A mini masterclass on LinkedIn for MSPs

The podcast powered by the MSP Marketing Edge

Welcome to Episode 262 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week…

• A mini masterclass on LinkedIn: Improve these three things on your LinkedIn profile to get people’s attention and encourage them to engage with you.
• The 3 tests to apply to new initiatives: The fear test, the regret test, and the comfort zone test – will these push you into taking the next big leap for your MSP?
• Should you start a podcast for your MSP?: Podcasts are a great way to grow relationships with an audience, but is it the right thing for your MSP?
• Paul’s Personal Peer Group: Stuart, from an MSP in Atlanta, has asked how much he should be paying for a content writer. Find out more on this and whether AI is a good tool to use too.

A mini masterclass on LinkedIn

It’s very easy to become complacent about social media and believe that it’s just a waste of time to a busy business owner like you who’s trying to build their MSP.

But the reality is that social media is still incredibly important.

Not all the networks, of course. I really don’t think most MSPs will get much from TikTok for some time, at least not until the generation that’s growing up with TikTok are the decision makers.

For B2B marketing in 2024 and next year as well the social media network to go for is of course…

LinkedIn – this is still the very best platform for MSPs looking for new clients, and I do highly recommend that you put in time on it every single day.

Let’s spend a few minutes now on a mini masterclass on LinkedIn, and I’ve got three things for you to look at.

The first is to improve three things in your profile. So here’s an interesting question. Based on your current profile, if you were an ordinary business owner or manager, would you want to be a client of your MSP? If not, here are three areas to spend more time on: The headline – focus on the benefit to your prospects rather than what you do. “I do IT for town businesses”, becomes “Helping town businesses grow with technology”. Then look at your headshot and don’t be cheap – pay a professional who does headshots every day and can make you look beautiful. Your about us bit – write it for your prospects, not other IT professionals. You want them to read it and think, ah, this is exactly the kind of person I want looking after my business.

Next up then, is to build your personal brand. And your personal brand is what others think about you. It’s not something you control, but it is something that you can heavily influence. And it’s based on a number of factors: the number of connections you have, the recommendations that you have, what you post about, and how often you post, the value of your contributions, the speed of your responses, and whether you do something like a LinkedIn newsletter or a LinkedIn live. Because people who are perceived as experts, they do these things. Now, like much of marketing, getting better results is about doing a series of small actions on a regular basis, for years. I spend no more than about 15 to 20 minutes a day on LinkedIn. I have a virtual assistant who does functional stuff like accepting connection requests. I just do new content and commenting.

In the early days, this felt like a waste of time, but today I have two sizable and engaged audiences – my connections and my LinkedIn newsletter subscribers. And these have only come from doing the work day in, day out for years whether I wanted to or not. Building your personal brand on LinkedIn is really no different to building your body at the gym. The magic happens over time, not on the day that you do the work. And of course, most people give up long before they see the results. Your opportunity is to be the only MSP in your area who does the opposite. You just keep putting in the work, the results are going to come.

And then the final thing to look at is ideas for content, for posts. There’s a lot of noise on LinkedIn, the same as any digital platform, so to cut through you must be creative and not just do what everyone else is doing. Here are five post ideas for you. Take each one and ask yourself, how can I put my own spin on this?: Educate them about something – don’t be technical. Celebrate a win = this could be a new client or protecting an existing client from a nasty cyber attack. Be thankful for something. Document what’s happening in your professional life. And the fifth one, occasionally share something from your private life – and no, not what you’re having for dinner, something that matters.

The 3 tests to apply to new initiatives

At the beginning of October, I was privileged to present the keynote marketing talk at the very first Scale Con in Las Vegas. Oh my goodness, that was such good fun. Because not only did I get to hang out with loads of other marketing and sales experts from around the world, but there were a couple of hundred MSPs there as well. And I spent three days meeting people I’ve known for years on forums or video calls, but never actually met in real life, as well as meeting brand new friends. And by the way, they are definitely doing a Scale Con ‘25. I will be speaking again, and you should really go to that if you can.

I tried very hard to catch a little bit of each of the speakers across the three days of the event, and I think there were well over 20 different speakers in all. And I always believe that speakers are like books. When you read a book, even if it’s something that you’ve read or studied before, there’s always a new idea that comes out of it and it’s no different when you’re listening to speakers talk. And there were some pretty awesome speakers. My brain even now is still full of ideas from that event.

Now, one of the biggest and best ideas was from Nigel Moore from The Tech Tribe, and it’s no surprise really, Nigel is just a stunningly inspirational character. And side note, it was so cool just hanging out with him, catching up with him only very briefly, but across the three days. And then on the third day, he did the final closing keynote and it was an insanely good keynote. I’m not being very humble here, but I thought mine was good, and yet I need to up my game after seeing what Nigel did.

One of the many things that he talked about is three tests that he applies to whether or not he should do something new. And these are: the fear test, the regret test, and the comfort zone test. If he’s looking at a new initiative that he’s thinking of doing, he’ll say, right, if I do this, does it scare me a little bit? Does it give me a little bit of fear? Fear is good because it shows that you’re doing something completely brand new, something you’ve never done before. If I don’t do this, will I regret that when I’m old? And then of course, the comfort zone test is will he regret not pushing himself out of his comfort zone?

So if you are looking at a new initiative for your MSP, it’s the same three tests… if you do this, will it create some fear? Will it create some regret if you look back in later life and you haven’t done it? And will it push you out of your comfort zone? I’ve had so many big ideas from that event that I’m now applying those tests to them as we speak. And I think that you can do the same, don’t you?

If you’re not asking those questions at least two or three times a year, maybe you’ve plateaued. Maybe you’re stuck in the comfort zone.

If I look back at my career, nearly 20 years of owning a business, as much as I’ve been constantly working towards stability and a business that thrives whether I’m there or not, which is a very stable business, the big leaps have come from pushing myself out of my comfort zone. And that doesn’t always mean that the big leaps are the right things to do, but certainly they kick off new actions and new directions, which can take your business to a very exciting place.

Should you start a podcast for your MSP?

It seems kind of weird to discover that podcasts have been around for 21 years. The first ever podcast started in 2003 when the audio RSS feed was created. And they’re now so popular that every year more than 500 million people listen to a podcast. So perhaps it’s inevitable that at some point you’ve wondered whether you should start a podcast for your MSP.

Let me tell you, a lot of work goes in behind the scenes to make our podcast happen every single week, but it is worth it. And if you have a passion for podcasting, and especially if you have a vertical that you serve, a podcast could be very powerful for you. My guest today is going to explore starting a podcast. He’ll tell you the classic mistakes first time podcasters make. And which is more important – presenting style, content or kit.

Hey everyone, I am Kieran MacRae and I’m a podcast marketing coach here to help you decide if you need a podcast as an MSP.

Now, we’ve got two professionals on the podcast today, Kieran. Well, we’ve got you who’s definitely a professional in doing podcasts, and I think I’ve just been winging it for enough years to say that certainly I’m a semi-professional on this. So thank you very much for joining us on the podcast today.

It’s a common question that I get from MSPs – should I start a podcast? We are coming up to or just over our fifth birthday here on this podcast. Lots of people listen to it all around the world. We have massive audiences in the UK and in the US, and inevitably for any MSP that’s ever thought, oh, I’d like to reach people, at some point they thought maybe I should do a podcast as well. And I will tell you as we go through this interview, I’ll tell you why my default answer has been probably not. It’d be really interesting to hear what your default answer is.

Before we get on to talking about podcasts and how you get them started and why they can be useful marketing tools for an MSP, just tell us a little bit about you, Kieran. So what makes you a podcast coach?

I have been growing my own podcast, which is a spooky Scottish history podcast, for four years now. That is generally spooky history. It’s been listened to all over the world. We’re coming up on, I think 8,000 downloads per episode, and that’s been going really well. And before that, I’ve been a digital marketer growing blogs and online audiences for nine years in total now. But I’ve had a lot of fun with podcasting. So I started helping people who were reaching out similar to you going, oh, should I start a podcast? Can you help me?

Yeah, I can imagine. And 8,000 downloads per episode is insane. I mean, that’s like 7,900 more downloads a week than we get, which was a joke, we have a bit more than that. But obviously we’re a very niche podcast. Yours is for anyone. Just give us the pitch for that podcast for someone that thinks that might be interesting. So you say you do spooky stories, is that like ghost stories in Scotland?

Yeah, we do the deep dive into Scotland’s history, focusing on its grizzly and mysterious past and ghost stories.

Okay, very interesting. Very interesting. I’m going to have a listen to that after we finished our interview. Now for an MSP a podcast seems like a good way to reach people. And for me, it’s our number one marketing tool. I think it’s something like nine out of 10 new members who join our MSP Marketing Edge Service say they either found us through the podcast or they got to know me through the podcast or they found out about the service. It’s an instrumental thing, and it’s something that started as a six to 12 month experiment and is now the last thing I would give up. You couldn’t drag me kicking and screaming away from the podcast. As much as it’s a lot of work, it’s a lot of hassle, and obviously it has a cost as well. In your experience with B2B, we are looking B2B here, when business owners look at doing a podcast, what are some of the mistakes or some of the wrong thinking that they jump into starting that podcast with?

It’s interesting hearing your thoughts on it because the biggest mistake with podcasts for any type, especially with B2B, is a podcast won’t help you find customers. You can’t really find an audience with a podcast. What a podcast is ideally suited for is nurturing. So once people have heard of you, they’ve maybe come to your website and then they make their way onto your podcast, they can learn more about you and your service, and you really build up a lot of trust.

Yeah, a hundred percent. I mean, we have a three step lead generation and marketing strategy. I’ve talked about this on the podcast for four or five years, where you build audiences, you grow relationships, and you convert relationships. And that’s what the podcast does, it’s that middle step. It’s growing relationships. And I’ve met people in real life who’ve said, I’ve been listening to you for five years, and it’s nuts. And they know me because I’m there in their ears for 20 minutes, and obviously I’ve never met them, which is really cool. So I agree with you. It’s not a place to acquire clients, it is a place to build relationships.

One of the things that I’ve noticed with MSPs when they jump into it, is that they think it will be a quick win that they can just get set up, put a few episodes out there, do perhaps a season of 10, and that in itself is going to generate lots and lots of interest. It really doesn’t work like that, does it?

No, not at all. It is a slow burn project, but as you’re now experiencing like five years into it, you have fans. You have people who’ve really connected with you as a person, and so are connecting with you and your business, and you in their heads have become the go-to service provider for marketing.

Well, that’s the plan anyway. That certainly what be nice. So when an MSP directly says to me, shall I start a podcast? I ask them questions, and the first question I ask is, who is your audience? And normally it’s just business owners, business owners in this area or anyone with a wallet, which is my least favourite answer. And my answer is, normally don’t start a podcast, primarily because I think it’s very hard to reach an audience when your audience is everybody. And I appreciate business owners is not everyone, but that’s too big.

When an MSP says to me, well, we are in a vertical or a niche, so we want CPAs (which is a US term for accountants), or we want lawyers or we want veterinarians, or we want dentists or all of the above. It’s a much easier sell for a podcast, I think, to say, Hey, this is the technology podcast for dentists, particularly when you then, we wouldn’t do it here in the UK, but in the US you might say, this is the technology podcast for dentists in California, because obviously California is the size of the UK and certainly in people terms.

Is that your experience as well, that the more defined and refined the audience is, the easier it is for you to reach those people and influence them?

Yes, you are dead on. Whenever I’m doing coaching calls with clients, it’s always an eye roll moment for me when we have the same discussion – oh, it’s really for everyone, there’s something here for everyone. I’m like, well, you can’t reach everyone because to reach everyone, you have to spend millions of dollars on advertising to reach everyone and you just won’t manage. You’re buying a Super Bowl ad if you want to reach everyone, and realistically, your customers aren’t everyone. So yeah, absolutely. You need to nail down your audience and the more specific, the better. I think for podcasts, you could have a hundred regular listeners and build your business from that. So the more niche you can go, the better, for sure.

Yeah, absolutely. So how would you recommend an MSP get started with that niching down if they don’t have the beauty of those verticals that we were just talking about, but they’re just appealing to business owners, decision makers in a wide geographical area, is there somewhere that you would start?

Scratching your own itch is the best place to start. If you’re an MSP selling to business owners, decide which business owners you would like to talk to through your podcast because your business can still market to businesses, but for your podcast you should decide which group of people you want to talk to. If you’re going to turn up every week and have an interview with someone or provide monologue style podcasting, you have to be excited about it, because it is very easy to see people who are disingenuous when you’re listening to a podcast or watching and hearing them.

Decide what excites you, which business owners you’re excited to talk to, and then go from there.

Yeah, that’s really, really good advice. And Kieran, you won’t know this because we met briefly just before we did this interview, but I did 10 years in radio before I started my own business. So for me, this is a natural extension of a skill that I’ve had since I was a late teenager, which is really cool. But I know a lot of MSPs and in fact, this comes onto the two topics I want to talk about, which is kit and content. Well, let’s talk about three. We’ll talk about kit, content and we’ll start with presenting. A lot of MSPs when they are thinking of starting, and I know loads who have started a podcast, almost all of them have fallen by the wayside within a few episodes. The presenting is the thing that terrifies them the most. It’s no different than when they’re doing videos. So with your coaching, do you tend to do a lot of time working on presenting skills or do you focus more on content and just let that natural passion come through?

It’s more on the content side of things because primarily a marketing coach. And a lot of, or where people tend to go wrong is with the positioning of trying to reach everybody. So it’s helping my clients kind of narrow down who they’re talking to and then figuring out what their audience will want to hear. And then it usually ends up with the host getting excited about it and that passion comes through. And then for the actual delivery and the presenting, just getting in reps is about the best thing you can do. It’s hard at first, but I think I saw you’re on episode at 260 or somewhere thereabouts.

Something like that. Yeah.

After a hundred episodes, it’s going to become easier. If you just keep getting the practice in, turning up every week, it’ll start to come together.

And the reason I’m vague about which episode, is because I don’t know which episode this interview’s being played out. And that’s one of our secrets… we’ve completely systemised it and we work weeks and weeks and weeks ahead. So I’m interviewing you now, where are we, at the end of September, 2024. But this interview might not be going out till early 2025. I don’t know. I have a producer who figures all of that kind of stuff out, but we are constantly eight or nine weeks ahead of ourselves, which gets very confusing as the host, particularly when someone talks to you and says, oh, I loved your podcast this week. And I’m thinking, what was in it? What were we talking about this week?

Coming back to content, and obviously MSPs are typically very technical people, very intelligent people, very passionate about technology, and unfortunately, the audience that they want to reach, although they know technology is important to their business, it’s not a rub the thighs moment for the audience. So in an instance like that, how would you take that really techy content and not water it down, but make it relevant to the people that you want to reach?

I would say spend a lot of time thinking about specifically who you’re talking to. Although you’ll be talking to your microphone, you want to imagine a person sitting on the other side of that. It might be that your typical customer knows as much as your mom does about technology. You’re around helping her set up the sky box and everything, telling her what’s going on, and she’s sort of smiling and nodding happy it’s getting done. If you keep that in your head, you can imagine you’re sitting here telling your mom about the services you’re providing and the technology. That kind of stops you getting too in the weeds when you can imagine it doesn’t have to be your mom, but that person kind of starting to gloss over because as a self-proclaimed nerd, when you get really in the weeds talking to someone and you’ve lost them, you can see it. You see it in their eyes, they’re nodding, they’re smiling, but nothing’s going in.

Yeah, a hundred percent. I completely agree with that. And that was a tip I was taught as a radio presenter right at the beginning of my career, which is don’t talk to the a hundred thousand people that are listening. Talk to one person, picture that person. You’re having a conversation with them just as you and I are talking now. I think what’s really easy or what’s an opportunity for MSP owners is that most owners are the people out doing the selling. So they’re sitting with ordinary business owners, they’re talking to their existing clients, so they understand that glazed moment. And when ordinary people glaze, the opportunity is to take the content that you talk about with those people and the things that they’re not interested about and use that to influence your podcast as well.

Absolutely.

Okay, final subjects then Kieran, and then we’re going to talk about what you do to help MSPs.

Let’s talk about technology and kit in particular. Now, MSPs often jump straight to the kit because it’s the most exciting thing for them. We do this as an audio, but we also video it, and I’ve got a green screen set up. I’ve got a dedicated space in my home office with all the lights and the camera and the microphone. But all of that came after three and a half years. When we started, it was me sat in an industrial office unit on the edge of Milton Keynes with a £40 microphone. And then if you go back and listen to episode one, which we don’t even have videos for, it’s just audio only, you can hear the echo, you can hear my presenting style isn’t there, the format’s not quite there, all of that kind of stuff. So what do you recommend for those people who just want to dip their toe in it, try it, commit it to five or six weeks and have a go? What do you recommend that they do kit wise?

I like to keep it pretty minimalist. Although as you said, the tech is the exciting part, you don’t want to get too bogged down on it. I recommend the Samsung Q2U, it’s the microphone I’m talking to you on right now, if you like the way I sound, then you’ll enjoy it. I think it’s around $100 to $200. So it’s a little more than the basic cheapy microphone you’ll get in the supermarket, but it’s not breaking the bank either.

On top of that, your best kit is some blankets. Some blankets you can use to cover up any hard services where you decide to record. So if you’re at a desk, throw a blanket on the desk and put your microphone on top. If you’ve got a lot of empty floor without rugs, throwing some blankets around will just soften the echo. And some cushions in the corner, if you’re in a square office unit as well, that does a lot to stop the worst of the echo. Just that little bit of sound treating the room, as we call it, will do wonders and can just give you that professional sound.

Yeah, completely agree with that. In fact, one of my very good friends who still works in radio, he does radio shows for national radio stations from his under stairs cupboard, surrounded by blankets. I mean, he literally sits with a blanket next to him. He’s got one on the door, and it’s exactly as you say, there’s no professional soundproofing and you wouldn’t know that he wasn’t in a professional radio studio in London. So Kieran, thank you. Thank you for that great advice. It’s been amazing. And by the way, if you are an MSP and you decide to start your podcast, will you drop me an email and let me know because I’ll have a little listen and subscribe to you on Apple or on Spotify or something. Our email address is hello@mspmarketingedge.com, and that’s how you can reach me.

Kieran, tell us what you do to help MSPs get started with their podcasts and grow their audiences.

So I am a content creator and I am creating content at Podcast Marketing Puzzle, that’s where all my free resources are for starting and growing your podcast. I have a five day Podcast Marketing Fundamentals course, which I highly recommend that goes into the details of positioning yourself correctly, deciding who you’re talking to and how you’ll get those first listeners. I also offer consultations, so if you want some one-on-one help, then you can book an appointment and we’ll jump on a call and get you started. Get in touch with me at podcastmarketingpuzzle.com.

Paul’s Personal Peer Group

This week’s question is from Stuart in Atlanta. He’s feeling pretty good about the marketing he’s doing for his MSP, including getting the look of his website revamped. However, in terms of the content, his question is – how much should I pay for a writer?

Although I have a full-time writing and content creation team on the MSP Marketing Edge, we do sometimes use freelance writers to help create the ton of content that we produce every single week. So as a guide, my all-time best and most efficient freelance copywriter charges me £30 an hour, which is about $40. We don’t have a contract, although I have verbally committed to around about 13 hours of writing every month, and the bill of course varies each month based on the time that she tracks.

Now, I believe that this is the best way to keep writers on their toes. I can walk away at any point if she has a couple of average months or if I feel that she’s overbilling me in some way. You’ve got to remember, there are a million writers and only a small number of writing gigs, especially gigs that go on month after month after month. So it really is a buyer’s market.

The other thing to bear in mind is that AI has made life much more difficult for writers. Now, AI can’t produce fantastic content but it can produce good basic content that can be shaped and edited by humans. So maybe that’s a route that you go down, you get a human to put a good prompt in, AI to do the bulk of the work, and then you pay a writer to reshape that, finish it off, and make it perfect for your MSP.

Mentioned links

• This podcast is in conjunction with the MSP Marketing Edge, the world’s leading white label content marketing and growth training subscription.
• Join me in MSP Marketing Facebook group.
• Connect with me on LinkedIn.
• Connect with my guest Kieran MacRae on LinkedIn and check out his website.
• Got a question about your MSP’s marketing? Submit one here for Paul’s Personal Peer Group.