There is an old question that asks, “If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?” A philosophical question that has been pondered for years, it leaves the thinker to ponder the ideas of perception and reality.
As service providers seek to grow and attract new business, they are often confronted with a problem of perception and reality, even if they don’t realize it at the time. Often, those who excel at delivering services believe that their offerings should stand on their own and are thus unskilled at marketing those abilities and truly communicating the value that they have to offer. Ultimately, this leads to opportunities lost to lesser providers. When sales lag or a company’s growth stalls, the first inclination can be to blame the service or its pricing, bringing with it a crisis of confidence about the service itself, while missing the bigger picture entirely.
Instead, the core issue is often that while the products and services do meet the needs of their potential customer base, they are simply not put in front of those who make the IT decisions or in front of the right kind of customers.
Marketing is a key skill to building a service base. While your service may be perfect, if no one is aware of it, there will be no buyers. A provider’s initial growth hinges on what that first message to prospective customers communicates.
Many solution providers start out with a very feature and function based marketing approach, believing that by listing the services they offer, they will then lure in prospects. This initial strategy usually fails, as it doesn’t speak in the customer’s language, missing the focus on the business “why” for the customer and completely overlooking an opportunity to demonstrate how they stack up against the competition.
As most businesses grow, their marketing approaches change. Initially, solution providers who are less mature in their approach tend to build credibility through the use of as many vendor relationships as possible, believing their credibility is established by their vendor brands. Their relationships are not deep, and they have not established a message that speaks to the benefits that they can offer to customers that other providers may be lacking.
In contrast, high performing solution providers will tend to focus on their own brand, removing vendor brands from their marketing and concentrating on their own company’s identity. This increases their ability to differentiate and establish their own value, reflected in their focus on building very deep relationships with a small number of vendors. By taking this approach, they can concentrate on the quality of services being offered and ensuring that their toolbox covers all of their customers’ needs now and in the future.
As such, a marketing plan should be built around some basic principles. First, it should focus on the business needs of the customer rather than the technical merits of the solution provider. Answering the question of “why” for the end customer is the strongest marketing message, and will deliver the best results.
Second, it should focus on the service provider’s brand and the value of their experience, rather than their partners. The close relationship between the provider and the end customer is the highest value portion of the delivery of services, and should take highest priority. Customers are much more interested in their own experience. Having reliable tools that work effectively is critical. The vendor name attached to those tools is not.
Good marketing should then be built in progressively. A single exercise is far less valuable than a well-planned series of marketing messages and campaigns, as awareness is built over time. The campaigns should be a series of mailers, emails, and social media outreach done over time, building on one another to convey relevant messages to the target group. The most successful plans focus on a year and are referred to monthly. They are distributed throughout the organization, in addition to a guidebook for execution, ensuring a consistent rollout.
Finally, the marketing must have a call to action that is relevant and meaningful for the audience. Successful campaigns have a clear action for the target to act on, compelling them to take the appropriate next steps. The next step doesn’t have to be complicated, but it does need to be well defined.
