Do you feel like content marketing is a struggle? You might feel like you don’t have the time or resources to achieve your content goals. Structuring content successfully can be hard in the competitive IT services industry; as an IT marketing agency specialising in MSPs, we understand that a solid content marketing plan can be a game changer.
Not only does creating content allow you to establish yourself as a trusted authority, but you can attract leads and build long-lasting relationships with your clients. However, creating a good content marketing plan requires careful planning, strategy and performance. Whether new to creating content or looking to improve your existing MSP marketing strategy, this guide will provide insights and practical tips to elevate your marketing efforts and achieve incredible results.
Define the goals you want to achieve through content creation
Firstly, it’s essential to define the goals you want to achieve. While the end goal is always to make a sale, how exactly will you get there?
Educating clients by providing value
By providing valuable information about the latest tech, best practices, and trends in managed IT services, you can aid your clients in making informed decisions. As time passes and they realise they need to hire an MSP, they will remember the content you created that helped them with a minor problem. The educational content could include guides, tips, and insights that assist SMBs (Small to medium-sized businesses) in elevating their IT knowledge, simplifying operations and achieving their business goals.
Increasing brand awareness and building trust
Building trust and increasing brand awareness are just as crucial as providing value. Doing so allows you to showcase your expertise and highlight success stories to show potential clients your achievements and build trust. Regularly producing high-quality content that reflects your brand values and missions can also help build brand awareness and increase visibility in the competitive market.
Produce leads and increase engagement
Creating content that resonates with your target audience can encourage them to reach out for your services. Promoting the content and communicating through comments, shares, and likes can help expand your reach and build a community.
Know your audience
For a successful MSP marketing strategy, you must create a buyer’s persona to understand your ideal clients’ characteristics, behaviours and needs. A buyer’s persona is a semi-fictional profile that helps you customise your marketing strategies, content creation and service offerings to meet your ideal clients’ specific needs and preferences.
Research and identify demographic information
Gather information on your existing clients. Use sources such as:
- Customer surveys
- Interviews with current clients
- Feedback from sales
- Market research reports
- Industry trends and insights
To identify your ideal client’s demographics, define their age, gender, job title and industry, company size, revenue, and location. To dive deeper into their professional background, explore their job responsibilities, challenges, and pain points related to IT management and support, as well as their goals and objectives about IT infrastructure and services.
Consider the behavioural aspects that influence decision-making, such as:
- Information sources and preferred communication channels
- Buying behaviours
- Engagement and experience with technology and digital platforms
- Budgets and spending habits
Goals and motivations
What are your buyer persona’s goals and motivations? These could include business objectives and growth targets, desired outcomes from managed IT services, and the factors influencing hiring an MSP.
Anticipate concerns
What concerns could your buyer persona have? These include common misconceptions about MSP services, barriers stopping them from adopting new technologies, outsourcing IT services, or general questions about pricing, contracts, and services.
Create the buyer persona
Use all of your information to create a detailed buyer personal profile. For example:
- Name: Tim
- Gender: Male
- Age: 35-50 years old
- Job Title: Business Owner or CEO
- Industry: Healthcare
- Company Size: Medium (100 to 500 employees)
- Location: Urban area
- Goals: Ensure reliable and secure IT infrastructure, improve productivity and efficiency of business activities, and reduce downtime to decrease risks related to IT issues
- Challenges: Limited in-house IT expertise, concerns about cybersecurity threats, uncertainty about the cost and ROI of outsourcing IT services
- Preferred communication: Email, phone calls, local networking events
- Objections: These include data security and privacy concerns, uncertainty about the reliability of an MSP, assurance of responsible support, and quick problem solutions.
This information will help you create content that addresses specific needs, interests and problems.
Try a content audit to see what works well and what doesn’t
If you already have content on your website, conducting a content audit to assess its quality, relevance, and performance is essential for a successful MSP marketing strategy. Start by creating an inventory of your content with an evaluation to identify outdated or low-performing pieces. Additionally, assess performance metrics like page views and bounce rate to measure content effectiveness and audience engagement. Gap analysis identifies content needs and shows recommendations for content creation.
Choose the correct type of content for MSP marketing
Leveraging various types of content can effectively market your services while educating your target clients and building trust.
Educational blog posts
Address common IT problems, industry trends and best practices through blog posts. This content can help you become established as a thought leader and provide value to potential clients. You can find content ideas independently or use an IT marketing agency like xpandly to help soften the workload.
Video content
Use video content for your MSP marketing strategy to discuss industry trends, showcase your services, and provide tutorials on IT solutions. Although creating original video content is important, you can also turn your blog content into video content. Not all of your clients will want to watch a video, and not all will want to read a blog post. Keep both in mind!
Case studies
Showcase client success stories and testimonials to prove how purchasing your services makes their lives easier. Make sure to highlight specific challenges, solutions implemented and the results you achieved to build credibility and trust.
Email marketing/newsletters
Email marketing will help you build connections with clients and prospects. Send regular newsletters with updates on exciting industry news, company announcements and content customised to their interests. Practising email marketing will help you nurture leads and uphold lasting relationships with your audience.
Social media
Neglecting social media is one of the worst things you can do for your marketing plan. Share curated content, company updates and industry insights on your social media platforms. Sharing will increase brand visibility, engage with your followers to gain connections and drive traffic to your website.
Develop a content calendar for consistency.
Consistency is key in content marketing; your hard work will seem well-organised with a content calendar. Create a content calendar to plan and keep track of your content creation, including content topics and titles, publishing dates, involved team members, and promotional channels. Practising this ensures long-term success and growth within the competitive MSP industry by maintaining relevance, consistency and effectiveness.
Optimise SEO for visibility and reach
Optimising SEO is essential for a good MSP marketing plan – it attracts organic traffic, increases visibility, and generates leads. There are several factors involved in good SEO:
Do your keyword research so you know what’s relevant
One of the most important steps to SEO is discovering suitable keywords and phrases your target audience is searching for. If you don’t know this, you won’t get far. Use SEO tools such as Google Keyword Planner to find high-volume and low-competition keywords related to managed IT services. These keywords should be added seamlessly into your content through the body text, headings, subheadings, images, and meta descriptions.
Really focus on the quality of your content
High-quality, informative, and enticing content that provides value to your audience improves user engagement and creates natural backlinks and social shares. Write content that addresses the needs and problems of your target audience. Remember to use clear and concise language to convey your message and stick to a specific tone of voice (TOV) throughout the content.
Use internal and external links to connect content
When relevant, add internal links to other pages or blog posts to keep users on your website and improve site navigation. You will also need to add external links to authoritative sources and reputable websites to provide additional value to your audience and show credibility to search engines.
Don’t forget to optimise for mobile
It’s great to have a website that looks good on a laptop, but if it doesn’t look good on a mobile device, it won’t help your SEO efforts. Mobile optimisation is crucial for improving user experience with the increasing use of mobile devices. Ensure fast loading speed on mobile and use responsive design to accommodate different screen sizes. Accessibility is key!
Pay attention to URL structure
Creating descriptive SEO-friendly URLs that include relevant keywords without adding numbers of symbols will increase crawling and click-through rates.
Promote your content
Creating high-quality content is only half the work needed—if you’re not sharing it on various channels, how do you expect your followers to see it? Share across social media channels such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, etc., and in email newsletters.
Another effective way to promote your content is through IT industry influencers/bloggers. Collaborate on content creation, guest blog, or co-host webinars. Their endorsement can help expand your content’s reach and credibility within the industry and reach a wider audience.
While using influencers, sharing on Facebook, and optimising SEO is important, ensure you don’t neglect paid advertising. Invest in paid advertising campaigns, including pay-per-click (PPC) ads, social media promotion, and sponsored content, to promote content to your target audience. Set specific targeting criteria based on demographics, interests or behaviour to reach potential clients seeking your services. There’s no good MSP marketing plan without promotion – whether you’ve aced SEO or not.
Engage with your audience
Remember to engage with your audience to maintain relationships once you’ve planned, created, and shared your content. A loyal and engaged audience can become advocates for your brand and, in turn, boost your reach, produce referrals and increase growth.
Respond to comments, questions, and feedback. Make it a priority to reply promptly and with customer service in mind. Encourage and acknowledge any input, address their concerns, and provide helpful solutions to any problems they have. For your audience, this provides a sense of community and shows you value them beyond being a client or follower. Consistent and transparent communication will build trust and showcase your commitment to customer satisfaction.
User-generated content is also a great way to engage with your audience and showcase real-life experiences with your MSP services. For instance, encourage satisfied clients to share promising, positive reviews and testimonials on your social media channels and website. Potential clients seeing these positive reviews might just be the last push they need before they purchase your services.
Measure and analyse content performance.
Don’t forget to regularly monitor and analyse the performance of your content, including website traffic, engagement rates, conversion rates, and ROI. Note your successful strategies and areas for improvement to maximise results. This increases the effectiveness of your content promotion efforts. Additionally, tracking audience demographics and feedback lets you understand how to improve your content and stay updated with industry trends, ensuring timely and relevant content creation.
The results
Finally, good content marketing leads to increased brand awareness, effective lead generation, and improved client engagement and retention. By creating valuable content, you can position yourself as a thought leader in IT services and improve your online visibility and SEO rankings. This marketing strategy attracts new clients and sustains loyalty among existing clients.
Create winning content with xpandly
We’re an IT marketing agency that specialises in marketing services for MSPs.
We understand that the Managed Service industry is competitive, so outsourcing content marketing to a specialised team ensures expert content creation, efficiency and adaptability.
At xpandly, we’re a dedicated team of content marketing experts helping MSPs improve their content strategies. With over 15 years of experience and a track record of driving £30M+ in MSP recurring revenue growth, we excel in overcoming various challenges.
Our expert industry insights and over a decade of experience allow us to pinpoint new opportunities and navigate difficult challenges in your industry. Contact us to discover how we can help you scale your content marketing efforts to new heights.