The IT industry is certainly not known for the world’s sexiest brands. That doesn’t mean, however, that MSPs should completely write off branding as the realm of consumer goods such as energy drinks or yoga pants with Red Bull and Lululemon.
The truth is that MSPs can benefit from the same branding concepts used by other consumer-facing industries.
How to make branding relevant to MSPs
The important thing when trying to build your brand is concerted effort. While you won’t have national reach, there are many ways to make your business a household name among businesses at the local level.
The different ways to get your brand known on a local level:
- Develop a unified creative vision
- Give companies free services when they recommend new customers
- Involve your company in local sponsorship events
- Social media marketing to targeted demographics
- Build alliances with other businesses to do cross-promotional advertising together
Turn the plan into action
This first step is develop your unified vision or brand. This means that you must organize a consistent written message that runs along a visual one that describes your company and differentiates you from the competition. Then you need to work hard to consistently put it out in front of your audience so that they see it on an ongoing basis. To do this, you need to integrate creativity and data with a plan to measure your success over time.
One idea to to get in front of customers is to go out and sponsor a technology conference. Then you can use the event to build community connections. For an even greater effect, invite your clients to come to event. In exchange for free services, tell them to recommend your services to their friends who may be looking to hop over from the rigid capital expense IT model to open their minds to a more flexible operating expense model.
Make sure you hire or contract a kick-butt digital marketing manager who understands your branding mission through and through. This is also an opportunity to use the alliances you’ve built to spend less while reaching a larger audience. For example, maybe there is a certain thin client device that is well-known in the region. Reach out to them and offer to do some cross-promotional offers to expand both of your reach in the local market.
These strategies are just some of the many ways to brand and market your business. What have you found to work for your MSP business?
About Parallels
Parallels is a global leader in virtual desktop, application delivery, and mobile device management solutions. Thousands of organizations worldwide trust in the reliability and scalability of Parallels VDI and virtualization solutions. Parallels makes it simple and affordable to deliver applications to any device over the cloud, or on-premise and hybrid deployments.
The company’s solution portfolio includes the award-winning Parallels Remote Application Server (RAS), providing platform-independent virtual desktop, application delivery, and integrated thin client management from an unified interface to any modern operating system. Parallels RAS enables MSPs to take advantage of exciting new business opportunities by offering their customers SaaS, DaaS, and file sharing on any device.
Visit https://www.parallels.com/partners/msp/ for more information.
