MarketBuilder: Marketing In a Can For Your MSP
By N‑able
*Please Note: The following article details the experience one of our partners had using MarketBuilder, as such individual results may vary.
“You can’t get this kind of stuff for free,” says Manuel “Manny” Lloyd, founder of Wilmington, NC based CyberSleuth. “I know technically MarketBuilder isn’t free, because you have to be an N‑able partner to use it, but at the same marketing can be expensive and MarketBuilder gives you all the tools you need to create targeted, MSP-specific marketing campaigns.”
Cyber Sleuth is the third MSP company that Manny has built. The first one, Geeks in a Flash, grew to a multi-million-dollar company with around 50 employees. It was a full-service MSP with a help desk, NOC, and SOC long before being an MSP was as popular as it is today.
“We were really successful,” says Manny modestly, “but marketing was a pain in the neck.”
Back then, the MSP concept was new to customers—although it wasn’t new to Manny, who had been at IBM in the 90s when they were providing outsourced support and monitoring for larger companies. They just called it being an NSP—network service provider. So, getting the message to customers could be a hard (and expensive) slog.
Vision and Foresight For Your Marketing Campaigns
“If we were to have had something like MarketBuilder and a partner like N‑able that had the vision and the foresight into what MSPs needed as far as marketing campaigns went, I know we could have done probably two times more of what we did because we spent so much time on marketing just trying to come up with ideas and campaigns. MarketBuilder does all that for you,” he opines. “If we’d had MarketBuilder we could have been number one in the MSP community, that’s how good this is as a resource*.”
Shifting forward to today, Manny outlines how MarketBuilder has already significantly impacted the bottom line for his business. “MarketBuilder helped me discover that I was under-pricing my services,” he admits. “I was charging about $50* per seat, but the way the MarketBuilder campaigns are structured and the services are packaged, the value we’re adding is so much clearer.”
Off the back of targeting the financial services sector with the managed security campaign, Manny says he was able to raise his cost per seat by 300%*. He was also able to raise the cost of his project management and CIO services as well.
The Marketing Strategy You Need
For Manny, MarketBuilder provides the first step for growing his business. Because, as he says, “marketing is not done effectively if you don’t have a good strategy and plan in place and MarketBuilder makes that easy for you.”
He continues: “For me it sets the tone of what I’m going after. It’s like I was thinking about targeting the veterinary sector, I looked in MarketBuilder and there was a campaign already laid out to target that sector. It sounds cliché, but it’s like MarketBuilder is your outsourced marketing team.”
With the campaign already set out, that’s work Manny doesn’t have to do; which saves him time, money, and energy. “I don’t have to sit there and make it up, I can just go to MarketBuilder. And the beauty is that I don’t have to use the whole campaign, I can just use bits of it based upon the current situation.”
With the hurricane season starting this month (June) in Wilmington, Manny had just sent out part of MarketBuilder’s Backup and Recovery campaign focused on “when was the last time you tested your backups? “I sent that campaign out yesterday, and I have 15* leads already,” he enthuses. “If I can get five to seven proposals out of that, and ultimately two or three deals, I’m a happy camper. And I didn’t have to do a lot of work or spend any money. Not like if I was trying to do that through something like Google ads!”
So how do things compare now to how he used to market his business?
“As I said earlier, marketing can be a pain. MarketBuilder takes a lot of that pain away. Of course, you’re always going to have the same pain of waiting for people to respond and going after them. You can’t do anything about that,” he says. “On top of this, I used to pay a marketing company about $1,500 a month and I still had to come up with campaign ideas. They just provided the engine and some templates. And they weren’t in the MSP business, they were a marketing company that sold to MSP. With MarketBuilder, you get access to all of N‑able’s knowledge about RMMs, online backups, end point protection, whatever, and you can just cherry pick what you want use. It’s like marketing in a can. You just pop the top and boom, there you go.”
Looking the Part
Manny also singles out the statistics that MarketBuilder offers. “The stats are amazing, you can go to client or prospect and say ‘65% of small businesses don’t back up their data,’ and when they question that you can show them the Verizon Data Breach Report from 2020 where that statistic is sourced from,” he says. “Being able to use validated stats like this make you to look like a genuine authority on the subject.”
What final bit of advice would he give other people wanting to start using MarketBuilder? “If you want to grow your business, just start using the campaigns. Don’t talk outside of what’s already there as you’ll create brand confusion. If you just follow what’s there, you’re going to generate new business*.”
He concludes: “It took me at least five years before I really saw any traction in my other MSP. I honestly think if I’d had MarketBuilder, I would have seen growth in a year.”
Want to grow your MSP business? Be more like Manny and check out MarketBuilder today!
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