How one client question can turn into 7 pieces of content for your MSP

To do great marketing for your MSP, you need great content.

There's tons of it around - many vendors give away content as "value add", and there are plenty of businesses that supply high quality content (cough cough).

I've always said there is a clear hierarchy of content where you creating your own sits at the top:

• Top: Create your own content
• Middle: High quality content only supplied to one MSP per area
• Bottom: Content supplied to thousands of MSPs

But of course creating your own content is a time and resource hog.

One of the tricks when creating your own content is to repurpose ideas into different types of content for different platforms. Have no doubt that what I'm writing here will end up on my podcast at some point next year! And a copy of this LinkedIn Newsletter has already gone on my blog.

Here's my Standard Operating Procedure for collecting, creating and repurposing marketing content for your MSP.

Collect ideas

Collecting ideas for content is a mindset more than anything. Once you realise that ideas are all around you all the time, you just have to open yourself to collecting them.

Your goal is to create content that's educational and entertaining for ordinary business owners and managers. Which makes every communication with every client a potential content goldmine.

Imagine how many ideas could come out of a sales meeting or a strategic review (aka a Quarterly Business Review).

Ask lots of open questions. Not only do they get quality answers which help you close a prospect or delight a client. They also generate content ideas. Here are some examples:

• What are your plans for the next few years?
• What are your most urgent priorities?
• What are your biggest business concerns?
• What would you like to do, that your current technology won't allow you to do?
• If I could wave a magic wand and do anything to make your business life easier, what would it be?
• What do you often hear your staff saying about your technology?

Let's say the response to the last question was "ha, I always hear them moaning about how slow everything is".

Not only is that a hot buying signal, but it's also a great content idea.

Get into the habit of writing down every content idea you hear, whether it's a good one or not. The goal at this stage is to capture everything.

I always have a notes page open in my browser when I'm chatting to MSPs. I just counted, and currently that page has 158 unused ideas 🤩 Just reading them gives me other ideas.

Create content

Let's take that comment about slow technology. And imagine you turn it into a blog on your website:

5 reasons why your staff moan about slow computers (and how to end the complaints for $297)

The 5 reasons, which I've made up off the top of my head (and you'd replace them with your own better reasons) are:

• They haven't restarted their device for 3 years
• They have a million tabs open on their browser
• They have every possible piece of software open and running
• Their computer is so old it's running Windows 3.1
• Their IT support team isn't being proactive

This last one gives you a chance to segue into the proactive tasks your team would perform regularly to keep their network and devices optimised. Talk in broad strokes and avoid technobabble. You want them sitting there feeling annoyed, wondering if their current IT people are doing anything or not.

And then you offer to help the reader delight their staff by spending $297 on a speed audit. What's this? I just made up the term 🤣 It's where you and your team do an audit aimed at finding out why their devices and network are so slow, including implementing any easy fixes.

We all know that this kind of audit is really just the prospect paying for a high quality sales meeting with you. They're paying for you to tell them everything that's wrong and how you'd fix it if they joined you as a contracted client. As a sales tool, paid audits have fallen out of favour in recent years. But I believe used well, they can still be very powerful.

By the way, you don't have to write this content yourself. It needs to come out of your brain, sure, but you can create it without actually pressing laptop buttons.

For example you could:

• Dictate it (I dictate most of my content now and then edit it into shape. This one habit has more than doubled my output)
• Feed your ideas into an AI to write it for (make sure you edit and humanise what it spits out)
• Record a voice note and send it to a freelance writer on Upwork

Repurpose content

That blog can now be turned into all sorts of different pieces of content.

• The blog can be copied as a LinkedIn Newsletter
• Each of the 5 reasons can become a social post
• You can film a video about it
• It can become a segment on your podcast
• You can do a webinar about it
• It's a great subject for a LinkedIn live

That's 7 different types of content, all from one idea.

There are two tricks to get this right. The first is to reshape the content to fit the platform. You don't just copy and paste the blog into a social post for example. You'd rewrite it, or at the least shorten it down and simplify the words you use.

And the second is to use a content calendar to plan when and how you will reuse content. Spread it out across the year across all the different platforms. You're looking for a variety of subjects so your content never feels "samey".