As an IT service provider, you face a crowded marketplace with stiff competition from strongly placed competitors. To make yourself stand out to potential leads, IT businesses require a special approach that takes into consideration the unique requirements of the industry. Below you will find some online and offline lead generation techniques that have proven successful for IT businesses.
As an IT professional, you will have ample data to create a useful compilation of findings. Perhaps your business has seen multiple clients make security errors. Why not release a report on the ten most common IT security errors made, and direct readers to visit your website for the best solution? You can use this both to add value to your industry and promote your own services indirectly. For instance, you could release your report in the form of a free ebook that visitors can download from your website after signing up for an email mailing list. You can then reinforce your message with a series of bespoke emails and supporting blog posts – each with strong calls to action and links back to a bespoke landing page on your site.
By creating your own interesting, relevant and above all useful content, you can spread your reach through your website, industry news outlets, and social media, with information that you already are likely to possess. This should increase your chance of lead generation, as you are providing useful information that people will engage with.
One easy way to establish your authority is to give advice to reputable blogs and websites, and do some easy online PR for your business. If you have senior IT professionals in your team that can give their expert opinion, invite them to comment on industry news and send their thoughts to relevant industry journals and bloggers. Potential clients will read the commentary and learn that your businesses’ experts are worth trusting with their money and faith, turning casual readers into genuine leads.
If you have the time and the personnel, you may even want to host online seminars and tutorials for businesses to raise your business’ profile. By giving people the opportunity to learn from your business, you increase the level of trust others will have in your work, and in turn this will lead to greater lead generation.
If you have an effective IT services business, you can leverage your current clients to work for you to generate leads. Considering that you will have already done the hard work of landing your current client set, there is no reason why you cannot get those already on board to work on your behalf to create leads for you.
To do so, it is advisable to set up a secure referral system that will give your current clients an incentive to do the outreach for you. This could be a financial incentive, or perhaps a service incentive, whichever would suit your business better. Send a newsletter out to your current clients to inform them of the advantageous situation, and respond promptly to any leads that do come in. New clients will have already placed their trust in your current clients, and will transfer that trust along to your business, resulting in lead generation.
For IT services experts, the word “network” may mean a very different thing, but networking is a key part of becoming an industry leader and for getting the business name out there. You should consider attending large-scale networking events to make contacts and invite referrals, as well as raising the company profile by spreading the news of your attendance through social media, newsletters and blogs. Keeping abreast of current news and industry changes will be invaluable for being at the forefront of the IT services business, and for generating new leads. Online networking can be effective through LinkedIn special interest groups, Facebook and by following industry leaders on Twitter.
Sending your best experts to give talks and participate in panels at industry exhibitions is a good way of spreading the word about your work, as well as making your IT services business stand out from the rest of the industry. By being informative and engaging, your business will generate leads and form new business relationships.
Lead generation can be highly effective for IT businesses if you are prepared to think a little outside the box and take proactive steps to engage with your market. With a little innovation and some lateral thinking, lead generation for IT services can be easy to execute and good for business. For more information, please send us a message and one of our marketing experts will get back to you at a time of your convenience.