When it Comes to MSP Content, Don’t Hide the Secret Sauce

Blogging isn’t just a hobby or a marketing tactic used for side hustles. For an MSP, it is your primary method of communication and a tool to drive traffic. Are you giving your blog the attention and, most importantly, the information it needs to attract an audience? Here’s why it’s essential to share the “secret sauce.”

Does Your MSP Website Have a Blog?

While blogging may have a lingering reputation of being a form of self-indulgence, the reality is blogs are the primary source of organic SEO marketing. Having a website without doing some legwork is no longer enough to drive traffic and attract an audience. If you aren’t spending time to build content, you’ll likely not be pulling in a lot of traffic, which means fewer leads.

In addition, if you’re still focusing on keywords as a driver of traffic, you should consider rethinking how you use keywords. Modern SEO is driven by content and context, not individual (key)words. 

In many ways, SEO is a feedback system: the more relevant content you have, the more Google will offer your website as a search result. It goes something like this:

• If your content provides valuable information, the more your website will turn up in a search result. The more you appear in a search result, the more people will see your content and go to your website. 
• Google pays attention to the amount of traffic your website receives. As such, the more traffic your website receives, the more Google will offer your website as a search result because you are providing information people are looking for... which Google uses as a metric to send more traffic to your site. Rinse and repeat.

Your blogs can provide the fuel that powers search engines and drives visitors to your website. Once there, these visitors are more likely to convert. However, you have to give Google a reason to send them to your website and then a reason for them to stay. Your blogs must answer a prospect’s technology-driven pain points. They are looking for a solution. If you can provide the answer, chances are they will be willing to take a chance that you can solve their other problems.

Don’t Hide the Secret Sauce

When sharing information, many businesses tend to hold back out of fear of devaluing their services—often falling into the mindset of "why buy the milk when you can get the cow for free"? 

The problem with this idiom is that owning a cow is a lot of work. Quite frankly, most people are better off paying for the milk than taking care of a cow. The same can be said for a business owner managing their own IT.

Let’s take a real-world example: One of our first marketing products was called the Ultimate Social Media Rig. We still offer it today. The idea is our team will get some information from you, and build out your initial social media presence. We set up your Facebook business page, your Twitter profile, your LinkedIn company page, and we make sure that everything is set up correctly with nice graphics that match with whatever the social networks want at the time.

The real product is the task list of what we do. We’ve always offered that task list for free (on ConnectWise University, on our blog, etc.). Anyone can download it, walk through the steps, and put everything together themselves by following the task list. The added value of paying us to do it is pretty straightforward.

1. We do it for you.
2. You get to pick our brains and get questions answered.

We know people have used the task list without purchasing the Ultimate Social Media Rig, and that’s fine. Many clients start working on the list and decide they’d rather pay us to handle it for them, or they need better graphics made, or they have specific questions, and that’s when they have us take over.

Chances are, folks that could follow the checklist didn’t need our help, and probably wouldn’t have paid for the Social Media Rig. They might, however, appreciate the resource and trust us for other things down the road. We didn’t lose potential business by giving away the task list, but we potentially gained more by offering it for free.

The same goes for the offering of most MSPs. Managed IT is a valuable service because an MSP can help a business make the most out of their technology by allowing them to focus on everything else. That doesn’t mean you can’t share insights and tutorials and valuable information that will improve how businesses use technology.

Traditionally the “secret sauce” is the essential ingredient for success and something to hold tight to the vest, lest your competitors steal it and take away your advantage. However, in today's 24/7 always-connected environment where a wealth of information can be found with a simple search query, secret sauces are not so secret anymore.

Your MSP content's primary function is to show potential leads you are a trustworthy resource by giving them a way to solve the technical problems plaguing their business. If you keep the sauce a secret, that is, the information to solve their problems hidden, then you're not giving them the insight to consider you an expert, and therefore worth taking a chance on. Without this “proof” of expertise, you provide them with no reason to consider you over one of your competitors.  

Let's face it, these days, every MSP has a website and a Facebook page. The only thing that separates you from them is whether or not they can convince a potential lead that you have the experience to solve their technical issues. The best way to do so is by solving issues and your blog is the best way to do that.

Why are MSP Blogs Important to Generate Leads?

While your content aims to give visitors a reason to visit your website by providing them with solutions to their problems, a second but equally important function your blogs offer is to provide Google and the other search engines a reason to constantly review your site and update your positioning in the search results.

Search engines like Google are constantly searching the web for changes and new content. The reason why is that they wish to provide searchers with the most relevant information to their questions. Your blogs provide your website with a constant flow of new information. When Google crawls your website, they see something new and re-evaluate your page rank based on whether or not your new content provides valuable information. Individual content gets indexed as well, obviously, and that helps with long-tail keywords that might never result in your homepage.

As such, it is essential to have blogs. If you’re like most MSPs, your website doesn’t change. Your service pages remain the same year after year unless there is a significant event to warrant a change, and even then, it’s usually only a page or two. On the other hand, even if you’re only posting new content once a week, your blogs give Google 52 changes to make a note of and a reason to review your website.

Are You Ready to Share the Secret Sauce? 

We can’t stress this enough—it’s a good practice. We rely on it for ourselves. If you take a moment to read our blogs, you’ll see that we offer a wide range of industry tips and tools designed to help MSPs market their business better. We practice what we preach and aren’t afraid to let MSPs in on the secret to grow their business. We even tell MSPs how to market their business on the cheap—and we’re a marketing agency! 

Our goal is to help MSPs be competitive and grow because we know what it’s like to be in your shoes, and we hope that by sharing our wisdom, you’ll consider us when you’re ready to invest the resources to market your MSP because we’ve proven that we know what we’re talking about.

If you’re not sure if your blogs are working for you, or don’t have any blogs at all, give us a call at 888-546-4384 today. We will gladly take a look at your current situation and develop a suitable plan for your unique needs.