Creating downloadable content is one of the many ways to obtain information from your prospects and clients. Understandably, you probably wonder whether anyone would willingly give up their email address for a short white paper or checklist from your website?
The answer to this is… Value
When there is real value on offer and you strive to answer important questions your prospects have, they will willingly volunteer this information and enter your sales funnel.
Determining Your Audience
Most MSP websites offer general information to a broad range of companies. Unless you have narrowed your services to a select number of verticals, you probably do the same.
To ensure the content you publish is as relevant as possible, though, it needs to be targeted to specific job roles and individuals within your ideal client companies – specifically CIO/CTO executives, SMB owners and operators, and practice managers and office managers. These are the individuals who you will ultimately work with, and each of them have very different needs:
- CIO/CTO Executives – Executives know their stuff and are looking for trust verification in the form of case studies, testimonials, and statistics, as well as very specific, technically rich discussions on topics they are currently tackling.
- SMB Owners – Small business owners and operators are direct decision makers and don’t want to have to worry about their IT concerns. They may have questions about recent security threats, specific problems they are having with their systems, or the process of migrating or onboarding to something new they don’t understand.
- Office Managers – These are individuals who currently handle IT concerns and are not necessarily qualified to do so. They have questions about security, software comparisons, and industry-specific concerns.
Pro tip: Learn the secrets of creating a buyer persona for your MSP business.
Producing High Quality Downloadable Content
There are many different formats your downloadable content can take. Once you know what personas you are targeting and what common questions they are asking, you can determine what format to present those solutions in:
- Educational – These resources answer broad questions and come in the form of checklists, white papers, eBooks and guides about common IT concerns and your processes for handling them.
- Evaluation – Tools in the evaluation tier are designed to help prospects determine how you stack up against the competition. This includes checklists, charts, comparison guides, and technical resources about your services.
- Service Overviews – At the bottom of the marketing funnel are brochure-style content that describes your services, ongoing service packages, general IT offerings. These tools are designed to help your point of contact engage with decision makers when deciding whether to bring you on board and should clearly demonstrate the value you offer.
How to Create a Strong Content Library
Very few people will visit an MSP website without some IT-related concern or need. They may be researching answers to an IT problem you wrote a blog post on, or are comparing local providers to replace their current IT company.
Whatever sends them to your website, now is the time to get them into your database for future followups and nurturing. They may not be ready to choose a new MSP for their IT needs, but when the time comes, you want to be top of mind. Here’s how to generate the content needed to do that quickly.
- Use Existing Materials – Gather any existing collateral you have. This may include print documents you use in sales, PDFs for training or presentations, or other resources you have in your files. Converting these to downloadable offers is relatively quick and allows you to start right away.
- Provide Technical Resources – If you have technical resources on hand, such as software comparison tools, migration guides, or even specification sheets, these can be valuable as well – even just to show that you have them.
- Leverage Your Sales Team – Tap into the expertise of your sales team to learn what questions your prospects are asking. Are you getting a lot of questions about security against malware attacks? That might be a good place to start when writing a new eBook.
Quality is important, but so too is the ability to address the common questions and concerns held by each persona you are targeting. By fully understanding what those needs are, what questions are being asked, and how you can address them all, you can build a content library that generates new leads for your sales team.
