Episode 218: Is Facebook a viable promotional tool for an MSP?

[00:00:00] Speaker A: Fresh every Tuesday for MSPs around the world. Around the world. This is Paul Green’s MSP marketing podcast.

[00:00:09] Speaker B: Welcome, my friend, to another fantastic podcast. Here’s what I got coming up for you this week.

[00:00:14] Speaker A: I’m Matt Tompkins of Two Brothers Creative. And on Paul’s podcast, we’re going to talk about emotional marketing and why this matters more than facts. It is the ultimate showdown of facts versus feelings. Turns out people aren’t making their decisions based on the facts. They’re basing it on emotional marketing. And we’re going to teach you how you can leverage this to get more customers and keep those customers happy.

[00:00:37] Speaker B: And on top of that fantastic interview with Matt, later on, we’re going to be looking at your website in particular. I have five common website mistakes. How many of them are you making on yours?

[00:00:50] Speaker A: Paul Green’s MSP marketing podcast.

[00:00:54] Speaker B: Let’s start this week with a very interesting question. This is the question, is Facebook a viable marketing platform for msps? And my answer to this is yes. But you can imagine a dot, dot, dot after that. So yes, comma, but dot, dot, dot. Let me explain. Now, Facebook in general is a viable marketing platform for almost any business. Whether you’re targeting other businesses as you are, or you were a restaurant looking to reach consumers, there are better platforms for each of those businesses. But Facebook is kind of like the everything platform. Facebook is one of those platforms that, and I’m going to put this in speech marks that everyone is on. And I say this as my 13 year old daughter has just joined Facebook with my permission and with my blessing. It was actually pretty much one of the only social platforms she wasn’t already illegally on as a twelve year old, he says, rolling his eyes. But Instagram, Snapchat, all of that, of course she went on those because all her friends did Facebook. She didn’t. Primarily because Facebook is seen by 13 year olds as the old person’s platform. Because I’m on it, right? No one wants to be on a platform their parents are on. But she has joined it because there are various groups she’s a member of Facebook groups for drama, things that she does. And she’s discovered that of the 10 million Facebook groups out there, some of them are really things that she’s interested in. And she’s realized there are communities on Facebook that she wants to be part of, which is cool. And that’s the beauty of Facebook, I think it has, as a product, it has transcended almost all generations. I talk to my elderly relatives on Facebook. I now have messages from and interactions with my 13 year old on Facebook. A lot of my other friends are on Facebook. In fact, it’s become the place where I have my friends, I have my clients, I’m connected to all sorts of people on Facebook. And I realize that not everyone uses Facebook, but it is. I would say if there was one universal platform, it would be Facebook. Whatever your views of it, whether you love it or hate it, you kind of have to look at it as what’s the average person doing with this platform? Compared to something like Instagram, which does tend to skew a little bit younger and tends to skew a bit more female, compared with something like Snapchat, which is for the kids, isn’t it? Compared with LinkedIn, which is very much a b to B platform and is not really used by consumers, and certainly compared to something like TikTok. So TikTok is huge, and TikTok is increasingly being used for search, and being used for news and being used for entertainment. But again, skewing young, you may be in your forty s and getting down on TikTok, man, how old do I stand saying that? But that’s not the universal thing.

You don’t get 70 year olds on TikTok getting down to those videos. That’s just not the platform for them. So that’s the power to me, of Facebook. It is the universal social media tool. And that’s why it could be a viable platform for you. Now, I say could. And we go back to what I said at the beginning, where I said, yes, it’s a viable platform, but dot, dot, dot. The but is that there are other platforms that are more powerful to you than Facebook. So if you are like the average MSP, where you have a very small amount of time, a very low level of time for marketing, and you want to make sure you get the best bang for your buck, you want to focus on the things that are going to give you the best return, then I would recommend that you look at LinkedIn number one, because LinkedIn is where all of your future clients are. It’s where all of your prospects are. That’s the place to start. The second place I would recommend you look is your email database. So building up email addresses, you can actually do this from LinkedIn. You can build connections on LinkedIn and then get their email addresses and put them into your CRM, your customer relationship manager, your mailchimp or your mailer Lite, whatever you’re using. And I think those two platforms have a greater payoff for the average MSP. Than Facebook. So Facebook should be almost like the third platform, maybe even the fourth platform if you kind of look at YouTube as well. What I’m saying is if you have a very small amount of marketing time, Facebook is not the right thing for you. But if you have more marketing time and you’ve got lots of resources, and let’s say you’ve repositioned yourself, start of a new year, doing it a new way, and you want to spend a couple of hours a day on marketing, then yes, Facebook can be a very, very viable thing for you to use. Now, one of the things that Facebook is really good for is something called remarketing. Remarketing is where you put adverts in front of people who’ve already had some kind of interaction with you. It’s an incredibly effective and powerful thing to do. So powerful, so effective that we’re going to look at it properly in next week’s episode.

[00:05:44] Speaker A: Here’s this week’s clever idea.

[00:05:47] Speaker B: So I know we’re a couple of weeks into January itself, but this is our first normal podcast of 2024 and I fancy starting a miniseries. I’m going to do this for at least two weeks. I might get a third week, I’m not quite sure, but we’re going to talk about common mistakes you make on your website. I got five for you today, another five next week. Maybe we’ll have a few more the week after that. We will see. But what we’re going to talk about are the things that many msps get completely wrong on their website. Really, I could turn this into a 20 week series because so many msps websites just don’t hit the spot. They’re just not there. You think of your website. It’s your number one marketing tool, the most important piece of marketing collateral you could ever have. That’s your website. And I know many people. In fact, you may have put hours and hours and hours and thousands and thousands of pounds or dollars into your website, and yet it may still just fall short. And that’s not your fault. Most msps are in exactly the same boat. Partly it’s not really understanding who we’re trying to reach, partly it’s not really understanding why they would pick you over your competitor. And partly it’s just the complexity. These things are difficult. Websites are difficult. So let’s run through five common mistakes today, and the first of them is having a website which looks and feels exactly the same as your competitors. And that may have come out of the fact that you use the same kind of web firms or you’re just pulling the same kind of template out of WordPress, or you’re just kind of looking at your competitors. And sometimes when you don’t know what to do, it feels easy to copy or be inspired by what other people are doing. The problem with this, and by the way, this isn’t just a design thing, this is a feeling thing where your website seems to be the same as your competitors. There’s nothing about it that makes it stand out. The big problem with this is when the average business owner or manager, that ordinary decision maker that you want to reach, when they are ready to think about switching MSP and they go and google it, support your town or whatever they Google, and they click on five websites, your website and four of your competitors. If all of those websites look exactly the same and feel exactly the same, then it’s very hard for them to know who to speak to. If they, all of them have a weak headline and a stock image of unreal looking people, or computers or cables, and then boxes of services and a little bit of blurb about your business, but not very much about their business. If they’re all that kind of the same. And that’s what we mean by the samey. That’s what we mean by the same. They can all have different designs, but essentially come across the same. We’re actually making it harder and harder and harder for that ordinary decision maker to pick someone. How do they pick someone when everyone seems to be the same? The goal for you is to be what we in marketing call the purple cow. Now this is actually a book by an author called Seth Godin. It came out, I think, in like the mid to late ninety s. And it’s very much about standing out. If you imagine a field full of cows, they’re all black and white, apart from one of them, the purple cow. Which cow is going to stand out? Well, obviously it’s going to be the purple one because it’s unusual. So you want your website and your marketing to be the purple cow. You want it to stand out ahead of the crowd, out of the herd, as it were. It’s quite a short read, by the way. Seth Godin. G-O-D-I-N. It’s probably on audible, but it’s definitely on Amazon or at a bookshop. Go and look up purple cow. So that’s the first one. Is looking feeling the same as your competitors? The second mistake that many msps make is believing that the prospect cares about you. Now, there is a point at which they care about you, but it’s quite late on in the buying journey at the point that they are going to look at your website. So they’re doing some google or a friend has said, oh, you should talk to my it people or however they get to your website at this stage. They don’t care about you. They only care about you in terms of what you can do for them. That’s the thing that they care most about. Now there does come a point, as I say, down the sales journey. It’s when they’re nearly ready to pick you and they’re nearly ready to say, you are the ones that I want to go for. That’s the point at which they start to care about you and they start to say, right, is this a solid business? Who’s leading this? Who are the people I’m going to be dealing with? What’s the culture? What are the values? We all pick suppliers that match up to us. Well, we attempt to, don’t we? And certainly something like an MSP, I mean, that’s a massive thing. They know that they are picking you for a number of years. No one wants to pick an MSP and have to change it down the line. That’s a nightmare for them. So they know they’re making a multi year commitment to you, even if they’re only signing a twelve month contract. So yeah, at that point they care about you. But early on in the journey, when they’re first visiting your website, it’s about them and not you. And this is why more of your website should be focused on them than it should about you. Now, I know you know, on your website you should have your home page and your about us page. And if you’ve listened to this podcast for a while, you’ll have heard me say that the home pages and the about us pages are the two most important pages on the website. But here’s the thing. That about us page is not really about us, about you. It should be about the customer. You can write an about us page so that it attracts and appeals to the people that you are trying to talk to. So rather than just talking about your history and what you do and your team, you talk about how a number of local businesses benefit from the team. You can talk about how this amount of history means that we understand how to strategize it for people, et cetera, et cetera. So you’re always writing it from the point of view or for anything on your website is written from the point of view of the one person who’s reading it. Right now, websites just like a podcast, just like radio, just like any marketing, unless you’ve physically got a bunch of people sat together, all marketing should talk to one person at a time. This podcast has many, many, many listeners and many viewers. But right now I’m just talking to you because it’s just you and me, right? And it’s exactly the same with your website. Your website talks to that one person that’s reading that page. Right now, there may actually be ten people on your site, but they don’t know that because they’re not in a room together. So it’s always a one on one. And that one on one is very much about them and not about you. So third common website mistake. And that is distracting people from the customer journey. You’ve kind of got to get yourself in the head and the hearts of the people who are on your website and ask yourself, why are they here? What do they want and what’s the journey they’re going on now? There will be some vendors that are on your website, ignore them, they don’t matter. There will be some tire kickers on your website. Ignore them, they definitely don’t matter. But what we are doing or what we need to do is to make sure your website talks directly to the people who in two months time are going to sign a contract with you and are going to join you as your latest client. What’s the journey they go on from here where they’re just doing some research and just going onto your site? What’s the journey from here to that point where they are physically signing that contract? That’s what we call the customer journey. And you need to make sure you don’t get in the way of that customer journey. Ways that you would get in the way of that customer journey is trying too hard to collect their data. Pop ups. I hate pop ups on websites. I’ve used pop ups on my sites in the past. Of course I have. Everyone’s done pop ups, but it’s 2024 now. We don’t use pop ups these days because pop ups are just a distraction. What we’ve got to do is ask in that journey, what are they doing? What are the research? What’s the research they’re doing right now?

What’s the information they need to gather? What’s the next step for them? I always think the next step from anyone that’s on your website is booking a 15 minutes zoom with you. And it needs to be 15 minutes because that’s a very low commitment for them. It needs to be Zoom or Google Meet preferably zoom, though, because Zoom is the standard tool that people use, not teams. Teams is horrible. For people who use teams, teams is fine, but for people who don’t use teams, teams is a real pain to get set up. Whereas Zoom is actually relatively easy if you’ve never used it before. And who hasn’t used Zoom before? Right? We’re talking ordinary people here, not text. So that’s the customer journey. And this is why your website has got to have an utter focus on the next step. The next step. That book a 15 minutes call with me. Here’s my live calendar. Book it in when you’re free and when I’m free. And you’ve got to keep your whole website focused on that next step, because that next step is the next step in their journey. That leads on to mistake number four, which is directly related to this, which is not answering their questions. Of course they’re going to have questions. They’re going to have some questions about you, but those are down the line questions. Remember, the questions they’ve got right now are, should we do this in our business? Is this safe in our business? We weren’t happy with our last people because of XYZ. XYZ. How do you overcome those things? Which could be as simple as we weren’t happy with the level of support we got with them, or we weren’t happy with how long it took to answer the phone, or we weren’t happy with how they looked after us. How would you do that differently? You’ve got to make sure your website answers their questions. And the easiest way to do that is to have an FAQ section, a frequently asked questions section, and stroke. Or you take the they ask, you answer approach. So they ask, you answer. In fact, we did an amazing interview with Marcus Sheridan, the author of that book. They ask, you answer. We did that about a year ago. If you go back to, I think off the top of my head, it’s something like episode 168 of the podcast, but it was January 2023. And they ask, you answer is an amazing book about your content marketing, but especially your website, where you anticipate the things that people ask you based on hearing the same questions again and again and again during sales meetings. And you answer those questions in your marketing, on your website, in your emails, and in your presales, literature and videos, and go and read or listen to. They ask, you answer to get the lowdown on that. And then we have the fifth most common mistake, which is not connecting one human to another human. People buy from people. And if you forget that and you consider that they are buying from a brand. They’re buying from your MSP’s brand name, which they’re not, by the way. You could be the biggest MSP on the planet. And unless you’re literally a household name like Microsoft, they’re not buying from your brand. They’re buying from people. They’re buying from you, or they’re buying from whoever’s on the website, who’s the face of the business, which may be you. Or they’re buying from the salesperson that sits in front of them. And they really do buy from that person. We as humans, we think that we’re making logical brain decisions based on facts and evidence, but we’re not. We really aren’t even something as important and big as buying MSP services. We are doing it with our hearts and we’re justifying it with our head. And that’s why you’ve got to make sure that your website and in fact, all of your marketing is so full of emotions and connection and your heart connecting to their heart and building trust with them and showing that you are a likable character that they can trust. All of this is so important. And it’s the thing that makes the difference between a website that generates leads and a website that just simply doesn’t generate leads. But listen, I have five more common mistakes for you that you may be making on your website, and I’ll bring those to you in next week’s episode.

One of the most powerful ways to learn anything is to use the world’s favorite video platform. What’s that called? Yeah, of course, it’s called YouTube. And there’s so much great stuff on YouTube. There’s a lot of crap as well, but there’s a lot of very, very good stuff on YouTube. And we have recently completely changed our YouTube strategy. We’ve gone away from sort of putting small clips of how to grow your MSp because that’s okay. But we wanted to go a little bit different and really make some impactful content. So we have started producing longer YouTube videos that have a lot more entertainment baked into them. The idea being that you can learn about growing your MSP and how to get more new clients while actually having some fun as well. And here’s just a short example of something we’ve done recently. Has anyone ever told you how to turn prospects into clients with lasagna?

Let’s set the scene. You need a new client. You’ve developed a promising lead, you’ve had some positive conversations with stakeholders, and you’re invited to pitch, but then for some reason they go cold and you lose them. How do you stop this from happening again with these three lasagnas? And I don’t mean you need to invite your prospects round to dinner. I mean you can if you want to, but I’ll let someone else explain. Hi, this is Jamie Warner from Envirosoft. I built my MSP organically to $10 million in revenue. So if you want more content like that and you want to learn while you laugh, hopefully while you laugh anyway, then just head over to our channel. It’s YouTube.com slash MSP marketing.

[00:19:20] Speaker A: Big interview. Hi, my name is Matt Tompkins. I’m the co founder of a content marketing agency, two brothers creative, based out of Omaha, Nebraska, USA.

[00:19:30] Speaker B: And welcome to the show, Matt. Now you’ve got a great company name and we’re going to explore where that comes from in a second. I think we can guess where it might come from, but we will go there in a second if you, for our audience, if you listen to the podcast on one of the many audio platforms and you often wonder what our guests look like or where are they? This is one of those that, particularly if you’re an MCU fan, you want to be getting onto YouTube and just looking at the podcast because Matt has one of those classic sort know YouTube studio setups and he’s got Iron Man’s mask at the back. And earlier on, just before the interview, he was showing me all of his toys. He’s got like Groot and Spider man and Batman and all sorts of stuff hiding in the background. So you definitely win the geekiest, coolest home video setup. That’s for sure.

[00:20:14] Speaker A: Everybody seems to love it. And I love it too, because I am a Marvel nerd and I have no shame about that at all. I could say that out loud, proudly.

[00:20:21] Speaker B: Okay, so post interview then we need to go down the MCU route, but we won’t do it now because it can be boring for non MCU people, particularly as it’s got so complicated since the Disney plus stuff came along. Anyway, let’s talk about your business. So you’re called two brothers. Is it as simple as it’s you and it’s your brother?

[00:20:38] Speaker A: It is as simple as that. It started as my brother and I. We had the opportunity in 2014 to produce the first ever sketch comedy television show. It was a half hour show in the midwest here in the United States that followed Saturday Night Live. Every week we signed on thinking, oh, this will be easy. We’ve done YouTube sketches before. And we found out real fast how hard it is to produce a weekly comedy show. Especially when our budget, our gross budget was $500 us dollars per episode. That was all we had to work with. That actually is what created this company, because we found all of these workarounds and ways to produce content, both written, video, audio, to deliver that to small business owners who didn’t have a massive budget and needed that help. And so that’s kind of where we cut our teeth. We both came from about 17 years working together in radio as well, and broadcasting. So a lot of experience on radio and television, and it led us to where we are today, where we’re doing the thing I never thought I’d be doing, which is being an owner of a business, an entrepreneur, and loving every minute of it, because it’s really just as simple as we love helping people, we love learning, really, and then using that to help people, that’s really what our passion is.

[00:21:47] Speaker B: That’s so cool. And of course, I’m a former radio guy as well. I did ten years in radio back mid ninety s to mid noughties. So look at us, the two x radio guys, talking about video now and running our own businesses. Let’s be honest, this is much better than working in radio, isn’t it?

Radio is fun at the time, but like any job, when you’ve had enough of it, you’ve had enough of it. So what did you do? Were you a presenter, a dj?

[00:22:09] Speaker A: Yeah. So I hosted a variety of shows. My brother and I had a show called the Mat and Ben show. It was an afternoon FM radio show, so music station, we did that on a few different stations. And then I hosted news talk shows, like a three hour talk show Monday through Friday, did some morning show radio. After that, I even hosted a nationally syndicated talk show on Sirius XM for a while, which was kind of a fun experience. That’s actually what gave me the funds, to be honest. I had the actual money to build my own first studio in my house. So that was kind of cool. But yeah. So variety about just about every format from like top 40 to country music stations. I mean, we got to meet all the big stars before they were stars. Like Taylor Swift, I’ll never forget, played her song in our studio and there was only like five people that showed up because nobody knew who she was at the time.

[00:22:54] Speaker B: Wow, that’s an insane story. That is. That’s the kind of story you can dine out on for the rest of your life, isn’t it? Something like that.

[00:23:00] Speaker A: And I do. And I do.

[00:23:01] Speaker B: Yeah, no, I’m sure you do. You got that celebrity dropping just as quickly as you possibly could. So we’re talking about videos, and we will come on to talk about exactly what you guys do and how you can help msps with the videos. But the subject I really want to drill in to is emotions and putting emotional content out there. Now, the reason I think this is of great interest is I know, because I talk to lots of msps all the time. I’ll talk to five or ten different msps a week. I’ve got Facebook groups, LinkedIn, I’m constantly talking to msps because it’s how you have to keep in touch with what people are asking and talking about. Right. And I know that one of the things that msps fear the most, not just in video, or especially in video, but in all of their marketing, is emotional content. And you look at the average MSP’s website and it’s very dry and it’s very factual and it’s about, this is what we do, these are the services, this is what we can buy, and there’s no emotional stuff to it. And I feel like I’ve spent the last four and a bit years on this podcast hitting a big drum that says, be emotional, be a person, be a real person. Connect to other people, because people buy from people. And I think this is an ongoing mission. What’s your experience of msps that you’ve worked with and other kind of business owners and their kind of attitude towards being more emotional in their marketing?

[00:24:20] Speaker A: I think emotional marketing, it is universal. And I think that’s hard to understand because MSPs, especially a lot in the IT world, you’re looking at facts and numbers and figures. It’s really easy to look at this and say, oh, this is a no brainer decision. Obviously, if you compare the facts I have, the better service. They’re going to choose me. That really doesn’t matter. Facts don’t matter in marketing. Marketing is all about perception. It is all about how you’re making someone feel. A great example of this is both in the UK and the United States. Look at our politics. You can’t change someone’s mind based on the facts. It is impossible. It is all based on the emotional connection. And there’s three distinct emotional connections you can make or reasons that people make a decision to purchase. And we can get into those in a second. But the overarching theme here is you have to disconnect from the facts. The facts are just a part of it. They don’t mean everything. And so business owners, MSPs, if you’re looking for that new client, you have to understand they are looking for someone that they know, like and trust. And trust is that key component. So the reason you have to invest in emotions in your marketing and marketing, when I say invest in emotions, I mean you need to build an emotional connection of some kind that is so that you can establish trust. When people trust you, they will fill in the blanks. It’s almost, we have clients where they trust us. I keep continuing to do my sales pitch, and they’re like, no, Matt, stop. Listen. We trust you. We don’t need to hear the rest. And it’s as simple as that when it comes to your marketing. It is as simple as perception is everything. Trust is how you build that new client, that new relationship.

[00:25:58] Speaker B: Yeah. So what is it then that makes it so difficult to do that? Emotional marketing? Is it fear of, I don’t know, fear of coming across as a fraud or in fact, you know what, I wonder if it’s this. Is it the fear that you will look unprofessional? Do you think MSP owners are scared that they will come across as unprofessional if they’re emotive in their marketing?

[00:26:20] Speaker A: Well, and I think you hit on something there that I think is important. And that is we think of emotions and we think of emotional marketing and we think, okay, I got to go cry on camera. Or what’s that mean? I have to wear my heart on my sleeve? No, that’s not what that means. There are so many different emotions, like trusting someone. How do you build trust with someone? Right? You’re going to show that you’re calm, you’re rational, you’re reliable, that they can count on you. That is connecting with their emotions, with your marketing. And so it doesn’t mean necessarily you have to reveal more yourself. You don’t want to be something that you’re not naturally right. You don’t want to try and fake it. And I think the musician pink said everybody should have one good cry per day. And you don’t have to start crying on camera every single day. Right. You don’t have to follow Pink’s advice, be yourself. But an easy way to frame this is, and this is a hard kind of hard thing to swallow for myself, for any business owner, for any MSP, is people don’t care about your business. They care about what your business can do for them. So think about your ideal customer and what is it that drives them? What is it that moves them? That really impacts their life with what they’re doing as your customer, focus on that emotional side of it. So how can you bring out the emotion of they’re looking for someone that they can trust and rely on, so how can you convey that to them? How can you show that you are the person behind the company that they can invest in? That’s the type of emotions you want to focus on. So I think that we initially think it’s all about just revealing more of our own emotions. It’s really figuring out what are the emotions of your ideal customer. Focus on that and then present yourself in a way that’s going to build on that emotional connection.

[00:27:58] Speaker B: Yeah, that makes sense. And in a second, I’m going to ask you some practical actions that we can take to actually implement that. As you were talking there, it occurred to me that this is kind of like dating, isn’t it?

[00:28:09] Speaker A: Oh, God, yes.

[00:28:10] Speaker B: And I’ve been single for a horrendously long time. Not because I’m a nutter or anything like that. It’s just sort of circumstance of my life. But recently met someone. She’s nice. She seems to like me, I like her. But it’s kind of like we’ve got our fourth date this week, so it’s very slow, and it’s like a getting to know you thing. In fact, as I’m talking about this, I’m thinking this is a future podcast subject relating the dating to the marketing. She may not be so happy about that, but maybe she’ll never know you’re.

[00:28:38] Speaker A: Hitting on this is actually 100% true. So there are three stages of any relationship. It doesn’t matter if it’s a business relationship, relationship with a client, or a personal relationship with somebody. And this is really important. So I’m glad you brought this up because your analogy of dating is perfect for this, for anybody. Any MSP listening, first you’re going to get their attention. So think of it as, let’s say you’re walking down the beach and this new friend that you’ve met, that you’re dating, she saw you. She saw, obviously, I’m sure you have like a six pack, abs and everything. So she saw you. She said, look at this good looking guy here walking on the beach. Right? You got her attention. Then you want to inform them that you’re something more. All right? So you want to show that you’re something more. So you want to show, okay, you’re a dad, you’re a great father, you care about family. It’s a priority to you, maybe. You’re really smart. You have a degree, you’ve done this, you’ve done that. You donate to these causes, you’re passionate about this. And they say this is someone is more than just this good looking thing I saw that got my attention. There is something more, and then there’s the commitment, which is the final stage. And sometimes people can jump right in, they can run to Las Vegas, Nevada, and get married that night, and they jump from meeting someone to getting married. But most people, it’s an evolution. And so that enlightenment phase, which is that second phase, that is important. And that’s where all this marketing comes in. So you’ve gotten their attention through a piece of content or your marketing that you put out there. Now, how are you going to back that up? How are you going to enlighten them? Is it through nurture email campaigns that you send out? Is it informational content and blog articles that you’re posting on your website? Is it content you’re sharing on social media? How are you going to enlighten them to get them to that commitment phase? So your analogy you brought up is perfect for marketing because it’s just as accurate, just as true in marketing as it is with a personal relationship.

[00:30:20] Speaker B: Yeah, I’m thinking of side business here. The MSP, dating experts. That could be it. Well, you could do that, Matt, I.

[00:30:26] Speaker A: Think you just hit on something big. Yes. Yeah. Let’s swipe right on that idea.

[00:30:30] Speaker B: Yes. I like that. While we’re on that, don’t ever do Tinder. I don’t know if you’re married, if you have someone important in your life, but keep that person. Tinder is a nightmare. All of the apps are a nightmare. I met this one off apps, and that’s a big thing in the old person dating world, which is the world I’m in, is when you’re introduced by an actual human to another human, you cling on. Not cling on because that makes you sound clingy, but you go for that. That’s a big deal. Anyway, dating stuff to one side, marketing stuff coming back in. Let’s talk about practical actions. So imagine you’re an MSP owner. You’re a technical person at heart. You like fixing things. You like logical problems, you like helping people. That’s 80% of the MSPs that I’ve met. And then marketing is a dark art. It’s a confusing, dark art. You know, you’ve got to do more of it because you want more of those clients. But that whole where to start what to do in what order is the most confusing thing. Hence listening to a podcast like this. So if you were in that situation, or if you were advising someone in that situation, in the context of emotional marketing, what kind of things could they do to get started?

[00:31:32] Speaker A: Well, I think there’s three problems here that you need to look at, and you need to understand how your ideal customer, your target market, is going to make that purchase decision. And this spans across any industry, any company, whatever product or service you’re selling. So, MSPs, this rings true with you just as much as someone selling homemade socks or candles on a website, right? So the three problems are, there are an external problem, an internal problem, and a philosophical problem. So the external problem is, let’s use a car analogy. All right? So I need to buy a car because I need to get from point a to point b. I need a vehicle, right? That’s the external problem. So for an MSP, it’s a service you’re providing. It solves this problem for you. The mistake that people make is we try and list think of that only that problem is the reason why they’re going to make the decision to hire us or contract us. The second problem is how they actually make the decision, and that is the internal problem. Okay, so the internal problem is, yes, I need a vehicle, but I want a vehicle that shows my neighbor Todd up because Todd, he has this brand new know hybrid. I’m going to get myself a Tesla and I’m really going to show off my status and feel good about myself and feel proud. So the internal problem is what is motivating them emotionally. So the external problem is kind of the fact based problem that you’re solving. The internal problem is the emotional problem that you’re solving. And then the philosophical problem is feeling as if you belong to something bigger than you. So by buying that Tesla, I am saving my carbon emissions, I’m not contributing to polluting the environment. So I feel like I’m contributing something positive to something bigger than myself. So if you hit all three of those, if you can solve all three of those problems, you have hit a grand slam, you have hit a home run. You are going to land that ideal customer if you only focus on the external problem. If you only focus on just that one problem you’re solving, you’re really going to struggle to land those new clients. Because most 99% of people don’t base a purchase decision off of just that external problem. Most people base the decision on the internal problem, which is, why should I make this for me, like, how does this make my life better? How does this move myself forward or drive me where I’m wanting to go? And then that philosophical. So try and hit all three. But if you’re focusing your efforts on one problem in particular, really focus on the internal problem versus that external problem.

[00:33:57] Speaker B: Yeah, I love that and completely agree with you on that. Okay, final kind of subject, which, let’s bring video into this. So is video the main thing that you guys do now?

[00:34:06] Speaker A: Yeah. So we started in the world of audio with radio. When we did the television show, we cut our teeth and learned really quick about video production. And today it’s important to understand that every social media platform is now a video platform. And every platform, from Google to YouTube to Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, they are all rewarding video content the highest, above all other forms of content that you put out there. So some things to consider, like, let’s say you write some content for your website, well, do a video version of that and put it on the same page or the same blog, it is going to help. Oftentimes what we see with clients, we’ll apply the same. We do organic SEO and things like search engine optimization for clients to help them rank higher. What we see is we could do a written blog, but if we do a video version of that blog, it’s going to show up faster because there are a lot of people, a lot of business owners that just aren’t thinking in this mindset. That really rings true today more than ever. And that is everything needs to be in video. I mean, I think it’s about 75% or customers are 75% more likely to make a purchase if there’s a video that accompanies that product, they’re more likely to watch a video than they are to read a bunch of copy. And so I think the important thing for any MSP listening now is that everything needs to include video. Video needs to be incorporated in your marketing efforts, even if it’s you behind the scenes. It doesn’t have to be as nice as either of our sets that we have here, behind us here today. Even if it’s just you on your phone using the world’s most powerful device today to just capture that content and connect with people, because that is how people are consuming content today in video. So I believe it’s a standard requirement now. And kudos to you for investing in the video side of podcasting, because a lot of people, you say, hey, I listen to a podcast, they don’t even think audio. They think it’s oh, that’s a video on YouTube. That’s what they think it is. So you want to be sure that you’re putting your content out there and your marketing efforts in the different formats. People are actually consuming and people actually prefer.

[00:36:09] Speaker B: Yeah, no, that makes perfect sense. And actually, this podcast is a great example of how you don’t need to be super professional. Early on when this started, it was literally me with a microphone at my desk, audio only. And then when we went down the video, it was just me using my webcam. And then I got an old digital SLR. And if you’re watching this on YouTube now, I’ve got this lovely virtual studio behind me, and we’ve got a green screen set up. And all of that’s only happened in the last few months. And yet this podcast is four plus years old. So, yeah, I agree. You don’t have to. And msps especially like to think, right, video kit. I’m going to go and get Kit because msps are good at Kit, whereas the rest of us think, oh my God, we’ve got to go and buy some kit. Msps are rubbing their thighs because they get to buy kit. But I think that’s the wrong place to start. I think you’re right, Matt. The right place to start is actually, it goes back actually to those problems that you were talking about earlier, that the right place to start is, what am I going to talk about? What are we going to present and how is that going to be received by the other person? Okay, tell us what you do with videos. How do you help msps and what’s the best way to get in touch with you?

[00:37:16] Speaker A: Yeah, so our company, we created what is now called the content in a box. And content in a box is really taking all of those baseline, basic marketing, foundational things every business needs and just taking it off your plate. Because we discovered really quickly that when we were doing video with podcasting, and we discovered pretty fast a lot of our friends and people we’d known over the years who own businesses in many different industries, from super high tech stuff to just people who are serving customers kind of b to c format, they were coming to us saying, this is overwhelming. My marketing is daunting. I have no idea what I’m doing. I don’t have time to figure this out. And if they hired a marketing agency, it would cost them tens of thousands of dollars and they’d get the same lackluster results. And so content in a box is based off of you. Give us 30 minutes of your time. Each month and we deliver 30 days of content. And that content comes in a box that we also schedule and post to your social media platforms of choice. But it is video. It is a video long form video. It is the audio podcast. It is video shorts, the vertical format shorts like you see on Facebook and Instagram, Reels, TikTok and YouTube shorts which are really the highest value commodity as far as video goes today in how people consume content. We write an SEO focused blog article in this box that’s delivered for your website with the images and everything for you. And then we create social media graphics and gifs to accompany. So you basically have 30 days worth of a variety of content to post. And all you have to do is just show up because we want you in the video. That’s important. We want to demonstrate you as an authority, as a subject matter expert, as a leader in your field. But you show up to do the recording, we handle the rest for you. So that’s kind of our passion project, if you will, that we’ve developed over the last several years. And then beyond that, we also serve as a full service content marketing agency. So we have big clients who we do full service SEO and kind of layering on different services, video production as they’re needed. But that content in a box is kind of our bread and butter entry package that we offer that any business of any size can really leverage and take advantage of.

[00:39:19] Speaker B: I love it. Thank you so much. And Matt, what’s the best way to get in touch with you?

[00:39:22] Speaker A: Yeah, so our website is thecontententbox.com and that’s the easiest way to get a hold of us. You can learn more about us and if you like emotional marketing, we got a blog article that I know you’ve kind of pointed out as far as this would be good to talk about today, all about emotional marketing that is up on the website. And you can read through our main page because we’re big believers in Donald Miller’s story brand structure, which would be my book recommendation as well. Marketing made simple because it really just takes you through the journey of what you’re experiencing now and how we can help solve those real problems. For Paul Paul Paul Greens MSP Marketing podcast Week’s recommended book hey everyone.

[00:40:01] Speaker C: My name is Braith Bamkin. I’m the executive director of BNI here in Melbourne, Australia, and my book recommendation is the slight Edge by Jeff Olsen. I love this book. My business mentor got me onto it about seven or eight years ago, and it’s really changed the way I do things on a daily basis. So the principle is really simple stuff, and I love simple. Effectively, the idea is that the decisions that we make on a daily basis don’t have a massive impact on us today or tomorrow or even the next day. But cumulatively, they have a massive effect over time. So let me give you an example. If you don’t go to the gym tomorrow, you’re not going to be a heart attack waiting to happen the day after. But if you consistently don’t exercise for the next three or four years, your health probably won’t be as good as it could possibly be. Likewise, if you eat a healthy meal today, you’re not going to notice anything tomorrow. But you do that over the next couple of years, every meal, and you’re going to see a massive difference. But it’s very easy to get discouraged because you don’t see results today. So you’ve got to stick with the course. And the slight edge really helps you to understand the little tiny decisions we make every single day cumulatively have a massive impact. It’s kind of like interest in the bank account. You don’t see it for a long time, then all of a sudden you seem to have a massive account balance growing and growing. So that is the slight edge. By Jeff Olsen. I love it. Read it. He talks about seven principles. You will love the book. It’s been a founding light for me.

[00:41:41] Speaker B: Coming up next week, I’m Chad Lauderbach.

[00:41:44] Speaker A: Founder and CEO of be Structured Technology Group. And from 2007 to date, I grew my MSP from just me in my one bedroom apartment in Los Angeles to 25 people in downtown LA. And you can hear my story on Paul’s podcast.

[00:41:58] Speaker B: And on top of that interview with Chad, we’re going to be talking next week about remarketing. I’ve mentioned it earlier. It’s a fantastic way to get a message in front of someone when they’ve already been on your website. It can be a very, very powerful way of following someone up to make sure you get the sale. Join me next Tuesday and have a very profitable week in your MSP.

[00:42:21] Speaker A: Made in the UK for msps around the world Paul Green’s MSP marketing podcast.