Category Archives: General

Five Tested Ways to Improve Your Vendor Relationships

March 24, 2017 Callum Huddlestone

MSPs may provide IT cloud services of all kinds to other businesses, but they too often obtain hardware and related products from third party vendors. In order for MSPs to be successful, it is imperative that they nurture their vendor relationships, and strive for improvement, whenever possible.

The following are some of the best ways MSPs can improve their vendor relationships:

First Things First – Select the Vendor Carefully

It goes without saying that choosing the right vendor is extremely important for a long lasting and healthy business relationship. Many MSPs focus too much on the pricing a vendor is offering, and make a selection on that basis. However, a vendor who is providing the best prices may not be the best vendor for you, especially, in the long run. Thus, you must take into account several other important factors, such as their expertise, terms and conditions, years of experience, customer support standard, etc. Finding and going through the reviews left by other MSPs on the Internet can also help you making the best decision.

Paying Bills on Time

Profits and sales are at the core of every business. Thus, one of the best ways you can ensure you have a good relationship with your vendor is by paying your bills on time, without fail. Vendors often have to work on thin margins, and with a fluctuating cashflow managing the inventories can be a challenge for them. By paying your bills on time you can make it a lot easier for them to stay in business, and also bolster the relationship.

Making Your Vision and Goals Clear

This is one of the things you must do first thing when you partner with a vendor. In fact, explaining them what you need exactly, and how you need it, is one of the best ways to find out if they are the right fit. If they understand your short-term and long-term goals, and reflect the same in the service, then they are perfect for you, without a doubt. Just keep them updated with where your business is headed, and you will have a lasting and bonding relationship with them.

Keeping Your Calm When Things Go Wrong

We don’t live in a perfect world, and things go wrong. Your vendor could delay a delivery, or maybe send damaged products that you needed urgently. Issues like these may make you want to call them up right away and just give an earful. However, this can never be the best approach. Before you jump to conclusions, it is better to hear out their side first. It is rare when a vendor causes a problem on purpose. By keeping your calm, you can understand their perspective and prevent your business relationship from taking a blow.

Helping Them Out

Going an extra mile doesn’t hurt to nurture your vendor relationships. For instance, you can offer your IT expertise to solve your vendor’s problems, if needed. Or you could also refer them to your other IT partners, who are looking for a reliable vendor themselves. You will be surprised how small gestures like these can go a long way.

Using “SMART” Goals to Evaluate your Website – Part II

March 22, 2017 Kris Price

In Part I, we discussed how to evaluate the success of your website using the SMART technique. In this series, we will further discuss the principles of SMART when measuring your marketing goals.

If a website doesn’t get traffic, then it will eventually get out of business. Growing your traffic will require you to create some kind of performance targets.

SEO

A website that is not found when Googled is bound to fail. This means, you must invest in SEOs. Keywords can be found from other high ranking competitive websites. SEO is not a one-time job, rather, you must continue to work on you SEO at all times.

Subscriber

Once visitors find your website, your goal is for a quick conversion if possible or at least for them to come back again. This an be accomplished by creating a subscriber list. List building is much easier if the signup page is placed at a visible location with in the website, and an incentive is given to the visitor to opt-in.

Inbound Link Building

Inbound link building definitely helps you to be SMART. Backlinks boost your SEO and increase traffic while creating great brand awareness. Achieving a huge number of backlinks might be very challenging, but if you put your efforts, you will be able to succeed.

Content Publishing

Search engines love fresh contents as do humans. Even though it might take up to 90 days or more for search engines to fully index your website, publishing high-quality contents and blogs on a regular basis will bring huge benefits. In addition to blogs, you can also publish some additional contents like ebooks, whitepapers, case studies, and surveys.

Measuring Your Marketing Goals

Not everything needs to be measured. In fact, collecting all kinds of information might lead to complications when you evaluate the results. Having said that, here are some of the key metrics that you can focus on:

Total Visits: The total number of website visits is a direct representation of how well it’s performing.

Page Views: Page views help you understand which specific pages of your website are more popular than others.

Unique Visitors: Repeat visitors are not half as contributing to your business as the unique visitors. After all, every unique visitor is a potential customer.

Traffic Sources: It is important to check where most of your traffic is coming from. Are your visitors using desktops or smartphones? Where are they based in? These factors can help you in improving the marketing campaign.

Bounce Rate: Bounce rate is defined by the number of visitors that leave your website almost instantly. If you observe a high bounce rate, then you may want to check your website to see what’s causing it.

Backup Technology Limited (BTL) is always available to help its partners and resellers with their marketing needs. Please contact BTL at https://www.backup-technolo gy.com/about-btl/contact

Using “SMART” Goals to Evaluate your Website – Part I

March 22, 2017 Kris Price

So, you have set up a beautiful website that has powerful and informative content for your prospects and other relevant visitors. You have added contact forms, explained your services clearly, and added important links. This should do just fine, right? Unfortunately, the answer is “no”.

Your marketing efforts must not stop at merely creating and hosting a quality website. The Internet is a big platform where a number of IT companies are vying for the same spot that you are after. Thus, traffic gets distributed unevenly, and if you want more of that to reach your website, then you must establish concrete IT marketing goals, and measure them for evaluation.

An ideal website for an IT business must have SMART goals, which are Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Timely.

Creating the SMART goals

With SMART goals you can cover all the major aspects of your marketing campaign, and make sure you are on the right track.

Specific

Goals that are vague have no value. Thus, if your marketing team needs to focus on creating a “good” website, and drive “excellent” results, then you must revise the entire strategy altogether. “Good” results don’t mean anything. Even if you want “good results”, you must be able to put it into numbers that define how “good” it is. Will you consider a 1,000 unique visitors per day good? Or do you need higher numbers to qualify as “good”.

Measurable

Borrowing the previous example, you must be able to measure your goals. This allows you to track your progress, and take actions accordingly. So, if it was your goal to convert at least 10 leads per week through your website forms, and if you are getting 5-6 leads conversions, you can make adjustments in your marketing campaign for improvement.

Attainable

It goes without saying that the marketing goals that you have set must be realistic and attainable. Goals that are not practical will not only waste time and resources, but also hurt the morale of the marketing team.

Relevant

A lot of thought and planning must go into creating the goals so that the team’s efforts are not in vain. For example, while a huge amount of brochure downloads might be good for business, but if the majority of these downloads are through bots, then you might need to revise the assets you have uploaded for downloads.

Timely

Each goal must have a fixed timeline. It doesn’t matter if a goal is to be attained within a month, a year, or more, a deadline is a must. This helps in keeping your team focused, and also increases the overall productivity.

To be continued in Part II.

Marketing Mistakes That Every MSP Must Avoid

January 21, 2017 backuptech

As more and more businesses are embracing cloud technologies, the need for dependable Managed Service Providers (MSPs) is increasing. And while most service providers are doing a great job at marketing, some of them are lagging behind. In order to become a well-established MSP, it is imperative that you focus on your marketing strengths, but at the same time, avoid mistakes that could potentially bringing you down.

Here are some of the main marketing mistakes MSPs must avoid at all costs:

Using a Poor Website Design

A business website serves as the company’s storefront. Just like a business owner ensures that their brick and mortar store not only looks appealing, but also allows their customers to do business easily, you must build your website, keeping these things in mind. It is surprising how so many MSPs’ websites are so bland. Many providers don’t even bother displaying an image of an actual person, when the MSP business has a lot to do with building relationships alone.

Apart from ensuring that your website looks simple and appealing you must take some additional steps to improve the conversion rate. Important links of whitepapers, brochures, and forms, etc. should be easily available for the visitors. You can also add a live-chat feature if possible. Many are not quite comfortable calling businesses on phone, or writing emails. A chat feature is simple and provides quick answers the visitors may have.

Telling, Not Showing

Don’t tell your leads how your state of the art technology is based on such-and-such proprietary algorithms, or that your systems are backed by some of the best security mechanisms. For instance, if you are an MSP who provides cloud backup services, show them how your cloud backup facility can protect their business if data breaches occur, or how they can save more than 50% or more of their existing IT costs by using your services. Customers are rarely swayed by tech jargon or an MSPs personal accomplishments. Instead, show them how your service can actually benefit them through facts and numbers, and you have piqued their interest.

Using an Inefficient Lead Generation System

A business depends on its customers. However, you always have to start with a prospect, which is converted into a customer over time. To improve this conversion rate, it is important that you have an excellent lead generation system in place. It should cover everything, starting from lead identification, to lead nurturing, and then finally lead conversion. Here a few points to keep in mind:

Creating a profile for quality leads: How do you identify the quality leads? Not every person who shows interest in your service is likely to close a deal. Thus, you must maintain a standard profile that you can compare your leads against. If they meet the profile, you can add them to your database of high-quality leads.
Nurturing the Leads: Once you have filtered your leads, you can start working on getting them to close. Following up with them is extremely important here. This is how you keep tabs on the entire operation. Make sure you ask the right questions when you contact them. Some examples include: “What kind of features are you looking for in your managed services provider?”, “Is there something we can do to make this work?”

Marketing is extremely important for every MSP. By ensuring you don’t make the same mistakes that most new MSPs are making, you can improve your business considerably.

Why Cloud Collaboration is Very Important – Part II

January 19, 2017 Sam Broadbent

In Part I, we discussed the definition of cloud collaboration; why some organisations are hesitant to adopt cloud collaboration, but rather opt in for emails, citing familiarity and simplicity; and how ill-informed security concerns keep some from adopting cloud collaboration despite the fact that security has been thoroughly addressed by cloud vendors.

Indeed, cloud backup and cloud computing companies are well aware of the potential for mobile data to be vulnerable to hackers, eavesdroppers and other malicious agents, so advanced security procedures like high-level data encryption and varying access privileges for all of the different collaborators make it so that files remain exclusively available only to those in the collaboration group.

Yet another unfortunate factor keeping some businesses from utilising cloud services for collaboration is that they fear that it would be cost prohibitive. After all, since using email is basically free, why pay to collaborate online? Well, it is important to keep in mind that cloud services are often now leveraged in a pay-as-you-go fashion, so businesses only have to pay for the services that they actually use. In addition to this, cloud computing services are now commonly bundled with online data backup packages and other utilities that businesses are already paying for in the first place! Also, cloud collaboration can be thought to wring more value out of hardware that businesses and employees have already invested in like smartphones, laptops and iPads. When you combine these factors with the collaboration-ready aspects of social networks like LinkedIn and Facebook, the potential result is a highly fluid and dynamic work environment in which employees can communicate and collaborate freely regardless of their physical locations, granting business owners and CEOs the peace of mind of knowing that they are getting the maximum return on their enterprise’s investment.

Of course, we here at Backup Technology Limited (BTL) don’t just see cloud collaboration as the way of the future; we think it should be the way of the present as well! For this reason, we have assembled the most cutting edge suite of cloud computing tools in our cloud services. And, with top of the line data protection practises like bank-grade encryption and advanced password security protocols, you’ll never have to worry about anyone except who you deem fit getting their hands on your precious data. So, speaking of not having to take any risks; why not visit our website and try our free trial today? We think that you’ll find that cloud collaboration is just one of the myriad advantages that BTL can bring to your SMB. Visit our website here: www.backup-technology.com/cloud-backup

Why Cloud Collaboration is Very Important – Part I

January 19, 2017 Sam Broadbent

Wikipedia defines “Cloud Collaboration” as “a way of sharing and co-authoring computer files through the use of cloud computing, whereby documents are uploaded to a central “cloud” for storage, where they can then be accessed by others. Cloud collaboration technologies allow users to upload, comment and collaborate on documents and even amend the document itself, evolving the document.”

The increased ease with which employees can now collaborate online is one of the most important and revolutionary of all of the advantages that the Internet itself has brought to the table for businesses of all sizes. However, although online collaboration (both over LANs and the cloud) has been readily available through a variety of different means to businesses for some time now, many enterprises are still somehow hesitant to take advantage of these valuable tools, often opting instead for basic email exchanges as their go-to collaboration method. With all the myriad advantages of utilising the cloud for collaboration, why are these enterprises still holding on to doing things the old fashioned way?

First off, some companies that have yet to harness the power of the cloud may try to point toward the relative familiarity and simplicity of using email for collaboration versus cutting edge cloud tools. However, this can be seen as somewhat ironic when one considers the fact that, when compared to the streamlined process of collaboration in the cloud, group projects through email can often become suddenly very complicated at a moment’s notice, with potential mis-saves to storage servers being a constant risk, not to mention the confusion that can result as to which collaborator has the most recent version of the collaborative project in question. In addition to this, the very simplicity of this one-way communication style often also serves to inhibit creativity by forcing the participants to create a rigid, preconceived hierarchical structure so as to avoid the above-mentioned confusions, delays and accidents that can be so common to collaborative email threads.

Another factor that often leaves businesses afraid to take advantage of the cloud for collaboration are ill-informed concerns over security. While being cautious about security is an understandable, nay, advisable stance for people to take (especially when beginning to use a new technology), it is important to keep in mind that, once again, cloud collaboration has been around for some time now, and thus potential security issues have been thoroughly addressed by cloud vendors. In fact, files being shared and accessed in the cloud oftentimes end up being more secure than ones passed around through email as simple unencrypted attachments!

In Part II, we will further discuss further the importance of cloud collaboration.