Three Digital Marketing Musts To Transform Your MSP Into An Online Sales And Referral Machine Right Now

Are you doing everything you can to drive traffic to your webpages? Do you have a strategy to market to your website visitors who leave without taking any action?

If you can’t answer both questions with a resounding “YES,” you’ll want to continue reading.  Because today, I’m going to show you how to turn your website visitors into appointments and sales on autopilot. You’ll also learn about an economical way to attract your ideal leads to your website, and I’ll show you the single best way to get free traffic immediately.

The strategies I’m going to share with you today have been rolled out over the past three months to Technology Marketing Toolkit members. The results have been phenomenal. It has exploded their traffic, and most importantly, it has substantially increased their revenue. It’s not an exaggeration to say that if you implement these three strategies, they could have a major impact on your business fortunes.

In the campaigns, (which I go into more detail below), a $17.28 investment turned into a return of $3,988 in revenue, it only cost $3 to follow up with 465 people, and website traffic increased by over 33%!

These techniques will help you find qualified leads at an extremely affordable cost, plus you’ll be able to target your ideal prospects with incredible accuracy. Unlike cold calling over the phone, there’s no gatekeeper to get past, allowing you to contact decision-makers directly. 

If you’re thinking to yourself, “Sounds great, but my prospects aren’t on social media,” here are a few statistics to keep in mind… 

  • 3.5 billion people are on social media every day (about 45% of the world’s population).
  • 68% of U.S. adults are on Facebook.
  • The average amount of time people spend on social media is three hours per day.
  • LinkedIn has over 500 million users in total and 250 million active monthly users.
  • 83% of B2B marketers are using social media to advertise and ranked it second in success just behind search engine marketing (SEM).

What about SEM? It works, but it’s also more expensive and it can be extremely time consuming. Plus, it requires a high level of expertise. These three strategies can be done with minimal cost and the results are trackable so you can see exactly what your Return on Investment (ROI) is. Here are the three strategies…

  1. Retargeting
    Every smart company uses retargeting because the ROI is so good.  If you go online, you’ve been retargeted with advertisements. Retargeting is a form of online targeting advertising which reminds website visitors about the products or services they looked at after they leave without buying. Suddenly you see ads for the same product or service you just looked at everywhere.  Now, while websites are an effective marketing tool, the average global eCommerce website conversion rate is only 4.31% (the average conversion rate of U.S. sites is 2.63%). This means that about 96 of every 100 people who visit your website leave without taking any action. Retargeting is a way to capitalize on those 96 lost opportunities. When someone lands on your website, a little snippet of code places what’s known as a cookie on their computer. This cookie allows you to “follow them around” for up to six months. What this means is that when they go onto Facebook, they’ll see an ad from you encouraging them to click back to your site. This has the potential to vault you ahead of your competition and can change your entire business fortunes over time. Best of all, it can be done for only a couple of dollars per day. (Note: You can’t retarget from someone else’s website. Only your own.)

    The following is an example of a retargeting campaign experienced firsthand. 4600 people visited our website. As a result of retargeting, an ad was shown to these visitors 26,709 times. The total cost for 26,709 views was $172.30. That translates into 155 views for every dollar spent. So, for three dollars a day, you can follow up with 465 people. There is no other media available that will give you that type of bang for your dollar!

    You can also use retargeting with LinkedIn. If someone visits your website without taking action, you can set it up so they are contacted via LinkedIn InMail. Because prospects are familiar with you, they will be more receptive to your message. We ran a LinkedIn retargeting campaign for the URL www.RobinsBigSeminar.com.  When someone left without taking action, they received a message from Robin Robins saying “Howdy FIRST NAME, looks like you and your posse were headed out of town in a hurry and forgot to reserve your spot for the IT Sales and Marketing Rodeo…” The message goes on to invite them to reserve their spot by revisiting www.RobinsBigSeminar.com.  65 people received the LinkedIn InMail; 49 people opened it; 4 people purchased a $997 ticket for total revenue from this one campaign of $3,988. The total cost of the campaign was $17.28 (about 25 cents a click) which was 230X the investment.

  2. Custom Audiences
    Online marketing has advanced to the point where you can be more precise with your target audience. You no longer have to market to an entire segment of people just to find the one percent (or whatever percentage it may be) who are the right fit for your product. While retargeting is for people who have visited your website, Custom Audiences is for prospects who haven’t visited your website. A good way to characterize Custom Audiences is instead of placing a billboard on a highway, you put a sign on the front lawn of your best prospects’ houses. Here’s how it works. You put together a list of your ideal prospects. Then you upload it to either LinkedIn, Facebook, or both, depending upon where your best prospects reside. (In our experience, this produces superior results using LinkedIn.) Then what LinkedIn and Facebook do is only send your ads to the people on the list you submitted. The benefit to you, besides more leads, is you spend a fraction of what you would if you were doing shotgun marketing.

    The Sponsored Ad in a campaign we ran had the subject line “Could you use some marketing help right now?” with the message inviting them to visit www.RecessionProofYourITBusiness.com.” You could also ask them to download a free report or book an appointment with you. A recent campaign received 830 for an average cost per click of 57 cents. The total spend was $475.87. It resulted in 33 conversions (permission to keep on marketing to them) with an average cost per lead of $14.42!

    Another way you can get people’s attention using LinkedIn is through conversation ads. It’s a short script that asks a question. An example is “Hi FIRST NAME, are you interested in getting my free guide for MSPs, where I reveal how to get leads and clients spending money on IT services right now?” We gave the reader two buttons to click on “Yes, I’m Interested” and “Show Me More.” When they click, you send them another email with a brief note and options to download a free report or to find out more information. With a campaign we ran recently, 1,378 people received the email; 665 opened it and 122 clicked on one of the buttons. Total conversions were 13. The total spend was $317.74 or $24.44 per lead. While the cost per lead was higher than the first example, this was a new campaign, and we hadn’t had the time to test it to try to increase the conversion rate. Even still, we will pay $24.44 for a good lead all day long.

  3. Google My Business
    There are three types of free search engine generated traffic: 1) Direct – People who find your business profile searching for your business name or address; 2) Discovery – People who find your business profile searching for a category, product, or service; 3) Branded – Customers who find your listing searching for a brand related to your business. This is a way to increase your “Discovery traffic.” In as little as four to six weeks you can make an enormous difference to the number of people who find you online. Using “Google My Business” is really an easy decision. It’s something you should set up ASAP. It’s free, it takes minimal time, and it produces results. To get started, simply type “How do I get on Google My Business” into Google and then follow the steps. Here are some statistics from a recent campaign we did for a client: Search views were up 77%; website visits were up 20%. The requests for directions and phone calls were also up. We have found that the average MSP gets just over 300 visits a month. Using Google My Business, traffic was increased by 126 visitors or an increase of 33% each month! These results were achieved by only posting once each week.

If you implement these three strategies, you’ll quickly start noticing an increase in the number of qualified prospects you attract which will quickly result in more sales and profit for you.

Do you want more leads, more clients, more profits now but don’t know where to start? Click here and watch a quick video about the three biggest problems IT Service Businesses face and how to solve them.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
MSP Success Magazine is a print and digital publication dedicated to helping the CEOs and owners of managed IT services businesses build strong, profitable, growth-oriented businesses. Written and published by Robin Robins, founder of Technology Marketing Toolkit, this magazine is uniquely focused on the topics of marketing, client-acquisition, sales, profitability, leadership and personal development.

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