If you had to make a list of the best professional athletes of all time, Wayne Gretzky would undoubtedly be right at the top. For those unfamiliar, he wasn’t just the most successful hockey player to ever live. He was one of the most successful athletes in any sport, ever. He had the type of career that legends are made of before he ever left Canada and played 20 incredible seasons in the NHL. Once upon a time, a journalist asked Gretzky a question that amounted to “How are you as good as you are? How is that even possible?”
Gretzky took a beat, thought about it, and answered simply: “I don’t go where the puck is. I go where the puck is going to be.”
That is why your marketing efforts for your MSP need to be much more proactive than you realize.
Gone are the days where you can sit back, rest on a list of technical specifications, and wait for people to come to you. If you really want to generate leads and make an impact, you need to take your efforts to them. But more than that, you need to know where they themselves want to be in five years and help them build a bridge to take them there.
This is the approach for we take at my MSP marketing agency, and I’ll use the rest of this space to explain exactly how we do it.
The proactive approach to MSP marketing
It’s been said before and it’ll be said again — marketing isn’t about selling services, it’s about selling value. But the definition of “value” is ever changing based on the unique pain points that your own clients are feeling in the moment. If you want to generate leads today, you need to get to know your audience intimately. Finding your niche helps a great deal with that. You need to understand what they’re going through, what problems they’re dealing with, and repackage your services around how you can help them achieve those goals in the easiest way possible.
But what then becomes of tomorrow?
It’s simple. If you don’t just want your MSP to be effective, but if you really want it to stand the test of time, you need to keep one eye fixed firmly towards the horizon where it belongs.
Think about the evolution of an industry like healthcare, for example. Let’s say that medical offices and other healthcare organizations are the niche you’ve already decided on. How is that industry currently changing? What evolving role does technology play in that story? How will the use of cloud services change in a decade compared to how they’re used today? What would a private medical practice need to do to get ready for that shift?
Start there, build your way back to your MSP as it exists today, and figure out what you need to do to connect those two dots. Then, create marketing that both establishes your business as an authority and that plainly shows that you’re prepared to be by those clients on this upcoming journey every step of the way.
It’s an approach that works for every industry you may be targeting. Construction companies or other industrial environments. Financial companies. The list goes on and on. Don’t just work hard to figure out their needs — think about how those needs are going to change. Do what you must to get ready for yourself and more people will be willing to come along for the ride.
The road goes on
In the end, it really comes down to a matter of perspective. All industries change — there really is no getting around it. All you can do, is choose to prepare for it with the resources available to you today. If you start with this perspective and hold onto it tightly, your marketing can absolutely lay the groundwork not for where you are, but for where you want to be as a business.
Changing market conditions will no longer be a source of disruption — or at least, not negative disruption. It’ll simply be yet another marketing opportunity for you to take advantage of because you were ready for it. Your own audience will be shocked at how prepared you are for what they’re going through and you’ll come out looking all the better for it.
But if your marketing is still passive — meaning that you’re doing little more than glorifying your technical specifications and selling services instead of value — you’re not going to be able to go on this journey at all. You’re only going to find yourself left behind.
If you’re interested in finding out more information about how to make your marketing more proactive in the way that you need, I encourage you to apply for a one-on-one strategy call with myself and my fellow team members at Tech Pro Marketing. We’ll go over every aspect of your business with a laser focus, helping you discover opportunities to continue to enact meaningful change in your marketing — and within your larger organization — for years to come.
Photo: Eugene Onischenko / Shutterstock.
