Why Blogging is Essential to Your MSP Marketing Strategy

When working to determine your MSP marketing plan for the year, you may be overwhelmed at the many different options that you are faced with. There are so many choices! However, there’s one foundational strategy that you should start with if you want to propel the rest of your MSP marketing strategy forward: blogging.

Knowing how much work it is to maintain an active company blog, you might be wondering: is it really worth it? Do the benefits that you’d receive from blogging outweigh the time and effort it takes to generate quality blog content on a regular basis?

We’re here to tell you that YES, it definitely does! Let us tell you what benefits your MSP can receive from blogging regularly.

Improve Your SEO Strategy

SEO and blogging go hand-in-hand. One of the best ways to improve your search engine ranking is to blog! Here are a few specific ways that blogging can do this:

• Keep Your Website Fresh - Search engines take into account how often your website is updated when determining your ranking. You might not always have a reason to update most of its pages, so publishing blog articles is a great way to add new content. Since each blog that you publish is a separate page that can be indexed by the search engines, there are increased opportunities to get found for each one published.
• Rank Higher for Desired Keywords - You can incorporate keywords that you are trying to rank higher for into your blogs. When doing this, be sure to do so naturally so you don’t negatively impact readability.
• Internal Linking Opportunities - In your blogs, you can link to other blogs on your website or to other relevant pages, such as your contact page or a service page. When you use internal links naturally, they improve website usability and keep visitors on your site longer.
• Generate Backlinks - If your blog articles are found to be valuable, other websites may pick them up and link to them. These backlinks can be a major boost to your search engine ranking.

Demonstrate Expertise and Trustworthiness

Constantly writing about various IT-related topics on your company blog helps your MSP establish authority. By writing articles that will be seen as valuable, expert information to business decision makers in your local area, your clients and prospects get to read about the knowledge and experience that you have gained through your years of working in the IT industry. By doing this on a regular basis, you build trust and can become the go-to resource for all things IT.

Develop and Strengthen Relationships with Your Target Audience

Beyond demonstrating general expertise and trustworthiness, you can write blogs tailored to a specific subset of your target audience. Writing in this way shows your audience not only that you know what you’re talking about when it comes to all things IT, but that you care about their specific needs and pain points.

The easiest way to do this is to create buyer personas, then write blog articles tailored to a specific persona.

Use in Other Marketing Efforts

In the intro of this blog, we touched on the fact that blogging is a foundational part of any MSP marketing strategy. That’s because each and every blog article can (and should) be used outside of your blog page on your website! Blogs are great because they are educational resources that can be used as soft-sell campaign pieces.

Here are some ways to use them in other marketing efforts:

• Social Media - When you publish a new blog, write a short social media post, pick an image that relates to the topic, then post it to your social media platforms with a link to the blog itself. You can also do this with older blog articles too, just make sure that the content is still relevant.
• Print and Digital Newsletters - Newsletters are a great touchpoint to use in your marketing. You can include snippets of multiple blog articles (we recommend 4-6), and direct readers to visit your website to read the rest of the article they’re interested in.
• Postcards - Postcards are an effective, eye-catching direct mail piece that are perfect to share blogs. We send out blog-tip postcards that direct recipients back to the website through the use of a shortened URL and QR code.
• Email Blasts - When you write a blog that you believe would be particularly valuable to a subset of your target audience, send them an email that tells them a little bit about your blog and why it’s worth taking the time to read. Then, end with a call-to-action to read it and link to the published article on your website.
• Deliverable - Repurpose a blog article (or multiple) as a deliverable! You can incorporate a single blog into a handout of some sort. You can also combine multiple blogs, along with additional content if needed, into a whitepaper or IT playbook.

Remember, as mentioned before, you can also direct your website visitors to your blog page (or, specific blogs) through other pages on your website too!

Drive (and Convert) Traffic

Regardless of how a prospect ended up on your blog, the blog itself is a great soft-sell piece that extends through all stages of the decision making process and can help move prospects through your sales funnel. For example, here are some general blog topics that can be used to target the three stages of the decision making process (awareness, consideration, and decision):

• Awareness Stage - Tips and checklists
• Consideration Stage - Training and recommendations
• Decision Stage - How-to’s and specific scenarios

To successfully move prospects through these stages, you’ll need a call-to-action at the end of your blogs that drives them toward taking the next step, whether it’s giving you a call, viewing one of your deliverables, or visiting a particular service page.

Get Quality Blog Content, Written Specifically for MSPs Like You

To receive these benefits, you need to be blogging about the right content (and, doing so on a frequent basis). Don’t worry! We’re here to help.

Through our MSP Blog Service, you get three relevant IT-related blogs per week published to your MSP website that are customized to your business and service area (your business name, phone number, location, etc.) using several different tags. We also have additional service offerings that can help you extend the reach of your blogs through emails, direct mail pieces, and social media. Contact us at 888-546-4384 to learn more.