The two most important functions of a business are: Marketing and Innovation. What about profit you might ask. Profit follows successful implementation of the two above functions – it should never be the motive.

Marketing is a function to do one thing: Create New Customers.

Innovation is a vehicle to support marketing and keep your business fresh, new, and alive.

While there are many many methods to do marketing – the most important one is to remember why you are doing it: to create a customer and follow that up with my own personal one: to KEEP a customer. Marketing in my opinion does not stop with a new customer….keeping those customers is just as important.

sjk

Great tips for marketing managed services. When we educate partners on this subject, we also discuss the difference between passive marketing vehicles such as websites, newsletters, white papers and case studies and direct marketing, such as direct mail letters, postcards and telemarketing, as well as the critical importance of the marketing list when conducting direct marketing, and how to source and filter it for maximum effect. Next we cover developing compelling messaging and collateral for the partner’s managed services, and leaving out the technical mumbo-jumbo, and focusing on identifying a prospect’s pain points and positioning managed services as the answer to those pains.

Your 5th point, Measure Everything, is critical in tracking the success and/or weakness of the partner’s marketing campaign. A good marketing campaign should include both passive and direct forms of marketing delivered in a specific schedule or rotation, and all activity and its result should be tracked on an ongoing basis. This is the only way to determine the ROI of any marketing campaign and identify areas for improvement.

We’ve got a webinar at http://www.mspu.us/courses titled “Effective Managed Services Marketing Techniques” in the “Our FREE Microsoft TS2 Managed Services Webcasts” section that goes into detail in each of these areas.

Thanks, Joe – for all you do!

Erick Simpson
MSPU University
http://www.mspu.us

That gradually changed with iMac (simplicity…) and iPod/iTunes (integrated user experience) and iPhone (game-changing technology, at time of launch).

Likewise, MSPs need to make sure their services are fantastic before they market and build brands around them.
-jp

The next time you go out to buy something or from what you’ve purchased this holiday season think about why you chose some brands over others and it won’t be solely on price point. Branding is the reason why people love Apple products, Apple’s marketing simple gets the word out there so people know when to start lining up outside the Apple store.