As a small or medium-sized MSP business, you may constantly be searching for IT marketing efforts that are going to help propel you past your competition. With this constant searching and striving for perfection, you may wind up overlooking or skipping over certain efforts that could help you reach your marketing goals, even if they aren’t exactly perfect.
Are Your Goals Blinding You to Effective Marketing Efforts?
Carefully consider your current marketing efforts. Are you outsourcing blog and article writing, social media, and other parts of your marketing plan? If so, you will likely discover that some pieces that come your way simply don’t meet your expectations. However, something that quite a few business owners don’t understand is just because it doesn’t meet their conception of the “perfect” article it does not mean they are going to be ineffective regarding an increase in ranking or reaching overall marketing goals.
While it is important for the decision maker to be happy with the content produced, don’t be overly critical or have requirements that simply can’t be met. This will result in very few pieces making it through to the website. The fewer pieces published, the harder time Google will have ranking the site. While some pieces may be drastically below expectations, it is important for business owners to realize that just because something is not perfect in their eyes, it does not mean it won’t help in terms of Google and earning a higher ranking in the search engine results pages (SERPs).
Don’t Set Your Requirements too High
When trying to manage your marketing efforts a good way to think about it, even when a piece may not seem “good enough” for your business, is to think of these efforts the same way you would when building a fire. When marketing your business, you will be building a fire using many different logs. While you may not be thrilled with a certain log, at the end of the day all that matters is how big the fire is. Even if a certain article does not meet all the requirements you have, it can still help you boost your marketing efforts, ultimately reaching your IT marketing goals.
Evaluating Your Marketing Goals
Think about your overall marketing goals. Do you want more social media followers? Do you want more people in your physical, brick and mortar store? Are you trying to acquire more online traffic? When you think about it, what makes a difference is that you are making efforts to reach these goals. Provide value that Google will take notice of, use keywords that people are searching for and maximize your presence by frequently posting on blogs, social media, and your website. This is what Google likes. Regardless of whether a piece is perfect in your eyes, these are the efforts that will make a difference and help you get noticed over your competition.
Should You Lower Your Standards?
As a business owner, you are faced with difficult decisions on a daily basis. However, the decision about lowering your standards regarding your marketing efforts is one you should not take lightly. If you currently have standards that don’t let anything but “perfection” through, it may be time to make a change. With this attitude, you are likely not going to make much headway.
When you think about lowering your standards, you should not view this as accepting anything that comes your way. Instead, think about what your customers want and what they are looking for. If the article, for example, answers a question or provides some other type of value, it is worth publishing, even if it is not your idea of perfection.
The Bottom Line
Your business is like your baby. You want to ensure it has the best of everything. However, when it comes to marketing, you have to be willing to negotiate on this a bit. Even if marketing efforts are not perfect, they can still be effective. Remember, while it is important for you to create content that is appealing to yourself, it is more important to create content that is appealing to your customers and the SEs. Keeping this in mind will help you find IT marketing success, regardless of the type or size of business you have.
About the author
Mark McGarvey is president of OneClick Solutions Group, an IT Managed Services and Security Provider serving small and mid-sized businesses with 20 to 100 employees in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Mark began his career in IT in the 90s as a senior support technician for a then-small company in Austin, TX called Dell. After working for a number of organizations in desktop support/management and systems administration, Mark realized a passion for two things: Ensuring computer systems ran smoothly and keeping the people that used these systems happy and productive.
As a small business owner, Mark empathizes with other business owners and understands the things most dear to them: Increasing productivity and efficiency and keeping costs low and ROI high.