Like all other companies, managed service providers’ marketing hinges on quality content. Creating thought-provoking articles, innovative videos, and highly converting ads is the best way of generating traffic and awareness for your brand. However, to get to that point, it takes a lot of planning and experience.
MSP marketers need to form an optimal strategy for their brand and choose the right channels. They should also be well aware of their target audience to ensure maximum conversions. About 40% of all B2Bs have a documented approach, which is why you should also take the issue seriously if you wish to remain competitive.
In this guide, we’ll talk about some of the most popular formats you can use to acquire MSP clients. We’ll also share a few tricks that will help you create an actionable content strategy.
5 Most Popular MSP Content Marketing Channels and Formats
Content comes in all sorts of shapes and forms. Depending on your MSP content marketing strategy, you might pursue blog posts, social media ads and organic posts, search ads, email sequences, and other formats. We will explain all options in regard to specific channels:
1. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Blog posts, guest posts, infographics, videos, white papers
SEO content marketing strategy revolves, for the most part, around the creation of blog posts. Marketers use them as a “beacon” for driving website traffic from search engines but also converting users who come from other sources.
On average, it takes a content writer 4 hours to create a new piece, while an average reader will go through it in less than 52 seconds. Although this might sound discouraging, a managed service provider should try to maximize user engagement and links to appear higher in Google. You should always remember that some of these users will become your clients eventually, making it all worthwhile.
Besides blog posts, marketers use other formats for this particular digital marketing tactic. For example, they use guest posts to acquire links from other sites and to boost direct traffic. White papers are an advanced type of blog post, garnering much more attention from the general public.
You can also introduce interactive content to your pages, such as videos and infographics, to achieve different goals. Even if a piece doesn’t provide a direct impact on your organic traffic, it might still promote your MSP website in some other manner.
2. Social Media Marketing (SMM)
Social posts, social videos, images
When we mention social media marketing, we primarily refer to organic strategies for increasing followership and driving traffic to your site. Sites like Meta, X, and Instagram might not be the best choice for promoting MSP services, but people expect that you have active accounts on these platforms.
These platforms are especially valuable for getting in touch with prospective customers. Given that email communication is often clunky, potential clients usually turn to these platforms to quickly get answers to their questions. Because of that, you should always have updated, engaging content so you can project success.
It’s worth mentioning that social media gives you much less flexibility when choosing formats. Most marketers nowadays use short videos that can easily be shared on other platforms. Intriguing images with stats might also work well for your MSP content marketing strategy, while businesses rarely use vanilla written posts.
3. Social Media Advertising
Social posts, social videos, images
Advertising on social media is similar to the creation of organic posts (at least in terms of format). MSPs combine images, videos, and text to generate leads for their businesses. Unlike organic marketing tactics, advertising is much more straightforward and yields faster results.
Social ads account for almost 29% of average marketing spending. With over 5 billion people frequenting social platforms, this means your message can be seen by every second person in the world.
Unfortunately, using paid advertising on social media for MSPs can be tricky. Simply put, this isn’t the type of service people expect to see on their Meta or X thread. Because of that, we suggest prioritizing some other tactics or, if you’re curious, allocating a limited budget for this activity.
4. Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
Textual ads
SEM is a term we use for any type of search engine promotion, but, in practice, it mainly refers to paid ads in Google. This content comes only in textual form, and it allows businesses to occupy top spots for lucrative keywords. When coupled with a quality SEO strategy, it allows marketers to completely dominate transactional keywords and find their target audience.
Similar to social advertisements, paid ads in Google (also referred to as pay-per-click or PPC) allow managed service providers to focus on prospective customers. They allow brands to convert organic traffic by guiding users from search engine results pages to valuable content on their sites.
However, there’s more to search ads than simple sales. According to study data, 80% of businesses have reported an increase in brand awareness after posting these messages online. The promotional tactic is especially great for managed services as it allows brands to gain clients without extensive marketing efforts.
With the improvements to AI tools, you can now test your paid ads before posting them. That way, you can maximize your budget and simplify the content creation process.
5. Email Marketing
Textual content
Email marketing strategy is commonly used in conjunction with other tactics and content formats. It allows companies to pitch prospects and retain existing customers through thoughtful, well-placed messages. MSPs can even use modern AI tools to streamline the entire process, from prospecting to creating content and sending it to recipients.
Email marketing is perfect for sales teams. Business owners can use it to connect with unknown users and get them acquainted with their offer. It’s worth noting that email marketing campaigns usually have extremely low conversion rates, and you need to send messages to thousands of people just to make any impact.
Creating MSP Content Marketing Strategy
The best way of generating quality leads for your MPS business is through proper strategy. It isn’t enough to be a great writer or video editor; you also need to ensure your messages resonate with the wider audience and potential clients. That being said, these are the things you need to do to create a perfect marketing funnel!
Consider Your Goals
First off, you need to determine what you wish to achieve with your content. For example, increasing brand awareness requires a completely different approach compared to selling services. Most businesses use the “spray-and-pray” method, where they will create content for all sorts of channels and try to acquire any traffic they can get their hands on.
As you’ll soon realize, dividing your attention usually results in subpar results across the board. Instead of having one powerful channel, you’ll have a bunch of non-related contacts posted on social, websites, and ad platforms. These are things you need to consider in terms of goals and content formats:
- Depending on how you use them, blog articles can be great for increasing brand awareness. Through smart interlinking, they can be used as a part of your sales funnel for closing leads.
- White papers and studies posted on your site can make your brand go viral. Unfortunately, they are among the most expensive content to produce and can completely flop
- Ads are ideal for boosting sales, although there are better content formats for boosting awareness
- Organic social media posts can build your account, ensuring you have a large followership. Unfortunately, this channel isn’t ideal for MSPs unless you can share revolutionary content
- Videos need to be engaging to resonate with users. On the other hand, the good thing about them is that you can share them across all sorts of platforms, and they speak to younger users
Understanding the differences between tactics and formats will set the basis for all other marketing efforts. MiroMind team suggests you focus on blog posts as the best-converting format for MSP businesses.
Procure Software
Nowadays, it’s hard to imagine a successful content marketing campaign without proper software. Businesses use all sorts of advanced programs to generate and optimize content, predict results, share posts on various platforms, and find content opportunities.
But before you can go shopping, it’s vital that you understand the differences between tools. Each one of them uses a unique algorithm, with creators promising that this is the “most advanced solution money can buy.” Even if a software brand uses other company’s technology, they usually provide significantly different features.
Truth be told, it’s hard to tell in most cases whether software A will provide better results than software B. As we don’t know precisely how Google operates, we can’t say whether using a tool will result in better search engine placement. Similarly, a program that predicts future results of your ads might not perform as well as you might’ve hoped.
The best way to overcome this problem is by testing different tools and making your own conclusions. While you can also use the same toolset as other marketers, that doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll come on top during the promotional race.
Form a Team
Almost every great company will hinge on its marketing team. Content creators, in particular, are the biggest difference-makers in whether your message will go viral and reach a target audience. That being said, here are a few tricks you need to keep in mind when selecting professional writers for your company:
- Use platforms like Upwork to find top-tier talent. Veterans can easily be recognized by their scores and reviews, information which can save you a lot of legwork.
- Seek out experts who specialize in MSPs. There’s so much great talent out there that you can always find a person who can cover the topic with great proficiency
- Perform short trials before hiring. Although you’ll have to spend during the process, it will actually save you a lot of money in the long run
- If you wish to be extra thorough, you can go through freelancers’ past client lists. Reach out to these businessmen to learn more about their performance
You should also use communication platforms, like Slack, and project management systems to onboard your new marketers. Get them acquainted with other team members and get them in the loop as soon as possible.
Research Target Audience
The next step is researching the MSP target audience. Like with traditional marketing, you need to know who you’re pitching so that the message resonates with that segment of the population. You need to take into account numerous factors, including:
- Demographics
- Consumer habits
- Family budget
- Location and language
- Road to conversion
While most businesses understand who their ideal prospects are, they have a limited understanding of advanced factors. For example, they might not have enough demographic data to pinpoint the exact segment of the population, or they might not know enough about their buying habits and budget.
Unfortunately, this isn’t something you can learn by spying on your competitors. While there are some awesome tools that can track your site’s demographic data, such as Google Analytics and Google Ads, this software can’t access demographic data for other platforms.
In other words, you’ll need to start gathering info through your own site to learn more about ideal clients. This makes things that much trickier for new sites that barely get any visitors.
Perform Keyword Research
No matter which promotional tactic you’re using, you need to perform keyword research. During this analysis, you’ll learn more about different types of phrases that are popular in your industry. Business owners can acquire insights about ranking difficulty, bidding prices, average monthly search volume, and keyword type.
The great thing about keyword research is that you can repurpose it for different tactics. Extract data from tools such as Ahrefs or SEMRush and transfer it to an Excel sheet. The information can now be used across different platforms for various purposes. In fact, if it makes sense, it’s recommended that you target the same phrases during SEO, SMM, and PPC efforts.
Create Content Schedule
Approximately 40% of businesses set new marketing goals every month. Although having a proactive stance and flexibility is necessary for staying afloat, you should also have some stability. Changing your MSP content workflow is usually detrimental to your team, affecting their performance over time while increasing stress levels.
Because of that, we suggest you create a quarterly or at least monthly content schedule and stick to it. Here are a few tricks that will help you along the way:
- Find a suitable template
- Add rows and columns with relevant metrics
- Segregate different content types
- Use different tabs for different tactics
- Introduce deadliness
- Assign roles
Nowadays, you have a few incredible project management tools that will assist you with content scheduling. We suggest using Trello or Monday, as two of the best programs in this vertical.
Create a Content Process
There are many reasons why the structured content creation process beats the alternative. By creating a set procedure, your team can experience the following benefits:
- Have similarly structured content on all platforms
- Make it easier for users to read several articles during one visit
- Implement the best marketing and SEO practices
- Improve the readability, engagement, and authority of your posts
- Create content clusters for better conversion
By implementing a set of rules, each piece you post on your site and social media will resemble the previous one. Even if you have several authors on your team, visitors won’t experience a major drop-off in quality and form. This small trick will boost your conversion and long-term retention.
When all posts resemble one another, it’s also easier to perform content analysis. For example, if all pieces are failing across the board, this is a clear indication that the process is faulty. On the other hand, if every writer used his own rules, it would be much harder to determine whether you’re succeeding due to a writer’s skill, marketing practices, or formatting.
Once you create a winning formula, we suggest you save it in a doc file so you can easily share it with all writers.
Analyze Results
When analyzing results, you need to consider your goals. Having a high number of impressions might not be good for brands who want to maximize sales, but it can show major progress for businesses who want to increase awareness. You should also consider results in comparison to the platform’s and your averages.
The good thing about content creation for MSPs is that you can always tweak your process. Then again, there are situations where you don’t want to react because there are many issues caused by algorithmic changes. Your content might be excellent; it’s just that there was a temporary shift causing your traffic.
Last Thoughts
At MiroMind, we take our content very seriously. Our team of MSP SEO professionals has enormous experience working with different platforms and formats, so if you ever need assistance, we’ll be glad to help!