Inbound Marketing: The Right Fit for Growing IT Services Firms

Inbound marketing is a repeatable, battle-tested approach to filling a company’s marketing pipeline with leads, and building brand reputation and visibility that pays long-term dividends.

What’s better, running inbound marketing campaigns is often significantly cheaper than traditional outbound campaigns, which makes them one of the most cost-effective and impactful ways to begin your MSP marketing journey.

Let’s take a deeper look.

Inbound marketing has three central components. To build a successful inbound lead generation machine, then you’re going to want to incorporate each of these elements into your marketing strategy.

Content Marketing

Understanding where each of your buyer personas needs to thrive, you can create high-value, insightful content will get them to engage with your brand and see your company as a trusted authority all topics related to information technology.  

Social Media Marketing

Social media accounts are free. Reflect on that for a minute, how many things with a tremendous amount of commercial value are free? According to growth experts from Gary Vee to Neil Patel, social media deserves serious attention because it’s simply the cheapest and most convenient way to connected with your prospects.

Search Engine Optimization

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the art and science of getting your website and content found by people using search engines like Google and Bing. When done properly, SEO can be a great way to drive consistent attention and engagement, for a much lower price than paid advertising.  

Does Digital Advertising Count as Inbound Marketing?

While technically a separate branch of marketing, digital advertising can play an important role in accelerating the top of your inbound marketing funnel.

This is especially true in IT companies in these groups:

Competitive SEO Markets

If you’re trying to claw your way to the top of the search engine results page in NYC or Los Angeles, then you may be better served by dialing in some focused offerings, compelling landing page optimizations, and a strategic advertising campaign to drive traffic.

The first result in Google gets approximately 27.6% of all clicks.

Midmarket Firms

Digital advertising is getting more expensive, so if you’re not able to throw several thousands of dollars a month into Google or LinkedIn ads to lay the foundation for optimization, then you’re probably not going to see a positive ROI, especially if you don’t have an advertising consultant who understands your market.

79% of marketers state that PPC ads are vital to their company’s success.

Generally, we recommend growing technology service providers work to dial in their marketing fundamentals, including website, landing pages, and social media presence, then accelerate those efforts with paid advertising only if necessary. 

How is Inbound Marketing Different from Outbound Marketing?

Outbound email campaigns and cold calling and traditional advertising are referred to as "outbound marketing" because marketers push their messages out to an audience, in the hopes that it resonates with a statistically significant portion of that group.

In the IT world, a Robin Robins direct mail campaign is a typical outbound marketing campaign. Because outbound marketing has such traction in the IT industry, look at how the two approaches compare.

High upfront cost and complexity

Doing outbound sales correctly takes a great deal of time and effort. You’ll need to either hire inside salespeople to make calls or vet and hire an outsourced team, train the salespeople, subscribe to ZoomInfo to get lead information, buy a tricked-out CRM solution, and more.

Increasing Resistance

We get hit with around 2,000 marketing message a day. It’s no surprise that people are looking for ways to either tune them or or prevent seeing them altogether. More than 226 million Americans have registered for the FTC's Do Not Call Registry to avoid cold calls. People simply don’t like being interrupted in their daily work by marketers.

Highly Targeted

With outbound campaigns, it’s easier to run highly targeted marketing campaigns that target a particular industry vertical or buyer persona. Inbound marketing, by contrast, is more diffuse. Sure, you can create content for a specific audience, but outside of paid advertising, there’s few ways you can make sure it gets in front of them.

Faster Results

When you make 1000 calls or send out 1000 pieces of direct mail, then you’ll know very quickly whether your campaign worked or not. While it’s not always a binary (some people will ask you to circle back in 6 months), people generally either take a meeting with you or they don’t. That gives you a pretty good sense of what’s working right away and can help you generate actionable leads right away.

Low Upfront Costs

You already have a website, right? Well with just a small fraction of the energy it’d take you to stand up an inside sales team, you can start building an inbound marketing machine.

Think of a few compelling offers, optimize your website and social media profiles, start developing regular, quality content based on the conversations you’ve having with customers and prospects, and find ways to promote your content.

It's Customer-Drive

Today’s B2B buyer is self-directed. There is so much information available on the Internet, people can get far more than halfway through the buying process before they need to reach out to potential vendors and get more information. Meeting people where they are and positioning yourself as the best choice means you value their time and are meeting them where they want to be met.

It’s a Long-Term Strategy

Whether you’re focused on building strong SEO positions, an email subscriber list, or a strong presence on LinkedIn, it’s going to take time. You shouldn’t rely on inbound marketing to feed an immediate need for new pipeline, that’s simply not how it works.

Harder to Measure

Marketing attribution inbound marketing can get tricky. Until someone converts by signing up to a webinar or downloading a white paper, it can be hard to understand who exactly is coming to your website, engaging with your content, or showing interest in your brand. The messy middle can be a challenge if you want hard proof of ROI.

Which Type of Marketing Should I Do First?

Naturally, the next question is, which one should I do, inbound or outbound marketing? The simplest answer is both.

That sure would be nice, right?

However, most growing firms can't afford or manage all that, so the real-world answer is a bit different.

If you’re one of the rare souls who enjoys calling strangers, you need leads right away, or you have the money to hire an inside sales staff, then outbound marketing is perfect.

It's a fact that if you make a consistent 20, 50, or 100 phone calls a day and do consistent follow-ups that, assuming a conversion rate of about 2%, you will eventually get someone to take a meeting with you and go deeper into your funnel.

However, I think inbound marketing is a better place to start for growing IT services firms, and here's why.

Inbound Builds Long-Term Relationships, Not Just Leads

Inbound marketing is about nurturing relationships; not just about signing a contract. The goal is to create a lasting bond with both prospects and existing clients by providing them valuable insights and actionable advice that they don’t otherwise have access to. It simply feels better for most growing IT services leaders to build themselves as a valuable business partner and a resource and ask for the sale as a secondary concern.

You Start Establishing Your Credibility and Expertise

Close relationships are the center of a strong MSP-client relationship; trust is everything. Inbound marketing positions your brand as an industry leader and helps you build word of mouth that you are the guy who solves serious IT problems. That trust, authority, and expertise is essential in the decision-making process, where clients often need multiple touchpoints before committing.

Building a Trustworthy Brand Takes Time

You can always start or expand an outbound marketing effort up once you’ve hit a financial or operational level of maturity.

However, you can’t simply turn on an brand marketing machine. It takes months and even years to build the visibility, audience, and trust that comes from an inbound campaign. Slow and steady wins the race, so start optimizing your online presence now and start reaping the benefits as soon as possible.