With the demand for different IT services being on the rise, the number of such businesses keeps growing. The only way to rise above the competition is to take the right approach to marketing.
Whether you are an IT service startup or a company with experience, you are probably looking for the best marketing practices to stay on top of your game.
The fierceness of the competition in this niche is hard to overlook. That’s why your marketing team should be working as hard as possible to make your company visible.
In this article, we’ve collected the best practices of IT services marketing for companies of all sizes. They are an excellent place to start.
1. Find your uniqueness or create one
If your company looks, feels, moves, and works just like another hundred IT service companies in the area, you have a problem. Your company must be unique. Even if the uniqueness is not too drastic, it should exist. Otherwise, clients won’t be able to tell you apart from the competitors.
If you can’t find a unique feature of your company, come up with one. There isn’t anything wrong with creating an artificial uniqueness, as long as it works.
The best way is to study the market and figure out what the demand is the highest. Once you know what your clients need the most, work around the service to make it appear unique.
After you identify or create a unique feature, describe it with a short sentence. It will become your key advertising message.
2. Use public relations
Each IT service company needs to take care of branding. In order to get your company name out there, you can write magazine articles, arrange conferences, send out news releases about events, and much more.
Whatever you can do to help people learn about you, works. Perhaps, at first, you would need to offer freebies to lure new clients in. You can arrange free workshops, offer free articles, give free consultations online.
Find out what your clients need the most and give it to them using PR. You could hire a PR company to take care of this branding effort for you. However, it may be costly.
PR helps with branding and establishing personas. It can also help you get new leads. However, it’s somewhat hard to measure how well PR works. So it should always be part of another marketing strategy, not the strategy itself.
3. Take advantage of email marketing
Email marketing is one of the most efficient marketing strategies available today. It has the highest ROI. According to Campaign Monitor for every $1 you spend on this strategy, you get $44.
By arranging your email marketing campaign correctly, you can reap the benefits almost immediately. All you have to do is build a top-notch email list and come up with high-quality content.
The best part about email marketing is that it can be arranged by using numerous automated features. You can send reminders, welcome emails, abandoned cart emails, and much more without any manual work. By investing in the right email marketing software, you can reduce the effort made by your team while improving your results.
One of the most important parts of email marketing is sending emails at the right time. By overwhelming potential clients with messages, you may end up sending your efforts to the spam folder.
If you want to make sure your marketing campaign brings the most desired results, always study your audience to learn when the best time for sending emails is and how often you should be doing it.
4. Write blogs
The power of blogs in the IT services niche can’t be underestimated. They offer a way to conquer a problem, the solution to which potential clients search for online. Today, before people opt for professional assistance, they try to deal with the problem on their own. The Internet is their “free” assistant.
Take advantage of this need for information and throw your extensive expertise into the mix to come up with high-quality blogs. You can use the articles you write for your SEO and social media marketing efforts. Use them for guest posts to improve your backlinking strategy.
Writing a blog about managed IT can help you create a community and attract a large target audience. High-quality information and content are the keys to becoming visible online. The more time and effort you put into your blogs, the more likely they are to bring you profit.
The best part about blogs is that they sell while educating. According to HubSpot, B2B marketers who employ blogs get 67% more leads than those who don’t.
The toughest part about writing blogs is finding original and highly interesting content regularly. You may need to hire team members, who focus on extensive research and finding topics for new blog posts.
5. Invest in SEO
If you aren’t visible online, you don’t exist. No matter how local the business is, even if it’s a neighborhood bakery, which has been around since the last century, it needs an online presence. For IT service companies, an online presence is a must-have without which it can’t succeed, even in the era of coronavirus.
How can you make sure your online presence works for you? Invest in SEO. The right approach to tech SEO doesn’t just improve your search engine rankings, it helps you establish authority and credibility as well as improve brand recognition.
In the 21st century, without SEO, your company can’t get ahead of the competition.
An SEO strategy involves optimizing your online presence, working with your website, helping you become visible on social media, and much more. From keyword searches to content polishing, SEO can help your marketing efforts tremendously.
Ideally, you should hire an SEO expert as soon as you create your company. By using these techniques at the initial stages of online presence, you can achieve success much faster than by taking advantage of them later in the company’s lifecycle.
6. Discover programmatic advertising
Putting your brand name in front of potential customers with online ads is an excellent way to promote your business. One of the simplest ways to take advantage of such ads is to use programmatic advertising. It’s an excellent alternative to PPC (Pay-Per-Click) ads because it takes a big load off your employees’ shoulders while costing less.
Essentially, such advertising involves finding a platform, sharing parameters of your potential clients, and paying money. By using AI, the platform finds a website, which is most likely to be visited by your potential clients, and bids for the ad space on it. If your bid wins, your ad appears right where it should. All of the above is done without your assistance.
Your ads can appear according to the clients’ requests and searches as well as on websites related to your niche.
Automated advertising, just like automated email marketing tools, can save you a substantial amount of money while attracting numerous clients.
PPC marketing should also be considered but only by companies that have the budget. To get started with Google Adword Retargeting, you should be ready to pay around $2,000 per month.
7. Encourage word-of-the-mouth marketing
Word-of-the-mouth (WOM) marketing is still one of the most powerful advertising techniques in the world. The majority of people are likely to opt for the service recommended by a friend or a family member rather than for something, they saw on TV or in their mailboxes.
Any IT service company should invest money and effort in developing a WOM marketing strategy. It should start by encouraging existing clients to share their experiences with others.
In the digital era, the first thing people and business owners start doing when choosing a company is look for reviews online. Make sure they find them.
Real reviews are golden. Encourage your clients to leave them everywhere they possibly can. Use incentives such as freebies and referral discounts to ensure that you get those valuable reviews.
Don’t forget that clients can only leave reviews if you maintain a presence. Make sure you have a place for reviews on your website. Register on such websites as Yelp, Google Places, Yellowpages, Bing Local, and the like.
8. Use analytics
No matter how well your marketing campaign seems to be going, you should be analyzing it on a regular basis. Numerous tools, such as Google Analytics, exist for such an analysis to help you adjust the campaign and avoid losing money in the process.
Even if you’ve just started the promotional efforts, begin the analysis. It can help you avoid costly mistakes.
Final thoughts
IT service companies exist in the world of fierce competition. To grow, develop, and make money in the process, they need to take the right approach to marketing. By taking advantage of the above practices, you can start making the first steps toward becoming one of the top IT service companies in your area.
It’s worth noting that proper IT service marketing efforts don’t require formidable monetary investments. As long as the marketing team has the right tools at hand, it can achieve tremendous results.