MSP Marketing Content
By: Carrie Richardson, Partner, Richardson & Richardson Consulting LLC
Ten MSP Marketing Content Creation Considerations
- Are there already 20 articles on LinkedIn today about the same thing?
- Has someone with more authority written a much better article about it?
- Is your Domain Authority high enough that your content even matters?
- Do you know what Domain Authority is or how it works?
- Do you know how to SEO optimize your content?
- Are you spending a ton on paid search for zero results?
- Can you trade content with other companies so you’re all doing less and getting more?
- Do you have something truly innovative to write about or are you filling space with noise?
- Can your marketing team show you how “likes” or “site visits” translate into actual dollars?
- Has anyone ever mentioned to you that they read that great article you wrote about….anything?
Your MSP content marketing strategy probably includes written content.
Do you know why written content is important, or are you just creating content because you think you should?
Does Your MSP Content Marketing Actually Equal Revenue?
Does your MSP content translate into actual dollars, or are you throwing your precious marketing budget down a black hole?
When and how did you decide that you needed to write content?
Who advises you on what MSP content you should be writing?
How do you measure whether content is working for you as a strategy?
Do you just keep writing and writing and hoping it will work for you eventually?
Are your prospects even reading your carefully crafted MSP marketing content?
“We Want To Understand What’s Important To Our Prospects Now.”
Have you ever watched young children playing soccer?
The children run to the ball and then kick at it madly in a great big clump.
When someone finally gets possession of the ball, they kick it out of the cluster…. but no one is there to receive the pass. The kids all run to the ball again and repeat this for most of an hour. It’s not very effective, but it’s kind of fun to watch. When my kids played, we called it a “bumblebee clump”.
Eventually, maturing athletes figure out that they must predict where the ball is going to end up once someone pries it loose from the clump. They need to run to that spot, away from the other players, and be there waiting for it. The first kid to figure this out becomes a superstar until the rest of the team catches up. Then the team begins to play strategically. The team with the better strategy – the team that can figure out where the ball is going to be – wins more often than they lose.
How Does This Relate To Content Marketing Strategy?
This is not so different from a company making their first attempt at proactive sales and marketing activities. Most companies will watch to see what their competitors are doing, then copy those tactics. They might choose to listen to a “guru” preaching the same course of action for their entire industry.
Write blog posts!
Inbox links to those blog posts in canned messages to random strangers on LinkedIn!
Include a call to action! Put in a rich offer!
You can guess what that leads to. Bumblebee clumps. Except instead of children running to the same ball, it looks like 20 MSPs sending the same kind of content in similar ways to the same prospects.
Everyone is running to where the ball is already, but no one is set up to receive the pass.
The Part Where I Say Password Management Way Too Many Times
Cybersecurity sales strategy is an excellent example of this bumblebee clump marketing strategy.
How many articles about password management will one small business owner read? If your competitors have already posted four or five articles about password management, is there any value in you investing time in creating more content about password management?
You’re running headfirst into the bumblebee clump.
There are brilliantly written articles about password management. They’re written by the vendors you buy your password management software from. They’re written by people who have degrees in marketing and business communication. If one of your prospects wants to read about password management, there is a never-ending supply of excellent articles written by the companies that created the product.
Send your prospect one of those.
If there are one hundred MSPs posting one hundred articles about the importance of password management this week, it’s all just noise online anyhow. I’m not reading the emails or blog posts my own MSP writes, so the odds on me reading similar content from another MSP is around zero percent. If I do happen to read a post by another MSP, I’m probably going to ask my own MSP about it, not contact the content creator for more information.
It’s a bumblebee clump.
You can spend a lot of money with a third-party agency executing on a done-for-you bumblebee clump strategy. You can spend a ton of time and treasure in-house trying to replicate the things you see online. However, if your marketing team or your marketing firm can’t show you a path from “we write ten blog posts and then we post them on LinkedIn” to “this generates us six new clients a year that are each worth 2500/month” that means one thing: there isn’t one.
It’s just a bumblebee clump.
Lots of activity; no actual results.
It’s Better Than Nothing?
We hear a lot of “well, it’s better than doing nothing” commentary any time we mention this at an event.
No. It’s not “better than doing nothing”.
It’s nothing.
And it’s very expensive nothing.
What should you do instead?
First, you absolutely need to figure out what your prospects care about now.
It’s easy to do this – just ask your current clients what they care about now.
Then spend some time considering these things, and do not build your marketing strategy around the things people care about now!
Everyone’s doing that already, and you’ll just get lost in the noise.
Figure out what they’ll care about next.
Today’s I.T. problems will be solved by your prospects current I.T. company.
Back To Picking On Password Management
I’m truly not using password management for any other reason than seeing dozens of posts about password management on LinkedIn this morning, so let’s just use it one more time.
Right now, people are being told they should care about password management, but nobody is going to change I.T. providers to buy it – they’ll just buy it from their current provider. Password management content will not translate into new dollars for you. It will turn into more revenue for your competitors. Their clients – your prospects – will just buy it there. It’s nice to be a go-giver, it’s nice to educate the market, but surely we can all agree that if we are going to spend money on marketing, we do it to get a return on our investment, not to be nice people.
Where Is the Ball Going?
Will using password management systems create new problems?
What kind of technology will replace it?
If the solutions we have are unable to outpace the innovation of bad actors what happens then?
In other words, where is that ball going? Can you get there first to receive the pass?
Bumblebee Clump Content Leads To Bumblebee Clump Clients
Do you really want clients who are just now figuring out why they need a password manager anyhow?
Wouldn’t you prefer clients who adopted that technology early, and are now looking for ways in which they can use new technology to stay ahead of the curve? Innovators and early adopters use technology as a competitive advantage. They don’t see technology as a cost center, they find ways to use technology to increase their revenue and improve their margins. Show them how you can help them do this, and you’ll soon find you’re meeting those innovators in uncrowded spots.
Marketing Should Create R.O.I.
Spend some time thinking about the results you want from the content you’re posting. If you want to work with innovators, leave the bumblebee clump marketing to the bumblebee clump marketers.
At Richardson & Richardson we’ve invested thousands of hours into developing innovative marketing solutions. We combine those solutions with proprietary data to create marketing campaigns with not just defined deliverables, but guaranteed deliverables.
We don’t care about clicks, or likes – because clicks and likes don’t pay the bills.
If you’re interested in learning more, we’ll be standing out in the field, ready for that pass. Join us there – schedule time to talk about it here: https://randr.consulting/connect
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