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Three Features MSPs Should Look for in Marketing Automation Tools

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Datto’s State of the MSP Report revealed that 43% of managed service providers (MSPs) surveyed struggle with marketing . If you experience this pain point in your business, you’re not alone. Many MSPs find marketing to be a complicated and time-consuming endeavor. Several factors contribute to this, including a lack of time and resources dedicated to marketing efforts. The good news? There are tools available that are designed to help MSPs overcome these hurdles.

Author: Caroline Chapin, director of partner programs, Datto

Marketing automation tools, for example, help MSPs go to market with ease, deliver the right message at the right time, to the right audience, and accelerate the sales cycle, which means more money in the MSPs pocket. In this article, we explain what a marketing automation tool is and share three features the best tools offer.

What is a Marketing Automation Tool?

 Marketing automation tools enable companies to plan and distribute marketing campaigns through a variety of channels to targeted audiences, all using an intuitive workflow. Each platform provides a series of tools to help your team:

  • Create emails, social media, and other content
  • Schedule and distribute campaigns
  • Segment audiences into targeted groups
  • Track leads and evaluate the ROI of your marketing efforts

These platforms often combine the capabilities of your email distribution solution, social media management software, and marketing analytics tools to make your workflow more efficient. A proper marketing automation tool will help you:

1. Do more with a small team: Marketing automation tools remove repetitive and tedious tasks from your every day to-do list and allow you to get more done, even with a small team. Let’s say, for example, you have a campaign involving several social media posts and email communications that need to be sent to your audience. Without a marketing automation tool, these tasks may require more time and involve several team members. It can also be quite the headache trying to decide when to optimally schedule all of these messages. With a marketing automation tool, one person could quickly and easily create and schedule campaign assets to be sent to customers. Often these tools provide user guides and templates that lead you through the campaign creation process, help ensure your branding and messaging are consistent, and provide insight on when each message should be sent.

2. Learn about what your audience needs and the impact of your efforts: Good marketing automation tools provide a myriad of analytics and campaign reports. You’ll be able to jump in and see just how well your social campaigns performed, how many individuals read your emails, and what percentage of those readers converted to your website to fill out a form or register for a webinar. Having this information helps your team understand what motivates your clients to act and which content they are most interested in or what drives the most engagement. It also provides direction in terms of which channels to use to reach your audience most efficiently.

3. Plan and schedule marketing campaigns in advance: Now that you’re saving time and can gain insight into what your audience is most interested in, it’s time to plan for the future. To be more efficient, your team should sit down and plan one or two campaigns for each quarter to start. You can then batch create several content pieces and communications assets for the campaigns. As you work your way through the campaigns, distribute them to your customers, and review the results internally you’ll learn what works and what doesn’t. This will allow you to adapt and increase the success of your marketing efforts over time.

At Datto, one of the benefits of our global partner program is MarketNow, a marketing automation tool that is available for all Datto Partners, globally and at no charge. In addition to the benefits we’ve listed above, our team works hard to provide partners with co-brandable assets, pre-built email and social drip campaigns, landing pages, and more.

To learn more about the benefits of MarketNow visit Datto’s website.


Author Caroline Chapin is director of partner programs at Datto. Read more Datto guest blogs here.