During the last several months, I’ve been getting a crash course in a facet of the MSP industry I didn’t really know too much about - the MSPAlliance channel. I sat on a panel at this fall’s MSPWorld conference in Austin, and from talking to exhibitors and attendees at the expo, I’ve learned that one of their chief frustrations is in marketing. The outbound and traditional advertising campaigns of the past don’t work as well as they used to, and many MSPs are getting turned off from marketing as a whole.
But the one thing that does still work for these business owners is word-of-mouth, and they’re all trying to find cost-effective ways to help that process along. That’s what we do at HubSpot – we give you the tools and training to kick your marketing in the jeans in the most cost effective way possible – inbound marketing.Here’s an experiment: In Google type “MSP” and the name of your town or state. Are you coming up on the first page? If so, great, you’re one step ahead of the game, if not, that’s a problem. Over the years since Google became a ubiquitous tool for search, we’ve stopped looking at pages two, three, and so on. You need to get up there in the rankings to be relevant. Try the same thing with “computer repair”, “outsource IT”, or IT security”. Did you make the cut? Step one in boosting your Google ranking is to continually develop interesting content. Simple blog posts, videos, podcasts, tweets…anything you can do to get your name out there as an expert in your field. Pepper these posts with key words you want to rank in Google for. Mention your location and what you do; the text of these posts, along with select HTML tags, are what Google searches to generate its rankings. The more optimized content you generate, the better your chances are of Google picking you up. On the web it’s not how good you look (i.e. your blog need not look like it’s written by a marketing professional) but how useful and relevant your content is so write to your heart’s content.
Still not convinced? Use our Website Grader tool to take a look at how you’re doing. This free tool measures whether your website is using standard best practices and comes back with a rating of your site’s efficiency. You can also punch in your competitors and see how they’re doing; don’t get left in the dust if they’re getting the job done.
Let me know if there are other channel marketing questions you’d like me to cover – you can reach me at amoorthy@hubspot.com or on Twitter at @juicemoorthy.
Guest Author: Arjun Moorthy, VP of Business Development @Hubspot
