Channel, Sales and marketing

Market Your MSP: Channel Marketing Tips and Best Practices

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Managed and other IT services providers who want to differentiate themselves from an increasingly crowded field need to find new ways to engage and entice prospective buyers. For MSPs looking to up their marketing game, social media is a critical element of any marketing program. Whether you’re an MSP just getting started, or a seasoned pro looking to optimize current marketing efforts, here are some channel and distributor marketing tips and best practices from to help expand your customer base and reach new audiences.

Channel Marketing Helps You Reach More People

MSPs looking to grow their business beyond their traditional marketing and sales efforts will often reach out to their channel or distribution partners. There’s only so many leads that direct marketing will produce, so how do you get to a broader audience? Find someone else with a bigger audience and become their partner so you can talk to their customers—that’s the goal behind channel marketing for MSPs.

Digital Transformation Makes Channel Marketing Essential

We all know the pandemic massively accelerated the move to the cloud and the use of online communications tools, and a lot of businesses are now struggling to manage all of these new applications. This is especially relevant in the MSP space because, to stay competitive and be agile, you have to partner with your distributors in order to build a solution package that meets the needs of today’s businesses. Today’s businesses have been forced into digital transformation, and many need the knowledge and support of an MSP as they transition to a hybrid workplace. How do they find an MSP? Through a distributor. So, by marketing through a channel or distribution partner, an MSP has a chance to reach more businesses and position their MSP has having the right tools, and the right solution, to help meet their goals.

For instance, if your MSP has a specialty serving dental offices, you’re able to market specifically to that audience through a distributor, to really differentiate yourself from your competitors and provide solutions that speak to them and help you attract those quality, high-value customers. Your channel is a strategic partnership that helps you get in front of more of the right customers to close more deals.

Getting Started with Channel or Distributor Marketing

The best way to get started is identify your ideal customer and then reach out to distribution partners who work in those spaces to build a solution and use it to market to those new audiences. Create marketing materials that feature the names of your channel partner—this will give your MSP some extra credibility when you’re talking to people unfamiliar with your business. Also, be sure to keep up with the latest solution stack to make sure your solutions stay relevant to your target audience.

Forming Channel and Distributor Relationships

You have to do some work to get in the channel partner game, and that means reaching out to those distributors that you think will add value to your offering. They are your subject matter experts, and they can work with you to build out a solution stack that helps you run your business and attract new customers. 

Channel Partners are Your Allies

Don’t be afraid of channel marketing! Start seeing your distribution partners as allies. They are there to help you be successful, whether you’re just starting out or are established and want to launch new services. It is very helpful to have a partner you can rely on to give you the toolset, resources and education you need for your business—and your end customers—to be successful. Lean into them for support, and then leverage their powerful platform and brand to market yourself to their audiences. 

Liongard helps turn distributors into partners

If you’re an MSP that doesn’t have a lot of marketing budget (or one at all!) channel marketing can help leverage your resources and experience as you build out a customer marketing program. Learn how Liongard can become a powerful part of your solution set with automated discovery, Actionable Alerts and customizable reporting. Schedule a platform walk-through today.  


Guest blog courtesy of Liongard. Read more guest blogs from Liongard here.