The Optimal Content Marketing Strategy for MSP Marketers

Like any business, you want to sell more of your products and services. To do that, you have to let your target audience - current and prospective clients - know about these services, which you do through marketing.

While researching the best way to market your MSP, you’ve probably come across the term “content marketing,” and how important it is for successful marketing ROI. What is it exactly, and what sort of content marketing strategy is needed to sell managed services and other IT-related service offerings more effectively than the competition?

Let us tell you how can you use content marketing to take your MSP marketing strategy to the next level.

Content Marketing...What Is It?

Before we talk about the strategy you need to use, you need to understand what exactly content marketing is.

Content marketing is marketing that involves creating and sharing various types of valuable, relevant, and consistent online content with the intention of stimulating interest in a product or service amongst the intended target audience.

You’ll see it equated with search engine optimization (SEO). You’ll see it equated with blog writing. It’s definitely related to both of those, but it’s so much more than that.

Blogging is considered by many marketers to be the foundation of content marketing. But, it’s not just any blogging. Effective content marketing blogs are often written after thorough keyword research, and incorporate the keywords in which that business is trying to rank higher in - hence why it’s so closely tied to SEO.

This quote from well renowned marketing expert Neil Patel explains it nicely:

"SEO demands content. Content marketing is content. There is no such thing as SEO without content. You need words, articles, substance, keywords, verbiage. I wince whenever I have to say it, because it’s so cliche, but it’s true: Content is king." - Neil Patel

As you can see, content marketing is very important, and it’s something that you need to be doing to promote your MSP.

It’s Not Just Keyword-Filled Custom Blog Articles

When you hear the word “content,” you may be thinking of blog content.

While blogging is an integral part of any effective content marketing strategy, there’s more that you need to incorporate into your MSP’s marketing efforts if you want that strategy to be effective.

Some other highly effective content marketing formats include:

• Videos such as webinars, explanatory, animated, testimonials, company culture, walkthroughs, webinars, and talking heads
• Social Media Marketing on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube, and Instagram
• Emails including drip campaigns, promotional emails and eNewsletters
• Pay-Per-Click advertisements on Google and social media
• Deliverables such as case studies, brochures, whitepapers, guides, and checklists
• Landing Pages to promote your live events, deliverables, and service promotions

We suggest that MSP’s try to incorporate as many of these formats into their content marketing strategy as possible.

That Sounds A Lot Like Inbound Marketing...

In a way, it sort of is. That’s why according to this HubSpot survey, the majority of marketing professionals consider it a subset of inbound marketing.

Content marketing is more about sharing knowledge, insight, or entertaining content in a consumable format, while inbound marketing uses content marketing in conjunction with other marketing tactics like search engine optimization, branding, and social media marketing to generate and nurture leads. That’s not to say that SEO, branding, and social media marketing aren’t a part of content marketing; we already explained that they are! Think of your regular, everyday marketing that you do as your inbound marketing and your content marketing as your more specifically tailored marketing efforts.

The bottom line is if you want your inbound marketing efforts to be effective, you need an effective content marketing strategy.

Content Marketing Strategy ≠ Content Strategy

Obviously you need content for content marketing, but having a content marketing strategy is different than having a content strategy.

Your content strategy involves just creating content that is valuable and easily accessible to your target audience. Your content marketing strategy (ideally) will help move people through your sales funnel.

In an ideal world, this is what would happen as a result of an effective content marketing strategy:

1. Company creates valuable content
2. Company promotes that content to attract visitors to their website
3. Target audience’s contact information is collected
4. Target audience continues to receive marketing from company
5. Target audience contacts company to make a purchase

Obviously, it’s not always going to be that easy, and not every member of your target audience is going to follow this linear path. That’s why it’s important to have a well-rounded content marketing strategy that includes a variety of content types that are produced and marketed on a regular basis.

High Quality, Custom Content To Improve Your Content Marketing Strategy

We have multiple Content Marketing packages that can help improve your content marketing efforts and assist in delivering quality web traffic to your doorstep. Check out our service page to find the package that best fits your needs. Pair this service with one or more of our many other service offerings including social media marketing, brochures, animated videos, and more to really take your content marketing strategy to the next level.