you need to keep in mind certain aspects:

• Company:
• Industries you want to target
• Number of employees
• Annual revenue
• Location
• Verticals

• Personas:
• Background: job, career path, family
• Demographics: male/female, age, income, location
• Identifiers: demeanor, communication preferences
• Goals: primary, secondary goals
• Challenges: primary, secondary challenges
• What can you do: to help them achieve their goals / to help them overcome their challenges?
• Common objections: why wouldn’t they buy your products/services?

At Simple Selling, we dig deep into all of this before creating a marketing strategy because who you are, who you’re competing with and who you want to sell to are important to understand before promoting a message or making a design or placing a call.