Sustained growth is needed for any business to remain profitable. To expedite growth Cloud Solution Providers can focus on increasing their internal efforts to acquire new business organically. For acquiring new customers organically, you have to have an in-depth understanding of the business and the customer journey. This requires not only having stellar product or services but marketing it effectively and ensuring the customers have an optimized purchase experience. As a CSP, there are different ways you can leverage to acquire new business organically and capture new markets.
Highlight Differentiators
If you are advanced specialist or key player in the market, you got it covered. If not, you must highlight your expertise that separates you from your competition. Microsoft has a partner ecosystem of around 90,000 plus global partners in Microsoft Cloud Solution Provider Program while AWS Partner Network (APN) has around 100,000 diverse partners from more than 150 countries. Having said that, not all the partners in the ecosystem carry same specialization skillset. For e.g., If you are the only partner or amongst very few partners in the country having a certain skillset or cater to certain industry, that’s your differentiator. Never forget to highlight it as that’s what sets you out from the crowd.
Your differentiator makes it much easier for you to communicate your product/service value to your potential customers, reduces deal loss to competitors and helps growing more business. Your differentiator is going to close most of the deals for you. Make your differentiator(s) an integral part of your marketing strategy to drive better results.
SEO Optimized Website
An increase in the website traffic will create a positive impact on your bottom line. Creating an SEO website will require some time and investment at the beginning but in the long run it will be less expensive than the pay-per-click ads. This one-time effort will yield results for a longer period. The close rate of visitors that arrive at your website organically will be higher than those who come via paid ads. Focus on putting high quality content with the right keywords on your website. Paying attention to components like meta description, cross linking, keyword density, in addition to on-page and off-page SEO can go a long way into capturing organic customers.
Marketing Toolkit
Make use of the tools and resources provided by your vendor partner, Microsoft, Amazon etc., free of cost to drive customer engagement. You can have access to training guides to improve your marketing campaigns. Your vendor partner can also provide you with digital marketing content on a weekly basis to use on your social media, blogs and website. Your vendor’s Go-To-Marketing (GTM) team can also support you in your marketing campaigns.
You can use other marketing toolkits and run campaigns that can help the customers discover your business. Experimenting with marketing tools like email-marketing, webinars, newsletters, social media marketing, etc. can be quite effective. However, marketing toolkits and efforts are not a onetime effort. You have to be consistent and continuous with your marketing campaigns for them to show any tangible result.
Customer-led Signup
Your website should not just be optimized for driving traffic but for conversion of the website visitors to paying customers as well. The website content should guide the visitors through customer signup journey with minimal or zero sales assistance. The new leads are valuable to the bottom line only when they become your customers. Invariably, customers prefer self-service platforms, not only once they have been onboarded, but from the very beginning.
If your signup process is too long or tedious the customers will avoid signing up with you. Make the sign-up process simple by providing single click sign-up and minimize the form fields. To reduce the reliance on sales representatives, invest in creating a knowledge base including FAQs, how to articles, tutorials and other informative resources that can be useful to the customers. These resources can help you in guiding the customers through the whole process without being intrusive.
Product Showcase Page
The website visitor needs to know exactly what products and solutions are being offered. Keep the content clear and concise but ensure that all the details of the product relevant to making a sale are mentioned. Any discounts or promotions being rolled out should also be visible on this page.
Focus more on the solutions you are selling, the gaps these solutions can fill for the customers. Analyze what a potential customer might be looking for and demonstrate how it can solve the problems your target customer segment might be facing. Showcase your rich solution portfolio with an intuitive interface to all your potential customers with C3.
Self-service Platform
For increasing the conversion rate, make your purchase process easy and quick. A customer who has shown interest in your products and services by signing up should be converted as soon as possible. If the signup has happened outside business hours, till the time a sales representative reaches out to the customer, they might have already moved to a different CSP.
A good customer experience involves fast response time which is possible when they use a self-service platform. Customers can have complete control over their purchases and access to all their transaction data without having to raise a request for the same. A self-service platform can help you keep the checkout and payment processes simple leading to a positive customer experience. C3 enables you to provide end customers the access to purchase, provision and manage cloud resources, invoices generated in C3 and reporting directly from your marketplace. Enable your customers to scale up and down based on their needs, without support requests.
Acquire customers with C3
C3 has been enabling CSPs across the globe to revolutionize the way they do business. With self-service capabilities, an intuitive interface to showcase your portfolio with a shop and cart experience, and the ability to convert visitors to customers with a public sign-up experience, C3 can help you scale and grow your business organically. Partnership with C3 has been empowering CSPs to focus on core business offerings while accurate and automated billing, a seamless experience and internal management is taken care of by us. Book a demo today to acquire more customers and accelerate your growth journey.
This blog was originally published on CSP Control Centre.
