Episode 220: MSPs: This tool sells more to your clients

NB this transcription has been generated by an AI tool and provided as-is.

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

This is episode 220. You are very welcome. And this is what I’ve got for you this week.

[00:00:15] Speaker B: I’m Trevor W. Goodchild, Facebook ad policy specialist. I’ve worked at Facebook in ads, tech, and project management. And on Paul’s podcast, I’m going to tell you about the one, one thing that you do not want to do to get your business shut down on Facebook.

[00:00:29] Speaker A: And on top of that fascinating interview with Trevor later in the show, we’re also going to talk about a very cool tool that you can use to sell more to your existing clients.

Paul. Paul Greens, MSP Marketing Podcast want to start this week by talking about some marketing myths. They’re things that hold back MSPs fears and worries and frankly, untruths about marketing. And I’m going to whizz through them really, really quickly because I want to just show you that actually marketing is a lot simpler than you think it is. In fact, isn’t that really the theme of everything we talk about on this podcast? Marketing is simpler than you think it is. And that leads on to myth number one, that marketing is a dark art and not at all logical, absolute nonsense. Marketing is really, really easy. I know it feels difficult to you because you’re a tech person looking at marketing, but trust me, as a marketing person looking at tech, which looks difficult, right? To me you would say, but Paul, it’s easy. It’s just logic and it’s just checklists and it’s just processes. That’s exactly the same with marketing. If you look at marketing and it’s just big and unknown and fluffy and difficult, you’re looking at it completely wrong. Instead, you need to look at it as how do I boil it down to checklists? How do I boil it down to processes and systems? Good marketing is always based around repeatable systems. Myth number two is that you need lots of cash to do good marketing. Now, don’t get me wrong. Having lots of cash allows you to buy resources, right? It allows you to buy some time. It allows you to buy other people to do stuff. Cash is good. That pretty much goes for everything. But you don’t need lots of cash to do marketing. In fact, if I look at the weekly marketing system that we suggest to our MSP marketing edge members doesn’t require any cash whatsoever to actually use it. There’s a little bit of cash needed to buy into our system, of course, but we keep that super low. But you don’t need a lot of cash to go and implement it. Cash just makes stuff easier for you. If you don’t have cash, you can use your own time, which isn’t ideal. But if that’s all you’ve got, you’ve got no cash, you’ve just got time. Then you can use that and you can have very good marketing with just a little bit of your time. Myth number three is that you need to hire a marketing agency. And don’t get me wrong again, there’s some good agencies out there. It will speed things up. But you don’t need an agency. You can do great marketing on your own if you find a good strategy, a good system. Again, this is what we teach to our MSP marketing edge members that actually you don’t need an agency. Agencies are great for building websites or doing really complicated marketing things. But for a simple marketing system that builds audiences, builds a relationship with those audiences and just generates leads into the business, you just need a simple marketing system. Now, myth number four is that marketing is all about the digital stuff. Digital stuff is important. It’s LinkedIn, isn’t it? It’s your website, it’s all of that kind of stuff. But the problem with digital stuff is everyone’s doing it. And when everyone’s doing something, it’s very hard for you to stand out. So the way to stand out often is to use some non digital stuff. I love print stuff. Sorry to keep banging on about the MSP marketing edge, but I plow like 99% of my work energy into that. We have in there a printed newsletter that we give people every single month. There’s an IT services buyer’s guide. There’s a book on business, email compromise. There are physical marketing campaigns where you send stuff to people. All of these sit alongside the digital stuff. There’s loads of digital stuff, but there’s loads of nondigital stuff, too, because the standout ability comes from the non digital stuff. So if you’re not doing any non digital stuff, if you’re not doing real life stuff, printed books, printed guides, printed physical campaigns you mail to people, then just have a look at that because I can almost guarantee your competitors are not doing this stuff. Which leads me on to myth number five, that you have to beat all of your competitors in order to win. You don’t have to beat all of them. You just got to beat some of them. How many competitors have you got? 10, 20, 30, something like that. Maybe there’s more, maybe there’s less. But you don’t have to beat all of those people, you just got to make sure that you’re beating a few of them. And I’ll tell you how to beat a few of them. It’s by doing a little bit of marketing consistently. It’s by having a marketing system where you do daily activities, weekly activities, and monthly activities. You do, for example, social media every day. Then every week you send out a promotional email or an educational email will be better. And then every month you send out a physical, printed newsletter. That system will always outperform a more aggressive, bigger, better funded competitor who does a big campaign once or twice a year. Because the problem with a big campaign once or twice a year is it’s a huge amount of work. It’s a huge amount of activity. But when that campaign has ended, they’re not marketing as much, whereas you are, because you’re doing daily, weekly and monthly activities. Marketing systems that you do from today until the day you sell the business, those are always going to outperform bursts of activity now and again. And you don’t need to beat all of your competitors, you just need to beat two or three of them because you don’t need that many new clients. Right. If I offered you two highly qualified leads a month, that would be more than enough for you, wouldn’t it? Because you only need, well, you probably close, what, 50% of the sales that you do. Essentially, I’m offering you a brand new client every month. And for most MSPs, that’s all it takes. You don’t need to beat all of your competitors to get that. Just a few of them, which makes MSP marketing very, very exciting indeed. Here’s this week’s clever idea.

A very, very long time ago, I used to work in radio stations and I was one of the people on the air doing the talking in between the songs. And I read the news at one point and it was all very cool. But as my radio career progressed and I became more interested in just how businesses operated, I got involved in sales and I kind of dipped my toe into that. And one of the things that I found fascinating was how those radio stations at the time managed the sales. So what they were selling was advertising, and they treated the advertising as inventory in that they had time to sell and once that time had expired. So if they’ve got an advert today and they don’t sell it, you kind of get that back, right? It doesn’t sit in a warehouse. So they used to treat it as a commodity product, as something which would expire. And they had these targets that they had to hit each month. And what was really cool, and this was the tool that I want to recommend to you, was they used a tool called gap analysis. So gap analysis was where, let’s say they had a target of 100,000 a month, but right now they’re sat on 80,000. So they’ve got a gap of 20,000. And that’s what the gap is in gap analysis. And we’re going to refer this back to or turn this back into something for you in a second. So they would then look at that and say, right, we’re halfway through the month, so we’ve lost half of our product. We’ve got half a month’s worth of product left. How do we sell whatever product we’ve got left over to hit that 20,000 to fill our gap? And this is where the analysis used to come in. And there was some really clever stuff, and I worked with some very clever sales managers over the time who would actually get towards the end of the month, and they would use urgency and deadlines to get the clients to pay more for this sort of urgent airtime, because the sales manager knew that that would expire, and that’s how they hit their gap. Now, I think a gap analysis as a tool can be used by you, but in a completely different way. You see, I think, for you, the gap analysis tool should be used on your existing clients to see what they’re buying and what they’re not buying. Now, previously on this podcast, we’ve talked about a tool called the profit matrix, which is a great way of doing this. In fact, it’s a constant way of displaying on a board on your wall who’s buying what and who’s not buying what. And that makes that a very powerful tool. But if you wanted to just get started and say, right, what can I do today to have a look at this? A gap analysis is a fantastic way of doing this. So, a gap analysis, you literally look at, right, I’ve got this client. Let’s say you’ve got three clients, and let’s say you’ve got ten services. You literally look and sit in your psa and look and say, right, client a buys services one, three and five. Client b buys services two, four and six. Client C by service one. We can instantly see the gaps there, can’t we? And that’s really for you what gap analysis is. It’s looking at it and saying, which of my clients are not buying what? And then you use that information to trigger one of two actions. You see, there’s one of two different ways that you can go and close those gaps. Fill in the gaps. Make sure that each client is buying as many services from you as they can. And by services, of course, I mean monthly recurring revenue services. There is almost always a ton more profit to be made selling an extra service to an existing client than bringing on board a new client. New clients are expensive. You got all that marketing costs, that onboarding cost, versus just saying to an existing client, would you like to buy this service?

[00:09:57] Speaker B: Yes, please.

[00:09:57] Speaker A: Okay. That’s going to be x a month, and much of that is going to fall straight to the bottom line. So two approaches that you’ve got to approach that gap analysis and fill those gaps. The first of them is the least effective, I believe, but it’s quicker. And that is to take a service driven approach to fill in the gaps. So, for example, you may have VoIP as one of your services, but let’s say it’s a new service for you. So you’ve got 20, 30, 40 clients, and they’re not buying VoIP from you. And, you know, you just know some of them have got really old systems. We’re talking like 2015 phone systems, 1997 phone systems. So you know that they should be upgrading because there’s so much better functionality. They don’t physically need to have handsets anymore if they don’t want it, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And you know that there are some clients you can go and target with that. So that’s where you can take a service based approach, where you take that service and you either go out to all of your clients or you target it to some of your clients where you know from previous experience they should be buying this. I say should because just because you can now do something or you introduce a new service doesn’t mean they’re necessarily going to buy it. But it’s one way of doing it, and that’s the quicker way of doing it. The longer way, but the more robust way of doing it is through strategic reviews and technology roadmaps. And this is where you don’t treat your client like a kind of like a piggy bank. You don’t treat them like a commodity that’s there to sell stuff to. Because actually, the downside of that first approach is that people say, I never hear from you, insert your name here until you’ve got something to sell. And that’s not the relationship you want with someone, right? That’s not how you build a 20 year relationship with someone versus doing strategic reviews and technology roadmaps. So strategic reviews, also known as quarterly business reviews, you sit down with your client, once a year will do it, unless they’re a super fast, massively fast growing business, which the vast majority of your clients won’t be. Once a year is enough. You sit down, you ask them about their plans, their future, where they’re going, all of that kind of stuff. You take all the cool stuff that they want to talk about their business and their future, and you get them telling you about it. The power of this being they bond with you, they see you as a strategic advisor and you help them. Well, you help them build that strategy. You may also then take that a step further and you actually build a technology roadmap for them. And this is literally a document laying out right, in the next twelve months, you’re going to invest in this. In 2025, you’re going to invest in this in 26, in this, et cetera, et cetera. And you kind of get their commitment to investing in their business’s technology.

How cool is that? That’s exactly what we want. So that’s another way of doing it. That’s a longer term, bigger commitment. You will do strategic reviews and build technology roadmaps that do not result in extra revenue. But that’s only today. The revenue will be there next year or the year after, I promise you. Because when you build a proper strategic relationship with a client, you become literally an integral part of their business. To me, that’s the most robust way of doing it. But you can do that first method as well, particularly if you need some more money. Now, it’s a great way for you to take a gap analysis to see that there’s money left on the table and for you to go and collect that money right now.

Paul’s blatant plug hey, are you and I connected on LinkedIn yet? Look, if we’re not, come and give me a connection request. It’s actually easier to find me on Google than it is on LinkedIn. So just go onto Google and type in LinkedIn.

[00:13:26] Speaker B: Paul.

[00:13:26] Speaker A: Paul Paul Greens MSP Marketing podcast to me. I look forward to chatting to you on LinkedIn.

[00:13:35] Speaker B: Hi, I’m Trevor W. Goodchild, Facebook ad policy specialist, helping ad agencies get compliant with Facebook when they stop answering.

[00:13:43] Speaker A: And thank you so much for joining me on the show, Trevor. Now, shortly we are going to talk about running Facebook ads and why MSPs should be doing this, but importantly, how not to get it wrong, because that’s what you’re an expert at. You’re an expert in helping people get unbanned when Facebook bans them. And we know that sometimes issues around technology, especially computer repairs, can result in. Well, I know that Google doesn’t like those kind of ads, and it’d be interesting to hear from you if Facebook is exactly the same. But before we get there, you’ve had a very, very interesting career because you did actually work at Facebook itself, didn’t you?

[00:14:17] Speaker B: Yes, I’ve worked at Facebook in three different departments. I started working out in advertising, supporting Fortune 500 companies like Jamba Juice or Toyota, getting their ads compliant, and then I moved on to get promoted to tech, supporting Facebook servers and remote access tools. So if Nike ran 50,000 ads in Black Friday in 30 seconds and Facebook servers couldn’t handle it, and it starts to crash, you’re seeing a white screen on ads manager. I’m getting the phone call at 03:00 a.m. In the morning. Hey, the servers are down. Facebook’s lost $10 million in 60 seconds that global ads have not been live. I’d have to get in somehow, figure out a way to fix that. And then more recently, project manager over creator monetization program, working with influencers on Instagram and Facebook, testing out new products like stars on reels or digital collectibles, connecting nfts to profiles.

[00:15:03] Speaker A: Some people wouldn’t understand half of the things you just said there, but I’m sure our audience understands a lot more than most. So what’s it like working somewhere like Facebook?

For those of us that aren’t sat in Silicon Valley trying to get those engineering jobs, I think we have a different relationship with Facebook. It’s just the thing on our phone, or it’s the thing that annoys us or whatever is the case. What’s it actually like to be there in the building and actually working there?

[00:15:29] Speaker B: Well, you know, it’s kind of funny because I never applied to work at Facebook. What happened is they found my profile on indeed or some other resume lister, and they saw some of my previous social media experience and they called me up and I’m walking downtown in Austin, Texas, where I’m based out of, and I get this phone call and it’s like, this is Facebook. We’d like, you know, potentially come work for Facebook doesn’t call people like, what the hell is this? It wasn’t until I walked into the skyscraper in downtown Austin, Texas, that said, literally Facebook across the doors. And I was like, oh, this is literally Facebook. I mean, it’s nice. I would say it’s like any startup that you’d find where they have the foosball tables and the fancy cafeterias and the beer tap sometimes that you can do on Fridays or whatever, and the full gourmet cafeteria. It’s nice when it comes to that. It really depends on where you’re working. When I was working in ads, it was a nightmare. I had to even follow a restraining order on one of my coworkers because he was was. It was mean, it was informative. I love learning about how the automations worked, but oh God, socially it was horrible. When I moved into tech, I was so much better supporting Facebook servers. You don’t have those teeth grating interactions with end users that are upset about something happening. It was more along that b two b line because I’m working with stakeholders in other parts of Facebook and different departments to make sure that everything’s working correctly.

[00:17:01] Speaker A: In more than four and a bit years of this podcast, you’ve just won an award for being the first guest who actually had to take a restraining order out against a colleague. So congratulations on that one, Trevor. It’s quite a strange one. So in terms of obviously you weren’t then based in California, sort of at the heart of engineering, but you’re obviously part of a big center that they’ve got in or were part of a big center they had in Austin, Texas. And the sort of the culture and the vibe of Facebook. Again, as someone who never will work for a company like that, you look at it and you think, well, surely there must be a big focus on innovation, but also a massive focus on we’ve got to get the engagement, we’ve got to get the figures up, we’ve got to get the revenue. Do you kind of feel that pressure internally or do you tend to be shielded from it?

[00:17:46] Speaker B: It depends on which role we’re talking about. The pressures that I had as a project manager were more on deliverables for testing out if something was viable for a go to market strategy. For instance, one of the things that I tested out was a way to connect membership only sites to Facebook groups for kind of a pay gated Facebook group. It was really fascinating. So the pressure was different. In that sense. It was, test this out, can this be viable? Show us the numbers. And then the problem with that is that you have the layoffs that went down starting November of last year of over 40,000 people. Now you have a smaller workforce having to do just as much, if not more work. And so that has additional pressures beyond just pressures of the market. When I was working in advertising, there wasn’t any pressure because the goalpost had moved. It wasn’t the same thing. We weren’t really responsible for a quota or anything like that. It was just really supporting advertisers. And then when I worked in tech, the pressure was more about the backlog of just how many different things were going on. Because one of the insights I gained from working inside Facebook is that it literally is still working like a startup company back in four, whenever it first debuted, and it hasn’t changed. So you have multiple departments not communicating with each other, making huge decisions. One engineer writes a piece of code, now the whole platform’s crashed because he didn’t look at how it integrates with the mainframe, with the rest of the tools. I was like, oh, my bad. Facebook’s lost millions of dollars. My bad. I was like, wow, it looks like a show from the outside. And the inside. I was like, oh, can confirm this is true. Show has entered the chat.

[00:19:25] Speaker A: That’s brilliant. And you know what? I think anyone who uses Facebook regularly, and I use it more for business now than I have some Facebook groups, more than I do personally. But that’s so pleasing to hear from someone on the inside.

Literally, this hand isn’t talking to the other hand because that explains a lot of the inconsistencies with the Facebook experience. And by the by, and just for context, we’re recording this at the beginning of November 2023 because it will be going out early in 2024. But could you imagine what it’s like at Twitter right now? Or X? And in fact, if you’ve read the recently released book about Elon Musk by Walter Isaacson, which is an eye opener, you should really should read it out. Oh, my goodness. The last third of the book is almost a blow by blow account of what was happening at Twitter after he took control of it. Anyway, by the bike, one of the.

[00:20:14] Speaker B: Engineers at Twitter actually hit me up to ask for some help with Facebook issues, and she told me that she could tell me a lot of stories about Elon Musk.

[00:20:25] Speaker A: Yeah, I bet there’s a whole ton of stories waiting to come out there, right? We’re going to put Facebook on hold just for a few more minutes because we are going to come back to the subject of using Facebook to advertise your MSP and the problems that you can come across that I just want to. Just as a side note, you told me just before the interview that not only have you worked at Facebook, but you’ve worked at Apple and Microsoft as well.

[00:20:46] Speaker B: Yeah, I actually helped launch the first ipod nano at Apple back in it was, I think, 2005. And then even before that, or around. Yeah, within a five year period, I believe from there, I helped Microsoft launch the first Xbox 360. That was insane. I was doing tech support for Xbox Live. And before Xbox Live, we didn’t have online streaming gaming platforms where you could game with anyone, anywhere across the world. It was a whole different landscape. I’m from the era of the Sonic the hedgehog, Mortal Kombat, Mario Brothers era. Like, that’s, that’s my era. And I’m still about that. I’m not about this first person shooter type games. My son is. He loves that stuff. But it was fascinating to watch this debut of this new platform that had never existed before and having to help gamers figure out, okay, these are the ports you want to open so your firewalls aren’t blocking the system. And this one gamer tried to ask, is peanut butter shoved inside the Xbox covered under the warranty? And I’m like, is there a warranty anywhere for any device that covers peanut butter shoved inside? I don’t think so. But it was fascinating being part of that kind of early phase. Now, of course, as well as tablet, you’ve got platforms everywhere that do the online games. And with iPod nanos, that’s old school to think of, the pest, because everyone’s on the smartphones. But I remember when the ipod touch came out, everyone was like, oh, it’s amazing you can get the Internet on it.

And we’ve come so far since then. But, yeah, it was really exciting being part of these companies, right when they’re launching some products that are household names now.

[00:22:21] Speaker A: Yeah, I bet the ipod nano, was that the little square one that was just. Yeah, I remember that. I think I might have had one. I had three or four ipods. My very first ipod actually had a spinning hard drive in it. You could feel it moving, which is like, I wish I still had that. That’s probably worth a fortune now. But anyway, we are distracting ourselves with retro tech. Let’s talk instead about Facebook ads. So the vast majority of MSPs don’t really embrace Facebook as a, a platform to reach decision makers, and b, they don’t use it for advertising. And I say that that’s a kind of a finger in the air thing. Obviously, I don’t know all MSPs, but I speak to so many, and we’re working with over 700. You kind of get a feel for what people are doing.

Some MSPs don’t like Facebook at all because of the privacy issues. And then when it comes to the advertising, they find. Although the platform is, I’ve used all the advertising platforms in my time, and Facebook, I think, is one of the easier ones. But it’s still an intimidating platform if you’ve never done it before.

For MSPs that want to, because I believe it can be a viable advertising platform. It can certainly be great for remarketing, which would be interesting to hear your thoughts on that. And you’ll need to explain what remarketing is for our audience, for anyone that doesn’t know, but what are your thoughts on the difficulties that MSPs would have using Facebook as an advertising platform?

[00:23:42] Speaker B: Well, I think a lot of companies that are on that b to b Sphere would be better served on LinkedIn. I love LinkedIn. I am doing LinkedIn marketing right now for the first time, and I love it. It’s amazing. It’s a whole different world. It’s like Facebook without the toxic social stuff. Not that there aren’t women that get dms from guys on LinkedIn, as we all know, which is not. I never understood that logic. I don’t go to LinkedIn to find babes like it’s not my thing, but from the women business owners in the startup world that I know, they get that a lot. I’m like, wow, okay. But I can see it on Facebook. On LinkedIn. Like, really, LinkedIn would be probably my gut recommendation, even as someone who’s worked at Facebook for people that are more b to B. But Facebook is still a powerhouse as far as the targeting abilities, as far as the audience goes with something like that, I would start with brand awareness campaigns, page likes, boosted posts with conversation starters, inviting the people who’s liked and commented on those to like your page. That helps you get more of a captive audience. But really, the way a simple funnel works is that usually you want to give away something for free that is of value to your target audience. Now you’d want to, of course, research who your target audience is with whoever MSPs are targeting the most. What is their pain points? What kind of magazines do they read? Who are the authority figures in their sphere? What are the top books in there? You get a profile based on these things, and then what you can do is you can say, hey, here’s a short pdf with top ten tips on solving XYZ on this pain point. Give it away for free, and then you can retarget those same people. If you have the Facebook pixel, a piece of javascript that’s installed between the headers of your website to track the traffic from Facebook to your website and then send retargeting ads to people who maybe they reached a book appointment page but they didn’t book an appointment or a buy page and they got to the checkout page but didn’t complete it. You can install different events based on the page and the action being taken and then retarget people. So hey, you almost got to the checkout page. Did you forget something in your cart? Or by the way, here’s another free item, a lead magnet that maybe you’ll find beneficial. And then based on that, you build reciprocity with your target audience by giving something away that’s valuable. The automatic sales machine book by Chet. God, I forget his last name.

[00:26:02] Speaker A: Chet Holmes.

[00:26:03] Speaker B: Chet Holmes. Yeah. I met his daughter Amanda recently. She came to present in Austin and we were chatting and I bought the book after meeting her. That’s what it took to get me to buy your book. I have to meet the daughter’s office. But one of the things that it talks about that I do already, that is I think really huge in any field for any industry is edutainment. Being able to present education on a specific topic automatically you’re seen as an authority figure to your audience. You build that reciprocity in and then at the very end, if you’re doing it correctly, you make it clear that you’re the only choice to choose for solving that pain point after you’ve educated your audience on that further. And so using that with Facebook will still be very successful.

[00:26:43] Speaker A: Oh, I love, love that. That, that book you mentioned, by the way, the ultimate sales machine is an absolute claim. Well, it is the book on selling and every MSP should absolutely go and get a copy of it. It’s on audible. I know. I think Chet passed away fairly young. I think he was in his fifty s. I think it was leukemia. And his daughter stepped up to run the business and has just taken it onto the next level.

[00:27:05] Speaker B: Done a great job.

[00:27:06] Speaker A: Yeah, I’d love to meet her. I’m going to have to come and hang out in Texas. Clearly that’s what I’m going to have to do.

So Facebook then has this value, as you say. It’s got some great targeting. I love the retargeting, the idea of reaching people that way.

Let’s talk about the do’s and don’ts.

Well, first of all, before we do that, I mentioned earlier that Google with Google Ads has a particular dislike of computer repair firms. So obviously MSPs are not really computer repair firms, but it is a part of what they do. Google doesn’t like it, I guess, because it’s a high scammer activity. So they seem to just hate ads that in any way involve computer repair. Is that the same with Facebook or is that different on Facebook?

[00:27:48] Speaker B: That’s interesting. Well, I’ll be completely transparent. I’ve actually never seen an ad for computer repair on Facebook. It’s not something I’ve come across. What I’ve seen more often than not is people that are running ads and they’ll give away a piece of technology, like a free iPhone or something like that. And a lot of those are scams. A lot of those are these giveaway ads. First of all, it’s hard to do a giveaway ad because as nice as that is, if you’re giving away, like a raffle to win an iPhone or iPad or something like that, the thing is that you get the people that only want the freebies, not actual customers. So that’s a challenge to that. But the other challenge is that Facebook’s going to think, you’re not really giving this away, are you? So that’s the closest I can think of electronically now. I’m not a Google Ads person. In fact, I’m looking to hire someone in that field because I’m a Facebook guy and not a Google guy. And so SEO I’m great at. But the Google Ads, it’s not my zone of genius, being a Facebook guy, but what I can definitely think about when it comes to that is if someone’s got a problem and you’re promising to fix it. One of the pitfalls for do’s and don’ts of Facebook ads is not overreaching either. Kicking the pain point too hard and being too negative because your ad can get flagged if you’re sounding too tired pregnant alone.

The whole PPS formula, the problem pain solution, where you talk about the problem, you kick the pain point and you provide your services as the solution. That doesn’t work as well on Facebook. Facebook operates more in a fomo where if you’re saying, hey, this is so great, you’re going to miss out on the benefits. That’s a better template when it comes to policy and compliance than kicking the pain points. But if you’re making an ad for, let’s say, computer repair, if you’re going a little too far by saying your whole computer system is down, your dog died, your wife left you, it’s like a country song.

There’s nowhere else to go, we can help you out that’s probably going to be an issue. Anything that looks spammy. If you’re trying to over promise something and you’re trying to say, we will fix all the problems, we’re the best in the world, no one else is as good as us. Well, that’s hard to prove that you’re the best in the world. So there’s a flag that Facebook has called unrealistic claims or misleading business practices. And where you get flagged for those is usually, if you’re coming off the cuff, just a little too braggy. When I was working with. What’s his name, Harve Ecker, he was the author of the Good Millionaire, and he’s a celebrity. One of the things he would get in trouble a lot that I’d had to help his marketing team with is he would know he’d make these outlandish promises about the results that he could guarantee with income. And here’s kind of the formula for mlms. Pyramid schemes, multilevel marketers, which are not allowed on Facebook. They’re really terrible because it’s one bad apple wins it for the bunch, so they’re the spammers. The problem is if the way you phrase your computer repair ads has qualities of an MLM, even if you’re not the machines, because it’s not humans that are flagging, you may mistakenly flag as an MLM. Here’s the formula.

Low effort, giant result, specific amount of time. So if you’re saying, I’ll just use an MLM model, make $100,000 in seven days with little to no effort, just stuffing envelopes like that’s an MLM formula. But businesses, MSPs, can fall in that trap if they’re saying with little effort at all, we can repair the worst problems that you have in your computers with only a few minutes.

You got to be careful about how you’re sounding as far as what the claims and the results and deliverables are that you’re promising.

[00:31:33] Speaker A: Yeah. No, that makes perfect sense. And look at you dropping another name in there. T halve ecker. That’s a name from the online marketing past in my head. And just for anyone listening who is not sure what MLM is, it’s multilevel marketing. So exactly as Trevor said there, that whole do ten minutes of work, earn a $1,000. We all know that’s not how the world works. Exactly. Yeah. Doing whatever. Okay, let’s finish off Trevor with just give us two or three other mistakes for an MSP that’s going to start playing with Facebook ads give us two or three other mistakes that they’re most commonly likely to make, which could get the wrong kind of attention from Facebook, or as you said earlier, just have them automatically banned by the algorithm without a human even looking at it.

[00:32:17] Speaker B: Well, I think most of the time humans don’t look at ads. And that’s the problem, is that people feel when they’re running ads that, oh, no, Facebook hates me, it’s personal. And then as a result of that, they react in a specific way. Right. And that’s not very helpful. One of the things that I see a lot is when people have an ad that’s rejected, instead of looking at the ad, they assume that Facebook’s wrong and they’re correct, and they immediately appeal the ad. But what if the ad actually has flags in them? There’s something called micro flags. These are smaller flags that may not be enough by themselves to shut you down, but after a threshold is reached, they will kind of like points on your car insurance after accidents, raising the rates eventually. It’s like that with the automations because they work based on SQL logic. If this, then that. So as a result, if you’re immediately appealing an ad that got rejected without finding out first why that ad was rejected, and then what you can do to change to make it compliant, you’re basically losing chances that you have in appeals to get that reactivated again, and possibly you can endanger your ad account becoming disabled. If you’re immediately appealing an ad that’s already against Facebook’s policies, they might not be transparent about which policies your ad violated, which is on Facebook’s fault for that. But if you’re appealing an ad that actually has flags in it, and then you’re expecting Facebook to approve it because you feel like they made a mistake, the problem is you’re asking Facebook, hey, Benjamin, make an exception to the rules that you’ve applied for your own private know, and make sure that you allow us this exception. And it doesn’t work that way. It’s better if you find out first of the flag is remove it, make a new ad that is compliant and learn based on those experiences. So that’s one thing. And I would say the second thing really just comes to a philosophy. I think a lot of people go to Facebook when they’re thinking of marketing as just buy, buy, sell, sell. How can really, I mean, this goes with Facebook policy as well as just being a good marketer for your business. People are tired of being made to feel bad about the problems they have. Ad fatigue is huge. Right now amongst millennials and Gen Zs, which are the next up and coming markets we need to target. And so as a result, this whole old formula of trying to sell as much as possible and not build that loyalty first, not build that reciprocity first, you’re going to run into a lot of problems where your ads may come across as spammy, as too salesy when you look at it as more of building the brand as a Persona instead of a faceless corporate entity. Look at flow from progressive, look at the gecko from Geico. Right? It’s cute. It’s funny. People now associate those feelings with the brand. But this whole pushing to just for conversions, what that does is it makes advertisers on Facebook, whether they’re MSPs or other industries, just focus on the sales instead of looking at the ecosystem you exist in within Facebook. What does Facebook want? They want people to stay on Facebook because they get more money from the ads those people see. And if your ads, because they’re too negative, too spammy, too salesy, are pushing people off of Facebook to rivals like TikTok or Twitter, Facebook loses money a lot. So thinking about what is Facebook interested in? Connections, keeping people on the platform, engagement, community builders. When you have that in mind, when you’re creating ads and your Facebook pages, that will put you leagues beyond people that are still on that clickbait. One weird trick tip.

[00:35:43] Speaker A: Yeah, perfect. Thank you. Thank you, Trevor. I have to go and look for my ipod nano now.

Get up in the loft, the attic. Before we go, just tell us very briefly, what do you do to help businesses like MSPs and what’s the best way to get in touch with you?

[00:35:57] Speaker B: So what I do is I provide a series of services that offer help for identifying specifically what in your marketing funnel got Facebook to flag you? Because I’ve worked with the engineers that created these automations, I’m not guessing. It’s not a Reddit search, Google Search, LinkedIn Search. This is from the source. I can tell you specifically what ad copy, creative or privacy policy in your landing page or your ad that triggered Facebook to shut you down and how to get compliant again. And the best way to reach me is either email at Trevor@trevorwgoodchild.com. Searching LinkedIn for Trevor W. Goodchild. You’ll see me with my Facebook background real easy. And then, of course, you can go to my website for free tips and articles and guidelines on Facebook policy, way beyond what Facebook provides@jetskyshaman.com. And that’s just like it sounds like jet ski like you’re on the lake. Shaman like you’re a magical witch doctor of Facebook policy. So Jet skisaman.com Paul Green’s MSP marketing podcast.

[00:36:58] Speaker A: This week’s recommended book.

[00:37:00] Speaker C: Hey, I’m Scott McCrady with SolCyber question I get asked all the time. What’s my favorite book? Well, I’ve got two for you. One, The Power of Positive Thinking. Two, Only the Paranoid Survive.

[00:37:11] Speaker A: Why?

[00:37:11] Speaker C: Because as a business owner, you sort of have to live in these two states of mind. You got to be super positive that you can make a difference and your company’s successful on the other side. You got to keep your head on a swivel and see what’s happening in the market and make sure you’re not missing anything that’s important to your customers.

[00:37:26] Speaker A: Coming up next week.

[00:37:27] Speaker C: Hi, this is Josh Fonger, and if you are stuck in your business, working long hours with no end in sight, you have a systems problem. Why don’t you join me on Paul’s podcast and you can find a solution to your systems problem.

[00:37:39] Speaker A: Oh, and that is going to be such a fun interview next week. We’re also going to be talking about failing. I think you should fail more, and you should definitely fail faster. I’ll explain it all in next week’s show. Join me next Tuesday and have a very profitable week in your MSP.

Made in the UK for MSPs around the world, Paul Green’s MS MS MSP marketing podcast.