10 Reasons Why Your MSP Needs Google Ads

As a managed service provider, you offer a great service to your clients that helps them run their business more effectively, securely, and frees up their time. The problem is, if they can’t find you then they can’t hire you. Businesses might not even know exactly what they are looking for, much less how to find specific providers. This is, of course, where your marketing department comes in. Getting the word out is something every business needs to do, and many have discovered the benefits of using Google Ads to do so. In this post, we’ll break down 10 reasons you should be using Google Ads to advertise your MSP.

Why Should You Use Google Ads?

There are many ways to advertise, so what is it about Google Ads that attracts so many businesses? Well for one it’s one of the highest intent channels in the digital advertising landscape. Advertising has changed quite a bit as the world has undergone a digital transformation, and Google has been leading the charge for most of that time. Google was one of the first large scale advertisers and because Google Ads are how parent company Alphabet makes most of its money, they’ve made massive investments to remain the dominant player in the market. If you are a managed service provider looking to bring in some extra clients, this means it’s in Google’s best interest that you are successful. Granted, that’s true of every other ad provider as well, but few of them have the resources Google does to make it happen. Let’s take a look at some of the ways Google’s vast resources set them apart from the competition and make them an attractive option for advertising your MSP.

1. Google’s Large User Base

Google advertising made it’s name with search engine advertising on Google via Google AdWords. However Google Ads is a completely different animal. If you take one thing away from this post it’s this: Google Ads is not Google AdWords. Google Ads is a multi-platform advertising ecosystem that collectively reaches just about everyone on the internet. Google Ads includes:

• Google Search
• YouTube
• Gmail
• The Google Display Network
• A broad network of partner app stores, search engines, and publishers

The largest resource Google has isn’t its massive bank account, but rather its massive user base. Their closest competitor is Bing, and you’ve likely never heard anyone say they are going to Bing something. When a search engine is so large and ubiquitous that it becomes the verb for performing an internet search, it’s hard to argue with the size of its audience. When you add in YouTube, and the Google Display Network you get reach of basically the entire internet. When you advertise with Google Ads you are giving your MSP direct access to that large base of users and maximizing the chance that your prospects will see your ad.

2. Finely-Grained Targeting

Google is accidentally in the advertising business, but really they are in the data harvesting business. When you literally know what people are searching for in private, and the videos they are watching, it’s a powerful understanding of human behavior, and almost like shooting fish in a barrel as far as commercializing that power. Yes as an advertiser Google Ads costs money, but more than a few fortunes have been made by narrowing in the targeting on a Google Ads accounts and putting Google Advantages to work for you. Google search campaigns offer some of the highest intent targeting in the digital advertising landscape. When someone searches “managed service provider [cityname]” or “it company [cityname]” it’s a pretty good bet that you want to bring that person to your website for a chance at conversion.

Search queries aren’t all that are available though. You can leverage contextual keyword targeting to show your ads on websites and videos related to certain keywords, like “cybersecurity” or “Microsoft 365”. Google also has target options for what items they are currently researching, who the type person they are, age, gender, parental status, income bracket, and many more options.

3. Engaging An Audience

Google offers many options to reach people who have already shown interest in your business via “retargeting”. Imagine someone searches for the term “it support [cityname]” for your city. Maybe they don’t convert right that instant, and still have some research to do. You can show those people video and display ads for a designated period of time in order to keep your company top of mind during the consideration phase. Reaching your most interested prospects with the right messaging is how you engage an audience and start to build momentum for your brand. Google Ads is great for companies like managed services providers because purchasing cycles are long, and often competitive with multiple firms. You can distinguish your MSP and make sure your brands story gets told via advertising.

4. Budget Friendly Pricing Structure

Another great reason to use Google Ads is the flexibility that comes in how much you spend on your campaigns. You can set daily budgets, lifetime budgets, and control what days and time of the week your ad are shown. There are a ton of options to control the pacing of spend and the amount spent in your account. You can get started with a minimal monthly spend, though advertisers who spend more, often get better results.

5. Scalable Advertising

As you are deciding how much or how little you want to spend, just keep in mind that a few thousand impressions isn’t enough to judge the success of anything. Google Ads can accommodate any budget size, but that doesn’t mean you won’t need to make an investment to see a return. Thankfully, Google Ads offers an easily scalable advertising solution. You could get your feet wet with a few hundred dollars a month and then scale it up as you begin to see a return on investment. As long as your existing ads are performing well, scaling up is as easy as telling Google that you’d like to increase your daily budget. Google Ads are budget-friendly, but also very flexible. If there’s a down turn in business, or you just get too busy to handle the leads (hey it happens!) then you can turn off the spend. This scalability of advertising is a great way to control demand and hiring needs.

6. Recruiting Benefits

Although it’s not the primary focus, there are a percentage of people that contact you that will be searching for jobs. I’ve seen this range for entry level folks looking for help with getting started, all the way up to executives that want to crack in to a leadership position. Depending on business conditions, these calls can be a welcome surprise, or a pesky annoyance, but MSP owners should bear in mind the cost of recruiting fees and job board listings before waving off the recruiting benefits that can come with advertising on Google Ads.

7. More Engaging Formats

Organic traffic great, and you certainly want to do as much as you can to improve your SEO and bring in visitors that you aren’t paying for. But organic search results are boring, and don’t contain a lot of information. The only thing that can set you apart from all the other results is your ranking. Google Ads allow you to use a variety of different formats, all of which are more engaging than standard search results. 

8. Brand Awareness

One of the purposes of advertising is to drive customers to your site, and convert them into clients. But that’s not the only purpose. Sometimes a web user isn’t looking to hire a managed service provider at the exact time they come across your ads. This doesn’t mean they’ll never become a customer. Someone who sees your ads repeatedly is going to remember your company name, and associate it with MSP services. That way, when they do need to hire an MSP, your name will be on the front of their mind. Branding is a huge part of marketing, and Google Ads makes it easy to associate your brand with whatever keywords you’d like. Just remember that broader keywords are better for branding, as people don’t frequently search the same hyper-specific keywords over and over. 

9. Remarketing Tools

Google knows the importance of brand awareness to advertisers too, which is why they added remarketing tools into Google Ads. Remarketing tools will put a cookie on a user’s computer when they visit your site. Armed with the knowledge that the user has shown an interest in your products before, you can target them with specific ads. Even general ads shown frequently to these users will be a powerful aid in keeping your brand at the top of that visitor’s mind when they are ready to commit to a MSP.

10. Helpful Analytics

In today’s digital landscape, data is everything. The more data you have about audience demographics and the performance of your ads, the easier it is for you to fine tune your campaign so that it is achieving maximum ROI. Keeping an ad campaign running at its most optimal can be a full-time job by itself, a job that cannot be done without powerful analytics. Google Ads gives you the data you need to ensure you are making the most of your ad dollars. When you combine that with Google Analytics for your website, you are creating a powerful combination that will help to optimize every portion of your sales funnel and turn more site visitors into clients. 

Final Thoughts

Google has built one of the most successful ad platforms in the world. Their success is driven in large part by creating a solution that manages to be both powerful and easy to use. In the right hands, a Google Ads campaign can transform the success of your company in a short amount of time. We invite you to contact us at Tortoise and Hare Software to discover how we can help craft a Google Ads campaign that will get you more clients. We have a team of accomplished web developers and digital marketers that understand what it takes to drive traffic to a site, and what to do after it gets there to maximize the chance of conversions.