Using Content To Supercharge Your MSP Marketing

Here's a beautiful thought, what if your clients and prospects actually looked forward to receiving your marketing material? What if customers spent more time reading your company newsletter than reading their favorite magazine? What if instead of tossing your newsletter in the junk mail pile, customers filed it away as a helpful resource? This kind of customer connection is possible with content marketing.

The definition of content marketing is to produce and distribute relevant and valuable content to attract, acquire, and engage your specific target audience. Basically, content marketing is your company's way of telling stories and proving that you are the authority in your industry in order to attract and retain customers. It comes in the form of 'free' information, engaging content, and articles that are worth reading and sharing. We've found the freemium model to be extremely beneficial.

Today's customers are constantly barraged with high volumes of advertisements, and they are reacting by tuning out traditional marketing. It is easy to ignore banners when surfing the web, use DVR to skip commercials, and flag email fliers as trash; it is likely that you too can identify with all of these habits. The general disregard for traditional advertising translates into more than lost sales revenue; it also means customers are failing to connect with your brand.

We are living in a time where information is everywhere, the good, the bad, and the painfully mediocre. The challenge is to not add more noise to the marketplace, but to make quality content that makes a positive connection with your audience. The value of this positive customer connection through custom content cannot be understated; 90% of consumers think custom content is useful, and 78% believe that content marketing makes them feel closer to the sponsoring organization. This positive customer connection does translate into sales, with 80% of business decision makers preferring to get company information in a series of articles over advertisements, according to a study by Roper Public Affairs.

CMI has found that 88% of all brands use content marketing. This 88% figure does not mean that your message will be drowned out by the messages of other content marketers; instead, the 88% stands as a testimony that content marketing works. One reason that content marketing works so well is because it is customizable. This means you can approach content marketing by focusing on a particular segment of the population, instead of blanketing the world. Obviously, the group of people you want to tailor your content to will already have some level of interest in your product or service. Technology has made it incredibly easy to find and network with groups based on shared interest, this opens up new and exciting doors of possibilities for content marketing.

If a customer has already expressed interest in your business, then they will also be interested in your message. Go ahead and tell your story, simply share information about your product. If the content is about something that excites you, then your customer base will also appreciate it. The point of content marketing is to engage your audience with information that makes them more intelligent. It helps to think of content marketing not in terms of selling, but as a consistent conversation that informs. Think of how much more pleasurable your business experience will be having an educated customer base!

Content marketing boils down to storytelling. Stories are fundamental to the human experience, and there are many different ways to tell a story. Finding new ways to tell your story, i.e. market your content, is only limited by creativity and imagination. Do not be afraid to try new storytelling mediums, just remember to always be engaging, consistent, and informative. You have a story to tell; do not hesitate to tell it. The rewards that come from connecting to others from a meaningful story can be a surprisingly fulfilling experience. Tell us, what's your story?