technologyreseller.co.uk 25 a business outcome, so MSPs have to be consultative. Twenty years ago it wasn’t like that. Then, it was a question of ‘support my endpoints, make sure that everybody can work’. Now it’s more business outcome-driven.” Relevant content This reinforces the need for MSPs to provide relevant content tailored to their customers’ needs that will also help to differentiate them more effectively than generic marketing material. “There’s a lot of material out there that MSPs can use to market their business, and a lot of it is generic, repeatable stuff. Everybody’s saying the same thing, and it just doesn’t read well. The search engines hate it because it’s just repeated across the web, so it doesn’t get the impact MSPs are seeking. They’re spending a low amount of money on repeated churned out material that doesn’t sit right with the customer and doesn’t get the traction unique stuff does. This includes video content that’s created monthly and branded to an IT company. It looks OK, but you can tell it’s a generic message,” explains Gordon. Marketing support If generic marketing material from vendors should be handled with caution, one area where Gordon says MSPs can lean more on vendors is in accessing budget for marketing. “The Pax8s and Tech Datas of the world have got millions and millions of marketing dollars to allocate to partners, and that’s one of the things we speak to clients about, not all the time, but certainly every quarter. One thing we try to do in our quarterly business review meetings, where we go through how the marketing has helped a client or not and what we need to change, is to identify who they’re working with, Pax8, Tech Data or whoever, and start talking to them about marketing dollar spend. “It’s actually quite frightening the amount of money they’ve got. One channel partner we spoke to offered up money pretty much straightaway. All we had to do is show how we were going to spend it. It was a couple of thousand pounds every month for six months – £12,000 just sitting there that our client didn’t know about that we managed to secure. They created some editorial content with it, around the Microsoft product set, Copilot and AI. That’s definitely something we’re keen to do more of.” https://techreachagency.co.uk Marketing services Techreach provides a range of strategic marketing services all tailored to the needs of MSPs. These include positioning and differentiation; pipeline-focused lead generation; LinkedIn marketing and thought leadership programmes for MSP owners and leaders; SEO, AEO and content strategy built around the buying questions that prospects ask; and CRM enrichment and marketing automation. Gordon himself is very active on LinkedIn, but he doesn’t regard it as the ‘be all and end all’. “For business-to-business marketing, LinkedIn is the one to go for,” he explains. “Facebook and the other socials, X to a certain degree, are good for short messaging, but for longer messages and longer campaigns, LinkedIn’s good. All the MSPs are on there trying to use it as a platform for sales. “What we try to do with marketing on LinkedIn is drive people from there onto a website. We try and convert prospects on a website rather than on LinkedIn, because generally speaking on LinkedIn people are not ready to buy. Sometimes they are, but it’s more likely they’re investigating. They’re probably not happy with their IT support and are starting to look at who’s out there and who’s saying the right things. Hopefully, once they hit the website, they convert. “Conversions also happen direct to web through Google search, so search engine optimisation is something else we’re big on. Answer engine optimisation as well. In the last few months being authoritative on your website and having the right questions answered to allow AI to index and reference it has become more important. We ourselves are getting enquiries through AI search. When a prospect types ‘good marketing agencies Aberdeen’ or ‘good marketing agencies UK’ or ‘MSP marketing agent UK’, it now comes up with Techreach (and others). People are going to start using AI a lot more for research.” Business outcomes Another major change Gordon has noticed in the last two decades is the need for MSPs to be more consultative and to focus more on business outcomes. “Cybersecurity existed back then, but it was very wishy-washy; ‘make sure you’ve got antivirus on your endpoint’ was about the extent of it. Now, it’s moved to a totally different place and is all about business outcomes. Whether that’s in relation to cybersecurity, AI or anything else, the customer is looking for of prospects and really knowing our target market, our avatar – identifying that ideal customer and targeting them with specific messaging and giving them something for free, like webinars, insights, newsletters tailored to their vertical. For instance, doing an insight on technology within the charity space will resonate better with prospects in that area.” Gordon adds that one of the first things Techreach does with MSP clients is to schedule a strategy session to identify what their ideal client looks like. “It’s much easier to grow a business when you know your ideal client and you can target that market. At IT Hotdesk we identified professional services type businesses as our ideal customers – accountancy, law, quantity surveying, all the professional services – and then when we targeted them we really got results because the customer saw us as a specialist in providing services for their industry. The other vertical in which we had great success was farming and agriculture. You might think they don’t spend a lot on computers, but one of our biggest managed services clients in that area had over 100 seats. It’s all about getting the messaging right.” An MSP like you So, what is Techreach’s target market? What is its avatar? “We are targeting MSPs throughout the UK,” explains Gordon. “They’re probably selling Microsoft products; they’re doing some cybersecurity; maybe some ISO-type business; doing IT support generally for their clients; and they’re ambitious and want to grow. Our customers range from six-man businesses all the way up to one MSP, which we’re talking to but is not yet a customer, with a turnover of £5 million or £6 million.” Techreach already has seven clients and is hoping to get to 20 or 30 by the end of this year (‘If we hit 20, we’ll be happy. If we hit 30, we’ll be delighted,’ says Gordon). However, in doing so, Gordon is determined to pick only clients that are right for the business – another lesson from his IT Hotdesk days. “To start with we had a shotgun approach, we’d have anybody as a customer. That’s OK at the very beginning, because you need the turnover, you need to make some money. But towards the end we didn’t necessarily need that; it was more about finding the right client that we can work with and deliver great results for. That’s our strategy now,” he explains. MARKETING
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy NDUxNDM=