By The MSP industry is growing. Whether you’re among the newer MSPs that have set up shop in recent years or you’ve been in the space for a while, you’ve probably noticed more competition popping up to meet the sizeable demand for your services. This makes planning for the future more important than ever: how will your MSP rise to the top and maintain sustainable, repeatable growth in the years to come? Using a white-label marketplace just might be the solution you’re looking for.
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In this article, you’ll learn how a white-label marketplace can help you stop referring your clients to agencies and start meeting more of their needs directly.
Today’s MSP challenges
The pandemic and its aftermath have impacted most industries in one or way or another, and the MSP space is no different.
One of the seismic changes that has taken place is that more businesses have taken their operations either partially or fully online. For example, many workplaces have switched permanently to remote work, resulting in a higher demand for the traditional MSP offerings of hardware, software, an information management.
This is all great for the MSP space broadly, but it also means that more new MSPs have seen the opportunity and opened up shop. While in the past MSPs may have been able to eschew traditional marketing altogether and built their businesses on referrals, this is less likely to work today. The industry is simply too competitive now.
Forward-thinking MSPs that want to secure a healthy, profitable future will have to get creative and think about how they can differentiate themselves from the competition.
Your edge as an MSP
Luckily, you have several competitive advantages as an existing MSP. For starters, you have long-standing relationships with your existing clients. Client have to entrust very important business functions to their MSP partners, such as the management and security of sensitive data.
From this position as a trusted partner, you can more easily offer additional services and have your clients be responsive. Your relationships with your clients are also “stickier”—switching to a different MSP is quite involved and and disruptive. So once you do have a client, you can be more confident than usual that you can retain them.
In fact, you’ve probably also experienced this privileged position when clients have asked if you can provide any additional services. Working with you means they can avoid vetting other service providers. Since they already trust you, you have a built-in client base for any additional services you offer.
Say “yes” to your clients
Having to turn away clients by referring them to agencies when they inquire about digital services is like leaving money on the table.
Using a white-label marketplace to round out your product offering puts you in a position of saying yes to your clients the next time they ask about digital services. Whatever your clients need, you can probably find a white-label provider who can help you meet that need in a multi-vendor marketplace. This means you can expand your offerings easily, without upfront costs.
It also means you can become more of a one-stop shop for your clients. The more services you can offer, the more likely you are to retain those clients when they buy multiple services from you.
How white label helps you grow
How do white-label marketplace products work, exactly? They make it possible to offer more services—as many or as few as makes sense for your business—without the need to hire in-house talent or purchase software to deliver digital services. They also make it possible to augment your product offering without any upfront costs.
Bringing on new talent comes with a great deal of expenditure, from the hiring stage through to the onboarding and training stages. It can be a while before your investment in a new hire pays off in profits for your MSP. Plus, if you’re hiring someone to deliver a service in which you don’t have a great deal of expertise, you run the risk of onboarding a hire who doesn’t deliver work that is up to the standards your clients expect.
With the white-label model, a team of experts working under your brand name can deliver services on your behalf. Additionally, you don’t have to pay until you actually sell a service. You’ll pay a wholesale price and can set your own profit margins. This eliminates the risk of costs outweighing revenue that can come with hiring an in-house team for a new service offering.
Cloud marketplace products
A good place to start when determining which products to choose from a cloud marketplace is with the products your clients have asked about in the past. If you have a sales team, they can provide valuable insights since they’re the ones primarily conversing with clients.
Here are the types of digital products and services you can expect to find in a cloud marketplace:
- Ecommerce – Get your client completely set up to do business online with responsive ecommerce website builds, payment processing, and more.
- Reputation management – Help your clients develop a stellar online reputation by collecting recent positive reviews.
- Local business listings – It's important for business listings to be consistent and correct across different sites. This gives search engines like Google a cue that the business is reputable and trustworthy. White-label marketplace tools make it easy to manage all listings from one place.
- Social media – Social media management is time consuming but essential for brand awareness. Use marketplace tools that allow for the management of multiple social media profiles from a single dashboard.
- Content marketing – High-quality content can boosts your clients organic reach. Find solutions for creating blogs, images, and video that your clients will get use out of for years to come.
- Scheduling – Make life easier for clients that need to create appointments with scheduling software. Even those that don’t need sophisticated solutions for client appointments but that need to manage a large number of internal meetings will benefit.
- Web design and hosting – Get clients online with beautiful, responsive websites and managed hosting to ensure their sites are fast and secure.
- Digital advertising – Get more eyes on your clients’ businesses with ads that drive results to their bottom line.
- Productivity and operations – Productivity apps allow your clients to achieve more, faster, and with less stress. With more business taking place online, productivity tools are becoming indispensable.
- SEO – Search engine optimization (SEO) management requires juggling a lot of different elements. Most businesses don’t have the expertise to handle it in house. Solve this problem by offering white-label SEO services.
- Customer communications – Customers have high expectations of the businesses they patronize, and they want to be able to communicate with them easily. Offer local businesses white-label marketplace tools that make customer communication a breeze.
Grow your product offering with a white-label marketplace
Every time one of your clients goes to a digital agency for services you could have provided them through white-label reseller products and services, you’re missing out on revenue not just today but for years to come. Since many of these services are offered as software-as-a-service (SaaS), they represent reliable, recurring revenue that your business can count on.
By using a white-label marketplace to source reseller services and digital products, you can reinvent your MSP for the future by offering digital services in addition to your core offering.
