Some managed IT providers tend to avoid marketing activities. They believe that providing great services is enough to land new clients. While this is partly true, and you will see a couple of new clients a month thanks to your happy customer base, consisting of your friends and business connections, that's still not enough for sustainable growth.
At the same time, other MSPs are doing market research and paid advertising, promoting themselves on social media, and hosting webinars, thus bringing more leads into their funnel in order to close them as clients. All that might seem too complex if you are not yet experienced with marketing. It is always better to choose one activity and master it.
Further reading MSP Marketing: How to Start So It Works
Hosting webinars is a great starting point to promote your managed IT services, show your technical expertise, educate your existing clients (thus enhancing their satisfaction and eventually decreasing the churn rate, and tell your prospects how your services can uplevel their business operations.
Read on to learn more on how to host a great webinar and bring in more clients.
Further reading The Role of Educational Content in MSP Marketing: Hosting Webinars, Workshops, and Seminars
Why MSPs Need Webinars
The customer journey is what your prospects and clients experience while interacting with your marketing, sales, and services. Webinars help managed IT providers to uplevel the customer journey at just about any stage. You will be able to generate interest in your services among your leads and educate and engage your existing clientele. Moreover, due to the nationwide switch to work-from-home policies, webinars become a great, if not to say the only, instrument of near-personal communication.
Here are more ways you can benefit from webinars:
- Turn prospects into clients. Try hosting a webinar for your prospects. Don't directly pitch your services; rather, educate your listeners and viewers, and address their business pain points.
- Upsell existing clients with new services. One great way to increase your monthly recurring revenue is to sell your clients new and updated services. For example, you might want to switch to a cloud-first approach in 2021. Host webinars to tell your existing clients and partners about the benefits of this approach.
Further reading MSPs' Guide to Upselling
- Educate your clients. While this is not directly tied to your sales figures, educational webinars can be a great help in reducing the pressure on your level-1 support. During such webinars, you should explain to your clients and end users the basics of the services you provide, and the solutions you manage and that they interact with.
- Work on security. Because of the outrageous number of ransomware and other cybersecurity dangers out there, you should not mix security webinars with educational ones. The security ones can be helpful in both cases, when you need to educate your existing customers and when you want to nurture your hot leads and prospects into buying your services.
Further reading Creating a Robust Cybersecurity Training Program
Bear in mind, though, that there are no webinars that tick all the boxes for all types of clients and situations. This is why you should think about developing several different topics. Which? We will discuss the best topics later in the article.
Engaging Webinar Structure
We've already said that there is no one webinar topic that fits all needs. However, here is a sample webinar structure that will allow you to create a stellar webinar:
- Introduction. Tell your listeners who you and your co-presenters are and briefly introduce your company, if needed.
- Challenge overview. At this point, you should fill the listeners in on the challenge, issue, or main topic of the webinar.
- Solution. You should overview several ways of solving the challenge and give real-life examples, if suitable.
- Call to action. All your webinars should lead to some sort of action, whether it's signing up for your newsletters, downloading the provided materials, or booking a call with the presenter. To gather attention, the call to action should go along with the Q&A session.
- Q&A session. One of the most important parts of the webinars. During Q&A sessions, you can show your expertise and engage with the audience.
Top 5 Webinar Ideas for MSPs
- Introduction to managed IT services. This webinar is great for your new clients and for the hottest prospects. You should briefly describe your services, overview your SLAs, and explain to your listeners how you can and should be reached. In the end, send every participant a follow-up email.
- Top 10 cybersecurity best practices. During this webinar, you should tell your end users the most iconic rules of thumb in cybersecurity – such mantras as ”use long and complex passwords”, ”don't leave passwords around your desk”, ”disable your PCs and laptops, when you're leaving the desk”, and other obvious things. Don't hesitate to add scary statistics to your story. Believe it or not, such advice is necessary for the non-tech-savvy end user.
- Ransomware prevention and protection. While the previous topic should be aimed at your existing clientele, this one can promote your security services and practices to your prospects. Alternatively, you can host it for clients who haven't yet purchased your security package.
Further reading How to Protect Against Ransomware
- Business booster. Any business owner or decision maker that you work with is concerned primarily with their business. So, if you gather real-life examples of how your services can boost their processes and increase revenue or reduce costs, you will be heard and budgeted for.
- Going cloud. There's a great chance that you will adopt more cloud services next year than this one. Why? It’s now obvious that anything on-premises will be harder to manage and maintain with the ongoing work-from-home initiatives. So, when you create a cloud-first offering, don't hesitate to present it to your clientele and prospects.
Further reading How MSPs Can Boost Growth in 2022: Cloud-First Opportunities
- Backup and disaster recovery practices. This webinar should be aimed at new prospects. Show how bulletproof your backup practices are and tell them about your successful real-life recovery examples. Bonus points for stories and examples tailored to the infrastructure needs of your listeners.
Conclusion
As you can see, webinars are a great instrument for selling your services and educating your clients. For sure, it's not that easy to host a great webinar. You need to create a clear and easy-to-follow structure, be concise, professional and entertaining at the same time. But your MSP, your whole business, is about the challenge. So why not try yet another approach to winning your clients' and prospects' hearts and minds?
We’ll cover everything from setting up the business to onboarding your first client:
- Essential steps of establishing business
- Building the software stack
- Сreating an onboarding structure, and more