How does one offer valuable information and raise awareness on the internet, without undermining their paid offerings as a service provider? This is the story of a managed services provider and its efforts to raise IT awareness across a wide variety of topics - without paywalls and without biases.
Prioritizing Education
The Internet is the single biggest resource we have ever created. But the low barrier to entry that makes all of this possible, also means that the information shared on the internet is often incomplete, and in many cases, incorrect.
As a company with over a decade of experience managing IT systems, our client was in a unique position where it understood the key problems that small-medium businesses faced and how they could be tackled.
About the Company
The company was founded by an experienced IT consultant and network security professional before pivoting towards managed IT services for a non-technical audience.
The company reached out to House of Brilliant Ideas to step up its efforts in IT awareness and inbound marketing.
The Challenge
The managed services provider realized it might be leaving business on the table by not leveraging content marketing and organic traffic.
To fill these gaps, the company's cofounder decided to ramp up content marketing through a clear-cut strategy that focused on specific problems relevant to SMBs at the time.
She also wanted a team who could take the initiative and do things on their own — only needing her to sign off on the content strategy and turn out quality content at a consistent pace.
Deliverables
When we started this project, our client was already in the process of A/B testing paid ads and decided it would be best to create monthly marketing campaigns with articles discussing the same problems and solutions. This way we could leverage the combined synergy of organic and paid channels.
We began this process through a few discovery meetings to explore the company's experience dealing with IT challenges and how to best convey their expertise in solving these problems.
Content Strategy
Among the numerous things the client and we agreed upon was the need for a content strategy to give direction to our efforts and make sure it's all well-planned out at least a month in advance.
At the outset of our partnership, businesses and employees were finding new ways to keep things going through remote work. This focus resulted in four articles written for Canadian businesses and workers. We continued the theme with a series on security best practices for Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) policies at SMBs.
The next campaign focused on security frameworks. The company has a history of helping businesses manage compliance across a variety of industries and help them meet and pass vendor screenings based on regulatory requirements set by national and global security frameworks like NIST, PIPEDA, and so on.
Articles & Technical Guides
Although some articles addressed an immediate shift to remote work, we wrote them to stay relevant as work arrangements evolved. More importantly, we'd anticipated that many small and medium businesses (SMBs) would continue with remote or hybrid work.
The technical content around compliance and security frameworks was naturally evergreen since these frameworks don't change very often. But when they do change, an editor's note about the change would make them relevant again.
