Lead generation is a very important part of creating a sustainable managed service provider (MSP) business.
In this webinar from SuperOps, marketing expert Lodewijk ‘Louis’ Veldhuijzen gave some insights into his marketing playbook. Tips that help you to gather more clicks to your website and generate more leads for your sales funnel.
The advice covered everything from getting better ranking for you business on Google, to making improvements to your website. And how to get the most out of a Google Ads campaign.
Introduction
Lodewijk ‘Louis’ Veldhuijzen is the CEO and founder of MSP Launchpad. It’s a digital marketing agency focused on creating inbound leads for MSPs.
They’ve been operating for around three and a half years, and been a part of over 80 marketing campaigns.
He says that a lot marketing agencies will promise 30 leads in a month to their customers, but it’s tricky to get good results if you don’t understand or respect the market.
For most of the presentation, Louis demonstrated some of the tips he’d learned in lead generation, which fell into four categories:
- Quickest gains
- Website
- Google Ads
- SEO
MSP Lead Generation 101 Webinar Replay
If you want to watch the replay of this webinar in full, you can find it here.
Quick Gains in Lead Generation
When you think about how people find your business online, you think about how you can better rank your business in search engine results.
It’s worth noting that having an optimised google business profile can help you rank in results local to the person searching.
In a average random selection of ten searches:
- Sponsored results get around one hit (10%)
- Results that feature on google maps that are nearby get around five or six hits (50-60%)
- Results below this will get an average of two clicks (20%)
Optimising Your Google Business Profile
Five things you should do:
- List ALL of your services (compare this with your main competitors)
- Optimise using keywords
- Include photos of your business (what you do, who you are, your office or fleet of vehicles, etc.)
- Call your clients for testimonials (and get them to write them with their phone so it picks up the location)
- Build citations in business directories (Chamber of Commerce, Yelp, Expertise) to improve Domain Authority
Improving Your Website to Increase Lead Generation
Whether you like to admit it or not, to your customers, how your website looks and feels indicates to them how professional your IT services will be if they buy from you.
Therefore, as an IT provider, if the experience for visitors is anything but slick, it may give them a bad impression. However, this can still be saved with good examples of social proof, such as certifications and amazing testimonials.
Photos on your website that show your team, your offices, examples of your good work and satisfied customers go a long way to building a strong rapport with new prospects.
The effort to put this in place need not be too costly. You can encourage your team to put a portfolio of shots together with a DSLR camera, or just hire a professional for a day. The return on investment (ROI) is well worth it.
According to Louis, when you are attracting small businesses, they care more about having their pain points resolved. Whereas larger businesses care more about process optimisation.
As long as usability and navigation is easy, a website needs to have clear calls to action (CTA) and clear forms that are easy to follow in order to be effective.
Better Lead Generation from Google Ads
Louis gave away quite a few tips on how to conduct an effective Google Ads campaign.
He said you need to be aiming for a budget of around $3,000 to $5,000 per month to expect a good return on your investment. And the key to a successful campaign lies creating a good balance of match keywords, with a comprehensive negative keyword list.
He explained that using generative AI here can be very useful in helping come up with keyword matches, as well as informing you what you need to exclude.
Here are just some other tips he recommends:
- Start with a high volume, don’t build up to a high volume – you’ll yield better results if you go big from the start. You can also reduce it later, once SEO kicks in
- Include matches in your negative keyword list that won’t result in a conversion for your business. e.g. “How to”, “Free” and “Jobs and Careers”
- Keep your keywords as local as possible to get the best matches for your business, and reflect this in your marketing local SEO
- You must invest in fraudulent click protection software as this will save you up to $1000 per month
Watch the full webinar replay for more tips on optimising your Google Ads campaigns.
Improving Your Marketing SEO for Better Lead Gen Results
In the final part of the webinar, Louis talked about search engine optimisation (SEO) as part of your lead generation marketing strategy.
He said that generative AI tools like ChatGPT are not very good at creating SEO content. Content needs to be of excellent quality to be effective at driving prospects in your direction.
Outstanding articles or other content will drive traffic in your direction. And if you can link content together in silos or through pillar pages it will amplify your content further. This is especially effective where the keywords you’re going for are highly competitive.
Only really large brands can achieve true global reach from SEO, according to Louis. However, you can still attain global reach through use of location keywords.
The Importance of Domain Authority
Domain authority (DA) is rating score that gives an indication of how likely a webpage will rank in search engine results.
For massive global brands, they expect this score to be in the higher percentile range. However for MSPs, a very good rating out of 100 would be around the 30-40 mark.
You can use tools like Semrush or Moz to find out DA scores for your own pages. This is worth doing before asking a marketing agency to improve your SEO, as this will give you a baseline.
Achieving Better Lead Generation for Your MSP Business
Lead generation is tricky for many businesses, but by understanding SEO and how keywords help you to rank better in search engine results, you can drive more traffic to your website.
If your keywords are cultivated to attract your ideal customer, then you’re more likely to have the right audience in front of the rest of your digital marketing machine.
To improve growth and increase revenue for your business, you might look at Google Ads as part of your strategy, but make sure you do it right. You’ve got to aim to be the number one provider, at least in your area, in order to put your business in the forefront of your future prospect’s minds.
Has improving your business profile on Google resulted in greater interest in your MSP? Have you had experience in using Google Ads, and if so, did it work out well for you? We would really love to hear your story in the comments.
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I'm a small business owner, technical writer and blogger, with 15 years experience in corporate IT. I frequently attend MSP peer groups and create content relevant to IT service providers and business owners.
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