Marketing for IT companies, compared on published evidence

Agencies with a verified published price

How to shortlist an agency for an IT business

1. Decide which IT business you are. Write one sentence naming who signs the cheque, where they are, and what triggers the purchase. A managed service provider selling to firms within an hour's drive and a security product selling to enterprise architects need different channels, different content and different agencies. Everything downstream depends on getting this sentence right first.
2. Ask what they can write without your engineers. Technical credibility is the constraint in this sector. Ask a candidate to name the last piece they published in a technical category and who wrote it. Then ask how many hours of your team's time their process assumes per month, because an agency that needs eight hours of engineering interviews and cannot get them will quietly ship filler instead.
3. Check they can handle compliance and security questions. Buyers in this market ask about certifications, data residency, incident history and subprocessors before they ask about features. An agency that has never built a trust page, a security overview or an FAQ that survives a procurement review will slow your sales cycle rather than shorten it, however good the campaign work looks.
4. Agree the metric and the ownership terms up front. Name the outcome you are buying: booked meetings, qualified pipeline, or signed contracts, with a definition both sides accept. Then confirm that the site, the analytics property, the search console access, the ad accounts and the content all belong to you. Create those accounts yourself and grant access rather than the reverse.

What managed service providers actually need

An MSP wins on being the credible local option when something breaks or when a company outgrows its current arrangement. That makes the work mostly local: a business profile that matches the office, service pages aimed at the terms buyers use (co managed IT, help desk, cloud migration, compliance support), evidence in the form of named clients and industries, and a follow up process that answers within minutes rather than days. Vertical focus is the cheapest advantage available here, because an MSP that is visibly the dental practice specialist in a metro area competes against far fewer firms than one selling generic IT support.

The common failure is buying a national content programme for a business whose entire addressable market sits in three counties. Traffic rises, enquiries do not, and the retainer is cancelled after nine months with nothing durable left behind.

What software and infrastructure vendors need

A product company is sold through documentation, comparisons, integration pages and proof. The buyer is often technical, arrives via a specific problem query, and is evaluating you against two named alternatives before anyone from your side hears about it. Google's guidance on creating helpful, reliable content describes the direction of travel plainly: content written for people who need the answer, demonstrably first hand, rather than assembled to occupy a keyword. In this market that is not a style preference, because a technical reader detects assembled content immediately and leaves.

Expect the price to reflect the writing burden. Agencies that maintain a bench of technical writers charge more per piece and produce less filler. Agencies that price content by volume are usually pricing the version of the work your buyers will not read.

What moves the price

Three factors dominate: the depth of technical writing required, the number of channels running at once, and whether paid media budget is being managed alongside the organic work. A single channel engagement aimed at one geography sits at the bottom of the range. A multi channel programme with technical content, paid demand capture, lifecycle email and analyst or review site management sits at the top, and reasonably so, since it is three or four disciplines staffed by different people.

Published starting figures in our index describe entry scope. Ask each candidate what the same engagement costs at the size you expect to be in a year, and get the step written into the agreement while you are still choosing.

Questions people actually ask

Should an MSP hire a marketing agency or a salesperson first?

In most cases the salesperson, because MSP growth is usually constrained by follow up capacity rather than enquiry volume. An agency is the right first hire when the phone genuinely is not ringing and the owner already has the time to work the leads it produces. Buying demand you cannot service is the most common waste in this segment.

How much of my engineering team's time will this take?

Ask for the number, in hours per month, before signing. Credible technical content typically needs subject matter interviews, and agencies vary from two hours a month to eight or more. An agency that says none is either using writers with genuine domain background, which is expensive and worth it, or producing content your buyers will recognise as hollow.

Do review sites and marketplaces matter more than search?

For some categories they are the primary channel, and an agency that ignores them is leaving the fastest path to pipeline alone. The right split depends on where your buyers actually look. Ask candidates how they would find that out for your category rather than accepting a default channel mix.

What contract length is reasonable?

Six months is a fair floor for organic and content programmes, since less than that cannot show a result honestly. Twelve month lock ins with no exit for non performance are worth negotiating. Ask for a defined review point where either side can stop, and confirm what you keep if you do.

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