MSP Marketing 101: How to Fix Your MSP’s Website | 5 Tips

Intro

Welcome back to the next post in the MSP Marketing Pillar series. Today we are talking about possibly one of the most overlooked items when it comes to your marketing strategy, and that’s the top 5 things to check off when looking at your own website.

If you haven’t been here before, hi, I’m Pete Matheson. In early 2020 I sold my MSP IT business which I started in 2011. It grew well over the next decade, and now I’m coaching other business owners to achieve similar and greater success than I did. 

Getting Started With MSP Marketing 

When looking at your marketing pillars, of which you should have a few, your website is probably one of the first ones that you would have taken care of. There are a number of issues that I come across, time and time again which will seriously impact how well it works for you. Don’t worry, I’m going to help you fix those issues! 

Once you’ve read this post let us know in the comments below if you’ve experienced any of these issues with websites you’ve visited.

First up, What do you do?

What you do should be blindingly obvious when someone lands on your website. A clear headline message that can be understood within just a few seconds of them landing on the page. We’re talking – above the fold here – and when I say above the fold, I mean that it should be visible without the visitor having to scroll. This means a desktop, laptop or even a mobile phone.

A clear message like, IT Support for Business can go down really nicely. Depending on your target audience, I would try to stay away from using words like MSP, MSSP and such in that headline, as most regular consumers don’t understand what an MSP is.

Keep it simple, and you should be golden.

MSP Marketing Number 2

Your contact information should be on clear display for all to see. This typically means that you are putting at least a telephone number in the top banner of your website, perhaps even an email address. At the very least you should include an obvious link to Contact Us. The link should then take them to a more secure form that can’t get spammed as much as a plain text email address in the banner. Please don’t put an image of your telephone number in your header and think you’ve solved some magical problem of being spammed by phone calls.

A) It makes it super difficult for people to contact you, because they can’t easily tap on the number on their mobile to call you

B) When implementing services such as Call Rail, which changes the phone number people see on your website, you won’t be able to do it. It just won’t work.

C) Putting an image of your phone number doesn’t actually achieve anything. I’ve had phone numbers on all of my websites for decades and I’ve never had an issue with being flooded with calls.

Simple, plain text phone number in the top banner of your website so that when someone lands on it, they can just tap and it will ring you. Simples!

MSP Marketing Number 3

Photos and personality. I cannot stress how many MSP websites I look over, and all I see are the same stock photos time and time again. Some of them even get creative and butcher the stock photos to insert their logo onto peoples shirts or the signage behind them! You may not have realised recently, that people are doing business with people.

It doesn’t take much, and it’s not expensive, but hire a photographer for an hour to take headshots of all your staff on a clean background. After that you simply cut the background out and start putting some real faces onto your website.

Yes, you could even put those real photos on top of stock photography for backgrounds if you want to pretend that your engineers are standing in a datacenter. The point is that the staff are real. This is Paul, he works in our engineering team. Here’s Sarah, she works on our Account Managers team. Meet Pete – he owns the business! The number of times that I see websites that don’t even show the face of the owner just astounds me!

MSP Marketing Number 4

Accreditations and Awards. If you are a smaller, more local business then you should be shouting out about any local awards that show how good your customer service is. If you are a larger firm, then some nationwide awards would look great but be careful here.

There are so many so-called awards that people win because they pay for an editorial, which is basically paying to win the award! I’m sure most of us have received those emails which start “Congratulations, you have won our award for the best MSP in the world ever. To claim your award, all you need to do is send a payment through for £3,000, and we will ship the award to you and give you a full double page editorial in our magazine…..

That is not a legitimate award. My advice here is to just be careful, and use awards that are recognised amongst your prospects. When it comes to Accreditations there are 2 rules.

1 Don’t Lie, and 2, Keep them up to date.

A good friend of mine has a tool which has scraped the Companies House data for IT Companies here in the UK. They discovered that there were more companies with websites claiming to be a Microsoft Gold Partner, than Microsoft’s own website states! Something phishy is going on there.

Number 1, don’t make it up and make it out that you are Gold this and Platinum that – because if anybody has watched Dragons Den, then you’ll know the dressing down the candidates get when they lie about their achievements on their own websites. Stop it!

Number 2, of course, keep them up to date. Some Partner Accreditations are including the year of issue in them now, which is good as it quickly identifies those who aren’t keeping up to date. Equally, it should be one of those annual checks to make sure you’ve got the latest logos on your own website.

MSP Marketing Number 5

Much like point number 3 around real photos, people want to see real reviews, real testimonials. This means you should be making an effort to collect and store those testimonials regularly as part of your day to day business.

Collect feedback and comments around both your day to day support service, as that is a huge resource of feedback just waiting to be tapped. Collect feedback around your overall service and from the senior leaders for your customers. Ideally this should be in video format, but written is fine too.

Many people still don’t like to appear on video and something like a written case study may be more comfortable for them than being on camera. With that said, there is nothing better than a customer doing all the selling for you whilst they talk about how efficient, or reactive, or understanding you have been whilst delivering your services.

Create a dedicated page on your website for Testimonials, and fill it to the brim with as many as you can. Ideally, automated so that when customers are visiting, they see a steady stream of recent testimonials, rather than one or 2 hand selected few which made the cut to appear on your website.

There you have it, with my 5 top recommendations when looking at your website as a marketing pillar.

BUT WAIT, THERE’S MORE!

To finish off this post, I’ll add 4 quick bonus tips around your Website.

First – Add a call to action to every page. Whether it’s to click a button and book a meeting or to pick up the phone and give you a call – anything!

Second – If you’re running short on video content, and particularly for your product and service pages, many vendors provide white labelled videos which you can use across your website easily. Although as in my previous video, about video – I would always recommend creating a personal video if you have the skills to do so.

Third, don’t make websites too wordy. No one wants to read hundreds of words. Keep it short, to the point and always engaging enough to encourage people to want to talk to you.

Lastly, fourth – Add your social media links to your website. It’s so easy to do! Now, there you really have it!

I hope that information was useful to you.

Thank you for reading, and I will see you once again, in the next post. Bye bye!

• Video Marketing  https://youtu.be/KW5k0rALLro​
• A Simple Customer Referral System  https://youtu.be/AvoAbmFCWnY​
• How to get Testimonials for your Business  https://youtu.be/ik6rjoEV104