The podcast powered by the MSP Marketing Edge

Welcome to Episode 278 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week…

• Optimize your MSP’s marketing for voice & AI search?: AI and voice search is on the rise – let’s find out if you can use it to get more traffic to your website.
• The perfect MSP sales promotion, that’s 1,000% GUARANTEED to work: What has worked really well for you in the past but for some reason you just stopped doing it? Perhaps it’s time to re-start it but with a better system in place.
• A simple MSP marketing framework you can swipe: MSPs are often at risk of making marketing way too complicated. My guest shares a simple marketing framework that you can adapt to suit your business.
• Paul’s Personal Peer Group: Do you perceive marketing as too creative or something outside of your comfort zone? It’s actually more logical than you might think.

Optimize your MSP’s marketing for voice & AI search?

Are you doing your MSP’s SEO wrong? Make sure you hear this first. Because if your MSP could really do with finding new clients and you need them to find your website, everything could be changing with search engine optimisation. Why? Because AI and voice search is on the rise. So let’s find out if you can use it to get more traffic to your website and whether you need to change your MSP’s marketing plan.

Tell me, how often do you search for answers using just your voice and how often do you use an AI tool to search? Whichever specific tools you prefer to use, I think we can all agree that sometimes it’s just easier to ask Alexa or Siri to search for something or get ChatGPT to do a whole ton of research for us. But have you yet considered how that might affect driving traffic to your MSP’s website?

We don’t talk a lot about SEO, search engine optimization, on this podcast or in these YouTube videos. I’m not an expert at SEO, there are much better people than me at this and I prefer to get on guests to talk about subjects where I don’t have a specific expertise. But I think we can take a holistic overview of the change in something as big as search. Now if you are as old as me, he says looking at his gray hair, you’ll remember when search was really clunky and difficult…yep, I’m talking about you AltaVista, back in the last millennium, and I’m feeling every single one of my 50 years right now. But honestly, if you weren’t alive back in the mid to late nineties, you have no idea how bad search was.

Yahoo was kind of doing its own thing by doing it manually. It was compiling manual links and editor driven lists of stuff. And then you had kind of basic search engines like AltaVista. There was a popular one here in the UK that was called Ask Jeeves, like a butler type character, and I think that was ask.com across the world. Now of course, we didn’t know that the search experience was bad until something way, way better came along, and that thing was Google.

Google really did change everything back in the day. Its method of crawling the web and ranking web pages according to backlinks, which is how many other sites actually connect to them. And also its ability to figure out what the page was about, that was revolutionary at the time. And you can argue that Google has been so utterly dominant in search in the last 25 years and even though that dominance is now under threat from a number of different ways, the next big shift after Google came along was of course the shift to mobile search. But what’s that, about 10 – 15 years since we all needed to make sure that our websites were optimised for mobile search and mobile acce...

The podcast powered by the MSP Marketing Edge

Welcome to Episode 277 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week…

• No idea where to start with your MSP’s marketing? Start Here: Discover the most important marketing things that will bring new leads into your MSP in my brand new, easy to read book.
• People only buy managed services for one of two reasons: Most purchases are made to either fix a problem (needs), or to make the buyer feel good (wants). You should offer an almost endless supply of additional services to meet these two criteria.
• The MSP mindset that grows your business: Building a successful MSP isn’t just about what you do, it’s also very much about the way you think. If you and your technicians adopt this way of thinking, then you’ll achieve immense things.
• Paul’s Personal Peer Group: Freeing up your time is a challenge but absolutely essential to the growth of your MSP. Here’s the simplest way to achieve it.

No idea where to start with your MSP’s marketing? Start Here

Does this sound familiar? Are you completely overwhelmed with what marketing you should be doing in the short amount of time you have to do it? Well, many MSPs are in this exact situation. There’s so much information and advice out there, the problem is actually cutting through all the noise and figuring out exactly what you should do and in what order.

I spent years figuring this out and refining it. And finally, you can discover the most important marketing things that will bring new leads into your MSP. They’re all in my brand new, easy to read book. Stick around for some of the best highlights.

One of the coolest things about recording a podcast or doing YouTube videos or even writing a blog every week is that it allows you to go back and see where your mind was years and years before. I’ve been working with MSPs since 2016, and the core marketing advice that I’m giving to you today is no different to the advice that I was giving nine years ago. Sure, some of the tactics have changed, but the good solid basic marketing strategy is exactly the same. Because a good strategy doesn’t change for decades, it’s just the tactics that change.

What I’ve really noticed over the last four or five years is that I’ve got considerably better at explaining what you should do in an easier and easier way. And I’ve spoken to thousands of MSPs over the years and I realised that the majority of them, they don’t want highly advanced marketing tactics and clever strategies that are actually quite difficult to implement.

The vast majority of MSPs I speak to just want marketing to be easy. They want clear, simple recommendations of what to do and how to do it.

And that’s driven me to refine my three-step lead generation system and the tasks that I believe you most need to do are contained within that. Now, I don’t think this is a mission that’s ever really completed, but in the last year or so, I believe I have made a big jump forward. And one thing that’s helped me with that is writing a book on this subject. It’s actually just gone on sale on Amazon worldwide. You can get it on your Kindle, including in the free Kindle library thing. You can also get a paperback copy. Now I’ve written a few over the years, but I genuinely believe that this one is the most powerful book I’ve ever written, because it’s the easiest to understand.

It’s called MSP marketing: Start Here. And I actually physically wrote the first version on an eight hour flight from the UK to Las Vegas when I was speaking at Scale Con in Octob...

The podcast powered by the MSP Marketing Edge

Welcome to Episode 276 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week…

• Happy client? Ask for a testimonial NOW: There is a perfect moment to ask your clients for a testimonial or review. This social proof is really important, and when you systemise collecting it, it’s going to make your life so much easier.
• Why MSPs should add new LinkedIn connections every day: LinkedIn is the single most important place for MSPs to go marketing right now and I’m going to tell you the best way to leverage it.
• How this MSP marketer grew the business: There’s no better way for you to find the right ideas to market your business than listening to other people who are doing it right now. My guest talks us through what he’s done and what you can take away and implement quickly.
• Paul’s Personal Peer Group: Do you know what a vanity URL is and have you ever wondered if you need one? An MSP has asked the question which I answer in this episode.

Happy client? Ask for a testimonial NOW

What if I told you there was a perfect moment to ask your MSP’s clients for a testimonial or review. But you must act on it super quickly, as that moment will very fast vanish. If you struggle to collect social proof from your clients, this is going to make your life so much easier and even allow you to systemise getting testimonials and reviews from your happiest clients.

So we all know that social proof is really, really important. Social proof is when people see other people like them acting in a certain way, and it gives them kind of a feeling of safety to know that other people have already tread the path that they are thinking of treading. And what I mean by that is collecting testimonials, reviews, and case studies from your existing clients, and then using that “social proof”, as it’s called, to persuade other people to pick your MSP.

You’ll be perceived as a safer choice by business owners and managers if they see that other business owners and managers have already picked you and are happy to endorse you.

Now, you’ve probably heard this before, but maybe there’s been something that’s been holding you back from collecting lots of social proof. Maybe it’s just been you simply haven’t had enough time, too many things to do, right? Or maybe you felt a little awkward asking your clients to give you a review or a testimonial. I mean, they’re already paying you money every month, surely you can’t ask them for something else, can you? Well, as a side note, yes you can. In fact, your best clients are often the most delighted to give you a testimonial or review because they want to see you succeed so that they can continue to enjoy your service.

Whatever the reason you don’t have enough social proof yet, let me tell you the perfect moment to go asking for it. You’re looking for the point at which your client is at their happiest, and we can actually predict when this will be. There are two, maybe three times that they’re most likely to be at their happiest, and the first will be about 90 days after they very first joined you. So that first month is always a little bit manic, isn’t it? As you are onboarding them and you are migrating any services away from their previous MSP. And then the second and third months are where you work your magic and where the really good stuff happens. So they see little problems that never got sorted with the previous MSP get fixed by you. And you probably over service them a little in that first month or so, so everyone is very happy with you,...