Leverage Your Tech Business Reputation to Market Residential Managed Services

The technology landscape has changed dramatically this year, and many people have found themselves working and going to school from home. But those home networks are often lacking the managed services they need (and that YOU can provide!).

Residential managed services are taking on a whole new level of importance. Even without the stay at home orders accelerating things, telecommuting and freelancing had already elevated home offices.

Now is a perfect time to leverage that IT support reputation that you’ve built up over the years to market residential managed services.

Clever Ways to Promote MSP for Residential Clients

Once the impacts of the pandemic are over, things won’t revert back to exactly the way they were before. There will inevitably be employees that continue working from home remotely and more emphasis put on things like e-learning and video conferencing.

Home networks will continue to have more demand put on them in the months to come. And as people have their work interrupted due to computer issues or cybersecurity incidents, the need for residential managed services plans will continue to increase.

There are several reasons to promote residential MSP if you don’t already, including:

• There are approximately 64 million freelancers in the U.S. and that number is expected to jump to nearly 80 million by 2025.
• 62% of employees between ages 22 and 65 work remotely from home at least part of the time.
• The e-learning industry is expected to triple in size between 2020 and 2025.

You’ve worked hard over the years through in-person networking, building up an email list, and creating relationships with your IT business clients. This work can pay off significantly when it comes to promoting your residential MSP.

Here are several ideas on leveraging your reputation and relationships to build up your residential managed service plans and encourage people to spread the word.

Offer a Referral Incentive

Nothing motivates people like getting something for free. Offer your email list and social media subscribers an incentive for any residential MSP referrals they make that sign up for a plan.

This doesn’t have to be cash. It could be a free month of residential MSP service for themselves or a free computer tune-up, or something similar.

Be creative! If you find one referral incentive isn’t getting any traction, try something else.

Pro Tip: Create a flier that people can email or hand out to people that explains what your residential MSP services can do. Also, make sure you tell people how to log a referral contact with you, so you’ll know who referred that person if they contact you.

Offer B2B Employees a Discount

One way that banks get more individual accounts is to offer employee packages to their business customers that incentivize their employees to use the bank’s services.

You can do your own spin on this by going to your B2B clients and asking them if they’d be interested in offering a discounted program to their employees for residential managed services.

Be sure to explain how this could help safeguard their company’s data when employees are working from home.

All the company would have to do is allow you to provide information on the program to their employees. The fact that their company trusts you with their IT needs is a big motivator for employees to sign up with you for a residential plan.

Give Your Residential Managed Services a Great Name

Nothing draws people in like great branding. Instead of offering “residential managed services” offer a “Home PC Protection Suite” or “Freelancer Computer Defense Package.”

A study of branding behaviors showed that the stocks for companies with easy to pronounce names consistently performed better than those of companies with complex names.

A memorable name for your residential managed services can immediately explain what the service will mean, attracting more signups.

Here are some suggestions for creating a great service name:

• It should be easy to remember
• Use positive associations
• Alliteration often makes names more memorable
• Make it easy to pronounce
• It should explain, at least in part, the service

Create Sharable Content

People love sharing clever memes and infographics on social media. Think of a way to incorporate a mention of your residential managed services into sharable content that you post on your social media channels.

One idea would be to use residential cybercrime statistics in an infographic, and near the bottom of the infographic, mention your residential MSP as a way to stay safe.

People remember visual information 6x more than information they’ve read or heard.

Statistics can be a compelling way to promote a message and using an infographic with colorful imagery can encourage sharing of your message.

Create Your Own Ads for Your Newsletter

If you’re sending out an email newsletter regularly, create your own ad for your residential MSP that isn’t just part of the newsletter text. This will help it stand out and encourage both engagement and sharing.

Review other newsletters you receive and see how ads are placed and what they look like. This page from Sage is selling newsletter ads, but if you just look at the images, you’ll find some great layout ideas for creating your own e-newsletter ads.

Tailor Your Residential MSP Offer for Your Markets

Do you have a lot of seniors in your area? Are the surrounding neighborhoods more upscale and include home offices? Do you plan to market mainly to remote workers and distance learning students?

Take the time to consider the different markets that would use your residential managed services and tailor the offer to their needs and pain points.

Seniors worried about phishing scams that try to take their life savings are going to react to different marketing than professionals working in a home office that can’t afford 2 hours of downtime when they’re working on a deadline.

If you tailor different offers to each customer type, then your current clients are much more likely to recognize someone they know that fits that persona and share your information.

Use Your Reviews in Your Residential MSP Marketing

76% of consumers trust reviews as much as they do personal recommendations from family and friends.

Make sure to add a level of trust to your residential MSP offer by adding a few customer reviews or testimonials to your flyer, email, or webpage marketing the services.

Someone stating that “Joe’s Computers saved us from a breach of our home computer and online banking account” will go a long way towards convincing another residential customer that managed services make sense for their home PC.

Ask for Help with a Testimonial or Case Study

If you’re just getting your residential MSP service going and don’t yet have any testimonials to share, be honest about that and ask for some!

Let your customers know that you’re expanding your popular business managed services to residential and home offices and would love to build up some case studies. You can also invite feedback as a way to hone your service to the residential market.

People naturally like to help others out, so asking honestly for some help can get you a few testimonials back quickly to use in your marketing.

Create a Fun Contest

You can build excitement for your residential managed services package by attaching it to a fun contest.

For example, you could ask your newsletter subscribers and social media followers to enter your contest to win a free year or 6 months of your new (fantastically named) residential managed service package.

They could submit a photo to win:

• The most organized home office in (your city)
• The best Zoom/Skype online meeting background
• Best balance of home/work space
• Most studious distance learning setup
• Funniest “pets and work colliding” photo

Explain Why Residential MSP is Important

This seems like a no brainer, but sometimes marketing for services will be heavy on what a tech business is offering and light on why someone needs this service.

Use creative ways to explain why it’s important for a home computer to have things like managed updates/patches, managed backup, and monitored antivirus.

A few ways to do this:

• Create a series of blogs focused on different residential customer types
• Do a Facebook live event on home network security
• Offer a dedicated employee home cybersecurity training webinar for your B2B clients
• Create some “How to Videos” on things like setting up a guest network for work devices

Cross Promote Residential MSP to Business Clients

Every business client you have could also be a residential MSP client. Don’t shy away from including your residential managed services marketing in your lead nurture emails or other marketing for your business clients.

You’ll want to tailor it for that audience and include something clever like “Don’t let online threats follow you home from the office!” as a way to tie business and residential together.

What you don’t want to do is just send residential marketing “as is” to your business clients. Tell them why you are mentioning residential services and connect the dots for them as to why using the same IT support they get at the office is just as vital at home.

Your Reputation is a Great Jumping Off Point

By connecting with people that already know you and leveraging your great reputation, you can easily reduce the time it takes to build up a residential MSP clientele.

What’s your best tactic for signing up residential MSP clients? Share your tips in the comments!