LinkedIn is a robust social network that allows professionals to connect, network, and showcase their industry skills and experience. Everyone uses it differently, but for MSP Content Marketing, it’s one of the most effective communication channels.
Research has discovered that personal profiles experience better growth and engagement than company pages. As an MSP, you might think that personal branding is optional as your business will do the job for you, but the truth is that your customers love authenticity.
With so many MSPs in the U.K. (c.11,500), it can take much work to stand out compared to your competition. MSP content marketing is essential to getting clients, so why not put a face to your company with a LinkedIn profile?
In this article, we’ll explore practical strategies on why individual profiles get better engagement and how to create great MSP content for LinkedIn.
Understanding LinkedIn for your MSP content marketing
You can tackle LinkedIn in two ways: an individual profile or a company page. Both have their uses, such as:
Personal profiles
- Showcasing your professional identity.
- Displaying your skills, experience, education
- Connect with colleagues and potential clients.
- Endorsements to show your clients your expertise and credibility.
- Build professional relationships by connecting with others.
- Share updates and achievements to keep up with your network and become the go-to person for all things MSP.
Company pages
- Represent and promote the overall identity of your company.
- Showcase your mission, values, and culture to attract potential clients.
- Share updates, news about your company, and industry-related content to keep your followers informed.
Individual profiles prioritise personal branding, networking, and professional growth while tailoring company pages to recruitment, content sharing, and engagement. Adopting a more personal approach to stand out against the sea of MSPs in the UK will help you succeed.
Benefits of Utilising Individual Profiles
Individual profiles on LinkedIn for MSPs are a great way to dive deeper with your potential clients and show them that there are humans behind your company name.
Build meaningful personal connections
Visual identity is a great place to start when creating a personal connection between you and your potential clients. Adding a precise and professional profile picture humanises you and makes the connection feel more personal. Your clients will feel like they’re talking to someone who will help on a human level rather than view you as a company that uses automated messages.
Storytelling is the best form of MSP content marketing
Everyone loves a story. Use the summary section of your LinkedIn profile to include your role and an overview of your experience in the IT and managed service industry.
Clearly stating the value you add to your clients. Discuss what differentiates you from other MSPs and how your skills benefit businesses. Adding client success stories demonstrating the impact of your MSP services can convince people to hire you. Keep your LinkedIn summary engaging and focused on your value to future clients. Use a professional yet approachable tone that resonates with your target audience.
Become an industry thought leader
One of the best ways to nail MSP content marketing is by posting engaging content regularly so you and your employees can set yourself as industry leaders. The more knowledge and content you share, the more likely others will come to your profile when they want to learn more about the MSP industry or hire an MSP. You can do this by making video content, networking with other Managed Service Providers, building credibility through recommendations and endorsements, and staying updated with trends.
Personal profiles offer more interactive features
Various interactive features are available when using LinkedIn on your profile to make your marketing feel more personal.
- Connection requests – Send personalised connection requests to connect with potential clients or like-minded professionals
- Posts and updates – Share updates, articles, images and videos
- Conversations – Keep yourself memorable by commenting on relevant people’s posts
- Polls and surveys – Take part in polls to gather opinions and insights from your network.
- Professional achievements – Show your network that you’re always willing to learn and succeed
- Following trends – Keep up to date with MSP trends and talk to them as soon as possible.
- Skills assessment – This validates and verifies your proficiency in specific skills.
Utilising your company page for MSP content marketing
While it’s clear that using your profile is beneficial to building a personal brand and marketing your MSP services, there are also benefits to a company page.
Brand image to showcase values and offerings
LinkedIn for MSPs can sometimes feel like a minefield regarding brand image – especially when everyone’s doing it. However, it can play a significant role in contributing to an unforgettable brand image. You can showcase your identity, values and offerings to a professional audience.
Reach a broad audience through MSP content marketing.
Through your company page, you can optimise with relevant keywords, industry-specific content and hashtags to attract potential clients. You can increase your visibility by tailoring your content to address the needs of the people you’re trying to reach.
Optimise your LinkedIn profile
Using LinkedIn for MSPs is a trick to be noticed, especially considering that 80% of B2B leads come from LinkedIn.
However, LinkedIn has 1 billion active profiles and 70+ million companies using the platform – meaning the competition to stand out can get tricky. To tackle the competition and showcase your talent as a go-to MSP, you can use SEO.
What is SEO?
When a profile meets the algorithm’s requirements, it gets ranked higher in search results. Ideally, if someone were to type ‘Managed Service Provider,’ you’d want to be at the top – your clients will spend less time scrolling through millions of profiles. For a successful MSP content marketing strategy, SEO is a non-negotiable.
Here are a few ways you could optimise your profile for SEO:
- Upload a high-quality profile photo and background banner – these must both relate to MSPs
- Add relevant Keywords – in your headline, summary, experience section, recommendations and skills section.
- Create backlinks – Backlink your blog posts to your LinkedIn profile. Not only will it improve your Google ranking but also your LinkedIn performance.
- Publish thought-leading content – Content will bring immediate viewership and help rank your profile higher in the LinkedIn search engine. Thought-leading content could include industry news in the IT industry, case studies, cybersecurity awareness, client testimonials, etc.
- Get recommendations and skills endorsements – Ask colleagues and past clients for a recommendation or skill endorsement on your profile. You can use this statement to testify to your work and validate a skill listed in your profile.
- Build relevant connections – Connect with those in the IT industry and potential businesses searching for a Managed Service Provider.
- Use hashtags – Add a hashtag at the bottom of your LinkedIn posts to reach out to more people outside your network. LinkedIn will suggest some for you if you need to know what hashtags to use.
What is thought-leading MSP content marketing?
To create content that keeps your potential clients interested, you must create thought-leading content. This content refers to insightful, high-quality, original content that positions you as a trusted authority within MSPs. It’s not only informative but designed to create discussions. Becoming a thought leader means having people recognise you as someone with high expertise, forward-thinking ideas, and the ability to influence industry trends.
Understanding your audience is one of the most important things to remember to produce industry content. Identify who your target audience is, including their job roles, interests, and challenges they might have. Customise to their needs and concerns within the IT sector. Once you’ve found your target audience, create thought-provoking blog content that addresses common challenges, providing strategic advice within IT and offering solutions throughout the content. If you can provide value to your ideal clients, they will keep returning for more.
But not all content is good content. White-labelled content refers to a piece of work produced by a third party and sold to another business as their own. While there are a lot of instances where this might make sense, there are a few reasons why you should stay away from it.
- Lack of originality – White-labelled content lacks originality. It doesn’t reflect your brand’s unique tone of voice or values. If multiple businesses use the same content creator, there could be a risk of everyone sounding the same.
- Limited customisation – Sometimes, the content may cater to something other than your business’s specific needs and goals.
- Reduced authority and expertise – Original, well-researched content is critical to building trust within the IT sector.
- Lack of content themes – Maintaining content themes is complicated when a third party produces your work. You’re the expert.
Thought-leading content increases personal branding
Your brand will strengthen by creating thought-leading content on your individual LinkedIn profile. People prefer to do business with other people, not just faceless companies. Building a personal brand allows you to humanise your business, showing clients that there’s a human being who understands their problems and will fix them as efficiently as possible.
What is a Thematic Content Strategy, and Why Should You Use it?
If you want to know how to create great MSP content for LinkedIn, a thematic content strategy will help you against your competition. This strategy involves creating content around themes and topics rather than focusing on individual and disconnected pieces of content. It’s an approach that aligns with broader goals, messaging and brand values.
The critical elements of a thematic content strategy include identifying core themes, content clusters, consistent messaging, content variety, cross-channel integration, content calendar planning, storytelling, brand authority building and community engagement.
These fundamental elements contribute towards a more impactful brand presence, showing your clients your expertise while building credibility and establishing stronger connections with them.
Top 4 tips for building a content strategy on LinkedIn:
- Outline Goals – Do you want to increase brand awareness? Engage with clients? Or educate? No matter what your objective is, make sure it’s clear and concise. The last thing you want to do is confuse potential clients.
- Create a Content Calendar – Uploading your content as and when you create it is one of the worst things you can do. No structure or real thought goes into the content process – your audience wants structure and value. A content calendar is mandatory for having a good LinkedIn content strategy. Use apps like Hootsuite to make a plan and schedule your content in advance.
- Interactive Content – Increase engagement with your posts by adding polls, quizzes, and stories. Encourage your audience to share their reasonings and get people talking about your profile by reaching out to them.
- Monitor your Engagement – If you receive comments, likes, and shares, reply and thank people for doing so. Engaging and responding to comments quickly can help build a community around your company. You might have noticed posts appearing on your LinkedIn posts because a connection commented. If you keep people entertained through discussion, you could do the same.
Create an effective MSP content marketing strategy with xpandly
At xpandly, we possess deep industry knowledge, keen market insights and a solid grasp of future trends to create innovative and effective go-to-market strategies for our clients.
We’re technology experts with over 15 years of experience. We understand that success in the technology landscape requires a deep understanding of the market and a forward-thinking approach that capitalises on emerging opportunities.
Driving success and revenue growth for businesses across the IT sector is what we do, and we have delivered more than £30 million in recurring revenue growth for MSPs.
Check out our MSP Marketing Services to see how we can help you stand out and thrive within the IT sector.