Active marketing reaches interested parties, customers, employees and also applicants

We are still a small company with 25 employees and always had an external person who supported us in marketing. However, at some point he no longer wanted to be self-employed and asked us if he could join us. As a result, we now have a full-time employee who takes care of the entire marketing side of things, which also helps us move forward, for example through our weekly meetings. About the goals.

For us, it's primarily about providing our customers with comprehensive information about our entire product range. So that I don't hear afterwards, oh, you also do firewall, I didn't even know that. And recently, we've been focusing more and more on spreading the word and actively looking for interested parties and new customers.

And the third point is employee recruiting. That's a big point for us, but it's intertwined again because this social recruiting doesn't just reach potential employees, but also managers, senior positions at prospective customers who then get us on their radar. It just has a lot of side effects. You notice that the level of awareness grows very strongly when you put your money where your mouth is.

We often use references or success stories. And marketing now works in all directions. Even our employees no longer hear about every project and can now be told what great projects we are involved in. We also use this for interested parties. We have also put this more in the foreground on our homepage, especially references, Google ratings etc.. We received a voucher from Sophos for a consultation with Marc Copeman, a marketing specialist for MSP service providers. That was very instructive. We analyzed our homepage together and then identified points that we could improve. And it turned out that although we already had our Google rating and our success stories somewhere on the homepage, we have now actually put them at the very front of the first page as references because we want to create a good feeling for new and existing customers.

Basically, the be-all and end-all is the Google rating, i.e. everything that is displayed positively on Google. He also liked the number of reviews, which doesn't have to be 1,000, but if there are more than 20, he thought that was good. Then the menu navigation on the homepage was very important to me. What might be confusing? Where do we perhaps direct the focus back to social media or Facebook instead of leaving the customer on our homepage? And then we also have to pick up the customer and tell them what the next step is. And that's not the end of it, we have also set up an online calendar directly for our sales department where you can book an appointment.

Not all of our content is played out on all channels. It starts with social media. I don't post a team event on LinkedIn. We're not looking for staff on LinkedIn either. For me, that's a Business2Business platform. Team events are then on Facebook and Instagram. And then LinkedIn is for webcast advertising and that's where we tend to post security information and things like that. Then we have monthly newsletters. Everything comes in there because we also want to inform our customers about what we do for our employees. And what we use a lot are our e-mail banners, which we change on a weekly basis. They sometimes contain product information or our webcast advertising. And then we actually also do print. So we actually still regularly send out the business flyer from a server and PC manufacturer.

For graphic design, we use Adobe Creative Suite, which we also use for video editing. Then we use Cleverreach for our newsletters. And we have stored the data in SAP. We use Teams' live events for our webcasts. We're struggling here and will probably look for a different solution now, because although we've built a registration process, invitation mailings, reminder process etc. ourselves, we'd like to have it all from a single source. And that's why the next webcast will probably be Go-To-Meeting or Go-To-Webinar, because we'd like to try it out.