Episode 242: MSPs who do this kind of marketing will ALWAYS struggle

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This is a transcription for episode 242 of Paul Green’s MSP Marketing Podcast: ‘MSPs who do this kind of marketing will ALWAYS struggle’

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If talk of PSAs and CRMs for MSPs just makes you scream WTF, you are in the right place.

So, you are ready to win new clients and make more money from your MSP. Let’s do this. Here are today’s big things. There’s a type of marketing which is so ineffective that MSPs who use it always struggle. I’ll tell you what it is and a better option, how to change your marketing message to appeal more to the different types of prospects. And my guest reveals why content marketing is essential for every MSP. Welcome to episode 2 4 2.

MSPs, who do this kind of marketing will always struggle. Let me tell you what it is, help you identify if you are doing it and give you a better kind of marketing, which will give you a much better return. I do a lot of activity on LinkedIn, which you should too actually, because it’s an amazing platform for you to go and find new leads and prospects. And most of my routine activity is actually done by my virtual assistant, Christelle. But then I do jump in every day myself and I do anything that requires me to give some specific advice or just point people in the right direction. And I’m always happy to help any MSP. So in fact, if you and I are connected on LinkedIn, please do message me. Don’t be afraid just to say hi. In fact, you can say hi to Christelle as well.

And if we are not connected on LinkedIn, just Google me, Google, Paul Green, MSP marketing, LinkedIn, and you’ll find me that way. Anyway, let me read you a LinkedIn conversation that I had with an MSP a few weeks ago. Now, I haven’t asked permission to read this conversation out to you, so I’m going to anonymize the person who messaged me. Let’s call him Dave. So Dave wrote Bonjourno, I need your help. That was the very first thing that Dave sent to me and he followed it up with, I’m really struggling with our marketing. Basically, I’ve made some content a video, I’ve stuck it on LinkedIn, and then I was kind of surprised that we didn’t get much engagement with it. I thought the video was too long, it was three minutes duration. We know our customers don’t grow on trees, and I was hoping that you might have some tips.

And by the way, this is actually typical of the kind of message that I might receive on LinkedIn. So as I said, please do send me anything. I’m not joking about that. Anyway, back to Dave. I asked a few clarifying questions and he told me that, well, he said, we’ve also just got a subscription to ZoomInfo and we’re sending out cold emails to relevant companies, making them aware of our offerings. Before I tell you what my reply to Dave was, what do you think about this? A good way of looking at marketing is always to look at it from the point of view of the person that you’re trying to reach. So do you think a single three minute video on LinkedIn would be particularly engaging? Do you think a cold email from an MSP would make you want to buy their services? Of course, the answer to these questions is no.

Managed services is a very difficult sell because it is a very highly bespoke and complex service, and if it goes wrong, it can completely paralyze a business. Now, ordinary business owners and managers, they might not understand the ins and outs of technology, but they do understand that it can destroy what they’ve spent years building up. So anyone that picks an MSP off the back of one cold email, well, they’re probably not going to be a very good client anyway. And this is why the marketing strategy that I suggest to all MSPs is to build multiple audiences of people to talk to, then spend weeks, months, years building a relationship with them until you’re then able to step three, convert that relationship and convert them into being a client. People only buy when they’re ready to buy, and the job of your marketing is to build a low level relationship with them using content marketing such as posts on social media, educational emails sent to them, direct mail, stuff like that.

Now, at the beginning I said that MSPs who do this kind of marketing will always struggle. So what kind of marketing is this? I’ll tell you, it’s tactical marketing. What Dave has done is look at some of the tactics used by other MSPs, and it’s just decided to copy those. And this is not a criticism of Dave. What he’s done here is what many, many, many MSPs do. They see some tactics being used or being discussed in a forum somewhere, and they decide that that’s what they should be doing. But here’s the thing, tactical marketing doesn’t work because it has no backbone. It’s almost a case of doing something rather than nothing. And while part of me would rather see you doing something rather than nothing, I’d also prefer that you operate strategically rather than tactically. When you do strategic marketing, you have a plan how you’re going to build your audiences, how you’re going to build a relationship with them, and how you’re going to be there at exactly the right moment that they are ready to switch MSPs.

So let me read you the reply that I sent to Dave. I said, hi Dave. There are some fundamental strategy questions to answer first, such as what their needs are, what their wants are, why would they buy your solution instead of a competitor, who are the decision makers, who are the influencers, et cetera, et cetera. What you are doing here, Dave, is a bit of tactical marketing without any strategy driving it. And then I kind of came up with an analogy. I dunno if this works or not, but I said, it’s like putting up one battery powered smoke detector in a first floor hotel bedroom and wondering why it didn’t detect the inferno in the kitchen downstairs. I’ve kind of made that analogy up on the spot. Does that work? I’m not sure, but you get the idea. So take a good hard look. Now at your own marketing, ask yourself this question. Are you just doing tactical stuff because that’s what you’ve seen other people doing? Or do you have a plan? Do you have a strategy which is driving everything that you’re doing in your MSP’s marketing.

Paul Green’s MSP marketing podcast still to come…

Talking of using content to build a relationship with your leads? My guest on today’s show will tell you about the different types of content needed at every stage of the lead to client process that’s coming up in the next five minutes. One of the most powerful marketing superpowers you can develop is the ability to look at what you sell from the prospect’s point of view. Let me tell you how to do this and examine three specific kinds of prospects that MSPs frequently try to sell to. Hey, I’m Paul Green. And don’t forget, for all the content, tools and training to market and grow your MSP, check out MSP marketing edge.com. Fear. Fear is a surprisingly strong driver of your prospects, or put more precisely, they are more driven by the avoidance of pain than they are by the opportunity to gain. You have to bear this in mind every single time you chat to a potential client.

They have fears, yet their specific fears are very different depending on the context of their situation. If they’re a business owner, they fear making a mistake, not because it costs them money, but because they won’t move forward. And in fact, they might even move backwards if they make a mistake. If they’re not a business owner, but they’re an employee such as perhaps a manager, then they fear looking stupid in the eyes of their boss. And of course all the penalties that come from that. And if they’re an internal IT manager, then they fear that you will uncover that they are incompetent or just make them look bad. And then the standard employee fears kick in. So whenever you are pitching your MSP, can you see how you need to alter your message according to the audience that you are talking to? It becomes even more complicated when you factor in whether someone is the decision maker or the influencer and internal IT manager might not be the decision maker on co-managed it, but you can sure as hell bet that they will block your company getting the contract if you haven’t addressed their fears because they’re an influencer in any sales conversation.

Ask lots of open questions until you can confidently answer these three questions in your head. What does this person need? What does this person want? And what does this person fear? Needs are almost irrelevant. Their decisions made by the brain and almost universally, the only uneducated prospects who pick at MSP with their brain are the ones who are choosing on price alone, AKA. The wrong kind of clients once are decisions made by the heart, and this is why your marketing must talk directly to their emotions. You paint a picture of safety, of partnership and a path well trodden by hundreds of other clients, but fears have to be addressed directly as part of this process. Otherwise, the fears will block the heart from making the buying decision in your favor. In fact, when someone throws up an objection, well that’s them verbally expressing their fears. And I’ve always said that from prospects are actually to be welcomed. Most of the time it’s a chance to allay the fears that they are trying hard to avoid. Just make sure that you answer those objections at an emotional level. Never forget the brain is only the influencer. It is the heart that is the decision maker.

Paul Green’s MSP marketing Podcast still to come…

Talking about fear. Would you love to put up your prices but you fear your clients won’t tolerate it and they’ll all run away to another MSP. That’s what one MSP owner fears, and I’m going to put his mind at rest in the next five minutes. My guest today knows all about how to warm up prospects using content. She’s going to tell us why content marketing is essential for every MSP, what the different types of content are that you need at every stage of the lead to client process and why marketing is overwhelming for so many MSPs, plus where you can get started. Today’s big interview is with an MSP marketing expert who knows the huge power of marketing content.

Hi, I’m Ruthie Sterrett, marketing strategist and founder of The Consistency Corner.

And thank you so much for joining me on the podcast, Ruthie, we are going to be talking about content today and how any MSP can use content strategically to build relationships with prospects and be there right in front of the right person at the right time with the right message just using content. It is still even now in 2024, one of the most powerful tools that you can use. So that’s what we’re going to be talking about today. Let’s first of all learn about you, tell us who you are and how you came to work with MSPs, helping them with their marketing.

Yeah, well, thank you so much for having me. I’m a marketing strategist and founder of the Consistency Corner Marketing Agency, which helps CEOs take off the marketing hat and get back to serving their clients and leading their team as they scale their business. And the thing about content, I am a strategic thinker naturally. I love to see the big picture and the pieces and parts and content is really a tool that we can use to build relationships, to build trust, which is what leads to sales. And I’ve got a background actually in sales, although I’m a self-taught marketer, I do have a background in sales. And what I found is that many CEOs did not start their business to be a content creator. They were like, oh my gosh, I do not want to be on this hamster wheel. I don’t want to be an influencer. Why do I have to create all this content? And so we find ways to help them create content and use content strategically in their marketing to get to their business results, not just to be an influencer or a content creator.

Yeah, I completely agree with you on that. It’s one of the, well, I think for many MSPs doing any marketing is a distress, but especially content creation. And of course, we are in a position where in theory Chat GPT can generate a whole ton of content for you. We all know there are lots of issues with that. It talks a bit weird, some of the references it makes and the fact that it turns out aren’t quite right. But yeah, I believe very much in content. I spend a great deal of my time and obviously I’m a marketer. I enjoy it. And I was a writer. I was a journalist before I did this. I spend a lot of time creating content, but I know it sucks up hours and hours and hours of your time. So if you’re going to do it, you should do it for a strategic purpose. What are some of the big content mistakes that you see MSP owners making?

Well, I’m glad you referenced Chat GPT, because that’s a big mistake right there of relying on AI alone. And listen, AI can absolutely help us with a lot of things, but it typically takes really being dialed in on our messaging, on our point of view, on what makes us unique, on who our I know client is and what their problems are. And that’s actually a mistake that I see a lot of service providers and MSPs making is that when they’re creating content, they’re not putting themselves always in the seat of their client. They’re thinking about what their problems are, they’re thinking about the problems in their industry, but not the problems that their client is trying to solve. And that’s what your content is there to do, to show your ideal client, to show your audience that you get them, that you understand what they’re going through, and that you have a solution to help those things.

And if we go to AI without that unique perspective and point of view and real deep understanding of our clients and what makes us unique, and AI is just going to give you a bunch of garbage, which is what they’re giving everybody else, and it becomes this sea of terrible content that everybody’s over. I mean, I’ll tell you pro tip right now, stop using the rocket emoji. If AI gives you the rocket emoji, delete it immediately because that’s a big tell. But I think the biggest thing is going back to truly understanding your ideal client, understanding their problems and how you can serve them uniquely with your unique perspective and point of view.

Yeah, exactly. And this is where you’re talking about using content in a strategic way. So talk us through what would you recommend? So if we take an average MSP might be someone listening to this right now, and let’s say they’re sort of a three, four, maybe five person business, most of those are techs. So you’ve got the owner, you’ve got some techs, they’ve added on maybe a bit of customer service, but there’s not a great deal of actual marketing happening. There’s lots of referrals coming to the business. Maybe those are starting to dry up, the owner’s starting to think about marketing more seriously and they’re hearing content is part of it. What kind of strategic approach would you have to that kind of situation using content?

Yeah, the simplest way I can break it down, and I’m going to be honest, it’s not simple. There is not an easy button. There is not a shiny object, even though everybody on the internet is going to try to sell you one. If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. But if we’re going to simplify it, the one piece of advice that I want you to understand is that your marketing platforms, the channels that you’re using, whether it’s social media, whether it’s email, whether it’s long form content, whether it’s paid advertising, even your referrals, those different containers and different content pieces are all going to have different jobs. And you’re looking for them to have the jobs of attracting new eyes to your business, which is top of funnel awareness, nurturing those existing audiences and existing relationships, which is middle of funnel or converting, asking for the sale, asking for someone to join your email list, asking for someone to follow you, which is the convert.

And no one single piece of content can do all three of those things. So when somebody puts up a piece of content and they’re like, well, that didn’t work. What was the intent of that piece of content? Were we trying to attract? Were we trying to nurture? Were we trying to convert? So we’re looking at different metrics and measuring different things, and I love to work with CEOs and be their strategic partner to say, where are we attracting? Where are we nurturing? Where are we converting? And making sure that we’re checking all of those boxes. Most people tend to do too much of one and not enough of the other two. And then how can we do it in a way that you can be strategic again and consistent, because it’s the compound effect of doing those things consistently that is actually going to get you results over time.

So thinking strategically, where would you get started? You’ve got those three distinctive phases there. Do you literally start at the beginning and create content for that first phase, or do you sprinkle a little bit into all three phases and then go back and add some more and add some more and add some more?

Yeah. Well, it’s different for every business. And I know that’s every marketer’s favorite answer is it depends, but it really does depend. And we can’t compare your chapter 10 to somebody else’s chapter 75. So we’ve got to look and see where your business is today. And so I’m going to do a marketing audit. We’re going to look at what content you already have out there. If you have zero, if you have literally been word of mouth only, the first thing we’re going to do is social media because that’s a quick win. We can get you started on social media. We can start testing content by putting things out there and see what your existing audience is resonating with. And then from there, we can layer on other things. With my clients, I kind of have a baseline non-negotiable that we’re going to leverage social media, email marketing, and long form content.

And the reason that we choose those three is long form content. Like a podcast has SEO value, you can repurpose the content into so many places and you can go back to it and reference it over and over again in your customer’s lifecycle and you own it. Social media you don’t own, but people are on social media. 3 billion people, if not 4 billion at this point, use social media. So your clients are there. So you want to make sure that your business has a professional presence that represents what you do, how you help people, the problems that you solve, and that we want to be strategic with our social media content there. And then again, email marketing, because you don’t own social media, so if you want to communicate with your audience, we’ve got to have a strategic email plan so that we can engage with them and converse with them on a platform that you actually own.

Yeah. Do you find that, because obviously for you and me, this stuff sounds really simple, but this is what we do in the same way for an MSP, talking about a server migration sounds really simple, but for you and me, our heads would literally explode, right? Because there’s, there’s too many moving parts to it. So when you’ve got that kind of overwhelm, what do you believe is the first easiest natural step for someone to start down that strategic content route?

Yeah, that’s a great question. I would say if I had to pick one, I would start with social media because it gives you an opportunity to test your messaging. And what I always tell my clients is in the beginning when you’re getting started, bad content or even, okay, content is better than no content. Because the more you create content, the better you’re going to get, getting your message out there. And if you’re in a position that you can outsource and you can bring on a marketing partner, even you just talking about it and spit balling, my favorite thing to do is just listen to my client talk in a strategy session because I’m writing down hundreds of ideas for their content just based on their own unique point of view and their own unique perspective. So getting started with social media, pick one platform where your audience is going to be and get consistent there with your messaging.

And then we can start to layer in the other pieces and parts. And I see a lot of clients do this, particularly if they think they’re going to get scrappy and do it on their own or they’re going to have somebody on their team take them and do the content for them. They try to do way too much too fast, and I’d rather you do less consistently than do more. And burnout and consistent doesn’t have to mean constant. Let’s take email for example. If you’ve been building an email list, you have a small email list of maybe people you’ve worked with in the past or a couple of referrals, and you say, okay, Ruthie, I hear you. I should be emailing. I’m going to start sending a weekly email newsletter. And every single client I’ve ever worked with said that we get through the first month. And I say, well, how is your email going? And they’re like, I’ve sent zero. So instead of saying, we’re going to send one every week, let’s start with one a month, let’s start with one, and then we can go three months. And if we’ve sent three now, maybe we can do two a month, and we can ease into that versus trying to do all the things all the time and not doing any of them very well.

Yeah. Yeah, that makes perfect sense. Something you said about 60 seconds ago, it was about picking a platform for MSPs, it’s LinkedIn. It is the number one platform. Of course, you could use Facebook, you could use Instagram if you’re trying to reach businesses that use Instagram in their own marketing like restaurants, hotels. But I’ve got to be honest, as an MSP, you put 60, 90 minutes a day into LinkedIn and it will pay back because that’s where your prospects are.

Yeah. And let’s talk about LinkedIn. With LinkedIn, the difference between the strategy of your company’s page and your personal profile, because different pieces of content are going to work differently there. Your personal profile where you’re being positioned as a thought leader, as a trusted source in the industry, you’re going to put different content on that versus your company profile. But if you as a thought leader, have grown your team and you’ve got other technicians. We’ve got to also make sure that we’re building authority for the company profile by having strategic content on that page as well.
Yeah, I completely agree. Personally, I think MSPs should focus just on their personal profile. When do you see company pages come up in your newsfeed in LinkedIn these days? You don’t so much, but you’re right, you need to have both of those things.

And that’s an interesting question. And I will even say as a LinkedIn user, I was having a conversation with my husband the other day, and he’s a general contractor, and I was talking to him about LinkedIn and I said, well, who do you follow? Who are the thought leaders in your industry? And he said, I don’t follow people. I follow companies because I want to see what other companies doing. And so I thought that was really interesting to hear, that that’s where he’s consuming content. And so even have conversations with your customers. If you have existing customers, ask them, who do you follow? What do you like? What type of content are you consuming? Because that can give you great insight to what potential customers might be doing and where you should be showing up.

Yeah, that’s a really, really good idea. Thank you, Ruthie. We’ll take that. And I have to say what exciting evenings you and your husband must have sitting talking about LinkedIn. Oh, my goodness. Yes, absolutely. You know, like you said, we’re marketers. We can talk about this stuff all day long. I try to talk to him about funnels and he’s like, I don’t know what you’re talking about. I’m like, well, when you talk about H Vac systems, I don’t know what you’re talking about. Yeah, let’s just put Netflix on instead. It’s a lot easier. Ruthie, thank you. Thank you for your time. Tell us what you do to help MSPs and what’s the best way to get in touch with you.

Yeah, so I help create that strategic marketing plan. You know, my agency, we have a CMO strategy plus implementation package where I’m going to sit with you and we’re going to map out, we’re going to figure out where you are today and where you need to be attracting, nurturing and converting. And we can either create that plan, hand it over to you to do on your own, and, you know, built for your bandwidth, or my team can do it for you and we can implement that plan so that you don’t have to think about marketing other than those strategy sessions with me once a month. So if you’re interested in learning more, you can head over to theconsistencycorner.com. you can book a free CMO consult. We can have a conversation to figure out how to get you to that next phase of growth.

Paul Green’s MSP marketing podcast, Paul’s personal peer group.

It’s okay to admit that you don’t quite know what to do to make your marketing better because we are here to help you. Every week on the podcast, I answer a marketing question from an MSP. Let’s do this producer. James, what have we got this week?

Thanks, Paul. Well, I think we’ve got quite a surprising question this week. Gary has a fairly well established MSP in South Carolina, and given that it is 12 years old, his question might surprise you. How do I know it’s the right time to put up my prices? I don’t want to lose clients.

Okay, so first off, this is a common fear, which means that loads of people will have this question. Now, when it comes to price increases, there are two different aspects to consider. The first is the price for new clients joining you tomorrow. This is actually a very flexible price and something you should be experimenting with all the time, constantly nudging up this price, testing the marketplace to see what it will tolerate. I can almost guarantee that the marketplace will tolerate a higher price than you are willing to charge. There’s something weird about being a business owner that we kind of place less of a value on what we do than what people are prepared to buy it for. So don’t forget that someone using your MSP, they want to trust you. They want to be able to rely on you. The right kind of clients will happily pay a premium for that.

They want to sleep at night, and they are happy to pay for this. So please never, ever, ever think that every single client buys on price alone because that is simply not the case. So that’s prices for new clients. Highly flexible. But the other aspect to consider is your existing clients. Now here, you have to be a little bit more cautious. You can do either overt price rises where you just put up your prices by a certain percentage every year, or you can do covert price rises where you sell them an additional service, but you load a ton of extra margin on top of the normal margin that you’d charge. So in effect, you’ve put the prices up and you are earning more, but they don’t see that the price of the basic service has gone up. They’ve just made a buying decision to buy something extra.

Now, I think of those two, it’s more transparent to just do an overt price rise. I think that’s always the best thing to do in any business dealings is as transparent as you can. If you’ve got a question about anything in your MSP that you’d like help with, well, anything marketing wise anyway, just go to the contact us page at mspmarketingedge.com. And while you’re there, if you’d love to attract new, better clients into your MSP, you just have to get our content marketing system currently trusted by more than 700 fellow MSPs around the world. And you can check if your area is still available at mspmarketingedge.com

Coming up next week.

Thank you so much for listening next week. I’ve got the smartest sales treat to get your existing clients demanding new hardware from you and all it’s going to cost you is a spare monitor. All will be revealed next week.

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