MSP Marketing 101: Are you Ready for Events?

Hot on the heels of the previous post around MDF Funding - welcome back to the next post in our MSP 101 Marketing Pillar Series! Today's topic? We're talking about events!

Before we get started, if you're interested in more MSP content - please do head over to the YouTube channel and subscribe. Otherwise, let's talk Events!

Events can be one of the best forms of lead generation for your IT business, and if you watched the last video - you'll know that you can likely access MDF funding from your suppliers to contribute towards these events. Which just sounds fricken awesome right?

So in this short post, I'm going to run through just a few examples of the events you could run regularly, and which could become one of your key marketing pillars this year.

EVENT NUMERO UNO

Lunch and Learns. These are a great place to start, particularly if you don't like standing up in a room full of people.

Invite a small number of prospects, mix them up with a few of your clients and do a short talk about a specific topic whilst you feed and water them.

These could be hot topics such as cybersecurity, online backup, modern workplace, or more niche topics depending on your target market.

Everyone gets some great information, everyone gets fed, and your clients will help reinforce that you a) look after your clients, and b) are good at what you do.

These events you could run on a regular basis, probably monthly, but adjust as you see fit.

EVENT NUMBER 2

Industry events. Think of larger events where you can focus on a specific theme. Again, something like Cyber Security is a great example, and actually, there is a really great example of this done by the Bluegrass Group here in the UK - who put on a Cyber Security Awareness Week.

With this sort of event, you can invite vendors to come and chat about specific topics, products, or services - to educate the audience. To make up the audience, you can invite all of your prospects, and as much of the local business community as possible.

The goal here isn't to sell to these people, but just become known as someone who a) Knows what they're doing. B) Gives back to the community with all of this useful information and c) Puts on a really great event that is worth attending.

Do this right, and you can have a relatively low or zero cost event. Go speak to Continuity about that and benefit from a consistent source of leads. These types of events are typically run once or maybe twice a year and could be offered for free to the local business community if done right.

EVENT NUMBER 3

Online Events, which coincidentally was the most popular event of 2020! Odd?

These events can take any form of a Presentation, Workshop, Networking, or any other type of digital event.

I know that's casting the net wide, but there is so much you can do with online events which take little to no prep. For those of you who are introverts like me - it's a great way to get in front of people without actually getting in front of people!

My only real comment here is please don't do death by PowerPoint, and of course, that means don't just read off of whatever is on screen.

I've had discussions with a number of IT vendors in the past few months and many of them are seeing fewer numbers show up for these events, so keep them engaging, show your face more than you show your slides and I'd actually recommend taking a look at something like Ecam or OBS for streaming, as that gives you some great ways to animate your Teams or Zoom presentations without doing death by PowerPoint.

There are of course other types of events you can put on, but these are a great way to get started. Don't forget to let me know what event you are looking forward to putting on.

Thanks so much for reading, I hope you found it useful!