Marketing 101 for MSPs: Websites

WHITE PAPER OCTOBER 2014 Marketing 101 for MSPs: Websites Enhancing Your Website to Boost Leads

2 WHITE PAPER: MARKETING 101 FOR MSPS: WEBSITES ca.com Table of Contents Introduction 3 Get Visitors 4 Engage Visitors 6 Collect Leads 7 Cultivate Leads 8 Conclusion 9 About This Document: Developed by the CA Service Provider Center of Excellence 9

3 WHITE PAPER: MARKETING 101 FOR MSPS: WEBSITES ca.com Executive Summary In the busy days of the MSP, enhancing the company website is too often seen as a huge initiative with negligible return, and so relegated to the nice to have, also known as the will never happen, section of the to do list. This paper outlines some practical, near-term steps MSPs can take to improve their website, and boost its potential for generating leads and sales. Introduction If your challenge right now is that you have so many prospects calling and emailing that your sales team can t keep up with the volume, you can safely close this paper now. However, if you re looking for ways to grow your funnel and your business economically, read on. The reality is that there is a way for your business to go from being the best kept secret to the fastest growing shop in your market. How? Focus on your website. A quick audit of MSP websites reveals that there s a tremendous opportunity. Many MSPs don t apply some of the tactics outlined below, so, if you do, you can start to use the Web to your competitive advantage. By taking some proven steps to enhance your website, your business can get onto more short lists of clients actively looking for IT outsourcing, win more deals, and boost its recurring revenues. Just to be clear, when I m talking about building or refining your website, I m not talking about six-digit investments, six-month rollouts, endless navel-gazing branding meetings, or armies of consultants. Some tactics can literally take minutes. Others may require some outside help or concerted effort, but the investment can be properly scoped to make sure you don t go broke trying to make money. How can MSPs score more customers through their website? Following are the four key requirements: Your website needs to get visitors. When prospects are searching for service providers, your website needs to show up, so they get to your site and find out about your business. Your website needs to engage. Your website needs to be visually appealing, credible, and communicate your value, so visitors stay, learn, and act. Your website needs to deliver leads. Your website needs to compel prospects to leave their contact information, so your team can engage, answer questions, provide information, and, most importantly, start selling. Your website and infrastructure need to support lead cultivation. MSPs need the processes, technologies, and staff to make sure the leads that come in don t fall through the cracks. In the sections that follow, we ll offer some practical pointers for getting your website up to spec across these four areas.

4 WHITE PAPER: MARKETING 101 FOR MSPS: WEBSITES ca.com Figure A. Search engine results feature organic and sponsored listings Get Visitors Start by thinking about that ideal prospect of yours. If he rolled out of bed today convinced he needed to find a new service provider, where would he start? While most of us first go to friends and colleagues to get referrals (which is a topic for another paper), the next step for just about anybody is to start with a search online. To be found when the prospect starts their search, there are two key steps: First, you need to know what term they d use to search for the type of services you provide. Second, you need to make sure your site shows up in those search results. The second step can be accomplished in two ways: organic listings and sponsored listings. Following are some tips and considerations for each of these routes. Organic Search Showing up in organic search listings is free, which is the good news. How businesses can get their site pages to show up in specific organic search results is the subject of scores of books and millions of articles, but here s the net for MSPs. Search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo! use what are known as spiders to canvas the Web, and effectively build an index of the pages available. Based on these indexes, the attributes and content of the indexed pages, the sites linking to a given site, and a host of other factors, the search engines determine which pages are most relevant to present when a user does a search. Try doing some sample searches on terms that our imagined prospect would use. Does your business appear in the search results? If so, where do you rank? If not, look at the sites that show up on the top, visit them and compare them to yours. Whose site would you shop if you were in your client s shoes? If your site isn t where it needs to be, following are a few keys to start getting it there.

5 WHITE PAPER: MARKETING 101 FOR MSPS: WEBSITES ca.com Targeting the Right Keywords A search in Google for IT outsourcing returns 4,130,000 pages. If you plug IT outsourcing into your site text and page attributes, will your site show up at the top position by this time next week? No chance. The key here is focus. Depending on the type of service they re looking to outsource, your prospects may want to search for service providers nearby, so they may narrow their search down by searching on IT outsourcing Chicago. Further, they would most likely search for a more specific service they need help with. They may use terms like outsource server administration, or even more specifically, outsource windows server administration. The more specific the term, the more targeted the traffic will apt to be, and the more likely an MSP will be able to get their pages to show up in the results. Optimizing Your Site Here are a few key considerations in doing search engine optimization (SEO) to boost your site s organic ranking: Page headers. The search engines tend to give more weight to keywords that appear in headlines, so be sure the terms that matter to your business show up in page headers and subheads. Page content. Use keywords as much as possible, but don t sacrifice readability. Page attributes. Make sure page titles, descriptions, and keywords are in line with your SEO objectives. The Bottom Line Adding relevant keywords to a page s contents and attributes can literally take a few minutes. Will this get your site into the top ten? Maybe not, but it may make the difference between whether you show up before or after your chief competitor. If so, those few minutes could yield some big dividends. Links. Wherever possible, use important keywords in links, so instead of having a link say, click here, have the link read, Learn more about how to outsource Windows server administration. Paid Ads While models vary, businesses that do paid advertising on search engines typically advertise on a pay-perclick (PPC) basis, so they only pay when a searcher clicks on an ad and goes to their site. Compared to the traditional models of advertising, where advertisers pay based on impressions (and readers who may or may not be paying any attention to the ad in question), PPC enables businesses to pay for results rather than amorphous, difficult-to-quantify gauges like awareness or mind share. Compared to optimizing your site to show up in organic search listings, paid ads offer some significant benefits. Namely, advertisers have control over the ads that appear, the keywords that ads get displayed for, the timing of the ad presentation, and more. Further search engines offer capabilities for targeting specific geographies, which can be a huge benefit to regional service providers. Perhaps most importantly, once an MSP decides to embark on a PPC program, getting ads to start appearing can literally happen in minutes where SEO efforts can take weeks or even months to start yielding results. The Bottom Line MSPs shouldn t view SEO and paid advertising as either/or propositions, but rather complementary in nature. They represent two ways to meet the critical end goal: getting in front of the right prospects at the right time.

6 WHITE PAPER: MARKETING 101 FOR MSPS: WEBSITES ca.com The tradeoff with PPC is cost, however. Depending on the term, advertisers can pay anywhere from pennies to $20 or even $30 per click for some highly competitive search terms. That s why, as with SEO, targeted, well-defined keywords are a critical way to ensure marketing dollars are spent wisely. Further, it s best to start small, with a fixed daily budget and a small set of keywords, to test the waters, measure effectiveness, and optimize and expand from there. When executing a PPC campaign, it s important to avoid another mistake I ve often seen repeated: Linking PPC ads to home pages or other pages that have no clear call to action, or even worse, with content that bears no relation to the search term entered. Ideally, ads should be linked to highly targeted landing pages, that is, landing pages that relate directly to the keyword entered, including relevant contents and calls to action. For example, if you bid on the search term, outsourcing windows server monitoring, the landing page should prominently feature those concepts, and the call to action would ideally be a closely related resource, such as a white paper entitled Five Steps to Successful Outsourcing of Server Monitoring. It s also important to note that PPC can be a great first step to an organization s SEO efforts. Because of its immediacy, MSPs can roll out a PPC program and quickly start to identify not only which terms receive a lot of traffic, but, if effective lead generation mechanisms are in place (see below), actually see what types of searchers are following up. Does one term generate a lot of traffic from students working on term papers, while another yields a high percentage of individuals that match your business sweet spot? These are the kinds of findings you can get pretty quickly from PPC, and this kind of insight is invaluable in guiding SEO and PPC efforts. Engage Visitors Will a well-designed site guarantee you more business? Not necessarily. Here s another way to look it though: When prospects are in the early research stages, they need to quickly come up with a short list. This means they need to rule out a lot of MSPs quickly. An old, unclear, unappealing site will give prospects plenty of excuses to remove you from consideration. Making your site the best it can be helps boost your chances of making prospects short lists. Following are a few essential characteristics of an effective website: Current. Take an objective look at your site and those of others in your market, and think of the sites as storefronts. Does the store appear to be fresh, inviting, and make it clear what s offered inside? Or, is the site dark, dusty, like it hasn t been visited, or even opened in years. It s not uncommon to see MSP sites that show the online equivalent of dust and disrepair: blogs that haven t been posted to in months, only ancient press releases featured on the home page, etc. The Bottom Line All a prospect may know about your business is what they see on your site. Poor design, typos, out of date content, and a host of other issues, both large and small, can be all it takes to raise doubts in the prospects mind and have your business excluded from consideration. Appealing. Does the site look professional, clean, and inviting? The objective here isn t to win design awards, but to provide a credible, compelling introduction to your company. Especially on the home page, stay away from dense, text-laden pages and instead provide open space, concise, easy-to-scan copy, and

7 WHITE PAPER: MARKETING 101 FOR MSPS: WEBSITES ca.com draw readers deep into the site and into PDFs when more detailed information is needed. Does your stodgy, old-looking site run directly counter to the innovative technologies and services you deliver? By delivering a poor experience online, are you contradicting your claims of customer dedication and service? Unique. Both through design, as well as through photos, for example of staff or facilities, try to convey what makes your business unique and memorable. Compelling. Look to come up with attention-getting copy that conveys your business unique value. Credible. Don t use empty hype but believable copy, and back up claims with proof points. Speak to your team s experience. Point to demonstrable results, and wherever possible let your customers sing your praises for you. Leverage quotes, customer testimonials, logos any way to feature customer success and traction can be a key asset on your site. Any MSP can say they offer the best customer service, endeavor to capture the specifics of how your brand of service helped a customer. Awards, certifications, customers, numbers all these specifics can help back up your unique value. Clear. Don t make it difficult for viewers. Avoid jargon and vague language. Make it absolutely clear, so it s simple for site visitors to understand exactly what services you offer, and the value they provide. Targeted. Focus on keywords that map to your core services, and write with an eye toward the titles and the organizations that your business can serve effectively. If your business focuses on a particular market, technology, or industry, make that focus clear. While visitors that don t match that focus may leave, this is vital to getting the prospects that are a good fit to understand your value. Also, here are a few additional objectives your site should achieve: Facilitate communication. Leverage blogs, RSS feeds, social networks, podcasts, and more to make it easy for prospects to connect and stay in touch with your team members. Offer free advice. Both in social channels and on the site, deliver stories, guidance, and tips that your prospects and customer base would find useful. These pieces of information can ultimately provide for compelling calls to action, and they also help establish your organization s expertise. Provide clear calls to action. What do you want visitors to do? Sign up for a webcast? Call for a consultation? Download a white paper? Either way, make sure those calls to action are given clearly and prominently. Collect Leads So now that your website is humming with activity, and is providing a clear, compelling value proposition, you re done right? Not quite. Turning this buzz into dollars takes sales, and sales takes leads. Whether a prospect comes through a pay-per-click ad, organic search, word of mouth, or any other vehicle, the site they come to needs to have compelling calls to action, and those calls to action need to require the submission of contact details. The Bottom Line The best way to ensure your investments in your website yield dividends is to maximize the rate at which browsers get converted to prospects. This doesn t happen online without registration forms.

8 WHITE PAPER: MARKETING 101 FOR MSPS: WEBSITES ca.com To do so, prospects will need to feel they re getting something of value. Build an objective white paper on a relevant topic that will help them in their work. Deliver webcasts that assemble industry experts to share their wisdom and insights. Offer an ROI calculator for IT outsourcing. Offer free assessments that will help prospects determine what their needs are. Offer a free monthly newsletter that offers ongoing guidance. Then, convey the value these resources will deliver, along with a brief registration form that s required to access the resource. Don t ask for too much info in your lead form, otherwise you ll scare off potential prospects. Understand that your goal is to connect sales reps with prospects, so that reps can get the additional information they need to qualify opportunities, and prospects can get their questions answered. Cultivate Leads Last, but certainly not least, is the area of lead cultivation. In my experience, it s been bewildering to see how common it is that, after investing a lot of time and effort to bring leads in, many of those leads come in and promptly fall through the cracks, and are left to languish. To make sure their marketing investments really pay off, businesses need to ensure they re equipped to maximize the value of every lead that comes in. To do so, just about every MSP should have some sort of sales force automation (SFA) or customer relationship management (CRM) solution in place. Without such a solution, achieving the following objectives is far more time consuming and challenging to get right. Following are a few of the most critical requirements: The Bottom Line Very real dollars go into generating leads. Make sure the people, processes, and technologies are in place to maximize the value of every lead that comes in. First, when leads submit their contact details in a Web form, that information should be automatically fed into a SFA system so the information is reliably captured in the marketing database. Second, rules should be in effect so that as leads come in, they are automatically assigned to the appropriate sales rep, who is immediately notified of the new lead. Third, depending on the nature of the initial interaction, reps should be able to set reminders to follow back up with leads that may be early in the process. Fourth, as your organization builds a contact database, you should fully leverage its value by instituting ongoing drip campaigns. This can include newsletters, invitations to regularly scheduled webcasts or events, or a host of other ways to get your organization to stay top of mind with prospects. Keeping in front of contacts with market insights is a great way to build trust and credibility among a prospect pool, so, even if a decision to bring on a new service provider isn t going to happen for several months, you re ensuring your business will be on the short list when they do kick off evaluations. Note, when emailing, it is essential to provide recipients with a way to opt out and to have an automated, reliable way to track and honor those requests.

9 WHITE PAPER: MARKETING 101 FOR MSPS: WEBSITES ca.com Fifth, the executive team should be able to track your reps attention to leads, outlining sales activity against leads and their current status. For example, it should be easy for a manager to get visibility into leads that haven t been contacted within seven days of lead submission. Aggregate reports should also be available that detail the number of leads by day, by geography, and so on, and, most importantly, that enable you to see the number of sales opportunities and total closed and pipeline revenue. Finally, each lead should be associated with a specific source. Did the lead sign up for a white paper featured on the home page? If so, which one. Did they respond to a PPC ad? If so, what keyword did they search on? Tracking these lead source characteristics is vital in terms of guiding ongoing optimization of your website and fine tuning your marketing investments. Conclusion By taking the time and resources to focus on the website, MSPs have very little to lose, and very much to gain. By driving traffic to a compelling, credible website, and using the site as a means to generate and cultivate leads, MSPs can significantly increase their lead flow, funnel, and recurring revenues. About This Document: Developed by the CA Service Provider Center of Excellence This document has been written by the CA Service Provider Center of Excellence team and is intended to provide our service provider partners with the guidance they need to address some of their most pressing challenges. Our team has rich expertise in service provider businesses, strategic consulting, technical deployments, sales and marketing. Our documents are informed by the Center of Excellence team s extensive experience over the past ten years in helping build successful service provider businesses and by interviews with some of our most successful service provider partners. This document is provided for informational purposes only and on an as-is basis. The guidance and results described herein are based on the unique experiences of our staff and partners, and may not be applicable to all organizations. For more information, visit the service provider page at ca.com.

10 WHITE PAPER: MARKETING 101 FOR MSPS: WEBSITES Connect with CA Technologies at ca.com CA Technologies (NASDAQ: CA) creates software that fuels transformation for companies and enables them to seize the opportunities of the application economy. Software is at the heart of every business, in every industry. From planning to development to management and security, CA is working with companies worldwide to change the way we live, transact and communicate across mobile, private and public cloud, distributed and mainframe environments. Learn more at ca.com. Copyright 2014 CA. All rights reserved. This document is for your informational purposes only, and does not form any type of warranty. 1014