MSPs, there’s a danger lurking inside my marketing advice… platforms like LinkedIn, Facebook and Instagram are actually “borrowed audiences”. Here’s how to build an “owned audience”. Also this week, how to turn boring compliance updates into lead gen on LinkedIn, and how to sell more cyber security by telling stories.

Welcome to Episode 340 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green, powered by the MSP Marketing Edge.

The danger of building your MSP’s marketing on borrowed platforms

Can I be honest about something? There’s a danger lurking inside the marketing advice that I give to you every single week in this podcast and I want to address it head on.

If you’ve been listening to or watching this podcast for a while, you’ll know that I tell you to build your audience on LinkedIn to make connections, post every day, send messages, and just grow your network. And of course, I stand by all of that. LinkedIn is still the number one place for MSPs to go farming for new business.

But here’s the thing… LinkedIn is not yours.

Your connections, your content, your years of relationship building. All of it lives on a platform that belongs to someone else.

Well, it’s Microsoft, I mean, they own LinkedIn. So that means that someone, some vice president of Microsoft hidden away in a building somewhere can change the rules at any point without warning, without apology, and without any obligation to protect what you’ve spent years building.

We have a name for platforms like LinkedIn and Facebook and Instagram within marketing. They’re called “borrowed audiences”. And borrowed audiences are really cool right up until the moment that they’re not. So let me give you two examples from my world that really bring this to life. And the first one involves my own MSP Marketing Edge Facebook group, which we use for member support.

So I started that in 2017 and for years that group has been a buzzing community with members sharing ideas and asking questions and getting answers and just helping each other out. It’s been great. But over the last couple of years, I’ve noticed something. The engagement has dropped significantly and it’s not because our members stopped caring or because the content within the Facebook group got worse. It’s because Facebook changed its algorithm. It stopped showing content from the groups that you’re in, in your feed. And you might have noticed this yourself if you still use Facebook.

You’re probably still a member of 10 or 20 groups and they’re all things that you’re really interested in. But the content from those groups never really appears in your feed anymore. You have to remember to go to those groups. And instead in your feed, you just see content from other places and other people trying to sell you stuff. And Facebook, for whatever reason, has prioritised that. So I’ve still got great content in my group, there’s great help there and great conversations, but some of my members never see it because they don’t remember to go and look at it. And the algorithm has decided without asking anybody that group content wasn’t worth promoting anymore. Thank you, Mark Zuckerberg.

I didn’t get the memo on that. Well, actually there was no memo on that, there was no announcement, the rug just got pulled slowly and silently. And that was a risk. It crept up on me. And obviously we’ve now actually gone and we’ve started other communities for our members on other platforms. Technically, we’re going to face the same problems again, but at least we can get around the Facebook algorithm problem with our other places that we can build communities.

Now the second example involves a friend of mine, Matt Solomon of Better Tracker, who’s very, very well known in the channel. A couple of Christmases ago, Matt got what I can only described as L...

Hello and welcome to a very special edition of the podcast. For the first time ever, we’re doing a complete deep dive into one of the biggest growth opportunities available to your MSP right now… co-managed IT.

Welcome to Episode 339 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green, powered by the MSP Marketing Edge.

Grow Your MSP 10x Faster With Co-managed IT

Before I get into it, I want to tell you something about how we prepared for this episode, because I think that’s going to matter. So some background… we’re launching a new co-managed IT marketing membership, and I’ll tell you more about that at the end of the podcast, although if you do want to sneak peek, it’s on my website right now at mspmarketingedge.com/membership.

Anyway, to help us get this right from day one, over the last six months, my team and I have done hundreds and hundreds of hours of research into this topic. We’ve interviewed IT directors, real ones who actually buy co-managed IT, so people who sit in the role that your MSP will be trying to reach if you did this. And we’ve also interviewed MSPs who already have co-managed clients and are winning more of them. And all of that work has helped us to build a new membership. And of course, it’s also got into this podcast episode.

So what you’re going to hear or see today isn’t just my opinion about marketing to IT directors, it’s grounded in what they actually told us. In their own words about how they think, what they fear and what they want, and crucially, how they make buying decisions. In fact, throughout this episode, I’m going to play you some clips from one of those research conversations. It was an interview I did with an IT director who was very open with us, and I’m operating here on the principle that it’s better to seek forgiveness than it is to ask permission so he doesn’t know I’m playing these clips. Let’s keep this a secret, shall we?

To protect his privacy, his voice has been filtered, and I’m going to call him Dave. Obviously, that’s not his real name, but these are his real words, completely unscripted. And remember, the call that I did with him was a research call six months ago. It wasn’t an interview. I’ve picked Dave for this because he really gave us insight into the emotions that an IT director goes through when they think about partnering with an MSP. And I think when you hear him speak, it’s going to change how you think about this massive opportunity.

So, four things we’re going to cover today. First of all, what co-managed IT actually is, and just as importantly, what it isn’t. Number two, who makes the buying decision. Number three, why businesses choose co-managed. Number four, how you need to position and market yourself differently if you want to win this kind of work. Let’s go.

What co-managed IT is and what it isn’t

The single biggest mistake that MSPs make when they try to enter the co-managed market is assuming that it’s just a variation of what they already do. They take the same messaging that they use for business owners and bolt the words co-managed onto the front. And then they wonder why the conversation dies. Well, it dies because the buyer is completely different and a different buyer needs completely different language.

In traditional B2B sales, you’re usually talking to a business owner or a senior manager who doesn’t live inside technology every day like you do. They don’t really want to understand it. They don’t want to talk about governance, architecture, service tiers, all of that stuff. What they want is relief. They just want someone to take all of the technology away from them. And that’s why phrases like, “We handle everything” or “Leave your IT to us”, they work so well in B2B marketing because you’re selling peace of mind to someone who just wants...

Your MSP’s marketing should feel repetitive to you but fresh to the people seeing it… here’s how that works. Also this week, what margins should you aim for and how to increase them, and you can be an influencer in your marketplace without taking photos of your dinner.

Welcome to Episode 338 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green, powered by the MSP Marketing Edge.

Why your marketing should feel repetitive to you, and fresh for prospects

Your MSP’s marketing should feel repetitive to you, but fresh to the people seeing it. And I know that sounds like a kind of a strange goal at first, because when something feels repetitive, most of us assume we’re doing something wrong. We assume we should mix it up and try new things and be more creative. But actually, when it comes to marketing your MSP, the opposite is true.

Now, I’m a huge fan of marketing systems. And by that, I mean a simple set of activities that you do on a regular basis. Small tasks, repeated daily or weekly. Things like publishing a blog or recording a podcast, posting on LinkedIn, emailing your list, putting out videos. None of these things are individually spectacular, but they have a power, which comes from doing all of them consistently every day and every week.

Now here’s the interesting bit, if you run a proper marketing system for your MSP it will eventually start to feel boring to you.

I’m recording this podcast for the 338th time. So every week since November 2019 I’ve sat down, decided what I want to talk about, written myself a script, and then recorded it. And obviously I’ve had holidays and vacations along the way, but in that instance, I just do two podcasts in a week so I never get behind.

It is a hamster wheel, I will tell you. And writing the script is not a thrilling creative adventure every week, I’ll be honest. It’s a job, it’s a task in the system. And of course I still enjoy it, but I have to sit down, I have to write it, I have to record it. My team, I’m sure it’s as much a hamster wheel for them. They have to edit it. They have to do all the colour corrections and the promotions and all of the stuff like that. It’s all just a whole series of systemised tasks. And I do it and my team, which is James and Simon and Laura, they do it as well because it’s an important part of our business’ presence out there.

And the same thing happens with your MSP’s marketing. If you’re doing it properly, there’s going to be a rhythm to it. You’re doing the same types of content every day or every week, the same channels, the same cadence week, after week, after week. And after a while, you might start thinking, “Oh my goodness, am I just repeating myself here? Am I just saying the same things again and again?” And the answer is probably yes. And that’s a good sign because here’s the thing that most MSP owners forget. You see your marketing every day… your prospects do not see it every day. You’re inside the system, they’re only catching glimpses of what you put out.

So if you do think about it from their point of view, a prospect might see one LinkedIn post from you this month, or maybe they read one blog on your website or they hear an episode of your podcast if you do that because someone recommended it to them. They are seeing a tiny, tiny slice of what you produce. Meanwhile, you’re seeing everything… every post, every email, every article, every video. So of course, to you it feels repetitive because you’re experiencing the whole system, but your prospects are not. And even if they do see your content more than once, it’s usually spread out to them over time. So they might see something today and then they might not see anything from you for another two weeks. And then by the time they see the next thing, the first one has already kind of faded from their memory.