Marketing Message? Run It By Grandma First

'Try and explain your company and what you do to your grandmother. If she understands, then you’re good. If she doesn’t understand, then you have to work on it,' says Jennifer Anaya, vice president of marketing for Ingram Micro.

For solution providers, marketing should not rely on a technology pitch but an easily understood story that represents their value and tells customers who they are and why they should be trusted, said Jennifer Anaya, vice president of marketing for Ingram Micro.

“It’s not about the technology,” Anaya said during a breakout session at The Channel Company’s Best of Breed conference. “People like marketers, CFOs, customer service reps, they’re making the decisions on technology. It’s no longer just the IT guys. We talk in a totally different language that they don’t understand.”

But she said tailoring that message to meet the market doesn’t need focus groups or outside consultants in order to see if a lay-person will understand the value proposition that solution providers are striving for.

“A great test for that is: Try and explain your company and what you do to your grandmother,” she said. “If she understands, then you’re good. If she doesn’t understand, then you have to work on it. What are you doing to really talk about your brand and who you are as a company?”

Mark Batchelder, regional channel manager at Unified Office, Nashua, N.H., said, like many MSPs, his company could do a better job of making sure their website stays relevant with the market that they are trying to attract.

“I think it's very important to make sure that the message that you're portraying on your website or any of your materials is really for the customer, and not necessarily just the technology that you bring to the table,” he said. “I think a lot of companies, us included, make that mistake where sometimes we focus on the technology and what we're delivering instead of really the message of what the customer’s benefit is going to be and why they should be doing business with us.”

Anaya said according to a recent Salesforce study, trust will be a leading decider for customers when it comes to choosing technology solutions. Since, by the nature of the work, solution providers are enmeshed in the inner workings of the companies that hire them, conveying a sense of trust is critical to winning them over.

“So what we do can be kind of scary,” she said. “We’re in there helping secure a business or helping a business develop a network, put stuff in the cloud. How can we think about building greater trust? When we do a good job of explaining who we are, they’ll talk about you, and they’ll recommend you, and it still the No. 1 marketing tool.”

Batchelder said MSPs that have to manage their business, their own website and their social media channels should look to their workforce for help in creating a message that portrays the company’s values and aligns with their employees as well as their market.

“I think it's a collaborative effort,” he said. “I think you really need to look at and get information from your employees as well as your customers, making sure that you send in the right message but also making sure that the employees agree with the messages that you send and the channels that you're delivering it to. They're the ones out in the field talking to customers on a regular basis.”