In today’s highly competitive market, managed service providers need to be proactive in continually improving their sales results. Growth is often the mantra that business owners are driven by.
One effective way to continually grow your sales is through growth marketing. This is a data-driven marketing approach that combines creativity, experimentation, and analytics to drive revenue growth.
In this article, we’ll take a closer look at how IT business owners can use growth marketing to steadily improve their sales results.
What Is Growth Marketing?
Ps come to us asking for help to improve their lead conversions. They get into a rut and aren’t sure how to get out of a stagnant growth rate. Some are just starting out with their IT business and trying to learn the sales and marketing ropes. They realize that word of mouth isn’t going to be enough to increase revenue to the level they’d like.
Growth marketing can help.
How does “growth” marketing differ from just regular marketing? It’s in the strategy and approaches you use.
In a traditional content marketing strategy, business owners often set-it-and-forget-it. Meaning, they add a new blog post to their website and maybe send out a social media post about it, then they consider the heavy lifting of marketing done. They wait for it to bear fruit and move on to the next thing.
Growth marketing is about going beyond that stage. It relies heavily on analytics and A/B testing as well as generating revenue throughout the prospect journey and the customer lifecycle.
This marketing approach also drills down into the customer’s journey and personalizes that journey wherever possible to drive better results.
49% of people have made an impulse purchase based on a highly personalized experience.
Some of the core components included in a growth marketing strategy are:
- Run A/B experiments that inform marketing decisions
- Map the customer journey to identify growth opportunities across the sales funnel
- Automate and personalize the customer experience in email campaigns, etc.
- Identify growth areas in the post-sale customer nurturing stage
In a nutshell, growth marketing is aimed at growing revenue through a hyper-focus on the numbers and details and adjusting to what’s working vs what’s not.
Simple Growth Marketing Strategy You Can Use
Content marketing is all about the basics. You engage prospects and customers with meaningful and helpful content. But what happens after you put out the content? Do you just sit back to wait and see?
Growth is proactive. It’s about looking at things like which blog content gets the most visits and the most conversions, testing one email against another to see which one works best, and continuing focused engagement after the initial sale.
Here are some steps you can use to take your marketing to another level and improve your revenue growth.
Step 1: Define Your Goals & Target Audiences
The first step in using growth marketing to improve your MSP sales results is to define your goals and target audience. This involves setting specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART) goals and identifying the ideal customer for your services.
Some examples of SMART goals for MSPs include:
- Increasing the number of leads generated
- Improving the conversion rate of leads into customers
- Increasing the average deal size
To define your target audience, you’ll need to create buyer personas that capture the characteristics and behaviors of your ideal customers.
Why take the time to define goals and audiences? Because these will be the metrics you’re tracking when analyzing what’s working and what’s not. You can also improve results when identifying the things that specific audiences react to.
For example, some customers may react more when you provide content related to improving compliance efforts. Others may be attracted to digital optimization messages. Knowing what triggers leads and conversions for each audience helps you drill down into those elements to increase your numbers.
Step 2: Develop a Data-driven Marketing Strategy
Once you have defined your goals and target audience, the next step is to develop a data-driven marketing strategy. This involves identifying the marketing channels that are most effective for reaching your target audiences and using data to optimize your marketing campaigns.
Some effective marketing channels for MSPs include:
- Search engine optimization (SEO)
- Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising
- Social media marketing
- Email marketing
By analyzing data from these channels, you can determine which marketing campaigns are generating the most leads and conversions and adjust your strategy accordingly.
Step 3: Experiment and Repeat
One of the key principles of growth marketing is experimentation. This involves testing different marketing strategies and tactics to identify what works best for your business goals. By experimenting and iterating, you can continually improve your sales results and stay ahead of the competition.
Some examples of experiments that MSPs can conduct include:
- A/B testing different landing pages
- Testing different email subject lines
- Experimenting with different ad copy in PPC campaigns
- Testing email personalization vs non-personalized
By testing and measuring the results of these experiments, you can identify the most effective marketing strategies and optimize your campaigns for maximum ROI.
If you’re using a tool like Google Ads (for PPC) or MailChimp for your email newsletter, you can use the features they have available to do A/B testing. The interfaces will allow you to send a percentage of your campaign with version “A” vs version “B” and you can see how numbers, like click-through-rate, differ.
Once you get a winner, test that against another contender. This helps you continually optimize the most effective marketing for the target audience.
Step 4: Use Analytics to Measure Performance
To effectively use growth marketing to improve your MSP’s sales results, you need to use analytics to measure performance. This involves tracking key performance indicators (KPIs) such as the number of leads generated, conversion rates, and average deal size.
Where do you get that data to analyze?
There are a lot of different analytics tools out there that you can use. If you want to start for free, set up a Google Analytics account and conversion tracking. A simple one to add is a contact form conversion that triggers a conversion goal. Google Analytics can then tell you the keywords or other referral methods that triggered that lead conversion.
Learn more: “8 of the Best Ways to Use Google Analytics for Your Tech Business Website”
By monitoring these KPIs, you can identify trends and patterns in your marketing performance and adjust your strategy accordingly. For example, if you notice that your conversion rates are low, you may need to adjust your messaging or offer to better resonate with your target audience.
Step 5: Generate Leads Throughout the Customer Lifecycle
Once someone converts from a lead to a sale, the sales cycle isn’t finished. While you aren’t doing any type of hard sell to existing customers, there are often other ways that you can help them, and thus generate more revenue.
One way is by offering them another service or product that they need. For example, a client may sign up for your managed IT services, and then a year or two later after reading your blog post about the benefits of VoIP, contact you to sign up for business phone service.
This is where an email newsletter is your best friend. It continues your engagement with current customers, letting them know in a helpful way about other services your IT business provides.
Another way to generate revenue from existing customers is through a reviews management process. Their reviews can easily be the thing that attracts more business. On the flip side, if you don’t have any reviews, leads might wonder why and choose a competitor instead.
72% of customers will share a positive experience with at least six people. So, give them a great experience and then ask them politely to review the service they’ve received.
Step 6: Focus on Customer Retention
Finally, it’s important to remember that growth marketing isn’t just about acquiring new customers – it’s also about retaining existing ones. By focusing on customer retention, you can generate repeat business and increase the lifetime value of your customers.
A 5% increase in customer retention rate results in a nearly 30% increase in revenue.
Some effective strategies for customer retention include:
- Providing exceptional customer service
- Offering loyalty programs and discounts
- Regularly engaging with customers through email marketing and social media
- Touching base with customers in-person or by phone quarterly
By keeping your existing customers happy, you can generate more revenue and improve your overall sales results.
Use Growth Marketing to Continually Improve Sales
You can get out of a rut and improve your revenue growth by following a growth marketing strategy. By taking a proactive approach to sales and marketing, MSPs can stay ahead of the competition and achieve long-term success.
Need more help with marketing? Check out Tech Marketing Engine for à la carte marketing solutions to supercharge your business.
Do you have any questions or feedback about growth marketing? Share your thoughts in the comments!
One engagement opportunity that many IT business owners miss is the email welcome sequence. This is a series of emails that go out automatically right after someone has signed up for a newsletter or downloaded a lead magnet.
