MSP Marketing: How to Use Off-Brand Blog Posts to Generate Leads

You might think all of your blog posts should feature content relevant to your business and services. After all, you want those sweet, sweet SEO rankings and conversions. However, consider using your blog for off-brand topics too, as you might find some of these posts bring a whole lot of traffic to your site. The question then becomes how to leverage this type of content to actually drive quality traffic.

While performing your monthly SEO audit (you are performing SEO audits, right?) you should be watching how traffic reacts to your blogs, looking for blogs that do well on their own, and listing blogs that don’t so you can promote them further or adjust them. Blogging is essential to your MSP marketing strategy, but it does take effort and TLC.

There are a lot of reasons why a blog post can suddenly become popular. Maybe someone discovered it and shared it on social media or Reddit, or maybe Google is driving a lot of long-tail keyword traffic to it, or maybe the content is so strong that it pulls in more people who scroll past it.

People don’t always want to be marketed to. Sometimes, it’s a nice break just to see what the news industry refers to as fluff pieces - the coverage of the new pandas at the zoo, someone celebrating their 100th birthday, or the girl scout who sold $10,000 worth of cookies.

Your version of that can be literally anything you are interested in that other people might like to see. There doesn’t need to be any mention of managed IT, cybersecurity, or any other service offering. Here are some examples of topics:

• Office pet pictures
• Personal achievements of your team
• Local community events
• Company events
• Silly “heard-around-the-office” stories
• Team member hobbies
• Throwback and origin story posts
• Food!

That last one was something that we have been doing for a long time. Every Thursday, we make food (or order in) for our staff. We take photos, share the recipe, and sometimes make a goofy video and post it to our blog. We found that this content pulled in more social media traffic than anything else. It consistently got more likes and comments than any other content.

Why? Because we weren’t selling anything.

It got us attention, which got us more followers and gradually led to more traffic and more to talk about online. Not only that, but you use off-topic content to generate leads for your MSP.

Create Relevance To Generate Leads

Let’s say a blog filled with office pet pictures is driving a ton of traffic, but the majority of it isn’t the type of traffic that converts; because they are interested in dogs, not managed IT. In other words, your audience is interested in your content, but not your services.

So, how to best optimize the blog (or any blog) to drive quality traffic to your site? By creating content that resonates with your audience.

The goal of adding relevance is to keep visitors on your site long enough to convert them into customers. What do we mean by relevance? Simply put, making the content somewhat relevant to the audience you want visiting. Unless you do this, all the traffic you have is being wasted, as readers of the blog are leaving after they read it. A good way to prevent them from leaving is to provide a good segue to your services through a Call to Action.

Take our example of a blog about pictures of pets. Try coming up with cute captions to make some of the images relate to IT:

Put a headset on a dog and have him say “I’ll sniff out your issues” or put an empty plate in front of a cat and have her say “I cleared your cookies!” Yes, you are allowed to be corny!

At the end of the blog, put a big, clear button or banner to drive traffic to a free audit or consultation. Throughout the page, you can even bring it up with text like “Percy the cat here is so good at spotting phishing attacks, and would love to help train your employees” and link to a free phishing simulation offer.

You don’t need to force this type of thing into every blog. Sometimes, we’ll do it long after a blog is posted and we see spikes in traffic. You really don’t know what or when something will start to “kick off.”

Don’t Waste Opportunities to Market Your MSP

How can an old blog about dogs generate leads for your MSP? By doing the same thing a blog specifically about managed IT does, recognizes your audience’s pain points, and provides a solution. People interested in your dog blog are also employees and/or business owners, who need their technology to work. You never know who is having a bad IT day, needs help relocating their business, or has a malware issue; but you can be sure one of the readers of your dog blog will or do.

When it comes to marketing your MSP, you never know what content or topic will resonate with an audience, but once you find one it would be a shame to let it slip away because you didn’t recognize its value until it was too late. JoomConnect has the expertise to see diamonds in the rough and give your MPS a plan to make the most of your marketing opportunities. Call 888-546-4384 or contact us today to schedule an appointment to see if we can help you achieve your goals.